Page 12 of She Who Devours the Stars

Axis Alignment: Accord Resonance Analysis Center

The Nova Helix Accord Resonance Analysis Center was not built to inspire awe. It was built to survive explosive decompression, survive a direct surface-to-orbit impact, and survive the kind of multi-vector sabotage attempts the Accord claimed never happened. This left little budget for ambiance, so the place radiated the aesthetic of a subbasement bathroom crossed with a cryogenic vault: walls the color of surgical gloves, floor so over-cleaned it gave you ozone rashes, and ceiling panels that flickered in time with your heartbeat, assuming you hadn’t already replaced that liability with a pulse regulator.

Technician Kall had one, and it was a liability.

He hunched over Terminal 7A, filtering backlogs from the Sagittarius A* observation post and trying not to think about how much he hated the sound of his breathing. The only thing worse was the clack of his supervisor’s shoes, which seemed specifically engineered to interrupt the moment just before a nap could take hold.

Kall checked the timestamp: 2866 ACE, 23rdday of the Quanta of Ruin, 15:14 GST. Two hours to shift end, and if he played his cards right, most of that would be spent running backgroundnoise reduction on a set of signals so dead even a necromancer would need a warrant.

The feed was supposed to be quiet today. The last time Sgr A* coughed up anything more interesting than a magnetar flare, Kall was still in diapers, and the Accord hadn’t realized off-brand androids had replaced half its workforce. He checked again, out of spite. The signal was still a perfect, silent flatline.

He allowed himself a glance at the adjacent terminal, where his neighbor, Gintz, was deep into a puzzle game disguised as machine-learning training. No one cared, as long as Gintz remembered to tap the override every thirty minutes to simulate a live response. Accord management referred to this as “dynamic labor optimization.” Gintz called it “not getting caught.”

The hum in the air shifted. Kall frowned and checked his wristpad, nothing. No surge, no diagnostic alert. He flicked back to the main window, more nothing. But the hum was real. He pressed the palm of his hand to the desk, feeling for vibration.

Static.

He looked up, scanning the cluster. No one else had noticed. Or, if they had, they were doing the time-honored tech tradition of ignoring everything until someone screamed.

The resonance analyzer pinged. Just once, a polite electronic cough, as if embarrassed to be noticed.

Kall blinked. The analyzer only pinged for three reasons: catastrophic equipment failure, simulated test burst, or an actual resonance match. Kall froze, then he triple-checked the results.

The waveform wasn’t just above background; it was impossible. Towering. A vertical spike punched so high that the auto scrolllagged, then hung, before it crashed entirely. The screen froze mid-render.

Kall tapped ‘Refresh’. Once. Twice. Three times. He expected it to vanish. It didn’t. The spike surged again, jagged and growing, as if something at the center of the galaxy had finally noticed it was being watched, and shouted ‘Fuck off’ back.

He opened a secondary log and started copying data, old instinct overriding even his bone-deep laziness. If this was a hardware bug, the lead would want to know. If it wasn’t…

“Hey, Gintz,” he said, quietly.

Gintz didn’t look up. “If you need to run an incident, do it before sixteen. After that, the algorithm dings you for overtime.”

“It’s not a test,” Kall said. “You seeing this?”

Gintz grunted, reached across the divider, and scrolled the log with two fingers. “Huh. That’s new.”

Kall tried to sound calm. “Resonance level?”

“Class Three at minimum,” Gintz said, but the lagging telemetry was finally catching up. “But that’s wrong.” He ran a query, squinting. “That’s way too clean for this much bleed.”

Kall’s skin prickled and his gut ached.

Class Three events didn’t happen here. They happened in warzones, or the deep border zones Accord PR swore were demilitarized. Hell, even Class Five meant evacuation orders. This? This was something else.

He pinged the supervisor.

The response was immediate and exasperated: “If you’re trying to cover for your lateness by faking a core breach, the system will flag you.”

“I’m not faking,” Kall said, “We’ve got a resonance anomaly. Live.” He almost added “and it’s making my testicles retract,” but decided against it.

The supervisor, whose name was Olaric and whose soul had long ago been processed into pure caffeine, stomped over to their block. He leaned in, scanning the display with all the energy of a man who had lost the capacity to fear.

“That’s a lot of noise for a single sensor event,” Olaric said. “Maybe if you cleared the cache once in a while—”

Kall rerouted the feed, dumped the cache, and the spike didn’t go away. Instead, it fractured, splitting into three, then nine, then a blizzard of overlapping signals, each one broadcasting an impossible signature. Each one labeled: SOVEREIGN-CLASS / ENIGMA ANCHOR DETECTED. Each one showed a single source point: Sagittarius A*. The supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way.

“Is this… right?” Gintz said, voice gone soft. “That’s a fucking Trivane pattern.”