Lanria crouched beneath the tangled brush of the forest edge, where dry leaves clung to her sleeves and the dirt smelled like oily metal. This wasn’t much of a forest, just a patch of stunted trees and scrub clinging to a slope the miners never touched. Still, it was the only place nearby that offered any cover.
She wasn’t a soldier. She didn’t know how to plan for something like this. But she knew the main building was not a safe space anymore, not after the helicopter-like drone blew a big hole into the side. Even if she hadn’t seen that thing in a while, she didn’t know that it was no longer on the planet.
Another wooosh tore the sky open.
It hit like a pressure wave or like standing in an open field when a supersonic jet cracks the sound barrier too low, too close. The air folded in on itself. Lanria’s balance slipped. Her ears rang. A flash of nausea bloomed behind her eyes.
Good thing she hadn’t been standing.
That probably saved her from falling over.
She dropped her PDA. It hit the ground with a soft thud.
Just a second. Maybe less. Her brain couldn’t pin down the moment. Time broke and reshaped itself too fast.
She blinked, reached down with trembling fingers, and picked the device back up.
The screen flickered. Nothing new. No messages. No signal. No comms out.
She was still cut off. What a fucking mess.
Somewhere above the cloudless sky, another massive ship had just dropped out of FTL. Far too close to the atmosphere, riding the edge of physics like they were daring the planet to scream.
No one had explained what was happening.
And there was no one left to ask.
The ship hovered just beyond the planet’s gravitational grip. A careful balance, low enough to cause trouble, high enough to drift without taxing the reactor. Efficient. Subtle. It barely shimmered against the stars unless you knew where to look. The ship was massive. You need mass to disturb the communications. Physics will be physics, after all. With its arrival, another window of silence began. FTL communication blackout of the mass-shadow wake. The signal bands would stay scrambled for hours. Maybe longer, depending on how tight they held position.
The next jump was already queued. Just enough delay to keep the atmosphere from settling, to keep the ionosphere in flux, to keep the planet quiet.
Someone had planned this well.
No flashy assaults. No declarations. Just a methodical suppression, like smothering a fire with blankets, one layer at a time.
It wasn’t the kind of work that made it into resumes.
But it was the kind that got contracts renewed. Just reliable.
The hangar opened, and the drones pushed another container into the storage bay. All automated. There wasn’t even a gravity field active, no need to waste power for such a short cycle. The container drifted smoothly until the mag-clamps engaged.
A spark flickered where the clamps gripped the container’s metal frame. Too quick for anyone on the bridge to notice. These clamps were toast, but that wouldn’t show for weeks. They’d just been overloaded in that moment.
The final cargo for this ship.
While the rail system locked it into place, the small bridge crew grew more animated by the minute. Quiet relief passed between them in glances and clipped phrases. That container would keep their operation afloat for at least two cycles.
Two cycles.
Shockingly close to four Earth years.
The label on the container read MATERIAL // NON-CRITICAL // AU-SCRAPS, a standard code for low-grade refined metals. Mostly gold, destined for circuit board manufacturing or raw-state market sales. It wasn’t locked, flagged, or tracked any differently than the rest.
No one on the crew questioned it.
Beneath the masking and shielding lay a raw payload of - Juno-3 - unrefined, unstable, and worth more per gram than the entire ship. Smuggled out of a narrow vein beneath Outpost 136, its presence was buried under routine. And because it wasn’t overseen by any government, there was no real resistance. Security through obscurity.
The blackout cycle was near ending, and the crew got ready to jump out. Reactors roared up and... wooosch.
One last ship to jump in, then the pattern would end. Another rotation of silence, another container gone, another breath of time bought for the mercenaries and whoever was paying them.
Then the jump signature hit.
Lanria had started to grow numb to them. The wooosh. The air folding in. The weird moment where sound and pressure misaligned and made her stomach twist.
But this one.. no no no.. this one wasn’t the same.
It didn’t hit the air. It swallowed it.
The sky collapsed. Gravity buckled around her like the forest floor suddenly didn’t know which way was down. A deep, thrumming pressure radiated through the ground, through her ribs. Birds scattered. Insects vanished. Her ears popped. Her vision blurred.
Lanria hit the dirt, eyes wide, breath caught in her throat.
Then came the light.
From the upper atmosphere, a burn of heatless white bled through the clouds.. silent, absolute. The previous ship just moved into its stable drift, shuddered once, briefly.. as if surprised.
Then it was gone. Not with a big explosion, more like grilling an insect with a magnifying glass.
A Titan had arrived. Mokar Titans are rare.
A capital-class human warship. Massive didn’t cover it. It eclipsed the upper atmosphere like a second moon. Even from the surface, it hummed with barely-contained force. Every FTL jump before it had felt like stones thrown into a lake.
This was a comet hitting the ocean.
Lanria didn’t know what she was seeing. She didn’t know what a Titan looked like. But she knew - deep in her gut - that something had changed.
The game was different now.
Write a comment