The sinking of the Invictus was a victory, but Alaric knew it was also a starting gun. The Empire of Solis didn't just have ships, they had a global network of trade outposts, spanning continents Alaric hadn't even mapped yet. If Oakhaven remained an island of innovation in a sea of imperial silence, they would eventually be crushed by sheer scale.
"We can't just defend the bay, Elena," Alaric said, staring at a massive table covered in charts of the Jade Sea. "We need to know what the Admiral is whispering in the capital of Solis before his messengers even leave the dock. We need the Trans-Oceanic Cable."
---
In the 1850s, the laying of the Atlantic cable was a feat of Herculean proportions. In 1042, it was considered madness. But Alaric had the "Oakhaven Advantage", Gutta-percha.
He had discovered a similar latex-producing tree in the humid southern valleys of the Marquis's former territory. When refined, it was the perfect underwater insulator, tough, flexible, and completely waterproof.
"We're going to weave a cable the size of a man's arm," Alaric explained to Harl's Engineering Union. "Seven strands of pure Oakhaven copper at the core, wrapped in hemp, sealed in gutta-percha, and armored with galvanized steel wire."
---
The Oakhaven-1 submarine was stripped and repurposed as a deep-sea scout. A new vessel, the Leviathan, was built, a massive, flat-bottomed barge with a giant spool in its center, holding fifty miles of cable.
As the Leviathan began its slow crawl across the Jade Sea toward a neutral island trading post, Alaric sat in the telegraph room, his fingers on the brass key. He wasn't sending orders. He was sending a Heartbeat.
Dot... dot... dot...
Every mile, the signal grew weaker. Alaric had to invent the Mirror Galvanometer on the fly, a device so sensitive it could detect the tiny electrical twitch of a signal passing through a thousand miles of dark, cold water.
---
Just as the cable reached the halfway point, the signal didn't just fade. It became Garbage.
Dash-dash-dash-dot-dot-dash-dash...
"That's not line-loss, Arthur," Elena said, her eyes narrowing as she looked at the jittering needle. "That's a pattern. Someone is tapping the line."
Alaric felt a cold sweat. "Impossible. The cable is three hundred feet down."
"Not everywhere," Elena countered. "It rises near the reefs of the Silent Isles. Look at the resistance, someone has physically spliced into the copper."
---
Alaric realized that the Empire of Solis hadn't just sent ships. They had hired their own "Architects."
The needle on the galvanometer began to move with a chilling precision. It wasn't the Oakhaven Cipher. It was a 21st-century ASCII-style binary code, translated into manual pulses.
H-E-L-L-O... A-R-T-H-U-R.
"Vane," Alaric whispered.
The rogue inventor hadn't died in the steam explosion. He had been "recovered" by Imperial spies. They had given him a laboratory, a budget, and a directive, Break the Web.
"Y-O-U... B-U-I-L-T... T-H-E... N-E-T," the needle danced. "I... A-M... T-H-E... V-I-R-U-S."
Suddenly, the University's internal telegraphs began to scream. Every bell in Oakhaven rang at once. The hydroelectric turbines in the valley began to spin out of control as Vane, using the spliced cable as a remote-access "backdoor," sent a surge of false data into the Oakhaven control systems.
---
"He's trying to overload the grid!" Alaric shouted, racing toward the main breaker. "He's trying to blow the transformers!"
"Arthur, stop!" Elena grabbed his arm. "If you cut the power, you lose the cable forever. We'll never get the signal back."
"Then we fight him in the code," Alaric said, his hands flying over a series of primitive patch-cables.
He didn't have software, so he used Physical Logic Gates. He began rerouting the pulses through a series of vacuum-tube-like glass jars filled with ionized gas, a primitive Signal Filter.
He sent a massive, high-voltage "Purge" pulse down the line. It was the 11th-century version of a DDoS counter-attack.
The needle on the other end would have slammed so hard it likely shattered Vane's receiver. The bells stopped. The turbines settled into a steady hum.
---
Alaric sat back, his breath ragged. The cable was silent now. The splice was still there, but Vane was gone.
"He knows how to hack us, Elena," Alaric said. "The 'Wow Factor' isn't the machine anymore. It's the Encryption."
"We need a code that can't be broken by a man with a slide rule," Elena agreed. "We need to start the Enigma Project."
As the sun rose over Oakhaven, Alaric looked at the copper wire trailing into the sea. He had built a nerve, but he had also created a vulnerability. The world was no longer just a map of land and sea, it was a map of Information Flow. And the first "Great Data War" had just begun.