I feel Roque flinch, and remember the sound of Antonia cutting Lea’s throat as she tried to lure me from hiding at the Institute. I had stayed in the shadows, listening to my small friend fall wetly to the mossy ground. Roque had loved Lea in his own fast way.

“I’ve told you before not to mention your sister’s name in our presence,” I say to Victra, her face souring at the curt dismissal.

I turn back to Roque.

“As Praetor, I do believe I have authority to stock my fleet with personnel of my choosing. Perhaps we should bring back some old faces. Sevro from Pluto, the Howlers from wherever the hell they got shipped off to, and maybe … Quinn from Ganymede?”

Roque flushes in the cheeks at the mention of Quinn’s name.

Personally, I wish for Sevro the most. Neither of us is particularly diligent at keeping in touch over the holoNet, especially me, because I haven’t had access to it since the Academy began. Anyway, all he’s partial to sending is holograms of uniquely perverted unicorns and video clips of him reading puns. Pluto, if anything, has made him stranger. And perhaps more lonely.

“Dominus.” The helmBlue’s voice draws me to the display.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

His eyes are glazed. Distant, jacked into the ship’s sensors, seeing the raw data of the display I stare at. “Not clear, dominus. Sensor distortion. Ghosting.”

On the large central display, the asteroids are there in blue. We’re gold. Enemies red. There should be none left. Yet a red dot throbs there now. Roque and Victra walk toward it. Roque motions his hand and the data transfer to his datapad. A smaller holo globe floats in front of him. He enlarges the image and cycles through analytic filters.

“Radiation?” Victra hazards. “Debris?”

“The asteroid’s ore could cause a mirror refraction from our signal,” Roque says. “Couldn’t be software.… It’s gone.”

The red dot flickers away, but the tension has spread through the bridge. All stare at the display. Nothing. There’s no one else out here except my ships and Karnus’s defeated flagship. Unless …

Roque turns to me, face drawn, terrified.

“Flee,” he manages just as the red signal burns back to life.

“Full power to engines,” I roar. “Thirty degrees plus our midline.”

“Launch remaining missiles at the surface of the asteroid,” Tactus commands.

Too late.

Victra gasps, and I see with my naked eyes what our instruments struggled to detect. One shadowed destroyer emerges from a hollow in the asteroid. A ship I thought we defeated three days ago. Its engines were off as it lay in wait. Its front half is torn and black from damage. Now its engines blast at full power. And its trajectory takes it directly toward my ship.

It’s going to ram us.

“Evac suits and pods!” I shout. Someone’s screaming for us to brace for impact. I rush to the side of the bridge where my command escape pod is built into the wall. It opens at my word. Tactus, Roque, and Victra sprint into its confines. I hold back, shouting at the Blues to hurry and unsync. For all their logic, they’ll die for their ships.

I range about the bridge, screaming at them to activate their escape hatch. The helmBlue does, pressing a button that causes a hole to dilate in the floor of the pit. One by one, they unsync and are sucked down the gravity tube into their escape pods.

“Theodora!” I shout, seeing her prying at a young Blue who still clutches his operations display with white-knuckled fear. “Get in the gorydamn pod!” She doesn’t listen. Nor does the Blue let go. I start toward them just as the proximity sensor lets loose one final warning blast.

All slows.

Bridge lights throb red.

I jump for Theodora, wrapping my arms around her.

And the destroyer hits my man-of-war at her midline.

Clutching Theodora to my chest, I’m thrown thirty meters across my bridge, slamming into a metal wall. White pain rips across my left arm along the seams of the mending break. I’m slapped with darkness. Lights dance there, first like stars, then as weaving lines of sand disturbed by wind.

Red light seeps through my eyelids. A gentle hand pulls at my clothing.

I open my eyes. I’m wrapped around a dented electrical column as the ship shudders, groaning like an ancient, dying beast sinking in the deep. The column trembles violently against my stomach as the destroyer finishes shearing through our middle. Gutting us with slow cruelty.

Someone’s shouting my name. Sound fades back into being.

Lights bathe the bridge, alternating shades of murderous red. Warning sirens. The ship’s swan song. Theodora’s delicate old hands pull at me, like a bird pulling at a fallen statue. I’m bleeding from my forehead. My nose is broken. I wipe the stinging blood from my eyes and roll onto my back. A broken display sparks beside me. It has my blood on it. Did it fall on me? A bar lies beside it, and my eyes drift to Theodora. She pried it off. But she’s so small. Her hands cup my face.

“Get up. Dominus, if you want to live, you have to get up.” The old woman’s hands tremble from fear. “Please, get up.”

Groaning, I pull myself to my feet. My command escape pod is gone. In the collision, it must have launched. Either that or they left me behind. So too has the Blue escape pod jettisoned away. The frightened Blue has become a stain on a bulkhead. Theodora can’t tear her eyes away from the sight.

“There’s another pod in my quarters,” I mutter. Then I see why Theodora winces. Not from fear, but pain. Her leg is shattered, splayed off to the side like a length of wet, cracked chalk. They don’t make Pinks to last through this. “I won’t make it, dominus. Go, now.”

I bend to a knee and throw her over the shoulder of my good arm. She whimpers horribly as her leg shifts under her. I feel her teeth rattle. And I run. I run through the broken bridge toward the wound that is killing my ship, through the bridge level’s hallways into a scene of chaos. People swarm the main halls, abandoning their posts and functions as they race to escape pods and the troop carriers in the forward hangar. People who fought for me—electricians, janitors, soldiers, cooks, valets. They’ll never make it to safety. Many change course when they see me. They tumble forward, leaning against me, panicked and crazed in their mania to find safety. They pull at me, screaming, pleading. I push them off, losing a small part of my heart as each falls behind. I can’t save them. I can’t. An Orange grabs Theodora’s good leg and a Gray sergeant hits him in the forehead till he drops like a stone to the ground.

“Clear a path,” the thick Gray bellows. She whips her scorcher out of her tactical holster and shoots it into the air. Another Gray, remembering himself, or perhaps thinking I’m his ticket out of this deathtrap, joins her in parting the chaos. Soon two more carve a path at gunpoint.

With their help, I make it to my suite. The door hisses open at my DNA’s touch and we move through. The Grays back in after us, training their scorchers at the thirty desperate souls who ring the entrance. The door hisses as if to close, but an Obsidian pushes through the crowd and jams herself into the doorframe, preventing the door from closing. An Orange joins her. Then a low-ranking Blue. Without hesitation, the Gray sergeant shoots the Obsidian in the head. Her companions gun down the Blue and Orange and shove them off the doorframe so it can close. I tear my eyes away from the blood on the ground to lay Theodora on one of my couches.

“Dominus, how much room is there in the escape pod?” the Gray sergeant asks me as I head to the pod’s entry lock. Her hair is buzzed in military fashion. A tattoo on her tan neck peeks from under her collar. My hands fly over the control prism, entering the password with a series of hand motions.

“Four seats. You get two. Decide among yourselves.”