The assault was becoming overwhelming. Soldiers everywhere, pressing from every direction, their tactics adapting in real-time to counter the Maker weapons. They were moving constantly now, never staying in one place long enough to present a clear target. They used their fallen comrades' bodies as temporary cover, advanced in short rushes that made tracking them nearly impossible, and coordinated their fire to suppress one defender while others closed in.

  Evan's rifle whined again and again, the targeting reticle dancing from contact to contact as he tried to engage multiple threats simultaneously. The weapon showed no signs of depleting—whatever power source drove it seemed designed for sustained combat—but even unlimited ammunition couldn't overcome the simple math of being vastly outnumbered.

  A glance at the tactical display confirmed what he already knew. They were on the verge of being surrounded. The Umbral forces had established positions on three sides of their defensive perimeter, and more soldiers were pushing in through the far breach. The path back to the Ascendant's ramp was still clear, but that gap was shrinking with every passing second.

  Brennik had said the Null Guard would come. One to two hours. They should be close.

  But they weren't close enough.

  An explosion rocked the tower's base to Evan's left, some kind of breaching charge blowing a new hole in the ancient wall. Umbral soldiers poured through the gap in a tight formation, their weapons blazing. Orven's rifle cut down the first two in rapid succession, but the rest scattered, finding shelter and returning fire with disciplined precision.

  Evan tracked from target to target, his rifle whining as he tried to suppress the new threat. One hit, cover gone. Soldier exposed, second shot finding center mass. Another soldier driven to ground but not killed, already rolling toward new shelter before Evan could follow up. The fourth Umbral was flanking Myris's position, moving along the wall, using the scattered rubble for concealment.

  Evan shouted a warning that came out in English, useless across the language barrier, but Myris was already turning, her rifle coming up.

  Too slow. The Umbral soldier had the angle, had the shot lined up, his weapon tracking⁠—

  Faelen's rifle whined from somewhere behind Evan. The soldier's cover disintegrated, and before he could move, the second shot shattered his helmet. He dropped without firing.

  The tactical display showed the contacts multiplying, the perimeter tightening, the noose drawing closed around them. They needed to fall back. Now. Before they were cut off entirely.

  Evan raised his hand, ready to signal the retreat.

  A cry cut through the helmet's comm system. Myris's voice, anguished and desperate, the words in Oridian but the emotion universal. Faelen's voice joined hers a moment later, the same tone of raw desperation, both of them calling out something that sounded like a name.

  Evan's head snapped toward Orven's position.

  The old scavenger wasn't there.

  His section of wall stood empty, abandoned. Evan's eyes swept the tower's base, searching for the distinctive shape of Maker armor. He found it twenty meters away, sprinting toward a crack in the wall opposite the ramp. A gap barely wide enough for a person to squeeze through, leading out into the ruins beyond.

  Orven was running away. No, not running away. His movements were purposeful. Deliberate. The sprint of a man with a plan rather than a man in panic.

  Myris and Faelen shifted their fire entirely. They weren't shooting at the soldiers assaulting their positions anymore. Every shot from their rifles was directed at the Umbrals between Orven and that crack in the wall, clearing a path, buying the old man seconds he desperately needed.

  Evan didn't understand. Didn't know what Orven was doing or why. But he understood covering fire.

  He took aim at an Umbral soldier who had broken from cover to intercept the running scavenger. Evan fired, cutting him down. Another soldier emerged from behind a pillar, weapon rising toward Orven, and Evan took him out, too.

  Orven reached the crack. He didn't slow down, didn't look back, just turned sideways and squeezed through the narrow gap, his armored form disappearing into the darkness beyond.

  Gone.

  Myris screamed something—a word, a name, a plea—her voice cracking with emotion that needed no translation. Faelen was still firing, but his shots were wild now, the precision of a trained fighter replaced by the desperate fury of someone watching a loved one vanish into danger.

  More Umbrals were pushing in. The momentary distraction of covering Orven's escape had cost them ground. Soldiers had advanced on two sides, closing to within twenty meters of the Ascendant's ramp. If they got much closer, they'd be able to pin the defenders outside while reinforcements sealed the trap.

  Evan made a decision.

  "Back!" He shouted the word in English, projecting it through the comm, knowing they wouldn't understand the language but hoping the tone would carry. "Get back to the ship! Now!"

  He pointed toward the Ascendant's ramp, then made a sweeping gesture to signal them to fall back, retreat, move.

  Faelen grabbed Myris's arm. The woman resisted for a moment, her faceplate turned toward the crack where Orven had disappeared, her body language screaming reluctance. Then Faelen was pulling her, dragging her toward the ramp, and she went, still firing, still fighting, but moving in the right direction.

  Evan provided cover as they retreated. His rifle whined again and again, each shot forcing an Umbral to duck or dive, buying seconds that felt like hours. A beam grazed his shoulder, failing to penetrate the Maker armor. Another sparked against the column he'd been using for cover, a crack winding its way deep into the stone.

  Faelen and Myris reached the ramp. They stopped at the base and turned, both kneeling to make themselves smaller targets as they provided Evan with cover fire. He fired three more shots from where he stood, then turned and ran.

  The ramp stretched ahead of him, maybe fifteen meters between him and safety. He sprinted toward the incline, his armor responding to his desperate need for speed. Faelen and Myris did their best to protect him, rifles whining, the air shimmering toward targets he couldn't see. Energy beams crisscrossed the air behind him, Umbral soldiers firing at his retreating back.

  One of the beams hit his thigh, not a glancing blow but a direct hit. The armor held, absorbed the energy, dispersed it, kept him alive when he knew any conventional protection would have failed.

  The two scavengers broke for the ramp as he reached it, all three of them sprinting into the cargo bay. Myris reached the control panel first, slapping her hand against it before Evan had fully cleared the ramp.

  Evan tumbled to the cargo bay deck, rolling to his feet as Umbral soldiers rushed toward the closing gap, their weapons blazing. Beams sparked against the ramp's underside, but the Maker technology was designed to withstand far worse than small-arms fire. The ramp continued its steady ascent, the gap narrowing, the ancient mechanisms grinding shut.

  The last thing Evan saw before the seal engaged was an Umbral soldier's faceplate, the man's features twisted with frustration as his prize disappeared behind inches of advanced composite.

  The ramp locked into place with a solid thunk that resonated through the deck. Safe for now, but he was sure that given enough time, the Umbrals could defeat the seal just like the scavengers had.

  He stood in the cargo bay's dim light, his chest heaving, his rifle still clutched in both hands. A sound reached his ears. Muffled, quiet, but unmistakable.

  He turned toward Faelen and Myris.

  The two scavengers had removed their helmets. They stood near the cargo bay's forward bulkhead, clutched together, their arms wrapped around each other in the embrace of people who had just lost something precious. Myris's face was wet with tears, her features contorted with grief. Faelen's eyes were squeezed shut, his jaw clenched so tight the muscles stood out against his skin.

  They were family. Had to be. The way they held each other. The way they'd screamed when Orven ran. The way they'd covered his escape with every ounce of determination they possessed. That wasn't the bond between colleagues or crewmates. That was blood.

  Orven was their father. To at least one of them, maybe both.

  Evan was certain of it now. The exact relationship didn't matter. What mattered was that he'd raised them, loved them, and now he'd run into the darkness to try to save them.

  But save them how? What could one man do against an army? Against ships in orbit and soldiers on the ground and an empire that wanted nothing more than to claim the prize hiding in this tower?

  Evan didn't know. But he understood sacrifice. Understood what it meant to put yourself between danger and the people you loved, even when the odds were impossible.

  Orven had gone to do something. Something he believed might give his children a chance.

  If he succeeded, Evan intended to be ready.

  He kept his rifle in hand and moved toward the lift, leaving the grieving scavengers to their private moment. The bridge waited above, and with it, the tactical display that would show him exactly how bad their situation had become.

  And maybe—if luck or fate or whatever force guided these things was on their side—it would show him Orven coming back.

  With help.

  41

  Evan dropped his helmet to the deck the moment the bridge doors opened and he ran to the command station. The interface surfaces immediately responded to his presence. Systems awakened, and the tactical display opened. Information he desperately needed but absolutely didn't want to see painted itself across the forward section of the bridge.

  Contact markers ringed the tower's base in a strangling circle, the cordon tightening as dozens of signatures arranged without gaps, blind spots, or mistakes. The soldiers they'd killed hadn't even dented their numbers. Even worse, more transports were descending through the upper atmosphere, their signatures flickering as they dropped toward landing zones just beyond the ruins. Reinforcements to press the assault. And at the top of the display, the ship blocking their only escape remained as immovable as a headstone.

  Sarxon wasn't screwing around.

  Evan's hands curled into fists against the armrests. They'd fought their way back inside Ascendant. Sealed the ramp. Bought themselves minutes, maybe, before the Umbrals breached the hull and finished what they'd started. All of it for nothing if they couldn't get past the ship crouched above them like a preying mantis ready to snatch them up.

  A flicker at the edge of the grid caught his attention.

  A new contact. Faint and uncertain, the signature appearing and vanishing as the tower's interference played havoc with the Ascendant's sensors. But its position was clear. Ground level. Outside the walls. Evan leaned forward, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The shape was wrong for an Umbral transport. Too small. Too light.

  Footsteps sounded on the deck behind him. Evan turned to find Faelen and Myris emerging from the lift, helmets off, faces still carrying the raw evidence of grief. But something had shifted in how they held themselves. The desperate way they'd clung to each other in the cargo bay had hardened into something that looked like resolve.

  They glanced at the sensor grid, then at him. Both of them nodded as if accepting him as their captain.

  Faelen moved to the tactical station and dropped into the seat like he'd done it a thousand times before. Myris crossed to the adjacent console, one Evan had noticed but never activated. The moment she sat, it blazed to life around her.

  The hologram that materialized above the control surface rendered the Ascendant and its surroundings in sharp detail. The tower walls. The blocked opening above them. The ship that held them prisoner. It had to be an operations display. Myris laid her right hand on the trackball. Adjusting the display, she zoomed in and rotated the hologram, pulling up Maker symbols in patterns Evan didn't recognize. Data he hadn't known existed. Her movements carried the confidence of someone who understood the technology at a fundamental level.

  They were preparing for something. Both of them. Taking stations, bringing systems online, working with the focused intensity of people who believed they still had a chance to get the hell out of here. What did they know that Evan didn't?

  A chime snapped his attention back to the operations display on his console. New data scrolled across the hologram, and Evan felt his stomach tighten as he deciphered it. The ramp. Someone was working the external controls again, running bypass sequences, probing for weaknesses in the Maker security. The scavengers had cracked it earlier. The Umbrals would manage the same trick soon enough.

  They were running out of time.

  Myris spoke without turning from her console, her voice carrying across the bridge in Oridian words Evan couldn't understand. But the tone needed no translation. Grief and pride tangled together, so thick he could almost taste them. She wasn't talking to Faelen, he realized. She was talking to someone who couldn't hear her anymore.

  Faelen answered with a single word. It might have been an agreement. It might have been goodbye.

  Evan's hands moved to the helm controls before he'd consciously decided to act. Whatever was coming, whatever Orven was doing out there, he needed to be ready for it. The trackpad responded to his touch as he began rotating the Ascendant, fighting the ship's mass against the planet's pull, angling the nose upward toward the ragged opening above. Through the viewports, ancient walls slid past as his perspective shifted from horizontal to vertical. The blocked gap appeared at the top of his vision, the enemy ship's dark hull silhouetted against what should have been stars.

  The ship's drive engaged. Evan felt it in his bones before he heard it.

  As if the air itself had grown heavier, denser, pressing inward from every direction, pressure built in his chest, behind his eyes, in the roots of his teeth. Then the sound reached him: a deep, subsonic thrum that bypassed his ears entirely and resonated somewhere in his marrow. The deck vibrated beneath his boots. The armrests hummed against his palms. The entire ship seemed to be gathering itself, coiling like a spring, building toward something that made the hair on his arms stand straight up despite the armor covering them.

  The tower's ancient stones began to tremble.

  Through the viewport, Evan watched dust sift down from cracks that had held for four thousand years. A fine haze at first, drifting through the hollow interior. Then larger chips of masonry—fragments of whatever had decorated these walls when they were new—began to fall. The trembling deepened into a grinding vibration he could feel through the deck. It escalated, ascending up through the command seat and into his spine. Somewhere in the structure above him, something cracked with a sound like breaking bones. They couldn't stay here for long with the drive active. Whatever force it used for propulsion would tear the tower apart.

  Visible on the sensor grid, the soldiers working on the ramp never had a chance to understand what was happening as the drive's forces slammed outward from the hull. Evan watched the shockwave, a force the soldiers couldn't see or fight, hurl dozens of them away from the Ascendant, slamming them into the tower walls at a speed they couldn't survive, even in armor. A handful near the walls, where the force wasn't as devastating, managed to scramble for cover behind fallen debris. A few others dragged themselves away from the nightmare the Ascendant created. Most of them didn't move again.

  Outside, the scavenger ship suddenly launched from the surface, arcing away from the tower and then coming around like a missile aimed directly at the ship camped overhead, blocking Ascendant's escape.

  Myris screamed, the sound tearing through the bridge, raw and primal. Her grief was tangible, given voice in a way that transcended language. Her hands flew to her face. Her shoulders shook. Her tears flowed, pulled from a daughter's breaking heart as she watched her father's ship slide off the side of the vessel he'd given his life to move and tumble out of sight.

  Evan's head snapped back to the viewport, his eyes on the Umbral ship above as metal screamed against metal, a sound so loud and so wrong that it seemed to tear apart the air itself. The noise reverberated down through the tower's hollow interior, bouncing off ancient walls, building on itself until the entire structure rang like a struck bell. He felt it in his chest, in his skull, like nothing he'd ever heard before.

  Through the viewport, Evan watched the ship's dark hull begin to move aside, as if struck by a giant's fist. Debris exploded outward from the point of impact, glittering fragments of hull plating tumbling away. And there, what remained of the scavenger vessel was crumpled against the Umbral ship's flank. Its hull had compressed on impact, the bow section folding back on itself, its structural supports snapping like dry twigs.

  Momentum carried both vessels away from the opening in a slow, grinding dance until a gap appeared above him, revealing a swath of stars.

  Ragged. Unstable. The edges of the opening still partially blocked by the Umbral ship. But there, a swath of clear sky and stars. Freedom.

  Faelen shouted something at Evan, pointing urgently at the opening, the Oridian words meaningless but the message unmistakable.

  Go. Now. Before this was for nothing.

  Evan slammed the throttle forward.

  The Ascendant hurled itself upward with a force that drove the breath from his lungs and crushed him into the command seat. The ship's drive howled—a sound like nothing he'd ever heard, somewhere between a scream and a roar—the protest of physics being bent beyond their breaking point. Power consumption spiked across the display, reserves draining at a rate that would have terrified him if he'd had time to think about it.

  Evan watched through the viewport as the drive carved a channel through the structure, massive four-thousand-year-old masonry coming apart around them. Support columns that had held for millennia shattered and flew outward. Sections of wall tore free from their foundations and tumbled away. The ancient walls simply couldn't withstand the violent forces, the spreading destruction catastrophic.