The war room lights were dimmed to tactical levels.

  At the center of the chamber, Brindle Scar rotated in slow, silent defiance.

  One hemisphere burned in molten light. The other lay frozen in pale fracture. Between them, a thin twilight seam glowed like a surgical incision.

  Helena Voss stood at the edge of the projection field.

  Her hands were clasped behind her back. Her uniform immaculate.

  “Replay the probe reconstruction,” she said.

  The hologram shifted.

  Not the planet now — but a lattice of mana readings layered in translucent strata. Saturation bands. Compression gradients. Harmonic interference echoes.

  A distortion bloomed across the projection like a bruise beneath glass.

  Fractured mana signatures. Not chaotic. Not random.

  Structured absence.

  “Baseline planetary saturation at time of event?” Hale asked quietly.

  “Minimal,” Voss replied. “Brindle Scar showed no life signs other than local fauna. The creatures were consuming structures and mineral deposits for residual mana trace. Ambient field density negligible.”

  Hale’s eyes tracked the fracture bloom with clinical interest. “This magnitude of destabilization to produce these readings should have been impossible.”

  “It was,” Voss said.

  Pike gave a low hum of amusement from the far side of the chamber. He leaned against a bulkhead as though the death of a planet were a scheduling inconvenience.

  “So we’re hunting a weapon,” he said. “Good. I prefer clarity.”

  “You are hunting an unknown,” Voss corrected.

  Pike’s smile didn’t falter. “Unknown weapons still die.”

  Rift stood slightly apart, hands folded inside his coat sleeves. He hadn’t looked up from the data stream once.

  “Does it pay more if it breathes?” he asked mildly.

  “It pays,” Voss said.

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  “Then I don't rightly care.”

  Hale stepped closer to the projection. She reached through the hologram, fingers slicing through layers of compressed mana readings.

  “These aren’t standard ruptures,” she murmured. “Look at the compression bands. They aren’t dispersal patterns.”

  “No,” Voss agreed.

  The distortion pulsed faintly.

  Like something that had inhaled too deeply.

  “Fractured signatures,” Hale said. “But coherent. The compression layers are intact. They’re just… misaligned.”

  “Meaning?” Pike asked.

  Hale’s jaw tightened slightly. “Meaning whatever caused this did not explode outward.”

  She turned to face them.

  “It propagated internally.”

  Silence held for a fraction too long.

  Pike pushed off the wall.

  “Then we kill it before it propagates again.”

  “You assume lethality is optimal,” Hale replied evenly.

  “I assume survival is.”

  Pike gestured aggressively toward the display. “The planet stopped rotating! That’s not research. That’s catastrophic failure! If it halted while you were groundside, you’d be thrown laterally at terminal velocity before you understood what happened.”

  “It may not have been intentional,” Hale said.

  Pike laughed once. Sharp. Unamused. “You think this is an accident?”

  “I think,” Hale said carefully, “that something capable of restructuring planetary mana saturation without dispersal may have control parameters we don’t yet understand.”

  “Control?” Pike echoed. “You want to capture it.”

  “I want to study it.”

  “And if it fractures this ship?”

  Hale did not answer immediately.

  “That,” she said finally, “is why we prepare containment.”

  Rift finally looked up.

  “If containment fails, does the payout increase?”

  “Yes,” Voss said.

  Rift nodded once. “Then I have no preference.”

  Pike’s eyes returned to Voss.

  “You’ve seen the surface,” he said. “You walked it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it prey?”

  The question hung heavier than it should have.

  The hologram rotated.

  Burning hemisphere.

  Frozen hemisphere.

  Twilight seam.

  Voss studied the distortion bloom again. The fractured mana signature. The compression layers bent inward rather than torn apart.

  Order broken without chaos.

  “I don't know,” she said. Something she rarely spoke out loud.

  Pike’s jaw flexed.

  Hale’s gaze sharpened.

  Rift returned to his data stream.

  Voss turned slightly, bringing Ashfall into projection alongside Brindle Scar. A volcanic sphere wreathed in ash and thermal turbulence.

  “Ashfall maintains higher ambient saturation than the Brindle Scar,” she said. “Compression thresholds will differ. Environmental variables will complicate replication.”

  “You believe it will replicate,” Hale said.

  “I believe,” Voss replied, “that anomalies continue unless stopped.”

  The room cooled perceptibly.

  Pike exhaled. “If it has a body, I can put a round through it from two clicks out.”

  “We will deploy with layered contingencies,” Voss said. “Engagement parameters remain flexible.”

  “That’s not an answer,” Pike said.

  “It is an answer,” she replied evenly. “And it is also an order.”

  Pike threw up his hands once. “Fine. Just tell me what to load before I look through my scope.”

  He and Rift left.

  The door sealed behind them.

  Hale studied Voss carefully.

  “You haven’t decided.”

  Voss met her gaze.

  “I haven't eliminated options.”

  “If it can be contained, we will contain it.”

  “And if it cannot?” Hale pressed.

  Voss’s eyes returned to the fractured bloom over Brindle Scar. The power it took to kill a planet's core was immeasurable.

  “Then we will correct it.”

  She waved a hand and the holo collapsed into darkness.

  For a brief second, the war room reflected only her face in the glass.

  “Prepare for Ashfall.”

  Voss tapped a screen and pulled up the ammunition manifest.