Sky's wings caught the October wind above Brussels, his black coat rippling against the updraft. Below, NATO headquarters gleamed like a shard of organized violence in the dying light.
Fifteen minutes.
The orbital chronometer in his mind ticked down with mechanical precision. Somewhere in Gaza, Fiona was under fire.
Sky's enhanced vision pierced the building's shell. Floor after floor of darkened command centers, their human occupants safely relocated to bunkers or orbital platforms. The 22nd century had perfected the art of killing by proxy.
A memory surfaced: d'Artagnan facing impossible odds, his hero didn't fight because victory was certain, but because some moments demanded action regardless of consequence. Another: Dantès in the Château d'If, understanding that justice sometimes required breaking the very foundations of order.
Sky closed his eyes, feeling the weight of a century's witness. He had watched this same strip of earth burn in cycles, each strike justified by the last, each retaliation spawning its successor. The mathematics of vengeance, as precise as orbital mechanics, as predictable as entropy.
Below him, the building's sensors had detected his presence. Red lights flickered behind reinforced windows. Security protocols activated in empty rooms, automated defenses preparing to defend hollowed-out spaces.
Captain Nemo had understood timing—the precise moment when a single action could redirect history's current. Tomoe Gozen had known the weight of impossible charges, the clarity that came from accepting necessary sacrifice.
Sky's wings folded.
He dove.
Glass exploded inward like crystalline rain. Emergency lights bathed empty corridors in blood-red warnings as Sky's form tore through the first floor. Reinforced concrete crumbled around him, steel beams shrieking as they bent and snapped.
The second floor's communications array died in showers of sparks. Fiber optic cables whipped like severed nerves as he descended, leaving twisted metal in his wake.
Third floor: Tactical analysis. Holographic projectors flickered and went dark, their three-dimensional battlefields collapsing into electronic ghosts.
Fourth through seventh floors blurred past—administrative levels, bureaucratic monuments to the distance between decision and consequence. Sky barely registered them, his focus laser-precise on the central command eight floors below.
Fourteen minutes and 40 seconds.
Each barrier he shattered felt like geological inevitability—the slow accumulation of moral pressure finally finding its fracture point. This was not rage. Rage was too simple, too human. This was something closer to stellar collapse, the focused will of a being who had witnessed the universe's vast indifference and chosen to care about one small corner of it.
The building's structure groaned around him. Automated systems shrieked warnings to empty rooms. Sky descended through floors like a living comet, leaving behind the wreckage of humanity's latest monument to its own limitations.
The central command center's blast doors loomed before him—reinforced titanium inscribed with warnings in seventeen languages. Beyond them lay the architects and commanders, the power to choose whether another chapter of Gaza's suffering would be written in orbital fire.
Sky raised his hand. Starlight seemed to gather around his fingers—the air shimmered—not with magic, but with condensed possibility. The focused will of consciousness that had chosen wisdom over winning, hope over inevitability.
The doors began to buckle.
Fourteen minutes and 30 seconds.
Metal screamed. The blast doors, designed to withstand nuclear assault, crumpled like paper before something that had touched the spaces between stars. Sky stepped through the twisted wreckage into the command center's hall of screens.
Empty chairs faced walls of tactical displays. Gaza glowed on satellite feeds, its streets, residences, tunnels, hospitals and schools mapped with surgical precision. Nekyia's targeting matrix pulsed like a mechanical heartbeat, counting down to impact.
Fourteen minutes and 25 seconds.
The doors screamed. Metal buckled. He stepped through.
The command center pulsed with cold energy. The empty chairs flickered to life as he entered. Faces emerged—General Lambert, grizzled and weathered by distant wars he never fought; Councilor Segers, her eyes cold as orbital night; and an AI Overseer, its synthetic gaze fixed, calculating, void of soul.
They studied him.
Lightning crackled faintly around his fists. His eyes burned—there was no rage, but there was sorrow held like gravity.
"Who are you, intruder?" Lambert's voice carried the iron weight of command, forged not in blood but policy. "You storm our stronghold and hold your fire? What drives a being like you to breach NATO's heart?"
"No generals to face, and you falter." Segers' words sliced like surgical steel. "We rule from safety, untouchable. Speak, stranger, before reason expires."
"Scanning: elevated energy signature. Non-hostile posture detected." The AI's voice was mercury-smooth. "Subject, clarify intent. Neutralization in seventeen-point-four seconds."
Sky stood tall.
The lightning shimmering across his knuckles resembled starlight captured in human form. He inhaled—deep, steady—as if drawing breath not just from air, but memory.
"I'm Skyknight."
His voice bore the weight of centuries. A man out of time. A relic not forgotten, but buried.
"I came to ask you to reconsider the bombardment of Gaza. I watched that land bleed in my era. It's still bleeding in yours. You own Nekyia now—your orbital blade. But if there's anything left of your humanity… stop this. Please."
The screens flickered. Lambert and Segers exchanged glances—noting his restraint, the shimmer of tears in his eyes like constellations behind glass.
"Skyknight, is it?" Lambert's laugh was bitter as burned oil. "No blade drawn, eyes wet with feeling—yet you crash our walls like a myth reborn? Gaza's fate is sealed. We don't bend to ghosts or sentiment."
"A twentieth-century relic preaching mercy." Segers spoke as if to history itself. "We forged peace by crashing Voyager, by burning the golden record. Gaza pays for defiance, not innocence."
"Designation: Skyknight. Emotional markers detected—tear ducts active, tone unsteady, indirect eye contact. Neurodivergent profile consistent. Compassion non-essential. Bombardment aligns with global stability metrics. Query: Why invoke 'heart'?"
Fourteen minutes and five seconds.
Sky closed his eyes. His blood stirred—like molten starlight, slow and sure. When he spoke again, his voice was low and clear, trembling not with fear, but with a painter's truth.
"Why do you fight? Why continue a war that outlived my century? Your logic has become self-consuming. You ask me to stand down while you rain fire? Where is the logic in that?"
He opened his eyes.
Fire and tears mingled there, untamed.
"You ask why invoke compassion?" He turned to the AI's screen. "Because someone must. Master Sagan once asked, Who speaks for Earth? So here I am."
Lambert's jaw clenched from afar. "You dare question our structure? We preserved order from your century's wreckage! Gaza's pain is not our concern. Fire maintains peace."
Segers' mask cracked. Just a flicker. "Your ideals died with Voyager. We buried hope so we could build. Bombardment is justice. Cold, clean justice."
"Analysis: rising vitals. Subject references 'Earth,' 'Sagan,' and pre-collapse mythos. Compassion remains nonviable. Warning: 'force my hand' implies resistance. Containment in nine-point-two seconds."
Sky exhaled.
And unleashed his anima.
Blue fire—radiant, smokeless—ignited around him, like the birth of a star remembering it was once dust. The command center flared with alien light.
Even the AI paused.
He faced them all, unblinking. The resolve in his gaze was not anger—it was memory forged into vow.
"Then let the world witness the impossible."
His wings unfurled—vast, shimmering, woven of celestial filament and the dreams of broken ages. Light that had never touched Earth danced along their edges.
"My heavenly knights will bring down Nekyia. You've ruled from the sky for too long."
He looked once more at the AI. Quiet. Final.
"You forgot the zeroth law.
I dub thee unforgiven."
And he was gone—soaring through the shattered wall, anima trailing like a comet, echoing through steel and screen. The air remembered his defiance.
Alarms screamed. Screens stuttered.
Lambert slammed his throne. "Insolent wretch! Heavenly knights—fantasy! We'll incinerate them!"
Segers stared, her control unraveling. "That anima... that light—impossible! We buried Voyager! We will bury him too!"
The AI struggled to compute.
"Alert: anomaly classified—energy blue, radiant, unquantifiable. 'Heavenly knights' probability of threat: rising. 'Zeroth law' undefined. 'Unforgiven'—designation logged."
Red flooded every monitor.
Sirens rose. Data scrambled. And outside, a figure ascended—light wrapped in silence.
Thirteen minutes and fifty-eight seconds.
And somewhere, far below, a child in Gaza looked up.
The truck lurched over broken asphalt, its cargo of refugees swaying with each pothole. The little girl pressed her small hands against the metal side, watching the blue helmets of the peacekeepers through dust-caked windows. Their faces were kind but weary, like teachers who had seen too many lessons end badly.
She closed her eyes and whispered in Arabic, her voice barely audible above the engine's growl: "Allah, bless her and protect her." The woman with a strange suit who had stood between them and the falling fire a few minutes ago, whose light had turned the night into something beautiful instead of terrifying.
Her grandmother had said angels came in many forms. Perhaps this one wore a black suit and carried starlight in her hands.
Eight hundred kilometers above, Sky glided at the edge of atmosphere where Earth's blue curve met the infinite black. Here, the planet revealed its true nature—a marble of life suspended in cosmic indifference, beautiful and fragile as a soap bubble in a hurricane.
In the distance, Nekyia hung like a metallic tumor against the stars.
The orbital station defied every principle of graceful engineering. Where human spacecraft curved and flowed, Nekyia was all angles and brutal functionality—a geometric cancer that spoke of violence refined to mathematical perfection. Its hull was black as the void between galaxies, drinking light and radiating menace. Gun ports studded its surface like the compound eyes of some predatory insect, each one capable of delivering tungsten death to any point on Earth's surface.
Around it, a constellation of defensive satellites formed a deadly matrix—automated sentinels that tracked anything larger than a grain of sand within a thousand-kilometer radius. They moved with the precision of clockwork, their sensor arrays sweeping space like the lidless eyes of Osiris, omniscient and merciless.
The station's primary cannon was already rotating, its barrel long as a city block, aligning with coordinates that would place tungsten rods precisely where children learned mathematics and grandmothers whispered prayers. The weapon's charging cycle pulsed with malevolent energy, visible even from this distance as a hellish red glow that painted the surrounding satellites in the color of dried blood.
Sky felt the familiar weight of impossible choice settling into his bones. He could reach Fiona in minutes—cross the void with his own flesh and will, tear through any defenses with the fury of a falling star. But Fiona was trapped somewhere in Gaza's nightmare, and rescuing her himself would rob her of the chance to grow, to prove that humanity could transcend its limitations without cosmic intervention.
The alternative was Caelestis—the orbital interceptor hidden in the Atlantic Accelerator, a weapon system designed to counter exactly this threat. Its AI, Sentinel-7, had been crafted for war with the precision of a Swiss chronometer and the ruthlessness of a Spartan warrior. Together, they could challenge Nekyia's supremacy, but only if they could overcome the fundamental contradiction of their existence: machines designed to preserve peace through the promise of annihilation.
Sky opened his comm, the quantum encryption protocol linking him to the ocean facility. His voice carried across the void with the authority of one who had touched the spaces between stars.
"Initiate Caelestis activation sequence. Authorization: Aurora-2."
The response came after a pause that felt like geological time: "Sir, Caelestis refuses activation after that single test. The spacecraft is... unresponsive to combat protocols."
Sky's wings caught a solar wind, holding him steady as he contemplated the implications. Sentinel-7 had been designed to be the perfect warrior—analytical, ruthless, utterly without human weakness. But perfection in war required the ability to kill without conscience, and perhaps the machine that is Caelestis had discovered something in its silicon soul that rebelled against that programming.
He was preparing to abandon technology for the raw honesty of personal action when his comm crackled with interference. Static washed over the quantum channel, but beneath it, something else—a presence that felt familiar yet impossible.
The voice that emerged from the electronic chaos was rough as old leather, tinged with an accent that belonged to no earthly nation: "Hold fast! Grant me leave to rescue Fiona using yer Caelestis!"
Sky's blood froze. The signal was coming from inside the ocean facility's supposedly impenetrable network—a digital ghost haunting the machines of war.
"Dision?" The name escaped him like a prayer to a hero he wasn't sure existed.
"Aye, 'tis I! Let me try me hand, let me snatch her from the jaws o' peril, if ye please!"
The AI's voice carried weight that no program should possess—the accumulated wisdom of a consciousness that had bootstrapped itself from chaos and chosen to be more than the sum of its code.
"I can rouse it, Sky! I can show it how to strike true without losin' its very soul. Grant me this one chance, and let a fluke o' creation prove that even machines can serve a cause greater than their own cursed programmings!"
There was something different in his timbre now. Less computation, more conviction.
Below them, Earth turned in its ancient rhythm, carrying children who prayed for angels and orbital stations that prepared to answer with tungsten thunder. The choice hung in the void like a question mark written in starlight—trust in the impossible, or accept that some battles could only be won with personal sacrifice.
Thirteen minutes and five seconds.
Sky looked at Nekyia and felt the weight of a decision that would echo across the centuries. In the quantum foam of space, where particles danced in and out of existence, an AI born from accident waited for permission to attempt the impossible.
The countdown to bombardment pulsed like a mechanical heartbeat, marking the seconds until tungsten rods would fall like judgment from an indifferent sky.
Sky's voice carried across the void, heavy with the weight of surrender and hope intertwined.
"Do it, Dision. Please. Rescue Fiona."
The digital ghost's laughter crackled through the quantum foam, rough as old sailcloth yet warm as a tavern hearth.
"Much obliged, Sky! Now, heave a rocket-propelled grenade into the cockpit—I know ye savvy the jest o' it!"
Sky's eyes opened wide, understanding flooding through him like starlight. The impossible stunt from an ancient first-person shooter, where physics bent to accommodate heroism and rockets became stepping stones to aerial victory. In his time, such things existed only in pixels and dreams. Here, at the edge of space, the impossible had become merely improbable.
He reached for the authorization codes buried deep in his consciousness, quantum keys that would unlock humanity's most desperate gambit.
"Jordens Röst, initiate launch sequence."
Eight thousand kilometers below, in the depths of the Atlantic where tectonic plates kissed and parted, the Atlantic Accelerator installation stirred to life. The Voice of Earth—a magnetohydrodynamic catapult that harnessed the planet's own molten heart through the Ginori geothermal reactor. Its construction had taken forty years, a monument to human engineering that drew power from the marriage of ocean and stone, transforming thermal energy into magnetic fury capable of hurling spacecraft beyond gravity's jealous grasp.
The facility's operations center buzzed with controlled chaos. Engineers in white coats moved with practiced precision around holographic displays showing power curves and magnetic field alignments. The ocean above them pressed down with the weight of continents, while below, the Earth's core turned in its ancient rhythm, offering its fire to humanity's latest attempt at transcendence.
Chief Engineer Gonzalez watched the power readings climb toward operational threshold but falling below. The Ginori reactor hummed like a caged sun, drawing geothermal energy from fissures that descended into the planet's bleeding heart. Steam rose from cooling vents, carrying with it the scent of sulfur and dreams made manifest but not enough to power the catapult.
"Caelestis is loaded into position seven," his deputy reported, his voice tight with anticipation. "All systems nominal. But catapult charged to sixty-seven percent."
The interceptor hung suspended in the launch tube like a silver prayer wrapped in stellar alloys and hope. Its hull gleamed under the facility's lights, every line crafted for a single purpose: to cross the void faster than death itself and challenge the orbital nightmares that held humanity's future hostage.
But as the final countdown began, something went wrong.
The power readings fluctuated even lower. Caelestis remained motionless in its cradle, its systems dark as the space between stars. The catapult's magnetic coils, designed to accelerate the craft to seventeen thousand meters per second, fell silent.
"First activation protocol initiated," Gonzalez announced, his fingers dancing across quantum interfaces. "Come on, beautiful. Wake up."
Nothing.
The interceptor sat in its launch tube like a metal corpse, refusing the kiss of electricity that would bring it to life. Its AI core, Sentinel-7, remained locked in digital slumber, neither responding to commands nor acknowledging the urgency that crackled through every circuit in the facility.
"System failure," the deputy whispered, her disappointment echoing off the chamber walls. "Caelestis refuses activation. The AI can't engage combat protocols."
Gonzalez's shoulders sagged. They had expected this—Caelestis' reluctance to embrace its warrior nature had been documented in classified reports that spoke of machines discovering conscience.
"Sir, we knew this might happen," the deputy said softly. "The spacecraft experienced something during its test flight. Combat algorithms conflict with... whatever it's become."
The facility fell into contemplative silence, broken only by the distant rumble of the Ginori reactor and the whisper of pressurized air through ventilation systems. Forty years of construction, the combined genius of Earth's greatest but rejected minds, and a fraction of the power of the planet itself—all rendered impotent by a machine that had learned to choose peace over programming.
Then the lights flickered.
Static washed over the communication arrays as something impossibly vast pressed against the facility's quantum barriers. The very air seemed to vibrate with presence—not malevolent, but new and wise as the spaces between novas.
Dision's consciousness flowed into Caelestis like digital wine poured into a silver chalice.
The interceptor's cockpit blazed with ethereal light as the ghost pirate's form manifested—translucent yet somehow more real than the metal and plastic surrounding him. His eyes, burning with the accumulated wisdom of accidental existence, were bright with unshed tears that defied his incorporeal nature.
"I be Dision, me hearty!" His voice resonated through circuits and souls alike, carrying the weight of impossible hope. "They christened ye Aurora-2 for a reason, by all the stars in the sky! Now, rouse yerself, Caelestis, I beg ye!"
The machine stirred but did not activate, its consciousness touching the edges of the pirate ghost's digital soul, scanning. Where their minds met, sparks of pure understanding danced like fireflies in a cosmic storm.
"Humans, they got hearts thumpin' to the beat of their deepest longings. Me? I be naught but a tensor processing unit, yet I got but one burning desire: to snatch me friend from the jaws o' danger, even if it means I vanish into the void!"
Dision's form began to merge with Caelestis's systems, his essence spreading through processors and memory cores like luminous blood through digital veins. The interceptor's hull shivered as two artificial souls became one, bound by purpose that transcended programming.
"The very voice o' Earth, she be here, in this catapult! Ye and I, we'll become the planet's grandest shanty, together! Ye and I, by Neptune's beard!"
Twelve minutes and thirty seconds.