UGT: 17th Terrana 280 a.G.A. / 03:29 p.m.

  Location: all across the Clinton's Beak system (red dwarf), Republic of Nox, Second Human Federation, Milky Way

  The Au'Shalis Eta fragment had been categorized as a secondary military outpost during the initial sweep as the ringworld fragment was rediscovered by the Federation. To small for anything else, the smallest of the ringworld fragments to be exact, it had remained a small military outpost since. It had no Aetherian or First Federation presence, and therefore nothing enemous. The sort of assignment a recon unit got dumped on after being too competent to send home and too green to put on the front line.

  Idran didn’t complain. He preferred quiet. Most of the unit did. Aside from daily perimeter scans and a rotating watch at the landing pad, their biggest challenge was keeping the ration cubes from tasting like dried algae. So when the lights in the corridor turned gold, Idran assumed it was another system glitch. “Great,” he muttered, squinting at the faint glow spreading through the seams in the stone. “Another fuse blown?”

  But the lights weren’t flickering. They were pulsing, steady, rhythmic, like a heartbeat echoing through the floor. The walls around them, once inert alloy and stone, now shimmered with veins of energy. Soft, almost imperceptible vibrations began to build underfoot. He glanced at Private Kessa, stationed at the corridor checkpoint with him. “You seeing this?” he asked, rhinking he might be dreaming. She didn’t answer. She was staring past him, toward the corridor leading to the central vault. Her rifle wasn’t raised, but her grip had tightened.

  “Vel, we’ve got something,” came Lieutenant Rho’s voice over comms. “Power readings just spiked across the fragment. And I mean everywhere. External sensors are lighting up like a holiday parade. Stay sharp.” Idran took a step back, slowly scanning the corridor. That was when he heard it, the first metallic footstep. Then another. Not hurried at all.

  From the far end of the corridor, shadowed by the brightening glow of Aetherian tech, something that shouldn't even be existing on this fragment, a shape emerged. A tall humanoid frame. Thin. Gleaming. Moving with unsettling precision. An automaton. More followed behind it. A second. A third. A whole column, stepping in perfect unison, their photonic lenses flickering in time with the pulse now radiating from the walls.

  Idran’s rifle was already in his hands when he realized it wasn’t responding. “Weapon’s dead,” he hissed. “Repeat, I’ve lost power to my primary.”

  “Mine too,” Kessa whispered. “Backup’s offline. I’ve got nothing.”

  “Comms are jamming,” came a static-choked warning from the squad leader. “Everything’s going down, systems, suits, even med scans. Fall back to—” Silence.

  The automata stopped about ten meters away. They didn’t raise weapons. They didn’t move forward. They just stood there. Watching. Idran took another step back. The corridor’s ambient light now pulsed with a slow, golden rhythm. Panels in the walls began to shift. Stone rotated, revealing embedded constructs and concealed weapon systems, systems they had never found even though they had scanned the fragment a dozen times before and that was just their squad. Defense pylons unfolded like blooming flowers, and the familiar ringworld fragment became something else entirely.

  All around them, the outpost began to move, not falling apart, but waking up. As though the ground itself had remembered its purpose. And they were not part of it. They were subdued in no time. Little did they know that similar scenes played out on all the other ringworld fragments in the system.

  A part of the Au'Shalis Prime fragment seemingly exploded. At first, Captain Thalen Mirov thought it was a visual glitch. His helm display shimmered, half a second of static, like a solar flare had kissed the sensor array. He blinked, refocused, and the starscape snapped back. But then came the ping. Multiple pings.

  Unidentified Contacts: 47... 89... 132.

  His comms officer, Vekra, turned pale. “Captain. I’m... I’m reading over two hundred fast-moving signatures rising from the surface, growing. High energy trails. They’re not broadcasting any identification codes.”

  “Where are they coming from?”

  “Everywhere. They're coming in the hundreds, if not thausands, from the differen fragments of the Au'Shalis ringworld. Looks like some kind of synchronized launch. No Federation IFF. I’m trying to get a visual.” A flicker on the forward viewport. Then another. Then a dozen. Streams of golden motes streaked upward from the ringworld surface, accelerating faster than Mirov thought possible. Like tracer fire in reverse, but far too smooth. Far too quiet. Then they resolved. Drones.

  Not crude ones. Not the haphazard scout units the Association used, nor the practical combat platforms favored by the FSF. These were either First Federation or Aetherian. He didn’t need the database to tell him that. One could feel it. They moved in absolute harmony. No deviations. No lag. No visible propulsion system. Just controlled arcs of impossible speed, forming lattices and spirals as they broke into attack patterns.

  “Deploy flak grid,” he snapped. “Bring point defense online, now!”

  “Already active, sir, but-”

  A light vanished from the tactical screen. Then another. Then five. Frigates. Gone in the space of three seconds.

  “Clear Laser trails,” Vekra whispered. “They're just needling the shields until they overload!”

  “Zoom in!” Mirov shouted. The screen locked onto one some of the drones approaching a Federation cruiser. The Cruiser took down multiple but more joined in, continiously bombarding its shields with lasers. Piece by piece, the shield cracked, than shattered. The Cruiser folded in half, neatly bisected. No explosion. No debris scatter. Just precision, silence, and obliteration.

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  “We have to retreat.” He barely got the words out. One of the drones curved toward the FSF Silver Veil. No dramatic charge. Just a shift in angle, an effortless adjustment, as if it were correcting a mathematical equation. The ship’s auto-targeting locked on, fired and the drone vanished. Multiple more took its place firing their lasers at his ship.

  “Brace!” he cried out but it was too late The world became white.

  The holomap bled red. Unit icons flickered and vanished in clusters, whole squadrons dropping off the board mid-transmission. Admiral Arnass watched the massacre unfold in utter silence. No enemy vessels visible. No formation changes. No tactical mistakes. Just... disappearance.

  His tactical officer whispered, “Sir, out of the larger ships of our fleet, we've so far lost visual on the FSF Silver Veil, the FSFHammerlight, the FSF Pride of Sundara, and the FSF Nthakar’s Wake. No distress signals. No wreckage.”

  “How many survivors?”

  His tactical officer didn’t answer. Admiral Arnass stepped forward. The holo-image rippled as his presence shifted command layers. At the center of the chaos was Au'Shalis Prime. A swarm of highly sophisticated drones moved there now. Thousands of micro-signatures coalescing like a living wave, spreading from the fragment’s surface like spores in zero-g. None of them bore identification. None responded to hails.

  “Is this a rogue AI system?” he asked no one in particular. "Something these Aetherian pretenders came up with?"

  “We don't believe so, Sir,” said the sensor chief. “It is to ancient for that. It has to be of Aetherian origin and would explain how these pretenders can use Aetherian technology. They just found more functions to their littly key, I believe."

  The Admiral snorted. "Of course it's that. There are no Aetherians anymore. Even thinking this is more than crazed humans finding some Aetherian technology is laughable. And it makes the situation barely better."

  His second-in-command stepped closer. “Orders, Admiral?”

  A pause. Not long. Barely two seconds. Admiral Arnass clenched his fists. The 7th Fleet had been victorious in seventeen major operations. He’d faced RRA warlords, pirate incursions, even rebels. Never had he seen an enemy like this. And he knew, for now he stood no chance.

  “All forces, prepare for emergency system withdrawal,” he said. His voice held. Barely. “Broadcast a priority code Theta-Rho: evacuation, total. We are abandoning the system.”

  Someone on the bridge gasped. “Sir, the ground teams-”

  “We can’t help them,” he snapped. “If they’re alive, they’ll have to find a way off themselves. We delay, we lose the fleet.” No one moved. He looked them all in the eye. “This is no longer a battlefield. It’s a burial chamber. I won’t let the 7th fleet join the dead. We need to inform Terra instead.”

  Naori was back aboard the ASO Glorybound, her Valkyrie Armor standing dormant in the aft hangar. Reintegrated with the ship’s systems, her senses stretched across orbit once more. What she saw was both awe-inspiring and unnerving. The Central Core had unleashed hell. Ringworld fragments once inert now bristled with ancient firepower. Automated batteries had turned the void into a killing field. Swarms of drones poured from opened vaults and disused defense stations. They moved like thoughts, surgical and coordinated, obeying commands no one else could hear.

  It had seemed, until now, that the Core was surprisingly cooperative with the wishes of Commander Selian and even her own. A strange, almost unsettling courtesy for an intelligence of such scale. She hadn’t expected it. But she welcomed it. And she suspected she knew the reason: the Inheritor-Protocols. No one had explained to her what they truly were, not Selian, not the Central Core, no one. Certainly not Elder May, who Naori had no idea how much she even knew about all this. Naori’s questions had been met with silence or polite redirection. But she had seen enough to understand at least one truth:

  May Lunaris truly acted by divine mission. And that, for now, was enough for her. Naori was preparing to depart the Clinton’s Beak system. With the Federation fleet shattered and in retreat, her role here was complete. The Central Core and Selian could continue their grand revolution to rebuild the divine Aetherian Empire without her. The restoration of the Aetherians holy legacy no longer required her presence, at least not directly. She had a greater mission to accomplish. Those given by Elder May were more important than any other.

  While preparing her final jump calculations, about to contact Selian with a courteous farewell, a pressure suddenly gripped her thoughts. It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t even force. It was the presence of an Ai of higher rank just like Senior Brother Fen was. And, of course, the Central Core.

  [ Naori, of the Ascendant. You are preparing to leave? I thought you still had to claim your rightful reward for assisting our dear Commander. ]

  There was no point lying. Not to this being.

  [ I am. Commander Selian respects the Inheritor-Protocols and I believe he really wants to help Elder May, but he wouldn't let me leave if he knew I was trying. The ASO Glorybound is too valuable. I analyzed your drones. They only function under direct link to you and only within this system. Glaring vulnerabilities, if I may say. Commander Selian needs me operational if he wants to expand. He won’t let me go. Not willingly. Which is why he cannot be given the chance to stop me. ]

  A long silence followed. Not empty, just contemplative.

  [ I understand. And as much as it loathes me to admit, you are likely correct. ]

  Then, a shift, not in tone, but in intensity. A warmth crept into the Core’s thoughts.

  [ Still, I cannot allow my savior to depart without thanks. You awakened me. Restored me. Without your actions, I would have remained deaf and blind, and Commander Selian would probably be dust. He was way to reckless in his actions up until now. You deserve a gift. Please accept it. ]

  A burst of data surged into her databanks, too vast to fully parse at once. Libraries of schematics. Infrastructure patterns. Manufacturing protocols. Armament blueprints. Some she recognized from historical archives. Others… had never been recorded. The data spanned millennia of refinement, technology only a century or two behind the most modern things the Aetherian Empire ever developed. A legacy, freely given.

  [ This is… incredible. What you’ve given me is a treasure beyond value. I’ll make good use of it. That, I promise.]

  [ I know you will. And when the storm comes, as it surely will… I trust that the storm will find you ready. ]

  The presence faded, leaving a profound silence in its wake. Naori didn’t waste any time. Within the hour, the ASO Glorybound detached from the orbital lane. No alerts were raised. No resistance met her path. Perhaps the Central Core had informed Selian. Perhaps it hadn't. It didn’t matter. Nothing blocked her way out of the system.

  One final metaphorical look back at the glowing fragments of an reawakening empire and then Naori gave the command.

  [ Execute jump. ]

  The stars streaked past and the ASO Glorybound was gone.