Julian didn't just play a sound. He played a memory.
He channeled the screaming of the Jungle Titan. The grinding of the Foundry gears. The wind in the hollow rocks. The silence of the ocean grave. He took every broken, rusted, painful thing the Empire had tried to pave over, and he amplified it through his nanite arm.
THE RUST.
It wasn't a song. It was a tear in the fabric of the Emperor's perfect world.
SCREEEEE-KRRR-ZAAAT.
The sound erupted from Julian like a physical shockwave of static. It hit the immaculate glass walls of the Throne Room.
The glass didn't shatter; it shivered.
Emperor Valerius, floating in his aura of golden perfection, flinched. For the first time, his face twisted in genuine pain. He clutched his ears, his concentration shattering.
"Stop it!" Valerius screamed, his voice losing its echo. "It is... unclean!"
The floating mandala of glass shrapnel wavered. The perfect geometric pattern collapsed, the shards raining harmlessly to the floor.
The Break
Across the room, the stasis bubble around Lyra popped.
Lyra collapsed, gasping for air, her heart restarting with a painful thud.
Above, gravity returned to normal. Marcus fell from the ceiling, landing hard but rolling to his feet.
"He's distracted!" Marcus yelled, grabbing his pistol. "The field is down!"
"Isolde!" Julian shouted into his comms, fighting the headache caused by his own noise. "Do it now!"
In the Lower Ring, Isolde slammed the manual override on the thrusters.
"Hang on!" she screamed.
WHOOOOSH.
The massive maneuvering thrusters on the side of the Spire fired at 100% capacity.
The Miss
The entire station lurched violently.
Inside the Central Shaft, the Kinetic Driver fired.
THOOM.
The tungsten rod—a twenty-foot spear of dense metal—shot out of the tube at Mach 25.
But the station was tilting. The angle was off by 0.5 degrees.
From the Throne Room window, they watched the streak of fire descend toward Earth. It didn't aim for the golden dot of the Capital.
It missed the city. It missed the continent.
It slammed into the Great Salt Flats—the empty wasteland between the mountains and the sea.
FLASH.
A blinding white light erupted on the surface of the planet. Even from space, the shockwave was visible, kicking up a mushroom cloud of salt and dust that reached the stratosphere.
"Target missed," Marcus confirmed, staring at the destruction. "He just vaporized a thousand miles of nothing."
"You..." Valerius lowered his hands. His eyes were bleeding gold light. He looked at the off-axis Earth.
"You ruined the alignment," the Emperor whispered. "The symmetry is broken."
The Emperor Unbound
Valerius looked at Julian.
The calm architect was gone. In his place was a being of pure, unstable energy. His skin cracked like porcelain, revealing blinding light underneath.
"If I cannot save the garden," Valerius roared, his voice distorting into a digital screech, "then I will burn the weeds!"
He raised both hands.
The Throne Room began to deconstruct.
The floor panels ripped themselves up. The glass walls dissolved into sand. The Master Gyroscope beneath the chair began to spin wildly, glowing red.
"He's tearing the station apart!" Lyra yelled, firing her gun at him. The bullets melted before they touched him.
"He's overloading the Aether Core!" Skid's voice screamed over the comms. "The station is going critical! You have five minutes before the Spire detonates!"
"We have to go!" Marcus grabbed Julian. "The tether is snapping! If we're here when it breaks, we drift into deep space!"
"Where do we go?" Lyra shouted over the roar of the disintegrating room. "The elevator is at the bottom of the shaft!"
Julian looked up. Through the dissolving ceiling of the Throne Room, he saw the massive, dark hull of the Sovereign's Will—the Emperor's flagship—docked at the very peak of the Spire.
"We go up," Julian said. "We take his ship."
"He's blocking the way!" Lyra pointed.
Valerius floated between them and the docking tube. He was gathering the debris of the room into a swirling cyclone of matter.
"No one leaves!" Valerius shrieked. "We ascend together! Into the Silence!"
Julian looked at his arm. The nanites were exhausted. The blue light was flickering.
I can't fight him, Julian realized. He's a nuke waiting to go off.
But I don't need to fight him. I just need to open the door.
Julian looked at Zephyr, who had just arrived at the door with Isolde and Skid (having evacuated the Lower Ring).
"Zephyr!" Julian yelled. "The airlock! Can you blow it?"
Zephyr looked at the massive blast door behind the Emperor.
"There is no wind here," Zephyr said.
"Make some!"
Zephyr nodded. He spun his staff. He didn't aim at the Emperor. He aimed at the control panel of the external airlock.
Tweet-WHOOSH.
A concentrated blast of air shattered the panel.
WARNING: HULL BREACH.
The external airlock blew open.
The vacuum of space roared into the room.
The Vacuum
The air in the Throne Room was sucked out instantly.
Sound vanished.
The debris cyclone around the Emperor was ripped away, sucked out into the void.
Valerius, floating in the center, was caught in the decompression. He grabbed onto the Master Gyroscope, his golden energy flaring as he fought the pull of the vacuum.
"Grab something!" Julian's voice echoed in their helmets (thankfully, they had sealed their suits).
Julian activated his mag-boots. Clang. He held onto Lyra. Marcus grabbed a railing.
The Emperor looked at Julian. His face was a mask of rage. He tried to raise his hand to crush them, but the vacuum was pulling him backward.
Julian raised his nanite arm. He pointed at the Emperor.
He didn't fire. He just waved.
Let go.
The gyroscope bracket snapped.
Valerius was sucked out of the hole.
He drifted into the black, flailing, a tiny speck of gold against the infinite stars.
Then, he vanished.
The Sovereign's Will
"Seal it!" Marcus yelled over the comms.
Skid hacked the emergency shutters. A blast shield slammed down over the hole, sealing the room. Atmosphere flooded back in with a hiss.
"Is he dead?" Lyra gasped, checking her oxygen.
"He's drifting," Julian said, standing up. "But he's not dead. He's Aether. He can survive in space. But he's gone for now."
"The station is still blowing up!" Isolde reminded them. The floor shook violently. "The Core is melting down!"
"To the ship!" Julian led the charge.
They sprinted past the ruined throne, up the final ramp, and into the airlock of the Sovereign's Will.
The flagship was massive. The bridge was dark, lit only by emergency red lights.
"Marcus, can you fly this?" Julian asked.
"It's Imperial code," Marcus jumped into the pilot's seat. "I wrote half of it. Strap in!"
He punched the ignition.
The engines of the Sovereign's Will roared to life. The docking clamps disengaged.
BOOM.
Below them, the Orbital Spire began to break apart. The hab-rings shattered. The central shaft buckled. The Zenith Anchor tether snapped, whipping away into the atmosphere like a severed nerve.
The explosion was silent in the vacuum, a blossoming flower of fire and debris.
The Sovereign's Will shot away, escaping the blast radius.
The Bridge
They sat on the bridge of the stolen dreadnought, watching the station burn.
"It's over," Lyra whispered.
"No," Julian stood at the viewport. He looked out at the stars.
"Look."
He pointed to the deep dark.
There, moving against the starfield, was a shadow.
It wasn't a ship. It was a Wave. A distortion in space, rippling toward Earth.
And within the wave, something was moving. Massive, organic shapes.
"The Dissonance," Skid whispered, reading the sensors. "The Emperor wasn't lying. It's real. And it's here."
The signal hit the ship's comms.
It wasn't a scream. It was a voice. A billion voices speaking in unison.
"WE HAVE HEARD THE BELL. WE ARE COMING TO SILENCE IT."
Julian looked at his team.
"The Emperor was just the jailer," Julian said grimly. "Now we have to fight the executioner."
He turned to Marcus.
"Take us down. We need to wake the rest of the Titans. All of them."
"Even the dead one?" Marcus asked.
"Especially the dead one," Julian said. "Set course for the Silent Sands."