A suited Baragon-aligned analyst leans toward his screen, eyes widening. Another person stands abruptly, chair scraping.
Morazin’s cadence falters for half a beat.
He notices the ticker.
His eyes flick to the holo wall.
Then the next overlay drops—my proof package, embedded like a blade:
Biometric mismatch charts. Docking log overwrites. Comm-jam signature graphs. Armor HUD anomaly captures.
And then—financial trails.
Not all of them. Not the deepest insurance trails I kept offline.
But enough.
Shell names. Routing tags. Node identifiers tying Nine channels to Baragon-linked accounts.
It’s not interpretive. It’s not “maybe.” It’s hard, ugly data laid across his speech like a stain.
The holo wall erupts.
Voices spill in through the audience feed—shouts, overlapping, panicked.
“What the hell is that?—?”
“Who put that on the stream?”
“Kill it—kill it now!”
Morazin’s face goes still, like a man watching a building collapse in slow motion. For one brief second, the smugness slips and I see the raw animal underneath—the predator realizing its trap just snapped on its own leg.
He turns sharply toward a tech off-camera. “Cut that overlay.”
A frantic voice answers, tinny through his mic. “We’re trying—sir, it’s not local. It’s— it’s propagating.”
Morazin’s jaw tightens. He turns back to the main drone, forcing his voice steady.
“This is a hostile injection,” he says, too calm, too fast. “A last-ditch attempt by an extremist network to?—”
The ticker updates again, almost gleeful:
MARKET SUSPENSION — ALL BARAGON-ADJACENT CLEARINGHOUSES
IHC EMERGENCY SESSION — COMMENCED
ALLIANCE HIGH COMMAND PING — PRIORITY STREAM LOCK
I see icons blink in the corner of the feed—Alliance comm markers. IHC emergency nodes. Red priority pings trying to latch onto the stream.
Political pressure builds in real time like a storm front.
Morazin’s console—visible on the holo wall now because the feed is compromised—lights up with incoming calls. Frantic. Priority tags. Names I can’t read from here.
He refuses to answer.
He keeps talking, voice louder, trying to bulldoze the narrative back into shape with sheer force.
