The heavy, grinding screech of Rook's vault door echoing through the garage signaled the end of their tense standoff.
Rook emerged from the shadows a few minutes later, pushing a rusted, anti-gravity dolly. Resting on top of it was a pristine, cylindrical piece of Vanguard engineering, glowing with a faint, healthy blue light. A Class-4 Quantum Manifold, along with two heavy Aether-fuel cells.
"Here," Rook rasped, her synthetic jaw clicking as she kicked the dolly toward Leo. "It's clean. The serial numbers are burned off, so the Inquisition won't flag your yacht the second you plug it in."
Jax stepped forward, his expression hidden beneath the shadow of his tattered cloak. He tossed the glowing, pale-blue Tier IV Glass-Stalker core through the air.
Rook caught it with her biological hand, her eyes widening as the freezing, feral energy washed over her skin. She didn't say another word, simply retreating back toward her workbench, mesmerized by the prize.
"Let's move," Jax murmured.
Leo grabbed the handles of the grav-dolly, the localized anti-gravity field making the ton of machinery feel as light as a suitcase. Thorne took the rear, his massive, shrouded frame acting as a physical barricade, while Sarah walked point.
They stepped out of the grease-stained garage and back into the chaotic, neon-lit labyrinth of Scrapper's Row.
"That went surprisingly well," Leo breathed a sigh of relief, pushing the dolly over the grated metal walkway. "We swap the manifold, fuel up, and we can be back in Capital space by tomorrow."
"Keep your head on a swivel, Leo," Jax said quietly, his Void-Sense expanding like an invisible net across the crowded promenade. "It went too well."
For the first ten minutes, their journey back toward Docking Bay 4 was identical to their arrival. The deafening noise, the suffocating smells, the overwhelming press of outcasts and criminals.
But as they crossed into a narrow, dimly lit sector of the promenade suspended over a particularly deep, black chasm of the asteroid, Jax felt the frequency of the street change.
"The crowd," Sarah whispered, her combat instincts instantly flaring. She subtly reached under her heavy poncho. "Jax, the crowd is thinning out."
She was right. The bustling, chaotic river of merchants and scavengers had suddenly evaporated. Storefront shutters were slamming shut with loud, metallic clangs. The people who belonged in Draft Space recognized the signs of an impending bloodbath long before the first shot was fired, and they were actively clearing the kill-zone.
Jax stopped walking.
"Rook sold the information," Jax said, his voice a flat, dead calm, realizing the ambush had already been set.
From the shadows of the rusted scaffolding ahead of them, figures began to step out into the flickering neon light. Behind them, dropping from the overhead pipes with heavy metallic thuds, more figures sealed off their retreat.
They were boxed in.
There were at least thirty of them. A diverse, terrifying mob of mercenaries, bounty hunters, and scavengers.
Growing up in the Barrens and fighting in the trenches of Aethos Prime, the Null-Squad had been surrounded almost exclusively by humans and Harvest bio-constructs. They knew that the Vanguard ruled over a vast, multi-species galaxy, but non-humans were rarely seen on the Capital Worlds, and almost never in the mud-trench infantry. They had only ever seen the other sentient species of the galaxy on Vanguard propaganda holovids.
Now, they were looking at them down the barrel of a gun.
Standing at the front of the mob was a towering brute of a species known as a Gorr. He was eight feet tall, his skin resembling cracked, gray granite, his face entirely devoid of a nose, possessing only a heavy, jutting jaw and deep-set, pitch-black eyes. Beside him stood two Vesperans—lithe, four-armed humanoids with sleek, cerulean-blue skin and predatory, feline eyes. They were twirling crackling vibro-blades in all four hands.
The rest of the mob was a mix of heavily cybernetic humans and various other rim-world species, all holding an assortment of illegal, modified plasma weaponry.
A human cyborg, half of his face a mess of optical sensors and sparking wires, stepped out from behind the Gorr brute. He was holding a heavy scatter-blaster.
"Rook sent a sector-wide ping," the cyborg sneered, his mechanical eye whirring as it scanned the four of them. "Said four kids walked into her shop carrying unrefined Tier IV indigenous cores. Said you produced raw, unshaped Aether from your bare hands."
"Rook exaggerates," Jax said, his voice carrying clearly over the hum of the surrounding plasma weapons. "We traded the only core we had for this manifold. We have nothing left. Let us pass."
The Gorr brute let out a sound like grinding boulders. "If you have no cores, then we will take the manifold. And your ship. And then we will harvest your marrow while your hearts are still beating. Rich Capital kids always have good marrow."
Jax sighed, a quiet, weary sound. He looked at Thorne, Sarah, and Leo.
"Remember the rules," Jax whispered over their secure internal suit-comms. "No Tier VI. No flashy Vanguard Aether. We do not light up this station. Pure physical combat."
"Jax, there's thirty of them, and they have blasters!" Leo panicked, gripping the handles of the grav-dolly.
"Then we hit them before they can pull the triggers," Sarah said, her gray eyes hardening to steel.
Jax looked back at the cyborg leader. He offered one last, polite warning. "We don't want to kill you. Walk away."
The Vesperans laughed, a high, clicking sound. The cyborg raised his scatter-blaster. "Take their legs!"
Jax vanished, and the tense standoff instantly exploded into a brutal street fight.
He didn't use the Pulse-Step. He didn't need it. His physical body, permanently hardened by the foundational density of his cores, moved faster than the cybernetic optical sensors of the mob leader could process.
Jax closed the twenty-foot gap in a fraction of a second. He slipped under the barrel of the scatter-blaster, grabbed the cyborg's wrist, and pivoted. Using the man's own weight against him, Jax snapped the wrist with a sharp crack, disarming him, and drove a perfectly aligned palm strike into the cyborg's chest plate. The mercenary was launched backward into the crowd like a bowling ball, knocking down three others.
"Go!" Jax yelled.
Thorne roared. He didn't summon his Earth-Golem armor, and he certainly didn't draw the World-Breaker's Bulwark. Instead, he grabbed the heavy handles of the anti-gravity dolly holding the manifold. With a massive heave, he spun the entire grav-lifted cart like a battering ram, slamming the heavy steel chassis into the charging Gorr brute.
The granite-skinned alien grunted as the cart hit him in the midsection, but to Thorne's shock, the Gorr didn't fall. The alien grabbed the cart, his massive muscles bulging, and tried to rip it from Thorne's hands.
"Oh no you don't, pebbles!" Thorne grunted, planting his boots and engaging in a pure, terrifying tug-of-war with an alien that weighed eight hundred pounds.
Sarah was a blur of lethal precision. Without her lightning, she relied on her Vanguard close-quarters training. She ducked under the four-armed flurry of a Vesperan's vibro-blades, swept the alien's digitigrade legs out from under it, and delivered a brutal elbow strike to its temple as it fell. She picked up one of the dropped vibro-blades, spinning it effortlessly to parry a plasma bolt fired from the crowd.
"Leo, push!" Sarah shouted, covering the analyst.
Leo was terrified, but he was Vanguard-trained. He shoved the grav-dolly forward with all his might while Thorne used it as a shield against the Gorr, slowly forcing their way down the grated walkway.
Jax was in the center of the mob, fighting ten men at once. He was a phantom. A mercenary lunged with a shock-baton; Jax sidestepped, tapped the man's elbow to hyper-extend the joint, and used the mercenary's falling body as a shield against incoming blaster fire. He flowed from one target to the next, his hands neutralizing threats with horrifying, absolute efficiency.
But they were vastly outnumbered, and the mob was entirely willing to kill them.
"Hold them down! Shoot the big one!" the cyborg leader yelled, having scrambled back to his feet, pulling a heavy plasma-pistol with his good hand.
A barrage of plasma fire rained down on them. Thorne cried out as a bolt grazed his shoulder, searing the heavy cargo vest. Sarah was forced to dive behind the grav-dolly, pinned down by overwhelming suppressing fire.
Jax deflected a vibro-blade strike, his mind racing. He could end this in one second. He could open the Sovereign Domain and crush the entire mob into the grated floor. But doing so would trigger every Aether-sensor in Draft Space. It would bring down the station's warlords, and eventually, the Inquisition.
They were pinned, hopelessly outnumbered in the crossfire. But before they had to make the choice between dying or exposing their Tier VI cores, an unexpected ally struck from the dark.
A small, spherical object dropped from the shadows of the overhead scaffolding, clattering loudly against the metal grating in the center of the mob.
BZZZZT.
A massive, localized electromagnetic pulse detonated.
Every single neon sign, plasma weapon, and cybernetic enhancement in a fifty-yard radius instantly short-circuited. The walkway plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness. The cyborg leader screamed as his neural-optics violently shut down. The heavy plasma-pistols of the mercenaries sparked and died.
"This way! Hurry!" a voice hissed from the darkness to Jax's left.
Jax's Void-Sense mapped the area perfectly despite the lack of light. He sensed a figure standing by a heavy maintenance hatch in the side of the canyon wall that had just been pried open. The figure wasn't human. It was tall, impossibly lean, with a distinct, avian-like Aetheric signature.
"Null-Squad! Three o'clock! Move!" Jax ordered over the comms, trusting his instincts.
Thorne shoved the Gorr brute backward with a massive heave of the grav-dolly and sprinted blindly toward Jax's voice, pushing the manifold cart ahead of him. Sarah grabbed Leo by the collar and hauled him through the dark.
They poured through the open maintenance hatch.
The moment the grav-dolly cleared the threshold, their mysterious savior slammed the heavy iron hatch shut behind them, throwing a heavy manual locking bar into place. Muffled shouts and the sound of fists pounding against the metal echoed from the walkway outside.
"Keep moving," the voice said. A small, chemical glow-stick snapped, casting a faint, eerie green light over the narrow maintenance tunnel.
Jax finally got a good look at the alien who had just saved their lives.
He was a species Jax had only seen in deep-archive Vanguard xenology files. An Aethelgardian. He stood seven feet tall, but was incredibly slender. His skin was covered in fine, iridescent feathers that shifted from deep violet to midnight black. His face was sharp, angular, and bird-like, with large, luminous golden eyes that possessed vertically slitted pupils. He wore a sleek, hooded smuggler's coat heavily modified with utility pouches.
"Who are you?" Thorne asked, panting heavily, keeping his massive body positioned between the alien and the manifold.
"My name is Rael," the alien said, his voice melodic but edged with a sharp, clicking accent. He didn't reach for a weapon. He just held up the green glow-stick, gesturing down the dark, dripping tunnel. "And if you want to keep your internal organs inside your bodies, you will follow me."
"Why did you help us?" Sarah demanded, her hand tight around the hilt of the stolen vibro-blade. "Rook put a bounty on our heads. Why didn't you collect?"
Rael let out a soft, trilling laugh. "Because Rook is a thief and a butcher, and I loathe her. I was observing her shop, looking for a way to slice her security grid, when I saw four heavily disguised humans walk out with a Class-4 Manifold. You clearly don't belong in Draft Space. Which means you have a ship. A fast one."
"And?" Jax asked, his brown eyes perfectly unreadable.
"And," Rael said, his golden eyes narrowing, "I need a ride out of this festering junkyard. I save your lives, guide you through the underbelly, and get you to your ship. In exchange, you take me with you."
"We're not a taxi service," Thorne grunted.
"Without me, you are dead meat," Rael stated bluntly, pointing a feathered finger at Thorne. "You are strong, human, but you don't know the layout of this station. The main promenade is cut off. Rook's mercenaries will be waiting at Docking Bay 4. I know the smuggler's maintenance routes. I can get you beneath the floorboards and pop you out directly inside the airlock."
Jax analyzed the situation. The math was simple. They were lost, they were being hunted, and they couldn't use their Tier VI powers without blowing their cover to the entire galaxy.
"Deal," Jax said. "Lead the way, Rael."
For the next thirty minutes, their underbelly run was a frantic, claustrophobic nightmare.
Rael moved with terrifying, fluid agility, leading them through a labyrinth of rusted ventilation shafts, dripping sewage pipes, and narrow maintenance crawls. Thorne had to turn sideways just to push the grav-dolly through some of the tighter gaps, scraping the heavy manifold against the walls.
"You kids fight well for humans," Rael noted over his shoulder, gracefully vaulting over a leaking plasma-pipe. "Most Capital Worlders would have frozen when the Gorr charged. Vanguard?"
"We're couriers," Leo squeaked defensively, adjusting his glasses.
Rael let out another trilling laugh. "Couriers. Of course. Couriers who take down a cyborg warlord with their bare hands and carry Aether that makes a mechanic like Rook salivate." Rael glanced back at Jax. "You're the leader. I can smell the quiet on you. It's unnerving."
"Just focus on the path, Rael," Jax said, staying right on the alien's heels.
Above them, the sounds of the hunt echoed through the metal grating. They could hear the heavy boots of the mercenaries searching the promenades, yelling in various alien tongues. Draft Space had locked down. The bounty was too high to ignore.
Finally, Rael stopped in front of a heavy, circular hatch set into the ceiling of the maintenance tunnel. A rusted, digital keypad was mounted next to it.
"We are directly beneath Docking Bay 4," Rael whispered, pulling a small, illegal decryption spike from his pouch and jamming it into the keypad. "The docking master has likely sold you out to the mercenaries. They will be waiting on the ramp of your ship. When I pop this hatch, we will be right behind them."
"How many?" Sarah asked, tightening her grip on the vibro-blade.
Rael checked a small wrist-monitor. "I read ten thermal signatures standing on the permacrete. Heavily armed."
"Leo," Jax said softly. "The second we breach, you take the manifold straight to the engine room. Thorne, Sarah, clear the ramp. We don't stop."
Rael hit the bypass. The heavy circular hatch hissed and popped open above them, signaling the violent, desperate start of their departure.
Rael launched himself upward, throwing the hatch open and vaulting into the docking bay with a pair of sleek, silenced plasma-pistols drawn.
Jax, Sarah, and Thorne poured out right behind him.
The Aethelgardian wasn't lying. A squad of ten heavily armed mercenaries was standing around the boarding ramp of the Celestial Zephyr, attempting to slice the ship's airlock encryption.
"Contact!" one of them yelled, spinning around as the hatch blew open behind them.
Rael didn't hesitate. He fired three rapid, perfectly placed shots, dropping the three mercenaries closest to the ramp. The alien moved like a dancer, his feathers ruffling as he flipped backward to avoid a return volley of plasma fire.
Thorne roared, heaving the massive grav-dolly up out of the hatch and shoving it toward the ship with a massive burst of physical strength. "Leo! Go!"
Leo scrambled out of the hole, grabbed the handles, and sprinted up the boarding ramp as the ship's proximity sensors recognized his biometric signature and hissed the airlock open.
"Cover him!" Jax shouted.
Sarah threw the stolen vibro-blade like a throwing knife, sinking it into the shoulder of a charging mercenary, then swept the legs out from under another. She fought with ruthless, brutal efficiency, covering Leo's retreat.
Jax stepped into the fray, his cloak billowing around him. A mercenary raised a heavy mag-rifle, aiming dead-center at Thorne's back.
Jax flowed into the man's space. He didn't strike the mercenary; he struck the rifle barrel with a sharp, palm-heel strike. The absolute, unyielding density of his bones permanently bent the heavy Vanguard steel barrel. When the mercenary pulled the trigger, the plasma bolt misfired inside the chamber, blowing the rifle out of the man's hands and sending him flying backward.
"Into the ship!" Rael yelled, laying down suppressing fire with his dual pistols as more mercenaries began pouring into the docking bay from the main promenade.
Thorne grabbed Sarah by the back of her poncho and practically threw her up the ramp into the airlock. Rael sprinted up behind her, his golden eyes wide with adrenaline.
Jax was the last one on the ramp.
The cyborg leader, having recovered from the EMP and tracked them through the station, burst into the docking bay. He was furious, his mechanical eye sparking, holding a heavy, shoulder-mounted rocket launcher.
"Nobody leaves with my bounty!" the cyborg screamed, leveling the launcher at the open airlock of the Zephyr.
"Jax!" Sarah screamed from inside the ship.
Jax didn't run. He stood at the bottom of the ramp, facing the cyborg.
Just air, Jax thought. Just form.
He didn't draw the Tier VI weapon. He didn't need to. He dropped into a perfect, heavily rooted Xing Yi posture. He channeled the foundational density of the Grizzly-Ape and the absolute hardness of the Obsidian-Skin directly into his open palms.
The cyborg fired the rocket.
It screamed across the docking bay, trailing a tail of white-hot exhaust, aimed directly at Jax's chest.
Jax exhaled sharply and thrust both palms forward.
He didn't use Aether. He used the perfection of martial alignment to violently compress the air in front of his hands. A concussive wave of pure atmospheric pressure slammed forward.
The wall of air hit the rocket mid-flight. The sheer kinetic force crushed the projectile, detonating it prematurely twenty feet away from the ship. The explosion sent a massive shockwave of fire and shrapnel washing over the docking bay, knocking the cyborg and the advancing mercenaries completely off their feet.
Jax didn't even flinch against the backdraft. He turned, walking calmly up the ramp as it began to retract.
"I got it! It's slotted!" Leo's voice screamed over the ship's internal PA system from the engine room. "Hyper-drive containment is stable!"
"Punch it!" Thorne roared from the co-pilot seat.
The airlock hissed shut, sealing them inside the pristine white leather and mahogany cabin.
The Celestial Zephyr didn't wait for docking clearance. The sub-light engines flared violently, tearing the rusted docking clamps entirely off the permacrete floor. The sleek silver ship shot out of the docking bay, tearing through the chaotic airspace of Draft Space.
As they cleared the gravity well of the massive, junk-yard metropolis, the hyper-drive spooled with a high-pitched, melodic whine.
The stars stretched into blinding white lines.
With a silent, seamless glide, the Zephyr slipped into the quantum slipstream, leaving the lawless, violent nightmare of Draft Space far behind them.
In the cabin, Jax leaned back against the bulkhead, sliding down to sit on the mahogany floor. He pulled his hood back, letting out a long, exhausted breath.
Across the room, Rael, the Aethelgardian smuggler, was leaning against the culinary synthesizer. The tall, feathered alien was looking at Jax, his slitted golden eyes wide with a mixture of profound awe and deep suspicion.
"You deflected a high-explosive rocket... with a gust of wind from your hands," Rael stated slowly, his clicking accent emphasizing every word.
"It was a very strong gust of wind," Jax said flatly, closing his eyes.
"I see," Rael murmured, crossing his arms. "I think, human, that we are going to have a very long, very interesting conversation before we reach Capital space."