Earth looked smaller than Heinrich had imagined.
Not in size, he knew the numbers by heart, had known them since childhood but in meaning. From the observation deck of Ascension Terminal, the planet no longer felt like the unquestioned center of existence. It hung beneath the transparisteel like a bruise-blue marble, swaddled in white cloud bands and fractured by the hard geometry of orbital defense grids. Light from the sun caught on thousands of ship lanes spiraling outward, each one a scar of traffic, evacuation, or war.
The cradle of humanity.
The battlefield that had nearly been its grave.
Heinrich Wynn stood at attention with the other recruits, boots aligned to deck markers, hands clasped behind his back. His spine was straight, jaw set, posture drilled into him through years of preparatory training. He did not fidget. He did not stare too long. Discipline was already expected here; the Academy merely refined it or crushed those who failed to adapt.
Obsidian Recruit 818.
The designation was stitched into the high collar of his departure uniform in matte-black thread. It rubbed against the skin at the base of his neck, an irritation he refused to acknowledge. The uniform itself felt wrong in a hundred subtle ways—too stiff, too pristine, too symbolic of something he had not yet earned. A costume for a role he had not yet survived.
Nineteen years.
That was all Earth had given him before demanding repayment. Nineteen years of oxygen, gravity, and relative peace, purchased at the cost of seventy percent of the human species. He had grown up beneath orbital guns, memorized evacuation routes before multiplication tables, learned the sound difference between a civilian shuttle and a military interceptor before he learned music.
Now Earth was letting him go.
Or sending him away.
He exhaled slowly through his nose, regulating his breath the way the Covenant psychological evaluators had taught him.
In for four.
Hold for four.
Out for four.
The technique was supposed to stabilize the nervous system, lower cortisol, steady the hands. Maybe even make it easier to kill when killing became necessary. Make it easier to function when the human brain encountered things it had not evolved to endure, vacuum combat, relativistic engagements, alien anatomy torn open by energy weapons.
This is it, he thought.
No more simulations.
No more curated history feeds.
No more dreaming about the war.
Now he was stepping into it.
The terminal thrummed with restrained motion. Boots struck deck plating in measured cadence. Officers murmured orders too low to be overheard. Mag-rails cycled transports into launch position with a bass vibration felt more in the bone than the ear. Somewhere deep in the station, engines spooled and unspooled like sleeping beasts.
Above them, filling half the sky, Astra Primus loomed.
Officially, it was designated Space Academy X Astra Primus, but no one called it that in casual speech. It was Astra Primus. The largest man-made structure humanity had ever assembled—larger than the old lunar shipyards, larger than Neptune Bastion had been before its fall. A rotating city of steel, light, and armored intent, bristling with weapon emplacements and sensor arrays.
A fortress.
A school.
A prison.
A promise and a threat welded into one.
Even from this distance, Heinrich could pick out the silhouettes of docked Ptah Starfighters clamped along the outer rings. The craft were unmistakable—sleek and predatory, all sharp planes and thermal vents, designed for close-quarters void combat where reaction time mattered more than pilot comfort. He had studied their schematics obsessively: dark-matter ignition cores stabilized by Ramos Fields, adaptive hull plating grown rather than assembled, neural-linked control systems that punished hesitation.
Human ingenuity, sharpened by extinction and survival.
If you got trapped out there—truly trapped—it was over. No air. No sound. No margin for error. A single breach, a single delayed maneuver, and you were reduced to frozen debris drifting between stars.
The thought did not frighten him but focused him.
Behind him, someone shifted weight nervously. Heinrich did not turn, but his mind cataloged the sound automatically: untrained micro-movement, civilian habit. Half the recruits standing on this deck would not last the year. Some would wash out during physical conditioning. Some would break under psychological strain. Some would die during live-fire exercises the Academy never advertised on the Holonet.
He welcomed the culling.
War had no tolerance for weakness, and the Apeps would show none.
His gaze drifted back to Earth, and with it came memory—borrowed memory, but no less vivid for that. Fire in the sky, pulled from archived feeds replayed every Remembrance Cycle. Cities burning beneath serpentine shadows. Alien plasma scouring continents in ritualized annihilation. Towers collapsing as evacuation clocks hit zero.
Neptune's orbit lit like a funeral pyre when the first counteroffensive failed.
The Apeps didn't come to conquer territory or extract resources. They had come to erase humanity. Serpentine humanoids—carnivorous, theocratic, and relentless. Religious zealots who worshiped the Flaming Serpent, a god that demanded expansion through destruction. Tricksters in doctrine as much as in battle, masters of feints, false retreats, psychic misdirection, and sacrificial assaults that shattered early human command structures.
For thirty years, humanity had been blindsided, burned, technologically outmatched.
Seventy percent of humanity dead.
You did not forget numbers like that.
I've watched the footage since before I could understand it, Heinrich thought. What was done has to be paid back tenfold.
He had been born in 2300, during the Surge—the population rebound that followed humanity's improbable survival. His generation was the answer to extinction. Or perhaps just more bodies. More minds. More soldiers.
Manuel Ramos had changed everything.
Heinrich had memorized Ramos's biography the way earlier generations memorized scripture. Scientist. Engineer. Visionary. The first human to understand that the Apeps' greatest advantage—dark-matter manipulation—could be stolen. Reverse-engineered. Weaponized.
Ramos had turned the enemy's divinity into a tool.
Twenty years of counterwar followed. Twenty years of clawing back planets one orbit at a time. Mars reclaimed. The Belt secured. Jupiter's moons fortified. Humanity's line pushed outward until the solar system was split like a healed wound.
Humanity held Earth, Luna, Mars, the Belt, Jupiter, Saturn's inner rings.
The Apeps held Uranus, Neptune, and the abyss beyond.
A cold war of distance, doctrine, and mutual annihilation.
And now it was heating up again.
"Heinrich Wynn."
The voice cut cleanly through his thoughts.
He snapped fully to attention. "Yes, sir."
The embarkation officer—Navy by bearing, Covenant insignia gleaming on his chest—looked him over with professional detachment. No curiosity. No encouragement.
"Transport Vigilant Dawn. Bay Three. You're cleared."
"Yes, sir."
He stepped out of formation. Each stride felt heavier than the last, not from fear, but from gravity—emotional, historical, inevitable. The mag-gate hissed as he passed through, sealing the world he knew behind him. The transport bay smelled of ozone and sterilization agents. A shuttle crouched on the deck like a coiled predator, hull gleaming beneath harsh white light. Its design was utilitarian, almost brutal—atmospheric-capable, shielded, armed. Nothing wasted.
As the ramp sealed behind him, Earth vanished from view. The ascent was silent except for the deep vibration of engines synchronizing with orbital traffic. Heinrich strapped into his seat, magnetic harness locking across his chest with a sharp click. Around him, other recruits did the same. No one spoke. No one prayed. He caught his reflection in the darkened viewport. Amber skin. Brown eyes. Hair trimmed to regulation-short waves. Six feet even, lean muscle earned through relentless conditioning rather than comfort. He had been told—often—that he was attractive. The fact felt irrelevant now. Good looks did not stop plasma bolts or psychic screams. They had opened doors, once. Smoothed conversations. Made social dominance easier, romantic entanglements effortless. He had never lingered in them. Somewhere inside him lived a desire for permanence, for something lasting. He buried it beneath ambition. Integrity—that was the fracture line inside him. What he truly wanted was power. Rank. Authority. The title Ra—Supreme Marshal Commander of Light burned in his thoughts like a private star. Ruler of the Star Covenant. The highest authority humanity could bestow. He told himself it was about protection. Ending the war. Making the Apeps answer for what they had done. But in quieter moments, he wondered who he was really trying to convince. The shuttle lurched gently as it locked into Astra Primus's docking ring. A chime sounded.
"Recruits," the pilot announced, "welcome to the Astra Primus. Disembark in an orderly fashion. Eyes forward. Mouths shut."
The ramp lowered.
Heinrich stepped into a cavern of steel and motion. The Academy's interior dwarfed anything he had experienced planetside. Docking bays stacked vertically like the ribs of a mechanical leviathan. Personnel moved along suspended walkways. Cargo drones hummed past carrying crates marked with hazard sigils and Covenant seals. Through open bay shields, the stars burned cold and endless.
For the first time since leaving Earth, he felt small.
Processing was ruthless in its efficiency. Identity confirmation. Neural baseline scans. Psychological profiling. Personal effects confiscated and archived. Hair measured. Nails checked. Bodies cataloged like equipment. By the time they entered the main assembly hall, time had blurred into a single stretched moment of anticipation. The hall was vast, amphitheater-shaped, capable of holding thousands. Recruits filled the lower tiers, a sea of dark uniforms broken only by the silver Covenant sigil over each heart. Above them hung banners depicting humanity's victories—Mars Reclaimed. The Belt Secured. The Siege of Ganymede.
Heinrich's gaze lingered on the last.
Ganymede. The first large-scale deployment of Ramos-tech. The first Apep retreat.
A door opened at the front of the hall.
Silence fell.
The man who stepped through needed no introduction, but the Academy provided one regardless.
"Colonel Kane," the announcer intoned. "Star Covenant Ground and Void Command."
Kane was taller than the feeds suggested—broad-shouldered, immovable. His face was a map of scars: burn lines, old cuts, shrapnel pockmarks. His eyes were sharp, predatory, belonging to someone who had survived by refusing to make stupid mistakes.
An architect of humanity's survival.
He stepped to the podium.
"You're here because humanity needs bodies," Kane said. No preamble. No ceremony. "And because some of you might become soldiers."
A ripple of tension moved through the hall.
"The Apeps are real. They burn worlds. They eat their enemies. They worship annihilation."
His gaze swept the recruits, and Heinrich felt it pass over him like a targeting laser.
"You will not defeat them with hatred. Or ambition. You will defeat them with discipline, coordination, and a willingness to live with what you do."
A pause.
"Most of you won't make it."
Truth. Clean and unfiltered.
"Those who do will become Voids. And Voids fight because if they don't—humanity ends."
The words settled into Heinrich's chest like an order already given
As the speech continued, his thoughts turned inward—not away from the moment, but deeper into it. Toward the path ahead. Toward the person he would have to become. He wanted to kill the Apeps. Wanted it with clarity bordering on obsession. But beneath that hunger lived a colder need—to understand. To know why humanity had been marked for extermination.
If I become Ra, he thought, I'll find out.
Kane's final words echoed through the hall.
"Welcome to Astra Primus. Hope to see at least half of you by year's end."
Heinrich stood straighter than he had all day. He told himself—without hesitation—that he was ready.