The stolen gunship Liberator's Dawn hung in the shadow of Tenebrae's gas giant like a predator waiting for the kill order. Forty-three hours remained on Judgment's purge clock. Orbital mirrors were already tilting, preparing to burn the planet clean of emotion.
Aren Vale stood at the tactical holo, nexus vines glowing beneath his skin in fractal probability trees. His calm voice cut through the red-lit bridge.
"Mirror array has twelve primary reflectors. We redirect four, fracture the rest. 71% survival if we strike in the next nineteen minutes."
Kael Riven leaned over the nav console, living tattoos mapping mirror trajectories in real time. Amber eyes flicked to Aren.
"Cold math says we die. Hot math says we make them blink first."
Commander Elias Thorne—salt-and-pepper beard, shoulders like bulkheads—locked the final plasma lance.
"Then we give them something louder than mirrors."
The plan crystallized: kamikaze run cloaked in the planet's magnetotail, slingshot into high orbit, board the central reflector, and turn the array into a sun-killing lens pointed at the Assimilator fragment instead of Tenebrae.
They launched.
Zero-g corridors became ritual ground. Armor peeled away—not for desire, but for connection. Vines and tattoos needed skin contact to synchronize. Hands clasped, pulses aligned, breath shared. Syl's orb hovered at the center, projecting a soft lattice of light that linked every heartbeat.
Thorne's deep voice anchored them.
"We are not weapons. We are the reason weapons fail."
The gunship screamed through radiation belts. Mirror arrays ignited, painting the void in molten gold. Liberator's Dawn rolled, shedding ablative armor like burning skin.
Impact.
They breached the central reflector—a cathedral of mirrored petals kilometers wide. Inside: silence, starlight, and the Assimilator's chorus—thousands of harvested voices singing in perfect, soulless harmony.
Echo Wraiths manifested: Jax for Aren, Elian for Kael, lost lovers wearing their old smiles. Illusions reached out, promising the peace of forgetting.
Aren's vines flared.
"Probability of deception: 99.8%. Hold the line."
Kael's tattoos lashed like whips of light, carving corridors through the wraiths.
"They want silence. We give them noise."
The team moved as one organism. Lira's vine-arm speared control nodes. Jorik welded overrides. Mara kept hearts beating. Syl's light grew brighter, child-voice rising into something ancient.
At the reflector's heart: the Chorus Core—a sphere of captured souls pulsing in perfect unison.
Thorne placed the Seed warhead.
"Time to teach them dissonance."
They had seconds before the mirrors finished charging.
Final ritual—no time for ceremony, only truth.
Hands on the core. Pulses synchronized. Syl's light became a lance.
Aren spoke the only words that mattered.
"We remember for them."
The Seed detonated—not with fire, but with memory. Every stolen heartbeat, every erased kiss, every forbidden dream flooded the chorus.
The perfect harmony cracked.
Wraiths screamed as their own voices turned against them. Mirror petals shuddered, realigning under the weight of reclaimed emotion.
Liberator's Dawn broke free as the array fired—not down at Tenebrae, but up. A lance of pure sunlight speared the Assimilator fragment hanging in high orbit. The moon-beast convulsed, chorus fracturing into a billion discordant cries.
On the bridge, the crew watched the fragment burn.
Kael's hand found Aren's.
"Chaos just won."
Aren allowed himself the smallest curve of a smile.
"Recalculating."
Far below, Tenebrae's oceans glowed brighter. The eclipse shifted—just slightly—as if the planet itself had taken a breath.
But in the dying light of the fragment, something vast turned its attention toward them.
The Assimilator was only the herald.
The true chorus was coming.