Ben tried to slouch in the ridiculous high-backed chair, but the thing was engineered specifically to force a posture of maximum shame. He glanced at Karn, who had the advantage of bulk: the chair looked like a kid's stool under him.

  Captain Ironbelly, arms folded and tail twitching, paced a slow perimeter around the briefing table like a substitute teacher rehearsing a truly withering classroom lecture.

  “Which one of you,” the captain growled, “thought it was a good idea to start a fire in a casino?”

  Ben opened his mouth to answer, and Karn, not wanting to spell out that it was an accident, spoke first. "It was a tactical distraction, sir. To mask our exit."

  Ironbelly's eyes narrowed. "And the second fire?"

  "We needed a bigger distraction after the first one didn't take." Karn shrugged. "Plus, you said improvise."

  Ben caught a faint twitch at the corner of Ironbelly's mouth. Not quite a smile. Maybe a hint of respect. Still, the captain barreled on. "We are not a demolition team, gentlemen. We are thieves—" he jabbed a thumb at Darius, seated at the far end and looking delighted by the spectacle, "—and opportunists."

  Darius raised his cup in a languid toast. "Hear, hear."

  Vaeris sat to Ben's left, arms crossed, her face a sculpted mask of elven stoicism but her foot tapping like a seismic meter during aftershocks. Ben tried not to look at her. She had a way of making you feel like you’d just tracked blood onto her favorite rug.

  Ironbelly stopped pacing and leaned forward, both hands braced on the table. "The mission was technically a success. The key word being technically. But next time, everyone with a bounty wears a holo-mask. Casino facial recognition was only lax because if it flagged everyone with a criminal record, they'd have no customers. The moment you left the floor, security was running your faces through back-channel servers."

  Ben felt his ears go hot.

  "Now," Ironbelly said, voice dropping an octave, "let's get to why we stuck our necks out to rescue Mr. Vex here." He jerked his chin at Darius, who gave a self-satisfied little nod.

  "Because," Darius said in third person, "Mr. Vex is one of the only living authorities on SoulCorp's real agenda in this sector. And as of this morning, he’s the only one not currently being dissected in a black site lab."

  Silence. Even the ambient hum of the Ember's grav systems seemed to hush.

  Vaeris broke it. "You said you had evidence."

  Darius reached into his tunic and pulled out a data wafer, no bigger than a thumbnail. He flicked it through the air, and it landed with a soft click in front of Ironbelly.

  "Everything I have, including the stuff that got me locked in a stasis field. I had to use a very expensive encryptor to back everything up before I had to destroy what I physically had on me. I suggest you read it somewhere secure, and not on anything with a SoulCorp serial number."

  Cassian chose that moment to push his little service cart into the room, timing as impeccable as always. He hovered uncertainly, eyes on Vaeris. After everything was passed around, she caught his gaze and gave a single nod. He sighed and stood behind her, hands fidgeting with the carafe.

  "There's more," Darius said, folding his hands. "SoulCorp isn't just harvesting souls from the void for the nobility. They're building something." He paused. "A synthetic gate. A physical one. The ultimate catalyst. Designed to act as a soulstar and brute force gates open. Except it’s not just two to three standard forced unlocks. The number is… significantly higher. As in… a dozen or more."

  Ironbelly felt a cold spot in his chest. "Well, that shouldn’t be possible."

  Darius smiled thinly. "It wasn’t. Most test subjects could barely handle three common gates. When kept inside the gate too long, subjects died. And when I say several, I mean thousands. Thousands of souls ripped from the void and thrown back into it.”

  “Dying the moment you’re reborn…” Vaeris spoke softly, “is a wound that shreds a soul, taking years to recover from even a soulstar crucible. To force the whole process, the magical knowledge they would've had to uncover…”

  A silence, dense and prickly, settled over the table.

  “How close are they?” Thimble asked.

  “To an acceptable survivability rate?” Darius shrugged. “No idea, this was the last information I found before I was caught.”

  Ironbelly grunted, voice low. "And if they succeeded?”

  Darius leaned back, fingers scratching through his cowl. "Then a lot of powerful people are about to get even more powerful.”

  Ben looked at Ironbelly, who looked at the wafer, then at Darius. Ben couldn't see the chill that went up everyone's spine, but he sure could feel it.

  “Thimble,” the captain said. “Isolate a network. Run decryption.”

  “Yes, sir. Gimme ten minutes to set up,” the gnome called back as she hurried out of the briefing room.

  Darius broke the silence after a minute. “Does anyone want to share an interesting fact about themselves?”

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  ***

  The Drifting Ember went dark by degrees.

  Not a dramatic blackout—Ironbelly would never allow that—but a deliberate dimming. Nonessential systems powered down first. Then the long-range antennae folded. Exterior lights winked out until the Ember was nothing but shadow against starlight.

  Ben hadn’t realized how loud the ship normally was until it went quiet.

  Ironbelly stood at the head of the briefing table, one heavy paw resting beside the wafer. He didn’t look at anyone when he spoke.

  “Thimble.”

  She was already moving. The gnome had dragged a pile of her workshop into the room: two consoles, a coil of fiber she insisted wasn’t stolen, three power cells, and something that might’ve once been a coffee machine.

  “This,” she declared, jamming a cable into a naked port she’d soldered herself, “has never seen a network. Has never heard of a network. If it starts asking for updates, it's getting melted into slag.”

  Vaeris positioned herself by the sealed hatch, one hand resting near the wand at her hip. Loose, but ready. Karn took the opposite wall, arms folded. Ben tried to look like someone who belonged in rooms where people whispered about corporate god-machines.

  Cassian just stayed behind Vaeris’ chair. He wasn’t pretending to be invisible this time. He was just… still.

  Darius watched all of it with a faint, satisfied smile.

  Ironbelly picked up the wafer between two claws. “If this pings anything outside this hull—”

  “It won’t,” Thimble snapped, insulted.

  She slotted it in. For a breathless second, nothing happened. Then the dead console flickered to life.

  The display came up in staggered lines of encrypted script, symbols folding over themselves like thorned vines. Thimble’s fingers flew over the improvised interface, muttering under her breath.

  “Layered cipher. Four tiers. No—five. Oh, that’s filthy. That’s genuinely filthy.”

  “Can you break it?” Darius asked. “I had to destroy the encryption key.”

  She shot him a look. “Please.”

  Layers peeled away. A directory tree unfolded.

  Not random.

  Structured. Labeled. Indexed.

  Project headers. Personnel logs. Subject registries.

  Ben felt the back of his neck prickle. Ironbelly’s tail stilled.

  The screen shifted. A title appeared in clinical white text: PROJECT SOVEREIGN — Synthetic Gate Initiative.

  Below it, a Stellar Nobility Compact crest. And beneath that:

  Objective: Construct a multi-harmonic catalytic vessel capable of simultaneous gate resonance across all known signatures.

  The air thinned. “Play it,” Ironbelly said. Footage replaced text. A laboratory chamber filled the screen—sterile, curved walls inlaid with runic conduits. A figure stood at the center within a suspended golden circle. Human. Young. Shaved head. Runes and sigils traced across their skin. A voice—measured, professional—narrated off-camera.

  “Subject 112-F. Initiating gate harmonization.” Light flared. Three distinct sigils ignited around the halo, and it started to spin.

  Beams of light shot forward from the lit sigils orbiting and plunged into his flesh. The subject didn’t scream at first.

  That didn't last.

  The sigils destabilized. Heat seemed to push against his skin from the inside. The recording cut to static. Next file.

  Another subject. Another attempt. “Subject 19-C. Quad signature test.”

  Increased to four sigils this time. The harmonics held. For three seconds.

  Then something inside the subject seemed to twist. Their body convulsed. The body snapped outward, breaking in half. The feed ended.

  Thimble swallowed. “Next?”

  Ironbelly didn’t answer. He nodded.

  File after file. Failures. Overloads. Flatlined bio-signs. Numbers and letters stacked upward in a column.

  When Vaeris finally spoke, her voice was softer than Ben had ever heard it.

  “How many?”

  Thimble highlighted the summary.

  Total Subjects Processed: 3,742

  Ben’s stomach dropped.

  “Thousands,” Karn murmured.

  Darius’ expression had lost its amusement, having already seen everything.

  “They were pulling souls from the void,” he said quietly. “Reconstituting them. Forcing resonance trials. When the gates rejected the strain…” He spread his hands.

  On the screen, a data block opened automatically.

  Stability Event — Subject 47-A.

  “Wait,” Thimble breathed. The footage began. The chamber again. Another subject. “Subject 47-A,” the narrator said. “Initiating full-spectrum harmonization.”

  The gate ignited.

  One sigil.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Five.

  Ben felt his pulse in his ears.

  Six.

  The harmonics didn’t tear.

  They aligned.

  The air in the chamber rippled like heat over sand. The subject stood upright—calm, focused—light radiating outward in structured bands.

  Twelve gates. Simultaneously.

  No explosion, combustion, or any of the other ways subjects rejected the process and died.

  The narrator’s voice wavered. “Stability sustained. Harmonic coherence at ninety-one percent—”

  The subject’s eyes lifted.

  Not to the glass.

  To the lens.

  Silence filled the briefing room so completely Ben could hear the faint tick of cooling metal somewhere in the walls.

  Thimble reversed the feed and hit pause. “That’s not a failure.”

  “No,” Cassian said.

  Every head turned.

  He hadn’t meant to speak. His fingers were white where they gripped the back of Vaeris’ chair.

  “That’s synchronization.”

  Vaeris looked up at him slowly.

  Cassian stepped forward, eyes locked on the frozen frame of Subject 47-A.

  “They aren’t brute forcing gates,” he said. “They’re tuning them. Aligning harmonic thresholds across signature boundaries. That pattern—” He pointed at the overlay of sigils. “That’s not random convergence. That’s guided modulation. They figured out how to weave the signatures into a single harmonic structure.”

  Vaeris tilted her head back towards Cassian.

  “And just how do you know this?”

  Cassian looked like he’d been caught with his pants down.

  “I was hired on Kestrel, but I grew up on one of its moons, Kestrel-9. My parents worked in gate research. They liked to explain things to me when they were stumped. Like a programmer’s rubber duck.” He shrugged. “It got more interesting as I got older.”

  Ironbelly’s voice was quiet now.

  “Explain for everyone who doesn't understand complex soul mechanisms, please.”

  Cassian swallowed. “Full-spectrum resonance doesn’t happen. Not naturally. Souls fragment under that kind of load. That’s why mages specialize.”

  For the first time, Elara spoke up, “They'd rather be a big fish in a small pond then?”

  “It’s not that simple.” Cassian answered. “Most people don't want a bunch of different powers at common grade. That's also where species and races come in. Some gates are going to be extremely easy to unlock for some. Such as elemental gates for those that live in harsh environments.”

  Thimble scrolled. A notation blinked in red text at the bottom of the file.

  Subject 47-A — Status: Missing

  Darius sighed. “I never found confirmation of containment.”

  A soft chime echoed through the room.

  Everyone froze. Thimble’s head snapped toward her rig. “That’s not from the console,” she whispered.

  Ironbelly moved to the wall display. A secondary sensor panel pulsed amber.

  “Pull it, Thimble. Ember, once she does, do a passive scan,” he ordered.

  Once they had finished their tasks, Ember didn't wait to be asked. “External handshake attempt.”

  “Military?” Vaeris asked.

  “Corporate.”

  The word hung there.

  Not an attack. Not yet. Just a quiet probe in the dark. Confirming.

  Ben’s mouth went dry. “They know,” he whispered.

  Ironbelly didn’t look at him. His claws dug faint crescents into the tabletop. He was watching the image of Subject 47-A staring into the camera with impossible calm. Everyone thought it, but no one said anything.

  Subject 47-A looked like Benjamin.

  Older. Sharper. Finished.

  Outside, the stars drifted on, indifferent.