Arthur’s Warcasket came screaming through the ruin of the station’s outer approach at full plume, engines burning so bright they turned the armor of his machine into a shape of white and red glare. Sentry guns tracked him the moment he crossed into their grid. Missiles dumped from recessed launchers in ugly swarms. Beam fire snapped through the dark. The whole stretch of wreckage ahead of him became a furnace of tracer lines, explosions, and screaming metal.

  Arthur did not slow.

  He dipped hard under the first wave, his Warcasket twisting through the fire with a violence that would have broken a lesser pilot’s neck. One missile passed so close that the blast washed his cockpit in white. Another struck the broken hull behind him and sent a sheet of flame rolling through the void. Sentry rounds chewed along the edge of his shield, sparks spraying in glittering bursts. He banked, rolled, then shot straight through the gap between two defensive emplacements as if the machine had been born to mock their aim.

  Inside the station, alarms screamed from every deck.

  On Jacen’s command bridge, the world was red light and panic.

  Men shouted over one another. Damage reports flooded the main screens faster than the officers could clear them. The pylon bay was a mess of ruptured systems and collapsing support structures. Internal fires were multiplying. Hull integrity in several sections had dropped to the point where the station looked less like a fortress now and more like a dying beast that had not yet realized its guts were hanging out.

  Jacen stood in the middle of it all like a prince at the end of the world.

  He was a handsome man. Too handsome, some would say, for the filth he trafficked in. His nose was fine and perfectly cut, his cheekbones sharp, his blond hair falling long around his features in loose waves, though sweat and emergency light had robbed it of some of its glamour now. A faint scar ran down the side of his face, not enough to ruin him, enough to make him look as though violence itself had once kissed him and left pleased.

  Around him, his men were not nearly so composed.

  “Captain, we have to abandon ship!”

  “Jacen, this station’s done!”

  “Sir, the lower support grid is collapsing. If we do not pull out now, there won’t be a pull out!”

  Jacen didn’t even raise his voice when he answered. That made it worse.

  “The job stated we were to remain in position for several minutes,” he said, eyes still on the main tactical display. “And I always follow through on my jobs.”

  A younger officer swallowed. “With respect, sir, this was before Martian and Mercurian knights started gutting the station from the inside.”

  Jacen gave him a sidelong look, almost amused. “Then perhaps you ought to phrase it better next time. We are not being gutted. We are being inconvenienced.”

  The bridge shook hard enough to send one of the lesser crewmen stumbling into a console. Sparks burst from a panel to the left. Somewhere behind them a woman screamed that they had lost another camera bank.

  Jacen lifted his comm unit. “Moreno. Wilum. Makelya. Report.”

  Static answered first.

  Then Moreno’s voice came through, rough and irritated, drowned by distant gunfire. “Pylon bay’s a fucking mess.”

  Wilum followed after, breathing hard. “We’re still in it, but not for long. That whole section’s chewed up bad.”

  Makelya cursed at someone on her end, then keyed in. “We can still move, but this place is not lasting much longer. I mean it, Jacen. The bay’s damned near gone.”

  Jacen’s face did not change. “Can you hold?”

  A short silence followed. That silence told him more than the words did.

  “For a little,” Moreno said at last. “Not much more than that.”

  Jacen lowered the comm slowly.

  A second officer hurried toward him. “Sir, the holding decks…”

  Jacen looked over. “What of them?”

  The man looked sick. “Hardly anyone’s left. The slaves we captured, the labor stock, most of them are gone. Martian, Mercurian, and local Block forces got to them. They practically rescued everyone.”

  For the first time, something colder entered Jacen’s eyes.

  “Hardly anyone?” he asked.

  The officer nodded, ashamed to still be standing there. “Y-yes, sir.”

  Another impact rolled through the bridge. One of the overhead lights burst and showered hot glass over a bank of terminals.

  Then Jacen clapped his hands once.

  It was not loud. It did not need to be.

  Everyone went quiet.

  “Prepare the escape pods,” he said. “Begin loading the suits that can still fly. Recall all exterior teams. Withdraw them into the station.”

  The bridge crew stared at him.

  One of the older officers frowned. “Sir, withdraw where? We’ve lost too much of the station.”

  Jacen smiled then. A real smile. Calm. Slightly beautiful. Slightly insane.

  “Into the station,” he repeated. “Because we are going to make planetfall whether any of you want to or not.”

  No one spoke for a second.

  Then, “Sir…what?”

  Jacen turned toward the main display where the wounded station spun above the world beneath them. “This fortress is already dying. We shall use its corpse well. Angle descent. Use the station itself to breach atmosphere.” He looked back to them. “We lose this station, yes. So we get another.”

  The men on the bridge looked at one another like they had just heard a king announce he meant to ride a cathedral into the sea.

  One crewman let out a stunned laugh before realizing he was doing it. “You can’t be serious.”

  Jacen’s voice became soft enough to freeze blood. “Do I appear unserious to you?”

  The crewman went pale and looked down.

  Before Jacen could say more, a sensor operator near the rear of the bridge jerked up so sharply he nearly broke the headset around his neck.

  “Holy shit!”

  Every head turned.

  “What now?” snapped Jacen.

  The operator stabbed at the screen with trembling fingers. “Something breached the outer defenses!”

  Another voice shouted from the opposite console, “Single mobile suit, high speed, closing directly on the bridge approach!”

  Then the forward blast shutters lit white.

  Arthur came through the fire like something torn from an old story and hurled into modern war.

  His Warcasket was at full plume, armor glowing red and gold in the wash of its own engines, shouldering through the last line of defensive gunfire as if the station itself had offended him personally. Smoke and debris peeled away from the frame. The cameras caught him only in flashes at first, a knight shape wrapped in engine fire, then all at once he was there, directly in front of the command section, huge in the viewing screens, the dead of space behind him and the ruined station around him like a burning crown.

  The bridge went silent.

  Arthur keyed open his channel.

  When he spoke, his voice came through deep, formal, old with ceremony, the kind of tone that sounded as though it belonged in a great hall beneath banners and torchlight rather than over the comms of a dying fortress.

  “Hearken unto me, thou craven cur.”

  Jacen’s eyes narrowed.

  “I am Sir Arthur Vale, Knight of the Red Templars of House Mars.”

  Arthur’s Warcasket held steady before the command bridge. Twin barreled laser rifle raised. Missile ports opening. Cannon housings shifting into place with mechanical finality.

  “In the name of the Kings of House Mars,” Arthur said, “in the name of the Emperor, and in the name of the Lord, King of All Kings, I have come to deliver unto thee thy end.”

  Some of Jacen’s men began shouting all at once.

  “Fire!”

  “Shoot him down!”

  “Move the bridge!”

  “Close the shutters!”

  Jacen himself barely had time to open his mouth.

  Arthur pulled the trigger.

  The twin barreled laser rifle fired first, two lances of ruin punching through the command deck glass and armored frontage with such force that the whole bridge ceased to be a bridge and became light. At the same instant his cannon thundered, a brutal flash erupting from beneath the rifle, and his missile payload dumped in a shrieking storm behind it, every weapon timed in vicious harmony.

  For one impossible instant the command bridge looked like a sun had bloomed inside it.

  Then it all vanished into annihilation.

  Glass turned to nothing.

  Steel turned white and then less than white.

  Bodies turned to shadows and then not even that.

  Jacen, his officers, the pleading men around him, the screens, the consoles, the air itself, all of it was swallowed in one synchronized act of overkill so complete it felt biblical. Twenty men. Maybe thirty. Whatever number had stood on that bridge became irrelevant the moment Arthur’s fire touched them. They were atomized so thoroughly there was no blood, no screaming after the first instant, no noble last words. Only a chamber of expanding light and a pressure wave that blew the remains of the command deck out into space in burning shards.

  Arthur’s Warcasket held there in front of the ruin, framed by fire.

  The remnants of the bridge spat smoke and molten metal into the void. Alarm lights died one by one. A section of the station’s upper spine began to buckle in the aftermath, the wound Arthur had opened now too great for even the fortress’s stubborn bones to pretend around.

  Inside his cockpit, Arthur exhaled through his nose, calm as a man after prayer.

  “The deed is done,” he said quietly.

  And behind him the station, robbed now of its captain, continued its long ugly death.

  Iman kept firing.

  Her beam rifle spat blue-white death through the dead industrial district of the Block, every shot cracking hard through smoke, broken warehouses, and floating scraps of fuel piping. The whole place was lit in bursts, steel skeletons and ruptured tanks flashing in and out of view beneath that ugly emergency red.

  Ivan barely saw the muzzle flare before the shot came for him.

  It would have gone right through his cockpit.

  Yuri shoved in first.

  “Move!” he shouted, and the blast hit his suit instead.

  The beam smashed into Yuri’s armor and tore a burning wound across his torso and shoulder, flinging his Warcasket sideways in a burst of sparks and molten scrap. He screamed, then laughed through it, that broken laugh of his crawling over the comms like something loose in the head.

  “Fuck!” Yuri barked. “She almost had you!”

  Iman didn’t stay for the kill.

  She broke off fast, tactical as ever, cutting through the smoke and dropping low around a dead fuel line before coming up hard on Carmen.

  Carmen swung the anti-Warcasket rifle toward her.

  Too slow.

  Iman’s beam blade flashed and the rifle came apart in two glowing halves.

  The barrel sheared clean off.

  The scope burst.

  The weapon drifted apart in the zero g like some expensive dream dying.

  Carmen’s face twisted. “No!”

  Then both of them slammed into each other.

  Their beam blades caught in a shrieking saber lock, blue-white light spitting between them as their Warcaskets shoved chest to chest through the industrial haze. Carmen growled and leaned in hard. Iman met it with a smile that was all teeth and contempt.

  “You aimed well,” Iman said.

  Then her wrist launchers fired.

  Grenades punched out from under her forearms, spiraling low and hot into the middle of the field.

  “Carmen!” Vanya shouted.

  Vanya burned in from the side and started firing, trying to catch the grenades before they reached the others. One blew early and showered the area in metal and smoke. Another struck a floating support beam and burst against it. A third tore into the side of a ruined fuel line and sent a sheet of flame coughing out into the district.

  The whole place flashed.

  Iman came through the light anyway.

  She ripped the beam rifle back around and fired at Ivan.

  He tried to pull off line, but with one hand and a machine half ruined already, he was too slow.

  The beam took his leg.

  Not the cockpit. Not center mass. The leg.

  His Warcasket’s lower limb blew apart in a bright ugly burst and Ivan’s whole frame lurched sideways, control thrusters screaming as he spun into a fractured storage structure.

  “Shit!” Ivan roared. “My leg!”

  Iman did not waste the opening.

  Her drone looped back toward her through the smoke, still damaged, still smoking from earlier hits, and she reconnected it to her machine in a spray of sparks and locking metal. The tether snapped in. Clamps bit. She angled upward, trying to reset the fight and break out before the others could collapse on her.

  Then the drone glitched.

  Its thrusters spat wrong.

  Instead of docking clean it slammed right into her back.

  The impact knocked Iman’s whole Warcasket off course. Inside the cockpit she was thrown hard to one side, shoulder cracking against the harness, teeth snapping together.

  “Damn it!”

  That was it.

  That was the opening Saturn had been waiting for all this time.

  Yuri came first.

  Half burnt up, laughing through pain, he still came on with the axe in both hands and brought it down hard on the drone assembly. The blow chopped the damaged unit loose from Iman’s back in a burst of torn cable, plate, and sparks.

  Iman reacted instantly.

  She twisted and used the force of the drone tearing free, kicked off it and shoved the ruined thing straight into Yuri’s chest. The detached shield module popped loose from the drone in the collision and spun out between them.

  Iman snatched it.

  One hand. One motion. Pure reflex.

  Then Vanya hit her.

  Vanya’s kick landed hard against Iman’s flank and sent her whole machine careening sideways. Before Iman could correct, Vanya’s beam blade slammed against the shield and rang sparks across the dead street.

  Then Carmen was there.

  Then Yuri again.

  Then Ivan on one leg and one hand, still coming, still cursing, still refusing to die.

  All of them on her at once.

  This time Iman was not hunting.

  She was surviving.

  Her beam rifle tried to fire and gave her nothing.

  No flash.

  No shot.

  Just a dead trigger and a dying weapon.

  Out of power.

  The malfunction, the drone, the constant shifting, the corrections, all of it had eaten the machine alive.

  “Shit,” Iman hissed.

  They knew.

  They felt it.

  Carmen’s voice came across the comms raw and hateful. “She’s mine now!”

  Laser fire cracked around Iman in hot flashes. She threw the shield up, dipped low, turned hard, but they were bullying her now, pressing her from every angle, not letting her breathe. Yuri’s axe forced her one way. Vanya’s fire forced her another. Carmen kept rushing close, hungry for the kill. Ivan, crippled as he was, kept adding pressure with his one remaining hand on the controls and whatever weapon he could still bring to bear.

  A shot clipped her shoulder assembly.

  Another slammed into the shield and drove her back.

  Then a burst hit her free arm.

  The arm blew off at the elbow joint in a burst of sparks and spinning metal.

  Inside the cockpit, Iman was thrown so violently her face slammed into the side console.

  Her nose burst.

  Hot blood splashed down over her mouth and chin. Her vision blurred for a second and the whole world doubled. She tasted iron immediately.

  “Fuck!” she gasped.

  Another impact hit.

  Her head snapped back against the seat. Then forward again. Then sideways as Vanya’s next strike slammed into the shield. Her harness bit into her chest and hips, but it didn’t save her from the beating. The Saturn team kept hammering her, and inside the cockpit she got ragdolled by every blow, face striking padding, shoulder clipping metal, blood running from her nose now in a steady stream.

  Bruising would come after.

  If there was an after.

  Iman snarled and fired off the last of her wrist launchers while charging Vanya with her beam blade, trying to force one clean opening, one savage break in their momentum.

  Yuri intercepted.

  His axe smashed against her blade and ripped it from her hand.

  The weapon spun away glowing into the dark.

  Now she had no rifle.

  No free hand.

  No blade.

  One shield half cracked.

  A machine nearly dry.

  A drone gone.

  Parts of her limbs hanging dead or missing.

  For the first time, the thought came clear and simple.

  I am going to die here.

  The industrial quarter floated around them like the inside of some gutted beast. Fuel tanks. Warehouses. Broken gantries. Leaking lines and dead lights. Fire drifted in strange blooming pockets through the zero g, and all around that ruin the Saturn suits closed in with their monoeyes burning.

  Iman breathed hard through blood and pain.

  Her mind went to Henryk.

  To his face.

  To his softness.

  To how badly she wanted to hate him cleanly and how that hatred kept getting tangled up with everything else.

  Then her anger turned.

  Toward this machine.

  Toward herself.

  Toward the whole world.

  The Saturn team moved for the killing blow.

  Vanya lined up.

  Carmen surged in.

  Yuri raised the axe.

  Ivan came behind them all, damaged to hell, voice low and vicious through the comms.

  “End it.”

  Then it hit her.

  That sensation.

  Sudden. Brutal. Absolute.

  It came over Iman so fast her eyes went wide and then strange, the pupils stretching, swallowing color, her gaze turning almost ecliptic in the wash of the cockpit lights. Her breath caught. Her hands moved before she had decided to move them.

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  Not thought.

  Not planning.

  Not even desperation.

  Instinct.

  Pure adrenaline.

  Pure force.

  Her remaining hand slammed the control cluster and dumped the last missile payload all at once.

  Not at them.

  At everything.

  Fuel lines.

  Storage tanks.

  Industrial towers.

  The floating machinery packed all around them.

  The district became fire.

  Missiles screamed out in every direction and struck steel and fuel and old infrastructure almost at once. Explosions rolled through the industrial area in a chain so violent it felt like the Block itself had taken a shotgun blast to the gut. Fuel tanks erupted. Pipes split open. Warehouses turned inside out. Orange fire and black smoke billowed in zero g, twisting and blooming as shockwaves pounded through the ruined district.

  The back blast caught Iman too.

  Her already ruined Warcasket got hurled backward through the inferno, tumbling wild. Inside the cockpit her head cracked against the restraint and her bleeding nose painted more of the console red as the machine spun end over end. Fire washed across the monitor feed. Metal screamed. Something blew out behind her.

  Then she was through.

  Through a jagged hole blown open in the colony wall, her battered suit thrown out into the black beyond trailing smoke, broken armor, and the last glow of failing thrusters.

  “She’s getting away!” Vanya screamed.

  Carmen immediately turned to pursue. “That bitch is mine!”

  “Put a sock in it!” Ivan roared.

  His voice hit hard enough that both of them paused.

  The industrial quarter was still blowing apart around them, atmosphere venting through the new breach in a long hungry howl, burning wreckage drifting everywhere.

  Ivan pointed with what little control he still had toward where Mag’s suit hung half buried and smoking in the ruins. “Grab Mag’s! Now! We’re done here!”

  Carmen’s jaw worked with rage. Vanya looked once toward the breach where Iman had vanished into the black with her broken machine.

  Then Yuri, still laughing through blood and pain, swung his damaged suit around toward Mag’s. “He’s right. Move your ass.”

  The Saturn team broke off and burned back through the wreckage toward their unconscious witch while behind them the fuel district of the Block kept exploding in ugly waves of light and fire.

  And somewhere beyond the torn colony wall, Iman drifted away alive, bloodied and bruised in her cockpit, face swelling already, nose still leaking red, her machine barely more than a butchered shell around her.

  Piper’s comms crackled.

  Not battle chatter. Not squad noise. A clean channel.

  High command.

  “Piper Garvey,” came the voice, clipped and cold with authority. “Confirm you are still operational.”

  Piper wiped sweat off her brow with the back of her glove and didn’t even look away from her HUD. “Operational,” she said. “What’s the word.”

  “The station is crashing,” command replied. “Jacen’s fortress. It’s going to make planetfall.”

  Piper’s eyes narrowed. She glanced up at the tactical overlay and saw the trajectory line, that ugly long arc pulling down toward Oceana II like a knife falling tip first.

  “Say again,” she muttered.

  “It is falling,” command repeated. “Half destroyed, but it will function as a cushion for retreating pirate Warcaskets. Expect survivors to use it as cover, and to scatter the moment they hit ground.”

  Piper’s throat went dry, not from fear, from the sheer scale of it. A station slamming into the planet. Fire. Metal. Thousands of tons of structure turning into a meteor with an attitude.

  “And Jacen?” she asked.

  There was a pause. A shuffle of voices on the other end.

  “Jacen’s command bridge took a catastrophic hit from a Martian Warcasket,” high command said. “He is believed dead.”

  Piper’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. Something sharper.

  “Good,” she said.

  “This is it,” command continued. “The end of Jacen’s pirates. We are putting the final nail into the coffin tonight. You and your squad are ordered back to the main Mercurian shuttle immediately. You will breach planetside and kill whomever remains. Capture if possible. But prioritize termination. His lieutenants will attempt to flee into the forests or caverns.”

  Piper’s answer came immediate. “Understood.”

  “Garvey,” command added. “Do not lose the momentum. The moment they touch dirt they’ll scatter.”

  “We won’t,” Piper said, voice low. “They’re done.”

  The channel cut.

  Piper turned to her squad. Her grey eye burned in the monitor like a wound that refused to close.

  “You heard that,” she said. “We’re going planetside.”

  One of her squad mates swallowed. “A whole station…that’s going to be insane.”

  “It’s Jacen,” Piper replied. “Insane is his favorite.”

  Then Henryk’s comm lit up.

  Not Mercurian.

  Mars.

  Maelia’s voice came first, calm but tight. “Henryk.”

  Henryk’s breath was still heavy from the engine bay fight. His Stargazer was shaking in little tremors, error logs stacking, heat gauges still flirting red. He wiped his face and keyed in.

  “Maelia,” he said. “What’s going on.”

  Edward’s voice cut over hers, all command and confidence, like he was leaning over a table and daring the universe to argue. “We’re going to mop them.”

  Henryk blinked. “What.”

  Ed didn’t repeat himself. He never did. “Jacen’s station is falling. The Mercurians want the survivors dead or processed. We’ve been in contact with their high command. We agreed to aid them.”

  Maelia’s voice softened the edges. “It’s good money, Henryk.”

  “And good fame,” Ed added, like that mattered more. “Lieutenants and foot soldiers without a leader become criminals, not rebels. They get charged, processed, and disappeared.”

  Henryk glanced toward Piper’s Warcasket in the near distance. “This is real.”

  “It’s real,” Maelia said.

  Ed continued, “But you must act quick. The moment they hit planet side they’ll scatter. Forest. Caverns. Anywhere the terrain can swallow them.”

  Henryk’s jaw tightened. “Where’s the Mercurian fleet?”

  “A bit far off,” Ed admitted, like it annoyed him. “But our transport has no issues reaching the drop. Arthur has already docked.”

  Henryk’s mouth twitched. “Of course he has.”

  “And Henryk,” Ed said, voice turning a shade more serious. “Your Stargazer has atmospheric reentry.”

  Henryk looked at the warnings still flashing on his display. Prototype. Damaged. Angry. Still fast.

  He keyed open his comms to Piper.

  “Piper,” he said.

  Her reply came sharp. “What.”

  Henryk swallowed a grin. “You need a lift.”

  There was a pause.

  Then Piper’s voice came back with that same irritated edge she always had when the world was on fire. “Don’t get cocky.”

  “I’m not,” Henryk said. “I’m practical.”

  “You’re annoying,” Piper replied.

  “Still need a lift,” Henryk said.

  Another pause. Then she sighed like she hated him personally. “Fine.”

  Henryk didn’t waste time.

  He pushed the Stargazer into transformation.

  The machine protested. It always did now. Panels shifted. The frame folded. Engines flared blue. A caution marker screamed in the corner of his HUD and Henryk ignored it, forcing the cycle through with sheer will and throttle.

  He came into proper flight mode, the nose angled and the silhouette sleek and vicious. He steadied himself in the dead void, thrusters burning, the battered prototype still holding together out of spite.

  Piper boosted over and landed on top of him like she had done it a thousand times, boots locking against his armor with a heavy metallic clank.

  “You better not drop me,” she said.

  Henryk laughed once. “I won’t.”

  “You drop me,” Piper continued, voice low, “and I will kill you before the pirates do.”

  “Fair,” Henryk replied.

  Below them, the Martian transport moved into formation, engines flaring as it angled for descent. Other suits streaked toward the rendezvous point too, Mercurian shapes burning bright against the dark.

  And ahead of all of them was the falling station.

  It looked like a wounded god.

  A burning fortress, broken and half hollow, tumbling on its descent path, pieces of it shedding off into glowing debris trails. The atmosphere began to catch it. A long plume of fire wrapped around its spine. The whole thing started to glow red hot like a blade in a forge.

  Piper stared at it. “Jesus.”

  Henryk’s throat tightened. “Yeah.”

  They followed.

  Full plume.

  The moment they hit upper atmosphere, everything turned violent.

  The Stargazer shook like it wanted to rip apart. Flames crawled along the canopy view, orange and white licking at the edges of the display. Henryk’s warning alarms erupted again, heat strain and stability warnings and reentry load indicators screaming as if the suit was alive and furious.

  He clenched his jaw and held it.

  “I’m getting a lot of alerts,” Piper said flatly from above him, like she was reading his fear off the vibrations.

  Henryk grunted. “Ignore them.”

  “That’s not comforting.”

  “You want comforting or you want alive,” Henryk snapped.

  Piper didn’t answer. But she leaned lower, bracing her body against the armor as the whole craft shuddered through the fire.

  The station ahead of them was a falling sun now.

  Chunks tore off and burned out like meteors, streaking past Henryk and Piper in flaming arcs. One massive piece spun end over end and exploded in the clouds beneath them, a bright bloom that made the whole sky flash.

  The Martian transport roared beside them, its hull glowing, engines screaming, leaving a trail of fire like it was dragging hell behind it.

  Henryk could see the planet now.

  Oceana II.

  Not the clean blue of a peaceful world. Not from this angle. From here it was dark forest, jagged mountain spines, deep cavern mouths like black wounds in the terrain. An ugly beautiful land that looked like it would swallow men whole if they stepped wrong.

  The station hit lower atmosphere and began to break.

  A whole section of its underside collapsed and peeled away like skin. Internal explosions flashed through the frame. The fortress finally lost the last of its dignity.

  It started to tumble.

  Piper’s voice came tight. “It’s going to land on the mountain chain.”

  Henryk’s eyes flicked to the descent map. She was right.

  The station slammed into the mountains like a god falling out of the sky.

  The impact was unreal.

  A shockwave rolled through the clouds. Fire and dust and shattered metal exploded outward across the range. The mountain face split. Rock broke. Trees vanished in a line of instant destruction. The station’s broken spine dug into the earth and skidded, carving a glowing trench through stone.

  It kept moving, still burning, still collapsing, still screaming.

  The whole horizon lit up orange.

  Piper stared at it. “That’s…that’s a crater.”

  Henryk’s voice came low. “That’s a battlefield.”

  Command chatter filled the air now. Coordinates. Targets. Callsigns. The Mercurian shuttle beacon came into view beneath them, burning hard toward the designated insertion zone.

  Ed’s voice cut in over the Martian channel. “All units. Approach. Contain. Do not allow them to scatter.”

  Maelia added, “Henryk, stay with the Martians. Stay with your squad.”

  Henryk answered, “Copy.”

  Piper’s voice came over their shared comms. “Alright, Hick. Don’t slow me down.”

  Henryk laughed through gritted teeth as the Stargazer shuddered again and the last of the reentry fire fell away.

  “Then hold on,” he said.

  He angled them toward the smoke and burning wreckage, toward the forest line and the cavern mouths beyond, where pirates would soon try to disappear into the world.

  And above all of it, the sky still glowed with falling debris like the planet was being punished by stars.

  Henryk didn’t slow.

  Still in Stargazer mode, he knifed through the smoke columns rising off the mountain range, blue engines burning hard as Piper stayed braced on his back like she belonged there. The wreck of Jacen’s station had punched into the side of the mountains and skidded, still shedding fire and metal, still collapsing in ugly groans that carried even through the storm of sound.

  Henryk watched the fuel and power bars falling.

  Not dropping like a leak.

  Dropping like a countdown.

  His mouth went dry. His fingers tightened. He didn’t say a word.

  Piper’s voice came down through their comm, calm like she didn’t notice the tremor in the airframe. “You’re pushing it.”

  Henryk kept his eyes forward. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “You always say that right before something breaks,” Piper replied.

  Henryk swallowed and forced the Stargazer lower, riding the edge of the wreckage plume as fragments rained down like shrapnel hail. A slab of burning plating tumbled past their left and exploded against a ridge line, blasting pine trees into black mist.

  Piper leaned closer, her tone sharpening. “Where are you taking me.”

  “Into it,” Henryk said.

  “You mean the station.”

  Henryk’s grin came quick and mean. “Where else are the rats going to run.”

  The wreckage ahead was a jagged open mouth in the mountainside. Pieces of the station were half buried in rock, half exposed to air, a twisted corridor of metal ribs and broken decks. Fires crawled through it like living things. Smoke poured out. Something inside detonated and the whole structure shuddered.

  Henryk watched his reserves tick lower again.

  He did not tell Piper.

  He chose not to.

  Back on the Martian transport, Ed’s voice cut through the comms with command in it, clean and certain, like he was calling an assembly in a hall instead of sending kids into a burning crater.

  “All knights. All squires. Into your Warcaskets.”

  The bay came alive.

  Arthur’s suit was already staged, immaculate in its brutality, like it had never known hesitation. Tyson climbed in with the speed of a man who’d already accepted the night would try to kill him. Axel was halfway suited up, jaw tight, eyes locked on the chaos outside.

  Then Mateo stepped toward a cockpit.

  Axel blinked. “Yo,” he said, stunned. “What the hell are you doing.”

  Mateo didn’t look back at first. He just kept moving like he’d decided this hours ago. “Getting in.”

  Axel laughed once, sharp. “No you’re not. You’re a squire.”

  Mateo finally turned his head, eyes flat with that quiet fire he carried when people underestimated him. “So are you.”

  Axel pointed a gloved finger at the cockpit. “Most squires don’t do this. Most squires stay on the transport and pray.”

  Mateo’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “I didn’t grow up like most squires.”

  Axel frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean.”

  “It means I trained,” Mateo replied. “MilAcademy. Same kind Isaac went through. I can fight.”

  Axel stared for a second like he was trying to decide whether to be impressed or pissed. “Since when.”

  Mateo climbed into the cockpit and started locking the harness. “Since always.”

  Arthur’s voice came over the bay comms, low and feudal, as if the transport was a chapel. “Quarrel not. There is work to be done.”

  Ed’s tone sharpened. “Launch. Now. Beeline to Henryk and Piper. We cut off any pirates trying to use the station wreck as cover.”

  The suits boosted out of the transport like arrows.

  Arthur first. Clean and heavy.

  Tyson right behind, engines flaring.

  Axel pushing hard, still side-eyeing Mateo’s silhouette.

  Mateo launching last, but smooth, controlled, not shaky at all.

  They formed up in the air and cut toward the smoking mountain wound where the station had crashed, their engine trails slicing across the sky.

  Above and beyond them, the Mercurian recovery effort turned the upper air into a swarm of moving lights.

  Transports. Shuttles. Rescue craft. Block Warcaskets drifting in patrol lanes. A distant line of Mercurian ships hung on the horizon of the planet, huge and cold, one acting as a triage and rescue hub while the others lined up for their own descent. Everything about it screamed operation, coordination, the weight of a government deciding it was done waiting.

  Marcus hovered above the chaos in his Warcasket, watching the pieces move.

  He could see survivors being collected from the Block, suits and shuttles gathering them like hands scooping people out of water. The planet below was still ruled by Neptune, everyone knew it, everyone pretended it didn’t matter for the moment, but Mercurian command wasn’t going to sit back and let Jacen slip away.

  That would be the story.

  Mercury came down like a hammer, killed the pirates, saved the people, and looked righteous doing it.

  Marcus knew the truth was uglier.

  Mercury wasn’t just here for Jacen.

  They were here because Neptune had the planet and Mars had the influence and the sector was a prize sitting in the open. Wedge it. Split it. Make it wobble. That was what governments did when they smiled at you and called it order.

  His mind drifted to what he’d been hearing whispered for weeks now, the stuff nobody said on open comms.

  Oceana will follow a Martian heir without complaint.

  Or a prime minister honored by Mars at the very least.

  That’s why Neptune was pushing so hard to bind Maelia. Drag her into their bloodline, strap a leash on House Mars through marriage, call it diplomacy. Even if they hated mutants, they’d swallow it if it meant holding the sector.

  Marcus clenched his jaw.

  Then his sensors caught something drifting wrong.

  A Warcasket shell.

  Not moving.

  Barely alive.

  He pushed his thrusters and closed fast, weaving past rescue craft and debris.

  It was the Stargazer.

  Or what was left of one.

  The frame was butchered. Plates torn away. One arm gone. Sections of the torso scorched and cratered. The cockpit canopy was smeared on the inside with dark red and the whole suit drifted like it had been punched out of the fight and forgotten.

  “Iman,” Marcus said into comms, voice going tight. “Iman, respond.”

  A beat.

  Then her channel clicked open.

  No swagger. No laugh. No bright cruelty.

  Just breathing.

  “Marcus,” she said, and her voice sounded thick, like she’d swallowed smoke. “I’m here.”

  Marcus moved in close and hooked his Warcasket’s arms around hers, careful as he could be while still moving fast. He pulled her in against his frame like he was carrying a wounded animal.

  “What happened,” he asked, keeping his tone steady even as anger crawled up the back of his throat. “Talk to me.”

  Iman didn’t answer right away. He could see her through the cracked canopy, face swollen, nose bleeding down to her lip, bruising already rising along her cheek. Her eyes looked too bright and too tired.

  “They got away,” she said finally.

  Marcus frowned. “Who.”

  “Half of them,” Iman replied grimly. “I killed about half. The other half got away.”

  Marcus stared at the wreck of her machine, at the missing parts, at the way she sat hunched like gravity had returned just to punish her. “How the hell do you even know that right now.”

  Iman’s laugh came out dry, no joy in it. “Because I was counting.”

  Marcus swallowed and adjusted his grip, turning them toward a medical transport ship with a bright beacon flashing.

  “What did they want,” he asked. “Jacen’s pirates, the station, the slaves, what was the point.”

  Iman’s gaze drifted out past him, toward the burning trail of debris still falling through the sky, toward the planet below that kept swallowing bodies.

  “I doubt it was the pirates,” she said.

  Marcus blinked. “What.”

  Iman’s voice stayed low. “Everything was too circumstantial. Too clean in the wrong way.” She breathed in, winced, and pressed her forehead against the inside of the canopy like she was trying to stop the world from spinning. “And their Warcaskets weren’t scrap. Not like Jacen’s.”

  Marcus’s eyes narrowed. “Jacen’s lieutenants run patched suits.”

  “Exactly,” Iman said. “Even they’re scrap. Even they look like they were built out of stolen bones.” Her mouth tightened. “These weren’t. They were customized. Tight. Efficient. A model I’ve never seen.”

  Marcus felt the cold settle deeper. “So what are you saying.”

  Iman’s eyes flicked to him through the glass. “Another party entered the playing field.”

  They drifted past a rescue transport and Marcus could see med crews inside, bright suits moving like ants, stretchers ready. He angled toward the docking lane.

  Iman looked down through the planet’s cloud layer.

  Oceana II.

  Forest. Caverns. Mountain scars. A world that made men greedy and made governments feral.

  “All these people are dead because of that planet,” she said, and there was something old in the way she said it.

  Marcus exhaled. “Because of land.”

  “Because the universe is getting smaller,” Iman replied. “The Eunuch Emperor has no children. The Houses aren’t waiting anymore. They’re laying claims with smiles and knives.”

  Marcus’s voice went quieter. “Territory conflicts of old Earth.”

  Iman nodded faintly. “But grander.”

  A beat.

  Then her eyes dropped to her hands, resting useless in her lap, shaking slightly. She swallowed, and her voice changed.

  “Henryk failed me again.”

  Marcus’s jaw tightened. “Henryk.”

  Iman pressed her head back into the canopy, eyes closing like it hurt to keep them open. “He failed me. And this machine did too.” Her voice went flat with disgust. “Like him. Same feeling. Promises. Expectations. Then nothing.”

  Marcus felt the anger rise fast. “What happened between you two.”

  Iman didn’t answer for a long moment. When she did, it wasn’t loud.

  It was small.

  “We had sex,” she said.

  The words hung there.

  Marcus went still. The world outside kept moving, rescue ships drifting, engines flaring, the fleet hanging in the distance like judgment, but inside his cockpit the air felt heavier.

  He softened his voice without meaning to. “Iman…”

  She didn’t look at him. “Don’t.”

  Marcus swallowed. “That’s why you’ve been like this.”

  Iman’s mouth tightened, and for a second she looked like she might break right there in the seat. “I hate him,” she whispered. “And I hate myself for not hating him clean.”

  Marcus shook his head, slow. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then, firmer, “But you’ve got to move on.”

  Iman let out a bitter breath. “Easy for you to say.”

  “I’m not saying it’s easy,” Marcus replied. “I’m saying it’s necessary.” He kept them steady as the medical transport’s docking lights flashed closer. “I know your culture has rules. I know what intimacy means for you. But what happened between you and Henryk does not define you.”

  Iman’s eyes glistened. She turned her face away so he wouldn’t see it, but he did anyway.

  Outside, the planet rolled beneath them.

  She stared down at the forests and cavern mouths and smoke trails from the crashed station.

  “I’m cold,” she said softly.

  Marcus frowned. “You’re in a sealed cockpit.”

  “It’s not that,” Iman whispered.

  Her voice cracked on the next words.

  “I miss my family,” she said. “I miss…” She swallowed hard, and the name came out like a prayer and a wound at the same time. “India.”

  Marcus didn’t have an answer that fixed that.

  He only tightened his hold on her broken Stargazer and guided them into the medical ship’s bay, where bright lights waited, and hands that weren’t his, and the long quiet after violence where the soul finally had time to feel what the body survived.

  Henryk stayed in flight configuration, Piper locked on top of him, and they went straight into the wound.

  The station wasn’t a station anymore. It was a corpse half buried in a mountain, still burning, still screaming, still trying to pretend it had bones. The entry was a jagged throat of metal ribs and cracked decks. Smoke poured out in thick pulses. Fire crawled along broken conduits like it was searching for air.

  Henryk’s eyes flicked to his fuel and power.

  Both falling.

  Fast.

  He didn’t say a word.

  Piper’s voice came over comms, sharp, not gentle. “Stop treating that thing like it’s immortal.”

  Henryk kept his eyes forward. “Hold on.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It’s the only one you’re getting.”

  They punched inside.

  Red emergency lights flickered, then died, then returned. Loose plating drifted in slow spins. Bodies were wedged in corners where gravity had stopped being consistent. Every few seconds the whole structure groaned, like the mountain was squeezing it and the metal was arguing back.

  Pirate footsoldiers spilled into the corridor ahead, rifles up, panic in their movements.

  Henryk’s beam rifle cracked and the hallway lit up purple. Armor burst. A man went down behind a spray of sparks. Piper fired over him, clean shots, no wasted motion, her grey eye burning in her monitor like a threat made real.

  “Left,” Piper snapped.

  Henryk dipped and hit the wrist launchers. Grenades punched out, bounced once, then detonated. The blast slapped the corridor walls and sent smoke and metal fragments rolling through the passage.

  They kept moving, stepping over bodies, cutting through the next line of pirates like they were late to a fight they refused to miss.

  Behind them, House Mars arrived in force, already in their suits, engines flaring through the smoke lanes.

  Ed’s voice cut in, calm and commanding. “Sweep and push. Do not let the lieutenants disappear into the caverns.”

  Arthur’s voice followed, feudal and heavy, like a knight speaking judgment. “Let none flee unpunished.”

  Axel’s comm popped with breath and adrenaline. “Henryk, we’re right behind you!”

  Tyson came in lower, steady. “We got you, brother.”

  Mateo didn’t say much. He didn’t need to. His suit moved clean in the corridor, trained, no hesitation, like this was what he’d been built for.

  They drove deeper.

  The station became a maze of fused metal and rock, corridors that were half hallway and half cave. Some sections were so tight the Warcaskets scraped. Some opened into broken bays with the ceiling caved in, mountain stone hanging above like teeth.

  Henryk caught a heavier silhouette ahead, moving with purpose, not a footsoldier.

  A lieutenant.

  “There,” Henryk said.

  Piper leaned forward on his back. “Don’t let him lead us into a trap.”

  Henryk didn’t slow. “He can try.”

  They chased him down a slanted corridor where the floor plates had twisted from the crash. The lieutenant ducked through a breach and Henryk followed, engines flaring, the flight frame cutting through smoke.

  Then the world opened.

  A massive underground clearing.

  The station had punched into an old cavern system and ripped it open. Jagged rock walls. Wet stone. Station plating scattered like wreckage bones. And all through the cavern were pressure holes, cracks in the mountain that breathed air like it was angry.

  One of them erupted.

  A geyser of steam ripped upward, violent and loud, blasting dust and debris into the ceiling. The fog spread fast, thickening the air until the emergency lights looked like ghosts.

  Axel’s voice cracked. “What the hell is that!”

  Tyson answered, grim. “The mountain. It’s splitting the wreck from the inside.”

  Arthur’s voice came like an oath. “The earth itself hath turned executioner.”

  Piper’s tone sharpened. “Structural integrity is gone. Those holes are pressure vents. They’re chewing through the station.”

  Henryk felt the shudder under his frame. Dust drifted down. A section of station wall groaned, then dropped, crashing into rock with a sound like a coffin being closed.

  Then the lieutenants stepped into view.

  Moreno first, bazooka shouldered, monoeye bright and hateful.

  Makelya beside him, axe in hand, moving like she wanted to get close enough to smell fear.

  Wilum wider on the flank, calmer, rifle ready, eyes on angles, trying to funnel Henryk into bad lanes.

  Behind them, pirate footsoldiers were running into side tunnels, disappearing into the caverns like rats into cracks. The lieutenants weren’t running.

  They were holding.

  Buying time.

  Moreno shouted, “Push them back! We get out now!”

  Makelya laughed, ugly. “Come on then, Martians. Come die in the mountain.”

  Wilum didn’t laugh. He just spoke, voice flat. “Keep them here. Let the rest go.”

  Henryk’s power dropped again.

  He ignored it and fired.

  The cavern lit up in purple streaks and green blades. Shots snapped against rock. Explosions boomed and the shockwaves made the steam vents stutter. The air turned into a hot wet fog full of ash and metal.

  Arthur hit Makelya head on, beam blade raised, voice like a sentence being read aloud. “Yield thy wicked hand.”

  Makelya shoved into the saber lock. “Suck my dick, knight.”

  Tyson hammered Moreno’s lane with heavy fire, forcing the bazooka arm up, making the blast go wide and detonate against a rock pillar. The pillar cracked and chunks rained down.

  Axel and Mateo moved as a pair, which still looked wrong until it worked. Mateo called angles and Axel listened. Their fire pinned Wilum long enough for Piper to cut in with a slash that forced him back into the fog.

  Henryk was everywhere, slipping through the steam, shifting frames just enough to gain speed, then snapping back, beam rifle cracking, wrist launchers barking grenades into tunnel mouths where footsoldiers tried to flee.

  His reserves kept falling.

  He kept fighting anyway.

  A geyser erupted close enough to slap his frame with heat. The suit vibrated. Warning lights flickered. He tasted copper in his mouth and realized he’d been biting his own cheek.

  Then Wilum cut across his lane.

  Henryk saw the opening like a flash in his skull.

  He didn’t think.

  He rammed.

  Full thrust.

  His flight frame slammed into Wilum’s Warcasket with a brutal impact that shook the cavern. Metal screamed. Wilum’s suit split down the center, torn in half, the lower section ripped away.

  Wilum was still alive.

  His cockpit didn’t crack. His voice exploded over comms, raw panic. “Get me out! Get me out!”

  Moreno and Makelya grabbed the upper half and dragged him, hauling their lieutenant toward an escape tunnel while firing back to cover it.

  Piper shouted, “Henryk, you insane bastard!”

  Henryk’s Stargazer shuddered from the collision. His power dipped so low his stomach clenched.

  He still didn’t say it.

  He didn’t want to hear it out loud.

  Then Piper took a hit.

  A beam shot clipped her rocket assembly and tore into the housing. Her suit lurched. Her thrusters stuttered. She nearly got thrown off Henryk’s back, boots scraping metal as she caught herself.

  “My rockets are compromised,” Piper said, voice tight. “I can’t climb out clean.”

  Henryk didn’t hesitate. “Get on and stay on.”

  “I’m already on you,” she snapped, then her voice softened for half a second like the anger was hiding something else. “Just don’t do something stupid.”

  The mountain answered them with another scream.

  Two more pressure holes opened and steam tore through the wrecked plating in white violent columns. The cavern fogged over so thick that sight became guesswork. The station started to shift again, not collapsing in one direction, but folding in ugly increments like it was being crushed in a fist.

  Ed’s voice cut in. “We retreat. Now. We got what we came for.”

  Arthur sounded furious. “To withdraw is—”

  Ed cut him off. “To withdraw is to not get buried alive. Move.”

  They ran.

  Back through the tunnels. Through broken corridors. Through sections where the ceiling had split and air surged in sudden punches that threw dust into spirals and knocked loose plating into flight.

  Behind them, the lieutenants and their remaining men vanished into the caverns, dragging Wilum’s ruined cockpit with them. The pirates didn’t chase the Martians. They were too busy escaping the mountain and the government coming down on them like judgment.

  Henryk’s gauges were nearly empty now.

  His frame shook. His thrust response lagged. The rifle heat indicator blinked angry. The suit felt heavier by the second.

  Piper’s voice came through, strained. “Henryk, your machine is shaking.”

  He swallowed. “I know.”

  “What does that mean.”

  “It means hold on.”

  They hit a corridor where the rock overhead bulged down into the station like a collapsing throat. Air surged from a crack to the right, a violent pocket reaching upward toward the surface.

  Henryk felt it before he fully saw it.

  That strange sense again, sudden and sharp, the world pulling tight for a heartbeat like it was about to snap.

  His eyes locked on the pocket.

  It was a way out.

  It was also a cannon.

  If he threw the frame into it, it would rip them apart.

  Unless he did it just right.

  Piper heard the change in his breathing. “Henryk,” she said, and the way she said his name was different now. “What are you thinking.”

  Henryk’s voice came quiet. “We promised we’d wait for each other.”

  Piper blinked, confused and angry at the same time. “Now? You’re talking about that now?”

  Henryk angled toward the air pocket anyway.

  Piper’s voice rose. “Henryk, don’t you dare!”

  He didn’t look back. “I always survive.”

  “What the hell does that even mean!”

  Henryk hit the pocket.

  The geyser of air caught the frame and ripped upward like a giant hand.

  The force was insane.

  Piper screamed his name and Henryk’s voice cut through it, loud, fierce, almost tender in the worst way.

  "Today you will fly higher than me!"

  He kicked the frame at the exact moment the pressure surged.

  Piper got thrown free.

  Her Warcasket launched upward through the crack toward daylight, rockets stuttering but enough, her scream breaking into a sob as she clawed at comms like her voice could pull him with her.

  “HENRYK! HENRYK!”

  The Stargazer got ripped sideways.

  Henryk’s machine slammed into the cavern wall hard enough to turn the monitor white for a heartbeat. Rock and dust exploded outward. The corridor caved in, the mountain finally deciding it had endured enough.

  Piper burst through the surface into cold air and smoke and falling ash.

  Below her, the crack sealed in dust.

  Henryk’s signal spiked once.

  Then vanished.

  And the place where he had been became stone, debris, and the sound of the earth settling like a grave being closed.