Kiera's plan was audacious. They would use the decoy in the Silent Veil, but not as a static lure. They would turn it into a puppet show.
Using holograms, remote-controlled drones, and a few very brave Forgotten volunteers, they would create the illusion of "Echo" actively exploring the Gloom, moving from wreck to wreck, occasionally flaring a fake resonance signal (generated by painstakingly copying the energy signature of his first, accidental ping).
The goal wasn't to convince the fleets the decoy was real forever. It was to waste their time, to make them chase ghosts, and to establish a pattern of "false positives" that would make them distrust their own sensors when the real resonance eventually occurred.
Meanwhile, the real Sovereign's Circle would go deeper into hiding. They would use Mira's spatial mastery and the Sanctuary Seed's innate abilities to sink their base deeper into the Gloom's reality-substrate, making it virtually undetectable.
The plan required perfect timing and coordination. It was the first major operation of the Sanctuary Network. The Whisper-Moths carried encrypted orders. The Forgotten militias staged distractions at the Gloom's periphery. Kiera's black-market contacts leaked misleading navigational data.
For two weeks, the Gloom became a theater of illusions. Order scouts chased phantom energy readings into asteroid fields ambushed by Corrupted scavengers, and vice versa. The two blockading fleets, forced to respond to the activity, began to skirmish with each other, their fragile non-aggression pact fraying.
The gambit was working. It bought them precious time.
But the Grand Design was not so easily fooled.