Henrok looks at the smoking wreckage of the Pink Slip. He looks at the bite mark on my neck. Then he looks at Rynn.
It’s a meeting of apex predators. Old blood and new. The silence stretches, weighted with something older than words.
Rynn doesn’t flinch. He holds the Warlord’s gaze, his own eyes flashing gold in the emergency light, his posture shifting subtly to shield me. Not submission. Not challenge. Just... acknowledgment. I see what you are. I am the same.
Henrok grunts. A sound like grinding stones.
“You fly like a maniac, Courier West,” he rumbles, looking at me.
“I learned from the best,” I say, nodding at Suki.
Something flickers in those garnet eyes. It might be approval.
Henrok’s gaze slides back to Rynn. “And you chose a mate who shoots straight. My perimeter drones report a precision hit on a stealth probe at three thousand kilometers. Nice shot.”
Through the bond, I feel Rynn’s surprise—he was expecting a threat, not a compliment. “Thank you. I... aim to be useful.”
“Useful is good.” Henrok turns, gesturing for us to follow. His crystalline veins pulse brighter as he moves, casting shifting patterns of light across the obsidian floor. “Lethal is better. Come. The Eclipse has entered the system. They are hailing us.”
“They want to negotiate?” I ask, falling into step beside Suki as we hurry toward the War Room.
“No,” Suki says grimly, checking the charge on her rifle. “They want to gloat before they start glassing the asteroid. Standard villain protocol.”
We pass Vex’ra on the way out. She pauses in her directing of civilians, those violet eyes finding mine with an intensity that makes me want to stand straighter. But then her gaze softens—just slightly—as it drops to the mark on my neck.
She’s holding a small Zaterran child’s hand—a girl, maybe five in human years, with grey skin and wide, terrified amber eyes. Vex’ra guides her toward the blast doors with a gentleness that contrasts sharply with the chaos swirling around them.
“Courier. Lord Valorian,” she says, her voice cool and melodious. “The non-combatants are eighty percent evacuated to the core sanctuary. We are sealing the blast doors in two minutes.”
“Thank you, Vex’ra,” Henrok says. “Keep them safe.”
“I always do, First Blade.”
The child looks up at me as they pass. Those amber eyes, huge and scared and trusting.
The guilt twists deeper.
They knew the risks, Rynn pushes through the bond, feeling my spiral. They have sheltered Valorian allies before. This is their choice.
But if they die because of us—
Then we make sure they don’t.
We reach the War Room—a cavernous space dominated by a massive tactical table carved from a single piece of obsidian, veined with the same amber crystal that seems to thread through every surface of this fortress. The crystal pulses in a slow rhythm, almost like breathing. Holographic displays float in the air above the table, casting blue-white light that plays off the faceted walls.
And on those displays, the Zater Reach system spreads out before us like a wound.
The red icons of the Meridian fleet swarm the edge of the sector like angry blood cells. Two dozen ships at least—corvettes, cruisers, support vessels. And in the center, bloated and patient and terrible, sits the Dreadnought.
The Eclipse.
It’s massive. Half a kilometer of gunmetal grey and bristling weapon ports, designed not for speed or elegance but for pure, overwhelming destruction. The kind of ship that doesn’t need to be fast because nothing can escape it.
I’ve seen warships before. Plenty of them. But this one makes my stomach drop.
“They’re jamming long-range comms,” Suki says, her fingers flying across a console. “But the Quantum Relay operates on a different frequency. We can punch through.”
“How long to upload the data?” Rynn asks, stepping up to the Relay interface. He pulls the Aethel crystal from his pocket, and even in the harsh light of the War Room, it’s beautiful—pulsing with inner light in colors I don’t have names for. It pulses fasternow, reacting to the proximity of the ancient Zaterran tech. Like calling to like.
