The universe was filled with the silent screams of dying stars and dying men.
From inside the cockpit of the repurposed asteroid miner he was forced to call a mecha, Wei Chen could hear both.
Alarms wailed a high, piercing keen, a symphony of failure he had become intimately familiar with. The main viewport, a lattice of spiderwebbed cracks, flickered between the void of space and the incandescent fury of the battle. Outside, emerald and crimson lances of plasma fire crisscrossed the darkness, erasing warships and mecha from existence in silent, blossoming explosions.
Pain was a constant, unwelcome companion. A piece of shrapnel was embedded in his left thigh, and every slight movement sent a fresh, searing wave of agony up his side. His flight suit was slick with his own blood, the metallic tang of it thick in the recycled air. He was thirty years old, though he felt a thousand. Ten of those years had been spent as property.
[WARNING: HULL INTEGRITY AT 12%. OXYGEN RESERVES AT 18%. REACTOR CORE UNSTABLE.]
The synthesized voice of the machine was calm, clinical, a stark contrast to the chaos it was reporting. Unstable. A gentle word for 'about to detonate'.
His callsign, etched onto his console by his own hand, was 'Ghost-734'. The 'Ghost' was his own addition, a small act of defiance. The number was all his masters had given him. He was the 734th slave pilot assigned to this scrap-heap unit. He had outlasted the last three. A meaningless record in a meaningless war.
He gritted his teeth, forcing his blood-slick glove to grip the control yoke. His machine, a pathetic, lumbering hulk the K'tharr called a "Scrapper," barely responded. Its joints screamed in protest as he threw it into a desperate evasive roll, a massive bolt of energy passing just meters from his cockpit. The heat flash momentarily overwhelmed the viewport's filters, bathing him in blinding white light.
"All Scrappers, advance on the Vorlag dreadnought! For the glory of the K'tharr Empire!" the voice of his commander, a guttural roar laced with contempt, crackled through the comms.
Wei Chen let out a choked, bitter laugh that turned into a wet cough. Glory. There was no glory here. There was only servitude. The K'tharr, the insectoid race that had shattered Earth's sky a decade ago, were fighting the Vorlag, a silicon-based crystalline race, over a barren sector of space that held a rare gas deposit. Humans, with their fast reflexes and adaptable nature, were considered prime slave-pilot material—resilient enough to be useful, disposable enough not to be missed.
He was a slave fighting a war for his masters against their enemies. The winner didn't matter. His chains would remain.
Another impact rocked his mecha, and the lights in his cockpit died completely, plunging him into absolute darkness, save for the red glow of the emergency warnings.
[HULL INTEGRITY AT 4%. REACTOR CORE CRITICAL. EJECTION SYSTEM OFFLINE.]
Of course it was. The ejection systems were the first things the K'tharr stripped from the slave units. An escape pod was a luxury reserved for creatures they considered sentient.
In the suffocating darkness, with the groaning of stressed metal as his final lullaby, his mind finally broke free. The terror of the present faded, replaced by the sharper, more vivid terror of the past.
He was twenty again, standing on a street in Shanghai. He remembered the sky. It had been a perfect, cloudless blue. A gentle breeze, the smell of street food, the hum of mag-lev traffic. Normal. Everything was so beautifully, terrifyingly normal.
Then the sky burned.
It didn't happen with a gradual warning. There was no announcement. One moment, there was blue. The next, pinpricks of light appeared, swelling into crimson orbs as the K'tharr orbital fleet de-materialized from their FTL jump. The world watched in stunned silence for three seconds. Then the pillars of light descended. The world's armies, with their tanks and jets, were erased before they could even understand what they were fighting. The sound of cities dying became the new global anthem.
He remembered the fall of Beijing, broadcast on a loop by the invaders as a message of futility. He remembered the sight of the first K'tharr mecha striding through the rubble, its multi-faceted eyes glowing with cold indifference as it vaporized a fleeing bus. Humanity, the proud apex predator of its world, had become nothing more than startled prey.
His family… he squeezed his eyes shut, the memory a physical ache in his chest. He had tried to find them. In the chaos, in the burning ruins of their home, he had called their names until his throat was raw. He never saw them again. He was rounded up, branded with a searing hot iron that marked him as K'tharr property, and shipped off-world in a dark, stinking cargo hold with thousands of others.
His name was taken. His past was erased. His future became an endless cycle of servitude and battle.
But even in that darkness, there had been a flicker of light. A memory from before his capture, during the brief, hopeless weeks of the global resistance. He hadn't been a fighter then, just a scavenger trying to survive. But he saw the broadcasts. Scrambled, low-quality signals that appeared for a few minutes at a time. They were always anchored by one person.
A young woman. Her face was smudged with dirt and grease, her hair cut short for practicality. She stood before the ruins of what might have been a government building, a rifle slung over her shoulder. Her voice wasn't loud, but it was clear, cutting through the static and the fear. She spoke of defiance, not victory. Of fighting back not to win, but to show them that the soul of humanity was not for sale. Her eyes… they were a force of nature. They held no fear, only a cold, burning resolve. A quiet fury that promised a terrible price for every inch of their world.
He never even knew her name. To him, she was just a symbol of the Earth that fought back. The Earth that he had failed. He heard later, through whispers in the slave pens, that her resistance cell was eventually cornered and annihilated. Like all the others.
The groaning of his mecha intensified, pulling him from his reverie. The metal shell that had been his prison for years was now becoming his coffin.
He was going to die here. So far from home, a forgotten speck of dust in a hostile universe.
A strange sense of calm washed over him. The fear was gone, replaced by a pure, final, and absolute hatred. He couldn't kill the Vorlag dreadnought. He couldn't kill his K'tharr commander. But he could perform one last act of defiance.
Fumbling in the dark, his fingers found the manual override for the reactor's magnetic containment. It was a simple switch, designed for emergency shutdowns. But if you flipped it while the core was this unstable…
He opened a private, unmonitored comms channel, a little backdoor he'd programmed himself. It wouldn't reach far, maybe only a few kilometers. But it was his. His voice, raw and broken, rasped into the microphone.
"My name is Wei Chen," he said, speaking the name for the first time in a decade. It felt foreign on his tongue. "I am from Earth. And you can all burn in hell."
He slammed his fist down on the override switch.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, he felt it. A deep, resonant hum that vibrated up from the floor, through his bones. The reactor core, freed from its magnetic bottle, was going supernova. The red emergency lights in the cockpit flashed once, twice, and then were consumed by an impossibly brilliant, pure white light.
There was no pain. Just light. Annihilation. The feeling of being unmade, atom by atom. His consciousness, his memories, his hatred—all of it dissolved into the silent, unforgiving vacuum.
It was the end.
…wasn't it?
The nothingness was not empty.
In the silent, timeless void where his soul was supposed to scatter, a new sensation emerged. It was not light, or sound, or feeling. It was… order. A profound, intricate, and impossibly complex structure of pure information imposing itself upon the chaos of his dissolution.
It felt like being read. Every memory, every emotion, every skill he had ever learned—from the engineering basics he'd studied in university to the K'tharr mecha combat protocols he'd learned as a slave—was being scanned, cataloged, and analyzed in an infinitesimal fraction of a second.
It was not a judgment passed in words, but a silent, absolute consensus from the fabric of reality itself. His hatred, his despair, and his ferocious will to live had struck a chord in the void, an answer to a question the universe had been silently asking.
Then, the unfathomable will that had observed him made its decision. A purpose, ancient and terrifying, was imprinted onto the core of his being. He was not just being saved; he was being reforged. He was being aimed.
A wave of vertigo, of a scale beyond physical comprehension, washed over his disembodied consciousness. He felt a pull. A force, ancient and powerful, was reeling him in from the brink of oblivion, weaving the scattered threads of his soul back onto the loom of time itself. It was a violent, wrenching experience, like being forced through a pinhole. The abstract void gave way to a torrent of sensory information, a chaotic flood of light, sound, smell, and touch. It was overwhelming, agonizing.
And then, stillness.
The first thing he registered was the smell. Not the sterile, metallic scent of recycled air, but something else. Dust. Sunlight on old wood. Clean laundry.
The second was the feeling. Not the cold, hard metal of a pilot's seat, but the softness of a mattress and a thin blanket.
Wei Chen's eyes snapped open.
He wasn't in a cockpit. He was in a room. His room. His childhood bedroom. The faded posters on the wall, the worn wooden desk, the bookshelf overflowing with textbooks. It was all exactly as he remembered it from… from a lifetime ago.
Sunlight streamed through the window, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. It wasn't the harsh, unfiltered light of a distant star; it was the gentle, golden light of Earth's sun.
He scrambled out of bed, his movements clumsy, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. His legs were weak, but they worked. He looked down at his thigh. The wound was gone. His skin was smooth, unblemished. He looked at his hands. They were smaller, softer, free of the scars and calluses that had been etched into them by years of hard labor and desperate combat.
Stumbling toward the full-length mirror leaning against the wall, he stared at his reflection.
A boy of eighteen stared back.
His face was thin, almost gaunt, but it was young. So impossibly young. There were no lines of stress, no haunted look in his eyes. Just the wide-eyed confusion of a teenager.
His gaze fell to the smartphone lying on his desk. His fingers, trembling uncontrollably, reached for it. He pressed the home button. The screen lit up.
The date was displayed in crisp, white numbers at the top of the screen.
June 12th, 2025.
Ten years. Ten years before the sky would burn. Ten years before the K'tharr would arrive.
It wasn't a dream. It wasn't the afterlife.
He had been given a second chance.
The reflection in the mirror changed. The boy's confusion evaporated, replaced by a chilling storm of emotions that swirled in the depths of his eyes. There was the crushing grief of a man who had already lost everything. There was the searing, unquenchable rage of a slave who remembered his chains. And beneath it all, there was the cold, hard glint of a ghost who had returned from his grave to rewrite the future.
The world was sleeping, blissfully unaware of the apocalypse slumbering in the void between stars.
But Wei Chen was awake. And he remembered everything.