Aventis Secundus – Exile Stronghold

  The storm outside was chewing at the stone again.

  Ice clung to their armor in jagged sheets as the outer gate sealed behind them, hissing shut with a final, echoing slam. The stone corridor ahead was dim, lit by dying wall sconces and lined with frost. Every step cracked against frozen tile.

  “Still escorting us through the damn halls like visitors,” Centurion Lucius Draconius muttered, pulling off his helm, steam rising from his breath

  Magister Quintus Aurelian snorted, his hood soaked and rimmed with ice. “Seventieth time, if I’m counting right.”

  “You are.”

  Two guards flanked them down the corridor, fully armored, weapons ready, eyes forward.

  Draconius didn’t look at them. “You’d think they’d let us come and go without the fanfare.”

  “They know exactly who we are,” Aurelian replied. “That’s why they do it. Illusion of control. Theatrics for the Senate.” Draconius grunted, his hand brushing the hilt at his side.

  Aurelian gave him a sideways look. “Heel Centurion… the Legatus doesn’t need any more trouble… yet.”

  The guards said nothing, but one shifted slightly wary.

  At the end of the corridor, the great chamber doors creaked open, the warmth inside spilling out like breath from a dragon’s mouth.

  The Legatus stood alone at the head of the war table, arms behind his back, eyes fixed on the holo-map projected above it, tracking red lines, dead zones, and the long list of systems already lost.

  “You’re late,” he said, voice flat.

  “We’re consistent,” Aurelian replied, stepping forward. “Which is more than I can say for your data slingers in the capital.”

  Varro’s fingers tapped the table once. “I assume you didn’t come here just to criticize the bureaucracy.”

  “No, my lord.” Aurelian gave a nod to Draconius to continue.

  Centurion Draconius stepped forward. “Twenty-seven eliminated so far this cycle. Fifteen were military, the rest Senate affiliates, financial backers, asset handlers.”

  Aurelian added, “Three more were marked for elimination, but we weren’t able to confirm their status immediately. Their bodies were too mangled for positive ID. We had to send tissue samples to an off-world lab.”

  Varro glanced up from the terminal. “Courtesy of Blackhand I presume?”

  Draconius gave a small nod. “Lanius Sanguinus logged them as eliminated. By the time our people reached the scene… there wasn’t much left to verify.”

  Varro turned back to the holomap. “Good. And what of Orion? Has the traitor been located?”

  Draconius folded his arms. “He’s begun negotiating with off-world buyers. Alien factions. Selling what looks like fragments of Genesis. Not the full package since not even we have replicated that yet. Just old, gutted tech he pulled from dead projects. He’s calling it proprietary.”

  Varro’s tone was cold. “And the fools are lining up.”

  Aurelian inclined his head. “They don’t know it’s incomplete. They just know it’s Republic.”

  “And he has protection?” Varro asked.

  “Yes,” Aurelian said. “But one of our own is embedded at the meeting. If it turns hostile, termination is authorized.”

  “The fool believes that if he sells the bones of Genesis to those monsters, one of them will place a crown upon his head. Let him play his hand. Let him reveal every piece of rot festering beneath his treachery. Then we shall burn it, root and stem.” Varro said waving a hand to continue.

  “Keep him alive, then track everyone who attends this meeting.” He waved a hand. “Now continue.”

  Aurelian stepped forward and placed a small stack of matte-black data shards on the table.

  “While Orion peddles scraps,” he said, “we found something real.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Varro’s eyes locked on the shards.

  “The Tevrani Waste,” Draconius added. “Nivara’s southern hemisphere. We sent a recovery team into the crater.”

  Varro didn’t look away. “Wasn’t that just listed as a failed terraforming zone?”

  Aurelian nodded. “Officially, yes. But the crater wasn’t natural. And the facility buried underneath it... wasn’t abandoned.”

  “It seems your doctor had a hidden lab he never reported.”

  Varro’s eyes narrowed.

  Draconius stepped forward. “Kiros was doing more than following orders.”

  Aurelian continued, “He may have been trying to keep Corvus stable… or something else entirely. The logs suggest he was refining neural suppression protocols in secret. Focused heavily on memory. Rebuilding, redirecting, erasing.”

  He hesitated, then added, “It appears the key isn’t power or physiology. It’s memory as previously discussed. But whether that’s worth pursuing… Or how we would even attempt to replicate Dr. Kiros’s work, I’m not certain.”

  Varro’s voice was quiet. “Why?”

  Aurelian didn’t answer. Instead, he slotted one of the shards into the terminal. The display flickered to life, trailing corrupted code and shattered file strings. It whined, sputtered, then finally stabilized.

  NEURAL OBLITERATION PROTOCOLS – TRNC INTERNAL LAB RECORDS

  AUTHOR: DR. VASSIAN KIROS

  SUBJECT 001-09 – FINAL ADJUSTMENTS PENDING

  “These are the original logs,” Aurelian said. “Subject Zero’s last recorded conditioning cycle. It was recent, just before he defected and started playing mercenary.”

  Varro leaned forward.

  Aurelian tapped through garbled data, piecing together what he could. Set after set of grainy, timestamped fragments scrolled across the display. Mostly just a bunch of half-corrupted logs, internal sensor data, partial biometric reads.

  Neural instability detected.

  Cognitive suppression degrading—erratic emotional spikes recorded.

  Subject exhibiting involuntary psionic discharge at dangerous amplitude.

  Environmental collapse initiated. Subsurface integrity compromised.

  No emergency protocol issued. Containment... failed.

  Planetary axial drift detected. Atmospheric destabilization at 98%.

  All personnel: presumed dead.

  “According to this, the subject was being prepped for final memory alignment. Kiros was refining something. Emotion suppression, full identity lockdown, maybe more. But the logs cut out mid-process.”

  Aurelian added, “The lab is completely destroyed, fused into the ice. Whatever happened wasn’t a mechanical failure, it appears to have originated from within, and every trace points to a psionic event.”

  Draconius stared at the feed. “That can’t be right, he was able to explode a planet?”

  Aurelian kept his eyes on the data. “It wasn’t an explosion. His psionic output synced with the planet’s ley structure, using it like a conduit. The suppression failed when his emotional state spiked, and the surge destabilized everything. Crust collapsed, atmosphere ruptured, thermal balance shattered. It didn’t freeze from cold, it froze because the planet couldn’t function anymore.”

  Varro’s gaze sharpened.

  “He snapped and destroyed a world...”

  Aurelian nodded. “The entire facility was wiped out leaving no survivors, no distress signal, nothing left but a crater.”

  Draconius pulled up a secondary feed. “So this is why he disappeared. The last TRNC ping shows him leaving the sector without authorization.”

  Aurelian closed the display. “He might not even remember the facility, the breach, hell maybe not even who we are.”

  Varro stood motionless for a long moment until finally speaking. “Something inside him triggered the failure.”

  He turned away from the table, voice low.

  “They wanted to turn my weapon against me. I should’ve seen it sooner… but you don’t cage something like him forever and expect it to stay loyal.” He looked back at the map. “And now he’s loose. No past. No orders. Just instinct.”

  “We should’ve destroyed him when he was young.” Draconius said bluntly.

  Aurelian turned, frowning. “Centurion...”

  Draconius lean over the table, voice cold and steady. “That boy was never ours. Not really. He’ll never forgive us for what we’ve done. We buried his past, rewrote his mind, built him into a confused weapon. And now he’s out there, off-leash. A threat we don’t understand. What part of this isn’t madness?”

  Aurelian opened his mouth, trying to de-escalate. “Lucius, we followed the protocols.”

  “Protocols?” Draconius snapped. “You can’t protocol whatever he did to cause that crater.”

  “If that weapon was a boy, we should’ve destroyed him. Not trained him. Not named him.”

  Varro finally moved, walking around the table, past the chairs, past the firelight, until he stood before the glowing projection. His black-gloved hand rose and extended, his index finger pointing to the south pole of Nivara.

  The crater.

  “You’ve killed more men than I can count, Centurion,” Varro said calmly, never looking away from the map. “But you’ve never changed the orbit of a planet with your mind.”

  He took a slow step forward, eyes narrowing on the scar across Nivara’s southern hemisphere.

  “When Corvus snapped… we don’t know what he remembered, or what he saw. But whatever it was, it broke the suppression and still… the moment the suppression broke, he shattered the crust, collapsed the poles, and flash-froze a world. Not with weapons. Not with malice. Just with raw untamed power.”

  Another step, his voice lowered, cold as the crater itself.

  “You speak of him like he’s a mistake. But do not forget, I built him, Centurion. I gave the orders to Dr. Kiros to do whatever it took to keep him obedient. And even broken… even blind… he did in seconds what fleets haven’t done in centuries.”

  “He will return to me. He will remember what he is and what he was made for. He will see what’s required for humanity to survive against the tide that’s coming.”

  Varro’s voice darkened, steady but full of venom.

  “Alien filth creeping into every sector, every system, infecting our bloodlines, rewriting our laws, diluting everything we built. The Senate squabbles over protocol while xenos tear apart our borders. Our admirals trade honor for peace treaties. Our citizens rot in comfort, too blind to see the knife at their throat.”

  He turned from the map, eyes sharp as glass.

  “But he’ll see it. Corvus will understand. He was made for war, not diplomacy. For order, not compromise. And when he remembers the truth, he won’t just fight for us—he’ll rebuild what this galaxy was meant to be. Human dominated. Every alien vermin that’s fed on our weakness will kneel… or burn in the ash of their own worlds."