Chapter 19

“Null-space is something of a misnomer because it implies that it is a place. A place with nothing in it, but still a place. Rather, null-space is the absence of all things, including all laws of physics, all mass, energy, everything. It is an entire plane of existence at the farthest extent of the dimensional range that is entirely devoid of everything. There have been arguments that it suffered some calamity resulting in its current state, others that it has always existed as the absence of all things, empty on an ontological level, because somewhere there had to be a dimension of nothing. Others have assumed the position that it is not a dimension at all, but instead, it is a step outside of all planes as we know them. A step beyond all of the known laws of all the known realities that have ever been encountered. The truth will, of course, remain a mystery because there are no answers to be found in null-space. For there to be answers, there would have to be something.”

—Going Dark: The Null-Space Paradox, Vestis Cromwull

They lurched back from null-space into reality, Sylvas dragging them to a halt as they burst out of nothingness before they could carry on along their course into yet more nothingness. Just nothingness in a universe where there was at least the option for there to be something. With a sigh, he turned to his friends. “There are almost as many deep-space asteroid fields as there are planets. We might be looking in the right place for the Consortium’s base now, but we’re no closer to actually finding it.”

Hector nodded along. “I think we need to try looking at their supply line.”

“Their supply line?” Sylvas repeated before he could stop himself.

“You only find shikari in a few places, usually around Aion ruins. They lie dormant in a kind of natural stasis until something living comes by, and they revive to start eating.” He pulled up the star maps on the consoles, overlaid the areas that the Consortium was known to operate in, and then overlaid that with a series of pins. “Everywhere Aion remnants have been discovered.”

There were dozens of worlds marked with those pins, within the reach of the Consortium’s operations, and each of them could have been the source of their supplies. When anything Aion was found, whether it was something as complex and compelling as a vault or as little as a discarded scrap of paper, it was reported, filed, and marked, but that was as much information as Hector had available to him, that there was “something” Aion on the world.

“I think we can eliminate any worlds with significant populations,” Malachai suggested. “Word would have gotten out if shikari were discovered there, and the Consortium would be reluctant to operate in plain view.”

“Right.” Hector nodded, and with a few adjustments, the number of pins dropped by about a quarter.

Mira was overlaying this map with the one that was under construction in Sylvas’ mind—the one that had all of the potential places where the Consortium base might have been out in deep space—and it helped eliminate another quarter of the pins. He tweaked the illusion the console was projecting to match what was in his head, and the others glanced his way, then didn’t question it. They trusted in his judgment by this point, and Hector closed his mouth after realizing that there were going to be no other objections.

Six planets remained, so Sylvas highlighted the closest of them. “Shall we start here?”

Hector clapped his hands. “Good a place as any. Wash up before lunch?”

The prospect of his cooking seemed to spark everyone’s interest, but Sylvas didn’t immediately move to join the brawl for the first use of the shower. “I’ll get us underway first.”

Hector shrugged as he headed out. “Alright, but you don’t get fed if you haven’t washed your hands.”

By the time the ship was in null-space, the engines engaged to keep it moving towards its destination, and Sylvas finally forced himself to extricate himself from the circle of control, the others had all washed up and were at work in the makeshift galley. He had to push his way through and tried to keep his amusement from showing on his face as all of Kaya’s mastery of metal had her reduced to a living food processor, chopping ingredients. Malachai had been left to knead some sort of dough by hand, and for whatever reason, whether it was the chillness of his touch or some mistake in the mixing, it seemed to be clinging to his fingers as though it never wanted to leave. The only one who looked genuinely happy was Hector, striding around the kitchen with a towel around his waist. Kaya may also have been slightly happy about that, but she was so irritated with trying to manifest the right combination and movement of blades with her embodiment that she wasn’t even getting to enjoy her eye candy.

A quick scrub to remove the poisons still clinging to his skin and a change of clothes had Sylvas dressed in an identical set of plain black coveralls to the ones he’d just shed. They were so nondescript that they’d manage to cycle all the way around again to being distinctive. It was a problem of owning nothing that he had no clothes other than his uniforms, and with leaving the Ardent, he no longer even had that. He didn’t know where these bodysuits stowed away in one of the drawers in their shared room had come from, only that they didn’t belong to either Kaya or Malachai, so by a process of elimination, they had to be for him.

Back in the galley, the dough had been untangled from Malachai’s hands, wrapped around whatever Kaya had been diligently blitzing, and was now baking, sending aromas drifting all through the Folly that made Sylvas salivate despite himself. Hector had deployed a seat for him, and they were all back in the same positions as the night before, sipping on some syrupy-looking drink that Malachai seemed to be having some trouble with, judging by his expression.

Hector gave the air a sniff. “Pastries will still be a couple of minutes. Do you have time to eat?”

Mira fed Sylvas the information he needed before he could even ask for it, and he relayed it, minus the word darling. “Seventeen minutes and twenty seconds before we leave null-space.”

Hector stared at him for a second. “You don’t need to double-check that? Look at any readouts?”

Sylvas settled onto his chair. “Nope.”

Glancing at the other two, where they sat complacent, Hector chuckled. “So he’s got some crazy good mental enhancements then?”

“Aye,” Kaya confirmed. “It’s annoying.”

“He makes those things that the rest of us struggle for look effortless, and for this, I doubt I shall ever forgive him.”

“Guess I’ll just have to get used to trusting him.” Hector’s smile looked a little more forced than usual.

Sylvas didn’t really know how to respond to that, so he tried to move on. “I’m wondering if there is anyone else we could contact for information.”

“Nope.” Hector stopped him. “No work talk at the dinner table. This is a place of peace and joy.”

It was Sylvas’ turn to close his mouth.

Hector was quick to alleviate the awkward silence. “So tell me more about what a pain in the ass he is.”

Malachai choked on his drink, but Kaya lit up. “Oh, man, you have no idea!”

Hector may have been given their files with the broad strokes of their careers to date, but the minutiae of their day-to-day lives, and how much of a frustration Sylvas had been to Kaya, had not been included. It was all told with an exasperated but loving tone, as someone might have talked about their pet dog’s misadventures, and it was interrupted by loud guffaws of laughter, and a brief sojourn to retrieve their lunch from the oven, from Hector.

“So then they think we’re married because we have the same surname on the files. I clan him, and they think we’re married.”

Something seemed to dawn on Hector. “Oh! So that’s why Ironfist loves you so much! You’re an honorary dwarf. He was acting like it was one of his own who had found the Covenant, talking about protecting you from the other councilors. I didn’t know where it was coming from.”

“Do I need protection from the councilors?”

“If you’re as much of a workhorse now as you were in the Ardent, then absolutely you do.” Hector paused to bite into his pastry. “The only reward for doing good work is getting more work.”

Sylvas chuckled. “I don’t mind work.”

“You will.” Hector’s grin faltered. “Ironfist wanted me to keep you from getting used up too quickly. So did Dreamweaver… but that’s just because she wants more fighters for when things with the Dominion come to a head.”

“I imagine that the Obsidian Dominion has a great many Covenant mages.” Malachai was working his way through his own pastry with small, measured bites, tasting each one thoroughly before moving on to the next. “I doubt that they’re as concerned about the disruptive influence that teaching people about the process might bring.”

Hector shook his head. “You’d be wrong there. Emperor Blackstar is in charge over there because he’s the most powerful. He doesn’t stay the most powerful by lifting everyone else up to his level.”

Kaya’s brow furrowed. “His whole schtick is saying that the Dominion’s the strongest, and that’s why everyone should join up with him, and he keeps his mages weaker than him?”

Malachai nodded. “The paradox of power in a dictatorship. The alliance of the Empyrean most likely has more collective strength than the Empire could ever muster, but we cannot bring it to bear with the same ease.”

Hector snapped his fingers, trying to remember something. “How did she put it? ‘Ours is the strength of outreaching hands, and theirs that of a clenched fist.’ Or something like that?”

Kaya was gawking at him. “That was a spot-on Elenya Dreamweaver impression.”

“Thanks, I do a good Karst Veilbohr, too. ‘I am most disapproving of the choices you have made. Shame on you. Shame on your family.’”

That one was good enough that even Malachai looked like he was going to laugh at it.

Sorry to interrupt, Mira cut in as the moment hung in the air, her tone a hair away from actually being apologetic. But it’s past time we took a closer look at our heading.

Sylvas sent her a mental acknowledgement and reluctantly swallowed his last mouthful of lunch before rising from his seat. “Back to work.”

“Boo,” Kaya cried with very little real feeling, reaching across to snatch the unfinished pastry off Sylvas’ plate.

Back in the cockpit, Sylvas stepped back into the circle and control of the ship just a few seconds before they arrived at their departure window. He slowed the ship’s engines to nothing, letting momentum carry them forward as he cast the second half of the teleportation spell to bring them back out into reality.

They emerged into a cloud of detritus. Sylvas flung a gravity shear up to protect the ship as soon as he parsed what was going on, but by then, dents had already been knocked into the Folly’s exterior. Dents that would likely have become hull breaches if they’d emerged at the usual speed instead of a crawl. The shear deflected all of the impending doom around them in its usual gentle curvature, but Sylvas still found himself cursing under his breath. There had been no hint anywhere on the star charts that there was any sort of detritus in this system, yet here they were in a vast cloud of it, spiraling out from one of the planets.

The planet that we are headed for.

Griswold 2 was a small world but one that had great promise for agriculture based on its natural weather, water content, and relatively smooth surface. There had been a few mountain ranges marked to be leveled for more field space the next time the appropriate ship came passing through the system, but the work had never come to fruition in the few years since it had been colonized. The report of an Aion discovery on the world had come only in the past month, but judging from what Sylvas had been able to pull from the communications record, whatever the find was had been sufficiently minor that the Empyrean hadn’t even scheduled a visit to investigate it yet.

That last and final pending note of ‘awaiting follow up’ had been the last report on the world, it caught in a state of temporary limbo until someone came to investigate it. Unfortunately it seemed that someone had, someone who clearly hadn’t had the planet’s best interests at heart. Now as Sylvas inspected the planet, he could see that the eastern hemisphere was not just missing a chunk of its landmass, but that a sizeable portion of it was now drifting in space as a natural deterrent to anyone who reached orbit. Even worse, the atmosphere that the reports had indicated was thick and stable, was barely even present anymore, slowly wisping away thanks to the uneven magnetic field that so much destruction had created. Something had happened to Griswold 2 and here it was now bleeding out and dying.

Hector stuck his head into the cockpit, and his mouth fell open. “Oh, that’s not right.”

Sylvas put them through evasive maneuvers to get them out of the asteroid stream. It seemed that the rocks that had been part of Griswold 2 were now being drawn in by the gravity of one of the gas giants farther out in the system, the big red orb fated to eventually swallow up the fragments of its sibling, when they finally arrived.

Kaya joined them with a whistle. “Someone really messed that one up.”

None of these insights were particularly helpful, but the sensory apparatus of the ship wasn’t providing much of use either. Something explosive had occurred down at the colony, something that had damaged the planet so badly it was now limping slowly towards death. Sylvas couldn’t sense the world soul at this distance, but he was willing to bet it had been injured just as grievously as the physical structure—a thought that was confirmed when Malachai breezed into the room, positively glowing with newfound death mana.

“The world is in decline,” he said as politely as he could while still gorging himself on all of the death pouring off it. “I would estimate it only has a few days left.”

“We need to get help, evacuate any survivors—” Sylvas began, but Hector cut him off.

“Then let’s get down there and find out what happened. If there are survivors, we’ll get them help, but we need to be down there first.”

Finding their way to the planet was easy. All Sylvas had to do was follow the long spiral of stone back to its source. In the deepest parts of the wound on the planetary surface, Sylvas could make out the dim glow of lava, as if an entire segment of continental plate had been sheared off amidst the other destruction.

The mapping they had of the planet had been sparse before, and the recent changes had stripped it of most of its significant landmarks, as well as changing the tilt of the planet and its rotation. It took Mira several moments of rapid-fire calculations to determine that the colony itself had been above that deepest hole and was entirely annihilated now.

“The colony was…right there.”

Hector nodded. “It’s gone.”

They continued their descent all the same. Even if there was nobody left to save, if they’d all been asleep in their beds when the calamity hit, there would still be answers down there. Answers that would help them bring whoever had killed this world to justice.

Breathe, Sylvas, Mira reminded him as they flew. This might look how it looks, but we don’t know anything for certain yet. This colony might have brought it upon themselves if they got impatient and tried to open the vault themselves. This might not even be connected.

But even despite her words, Sylvas couldn’t answer on the account of the rage building in his chest. This was what he had signed up to the Ardent to stop. This was the kind of horror and destruction he wanted to fight. And this time, there was no eidolon or impossible catastrophe to blame. Only people. He didn’t know how the Consortium had done this, but there was no doubt in his mind that they were responsible. He regretted pulling his punches back on the last planet. He regretted letting the ships that had tried to chase them remain in the sky. There had been a planet here, people here. A world that was alive was now dead. When they’d tried to kill him, he hadn’t taken it personally. He was a threat, he recognized that, and he could understand why it made sense to try and take him off the board, but these people were farmers.

Kaya’s hand on his arm felt like ice, but it startled him out of his rage. The red glow that had been suffusing his skin faded away. “Hey, stanzbuhr. Take it easy.”

He took a deep breath and crushed Strife’s presence back down into his core where it belonged. “Sorry. It’s… too much like home.”

“We’ll make them pay.” Her hand stayed there on his arm; the cool of her skin on his was comforting.

“We will,” Malachai affirmed.

They hit turbulence as they entered the atmosphere that Sylvas wasn’t prepared for, even after the storms of the last world. Understandable, given that the whole atmosphere was being dragged over and siphoned off. Still, it gave him something to concentrate on, so when Kaya let him go, the wolf inside him didn’t immediately start howling again.