Yet here it was.
She loved them. All of them. Not in pieces or categories or ranks. She loved them in full.
Just in time to feel them die.
“First wave. Go.” The flight leader spoke into the crystal affixed to his shoulder.
From her place on the bridge, she watched it all unfold with brutal clarity.
The fighters streaked into the black, swarming like a net thrown wide, then tightening with each pass. The Wraith cluster bulged forward in response, tendrils of power cutting through the trap with brute force.
“Ice Wing—cut left, now!” the flight leader ordered.
Two of the lead ships pivoted late, and a pulse of energy bloomed from the enemy fighters, flashing white across the screen.
Rynna inhaled as her ships disappeared in fire, shrapnel, and plasma scattering through the field.
Battles in the stories always came with noble speeches and clean victories. But those stories were shaped by half-memories and softened lies, filtered through the minds of the few who made it back.
This was no tale. This was the truth.
Every time one of her attack vessels erupted in flame, it wasn’t a number. It was a name. A face. A memory. She felt their terror and their desperation—all of it—through the strange bond that sometimes formed between commanders and those under their care. It was a kind of psychic thread, too thin to hold, too deep to sever.
And each thread that snapped sent a jolt through her ribs, carving hollows inside her chest.
Rage ignited in her, flooding her veins with molten fury. These Wraith had consumed too many worlds, too many lives. They had taken and taken and taken, and now, they would pay.
Each death brought her closer to the decision she had already made, formed in her mind like a whispered dare from the abyss. She couldn’t let her people be extinguished. Not all of them. Not like this.
Humming around her,Silanda’ssystems coughed from the damage accumulated over the chase as the enemy inched closer toward the tear in a writhing mass of hunger and shadow, hounded by her warriors.
It was almost time.
Stepping forward, she cast one last lingering glance over the bridge, knowing this would be the last chapter of her story. Then, without a word, she activated the preset commands that might just save some of them.
One by one, they blinked to life, cascading through the command interfaces. Engines fired, and the ship pivoted hard, throwing sparks from its rear thrusters as it prepared to launch.
TheSilandawould lurch back the way they had come in one final, furious rush for the nearest inhabited planet where they had last offloaded survivors. If the calculations held and the fates were kind, someone would be there, someone who could pull her crew and passengers from the wreckage.
If not...
She didn’t let herself finish the thought.
Following that last burst of power, the commands would jettison the ship’s energy core into the vacuum behind them. And if everything timed just right, she would be able to catch the enemy in the center of the tear.
If not...
TheSilandabegan to turn.
Somewhere in the shift, her face must have changed—a flash in her eyes, a flick of her tail.
The cries were instant.
Voices rose behind her, shocked, pleading, enraged.
But they were already too late.
She vanished from the captain’s platform in a pulse of starlight, her body dissolving into the ether between seconds.
