The light was wrong.
Traq's eyes opened to sterile whiteness—ceiling tiles, fluorescent panels, the antiseptic geometry of a medical facility. Not the organic nightmare of Arcadia's corrupted corridors. Not the darkness of death he'd expected to find waiting. The light was flat and even and utterly without menace, and for several long seconds he couldn't process it. His brain expected threat—had been expecting threat since the moment the scout's psychic assault had torn through his implant like a blade through silk—and the absence of danger registered as dissonance, a wrongness that took longer to resolve than it should have.
He tried to move. His body refused.
Diagnostic assessment, automatic: Right arm immobilized in a regeneration sleeve, the medical polymer warm against his skin, humming with the low-frequency vibration of accelerated cellular repair. Left shoulder packed with surgical foam, nerve bundle damage—weeks of physical therapy minimum. Ribs bound with smart-bandages that hummed softly as they monitored his breathing, the adhesive pulling against his skin with each inhale. Punctured lung sealed but tender, the tissue fragile enough that a deep breath sent a lance of pain through his left side.
The implant.
Traq reached for the familiar presence at the base of his skull, the constant hum of enhanced cognition that had been his companion since the Vanguard academy. Since before he could remember being anything else. The implant was the first thing he'd known every morning for twenty-three years—a warm pulse of awareness that activated before his eyes opened, cataloguing his physical state, updating his tactical awareness, connecting him to the network of enhanced minds that formed the galaxy's most capable military force. It was as natural as breathing. More natural. Breathing was involuntary. The implant was everything.
Nothing.
Cold silence where the implant should have been. Not damaged. Not dormant. Not the muffled, restricted sensation he'd felt during rare maintenance cycles when the technicians had temporarily reduced its processing load. Gone. The socket was wrong—smooth, surgically closed, the skin sealed over the access port with the precision of medical-grade closure. Nerve endings that had connected to crystalline processing matrices for over two decades now led nowhere, terminating in scar tissue that his fingertips could feel when he reached up to touch the back of his skull.
They removed it.
The realization hit harder than any of his physical injuries. Twenty-three years of enhanced perception, tactical processing, accelerated reflexes—stripped away. He was baseline human now. Ordinary. Vulnerable. The word that the Vanguard program had spent his entire adolescence teaching him to despise. Baseline. The starting point that enhancement was designed to transcend. The state of being that every Vanguard was taught was insufficient, inadequate, the raw material that the implant transformed into something worth having.
Weak.
No. Not weak. Just... slow. His thoughts came at the speed of thought—biological thought, unassisted, the natural tempo of a human brain operating on its own electrochemistry. Each idea required effort. Each perception required processing time. The room around him registered in layers rather than instantly: first the light, then the shapes, then the colors, then the details. A process that the implant had compressed into a single simultaneous burst now unfolded over seconds, each element arriving separately, like watching a photograph develop one pixel at a time.
"You're awake."
Oliver Atchison stepped into view, looking like he hadn't slept in days. Dark circles under his eyes, carved deep enough to cast their own shadows. Stubble creeping across his jaw in a pattern that suggested he'd been shaving by feel and missing spots. Clothes rumpled and stained with something that might have been stim or might have been blood—the medical variety, transferred from sitting too long in chairs beside hospital beds. He carried himself with the careful exhaustion of a man running on fumes and willpower, his movements precise despite the fatigue because Oliver had always moved with precision, implant or no implant.
"How long?" Traq's voice came out as a rasp. Throat dry. Intubation damage—the raw, scraped sensation of tubes that had been removed recently enough for the tissue to remember.
"Three weeks." Oliver pulled a chair to the bedside and dropped into it with a controlled collapse that suggested the chair was an old friend. "Touch and go for the first few days. The docs said your brain was hemorrhaging—something about the implant overloading during combat, the neural pathways burning out when you pushed it past its design limits. They had to remove it or watch it kill you."
Three weeks. The alien fleet would be closer now. Whatever the Arcadia had summoned from lost space—the vast, organic shapes that his dying transmission had shown the galaxy—it was coming, and Traq had lain unconscious while the galaxy burned.
"The transmission," he said. "The psychic vision—"
"Everyone saw it." Oliver's face darkened—not with anger, but with the expression of a man who'd spent three weeks processing something that defied processing. "Anyone with an implant, anyway. Which is pretty much every soldier, officer, and government official in the galaxy. The whole thing played out in their heads like a nightmare broadcast—alien images, fleet movements, the sensation of something vast and hungry turning its attention toward populated space. Imperial High Command calls it mass hysteria. The Union claims it was some kind of Vanguard psy-ops attack. And the independent systems..." He shook his head. "Panic. Riots. Three stations in Sector Four went dark last week—no one knows if it's raiders or refugees or something worse."
Traq absorbed this. Three weeks of chaos while he lay in a hospital bed, useless. The implant would have processed the information instantly, filed it into tactical categories, identified priorities and optimal responses. Without it, the data just sat in his mind, heavy and unorganized, like loose cargo in an unsecured hold.
"Jim?"
"Downstairs, arguing with the station quartermaster about fuel costs." A ghost of Oliver's old smile—thin, dry, the expression of a man who found comfort in the predictability of small irritations. "Some things never change. Elizabeth is here too—she's been helping coordinate our supply runs while you recovered."
"Corinne?"
"The hacker? She left two weeks ago. Said she had contacts in Union space who might know something about the Arcadia's origins. The imperial cover-up, the Vanguard program's history—she thinks the answers are buried in classified archives. She'll find us when she finds something." Oliver leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "Traq, what happened on that station? The transmission showed... things. Creatures. A fleet coming from somewhere beyond the rim. But it was fragmented, distorted. Nobody got the full picture."
Traq closed his eyes. The memory was still raw—not dulled by the implant's emotional dampening, not filed into neat categories of threat assessment and strategic relevance. It was just there, vivid and terrible, the alien's psychic assault playing out in unedited sensory memory. The moment his implant shattered. The flood of images that had poured through him and into every enhanced mind in the galaxy.
"The Arcadia wasn't a human station," he said. "It was a trap. A lure. Something ancient built it to attract ships, to harvest..." He struggled for words that would make sense. The concepts the entity had shown him didn't translate cleanly into language—they were feelings, impressions, vast patterns of consciousness that existed outside the framework of human expression. "Minds. Souls. Whatever you want to call it. The seven hundred thousand passengers on the Indeil—they didn't disappear. Something consumed them. Converted them into fuel for an entity that had slept in lost space for centuries. Maybe longer."
Oliver was quiet for a long moment. The medical equipment hummed beside them, tracking Traq's vital signs with mechanical indifference. Heart rate elevated. Blood pressure slightly high. Neural activity patterns abnormal—the monitors didn't know what to make of a brain that had been wired to an implant for two decades and was now trying to function alone.
"And now it's awake," Oliver said.
"Now it's awake. And it's hungry."
"The fleet you showed everyone—"
"Hundreds of ships. Maybe thousands. Organic technology, same as the station. They were already moving when I killed the scout—already in transit, following trajectories that pointed at the densest concentration of inhabited systems." Traq opened his eyes. "How long until they reach populated space?"
"Nobody knows. The astronomers are arguing about it—some say months, some say years. The velocity data from your transmission was fragmentary, and the experts can't agree on whether the organic ships follow conventional physics. The Empire's official position is that it was all a hallucination and there is no fleet." Oliver's jaw tightened. "They're lying, of course. We've seen the classified reports—Jim has contacts in the independent astronomical community. Imperial scouts have already detected anomalies at the edge of the Vaalin system. Gravitational disturbances. Organic mass signatures. Something's out there. Something big."
Traq tried to sit up. His body screamed in protest—ribs grinding against the smart-bandages, shoulder flaring with a hot spike of pain that radiated down his arm, something in his left leg that hadn't quite healed right sending a deep, dull ache through his thigh. He pushed through it, forcing himself upright against the pillows, his teeth clenched against the pain that the implant would have managed, modulated, reduced to a background data point.
"I need to get out of here."
"You need to rest. The doctors said—"
"The doctors don't understand what's coming." Traq's voice was harder than he intended—the frustration of a man who could feel time slipping away while his body refused to cooperate. "Oliver, I was inside that thing's mind. For a moment, when the implant shattered, I connected to it. Not just receiving—transmitting. It sensed me. Evaluated me. And it was... interested. Not the way a predator is interested in prey. The way a scientist is interested in an anomaly."
Oliver's face went still. "What does that mean?"
"It means I'm a liability. It knows I exist. Knows my mind, my patterns, the way I think. Everyone near me is in danger—not from physical attack, but from the entity's awareness. It can reach through the implant network. Through any enhanced mind within range." Traq looked at his old friend, seeing the exhaustion and fear beneath the stubborn loyalty. "You should have left me on Arcadia."
"Don't be an idiot." Oliver's tone brooked no argument—the voice of a man who'd been protecting Traq Lain since they were cadets at the Academy and wasn't about to stop now because the stakes had gotten incomprehensibly large. "We've been through too much together for me to start abandoning people now. Jim feels the same way. So does Elizabeth. And Adeline—" He paused. Something shifted in his expression—not softness, exactly, but a recognition of something important. "She's been sitting with you every night. Barely sleeps. Just watches you and waits."
Adeline. The name brought memories of a different kind—her face in the slave pen on Bateria, hollow and broken. Then later on the Adelina, slowly healing, her voice growing stronger day by day as the distance from captivity gave her room to remember who she'd been. She'd been strong enough to survive three years of captivity. Strong enough to stand beside him despite knowing what he'd become and what hunted him.
"Where is she?"
"Getting food. She'll be back soon." Oliver stood, moving to the window. Outside, the bustle of Meridian Station continued—ships docking and departing, cargo being loaded, automated transport vehicles weaving between the larger vessels with mechanical precision. The ordinary commerce of a galaxy that didn't know how close it stood to ending. "Traq, what's the plan? You always have a plan."
Did he? The implant had been more than just processing power—it had been his strategic advantage, the thing that let a man with physical limitations compensate through cognitive superiority. Without it, he was flesh and bone and scar tissue. A soldier who'd outlived his usefulness. A weapon that had been disarmed.
But the alien had seen his mind. Had sensed his determination in that final moment before the implant shattered—the irrational, unsupported refusal to die that had driven him to pick up a plasma blade and charge a creature that should have been unkillable. And it had been... surprised. Perhaps even afraid.
Why would something that old, that powerful, fear a dying man with a plasma blade?
Because it expected us to break, Traq realized. It expected terror, surrender, despair. That's what it feeds on. That's what it consumes. Organized consciousness, optimized minds, the predictable patterns of enhanced intelligence—those are its food source.
And I gave it something else. Something it couldn't model.
"The plan—" He paused, letting the words settle into their proper weight. "The plan is the same as before. We find out everything we can about the Arcadia, the implants, the entity behind it all. We figure out how to close the door I opened. And we do it before that fleet arrives."
"With what resources? We've got one ship, minimal crew, and half the galaxy's governments would love to get their hands on us for questioning."
"We've got something better than resources." Traq met Oliver's eyes. "We've got knowledge. I saw inside that thing's mind, Oliver. Not much—fragments, impressions—but more than anyone else alive. The Empire and the Union are going to spend months arguing about whether the threat is real while their intelligence agencies try to classify it. We can act now."
"Act how?"
The door opened before Traq could answer. Adeline stood in the threshold, carrying a tray of food she'd clearly forgotten about. Her eyes went wide when she saw him sitting up—wide and bright and full of something that the implant would have classified as emotional response, low tactical relevance, and that Traq's unenhanced brain recognized immediately as relief so intense it was almost pain.
"Traq."
"Hey."
She crossed the room in three quick strides, set the tray aside with a clatter she didn't notice, and took his hand. Her fingers were warmer than he remembered, stronger. Three weeks of regular meals and safety had put some weight back on her frame, and the brittle quality that captivity had given her was slowly being replaced by something more solid.
"You scared me." Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "The doctors kept saying you might not wake up. That the neural damage was too extensive. That even if you survived, you might not be..." She trailed off.
"Myself?"
"Functional."
"I'm functional. Barely." He squeezed her hand. "Oliver's been updating me on the situation. The transmission, the fleet, all of it."
"I know what you're planning." She met his eyes, and in her gaze he saw the same determination that had kept her alive through three years of hell. "You want to go back out there. Find answers. Stop whatever's coming."
"Do you think I shouldn't?"
"I think you can't help it. And I think you're right—someone has to do something, and nobody else is going to." Her grip tightened on his hand. "I'm coming with you."
"Adeline—"
"Don't." Her eyes flashed—not anger, but the fierce certainty of someone who'd made a decision and wasn't interested in debate. "I told you on the Adelina that we face this together. I meant it. I'm not some fragile thing you need to protect, Traq. I'm a survivor. I've been surviving since before you were a Vanguard."
He looked at her—really looked—and saw the woman she'd been before the slavers. Before the years of captivity had ground her down. She was finding herself again, piece by piece, and part of that process was choosing to stand beside him despite knowing the cost. Not because she couldn't survive alone—she'd proven she could. But because she'd decided that survival wasn't enough. That living meant choosing what to fight for.
"Okay," he said. "Together."
Oliver cleared his throat. "Not to interrupt, but we've got a more immediate problem. The station administrator is asking questions about our extended stay. Meridian's supposed to be a transit hub, not a long-term medical facility. If we don't move soon, she's going to start looking into our identities, and that's attention we can't afford."
"How long until I can walk?"
"The docs say another week, minimum. Your leg took more damage than they initially thought—something about old Parwen tissue not regenerating properly. The damage from the arena fights left scarring that the natural healing process can't work around."
A week. Too long. The alien fleet was coming, the galaxy was in chaos, and Traq lay stuck in a hospital bed waiting for his body to remember how to function without the machine that had been running it since childhood.
"Then we leave tomorrow," he said. "Rig up a mobility assist if you have to. I'll manage."
"Traq—"
"I've fought with worse injuries. And sitting here isn't going to help anyone." He looked between Oliver and Adeline, seeing the concern in their faces, the reluctant acceptance that followed. They knew him well enough to know that arguing would waste time they didn't have. "We need to find Jim, get the Adelina prepped, and plot a course for somewhere we can actually work without attracting attention."
"I know a place." Adeline released his hand and moved to the window, standing beside Oliver. "When I was... away... I heard the slavers talk about a station in Sector Nine. Off the grid, no government affiliation, neutral ground for anyone willing to pay. They call it Haven."
"A black market station?"
"A free station. They don't ask questions, don't keep records, don't cooperate with Imperial or Union authorities. It's where people go when they need to disappear." She turned back to face him. "Or when they need to do things that can't be done under official eyes."
"Can you get us there?"
"I remember the coordinates. The slavers used it as a transit point sometimes, when they had cargo too hot for regular markets." Her voice was steady, but Traq caught the flicker of old pain beneath the words—a woman revisiting the geography of her captivity, finding it changed from prison to tool. "I never thought I'd go back voluntarily."
"You don't have to—"
"Yes, I do." She straightened her shoulders. "I survived that place once. I can survive it again. And if there's information there that can help us stop what's coming, then it's worth the risk."
Oliver nodded slowly. "I'll tell Jim to start the preflight checks. We can be ready to leave by morning."
"One more thing." Traq gestured toward the monitoring equipment beside his bed, the displays that tracked his vital signs and neural activity with mechanical precision. "Can you get me access to the station's information network? I want to see what the galaxy's been doing while I lay unconscious. News feeds, classified intercepts if you can manage it. Everything."
"The doctors aren't going to like that."
"The doctors don't get a vote."
Oliver almost smiled—the first real one Traq had seen since waking up. "I'll see what I can do. Get some rest while you can. Tomorrow's going to be a long day."
He left, his footsteps fading down the corridor. Adeline moved to the chair Oliver had vacated, settling into it with the ease of someone who'd spent many hours in that exact position. The cushion bore the shape of her body—proof of the weeks she'd spent there, watching, waiting, refusing to leave.
"He's worried about you," she said. "They all are."
"I know."
"So am I." She reached out, brushing a strand of hair from his forehead. "The implant's gone, Traq. Whatever you were before—whatever edge it gave you—that's over now. You're going to have to fight differently."
"I know that too."
"Do you?" Her eyes searched his face. "You've been a Vanguard since you were a child. You don't know how to be anything else. And now you're planning to go up against something that's been consuming civilizations for centuries, without the one thing that made you special."
Special. Was that what the implant had made him? Or had it been a crutch—a way to avoid confronting the truth about what he really was? A broken man given power he didn't deserve, wielding it in service of governments that didn't deserve his loyalty.
"Maybe that's the point." His voice was barely audible. "The entity expects Vanguards. It's built to consume enhanced minds, to turn our power against us. But a baseline human? A man without the implant?" He shook his head. "Maybe that's exactly what it won't see coming."
Adeline was silent for a long moment. Then she leaned forward and kissed his forehead, gentle and fierce at once.
"Get some sleep," she said. "I'll be here when you wake up."
Traq closed his eyes. The darkness behind his eyelids was different now—quieter, emptier, without the constant hum of the implant processing information in the background. Part of him missed it. The security of it, the capability, the sense of being more than the sum of his biological parts.
But another part of him—the part that had picked up a plasma blade and charged an alien predator, the part that had refused to die when every calculation said he should—that part was still there. Untouched. Unenhanced. Purely, stubbornly human.
Outside the window, Meridian Station continued its endless dance of commerce and transit. Ships came and went. People lived their lives, unaware or uncaring of the doom that approached. In a few months—maybe sooner—all of this would change. The fleet would arrive. The harvest would begin. And unless someone found a way to stop it, the galaxy would burn.
Traq Lain lay in a hospital bed without his implant, his body broken, his mind stripped of everything that had made him formidable. The most dangerous thing he possessed was a handful of fragmented alien memories and the stubborn refusal to accept that the situation was hopeless.
It wasn't much.
But it was human. And the entity, for all its millions of years of consuming civilizations, had never quite figured out what to do with that.
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