Royal Exile Over the Void

Copper shavings drifted across Torvund's faceplate like dead stars, each filament catching the violent sodium glare of an oncoming warhead against the open cockpit. He did not bother brushing them away. The digital timer on the console counted down seven seconds of uninterrupted current required to bypass the skiff's fried signal limiter, and the third imperial picket corvette was already three kilometers out, burning its auxiliary thrusters to slag in a direct suicide vector toward the star-manta’s left sensory eye.

Brannar’s voice crackled through the comm channel, level in the cold silence: "Capacitors are flat, Torvund. Payout on this beast surviving the next ten seconds just hit zero. Tell me your family clearance works on suicide runs, or we're all settling our accounts in the void."

"Patience is an aristocratic virtue, gunner," Torvund replied, his fingers working with surgical stillness inside the exposed wiring harness beneath the steering yoke. "Though I concede the imperial navy has grown deplorably uncouth in its piloting standards. Ramming at quarter-impulse is the tactical equivalent of hurling fine porcelain at a charging ox."

With a sharp flick of his brass-sheathed pliers, Torvund severed the skiff’s primary civil transponder line. The green telemetry light died instantly. In its place, he jammed a braided superconducting lead straight into the open socket, routing the signal directly into the star-manta's exposed dorsal power conduit. The leviathan's raw bio-electric current surged through the cable, rattling the console frame and throwing sparks against his fireproof gauntlets.

On the long-range sensor sweep, the charging corvette grew from a jagged blip into a howling wedge of blackened composite armor. Two kilometers. Its prow glowed dull orange from atmospheric drag it had collected in the upper shoals, venting incandescent coolant into the vacuum.

Torvund reached past the scorched casing of the transmitter and lifted the magnetic shroud off a recessed, six-pin cipher matrix. He had not touched that keyway since fleeing the imperial dockyards of Valdemar Prime four standard years ago. His thumbs knew the sequence before his mind debated it: five descending pulses, a parity lock, and the sovereign override signature reserved for admirals of the blood royal.

The audio feed from the imperial fleet band hissed with open static, followed by the harsh barking of a corvette flight lieutenant over an automated proximity alarm: "Target locked on primary optical cluster! Brace for—"

Torvund keyed the open link, his tone dropping into the cold, clipped cadence of the High Admiralty. "Corvette Scylla-Four, this is Imperial Command Authority Sigma-Seven. Countermand order alpha-nine. Dump your thrust manifolds and yaw forty degrees retrograde, or face summary execution for mutiny against the crown."

For two tenths of a second, nothing happened except the silent, terrifying acceleration of eight hundred tons of hardened alloy closing the final thousand meters.

Then the corvette’s primary avionics core answered the broadcast.

The warship's automated safety overrides, hardwired into every imperial keel by the foundries of House Valdemar, recognized the sovereign cipher and seized control of the maneuvering grid. Red warning beacons erupted across the corvette's flank. Its port vernier thrusters ignited in a frantic, uncoordinated sequence, fighting the locked burn vectors with mechanical hysteria.

The ship's bow lurched sideways.

It flashed past the star-manta’s left eye at less than eighty meters, its kinetic wake buffeting the maintenance skiff like a hammer striking an anvil. The roar traveled through the magnetic anchors into Torvund's boots—a bone-jarring vibration of screaming metal and sheared radiator fins. A shower of crystallized hydrazine sprayed across the manta’s nickel-iron scales, freezing into shimmering sheets before sublimation claimed them.

"Sweet mercy of the drift," Brannar muttered over the suit link, his breath hitching as the corvette tumbled end over end into the void. "You actually convinced that lunatic to tap the brakes."

"I did nothing of the sort," Torvund adjusted his harness buckle, setting the ceramic pin with a quiet click. "I merely reminded his navigation computer of its royal pedigree. Machines possess far superior manners compared to the officers who commandeer them."

A sudden diagnostic chime screamed from the skiff's auxiliary console.

Before the tumbling corvette drifted past the manta's stern, its lower ordnance hatch blew open with an explosive puff of nitrogen gas. A heavy breaching pod—a four-legged, spike-nosed boarding chassis packed with shaped thermite charges—decoupled from the belly rack and fired its cold-gas thrusters directly at the skiff.

The boarding chassis was not aimed at the leviathan's hide. Its optical lenses were locked squarely on Torvund's cockpit.

"A parting gift from the lieutenant," Torvund said smoothly. He did not touch the evasive thrusters. Instead, he whistled a two-tone command chirp into his secondary comm transmitter, toggling the slaved frequency of the six House Valdemar defense drones escorting the beast's spine. "Escort wing, defensive perimeter theta. Neutralize the pest."

The six disc-shaped drones detached from their cruising positions along the manta’s armored ridge. They moved in flawless unison, their copper-chased hulls gleaming against the darkness of the Vast. Accelerating with brutal magnetic snap, two drones crossed the breaching pod’s vector, projecting overlapping graviton shear fields across its midsection.

The boarding pod crumpled inward like a stamped ration tin. A third drone fired a concentrated arc of blue plasma into the pod’s propellant bladder, detonating it in a silent flash of white flame that vanished as quickly as it blossomed. The charred debris scattered harmlessly into the vacuum, tumbling toward the distant debris shelf.

On the manta’s forward crest, Velskr’s laugh broke over the tactical channel, raspy and laced with adrenaline. "Remind me never to insult your family silver, Torvund! You just gave that warship an eviction notice and a funeral in the same breath!"

"Do focus on the helm, Velskr," Torvund said, though a rare, faint smirk touched the corner of his mouth inside his helmet. "The steering bridle is slipping three degrees off the central nerve trunk, and I would prefer not to die while correcting your sloppy knot-work."

Torvund turned his attention back to the transceiver display. The spliced superconducting lead was still siphoning the dead corvette’s telemetry buffer, drinking down the warship’s decrypted tactical cache before the vessel fell out of line-of-sight range. Packets of military-grade data streamed across his flight glass in clean, amber columns.

He isolated the flagship's master broadcast link, where standard picket coordination directives normally ran.

What blinked back at him made his breath catch against the inside of his visor.

The transmission was not an open search-and-destroy perimeter order for stray beast-wranglers. It was a targeted containment net, signed with the personal seal of Crown Prince Haelmund.

The directive laid out the deployment grid across the egress corridor in meticulous detail: three heavy cruisers anchored across the grav-wells, kinetic suppression buoys placed to funnel the star-manta directly toward the flagship's tractor array, and an explicit standing order stamped in red imperial glyphs: Target Alpha identified aboard leviathan dorsal ridge. Preserve the traitor prince alive; vaporize all ancillary personnel.

The dispatch carried a timestamp matching the severed transponder ping in the lower shoals. Haelmund had not stumbled upon them by chance; the imperial vanguard had tracked the royal signature from the start.

Across the bow, three kilometers ahead, the running lights of the three imperial heavy cruisers shifted from scanning amber to a synchronized, icy blue. Their long dorsal rail-cannons swiveled in dead silence, tracking the manta's trajectory not to shatter its hull, but to bracket its flight path with kinetic flak.

Brannar’s voice cut in again, the humor gone. "Torvund. Those cruisers aren't spreading out to hunt. They’re forming a funnel. They want us to charge straight down the center."

Torvund calmly detached the superconducting lead from the console, securing the captured encryption module inside his breastplate pocket.

"They do indeed, Brannar," Torvund said, his voice level and steady as the shadow of the imperial dreadnoughts fell across the manta's gleaming hide. "My dear brother has set a dinner place for me at his table. It would be remarkably poor manners to keep him waiting."