“You don’t have time to review! That sequence is buried in the wormhole core. It’slive.”
“Captain Starling,” he says, voice that special brand of condescension reserved for women who know more than their male superiors, “we’ve initiated a controlled shutdown. The situation is under control.”
“No,” I say, standing. My chair scrapes the floor like a weapon unsheathed. “You don’t understand. Stark didn’t careabout sabotage. He wanted toopenthe wormhole, not collapse it. And now that door’s still cracked—just enough. He left a tether inside. Something quantum-level.”
Linx blinks. Once. Slowly.
“We’ll monitor the array.”
My blood is boiling.
“By the time your monitors catch the fluctuations, this whole planet could fold in on itself.”
He opens his mouth—probably to remind me of protocol—but I’m already moving.
Out the door. Down the corridor. The walls blur, faces become streaks of uniforms and flickering status screens. The back of my throat tastes like copper. Rage and fear and the hollow punch of knowing you’re right but nobody’s listening.
The doors to my quarters hiss open and I head straight for the console, bypassing all the security prompts with a series of authorization overrides that should probably get me court-martialed.
The wormhole logs pull up in a cascade of blue and red text, scrolling like a fever dream. I narrow it to the last ten minutes before the mainframe went dark.
There it is.
Buried under sixteen layers of obfuscation code. Masked as a routine calibration ping. The data signature isStark’s. Time-stamped post-containment. I isolate the string and expand it.
My heart stops.
Sequence: INIT.
Execution: 22:00 system time.
Effect: Quantum Cascade Initiation.
Target: Wormhole Singularity Node ALPHA-DAV.
I backtrack. Fast. Trace it into the command spine.
There’s a nested loop.
A goddamn chain reaction.
Self-replicating code—fractal algorithms designed to bypass every safety protocol the Alliance baked into the system. The moment the “controlled shutdown” begins, it’ll trigger the cascade.
Stark didn’t want toescape. He wanted a stage. A statement. A legacy.
And unless I stop it, it’s going to tear Daveros open like a tin can under a gravity hammer.
I slam my fist down on the console and the display flickers. “Shit!”
The starscape lamp above Dar’s bed starts spinning again, slow and lazy. It always resets when the room AI detects elevated heart rates.
I’m halfway through rerouting the sequence to a sandbox server when I feel it.
Kaz.
I don’t hear him come in. He doesn’t knock. He just stands there—silhouetted in the doorframe, jaw tight, eyes already scanning the screen.
“What happened?” he says, voice low, sharp.
