Chapter 236: An Unlikely Inheritance
The Bastion Alliance fleet was being unmade. It was a slow, quiet, and deeply terrifying process.
Ships were not exploding in fireballs; they were simply ceasing to function, their systems failing, their hulls bending like soft plastic, their crews floating in zero gravity as the laws of physics took a coffee break around them.
Regent Vorlag’s attack was a silent, creeping wave of pure, weaponized order, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.
On the bridge of the Odyssey, the mood was desperate. They had made their stand, a grand, rebellious gesture for love. Now, they were about to be erased for it.
"Shields are offline!" Scarlett yelled, her hands flying over a dead console. "Weapons are useless! I can’t even get the engines to respond!"
"It’s rewriting everything," Zara said, her voice a mixture of terror and fascinated horror. She was watching the energy readings, which were fluctuating in ways that should have been impossible.
"It’s not just turning things off. It’s changing the rules. The value of Planck’s constant just changed. The speed of light is... slowing down. My brain hurts just looking at this."
They were trapped. Their brave rebellion was about to end with a quiet, logical fizzle.
And then, in the middle of the chaos, Zara had a breakthrough.
Her mind, pushed to its absolute limit, suddenly made a wild connection. She remembered the massive data packet Valerius had given to Ryan in his final moments.
They had spent days sorting through the intelligence files and the secret schematics, but there had been one folder, buried deep and protected by a level of encryption that had taken her a week to crack, that they hadn’t understood.
It was labeled simply: "Project Absurdity."
She had thought it was a joke, or perhaps one of Valerius’s failed experiments. The files inside described a device so conceptually insane, so fundamentally opposed to the laws of nature, that she had dismissed it as a theoretical fantasy.
Now, she understood.
"Valerius," she whispered, her eyes going wide. "That magnificent, arrogant, paranoid genius. He was planning for this."
"Planning for what?" Emma asked, her voice tight with tension.
"For this!" Zara exclaimed, pulling the files for Project Absurdity up on her own, battery-powered data pad. "Valerius always saw the god Core as a tyrant, a system of laws that was holding the galaxy back. He was building a weapon to fight it.
Not a bigger gun or a stronger shield. A weapon to fight the laws themselves!"
The schematic for a strange, spherical device appeared on her screen. It was covered in impossible angles and glowing, contradictory symbols.
"He called it a ’Reality Destabilizer,’" Zara explained, her voice quick and excited. "It’s not a weapon. It’s a bubble of chaos. It’s designed to create a small, localized pocket of space where the fundamental laws of reality temporarily cease to function.
A zone of pure, conceptual lawlessness. Inside the bubble, the Regent’s power won’t work!"
It was a crazy, desperate hope, a single "get out of jail free" card left to them by their greatest enemy.
"Can you build it?" Ryan’s voice, calm and steady, came over the private comm channel to the Matriarchs. He was safe in a shielded room, guarding the seed, but he was listening to everything.
"I can’t build it from scratch," Zara said. "But the files say he constructed a single prototype. He had it stored on a small, stealth shuttle docked in his secret asteroid base. We captured that base after Asylum. That shuttle... it’s in our cargo bay right now."
A new plan was formed in a matter of seconds, a plan so risky it made their previous suicide missions look like a walk in the park. The Reality Destabilizer had to be deployed outside the fleet. Someone had to fly a small ship out into the middle of the reality-bending storm and turn it on.
"The device is experimental," Zara warned. "The energy surge when it activates will be immense. The ship that deploys it will almost certainly be destroyed."
A heavy silence fell on the bridge. It was a one-way trip.
"I’ll do it," Carmella said, her voice quiet but firm. She was the best pilot they had for this kind of insane, delicate work. She knew how to fly in places where the rules didn’t apply.
"No," a voice said. It was the echo of Jaxon, speaking through the ship’s main computer. "You’re not going alone. The Destabilizer needs to be manually tuned as it’s deployed. Zara’s notes say it requires constant adjustments to create a stable bubble. That’s a slicer’s job. My job."
"You’re a ghost in a machine, Jaxon," Carmella said, her voice soft. "How are you going to come with me?"
"The stealth shuttle," Oracle’s calm voice interjected, "the Void Cutter, has a small, portable Oracle-core extension. Jaxon’s consciousness can be temporarily transferred into the shuttle’s computer system."
The plan was set. They would transfer Jaxon’s mind into the small shuttle, and he and Carmella would fly out to their almost certain death.
Minutes later, in the cockpit of the small, black shuttle, the Void Cutter, everything was ready. Carmella sat at the controls, her hands steady, her face a mask of calm focus. A small, blue light on the console next to her pulsed gently.
"You comfy in there, old man?" she asked the light.
"It’s a little cramped," Jaxon’s familiar voice replied from the cockpit’s small speakers. "And the décor is terrible. But for you? I’ll manage."
She smiled, a small, sad, and beautiful smile. They looked out the cockpit window at the chaos outside, at the beautiful, terrible sight of their fleet being slowly erased from existence.
"Looks like we’re the last hope of the rebellion, partner," Jaxon said, his voice soft.
"Just another Tuesday for us, right?" she replied, trying to sound brave.
They flew the small shuttle out of the Odyssey’s dying hangar bay and into the storm. The little ship was tossed and battered by the shifting physics. Carmella fought the controls, her teeth gritted with effort.
In the middle of the chaos, with alarms blaring and the ship shaking itself apart around them, they finally had their moment. The moment they had been dancing around for so long.
"Carmella ," Jaxon’s voice said, suddenly serious. "I, uh... I never got to tell you..."
"I know, Jaxon," she whispered, her eyes still locked on the swirling madness outside. "I know. Me too."
"If we get out of this..." he started.
"We won’t," she said, not with sadness, but with a simple, calm acceptance.
"Yeah, probably not," he agreed. "Well... in that case..."
She reached out and gently touched the pulsing blue light on the console, her fingers tracing its warmth.
"I love you, you magnificent, reckless fool," she said.
"I love you too, my impossible, beautiful Captain," his voice replied.
In the tiny cockpit of a doomed ship, surrounded by a universe that was trying to erase them, they finally confessed their love. And then, Carmella leaned forward and gently kissed the pulsing blue light, a final, heartbreaking kiss for the ghost in her machine. It was a perfect moment of defiance against a universe trying to tell them that nothing mattered.
"Alright," she said, her voice full of a new, fierce energy. "Let’s give ’em hell."
She flew the Void Cutter to the designated spot, right in the heart of the reality distortions.
"Do it, Jaxon!" she yelled.
"Deploying the bubble," his voice replied. "It’s been an honor, Captain."
He activated the Reality Destabilizer. A brilliant flash of pure, white, chaotic light erupted from the shuttle. A perfect sphere of calm, lawless space began to expand outwards, pushing back against the Regent’s power. It was working.
But the energy feedback was too much. The little Void Cutter was at the epicenter of a conceptual explosion. They were safe inside their beautiful bubble.
But they were also trapped. The bubble had saved them from the Regent, but their own technology was now unstable inside the lawless zone. And the Regent was still out there, on the other side of the bubble’s shimmering wall, waiting for them.
They had bought themselves a reprieve. But the stalemate was absolute.