Silence.
It was the first true silence Kaelen had experienced since brushing the petrified metal. Not the passive silence of the void, but an active, deafening quiet in his own mind. The symphony of the mech's senses had receded to a low hum. The ghostly presence of the Echo was gone, leaving only a hollow, psychic ache in its place.
He was floating in a nameless star system, a speck of impossible technology adrift in a sea of infinite black. The red dwarf star painted the cockpit's interior—no, the nexus's interior—in a dim, bloody light.
He tried to focus, to assess his situation. Fuel. Navigation. Life support. The standard checklist of any pilot lost in the deep black. But Axiom-01 had no such readouts. It had only a state of being. It was… whole. Its power was innate, not measured in joules or liters of reaction mass. It was a cup that could not be emptied, yet using it came with a price far more personal.
The warning echoed in his mind: Psionic Integrity at 82%.
What did that even mean? He thought of the Echo, the cold, flawless skill that had flowed through him. The certainty. He tried to recall the exact feeling of the Precursor pilot's resolve, the texture of her memory.
It was… fuzzy. Like trying to remember a dream from a week ago. The broad strokes were there—the sorrow, the purpose—but the details, the visceral feel of her consciousness, were erased. Smoothed away.
A cold knot of dread tightened in his stomach. The cost wasn't abstract. It was a transaction. A piece of a dead woman's memory for a piece of his own.
A chime, soft and melodic, resonated through the nexus. It was not an alarm. It was an alert. A notification.
Passive Sensor Sweep Detected. Origin: Galactic Federation Signature. Designation: Long-Range Scout Vessel *Whisper-4*. Distance: 0.3 AU.
Kaelen's blood ran cold. The Federation. They were everywhere, the long arm of a military desperate for any advantage. Their sensors would be calibrated to detect the anomalous energy signatures of Chimeran tech. What would they make of him?
He willed the mech to hide, to cloak, to do something. The Axiom mech responded not with action, but with information. A schematic of the local space appeared in his mind. The scout vessel was on a routine patrol vector. It hadn't seen him yet. Its sweep was broad, unfocused.
But it would be. Soon.
He had to move. But where? He was a historian, not a navigator. The star charts he knew were ancient Precursor relic maps, not modern Federation astrogation data.
Think, Kaelen, think! He mentally reached for the memory of a specific cartographic archive on Cygnus Prime, a room he'd spent countless hours in during his Academy days. He needed the reference point, the spatial coordinates for a quiet, unclaimed system where he could breathe and think.
The memory wouldn't come.
He could picture the room—the smell of old data-slates, the glow of the holographic projectors. But the star charts themselves? The specific coordinates of the Rimward Fringe systems? They were… blank. A blur of static where precise data should have been.
Psionic Integrity: 81%.
A whimper escaped his lips. It wasn't just the Echo's memory he'd lost. It was his own. The Axiom had burned a piece of him away to power itself. The most specific, most recently accessed knowledge… gone.
Panic, pure and undiluted, began to set in. He was lost, hunted, and sitting in a machine that consumed his very mind to function.
The melodic chime turned into a sharp, urgent pulse.
Scout Vessel *Whisper-4* Altering Course. Active Targeting Scans Initiated. They have detected residual Axiom Energy Signature.
On the schematic in his mind, the scout vessel turned. A piercing, invisible lance of active sensors began painting space, searching for the source of the anomaly. It was only a matter of seconds.
The mech's presence was calm, patient, and utterly inhuman. It did not care about his panic, his loss. It was a tool waiting to be used.
He had no Roric to scream at. No Academy to curse. There was only the void, the hunter, and the god-machine that was eating him alive.
The active scan washed over him. Alarms blared in the scout vessel's frequency, a scream of panic and confusion they broadcasted on an open channel. They had found him. They saw the power signature, and it terrified them. Their weapons systems—light railguns and point-defense lasers—powered up. A standard challenge and detain protocol.
They thought he was a thing to be captured. A weapon to be claimed.
They had no idea what they were truly pointing their guns at.
The fear in Kaelen's mind crystallized into something harder. Something colder. They weren't here to talk. They were here to take. To take the one thing he had left, the one answer to the questions that had defined his life.
He wouldn't let them.
He reached out, not into the void, but into himself. Into the hollow ache where the first Echo had been. He groped for another memory, another ghost in the machine. He didn't want to fight. He just wanted to be gone.
A new memory stirred. Not the resolved sorrow of the Guardian. This was different. Sharper. Angrier. A flash of a billion shattered data-streams, a network screaming as it was severed.
An Echo of Severance.
The Axiom mech's energy veins flared, burning not gold, but a blinding, actinic white.
The Federation scout vessel locked on. A railgun slug, a projectile moving at a fraction of lightspeed, was fired.
Kaelen didn't speak. He simply was the command.
The world didn't ripple. It fractured. Space between the mech and the incoming projectile didn't bend. It was severed. The railgun slug ceased to exist in the same dimensional plane as him. One moment it was there, the next, it was not.
The Axiom field expanded, a silent, invisible wave. It touched the scout vessel's communications array.
The open channel of panicked alarms didn't just go silent. It was erased from existence. Every record of his energy signature, every byte of sensor data they had gathered on him, was surgically excised from their systems. It was digital amnesia on a cosmic scale.
On the bridge of the *Whisper-4*, the crew would be staring at their suddenly blank scopes, their heads filled with a collective, unshakable feeling that they had just forgotten something vitally important.
Kaelen didn't wait. He poured his will, his fear, and his anger into the command.
"Run. Far."
The Axiom mech complied. Reality bent, twisted, and tore.
As the familiar, soul-wrenching lurch of the jump took him, a new message seared itself across his fading consciousness.
MEMORY FRAGMENT [ECHO OF SEVERANCE] ASSIMILATED.
PSIONIC INTEGRITY AT 79%.
COST: [The memory of his mother's face.]
The void swallowed him whole, and Kaelen Vance screamed into the silence, alone with the terrifying knowledge of what he had just lost.