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.

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

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