Chapter 112 – False Mirrors
Hero Tower’s Level 5 command deck was built like a warship bridge—open sightlines, tiered workstations, and translucent walls that glowed faintly with real-time uplink feeds. The panels breathed with data—red during alerts, blue for standard flow, green for live engagement. At dawn cycle, it buzzed like a hive trying to outrun collapse. Too many feeds. Too few eyes. Everyone running one step behind the next emergency. Hernan stepped into the central tier just past 0800.
His field uniform was crisp—black-on-black, no cape, no hood. Just the flat collar of a Command Class operative and a rank badge polished sharp enough to draw a reflection. A quiet symbol of compliance. Or camouflage.
He spotted Commander Rael reviewing a surface-skimmer recon report at Station 3. Rael was old-tower DNA: thick forearms, gray buzzcut, a stare like a biometric scanner. He’d led strike teams in the Meiros Collapse and lost three squads in the process. Now he managed logistics. No one called it a demotion, but it tasted like one.
Hernan approached straight-on, no hesitation.
"Sir. I’ve flagged a potential signal breach in the Archive relay stack. Channel tier C-seventeen."
Rael blinked once, lifted his eyes. "Severity?"
"Low-pulse. Dormant. It’s nesting in legacy code—one of the tertiary subroutines retired after the last OS update. Might be drift. Might be a bleedover from foreign tech still in the tower."
Rael set his tablet down. His tone didn’t change, but his shoulders tensed the way all career soldiers did when the past tapped on the back of their neck.
"You think it’s external?"
"I think it’s old," Hernan said. "Maybe a ghost signal from a Vaskari incursion protocol. Maybe just a data molar that got left behind and started chewing through passive channels. Either way, it’s inside our shell now. And we don’t ignore infection."