The morning haze over Kinergi Ekta never quite cleared; it simply thinned into a pale, metallic smear that felt more like exhaust than atmosphere. Fex’s compound sat in the middle of it, all sharp angles and quiet suspicions. The group arrived with a crate full of silent bodies and a lie balanced on Jun’s tongue. They had made their choice hours earlier: keep five clones, the strange ones who spoke in riddles, and dispose of the thieves who had tried to interfere. Jarek had done the work with the grim efficiency of someone who had closed too many doors on too many lives, and E-20 had erased the scene with the clinical neatness of a machine that understood “evidence” as something to be unmade. The ravine nearby swallowed the bodies without complaint, and the ship—Daniil’s jury-rigged life support box strapped to a corner of its cargo bay—swallowed the clones.
The crate they delivered to Fex contained one hundred twenty-three. Fex’s eyes narrowed as he verified the count. Jun stood there, hands folded loosely, every nerve alive. When he asked about the missing five, she met his suspicion with a practiced blankness. They delivered what they found, she said. The truth sat behind her teeth like a shard of glass. Fex accepted the lie for one reason only: profit. He paid them for the delivery and immediately dangled a new job in front of them, a tidy sum for locating the “missing clones”—the very ones resting quietly in their stolen sanctuary aboard the Celestial Princess. Jun pushed back, negotiating not from strength but from sheer audacity. Fex relented. They had three days.
Their investigation began with threads pulled from Konrad’s quiet digital spelunking. In the labyrinth of corporate servers, he found the man responsible for isolating the anomalous clones: a hobbyist dollmaker with a keenness for patterns and an aversion to authority. Cassian and Jarek went to visit him in person, under the guise of internal investigators. The man welcomed them nervously into a home cluttered with porcelain faces and tiny glass eyes. He remembered the clones well. They had exhibited something no batch ever should: synchronized awareness. They had spoken in perfect unison, murmuring phrases that didn’t belong in any technical report—“temporal river,” and “door without a room.” He had quarantined them, waiting for specialists who never explained much and never returned.
Cassian listened, his mind tuning itself to the old echo he had sensed since their first encounter with the batch. The man described how the clones had stared fixedly at a flickering ceiling fixture for forty-three seconds. He mentioned the fixture’s faint hum, the sort of detail no one bothers with unless it frightens them for reasons they can’t articulate. Cassian recognized the sound from somewhere darker and stranger: drill space. That vibration that threaded through the void, the one no normal mind should find familiar. The realization lodged beneath his ribs like a ticking device.
The man finally gave them a warehouse address where the defective batch had been sent. He hesitated about protocol access, certain they should have it already, but Cassian’s insistence wore him down. Jarek watched him, stone-still, weighing every twitch for deception. But the man simply feared something he didn’t have a name for.
When they returned to the ship, Cassian ordered the clones’ container reinforced. Daniil obliged, wrapping soundproofing around it like insulation around a secret, and installing a recorder to capture anything the clones might mutter or dream. Jun lingered beside the container afterward, resting a hand against its shell. She spoke to them softly, knowing they could not hear her, but somehow believing the gesture mattered. The five within floated in their suspension, their faces calm, their silence too deliberate.
To keep themselves moving and funded, the crew accepted a side job hauling space mail three hexes away. A tight schedule, but within Gray’s piloting reach. He made the jump cleanly—according to anyone watching from the cockpit—but he did not share the vision he had glimpsed earlier. The one in which everything went wrong. The one where he lost control of the ship in drill space, Cassian shouted about the clones waking, and Jarek’s voice—cold and unsurprised—cut through the chaos. Instead, Gray simply announced that the route looked good.
The first few hours in drill space were uneventful, those familiar needle-prick stars whipping into elongated threads outside the viewport. Cassian attempted to meditate, to sense the mind-prints of the clones or the hum behind the universe. There was something out there, yes, but not a mind. Not anything shaped for human understanding. Just a vibration waiting to be noticed.
Then the alarms erupted.
Gray’s vision began to unfold with sickening precision. The rutter didn’t drift—they drifted. Something in the currents of drill space had seized the ship and begun to pull it off the mapped path. E-20 clamped onto the nearest console to steady itself as Gray wrestled the controls. His breath sharpened. His muscles locked. The readings scrolled into nonsense. He felt the ship sliding toward an unseen chasm, some gravitational undertow in the uncharted dark.
In the cargo bay, Jun felt it before she saw it. A pressure in the air. A shift in the hum. She turned toward the container just as five pairs of eyes snapped open inside. The clones focused on nothing, or perhaps on everything at once, and their mouths began to move. Jun’s skin crawled. She hit the comm channel instinctively.
“We are seen,” they whispered. Not in unison, not quite. More like a single mind speaking through five fragile conduits.
Gray’s hands trembled on the flight sticks. The hull groaned. Down the comm, the clones’ chant crackled like interference and prophecy. Cassian leaned forward, heart pounding, sensing the same vibration as before—but louder now, no longer patient.
With E-20 rerouting power feeds and Gray clawing their trajectory back into the recorded currents, the ship shuddered, dipped, and then righted itself. The pressure eased. The alarms thinned into isolated warnings. The rutter’s signal pulsed steadily again.
Gray exhaled a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. Cassian sagged back into his chair, pulse still racing. Jun stared at the container from across the hold, her hand hovering near it but unwilling to touch. Inside, the clones’ eyes had closed once more, as if nothing had happened.
The stars of normal space waited ahead, three and a half days away. So did a warehouse full of unanswered questions, a corporation that lied as easily as it breathed, and clones who had begun to wake to something no one understood.
But for now, the ship held its course. And every mind aboard knew that whatever had whispered through those five fragile bodies had not finished speaking.
Session Notes