They didn’t speak.

  They didn’t blink.

  As the Valkyrion’s shields buzzed to life, the invaders simply floated—no propulsion, no gear, nothing but their presence, like shadows carved from light.

  Lys stared through the viewport. Her enhanced ocular implants ran scans automatically—heart rate, breathing patterns, muscle tension. But every reading returned one word: Normal. Just like hers.

  Except they were standing in space.

  “Focus the cannons on the front three,” she said.

  “Still no ship ID. They didn’t jump in on tech we know,” said Kael. “They just… appeared.”

  “Don’t care. If they’re human, they should die like humans.”

  Kael hesitated, then toggled the Gravion Lances. The ship’s dorsal turrets locked on, whirring as their cores spun to lethal heat.

  Lys gave the command. “Fire.”

  A flash.

  Silence.

  No scream. No scorch. Just light wrapping around them—and dissolving.

  Not them—the beams.

  The lances broke apart like sugar in rain, turning into harmless particles that scattered into the void.

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  “What the—?”

  “They deconstructed it,” said Sol, the comms officer. Her voice trembled. “Not shielded. Not deflected. They understood the weapon and rewrote it. In real time.”

  A pulse rocked the bridge.

  The invaders began to move. Slowly. Deliberately. One step at a time. As if walking through water—or time itself.

  “They’re closing,” Kael hissed. “We need to warp!”

  “No,” Lys said coldly. “They want us to panic. We’re not giving them that.”

  She turned, headed for the central lift.

  “Where are you going?” Kael called after her.

  Lys didn’t look back. “The Core.”

  Valkyrion — Psionic Core Chamber

  The chamber thrummed with the rhythm of a living heart. Suspended in a containment field was the ship’s singularity nexus—a thought-engine, forged in the black laboratories of Aetherion Labs. It didn’t run on fuel. It ran on will.

  And Lys was one of the few who could speak to it without going insane.

  She pressed her palm to the surface of the core.

  “Wake up,” she whispered. “We’re not facing aliens.”

  Silence.

  Then a whisper—her voice, but layered with others, too many to count.

  “Mirrors cannot invade. They can only reflect.”

  “Tell me what they are,” she growled.

  “You know.”

  Lys stared through the light.

  And then she saw it.

  A memory that wasn’t hers.

  A boy, no older than ten, bleeding in an underground lab. Screaming. Implanted with neural crystal. Burning with radiation.

  The first of the Echoes.

  Perfect clones of humanity—built, tested, abandoned. Their creators had buried them in dimensional voids, thinking they’d rot in silence.

  They didn’t.

  They evolved.

  And now they were back.

  Bridge — Moments Later

  Lys returned, pale but composed.

  “They’re not invaders,” she said.

  “They’re survivors.”

  Kael looked at her like she was mad. “What does that even mean?”

  Before she could answer, the invaders stopped.

  Each raised a hand in eerie synchrony. Not in aggression—but in acknowledgment.

  Then they spoke. All at once. A chorus of voices coming from nowhere.

  “Earth is reclaimed. Let the first war of origin begin.”

  Then they vanished.

  Just like that.

  But on every screen, on every ship, on every planet connected to the human network...

  The same signal broadcasted:

  A DNA sequence.

  Lys stared at it in silence.

  Her exact genetic code.