The shape clarifies.
A node.
A buried transit convergence hub.
Reaper-era.
My blood goes cold.
This isn’t just strategically unusual ground.
This is infrastructure.
This is a ghost artery from a logistics network that predates the Nine, predates the Alliance, predates the sanitized official history I was raised inside.
This is the kind of thing entire wars get fought over when the wrong people realize it exists.
My pulse roars in my ears.
“What the fuck are you doing here,” I whisper to the foundation.
The answer slams into place with brutal, nauseating clarity.
Novaria was never random placement.
I wasn’t here because I wanted cheap rent and a quiet off-grid life running deliveries for a guy who paid in cash and didn’t ask questions.
I was here because someone higher up the food chain than Varek Glimner needed a Reaper-shaped watchdog sitting on top of a buried asset they didn’t want anyone else finding.
Containment.
Surveillance.
Bait.
The lie I’ve been living inside fractures cleanly down the middle.
My breath comes shallow and fast.
“Son of a bitch,” I growl.
I don’t have time to process the existential implications of that revelation, because my implant pings hard against my skull a split second later, a sharp, cold spike of sensation that makes my teeth clench.
Alliance tracking protocol.
Again.
Closer this time.
Tighter.
Triangulating.
I snap my senses inward and slam up countermeasures out of pure reflex, sealing off the sensory logs I just generated and wiping the electromagnetic trace signatures my Reaper field leaked into the environment when I unfolded it too far, too fast.
I jam encryption spikes into the implant’s outbound telemetry feed and reroute its handshake protocols through three dead relays that shouldn’t even exist anymore.
My hands are shaking.
