Page 50 of Hunted By the Wraiths
The first missile hit the leftmost transport, turning it into superheated scrap metal. The second and third hit simultaneously, taking out the command post and most of the soldiers near it. The concussion knocked everyone off their feet, including me.
That firing pattern. Overlapping coverage, maximum destruction, zero warning. It wasn’t Consortium chaos. It was precise, military-grade, and aimed exclusively at Vashil’s forces.
There was only one answer.
The Raptor.
She dropped out of jump-space directly above the docking bay, which was insane. You didn’t jump that close to a structure unless you had a death wish or a pilot who thought physics was more of a suggestion than a law.
An insane pilot. Had to be.
The Raptor’s belly guns opened up. Not the big cannons—those would have destroyed the entire station. These were the anti-personnel turrets, designed to turn infantry into memory. The Consortium soldiers scattered, looking for cover that didn’t exist. When a military frigate decides to rain death from above, cover is largely theoretical.
“Return fire!” someone shouted. Might have been Vashil. Hard to tell over the sound of the universe ending.
The soldiers who still had functional weapons started shooting at the Raptor. Small arms fire against military-grade hull plating. Like throwing pebbles at a mountain.
I rolled toward Thoryn. He’d gone down hard, dazed by the blast, and wasn’t moving. Blood pooled under him, more than before. The fall must have torn his wounds open again.
“Can you move?” I shouted over the chaos.
“Define move.” His voice was weak but he was conscious. Good enough.
The Raptor’s boarding ramp dropped. Exposing the interior during a firefight was madness. But then the crew Thoryn had described in the stories he’d told during those hours of waiting appeared at the top of the ramp, and I understood.
The Khavi commander, Serak, moved like smoke, his pale, pupil-less eyes sweeping the battlefield. Soldiers just... stopped. Not fear exactly. More like their brains couldn’t quite process what they were seeing. Shadow-meld. Thoryn had tried to explain it. I’d never seen it.
The human woman he’d called Jessa came next, laying down precise covering fire. The bonded pair, Ressh and his human mate Alix, flanked her, moving in perfect sync. He’d said they were “one weapon in two bodies.” He wasn’t wrong.
And then the Rokavai, Solren.
Thank the Dark.
The medic dropped from the ramp and headed straight for us. Through the firefight. Through the explosions. Like combat was a minor inconvenience between him and his patient. Three soldiers tried to stop him. He put them down without breaking stride. Not dead—apparently he didn’t kill unless necessary—but they weren’t getting up soon.
“About time,” I said when he reached us.
“My apologies. The welcoming committee was rude.” He was already assessing Thoryn, pulling out field dressings. “How much blood has he lost?”
“Most of it.”
“Helpful.” He slapped a pressure bandage on the worst wound. “Can he walk?”
“I can walk,” Thoryn said, then immediately proved himself a liar by failing to stand.
Solren sighed and threw Thoryn over his shoulder. I shook my head at the display of Rokavai strength. Thoryn, all seven feet and three hundred pounds of him, might as well have been a sack of flour.
“Move,” Solren ordered.
We moved—forty-seven meters of chaos between us and the Raptor. Soldiers shooting. Serak appearing behind them like a nightmare. Jessa and her team laying down covering fire. A man I didn’t recognize in the Raptor’s doorway with some kind of modified mining laser that turned cover into slag.
Halfway there, I saw Vashil.
She was behind an overturned cargo container, shouting into a comm unit. Calling for backup, probably. Or trying to salvage her payment. She looked up, saw me seeing her.
Our eyes met across the battlefield.
She ran.
