The rear lines were supposed to be safe.
That's what the logistics officer had said when assigning Earth's Emotional Warrior teams to Base Theta-7—a repurposed asteroid station orbiting a dead pulsar, far behind the galactic core front. "Support role only," he'd insisted. "Broadcast empathy, stabilize allies. No direct exposure."
But despair doesn't respect battle maps.
It seeped through the void like smoke through cracks, silent and suffocating. One moment, the base hummed with alien meditations—Veln harmonic chants, Xylosian memory-weaving—and the next, the lights didn't dim… but everyone felt them dim.
A technician dropped her datapad. Not from shock. From resignation.
"Why fix it?" she murmured. "It'll break again."
Then another. And another.
Within minutes, over two hundred non-human warriors slumped against bulkheads, eyes open but empty, breathing slow as if conserving air for a world that no longer mattered.
Except the humans.
