Page 1

RYLOS

Ihad planned the assault on the Capital Spire seventeen ways. Every version ended the same.

Everyone dies.

The schematic turned over the war table, a hundred and twelve floors of it, and I’d stopped seeing the building days ago. I saw only the obstacles now.

Four hundred meters of shielded structure. Six thousand Conclave personnel. Sensor grids on a rotating swap, so no map of them stayed true longer than a month. And three levels under the throne room, behind two meters of blast plating, the vault my Sovereign sealed the night they killed him.

We had all five keys. Less than half a year, five jobs everyone called impossible, every one of my brothers nearly dead collecting them. The keys sat in a case ten steps from my chair.

The Conclave had already sealed the Sovereign’s distributed financial vault network. Those accounts, supply depots, and logistics reserves were ghosts now, locked behind the quantum system that started this run.

The objects in the case were different: physical Crown keys, air-gapped, built for one door beneath the throne room. We had the right to open his last stronghold. We did not have the army required to reach it.

I couldn’t reach the door.

“Run the orbital option again,” Talon said. He’d taken the seat across from me three hours ago and hadn’t moved.

“I’ve run it. Drop insertion puts four of us on the upper platform before the grid registers the pods. It registers them ninety seconds later. Garrison response is four minutes. We’d need forty to reach the vault.” I let the numbers sit.

“It’s not a plan. It’s a slower way to die in the same building.”

“Ground assault,” Zarek said from the wall he was holding up.

“Six thousand defenders.”

“I’ve fought worse odds.”

“You fought worse odds with a planet’s monsters on your side.” Bronwen sat cross-legged on the bench, one hand scratching behind Turnip’s ear. The boar lay under the table like two hundred kilos of spilled cargo, snoring.

Somewhere along the way my war council had acquired livestock.

“No monsters in the Spire, love,” Bronwen added. “Only bureaucrats.” She sounded genuinely sad about it.

Flinx watched from the top of the equipment locker, as far above the boar as the room allowed, tail curled around his chrome feet, radiating judgment.

“I can get us through the front door,” Brevan said.

“Trade delegation, forged credentials, the right bribes in the right accounts. Ten people onto the public levels, easy.” He turned his palm up.

“The public levels end at floor ten. Beyond the public band, the secured interior runs on biometric locks keyed to the inner circle. I can charm a checkpoint. I can’t charm a gene lock.”

“And I can’t slice one,” Varrick said, not looking up from his console. Sabine sat beside him, checking his work against her own models.

“Twenty years of paranoid patches, each stacked on the last. I could break any single layer. By the time I’m through the third, the first has cycled to a new protocol and locked me out again. It’s ugly. It’s wasteful. It’s the best security I’ve ever seen.”

“The models agree,” Sabine said. “Every approach fails. The cleanest one fails at ninety-nine point three percent.” She looked up. “That was the orbital drop.”

Verath had narrowed the unknowns without giving us a way in.

Six weeks ago the others had pulled clean credit reserves, Sovereign breach weapons, three old military transponders, and a partial garrison-response archive out of the cache before the Conclave burned the rest. It gave us equipment, cover capital, and better estimates. It did not give us current Spire biometrics, an interior guide, or six thousand soldiers.

Carys had been pulling old schematics from archive brokers for two days, hunting a forgotten maintenance shaft, a dead tram line, anything the Conclave’s engineers had missed. She shook her head before I asked.

“They gutted the building after the coup. Everything old is sealed or watched. There’s no forgotten door.”

“The vault itself isn’t forgotten,” Carys added.