Page 153 of Star Claimed Omega
With a deep inhale, she eased away from the controls as her hand palmed the modulated explosive device from her inner jacket pocket.
Her finger brushed the activation glyph.
‘I’m sorry, Santi,’ she whispered. ‘There’s no other way.’
With an intake of breath, she hurled the bomb at the ferrous grating on the floor between her and Varnok.
A mere second later, she snapped her fingers.
A flicker of spectral potency wrapped around her, a last-second shield of crimson energy shaped like wings, closing tight.
Panels buckled, walls cracked. The hull ruptured.
It’s a new season, a new dawn, fly little bird, you’re free.
The melody drifted from a corner of her memory, from a time she scarcely remembered.
A lullaby once hummed by a woman with lemon and cocoa-scented hair and hands soft as velvet.
The song was all Soleil heard, even as a scream of light and combustion burst from the incendiary.
The Claw’sbelly ripped apart in a blast of searing white-gold fire, detonation cracking the floor apart like dry ice beneath boiling metal.
Varnok was engulfed, his spectral fur in flames as the blast wave, tinged with giant tendrils of radiant energy, curled and shredded through his frame.
Even as bulkheads and steel guarders were vaporized into atomized glitter asThe Claw’slast luminescence painted the heavens in wild hues.
Her world fell to black.
SANTIAGO
Santi, I’ve received an urgent message from Soleil. She says to stay back and keep a safe distance from the enemy ship.
Miral’s communique was clipped and urgent in Santi’s neural node.
‘Thefokk?’ he growled, trying to make sense of it, eyes on the attacking vessel.
Without warning, theVermilion Clawerupted before his eyes.
One moment, the crimson-threaded beast of a ship twisted through the abyss, her retro-thrusters flaring as she tried to gun him down.
The next, the void filled with a shrieking, sun-splitting scream of light.
The explosion punched outward in an expanding corona of molten debris and spectral energy.
The resultant shockwave burst from the epicenter like a god’s fist, beautiful, ruinous, and catastrophic, as if a dying star turned inside out.
Santi hovered mid-space, frozen in a split second of agonizing clarity, as the ship Soleil was on board, reduced to flaming shards and vaporized fragments.
Scarlet fire bloomed through the cosmos, flaring in brilliant curls of gold and carmine that seemed to singe the very fabric of the heavens.
He howled into the stars. ‘Nada.’
He got no response from the vast void, only a cold emptiness that mirrored his core.
His vision fractured when a second wave of light hit, illuminating debris as shards of hull plating spiraled toward him, dancing like jagged angels of death.
Still, he didn’t move; he simply couldn’t.
