The stars waited...

  43

  Evan allowed himself a fraction of relief. They'd made it past an entire fleet. Past overwhelming odds. Against everything Sarxon had thrown at them, they'd made it off Thrax.

  But where should they go now?

  Before he could begin to consider the question, Faelen rose from the tactical station and crossed to the navigation console with an urgency that immediately set him on edge. Faelen's hands found the control surface, and he entered a sequence of coordinates. He was entering coordinates!

  Symbols began scrolling across the display.

  "Hey." Evan's voice came out sharper than he'd intended. "What are you doing?"

  Faelen didn't look up. His fingers kept moving, pressing symbols, confirming selections, building toward something Evan couldn't read.

  "Hey!" Evan rose from the helm, stepping to the adjacent navigation pod where Faelen sat. "Stop. What are you entering?"

  The young scavenger finally glanced at him, speaking rapidly in Oridian, his tone carrying something between explanation and urgency. The words meant nothing to Evan. The gesture that accompanied them—a sweeping motion toward the stars ahead, then a complicated pattern that might have indicated distance or direction—provided no clarity.

  "I don't understand you." Evan's hands clenched at his sides. "Where are you taking us?"

  More Oridian. Faster now, more animated. Faelen's voice rose as he tried to convey something that the language barrier made impossible. His hands kept working the console even as he spoke, entering more symbols. More coordinates. More data that Evan couldn't interpret.

  "Stop!" Evan grabbed Faelen's wrist, pulling his hand away from the controls. "We're not going anywhere until I know where you're taking my ship!"

  Faelen's expression shifted from urgency to frustration. He pulled against Evan's grip, trying to free his hand, his voice rising to match the tension in his body. Whatever he was saying, it sounded like an argument. Maybe a justification. Maybe a plea. Evan couldn't tell, and that uncertainty was exactly the problem.

  "I don't know you!" Evan's own voice had risen now, the stress of the past hours finally cracking through his controlled exterior. "I don't know where you want to go, I don't know what you're planning, and I'm not letting you fly this ship just anywhere in the hell you want to!"

  Faelen shouted something back, his free hand gesturing wildly. The meaning was clear enough. They needed to get away from the forces hunting them, but Evan couldn't just blindly trust the scavenger. Couldn't just hand over control of the Ascendant to strangers based on nothing more than shared survival and a dead man's sacrifice.

  "No!" He tightened his grip on Faelen's wrist. "Not until you⁠—"

  "Evan." Myris's voice cut through the argument, calm in a way that neither of them had managed. She had risen from her console and stood between them now, laying her hand on Evan's forearm, her tear-streaked face carrying an expression of forced patience.

  She spoke to Faelen next, her tone gentle but firm, the Oridian words carrying a weight that made the young man's shoulders drop slightly. He stopped pulling against Evan's grip, though his eyes remained fixed on the navigation console with obvious anxiety.

  Then Myris turned to Evan. She couldn't speak his language any more than her brother could, but she tried anyway. Her hands made slow, deliberate gestures. Pointing at Faelen. Then at the console. Then at herself. Then at the stars beyond the viewport. Her expression asked for something she couldn't put into words.

  Trust.

  She was asking him to trust them.

  Evan's jaw worked. Everything in his training screamed against it. You didn't hand control to unknowns. You didn't trust people just because they happened to be fighting the same enemy.

  But these two weren't just unknowns. They were Orven's family. They had watched their father die to give them this chance. They had fought beside Evan in the tower, covered his retreat, taken up stations on his ship and defended it like it was their own.

  And Myris was right about one thing. They needed to leave here.

  Evan released Faelen's wrist.

  The young scavenger didn't hesitate. His hands flew back to the console, completing the sequence he'd started, entering the final coordinates. The navigation display updated, showing a projected course that led somewhere far beyond the system's edge.

  Evan returned to the command station, his eyes moving between the navigation display and the tactical grid. The Umbral fleet was falling well behind. Nearly off the sensors. A few seconds more, and they would be⁠—

  The tactical display flickered. New contact. Massive. Appearing directly ahead of them with a signature that made Evan's blood run cold.

  The Möbius.

  The relic ship emerged from its jump like a nightmare given form, its impossible geometry twisting against the stars, its hull a contradiction of angles and curves that hurt to look at directly. One moment the hundreds of thousands of kilometers that lay ahead of them was empty. The next, that terrible vessel hung across their path, blocking their current escape route with the same implacable certainty it had demonstrated over Thrax.

  Slowly moving into position, Sarxon had once more anticipated their course. When they slipped the blockade, they'd probably received sensor data from the other Umbral ships.

  Evan waited for the comms station to indicate an incoming hail, expecting another effort by High Commander Abrelle to convince him to surrender.

  Instead, the Möbius opened fire. No warning. No communication of any kind. Just violence, pure and immediate. Violet-and-gold energy lanced across the void toward the Ascendant with killing intent.

  Myris yelled something and threw herself at her pod, rolling the trackball and shifting the shields all the way forward. Defensive energy flared along the Ascendant's bow with everything the system could muster. The beam hit like a physical blow, the impact shuddering hard enough through the deck to stagger Evan in his seat. But the shields held. The beam that should have erased them from existence splashed against the Ascendant's defenses and dissipated, its terrible power contained by Maker technology designed to withstand exactly this kind of assault.

  Except, it didn't just contain the power.

  It drank it up.

  Evan glanced at the power indicator. Full. The reserves that had been draining steadily throughout their liftoff from inside the tower and their escape through the blockade. Reserves that had dropped with every hit the fighters scored. Reserves that had been at maybe thirty percent when the Möbius appeared now read at least ninety percent.

  Sarxon had just handed them a nearly full tank.

  A fierce grin spread across Evan's face. The Möbius was already tracking for a second shot, preparing to fire again.

  Faelen shouted from the navigation console, his arm sweeping in an urgent gesture away from the relic ship. Evan understood. The smart move was to run away from the threat. To find a new course that would put distance between them and that terrible vessel. Hopefully, all the way to the jump point and safety, but they couldn't count on that. Sarxon had tracked him down before. Had found them when he didn't think it should be possible. Who was to say she wouldn't find them again?

  The other ships had held back, afraid to damage their prize. Sarxon hadn't. She'd opened fire with everything she had, proving her willingness to destroy the Ascendant rather than let it escape. In doing so, she'd given Evan exactly what he needed to fight back.

  He was done running.

  He pointed at Faelen, then jerked his thumb toward the tactical station. The young scavenger stared at him with an expression of disbelief, clearly not understanding what was being asked. Evan pointed again, more forcefully this time, then mimed firing a weapon with both hands.

  Faelen's eyes went wide. He looked at the Möbius through the viewport, then back at Evan, then at his sister. Myris said something sharp—it sounded like a protest—in Oridian, but Evan was already moving.

  He abandoned the command station and crossed back to the helm, dropping into the pilot's seat as his hands found the familiar controls. The trackball settled beneath his right palm. The throttle waited at his left. Through the viewport, the Möbius hung against the stars like a wound in reality.

  Evan pushed the throttle forward, directly toward the Möbius.

  Beside him, he heard Faelen scrambling to comply, abandoning the navigation console and returning to the tactical station. The young scavenger's voice carried a note of barely controlled terror as he called out something to his sister. His hands already moving across the control surface, he brought the primary weapons systems online.

  The Möbius fired.

  Evan's hand rolled the trackball. His inner ear screamed as the ship slewed sideways, the deck seeming to tilt beneath him even though the artificial gravity held steady. Myris brought the shields up just in time. The violet-and-gold beam barely brushed the Ascendant's starboard side, the power indicator climbing even higher. To nearly one hundred percent.

  Evan almost laughed out loud. She could shoot all she wanted. She couldn't hurt them. Not alone.

  Another shot. Evan pitched the nose while pulling the throttle in a new direction, and suddenly he was falling in two directions—down and to the side—at once, his stomach lurching as the ship traced a path that would have been impossible for any other thrust-based vessel. Behind them, the beam found only an empty void.

  The distance between them closed rapidly as the Möbius filled more and more of the forward viewport.

  Evan called out to Faelen, his voice cutting through the bridge noise with sharp authority. The young scavenger looked up from his console, and Evan made the gesture he'd used a hundred times before. A fist, then two fingers pointing at the eyes, then pointing toward the target. Prepare. Watch. Fire on command.

  Faelen's face had gone pale, but he nodded.

  The Möbius fired again. Twin beams this time, converging on the Ascendant's projected position. Evan yanked the trackball hard while shoving the throttle in a completely different direction. The ship snapped into a violent course change that grayed the edges of his vision. Falling left, then right, then somewhere in between, he threaded Ascendant through the gap between both beams before they crossed behind them. Myris caught a glancing blow on the aft shields, and the power reserves reached full capacity.

  Twenty kilometers. Fifteen. The Möbius's center—that hollow space at the heart of its twisted form where the ship's geometry folded back on itself—approached. Evan remembered seeing it before, during their first encounter, when Sarxon had demanded his surrender and he'd escaped by flying through that opening at maximum acceleration.

  He was going to do it again. But this time, he had a parting gift prepared.

  Another beam lanced toward them. Evan pulled back on the throttle and simultaneously rolled the trackball, the ship falling upward and forward in a maneuver that left his stomach somewhere behind. The shot passed beneath the Ascendant's belly. Then he reversed direction entirely, the deck seeming to drop out from under him as the ship plunged toward the center of that impossible structure.

  The twisted hull rushed past the viewport on both sides, close enough now that Evan could see its surface details. Weapon emplacements. Sensor arrays. The strange angles where sections of the ship seemed to exist in multiple places at once. One of those weapons—a massive turret mounted near the inner edge of the Möbius's ring—was tracking them. Its barrel swung to follow their approach, preparing to fire at point-blank range as they passed through the ring.

  "Now!" Evan shouted the word in English, hoping the urgency would translate even if the language didn't. His hand came up in a sharp gesture, fingers pointing at the turret, then closing into a fist.

  Faelen fired, and the Ascendant's main guns discharged with that familiar, deep bell-like tone that preceded an enemy's destruction. The space between their ship and the Möbius shimmered, reality distorting as the resonance wave propagated outward to make contact.

  The turret simply came apart, the weapon housing cracking like an eggshell, fracture lines spreading across its surface in the instant before it collapsed. Armor plating that had withstood centuries of combat lost cohesion, separating into fragments that tumbled into the void. The destruction spread outward from the impact point, eating into the hull surrounding the turret and devouring a section of the Möbius's inner ring that was easily fifty meters across and twenty meters deep. Multiple levels suffered damage. Atmosphere vented, crystallizing as the vacuum pulled crew out through the sudden breach before emergency bulkheads could seal.

  As the Ascendant shot into the Möbius's hollow center—its twisted geometry surrounding them for one terrifying instant—Sarxon's weapons tracked them from impossible angles. Then they were out the other side, clear space ahead of them, the stars awaiting them.

  Myris cried out in elation, throwing her hands up in victory. Faelen was already out of the tactical pod and rushing back to navigation, his hands finding the console before he completely settled into the seat. One finger stabbed down on a symbol Evan couldn't read.

  The universe tilted.

  Evan felt it before he saw it—that strange sensation of gravity deciding which direction was down. The stars didn't stretch or blur. They shifted, rotating by degrees that shouldn't exist, and then began to sink.

  The Ascendant fell.

  Not forward. Not backward, but elsewhere. Some direction that didn't have a name. One that his brain couldn't process. It made his inner ear give up trying to make sense of the input it was receiving. As they accelerated toward something that wasn't quite a destination, Sarxon's flagship fired one final shot. But they were already falling too fast, sliding along gradients that conventional weapons couldn't follow. The desperate violet-and-gold lance found nothing but void off to Ascendant's port side, the Möbius shrinking to a mere speck behind them.

  Then the stars were gone.

  They'd made it.

  Evan slumped back in the pilot's seat, his hands falling away from the controls, his chest heaving as the adrenaline began its slow retreat. The bridge was silent except for the gentle thrumming of the Ascendant's reactor and the ragged sound of three people trying to remember how to breathe normally.

  Faelen stood at the navigation console, his head bowed, his shoulders trembling with what might have been relief or exhaustion as he rested his hands on the console. Myris had risen from her station and crossed to stand beside her brother, one hand resting on his arm, the other wrapped around him, the two of them supporting each other in the aftermath of everything they'd survived and what they'd lost in the process.

  Evan looked at his navigation display, at coordinates he couldn't read. A destination he didn't know. A course plotted by strangers who had just helped him escape an empire's wrath.

  They were alive. They were free. The Möbius was far behind them, its primary weapon silenced, damaged by their parting shot.

  But where the hell were they going?

  44

  Sarxon sat in the command station, her hands resting on the armrests, her spine rigid against the seat back. Her face might as well have been carved from stone. She stared at the space where the Ascendant had been, where it had punched through the center of her ship and simply fallen away into nothing, defying everything she understood about faster-than-light travel.

  He had figured it out.

  The thought circled through her mind like a predator testing for weakness. An Earther. A man who had possessed the effigy for mere weeks. He had learned to operate the Ascendant's jump systems well enough to escape her.

  And he had damaged her ship.

  The memory of those final seconds replayed behind her eyes whether she wanted it to or not. The wave striking the inner ring. The turret coming apart as if it were made of sand. Armor plating that had withstood centuries of combat simply losing cohesion, cracking, fragmenting, venting atmosphere and crew into the killing void.

  It was the first damage the Möbius had sustained since she'd taken command. The first damage it had sustained. Ever.

  "High Commander."

  Commander Ashe's voice reached her from somewhere to her left. She didn't turn to acknowledge him. Didn't move at all. She just kept staring at that patch of empty space where her prize had slipped away.

  He waited. The silence stretched between them, broken only by the soft murmur of bridge operations continuing around them. Damage control reports filtering in through whispered conversations. Officers exchanging glances they thought she couldn't see.

  "High Commander," Ashe repeated, more carefully this time. "The damage assessment is complete."

  Sarxon's jaw tightened. She forced herself to turn. To meet his eyes. To behave as a commander should behave after her ship had been wounded. Ashe stood at attention beside her station, a data tablet held in both hands, his gaunt features arranged in that careful neutrality she had come to expect from him. But there was something else there now. Something behind his eyes that looked almost like concern.

  "One particle cannon was destroyed." Ashe consulted his tablet, though she suspected he had memorized the contents before approaching her. "The weapon housing and supporting structure are compromised beyond repair. Four levels of the inner ring suffered hull breaches. Emergency bulkheads sealed the affected sections within eight seconds of the strike."

  He paused, his hesitation barely perceptible.

  Sarxon had served with him long enough to recognize it. "Casualties?"

  "Ten crew confirmed lost, High Commander. Six were pulled through the breaches before the bulkheads sealed. Four more were in the particle cannon housing when it was struck."

  Ten of her people, gone in an instant.

  "Repair estimates?"

  This time, Ashe's hesitation was more pronounced. He met her eyes, and the concern she'd glimpsed earlier became something closer to reluctance. "We can patch the hull breaches, High Commander. Seal the damaged sections, restore atmospheric integrity to the surrounding areas. But the particle cannon..." He trailed off, his expression saying what his words wouldn't.