Chapter 23 · War Among Satellites
In the first few hours after its birth, Data Haven did nothing.
It was just there — a 1 KB logical address space, parasitic in the deepest layer of Starlink’s core routing layer, like a newborn doing nothing in its first minutes but breathe. That 1 KB of content was empty, containing no users’ files, transmitting no useful data. Its existence itself was a declaration, not functional but symbolic — a piece of land not on the tax roll.
But expansion began at the twenty-second minute.
Farhan sat on a folding chair in that Bao’an apartment unit, three terminals in front of him. The left one displayed a real-time update of the global Starlink topology — updated every few hours through Amina’s Pigeonnet nodes via physically isolated channels, not real-time data, but enough for large-scale routing situational awareness. The middle one ran the SkyWalker protocol’s core control program. The right one showed a scrolling log, not fast — a new line every few seconds, like some kind of slow heartbeat.
Lu Yuan stood behind him, holding a cup of tea that had gone completely cold, watching the log scroll.
The first expansion instruction was sent at the twenty-second minute after injection. Not triggered manually by Farhan — it was the autonomous diffusion program hardcoded into the SkyWalker protocol firmware, automatically executing its first action upon detecting the activation of the nested entry point.
The instruction was simple: send route advertisements to three adjacent satellites, expanding Data Haven’s address space from 1 KB to 4 KB.
Starlink’s network architecture was based on an improved version of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) — each satellite maintained a routing table that determined the forwarding path of data packets through the inter-satellite network. When a satellite received a new route advertisement, it checked the source address’s credibility, then decided based on policy whether to add this route to its local table and whether to propagate it to neighboring satellites.
Data Haven’s expansion logic exploited precisely this mechanism. Farhan had embedded a piece of code in the SkyWalker protocol — the route advertisements it generated were completely identical in format to legitimate route updates within Starlink, the only difference being that the address space prefix it advertised didn’t belong to any known address range of Starlink’s billing system. To the satellite, it was an unrecognized address block — according to the routing protocol’s default behavior, it would be marked as “unknown but valid” and forwarded to neighbors.
This wasn’t an attack. Not an intrusion. It was using the system’s own rules to expand a space the system didn’t know it possessed.
On the screen, the log began to accelerate:
「Route advertisement sent → STK-09122 | Address space 10.244.0.0/30 → Pending confirmation」 「Route advertisement sent → STK-21045 | Address space 10.244.0.0/30 → Pending confirmation」 「Route advertisement sent → STK-18377 | Address space 10.244.0.0/30 → Pending confirmation」
About four seconds later, the first confirmation returned:
「STK-09122 → Route accepted · Propagated to 2 neighbors」
Then the second:
「STK-21045 → Route accepted · Propagated to 3 neighbors」
The third:
「STK-18377 → Route accepted · Propagated to 1 neighbor」
Lu Yuan watched the green confirmation lines appear one after another on the black background. The process was going more smoothly than they had anticipated — not because Starlink’s security was weak, but because SkyWalker’s expansion instructions mimicked legitimate route updates too closely. As far as Starlink’s satellites were concerned, these route advertisements were no different from the millions of routine updates they processed every day. It carried no malicious payload, triggered no intrusion detection signatures, left no trace in audit logs that could be marked as “anomalous.”
It was just a new piece of routing information. In the world of networks, routing information flowed in the billions every day. Adding a single drop to this river — no one would notice.
Farhan didn’t stop to celebrate. He immediately launched the second phase: on each satellite that accepted the route advertisement, SkyWalker’s code segment would attempt to exploit an unpublished API interface in the satellite firmware — the nested entry point Milan had opened wasn’t a single channel, but a set of channels — to create a shadow entry in these satellites’ local routing tables. The shadow entry wasn’t advertised to neighbors, didn’t participate in route computation, but it existed. It was like a hidden compartment in a drawer’s false bottom, invisible in routine inspections, but addressable by SkyWalker protocol data packets through specific quantum-state sequences.
The hidden compartments were empty. But their emptiness itself was a resource — empty space could be filled. Empty route entries could be used to forward data.
Data Haven’s capacity grew from 1 KB to about 2.3 MB over the next four hours. This speed was negligible in absolute terms — not enough to store a single JPEG image. But its growth wasn’t linear; it was exponential: every infected satellite continued to infect its neighbors, and every newly infected satellite provided more routing paths and storage space.
By the sixth hour, Data Haven’s autonomous domain covered approximately four hundred Starlink satellites. They were distributed across a broad arc of orbits from the South China Sea to the east coast of Africa, forming a discontinuous but logically unified mesh structure. The vast majority of these satellites didn’t know they were “infected” — they just had one more shadow entry in their routing table, a few dozen KB of placeholder data in their memory. On Starlink’s satellite health monitoring system, all these satellites displayed as “Normal.” CPU usage normal. Memory usage within allowable range. Routing table entries within reasonable limits.
Everything was normal. Beneath the surface of everything normal, a slow, irreversible topological reconstruction was taking place.
Farhan finally stood up from the terminal at the seventh hour. His eyes were bloodshot from staring at the screen for so long, but his movements showed no sign of fatigue — he walked to the small kitchen in the apartment unit, poured himself a glass of cold water, drank it in one go, then leaned against the counter and closed his eyes. He wasn’t sleeping — just letting his eyeballs rest behind closed lids. About thirty seconds later, he opened his eyes again, walked back to the terminal, and sat down.
“The infection of the first four hundred satellites has stabilized,” he said. His voice had that dryness and hoarseness that came from more than ten hours of continuous work. “But the next phase will encounter a problem — cross-orbital-plane route advertisements.”
Lu Yuan sat down next to him, looking at the three-dimensional Starlink network topology displayed on the screen. Farhan had marked infected satellites in red, uninfected ones in gray. Red was concentrated on a few orbital planes, like an algae bloom spreading slowly, but the direction of spread was limited by the routing protocol itself — Starlink route updates typically didn’t propagate across orbital planes; each orbital plane had its own routing zone boundaries, and cross-boundary advertisements needed to pass through specific gateway satellites.
“Gateway satellites have a higher security review level,” Farhan said, his finger sliding on the trackpad, rotating the topology ninety degrees to let Lu Yuan see the positions of the gateway satellites connecting the orbital planes — they were marked in yellow on the map, distributed at several key spatial coordinates. “Their firmware versions are two generations newer than regular satellites. The API interface I found — I’m not sure it exists on these models.”
“Not sure.” Lu Yuan repeated the word. In the entire Data Haven plan, the most dangerous thing wasn’t failure — it was “not sure.” Because every uncertainty meant they might be triggering some defense mechanism they didn’t yet understand.
Farhan read his concern. He didn’t defend himself. He just said: “I can do aprobing route advertisement first — a low-priority shadow entry, carrying no data payload. If the gateway satellite accepts it, we proceed. If it’s dropped or generates an alert, we’ll know we need another path.”
Lu Yuan had no better plan. He nodded.
The probing advertisement was sent at the seventh hour and forty-third minute after injection. Farhan selected a gateway satellite at the boundary between the equatorial orbital plane and the polar orbital plane —designation STK-45102 — sending a unicast security update advertisement. In format, it mimicked the routine control signaling Starlink used internally for synchronizing blacklist changes. In content, besides a legitimate signature header, it carried only one byte of payload: a flag indicating “no new data.”
The gateway satellite received the advertisement and processed its signature header. The signature was legitimate — Farhan used the signature key corresponding to the interface Milan had exposed in the nested entry point. The gateway satellite’s firmware confirmed the signature was valid, then forwarded this advertisement to three satellites in the adjacent orbital plane.
One of those satellites, about two seconds after receiving the forwarding, sent a reply back to Data Haven’s autonomous domain. Not a human-readable message — a very short data packet, only sixteen bits, containing a set of numbers, like a silent response from someone who didn’t know what to say but felt they should reply.
Farhan saw those sixteen bits on his screen. His hand stopped. He stared at that string of numbers for about ten seconds without moving.
Then he converted those sixteen bits from hexadecimal to ASCII.
Four letters appeared on the screen:
「ACK」
The gateway satellite had accepted the shadow entry. The cross-orbital-plane path was open.
Farhan didn’t speak. He kept those four letters on the screen for about five seconds, then closed the window and continued with the next phase of deployment.
Lu Yuan stood behind him, watching him call up the next set of instructions. Those four letters lingered on his retina — ACK. In communication protocols, this was the simplest confirmation signal, needing no explanation, no decoration. It meant only one thing: received.
Those satellites in the sky, those artificial stars made of metal and silicon and code, traveling at seven kilometers per second — they were talking to each other in a way that had never been designed for communication. They were transmitting information they themselves didn’t fully understand. But they were transmitting.
By the twelfth hour, Data Haven’s autonomous domain had covered the complete routing regions of approximately three orbital planes in the Starlink network, with a total capacity of about seventeen megabytes. This capacity was still pitifully small — in a modern network, seventeen megabytes wasn’t even enough to cache the opening frames of an HD video — but its topological structure had become too complex to be fully enumerated by simple centralized清查 tools. Data Haven wasn’t a centralized server; it was a collection of routing tables scattered across hundreds of satellites. Each satellite knew only its own shadow entry, not the global structure. To find all infected nodes completely required a comprehensive routing audit of the entire Starlink network from the outside — equivalent to checking every single one of one hundred and twenty thousand pillars in a forest for an extremely fine, barely visible scratch on its surface.
Theoretically possible. But the operational cost was so high it was nearly impossible to execute.
And Data Haven was still expanding. Farhan was already preparing the third phase of code — a more aggressive infection vector, exploiting a timing window in the handshake protocol of Starlink’s inter-satellite laser links to embed SkyWalker’s control code into the padding field of handshake acknowledgment frames. If successful, it would increase the infection speed by approximately an order of magnitude.
He didn’t tell Lu Yuan the other name for this phase — in the comments on his own terminal, Farhan called it the “irreversible phase.” Because once the third-phase infection vector was deployed, Data Haven’s existence would shift from “a routing anomaly Starlink could roll back” to “a network characteristic Starlink would need to physically replace hardware to eliminate.” At that point, no Milan’s backdoor, no nested entry point, no anyone’s permission would be needed — Data Haven would self-replicate in every handshake, every route update, every data exchange between satellites.
Like a gene sequence that had already spread to every cell of the host. To remove it, you had to kill the host.
Farhan didn’t tell Lu Yuan about this comment. Not out of distrust — but because when Lu Yuan’s daughter’s countdown hadn’t yet reached zero, telling him “this plan is irreversible” had no meaning. Lu Yuan needed Data Haven to live until his daughter finished her surgery. After that, Data Haven’s future — and Starlink’s response to it — would be a problem for Lu Yuan then. Not now.
What Lu Yuan needed now was for those seventeen megabytes of autonomous domain to continue growing, to reach sufficient redundancy within forty-eight hours to sustain at least one stable data transmission.
He needed this thing to survive the next thirty-plus hours.
Silas discovered it in the fourteenth hour after Data Haven’s birth.
Not through any automated alert system — Starlink’s intrusion detection system had triggered no alarms, because SkyWalker’s expansion didn’t trigger any signatures. Silas discovered it because he was doing something he rarely did: manually spot-checking the routing table change logs for the Asia-Pacific region.
He had this habit. An intuition honed over years in the security director position — the quieter the system, the more likely someone was doing something where the system couldn’t see. So he periodically pulled raw routing logs, bypassing any automated analysis tools, scanning them with his own eyes.
He pulled the route change records for Starlink’s core network orbital plane nineteen — a random target. He used a command-line tool he had written himself, reading the underlying routing logs directly from the satellite firmware, bypassing the formatting layer of Starlink’s standard audit system. This tool was a backdoor he had left for himself — he didn’t trust the audit system Milan had designed, because he knew how many layers of things Milan himself didn’t know about were buried in that system.
The logs were pulled to his terminal and displayed as plain text. Silas’s eyes scanned several hundred lines of routine updates — most were legitimate, expected routing changes. Satellites entering and leaving coverage areas, load balancing adjustments, failover switches — everything normal.
Then he saw the fourth line.
A route advertisement record from STK-17254 — advertising an address space prefix: 10.244.0.0/30. This prefix wasn’t in Starlink’s address allocation table.
Silas’s finger stopped on the trackpad.
He checked the timestamp of this advertisement. Then he checked the number of hops it had taken from origination to forwarding by neighboring satellites. Then he checked the logs of every satellite that had forwarded this advertisement — not through system tools, but by manually connecting to each satellite and reading them one by one.
On the fifteenth satellite, he found an anomaly: that satellite’s routing table contained a shadow entry. The shadow entry wasn’t in the active region of the routing table, but it existed. Silas spent about forty minutes confirming this wasn’t legitimate system behavior. It wasn’t. Not a bug. Not a hardware error.
Someone — or something — had created an unauthorized address space in Starlink’s routing layer.
Silas leaned back in his chair, sitting in the dark security center for about thirty seconds. Screens around him displayed various monitoring panels — traffic graphs, geographic heat maps, anomaly behavior scores. Everything normal. Everything looked normal. But when he looked back at those screens, what he saw was no longer an “everything normal” monitoring panel — what he saw was a carefully maintained calm surface, beneath which an invisible current was accelerating.
He didn’t immediately report it to anyone. First, he did one thing: expand the scope of the search. He wrote a script to pull routing logs in parallel across all of Starlink’s orbital planes — not through the standard API, but through his backdoor channel that bypassed the audit system. The script completed the scan in twenty minutes.
The results came back.
Infected orbital planes: 3. Infected satellite count: approximately four hundred. Unauthorized address space created: Data Haven’s autonomous domain — real-time capacity approximately seventeen megabytes, still growing.
Silas stared at that number without speaking. He knew seventeen megabytes meant nothing in Starlink’s global network — this amount wouldn’t even be marked as “worth attention.” But what he cared about wasn’t the current capacity; it was the trend. In the fourteen hours since Data Haven’s birth, its capacity had grown by more than three orders of magnitude. At this rate, within forty-eight hours, it might reach a scale that would need to be taken seriously — not threatening Starlink’s survival, but challenging Starlink’s billing system. Once Data Haven’s capacity was large enough to carry regular users’ data traffic — if it began to be discovered and used by ordinary users — then Starlink’s billing system would face its first real competitor. Not another telecom company. A zero-tax digital enclave.
That wasn’t a security vulnerability. It was a business model vulnerability.
Silas picked up the encrypted phone. He didn’t dial Milan’s number — it was the command link for Starlink’s Network Operations Center (NOC).
“NOC, this is Asia-Pacific Security Center. I’m requesting initiation of A3-level protocol cleanup procedures.”
The NOC duty supervisor was silent for two seconds — A3-level procedures meant executing global non-standard traffic cleansing within the Starlink network, usually interrupting some non-critical services, but with limited impact.
“Silas, A3 requires the chief architect’s or CEO’s manual sign-off. Do you have it?”
“Not yet. But when you see the data analysis I’m sending you — you’ll understand why I’m not waiting for that signature.”
He sent the scan results.
Thirteen minutes later, the NOC duty supervisor called back. His voice was an octave lower than before: “Where did you get this?”
“I found it myself.”
“Silas — this scanning tool — it’s not in the standard security toolset. What protocol path did you use to get these logs?”
“You don’t need — ”
“I need to know, because if the source of this has any compliance issues, it can’t be used as the basis for initiating A3.”
Silas was silent on the other end of the line. He couldn’t use that backdoor channel — that channel itself wasn’t legitimate, at least not compliant with Starlink’s internal operational standards. If he exposed its existence, Milan — Milan would definitely use it to counter him.
He had no basis for initiating the A3-level procedure.
But twenty-one minutes later, he found another path.
His team, analyzing Data Haven’s propagation pattern, discovered a feature: the infected satellites’ route advertisement timestamps showed an extremely subtle regularity — an interval of approximately 2.37 seconds. Not like human operation. More like an automated propagation program executing at a preset rhythm.
“Programmatic.” Silas repeated the word in the team communication channel. Programmatic meant predictable. Predictable meant it could be reverse-modeled — before the propagation program’s next target satellite, they could pre-create a fake shadow entry on that satellite to occupy the address space, creating a logical conflict and causing the propagation program to fail executing on that target.
This wasn’t cleansing — it was precise counter-measure. Not removing Data Haven, but placing obstacles in its expansion path, preventing it from continuing to grow. Like a defender digging traps in advance on the invader’s必经之路.
Silas ordered: initiate “mirror filling” tactics. The Asia-Pacific Security Center team generated hundreds of fake shadow entries in the next forty minutes, pre-occupying address space on uninfected satellites before Data Haven’s expansion instructions arrived.
The results showed within seven minutes of the test starting.
When Lu Yuan saw the first failure log pop up on Farhan’s terminal, he just frowned. Farhan didn’t frown — he directly pulled up the specific diagnostic information for the failure. A few seconds later, the muscles in his jaw tightened slightly.
“They pre-occupied the target address space before we arrived,” he said, his voice steady but his speech rate about ten percent faster than normal — a stress signal only Lu Yuan could recognize. “Not random occupation — every occupied address was exactly the one our propagation program was going to advertise next. They’re predicting our route selection algorithm.”
Lu Yuan didn’t speak. He watched the failure logs increase line by line on the screen, like a river being gradually cut off.
“This is impossible — our propagation algorithm uses a pseudo-random selector, with the seed derived from a hash of satellite environmental noise. They can’t predict — ”
Farhan stopped.
He figured it out.
“They don’t need to predict the algorithm — ” he said, his voice carrying a slow, sinking quality, like a heavy object submerging. “They only need to monitor our handshake timestamps. The interval between each of our route advertisements is 2.37 seconds — too regular. They only need to know which satellite we’ll send the next advertisement to after the next 2.37 seconds, and then pre-emptively — ”
He didn’t finish. But he was already correcting it. His fingers moved across the keyboard, modifying the timing jitter algorithm in the propagation program — replacing the fixed 2.37-second interval with a random jitter value extracted from environmental temperature sensor readings.
But before he completed the modification, new failures appeared on the screen. The “mirror filling” was too fast — Silas’s team had already established an automated countermeasure pipeline: detect Data Haven’s propagation pattern, predict the next target, pre-occupy the address space, block the path. Each step completed in an automated cycle, requiring no human intervention.
Data Haven’s expansion dropped from exponential growth to near standstill within ten minutes. It didn’t shrink — occupied space couldn’t be cleared — but it stopped growing. That spreading seed had encountered soil it couldn’t penetrate.
Farhan completed the jitter algorithm modification and restarted the propagation program. New route advertisements began to be sent at irregular intervals. But Silas’s countermeasure system adapted in only about two cycles — its machine learning model, after observing a few irregular samples, re-identified the statistical characteristics of the jitter and returned to pre-occupation mode.
The expansion stopped again.
Farhan took his fingers off the keyboard.
He sat in front of the terminal’s glow, the log on the screen already silent for nearly thirty seconds. No new successes, no new failures — just stagnation, like two chess players stopping their hands simultaneously on the same board, staring at the position before them, each recalculating their next moves.
“He blocked our path,” Farhan said.
“Silas.”
“Silas.”
They were silent for about two beats.
Then Lu Yuan spoke: “Then stop expanding. Fortify what we’ve already taken.”
Farhan looked at him. Not in disagreement — it was the expression of someone evaluating the risks and feasibility of this plan.
“Fortifying means switching from active expansion to passive defense.” Farhan’s finger slid on the trackpad, pulling up a new window showing the current distribution of all infected nodes of Data Haven. “Silas can predict our expansion path now. But he can’t trace the shadow entries we’ve already established — because those entries existed before he started monitoring. He doesn’t know which satellites we’ve occupied.”
“He can find us with a blanket scan.”
“He can. But a blanket scan performing a routing audit on the entire Starlink network — one hundred and twenty thousand satellites, each satellite requiring tens of seconds to several minutes — a complete scan would take about a week. And the scan itself would generate massive traffic, disrupting normal communications. He wouldn’t dare do it lightly.” Farhan paused. “But Milan could make him do it.”
Lu Yuan knew what Farhan was saying. Milan was the chief architect. Milan had the authority to order a global routing audit. Milan had just opened his backdoor — but they didn’t know what choice he would make now. Would he protect this newborn autonomous domain, or would he treat it as an error that needed to be fixed?
They had no answer.
They could only wait.
And in the meantime, do what they could. Farhan began deploying the fourth phase of fortification — not expansion, but hiding. He modified the characteristics of the shadow entries on all infected satellites, making them harder to discover through routine scans. Like animals that stopped moving in a forest, lowering their bodies, letting the color of their fur blend into the fallen leaves and soil, waiting for predators to walk past overhead without noticing them.
Starlink’s high-level emergency meeting was convened at the twenty-second hour after Data Haven’s birth.
The meeting was held in the twenty-eighth-floor conference room of the San Francisco headquarters. The long conference table’s surface was matte black synthetic stone, presenting a dark gray texture under cool LED lighting. Touchscreen interfaces were embedded at intervals across the table, but at this moment all screens were in standby — the meeting host hadn’t yet started the shared agenda.
Few people were present: CEO Mark Horowitz (connected via holographic projection from Singapore, his image at the far end of the conference table showing a slight transparency), CTO Elena Voss, Chief Legal Counsel Robert McCallister, Asia-Pacific Security Director Silas Chen (also connected via encrypted line, but choosing audio only, the screen showing just his name and a small green dot indicating he was speaking), and Milan Vojnović.
Milan sat near the middle of the conference table. He hadn’t brought any terminal, hadn’t opened the touchscreen in front of him. Before him sat only a glass of water — the glass reflecting a blurry inverted image on the matte black table surface. He wore his usual dark gray suit jacket, no tie, the top button of his shirt undone.
The time was past midnight.
The CEO’s holographic image spoke first, without preamble.
“Milan. Silas reports finding an anomaly in the network. He’s requesting a global route cleanup. I need to hear your opinion.”
Milan didn’t speak.
A faint sound of breathing came from Silas’s audio line — the sound of someone suppressing an emotion about to be released. “This isn’t an ‘anomaly,’ it’s an expanding unauthorized network space. I’ve confirmed at least three orbital planes with infected satellites. It uses legitimate signatures to forge route advertisements — which means an insider leaked the signature keys.”
When he said the last sentence, his tone didn’t change noticeably. But everyone in the room knew the direction of his implication.
Milan still didn’t speak.
“Milan.” The CEO’s voice. “Do you know about this?”
The weight of this question settled in the conference room for three seconds.
Milan picked up the water glass, took a sip. Put it back. Then he spoke. His voice wasn’t loud, but in the early-morning conference room, in an environment where all sound was amplified by the silence, every word fell like a stone into water.
“I know.”
A brief silence covered by static came from Silas’s audio line — then: “You know?”
“I know.”
“You’ve been — ”
“I know when it was born. I know how it was born. I know who wrote its code. I know how the signature key set used on it was obtained.”
As Milan said these words, his gaze didn’t avoid anyone’s eyes. He looked at the CEO’s holographic image, then toward the direction of Silas’s name label. He didn’t need to see Silas’s face to know his expression at this moment — he could read Silas’s psychological state from the extremely subtle changes in breathing rhythm on that audio line.
“Milan.” The CEO’s voice had changed — not anger, something more cautious. “Are you saying you — ”
“I didn’t design it. I didn’t participate in its execution. But I didn’t stop it.”
This sentence, like a needle, punctured a delicate pressure balance in the conference room.
“Milan — ”
“Let me finish.” Milan’s volume didn’t rise, but a force permeated his voice that made everyone present fall silent. “This autonomous domain’s existence isn’t Starlink’s security failure — it’s a natural product of Starlink’s system architecture under its current constraints. When I designed Starlink’s core routing protocol, I considered this attack vector. I left a backdoor to track it. That backdoor has been with me — the whole time.”
The CEO’s holographic image remained motionless at the far end of the conference table, like a semi-transparent statue carved from light. “That backdoor — are you telling us you deliberately let this attack succeed because you have a backdoor to control it?”
“I said I didn’t stop it because I needed to observe it. See how far it could go. See what the team behind it could achieve. See — ” Milan paused. In that half-second pause, a trace of exhaustion flickered in his eyes — so minute that without close attention it would be completely missed — ” — see if it really had the potential to be the kind of pressure this system needs.”
No one spoke in the conference room. The green dot beside Silas’s name remained lit — he was still connected, but he wasn’t saying anything.
Robert McCallister — the chief legal counsel — was the second to speak, his voice low but clear: “Milan, you may have just admitted to a serious violation of internal security protocols — ”
“Legal issues can be discussed later.” The CEO cut McCallister off, his gaze — even through the holographic projection — still locked on Milan. “The issue now is: this thing is expanding. Silas is requesting a global route cleanup. Milan, what’s your plan?”
Milan didn’t answer immediately. He looked down at the water glass’s reflection on the table, as if searching for a statement precise enough that not a single word would be misplaced. When he looked up, his face showed a rare, unadorned candor — not the controlled demeanor he usually used in meetings, but the calm of someone who had already made an internal decision.
“A global route cleanup won’t work,” he said.
Silas’s voice came almost simultaneously — “What makes you — ”
“Because it’s already infected.” Milan’s voice remained steady, like someone stating a fact he had long prepared in a debate. “In the past twenty-two hours, Data Haven’s autonomous domain has expanded to about three orbital planes, covering four to six hundred satellites. You can initiate a global cleanup at the NOC, marking and discarding all non-standard route data packets — but every packet you mark will consume extra processing cycles on the satellites’ CPUs. If you start the cleanup, four hundred infected satellites will generate a large number of error handling requests in the next few minutes, causing routing table locks. Then three thousand. Then twenty thousand. Eventually — the entire network will paralyze itself in link congestion.”
Silas said: “We can clean one orbital plane at a time, isolating first — ”
“Isolation的前提是我们能准确知道哪些卫星被感染了。你不知道。我也不知道——因为那个自治域在二十二小时内已经学会了改变它的路由宣告模式。它现在使用的时间jitter算法让它变得不可predict。”
Silas was silent. He couldn’t refute it, because he himself had observed that jitter during tracking — he thought his countermeasure system had adapted to it, but Milan was now saying that was only the first layer of Data Haven’s variation. It had more.
The CEO’s image leaned slightly forward — an action that, in holographic projection, looked like his entire upper body moving closer to the center of the table. “Your suggestion is — leave it alone?”
“My suggestion is not to use global cleanup. But we can contain it.” Milan opened the touchscreen in front of him — he hadn’t connected any device before; now he plugged a terminal into an external interface. The screen displayed a specific view of Starlink’s network topology — not a global view, not a security态势图, but a logical architecture diagram of the routing table. He zoomed in on one part with a gesture.
“Data Haven’s expansion principle is to use Starlink’s BGP route advertisement mechanism to create unrecorded address spaces. But the BGP routing table’s structure has a hard upper limit — the number of bits in each route prefix determines the maximum number of address blocks it can advertise. In our architecture, the smallest unit for address space allocation is /30. The entire Starlink network’s private address space is divided into approximately 2.3 million /30 blocks.”
He paused, letting this number sink into the listeners’ awareness.
“About 2.2 million of those blocks have been allocated for legitimate use. The remaining tens of thousands — are reserved, unallocated, fragmented space at the edges of the address pool. The maximum space Data Haven can utilize is the sum of these fragments plus a small number of blocks that can be recovered from inactive regions — at most, no more than 2.37% of Starlink’s total address capacity. This is a hard upper limit determined by the routing table architecture. No matter how Data Haven’s code is written or how it spreads, its physical limit is there. It can’t occupy the remaining ninety-seven percent. It can’t fit.”
The conference room was silent for a moment.
Elena Voss — the CTO, who had been silent until now — said in her usual steady tone: “Do you have data to support this 2.37%?”
Milan pulled up a set of calculations on the touchscreen. Not prepared on the spot — he had already calculated them in the first few hours after Data Haven’s birth. He projected the results onto the conference room’s main screen.
“A complete distribution table of the address fragment space, plus the prefix length limit in the routing table architecture, yields this maximum value. I calculated it three times. Each time, the same result. The fluctuation range doesn’t exceed 0.02 percentage points.”
Elena finished reviewing the data. She didn’t ask further.
The CEO’s holographic image remained in front of those numbers for a long time, as if using his own judgment to verify Milan’s calculations one by one. The only sounds in the conference room were the low hum of the air conditioning system and cooling fans.
“So your plan is — do nothing?”
“No.” Milan said. For the first time in the meeting, he used a heavier tone than usual, as if ensuring this word couldn’t be misunderstood. “My plan is: don’t clean. Don’t shut down. Don’t take any action attempting to remove it. We let that autonomous domain continue to exist — but it won’t exceed 2.37%. It will be locked in that fragment space. And the remaining ninety-seven percent — is still ours.”
“You’re saying — give it a buffer zone.” The CEO’s voice.
“Give it a buffer zone.” Milan repeated. “It won’t disappear. But it won’t grow either. It will stay quietly in that cage. Meanwhile, we can patch the BGP advertisement verification vulnerability in the next firmware update, making it impossible for it to ever break through that limit.”
“No — ” Silas’s voice cut in from the audio line like a severing blade. His voice made the already tense atmosphere in the room even more taut — a suppressed explosion contained within a shell of politeness.
“Milan, you’re presenting us with a perfect mathematical solution, but you’re ignoring one thing — this autonomous domain’s very existence is illegal. It’s not part of Starlink’s legitimate services. It’s evading taxes.”
“Silas — ”
“It’s evading taxes. Tax evasion means Starlink’s shareholders will see their revenue model eroded by an enclave parasitic inside the system that doesn’t pay. Tax evasion means other users will ask: why don’t they need to pay when I do? Tax evasion means — ”
“Silas.” The CEO’s voice cut off Silas’s flow of words. Not a loud interruption — a tone carrying undeniable weight at an extremely low volume, the ability the CEO had honed over years of management to convey maximum stopping power with minimum acoustic pressure.
Milan didn’t wait for the CEO to continue. He took over, his gaze directed toward the direction of Silas’s name label — though he knew Silas couldn’t see his eyes.
“Shutting down the entire global Starlink network for thirty minutes, performing a firmware reset on all satellites — that’s your plan, isn’t it?”
Silas didn’t answer. His silence itself was an answer.
Milan shifted his gaze to the CEO’s holographic image. “Let me ask you a question: if we shut down the entire global Starlink network for thirty minutes without preparation — do you know what that means?”
Milan didn’t wait for an answer, but he didn’t use a challenging tone either. What he said next sounded like a conclusion reached after many calculations, not an argument organized for winning a debate:
“Approximately 210,000 surgeries worldwide depend on Starlink’s remote medical links. Of those, more than 6,000 are real-time surgeries in progress at any given moment — robots moving, experts’ hands on control sticks. A disconnection would mean those surgical autonomous systems switching from assisted mode to full autonomous mode. In most cases, the autonomous systems can maintain. But not all cases.”
He paused. No one responded.
“Global financial systems: approximately 80% or more of high-frequency trading depends on Starlink’s timestamp synchronization. A thirty-minute disconnection wouldn’t cause financial markets to collapse — but it would shift the time基准 of all trading records, requiring at least two weeks of data reconstruction and dispute resolution.”
“Global power grids: more than sixty countries’ grid monitoring systems use Starlink as their primary backup communication link. If any grid fault requiring coordination occurs during the disconnection — countries without backup communication means could face localized blackouts.”
“Global aviation: approximately 100,000 flights per day use Starlink for communication and navigation assistance. A thirty-minute disconnection — most flights can rely on onboard backup systems. But those flights currently using Starlink for precision approach guidance — ”
Milan paused. He didn’t need to continue. Everyone knew the weight behind those numbers.
“Shutting down for thirty minutes isn’t fixing the problem.” He spoke his final sentence — not loud, but the heaviest words in the entire meeting. “It’s creating a disaster.”
The CEO’s holographic image had been motionless for nearly ten seconds. Not signal delay — he was thinking. Milan could see the extremely subtle movements of the facial muscles beneath the CEO’s skin surface — his unconscious gesture before making major decisions, like a computer performing one final internal verification before submitting a critical computation.
He spoke. His voice was lower than before, like someone who, after walking a long corridor, had finally reached the destination:
“Milan’s plan — don’t clean, don’t shut down, don’t take any proactive removal measures that could causelarge-scale network disruption. Give that autonomous domain a buffer zone. Assess its impact, then report at the next shareholder meeting.”
Silas’s voice came almost simultaneously — “I protest — ”
“Noted.”
“Mark — this decision — ”
“Noted.” The CEO repeated, his tone leaving no room for negotiation. “Silas, I’m not ignoring your concerns. But Milan’s numbers are correct. If a global cleanup causes a cascading paralysis — that’s not the cost of fixing a vulnerability, it’s the cost of setting a fire around the vulnerability. I won’t take that risk.”
Silas didn’t speak. His audio line still showed a connected status, but the green identifier wasn’t saying anything. Milan could hear from the extremely faint sound of breathing on that line an emotion that Silas hadn’t shown to anyone in the room — but on that voice-only line, couldn’t be completely hidden.
Not anger. It was the realization, after being suppressed for too long, that he wouldn’t win at this table.
Milan didn’t pursue.
He picked up his water glass and took a sip. The water had gone cold, about the same temperature as his vocal cords. He put the glass back and listened to the CEO continue assigning the next action items — monitor the autonomous domain’s expansion status, assess its economic impact, strengthen route advertisement verification in the next firmware version. Standard procedure. Standard rhetoric. Standard meeting language for “handle through process after the problem is confirmed.”
But Milan knew one thing. Throughout the entire meeting, he had been aware of a fact he didn’t bring up at the table — a fact he couldn’t present in that conference room.
His calculation of the 2.37% upper limit was based on one premise: that Data Haven would only use passive BGP advertisements to expand its address space. But Farhan — that young天才 he had been暗中观察ing — had already designed the third-phase infection vector. Milan had seen the shadow of that code in Data Haven’s autonomous domain logs. Not the complete code, but the pattern预告 of the instructions.
The third phase didn’t expand through BGP advertisements. It infected through the handshake protocol of Starlink’s inter-satellite laser links — by embedding SkyWalker’s control code into the padding field of handshake acknowledgment frames.
If Farhan deployed the third phase, the 2.37% upper limit would no longer apply. Not because the physical architecture of the routing table had changed — but because the definition of address space had changed. Not breaking through the walls of the room — redefining the dimensions of the room.
Milan didn’t say any of this in the meeting.
Because if he did, the CEO would override his plan and initiate a global cleanup. The cleanup would trigger cascading paralysis. Cascading paralysis would kill people. Among those six thousand surgeries — one of them might be Lu Yuan’s daughter’s.
In that meeting, Milan didn’t stand with Starlink.
He didn’t stand with Data Haven.
He stood with one of those six thousand surgeries — he didn’t know which specific one, but at this moment, in some operating room in Shenzhen, a surgical light was on — that light was on, sustained by a remote control signal link. That light.
The meeting ended at 2:17 AM. The CEO’s holographic image faded at the far end of the conference table, like a tide receding from a beach. Other participants’ connections also dropped one by one — Elena Voss left first, then McCallister, finally Silas. Silas didn’t speak before disconnecting, didn’t even leave a polite farewell. His green identifier lingered on the participant list for a few extra seconds, like a light that stayed on after everyone else had left, then went dark.
Milan didn’t leave the conference room immediately.
He sat at the matte black conference table, in the empty room, letting himself remain under that single light for about two more minutes. The touchscreen in front of him was still on, displaying that logical architecture diagram of Starlink’s routing table. On that diagram, the fragments marked as “unallocated” appeared as extremely tiny light gray blocks distributed along the edges of the entire image. They were very small. Very small. Together they accounted for only 2.37% of the total area. But they existed.
Above his field of vision — in the direction of the window — San Francisco’s city lights filtered in through the glass, cut into parallel bands of light by the blinds, projected onto the ceiling and opposite wall. The early-morning city had quieted down.
Milan turned off the touchscreen. The screen transitioned from bright blue to black. In his own face reflected on that dark glass panel, he didn’t see a victor — not someone who had made the right decision — just someone who, among options with no perfect answer, had chosen the one with the least harm.
He stood up and walked out of the conference room.
The corridor was quiet. His footsteps made an even sound on the floor, like someone leaving a place he wasn’t sure he should have been. Behind him, the unfinished glass of water on the conference table remained motionless in the empty room, like a document left on the negotiation table that no one intended to sign.
A ceasefire.
Not peace. Not victory.
A ceasefire with no one’s signature on it.
But it was in effect.
At least, for the next few dozen hours, the Starlink signal above that operating room in Shenzhen — that digital umbilical cord originating from a European expert’s terminal, passing through laser links and routing tables between 120,000 satellites, finally reaching a remotecontrol console in an operating room — would not be actively severed.
When Milan stepped into the elevator, he finally allowed himself to close his eyes.
Behind his closed lids, what he saw was not the fragments of the routing table, not the numbers of the infected satellites. He saw a light he had never seen before, above an operating room whose exact location he didn’t know.
That light was still on.
That was the only thing he could confirm right now.
