Session 05: The Heart

The dinner with Cailan Sultane was all porcelain smiles and predatory etiquette. Outside the governor’s vaulted windows, Aidah’s twin moons drifted like polished coins – reminders of debts owed. Cailan spoke languidly of civic duty while the silver insignia of House Sultane winked at Jun Minh from his collar like a threat. What he wanted was simple: proof that the Irid Syndicate could, or could not, detonate the planet’s ancient terraforming lattice at will. What he offered was simpler still – fuel, supplies, and a promise of refitting their warped old frigate. The crew of the Celestial Princess accepted, not because they trusted Cailan, but because the frigate’s life-support readouts were already blinking amber.

They began in the jungle, where air clung to skin like wet cloth and every frond dripped corrosive dew. Cassian Vrye felt the psychic pressure first – a low, maddening thrum that rattled memories of interrogation cells. Then came the cats: panthers wrought from muscle, bone, and quicksilver nanites, their hides rippling to match the foliage. Jarek Thorn met the first with a shotgun blast that scattered liquid metal across broad-leafed vines. Grald ‘Gray’ Camrin jinked between trunks, his sidearm popping in counter-rhythm to Daniil’s hoarse curses as claws scored his vac-suit. When the last beast spasmed into twitching shards, Jun Minh felt the jungle sigh; the psychic pressure withdrew like a polluting tide.

Konrad Paxt found the vault door half buried in moss. Even silent, it radiated pre-tech menace. A minute later it surrendered to his code-breaker and the party plunged down an elevator tube flecked with roots and fallen mycelium. Beneath, they discovered the caretaker: PRISM-4, a fractured virtual intelligence charged three centuries earlier with tending Aidah’s terraforming grid. PRISM bore no malice, only directives, and those directives were compromised. It spoke to Cassian in crowns of thought-light, lamenting that someone named Rell now held the master switch deep in a mountaintop “Heart” facility, and that seventy-four days remained before a forced recycling of the planet’s surface – buildings, crops, livelihoods liquefied in grey nanite fog.

To seize control PRISM required a living scion of House Sultane. The irony bit hard; Sultane blood was the very leash Aidah wished to slip. Yet necessity trumped pride. The crew relayed to orbit where Cailan’s battlecruiser Ascendant Will prowled the mesosphere. An encrypted packet of royal gene-codes came down, bound with self-expiring shackles.

That should have been enough – accept the keys, lock out the rebels, return to dinner. But necessity has a second name: opportunity. Konrad and E-20 dissected the packet, copying the raw authority hidden inside. If the governor could rewrite a world, so could the dead-eyed fugitives he had hired.

Night cloaked the ascension to the Heart – a white fang of mountain, its peak riddled with vents. Below zero winds rattled around the Princess’s landing skids while Cassian, Gray, Jarek and Jun Minh dropped through an exhaust shaft on ropes that burned cold through their gloves.

Inside, steam-lit corridors echoed with the chatter of Syndicate patrols. Cassian’s precognitive flicker warned of a pair rounding a corner; a moment’s pause, a held breath, and the squad slid past like ghosts. The auxiliary control alcove was smaller than a monk’s cell – one iris door, one sigil-stamped interface stalk, and air that tasted of antifreeze. Cassian laid his palm on the stalk; Konrad fed the stolen authority across their private comm-line.

“Operator,” PRISM intoned inside their minds, “state intent.”

“Safeguard Aidah’s people,” Cassian replied. He could feel the opposing presence of Rell on the network, a young mind raw with power and fear. For a heartbeat their wills meshed: memories of prison bars versus memories of discarded limbs replaced by chrome. Then PRISM chose. House Sultane’s codes, Cassian’s empathy, and Jun Minh’s whispered plea for mercy tipped the scales. Rell’s access guttered out like a blown fuse.

In the stillness that followed, PRISM revealed the rot: Ancha Tolvec, the last pre-Scream controller, had implanted the 64-year purge as a poison pill, a final act of secession from the Terran Mandate. The Syndicate had merely inherited a doomsday they half understood.

Cassian issued a new directive. The terraformers would serve the population, not the crown. For one week PRISM would pretend obedience to Cailan, enough time for the Celestial Princess to vanish into the black. After that, Aidah would be answerable only to itself. PRISM accepted, a note of quiet pride ringing in its synthetic timbre.

Evacuation alarms rolled through the Heart’s halls. Some Syndicate fighters fled in atmospheric skimmers; others surrendered when Ascendant Will’s dropships hammered onto the ice-fields. Fifty rebels – barely more than a communal kitchen’s worth of souls – disappeared into prisoner holds. From the Princess’s cockpit windows, Gray watched gunships rise like sparks against aurora. He thought of the nanite cats, of the governor’s dining crystal, and wondered which image would haunt his sleep.

Cailan Sultane never learned the truth. He saw only success: terraforming lockdown, rebels broken, mercenaries paid. True to his word he resupplied the Princess and, ignorant of the missing weapon feed-lines, authorized a final upgrade. Engineers bolted a miniature workshop into the cargo bay and swapped drive coils, coaxing another light-year of jump out of the old frigate. The crew smiled, signed for delivery, and kept their secret: the sand-caster now sat cold and silent, its power diverted to the new Drive-3’s hungry capacitors.

Hours later Aidah’s skyline dwindled, a jade-and-pearl marble in the aft monitors. In the workshop E-20 hummed over a gasket printer while Daniil sketched cargo conversions on a datapad already slick with engine grease. Konrad catalogued the stolen Sultane credentials – a skeleton key to half the sector’s customs nets.

In the galley Jun Minh poured steaming tea for Cassian and Jarek. They spoke little. Victory tasted of metal and of fifty names they did not know. Somewhere on the far horizon cyborg wars simmered and unlabeled star-lanes beckoned. Aidah, at least, had been given its chance.

Whether it would rise on it was no longer their burden.

Outside, the Drive-3 flared, star-light bent, and the Celestial Princess slipped, unseen, into the rift.