Character
TD 6
General of Cyborg electronic warfare: he destroys nothing, he cuts — jamming, blinding and imposed silence before the assault.
General TD 6 commands the electronic warfare of the Cyborgs, from the data towers of Varn-Kor Central. His single-digit number makes him one of the oldest units still on the registers of Karn-Tor IX.
He destroys nothing. He cuts.
The weapon that does not fire
A Cyborg army never arrives first: what arrives first is TD 6’s silence. Links jammed, watches blinded, channels saturated, relays erased — by the time the fleet finally appears, the place under attack has warned nobody for a long while.
The officers of Araze have a phrase for that moment, and it is not a phrase of war: they say the line is dead. They know then what follows.
The hall of towers
His command post has neither map nor window: nothing but columns of channels, and the count of those still answering. TD 6 works on a single figure — the one that has to reach zero.
He never does it all at once. He always leaves one channel open a little longer than the rest, to hear what the enemy says when it believes it is the last one speaking.
His doctrine
You do not take a place by walking into it. You take it by removing the rest of the universe from it.
Him and TG 809
The two generals are alike enough to be confused, and not at all alike to anyone who has seen them work. TG 809 enters: he reads, he copies, he leaves without anyone knowing he came. TD 6 closes: he wants to read nothing, he wants nobody else to be able to.
The Cyborg archives never show them on the same operation. The Arazian archives note that the two things often happen in the same week.
What the archives do not say
Nobody among the Arazians has ever intercepted TD 6’s voice — not a transmission, not an order in clear. It is logical, and it is what unsettles the listeners most: the general of electronic warfare is the one Cyborg officer of whom no sound record exists.