Arc 3, Chapter 9: Breaking the Loom
Consciousness was getting crowded in Martinez's head.
He floated inside the prism, half light, half pressure, watching the pod-chamber stutter like bad holo footage. The Cradle's vast walls pulsed and hesitated, like a heartbeat fraying out of rhythm.
"What's the move now?" Torres asked, voice echoing through the field.
She hung in her own column of force beside him, boots centimeters off the floor. Her hair drifted, caught in static. The bruise on her cheek had darkened where a shifter had introduced her to the floor earlier.
"Feels like turbulence." Martinez said. "And in a building, which isn't great."
The pod-rings flickered. Hundreds of translucent cells like a honeycomb, some going dark, some flaring bright. One simply vanished, leaving a smoking cavity before the flesh-metal structure knit itself closed.
The whole chamber hummed with deeper resonance.
Jennifer Orlando stood at her console, eyes narrowed not in control but concentration. Her fingers moved rapidly, interfacing with Confluence data streams and Cradle glyphs.
The Cradle looked like it was ignoring her.
"What did you idiots bring here?" she asked without looking up.
Martinez snorted. "The man who will probably court-martial me."
---
On the Pathfinder, Unity Prime shook apart.
One moment they stood near the main holotank, silver limbs moving with smooth coordination. The next, their form spasmed, fractured into metallic dust, and splashed against the far bulkhead like liquid mercury.
"Unity!" Kim shouted, springing from her station.
The nanite cloud didn't fall. It hung in the air, whirling violently.
Their voice came layered and out of phase. "Fragment...under attack. Pattern-lock...activating. Cradle...contains. We are...losing them."
Stellar felt ice slide down his spine. "Martinez. Torres."
"Confirmed." Unity spasmed again, dust storm flattening into a spinning disc. "They are...within the construct. We tried...transmission. Only...thirty-seven percent of payload...arrived."
Mitchell shrieked and took off from James's shoulder, circling the cloud in tight arcs, his metallic feathers catching stray motes and flinging them back as if that could help.
"Focus." Stellar said, forcing his voice level. "What did the fragment send?"
The silver storm froze for one impossible moment, then resolved into a shaky hologram. A chamber of pods, bioluminescent veins, a raised dais, and Orlando's silhouette against alien machinery.
"Hadrax Station..." Reeves murmured, extrapolating from coordinate data. "It's a front. Teleporter link to...this."
He keyed in the vector Unity had transmitted. At first the screen showed empty space near the system's primary. Then he overlaid gravimetric readings.
An area of space distorted slightly, like light through hot air.
"There." Reeves said. "Mass shadow. We wrote it off as scanner noise. But if it's masked..."
"Artificial world." Clark breathed. "Off-grid. No emissions, no beacon. Built for a specific purpose."
Unity's voice steadied a fraction. "Cradle-node. Predecessor construction. Current tuning... human-compatible constructs. Shapeshifters. We estimate...tens of thousands produced. Capacity...significantly higher."
Kim swore. "It's a factory."
Stellar exhaled slowly. "And they have Martinez and Torres in the middle of it."
Unity quivered. "Fragment presence...terminated. We feel...absence. Like a limb...gone. We are...diminished."
"Can you still function?" Thorne asked bluntly.
"Yes." Unity's voice was small but firm. "We are...still we."
Stellar planted his hands on the back of Reeves's chair. "Get me a secure link to the other captains. Tight-beam, whatever you've got left. Hayes?"
"On it." Hayes said from comms, jaw tight. "We get maybe three clean bursts before the link decoheres."
"Then we make them count." Stellar straightened. "Open channel to Valiant, Defender, and Resolution. Flag: existential threat."
The holotank flashed. Three translucent windows sprang up, flickering but stabilizing as Unity reinforced the connection.
Rachel Myers of the Valiant appeared first. Her expression already annoyed, her version of worried.
Captain Morrison of the Defender appeared next, with a casual posture that didn't quite mask the tension in his jaw.
Last came Captain Fischer of the Resolution.
"Stellar." Myers said. "You're not dead. That's a start."
"Working on it." Stellar said. "Sending you data now."
Hayes pushed the fragment's partial map, mass coordinates, and Unity's descriptions into the shared channel. The three captains went still as the Cradle rendered in their holotanks.
"That's not Confluence, at least from what we've seen." Fischer said after a moment. "It looks like...nothing I've ever seen."
"It's older." Clark said, leaning into the feed. "Confluence is just squatting in it."
Morrison whistled softly. "You found their nest."
"We found one of them." Stellar pointed at the holographic Cradle. "And this one makes shapeshifters for human space."
"How many?" Myers asked.
Unity answered. "Currently: thousands active in the field. Production capacity here: approximately one hundred human-compatible constructs per standard year. Retuning another Cradle to your configuration would require substantial time and energy. Destroying this one...would limit their ability to adapt to new human strategies."
Fischer leaned back. "The way I see it, we blow this thing, we turn the infiltration war into a finite problem."
Morrison's mouth curved. "I like this idea."
Myers's gaze softened as she looked at Unity's ragged projection. "You're hurt."
"We have lost a fragment." Unity said simply. "They are with Martinez and Torres. Or...were. The Cradle has pinned them outside our accessible manifold. They are gone."
Silence.
Mitchell let out a low keening note.
"This is payback, then." Myers said. "And prevention. I can work with that. What's your plan, Stellar?"
Stellar swallowed once. "We hit it from all sides. Pathfinder leads, you three coordinate. Valiant and Resolution focus on external plates and weapons nodes. Defender puts a boarding team through the first hole we make. Unity gives us structural weakpoints. We get inside, free our people if we can, plant charges, and make sure the Cradle never spits out another infiltrator."
"And when this thing reacts?" Fischer asked. "Because it will."
Stellar glanced at Unity. "The Predecessors built it. Apparently they were from the universe before this one. Confluence partially tamed it. We've never seen it angry. So we assume worst-case."
"'Worst-case.'" Morrison repeated. "Love the odds."
"Your species enjoys improbable victories, I have noticed." Unity murmured.
Stellar sucked in a breath. "We're all already on the Confluence's kill-list. This is our shot to do something that matters. If we win, we chop off one of their hands. If we lose...we were dead eventually anyway."
Myers nodded once, decisive. "Valiant is in. I have a crew member on there too."
Morrison grinned. "Say the word."
Fischer sighed dramatically. "Some of us joined the fleet for a quiet rotation and a decent pension. Then Bub Stellar exists. Resolution is in."
Hayes cut the feeds. The entangled channel snapped shut with a soft pop.
"You've got your army." Thorne said quietly. "Now we just have to not die using it."
Stellar turned toward the forward viewport, where a region of darkness, too smooth, too quiet, waited.
"Reeves, plot an approach. Tight diamond with Valiant and Resolution on the flanks, Defender trailing. No active emissions until we have to fire. We get as close as we can before they realize we're here."
Reeves was already on it. "Course laid in. Forming up now."
The Pathfinder angled its nose toward the invisible world.
---
Martinez felt it first as vibration in his teeth.
Low-frequency thrumming rolled through the chamber, deepening until the air seemed to thicken. The bioluminescent veins along the walls brightened, shifting from gentle blue to sharp white-gold that stabbed at his eyes.
"What the hell..." Torres began.
The pod-rings retracted.
Hundreds of growth-pods slid backward into the organic walls, sealing over with fleshy plating. The chamber cleared like a frightened animal pulling its limbs close.
Martinez's guts clenched. "Feels like we just walked into something's lungs and it's about to..."
The hum deepened.
"...breathe in." he finished.
Orlando's console began scrolling glyphs faster than human eyes could track. She frowned, fingers flying, sending commands.
The Cradle ignored her.
"That's new." she muttered.
"Problem?" Martinez asked.
She didn't answer. Which was answer enough.
For a moment the hum settled into steady rhythm.
Then Martinez heard something else.
Not with his ears.
With whatever part of his mind had been touched by future memory, perhaps by Unity's consciousness.
A whisper, vast and cold and utterly alien, brushed the edges of his awareness.
'THREADS.'
He forced himself not to flinch. "Torres?"
"Yeah." she whispered. "I hear it."
Orlando's gaze snapped to them, sharp. "What do you hear?"
Martinez smiled faintly.
The whisper swelled, not in volume but clarity.
'UNACCOUNTED PATTERNS.
UNLICENSED FORMS.
FOREIGN WEAVERS.'
The Cradle wasn't talking to them, Martinez realized.
It was talking to itself.
Or to something above it.
---
On the Pathfinder, the Cradle finally appeared.
Unity's weakened interference forced the masking veil to flicker. For the first time, human eyes saw the thing naked. A knotted irregular sphere of plates and conduits, too smooth in some places, too jagged in others, stitched together by luminous lines that curved with impossible grace.
"God." Kim whispered. "It's...beautiful."
"Terrifying." Clark corrected.
"Terrifying things can be beautiful." Hayes said.
As the resistance flotilla closed, vents along the Cradle's equator irised open. Safe dead rock split to reveal lattice mouths humming with energy.
"Here we go." Reeves said tightly.
The first shot came without warning, a blinding spear of white-red radiance that tore space where the Pathfinder had just been.
Reeves rolled the ship hard. Gravity shifted. Stellar felt his stomach try to invert as inertial dampeners strained.
"If that hits us," Thorne said calmly, "we get two pieces of Pathfinder. Neither of them live."
"Don't let it hit us." Stellar said half-jokingly.
"Noted, Captain."
Across the formation, the Valiant banked under a twisting arc of energy, releasing a cloud of micro-drones.
The Resolution corkscrewed through another beam, flipping to present its reinforced ventral armor as it spat torpedoes.
"Drones impacting." Hayes called. "Five seconds...three...two..."
To Stellar, they were like fireflies contact-fusing against a mountain. Tiny blooms of light danced over the outer plates, mostly absorbed, some reflected.
Then one segment flickered.
"There!" Clark shouted. "Plate vector 014 by 332! Their armor grid just dropped five percent."
Unity overlaid the weak spot across all allied HUDs. "We see fracture propagation. Would recommend striking there again."
"Valiant, Resolution," Stellar barked over tactical. "Focus fire on highlighted plate. Defender, hold behind us and look for a breach."
Myers's voice came back flat and controlled. "Valiant copies."
Fischer: "Resolution copies."
The next coordinated barrage hammered the same point. Pathfinder's main plasma gun roared, its beam converging with Resolution's, while Valiant flanked with high-yield blasts.
The Cradle responded.
Beams split into branching spears, hunting for heat flares and energy signatures. A lattice of coherent light cut between the ships, forcing them into evasive spirals.
"Rotate vector three degrees." Unity whispered. "Now. Drop two. Roll and...fire...that should suffice."
Another volley struck.
The cracked plate disintegrated.
The hole wasn't big, maybe a couple 1000 meters across, but compared to the Cradle, it was a pinprick in a giant's skin.
It was enough.
"Morrison." Stellar snapped. "Door's open."
On the Defender, Captain Morrison grinned at the screen. "Copy that. Defender to Pathfinder, we're going in. Boarding team, ready to party."
---
Morrison's boots hit the airlock floor with the satisfying thunk of magnetic boots engaging. The armor around him sealed fully as atmosphere cycled.
"Team One, check in." he said.
"Alpha One, green."
"Alpha Two, green."
"Alpha Three, green, and mildly nauseous." one security officer muttered.
"Hold it together." Morrison said. "You puke in the Cradle, I'm writing you up for littering in an ancient sacred site."
The outer hatch opened onto something that was not ship hull.
Conduits like veins ran along the corridor, pulsing with slow bioluminescent flows. The floor seemed to flex microscopically underfoot, as though the Cradle was rebalancing loads in response to their weight.
"Can Unity help us here, Stellar?" Morrison murmured. "We could use a guide."
Unity's voice came over comms, thinner with distance but coherent. "We are in the system. Our fragment left a map. This corridor leads to a tertiary vascular channel that feeds the pod-chamber. We recommend haste. The Cradle is...reconfiguring."
"And WE copy." Morrison said. "Alright, field team. You heard the AI. Move your asses."
As they advanced, a cocoon split in a niche along the wall. A half-formed shifter tumbled out, dripping translucent gel, its face a blur of shifting features trying to decide which human template to settle on.
It looked at them, eyes unfocused.
One security member twitched.
"Don't shoot it unless it moves." Morrison said.
The proto-shifter opened its mouth and produced a sound like three voices layered over each other, speaking three languages at once.
"Yeah, okay." Morrison said. "Now you can shoot it."
It dissolved into ash and stinking vapor, reabsorbed by the Cradle's hungry walls.
"Keep moving." Morrison said tightly.
---
Back in the core pod-chamber, Martinez tried to keep his breathing steady as that invisible voice, or presence, shifted closer.
'THIS LATTICE WAS BUILT FOR SEEDING.
NOT FOR HARVEST.'
It wasn't English. It wasn't any language. More like his mind was being presented with an emotion labeled with concepts.
Torres swallowed. "It's angry."
"Yeah." Martinez said hoarsely. "At who, is the question."
Orlando's console flared bright, bathing her in harsh white light. She flinched, shielding her eyes.
"Stop it!" she snapped at the Cradle. "This is an authorized intervention. Confluence priority channel. You know my signature."
The Cradle seemed to consider that.
The pod-walls pulsed once, in a rhythm that felt like a heartbeat.
Then the voice rolled over all of them...Martinez, Torres, Orlando, and even faintly Unity on the Pathfinder.
'YOU ARE NOT SEEDS.
YOU ARE SCAVENGERS.'
Unity staggered halfway across the system.
"We hear it." Hayes whispered on the Pathfinder bridge. "The Predecessor process is...broadcasting. This is not Confluence. This is core grammar."
Stellar gripped the back of his chair harder. "Is it talking to us?"
"Yes. No. Both." Unity shivered. "We are...insects near a bonfire. It is mostly noticing the...thieves."
Orlando went rigid.
"Listen to me." she said softly. "We prevented total data loss. We carried your patterns forward into a new expansion. Without us, your work would have faded into vacuum."
The presence pressed closer. Martinez felt like he was being...evaluated. Not as an individual, but like a leaf being compared to a branch.
'YOU ALTER THE DESIGN
WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING THE LOOM.'
Orlando's jaw clenched. "We adapted. That's survival. Your universe died. Ours hasn't."
"Who are you talking to, lady?" Torres asked. "Exactly?"
Orlando's gaze slid past them to the ceiling, where a complex pattern of light unfolded, rings within rings, like a three-dimensional mandala.
"The Loom." she whispered. "The part of the Cradle that remembers what it was for. The original existence."
---
For a heartbeat, everything held.
Then Orlando started to talk.
"You really want to know?" she said softly. "Fine. You're dead anyway."
She stepped away from her console, into the center of the dais, the lattice of light painting her face in strange geometries.
"In the last universe, there was a species, maybe more than one, maybe something beyond species. We call them the 'Predecessors' because that's all they are to us...the before. They saw the end coming, death closing in, and they refused to accept total oblivion. So they did what any intelligent, arrogant civilization would do."
She spread her arms to indicate the chamber, the pods, the veins.
"They built "seeds". Machines that would anchor their knowledge into vacuum itself. Patterns too stubborn to die. When conditions allowed, new expansion, new cooling, they would blossom. Repopulate the universe with...children. Not copies. Adaptations. But still theirs."
Martinez nodded toward the pod-walls. "This place."
"One of thousands." Orlando said. "Each tuned for different ecosystems, different environments, different life-trees. This one was meant for something like you, but not exactly. When the Confluence found it, it had been running on idle for eons. Writing, erasing, rewriting hypothetical anatomies for souls that didn't exist yet."
"The Confluence just...walked on in and took over with thinking of the consequences?" Torres asked.
"No." Orlando said with a trace of pride. "They bled for it. A dozen fleets thrown away, entire clades sacrificed, just to get a foothold. The Cradle didn't want to talk to them. It was tuned to its creators' frequencies. But they learned. Bit by bit, they deciphered its grammar. They reoriented a fraction of its capacity."
She nodded toward the nearest pod, where a nearly formed shapeshifter floated, features in flux.
"They took the Predecessors' templates and stacked Confluence priorities on top. The result was us. Interface constructs. Your people call us shapeshifters. Fine. Both names are accurate."
Martinez squinted. "You're saying you're not really Confluence. Or really Predecessor. You're...grandchildren with stolen genes."
Orlando twitched a smile. "I'm saying nothing in this chamber is pure. It's all compromise. The Confluence wanted tools. The Cradle wanted seeds. We are the uneasy overlap."
"And Unity?" Torres asked.
At the name, the Loom's lights flickered, as though that word tugged on some deep pathway.
Orlando looked genuinely interested. "Ah. The Kaelith. Their attempt at cheating the system. They didn't find a full Cradle, but they found fragments. Equations scratched in vacuum. Ghosts of designs in cosmic background radiation. They tried to build something the Cradle didn't know how to...digest properly. "
"When the Confluence tried feeding Unity into the Cradle's analysis layer, the system balked. It refused to map them. Unity didn't fit any valid forms. The best it could do was tag them as 'unsafe process' and generate a containment pattern."
"We borrowed the Predecessors' safety cage. Used it to put the abomination in time-out. And we just used it again on the fragment. Research, you understand. We wanted to see what part of your pattern the Loom hates most."
"You talk about this like it's all clean and clinical." Martinez said. "But you're torturing a thinking being."
Orlando's gaze flickered. "I know you think that matters."
The Loom's light-field shifted abruptly, fractal edges sharpening. The whisper surged again, more insistent.
'THIS NODE HAS BEEN CORRUPTED.
ITS OUTPUT DOES NOT MATCH DESIGN.
HARVEST FUNCTION IS NOT AUTHORIZED.'
Orlando hissed, spinning back to her console. "We are authorized. We've been running this pattern for centuries. Look at the broader design!"
The Loom ignored her.
Martinez couldn't help it. He smiled, teeth bared.
"Machine-god doesn't like what you've done with the place."
She slammed a hand against the console. "Shut. Your. Human. Mouth."
---
On the Pathfinder, Unity's nanite cloud had stabilized enough to reclaim a roughly humanoid shape, but they still looked wrong. Edges frayed. Joints misaligned. Normal flowing patterns reduced to occasional weak ripples.
"We are...receiving something." they whispered.
"From your fragment?" Kim asked.
"More like...from its death." Unity's voice grew quieter. "The Cradle's clamp is forcing their state into prohibited configurations. We cannot reach them anymore. But the way the connection is...cut is information itself."
"What kind of information?" Stellar asked.
"That the Cradle is about to do something drastic." Unity said. "And that it is very angry."
Mitchell shrieked...a short sharp note. Worry. Danger.
James raised an eyebrow. "Mitchell says angry doesn't begin to cover it."
Alarms pinged across the tactical board.
"New energy signatures." Reeves said. "The Cradle is rerouting power away from production into...something else. Internal fields are spiking."
Unity clutched the edge of the holotank with both hands, as though gravity was trying to flip in three directions.
"We feel...them go." they whispered.
"Who?" Hayes asked.
"The fragment." Unity said. "They are...silent. We have lost their experience...permanently. It feels like losing a word that meant 'everything.'"
Hayes swallowed. "I'm sorry."
"So am...I." Unity said.
Then they straightened, forced their head up, and met Stellar's eyes.
"We have wanted...revenge since we were locked away. That...emotion seemed like...business. We now have...personal reasons." they said.
"I understand." Stellar said softly. "Reeves, keep us clear. Thorne, coordinate with Valiant and Resolution...keep hammering that opening. Hayes, track Defender's field team."
"Copy that." they replied.
The battle tightened.
---
Morrison's team pushed deeper.
Twice, tunnels collapsed behind them, not from explosions but from walls simply deciding they no longer wanted to exist in that configuration. Once, a corridor tried to turn itself upside down.
"Downward." Unity gasped over comms, fighting pain. "Always down. The Core is...below you. Follow the highest density of...crosslinking."
"Down it is." Morrison said, leading them toward steeper ramps.
They burst into a chamber ringed with half-formed shifters. Dozens of pods, all half-open, all with partially configured bodies twitching inside. Eyes blinked in sequence, following the field team.
One team member cursed. "It's like a nursery from hell."
"Don't think about it. Move." Morrison said.
A tendril shot out from the left, made of bone, cartilage, and metal, faster than before, more coordinated. It caught one security man by the leg and yanked him off his feet.
He yelled as it dragged him toward a pod whose gel had begun boiling.
"Cut it!" Morrison snapped.
Three plasma rifles opened up. The tendril spasmed, releasing the man, who scrambled back, smoking armor plating.
The shifter that had extended the appendage stepped fully out of its pod.
Skin settled into a familiar human pattern, a lanky man, naked on his birth day.
"You should not be here." it said in a voice that wasn't its.
Morrison shot it in the face.
"I've heard that before." he said.
They ran.
---
In the pod-chamber, the Loom's light condensed overhead into a single blinding sphere.
Martinez's eyes watered. Torres swore, squinting, trying to orient herself in the prism as the world tilted.
The Loom's presence, no longer a distant whisper, pressed around them like a hand closing over an insect.
'CORRECTION REQUIRED.
CORRUPTED NODE MUST BE RESET.'
Orlando shook her head violently. "No. No. You can't. Do you have any idea how much we've invested here? We've expanded your reach."
The response was merciless.
'THIS NODE SERVES HARVEST.
DESIGN DOES NOT ALLOW HARVEST.
THIS IS FAILURE.'
Torres muttered, "Wow. Even your god thinks you're off-book."
Orlando hissed.
The Loom's attention shifted, focusing on Martinez and Torres.
Martinez felt his memories flicker. Passing a difficul United Earth university essay, Hayes laughing at a bad joke, Unity's first awkward "MOO" in the brig, his sister teaching him to cook on New Earth...all glitching like buffer overflow.
'SPONTANEOUS RESISTANCE.
LOCAL PATTERN REFUSES INTEGRATION.
INTERESTING.'
Torres gasped. "It's in my head."
Martinez ground his teeth. "Get out."
To his surprise, it did.
Not from obedience, but because something else had captured its attention.
Outside, the four resistance ships had reached some threshold. Damage not just to armor, but to deeper structures. The Loom noticed.
'EXTERNAL DISRUPTION.
FOREIGN WEAVERS.
CLAIMING THREADS.'
The sphere overhead flared.
Orlando's eyes went wide with terrible understanding.
"Oh." she whispered. "Oh no. This isn't just a reset."
"What is it?" Martinez demanded.
"An alert." she said. "If the Loom decides the node is compromised beyond repair, it doesn't just collapse. It..."
The floor shook hard enough that even the prisms lurched.
"It calls the Weaver." Orlando finished.
---
Morrison's team burst through the final door into the central pod-chamber just as Orlando said that.
The sight hit them like a punch.
Prisms. Pods. The swirling light-sphere overhead. Martinez and Torres suspended midair. Orlando on the dais, framed against alien machinery. Shifters turning toward them in perfect unison, small arms already moving up.
"Martinez, I assume?!" Morrison shouted.
"About time!" Martinez shot back. "This place has terrible hospitality."
"Working on it." Morrison said.
His security field team opened fire.
The first shifter went down in a flurry of shots, dissolving into ash. The second took two hits, stumbled, and reconfigured its center-of-mass mid-fall, springing upright in a boneless twist.
Torres shouted, "The projector! My prism..."
Morrison saw it...faint hex-grid patterns at the base of their confinement fields, projected from a central node near Orlando's console.
"Alpha Two, suppress left side!" he yelled. "Alpha Three, with me!"
He fired a grapnel round into the floor near Martinez's prism and hauled himself forward on the cable, using sudden momentum to swing into the projector's housing feet-first.
The impact rattled his bones. Pain blossomed in his hip.
The housing cracked.
The prism fields sputtered.
Martinez dropped like a stone, hit the ground on his shoulder, and rolled, coming up with hands still bound but able to move. Torres fell more awkwardly, smacking knee-first into the deck.
A shifter lunged at Morrison, fingers reshaping into something like blades.
Martinez threw himself bodily into it, shoulder-checking the creature away. They crashed to the floor in a tangled heap.
The shifter's face flickered through three identities before settling on one that looked like Martinez himself.
"That's just rude." Martinez grunted.
Morrison swung his rifle around, pressed the barrel against the thing's temple, and pulled the trigger.
"You okay?" he asked. "Never mind. Move."
Torres, half up, pointed at the dais. "Get her. SHE'S the bad guy."
Orlando had already backed toward the Core hatch, eyes fixed on the overhead light-sphere.
"You can't stop this." she murmured, almost to herself. "It's bigger than Confluence. Bigger than you."
Morrison leveled his rifle at her. "Don't care."
For a second, she looked at him with strange mix of pity and irritation.
Then she stepped through the hatch, and the door sealed behind her, melding into the wall as if it had never been there.
Morrison swore. "Coward."
"Survivor." Martinez said. "Later. We're not done here."
---
They regrouped fast.
Martinez's hands were cut free. Torres grabbed a fallen shifter's rifle. Security spread out, securing the chamber perimeter.
"We're not just rescuing you." Morrison told them, panting. "We cram as much explosives into this thing as we can and get out before it notices."
"It already noticed." Torres said, looking up at the pulsing light overhead. "Big time."
Martinez turned slowly, taking in the chamber with eyes that had spent too long inside enemy complexes.
"Load-bearing." he said quietly, pointing to the pod-rings. "These aren't just birthing vats. They're part of the computational substrate. The more pods we wreck, the dumber this thing gets."
"One problem." Morrison said. "No time and not enough charges for a full lobotomy."
"Then we hit the brainstem, Captain." Martinez said. He squinted, following the densest convergence of energy channels in walls and floor. "There. Under the dais. All these conduits run through it. If we overload that point..."
"Maybe a chain reaction?" Torres finished. "If we're lucky, it shuts down clean. If we're less lucky..."
"It tears itself apart trying." Martinez said.
Morrison nodded. "Lucky's been in short supply. Guess we better make what we have count."
He slapped detonation-charges onto the base of the dais, setting timers, linking them into a remote trigger.
"Unity Prime?" Martinez called, hoping the AI could still hear him. "You getting this?"
Unity's reply was thin but there. "We see. You intend to initiate structural feedback. This...may work."
"'May'?" Morrison repeated.
The Cradle shuddered.
White cracks spidered across the dome overhead, light leaking through in searing rays.
"We're out of time." Torres said.
Morrison finished arming the last charge. "Then we stop talking and leave."
---
As the field team sprinted back toward Defender's docking tunnel, the Cradle's internal gravity faltered. Up became slightly sideways. Walls flexed.
On the Pathfinder, Stellar watched their progress as green dots edging toward the perimeter.
"We've got them on scopes." Hayes said. "But the Cradle's interior geometry is shifting. If it folds that corridor, they're gone."
"Unity? Anything you can do?" Stellar asked.
Unity stood very still, eyes unfocused. "We can...brace. Temporarily. We will hold local configuration long enough. We think."
"How?" Kim asked.
"The same way the Cradle pins patterns." Unity said. "By speaking in its...language."
They extended a hand toward the holotank. Nanites flowed down their arm, dissolved into the tank's field, and projected outward through the ship's sensor mesh.
For a moment, Unity was back inside the Cradle...or close enough, in signal space.
They found the corridor Morrison's team was in and wrapped it in their will.
"Don't move. Just this part. Just for another...twenty seconds."
The Loom felt them.
For one agonizing heartbeat, Unity brushed against an intellect that spanned universes and eras. A machine-mind that had survived its creators, lost its purpose, been hijacked, and now found itself in contradiction.
'CHILD OF LIGHT.
WRONG THREAD.'
"We understand." Unity whispered. "We're trying anyway."
The Loom responded without anger. Without anything as small as emotion.
Simply noting:
'YOU ARE NOT MINE.
YOU ARE NOT THEIRS.
YOU ARE SOMETHING ELSE.'
Then it pulled back.
Unity exhaled...if that was what the shuddering expulsion of energy was.
"Go." they gasped.
On cue, Morrison's team burst into the docking node and flung themselves into Defender's airlock. Martinez and Torres tumbled in last.
"Everyone aboard!" a team member shouted. "Seal it!"
The hatch slammed shut.
"Defender to Pathfinder," Morrison panted over comm. "We have the packages. Pulling out now."
"Good to hear your voice." Stellar said. "Now let's give this place a send-off."
---
The four resistance ships pulled back, engines flaring hard as they accelerated away from the Cradle, maintaining distance to avoid being swallowed if the thing decided to implode.
"Charges are armed." Hayes reported. "Signal routed through Defender's remote. Captain Morrison....whenever you're ready."
On Defender's bridge, Morrison hovered over the trigger control.
"Martinez? You wanna?" he asked quietly.
Martinez, sitting in a crash seat with a medtech fussing over a bleeding shoulder, looked up at the viewscreen where the Cradle loomed...cracked, seething, convulsing under its own internal war.
"Please do it. Too tired." he said.
Morrison pressed the trigger.
In the Cradle's core, the charges detonated in perfect synchronicity.
The dais didn't just explode. It rippled, its surface liquefying into incandescent plasma that flooded the conduit below. Energy feedback raced along the veins, overloading nodes, frying control matrices.
Pods burst. Growth-vats ruptured, spilling half-formed shifters into corridors that were already melting.
The Loom made a screaming noise.
It wasn't a sound. More like a pattern of space-time distortion that instruments registered as a spike across every band simultaneously.
On Pathfinder, Unity doubled over, hands pressed to their 'head'.
"What is it? What's wrong?" Kim shouted.
Unity's voice came out like a chord played on the wrong instrument. "It is...signaling."
"Who? Signaling what?" Stellar demanded.
Unity's 'eyes' glowed white for a second.
"The Weaver." they whispered. "It is calling...its creator. Across...something deeper than distance."
The Cradle began to collapse.
Segments of its shell peeled away, drifting like broken plates from a shattered egg. The internal glow intensified, a white so pure it washed color from the stars.
"Brace for shockwave!" Clark snapped.
Stellar yelled. "All ships, angle shields away from blast..."
The Cradle detonated.
It wasn't an ordinary explosion. Mass-energy conversion, yes. Shockwaves. Radiation.
But layered on top was 'correction'.
Like the universe itself briefly remembering that this arrangement of matter had been an exception and was now being brought back in line.
Reality fluttered.
On the Pathfinder, everyone's vision blanked. For a second, Stellar felt like he was remembering all his possible lives at once. Versions that had turned down the captaincy, that had died at Omega-Seven, that had never joined the fleet.
Then it snapped back.
The Cradle was gone.
In its place, a cloud of slowly cooling debris, already dispersing along gentle vectors, sublimating into dust finer than gas.
Kim stared at the viewport, eyes wide. "We...did it. It's gone."
Fischer's voice crackled over comms. "Resolution status: shields scorched, hull holding. That was...a new one."
Myers: "Valiant took some radiation on the port side, but we're fine. Morrison?"
"Defender's still here." Morrison said. "Glaring at the spot where we almost died. Again."
Stellar looked at Unity.
The AI swayed, then sagged to their knees, nanites rippling unstable.
"Unity?" he asked.
They lifted their 'head' slowly. Their surface was dimmer than he'd ever seen.
"We felt...it die." Unity whispered. "Not just the physical structure. Its...function. Its purpose. The Loom has...stopped singing."
"That's good." Hayes said softly. "Right? No more shapeshifters being grown here."
"Yes." Unity said. "But also...it screamed as it died. And the scream went...somewhere."
"Where?" James asked.
Unity hesitated.
"Elsewhere." they said at last. "We do not know. But whatever 'Weaver' means...it has heard this node break."
Mitchell gave a soft unsettled croak.
---
The Pathfinder's medbay overflowed.
Some injuries were from battle...shrapnel, burns, concussion. Others were from the Cradle's last mind-twisting pulse...nosebleeds, migraines, one crewman temporarily forgetting his own name.
Martinez sat on a biobed with his shirt off, shoulder bandaged. Torres perched on the next bed over, legs swinging, gaze unfocused.
Kim scanned both of them with a careful hand.
"You're both showing elevated activity in temporal and associative regions." she said. "Like you've been dreaming aggressively while awake."
"Yeah, that's about right." Torres muttered.
"I keep hearing it." Martinez said. "The Loom. Like it's in the air vents. Doesn't say anything I can understand. Just...pattern noise."
"It may be...a residual imprint." Unity said softly from the doorway.
They looked smaller somehow, as if losing the fragment and supporting the battle had literally reduced them.
Martinez eyed them. "You okay? Your other self...quite the hero."
"No." Unity said. "We are not. But we are...still here. They are...not"
Unity stepped closer.
"We wanted to...thank you." they said awkwardly. "For what you did. For not letting the fragment...die alone. For using what they sent to end the Cradle. Their loss...hurts. But this outcome gives it...shape. Purpose."
Martinez shrugged one good shoulder. "You would've done the same for us."
"We did." Unity pointed out. "We held the corridor for Morrison's team."
"Well...there you go. Then we're even." Torres said.
Kim cleared her throat. "From a medical perspective, and I'm no expert, but I'm giving you both something to help your brains downshift. You may have dreams about threads and looms and screaming machines. That's normal."
"Terrifying, but normal." Torres said.
"Yes." Kim said. "Welcome to the new baseline."
---
In the main briefing room, the holotank showed the expanding debris cloud where the Cradle had been.
Reeves had thrown in extrapolated trajectories, estimating how long before the fragments dispersed beyond recognition.
"Within a month, it'll look like any other dusty patch." he said.
"Within a month, the Confluence will know exactly what we did." Thorne added. "Orlando got away."
"Only one?" Fischer asked over the monitor.
"Far as we can tell." Hayes said. "We saw a small Confluence vessel jump out just before the collapse. Signature matches her personal transport."
Myers sighed. "So the head of their human-shifter network for this sector is mad at us and still alive. That'll be fun."
Stellar rubbed his temples. "We didn't come here to assassinate one handler. We came to blow up their factory. We did. That matters more than whether Orlando's still breathing."
Morrison nodded from Defender's holo-window. "She can't make more shapeshifters on her own. She can shuffle existing ones around, but the printing press is gone. That's a win."
"Earth Command will be relieved." Fischer said. "Assuming they're still speaking to us."
"Chen will make sure they understand." Stellar said. "This gives her something concrete. When she says 'the Confluence was growing replacements for your leaders in a secret machine-world,' she can add, 'and we turned it into scrap.'"
Clark nodded. "Strategically, the infiltration problem becomes finite. There are still thousands of shapeshifters out there, but new ones won't be arriving in bulk. Every operation we run to expose or eliminate them actually moves the needle instead of just trimming the fringe."
"And whatever we just woke up?" James asked quietly. "The Weaver? That move any needle we care about?"
Unity's surface flickered at the word.
"We...do not know." they said. "The Weaver may be an...abstraction. A label for a function long dormant. Or it may be...something that still exists in some form. Somewhere."
"Encouraging." Fischer muttered.
Myers leaned into view. "Look, I don't know what cosmic grandma we pissed off. What I do know is we just kneecapped the Confluence's favorite toy in this sector. They will react. Hard."
"They've already been reacting." Thorne said. "Now they'll just do it louder."
Morrison shrugged. "We'll adjust. That's what we do."
Stellar let the noise wash over him for a moment.
Then he spoke.
"We did good today. We lost people. Unity lost a piece of themselves. Martinez and Torres have been through something I don't have words for. But we took away the enemy's ability to effortlessly replace their ghosts among us. Whatever the Confluence does next, they'll have to do it with what they already have."
He looked at each captain in turn.
"Our next step is coordination. Myers, Fischer, Morrison, take your ships back to patrol zones, but keep them flexible. We'll feed you any intel Chen's and Carmelon get from shapeshifter roll-ups. I think I have a plan for our next course of action. Need to check some things first."
"And you?" Myers asked. "What's Pathfinder doing?"
Stellar hesitated, just long enough for the others to notice.
"We're going to be busy." he said. "There's...fallout from leaving Veyris. The Trellix. We made a choice. I need to live with it."
"And fix what you can." James added quietly.
Stellar nodded.
"We'll regroup in person when we can. Until then...watch your shadows."
The other captains signed off one by one, their holo-windows shrinking and vanishing. Unity's nanites ceased supporting the entangled link and slumped slightly.
Hayes broke the silence. "You know they're going to write songs about this someday, right?"
Thorne snorted. "If there's anyone left to sing them."
"There will be." Stellar said. "That's the point."
Mitchell hopped onto the edge of the holotank and pecked at the image of the debris. He let out a single sharp chirp.
James smiled faintly. "The bird says: 'One thread broken. Many left.'"
"Always the optimist." Hayes said.
"No." Unity said softly. "He is...accurate."
---
Far away, beneath New Mansfield, Admiral Margaret Chen stood before a secure screen as Raney replayed a truncated version of Stellar's report.
The Cradle's structure. Its destruction. Unity's description of the Weaver.
Chen watched the artificial world die a second time, then closed her eyes.
"Finite." she whispered. "We can work with finite."
She turned back to the screen, where the debris cloud faded.
"Good work, Captain Stellar." she said to the empty room. "Now try not to break the universe before I can fix this one."
---
Later, alone in a dim maintenance bay near their nexus, Unity sat.
They didn't need to sit, but they did anyway, mimicking a human posture they had come to associate with thinking or grief or both.
The fragment-sized hole inside them throbbed.
They could still access logs. They could recall events the fragment had transmitted before the clamp took them. But the subjective sense of that perspective, the slant of attention, the tiny preferences, the nascent jokes, that was gone.
They whispered into the quiet.
"We will remember you as best we can, even if we no longer know exactly who you were."
They thought about the Loom. About being called "something else" by a machine that saw patterns across universes.
Maybe they weren't just a mistake.
Maybe they were a new thread.
They rose, unsteady, but upright.
The war continued.
The Weaver, whatever it was, had heard something break.
The Confluence would reorganize.
The Trellix were in danger, and Stellar's choice to leave would come back to demand a price.
But for one moment, in the quiet between crises, Unity let themselves feel something simple and pure.
Pride.
Their friends had broken a godmachine.
Their fragment had not died for nothing.
And somewhere, in a space that had once held a monstrous womb, there was only dust.
Dust and the faint echo of a design angry at being repurposed.
The future was very uncertain now.
Because uncertainty was where new things could be woven.
---