Ozymandias


Objective III | Mirror's Edge
Silent Mirror Pocket, Mid‑Rim
Jump‑beacons flickered and died the instant the strike flotilla slipped from realspace. Stars doubled—ghostly twins hovering half a breath out of phase—and the nav‑computers’ chronometers disagreed by three exact minutes. Here, in the Silent Mirror, even time lost its bearings. Ahead loomed the lost convoy: thirty hulks frozen mid‑formation, plating shredded, drive cones yawning open like ruptured lungs. The lead freighter’s name—Chemra’s Hope—floated across the viewscreen twice, the second echo chasing the first by a heartbeat.
Boarding craft launched in pairs. Tractor beams had no purchase; pilots feathered thrusters to drift alongside rent airlocks while Starweird silhouettes flickered at the edge of running‑lights, watching with unblinking hollows. The void was silent until an unexpected ping tremored along hull plates—one note, metallic and lonely, repeating at odd intervals. Every second ping preceded the first, a sound arriving before it was struck. Familiar déjà vu vertigo washed over boarding teams; some muted audio feeds to keep their own hearts from racing three beats ahead.
Inside, the corridors were littered with flash‑frozen crew still strapped to crash webbing, faces frozen mid‑scream. Emergency lighting cycled forward, then rewound. Each bulkhead carried a stencilled beacon code—N‑57, K‑12, D‑34—letters shimmering in reverse order each time the lights hiccupped. Data‑tabs clamped to permafrosted consoles showed corrupted cargo manifests: the final entry on every ship read simply ΔT = –3 min.
At the convoy’s core lay Hold Sigma, once a secure vault for Celestial salvage. Its blast door was half‑sheared, mauled by Starweird claws. Within, the Echo Resonator floated in zero‑G: a lattice of shattered transmitter rings still sparking with impossible fore‑signals. Touching it without stabilizing the cracked focus lens would dump boarding parties into 60‑second recursion loops—time folding, events re‑playing, casualties un‑dying and re‑dying in sickening cascades. But capture it intact and a fleet could read hyperspace threats three minutes before they happen—or spoof a rival’s lane echoes to vanish entire armadas.
The hull ping reverberated again, second note first. Boarding lights flickered out of sequence. Somewhere beyond the viewport, moth‑white figures converged on the breach like dust drawn into a lung. Teams fixed mag‑boots to deck plating and readied grav‑anchors; in the Silent Mirror, the future approached you before you stepped into it, and every breath might be one you’d already taken.