The display shifts in response to my contact—confirming a new permission tier now that I’m in the core. Two primary system branches resolve, clean and unmistakable.
PLANETARY STASIS MODE
ORBITAL RECOVERY PROTOCOL
Planetary Stasis flashes warning-red—nonviable long-term.
“That’s what it’s been doing,” I whisper. “Trying to stabilize itself here. Dumping excess energy and byproducts because it doesn’t have anywhere else to put them.”
Travnyk nods grimly. “An ark anchored to the wrong harbor.”
“And the second?” Tomas asks.
I focus on the orbital schematic. On the faint projected arc that curves away from Tajss and back into deep space.
“That’s what it was built for,” I say. “Low orbit. Long-term monitoring. Preservation. Observation.”
“And if you activate it?” Rakkh asks quietly.
The question isn’t technical. It’s personal. The ship hums as it waits.
“If I initiate orbital recovery,” I say slowly, “it will disengage. Fully.” Relief ripples through the room, but it isn’t going to last—because there is more to it. “But,” I continue, forcing myself to say it aloud, “the ship will take everything with it. All the records. All the samples. All the things Maddy stored here so they wouldn’t be lost.”
Tomas frowns. “Isn’t that… the point?”
“Yes,” I say. “But it also means no more access. No more intervention. No more chance to fix things if it makes another wrong assumption.”
Rakkh steps closer, close enough that his chest is at my back—solid and cool. His hands brace on the console edge on either side of me, bracketing me without caging me.
“And what does it want?” he asks.
The ship answers before I can. A condition surfaces beneath both branches—subtle, half-buried, absolute.
ANCHOR REQUIRED
Now it’s a gate on both choices.
“It can’t leave without one last confirmation,” I whisper. “Not genetics—governance. It needs a human directive layered over its war parameters.”
Travnyk’s brows draw together. “Define anchor.”
I shake my head, throat tight. “Not a person. Not exactly. More like a declaration.”
Rakkh’s voice is low, steady. “Say it.”
I meet his eyes in the screen’s reflection.
“It wants to know if it’s allowed to go,” I say. “Or if we’re asking it to stay and keep fighting a war that’s already over.”
Silence stretches, heavy and sacred.
Tomas rubs his hands over his face. “No pressure or anything.”
Rakkh doesn’t look away from me. “What do you want?”
There it is. Not what saves the desert. Not what preserves history. Not what sets up future consequences or wars or stories yet to be told. Just what I want.
I look at the schematics again. At Tajss scarred but alive. At the ship—ancient, wounded, still trying to do right by a directive written in fear and hope.
