Through the rear sensor feed, Evan glimpsed one of the Umbral transports that had been hovering near the tower's base. It fought to climb clear of the expanding destruction behind them, but a wave of debris caught it broadside. Stones the size of small cars slammed into its hull with enough force to crumple armor plating and shatter viewports. The transport spun wildly, its engines flaring in a desperate attempt to compensate, before a second wave of masonry smashed into its underside and sent it tumbling toward the ground.

  Another transport tried to climb clear of the expanding destruction in Ascendant's path. It didn't make it far. A section of the tower's wall—a slab that must have weighed dozens of tons—caught its tail as the structure blew apart. The impact sheared the engine housing clean off, and the transport dropped like a stone, vanishing into the dust cloud billowing up from below.

  The force of Ascendant's passing pushed away whatever rubble hit the hull, leaving their path upward clear.

  Behind them, the tower couldn't take it. Level after level gave way, each floor lasting only seconds after the ship passed. The combination of the drive's destabilizing wake and the structure's own compromised integrity spelled its doom.

  Evan watched through the rear viewport as walls that had weathered millennia didn't just collapse. They exploded like a bomb going off in slow motion. Stones separated from mortar. Support beams twisted like warm taffy. Entire sections of the tower peeled away, tumbling into the maelstrom below and crushing everything in its path. The explosion buried everything within a hundred meters under an avalanche of ancient stone.

  Breathing heavy, his heart pounding, Evan returned his attention to the forward viewport, his hand easing back on the flight controls. As the Umbral vessel continued its slow rotation away from the opening, he angled the Ascendant toward the gap Orven's sacrifice had created.

  The Ascendant punched through the tower's shattered crown like a bullet through rotten wood, clear sky bursting across the viewport. They climbed, trailing dust and debris—fragments of ancient civilization streaming behind them—as the tower finished its collapse, reduced to rubble in a matter of seconds.

  They were out.

  But they weren't clear.

  The sensors erupted with new contacts. Starfighters launching from positions across the grid, their signatures multiplying like angry wasps escaping a burning nest. The damaged assault ship struggled to compensate for the wound Orven had carved into its flank, even as it tried to alter its course to pursue the Ascendant. A dozen more just like it appeared at the edge of Evan's sensor range, their vectors converging on the Ascendant's projected course.

  And somewhere out there, waiting with terrible patience—the Möbius. Its twisting hull lurking in the darkness. Its matter-erasing weapons ready to end them the moment Sarxon decided they'd become more trouble than they were worth.

  Evan kept climbing, his eyes on the stars above while Myris wept at her station. While Faelen observed the tactical situation in grim silence. And while the forces of an empire scrambled to stop them.

  But they had a chance.

  Orven had given everything to give them that chance.

  Now Evan had to make his sacrifice count.

  The Ascendant rose toward orbit, toward the enemy fleet, toward whatever came next. Behind them, the dust cloud from the collapsed tower spread across the ruins, marking the place where a scavenger had become something more.

  A father. A hero. A man who'd chosen his children's lives over his own.

  Evan understood that choice. Beth had died in a hospital bed while he was hiding in a motel room six states away, too broken to face her, too afraid to say goodbye. He'd failed her. Failed Jake. Failed everyone who'd counted on him to show up when it mattered.

  Orven hadn't failed. When the moment came, he'd risen to meet it. He'd looked at the impossible math of their situation and found the one variable he could change.

  Evan owed him a debt that could never be repaid. But he could honor it. He could make sure Faelen and Myris survived to mourn their father somewhere other than an Umbral prison cell. He could keep fighting. Keep flying. Keep pushing toward whatever slim hope still existed in a galaxy that wanted him dead.

  The stars waited above.

  The enemy waited to stop them.

  He kept climbing.

  42

  Evan's stomach kept insisting he was falling even as the Ascendant climbed toward orbit. The sensation still felt wrong to his Earth-trained instincts, rising while every nerve screamed he was plummeting, the rust-colored landscape dropping away beneath them as if he'd stepped off a cliff that pointed at the sky. The ruins of the capital shrank into an abstract pattern of shadows and dust, the collapsed tower already lost in the spreading debris cloud that marked Orven's grave.

  The first starfighters entered weapons range.

  A chime sounded from the tactical station, and Evan glanced over to see Faelen's hands moving across the control surface with sudden and quick purpose. The young scavenger's face was set in hard lines, grief pushed aside by the immediate demands of survival. His fingers found symbols Evan hadn't learned yet, pressed them in sequences that meant nothing to him, and something in the ship's systems responded.

  The point defense emitters activated.

  Evan felt the change before he heard it. A subtle vibration ran through the deck before a shift in the background hum of the Ascendant's systems amplified. Through the viewport, he caught glimpses of energy discharges lancing outward from the ship's hull, rapid pulses of light that tracked toward the incoming fighters with unerring precision.

  The lead starfighter's shields flared as the first burst connected. A shimmer of protective energy absorbed the impact. The system kept firing, spitting shot after shot at the same target. The second hit made the shields flicker. The third caused them to spark and stutter. The fourth punched through, scoring the fighter's forward hull in a spray of vaporized metal.

  The pilot broke off his attack run, trailing debris from the wound in his ship's skin, peeling away to reassess the threat.

  Another fighter pressed in from the opposite side. Faelen's console chimed again, and another sustained burst of point defense fire reached out to meet it. The fighter's shields held through the first three shots, absorbing the energy with that characteristic shimmer, but the fourth and fifth hits overwhelmed the protective field entirely. The sixth beam found the fighter's wing, punching through the now-unprotected armor plating. The craft wobbled, its flight path suddenly erratic, as the pilot struggled to compensate while his vessel began to spiral toward the planet below.

  But the fighters weren’t giving up. They kept coming, and in greater numbers, catching up to Ascendant as it fought to break free of Thrax's gravity. The fighters were faster and more agile, allowing them to sweep toward the relic ship from multiple directions, attacking in a synchronized pattern.

  The point defense system responded as the fighters approached, emitters across the hull spitting energy at anything that crossed within range. Evan watched through the viewport as beams lanced out toward the nearest fighter, dismayed when the attack splashed harmlessly against its shields. The same thing repeated all around them, the automated system firing at every target it detected, each burst too weak to do more than make the fighters' shields shimmer briefly before they pressed their attack.

  Evan gritted his teeth as fighters converged on the Ascendant from three directions, their attack angles leaving him little room to make effective evasive maneuvers. Energy blasts streaked toward them, each one promising to weaken the shields before ultimately penetrating. Evan prepared for the impacts.

  Nothing happened.

  No shudder through the deck. No alarms. No power fluctuation. The blasts hit. He saw them hit, watched the bolts of energy terminate against the ship's outline, but the Ascendant absorbed them like a sponge soaking up water. The attacks simply vanished.

  Evan's head snapped toward Myris.

  She was hunched over her console, her right hand on the trackball, her attention fixed on a display that showed a wire-frame outline of the Ascendant surrounded by flowing indicators. As he watched, she spun the trackball hard, and the indicators shifted, concentrating along the ship's starboard flank just as another blast struck from that direction. The energy vanished the same way, swallowed completely.

  The defensive system wasn't a static barrier. It was dynamic, a pool of protective energy that Myris could push and pull around the hull to meet threats as they developed. The trackball let her reinforce the sections under fire while letting others run at minimum power.

  Then Evan noticed something else. The power reserves on the command surface weren't dropping. They were climbing.

  He stared at the indicator, certain he was misreading it. But no, each time Myris caught an incoming blast with a reinforced shield section, the ship's power storage ticked upward. The defensive system wasn't just blocking the attacks. It was drinking them in. Converting enemy fire into fuel.

  Evan let out a disbelieving laugh. The Makers had built a ship that got stronger the more you shot at it.

  The fighters shot past and began to circle, coming around for another pass. Evan noticed Faelen's hands moving across the tactical controls once more, pressing symbols until the beam emitters suddenly stopped firing.

  "What did you do?" Evan cried out, worried about the sudden loss of offense.

  Faelen looked back at him, a grin spreading across his face. He tapped the controls and a single emitter triggered, concentrated bursts tracking a single fighter as it curved back toward them. Shot after shot hammered the same target. The fighter's shields flickered on the third hit. Sparked on the fourth. Collapsed entirely on the fifth, and the sixth beam punched through, hitting something vital and turning the ship into a momentary fireball.

  Evan understood immediately. The system had a maximum output, and Faelen had somehow changed it to a more manual control. He was able to choose a target to focus on and go for the kill. The downside? That single knockout punch had taken nearly eight seconds, giving the other enemy fighters time to make another run.

  Myris spun her trackball, dragging shield power toward the stern, but she couldn't cover everything at once. Two shots splashed against reinforced shields and fed their energy back into the reserves. The third found a section where Myris had drawn power away, striking hull protected only by the baseline shields.

  The ship shuddered. The power indicator dropped as they lost more energy deflecting that attack than they'd gained from the absorbed hits.

  The equation was brutally clear. Faelen could kill fighters, but only by letting the others attack unopposed. Myris could protect the ship and even profit from enemy fire, but not from every direction at once.

  And the fighters kept coming as Ascendant continued to climb.

  The atmosphere thinned around them, the rust-colored sky fading as they approached the black of space. Stars began to appear through the viewport, sharp points of light against the void. Below, Thrax's surface curved away toward the horizon, the planet becoming a sphere rather than a landscape.

  Umbral capital ships waited for them at the edge of orbit, just outside the planet's gravity well. Evan counted their signatures on the tactical display. A dozen vessels arranged in a loose arc, positioned to intercept anything trying to escape. Anything being the Ascendant.

  As he watched, new contacts bloomed from their hulls. Additional starfighters launching. Fresh pilots joining the squadrons that had failed to stop them during their ascent. Something about their positioning bothered him. The arc was too loose, the gaps too wide. A proper blockade would have been tighter, overlapping fields of fire leaving no avenue of escape. Instead, the capital ships remained ready but silent, relying on the smaller craft to keep the pressure on.

  It took Evan only a moment to understand why. While Sarxon had expressed a willingness to destroy the Ascendant rather than let it fall into the hands of any of the other empires, whoever commanded these other ships clearly didn't feel the same. The capital ships couldn't open maximum fire without risking that a lucky shot would vaporize them. The fighters' lighter weapons had a much better chance of disabling instead of destroying.

  It was a fatal flaw in their blockade that Evan intended to exploit. He adjusted their vector, angling toward the widest gap in the Umbral fleet's formation.

  The newly launched fighters moved to intercept the Ascendant, but Faelen was ready for them. The point defense system concentrated its fire on the lead craft, stripping its shields with four rapid shots before the fifth and sixth beams found an unprotected hull. The fighter shattered under the sustained assault, the craft tumbling away, dark and lifeless.

  Another fighter tried to close from below. Myris spotted it on her display and called out something in Oridian, her voice sharp with warning. Faelen's console chimed, and a concentrated burst of fire reached out to meet the threat. The fighter's shields flickered, sparked, and collapsed under the barrage. Two more shots punched through the unprotected engine housing, and the craft disintegrated.

  Two down, close to sixty more to go. The Umbral fighters were vectoring in formations, lining up shots designed to overwhelm, anticipating Ascendant's vector as Evan continued holding them in a straight line.

  He had only done that to conserve power while they climbed through atmosphere, fighting the planet's full gravity. They were still inside its well, but he could hear the change in the thrumming of the ship's engines, and understood it was having an easier time now that they were further from the surface. He had no intention of flying in a straight line forever.

  He jumped from the command station, drawing momentary glances from Faelen and Myris as he quickly settled at the helm, one hand on the trackball, the other on a real throttle, offering him much greater control over the ship.

  Just in time, he rolled the trackball right and pushed the throttle forward in a new direction. His stomach lurched sideways as the Ascendant fell away from the incoming fighters. Eight fighters that had been lining up attack runs suddenly found themselves chasing a target that was no longer where they'd expected it to be.

  One of them adjusted faster than the others, cutting across the Ascendant's new vector, its weapons already firing. Myris caught the shots with the reinforced shields, the power indicator ticking upward as the defensive grid drank in the energy. Faelen's concentrated fire found the fighter two seconds later, its shields flickering, sparking, collapsing before the craft became an expanding cloud of debris.

  Two other fighters adjusted their vectors and came in from opposite sides, trying to bracket the Ascendant. Evan yanked the trackball back while reversing the throttle, his stomach churning as the ship dropped backward and down, simultaneously falling away from both attack vectors. The fighters' blasts crossed through the empty space behind them.

  "Come on," Evan muttered, trying to will the fighters into his firing zone as he moved the throttle forward, shooting ahead of them as they worked to regain their own firing solutions. "Come on!" His voice rose.

  The gap in the formation was closing. Maybe two thousand kilometers were between them now, the capital ships on either side only visible on the sensor grid, their massive hulls reorienting as they moved to cut off his escape route.

  A fighter dove at them from above and Myris spun her trackball to meet it. The shields concentrated along the dorsal hull just as three rapid shots splashed against them, each impact feeding power back into the reserves. Faelen tried to track the fighter as it passed, but it was already gone, pulling away before he could strip its shields.

  Another fighter. From below and behind, this one flew up fast on their stern. Evan rolled the ship, presenting the ventral surface to the attack, giving Myris a better angle to catch the incoming fire. She did exactly that, but just barely. The last shot of the burst caught a section where she'd already drawn power away, and Ascendant shuddered as energy found hull instead of reinforced shields.

  Fifteen hundred kilometers to the gap. The capital ships were still closing, but they weren't going to make it in time. Evan could see clear space beyond them now, the stars waiting past the blockade, freedom measured in seconds rather than minutes.

  The remaining fighters seemed to realize it too. They stopped trying to bracket the Ascendant, stopped cycling through careful attack runs, and simply charged. All of them at once. A desperate swarm converging from every direction, weapons blazing, filling the space around the ship with crisscrossing beams of deadly light.

  Myris screamed something that needed no translation. Too many, too fast, coming from everywhere at once. Her hands flew across the trackball, the shield indicators whipping around the ship's outline in a desperate attempt to catch everything, but she couldn't be everywhere. Shots splashed against reinforced sections and fed the reserves. Other shots found gaps and hit the regular shields, stealing more energy than they gained, threatening to leave them defenseless.

  Faelen abandoned any attempt at precision. He let the point defense system run wild, automated fire spraying in every direction. It wasn't enough to kill anything but it made the pilots flinch, and it threw off their aim to buy precious seconds.

  Evan flew through the chaos.

  He stopped thinking about the controls. Stopped planning his maneuvers. He flew through the chaos, letting his instinct and desperation guide his hands. The trackball spun. The throttle moved. The ship fell in directions that had no names, dodging through a storm of energy that would have vaporized any conventional vessel. A blast passed close enough to leave afterimages on his retinas. Another clipped the port side and made contact with the hull itself, sending a warning tone from the operations pod.

  The gap swallowed them, the capital ships sliding past on either side, close enough for Evan to see the weapon emplacements and sensor arrays on their hulls. The fighters tried to follow, but clear space opened ahead. Evan pushed the throttle forward, gaining velocity more rapidly than the fighters could match. The blockade fell away behind them.