with twenty miles of dreadnought bearing down on us, that directive is the most urgent it’s ever been.
Impossibly, my eyes move to Gal himself. His mop of unruly hair curling over his forehead. His hooded eyes—his mother’s eyes. The way his throat bobs as he swallows. The way fear bends him low, even though he’ll never let it consume him fully. And a razor’s edge saws through my worry. With him at my side, we’ll always fly true.
“C’mon you ruttin’ bastards,” he whispers. “Do it.”
The readouts beneath his hands flicker. The Torrent’s hull buzzes with activity. Launch-tube doors peeling open. The silent glimmer of air venting into the black. Gal’s fingers twitch, counting the apertures, calculating the chances.
His thumbs yank up the comm line. “We have our opening. All teams move.”
Forty Vipers breach from the Torrent’s flanks, wheeling in the void as their gyros point them squarely at us. Their engines are hot, but their guns are cold as ice. They burn for us, curving out in arcs that weave their vectors together in a net. They’re here to herd.
Just as Gal predicted.
Space doesn’t react when a vessel drops from superluminal. There’s no flash of light, no noise—in a vacuum, there’s nothing to react against. So when a hundred members of the assault fleet come screaming out of the void between stars, it happens in a blink. One moment there’s nothing.
Blink.
Ships.
Their calculations are precise. Their pilots are far more skilled than I’ll ever be. They match the Torrent’s forward vector and arrive with just enough distance to avoid pancaking themselves on the cityship’s hull. From our distance, they’re barely visible, motes of dust next to the dreadnought’s might.
But our instruments and the flurry of information coming in through the comm lines paint a different story.
The carrier-ship crews haul open their launch doors, puffing a blast of air into the void along with the resistance Vipers lined up inside their bays. The fighters are locked and loaded, ready for launch, their pilots howling through the lines as they dive headfirst down the dreadnought’s exposed tubes.
“First teams are in,” Adela Esperza announces through the comm from her spot at the flagship’s helm. War drums echo in the background of her line, Archon’s thunder rising again. “Let’s clear a path for the gentleman, shall we?”
In the rear of our ship, the soldiers pick up the rhythm. The Ruttin’ Hell shudders with the stomping of their feet, the slapping of hands on bulkheads, the pounding of fists on chests.
“Ettian,” Gal reminds me, “time to split.”
I rip my eyes away from the battle unfolding on the instruments and tune out the drumming, my hands jerking on the Ruttin’ Hell’s controls. With a hard burn of the rotary thrusters, I bring our nose spinning around, gunning the main engines at the same time. We catapult across the black as I lock our vector onto the distant speck of Rana. “Vipers?” I ask through gritted teeth.
“Recalculating,” Gal replies.
I glance down at the instruments, watching our gambit play out in points of light. The Torrent’s acting captain has to make a split-second decision. The Archon forces have pinned down the Torrent’s flanks, their guns poised to blast away any Vipers that launch from the hull. The Torrent’s scrambled fighters could bully us in, securing her grasp on the Umber heir and the favor of a ruthless system governor. But if she has any hope of saving her ship from the commandeering Archon forces, she needs to target the assault fleet, not one measly Beamer.
Only, if the prince gets caught in the crossfire, she’ll have to answer to both Berr sys-Tosa and the Umber imperials.
And the prince has every intention of jamming himself squarely into the crossfire.
Right on cue, the Vipers split, their formation blooming like a flower as half of them peel off, wheeling back toward the Torrent and the flickering battle around it. “Ruttin’ hell,” Gal mutters. “That’s what I would have done.”
Behind us, the Torrent is accelerating again, bearing down on our rear as the Archon forces struggle to match speed. The