The Windowless Room had become poison.
The Apex Council meetings, once displays of unified power, were now veiled interrogations. Every word was weighed, every silence dissected. Valerius, the spymaster, delivered daily security reports that, instead of reassuring, only deepened the fractures—highlighting minor flaws and lapses in each guild's network. No one was innocent. Everyone was suspect.
General Ares was at the breaking point. His fury, once a weapon aimed outward, now turned inward, devouring him with frustration. He found himself paralyzed—not by Ishtar, but by a bureaucracy of distrust. A caged lion, forced to listen to the whispers of rats.
"More reports? More analysis?" he snarled during a particularly tense session, his warrior avatar practically vibrating with restrained rage. "While we drown in your useless data, Valerius, Ishtar is out there laughing at us! Consolidating her power! We need to act!"
"Act how, General?" Valerius replied, his calm as infuriating as ever. "Attack our own shadows? Declare war on a system bug? Our enemy, at the moment, is suspicion. And it's sitting at this table."
Ninsun, feeling her grip on the group slipping with every accusation, intervened.
"None of us is the enemy. Distrust is the weapon Khepri used against us. The only way to defeat it is to refuse to turn it on each other. We need a target. A tangible target."
She knew she had to give them a victory—something to unify the starving wolves before they started tearing each other apart. But Ishtar was in tactical silence. The Ladybug Network had vanished. There were no targets.
What Ninsun didn't know was that Ishtar was about to give her exactly what she wanted.
On the bridge of the Star-Mite, the atmosphere was one of focused calm. Helen and Khepri weren't planning a battle.
They were rehearsing a play on a galactic stage.
"Operation Shadow is ready, boss," Khepri said, his glitching code-avatar hovering over a star map. "The instruments are tuned. The orchestra is in position."
Khepri's "orchestra" consisted of five hundred cheap mining drones—the kind you could buy in any Rim scrapyard. Hollow shells, little more than engines and chassis. But the Web Cell, under Khepri's direction, had turned each one into a professional liar.
Each "Shadow" drone had been fitted with a signature emulator—a small device capable of projecting the radar, thermal, and energy readings of something far, far larger. One drone could masquerade as a frigate. Ten as a battlecruiser. A hundred as a capital ship.
Five hundred… as an invasion fleet.
"They're desperate for a target," Helen said, eyes scanning intelligence reports on the Council's state of mind. "Ares wants glory. The others want to prove loyalty. Ninsun needs a win to reassert control. They're looking for a ghost to shoot at. Let's give them an entire army of ghosts."
The plan was audacious in its simplicity. This wasn't a battle. It was psychological warfare. They wouldn't strike an Apex asset.
They would fabricate the illusion of an imminent assault.
The target: Eridu-Secundus—a dusty backwater whose only claim to relevance was a minor Apex refueling outpost.
"It's perfect," Khepri said, almost gleeful. "Not important enough to defend to the last ship, but still Apex property. Hitting it would be an insult. A slap in the face. One General Ares' ego won't be able to ignore."
"Deploy the drones," Ishtar ordered. "Start the performance."
Aboard the Apex long-range observatory Vigilant Eye, a junior sensor operator blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.
What had been a silent stretch of deep space was now lighting up like a Christmas tree.
"Sir… I'm picking something up on the Eridu border," he called, uncertainty in his voice.
His supervisor approached, annoyed. "What is it? A lost cargo convoy?" He looked at the screen—and his jaw slackened.
"My gods…"
The display was red.
Thousands of hostile ship signatures had appeared out of nowhere.
The scale was staggering. Cruisers. Destroyers. Frigates. And at the center—multiple capital-class readings. It looked like Ishtar's entire rebel fleet—and more—was massing for a full-scale assault.
The alarm sounded.
Within minutes, the data reached the Windowless Room.
The reaction was electric.
Paranoia vanished, replaced by a surge of collective adrenaline. The enemy was no longer a whispering spy—it was a massive fleet on their sensors. Real. Tangible.
"It's her!" Ares thundered, rising in triumph. "She's made her mistake! Overestimated herself—grown arrogant! She's giving us the open battle we wanted!"
Valerius remained silent, gray eyes fixed on the data.
It was too perfect. Too loud. Ishtar was never loud.
"General," he said slowly, "I would advise caution. The energy signatures are… unstable. And why Eridu-Secundus? There's nothing there to justify an attack of this scale."
"It's a test!" Ares snapped. "She's testing our resolve! She thinks we're divided—afraid. She expects hesitation. We must crush her now, with overwhelming force, and end this rebellion once and for all!"
All eyes turned to Ninsun.
The decision was hers.
Valerius' caution was logical. Ares' bloodlust was contagious. And politically—she needed a victory.
If she hesitated and Ishtar struck—even a worthless system—she would look weak.
If she attacked and crushed the rebellion, her authority would be absolute.
It was a calculated risk.
"Assemble the fleets," Ninsun ordered, her voice ringing with renewed authority. "Ares' Vanguard Legion. The Jötunheim Berserker Horde. And Blackwood's Corporate Fleet. Three of our heaviest battle groups. Seventy percent of their primary assets."
The Berserkers were infamous for suicidal ferocity. Blackwood's fleet, for cold efficiency. Combined with Ares' Vanguard, they formed a trinity of annihilation.
"You will jump to Eridu-Secundus and erase that fleet from existence," she continued. "No survivors. No prisoners. I want the universe to see what happens when you defy the Council."
The mobilization was titanic.
Across three systems, massive jump gates ignited, tearing space-time open. Rivers of steel and fire surged toward staging points. Carrier ships the size of moons aligned in formation, surrounded by swarms of cruisers and destroyers. Space filled with the roar of thrusters and the chaos of battle comms.
It was the largest military deployment the galaxy had ever seen.
Ares stood at the helm of his flagship, the End of the Line, watching it all come together. Glory filled his chest.
"Jump coordinates locked," his navigator reported. "All fleets ready on your command, General."
Ares smiled.
"For Ninsun. For the Council. End them. Jump!"
The universe folded.
Thousands of ships were dragged into hyperspace—a tunnel of blinding light and impossible color.
Less than a minute later—
They arrived.
Space tore open as the Apex armada emerged into Eridu-Secundus like a tidal wave. Weapons charged. Shields at maximum. Crews braced for war.
And found…
Silence.
Empty space.
The Apex outpost floated undisturbed. No fire. No enemy fleet.
Nothing.
"Report!" Ares barked, confusion gnawing at his triumph.
"Sir… we are detecting the targets," the sensor officer said, voice thin with disbelief. "But… they don't match the profiles. They're small. And… cold."
The main screen zoomed in.
The "hostile fleet" resolved into five hundred small mining drones—drifting in loose formation, blinking stupidly.
Silence fell over the End of the Line.
Crew members looked from the screen to their General… and back again.
One of the drones, as if triggered by their arrival, began broadcasting on an open, unencrypted frequency.
It wasn't a challenge.
It wasn't a threat.
It was music.
A cheerful, dissonant, horribly familiar melody from the real world—played on a warped organ.
A circus tune.
The three greatest battle fleets in the galaxy—tens of thousands of crew, enough firepower to burn suns—had jumped across the universe into a trap.
And the trap…
was a joke.
On the bridge, silence broke only with the absurd circus music echoing through the speakers.
Ares stood frozen.
His marble face cracked beneath the weight of humiliation so vast, so absolute, it became a weapon in itself.
They hadn't been defeated.
They had been ridiculed.
And in a war of ideas—
ridicule was a wound that never healed.