Bridge 4B(S), communication deck: "Dead Men Tell No Tales — Unless They Record First”"
The room sank once more into that same oppressive silence — the kind that usually precedes either a revelation or a nervous breakdown. Hans, evidently leaning toward the latter, broke it.
"So let me get this straight, Director. You knew. About all of it. The lie. The massacre. We asked for clearance to activate the ship, you gave us the go-ahead, then started spying on us the moment we set foot aboard, and now you just… show up."
He blinked. “Right. And now you show up to tell us what, exactly?”
“Well,” Cross said, eyes sliding toward the pocket of Hermann’s coat, “the ending, I’m afraid, you’ve already discovered for yourselves.”
Hermann instinctively rested a hand over it.
“But what you haven’t uncovered — and never would, unless I told you — is why it happened. That’s because the very last logs, the truly final ones, were the only ones successfully purged a century ago. Aren’t you curious? Now that you’ve made it this far?”
The three exchanged glances, less astonished now than profoundly uneasy.
“Well then. Silence is consent.” She sat down on a nearby storage crate like it was a throne.
“I don’t remember which of you said it, but one of you was right — the Corsairs were already aboard the flotilla.”
“That was me,” said Hans, raising a hand.
“Of course it was. Good lad.”
"And what were they doing there, you might ask? They were brokering a deal with us. Or rather — we were brokering one with them. Do you know why the Hawaii hasn’t been turned into scrap metal over the last thirty years? Why Corsairs wave at our ships instead of vaporizing them? Why when you run into one, he asks for a few crates of alcohol and not your liver? Why the Hawaii just happens to be the second-largest artifact market in all of Sirius?"
She paused for emphasis.
"Because it was all being decided that day. Right there. On the Cayman. Between our representatives and the Elders themselves."
Silence returned, but this time it had sharp edges. Schmidt’s eyes lit up in dawning horror.
“Von Tanner… he didn’t do anything wrong,” Hermann said, this time with a different weight to his voice.
He wasn’t angry anymore. Just tired. The kind of tired that comes from seeing a puzzle finally fall into place—too late to change anything, but just in time to hurt. “He was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time… and with the wrong damn people aboard his ship.”
“Unfortunately for him, it's like you said. The very moment the Corsairs heard the words ‘Rheinland Navy,’ they snapped. No negotiation, no compromise — they threatened to kill everyone, including our people, unless something was done. The stakes were too high. Redcroft — or whatever his name was — called the director. And the director made the only rational choice left to him: he let them win.”
“Don’t make him sound like a hero,” Albert muttered.
“I’m not,” Cross replied, voice suddenly colder. “I’m making him sound like a man who wanted his employees to live another day and his company to stay afloat.”
Schmidt exhaled slowly. “So the Pelicans were full of Corsairs and Orbital staff. They weren’t arriving to negotiate — they were arriving to execute.”
“And the rest?” Hans asked. “The freighters, the probe, the so-called "brilliant plan?"”
“Oh yes. According to those logs — the ones that officially don’t exist — in a last-ditch effort, Von Tanner ordered the remaining freighters to ram the gunboat. Just to buy time.”
“My God.”
“And then,” Cross continued, settling deeper into her impromptu seat, “he threw the Morgenstern at the jump hole at full throttle. It was brilliant, in its own reckless way. He preloaded the final logs into this antenna, hoping to dump them into every emergency channel on the other side. And in case they didn’t make it, he launched the entire archive — start to finish — on a mining probe headed in the same direction. Hoping the chaos would draw all eyes to the ship, and the truth might slip past unnoticed."
None of them spoke. They simply stood there, caught in the gravity of it all.
“He never gave up,” Schmidt whispered at last.
“No,” said Cross. “He didn’t.”
“Unfortunately,” she added after a beat, “Hornet missiles are faster — and far more stubborn — than courage. They spotted the probe just in time, intercepted it, and blew it to pieces barely a few hundred meters from the edge of the Cambridge Jump Hole. In the meanwhile, the Corsair commando, well, was doing what you already know onboard"
She paused, her voice almost tinged with reluctant admiration. “Truly brilliant. Stubborn. Heroic, even. Von Tanner… I’d never have thought it of him. Not until today.”
After a moment of heavy silence, Albert was the first to speak again.
“Well… now what?”
“Now what?” Cross echoed, deadpan. “Isn’t it obvious? Now that you know everything… I can’t possibly let you leave here alive.”
