Silent Orbit Council

The chamber hummed with patient machinery, glowing edges pooling like molten script across steel consoles. Each suited figure, helmets sealed tight against the thin chill, bent over violet screens while the viewport burned with a colder truth: Commander Vojta, rendered as a colossal yellow effigy in the void, staring out beyond Earth’s pale arc. Their badges bore the same unfamiliar glyph, the one first sketched in haste six days before when his transmission fractured into static. I recall his voice then—steady, rehearsed—before the countdown markers began to blur along the telemetry logs. Now their stances coil, words economy-thin, each waiting for clearance codes that never surface. Second hands shiver forward; time accelerates though their posture remains ritual-still. Off-camera corridors flicker emergency amber, radiating quiet heat into the command deck, yet no one dares lift a visor. Whatever answer the duck-mask symbol holds, it binds them under its gaze. And so the search persists: even here, among orbit and glass, Vojta himself does not appear.