Chapter Text
Mount Elgin Subterranean Research Annex – Erusean Airspace March 3rd, 2023 – 04:21 hrs
The cold was different beneath the mountain—sharper somehow. It didn’t bite the skin, but wrapped around the lungs, tight and insistent. Like the air itself resented being disturbed.
A low hum filled the server room—not from machinery, but from the mountain itself. It was subtle. Residual. As if the very stone had learned to listen.
Dr. Alena Vos tightened the folds of her coat, trying to block out the bite of the lab's unnatural chill. Frost spread in delicate webs across the edges of the interface’s central prism—an eerie phenomenon given the warmth of the subterranean facility. The chamber lights dimmed as the pulse of the Chrono-Rift Node intensified. Encased in crystalline glass, the device resembled a turbine wrapped in layers of static light. Its core pulsed in quiet rhythm, each thrum aligning perfectly with the readings dancing across surrounding monitors. Neural waveform plots flickered alongside electromagnetic spectrographs and archived combat footage, parsed in real time. The system consumed history like a living thing.
"Initiate Layer Phase One,” she said calmly, her voice carrying into the room through a ceiling speaker.
A reply came from the console deck: “Confirmed. Splicing telemetry from Operation Ravine. Cipher flight log—timestamp zero, Belka engagement.”
Alena didn’t move. She stared down as the data converged, two combat pathways snaking across the interface’s display wall, diverging, converging again, until the simulation stilled.
"Overlay matched. Predictive recursion locked. 87.3% sync," came Renik's voice. A good result. Too good.
Vos crossed her arms. “Run until entropy breach. Do not pause at spike events.”
The Ghost Code
They had named it Project Chrono-Rift. On paper, it was a fusion of historical combat intelligence—a glorified prediction engine. But beneath layers of protocol and cold war leftovers, it became something else. A way to understand instinct. Not through statistics, but through signal resonance—coded impressions left behind in radar sweeps, cockpit black boxes, even corrupted audio logs buried in forgotten archives.
The first success was Cipher’s maneuver data. Belkan war archives were notoriously patchy, but they pulsed with unfiltered emotion: precision evasion, kill-loop spirals, sudden stalling tactics that no textbook could explain.
But what no one expected was the signature echo. A second aircraft. Galm 2.
Not in the dataset. Not loaded. Yet present.
Testing Log: March 5th
Subject: Cipher Neural Overlay Result: Full synchronization Anomaly: Secondary pilot behavior shadowing test flight, initiating maneuver correction unprompted
Vos tilted her head at the ghost trace, glowing red on the terminal.
“Run it again,” she said. “I want to see what choices Galm 2 tries to overwrite.”
Renik hesitated. “We didn’t upload Galm 2’s data. It shouldn’t exist.”
Vos stepped forward, voice low. “Then this is something new.”
Sequence 03: Scarface
Ten days later, after another round of bureaucratic delays and one hushed reprimand from the Erusian security liaison, the team received encrypted packages from an Ustian subcontractor.
Inside: raw telemetry from 2004—Scarface 1, from the Usean Continental War.
Scarface’s flight data was different. Where Cipher darted like a blade, Scarface flowed like a current. In testing, Riftline overlaid his evasive maneuvers with near-perfect fluidity. But at minute 43, something changed.
The interface shimmered.
Renik gasped. “Stop the run, it’s glitching.”
“No,” Vos whispered, eyes wide.
The screen twisted, two trajectories spiraling into each other. The second aircraft—a fighter unknown in Scarface’s time—appeared out of sync.
A voice cracked through the speakers, faint and torn by static:
“I’ve got two on me—clearing space for Phoenix.”
Vos staggered back. “That name… that’s not in the log.”
No one spoke.
The Moment of Fracture
On April 1st, against advisory, Vos conducted an unsanctioned splice—using combat signal data pulled from an errant drone sweep outside Selatapura. The file was incomplete, encoded with burst transmission markers and electromagnetic frequencies far beyond current tech.
The Riftline interface responded violently.
Screams of distortion bled from the speakers. The lab’s lights flickered. Fire alarms tripped with no smoke. Radar feedback from the nearest airbase recorded an unregistered aircraft flying inland at Mach 2—then disappearing mid-flight.
Most alarming: its callsign appeared on base logs for twelve seconds before vanishing.
STRIDER 1
Vos didn’t sleep that night.
Final Entry – Vos Archive Log [Redacted]
I thought we’d simulate ghosts. Instead, we summoned something far more dangerous. Time doesn’t remember neatly. And pilots like these… they leave wounds. They came with missions. They came with emotion. They will come again.
A lone display in Lab 3 flickered awake. The interface glowed, no longer reactive—aware.
And far above the mountain, barely visible through a break in the clouds, a contrail crossed the sky. Pure, silent, impossible.
The Riftline Interface remained quiet.
The cobalt prism, once pulsing like a nervous heartbeat, now hung motionless in its magnetic cradle, suspended like a frozen eye. The lab was dark except for the glow of half-functioning monitors, each whispering static into the silence. Alena Vos hadn’t moved in hours.
She stood with her back to the control wall, arms crossed tightly over her chest. Behind the reflection in the glass, she could still see it—that streak across the clouds. It had come and gone too fast. No engine flare. No sonic boom. No source. Just movement.
Below her in the trench, Renik paced quietly, headset looped over his neck. He held a folder with diplomatic seals—Ustian navy blue, Erusian crimson. The top was labeled in bold red: Inter-Theater Observational Committee (ITOC): Contrail Event 003.
“AWACS unit out of Cape Rainy logged it,” he said, voice flat. “Tagged it transient and moved on.”
Vos exhaled, slow. “They’re burying it.”
“Like all the others.” Renik flipped open the folder. “Osea filed a weather pattern interference memo. Yuktobania sent a poetic warning.”
Vos raised an eyebrow.
He read aloud: “Do not reach into the sky for ghosts. The living are always watching.”
A pause.
“I think they know.”
Vos turned to the terminal and ran her fingers over the keys, lighting up a new data folder: Residual Echoes – Peripheral Effects. The interface hissed softly, recalibrating. She glanced at Renik.
“They might know something’s wrong,” she said. “But we’re the only ones watching what happens to the ones it touches.”
Renik leaned forward, staring at the notes. “It’s not just showing data anymore.”
Vos didn’t respond. She watched a replay of a flight path skimming across Usean airspace—one not in any recorded mission. It ended with the aircraft pulling a maneuver neither Cipher nor Scarface ever executed. Yet it bore both their imprints.
She whispered, “It’s learning from them. It’s writing tactics that never existed.”
He stepped beside her. “Or they’re writing from somewhere else.”
Three encrypted transmissions hit the Annex’s terminal in succession:
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Yuktobanian Foreign Affairs Office→ Subject: Unnatural Combat Precision Recorded Near Akerson Hill
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Osean Defense Directorate (Internal Memo)→ Subject: AWACS Redshift Logs—Unexplained Aircraft Maneuvers
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Ustian Emergency Commission→ Subject: Immediate Termination Request – Chrono-Rift Classification Upgrade to Level 7
Renik skimmed them, frowning. “They want us shut down.”
Vos shook her head. “They want the Riftline contained. There’s a difference.”
He gestured at the console. “We’ve pulled everything. Cipher, Scarface. And the Scarface overlays are starting to self-edit. We’re out of material.”
“No,” she murmured. Her fingers hovered over the interface.
Renik hesitated. “What are you thinking?”
“We reached into the past,” she said. “It’s asking for what comes next.”
Renik went still. “You mean the future?”
Vos tapped a sequence into the console. A new folder loaded, marked Uncatalogued Signal Fragments—data bursts salvaged from Erusian AWACS surveillance east of Selatapura. No known aircraft matched the telemetry. No timestamp correlated with past missions.
At the bottom, a line of comms crackled faintly:
“Strider 1 to Long Caster… just dodged a railgun. Again. They just don't stop, do they?”
Vos stared at the screen, hands trembling.
Voice Log – Alena Vos (Private Entry)
"April 4th. I thought ghosts haunted the past. I was wrong. We reached backward—and found memories with names and callsigns. But what frightens me now isn’t what we summoned. It’s what wants to be summoned. I don’t believe we’re alone in this airspace anymore."
The Riftline hummed. Not randomly. Not in cycles.
It pulsed like it was breathing.
Vos stepped back. On the nearest monitor, a faint flight silhouette appeared—blinking, unverified. It traced a climb pattern resembling a Strider tactical ascent.
Renik whispered, “It knows we’re watching.”
Vos didn’t blink. “No,” she said. “It knows who’s missing.”
She tapped the final key.