Planet Teleopea — High Chancellor’s Residence

Surveillance Vault

The vault doors sealed with a low hydraulic thud, cutting off the noise of the palace above.

Inside, the air hummed with the patient, predatory quiet of machines older than most civilisations. Rows of core-stacks glowed behind tempered glass, their indicators pulsing like a field of distant stars. They had watched the galaxy a very long time.

Shi didn’t spare them a glance.

He paced in front of the main holo-wall like a trapped storm, movements tight and controlled, gold hair snapping slightly with each turn. Every report he’d pulled on the border-station catastrophe had been scrubbed, every trace of Xiao, Lan, Chen—gone.

Nothing.

Until now.

“L-Lord Shi…” The surveillance analyst at the console sounded as if he’d rather be anywhere else in the universe. “An anomaly just came through the public incident relay on Vanfylion. It… hit multiple phenotype filters. Flagged at highest priority. You should see this.”

Shi stopped pacing.

“Put it up,” he said.

No softening. No delay.

The analyst’s fingers flew over the interface. The holo-wall flickered; static resolved into a neon-lit corridor. The camera angle was low, slightly skewed, as if someone had bolted it on as an afterthought.

A public facility. A neutral world.

“Vanfylion,” Mien said quietly from behind Shi. “Zianllo city.”

He had entered the vault without announcement—as he always did when the system spat up something it didn’t understand. Shi didn’t turn. Of course, Mien was here. Data went nowhere important without crossing his path.

The feed rolled.

A corridor fronting a restroom block. Doors lined with glowing alien glyphs, icons representing more genders and castes than Teleopea even acknowledged. People moved in and out in a steady stream.

Then one of the doors slammed open.

A tall figure stepped out into the hall, covered in shimmering cosmetic dust as if someone had detonated a beauty product in his face. Glitter clung to his lashes, cheekbones, the ends of loose golden hair.

Behind him, a dozen alien patrons screamed.

Someone vaulted onto a sink. Another creature with too many limbs hurled a toiletry bag at his head. A voice shrieked something that translated roughly to “PERVERT!” in three languages. Foam and perfume burst into the air.

The figure just stood there, blinking, as if all of this was happening very far away.

Under the neon, his hair shone with a metallic sheen. His features were too regular, too symmetrical—a deliberate genetic design. He looked young. And beneath the flat composure of his face there was the faintest flicker of bewilderment, like the world refused to line up with his expectations.

Chen.

The name hit Shi like a blade driven between his ribs.

His breath stopped.

“…Pause it,” he said.

The analyst froze the frame mid-chaos. Foam hung suspended in the air. An alien in the background was half-way through climbing into a ceiling vent.

Only Chen’s face was sharp.

Under the holo’s glow, Shi’s own features looked carved and thin. Mien, at his shoulder, had gone very still. Only the slight tightening of his jaw betrayed that he’d recognised the boy too.

The child.

No, not a child. Not really.

The Continuation born from their grandchild’s corpse.

A cursed being.

The analyst swallowed audibly. “Th-There’s another angle, my lords. From the hallway security node.”

“Play it,” Shi said, without taking his eyes off Chen.

The feed stuttered, switched.

Now the view was pulled back, capturing more of the corridor.

A smaller Teleopean bolted into frame—juvenile proportions, stress-puffed tail, eyes wide with horror.

Lan.

He seized Chen by the sleeve and yanked furiously. Chen looked at him, confusion plain even through the dust on his face, but let himself be dragged away from the screaming crowd.

“That’s Lan,” Shi muttered. “On the red-tier list with Xiao and Chen.”

Security staff appeared at the far end of the hall, pushing through the chaos.

And then another figure entered frame.

Tall. Dark-haired. Dark-eyed.

Not Teleopean.

He moved through the crowd with a relaxed, economical balance that set Shi’s instincts on edge—each step placed exactly where it needed to be, weight controlled, never brushing anyone unless he meant to.

He reached them in three strides.

One hand caught Lan by the collar. The other closed around Chen’s bare forearm.

He tugged both Teleopeans out of the mess, head tucked, profile turned away from the camera. They slid past the security officers and vanished out of frame.

“Freeze,” Shi said.

The image locked.

Lan mid-protest, mouth open.

Chen-half turned, expression unreadable, dust glittering on his skin.

The stranger between them, shoulders set, hands steady on both of them.

Mien stepped closer. The analytical chill in his silver eyes sharpened.

“Not Teleopean,” he said quietly. “Near enough in morphology to pass at a glance, but the bone structure is wrong. Muscle carriage is wrong. That is not our species.”

He flicked fingers over the controls, zooming in.

The image tightened around the stranger’s hand on Chen’s arm.

No recoil from Chen. No telltale flinch from tactile overstimulation. Just a faint line of tension in his shoulders—and acceptance.

“Look at the grip,” Mien murmured. “He knows exactly where to touch to minimise sensory feedback. Wrist, not palm. Outer radius, not the inner membrane. Whoever he is, he’s handled Teleopeans before. Extensively.”

“And Chen lets him,” Shi said. The words came out low and dangerous. “He barely tolerates medical staff with sedation. But he lets this stranger drag him around in a public hallway?”

“Which means,” Mien said, “his nervous system has already filed this man under ‘safe.’ Familiar, even.”

Shi tore his gaze away from the screen long enough to look at him.

“Familiar with who?” he demanded. “We’ve never seen him. He isn’t in any allied database.”

“That,” Mien replied, “is exactly what concerns me.”

The analyst stood as still as a prey animal, wishing he could disappear into the console.

“My lords,” he ventured, voice shaking, “this came through this sector space public incident relay. Protocol says we forward all such flagged incident to both the Council and imperial nets for cross-checking. I… I can erase the packet at this stage, before propagation, if you command it.”

“Yes,” Shi said immediately.

“No,” Mien said, at the same time.

The analyst looked like someone had pointed an anionic cannon at his head.

Shi rounded on Mien.

“Mien.”

Mien didn’t take his eyes off the frozen image.

“If we touch it,” he said, voice calm but edged with steel, “the Emperor’s net will see the checksum mismatch. He’ll know the Council intercepted and altered a flagged anomaly.”

“I don’t care what he knows,” Shi snapped. “Erase it.”

“I care,” Mien said, turning his gaze on him at last. “Because when he knows, he doesn’t just kill you. He destabilises everything around you. The Council. The lines. The outer cities. This entire civilisation.”

Shi’s hand curled into a fist.

“And if we don’t erase it?” he demanded. “You think he’ll see Chen and send a gift card?”

Mien’s jaw tightened.

“It will enter his personal queue in three star-ring hours,” he said. “Less, if one of his pets fast-tracks it. I can route it through our own internal audit buffer first, introduce delays on our side. But we cannot simply make it vanish. That’s how you tell a paranoid tyrant that you are hiding something from him.”

“Three hours,” Shi said, staring at Chen’s glitter-dusted face. “While he sits on that throne and decides which method he’d like to use this time.”

His voice wavered.

“And in those three hours, he’ll send special units the moment he sees that face.”

Mien didn’t bother to deny it.

The analyst cleared his throat, very softly. “L-Lord Shi… Lord Mien… shall I at least throttle the packet to lowest priority—?”

“Erase it,” Shi said again, louder. “You heard the command.”

“Do not touch it,” Mien cut in. “That is also a command.”

The analyst looked as if his soul had left his body.

The thin thread of Shi’s control snapped.

He turned fully on Mien, eyes bright with something too raw to be contained.

“I had a beautiful child,” he said.

The sentence ripped out of him like tearing metal.

The analyst flinched. Mien’s expression flickered—just once.

Shi didn’t stop.

“WE had a beautiful child,” he spat, throwing the word like an accusation. “We brought him into this world. We raised him. Educated him. He was—”

His voice cracked, then surged again, louder.

“He was perfect.”

Yun. Their Yun. His laugh, his stubbornness, his hand curled around Shi’s thumb the first time they held him. Gone.

Mien’s throat bobbed, but he said nothing.

“And we let him die on that throne,” Shi hissed. “We did nothing. We let our child die—alone.”

The words hung heavy in the vibrating air.

Shi dragged in a ragged breath.

“Then, when I thought I had a chance at redemption—when I thought, ‘Just once, I can do something right’—I failed again. I let his own child die an even more horrid death.”

Their grandchild. ‘Chen’ as he had been before—before the corpse, before the Continuation. A child too gentle for the world he was born into. Die by the current Star Emperor’s hands.

The analyst stared at the floor, blood drained from his face.

Shi jabbed a shaking finger at the holo.

This Chen, the Continuation, his frozen face stared back at them—young, dust-smeared, faintly confused. The bone structure was Yun’s. The eyes were painfully close to Mien’s. The flesh had once belonged to their grandchild. Now it housed something else.

“This,” Shi said hoarsely, “is the only one I have left of him now.”

Silence.

The grief in the room was a physical thing.

When Mien finally spoke, his voice was very soft.

“Do you think,” he said, “that you are the only one who lost them?”

Shi went still.

“We had a child,” Mien continued, each word precise. “We had a grandchild. You do not get to stand there and talk as if you loved them alone.”

“They died in a system you protect,” Shi said, eyes burning.

“They died in a system that is Teleopea, our civilisation,” Mien snapped back, silver eyes blazing for once. “Don’t you dare rewrite that to soothe your guilt.”

The analyst tried to merge with the console.

Mien dragged in a slow breath, forcing his voice steady again.

“And grieving,” he said, “does not give you the right to make the worst possible strategic decision. If we erase this, the Emperor will know where to start digging. He will assume we have already made contact with the Continuation. He will move faster, not slower. You will never reach Chen before he does.”

Shi closed his eyes.

The grief on his face didn’t fade. It sharpened into something hard.

“Can you delay it?” he asked, without looking up.

Mien turned back to the console.

“Yes,” he said at last. “I can push the incident into the Council’s internal audit buffer. Flag it as low priority. Introduce checksum discrepancies that look like transmission noise, not tampering. To the imperial net, it will look like a dropped packet bouncing around for re-verification.”

“How long?” Shi pressed.

“Two star-ring hours,” Mien said. “Three if the Emperor is distracted. No more.”

Shi swallowed, voice hoarse.

That would not be enough.

“Is there anything—anything—you can do to delay him seeing this?”

Mien hesitated, then lifted another holo.

“Yes,” he said softly. “One thing.”

Shi looked up sharply.

“The Emperor is not on Teleopea,” Mien said. “He is inspecting the Fenreiga front. That region sits in a distorted Minkowski frame.”

Shi blinked.

“…Meaning?”

“Any transmission crossing the military FTL relay undergoes time-shear buffering.”

Mien tapped the frame.

“He’ll receive the footage almost instantly on his end. But his outbound orders—from that frame back to ours—will arrive one full star-ring day later.”

Shi stared.

“A whole day?”

“One,” Mien confirmed. “No more. Physics won’t give us two.”

Shi exhaled, something fierce and desperate flickering in his eyes.

“One day,” he said. “Enough.”

“No,” Mien said. “Not enough. But all we have.”

Shi straightened.

“Prepare a shadow transport,” he ordered the analyst. “Stealth signature. Minimal trace. Ready in twenty.”

The analyst saluted shakily and fled.

Mien watched Shi with something between fear and resignation.

“You’re going alone.”

Shi didn’t deny it.

“Someone has to reach them before the Emperor.”

“You realise,” Mien said softly, “that once he connects the dots—once he sees the feed and learns you intervened—he’ll come for you.”

Shi looked at the screen—Chen dragged by a stranger, Lan shouting, neon glitter smeared across his grandson’s lashes.

“Let him come,” Shi said.

Mien’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“Shi… don’t die with him again.”

Shi paused at the door.

“I won’t,” he said quietly.

“Not this time.”

The door sealed.

Mien remained alone with the frozen image.

Chen.

Lan.

And the stranger—calm, sure, impossibly familiar in a way no outsider should be.

Mien stared, silver eyes narrowing.

“…Who are you to him?”

The holo didn’t answer.