The Obsidian Wraith crept across Yora's stratosphere like a smudge in the dark, silent and unseen.
No transponder.
No beacon.
No return ping.
Under Iris's watchful algorithms, Ethan guided the ship manually toward a ravine etched deep in the moon's crust, an old survey scar from the mining era. The sensor interference here was strong, tangled in centuries of geological data corruption and deliberate EM clutter.
"Final descent vector stabilized," Iris reported softly. "Vault sensors will not register us unless they conduct a manual sweep."
"Which they won't," Ethan said, adjusting throttle. "They've got other shadows to worry about."
The Wraith settled gently into the crevice, its matte hull absorbing the pale lunar glare. Ethan powered down to low-drift mode, letting the heat signature bleed slowly into the rocks.
He stood in the aft bay, sealed crate beside him. The resonant coil inside was cushioned, rigged with dual biometric locks, and laced with a remote-deletion failsafe in case things went sideways.
Ethan touched the lid once. No ceremony. Just precision.
Then he activated the beacon. Low-band, quantum-split, piggybacking a scavenger-ping channel that was rarely used except by the paranoid and the skilled.
"Your hardware's in the shadow. Coordinates embedded. Clock's ticking."
–EW
He shut the crate, keyed the auto-seal, and stepped back into the Wraith.
The camera feed showed a soft, hazy silhouette gliding toward the drop site.
A hover rig, quiet, low-emission, jury-rigged for silence. Its rider wore a thick poncho coat draped over a frame of exposed cybernetics. Trask Molten.
Ethan watched silently as the Ghoryan dismounted, ran a scanner sweep, then crouched beside the crate.
He touched the seal, ran a flat device across the biometric pad, and nodded when the lock chimed open. The crate lid hissed up. Trask stared at the coil, just stared for a long second like it was a memory trying to breathe again, then closed the case and wheeled it onto his rig.
He left the way he came, without a word, without a trace.
"Retrieval complete," Iris confirmed. "No surveillance encountered."
Ethan leaned back in his seat. "Good. Let's see what he builds."
Trask didn't speak often, but when he did, the messages came as encrypted visual packets: schematics, updates, calibration ranges.
He was building something sharp.
Something real.
Ethan reviewed the data in the dimmed bridge, floating above the world like a ghost in meditation.
Trask's makeshift lab was a controlled chaos, steel racks, precision lasers, and fragments of ancient tech scattered across workbenches like a battlefield for invention. At its center sat the coil, now connected to three major components:
The Gryllex Shard, embedded inside a synthetic quantum-lattice housing, refracting energy off itself like ripples across black glass. Tolarian glass-thread, wound through modular filaments, shaped with a no-heat micro-lathe that hummed like a whispering god.
And a sheet of triple-phase dampener mesh, slowly being etched with light-bending channels and flexion nodes.
Trask muttered as he worked, occasionally caught on the silent feeds Ethan monitored from the Wraith's cold-drift orbit.
"This ain't black-market junk… this is military-experimental. Deep prototype. Where the hell did this guy get a blueprint like this?"
The Ghoryan's voice crackled through Iris's filtered channel, low and gravelly with a tinge of awe, but layered with suspicion. His augmented fingers moved with mechanical grace across the Gryllex housing as he layered dampener mesh, thread-by-thread, into the exposed matrix core.
Ethan sat still in the darkened cockpit, watching through a small window in the feed, lit only by soft-blue diagnostics scrolling across the upper right corner. He didn't answer Trask's rhetorical question. He didn't need to.
Because he remembered.
He remembered the young engineer, maybe early twenties, with oil-streaked sleeves and desperation behind his eyes. The man had been pleading for help, his cousin abducted by some gang.
Ethan had stepped in. Quietly. Brutally. The cousin returned with a fractured voice and a look that said he wouldn't forget.
The engineer hadn't offered creds. He'd offered a nondescript shard, smooth black, encrypted six layers deep and signed only with a corrupted call tag.
The stealth-core blueprint had been on that chip.
Iris had vetted it.
Mostly.
Ethan hadn't expected a gift. And he'd trusted no one. But the design had been sound, elegant, layered with complexity he hadn't seen before.
So he decided to use it.
And now Trask was building it, layer by layer, marveling at what he didn't know he was helping bring online.
The Obsidian Wraith floated like a dead thing in the void. A stone swallowed by black.
Power at minimum. Engines chilled. Running dark.
In its belly, Ethan returned to the rhythm that had kept him sane long before the Wraith, before the Slayer, before the Federation's tangled fingers reached so deep into his life.
Combat sims. Full-reactive rig sparring, absorbing pattern recognition from a dozen martial forms and integrating psionic micro-adjustments mid-sequence.
One moment he practiced joint disruption against hardlight projections. The next, silent takedowns in artificial gravity pockets, recalibrating footwork for stations with rotating floors and magnetized walls.
When he wasn't moving, he was meditating.
His legs folded on the padded floor of the ship's core chamber, arms resting against his thighs, palms facing up. The Astral Slayer sat in its sheath across his lap. He focused on the blade. On its hum. On the edge he could feel but not hear. On the energy that clung to it like breath on glass.
He breathed in.
And ghosts came for him.
The courier in the cryo-pod. Frozen, half awake, eyes clouded with a kind of fear Ethan still couldn't name. A Federation emblem half-burned off his collar, and dried blood clinging to his jaw.
The auction. Xanthe's Dream. Red velvet halls turned to battlegrounds. Billionaires and masked big players from all sorts of fields running for their lives as pirate groups and Silica Arc's security turned an opulent showroom into a war zone.
And the refinery. The Iron Veil's lair, the Specter Coil agents flanking the bait coil like they were waiting not for a thief, but a test subject.
Each memory was more than a moment. They were puzzle pieces, shards of something deeper, heavier. Tied not by incident, but by pattern.
Someone was watching.
Someone was baiting.
He rose slowly and walked the Wraith's corridor in silence.
He paused at the reflective wall of the starboard maintenance alcove, the one he rarely looked at.
His face stared back at him, leaner than it once was. Eyes sharp. Focused. Tired. His hand drifted down instinctively, brushing the hilt of the Astral Slayer at his hip.
A comfort.
A weapon.
A destiny.
"Three sectors," he said quietly, eyes locked on his own reflection. "Three shadows. One pattern."
The silence held.
Then Iris's voice, soft and precise, broke across the ship's calm.
"Incoming transmission."
A single line blinked across the display:
"It's done. Prep the bay."
Ethan's breath caught.
Then he turned.
Trask Molten emerged from the hatch with two wheeled crates and a toolkit the size of a coffin.
His armor was dirtier. His eyes more tired. But the pride in his voice was unmistakable.
"Hope you like your ship quiet," he said, patting one of the containers. "Real quiet."
Ethan stepped forward and ran a hand along the crate's side. He could feel it already—the subtle charge, the whisper beneath the metal.
A core meant to disappear.
A ghost's skin.
He met Trask's gaze, nodded once.
"Let's get to work."