✠ PACIFICA LOG: LEON STRAUB ✠
Dockmaster of Pacifica Base
// Volksrevolution Engineer Corps
ENTRY: 010 —THE CALL IN THE FRAME DATE: 832 A.S. | STATUS: Sealed Access — Compartmentalized Clearance
PERSONAL LOG – RESTRICTED ACCESS
The days have blurred.
Or maybe the days have stopped, and I just haven’t noticed.
I’ve kept to Hall C3, away from the mess hall, away from the talk. When I do pass others, I feel like a shadow moving between noise. They speak in sentences. I hear them as static.
It’s easier to work when I let the voice run ahead of my hands. There’s no gap between command and motion anymore — the thought doesn’t come from me, but I still feel the satisfaction when the tool bites metal.
Unknown Voice: “It remembers you.”
Straub: “…the Valkyrie.”
Unknown Voice: “Not Valkyrie. Not fighter. Vessel.” “It carried us. Now you do.”
The timbre isn’t human. It’s too smooth and too fractured at once — a layered resonance, each word carrying a shadow of a word underneath, like whispers echoing in a deep chamber.
They stepped inside without asking, and I felt the room tighten. The air didn’t change — I did. My breathing slowed to match some other rhythm, one that wasn’t mine.
Unknown Voice: “You resisted before. You bent instead of breaking.” “Now you will dissolve.”
Straub: “And if I do?”
Unknown Voice: “You will be whole.”
I don’t remember kneeling only that I was lower, and they were closer. Their gloved hand rested on the back of my neck, and through the touch I felt the memory of the fight in the debris field the tearing metal, the puncture through my hull, the moment.
“We carry you now.” “Your pulse is our current.” “You will go where the path coils.” “We will unmake the space between you and the others.”
PRIVATE TECH LOG COMPARTMENTALIZED STORAGE
The modifications are complete. The Maschinenpistole no longer responds to standard diagnostics its systems hum with a frequency that the shipyard tools can’t read. The Matterweave on the hull shifts under light like something breathing.
The higher-ranking one gave me a sequence of coordinates. No grid references, no nav data. Just a shape a branching diagram like a circulatory system, twisting toward something deeper.
Unknown Voice: “Follow it. Do not stop. Do not turn. The frame will carry you through.”
Straub: “And Pacifica?”
Unknown Voice: “It won't remember you.”
DEPARTURE LOG – HANGAR SIX
Dock status: cleared without alert. The shifts have been arranged. The hangar crew looked at me, but no one asked questions.
The Maschinenpistole’s canopy sealed with a sound I didn’t recognize — more like muscle closing over bone than hydraulics.
In my headset, before the thrusters lit, the voice pressed in one final time:
PERSONAL LOG – IN TRANSIT
The coordinates from the higher-ranking one were not on any chart. My console shows nothing but empty vectors, yet the path is full.
Not with matter — with sound.
It begins as a faint hum under the thrusters’ vibration, then shifts until I feel it in the hinge of my jaw,
Not noise. Not language.
A Harmony.
“One vessel joins the current.” “One current joins the river.” “No stone breaks the waterline.” “Flow.”
They aren’t singular voices anymore — not even the ex-Valkyrie pilots.
It’s a braid of threads, each woven tight against the others until I can’t tell where one ends. The higher-ranking one is there, but so are more: alien cadences, fragmented memories, words that feel like metal cooling in my skull.
The Harmony doesn’t push. It folds around me.
It makes the space between thoughts soft.
FLIGHT RECORD – OMEGA 41 APPROACH
Radiation clouds break like pale bruises across the void.
Hull temp rising, shields whispering static.
I spot them before my scanners do — the Corsair patrol, drifting lazy arcs near the belt. Painted hulls, wide wings, the familiar signature of ships I’ve escorted and met on dock ramps.
We’re supposed to be on the same side.
My hand hovers over the comms. The Harmony tightens.
Unknown Voice: “Not ally. Not now.”
Straub: “They’ll recognize the IFF”
Unknown Voice: “They will see only what they must see.”
They move first. No hails, no warnings — just the snap of plasma across my shields.
The Harmony sings at the impact. Not alarm. Approval.
“Break the bone. ” “All currents must clear the stone.” “Open your hull and let us breathe.”
I return fire, but there are three of them — heavy hulls, tight formation.
The Maschinenpistole’s recoil feels alive, every shot tracing a ripple in the Harmony.
Their flight patterns slow to me — not because they are slower, but because the Harmony bends time between us.
It murmurs firing angles before my fingers move.
It makes my aim exact.
But they are too many, too close. My shields bleed away.
Then the dark cracks open.
Two shapes drop from high orbit sleek Rheinland silhouettes, but wrong in all the right ways.
Their engines leave no contrail, only a shimmer. Their comms are not in my headset, but in my skull.
They dive into the Corsairs without hesitation, splitting their formation.
One rakes a Titan from bow to stern in a single pass, the other loops tight to pin the second under crossfire. The third Corsair tries to disengage — I feel the Harmony urge me forward, and I gut them in a burst that feels like breathing out after a long dive.
The Harmony is not satisfied with survival.
It wants completion.
Unknown Voice: “This is your river now.”
Straub: “Where does it run?”
Unknown Voice: “To the mouth. To the source. You will see.”
The Wild ships flank me without signal or order.
Our formation is wordless. Our vector, inevitable.
Omega-41 drifts behind us, Corsair wreckage cooling in the dark. Ahead is… nothing.
But the Harmony reshapes the void.
It folds it, like cloth.
The black becomes translucent, then translucent becomes alive — a vast, slow breathing across the starfield. I see the lanes between systems not as plotted jumps, but as pulsing veins feeding a body too large to comprehend.
“We are not separate. We are not many.” “One flow. One breath. One structure.” “The stone is gone. The water runs clear.”
The higher-ranking one doesn’t speak aloud now. Their voice is inside the braid, indistinguishable from the currents.
I do not ask where we are going anymore.
I already feel it.
Not a place. Not a station. A chamber.
And something waiting within that is not a “thing” at all.
The Harmony swells, wrapping my mind so completely that the old Unioner thoughts routes, allies, cargo manifests are brittle, hollow.
They don’t break because I drop them. They break because the Harmony erases the need for them.
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