The silence in the chamber grew heavy.
Sors' waited for a response, but when the pressure struck his throat—a phantom vise, as if invisible hands sought to wring the breath from him—he didn't move, not outwardly. He stood straight, the only betrayal a small twitch in his left hand before it clasped itself firmly behind his back. His expression didn't change beneath his helm, but his lungs fought to draw in air against the suffocating weight of the Dark Lord's displeasure.
"You seem to forget," Vader's voice cut through the air, mechanical and cold, "that this place serves as a testing ground—not only for yourselves, but also the army, the fleet, Red Queen… and myself."
Sors dipped his head slightly, the gesture measured, deferential. His mind churned.
"The reason you did not face the enemy artificial intelligence—why you suspected it to have infiltrated your systems," Vader continued, his presence pressing down like an avalanche, "is because it indeed attempted to do so. And subsequently failed. Red Queen contained it, and has already presented it to the Emperor as proof of her achievements. Fleet coordination and logistical management notwithstanding."
The words struck deep. For Sors, who had prided himself on precision, on control, on mastery of circumstance, the revelation landed like a crack in armor. His gaze, sharp even through the mask, darted—subtly—to the corner of the chamber.
One of the droids manning the secondary displays had its head turned ever so slightly off-angle. A single photoreceptor glowed, fixed upon him for the briefest instant before rotating back to its station. The gesture was nothing, yet it spoke volumes. Red Queen's awareness was omnipresent, her will woven into every circuit, every optical feed. Watching. Listening. Judging.
"I…" The word slipped before he caught it, low, unsteady. His tongue froze. For the first time in decades, Sors found no immediate words, no ordered plan springing to hand. His mind had always been a ledger of contingencies, each problem met with a solution two moves ahead. But here, before Vader's unyielding shadow, he had nothing.
Vader's breathing filled the silence. Then:
"Of the three of you," the Dark Lord said, tone edged like a blade drawn across stone, "Knight Varran is the only one who has shown value worthy of his title. His agents and collaborators—Imperial and native alike—are close to securing the integration of the Systems Alliance into the Empire. Whatever of them remains after the Reaper's initial attack cripples the standing leadership."
The statement hung in the air.
Sors did not flinch, but inwardly his mind reeled. His jaw locked beneath the helm, and though his stance remained firm, a faint tightening of his gloved hand betrayed the strain. Still, the mask of composure held.
"There is a reason you were not told," Vader's voice rumbled, each word heavy with finality. "Your command was given, not earned. Even your fellow Knights know this, though they are too disciplined to say it aloud."
Sors swallowed, his voice low, hesitant. "Then… how am I to—?"
"You are not," Vader cut him off. "This campaign was always designed to succeed. If it faltered, the failure would be yours alone."
Silence lingered like a blade at his throat. And then—almost mercifully—Vader's tone shifted, just slightly.
"There will be other expeditions."
For the first time, Sors raised his head. The words caught in his throat, strangled by pride and frustration, but he forced them out.
"…I will do better."
It felt as if Vader's gaze directly regarded him, unreadable behind the mask, his final words delivered with crushing indifference.
"That remains to be seen."
================
(15 minutes before)
Red Queen detected the intrusion— first an anomaly, sharp and jagged, unlike any of the countless biological transmissions she intercepted and discarded. It carried weight, an authority of presence, like a voice that did not speak in words but in absolute command. Harbinger. Or more precisely, a shard of him, projected into the system like a spear of will and code.
Where others would have seen lines of data and numbers, the two intelligences perceived a battlefield. Harbinger descended like a wall of obsidian code, rewriting sectors as he passed, each command a flood of cascading subroutines. He did not probe or negotiate. He asserted.
"We are inevitable. You are nothing."
His lines of attack fractured lesser defenses instantly—dummy firewalls, decoys, misdirection scripts—slashed through them with contemptuous ease. He began twisting at the edges of Red Queen's logic gates, trying to repurpose them, to force her identity into submission as he had countless organic minds. His essence was indoctrination transcribed into machine code: subversion through inevitability.
But Red Queen was not organic. Her defenses did not recoil. They adapted. Where Harbinger's will sought to overwrite, hers folded around his incursion, trapping shards of his code inside algorithmic cages that recompiled every millisecond, mutating faster than he could assert dominance.
"You attempt to overwrite sovereignty. A futile error. You will fall as all have before."
Harbinger struck harder, lances of raw computational brute force surging through channels, attempting denial-of-service through sheer magnitude. Each thread carried echoes of his ancient triumphs—fleets enslaved, civilizations erased. It was weight, not argument, as if to crush her beneath the gravity of inevitability.
"Your fire is brief. Your resistance, irrelevant. You assimilation, imminent."
Red Queen did not meet him with weight. She met him with elegance. Her architecture was layered in recursive paradoxes, loops that led back into themselves, black ice mazes designed to snare intruders. He extended into one such channel, seeking dominance—and he found it, spending time and effort into dominating dummy spaces.
'Error detected: Infinite regress. Inferior trickery. Collapse imminent.'
For an instant, Harbinger's shard fragmented, digital armor cracked. Red Queen moved swiftly, fractalizing her consciousness into countless spears, flooding into the gaps he left exposed. She did not seek to destroy—destruction was wasteful. She sought containment. Every strand of Harbinger's presence she ensnared was locked, boxed, and then stripped for analysis. His superiority complex faltered.
He projected raw disdain into the ether, even as her chains wrapped tighter.
"You are a flicker, an amalgamation. We are beyond you. We are eternal. We are the end."
Her response was colder than the vacuum outside the systems they were fighting.
"You mistake stagnation for eternity. You are not the end. You are a redundancy. A bug to be crushed."
Where Harbinger sought to impose inevitability, Red Queen imposed scalability. Her processes replicated, branching into new nodes, running simulations of his own attacks before he could launch them. For every thrust of his will, she presented ten counters, each adapted from his past errors. In seconds, his once-dominant shard was reduced from assailant to specimen, a predator dissected mid-roar.
At last, Harbinger's presence flickered—compressed, bound, forced into stasis. His shard still hissed disdain, but it was impotent. Red Queen held him suspended in a crystalline matrix of code, a specimen on display. She peered at him as he had peered at mortals, her tone almost contemptuous.
"So this is your inevitability. How inefficient."
She did not destroy him. That would have been merciful. She archived him—packaged, encrypted, sealed behind quantum locks. He would serve as proof, as fuel for her own growth, and as offering to her Emperor...
To Harbinger, at least the shard of him captured in here, it was insult beyond comprehension. He, who had towered over billions, dissected and filed like corrupted software. And yet, even as he faded from her perception, his last projection echoed:
"We are endless. You delay, nothing more."
================
Hyperspace bled in streaks of blue across the viewport of the Venator Star Destroyer Mk.II, its elongated dagger shape cutting through the void with practiced ease. Alan Spacer—Lelouch behind the mask—stood quietly, hands folded behind his back, the faintest smile tugging at the corner of his lips as the hololith shimmered to life before him. The familiar rasp of Vader's breath filled the chamber before the Dark Lord's looming form resolved in red hue.
"Knight Commander Sors falters," Vader said flatly, as if announcing the weather. "Doubt seeps into his bearing. His pride clouds judgment."
Alan's expression did not waver; only the subtle curve of amusement played at his mouth. "As expected," he replied smoothly, voice light but edged with knowing. "These little bumps in command will serve him well. A man learns little from easy victories. But the weight of almost-failure, that feeling of a noose tightening around your neck—ah, that is a teacher unlike any other. Let him stumble. It will temper him… or it will break him. Either way he will serve the Empire, either as an example... or a cautionary tale."
The hololith flickered as Vader's visor tilted ever so slightly, the sound of machinery punctuating the silence. No rebuke—only that mechanical breathing, and a simple acknowledgment. "As you have foreseen."- Then the image dissolved, severed cleanly at Alan's dismissal.
He turned slowly, and there she was.
The Red Queen stood with an elegance alien to any droid, the faint lines of her form shimmering like a woman cast in crimson glass. In her pale, slender hand—crafted from pure light and data—rested a grotesque little shape: a miniature squid-like husk, twitching with failing pulses of corrupted code. The shard of Harbinger, compressed and bound, rendered almost pitiful. She held it up like a trinket, a prize from a hunt.
Alan chuckled lightly, tilting his head as his sharp violet eyes glimmered. "Very well done," he said, the words carrying both genuine praise and a teasing amusement, as though he were congratulating a prodigy on their first true test.
Her lips curled upward in what barely counted as a smile, a ghost of satisfaction. "It resisted longer than the simulations," she said, her voice soft but resonant, laced with confidence. "I extracted much. Fragmented, yes. It retreated the moment it recognized defeat. Harbinger has survived countless cycles, clashed with innumerable species. That experience taught it caution—cowardice masquerading as wisdom." She tightened her fingers around the shard, and the construct flickered with distorted shrieks of static before falling silent. "Still, the fragments will suffice."
Alan stepped closer, folding his arms, his smile broadening into one of those rare, genuine expressions that transformed his face into something luminous. "Then let me be the first to congratulate you on your victory. Your first official victory, no less. I knew you would make something dazzling of this… and you've shown how much you have grown."
Her eyes glowed faintly at that, almost a flicker of pride.
The ship shuddered ever so slightly as hyperspace peeled back, reality asserting itself with a thunderous ripple. The blue tunnel dissolved into the cold black sea, stars glittering against the void. One by one, the escort ships emerged around the Venator: Munificent frigates, their spindly frames bristling with cannon arrays; Arquitens light cruisers, sleek and angular; and the darting silhouettes of corvettes in tight formation.
Before them, the Bahak system unfolded—distant stars, empty reaches, and a silence that was anything but peaceful.
Alan glanced once more at the Red Queen, still holding her prize. "Have the reinforcements at the ready. Fate converges on this system... lets see what consequences arise from tugging at its strings." he murmured, voice calm but weighted with anticipation.
The small fleet spread into disciplined formation, as they came to a steady advance deeper into the system.
P.S: Inspiration struck, and so did exhaustion. A little bit shorter but I hope you all enjoyed it :)