2025-05-17 16:25:29The Arcturus Drift was not a station but a precariously stable ecology of bolted habitats, orbiting trash, scavenged freighter hulls, and gravity-reversed asteroids—all tied together by jury-rigged tunnels and anarchy. It lazily rotated in the orbit of a faint, dying star, half-illuminated by artificial flares and digital firework advertisements flickering in twenty languages. Riven had witnessed more organized war zones.
The Drift was where secrets smoldered.
Riven descended from The Vanta's landing clamp and into the reek of sweat, smoldering synth-meat, ozone, and unresolved stress. Street vendors crowded the walkways, peddling weapon mods, pirated memory splices, and off-color AI fragments. Music thumped somewhere in the depths of the bazaar, syncopated and industrial, as if someone had attempted to convert a dying motor into a drum.
Above, a frayed pennant said in neon letters: "BUY WHAT'S FORGOTTEN, SELL WHAT'S DENIED."
Nix's voice hummed quietly in his ear. "Security override: No formal surveillance grid in effect. High threat index expected."
"Recorded," Riven grunted, tightening the magnetic strap holding his gun in place.
He pushed through the chaotic throngs—Dustborn mercs in worn-out armor, bioprint merchants with glowing veins, and Interzone defectors with forbidden tech. All for one purpose: the Drift didn't ask questions. Not about the Veil, in particular.
A kiosk drone with red eyes offered him "intimate access" to the dying Architect's last recorded dreams. He refused.
Riven set off toward the core ring of the Drift, where business was done and throats were cut. His target was a abandoned observatory that had been converted into an archive—said to be operated by a woman named Soli.
A loose historian. And perhaps the last person to openly challenge the established version of the Collapse.
Within the observatory, blue dim lights etched constellations upon the cracked glass ceiling. The air was scented with metal, paper, and smoke—a unusual blend in a post-digital world.
He spotted her sitting cross-legged upon the floor, bathed in floating data shards and a rusty globe projector that beat like a heart.
"You're late," she replied without glancing up.
"I didn't know I was expected."
“You weren’t,” Soli replied, brushing tangled hair from her face. She was young, but her eyes carried that Veil-worn fatigue he recognized instantly. People who’d seen too much. “But they said you’d come.”
“‘They’?”
She tapped the air, and a shard blinked to life—displaying the symbol again.
⟁
It glowed softly, rotating.
“I’ve seen it before,” he said.
“I know. That’s why you’re here.”
Soli stood, information hovering around her like stars around a gravity well. "The Collapse wasn't a failure, Commander Hale. It was a choice. The Veil didn't fail, it was initiated."
Riven scowled, "Show me."
She motioned toward the rear room, and Riven trailed behind her through a cramped corridor lined with scavenged memory modules and sewn-together AI cores thrumming like half-extinct gods.
In the back room, a bent screen showed a starmap, quivering with streams of data and flagged-red timestamps. Soli indicated a string of disturbances weeks before the Collapse—readings from ancient probes forgotten, light distortions, even stored dream-patterns from ancient sleep ships.
"They're all synchronized," she said. "In dozens of systems. Each one linked to a pulse event close to an established Veil gate. Someone or something was triggering them."
Riven leaned forward. "Why?"
"That's the piece I've yet to figure out. But the pattern indicates a test—some kind of calibration sequence. The Veil wasn't breaching. It was evolving."
"And the Council?"
Soli sneered. "Blind, or in on it. You don't think it was just coincidence that half of humanity's records on the Veil disappeared after the Collapse? Someone erased the truth.
She pressed another key. A new clip materialized—hazy video, dated just prior to the initial breach. It was a military briefing. His own voice was heard.
"…if it stabilizes, the gate opens both ways. We can't risk—"
The feed stuttered.
"I don't recall saying that," Riven whispered.
"Precisely."
The lights dimmed.
Soli halted.
"They found us."
From somewhere deep within the Drift, an alarm throbbed—low and pulsing, like the breath of a predator. The hiss of forced airlocks.
"Council hounds?" Riven asked.
She nodded. "Or worse. They've been attempting to delete me for a year."
"Not today."
Riven spun, gun in hand, scanning the corridor. Nix pinged his comms.
"Two signatures incoming, armed, and employing stealth dampeners. Velocity indicates lethal intent."
"Got it," Riven growled. "Soli—this facility have a back door?"
She laughed bitterly. “You’re standing in it.”
She slammed her palm into a wall panel. A section of the floor split and slid open, revealing a grav-chute.
“I hope you’re not scared of falling.”
“Terrified.”
“Good.”
They dropped.
Down through old pipes, forgotten data lines, and steam vents. The chute spat them into a maintenance corridor beneath the Drift’s core plaza, where flickering signs and smell of ion smoke filled the air.
Soli took the lead, scurrying down a narrow alley between stalls and out to the rim edge, where her "ship" was moored.
It appeared to be an gutted transport filled with too much history and too little shielding.
"They jammed my launch codes," she muttered, stabbing furiously at her console. "They always do this. Every damn time I'm near something real."
"Let me try.
Riven reached into his sleeve and pulled out a thin override shard—the type only ex-commanders could possess. He inserted it into her ship's panel. The system flared, hack-coughed, and roared to life.
"Old ghosts still hear you," Soli said, admiring.
The ship was starting to boot up—right as a pair of dark-clad figures emerged onto the dock behind them.
"No sudden movements," one of them ordered, voice metallic from a helmet modulator. "You're holding a classified memory leak. Turn over the girl."
Riven advanced. "She's not leaving."
"You're supporting a known manipulator of facts. That makes you complicit, Commander Hale."
"Amusing," Riven said. "You sound like someone afraid of the truth."
The agent raised a pulse rifle.
Riven fired first.
The fight was brief—blinding flashes, sharp concussions, and screaming steel. One agent fell into the void. The other tried to flee but Soli shot her in the back with a repurposed mining pistol.
Riven turned to her, breathing hard.
“You’re full of surprises.”
“I live in the gaps between history,” she said grimly. “You learn to fight dirty.”
They launched seconds later. The Drift spun behind them like a fractured memory.
As the stars unrolled before him, Riven sat in silence, observing the symbol ⟁ spin slowly on Soli's cracked dashboard.
"You said it was triggered," he whispered. "The Collapse."
Soli nodded. "And I believe that I have an idea of where the first trigger originated."
"Where?"
She met his gaze dead on.
"From you."
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Chapter 14: The Architect's Shadow
The chamber’s lights dissolved into white noise. Riven’s head pounded with every beat, as if the Spiral itself had taken hold and was roaring through his skull. The last image he registered before the world went dark was the architect interface’s translucent hand pressed against his glyph—its crystalline glow pulsing in sync with his fading heartbeat.And then—nothing.He awoke to a sound like bone grinding. A slow mechanical groan echoed around him as he tried to move. His vision swam into focus to reveal curved walls of burnished metal. The room was silent—no Dustborn guards, no council enforcers. Only the hum of failing systems and the dull throb of his own pulse.He tested his limbs. They worked. He sat up, breath shallow and sharp.Soli.Riven turned his head. Light reflected off her still form a few meters away: slumped, unconscious—or worse. He reached her side, heart racing, and gently shook her shoulder.“Soli,” he whispered.Her eyelids fluttered. She groaned, lifting a hand
Chapter 13: Veilborn Reckoning,
The cockpit lights flickered once—then died. Riven’s heartbeat thundered in his ears as the viewport went dark, swallowing Halvex Prime’s glowing horizon like a severed pulse. Outside, the architect-craft—alive, sentient—hovered in total eclipse. All light came from its crystalline veins, which pulsed with slow, deliberate reverence.He swallowed, fear and determination tangling in his chest. The glyph on his shoulder throbbed beneath his skin, each beat a reminder that he had named and awakened something beyond human reckoning. He’d said the code aloud. He’d delivered himself to this moment—and he would not turn away.“Soli,” he whispered, voice coarse. He turned to the passenger seat—empty. She must have left the shuttle again. His heart froze.Then the airlock hissed—and she stepped back inside, helmet removed. Bruises under her eyes glimmered; her expression was fierce. “They escorted me through the outer decks. Stasis pods still active—like a prize exhibit. They know exactly what
Chapter 12: Silent Echoes
The cockpit lights were too dim, the silence too loud. Riven watched Sedna, the red planet of Halvex Prime, drift by like an ancient wound under fractured clouds of ash. Everything out here had been broken once—and never quite healed.He swallowed. His reflection stared back at him: hollow cheeks, eyes weighed down by memory fractures. The glyph branded on his shoulder pulsed faintly beneath his skin, as if waiting for permission to surface again.You are late.The words echoed in his skull, not as memory but as dread. He reached for the console, but his mind recoiled. The station was waiting. And it knew he was coming.“Soli.” He turned. She’d been sleeping against the seat, head tilted, still clothed in dust and dread. Bruises marked her face, hardened with fatigue. Eyes half-open, she rubbed them and touched her side where old scars still throbbed.“Good morning,” she managed, her voice strained but solid.Outside, Sedna pulsed. The planet seemed to breathe beneath the ash storms—p
Chapter 11: Ash Company Memory
The corridor was silent. Too silent.Riven’s heartbeat wasn’t.He stepped out of the Palimpsest’s airlock and into the half-ruined mining compound, his boots echoing on fractured metal. Behind him, Soli wiped blood from her cheek, her breath shaky. Nix remained silent and motionless—its programming apparently frozen by the Dustborn blast.But Riven’s eyes were locked on the shattered horizon.He held the empty case of the datashard in his hand. Whatever had been encoded in that fragment had burned a hole in his mind—a memory of a time he’d never lived. Standing before a living Veil gate. Younger. In full Anchor gear.The shards of his identity were fracturing. The real Riven, the displaced Ashley… who knew anymore?They walked toward the holo-comm array where they’d boarded seconds before. Soli’s hands trembled as she powered up the system. The internal display flickered, half offline. But when it came to life, Riven could see his reflection behind the glare—and the flicker of doubt i
Chapter 10: Dust Spiral
The surface of the planet was hissing with heat mirages and nasty splinters of rust-red stone, broken as if the planet itself had split apart in agony. They'd abandoned the wrecked freighter hours ago—its empty halls still ringing with the faint dying whisper of the logic core. Riven, Soli, and the demure AI Nix now made their way back towards The Vanta, navigating between the fossilized ridges of what once was a mining colony.The wind tasted odd here. It was not dust—it was rust, data rot, and something acrid, as if the air recalled violence.Soli led them, sweeping with a hand-held spiker relay, as Riven had his hand resting on his gun. Nix brought up the rear, its humanoid casing crackling slightly, a stuttering shine as if it wasn't designed to be on the same plane of reality."Still no sign of our tail?"Riven asked.Soli looked over her shoulder. "Nothing on the scanner, but that don't mean they ain't here.""Dustborn?""Maybe. Or maybe they were already on-world."They went an
Chapter 9: Breach Code
The AI fragment had said nothing since they departed the Marrowhold. But when The Palimpsest glided into low orbit around a nameless planetoid for emergency calibration, the sphere—tethered in the rear compartment—sparked to life.Riven was the first to see.He sat alone, gazing at the sleek, thrumming shell of the logic core while Soli labored at the front. The ship's steady thrum was the sole sound until the lights softened slightly and the AI core beat with an almost unfelt rhythm—three, then nothing. Three again. He thought of a heartbeat. No—a beacon.Then, the voice, not in speakers.Not in his ears.It cut through all that."ANCHOR DETECTED."The words ripped across the back of his mind like icy fingers.Riven was on his feet, attuned in an instant. "What did you say?""ANCHOR RIVEN HALE ACCEPTED."He took a step back, hand reflexively reaching for the sidearm holstered at his hip. But how do you shoot something in your head?"Define 'Anchor,'" he growled."YOU ARE THE REMNANT
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