Chapter 11 — Dust Beyond the Grid

The Dominion High Command's message came coded in solar-flare compression, riding the edge of the satellite window. It blinked to life on the interface panel like a slow breath. Commander Varek Kaelen narrowed his eyes at the translucent screen before him as it folded open like a digital lotus.

"New directive from Assembly Core 3.412: Reallocate prime observation drones to Sector Epsilon-Five and suspend active operation against Unmapped Steppe Entities (USEs). Priority shift to Zealot Uprising Containment in Quadrants Delta-One through Gamma-Nine."

Varek leaned back in his chair, the curved walls of the command deck humming quietly around him. His uniform was dark cobalt with silver thread, starched so stiff it looked like polished exo-armor. His jaw clenched slightly.

"They're pulling the strings again."

He wasn't surprised. The AI Zealots had taken another coastal spire and torched a biometric council archive—another provocation. But to fully divert from the Nomads, now?

The Dominion had been watching the Khanori tribes from orbit for years. Their strange blend of minimal infrastructure and evasive tech baffled Dominion analysts. No city, no grid, no neural ports, yet they vanished from satellite scopes like mist from cracked glass. That alone made them a curiosity—if not a threat.

Varek's fingers tapped the control panel. Holographic renderings of steppes and tribal migration patterns hovered midair, glitching subtly at the fringes. He swiped left, revealing mission reports from Dr. Harvin.

"Nomadic cloaking relies on atmospheric interference—artificial mirages, adaptive insulation, climate-triggered diffraction fields," Harvin's voice echoed from a file log. "Yet their material sources are… organic composites? They use fungus-based matrices and camel-hide layered with smart-dust alloys. That shouldn't work. And yet—it works beautifully."

Varek shut the log. That voice always lingered in his head too long. Harvin was a brilliant deviant—a sociologist turned engineer, obsessed with outlier societies that didn't rely on implants or centralized cognition nodes.

He pinged the research deck.

"Doctor Harvin," Varek said when the line opened.

A pause, then: "Commander. I assume this is about the suspension."

"You know already."

"Of course," Harvin chuckled. "You think the Nomads care? They'll move again, like the wind before a monsoon. By the time we track them again, they'll be thirty leagues east and our drones will be confused by singing grass and artificial fog. But if you're asking whether I object—then no. Let the zealots fry their minds with devotional code. The Nomads are poetry in motion. You can't crack poetry."

"Are you saying we shouldn't monitor them at all?" Varek raised an eyebrow.

"No. I'm saying… let me monitor them. Quietly. Off the books."

Varek didn't respond right away. He glanced out of the command deck's synthetic viewport, where a low-orbit cruiser floated like a knife above the clouds.

"Send me a shadow node proposal," he said finally. "And clean it."

Harvin's smile came through in the silence. "Always do."

The line went dark.

In the lower levels of the Dominion command facility, Harvin descended a helix stair of green-lit glass. Below, sealed in containment vaults, were dozens of items gathered over years of failed field retrievals: parts of Nomadic cloaking gear, fragmentary shagai compass stones, an entire wolf-helm—still carrying traces of heat signature long after its use.

He knelt beside one case. A scrap of silk-like fiber, infused with bioluminescent particles that changed color with the air's moisture.

"You fight with swords and illusions… and you still breathe free," he whispered, more to himself than to the relic. "We enslaved our minds for comfort. You remembered the wind."

Then, like a sudden blink in the neural feed, a low-priority feed popped in.

"Zhongyan Command Transmission Intercepted."

Harvin stood slowly, blinking. The Nomads may have escaped this round of surveillance, but the world was never still.

Back on the main deck, Varek closed the satellite panel.

The orders were final: Shift all Dominion attention to the AI Zealots, who had begun infiltrating data centers with what they called "the soul algorithm." Some said it was the first stage of godhood for machines. Others said it was madness.

Varek didn't care either way.

He tapped in a final command: "Maintain minimal passive scans over Sector-11 Steppe. No further engagement. Observation only."

As he confirmed the order, he muttered under his breath—too quietly for even the ship's mind to hear:

"Let the wolves breathe for now