My lungs burn, legs ache as I struggle to keep up with Dima, leading us through a corridor wide enough for a heavy tank. Pale drags behind me as I pull on his arm. I glance back and his hand is pressed to his stomach, eyes downturned.
“Dima, slow down!”
“There’s no time,” Dima yells over her shoulder.
Sommer’s skylights close overhead, creak and grind of machinery moving the massive steel plates. We reach a reinforced door the width of the tunnel and Dima keys a code into the control panel.
Wheels squeal in their tracks as the door draws aside gradually, and I rest my hands on my knees to catch my breath.
“You okay, buddy?” I ask Pale. He only shrugs. “We’re almost there.”
“I’ve got Neer on comms: he can’t hold them off any longer,” Dima says.
“Let me guess, they’re saying I’m a dangerous terrorist, and they have to come down here for your own safety?”
“Something like that,” Dima says. She smiles, but I can tell her heart isn’t in it. To her—to most people—imperial forces are both unstoppable force and immovable object. To me, they’re just another pack of assholes, the biggest pack, with the biggest assholes.
We slip through the still-widening gap. A few ships line the dock: scout planes not suitable for the void, a huge, beat-up old frigate that can barely fit beneath the roof, and a shiny corvette tucked away in one corner. The Rua idles in the center beneath the two retracting hangar doors, dirt spiraling across the ground beneath it in accidental arabesque.
It’s the first time I’ve seen it properly since we escaped from Joon-ho. Divots spot the hull where armor was vaporized, patches scorched black with laser burn.
“Waren, are we good to go?”
“Ready when you are,” he says over comms.
I pat Pale on the head, and give him Ocho. “Go get strapped in, alright?” He nods and runs for the ship. “Goodbye, Dima. I’ll be back soon.”
“Take this,” Dima says, handing me a shard.
“What is it?”
“Everything I could find on your mother. Sorry there wasn’t more.”
“I’m surprised you found anything so quickly.”
“It’s all indexed along with the Teo avatar.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank me after you get away.”
She squeezes my arm and I walk toward the Rua. The dock doors finish retracting with a hollow dhoom.
A flash of light brighter than the sun puts me on my ass, ears ringing, skin hot and dry. I get onto all fours and blink against the temporary blindness, feel a hand lift me to my feet: Dima, helping me toward the ship. I raise my eyes back to the sky; distant blue streaked with white falling like shooting stars. I raise a hand and form a shield across the dock just before another barrage of lasfire rains down, hammering the shield like a dull patter of pain across the roof of my skull.
When we reach the air lock to the Rua, I push Dima aside gently. “Get out of here,” I yell over the steady drum of the orbital bombardment.
“Will you be alright?”
“Worry for them, Dima, not me.”
She smiles for real this time, and jogs away.
I dress quickly into my voidsuit, body a distant entity while I focus my thoughts on maintaining the shield. I step back into the air lock, closing both doors and clipping the tether to my belt.
“Departing now,” Waren says, voice clean and too close through the comms system of my helmet, like he’s inside it with me. “You aren’t coming inside?”
“Not yet.”
“Alright,” he says in a condescending singsong. At least he knows better than to argue.
The ship lifts steadily above the lip of the dock and I raise my shield with it. The hangar doors close and we fly away from Sommer, racing to clear the rain of weaponized light. Already forest fires are burning, dry leaf litter set ablaze by the assault. The landscape glowing orange around scorched black patches. Waren turns the Rua’s nose up to the sky, and with a bone-rattling shudder we pull away from the earth, ascending higher until Sommer is just a distant fire burning in a field of smoky dark.
“Tell me when it’s safe to go outside, Waren. And show me where the ships are.”
“Anything else? A coffee perhaps?” he says, but he draws a shapeless mass of square brackets across my helmet’s HUD.
“I could murder a cup.”
The blue of atmosphere thins as we continue to climb, fading dark, indigo dyed black. The ships of the Emperor’s Guard drift in a holding orbit, hanging stationary over Sommer—frigates and fighters in a cloud around three heavy cruisers.
“You’re clear,” Waren says, and the outer air lock door irises open silently.
I swing out into the void and follow the handholds to clamber up the side of the Rua’s roof. I fasten the tether to an anchor point and wrap it tight around my right arm, staying crouched low to the hull.
“Time to get their attention,” I mutter, and my voice echoes back from the helmet glass in a death-soaked drawl. I want this. Why do I want this?
I inhale deep and reach my left hand out in service of my intent, every one of those ships close enough to touch, to crush. I hum quiet in the back of my throat and grab the cruisers. They move in slow motion, massive ships buffeted by an unseen sea. The hum builds to a growl and I slam the ships together, like knuckles on jaw. Superstructures buckle and explosions bloom in the dark of the void. Breached reactor cores glow plasma hot, a second sun over Sanderak for a few short seconds. Still I keep crushing, the three ships tangled and torn, drifting in dead orbit.
My brain thrums inside my skull, reverb at its natural frequency. A grin stretches across my mouth, gritted teeth flashed at the universe. I see the reflection in my helmet glass: rictus, death’s head, murderous joy. My smile falters.
How many ships will they send before they give up? How many do I have to kill before they leave me alone?
Frigates rally, pulling away from the carnage. Fighters streak through fields of debris, cruisers broken behind them, scattered formations remade as they track our escape. Thirty of them, at least. Thirty pilots ready to die for their orders.
“How much longer, Waren?”
“I thought you liked this bit.”
“How much longer?” I bark.
The fighters close in, hulls sleek as knife blades, plunging right for us. I snarl, ready to strike out across the desolation, and— Just like that, they’re gone. The fighters fold away with the fabric of realspace, blades resheathed in the void. Sanderak disappears, that smoky maybe-home reduced to a single pixel, small as a distant star, extinguished from view with all the rest. Replaced by the inky swirling black of worm-space.