The universe was a symphony, and Kaelen Vance was suddenly, terrifyingly, its conductor.
The Axiom mech—his mech—was not a machine to be piloted. It was a body to be worn, a senses to be experienced. He didn't see through a viewscreen; he was the viewscreen. The torn-open hull of the Oblivion's Span, the glinting menace of the Chimeran boarding pod, the infinite star-dusted blackness beyond—it all flooded into his consciousness with a clarity that was dizzying. He could feel the subtle pull of the nearby moon's gravity, the minute thermal expansion of the mech's own hull, the silent scream of the vacuum.
"Vance! What did you do?!" Roric's voice was a shrill, digital spike in the new, vast ocean of his perception. "The whole damn graveyard just lit up on my scopes! I'm reading a power signature from your location that looks like a small star going critical! And the Chimerans—they've seen it too! They're breaking off from the derelict and coming straight for you!"
Kaelen tried to form words, to tell Roric to run, but his mouth was no longer his primary means of communication. His intent was the command.
The thought
Axiom-01 moved.
It was not the thunderous, gear-grinding lurch of a Federation mech. It was a silent, terrifyingly graceful uncoiling. The petrified stone that had encased it for millennia shattered away like a shell, revealing a chassis of polished, living metal that drank the starlight. It rose from its tomb, and the wreckage around it groaned in protest.
The Chimeran pod reacted instantly. It was a grotesque thing, a fusion of insectoid carapace and exposed, pulsing biomechanical muscle. A plasma cannon, grown organically from its hull, swiveled and glowed a malevolent green.
A warning shiver ran through Kaelen's new senses—a premonition of incoming destructive energy. Instinct, both his and the mech's, took over.
The Axiom mech didn't jump. It simply... drifted to the side. Space itself seemed to flex around it, propelling it clear of the searing lance of plasma that vaporized the spot where it had just stood.
He was thinking too small. This wasn't a scholarship debate; this was a fight for survival. The pod was reorienting, its cannon recharging. He needed a weapon. His eyes—the mech's myriad sensors—scanned the debris field. A shard of the Oblivion's Span's hull, a girder twenty meters long and sharpened to a point by the ancient explosion, floated nearby.
The thought was a command. A compartment on the mech's forearm irised open. A beam of coherent light, faintly gold, lanced out and enveloped the girder. With another thought, Kaelen willed it closer. The mech's hand closed around the makeshift spear.
The Chimeran pod fired again. This time, Kaelen didn't evade.
The memory of the vision slammed into him. The silent, righteous fury of the Precursor pilot. Her determination. Her sorrow. It was an Echo.
It wasn't a memory he recalled; it was a memory he wore. His consciousness synced with the ghost in the machine. His fear was burned away, replaced by a cold, ancient certainty.
The Axiom mech moved with a skill that was not his own. It brought the girder-spear around in a perfect, economical arc. The plasma bolt struck the spinning metal and splashed harmlessly against it, dissipating into void.
The Echo showed him the opening. The pod was overconfident, its systems momentarily taxed from the double discharge.
The Axiom mech thrust the spear.
It was not a brute-force impact. In the fraction of a second before contact, the mech's hand glowed, and a field of altered physics enveloped the spear's tip. The Chimeran pod's adaptive armor, designed to dissipate energy and redistribute kinetic force, did nothing. The Axiom field treated it as if it weren't there.
The girder punched through the pod's core like a needle through a blister.
There was no explosion. Just a violent, silent release of internal atmosphere and biological slurry that flash-froze into a grotesque cloud. The pod's lights died. It was dead, a bug on a pin.
Silence. Or the closest thing to it in the vacuum.
Kaelen's connection to the Echo shattered. The cold certainty vanished, and he was just a man again, trembling inside a god-machine. Nausea washed over him. He felt a profound emptiness, as if a part of his own mind had been scooped out and used as fuel.
"By the bleeding stars..." Roric whispered, awe and terror warring in his voice. "Vance... what are you?"
Kaelen opened his mouth to answer, but a new alarm shrieked through his consciousness. Not from Roric. From the Axiom mech itself.
WARNING: PSIONIC INTEGRITY AT 82%.
LOCALIZED REALITY COHERENCE RESTORED.
MEMORY FRAGMENT [ECHO OF THE GUARDIAN] ASSIMILATED. COST: [REDACTED].
Memory fragment? Cost?
Before he could process it, the larger Chimeran vessels on the edge of the graveyard began to move. They had seen the death of their scout. They were coming. Not to scavenge. To exterminate.
"Roric, get out of here!" Kaelen yelled, the words finally finding their way out.
"Damn right I am! They'll be on you in seconds! Don't expect a funeral, you lunatic!"
The commlink cut out. Kaelen was alone.
The dread was paralyzing. He was a scholar, not a soldier. He had one Echo, and using it had felt like having his soul sandblasted. He couldn't fight a fleet.
The mech inquired again, its presence in his mind patient, relentless, and utterly alien.
He looked at the approaching fleet, a swarm of biological nightmares against the stars. He looked at the dead pod on his makeshift spear. He felt the hollow ache in his mind where the Echo had been.
His Command wasn't a warrior's cry this time. It was a whisper, a plea, the only thing he had left.
"Run."
The Axiom mech obeyed.
It didn't turn and fire thrusters. The space around it rippled. The stars stretched into lines. The derelict graveyard blurred into a smear of grey and black. With a silent, reality-bending lurch, Axiom-01 punched a hole in the fabric of space-time and was gone.
The transition was not the nauseating plunge of a Federation FTL drive. It was instantaneous. One moment, certain death. The next...
Silence.
Empty space. A different sector. A different star, small and red, hung in the distance.
The adrenaline faded, leaving a bone-deep exhaustion and a throbbing headache centered behind his eyes. He tried to remember the face of the Precursor pilot from the vision. It was fuzzy, indistinct. He tried to recall the specific feeling of her resolve. It was fading, like a dream upon waking.
A cold realization settled in his gut.
MEMORY FRAGMENT [ECHO OF THE GUARDIAN] ASSIMILATED. COST: [REDACTED].
The cost wasn't energy. It wasn't fuel.
It was him.
Every time he used an Echo, it burned away a piece of his own memory, his own identity, replacing it with the ghost of a dead pilot. To wield the power of a god, he had to erase himself.
Alone in the dark, at the controls of the most powerful weapon in human history, Kaelen Vance, the man who sought to uncover the past, faced a terrible future: to save humanity, he might have to sacrifice everything that made him human.