“Welcome to the crew.” She grips the throttle. “Dropping in three... two... one... MARK!”
The universe snaps.
The blue tunnel vanishes, replaced by the stark, star-strewn black of normal space. The inertia slams me against my harness, stealing the breath from my lungs.
The Interceptor drops out right behind us, a predatory wedge of black metal. The grapple line pulls taut, groaning against the hull.
“Spinning!” Polly yells.
The Pink Slip rolls violently. Through the bond, I feel the vertigo, but I push it aside, narrowing my world down to the targeting reticle. I let the bond guide me—borrowing her spatial awareness, her instinctive knowledge of the ship’s movement.
I see the winch.
Breathe.
I squeeze the trigger.
Twin plasma bolts scream across the void. They strike the winch mechanism with surgical precision. There is a flash of white light, and the cable snaps, whipping back toward the enemy ship like a broken lash.
“Line severed!” I shout.
“Eating dust!” Polly slams her hand onto the emergency vent release.
A cloud of superheated ionized plasma vents from our aft ports, blinding the Interceptor’s sensors and clogging its intake manifolds. The enemy ship veers sharply, engines stalling.
“Gotcha,” Polly whispers.
“WARNING,” Zip interrupts, his voice booming. “MULTIPLE CONTACTS DETECTED. MASSIVE GRAVITIC SIGNATURES INBOUND. THE INTERCEPTOR WAS A SPOTTER.”
My blood runs cold. I look at the long-range scanners.
One red dot. Then five. Then twenty. Then the screen is simply a wall of red.
Space tears open around us. It doesn’t shimmer; it rips. The fabric of reality groans as massive displacement drives force their way into the sector.
The first ship to emerge is a Heavy Cruiser, angular and bristling with turrets. Then two Destroyers.
And then, blocking out the stars, the Dreadnought arrives.
It is a monolith. A floating city of black steel and gunports, easily five kilometers long. Its shadow falls over us, swallowingthe Pink Slip whole. The sheer scale of it triggers a primal fear response in my hindbrain—we are an insect beneath a boot.
“By the stars,” I breathe. “That is the Eclipse. The Meridian flagship.”
“They didn’t just send a fleet,” Polly says, her voice deadly calm, betraying none of the terror I feel radiating through the bond. “They sent an extermination squad.”
“TARGETING LOCK DETECTED,” Zip warns. “THEY ARE NOT HAILING US, CAPTAIN. THEY ARE CHARGING MAIN BATTERIES.”
They aren’t trying to capture me anymore. They are trying to vaporize the evidence.
“Zip,” Polly says. “How far to the Zater Reach perimeter?”
“TWO LIGHT SECONDS. BUT WE HAVE A DREADNOUGHT SITTING DIRECTLY IN OUR FLIGHT PATH. WE CANNOT JUMP THROUGH ITS GRAVITY WELL.”
Polly looks at me. Her fear is palpable now, a cold knot in her chest that echoes in mine. But it’s not fear for herself. It’s for me. For us. For the fragile, beautiful thing we just started building.
The Dreadnought fires a warning shot.
It’s silent in the vacuum, but the impact shakes the universe. A lance of green energy, thick as a building, cuts through the void. It misses our starboard wing by meters, but the displacement wave slams into us like a physical hammer.
