The file on Carro Denn was thin in the way that deliberately edited things were thin. Not incomplete, scrubbed. The gaps had a shape to them, the specific outline of information that had been removed by someone who knew what they were doing and had the authority to do it cleanly. What remained was enough to tell the story. Nix got the impression that was intentional too. Leave just enough that the lesson lands.
Varek walked them through it without editorializing. Just facts, in order, which somehow made it worse.
Carro Denn had been sixteen when he was found. A dockworker's son from a mid-rim world called Sessa, Null-rated at testing like Nix, unremarkable in every documented way until a workplace accident at the dock where his father worked sent a rank two Flare's frequency discharge into his chest at close range and Carro walked away without a scratch. His father had not been so lucky.
The Compact found him three weeks later. A different unit than Varek's, an older one, operating under different assumptions and considerably less preparation. They brought him in, ran the tests, confirmed the classification, and immediately began trying to figure out how to weaponize it.
"They weren't wrong to see the potential," Varek said. "They were wrong about the timeline. They pushed too fast."
Within four months Carro was absorbing rank three discharges without difficulty. Within six he was taking rank four hits and holding the accumulation for controlled release. The unit's leadership decided he was ready for field deployment. The theoretical literature, such as it was, suggested a Void's capacity for accumulation had limits, a ceiling beyond which the absorbed energy became unstable and uncontrollable. The unit's leadership decided Carro was nowhere near that ceiling.
They were wrong about that too.
The mission was a Voidborn suppression operation on a border world called Heth. A Voidborn cell had been operating there for months, high level, mostly former Ascendants. The kind of target that required significant force. Carro went in with a four person team as fire support, the idea being that he would absorb the Voidborn's frequency discharges and return them, neutralizing the cell's main advantage.
It worked, for about eight minutes.
"The problem," Varek said, "was that there were more of them than intelligence suggested. Seven Voidborn instead of three, all former Ascendants, all hitting him simultaneously once they understood what he was." He looked at the degraded file on the display. "His team pulled back when they saw what was happening. They were the right call. Carro had absorbed the equivalent of seven sustained rank four discharges in under two minutes."
He paused.
"The ceiling," Nix said.
"The ceiling," Varek confirmed. "The accumulation became critical. He couldn't hold it and he couldn't release it in a controlled direction because there was too much coming in too fast for him to manage. When it went it went in all directions simultaneously." He pulled up a secondary file. Aerial survey imagery of a city block, or what had been one. "Four hundred and eleven dead. Mostly civilians in the surrounding area. The Voidborn cell was eliminated. So was everything else within a two hundred meter radius."
The room was quiet.
"Carro survived," Varek continued. "The release didn't kill him. He was found in the crater, unconscious, and brought back into custody." He looked at the image for a moment. "The High Council convened within forty eight hours. Their decision was to terminate the Void program entirely, remove all classification records, scatter the bloodline, and ensure nothing like it could be traced or reproduced." A pause. "Carro Denn was seventeen years old at the time of the incident on Heth. He lived in Compact custody for another six years before he died of complications from the accumulated frequency damage to his internal organs."
Nobody said anything for a while.
Nix looked at the aerial image on the display. The crater where a city block used to be. He thought about the scorched circle on the testing room floor, half a meter across, one machine with a broken display. He thought about what that circle looked like at two hundred meter scale.
"You told me this," he said to Varek, "because you want me to understand what happens if the training goes wrong."
"I told you this because you asked for the full version and you deserve it," Varek said. "But yes. That's also why."
"How is what you're proposing different from what they did with him."
Varek leaned forward slightly. "Three things. First, we have eleven years of preparation that unit didn't have. We understand the accumulation ceiling theoretically in a way they didn't. We know the signs, we know the rate, we know how to pull back before it becomes critical." He held up a second finger. "Second, the objective is not to use you as a weapons platform in a conventional engagement. We're not sending you into a firefight to absorb and return. What we're proposing is different in nature." A third finger. "Third, and most importantly, we're not pushing the timeline. Carro Denn was in the field in four months. We're talking about a minimum of a year of controlled training before you go anywhere near an actual threat."
"A year," Sera said from her chair. She said it like it was a problem.
"The worlds are going quiet faster than that," Osk said quietly. Not an argument, just a fact placed on the table.
"I know," Varek said. "I'm aware of the tension there."
Nix looked at Sera. She was looking at the aerial image with an expression he couldn't fully read, something complicated moving behind it. He wondered how long she'd been in this unit. How much of this she'd known before today.
"You said the objective is different in nature," Nix said to Varek. "What does that mean exactly."
"It means we don't fully know yet," Varek said, and at least he said it straight. "We know you need to be able to get close without being detected. We know that whatever happens when you make contact with a Reaper, it won't look like conventional combat. Beyond that we're working with incomplete information and we'll be honest about that as we learn more."
Nix sat back.
He thought about Carro Denn at seventeen, in a crater, surrounded by what he'd done. A kid from a dockworker's family who'd tested Null at six and spent the next decade being told he was nothing before someone found a use for him and pushed too hard and too fast and got four hundred people killed and then kept him locked up until his body gave out.
He thought about five worlds gone silent. Six hundred thousand people. The number so large it didn't feel real, the way very large numbers sometimes didn't.
He thought about his crew on a transport to the core systems, safe, because they'd gotten out of Grevian before it went quiet.
He thought about zero. Null. Nothing. Seventeen years of closed doors and careful kindness from people who felt sorry for him and a life hauling cargo at the edge of space because there was nothing else available to a person who registered as worthless on the only scale that mattered.
He looked at Varek.
"I want two things," he said.
Varek waited.
"I want real information as we go. Not summaries, not the version you think I can handle. Everything, when there's something to know." He paused. "And I want to talk to my crew before we start anything. Not a supervised check-in. An actual conversation."
Varek considered that for a moment. "Both are reasonable."
"Then I'm in," Nix said.
He said it simply, without drama, because it wasn't really a decision he'd been working toward in this room. He'd made it somewhere between waking up in the medical bay and now, in the quiet spaces between everything he'd been told. It had just taken this long to say out loud.
Sera looked at him from across the table. Still no expression he could read. Then she looked away.
Osk nodded once, the same mild nod he seemed to apply to most things.
Fen had stopped pretending to look at his datapad.
Maren finished his coffee.
"Good," Varek said. "We start tomorrow."