The Sentinel's Choice

Chapter 43

The Sentinel's Choice

Time seemed to stretch and compress in the cockpit of the Wraith. Before Jax lay an impossible choice, with only a fraction of a second to make it. The client's stealth shuttle was a black dart screaming toward the station. Zana's command to stand down was a wall of ice in his mind.

Observe only. Do not engage.

To obey meant their mission's secrecy was preserved, but Client X would gain four Force-users, becoming an even greater threat in the future.

Do not compromise our position.

To attack would mean revealing the Wraith to every major power in the system. A catastrophic failure.

He saw the faces of the four terrified players in his mind's eye. He felt the cold, predatory intent of Client X. Zana's logic was sound, but it was based on the premise of avoiding detection. Jax, in a flash of insight born of the Force, saw a third path.

He didn't have to attack the ship. He just had to attack its perfection.

He remained a ghost, his ship motionless. He closed his eyes, his consciousness lancing out across the void. He ignored the shuttle's hull, its shields, its engines. He reached for one tiny, critical component inside it: the primary navigational sensor array that was guiding its high-speed attack run.

He didn't try to crush it. He didn't try to overload it. He just… touched it. With his mind.

He sent a single, infinitesimally small, focused pulse of disruptive Force energy directly into the sensor's core processor.

For less than a nanosecond, the sensor glitched. It fed the shuttle's aggressive, high-speed autopilot a single, corrupted frame of data, one that reported the station's hull was three meters further away than it actually was.

To a machine moving at that velocity, three meters was an eternity.

The shuttle's autopilot made an instantaneous, microscopic course correction based on that single, flawed piece of data. The error was catastrophic.

Instead of executing a perfect, silent breach of the station's lounge, the shuttle's port-side wing slammed violently into the station's main hull. A brilliant, silent flash of shield energy erupted in the void as the small ship was sent careening off course, its stealth plating buckled and torn. It tumbled through space, its surgical strike utterly and completely ruined.

To every other observer in the Xylos system, it looked like a moment of colossal, embarrassing piloting error, or a sudden, catastrophic system malfunction.

Jax opened his eyes, his heart hammering, a thin line of sweat tracing its way down his temple from the intense, precise effort.

He remained a ghost. No one knew what he had just done.

He watched as the damaged shuttle, its mission a spectacular failure, aborted its run and began to limp back toward its dark, waiting mothership. He had just declared a secret war against a shadowy superpower, and they didn't even know his name.

The aftermath of the failed abduction was instantaneous and system-wide.

The client's reaction was the most terrifying. There was no attempt to recover their damaged shuttle. There was no communication. On the tactical display aboard the Leviathan, Zana and Kael watched as the sleek, black mothership simply… ceased to be. It didn't jump. It just engaged its advanced stealth drive and vanished, abandoning its shuttle and its crew without a moment's hesitation. It was the brutally efficient act of an entity that valued secrecy above all else.

The failure of their covert operation threw the entire Xylos system into chaos.

"They're launching fighters!" Kael yelled, his console lighting up with dozens of new hostile icons. "Titan and Cygnus are both deploying their squadrons!"

The two hyper-corporations, seeing a violent, unprovoked attack on a neutral station by an unknown stealth ship, immediately assumed it was the work of their rival. The comm channels, which Kael was monitoring, erupted into a firestorm of accusations.

[Cygnus Command to Titan Fleet]: Your covert action against a neutral port is a direct violation of the Corporate Accords! Withdraw your forces immediately!

[Titan Command to Cygnus Fleet]: We have no assets involved in this cowardly attack. This is clearly a false-flag operation. Disarm your weapons or we will respond in kind!

On the tactical map, the two corporate fleets began to move into aggressive postures, their fighter wings forming combat screens. The Red Suns Syndicate, smelling blood in the water, moved its own carrier group out from behind its asteroid cover, like vultures circling a dying beast.

The tiny station of Prospector's Deep went into full lockdown, its pathetic defensive turrets firing blind, panicked warning shots into the void.

On the bridge of the Leviathan, Kael stared at the unfolding chaos. "The whole system is about to go to war," he breathed. "All because of one little shuttle that… slipped?"

Zana wasn't watching the corporate fleets. Her eyes were fixed on the empty space where Client X's ship had been. "They sacrificed the shuttle and its crew to maintain their secrecy," she said, her voice a low murmur of grudging respect. "They're professionals."

She opened the secure comm to the invisible Wraith. Her voice was pure command.

"The system is hot. The mission is compromised. We're pulling out. Jax, get back to the rendezvous point. Now."

From his silent cockpit, Jax watched the galactic superpowers poise to tear each other apart over a crisis he had single-handedly, and secretly, created. He had wanted to prevent a capture. He had instead instigated a potential war.

Without a word, he turned the Wraith and, like a ghost slipping out a back door during a riot, he melted away from the escalating conflict. His reconnaissance was complete, and he had left chaos in his wake.

The Wraith slid back into its docking cradle aboard the Leviathan as silently as it had left. The mission was over. Jax disembarked, the cool, quiet air of the hangar a stark contrast to the high-stakes tension of the past hour. The walk to the bridge felt longer than the jump across the star system. He knew a confrontation was waiting for him.

He entered the bridge. The atmosphere was thick enough to cut with a knife. Kael was at his console, pointedly focused on analyzing sensor logs, refusing to look up. Zana stood in the center of the room, her arms crossed, watching him approach. Her face was an unreadable mask of cold neutrality.

"You disobeyed a direct order," she said. It was not an accusation. It was a simple statement of fact.

Jax stopped a few feet from her, meeting her intense gaze without flinching. The fear he once would have felt was gone, replaced by a calm certainty in the choice he had made.

"No," he replied, his voice steady. "I fulfilled the mission's primary objective. I gathered intelligence. And I did it without compromising our position."

Zana's eyebrow raised a single, skeptical millimeter.

"Letting Client X capture those four new awakened would have been a catastrophic strategic failure," Jax continued, laying out his logic as if he were presenting a mission report. "It would have handed a ruthless, unknown power four Force-sensitive assets to use or study. That was an unacceptable risk to our long-term security."

He took a step closer. "I neutralized the immediate threat. I did it without revealing the Wraith's existence, its capabilities, or our identity. To every other ship in that system, the official record will show a shuttle suffering a critical system malfunction during a high-speed approach. I gathered vital intelligence—that Client X is willing to execute hostile military abductions in neutral territory—and I protected four potential assets, all while maintaining our core security."

He delivered the final, unassailable point, using the very logic she had drilled into him. "I didn't disobey the mission, Zana. I made a better tactical decision."

The silence that followed was profound. Kael had stopped typing, his head slowly turning to stare at Jax in disbelief.

Zana held his gaze, her cybernetic eye whirring almost silently as it analyzed him. She saw no defiance, no arrogance. Only the cold, hard conviction of a leader who had weighed the variables and chosen the optimal path. He had taken her own ruthless pragmatism and wielded it with a finesse and daring that she herself had hesitated to use.

A long moment passed. Then, she gave a single, slow nod. It was a concession. An acknowledgment. An acceptance.

"Your assessment is correct," she said, her voice neutral, but the admission was a thunderclap on the quiet bridge. "The outcome was optimal."

The power dynamic had just been permanently reforged.

She turned back to the main tactical display, her mind already moving on to the new reality. "Kael," she commanded, her voice its usual sharp tone, but with a new note of respect for the third member of their command staff. "I want a full intelligence workup on every ship that was in that system. Cross-reference their guild affiliations with everything we pulled from the Void Vultures' logs. I want to know who else was there watching."

Jax stood his ground, no longer just the pilot, no longer just the key. He was a partner in command. And Zana, for the first time, had acknowledged it.