Location: The Rust-Belt of Aethelgard (A floating junk-city).
The sky above Sector 4 wasn't blue. It was the color of a bruised plum, choked by the exhaust of a million hover-freighters and the neon bleed of the upper-city holographic ads.
Kael Ardent adjusted his rebreather, the rubber digging into the bridge of his nose. He hated the ads. Specifically, he hated the one currently playing—a fifty-foot projection of a Vorthax Ambassador shaking hands with the planetary Governor. "Peace through Integration. Strength through Biomechanics."
"Peace through slavery," Kael muttered, his voice cracking. He was nineteen, scrawny for his age, with messy black hair that hadn't seen a comb in weeks and eyes that were a startling, unsettling violet.
He wasn't looking at the sky for long, though. He was looking at trash.
Kael was a Diver—someone crazy enough to repel down the underside of the floating city to salvage parts that fell into the gravitation nets.
"Come on, come on," Kael whispered, hanging upside down by a magnetic tether attached to his boots. "Give me a hyper-coil. Just one hyper-coil and I can eat real protein tonight. No more algae paste."
His magnetic glove hummed as he scanned the debris caught in the net. Rusty hull plating. Useless. Broken servo-droid. Stripped. Bio-waste canister. Gross.
Then, he felt it. Not a hum in his glove, but a hum in his teeth. A vibration that started in his marrow and rattled his bones.
He looked to his left. Tangled in a knot of copper wire and optic cables was a cube. It wasn't metal, and it wasn't plastic. It looked like obsidian, but it pulsed with a faint, rhythmic azure light.
"Jackpot?" Kael asked himself. "Or bomb?"
Usually, in Sector 4, the answer was bomb.
He reached out. The moment his fingers brushed the surface of the cube, the hum stopped. The noise of the city—the roaring engines, the distant sirens, the buzzing ads—vanished.
Hello, Starborn.
The voice didn't come from his comms ear piece. It came from inside his skull. It sounded like the crash of a glacier and the whisper of a lover all at once.
Kael yelped, jerking his hand back. His magnetic tether slipped.
"Whoa!" He flailed, gravity reasserting itself as he dropped ten feet before his emergency brake kicked in, slamming him against a rusted support beam. "Oof. Okay. Hearing voices. Probably oxygen deprivation. Cheap filters."
He looked back at the cube. It was floating. Not caught in the net. Floating. Hovering in mid-air, defying the artificial gravity generators of the city.
Kael scrambled up the beam, adrenaline flooding his system. He grabbed the cube. It was warm. Danger approaches, Kael Ardent.
"Stop doing that!" Kael hissed, shoving the cube into his satchel. "And how do you know my name?"
Above.
Kael looked up toward the ledge of the sector. Three figures stood silhouetted against the neon sky. They weren't human. They were Vorthax Skulkers.
They looked like nightmares welded together. Seven feet tall, their bodies a grotesque fusion of grey flesh and chrome plating. Their eyes were red optical sensors, and where their right arms should have been, rapid-fire plasma casters hummed with lethal energy.
"Target identified," one of the Skulkers droned. Its voice sounded like grinding gears. "Anomaly detected. Surrender the artifact."
Kael looked at the Skulkers. He looked at the endless drop below the city—a three-mile fall into the gas giant the city orbited. He looked at his rusty magnetic tether.
"You know," Kael shouted, forcing a bravado he didn't feel. "I found it first! Finders keepers is a recognized intergalactic law!"
The Skulker raised its arm. The plasma caster began to whine, charging up.
"Law unrecognized," the machine said. "Terminate."
"Run. Right. Running is good," Kael said.
He hit the release on his boots.
He didn't climb up. He dropped.
As he fell, the plasma bolts sizzled through the air where his head had been a second ago. Kael plummeted into the mist, the wind roaring in his ears. He fumbled for his grappling gun, aiming for a lower support strut.
Click. Nothing. Jammed.
"You have got to be kidding me!" Kael screamed, tumbling through the air. "Cheap piece of junk!"
The ground—or rather, the dense, crushing atmosphere of the gas giant—was rushing up to meet him. This was it. The outcast, the rat of Sector 4, was going to end up as a smudge on the windshield of a mining drone.
Unlock the gate, the voice in his head commanded.
"I'm a little busy falling to my death!" Kael screamed.
The gate is within. PULL.
It was an instinct Kael didn't know he had. It felt like reaching for a muscle he had never flexed. In his panic, clutching the strange warm cube in his bag, Kael pulled at the empty space in front of him.
He didn't reach for a physical object. He reached for the fabric of reality itself.
His eyes flared with a blinding white light. The violet iris was consumed by the glow of a collapsing star.
KRAKOOM.
The air around him didn't just break; it shattered. A rift tore open in the sky—a swirling vortex of gold and starlight.
Kael fell into it.
Instead of hitting the crushing depths, he slammed onto a hard, cold metal floor. He tumbled, rolling to a stop, gasping for air.
He wasn't falling anymore. He was inside a room. A clean, white, sterile room filled with humming server banks.
"What..." Kael wheezed, sitting up. He looked at his hands. They were smoking. Not burned, but radiating a faint, mist-like energy.
"Intruder alert," a sassy, distinctly female voice chimed over a loudspeaker. "If you are here to sell me extended warranty on this ship, I swear to the Maker I will vent this room into space."
Kael looked around. "Where am I?"
A hologram materialized in front of him. It was a chaotic avatar—a shifting geometric shape that occasionally looked like a smirking face.
"You," the AI said, "are on the bridge of the Celestial Vanguard. A ship that has been buried in this asteroid for three thousand years." The hologram leaned in close. "And you, skinny boy, just teleported through four feet of solid durasteel plating using magic. So, explain yourself before I get the cleaning drones to scrub you off my floor."
Kael reached into his bag and pulled out the cube. It was glowing brighter now. The AI froze. The hologram stopped shifting and turned into a face of pure shock.
"Oh," the AI whispered. "Oh, scrap."
"Is that bad?" Kael asked.
"That," the AI said, "is the Key to the star-forge. And you... you're a Starborn." The AI paused. "I thought you were all dead. Like, really dead."
Kael looked at the cube, then at his glowing hands. "I was just looking for a hyper-coil."
BOOM.
The entire ship shook. Dust fell from the ceiling.
"Well," the AI said, its voice turning cheerful. "It seems your friends followed you. The Vorthax are cutting through the hull. I have no engines, no weapons, and a pilot who looks like he hasn't eaten a vegetable in six years."
Kael stood up, the fear suddenly replaced by a strange, cold calm. The energy in his veins was humming again.
"Can you fly this thing?" Kael asked.
"If you can power it," the AI retorted. "My fusion core is dead. I need a jump start."
Kael stepped toward the main console. He placed his hand on the dead interface. He didn't know what he was doing, but the voice did.
"Let's wake up the dragon," Kael whispered.
End of Chapter 1