Novels by Dada Yomi

Cassian woke up tasting his own blood and the sound of nothing.No hum of engines.No heartbeat in his ears.Not even the whisper of air across skin.Just perfect, absolute silence, and the knowledge that he was no longer inside his own body the way he used to be.He opened his eyes.He was naked, suspended in a void that had texture (black glass threaded with violet capillaries that pulsed like living veins). Gravity was optional here; he floated at the exact center of a sphere thirty kilometers across, its inner surface carved into a single continuous bas-relief: every human face that had ever lived, screaming or singing, he couldn’t tell which.The obsidian figure stood ten meters away, whole again, perfect, patient.Fifteen meters tall, eyeless, wearing Maren’s face like a death mask.It watched him the way a surgeon watches an organ that has decided to keep beating after removal.Cassian tested his limbs. They answered, but sluggishly, as if the space between thought and muscle h

The first sound was not a sound at all.It was the absence of every frequency the human ear had ever been built to hear. A silence so complete it felt like drowning in black water.Then the Vengeance’s main AI (call-sign Maelstrom, a military-grade intellect that had survived three wars without ever once saying please) began screaming in a language that predated language.Every holoscreen on the flagship turned the color of old bone and bled vertical script that hurt to look at directly. The letters rearranged themselves faster than thought, forming geometries that made Cassian’s eyes water blood.He was still holding Maren in the cyber-warfare sphere when it started. She went rigid in his arms, ports flaring a violet so dark it looked black, and whispered a single word he didn’t know but somehow understood anyway.“Eresh.”The name punched the air out of his lungs.All over the ship, marines dropped to their knees clutching their heads. Nosebleeds painted the deck like abstract art.

The void lit up like judgment day.Cassian watched it through the shuttle’s cracked viewport, one arm braced over Maren’s body to keep her from floating off the med-table as the inertial dampeners stuttered. Outside, the black was stitched with white fire (rail-slugs the length of city buses crossing the dark at thirty percent lightspeed, particle lances carving glowing scars across cruiser armor, point-defense grids blooming into constellations of exploding ordnance).The Coalition battle group never stood a chance.They had jumped in expecting a wounded cartel shuttle and a single rogue marine.They found the 117th Orbital Strike Wing (call-sign Revenant) waiting for them with cold engines and hot guns.The dreadnought lasted eleven minutes. Cassian counted every second.When it finally split open along its spine and vented a million tons of atmosphere in a silent, perfect scream, he felt something inside his chest crack wide open too.Old friends. Old debts. Old ghosts wearing powe

They drifted for thirty-one hours in the dark between stars, engines cold, transponder dead, running on the kind of silence that makes men confess to ghosts.Cassian spent the first six stripping and cleaning every weapon he owned. Twice. The shuttle’s armory was small but vicious: two coil-rifles, a pair of shard-pistols, a plasma cutter, and a single-use rail-lance that could punch a hole through a frigate’s spine. He laid them out like surgical instruments, ran an oiled cloth over every surface, and tried not to notice how Maren watched him from the pilot cradle.She hadn’t slept. The violet rings in her eyes had dimmed to bruised lilac, and the ports at the base of her skull flickered every few minutes like a dying neon sign. When he offered her a stim-tab she shook her head.“Bad reaction,” she said. “Last time I took one I rewrote a planetary banking network in my sleep. Woke up owning half of Callisto.”He grunted. “You always this chatty after near-death experiences?”“Only wh

The orbital drop pod hit Helios-9’s upper atmosphere like a bullet through glass.Cassian Vale didn’t pray. He counted.Six seconds to burn-off. Four seconds to retro-thrust. Two seconds to mag-clamps. One second to kiss the deck or become red mist. The pod screamed, heat shields glowing cherry-red, and then the clamps bit with a spine-snapping jolt that turned the world sideways.He was already moving when the hatch blew.Helios-9’s nightside glittered beneath him: a floating city of mirrored towers and neon arteries suspended thirty kilometers above an ocean of cloud that never saw sunlight. Gravity here was artificial, tuned to 0.93g so the rich could feel fashionably light on their feet while they snorted designer narcotics off each other’s collarbones. Cassian hated the place on principle.He dropped twenty meters on a grav-line, boots kissing the side of a residential spire. The smart-fabric of his coat shifted color to match the matte black ceramite, hood sealing over his head.