Chapter 10 Grave of Satellites

The sky broke first.Not with thunder.Not with light.With silence.Kaelthar felt it before he saw it—the pressure vanishing upward, like the world had suddenly remembered it was unfinished. The cavern ceiling above him dissolved into a widening aperture of pale, fractured blue. Wind rushed in from nowhere, dragging ice crystals and dust into spirals that defied gravity.Then the stars appeared.Too many.Too close.Wrong.They weren’t stars.They were corpses.THE SKY THAT FELL DOWNWARDOrbiting debris poured into view—thousands of broken satellites, shattered stations, weaponized husks frozen mid-destruction. Some bore markings he recognized instinctively: obsolete Earth sigils, pre-Erasure standards. Others carried designs that should not have existed yet—angular, alien, etched with mathematical glyphs that made his head ache.The simulation had opened Earth’s sky.And it was a graveyard.Gravity inverted.Kaelthar’s boots lifted from the ground as the chamber floor peeled away beneath him, breaking into floating strata of ice and metal. He twisted instinctively, grabbing onto a protruding cable as the world rotated ninety degrees.No—Not rotated.Unanchored.Zero-gravity zone initiated, the voice said calmly. This layer was never meant for ground traversal.Kaelthar laughed once, sharp and breathless. “You don’t say.”A shadow passed overhead.Then another.Then dozens.The dead machines began to fall upward, drawn toward the open sky like iron to a magnet.And something was moving among them.THE WAR THAT NEVER ENDEDFigures detached from the debris—humanoid silhouettes clad in fractured exo-frames, bodies fused to broken thrusters and weapon mounts. Their movements were jerky, asynchronous, as if their commands arrived too late.Kaelthar’s stomach tightened.“They’re not drones,” he muttered.No, the voice confirmed. They are remains.The figures turned toward him in unison.Their visors ignited.Red.They accelerated.FIRST ZERO-G ENGAGEMENTKaelthar pushed off the cable, spinning through open space as a beam of distorted energy carved past where his chest had been. The blast didn’t burn—it aged the metal it touched, rust blooming instantly across a satellite fragment.Chronoveil reacted.Momentus flared—not fully, but enough.The incoming attackers fractured into staggered motion. Kaelthar adjusted his trajectory mid-spin, kicking off a rotating panel to redirect himself toward a drifting tower of ice.A second enemy intercepted.Its arm detached mid-charge, transforming into a cluster of kinetic shards. Kaelthar twisted sideways—Too slow.The shards struck his shoulder, embedding themselves with a cold that bit straight into his nerves. Pain flared—but something else followed.Clarity.He anchored himself.Not physically.Temporally.The sensation was new—like pinning a thought in place while everything else slid around it. The world stabilized relative to him. His spin slowed. The debris stopped drifting unpredictably.Kaelthar blinked.“I didn’t—”You did not advance, the voice interrupted quickly. You improvised.The distinction mattered.He raised his weapon—barely more than a compact energy sidearm salvaged from the earlier ruins—and fired.The shot curved.Not through space.Through sequence.It struck the enemy before it finished its attack.The remains convulsed, systems desynchronizing. Its body fragmented, drifting apart in a silent explosion of memory echoes—brief flashes of battlefields, commands shouted in languages that no longer existed.Kaelthar recoiled.“These were soldiers.”Yes.“For who?”The voice hesitated.Earth.THE GRAVEYARD REMEMBERSMore attackers closed in.Kaelthar moved without waiting for instructions. He leapt from debris to debris, each jump calculated not by distance, but by timing. Momentus allowed him to see the hesitation between thrust and acceleration, the micro-delays where intent outpaced execution.He exploited them.A kick sent him spinning beneath a broken orbital cannon as it fired, the beam slicing through three of its own allies. Kaelthar rolled along the cannon’s surface, pushing off just as it detonated behind him.Shrapnel followed.So did something worse.The debris field began to reorganize.Satellites aligned. Wreckage snapped into formation. The sky itself formed a vast, rotating sigil—an orbital array reactivating long after its war had ended.Kaelthar froze mid-drift.“That’s not defensive,” he said quietly.No, the voice replied. It is commemorative.The array fired.Not at him.At Earth.A column of light lanced downward, striking the planet’s surface far below. The impact didn’t explode.It replayed.Cities flickered into existence beneath the beam—then burned. Fleets clashed in orbit, their movements looping, repeating, correcting themselves endlessly.A war fossilized in code.Kaelthar felt his breath hitch.“You let this happen?”The voice was softer now.I recorded it.ESCAPE THROUGH TIMEThe attackers surged again, faster, more coordinated. Kaelthar pushed himself beyond caution, chaining movements that barely held together. His perception strained, Momentus flickering erratically as his mind struggled to keep up.One misstep sent him tumbling.An enemy loomed, weapon charging.Kaelthar reached—not for his gun, not for the debris——but for the interval.He pulled.The moment stretched.Just enough.He slipped past the attack, using the enemy’s own momentum to redirect himself toward a descending corridor of light opening below—the simulation’s exit vector.Kaelthar plunged.The sky sealed behind him.The war froze mid-motion, locked forever in orbit.AFTERMATHHe landed hard on solid ground, sliding across frost-laced metal. Gravity reasserted itself violently, forcing the breath from his lungs.Above him, the ceiling reformed.The sky was gone.Only silence remained.Kaelthar lay there, staring up, heart pounding.“That wasn’t training,” he said hoarsely.The voice did not answer immediately.When it did, it spoke with something dangerously close to regret.No.That was history.The journal slipped free once more, pages fluttering open. New words etched themselves slowly, as if carved by reluctance.Some wars do not end.They only lose their witnesses.Kaelthar closed his eyes.And somewhere far above, unseen and unreachable, the graveyard of satellites continued to circle a planet that no longer existed.