Chapter 14: Dossian's mission:

  The ship latched onto the station’s lower ring with a muffled groan, as if two metal plates were recognizing each other after too many years. Magnetism did the rest. For an instant everything turned weightless; then weight came back, denser, heavier, more real.

  Dossian Glass tightened the strap on his vest without looking at anyone. Around him, the other three veterans stayed silent. One of them, a gaunt man with an empty stare, had been shaking for most of the trip. When gravity returned, a sharp acrid smell spread through the cabin. The man did not even notice it, just as he did not notice the stain at his crotch.

  The other two were not in better shape. One breathed with a disturbing whistle, and the last kept his gaze fixed on the floor, mumbling something that never quite became a prayer.

  Dossian did not feel contempt for any of them. Only a familiar heaviness. That was war too.

  They were men who deserved respect. None of this was their fault.

  When the hatch opened, a pressurized corridor took them into the transit hub. Colonel Ardeval was waiting there, his uniform immaculate, his face thinner than in Dossian’s memories. The colonel did not hide his reaction when he saw them.

  “Welcome,” he said, bowing his head slightly with sober respect. “Each of you will be taken to medical staff immediately. You have done more than anyone ever had the right to ask of you.”

  Those words made the three veterans tense, as if dignity came back for a brief moment to some corner inside them.

  Then Ardeval laid a hand on Dossian’s shoulder.

  “Glass, come with me.”

  It was not a barked order and not quite an invitation. It was closer to a shared duty.

  They walked in silence through several corridors until they reached an improvised war room. There were no decorations, only floating displays and maps where Tau Ceti IV appeared dissected in red, blue and yellow lines that flickered like wounds that would not close.

  Ardeval activated the main screen.

  “Before we go on, I want you to understand the real state of the front,” he said, without theatrics. “Zinerman and his squad have just completed a containment strike in the eastern sector. Hard work. Very hard. But they did it. They slowed a full advance of the Balmorean forces. If they had not, we would be talking about another broken defensive line.”

  Dossian nodded slowly, letting the information sink in.

  Ardeval expanded the map toward the heart of the northern continent.

  “And this is what matters now. Rysha.”

  The name appeared floating over a valley with complex topography, curved like a fractured bone.

  “There,” Ardeval continued, “is the Undulating Valley. What civilian reports describe as mining tunnels is in reality an underground mesh that connects half the hemisphere. If we lose Rysha, we lose the war. Even if we take every city, even if we hold every coastline, none of it will matter if they keep the tunnels.”

  Dossian stepped a little closer. Something in the complexity of that network unsettled him.

  “Have you already sent units?” he asked respectfully.

  “Not yet. We do not want to look desperate. That would signal that something important is there and it would put them on higher alert. That is why we needed Zinerman’s squad back. And why we needed you back. We are going to need a smaller, more precise operation.”

  The colonel drew a long breath before continuing.

  “Your first mission will be to integrate with that squad. Zinerman is at his limit and he is a kid. His people too. They need someone who can hold them together, organize, decide. They need a leader, a real man.”

  Dossian kept his eyes on the map.

  “I will do what I can.”

  Ardeval watched him for a second longer than necessary. There was something he wanted to say and was holding back.

  In the end he let out a brief sigh.

  “Glass,” he said, with a hint of discomfort, “I am going to have to apologize for this. I should have given you time. Hours at least. But we do not have them.”

  Dossian looked at him without reproach. Just waiting.

  “There is a conversation we need to have right now. And I cannot be the one to have it with you.”

  Ardeval gestured toward a side door. Not the one that led back to the corridor they had come from, but another one, more discreet, reinforced, with dual biometric access.

  He opened it.

  The light in the conference room was not different, yet it felt that way. There was a harsh clarity there, a silence that did not belong to the rest of the station. And in the middle of that tightly lit space stood him.

  He was not sitting, not relaxed. He was standing with the stillness of someone who had learned to turn every second into a political resource. His hands were behind his back, his eyes fixed on a point that was not any specific object. A figure that did not need to move in order to fill a room completely.

  His mere presence altered the room, as if the air itself had decided to grow thinner out of respect.

  He had no escort, as if the armored room itself were his personal bodyguard.

  He did not speak, yet it was not silence. It was calculation.

  It was Robert Santiago.

  Ardeval did not advance. He did not try to accompany him. He only set a hand on Dossian’s arm, a gesture that carried every layer of a warning.

  “Go in,” he said in a low voice. “He is waiting for you.”

  The door closed behind Dossian with a deep, clear, almost ritual sound.

  And the world felt divided between before and after that threshold.

  Dossian stepped inside and remained still for just a second. Robert Santiago needed no introduction. Dossian had seen him dozens of times, in broadcasts, speeches, ceremonies, and at a distance during a couple of military inspections. Always surrounded by people. Always radiant. Never this close.

  Santiago rose smoothly, wearing a studied smile that seemed almost perfectly natural.

  “Dossian Glass,” he repeated, as if tasting the name. “From the moment Loran Vek told me you were back, I knew we had to talk.”

  Ardeval came in after him and closed the door. He did not sit down. He stayed standing, as if he were part of the room’s furnishings. A necessary witness.

  Santiago pointed at one of the chairs.

  “Please, sit. I am glad to have you here. There are few men with your experience, and fewer still who are alive after everything we saw in Tau Ceti.”

  Dossian sat without letting go of his pack. Santiago took a water pitcher from the table and brought it closer. He poured with calm, almost intimate movements.

  “How are you, Dossian? Truly,” he asked. “I heard about Rellan Gaius. He was a good man.”

  When the glass was full, Santiago took it in one hand and offered it to him directly, setting it in Dossian’s hand as if it were a personal, almost affectionate gesture.

  “I am sorry,” he added, lowering his voice slightly.

  Dossian closed his fingers around the glass. He did not know what to say. He did not know what Santiago wanted from him. Ardeval still did not intervene.

  “Forgive me, Santiago, but I do not know why I am here,” he admitted.

  Santiago smiled, as if he had been waiting for that exact sentence.

  “Because of the mission you are about to undertake, Dossian. An important mission, but above all a delicate one. It is no coincidence that Ardeval separated you from the rest. We needed this space.”

  He opened a side screen with a gesture, and the map of Ularis was projected over the surface of the table, spreading out in three dimensional layers. Valleys, tunnels, branches.

  “The Undulating Valley,” Santiago said. “I am sure Ardeval has already explained how important the tunnels are. But there is something else. Much more.”

  A red dot appeared on one of the deepest corridors.

  “One of these access routes leads to an Omnis node.”

  Dossian narrowed his eyes.

  “A node? Does that really change anything?”

  “It changes everything,” Santiago answered with almost pedagogical patience.

  He leaned forward a little.

  “This node has been disconnected for thousands of years. Since before the times of the Xylpharian Empire, when Tau Ceti IV was a key military hub. After the Synthetic War, when Omnis was limited, this node was shut down. Its existence was recorded, but badly, scattered through archives and forgotten by generations of governments. Until we found it again after the annexation.”

  Dossian weighed this information.

  “Why did you not integrate it? If it is part of the system…”

  Santiago shook his head slightly.

  “Because its military functions were never limited. No tactical server of Omnis, absolutely none, can operate without going through the security locks imposed after the Synthetic War. Except this one.”

  “And what does that imply?”

  “That it can attack. It can execute automatic offensive maneuvers. It is a pure war server. Intact. Forbidden. That is why it was never announced. The simple knowledge of an unaltered node could lead to chaos.”

  Dossian felt a strange discomfort, as if he had taken a step toward a pit whose depth he did not know.

  “So,” he said, trying to put the idea in order, “you want me to disable it before the separatists find it.”

  Santiago leaned back, still smiling.

  “No, Dossian. I want you to activate it.”

  For the first time, Ardeval’s expression tightened, almost imperceptibly. Dossian noticed.

  “Activate it? That would be a scandal. Nobody would approve it, nobody in their right mind…”

  “I know,” Santiago said, without losing his pleasant tone. “And that is why it will be a secret operation.”

  “What do you want to activate it for?”

  “To win the war, Dossian,” Santiago answered, as if it were the most obvious thing in the universe. “The Universal Government cannot afford to keep losing ground. We cannot prolong this crisis. That node, with a code that only I possess, could give us the ultimate tactical advantage.”

  Dossian tightened his grip on the glass. He still had not taken a sip.

  “I am not an intelligence agent. I am not an ecclesiastical operator. I am just a soldier, sir.”

  “A soldier who survived where others did not,” Santiago corrected. “A soldier whom people listen to. And a man who knows how to move in the dark when necessary. That is why you. Not Zinerman. Not his cadets. You.”

  The smile was still on his face, but behind it there was a political shadow, calculated and immovable.

  And also someone to blame if anything goes wrong, Dossian thought bitterly.

  “I need you to go into the tunnels,” Santiago said, “to reach the node and activate it using this code.”

  He tapped a small device against the table. It was no bigger than a finger, glowing softly and sealed.

  Dossian swallowed.

  “If this ever became public…”

  “No one will know,” Santiago replied. “Except the three of us.”

  A thick silence followed.

  Santiago tilted his head.

  “Will you do it, Dossian?”

  The light in the medical bay was whiter than on the surface. Cold. Aseptic. As if the cleaning were not only against bacteria but against emotion. Reis Zinerman leaned his back against the wall, arms crossed, watching his squad as they finished their checkups.

  Jevin’s arm was bandaged, but he was smiling, even joking with the nurse, as if he still had not processed that he was alive. Alis, sitting on a cot, had her hair stiff with dried sweat and her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Yet for the first time in days she did not look irritated. She looked present. Miren was helping Alzar out of his exosuit, guiding his movements with a patience that neither of them could explain.

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  It was strange to see them like this, breathing as if everything they had gone through until that day belonged to another life. It was not happiness. It was not relief. It was something close to optimism, a word Reis had not used in weeks.

  “Good work down there,” he said in a firm voice.

  They all looked at him. Some nodded. No one replied.

  That was part of the balance as well. They still saw him as a tense figure more than as a natural leader. But they did not despise him. He had done his part. They had done theirs. Maybe that was enough.

  The side door slid open with a soft hum.

  A man entered who did not seem to belong entirely to that place. Tall, thin, face crossed by deep lines, and an odd aura, as if he had arrived without moving. He still wore part of his uniform unfastened, as if he had never really left the combat zone. His face was marked by hard lines, but not with a soldier’s rigidity. It was more erratic. A subtle shoulder twitch, a blink that came late, a gesture that arrived a second after it should have.

  Dossian Glass.

  Reis straightened almost automatically. He pushed himself away from the wall and squared his posture. Not stiffly, but with what remained of a muscle memory trained under that very man.

  “Commander Glass.”

  Dossian looked at him and, for a second, smiled.

  “Reis,” he said, offering his arm with a firm gesture. “You got thinner. Or the uniform fits you worse.”

  The smile that came with the comment was not truly humorous. It was slightly off, out of step.

  They greeted each other with what would have been affection in another context. Here it was military affection, hard and brief but genuine in its own way.

  Dossian walked to the center of the room. The soldiers watched him in silence. They knew his name. They knew the stories. Some had seen him in distant footage from old campaigns that no longer circulated.

  “My name is Dossian Glass,” he said, without raising his voice. “From now on I will be operating as tactical reinforcement and direct liaison to high command on the surface.”

  No expression changed. No complaints. Yet everyone felt the subtext. Everyone except him knew that this never happened if there was full trust in the current commander.

  “Ardeval told me you completed a containment maneuver successfully. Good sign. The report also says you kept formation even under crossfire. That speaks of you. Not of command. Of you.”

  Dossian paused and walked over to the screen on the wall. His movements were fluid, but there was something in his pace, a barely perceptible rhythm that made Alis narrow her eyes, alert.

  An asynchrony. An unease.

  “We have just been assigned a new objective. The city of Ularis, in the Undulating Valley. Mining zone, critical underground connections. If it falls completely, we lose more than territory. We lose the structural network for transport, communication and support.”

  The screen lit up, showing a geographical cross section of the tunnels.

  “We will not go in from the surface. This mission is a deep infiltration through old secondary routes. We are going to sweep zones, mark nodes, identify possible sabotage and determine whether the Balmoreans are using routes that do not appear on the official maps. Our final objective is to reach the main camp and extract information.”

  “Orbital support?” Jevin asked, more out of habit than hope.

  “Only if you are all killed. And even then it is not certain.”

  No one laughed. No one commented. Reis felt something knot in his stomach.

  That answer was dry. Honest. Brutal.

  But that was not what troubled him.

  It was the way Dossian had said it. Without irony, without drama. As if it were a likely scenario that did not deserve any emotion.

  Reis stayed straight, but something burned faintly inside him. Being introduced as if he were being replaced irritated him, though it did not surprise him. He did not need a mentor. He needed trust. But he was not going to say that.

  Dossian looked at him for a fraction of a second longer than necessary.

  “Anything you want to add, commander?” he asked calmly.

  Reis shook his head.

  “All clear.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Dossian’s gaze held for an instant longer. It was not a challenge. It was just registering. Then he nodded and turned away.

  “In one hour we go down. Go to Hangar Three to re equip. The surface is waiting.”

  And he left.

  Reis let the air out through his nose and looked at his squad again. No one said anything, but Jevin glanced at him and nodded once. Maybe they were still not a united squad, but now, for the first time, they were not just a group of broken kids.

  He only wished the savior had been him.

  The soldiers began to leave the medical bay in a loose file. Some exchanged short comments, others walked in silence, as if Dossian’s announcement had returned them to duty by pure mechanics, without involving their minds.

  Reis stayed a few seconds longer. He watched Jevin go out muttering only about the new armor. Miren and Alzar remained for a moment by the door, as if waiting for him to make some gesture, but he did not. When the threshold finally cleared, only Alis remained in the room, placing her medical file into her jacket pocket.

  Reis approached, not hurried but without hesitation. She did not look at him until he spoke.

  “Alis,” he said, and his own voice sounded strange to him. “About the other night.”

  She stopped.

  “I should not have spoken to you that way. It was unfair. I know you were trying to help. I did not see it at the time.”

  A clean silence settled between them. She nodded, not with hardness but not with tenderness either.

  “We are all at the limit, lieutenant.”

  The way she used the word lieutenant made his jaw clench. There was no irony in it, but no closeness either. It was the exact word to keep the exact distance.

  “I know,” he answered.

  “Just give me some space, all right?” she added, this time in a slightly lower tone, as if she did not want anyone else to hear.

  Reis nodded. He did not ask for more. He did not expect more.

  She hung the helmet from her arm and walked toward the door.

  Before stepping out, without turning around, she said:

  “Good call, down there.”

  And she was gone.

  Reis stayed a second more, alone. The white light did not illuminate him. It scoured him. He thought of how badly he needed a drink.

  The compartment assigned to Dossian Glass was more cell than bedroom. Narrow, without windows, with a single hanging lamp that flickered at irregular intervals. The air smelled of sealed plastic and old sweat. The space station orbited in complete silence, but in Dossian’s head something kept buzzing.

  He opened the storage container. His weapons lay there, lined up like bones on a surgical tray.

  He picked up the knife first. The black bone blade, an inheritance from an old war no one remembered, could cut even the air if you turned it with the precise twist of the wrist. He wiped it with a dry cloth and set it next to his belt. After that came the magazines, the tracking tools, the mini pressure sensors. He checked each one twice. Then a third time. Not for efficiency. Out of need.

  The tactical rifle came apart in his hands almost by reflex. As if someone else were doing it. As if his body were following a manual while his mind was somewhere else.

  And it was.

  Tau Ceti IV. Again. Always.

  Smoke rising in spirals from the cracks in the earth. Distress signals saturating the frequencies. Maps glowing in red. The dull roar of the explosion on the southern flank. And Lupers. Always Lupers.

  He remembered him with his throat torn, his mouth bloodied, giving him an order that he could no longer obey. There had been something in his eyes that Dossian could never forget. Not fear. Not rage. Something colder. More real. A farewell without ceremony. A surrender.

  The rifle slipped from his hands.

  It was not an accident.

  His fingers simply let it go.

  The metal struck the floor with a dry, sharp sound, but he did not move. The buzzing in his head grew louder. His chest locked up like an old safe. He tried to inhale. Nothing. He tried again. Nothing.

  He braced one hand against the wall, then both hands. His forehead rested on cold metal.

  He could not breathe.

  The panic did not arrive like in films. There were no screams, no visible shaking. Only an absolute awareness that his body was no longer responding the way it should. As if someone else had taken control of his lungs and refused to open them.

  The air turned alien. Time became a series of broken mirrors.

  He let himself slide down. Not from weakness. For strategy. The floor anchored him. It was real. It was here.

  Sitting, his back against the wall, he let his head fall back.

  “Not now,” he murmured.

  “Not again.”

  “You cannot allow it.”

  He closed his eyes. The images of Lupers remained, but now they were slower, less violent. The explosion repeated itself, but with the volume turned down. The face of his old friend seemed to look at him from a fogged memory.

  “You are not the one who died,” he told himself.

  “You are the one who stayed to tell the story.”

  “And now you have to save the ones who do not have a story yet.”

  He thought of the kids. Of his new soldiers.

  He thought of his own name, spoken quietly by soldiers who did not know him. Of the stories Reis could tell about him. Of how far he was from being that man. And of how necessary it was to pretend he still was.

  He drew one breath. Forced a second. On the third, something moved again in his chest.

  The air came back. Not as relief. As an order.

  He stood up slowly, without rushing. He put the rifle away. He adjusted his belt. He pulled on his gloves, tightened the strap, checked the pressure capsule in his back pocket.

  He looked at his distorted reflection in the metallic panel of the compartment.

  “You have a squad under your command,” he said in a flat voice. “You cannot afford to break.”

  He switched off the light.

  He did not lie down. He was not going to sleep. But he was not going to break.

  The hours passed without hurry. Dossian did not sleep for a single minute. By the time the alarm sounded, he had already been waiting for it for hours.

  When the notification echoed through the corridors, “Hangar Three. Squad U 17. Immediate embarkation,” Dossian was already stepping out of his module, helmet in hand, rifle magnetized to his back.

  The hangar had a different kind of silence from the rest of the station. More than silence, containment. As if the structure knew that those who went down might not return.

  The squad was already waiting at the mouth of the shuttle. Miren was checking magazines. Alis was crouched, adjusting her boot. Jevin and Alzar were talking in low voices. Reis Zinerman, as always, stood slightly apart. Perfect posture, eyes fixed on the metal floor.

  Dossian stopped in front of them.

  “The objective is eighty kilometers from the drop point,” he began, without preamble. “We cannot cover the distance with transport. Not air and not ground. If we go in through active routes, they will detect us. That is why we walk.”

  He paused. No one objected.

  “Estimated march is three days, depending on obstacles and cave ins. The tunnels are not stable. We will take abandoned routes that were sealed decades ago. Sixty percent of the maps are out of date. The other forty percent is probably false.”

  He pointed to his wrist display, where a downward spiral route pulsed in dim red.

  “We walk together. Tight formation. No splitting up. Two rest stops per day, no communication blackout. Jevin and Alzar, you will rotate as vanguard. Alis, you take the rear. Miren and I will carry the thermal visors. Zinerman coordinates internal communications.”

  Dossian looked at the group. No one’s gaze trembled. Not even the younger ones.

  “We will not turn on flashlights unless it is an emergency. Spectral vision mode at all times. Ventilation is almost nonexistent. If you feel dizzy, report it. If someone goes down, the group stops. We do not sacrifice anyone for speed.”

  Everyone nodded, except Reis, who only lowered his eyes a little. A subtle gesture, like someone swallowing an objection.

  Dossian noticed.

  “Anything you want to say, commander?” he asked, keeping his tone neutral.

  Reis looked at him from the corner of his eye.

  “No, sir. All clear.”

  It was not clear. But the kid was not going to say so. Dossian knew him well enough. He was the exact mix of pride, distrust and discipline. The kind of man who had survived and did not know why he was still fighting.

  The shuttle’s hatch opened with a hiss of released pressure. The interior was narrow and had no seats, only side bars to hold on to during the descent.

  They entered one by one. Their steps sounded the same as always, heavy and metallic, as if they were part of the hull.

  Dossian was the last one in. The hatch closed behind him.

  “Descent begins in thirty seconds,” announced the artificial voice.

  As the vibration started and the safety light pulsed red, Dossian took his place with his back to the hatch, facing the squad.

  “We are not going down into a war,” he said. “We are going down into a crack.”

  Silence.

  “Our job is not to win or to kill. It is to report and to stay alive.”

  The shuttle descended without visible incidents, but the hum of the stabilizers and the jolts of the final contact left a tension in their muscles that would take hours to fade.

  The outer ramp opened onto an artificial cavern reinforced by old supports. Dust floated in the air as if the rock were in the process of dying.

  There was no wind. Only echoes.

  “Visors on,” ordered Dossian.

  The squad’s eyes turned opaque. Spectral vision revealed the thermal layers of the stone, the points of residual heat on the floor, and a thin blue line that snaked northward, the cold trace of an old ventilation duct that marked the beginning of their route.

  They started walking.

  The first hours passed in silence, the sound of their boots absorbed by rock. Dossian kept the map updated on his interface, comparing the real path with the estimated route. For the moment, everything matched.

  After five kilometers they reached a fork.

  “Left turn. Secondary tunnel,” Dossian said.

  But Reis stopped. He stepped closer to his visor display and checked humidity and air composition.

  “This tunnel has more carbon dioxide built up than the other one,” he said, pointing to the passage on the right. “If we take the left side, we will go through a section with no ventilation for at least four kilometers. There is a real chance of collapse.”

  “I already considered that,” Dossian replied. “The right side passes closer to the area covered by Balmorean acoustic scanners. Even if the tunnel is more stable, if they hear us, it is useless.”

  Reis crossed his arms. His tone was not defiant, but it was not obedient either.

  “We could take the right side only for a stretch, then reconnect with the main duct through the gamma side corridor. It is in the old infrastructure maps. It does not appear in the military file, but it does in the civilian records from before the conflict.”

  Dossian looked at him. He did not answer right away.

  “You have it downloaded.”

  “Yes. I checked it before we came down.”

  A pause.

  “And why did you not suggest it earlier?”

  “Because I did not want to assume you did not know about it,” Reis answered, firm but without aggression.

  Miren and Jevin exchanged a glance, as if the air had grown tense without warning.

  Dossian reviewed the route on his display. There it was. The gamma side corridor. Not validated, not recognized, but theoretically functional.

  Finally he nodded, with a barely visible twist of his mouth.

  “Fine. We will try your path. If we find a blockage, we go back to the original plan.”

  “Agreed.”

  Reis lowered his eyes slightly, without smiling.

  The squad began to move again, this time taking the right fork. The rock grew damper and darker. Marks from old civilian traffic were visible on the walls, guidance lines turned to fossils, dead pipes, evacuation signs buried under the dust of a forgotten war.

  Dossian now marched second, behind Reis. He did not take his eyes off the young commander’s back. There was something about him that he still did not understand. It was not rebellion. It was not pride. It was something else.

  Something he could not yet name.

  And something that, if he did not understand soon, might cost them their lives.