The team was introduced to him the next morning in a briefing room that smelled like cold coffee and recycled air.
There were four of them. They were already seated when Varek brought Nix in and none of them stood up or smiled or did anything that suggested this was a welcome situation. They just looked at him with varying degrees of skepticism and waited to see what he was going to do with that.
Nix stood at the front of the room and looked back at them and did nothing with it.
Varek stood to the side. "I'll let them introduce themselves."
The first one to speak was a woman maybe five or six years older than Nix, early twenties, leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed and the particular expression of someone who had already decided something and was waiting for the evidence to catch up. She had close cropped hair and a scar running through her left eyebrow that looked like it had come from something fast and unpleasant.
"Sera Vane," she said. "Rank four Ascendant. I've been with Varek's unit for two years." She looked Nix up and down in the unhurried way of someone assessing a problem. "You're seventeen."
"Yes," Nix said.
"You look fifteen."
"I get that a lot."
She didn't smile. Just moved her eyes back to the front of the room like she'd confirmed whatever she'd been checking.
The second person was a man, broad and dark haired, maybe thirty, with the relaxed stillness of someone who spent a lot of time in combat situations and had made his peace with that. He had a rank three Radiant's build, the kind of physical conditioning that came from years of frequency development pushing the body past what ordinary training could achieve. He was the only one in the room who looked at Nix without any particular judgment, just mild curiosity.
"Davan Osk," he said. "Rank three. I handle close combat and breaching." A pause. "You're the Void."
"Apparently," Nix said.
"Good," Osk said, like that settled something, and leaned back in his chair.
The third person didn't introduce himself immediately. He was young, not much older than Nix, with the slightly distracted look of someone whose brain was running a separate conversation from the one happening in the room. Thin, unremarkable looking, with a rank one Ember's faint warmth around his fingers that he seemed completely unaware of. He was doing something on a datapad and glanced up when the silence stretched long enough to become pointed.
"Oh." He put the datapad down. "Fen Rael. Rank one. I do systems, intelligence, navigation, anything that needs someone to sit still and think about it for a long time." He looked at Nix with genuine interest, the first real interest anyone in the room had shown. "Can I ask you something."
"Sure," Nix said.
"When you discharged in the testing room. Did you feel it coming or did it just happen."
"It just happened."
Fen nodded like that was exactly what he'd expected and picked his datapad back up. "Okay."
The fourth person was older than the rest, mid forties, with the lean weathered look of someone who had spent a lot of years in hard places and stopped noticing. He had no visible glow, no frequency warmth, nothing that suggested a rank at all. He was the only other person in the room besides Nix who read as unranked. He sat at the far end of the table with a cup of something hot and watched Nix with eyes that were tired and sharp at the same time.
He didn't volunteer a name.
"That's Maren," Avrel said from the doorway, where Nix hadn't noticed her until now. "He doesn't do introductions."
"Does he do anything," Nix said.
"He keeps everyone alive," Osk said, in a tone that suggested this was not an exaggeration.
Maren said nothing. Just drank from his cup.
Varek moved to the front of the room. "Now that we've all met," he said, with the dry patience of someone used to managing rooms full of difficult people, "we can talk about what comes next."
He pulled up a display on the wall behind him. A star map, the forty systems of the Compact spread across it in clusters of blue light, and beyond the outermost cluster, past a marked boundary line, nothing. Just dark.
"The Ashveil Boundary," Varek said. "The edge of Compact explored space. Beyond it, approximately sixty light years of unmapped territory, and beyond that, the point of first Reaper contact." He indicated four blue lights near the boundary, dimmer than the rest. "The four worlds we've lost. Crest, Vallo, Miren, and the Grevian outpost."
Nix went still.
Grevian. The outpost he'd been running cargo to two days ago. The place his crew had been transferred to.
"Grevian," he said. "You said my crew was at Grevian."
A pause in the room that was one second too long.
Avrel moved forward. "They were evacuated from the outpost before contact. They're safe. I want to be clear about that."
"When did contact happen."
"Thirty one hours ago." She met his eyes. "We found out while you were in testing. I made the decision to wait until you were stable before telling you."
Nix sat down because standing suddenly seemed like more effort than it was worth. He thought about Captain Mura and her permanent calculating expression. Yeva and her orange glow. Pol dropping the weapons in the corridor. A crew he'd spent two years with on a ship that smelled like burnt coolant.
"They got out," he said.
"They got out," Avrel said. "All of them. They're currently aboard a Compact transport heading toward the core systems."
He breathed.
"Okay," he said.
Varek waited a moment before continuing. Not out of ceremony, Nix got the impression Varek didn't do much out of ceremony, but because he was a careful reader of rooms. "Grevian makes five," he said. "The rate of contact is accelerating. Six months ago it was one world every three months. Now it's one every three weeks." He looked at the map. "At current progression we're looking at core system contact inside of a year."
"Core systems," Osk said. "That's twenty billion people."
"Yes," Varek said.
The room sat with that.
"What do we actually know about them," Nix said. "The Reapers. Not what you think, what you actually know."
Varek looked at him. Something in his expression shifted slightly, the first real sign of approval Nix had seen from him. "Very little," he said, and it was clearly not a comfortable admission. "We know they travel in formations. We know they don't communicate in any way our instruments can detect. We know that every ranked fighter we've sent toward them has failed to return. We have one piece of sensor data from a probe we managed to get close before it was destroyed." He pulled up the data on the display.
Nix looked at it. It was a frequency reading, a resonance map of something enormous, the kind of display that usually showed the output of a ranked fighter during a test. Except the readings were off the scale. Not rank six Eternal level. Not anything with a level.
Just a number that made no sense followed by several zeros.
"Whatever they are," Varek said, "they run on frequency the way we run on air. It's not something they use. It's something they are." He paused. "And we've been sending ranked fighters at them. People who generate frequency, who are made of frequency, for two years."
"You've been feeding them," Sera said from her chair. Her voice was flat. Not angry, just stating it.
Varek didn't argue with that. "In effect, yes. We didn't understand what we were dealing with." He looked at Nix. "A Void absorbs frequency rather than generating it. In theory, in direct contact with a Reaper, you wouldn't be a beacon. You might be the opposite."
"In theory," Nix said.
"In theory," Varek agreed.
Nix looked at the sensor reading on the wall. The impossible number. The zeros after it.
He was seventeen years old. Three days ago he was doing inventory on a cargo freighter. His entire combat experience consisted of one shot from a pulse rifle that had done nothing and then getting hit so hard he'd lost consciousness.
He looked around the room. Sera was watching him with that same flat assessing expression, giving nothing away. Osk was relaxed and unhurried. Fen had gone back to his datapad but Nix suspected he was paying close attention. Maren was drinking his coffee and looking at the wall.
"You said you'd tell me everything," Nix said to Varek.
"I did."
"Then tell me what happened to the last Void. The full version. Not the summary."
The room got quiet in a different way than before.
Varek looked at him for a long moment. Then he pulled up a different file on the display. Old records, the kind with degraded formatting and missing sections where data had been removed and the removal hadn't been perfectly cleaned.
"His name was Carro Denn," Varek said. "And the story is longer and worse than what Avrel told you."
He sat down.
"So get comfortable," he said.