I lift my chin, eyes burning, throat tight with dust and defiance.
Morazin steps forward too, reclaiming center stage despite the collapsing world behind him.
“This is stability,” he says into the mic, voice shaking with fury now. “This is order.”
I stare at him and taste copper and grit and the sharp, bright edge of my own stubbornness.
“Then choke on it,” I whisper.
The shooter’s finger tightens on the trigger.
Above us, the sensor overlay flashes again:
INCOMING ORBITAL TRAJECTORY — UNKNOWN VESSEL — STEALTH VECTOR
The horizon is about to fill with ships.
And I’m about to find out whether seconds are enough.
CHAPTER 18
LONARI
Terranus V looks like it’s daring you to come closer.
From orbit, it isn’t pretty in the way death-worlds get romanticized by idiots who’ve only ever seen them on curated holos. It’s a scabbed sphere of ash-colored landmasses and bruised cloud bands, with storm systems that spiral like they’re trying to drill into the crust. Lightning freckles the atmosphere in weak, sickly flashes. Even the planet’s terminator line—the edge of night and day—looks jagged, like the light itself gets cut up trying to land.
The Nun’s Tooth drifts in under stealth, engines throttled low, hull cooling vents sealed tight. The bridge air smells like warm circuitry and coolant and the faint tang of recycled breath—crew anxiety, contained. Screens glow dim, filtered, signatures masked. We’re a shadow sliding behind another shadow, and my hands are steady on the helm because if they aren’t, I’ll start imagining Jordan’s face framed in drone cameras, her throat bared to a man who thinks murder is an accounting practice.
Renn stands behind my chair, posture rigid, eyes pinned to a tactical overlay. Jessa is at the boarding control station, fingers flexing like she’s itching to tear something open. Mira and thetech team are hunched over their consoles, reading signal noise like priests reading entrails.
“First ping’s up,” Mira says, voice low. “We’re seeing a relay net. Ground tower, two orbiting sats, one mid-alt repeater. It’s not Alliance standard. It’s corporate kit stitched with merc upgrades.”
Morazin’s style: clean enough to look legitimate until you rub your thumb against it and feel the counterfeit.
“Drone swarms,” I say.
Jessa grins, feral. “Finally.”
A bank of launch bays opens beneath us with a muted mechanical sigh, and dozens of micro-drones spill into the black like glittering insects. They fan out in coordinated arcs, their sensor suites blinking in patterns I can’t see with the naked eye but can feel through the rising texture of data on my screens. The drones’ feed stitches together a map: relay frequencies, line-of-sight channels, reinforcement request routes, dead zones.
Renn points at a cluster of signal spikes. “Those are Morazin’s reinforcement channels.”
“Yeah,” I murmur. “He’s screaming for help.”
On a side monitor, the broadcast feed is still live—Morazin’s platform, the drones circling, the ticker chaos crawling across the screen like a wound. I catch a glimpse of Jordan in restraints and something in my chest turns to a cold, focused hatred so pure it feels clean.
“Find the relay nodes,” I say. “Then we kill his voice.”
Mira’s fingers dance. “Two orbiting relay sats are within pod range. Third is a repeater we can flood.”
I glance at Jessa. “Pods.”
She snaps her comm open. “Boarding pods one and two, you’re up. Targets: relay sats alpha and beta. No hero entries. Punch in, sabotage, punch out.”
A chorus of confirmations returns—hard voices, excited.
“Cyber flood on the third,” I add, nodding at Mira. “False traffic. Make his ‘help’ requests bounce into dead space.”
