The first signs were faint, almost invisible—a technician missing a shift, a coded transmission buried deep in the comms array, a hesitation in a soldier's salute. Ashoka might have overlooked them had it not been for Meera's sharp instincts. She intercepted a fragment of encrypted data during a late-night systems check. When decrypted, it was nothing more than coordinates drifting into the void, but to Ashoka, it was proof: someone was feeding information out.
Ashoka convened a secret council with Meera, Arhaan, and Darvos in a dim chamber lit only by tactical holo-screens. His face was stone, but his eyes burned with quiet fury."Someone within our walls carries the Shadow's mark," he said. "They are not spreading lies by chance. They are planted."
Arhaan slammed a fist against the table. "Find them, and I'll carve their tongue out myself."
"Not yet," Ashoka replied, voice low. "If we expose them too quickly, we reveal what we know. Better to follow the poison to its source."
So the hunt began, not with brute force but with careful deception. Ashoka deliberately fed false information to different sectors of the fleet—minor changes to supply routes, hidden markers in patrol paths. Within days, whispers began to shift, always echoing the false data Ashoka had planted.
The traitor was caught in his own trap.
It was Meera who cornered Kael in the engineering bay. His hands twitched toward the crystal communicator in his pocket, but before he could activate it, Ashoka stepped from the shadows, his presence filling the room like a storm.
"You wear loyalty like a mask," Ashoka said, his voice cold. "But masks always crack."
Kael's defiance burned for a moment. "The Council of Shadows does not fight in the open. We rot you from within. Even if you kill me, doubt will remain."
Ashoka's gaze did not waver. "Then I will turn doubt into fire. My men will learn that betrayal does not weaken us—it makes us stronger."
With a sharp gesture, Arhaan bound Kael's wrists. The traitor spat curses as he was dragged away, but his words no longer cut. Ashoka had caught the serpent by its neck, and now he would show the fleet that shadows cannot break an oath.
Still, as Ashoka stood in the silence of the engineering bay, his thoughts darkened. If the Council had planted one agent, how many more lay hidden across the stars?
The game was no longer about building an empire. It was about surviving the unseen war.