"A hero of the Arkai Empire. A beacon of order and discipline. General Kline was all these things before being branded a traitor. The irony weighs heavily as I recount his fall. He was a man of principle, answering not the call of ambition but the cries of our people seeking justice from the oppression we ourselves had sworn to uphold."

  "In his pursuit of reform, Kline dared to question the infallibility of the Grand Synapse. His discontent became a clarion call to those who felt suffocated under the Empire's rigid structure. But in challenging the status quo, he awakened a storm; it was not just the Lumeri he faced, but the iron will of a bureaucracy determined to silence dissent."

  "As the broadcasts of his dissent flickered across screens, we began to see the fractures in our Empire. No longer a united front, we split between those holding tightly to the Astraean Order and those yearning for freedom from its constraints. Kline turned our ideals into weapons, rallying those disillusioned by diplomacy into revolt."

  "Division has replaced what was once loyalty. The embers of civil conflict have ignited into a blazing inferno. How tragic that General Kline's vision of a better Arkai has made him the unwitting architect of our potential downfall. Revolution tempts us, seductive in its appeal, but the blood toll may be more than we can bear."

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  ?

  My hands calmed enough to work the console. The fuel gauge sparked across the heads-up display, numbers clarifying into clarity as the ship's systems recovered from the encounter. Fifty-three percent.

  I stared at the reading. Before the creature arrived, before that cosmic shockwave had torn through Gavis Station like tissue paper, the gauge had read ninety-seven percent: nearly full. The corrupt official had kept their escape vessel well-maintained. Now I had barely half. I started a diagnostic check. The computer ran through each system, showing status reports in clear Arkai script on the display. Hull integrity: normal. Life support: working. Navigation: operational. Weapons: locked. Fuel cells: catastrophic drain.

  The report explained everything. The shields I'd improvised weren't designed for this vessel: I'd forced them into existence through raw Warp-Echo manipulation, bypassing the ship's proper defensive systems entirely. Instead of using the minimal power a proper shield generator would draw, my makeshift barrier had functioned like a military-grade combat shield running at emergency overload. The kind of protection meant for capital ships under sustained bombardment, not a small courier craft.

  The energy consumption was obscene. In those few minutes of protection against Marekthos's shockwave and the debris field, I'd burned through fuel reserves at the same rate as days of standard flight. The ship's systems had never been designed to channel that much power. Fifty-three percent, and somehow the fuel cells hadn't exploded entirely.

  "Lucky," I uttered softly. The word tasted like ashes.

  Out of the observation window, the debris field stretched for kilometers. Shattered hull sections tumbled in slow rotation, trailing frozen atmosphere that glittered like snow. Bodies were out there somewhere in that vast expanse of wreckage: thousands of them, scattered across cubic kilometers of space. The statistical improbability of seeing them from my viewport didn't make them any less real, any less dead. Lucky. I made myself focus on the console again. The navigation computer showed local system data, using what it could from Gavis Station's last transmissions before the hub vanished. Most of the data was damaged, but sufficiently remained to show how bad things were.

  The nearest port: Grolak mining outpost K-77, designated "Rust-Deep" in common parlance. Distance: three days at standard cruise. Fuel required: 42% with minimal maneuvering reserves.

  That left me with eleven percent remaining. Not eleven percent margin: eleven percent total. If anything went wrong, if I had to maneuver around debris or evade a patrol, I'd run dry before reaching the station. The math was brutal and unforgiving.

  The computer kept working. Automated distress beacons crowded the comm channels, with thousands of emergency signals from broken station sections and damaged ships. Each one sent out its location, casualty numbers, and urgent calls for help. Rescue would eventually come from nearby worlds and stations, but I was a wanted man.

  I muted the signals. There was nothing I could do. I didn't have fuel for detours or heroics. The numbers made the choice clear.

  I accessed the ship's recording systems. The official had installed internal surveillance gear throughout the cabin: premium equipment designed to record meetings, capture blackmail material, document the bribes and deals that kept a corrupt bureaucrat in power. But the external sensors told a different story.

  The ship's basic navigational arrays had captured the encounter. Not high-resolution footage, these were standard threat-detection sensors meant to track debris and incoming vessels. But they'd recorded Marekthos. The creature's approach, the energy signatures, the beam weapon's discharge. Rough data, but enough to prove what had happened. Enough to show the galaxy that the myths were real.

  There it was: Marekthos coming out of the void. Its wings spread. The shockwave grew. The beam weapon struck with deadly accuracy. The creature left. Everything was recorded in sharp detail, with sensor data showing energy levels higher than standard weapons.

  I copied the data to isolated storage, then duplicated it across three redundant systems. The Strurteran Star Council would pay fortunes for this. So would the Arkai Grand Synapse. The Lumeri Consortium would kill for it. Which meant I needed to disappear before any of them found me. The navigation console displayed K-77's coordinates. It was a Grolak facility, officially neutral, though the miners there kept quiet ties with all three major factions. They sold rare-earth elements to anyone who paid. They didn't ask questions or remember details.

  I opened the ship's identification systems. The IFF transponder sent out basic details: ship name, registration, and faction. At the moment, it broadcast "Gavis Station Authority" to anyone nearby. That would be a death sentence once news of the station's destruction spread. I accessed the primary codebase. The system pushed back. Security protocols blocked me, asking for admin credentials I didn't have. I gave a humorless smile. I had learned a lot at the Strurteran Applied Sorcery academies, but my most useful lessons came from watching Arkai tech specialists in the military.

  I moved my fingers over the haptic controls, opening subsystems and finding backdoor access points. The Arkai manufactured these components, but the station's chaos had degraded normal security protocols. Emergency mode had kicked in across all systems, defaulting to simplified authentication to allow rapid evacuation procedures.

  I had watched Arkai tech specialists exploit this exact vulnerability dozens of times during my military service. They always built emergency overrides into their systems: backdoors meant for disaster scenarios exactly like this. I couldn't crack proper military encryption, but emergency mode authentication? That was designed to be accessible.

  I entered the standard Arkai emergency override sequence. The security accepted it without question. Administrative access granted.

  The IFF database scrolled past: faction IDs, registration codes, the usual options. Arkai? No. The Loyalists wanted me dead. Strurteran? The Star Council had labeled me a deserter. Lumeri? Months as their prisoner ruled that out. Independent human trader, it was.

  I searched the registry until I found it in the civilian commercial section. The label was simple: Merchant-class personnel transport, human-operated, registered to the NTC (Neutral Trade Commission). This kind of ID made bureaucrats overlook it during routine checks. I chose a random call sign from the approved list: Wandering Comet. It was easy to be ignored, but with sufficient detail to pass automated checks.

  The transponder accepted the new identity. In moments, my stolen ship became just another anonymous trader in the remains of galactic commerce. I engaged the main drive.

  The ship's acceleration pressed me into my seat as it turned away from what was left of Gavis Station. Outside the window, the tunnel Marekthos created still glowed, its edges cooling where hot metal met the cold of space. I forced myself to look away. The navigation computer plotted the route to K-77. Three days. Seventy-two hours of crawling through contested space in a vessel that broadcast civilian weakness to every patrol and pirate within scanning range.

  But no one paid much attention to independent traders. The Arkai ignored them as a background economic factor. The Lumeri saw them as useful fools. Even Strurteran officials barely noticed them except for taxes. A human merchant bringing supplies to a Grolak mine never raised questions.

  I verified the course and engaged autopilot. The stars wheeled into new positions as the craft oriented itself along the optimal trajectory. K-77 waited somewhere ahead, a cluster of rock and mineral wealth where questions died in the crushing silence of Grolak hospitality.

  The comm channels were still full of distress signals, but I left them muted. Survivor pods appeared on my display, each sending out automatic calls for help. Rescue ships would come eventually, but too late for most. I didn't have the fuel or time to help.

  I checked the recording storage. I had three backup copies of Marekthos, each one perfectly detailed. This data alone could shift the balance of power between the major factions, if any of them survived to use it. Assuming the creature didn't return first.

  I looked over the ship's inventory. The corrupt official had stocked it well: two weeks of food, basic medical supplies, and spare parts for important systems. Emergency currency in three denominations, Arkai Credits, Lumeri Favors, and trade chits that worked anywhere money still had value. Disappearing was possible. Staying disappeared wasn't. The ship sped up to cruising speed. Behind me, Gavis Station kept breaking apart, pieces falling away like ice from a melting glacier. The distress signals faded.

  I checked the fuel use. It would take forty-one percent to reach K-77, which was manageable. The eleven percent margin would disappear if anything went wrong, but the route was mostly empty space. Pirates stayed away from these areas because they were too close to Grolak territory, where the quiet miners had defenses that destroyed threats without warning.

  The time dragged on ahead.