They moved through the smoke like wolves on leashes, Major Sergei barking orders as boots slammed against ruined concrete, squads fanning out across the base to hunt down the Tartarusios' crew. "Get every ground trooper we have left," he snapped, his voice brittle with the mixture of greed and fear that had carried him this far. "Find the crew. And I want them alive."
On the other side of the base, Oscar's search was turning up nothing. The hangars were hollow, the shadowed corners empty. Every corridor he ran down ended in rubble or in more smoke. "Have you found Youri?" he demanded into his comm, but only static answered him. The whole base smelled of burned wiring, spilled oil and panic. He had just turned to try another corridor when hands seized him from behind. Bright weapons came up all around him, a command was shouted, and the world compressed into one cold moment.
"Put your hands up," a soldier ordered. "You are under arrest."
Oscar stared at him in disbelief. "For what?"
The answer came clipped and bureaucratic. "Higher-up's orders."
They marched him through the ruins to the courtyard, where Halley, Chris, Mario, Harry and Vanessa were already on their knees with their wrists bound. Oscar's eyes searched the faces around them for the one person who could have stopped this. Stefan was nowhere to be seen. His absence made the air feel thinner. Then Sergei stepped out of the smoke. When Oscar asked where Stefan was, the major told him without even blinking that the commander was dead — killed in an "unpredictable shootout" with the captain of the Tartarusios. He said it smoothly, but his eyes slid everywhere except to Oscar's face. That was how Oscar knew he was lying.
It did not take long for the rest to come out. Sergei had sold them. He had traded friends for a purse and a promise. He did not seem to think there was anything shameful in saying so. "I give you up to the Empire," he said with a small shrug, "and I get to live. And I get paid." The words slid out of him like venom.
Even as Sergei preened in front of his captives, a new voice cut through the static of his comm unit — cold and imperious. The Marquis himself was on the line. Sergei straightened like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been pulled.
"You have done a good job, Major," Miller purred over the feed. "Your fee has been paid."
Sergei's eyes lit up greedily. He dared to ask for one last mercy — a small ship and a quiet exit from Altea, somewhere far from whatever happened next.
"You will leave unharmed," the Marquis promised. "Now, let's elevate this battle. This time it's the Ravens' turn to play."
The moment the channel to Sergei closed, Miller turned to his officers. The hand that had just promised mercy was already reaching for the hammer. "Make sure that man is taken care of," he said. "I don't want any loose ends."
The Ravens readied themselves in their bays — units bred for precise ruin, sleek, dark and fast. "Raven One through Seven, copy." The payloads were armed, the coordinates set. The order came down blunt and absolute: burn the base. The pilots traded jokes about their paint jobs as they strapped in, because somewhere between bravado and fear the machinery of war still demanded its rituals before the slaughter. "Fire at will. Crack those havens open."
Down in the courtyard, Sergei played the part he had chosen for himself, smug, petty and small-crowned. He walked up and down the line of prisoners as if they were trophies. He told them, almost proudly, how he had learned to survive by selling secrets to whoever paid the most. "I live for it," he said softly. The awful thing was that he seemed to mean it, as though the confession were a kind of art. Around him, the crew knelt with their wrists rubbed raw by rope, their eyes hard with betrayal. The courtyard stank of diesel and fear, and of something darker underneath it all, the iron tang of compromise.
Then the earth answered him. A low, rolling tremor crawled through the concrete. The corrugated roofs around the courtyard bowed under the first strike.
"What is this?" Sergei shouted, but the answer was already overhead. Orbitons cleaved through the clouds and the Ravens dove after them like falling knives. The base convulsed as ordnance hammered into it, turning everything that was still useful to ruin. Sergei stared up at the sky with his mouth open. For the first time since Oscar had met him, his face showed something — the dawning understanding that the man he had sold everyone to had never intended to let him walk away.
"Hey, Captain," Chris called from the end of the line, his voice half hopeful and half accusing, "couldn't you have told us this was more of a suicide mission?" The joke broke apart as another explosion tore a chunk out of the courtyard wall and sent the guards scattering for cover.
That was when they heard it — a deeper roar beneath the scream of the Ravens, an engine sound that every one of them would have known in their sleep. The Tartarusios came down out of the smoke like a spear thrown from heaven, her plasma shields flaring as Imperial fire broke against them. Before her landing gear had even touched the ground, her ramp was already dropping. Nolan came down it first with a rifle in his hands and half the engineering crew behind him. The guards who had not already run took one look at them and decided they were not being paid enough to stay.
In the confusion, Sergei tried to bolt. He did not get far. Mario caught him by the collar and slammed him into the dirt. The man who had sold everyone for a ship of his own ended up face-down in the rubble with his own rope around his wrists.
Through the smoke and the ringing in everyone's ears, a voice called out from the ship's open ramp — tired and iron-hard, and somehow full of life. Oscar was on his feet before anyone had finished cutting his bonds. He walked toward that voice with a grin he could not have stopped if he had tried.
"Finally," Oscar said. "You made it."
It was not relief so much as recognition, a shard of human sound lodged in the middle of all that chaos. The survivors who could still move, run and think through the panic turned toward it like sailors toward a light in a storm. Above them, the Ravens arced around for another pass. Below them, bargains and betrayals lay scattered across the courtyard like corpses waiting to be counted. The whole world narrowed down to one urgent truth: survive, or let the sky decide