Episode 006| CV-1A Departs

Kaiyuan Year 1010 · Jan 1 · 03:58 · Saint Tranya · Magnetar Transport western-district private hangar

The hangar's rolling steel door wound slowly upward.

The full two hundred square meters of space inside held only one airframe. CV-1A occupied the dead center, its silver-grey shell throwing back almost no light under the overhead lamps — its metal coating had been treated specifically to absorb light, so that from a distance it looked like a clump of half-transparent fog. Carved beneath the nose was the family crest of the Oitia house — Magnetar Transport had cast it on from the very first draft of this airframe's design.

Lika walked into the hangar, his soles giving the faintest scuff on the anti-static floor tiles.

"Time to set out," he said to the empty hangar.

CV-1A didn't answer — it wasn't a machine that talked — but the indicator strip running along its flank, tracing the wing surface, shifted from the dark blue of sleep to a pale cyan. That meant it recognized Lika's brain-crystal interface and was ready to take commands.

---

Lika laid his hand on the boarding panel.

The cabin opened, the interior far larger than the outside suggested. The maglev-turbine design shrank the power bay to a minimum, so the cockpit took up most of the interior volume. The dashboard was a single sheet of transparent synthetic glass, no physical keys at all — every operation ran through the brain-crystal interface and retinal projection.

He settled into the pilot's seat. The seat adjusted itself to his frame, propping up a little at the hip — he'd flown CV-1A a few times before, and the brain-crystal interface remembered his flight posture.

"Spectra offline," he ordered.

[Spectra link: OFF]
[CV-1A autonomous mode: ON]
[Route: manual]

---

From this moment, CV-1A did not exist to Spectra.

This was a function Lika had written into the craft with his own hands. He'd done it eight months ago, just after he finished tuning this airframe — in theory it shouldn't exist, because every commercial craft of Magnetar Transport was required to stay open to Spectra reporting; that was Saint Tranya aviation law. But CV-1A wasn't commercial. It was a private test craft registered under Lika's name. Private test craft had a legal edge — "experimental-phase exemption."

Under that exemption he'd slipped in a "fully offline" option. Unfiled. Unregistered.

Tonight he used it.

---

The skylight at the top of the hangar drew slowly apart.

CV-1A's turbines needed no runway; a vertical lift would do. The airframe gave a light shudder — the instant counter-thrust of the maglev against ground gravity — and then it rose. No roar of engines, no shriek of fans, only a low-frequency hum you half-took for tinnitus of your own. The residents around Magnetar Transport's Saint Tranya headquarters still hadn't adjusted to this silent craft these past months — lying awake at night, they'd always assume the hum a moment ago had been an illusion.

Lika checked the altimeter. Thirty meters off the surface, fifty, a hundred. He kept low.

The hangar roof lay far below his feet, lit in a grid of yellow cells. The Saint Tranya cityscape lay farther still, the whole city still alight at 04:00 — the arc of the maglev flashed every few seconds in the south, holographic billboards blinked on and off across the center, six red lights pulsed in steady rhythm atop the cooling towers of the Source-Stone power plant.

He pulled his view back from the outside into the cockpit.

---

[Heading set: Frozen Northern Reach, signal marker S-17-R]
[Standard commercial-route flight time: 12 h 47 m]
[Defenses en route: Saint Dora north-perimeter bio-energy barrier shield, Nameless Channel storm belt, mid-section of the Ice-Shadow Trench, Frozen Northern Reach unauthorized airspace]
[Warning: this route holds no legal cross-boundary permit]

Twelve hours. Meaning he wouldn't arrive before dawn.

Lika stared at the predicted time a few seconds, then keyed in a command.

> auth L.K.S._Core --override flight_path
> bypass: barrier shield / storm belt / trench mid-section
> recalculate

---

CV-1A paused about a second.

The one tipping off the controllers wasn't CV-1A — the craft still didn't exist to Spectra. It was Lika's signature spanning a thousand years, knocking through one-way, traveling the signature's own independent channel, not passing through CV-1A's ID. The traffic-control module asked no questions, verified no identity, logged nothing, and simply answered "received," then pulled this craft off the detection lists of every one of Saint Dora's perimeter shields for 57 minutes.

[L.K.S._Core shortcut mode: activated]
[Recalculated flight time: 6 h 40 m]
[Notice: shortcut mode valid this run only]

---

Six hours, forty minutes.

Over the past eight months he'd flown CV-1A himself a total of three times — three short-range test flights all within Saint Dora's own mainland, the farthest no more than north to an uninhabited peak at Saint Dora's tip. He hadn't even touched the edge of the open sea.

You didn't just cross continents on a whim — the Badlands side had Saint Dora's own gravity shield blocking the way, the Dawn side was flanked by a lone island in an eternal storm, and the Frozen Reach didn't bear discussing: no one had legally gone there in the thousand years counted from the first year of the Kaiyuan Era.

Tonight was the first time. Also the time that broke a thousand-year treaty.

---

CV-1A began south.

Saint Tranya shrank behind him. He opened the retinal interface.

> open --file last_query --display side_panel

The 4,891 records ranged by timestamp in a half-transparent window below his left eye. He picked the fourth.

[4] Kaiyuan Year 932 · 11 · 25 · 23:58:11
 · Frozen Northern Reach S-17-R
 · Observer resync
 · Executor: L.K.S._Core
 · Verified by: L.K.S._Core
 · Sync target: unlogged

---

"Sync target: unlogged."

He read it softly once from the pilot's seat.

Every Spectra record logged a sync target. Every record. Even if the target was a stray test signal mis-fired, a built-in virtual module, a patrol AI on autopilot — it would have a number. Not one Spectra record ever showed those two words, "unlogged."

Except this one. Except — he only noticed now — the remaining 4,890 of these 4,891. The sync target of every one was "unlogged."

Meaning this signature had run over a thousand tasks across eighty-five years, and every time it synced with something Spectra wouldn't even set down a name for.

---

Lika stared a long time at the half-transparent window below his left eye.

While he wasn't watching, CV-1A had climbed to 3,000 meters; below was the coastline at the southern end of the Saint Dora continent, the sea giving off a steel-colored glint under the moon.

Ahead lay the Ice-Shadow Trench.

"Old friend," he said to his craft, his voice softer now than back in the hangar, "once we're in, we don't talk."

CV-1A's indicator blinked once, from pale cyan to a deeper cyan.

It had received it. From this moment, it was like that signature — it didn't talk.

---

【Ch. 006 End · CV-1A hovering rotorcraft → Frozen Northern Reach】