The Obsidian Wraith rose from Yora's darkside like an unmarked blade slipping free of a sheath.
No docking clearance. No signals sent. Just lift-off, smooth and silent, from the hollowed-out trench carved into the blackened stone where Mirth Vault had held her like a secret. The silence felt earned.
Wraith's new skin, woven with Tolarian thread and dampener mesh, refracted her shape against the stars like a shadow that refused to cast one.
No alarms. No farewell. No debt owed.
Just dust in the retrothrusters, and Trask Molten's workshop falling away into cold lunar night.
Ethan stood in the cockpit, one hand on the stabilizer rail, the other folded across his chest. His eyes scanned the navgrid, but his mind had already left Haltris.
Too many patterns. Too many hidden hands.
No one said goodbye at Mirth Vault. No one needed to. The only person he somewhat knew, Trask Molten, had already secretly left the system a few days ago.
As far as the void was concerned, he had never been there.
The Haltris Sector glittered with cold geometry. Unlike the somewhat lawless routes of Enover or Aldaron, Haltris shone with order.
Beacons pulsed in mathematically perfect lanes. Corporate convoys with escort ships swept past in glimmering chains, and patrol frigates spun orbits between hyperlane junctions like priesthoods performing their rituals.
Everything looked clean.
Perfect. Too perfect.
"Status?" Ethan asked without turning.
"All sensor ghosts clean. Tracking radii within stealth threshold," Iris replied. "We are functionally invisible. Shall I begin departure sequencing for Caryth sector?"
Ethan watched as a patrol heavy cruiser passed beneath them, scanning with wide-angle sweeps. The Wraith registered zero return. No ping. No pulse.
He let the silence linger.
"No," he finally said. "Not yet."
He moved to the secondary command console at the rear of the bridge. Flipped three physical switches. The board lit up with dull crimson, a layer beneath the standard interface, locked away behind dual-auth codes and anti-trace encryptions.
"We're ghosts now," he murmured. "Time to find out who's been tailing us."
Deploying the Black Channel
"Access the Black Net," he said quietly. "Dead frequencies. No Federation relays."
"Routing through phantom nodes," Iris confirmed. "Channels include ex-Fortune Drift beacon wreckage, Echo Cross comm-stacks, and decommissioned Dreldian signal hubs. Warning: querying Specter Coil identifiers will trip passive listening triggers."
Ethan exhaled slowly.
"They're already watching me," he said. "Let's wave back."
The screen dimmed. Search protocols deployed.
Ethan folded his arms and watched the lines stream across the console. Snippets of corrupted data from abandoned outposts, broken loops from collapsed moonside servers, and low-level burst signals that lived only in the cracks between coded silence.
The Wraith drifted slowly in low orbit, the moons of TH-9 glittering like glass teeth in the dark. No one approached. No one saw.
They wouldn't even know he was there.
Five minutes passed. Then ten.
Then Iris' voice cut through.
"One result: Alias Yilen Goss. Cross-referenced with three zero-phase data auctions and five tagged intelligence fragment drops in the last six months. Identity unverifiable."
Ethan leaned forward.
Yilen Goss. No face. No origin. Just Goss.
A collector of secrets who only answered the right call.
"Location?"
"Last trace ping from Dreld Space Station in the Ganymede Cluster, now off-grid. Likely operating through cascading shells. Digital echo routes only."
Ethan smiled faintly.
"I want a comms vault," Ethan said, stepping toward the Wraith's secondary console. "Air-gapped. Hard-sealed. Nothing traces. Forge me a persona."
"Acknowledged," Iris replied, her voice lower, almost blending into the faint hum of the ship's environmental systems. "Deploying quantum vault now. No signal bleed. No relay footprints. Generating identity."
He watched as the console shifted, changing from familiar ship interface tones into the black-and-blue pulse of the Wraith's deep systems. The screen dimmed, shielded. Patterns of random entropy flickered, visual noise used to mask input logic.
"Identity selected: Havik Drayn," Iris said. "Background seeded as a retired fleet broker from the outer Sothen Ring. Digital paper trail composed of six fragmented certifications, three shell companies, and one disbanded logistics contract. He's quiet. Nondescript. Believable."
"Good," Ethan murmured.
"Message vector seeded through five dead-drop layers. Routing through a collapsed trade satellite over the Oska Rift, then bouncing through a corrupted mine-lens array in the Tessel fringe."
Ethan flexed his fingers. "Open the vault."
The screen responded instantly. A fresh window bloomed, flat black, windowless, empty. In its center blinked a solitary cursor. Nothing else.
Tracking spectral contract fallout. Seeking fragments.
The cursor froze. For a breathless moment, it didn't move.
Then... A small distortion shimmered across the screen. A pulse like a breath being held, then slowly released. The cursor blinked once more and vanished.
A reply appeared, slow and deliberate:
Half now. Half later. No names. No lies.
Ethan stared at the words. The simplicity of them. The finality. No codes. No handles. Just an immutable phrase that read like scripture from a dying religion.
He raised one brow slightly.
"Well," he muttered, "that's poetic."
Then he tapped into his private fund vault, one of three Iris had scattered through outer and inner sector banks, bound to no identity and carefully broken into a thousand fractal chains. The credits were untraceable, scrubbed of history, and distributed across black-market accounts that had long since forgotten their owners.
"Preparing payment," he said aloud, even though Iris was already ahead of him.
"Two million galactic credits prepared. Channel encrypted. Funds will appear as unclaimed drift salvage from a decommissioned pirate holdout. Tag designation Bane of Cygn."
"Send it."
The transfer executed in less than a second. On the surface, it looked like a salvage claim payment to a non-existent freelancer. But in the black-net economy, it was as loud as a shout in a whisper chamber.
The funds vanished. Clean. Absolute.
A heartbeat passed. Then two.
No reply.
The cursor didn't return.
The screen remained dark, the static in the background shifting only slightly, like a long breath being drawn and held.
Ethan didn't move.
"No pingback received," Iris said softly. "Signal indicates presence acknowledged, but no return vector authorized."
"He's watching us," Ethan murmured, "deciding if I'm worth the answer."
He leaned back in the chair, arms folding loosely as he stared at the motionless display.
"Let's see if he talks," he said under his breath, almost smiling. "Or I find him."