01Scene 1
The blast doors were halfway open when the corridor behind them exploded.
Selan came through the smoke low and fast, her green eyes glowing. Two defenders followed, firing back through the gap. Orvek stumbled in behind them, blood running from his temple down the stone-gray skin beside one long pointed ear. Weapons fire struck the bronze doorframe and sprayed fragments across the floor. One defender hit the emergency close control. The doors groaned toward each other, then one jumped its track and jammed, leaving a gap wide enough for more fire to flash through.
Black control banks stepped down toward a central launch console. Bronze ribs crossed the ceiling. Thin violet lines marked the systems still alive, flickering through smoke that smelled of burned insulation and hot metal. A panel burned behind one bank of controls, and alarms rang over the blasts outside.
Through an armored observation opening behind the console, the last launcher stood among fires and broken towers. The crystal load was already locked into it, a cluster of faceted violet crystal bound inside temporary black-and-bronze restraints. Beyond it, Rhalis was burning.
Selan's eyes moved from the launcher to the console to the damaged doors. "Hold the entrance."
The defenders dropped behind a broken control bank facing the doors. Orvek was already at the central console. He swept dead interfaces aside, tore open a lower access panel, and dropped to one knee with both hands inside the machine. Violet light ran along the exposed pathways beneath his fingers and lit the hard angles of his face from below.
Selan took cover where she could see the entrance, Orvek, and the launcher without moving.
"One lock left," Orvek said.
"How long?"
He opened another panel and followed a changing line of light deeper into the console. "Longer than we have."
"Fuck."
A burst of fire punched through the gap. The defenders answered. A shot hit the wall above Orvek and showered him with hot fragments. He flinched, wiped blood from the side of his face, and went straight back into the console.
The room shook hard enough to knock loose pieces of the ceiling down between them. Half the lights died. The console went black under Orvek's hands, then the violet pathways crawled back to life. At the doors, a shot crossed the gap and hit the defender on the left. He dropped behind the control bank and did not get back up. The second defender shifted into his place and kept firing.
Orvek leaned closer to the open housing. His eyes moved with the changing pathways. He pulled a connection and spliced it into a new path. Nothing. He tried another, stopped, then shoved both hands deeper into the machine.
"Come on. Come on."
More fire struck the room. A black panel beside Selan broke apart and forced her lower.
Orvek froze for half a second. Then his hands moved again, faster.
"I have it. I have it. Cipher!"
Selan pulled a palm-sized authorization key from a sealed slot on her gear and threw it across the room. Orvek caught it against his chest, drove it into an exposed port, and twisted it hard enough to seat the contacts.
The console glowed to life and a single command burned along the controls.
ARMED.
Outside, the firing clasps rose around the crystal, spun into position, and tightened. Light climbed the launcher. Dark sections of the structure woke one after another.
Orvek looked through the observation opening and started to grin.
A shot hit him in the head.
Orvek was dead before he reached the floor.
Selan stared at him. "No."
It came out almost too quietly to hear.
The last defender fired again. A shot struck him and folded him across the control bank. More fire tore through the room behind him. The entrance was gone. The console was still alive.
Selan looked once at Orvek, then at ARMED.
She left cover.
The first shot hit high in her shoulder and spun her into a control bank. She pushed off it and kept moving. Another struck her side. Her legs folded, but she caught herself before she hit the floor and forced herself forward while fire broke pieces from the black surface around her.
The ARMED control stayed lit.
A third shot hit her thigh two steps from Orvek. Selan went down hard. She reached for the console, missed, dragged herself closer, and caught the bronze edge with both hands. Another impact struck outside. The launcher shook in the observation opening.
Selan pulled herself up.
Blood ran down her arm and over the bronze guard. Orvek lay beside her, eyes open and unmoving. The control was within reach.
She said nothing.
Selan lifted her hand and drove her palm into the glowing control.
The control sank against a heavy mechanical stop.
The chamber jolted. Through the observation opening, the launch structure came alive in white-violet light. The crystal load tore upward inside its temporary restraints, climbing past the burning towers as the room shook around Selan.
She stayed upright long enough to watch the violet cluster clear the tower. Then her hand slipped from the console. Selan collapsed beside Orvek and did not move again.
By the time the launcher vanished behind smoke and fire, no one in the control room was alive.
02Scene 2
High above Aurelia, the temporary launch frame opened.
Bronze restraints released from the crystal mass. Black sections of the machine unlocked and kicked away on separate paths. For a few moments metal and crystal shared the same darkness, then the gaps between them widened. The metal fell behind, and the crystal went on alone.
At first Aurelia still filled much of the dark. Weather turned over its oceans, and the fires of the war stained the night side. As the planet shrank, Rhalis dropped out of sight first. Soon the burning cities looked like any other light.
Aurelia became a bright circle, then a point among other points.
The crystal turned slowly through the dark. Starlight traveled across its violet faces and vanished. Fine dust marked surfaces that had left Aurelia clean. Much later, the light of a far sun caught its edges, threw color through it, and faded.
It crossed emptiness beneath changing fields of stars. A distant world once filled its polished faces with a pale curve and slipped away. Darkness returned. Over years uncounted tiny scars gathered on the crystal.
Eventually one point ahead grew into a bright circle. Clouds appeared, then blue water and dark land. Mountain chains caught white along their highest edges.
The crystal met atmosphere.
Fire wrapped around it. The mass split along its seams into half a dozen pieces. Most fell in burning violet lines toward the same stretch of night. Three kept wider angles and did not come down with the rest.
Below, winter had settled over a mountain valley...
03Scene 3
Snow clung to shaded slopes and high ridges, but the valley floor was mostly brown grass, dark forest, stone, and a river that still ran black beneath the moon.
A loose herd moved along the lower ground. A small band of people traveled above them near the tree line, wrapped against the cold with wooden spears in hand.
Something much larger moved between the two groups.
Brown curls covered a body built on the scale of a mammoth. Tusks swept forward beneath a broad canine face. The giant dog kept to the edge of the herd without driving it, slowing whenever the animals behind him slowed and drifting outward when one wandered too far from the others.
He stopped before anyone else looked up.
His head lifted toward the sky. A low warning rolled out of his chest.
One of the people heard it and turned just as the first burning line crossed the stars.
The herd broke. Animals scattered across the frosted ground. Larger bodies drove downhill while smaller ones crowded into whatever space they could find. One young animal ran the wrong direction, straight toward the open center of the valley.
The giant dog went after it. He came up along its outside, matched it for several heavy strides, then crowded its path with his shoulder. The smaller animal veered away. He stayed with it until it turned back toward the others, then cut across the rear of the herd and drove the loose edge uphill.
More fire crossed the sky. The people above had stopped moving. One pointed toward the burning streaks. Another stepped farther out from the trees.
The dog changed direction and came up from below, filling the open ground in front of them with his body turned broad across the slope. One person tried to move downhill around him. He moved too, taking the path away.
A burning crystal passed overhead. The person stumbled backward. The dog pushed forward until they gave ground.
He stayed on their downhill side and kept pressing them toward a broken shelf of rock above the trees. One person fell behind. The dog circled back, crowded close until the straggler started moving again, then turned with the group toward higher ground. The herd was gathering below the same rock shelf.
The sky flashed violet.
The giant dog stopped outside the sheltering ground and looked back. The last animals were coming. So were the last people. Only then did he turn toward the valley.
The crystals dropped out of sight at the valley's far end.
For one heartbeat, the valley was quiet.
Then the horizon turned white.
The ground rose beneath them. The impact came through the earth first, a deep violent roll that threw animals sideways and drove the people against the rock. A moment later the sound arrived, large enough to flatten every other noise in the valley. Snow broke loose from the ridge. Birds burst from the dark trees.
The giant dog planted himself at the open edge of the group. Wind and dust hit next. He lowered his head and took it.
When the ground stopped moving, the herd started to spread again. He turned from the distant glow and moved along them, pushing the loose animals back together. One of the people stepped out from the rock shelf. The dog blocked that path too until the person retreated.
Only when everyone behind him had settled into a tight, nervous cluster did he look toward the far end of the valley again.
A violet glow was rising there. The giant dog climbed the broken slope at a steady pace and stopped once to look back. The herd remained together. The people had stayed near the rock. He continued until the ridge opened beneath his front paws and the whole valley lay below.
Smoke lifted from the impact site in a dark column. Fire moved low across broken ground. Beneath it, violet light showed through the haze where nothing in the valley had been glowing before.
The wind pulled at the long fur over his shoulders. Behind him, the lives he had moved off the valley floor waited in the dark.
He stood between them and the glow and watched.
A bank of cloud passed across the moon. The mountains sank into shadow until the only light below came from the place where the sky had struck the earth.
Before winter ended, snow would cover the scar. In time, the people who had seen the fire would be gone, then their stories, and eventually even the shape of the valley would change.
The crystals would remain.
