The tension in the hall rose with every second. The Emperor was testing them, and the truth was that they were exactly what he suspected — humans pretending to be gods.
Zoma stepped forward, her projection flickering with restrained power, her voice straight and unwavering. "Kaiser Baraka, Emperor of the Baraken Empire, you call us impostors. We come from a world beyond your comprehension, one you cannot even imagine. But very well — everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt, so I will show you." She lifted her chin. "In two days, the Empire's campaign in the Ohara region will fail, and every fleet stationed there will be lost."
The Emperor's expression changed. His brows drew together, and his pride, struck at its root, flared into anger. His voice thundered through the chamber. "You — a mere hologram, a thing built by men — dare to tell me my army will fail?"
The whole hall seethed. Kaiser Baraka was known throughout the Empire for his pride, especially in the might of his legions, and somehow Zoma had struck a nerve that ran deep. But she did not waver. "Do you know why you will suffer that defeat?" she asked, and her eyes glowed faintly as she met his. When he only glared at her, sharp as a blade, she went on. "You will fail because your technology lags behind your ambition. You have only just begun your campaign of conquest, and you have no idea what lies beyond your reach. You will overextend yourselves, and you will burn. So believe me when I tell you that in two days, you will summon us here again."
"Enough!" Kaiser roared, and his voice shook the hall like thunder. "Get them out of my sight — and send them straight to the Labyrinth!" He turned sharply toward the kneeling captain. "And you, Mahin. For this insolence, you will join them. The people will be told that the mighty Hero of Dazar was lost in action. Take that as my final gift to you. At least this way, you keep your honor."
Mahin's face went dark. He had just lost everything, and for what? For a single act he had believed would bring him glory.
Soldiers flooded into the chamber with their boots striking the floor in unison. There was nothing the crew of the Tartarusios could do. Zoma's words had sealed their fate — prisoners of a proud empire, ten thousand years in the past. Shackles were clamped cold and heavy around their wrists. Zoma was taken away to another room, the DTI that projected her sealed beneath heavy locks.
As they were marched to the shuttle, Oscar turned to Mahin. "I'm sorry for dragging you into this," he said quietly. Mahin did not answer at first, so Oscar tried again, more uncertainly. "What is this Labyrinth?"
Mahin smiled bitterly. "A place that no one who enters ever leaves."
There were many prisons in the Empire of Baraka, some built to hold rebels and others to silence the inconvenient, but only one of them had no walls, no doors and no return. They called it the Labyrinth. It lay at the edge of the world, carved deep into the crust of Baraka's northern continent. From orbit it looked like an open wound across the planet's dark surface — a vast spiral of stone and metal that twisted endlessly inward until it vanished into the ground. No map had ever captured its full reach, and no prisoner who entered its depths had ever returned to describe its end.
Its entrance was a colossal arch of black iron bearing the sigil of the serpent devouring its own tail, the mark of eternal confinement. Around it stretched the Warden Plains, barren and cold, where the air smelled of rust and ash, where every step toward the gate seemed heavier than the last, as though the ground itself were resisting anyone who came near.
Inside, the Labyrinth was alive. Its corridors twisted back on themselves, and its walls shifted with the movement of mechanisms buried in the rock, so that passages that existed one moment were gone the next. The walls pulsed faintly with veins of red and blue light, the remains of the ancient core engines that powered the place. No one truly understood how any of it worked. Some said it had been built long before the Empire by an older civilization that the Baraka had simply conquered and put to use. Others whispered that it had grown on its own, a living construct that fed on the despair of the people trapped inside it. From its depths came the endless sound of distant machinery — the groan of gears, the hiss of steam, the hum of power deep beneath the stone. Every corridor seemed to breathe out a faintly glowing mist in which faces sometimes appeared, fleeting and broken, the reflections of those it had long since swallowed. The guards almost never went in. They did not need to. Once a prisoner was thrown through its gates, the Labyrinth itself became the warden.
The Baraken called it a prison. Those who believed in older things called it a mouth — one that never stopped eating. Any sentence that ended with the words "to the Labyrinth" was not a punishment. It was erasure. No family ever visited, and no one was ever buried. The condemned simply vanished into its depths, and the Empire went on without them.
When the shuttle set down and the guards marched them to the gate, something unexpected was waiting there: the rest of the Tartarusios' crew. The Emperor had made sure that no one from their ship was left behind. Confusion rippled across their faces, but the moment they saw Oscar coming toward them, their expressions brightened.
"Oscar! He's here! Hey, everyone, he's here!"
Oscar looked at them with sorrow written all over his face. "I'm sorry, everyone," he said quietly. "We got ourselves into more trouble."
"Come on, Captain," Nolan said with a grin. "Chin up. At least we're all together. And if there's one thing I know, it's that no matter what, we always make it out."
Oscar managed a faint smile.
Behind them, the massive doors began to move. Someone at the back of the group turned his head and shouted, "Hey, everyone! I think they're welcoming us in!"
A deep, metallic groan rolled out across the plains, slow and ancient, like the earth itself exhaling after centuries of silence. Dust rose in clouds from the cracked black ground, the air grew thick with the smell of iron and rot. Every other sound faded away beneath the mechanical roar of the Labyrinth opening its mouth.