"I don't understand," Evan said. "I don't speak⁠—"

  The voice repeated itself, the tone shifting from authoritative to demanding. Whatever the Solmarch captain was saying, he clearly expected compliance.

  Sarxon's voice cut through on the first channel, sharp and urgent.

  "He's ordering you to surrender to the Solmarch Empire." A pause, laden with implications. "You already surrendered to me. Come now."

  The universe outside the Ascendant's viewports deteriorated into chaos.

  Solmarch starfighters engaged the Umbral craft, energy weapons flickering between the formations in rapid exchanges. The coordinated net that had been closing on the Ascendant was fragmenting as pilots broke formation to deal with the new threat, their precise spacing dissolving into the swirling confusion of active combat.

  Evan watched through the viewports as a Solmarch fighter dove on an Umbral craft from above. The Umbral pilot fired lateral thrusters, trying to change vector, but the Solmarch fighter adjusted to stay on its tail. Energy bolts streaked from the pursuing ship's weapons, three shots in rapid succession. The first two splashed against the Umbral fighter's shields, flares of light marking the impacts. The third punched through the weakened barrier and burned into the hull. The craft went dark, dead and drifting on its last vector.

  The Solmarch fighter fired its maneuvering thrusters, flipped to face a new direction, and accelerated away, the pilot already hunting for their next target.

  More engagements erupted across his field of view. Two Umbral fighters—their darker hulls marked with charcoal insignia—swept in formation toward a trio of Solmarch craft. Weapons fire crisscrossed between them, energy bolts tracing bright lines against the black. One of the Solmarch fighters took multiple hits, its shields flaring blue-white before collapsing. The pilot tried to break away, thrusters firing in desperate bursts, but the Umbral pair stayed with them, pouring fire into the unprotected hull until the craft came apart in a silent bloom of debris.

  The other two Solmarch fighters split, one diving low, one climbing high, forcing the Umbral pilots to choose their targets.

  To Evan's left, a head-on pass between two fighters ended badly for both. They'd been closing too fast, weapons blazing, neither willing to break off. Shields failed on the Umbral craft first, but the Solmarch pilot's victory lasted only a fraction of a second before return fire punched through his cockpit. Both fighters tumbled past each other, dark and lifeless, carried by momentum toward destinations their pilots would never see.

  A stray energy bolt streaked past the Ascendant's viewports, close enough that Evan involuntarily flinched.

  The battle had engulfed him. Fighters wheeled and spun in every direction, thrusters flaring as pilots fought for position, weapons lighting up the void in strobing flashes. The tactical display showed contacts everywhere, Umbral and Solmarch markers intermingled in a swirling mass that made it impossible to track any single engagement.

  It didn't make sense.

  The Solmarch fleet had to know it was outmatched. The Möbius was a relic ship. Its capabilities were known throughout Oridia, documented and feared. Why had they picked a fight? What could they possibly hope to achieve?

  Then it clicked.

  The Ascendant wasn't just another relic ship. It was the Key-ship. The vessel that legends said could lead to a starship powerful enough to destroy every other relic ship in existence. If the Umbrals captured it, if they found that weapon, no empire in the galaxy could stand against them.

  The Solmarch fleet wasn't throwing their lives away for nothing. They were trying to stop the end of everything they knew.

  As if in response to Evan's thought, the Möbius opened fire.

  Violet-and-gold energy rippled outward from the twisted hull, space itself seeming to bend around the discharge. The beams swept across two of the Solmarch patrol craft, and where they touched, matter simply ceased to exist. One moment the ships were there, solid and real. The next, they were gone.

  Not destroyed. Not exploding in the conventional sense. Erased as if they'd never been.

  "Come now." Sarxon's voice carried through the chaos, her composure cracking at the edges. "While there's still time."

  Evan stared at the tactical display. His mind racing, he processed the new situation with desperate speed. The Solmarch fleet had changed everything. The careful trap Sarxon had constructed was dissolving into open combat, her attention divided between capturing him and defending against this unexpected threat.

  The large ships couldn't follow him to the surface. The starfighters were too busy destroying each other to maintain their intercept formation. The Möbius was focused on the Solmarch vessels.

  The planet hung in the display, rust-colored and barren, its atmosphere a barrier that none of the capital ships could cross. He couldn't stay there forever. They would know he was down there. They would send reinforcements. But a temporary hiding spot might be enough.

  He could go back to Earth. Consult with the Null Guard. Figure out his next move with people who actually understood this galaxy.

  The opportunity wouldn't last. Already the battle was shifting, the initial chaos giving way to something more organized as commanders on both sides adapted to the new reality. In minutes, maybe less, one side would gain the upper hand. The survivor would turn their attention back to him.

  He had to move now.

  "Sorry, Sarxon," Evan said, his hands already moving to the helm controls. "But it looks like the offer's expired."

  He slid the throttle forward. The deck tilted beneath him as the Ascendant fell into motion, the familiar sensation of gravity shifting as the ship slid into a new vector. He adjusted course with the trackball, angling away from the direct path to the planet, threading a route that would take him around the Möbius while its attention was elsewhere.

  Immediately, Umbral and Solmarch craft broke from their engagements and vectored toward him, thrusters flaring as they accelerated in pursuit. They didn't stop shooting at each other, but now they were doing it while chasing him. The tactical display showed a spreading wake of contacts converging on his vector, two fleets that hated each other but apparently hated losing him more.

  Through the viewports, he saw the Möbius fire again. Three Solmarch capital ships, the remaining patrol vessels that had been holding position near the planet, vanished in rapid succession. Violet-and-gold energy swept across them one after another, each ship there and then not there, erased with the casual efficiency of someone clearing clutter from a desk.

  "Marshall." Sarxon's voice had lost its composure entirely, her face twisted in frustration and rage. "Surrender now. This is your final warning."

  Evan reached for the controls and disconnected the channel. Then space lit up ahead of him. Violet-and-gold energy streaked past the Ascendant's bow, close enough for viewports to automatically dim against the glare. A warning shot. Sarxon wasn't aiming to hit him—the Möbius could have vaporized him as easily as those Solmarch ships if she'd wanted to. She was trying to force him to stop.

  He wasn't about to hit the brakes.

  The first impacts hit his shields from behind. The Ascendant shuddered as energy bolts splashed against the aft barrier, the ship's defensive systems flaring to absorb the damage. Evan checked the tactical display. Umbral fighters. They'd closed the distance faster than he'd expected.

  He slid his finger left on the trackpad, felt the deck shift beneath him as the ship fell sideways into a new vector. Another volley of fire streaked through the space he'd just occupied. He pushed the throttle harder, building speed, watching the rust-colored planet grow larger in his forward viewports.

  More impacts. The shields held, but the indicators on his display showed the aft section taking the brunt of it. He couldn't keep absorbing hits like this.

  The atmosphere was close now. A thin haze visible at the planet's edge, the boundary between vacuum and air.

  Evan adjusted his vector and dove toward it.

  31

  One moment the Ascendant was gliding through vacuum, the familiar silence of space surrounding the hull. The next, the viewports flared orange as plasma wrapped around the hull, atmospheric friction generating heat that would have vaporized any conventional spacecraft. The Ascendant's advanced composites absorbed the punishment without complaint, the ship's systems compensating for the sudden transition from vacuum to air with an efficiency that bordered on disregard. The deck remained steady beneath him, the Maker engineering handling atmospheric entry as easily as it handled everything else.

  The problem wasn't the ship. The problem was where it was going.

  The rust-colored planet filled the viewports now, no longer a distant sphere but a looming presence that rushed up to meet him with terrifying speed. Brown terrain stretched to every horizon, scarred and barren, the surface growing larger with each passing second. Too fast. He was coming in too fast, too steep, the ship's trajectory carrying him toward the ground at an angle that would end in impact rather than flight.

  His hand shot to the trackpad, fingers sliding across the surface as he tried to adjust the ship's orientation. Pull up. Level out. Basic maneuvers that should have been instinctive by now. Nothing happened. The subsonic thrumming of the ship intensified, but the Ascendant continued its dive. The deck still tilted at that sickening angle. The ground still rushed up with implacable certainty. Evan's stomach lurched as he worked the controls, more forcefully this time, but the response was still sluggish, wrong, the trackpad offering none of the control he'd grown accustomed to in vacuum.

  Something was different.

  His eyes moved across the helm interface, searching the Maker symbols for anything that might explain the problem. The controls that had served him perfectly in space were fighting him now, the ship's behavior fundamentally altered by the presence of atmosphere and gravity.

  The effigy.

  The thought surfaced through the panic. He'd held that toy starship dozens of times now, memorized every detail of its hull. The wings could be opened or folded back. If the effigy was a perfect miniature of the Ascendant, accurate down to the smallest detail, then the real ship had wings too. Wings that could extend from the hull and provide lift, transforming it from a spacecraft into an aircraft.

  He needed to activate that system. Now.

  Warning tones shrieked from the command station. Symbols flashed across the tactical display in urgent patterns he couldn't read, but the meaning was clear enough from the viewport. The ground rushed up to meet him, and he had seconds to do something about it.

  Evan's eyes darted across the control surface. Dozens of symbols, none of which he understood well enough to trust. The ship had wings. There had to be a way to deploy them. But which one? Which control would save his life and which would do nothing at all?

  He picked a symbol near the edge of the interface—a horizontal bar with angled lines branching from either end, something that could mean wings or weapons or self-destruct for all he knew—and stabbed at it with his finger.

  The ship vibrated. A deep mechanical hum resonated through the hull, different from the background tone of the gravitic drive. Movement rippled along the vessel's flanks, visible through the edge of the viewport—white surfaces traced with orange bands extending outward from the fuselage, sweeping back into aerodynamic shapes that caught the rushing air. At the same moment, the control surface beneath his right hand shifted. The material softened, reformed, and suddenly his fingers were wrapped around a small joystick that rose from the interface. Thrusters roared to life somewhere behind the bridge, actual thrust combining with the ship's strange propulsion system in a way that finally made sense in atmosphere.

  Evan eased the stick back. The ship responded. He felt the nose begin to rise, the wings bite into air. The ground was still getting closer, but not as fast. The dive was flattening out, his trajectory curving from vertical toward horizontal, but the angle of attack was still too steep. Brown terrain filled the lower half of the viewport. Details—boulders, cracks in the dead earth, the skeletal fingers of ruined buildings—sharpened as the distance shrank, the surface still rising far too fast for comfort.

  Evan's vision narrowed to a tunnel. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, drowning out the warning tones, drowning out everything except the viewport and the death it promised. On a planet he couldn't name, in a galaxy he'd never asked to visit, inside a ship he'd only guessed how to fly.

  He could see the texture of individual rocks now. Could see dust swirling between the ruins of whatever civilization had died here. Could see the Ascendant's shadow racing across the rubble below. Its angle of attack was still flattening—he could feel the ship leveling out—but the surface was right there. The corpse of a civilization blurring past.

  Then, for one horrible moment, the ship slowed, the nose suddenly dipping as the ship leveled out and came to a sudden, stagnant hover he had no idea how he'd accomplished.

  Evan didn't breathe. Didn't blink. He even stopped thinking. He just sat there, held the stick while his heart tried to remember how to beat normally.

  Close. Too close. He couldn't read the symbols on the console in front of him, but his eyes told him the ground was maybe five hundred feet below the hull, if that, near enough that he could make out individual features in the dead landscape. Not just barren earth, but the broken bones of massive structures that must have been remarkable when they were built, but were now reduced to skeletal frameworks and collapsed foundations. Alien skyscrapers scoured smooth by millennia of wind and dust. Bridges that arced between distant towers, some spans shattered, others still standing. The remains of a civilization that had burned in the Maker wars, dead longer than humanity had existed on Earth.

  Evan checked the tactical display, cursing under his breath when he saw that some of the starfighters from both empires had followed him down. Most of them had already pulled up, their pilots recognizing the danger of atmospheric entry sooner than Evan had, aborting their pursuit before they hit the point of no return, but a few had committed too deeply, their trajectories too steep, their reactions too slow. Contact markers vanished from the display in rapid succession. Evan caught glimpses of the aftermath in the rear view display. Fireballs blooming against the brown landscape as starfighters slammed into the surface at terminal velocity. Brief flares of orange and black marked the graves of pilots who had pushed too hard.

  His stomach heaved. The motion sickness from the atmospheric transition combined with the terror of the near-impact twisted together into a wave of nausea that clawed at the back of his throat. He swallowed hard, forcing the sickness down. No time for that. The surviving starfighters were reorganizing above him, contact markers spreading across the tactical display as they recovered from the chaotic entry and began hunting for their prey.

  Some of the Umbral and Solmarch pilots continued their private war even as they descended, energy weapons flashing between craft that should have been working together. The tactical display showed a confused tangle of contacts, the faceted dark hulls of Umbral fighters mixing with the blockier Solmarch designs.

  One thing clear from watching them maneuver: they were struggling. The starfighters had been designed for vacuum, optimized for environments where air resistance didn't exist. Down here, in a thick atmosphere, they moved like swimmers fighting a current. Their turns were wide and sluggish, their acceleration nothing like the sharp vectors Evan had witnessed in space. The ones locked in combat engaged one another like out-of-shape heavyweight boxers, slow and lumbering.

  The ones chasing him were a different story. They didn't need better aerodynamics to accelerate in a straight line. They had more than enough available thrust, and they gained on the Ascendant like missiles. Their renewed attacks sent energy blasts zipping past the wings, flaring the weakened rear shields as they connected with the tail.

  Running wouldn't work. That much was obvious. Even flying like drunks, the starfighters would eventually corner him, catch him against terrain or wear down his shields through sheer attrition.

  It was time to see what the Ascendant could do.

  Evan pulled the stick left, banking into a turn that pressed him into the command seat. The response surprised him, the extended wings and thrusters working in concert with the ship's alien propulsion to give him more control than he had in space with the trackpad. Even though the vessel was the size of a jumbo airliner, it handled like a fighter.

  The brown landscape tilted beneath him, ruins flashing past as he curved back toward the pursuing fighters. A quick glance at the power indicators showed acceptable levels, the three functional reserves still strong enough for what he had in mind. He found the weapons interface and opened it, sensing the main guns hum to life. That distinctive harmonic tone began building, the deep chime he remembered from his practice sessions against asteroids and debris.

  A cluster of four starfighters—two with the angular dark hulls of the Umbral forces, two with the blockier frames of Solmarch construction—flew toward him in loose formation. Maybe five kilometers out. They had joined forces, spewing energy at him that peppered the sky around him as they worked to center their aim.

  Evan tapped his fire control. The air shimmered ahead of the ship, that distinctive refraction effect spreading outward in a pair of expanding cones. Three of the starfighters flew directly into the distortion, and the effects were immediate. Hull plating cracked along stress lines. Running lights flickered and died. Systems failed in ways he couldn't see, but he could certainly observe the results of it.

  They didn't explode. They simply stopped working. All three fighters rolled over and plunged from the sky to the dead earth below. The fourth fighter broke hard right, its pilot recognizing the threat, but Evan was already past them, pushing the throttle forward.

  The deck shifted beneath him as the ship built speed, the sensation of acceleration pressing him back into the command seat. The sound barrier shattered somewhere behind him—a crack he felt more than heard—and the Ascendant kept accelerating, the brown landscape below becoming a blur of dead earth and ancient ruins.