"Come on, Halley, get up," Oscar said, pulling her off Stefan with a hand that had learned to stay steady through far worse storms than this one. Stefan was still on the floor laughing, holding his jaw, and the soldiers who had gathered in the doorway to watch were trying very hard to look as if they had not been enjoying the show.
"You two," Oscar muttered, half a joke and half a prayer. "This is embarrassing."
"Tell that to her," Stefan protested, sitting up. "She started it!"
"Shut up, moron," Halley shot back, the words edged. "You kidnapped me and my team first."
"I didn't kidnap anyone. I wasn't even here," Stefan said, which might have been true, but it was a hollow defense coming from the man whose soldiers had nearly gassed her friends.
Before Halley could tell him exactly what she thought of that, the base's comms lit up with a voice that sounded like a warning bell. "Commander, sir, we have a problem."
The word problem felt almost laughable after the last hour, right up until Stefan answered it. "What?"
The report came through in pieces, static and fear braided together. There had been breaches in the upper atmosphere, and the sensors had caught Brion signatures, a lot of them, coming in fast. The Empire had found them.
The laughter drained out of the room all at once. "Shit," Stefan said, and he was on his feet now, the grin gone as if it had never been there. "How could this happen? Get everyone ready. We have to fight them. We don't have a choice."
Another voice answered on the channel, quieter, with the blunt honesty of someone who could count. "But sir, we're outmatched. Seven planetary ships against the three we have at the base. I don't think we have any chance."
"Don't lose hope, my friend," Stefan said, and there was something stubborn and bright in his voice that Oscar remembered from the old days. "We have the advantage on the ground. I'll request backup from the main fleet. They should be here in a few hours, so we just need to survive until then." It sounded threadbare even as he said it, but it was all any of them had. Holding the ground and waiting felt like a prayer thrown into the wind.
"Goddamn it," Oscar swore under his breath. "Can we ever catch a break?" He turned to Halley. "Come on. We need to get Harry and Vanessa and get out of here."
"Don't worry about us, Oscar," Stefan said. "We'll cover you so you can get away. But you need to hurry. They'll be here any minute." It was a fierce promise, and a fragile one. Both of them knew it.
High above Altea, the Empire's assault ships descended through the clouds like black teeth. On their command decks, the language was simpler and more brutal. "My lord, we are almost at the enemy base."
The answer came with the cool cruelty of men who counted bodies like currency. "Let's show those fools what real power is. Get the new Orbitons ready and rain fire on them. Spare no one. We'll level that base to the ground."
In the hangars below, the pilots joked as they strapped themselves into machines built for killing, because the banter was the only armor they had against what came next.
"This is gonna be a hassle," Clover groaned as he settled into his cockpit. "I just hope they don't have Orbitons down there. Maybe I can catch a wink."
"Watch your mouth, Clover," Palmer snapped from the next bay over. "If you do anything stupid out there, I'll kill you myself." They argued about paint jobs and names — purple or white — while the world below them got ready to burn. The triviality of it felt obscene and deeply human all at once.
"Raven unit, prepare to launch," came the order, and the cannons warmed. "Fire at will. Crack those havens open."
The first impact reshaped the base. Buildings that had been whole a breath earlier collapsed into themselves. The air filled with dust that tasted like iron and old rain. Oscar was thrown against a wall and came up coughing, already shouting into his comm. "Shit, they're already here! Tartarusios, do you copy?"
Bjorn's reply came through measured but raw. "Most of the work is done, Captain, but there are still sectors under repair."
"Can we leap anytime soon?"
"The engine repairs are finished, but the drive isn't warmed up. We might risk another failure on the next leap." It was a thin, dangerous kind of arithmetic. Oscar did it in his head in less than a second.
"Then we have to risk it," he said. "Get the ship here. We'll fight too."
In the rubble of what had been the command center, Stefan paced with a thousand-yard stare while his officers tried to make sense of the damage reports. "We lost thirty percent of the base in that first strike," he said, and regret and anger tangled together in his voice. "You think I don't know that? Goddamn it. If only I'd brought more reinforcements this time."
Sergei stood beside the map table, tracing the outline of the base in the dust with one finger. He spoke the way he always did, slowly and without any emotion at all. "Do you really think they came all the way here just for us?" He did not wait for an answer. "They're here for the Tartarusios' crew. What other reason would they have to leave the front lines?" He did not need to explain the rest. Everyone in the room had heard what had happened at Zellion only a few days ago, how the Tartarusios had nearly wiped out an entire Imperial fleet by herself.
"Oscar is a liability," Sergei said, and the words landed like a verdict. "They're just a group of mercenaries. Think how many lives we'd save if we handed them over to the Empire."
The idea had weight, and everyone in the room felt it. Survival had a price, and here was someone offering to pay it with other people's lives.
"You do have a point," Stefan admitted, and the hardness in his voice made the air colder. Then he looked up from the map, and his eyes were steady. "But when did we start selling people's freedom to save our own asses?"
The room filled with the bitter taste of choices made in panic. Sergei did not move. "Is that your final decision?" he asked, and there was an edge on every syllable now.
"Yes." The word came down like a door slamming shut.
There was a moment then, a breath held between two heartbeats. Then a single gunshot cracked through the room, sharp and obscene. Somewhere in the ruined base that had once whispered of rebellion, a deal had just been made with the devil, and someone had paid for it in blood.
Outside, the sky kept raining cannon fire, and Orbitons wove death between the clouds. Oscar stood in the doorway of the barracks with Halley at his side, her jaw set, the others braced around them like anchors. He felt the full weight of the decision they were about to make. They were not running away from the storm. They were running straight into it.
The planet convulsed under the bombardment, light and shadow wearing the same face. As the alarms wailed, the whole world narrowed to a single imperative: live, or die trying.