CHAPTER 1
RYCHNE
Vacuum roars through the holes in my ship like a starving animal. Not the real sound—there’s no air out here, no medium to carry it—but the pressure differential is something my internal translators register as a scream, primal and enraged. My Starfighter lurches again as a plasma torpedo misses me by less than a ship’s breath and detonates against the husk of a derelict cruiser. The blast shudders through my bones. My molars crack together.
I bark a laugh. It’s not humor, not really. More like the sound madness makes when it has too much room to stretch its legs.
“System integrity at twelve percent,” the ship tells me in my mother tongue. The console, what’s left of it, is an open wound of warning glyphs blinking in rhythmic agony—red, amber, red again. Life support is fluctuating. Hull stress at catastrophic levels. One more direct hit and I’ll be vapor, just another drifting smear in this cold, unending theater of death.
“Shut up,” I grunt through gritted teeth. The words are for the console, for the war, for the entire doomed Trident Alliance if I’m being honest.
I jerk the stick hard right, banking between two spinning chunks of slagged metal that might’ve once been an Alzhoncarrier. My ship groans in protest. The starboard wing trails smoke—black and bitter, like burnt blood and scorched regret. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the cracked canopy glass. Gold eyes wild. Scales singed. I look like a beast cornered in a cage too small to die in.
One of the Grolgath cruisers lurches into view ahead, its green hull glinting like oil on bone. It’s too close. They're always too close. Their weapons lock on—three red dots painting my cockpit in a triangle of inevitable death.
“Shoot first, think never,” I mutter. It’s an old Vakutan saying. A creed. A joke passed between warriors with more muscle than sense. I used to wear it like armor.
But now?
Now the words feel hollow in my mouth. My fingers tighten on the stick. My thumb hovers over the eject trigger, though it won’t help. There’s nowhere to go. My oxygen is down to fumes. My coolant system died fifteen kliks ago. And worst of all, my translight core—my jump drive—was shredded by that last barrage. I’m trapped. Snared in a graveyard built from centuries of mistakes and the bones of better men.
I am going to die.
“Negative,” I hiss to no one. “Not yet. Not today.”
Then I see it.
A cruiser, larger than the rest, its gravity well destabilized by damage. Shields fluctuating. Its jump core is primed and humming, bright as a miniature sun. If I can get close—just close enough—I can latch on with my mag clamps. Ride the bastard through its jump window like a parasite on a blood-slick beast.
It’s suicide.
It’s also the only plan I’ve got left.
“Computer,” I growl. “Prep mag latch. Boost engines. Target vector: forward belly of that cruiser.”
“Warning,” it chirps with maddening calm. “Jump window unstable. Probability of successful traversal: less than?—”
“—Do it.”
The ship doesn’t argue. It’s dying too. We might as well die on our feet.
I slam the throttle, every servo in the console screeching. The ship surges, bleeding atmosphere and fury. Pulse fire erupts from the enemy, tracer lines of plasma burning too close, too fast. One clips the undercarriage and I feel the jolt in my spine. Pain flares behind my eyes, white-hot. My ribs are bruised or broken. Doesn’t matter.
The cruiser’s jump ring expands, a halo of iridescent blue—unstable, flickering, pulsing like a dying heartbeat. It’s close. So close.
The mag clamps engage with a bone-deepthunk, and I’m slammed against my seat as we hit the grav field. I’monthe cruiser now. Half a second later, the jump initiates.
Time warps.
Space folds.
And then everything goes wrong.
The jump window collapses—premature, explosive, tearing open with a sound that isn’t a sound at all but asensation, like being peeled apart at the quantum level and smeared across realities.
The jump window collapses—premature, explosive, tearing open with a sound that isn’t a sound at all but a sensation, like being peeled apart at the quantum level and smeared across realities.
My vision fragments.
