The Rust Bucket screamed as it cleared the shadow of the primary spire. Behind them, the Hegemony cruisers—the Iron Duke and the Hollow Faith—were carving a path through the silence of the Cradle. Their railgun slugs impacted the ancient, floating cathedrals with the force of small meteors, sending shards of prehistoric alloy spiraling into the violet atmosphere below.
"I'm losing stabilize-rs!" Mina shouted, her feet braced against the cockpit floor as she fought the centrifugal force. "This station has its own gravity well, and it's fighting me!"
"Correct," the voice of UNIT-7 vibrated through the ship's speakers, no longer needing the holographic display. The droid had successfully slaved itself to their comms. "The Spires generate a localized Higgs-field. Align your approach to the blue-lit aperture on the central axis. Do not deviate, or the automated dampeners will crush your hull like a dry leaf."
"He's charming, isn't he?" Mina gritted her teeth, throwing the ship into a violent roll to dodge a stray beam of light from the Iron Duke.
The aperture loomed ahead—a massive, hexagonal maw glowing with an ethereal, sapphire light. As the Rust Bucket crossed the threshold, the chaos of the battle outside vanished. The sound of the cannons was replaced by a low, humming thrum that vibrated in Kael's marrow.
The ship settled onto a landing pad made of a translucent material that felt more like frozen water than metal. As the engines wound down, the silence was absolute.
"Stay here and fix what you can," Kael said, unbuckling his harness. He grabbed the obsidian drive. It was hot now, nearly burning through his jacket.
"Kael, wait," Mina caught his arm. She looked at the golden circuits etched into his skin, which were now glowing so brightly they shone through his sleeve. "If that thing does to you what it did back in the debris field… if you don't come back to yourself…"
"Then leave," Kael said firmly. "Take the ship and find a hole to hide in. But I have to know what he was trying to tell me."
He hit the ramp release.
The air inside the station didn't taste like the Ring. It was crisp, smelling of rain and ozone, filtered to a degree of purity that made Kael's lungs ache. Waiting for him at the end of the ramp was the figure from the screen.
UNIT-7 was taller than a human, its chassis a graceful blend of white ceramic and exposed, pulsing fiber-optics. It didn't have a face in the traditional sense, but its sensory visor shifted colors as it scanned Kael.
"Kaelen Voss," the droid said, its voice now resonant and clear. "You are smaller than the records suggested."
"And you're more robotic," Kael countered, his heart racing. "What is this place? Where are the people?"
"The people are... stored," UNIT-7 replied, turning and gesturing for Kael to follow. They walked down a long corridor where the walls seemed to be made of liquid data, scenes of Earth's history flowing past them like a river. "This is the Arkshell. When the Great Collapse began, your grandfather, Elias Voss, realized the Earth could not be saved. Not through politics, nor through technology. The damage was too deep."
"So he built a wormhole?"
"He built a bridge to a world that was seeded eons ago for this exact moment. But the bridge required a living catalyst. A genetic signature to lock the coordinates."
They reached a massive circular chamber. In the center sat a pillar of the same obsidian material as the drive, surrounded by rings of rotating light. This was the Central Core.
"The Hegemony is currently breaching the outer hull," UNIT-7 said, its visor flashing red. "They do not want this world for humanity. They want it for their boardrooms. They want a fresh start without the 'dead weight' of the three million souls on the Ring. If they take the Core, they will purge the station and lock the gate behind them."
"How do I stop them?"
"Place the Key in the Core, Kaelen. But be warned: the drive is not just a map. It is a bridge. To activate it, you must interface. Your mind will become the processing unit for the gate's stabilization."
Kael looked at the pillar. He could hear the muffled thuds of Hegemony breaching charges echoing through the station's skeleton. He thought of Jax in his cramped basement, of the millions of people breathing recycled filth on the Ring, and of the man in the vision who had his eyes.
He stepped forward.
As he moved the drive toward the pillar, the golden lines on his arm leapt from his skin, connecting to the obsidian surface like lightning.
"Kael! They're inside!" Mina's voice crackled over his hand-radio. "I'm pinned down in the hangar! There's a whole squad of 'em!"
Kael didn't hesitate. He slammed the drive into the central slot.
The world exploded into white.
He wasn't Kaelen Voss anymore. He was a stream of binary and starlight. He felt the entire station—every bolt, every wire, every dormant defense turret. He felt the Iron Duke outside, a parasite clinging to the skin of something holy.
Targeting... a voice echoed in his mind. It was his own voice, but layered with a thousand others.
Across the station, ancient defense turrets that had been cold for a century suddenly hummed with power. In the hangar, the Hegemony soldiers froze as the very floor beneath them began to glow.
"Unauthorized presence detected," Kael's voice boomed through the station's intercoms, sounding like a god.
A pulse of pure kinetic energy rippled outward from the Core. In the hangar, the soldiers were thrown backward, their weapons deactivated by a localized EMP. Outside, the Iron Duke was swatted away from the spire by a gravitational lash, its hull buckling as it was forced into a higher orbit.
But the cost was immediate. Kael screamed as his nervous system was flooded with more data than a human brain could hold. He saw the "Second Earth"—the planet below—and he saw the billions of lines of code required to bring the Ring through the gate.
"It's too much!" he gasped, his body arching as he clutched the pillar.
"Hold on, Kael!" UNIT-7 moved to the console, its fingers moving at light-speed. "I am offloading the secondary calculations to my own processor, but you must maintain the link! If you let go now, the gate will collapse and take the Ring with it!"
Through the haze of pain, Kael saw a new vision. It wasn't the past. It was a potential future. He saw the Ring—the massive, rusted station—slowly drifting through the gate, its inhabitants staring out at the violet oceans in wonder.
He gripped the obsidian tighter. "I've... got it..."
"Kael!" Mina's voice was closer now. She had reached the chamber, her pistol smoking. She stopped, staring at the boy encased in a pillar of golden light. "What's happening to him?"
"He is becoming the Horizon," UNIT-7 replied.
But as the gate began to widen in the space between the moons, a new shadow appeared on the station's sensors. A ship twice the size of the cruisers, cloaked in a field that bent light itself.
The Tyrant. The flagship of the Hegemony High Command. And it wasn't firing at the station. It was firing a harpoon—a massive, data-tether designed to hijack the Core's signal.
"They're trying to steal the gate," Mina realized, raising her gun.
The battle for the new world hadn't just begun. It had just escalated to the point of no return.