TATEK
The lights on Voorstal dim earlier than usual. Not enough for civilians to notice, maybe. But I do. The station’s power grid hums at a frequency I know better than my own name, and tonight it’s pitched wrong—thinner, anxious. Like it’s bracing for something. Like it knows what I just read.
The message from Serat is still flickering across my compad screen, four words like a trigger press:The replacement is live.
Underneath that, in smaller encrypted subtext—his real voice:
You have hours.
No signature. No timestamp. No offer of help. Just that.
I pocket the pad and inhale through my teeth, sharp. The air’s too still in this corridor. Too filtered. I hear my own pulse over the ventilation. My boots barely make a sound on the composite flooring, but every step feels like thunder. There’s no other foot traffic. That’s wrong. Shift change was twenty minutes ago—there should be a trickle of engineers, mess hall staff, the usual friction of life.
But the friction’s gone.
Voorstal’s in lockdown. Not declared. Not posted. Not even announced on the system bulletin. But I know the pattern. Toomany patrols doubling back. Too many eyes lingering in the corners. Too many backup generators online “for calibration.” Someone’s priming the station for a snatch-and-bury.
And Mara’s the target.
I stop at a supply node to calibrate my breath. Hands behind my back, posture upright, like I’m just another officer checking route logs. The holo display flickers in a lazy arc in front of me. I don’t even look at it. I keep my focus inward. Regulating. Rebalancing. This is where others would start to panic. To lash out.
Not me.
Panic is an emotion. And I am not a man who lives in emotion.
I am a weapon.
But gods, right now—I want to break that rule.
Because this isn’t a drill. It’s a purge.
The Obol leaks are spreading faster than anyone predicted. What began as whispers across encrypted comms and smuggler side-channels has detonated into full-spectrum awareness. Miners on Nuustal, freetraders in the Nebari run, and even outer-fringe colonists with patched-together signal boosts—they’re all waking up. They’re remembering. Not just the lies the Coalition fed them, but the lives that got overwritten. Erased like bad code.
And Mara was the spark.
Her analysis pulled the first threads. She didn’t even know what she was unraveling. She thought it was corruption. Greedy logistics officers, lazy auditors, maybe a black-flag op rerouting aid. But it wasn’t any of that.
It was memory warfare.
And now, someone’s decided the only way to contain the leak is to erase the source.
I’ve seen replacement protocols before. Not often. They’re rare. Messy. Final.
The body stays the same.
The mind… doesn’t.
Sometimes they don’t even wipe you. They overwrite. Implant a false persona, new clearance codes, reroute your ID through a shell identity. You wake up thinking you’ve always been someone else. Sometimes you don’t wake up at all.
I clench my fists behind my back and look straight ahead as a patrol passes. Two soldiers in black-grade armor. No insignia. Recovery team. Not station security.
They’re early.
They don’t look at me. That’s the only reason they’re still breathing.
Back in my private quarters, I engage the secondary lock sequence. Three layers deep. None of them Coalition standard. Serat gave me this encryption years ago, back when we still called each other by name instead of assignment code. He said I’d never need it.
He was wrong.
