General Inverse heard the noise before she saw the room.
Metal benches shifting. Voices too close together. The broadcast feed turned past regulation volume.
She didn't quicken her pace.
The tablet in her hand glowed dull blue. Roster grid, timestamps, a single red absence that refused to resolve. She tapped it once. No change.
Yoon.
The mess hall doors opened.
Dozens of soldiers stood facing the screen. No one saluted. No one sat. The broadcast jittered with signal lag from orbit.
A woman, framed by static and subtitles.
—stateless—
—terrorist—
A young corporal near the screen tilted his head—frowning.
"Isn't that Tianyu Star?"
The question wasn't loud but it made Karinka stop just inside the room.
She didn't look at the screen yet. She looked at shoulders.
No flags. No borders.
Only the pulsar—white thread on black cloth. Sagan's map, stitched and restitched, edges fraying from use. Someone's fingers curled into it unconsciously, thumb pressing into the star's core until the fabric creased.
The tablet vibrated.
A soft haptic pulse. Then another.
Coordinates populated the missing field. Not flagged. Not transmitted. Simply present.
Karinka lowered her gaze.
For a moment, the room held.
She raised the tablet.
For one breath, it glowed steady in her palm.
Then the alloy bent before it broke.
A sharp metallic protest as the casing folded under her grip, the screen flaring white before collapsing inward. Components spilled out and struck the floor in heavy, industrial clatter. One piece slid across the tiles and came to rest against a boot marked with desert dust.
No one spoke.
Karinka's hand remained closed.
Across the room, helmets were lifted from hooks. A pilot reached up and straightened the patch on his shoulder.
Somewhere beyond the walls, a launch system cycled from idle to deploy.
No announcement followed.
No order needed to.
The Heavenly Knights mobilized.
**
PAX NOVA 80 | 2110 CE — Xmas Eve
The station woke, already firing.
Its first solution wasn't aimed at a formation, a weapons lock, or a hostile vector. It selected the nearest mass that exceeded a certain threshold and erased it.
A NATO interceptor vanished mid-turn. Subtracted. The space it had occupied pulled inward for a fraction of a second, vacuum collapsing on itself, before stillness returned.
"Control, we're taking fire from Nekyia—repeat, Nekyia—"
The call cut off as the pilot's craft sheared lengthwise, nose and cockpit separating cleanly before inertia finished the job.
Confusion spread faster than panic. Pilots tightened formations instinctively, sliding closer to one another, stacking for mutual coverage.
They died for it.
The station's fire intensified where density increased. Rounds threaded through clustered fighters, passing from hull to hull as if following a rule no one else could see. Two Knights were clipped while maneuvering to cover a NATO wingman; the wingman was hit anyway, the shot passing through one engine, then another, then another, until the line ended in vacuum.
"Break—break apart—spread out—"
The order came too late. Spreading out only changed which pilots were closest.
Elvis saw it then.
"Not threat," he said, voice flat across three channels. "Error correction. Distance."
No one asked him to clarify.
He rolled and burned inward.
Just decisively enough to cut across the chaos at an angle that reduced his relative motion against the station instead of increasing it. Fire skimmed past him, missing by margins that felt intentional, as if the system had already deprioritized him.
The station reacted.
Segments along its hull separated and released shapes that didn't emerge so much as unfold.
Drone fighters—assembled themselves mid-flight, acceleration vectors snapping into place before their geometry resolved.
They ignored everything already dying.
A drone crossed Elvis's path without adjusting course, firing not at him but through the space he had occupied seconds earlier. The shot continued onward and struck a NATO fighter that had drifted closer, its pilot still trying to rejoin formation.
"Why isn't it tracking—why is it—"
The voice ended in a static hiss as the fighter came apart.
Elvis didn't chase the drone. He let it pass, counted the delay in its correction, and fired into the gap that delay created. The drone split asymmetrically, fragments spinning off at incompatible speeds.
Another took its place immediately. Then another.
A Heavenly Knight cut across Elvis's blind side without warning. The rounds chewed through her fuselage, tearing it open. Her fighter tumbled once, then twice, then disappeared into the station's shadow.
The fire pattern adjusted again.
Elvis moved closer.
The nearer he flew, the less the station seemed to notice him—its solutions bleeding outward, prioritizing larger deviations, denser clusters, anything that stood out against its internal model.
Behind him, the sky was breaking into pieces that still transmitted for seconds after their pilots were gone.
No one screamed anymore.
Breathing. Numbers. Short confirmations that ended abruptly.
Elvis angled his approach toward an opening in the station's outer defenses—damage from earlier impacts creating a void the system hadn't corrected for yet.
"Proximity suppresses it," he said, not loudly. "Get close enough, it has to change states."
Some pilots followed.
Most didn't make it far enough for the rule to matter.
The drones kept coming, indifferent to allegiance, uninterested in victory, carving space until the only thing that seemed to confuse the station was something flying where it shouldn't be.
Elvis flew into the blind spot.
Below the atmosphere, the auroras came without warning.
Not the slow, ceremonial kind from postcards, but hard curtains of color tearing across latitudes that had no business hosting them. Magnetic readings jittered. Long-haul flights rerouted. A scrolling banner appeared at the bottom of morning news feeds:
GEOMAGNETIC DISTURBANCE — NO CAUSE FOR ALARM.
The weather segment still aired.
Traffic lights flickered once, corrected, and resumed their cycles. Trains ran. Offices opened. Cafés served coffee to people who glanced up only long enough to complain about reception.
In apartments and classrooms, children watched the battle through feeds compressed for speed and clarity. Icons blinked. Kill counts updated. Commentators filled silence with certainty.
Young adults kept working.
Meetings continued with the volume muted in the corner of shared screens. Someone joked about bonuses. Someone else checked a watch and asked if the signal interference would excuse a late report.
The world did not stop.
But the old ones stepped outside.
In Bucaramanga, night had just settled when Mrs. Valencia pushed open the balcony door. The air smelled faintly metallic, like rain that hadn't fallen yet. Green light rippled low on the horizon, bleeding upward into red.
A nurse turned from the doorway.
"Why are you stepping out?"
Mrs. Valencia didn't answer at first. She leaned both hands on the railing, shoulders stiff, eyes straining upward.
"It's on the feed," the nurse said gently. "You don't need to—"
"I need to see it," Mrs. Valencia said. "With my own eyes."
The nurse hesitated, then let the door close behind her.
Mrs. Valencia remembered 2025.
She remembered streets filled with people who still believed that numbers could outweigh machinery. That shouting together mattered. That history bent if enough hands pushed at once.
She had taught her daughter those stories.
Her daughter had smiled, patient, already busy surviving.
She had taught her granddaughter too—about marches, about solidarity, about the lie that nothing ever changes. Her granddaughter had learned them the way one learns myths.
Now the feeds called that same girl stateless. Combatant. Threat.
Mrs. Valencia tilted her head back until her neck ached.
She wasn't looking for color.
She was looking for proof.
Across the world, the same movement repeated.
Old men in Tokyo stood on rooftops in slippers, hands clasped behind their backs. Women in Warsaw wrapped coats tighter and stared upward, unmoving. In Johannesburg, elders gathered silently at street corners, not speaking, just aligning themselves with the sky.
No chants.
No signs.
No demands.
Only watching.
Someone young noticed.
A college student on a night tram slowed, confused, and raised a phone. The camera caught dozens of elderly figures standing beneath a sky gone wrong, faces lit faintly by aurora and city glow.
They weren't protesting.
They weren't afraid.
They were... waiting.
The post went up seconds later.
Someone posted a photo. The caption read: #BoomerBehavior.
It spread quickly. Comments piled on. Laughing emojis. Speculation. Someone suggested it was a cult. Someone else blamed nostalgia.
No one asked what they were watching for.
Still, the pale blue dot continued its rotation.
Life went on because it had been trained to.
Only the witnesses remembered a time when belief had teeth.
So they stood outside, eyes burning, joints aching, refusing mediation and compression and commentary.
Because if someone from their century...
From their language, their mistakes, their abandoned hopes...
Was still fighting,
Then maybe they hadn't been fools.
Maybe the future they were promised hadn't died quietly in boardrooms and lodges and footnotes.
Maybe it was still up there.
And they needed to see it with their own eyes.
Aldric met Sky above the station's scarred limb, where debris still drifted in slow, unresolved arcs.
The mobile armor moved like it had already decided where the fight would happen.
Sky felt it before he saw it—the pressure change, a tightening of probability. Space ahead of him stiffened, vectors resolving too cleanly, as if the universe had been simplified for someone else's convenience.
He burned sideways.
A claw passed through the space he'd occupied, not slicing but tuning. Its passage left the vacuum behind it humming, field lines ringing like struck wire. Sky's trajectory bent anyway, his momentum shedding in a direction he hadn't chosen.
Too early, he realized.
Aldric was already there.
The armor didn't chase. It arrived. Claws unfurled from its frame, long, segmented tendrils that didn't obey rigid geometry, flexing through angles that belonged to math more than matter. They touched nothing—and Sky spun, his inner ear screaming as reference frames slipped.
He kicked thrust with his wings, overcorrected, barely caught himself on a new vector.
A claw snapped past his shoulder. The heat flash seared skin, vacuum pulling blood into a red arc that froze instantly and shattered.
Sky didn't look.
He dove.
Down wasn't a direction so much as a choice. He dumped altitude, letting gravity well curvature do what engines couldn't, letting the planet's mass interfere with ACE's clean solutions.
The claws followed.
They embedded in nothing visible, tendrils tugging at his path, correcting him back toward a solution he refused.
Aldric closed again, movements fluid, precise.
From inside the armor, it felt perfect.
Every adjustment landed. Every counter came before Sky finished committing to the maneuver. The fight flowed, uninterrupted by doubt. Sky was fast, yes—but readable.
Predictable.
Aldric pressed the advantage.
Sky cut thrust entirely.
For half a second, he was dead weight—no emission, no pattern. The claws hesitated, their resonance nodes searching for continuity that wasn't there.
Sky used the gap to slip between two tendrils, skin burning as fields scraped him raw. He came out the other side tumbling, lungs spasming, vision narrowing.
He needed air.
Below him, the blue curve of Earth rose—thin atmosphere glowing faintly, a boundary he had crossed too many times to ignore. His body screamed for pressure, for oxygen, for down.
ACE noticed.
Solutions recalculated. The claws withdrew slightly, reoriented. Aldric angled the armor to cut off descent, herding Sky away from the Kármán line with elegant efficiency.
Sky saw it.
And then he saw what didn't follow.
The armor slowed as they dropped. Its movements grew conservative, corrections tighter, unwilling to commit to the steepening curve. The claws stopped anchoring ahead of them.
A limit.
Sky bared teeth without breath.
He burned hard toward the atmosphere, skin tearing as reentry plasma licked him alive. The pressure hit like a fist. His lungs dragged air in so violently it hurt.
Above him, Aldric halted.
The armor hovered at the edge of the sky, claws coiled, unwilling to cross.
For a moment, they simply watched each other—one bleeding and breathing, the other pristine and constrained.
Both understood.
The fight was not over.
It had just found its borders.