The deep null was not empty; it was a graveyard.
For four days, the stealth shuttle slipped through the darkest, quietest sectors of the fractured universe. Inside the cabin, the ambient lighting was kept low. Martha and Jax's father slept in the passenger webbing, exhausted from a lifetime of stress finally leaving their bodies. Mia spent hours with her face pressed against the thick permaglass viewport, mesmerized by the passing nebulae and shattered asteroid fields.
In the pilot's seat, Jax didn't sleep. He couldn't.
He sat with his eyes closed, his consciousness expanded far beyond the hull of the ship. He was using a fractional Tier IV Spatial-Sense, casting his Void-Sense out into the dark like a massive, invisible net, plucking at the Aetheric frequencies of the passing solar systems.
Cassian's coordinates had given him a haystack, and Jax was analyzing every single piece of hay.
Planet designate 44-Alpha. Jax's mind brushed against it. Toxic. Acid oceans. Dead.
Planet designate 89-Sigma. He probed deeper. Shattered mantle. Ambient gravity crushed by a passing Leviathan centuries ago. Dead.
Planet designate 112-Echo. His Void-Sense recoiled slightly. Crawling with Tier III Void-Scorpions. Hive-world. Dead.
He searched dozens of planets, scanning their atmospheric frequencies, looking for the telltale hum of a hidden settlement or the heavy, dense footprint of an Iron-Ant core. But he found nothing but static and cosmic dust.
Jax opened his eyes, the golden light bleeding into his brown irises. He looked at the navigation console, frustration briefly tightening his jaw.
I'm looking at this the wrong way, Jax realized, his fingers hovering over the slipstream drive. If this planet is truly a ghost-world, it wouldn't have a frequency. To the Leviathans, it's a dead rock. It wouldn't emit Aether. It would consume it.
Jax didn't look for a signal. He opened the doors to his Infinite Repository and sparked the Tier 5.5 Abyssal-Maw.
He used the absolute gluttony of the evolved worm-core not to destroy, but to listen. He scanned the sector for an absence of energy. He looked for a mathematical hole in the universe.
An hour later, the Abyssal-Maw twitched.
It was faint—a microscopic blind spot in the cosmic background radiation. A localized pocket of space where the math simply stopped. It was a perfect, spherical void of absolute null-energy.
Jax's lips curled into a fierce smile. "Got you."
He punched the coordinates into the nav-computer and pushed the throttle forward. The stealth shuttle dropped out of slipstream, ripping through the veil of the deep null.
Suddenly, the viewport was filled with the blinding, brilliant light of a yellow sun.
"Mia," Jax called out softly over his shoulder. "Wake Mom and Dad up."
Mia unbuckled her harness and scrambled over to her parents. As they blinked the sleep from their eyes and looked out the reinforced glass, Martha let out a quiet, trembling gasp.
Hanging in the blackness of space was a pristine, jewel-toned sphere of vibrant emerald greens, deep sapphire oceans, and swirling white clouds. There were no Vanguard plasma refineries choking the atmosphere. There were no syndicate orbital blockades. It was a world untouched by the apocalypse.
"Founders..." Jax's father breathed, his hand resting against the glass. "It's beautiful."
"Strap in," Jax said, a heavy knot of relief untying in his chest. "We're going down."
On the surface of the uncharted paradise, the afternoon was perfect. The coastal winds were warm, and the children in the settlement were playing in the shallow surf.
On the high cliffs overlooking the jungle, Captain Vance was using a heavy iron machete to split native coconuts for the settlement's lunch. A few feet away, Inquisitor Varos sat in peaceful meditation, the ocean breeze ruffling his simple woven shirt.
Suddenly, a sharp, piercing, high-frequency alarm shrieked from the Vanguard proximity-sensor planted in the dirt.
Varos's silver eyes snapped open. Vance dropped the machete, his relaxed posture instantly vanishing.
"Atmospheric breach," Varos stated, his voice clipping into its aristocratic, military cadence. His internal architecture flared, twenty harmonized cores waking up from their slumber. "Northern ridge. But the signature... it's faint. Ghost-faint. It's not a scavenger drop-ship."
"High-tier active camouflage," Vance grunted. The heavy, matte-grey sheen of the Tier III Iron-Ant core rapidly spread across his skin, turning his forearms into impenetrable blocks of siege-armor. "Vanguard Remnant? Or Syndicate elites?"
"It does not matter," Varos said, his silver eyes cold. "They do not land."
The two veterans sparked their movement cores, blurring through the dense jungle canopy toward the designated landing zone.
They reached a wide, natural clearing just as the air above the trees began to ripple and distort. The cloaking matrix of the stealth shuttle deactivated, revealing a sleek, unmarked black hull descending rapidly on repulsor lifts.
"I'll ground it," Vance roared, his mass skyrocketing to an impossible ten tons.
"I will sever the engines," Varos agreed, drawing a blade of pure, humming Tier V Spatial-Shear hard-light.
The shuttle was still fifty feet in the air, its landing gear just beginning to unfold.
Vance didn't wait. He bent his knees, the bedrock cracking beneath his ten-ton weight, and launched himself directly upward like a super-massive artillery shell. His fist was pulled back, wreathed in the devastating, localized gravity of an Iron-Tremor strike designed to punch straight through the ship's reinforced hull.
But as Vance soared upward, the shuttle's heavy boarding ramp suddenly hissed open mid-air.
A figure in a tattered canvas traveler's cloak dropped out of the descending ship.
Vance's eyes widened, but his momentum was absolute. He couldn't stop the strike. His ten-ton, gravity-infused fist hurled toward the falling figure like a meteor.
The figure didn't dodge. He didn't spark a shield.
He simply reached out his bare left hand.
CLANG.
The sound was like a temple bell being struck by lightning. The kinetic shockwave exploded outward in a massive ring, violently flattening the jungle canopy in a two-hundred-yard radius.
Down on the ground, Varos actually took a step back, his silver eyes widening in sheer, unadulterated shock as he looked up.
Hanging suspended mid-air, fifty feet above the dirt, the young man in the cloak was perfectly still. He had caught Vance's hyper-dense, ten-ton strike in the palm of his hand. The young man's arm hadn't even buckled. His canvas sleeve was fluttering in the shockwave, but his center of gravity was mathematically, conceptually absolute.
Beneath the shadow of the traveler's hood, a pair of golden eyes blazed with the terrifying, beautiful weight of the Sovereign.
Vance hung there in the air, his fist trapped in an immovable vice, his jaw slightly open as he stared at the face he hadn't seen in three years.
Jax offered the grizzled Captain a bright, effortless smile.
"Don't you owe me a rematch, Captain?"