The vibration stopped.
For forty years—four decades of life inside the Veil—the floor had hummed with the subsonic rhythm of the Planetary Engines. It was the lullaby of the new generation, the constant reminder that Terra-Nova was moving. When it ceased, the silence was louder than any explosion.
In the Deep Core Command, Jiang Chen unhooked his neural interface. The liquid in his tank drained with a harsh gurgle. He stepped out, his cybernetic limbs gleaming under the harsh white lights, and looked at the main viewscreen.
They had arrived.
The Void Nebula was not a beautiful swirl of colors like the pictures in the old astronomy books. It was a bruise on the face of the universe. Thick, opaque clouds of purple and black dust blotted out the stars. It looked heavy, suffocating, and utterly hostile.
"Station keeping established," Emperor Xia's voice came through the speakers, sounding weary. For forty years, he had held the tectonic plates together with his will. "The inertia is neutralized. We are drifting."
Grand Marshal Ye Bai stood by the tactical table. He looked older now, the weight of command etching lines into his face that cultivation couldn't erase. He watched the sensor readouts with paranoia born of a century of war.
"Sensors are struggling," Ye Bai muttered. "The dust is high in heavy metals. It scatters radar. It absorbs Qi. We are flying blind, Administrator."
"We aren't here to sightsee," Jiang Chen said, pulling on his coat. "We are here to feed the forge."
He pointed to the dense cluster of massive, spherical asteroids floating in the outer band of the nebula.
"Scan analysis confirms high concentrations of Dark Matter Ore. That is the metal we need to upgrade the Legion's armor from 'Planetary' to 'Interstellar'. Launch the Harvesters."
Mei was thirty years old, born ten years after the Veil went up. She had never known the sun, only the fusion lamps of Neo-Beiluo. She was a Star-Born, a child of the drift.
She sat in the cockpit of Harvester-1, a heavy industrial mining ship equipped with plasma lasers and grapple arms. She felt invincible. She had top marks in the flight simulator. She had run this mission a thousand times in VR.
"Harvester Leader to Command," Mei said, her voice crisp. "Approaching Target Cluster Alpha. The rocks are... surprisingly round. Perfect spheres."
"Maintain distance, Leader," Ye Bai's voice crackled in her ear. "Standard procedure. Cut, grab, retreat. Do not linger."
"Relax, Grand Marshal," Mei smirked, flipping a switch. "It's just rocks. They don't shoot back."
She maneuvered her ship toward the nearest asteroid. It was black, pitted, and about the size of a stadium. Her sensors pinged it.
[Composition: Unknown Alloy shell. Core: High Energy Density.]
"Jackpot," Mei whispered.
She locked the mining laser. "Firing main beam."
The plasma lance shot out, silent in the vacuum, striking the black surface of the sphere.
It didn't spark. It squelched.
The beam burned through the outer crust, but instead of molten rock spraying out, a geyser of pressurized, neon-green fluid erupted into the void.
Mei blinked. "Fluid pocket? Command, I have a gas leak."
Then, the "asteroid" moved.
A massive fissure cracked open down the center of the sphere. It wasn't a crack. It was an eyelid.
A yellow eye, the size of a city block, rolled over to look directly at Mei's ship.
Mei froze. The simulation hadn't prepared her for this. The simulator taught her how to dodge debris, how to manage fuel, how to fight pirates. It didn't teach her what to do when the mountain you were mining blinked at you.
"Command..." Mei's voice trembled, her confidence shattering instantly. "It's... it's looking at me."
The sphere uncoiled. It wasn't a rock. It was a curled-up organism.
A Void Beast Hatchling.
It stretched, revealing a body of chitin and muscle, four miles long. It had no mouth, just a mass of writhing tendrils designed to absorb energy.
And Mei had just burned it with a plasma laser.
The creature shrieked—a psychic blast that bypassed the vacuum and hammered directly into the brains of the pilots.
PAIN. HUNGER. ENEMY.
"Pull back!" Ye Bai screamed over the comms. "All units, full reverse! Those aren't rocks! They're eggs!"
Mei slam-shifted her thrusters, but she was too slow. The Hatchling whipped a tendril out. It moved with impossible speed for something so large. It smashed into her wingman, Harvester-2.
There was no explosion. The tendril simply wrapped around the ship and crushed it. The metal hull buckled like foil. Mei watched, paralyzed, as the ship—and her friend inside—was compacted into a ball of scrap and then shoved into the creature's absorption mass.
"Kevin!" Mei screamed.
The Nebula shifted. The other "asteroids" began to wake up. Hundreds of them.
In the Command Bunker, the alarms were deafening.
"Ambush!" Old Wu yelled. "Multiple biological signatures detected! Tier 9... Tier 9... Administrator, we have Tier 9 Nirvana Beasts waking up! They are planetary threats!"
Jiang Chen stared at the screen. The Star-Born pilots were panicking. They were breaking formation, fleeing in random directions, getting picked off like flies.
"They don't know fear," Jiang Chen said coldly. "They grew up in a safe room. Now they are in the jungle."
He turned to the one man who understood the jungle.
"General Han."
The giant Space Marine stood by the airlock, his helmet under his arm. His face was a map of scars from the Unification Wars.
"The kids are dying," Han rumbled, his voice deep as a tectonic shift.
"Go teach them," Jiang Chen ordered. "Deploy the Iron Legion. Close quarters. We can't fight them ship-to-ship; the beasts are too big. Board them."
"Board the monsters?" Han put on his helmet. The green eyes of the visor flared. "Understood."
The airlock of the UNSC Kunpeng—now retrofitted for space—blasted open.
Five thousand figures in matte-black power armor launched into the void. They didn't use ships. They used magnetic boots and jump-packs.
General Han led the charge. He rocketed toward the Hatchling that was chasing Mei's damaged ship.
"Target the sensory clusters!" Han roared over the squad net. "They have no shields! They rely on regeneration! Bleed them out!"
Han slammed onto the back of the Void Beast. His magnetic boots locked onto the chitinous shell. The creature thrashed, sensing the parasite on its skin.
Han revved his Chain-Glaive. The diamond teeth spun at 10,000 RPM.
"Open wide!"
He drove the blade into the creature's neck.
The beast screamed psychically. Purple ichor sprayed into the vacuum, freezing instantly into crystals.
The Iron Legion landed all over the beast. They were ants taking down a lion. They used melta-bombs to blow holes in the armor, then fired bolters directly into the soft meat underneath.
Mei, watching from her cockpit, was shaking. She saw the "Invincible" Space Marines dying. She saw a Marine get swat by a tendril, his armor shattering, his body turning to mist. She saw another get melted by acidic blood.
This wasn't the heroic stories the teachers told. This was meat grinder.
"Pilot!" Han's voice boomed in her headset. "Stop staring and shoot! Provide cover fire!"
Mei snapped out of it. She grabbed the controls. "Yes... Yes, General!"
She spun her ship, lining up the mining laser. She didn't aim for the armor. She aimed where Han had cut.
ZAP.
The plasma beam hit the open wound. The Hatchling convulsed.
"Kill confirmed," Han grunted as the beast went limp, floating dead in the void.
But the victory was short-lived.
From the depths of the Nebula, a shadow emerged. It dwarfed the hatchlings. It dwarfed the Harvesters. It was the size of a moon.
The Matriarch.
It opened a maw that glowed with the light of a consumed star. It began to inhale.
Not air. It inhaled gravity.
The Harvesters, the debris, even the Space Marines were being pulled toward the maw.
"It's a Star-Whale," Ye Bai whispered from the bridge of the Kunpeng. "A mature one. Tier 10. We cannot fight that. It eats planets."
"We have what we came for," Jiang Chen's voice cut through the panic. "We harvested the Hatchling carcasses. That's enough Dark Matter Ore for the prototypes."
"Retreat!" Jiang Chen ordered. "Fall back to the Planetary Veil! Activate the Flash-Bang Protocol!"
The Iron Legion disengaged. They grabbed the dead bodies of their fallen brothers and boosted back toward Terra-Nova.
As the Matriarch lunged to swallow the fleet, Jiang Chen hit a switch in the core.
The Planetary Veil didn't turn invisible. It flashed.
For one microsecond, Terra-Nova emitted a burst of light equivalent to a supernova.
The Matriarch, accustomed to the darkness of the nebula, was blinded. It recoiled, shrieking, its massive eyes burning.
By the time its vision cleared, the fleet was gone. The planet was gone. The Veil had reactivated, cloaking Terra-Nova in silence once more.
Neo-Beiluo - The Hangar
Mei climbed out of her ship. Her legs gave way, and she vomited onto the deck.
Around her, the hangar was chaos. Medics were rushing to the transport shuttles carrying the Iron Legion. She saw Marines missing limbs. She saw armor fused with alien acid.
She looked up. General Han was walking past her. His armor was covered in purple blood. His chain-glaive was smoking. He stopped.
"You hesitated," Han said. He didn't sound angry. He sounded sad.
"I..." Mei wiped her mouth, tears streaming down her face. "I thought I was ready. I had the highest scores."
"Scores measure how you play the game," Han removed his helmet. His face was pale, exhausted. "Space isn't a game, kid. The universe is a dark room full of things that are hungry. And we are just meat."
He pointed to the black sky above the fusion lamps.
"Forget the simulation. Remember the fear. Fear keeps you alive."
Mei looked at the blood on the deck. The arrogance of the "Star-Born" generation died that day.
In the Command Bunker, Jiang Chen watched the casualty report.
[Iron Legion Casualties: 412 Dead, 800 Wounded.][Harvester Fleet: 12 Ships Lost.][Resources Gained: 4,000 Tons of Void Carapace (Dark Matter Source).]
"A high price," Ye Bai said softly, standing in the shadows.
"The price of tuition," Jiang Chen said, closing the file. "They needed to see it, Ye Bai. They needed to see that we aren't the apex predators. We are the prey."
He looked at the sample of the Void Beast carapace on his desk. It was black, absorbing the light of the room.
"But prey can evolve," Jiang Chen picked up the sample. "Old Wu. Take this to the foundry. I want the new armor prototypes ready in a month. Next time we meet them... we won't be using mining lasers."