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Chapter 173: The Garden of Screams
The map was accurate. I found the Garden on sublevel three, one level above what the clone had marked as the holding cells.The door was unlocked—that bothered me more than a lock would have.Inside, the plants were wrong. They looked like plants from a distance, tall and branching, filling the space from floor to ceiling in dense rows. Up close they were made of something that moved when there was no wind. The branches were pale and slightly translucent. They made a sound, low and continuous, that my translation buffer kept trying to process and kept failing on.[Unclassified biological material. Nerve-adjacent tissue structure detected.][Audio output consistent with sustained low-frequency vocalization.]Living nerves that kept singing. I kept walking. The Garden was bigger than the door suggested. The rows went back further than made architectural sense for a sublevel chamber. I followed the main path through the center and kept my hands loose at my sides.He was sitting on a ben
Chapter 172: The Gilded Nebula
The wormhole dropped me on a platform the size of a football field, and underneath the platform there was a star.Not a dead one; a dying one. The surface was close enough that the heat came through the floor material in long, slow pulses. The city built on top of it stretched in every direction, towers, walkways and open plazas, all made from the same gold-tinted material that the invitation spike had been made from. Everything glowed faintly from below.[New environment detected. Stellar proximity warning. Ambient energy absorption is active.]I took one step forward and the field hit me.It wasn't painful, it was just sudden. Like someone pulled a coat off my shoulders, except the coat was sixty pounds of integrated armor and scale plating. The black scales peeled away in sheets and dissolved before they hit the floor. My plasma housing went with them. The phase-state anchors in my skin went quiet. When it was done I was standing in plain clothes, roughly human-shaped, no visible
Chapter 171: The Emperor's Invitation
The spike came through the ceiling at an angle and buried itself three inches into the throne room floor, two feet from my left boot.I looked at it. Gold-plated, it was crystalline, about the length of my forearm. A scroll of light unrolled from the top of it automatically, projecting a holographic text in the air above the throne.Kael was at the door in thirty seconds. He looked at the spike, then at the scroll, then at me. "Did you invite that in?""No," I said. He walked over and started scanning it with his handheld. "It came through the hull without triggering a single alarm. No breach, no pressure change, no entry point on the sensors." He looked up. "It just appeared.""I can see that," I said. I read the scroll—it was short. Gold lettering on a dark background, a formal language but not complicated.You are invited to the Feast of Sovereigns. Your claim to the Abyssal Sector has been observed. Recognition of sovereignty requires attendance. Attendance is mandatory for all e
Chapter 170: The Way Beasts Fight
The platform was a slab of fused hull plating about forty meters across, floating in the middle of a nebula pocket between two dead ships. Kael had it positioned there in twenty minutes. No walls, no ceiling, just the platform and open space on all sides and the generals standing around the edges watching.Jax was at the far end. He had his arms crossed and his face said he thought this was stupid. He was probably right.The Ancestor walked out onto the platform from the other side. He had stripped the integration tech off his upper body. No plasma housing, just him. Grey skin and four arms and a thousand years of bad decisions."No powers," he said. "You said primal.""I said it," I confirmed. " The Pearl stays off.""Agreed.""The system stays off." I looked at him. "It's already off; it has been since I deleted the Overseer."He made a sound that might have been an approval. "Good. Then we find out what you actually are." He spread two of his arms wide. "Come on, then."I walked t
Chapter 169: The Mercy of the Deep
My claws were out. The alien child looked at them. It pressed harder into the back of the wall cavity, both sets of arms folded over its face now.Jax's voice came through the comms. "Osric.""I heard you," I said. "Then do it." I stood there. The yellow emergency light made everything look worse than it probably was. The child had stopped making sounds. It was just watching me through a gap between its arms, waiting.Elara hadn't moved. She was standing right next to me, close enough that I could hear her breathing. She wasn't saying anything now. She had made her argument. She was just waiting too.I thought about Marcus. Not the S.I.'s version, the real one. The Glasses with the cracked lens, the way he would talk about his daughter like she was the funniest person he had ever met. He showed me a picture once, on a scratched tablet with a broken corner. She was maybe six and she had his eyes. I retracted my claws."Osric—" Jax started. "It's done," I said. I looked at the child.
Chapter 168: The Scavenger Hunt
A million ships and none of them moving. That was the whole solar system now."How many are intact?" I asked. Kael was already pulling numbers. "Roughly sixty percent. The S.I. format command hit the drives and navigation first. Hull integrity on most of them is fine. They just have no one home.""Good," I said. "Get the Drowned moving. I want salvage teams on every intact ship in the outer ring first, then work inward.""All of them?""All of them."Jax pulled up next to me at the viewport. He looked at the fleet for a second. "You want to eat a million ships.""I want to become a million ships," I said. "There's a difference." He thought about that. "Not really.""Move, Jax." The salvage took six hours to get organized and three days to get ugly.The Drowned weren't just stripping the fleet for parts. They were integrating. The alien metal fused to their suits first, then to their armor, then to their skin. By the end of the first day I was watching soldiers walk back to the stagin
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