The Obsidian Wraith rested in stillness, buried beneath half a kilometer of alloy and stone. They had hidden her inside an auxiliary cradle at the lowest levels of Mirth Vault's spine, in a region of moon rock where gravity ran weird and signal bounce made even Iris double-check her return loops.
It was the perfect place for ghosts.
Trask moved like a surgeon, if the surgeon was part demolitionist and part relic restorer. His exo-reinforced frame loomed over the open hull as he pried off old stealth hardware, disconnecting masking nodes and camo baffles with a patient hand and sparks flying behind his tools.
Ethan watched from inside the ship, standing at the edge of the corridor leading to the cockpit, arms crossed, silent. This wasn't a job done with haste. It was craft. Careful. Layered.
Trask didn't talk. Didn't boast. Didn't pause for commentary or questions. He just worked.
And Ethan respected that.
Piece by piece, the Wraith changed.
The Gryllex shard was first. Trask installed it at the heart of the refractor core, nestled in a vibration-stabilized prism chamber lined with quantum-redundant relays. The shard pulsed faintly with its own resonance. Not light. Not heat. Something else. Something deeper.
"Feels like it's breathing," Trask muttered once, voice low and reverent.
Then came the Tolarian glass-thread, so fine it barely registered on visual scan. Trask wove it through a redesigned dispersion matrix, nodes arranged like nervous system pathways that spidered out from the Wraith's spine and linked into her onboard camouflage logic.
Each fiber had to be etched with a phase-stability pattern, the laser passes so fine they hummed in near-silence. It took hours. He didn't flinch once.
Finally, the dampener mesh, the triple-phase sheet, was cut and layered like a second skin beneath the armor plating. It flexed with every movement, designed to ripple counter-frequencies in response to atmospheric drag, radiation spikes, or even onboard noise.
"Your hull won't just hide," Trask told him between welds. "It'll lie."
Ethan didn't answer. He watched. Absorbed. Logged every connection point. Every pressure seal. It was his ship, and this was his skin now. No part of it would be misunderstood.
Sixteen Hours Later
The last node was in place. The refraction lines were sealed. The hull plating reattached.
Inside the cockpit, Ethan lowered into the pilot seat. The room was dim, set to low power, but the new stealth matrix was alive behind the screens. He could feel it, even before Iris finished cycling diagnostics.
"Primary systems green," Iris said. "Initializing test calibration sequence. Deploying passive cloak now."
Outside, the cameras adjusted. The Wraith's outline shimmered… then vanished.
Ethan leaned forward. The station's metal cradle, the rock walls beyond, even the emergency scaffolds surrounding the docking clamps, they all bent subtly in the image. As if the space where the ship should be was blurred by heat. Water. Smoke. A shimmer that wasn't quite real.
"Optical distortion field stabilized," Iris reported. "Refractor resonance at ninety-nine percent efficiency. Thermal bleed negligible."
"How close can someone get?" Ethan asked.
"Current margin of detection via standard scan: less than fifty meters. Adjusted projection: complete undetectability within passive range of three hundred meters unless actively probed by Class-One military-grade ships."
He exhaled.
"Damn."
"Your ship," Iris said, "is now one of the quietest object in this sector."
Ethan leaned back, one hand resting lightly on the controls.
Then the flicker hit.
"Diagnostic anomaly detected," Iris said calmly. Too calmly.
Ethan's eyes snapped open. "Define anomaly."
"Subroutine activated in secondary interface layer. Unregistered. Embedded in blueprint integration zone. Attempted to ping external frequency cluster for authentication handshake."
He was on his feet in a flash.
"Quarantine it."
"Already done. Trace handshake terminated. Root signature isolated. Origin: schematic packet sourced from Ashen Prime."
His mouth tightened. His heartbeat didn't spike, he'd trained for this but something inside him went still. He didn't move for a full second.
"Burn it. I want every byte sterilized."
"Confirmed."
A slow pulse spread through the system. Iris's AI modules swept the framework like fire through dry code, non-invasive, recursive, and absolute. By the time she finished, the Wraith was clean.
Utterly clean.
But not untouched.
Down below, Trask was checking the final seals on the undercarriage when Ethan dropped down from the service tunnel.
"You plant a trace in my stealth core?" Ethan asked flatly, each word level.
Trask turned slowly, eyes narrowing. "What?"
"There was a surveillance ping in the interface logic. Hidden behind redundant code layers. It was clean. Deep. Meant to activate once the system fully came online."
Trask froze. "You think I had time to hide military-grade signal forks in your stealth core?" His voice wasn't defensive, just angry. "I barely touched the design beyond your installation cues."
Ethan held his gaze. Then gave a short nod. "I know. It came with the blueprint."
Trask exhaled, shaking his head. "Who gave it to you?"
"Engineer on Ashen Prime. Payment for a job."
"You scan it?"
"Iris did. Six times. Still missed the trigger packet."
Trask looked at the hull, then back at Ethan. "Then whoever built that core wasn't just smart. They wanted to listen, not break."
Ethan agreed. This wasn't sabotage. It was observation. Monitoring. Behavior modeling.
"Specter Coil?" Iris suggested softly through Ethan's ear-link.
"Likely," Ethan murmured. "But maybe someone worse."
Back aboard the Wraith, Ethan stood by the pilot console while Iris ran a full cleansing loop. The ship's new skin shimmered in diagnostic pulses, ghost light running down the hull in lines of blue.
"All systems clean," Iris confirmed. "Trace removed. Code integrity restored."
Ethan looked at the screen without really seeing it.
"She's invisible now," Iris added. "Truly."
He sat in the pilot chair slowly.
It didn't feel like a victory.
The cloak was online. The Wraith was perfect. But someone had tried to watch him through it. From the moment that schematic was passed off, Ethan had been tagged.
And maybe he still was. Just not electronically.
"We've been bait this whole time," he muttered.
"The stealth core was the hook," Iris agreed. "Not just to see who'd use it… but how well."
Ethan tilted his head back. "And if we hadn't noticed the trace?"
"Specter Coil, or someone aligned, would have logged every movement. Every ping. Every tactic."
He closed his eyes.
Not again.
"We can't keep reacting," he said quietly. "We need data. Names. A direction. Something that connects the dots between Ashen Prime, Aldaron, Enover, and now Haltris."
"Then I recommend we begin sifting for Specter Coil's data trails," Iris said.
He opened his eyes again, sharp and clear.
"Start sifting. Quietly. If we find them, we pull the thread until the whole damn veil comes down."