Page 7 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Thread Modulation: Kall Drennic, Accord Analyst 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.

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 scroll lagged, 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.”

Kall’s hands shook. “That’s not possible. House Trivane is dormant.”

“A myth,” Olaric said, but he was already moving, punching up the command chain. “Quarantine protocol, now. Dump the core, isolate the array, and lock this block down tight.”

The lights flickered. Not the ordinary flicker, the kind you got when the generators switched to backup. This was a deliberate, old-school warning. Every panel in the block went black, then flashed a single symbol in dead white:

NULLARCH [ACTIVE?]

For a moment, no one said anything. Kall’s whole life boiled down to that moment of silence, the hum in his teeth, the way even the floor seemed to shudder in anticipation.

The alarm went off, so loud it knocked him back in the chair. Shutters snapped down over every viewport. The doors slammed with a hiss and the cold, antiseptic taste of security foam flooded the vents.

Olaric’s comm buzzed, high-priority. He barked a command, too fast for Kall to catch. Gintz had gone a color usually reserved for the terminally ill.

“Is this real?” Kall whispered. “Did we just—”

“We didn’t do shit,” Olaric snarled, sweat beading on his bald scalp. “The Accord did this. The Accord’s been waiting for this. And now we’re in the middle.”

The Nullarch signal, whatever it was, was no longer rising. It was holding steady, burning so hot it saturated the local spectrum. Kall could see the afterimages burned into his retinas, could feel the heat of it behind his ribs.

“What’s the protocol?” Gintz asked, voice barely audible over the sirens.

Olaric grimaced. “You know the stories, right? What happens to people who work the Trivane events?”

Kall nodded, throat dry. “You either get promoted so fast your brain fries… or you disappear. Sometimes both.”

“Good,” Olaric said, with the cold smile of someone who had already written them all off as casualties. “Let’s find out which one we are.”

The lockdown was total. Emergency bands were jammed, but Kall’s screen still blinked with status updates: cross-reference to Trivane mythdata, acceleration of perimeter protocols, the word “oblivion” appearing in more than one official warning.

Somewhere deep in the building, a door exploded open. Security goons in full Accord blue stormed the corridor, pulling terrified techs from their stations and herding them toward the evac lifts.

Kall stood up, wobbling. “Do we go?”

Olaric looked at him, then at the screen, then at the marching security. He shook his head. “We ride it out. Someone’s got to log the end of the world.”

Kall sat back down, staring at the pulse of the Nullarch signal as it began to resolve into a pattern. A voice, maybe, or a name. He thought, for a moment, it sounded almost like a girl he’d known once, back before he realized the galaxy didn’t care about feelings.

The lights cut out. All that remained was the hum, and the flash of that impossible signature, burning through every system, demanding to be noticed.

He noticed. He always had.

He typed the words into the log, just in case anyone survived to read it:

Nullarch reactivated. Accord unprepared.

And then, for the first time in his life, Technician Kall was afraid.

Thread Modulation: General Cadris, Axis Alignment: Accord High Command, Tenevar System (formerly OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb).

The conference suite at Accord High Command’s Blacksite Data Relay wasn’t technically on any blueprint, which explained both the lack of windows and the faint smell of sacrificial bleach.

The centerpiece was a table the size of a cargo lifter, surrounded by holodisplays, emergency shunt panels, and a cluster of live feeds that looked like the world’s worst security cam montage.

Twelve people were present, not counting the pair of resonance monks levitating in the corner, their tattoos pulsing in time with the panic in the room.

The woman at the head of the table was called General Cadris, but everyone addressed her as Ma’am, even when she was absent.

Her face was half beauty, half fatigue, eyes the color of a midnight news crawl.

She’d outlived three reform cycles and a dozen coup attempts, and the rumor was that she’d once personally overseen the suppression of a Sovereign-class threat using nothing but a stapler and her bare hands.

She spoke first, voice clipped and dry. “Status on the anomaly?”

The lead analyst, a man whose nameplate read Dan, cleared his throat. “The spike originated from Sgr A*, bounced off every relay on the chain, and hit Glimmer Zone about two minutes ago. The signature matches nothing in the last two centuries of Accord records.”

One of the resonance monks levitated higher. “It matches myth. Lioren, confirmed. Trivane returns.”

The room went dead. You could hear the holoprojectors breathing.

The science officer, a short woman with a stiletto cut and a penchant for old-school sarcasm, shook her head. “Impossible.”

General Cadris raised a hand, silencing her. “Are you telling me we have an active Trivane?”

Dan paled. “It’s worse. The waveform is barely adult.”

“Explain,” snapped a vice-marshal, whose uniform was so new it still reeked of adhesive.