The Vanguard Protocol Book 2 the Veil Awakens
Copyright© 2026 by Sci-FiTy1972
Chapter 8: The Quiet Above Us
(Polished Edition)
The first thing people noticed was the silence.
Not the kind that followed an explosion or preceded a storm—but a wrongness in the sky, a pause where noise should have been. Satellites stopped making their constant micro-adjustments. Long-range radar arrays returned clean sweeps where clutter should have lived. Even the background hiss of cosmic radiation dipped below expected thresholds.
Space did not go dark.
It went still.
Most civilians didn’t notice at first. The sky looked the same. The stars were where they’d always been. But something in the air—something older than logic—told people that the universe had shifted its weight.
Canberra — The Analyst Who Wouldn’t Blink
In a subterranean control room outside Canberra, a junior analyst stared at her screen longer than protocol allowed.
She tapped it once. Then again.
“Sir?” she said finally. “I’m getting null returns on deep-space tracking.”
Her supervisor didn’t look up. “Reboot the array.”
“I already did.”
That earned his attention.
He leaned forward, frowning as the data refreshed. Empty arcs. Perfect curves. No noise.
“That’s ... clean,” he muttered.
“Too clean,” she replied.
They exchanged a look neither of them wanted to name.
Washington, D.C. — The Briefing That Shouldn’t Exist
They tried to explain it away at first.
Solar interference. Instrument drift. Software regression.
Then the emergency briefing convened beneath the Capitol, and no one pretended anymore.
Screens lined the secure chamber—Earth’s orbit, cislunar space, the Moon. Empty. Not jammed. Not obscured.
Absent.
“We are blind beyond lunar distance,” a general said flatly.
“That’s not possible,” a civilian advisor snapped.
A scientist leaned forward, hands trembling. “It is if something isn’t blocking signals ... but collapsing outcome resolution.”
Silence followed.
“I know how that sounds,” she added quickly. “But our sensors aren’t failing. They’re ... undecided.”
At the far end of the table, a man in a private-sector suit smiled faintly.
“Maybe,” he said, “we should consider that ambiguity is intentional.”
No one laughed.
Low Earth Orbit — The Astronaut Who Saw Nothing
Commander Luis Ortega had trained his entire life to notice deviation.
So when the stars above the station seemed hesitant, he felt it immediately.
They weren’t gone.
They were uncertain.
He floated to the view port, heart pounding.
“Houston,” he said quietly, “do you see that?”
Static crackled. Then: “See what, Commander?”
Ortega swallowed. “Never mind.”
But he didn’t look away.