After the destruction of the Baraken space station, the Tartarusios turned her course toward the Labyrinth, and it did not take long for the news to reach the Emperor's palace.
In the great hall, Emperor Kaiser the Second sat on his throne of black stone the air thick with the heat of the enormous torches that lined the room. Veyra stood at his side when a guard burst through the doors, breathless and pale. "Your Majesty, my lady," he stammered, bowing low, "urgent news. The ship we had in custody has launched from orbit."
Kaiser's head snapped toward him. "What did you say?"
The guard was trembling. "After they escaped, Your Majesty, they turned their weapons on the station. It's gone. All of it, gone in a single shot."
For a moment, there was nothing but silence in the hall. Then Kaiser rose from his throne, and his voice burned with fury. "How is that possible? A single vessel destroying one of our stations?"
Veyra's expression had hardened into something cold. "Mobilize every force we have on the planet," she ordered. "If they're heading for the Labyrinth, we'll crush them before they ever reach its walls."
Within the hour, the skies over Baraka were full of movement — thousands of Imperial ships forming ranks across the stratosphere, their engines roaring as the whole planet prepared for war.
Aboard the Tartarusios, the tension was thick as the ship cut through clouds of red dust toward the far reaches of the planet. Youri turned to Zoma. "How do you even know they're inside that place?"
Zoma's eyes flickered blue as data streamed across her display. "When the Emperor ordered their imprisonment, I intercepted the signal. Every prisoner was sent to the Labyrinth, a facility deep in the northern wastes. It isn't just a prison. It's a world inside walls." She brought up a holographic projection of the planet's surface. "This is the outer layer — the Gates. It's the only way in."
Everyone gathered around the glowing map. The outer layer was nothing less than a fortress, with reinforced walls of concrete and steel and stone stretching for kilometers in every direction, built so dense they could survive orbital bombardment. They rose more than a hundred meters high, bare, gray, weathered by dust storms, but whole and unbroken. Watchtowers lined the perimeter at even intervals, narrow spires crowned with rotating spotlights and automated turrets whose scanners swept the horizon in slow arcs. Beyond the walls lay a barren security yard of barbed fencing, motion sensors and armored patrol roads. On the northern face stood the main gate, a pair of colossal blast doors layered with metal and magnetic seals, each weighing thousands of tons. Control bunkers were set into the walls beside them, where clearance codes were checked against biometric and neural keys. Further inside stood a second wall, smaller but no less fortified, that formed an airlock zone between the outside world and the depths of the Labyrinth. It was not beautiful, and it was never meant to be. It was raw, functional, terrifyingly efficient.
Youri leaned on the table and frowned. "There's no way we're getting in on the ground. That place is locked down tighter than a star vault."
Zoma nodded. "Exactly. That's why we won't go through it."
Preston glanced at her. "You mean—"
"The third level," she said. "There's a natural breach, a crack in the ceiling that opens onto the forest inside. It's unstable, but it's open. If we can reach it before their fleet closes in, we can slip through."
Youri smirked. "It's a long shot. But it beats dying at the gate."
Zoma's eyes gleamed. "Then it's settled."
Hours later, the Tartarusios came down through the storm. At the outer wall, a lone guard stood at the top of his tower scanning the red horizon. For a long moment everything was still — until a dark silhouette appeared out of the haze, massive and fast. He blinked and adjusted his scanner. "What the—?" The signal spiked, and his heart froze. That was no supply freighter. "Sound the alarm!"
Sirens wailed across the perimeter. The towers lit up and their guns swung toward the sky as the whole outer layer came to life, engines powering up, soldiers running for their stations. Then the Tartarusios broke out of the clouds with her hull gleaming and her main cannon charging with blinding blue light.
"Fire control ready!" the tower commander shouted. "All defenses, open fire!"
They were too late. A single beam of pure, focused energy burst from the ship's cannon and cut through the air like a blade. It struck the gates dead center. For a fraction of a second there was silence, and then everything vanished in light. The gates evaporated. The watchtowers melted, and the walls that had stood for centuries turned to molten slag while the ground shook and the flames swept everything away. The Tartarusios soared through the rising smoke with her engines howling and her shadow sweeping across the burning yard. Behind her the planet's surface glowed red.
On the bridge, alarms flickered, but nobody said a word. There was no time.
"Target destroyed," Zoma said, calm in the middle of the chaos. "Proceeding to the third-level breach."
Youri gripped the controls. "Hold on to something."
The ship climbed with her engines straining against gravity and then turned hard toward the great fissure that split the ground above the Labyrinth's third level. Down in the hangar, the bay doors opened with a rush of steam, and a towering metal shape stepped out onto the launch pad, its armor glinting in the reactor light. Tom climbed into its cockpit and locked in the neural links. "Titan online. Deploying now."
"Good luck," Youri said.
The Titan dropped through the open hatch and plunged into the storm, its thrusters igniting to slow its fall as it dove toward the forest below. The Tartarusios hovered over the breach, her cannons firing in every direction to hold back the waves of interceptors already streaking in from the horizon. Far below, the canopy of the third level shook as Tom's Titan landed and sent dust and debris exploding outward.
From orbit, the Labyrinth now burned like a scar across the planet's surface, its impenetrable walls reduced to ash. The Empire's fleets were closing in fast, thousands of ships darkening the sky, but the Tartarusios held her ground, firing, moving, surviving to buy time for the people below — and for the first time in centuries, someone had broken through the Gates of the Labyrinth.