The void between stars was not silent to Orion Emris. It hummed with the low, ceaseless thrum of quantum drives, the whispered calculus of navigation arrays, and the cold breath of solar winds slipping through the shields of his *Origin 890 Jump*. To a man who had lived six centuries, the music of the cosmos was as familiar as the rhythm of his own breath—though breath, these days, was a courtesy rather than a necessity.
He stood in the observation lounge of the *Echo of New Babbage*, his hands clasped behind him, the glow of Stanton's sun gilding the edges of his silhouette. Below, the planet MicroTech sprawled like a frosted jewel, its glaciers shimmering beneath the latticework of arcologies and shipyards. New Babbage, his city, pulsed with light even now, a beacon of human ambition in a universe that rewarded neither patience nor mercy. Orion's lips twitched. *A beacon built on secrets.*
The accident had been a trivial thing—a drunk hauler pilot, his thrusters misfiring after a bender at Port Tressler, careening through the uncharted jump point that should not have been there. The man's ship had crumpled against Planetos's exosphere like foil, his last transmission a slurry of curses and static. Insurance contracts, ironclad and millennia-old, had funneled the incident to MicroTech's legal enclaves. And there, in the quiet of his private sanctum, Orion had watched the scans.
*Not a climber, this Brandon Stark. No. The boy lived in the saddle.*
The feeds had shown him: a lean, wild-eyed youth with a laugh like shattered ice, galloping through the Rills astride a midnight courser. His sister Lyanna rode beside him, smaller but fiercer, her braid whipping like a banner in the wind. She did not shout, did not jeer—she simply *rode*, her mount cutting through the frosted hills with the grace of a creature born to the earth. Brandon's pride had flared like a supernova. Orion had seen it in the boy's feverish grin, the reckless angle of his heels as he drove his horse toward a jagged outcrop. A jump meant to humble his sister. A jump that would end with the horse's hoof catching stone, with Brandon's body arcing too far, too fast—
"Memory lapses administered, sir." The voice of A.I. Lyra, smooth as quantum filament, threaded through his auditory implants. "Eight witnesses. The hauler's black box has been scrubbed. UEE regulators detected no anomalies."
Orion did not turn. His eyes remained fixed on the stars, though his mind parsed Lyra's report with the precision of a neurosync array. "And the board?"
"Oblivious. The exploration committee remains fixated on the Hadrian Expanse. Director Vell insists the 'wild space' rhetoric is damaging stock projections."
A faint smile. Let them chase profit margins and political favors. They were moths fluttering toward the sterile glow of corporate approval. Orion had long since learned to see in the dark.
---
The body awaited him in the *Echo*'s medbay—a masterpiece of biotech and stolen magic. Orion ran a hand over the synth-flesh of its face, cold and perfect as lunar regolith. Sixteen years old, Dothraki-blooded but pale as a Stark, with eyes the color of dying stars. He had woven the genome himself, strand by strand, splicing in the fragments of psionic resonance observed beyond Planetos's Wall. *Magic*, the smallfolk called it. Orion called it *variables unaccounted for*.
He donned the form like a suit of GhostSkin armor, synapses threading into alien nerves, his consciousness settling into the unfamiliar flex of muscle and bone. For a moment, the sensation was… *vulnerable*. The raw, animal throb of a heartbeat. The prickle of cold air. The ache of *mortality*.
*Delicious.*
His reflection in the medbay's glass showed a youth of the northern wastes—braided hair coiled in a warrior's knot, a snow bear cloak draping shoulders that had never known a sword's weight. Twin daggers of folded uridium hung at his hips, their edges humming with mono-molecular sharpness. In his hand, he hefted the staff, its nano-alloy core disguised as gnarled wood, its tip crackling with a containment field even Lyra could not fully explain.
"The Westerosi will name you a sorcerer," Lyra observed.
"All science is sorcery," Orion replied, "if the candle is dim enough."
---
The *Echo* slipped into Planetos's orbit at local midnight, its hull sheathed in stealth composites that drank the light of a crescent moon. Orion descended alone in an Argo MPUV, its thrusters muted to a dragonfly's whisper. The Rills sprawled below, a tapestry of frosted hills and skeletal trees, their roots clawing at thin soil. Somewhere in that labyrinth, Brandon Stark's laughter echoed—a sound soon to be choked by the crunch of bone.
*Not yet,* Orion thought. *Not yet.*
He landed in a hollow, the MPUV's ramp hissing as it kissed the snow. The cold bit through his Yiti silks, a pleasant sting. His enhanced metabolism adjusted, capillaries dilating, breath steady. Above, the stars were wrong—no Crusader's gaseous swirls, no ArcCorp's neon webs. These were the stars of men who prayed to horses and named their gods in the cadence of hooves.
Orion moved like a shadow through the trees, his GhostSkin cloak bending light around him. The thud of galloping horses vibrated in the earth before he saw them: Brandon first, his courser's muzzle flecked with foam, Lyanna close behind. The girl rode low, her knees gripping the flanks of a lean grey mare.
"You'll eat my dust, Lya!" Brandon crowed, veering toward the outcrop—a jagged tooth of granite jutting from the hillside.
Lyanna did not answer. Her silence was answer enough.
The boy urged his horse faster, its hooves skittering on loose stone. Orion's retinal overlay flickered, calculating trajectories. *Too steep. Too slick.* The horse's foreleg buckled mid-leap. Brandon sailed free, his body a comet against the twilight.
Lyanna's scream was raw, primal—a sound Orion had heard in a hundred dying star systems.
He raised his staff. The containment field at its tip flared, invisible tendrils of energy lashing out to cradle Brandon's fall. The boy hit the snow with a grunt, the breath punched from his lungs but his spine unbroken. The horse scrambled away, limping but alive.
Lyanna reached her brother first, her hands already probing for wounds. "Fool," she hissed, though her voice trembled. "You'd have died for *pride*."
Brandon grinned through gritted teeth. "Worth it… to see you fret."
Orion lingered in the trees, unseen. His sensors mapped the girl's face—fierce, fearful, *alive*. This was no variable. This was a fulcrum.
*Patience,* he reminded himself. The board of MicroTech dreamed of profit and power, blind to the symphony of cause and effect unfolding here. Let them squabble over stock projections. Orion would trace the threads of this world's magic—or science—one careful stitch at a time.
The wind shifted, carrying the scent of iron and pine. Somewhere, a wolf howled. Orion smiled.
*Let them come.*
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