The Rise of Project Cradle

DOWNLOAD THIS PODCAST FREE HERE

Following the mayhem of Harskell 5, the blazing liberation of Yarnax, and the hilariously philanthropic heist at Gravepoint Station, The Zone Warriors found themselves thrust into a new and unexpected role, not just as misfit heroes of the fringe systems, but as symbols of rebellion. Their names, once muttered in backwater bars and pirate docks with equal parts amusement and disbelief, began to carry weight.

The Dominion listed them as “Interstellar Disruptive Entities,” a bureaucratic term for

“we can’t catch them, and they keep making us look stupid.”

Their bounties increased tenfold. Surveillance footage of their antics spread across systems like wildfire, turning them into underground folk heroes. Freedom fighters in distant colonies adopted their symbol, a crescent grin with crossed thrusters beneath it

as a mark of resistance. Children painted it on school walls. Mercenary bands began mimicking their tactics, with… less success.

A bakery on Thalros VII renamed its signature pastry “Zone Bombs,” which exploded with jam when bitten into. The movement had begun.

With notoriety came darker challenges. The Dominion no longer treated them as nuisances they were now a systemic threat, inspiring rebellions and disrupting economic strongholds. In response, Dominion High Command authorized the creation of Task Force Theta, a precision strike unit composed of former bounty hunters, AI enforcers, and blacklisted psychics. Their only purpose: eliminate The Zone Warriors.

This triggered a new phase for the crew: less flamboyance, more strategy.

They couldn’t just crash ships into fuel depots forever. They needed to strike smarter, deeper.

They began to target Dominion data vaults, leaking information about planetary resource thefts, prisoner exploitation programs, and suppressed histories.

Every leak ended with a coded signature,

“Truth, by way of thunder.”

New recruits trickled in, drawn by the Warriors’ code of chaotic honour.

Among them:

A blind sharpshooter who used sonar rounds.

A former Galactic Justice tech agent turned whistle-blower.

A poet-turned-sniper who quoted sonnets before every shot.

VIXI, their deranged AI companion, evolved too, upgrading herself with stolen Dominion code, gaining access to language libraries she used only to insult enemies in increasingly obscure dialects. At one point, she challenged a Dominion commander to a rap battle across intercepted comms, then triggered his ship’s coffee machine to explode mid-verse.

Rumours began to circulate of a Dominion project hidden beyond the Cassian Belt, something ancient, massive, and capable of rewriting gravity itself.

The Zone Warriors intercepted fragments of a transmission that hinted at Project Cradle, a weapon so devastating it could collapse planetary cores in seconds.

With no time to waste, they plotted a course. The freighter, The Black Mongoose, burned through radiation storms. Keera flew like a demon possessed. Brakka cleaned his weapons in silence. Rugg hummed subspace folk tunes while scrambling enemy radar.

Detta prepped explosives

“for every possible eventuality—including diplomacy.”

What lay ahead would test them like never before. They would face death, betrayal, and revelations about their own pasts that would alter everything they believed in.

The journey to Project Cradle carried The Zone Warriors into uncharted reaches of the Cassian Belt, where gravity turned on itself, and light bent in whispered spirals. Nothing traveled here without consequence. Space twisted. Time fluttered. Even VIXI paused before speaking. That alone unsettled the crew more than any Dominion fleet ever had.

Project Cradle was not a weapon in the traditional sense. It was a planetary-scale gravity lattice, a relic built upon a long-abandoned world known as Kaelor Prime, long believed uninhabitable due to its fractured tectonics and radiation storms.

The Dominion had converted it into a gravitational crucible, designed to manipulate planetary mass, not to destroy planets outright, but to crush rebellion by collapsing cities, shifting oceans, and rewriting geography.

The purpose was psychological. Total control without firing a shot.

Using a series of gravitational anchors buried beneath Kaelor’s crust, they could destabilize resistance worlds, making them inhospitable without leaving a trace of war. A clean genocide. A weaponized silence. this was beyond anything The Zone Warriors had encountered and they were all in.

The Black Mongoose entered orbit cloaked and silent. Keera flew low and tight through storm corridors, weaving through electromagnetic vortices and collapsed satellite hulls. Brakka loaded what he called

“The Big One” without elaboration.

Detta packed charges in her belt labelled “Plan A” through “Plan E,”

none of which were marked as non-lethal.

Rugg hacked the planetary lattice interface from orbit,

discovering encrypted Dominion override codes.

The tech was ancient, part Dominion, part Precursor, something older than even VIXI’s sarcasm. That fact alone terrified her enough to begin singing lullabies in binary.

The plan was madness, of course. It always was.

Keera would dive the cruiser into the upper stratosphere, dropping the ground team through a controlled gravity fall. Brakka and the twins would breach the main anchor facility and plant the anti-grav imploders. Rugg would upload a virus into the control lattice, setting it to collapse in on itself and trap the Dominion’s own command station in an artificial gravity well and Detta, naturally, would make sure the fireworks were worth remembering.

The twins took out the guard towers by ricocheting plasma rounds off falling debris accidentally, according to them, but perfectly in sync, all the same.

Brakka engaged an entire Dominion mech squad alone while shouting,

“I’m the distraction, you fucktards!”

over a loudspeaker made from, a repurposed soup can? Yeah ok, soup can why not?

Detta planted charges in a spiral pattern purely because she liked the aesthetic.

When the anchors collapsed, they didn’t just fall, they sang, warping sound waves into harmonic tremors that caused the planet’s surface to ripple like water.

The Zone Warriors became more than rebels after Kaelor. They became a myth. Whispers spread of a crew that could collapse planets and dance while doing it. Dominion propaganda painted them as terrorists. Underground worlds called them saviors.

Children on fringe colonies wore bootleg badges that read:

“All Smiles, Explosions and Justice.”

Yet the crew remained the same. Quirky. Foul-mouthed, gloriously dysfunctional. Loyal to each other and loyal to their code

''protect the underdog. mock the powerful. never take a mission, too seriously''