Null Signal

Nix Dross has spent seventeen years being told he's nothing. In a civilization where your Resonance Frequency determines your rank and your rank determines everything else, a zero reading isn't just a disappointment. It's a life sentence. So he stopped fighting it and ended up hauling cargo at the edge of Compact space with nowhere better to be. Then his ship gets hit by Voidborn raiders and Nix survives something that should have killed him outright. Next thing he knows a Compact intelligence director with no insignia and too much patience is sitting across a table telling him he isn't Null at all. He's a Void. A frequency anomaly so dangerous the Compact buried it from their own records two centuries ago. He doesn't generate resonance energy. He absorbs it. Every attack that lands on him feeds him, and what gets absorbed can eventually come back out. The last person born like him nearly unmade a star system. The Compact wants to try again because something is coming from beyond explored space that has already swallowed five worlds whole and left nothing behind. They've been sending their best fighters at it for two years. Rank sixes. Eternals. None came back. Turns out every ranked fighter is a beacon and whatever the Reapers are, they're drawn to frequency like fire to air. Nix generates nothing. To whatever the Reapers use to hunt, he's invisible. He's seventeen, undertrained, and being asked to walk toward the thing that killed three Eternals. The road from zero to something worth fearing is long and ugly.