Peace was a logistical puzzle more complex than any siege. The Bastion's mighty forges, once devoted to shell casings and armor plate, now hummed with the production of water-filtration membranes and sterile medical packs. The Bulkhauler, stripped of its rock-crusher, was reconfigured into a 'Provisioner'—a mobile aid station and trade vehicle, its hide painted with the Bastion's sigil and the universal runes for 'water' and 'aid' learned from Hope's Respite's scribes.
Isaac established Protocol: Gentle Hand. All Bastion patrols, even the silent Ghost and the hulking Legionnaires, were to avoid visual contact with marked settlements. Aid drops were to be made at pre-arranged, neutral locations—a crossroads of crumbling highway, a cleared stretch of plain—with no personnel present. The Provisioner would deposit its cargo, broadcast a simple, repeating chime on an open frequency, and withdraw.
The first drop was medicine for a persistent lung-rot afflicting the children of Hope's Respite. The Provisioner left the crates and drove away. Scouting drone SD-007, hidden a kilometer off, observed through a zoom lens. For hours, nothing. Then, as dusk fell, a small, cautious party approached. They took the crates and vanished back into the canyons. No contact. No thanks. But the medicine was taken.
It was a start.
The Orrery's sensors, now finely tuned, began to pick up more than just Gloom-energy and geology. They detected the faint, scattered signatures of other human technologies—the burn of a small fusion torch, the EM flicker of a crude radio, the heat bloom of a hidden forge. More sparks in the dark. Some were stable, like Hope's Respite. Others flickered, on the verge of guttering out.
Isaac faced a new ethical calculus. Non-interference was a clean principle. But was it moral to watch a spark die when you had the means to relight it? The old Isaac, the Commander, would have calculated the resource cost versus strategic benefit. The new variable—the intrinsic value of a surviving human life—didn't have a clear number.
He compromised with Protocol: Silent Watch. When sensors detected a settlement in imminent collapse—from famine, plague, or a localized Gloom resurgence the dampening field hadn't yet reached—the Bastion would act. Not with soldiers, but with precision. A single, anonymous mortar round would land miles away, its explosion carefully calculated to trigger a landslide that diverted a Gloom-spawn pack. A drone would airdrop nutrient packs and water purifiers into a valley just ahead of a starving group's projected path, making it look like forgotten pre-Fall caches.
It was interference disguised as fortune. He was playing god with a light, desperate touch.
One such group, a nomadic band his sensors tagged as the 'Dustwalkers,' was fleeing a reactivated Spiker Nest cluster on the edge of the dampening field. They were thirty strong, with children, their bio-signs weak with exhaustion. The Spikers were dormant-turning-active, a fringe effect of the field's boundary.
Isaac couldn't send the Legionnaires. That was an invasion. He couldn't bombard the Spikers from afar; the Dustwalkers were too close.
He used the terrain. The Orrery identified an unstable salt-flat adjacent to the Spiker's position. The Catapult, from its distant perch, fired a single, specialized round—a 'Geological Agitator'—into the flat. The round burrowed deep and detonated, not with fire, but with concussive force. The salt-flat, already under pressure from a subsurface aquifer, liquefied. A slow, grinding sinkhole opened, swallowing the Spiker cluster whole before it fully awakened.
The Dustwalkers, witnessing the earth itself seemingly come to their aid, altered their course and found the hidden cache of supplies Isaac had placed days earlier in their probable path. Their spark stabilized.
He was no longer just a commander or a curator. He was a gardener of chance, tilting probability with surgical, anonymous strikes.
But the peace was not passive. The dampening field continued its slow, relentless expansion. It was now pacifying an area the size of a pre-Fall continent. The Orrery's deep scans showed something new: the field wasn't just suppressing the Gloom; it was subtly re-wiring it. In areas long-saturated, the Gloom-mass was beginning to crystallize into inert, geometric formations—black, glossy pyramids and perfect spheres—as if the paradox's resonance was forcing the entropic energy into stable, pointless shapes. The Gloom wasn't just sleeping; it was being sculpted into harmless, dead art.
And then, the signal.
It came not from the surface, but from deep underground, in a region the old maps called the 'Shattered Spine.' It was a pulsed, repeating broadcast on a Bastion emergency frequency, but encrypted with a cipher that even the carrier's data core didn't hold. It was weak, fading in and out, but it was active. Not a recording. A beacon.
Another Bastion? Survivors from the Fall in a deep bunker? Or a Gloom trick, a lure mimicking the last thing a desperate human would respond to?
The Sergeant analyzed the signal's structure. "The encryption protocol is Level-9 Omega, reserved for Strategic Command Continuity or… automated Apocalypse-Class asset preservation. The signal originates approximately 2.1 kilometers below the surface. Power signature is minimal but consistent. It has been broadcasting for 347 years, 81 days, and 14 hours."
An Apocalypse-Class asset. Something meant to survive the end. A weapon? A vault of knowledge? A last-ditch lifeboat?
This wasn't a spark. This was a buried star.
The peaceful calculus of aid and subtle guidance shattered. This was a strategic object of incalculable potential and risk. To ignore it was impossible. To approach it carelessly could unravel everything.
The quiet, curated peace had just been interrupted by a heartbeat from the grave. The gardener had just heard a knock from inside the tomb.