The world didn't end with a bang, but with a silent, irrevocable un-writing.
Kaelen's command—"Sever them."—was not a request. It was a declaration of law, enforced by the Echo of a Precursor Fleetmaster who had once scoured entire star systems of a similar infestation.
The Axiom mech complied.
There was no weapon discharge. No flash of light. No sound.
The lead marine, the one holding the neural restraints, simply… partitioned. A vertical line of nothingness appeared from the crown of his helmet to the floor between his boots. For a nanosecond, he was two separate, perfect halves of a man. Then, the horrific physics of sudden bisection took over in a spray of atomized armor and biological matter.
The other marines stared, their training shattered by the incomprehensible horror. They opened fire.
Plasma bolts and hypersonic slugs crossed the short distance to the Axiom mech—and ceased to exist the moment they touched the invisible field of altered reality that haloed it. The field expanded, a bubble of absolute authority.
It touched a marine. The woman's scream was cut short as her legs were severed from her torso at the thighs, the limbs dropping to the floor with a metallic clatter while the rest of her hung in the air for a moment before collapsing.
It was not an attack. It was an editing of existence. The Axiom field defined a new law: The space occupied by the hostile organisms is null.
Kaelen watched, his body frozen on his knees. The Fleetmaster's Echo held him in a grip of ice-cold clarity. He felt no rage, no disgust, no triumph. He observed the tactical efficiency of the mech's function with the detached interest of a scholar reviewing data. The marines were not people; they were variables in an equation being solved. Eliminated.
It was over in less than three seconds.
The bubble retracted. Silence returned to the archive chamber, thicker and heavier than before. The air smelled of ozone, scorched metal, and copper.
The Echo of the Fleetmaster receded, its purpose fulfilled.
The return to his own mind was a violent crash. The cold clarity vanished, replaced by a wave of nausea and a psychic recoil so severe he vomited onto the pristine floor. His head felt like it had been split open. He gasped, trembling, trying to wipe his mouth with a shaking hand.
He looked at the carnage. The pieces. The things that had been people moments before. His stomach lurched again.
MEMORY FRAGMENT [ECHO OF THE FLEETMASTER] ASSIMILATED.
PSIONIC INTEGRITY AT 76%.
COST: [The memory of his first kiss, and the name of the girl it belonged to.]
The loss was a double punch to his soul. A warm, fuzzy memory from his adolescence—the nervous sweat, the beating heart, the sweet, awkward press of lips—was gone. Erased. In its place was the sterile, tactical memory of how to most efficiently dissect a target.
He had traded a milestone of his humanity for a lesson in butchery.
A weak, shimmering light drew his attention. The Curator. Its form was flickering erratically, like a dying hologram.
"The… breach… has been contained,"
Its voice whispered in his mind, faint and fraying.
"But the… disturbance… is registered. More will come."
Kaelen pushed himself to his feet, his legs barely supporting him.
"The archive… I saw something. In the data. A cure. A contingency plan."
The Curator's light pulsed weakly.
"The… Omega Axiom. A theoretical reversal. A command to restore a default state to localized reality. To… un-write the changes."
Hope, desperate and frail, sparked.
"Could it restore what I've lost? My memories?"
"The Omega Axiom is not a tool for personal salvation. Its scale is… catastrophic. Its purpose was to reset a battlefield, to undo the horrific reality-warping mutations of the Hive. To use it is to risk a cascade failure in the fabric of spacetime itself. It was never activated. Only theorized."
The Curator's form began to dissolve into motes of light.
"The data you seek… the core schematics… are not here. They were divided for safekeeping. One fragment was sent to the last great Precursor stronghold. A world now dead. A tomb guarded by the Hive's most evolved and terrible creations."
"Where?"
Kaelen begged, stumbling toward the fading light.
"Tell me where!"
"Find the… Cradle of the Hive…"
The Curator's voice was a ghost of a whisper.
"The world where we first made our mistake. The source of the corruption. The answers lie in the heart of the nightmare. But to go there is madness."
The light of the Curator flickered one last time and went out. The crystalline plinth turned dark and inert. The star charts on the walls vanished, leaving only blank, dead metal.
The archive was silent. The Curator was gone. Kaelen was alone again, standing amid the gore of the men and women he had killed, his mind stained with the knowledge of a dead race and the cold, precise memory of how he had done it.
The weight of it all crushed down on him. He sank back to his knees, not in submission, but in utter exhaustion. He was a murderer. A thief of his own past. A pilot of a doomsday weapon on a quest for a cure that might not exist, leading him to the most dangerous place in the galaxy.
A soft chime echoed in the silence of the hangar, transmitted from the Axiom mech.
Incoming Wide-Band Transmission. Source: Galactic Federation Battleship Judgment of Cygnus. Priority: Omega.
They knew. They had lost their team. And they were not sending another.
Kaelen looked up as the transmission played, not through the mech, but through the station's dead comms, a voice of cold, imperial fury.
"Unidentified hostile. You have slain Federation citizens and claimed technology under the Domain of Mankind. Your actions are declared those of a rogue entity. A price is now on your head. All Guilds, all Mercenary bands, all Planetary Defense Forces are hereby authorized to use lethal force. You are anathema. You are damnatio memoriae. Erased from record. Hunted without quarter. There is no harbor for you. There is no salvation. Only a waiting grave."
The transmission ended, leaving a deeper silence in its wake.
Damnatio memoriae. The condemnation of memory. The irony was so bitter he could taste it.
They had erased him. Just as he was erasing himself.
He was alone. Hunted by the entire human civilization. Piloting a weapon that consumed his soul. On a quest to the most forbidden world in existence.
The hunger in his mind stirred, patient and eager.
Kaelen Vance looked at the dark plinth, then at the dead marines, and finally inward, at the empty spaces where precious things used to be.
He had no home to return to. No past to cherish. His only purpose was the next step. The next fragment. The next memory to burn.
He rose. His face, reflected in the dark glass of the dead viewscreen, was no longer that of a young academic. It was harder. Older. His eyes held the grim light of the Fleetmaster's Echo and the deep sorrow of the Guardian.
He walked back toward the hangar, toward the waiting god-machine. His steps were slow, but they did not falter.
His voice, when he finally gave the command, was quiet. Flat. Resigned to the terrible calculus of his new existence.
"Set a course"
He said, climbing back into the crystalline nexus. The interface embraced him, the symphony of the universe flooding his senses once more.
"For the Cradle."