[IC] Blood of the Red Sun. Light of the Dark Night. ⁽ᵉˣᶦᵗ ˣ ʳᵘᵇʸ⁾

__________________Absence was difficult to quantify in a vacuum. Bereft of anything to compare. Void of information. An infinity that is both too large to grasp and too small to pluck between two fingers. To find meaning in it was to try to imagine the shape of nothing. Yet, in the endless vast empty that was the expanse of space, a spreading dark against a pitch black sea was measurable only by that which could bridge nothing.

Light was the breath of the stars themselves, returned to the cosmos and carrying with it the story of the universe. Sharing information. Defining causality. It was the rule of all things, existing to tell it and protect it, so when a stretch of the night sky was absent of it, that absence spoke volumes. A black scar struck across the skies above Krypton, snuffing out a million stars.

First discovered a millennia ago by ancestors of the House of El, by the progeny of the first navigators. The question of its existence sparked debate among scholars in college halls and reverence among the faithful in the church, but for years the question remained unanswered. A mystery useful only to the devout and assumed by a select few. It wouldn’t be until nearly a thousand years later that the question would be posited again, this time by the last children of Krypton who looked toward the stars only to see a scar turned to a gash swallowing the light.__________________

__________________..

…Deep Space.

…RSF +248,771.44:-93,502.18:+411,990.73

…Position of the last known supernova event.

A collaboration of members from the Science and Military Guild are dispatched ____

to investigate the edge of the local void. Among them are Kara Zor-El, a prominent __

young expeditionary scientist, and Commander of the Vel’Ara, Lor-Zod. __

_________
Exit   
Lor stood at the helm, doused in low light and staring intently through the panorama before him, contemplative. Concentrating, It wasn’t new to him, this assignment. Escorting teams of both the Explorer and Science guilds often meant time spent in space uncharted, or to the edge of neutral zones. Knowledge never stopped expanding, even when there was no room left to grow, or even when at the very least there was nowhere safe for it left to grow. Protection was a part of what he did. What he was good at and what he enjoyed doing. What he didn’t enjoy was the unknown. It was impossible to protect against a thing he could not see or read or feel. It was impossible for him to fight against nature itself, or as Lor was starting to understand it, the laws of the universe. No weapon or defense apparatus in Krypton’s arsenal could stop… this.

Debri, by some miracle, still present and spinning around a point of space that was once a star, now a tightly wound collection of ejected material, and not even in the original position. Smothered in pitch black and visible only by the thin lines of light tracing them courtesy of Kayla. They followed a predicted path, painted by her as a thousand rings trapped in a chaotic dance around the only nearby concentration of gravity. An anomaly shrouded in darkness and its origin a puzzle that broke the laws of physics. Whatever did this was not something Lor-Zod knew how to stop.

What really bothered him was the scale of time. The flash of light was detected a mere week ago. That tell tale sign took a million years to reach Krypton. The void they were standing in was bigger now than it was when they left and whatever did this, whether natural or not, was also much closer to their home. A million years closer.

”We might have flown right past it.” He mostly whispered to himself.

”Flew past what?”

Kayla apparated in the open space in front of him, floating above the ground at about his eye level but standing, considerately, a little to his left. A girl about 12 inches in height. Bleach white hair a curtain that fell to the back of her knees and two locks held over her shoulders in perfectly shaped columns, pinched in large solid silver hair cuffs. The gown she wore was white with edges lined in black and the elegant crest of the House of Zod emblazoned across the chest. It was cut at the midriff, opening to an off-white underlayer that covered everything down to her feet. There were golden bands clamped on either side of her above her hips and under her ribs.

She stood, or floated, elegantly in place, spinning every so slightly as she addressed Lor.

”Whatever caused this.”

”I didn’t detect anything.”

Lor pressed a hand to the back of his neck to relieve some pressure and closed his eyes. The pressure didn’t go away. What he was seeing and what he was hearing was only making things worse.

Didn’t detect anything. That’s much worse.

”Kayla. Refresh handshake with Kandor.”

”Last exchange was an hour ago.”

”I know. I want another and increase that to every five minutes.”

”They’re going to absolutely love the constant updates of nothing.” Kayla replied deadpan. ”Happy to.”

”Thank you. Kara?” Lor turned to the girl standing nearby, her gaze still fixed on the panorama. He knew she was seeing it through a lens very different than his own and it was at rare times like these that he wished he could see through a lens like hers, if only to understand what he could not. Everything was so black and white to him. Some answers required a little more color. ”The way I understand it, the death of a star leaves behind a stellar body, but I don’t see one. So what happened? What are we looking at?”
Ruby   
Kara allowed silence to be the first word in response as her eyes moved across the panorama, not looking at the darkness itself, but at everything around it. The debris, the predicted orbital traces, the direction of the missing light. The starfield beyond the void. Every fact Kayla had painted and every fact the universe had refused to provide.

“No neutron star,” Kara said. “No white dwarf. No black hole accretion signature. No expected radiation profile. Debris field present, but displaced. Angular momentum inconsistent with standard collapse. Ejection pattern wrong for supernova. Wrong for collision. Wrong for artificial detonation, unless the device operated below all detectable interaction thresholds, which is functionally identical to saying magic, and I object to that on wanting-to-keep-my-Academy-graduation-diploma-grounds.”

Kara gave a silent sigh as she lifted one hand, fingers moving through the projected rings. Kayla adjusted the model without being asked.

“Possible explanations. One: sensor failure. Rejected. Multiple platforms, same absence. Two: stellar remnant present but non emissive. Unlikely. Gravity profile insufficient. Three: remnant translated. Possible, but energy requirements obscene. Four: local spacetime excision.”

Kara’s expression did not change, which somehow made it worse.

“Something removed the star,” she said. “Not destroyed. Removed. Or displaced it into a region not causally connected to this one.”

Kayla’s small face tilted. “That is not better,” she said.

“No,” Kara gave a tiny snort, “It is absolutely terrifying, and potentially fascinating.”
Exit   
“Potentially fascinating.” Lor repeated. It was meant as a question but his tone could be mistaken for agreement. He’d never admit it in present company, but ‘potentially’ was leaning more ‘definitely’.
Ruby   
Kara stepped a half step closer to the display, index and middle fingers tracing what she saw, “The supernova flash may not have been death. It may have been boundary failure. Last light emitted before the system stopped participating in normal spacetime.”

“And the void?”

Kara shrugged, blue eyes darker in the soft lighting of a Kryptonian military bridge. “Expanding. Or we are only now seeing the historical expansion. Either way, the visible absence is old data. One million years old. Present state radius unknown. Present state vector unknown.”

She finally looked at him.

“If it is natural, we do not understand the universe well enough to defend Krypton from it. If it is artificial, then someone has weaponized nonexistence. Recommendation: immediate full-spectrum quarantine of all telemetry. No close approach. No probe recovery. No physical sample retrieval. No heroic stupidity.”
Exit   
Lor gave a curt nod. “Kayla.”

“Isolating all telemetry packets and transferring analysis authority to the science module.” Kayla replied smoothly. Her dazzling form blinked out of existence and reappeared near Kara, the edges of the AI becoming jagged and misaligned for a half a second. “Unfortunately, I cannot do anything about the ‘heroic stupidity.’” She threw her hands up in mock defeat. Lor gave her a look.

“Weaponizing non-existence…” he began, turning again to Kara. “My next question would be why? What is the purpose of removing a star? One at the center of a hostile system I can understand, but this is galaxy spanning. It’s wasteful.”
Ruby   
“Only if the stars are the target. They may not be. They may be fuel. Anchors. Boundaries. Containment points. Or collateral damage from something moving through normal space incorrectly.”
Exit   
Lor shook his head. “Nothing on that scale should exist…” he said, stepping away from the center of the room. Out of the floor from a crease pressed into the cold metal, several separated slices of a console were carefully lifted and assembled on their own, pieced together perfectly so the seam at their separation was invisible. It finished just as Lor approached. He pressed a finger against the unmarked surface and several beads of light appeared in the space in front of him. Small Kryptonian script populated next to the miniscule motes, labeling each for the Commander. With a few finger strokes, the beads of light began to coalesce into each other.

Outside the panorama, barely visible in the dark, probes that had already been dispatched to a distant holding position began their return journey to the ship.

“Kayla. Put up the star chart.”

The projection in the center of the room began to shift, the chaotic rings and jagged outlines of tumblings rock breaking apart into a million beads of light that spread across the entire room almost seamlessly with the stars visible outside. When they finally settled, stretching across the bridge was Andromeda, its bright center spinning and its arms sweeping the edges of the room. A dazzling array of light and colors trapped forever in their spiraling dance.

“Zoom all the way out and plot every recent similar event.”

Andromeda immediately began to shrink, forced into the center of the room until it was but a miniscule disk of lights that was joined by others. Eventually, these disks began to form filaments. Glowing strings spanning an incomprehensible distance, twisting around each other into fingers that scraped at the dark. Between these luminous structures were pockets of black space where nothing existed. Voids. These were nothing new.

Kayla appeared again in the center of the room near the edge of one of these voids. Nearby, a small circle indicated where their home galaxy was located, a single bead of light barely distinguishable as part of a stem of the known universe. Near it, a series of small flashes were being mapped by a persistent white path that trailed behind each luminescent burst, connecting them to each other. The footprints of something that shouldn’t exist.

Lor didn’t need to ask if what they were seeing was abnormal. The death of nearby galaxies, one star at a time, all happening locally, was not normal by any means. Galactic empires expanding their reach? Drive them back. Super massive black holes? Avoid. The heat death of the universe? Well that he couldn’t do much about, but there was a peace in accepting the end of all things. These were his only options and none of them fit. Kara’s options however, all of them were the worst case scenario compared to his.

Lor moved through the projection, watching the white line crawl ever closer to their home. Through it, he could see Kara watching as well from the other side, those same eyes he’d seen earlier looking again at a thing he could not understand with a lens he did not have. The hungry line danced for a while in front of her, eating away at another helpless galaxy.

“I almost prefer it was magic.”
Ruby   
Kara’s blue eyes shadowed as she watched the projection, as she listened to him, both words and tone. She stepped closer to Lor, passing through the holographic projection, the light flashing across her eyes for half a second as she fixed on the source of the error presented. Her voice dropped in volume, the heat of irritation barely visible under her otherwise cool demeanor.

“Assumption error. You’re treating the stars as targets. They may be resources, anchors, boundary markers, or collateral damage,” she repeated herself, gently. If it had been someone besides Lor, she knew she wouldn’t have repeated herself so gently.

Plans built on false premises always fail immediately when execution begins.

She knew the Kryptonian Unified Forces Handbook. Not as well as he did, she imagined, but enough to know an assumption error was the immediate cessation of military thought and action, because of the disaster it would, not could, invite. Kayla’s projection flickered around the latest burst of light, marking its position, timestamp, and estimated origin. Kara watched the line crawl another fraction closer to home.

“If the line is intentional, it has a vector. If it has a vector, we can model it. If we can model it, we can decide whether Krypton is in its path.”
Exit   
“Calculating vector…” Kayla announced as she blinked to a new position within the model universe. The strands of strung together galaxies pulsed, and new lines by the thousands began to branch from the original stem, spinning a web of light that slowly encroached upon the more dense pockets of the universe.

“Collatoral damage.” Lor repeated, his eyes meeting the young scientist’s. “What bothers me is something moving through space incorrectly, as you put it, rolling over a star like a boot over Zuurt droppings. Nothing like that should exist and yet it could. My assumption is that I cannot stop… I cannot stop something that can ‘weaponize nonexistence’.”

The hesitation was heavier than he expected. Not laced in fear or doubt but an inability to accept the words as he spoke them. It was heresy, that so casually changing the laws of physics could exist by unnatural means. That they themselves didn’t already hold this power and were now forced to learn how to defend themselves against it. And it wasn’t just him. By extension the Military Guild as a whole would be unprepared. They just didn’t know it yet.

“I need you to tell me I’m wrong. Again.”

Lor was a simple solution to simple problems. Kara was not. If there was an answer to this puzzle, it’d be with her, buried beneath her more even, correcting tone.

Behind her, the web continued to expand, inching ever closer to their home galaxy until…

“Calculations complete.” Kayla appeared now where a white line had come to a stop, right on top of their galaxy. The rest of the web had been removed and the void edge had shifted right to Krypton’s doorstep, swallowing even their sister galaxy only two and half million light years away.
Ruby   
“I can tell you the model has uncertainty,” Kara said quietly, wishing she could hug him. “I cannot tell you you’re wrong.”

"Last handshake complete. Krypton requests all ships return home... immediately."
[IC] Blood of the Red Sun. Light of the Dark Night. ⁽ᵉˣᶦᵗ ˣ ʳᵘᵇʸ⁾

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