The Heavenly Knights pilots commit without ceremony.
No speech. No banner unfurled. Just throttles opening and trajectories tightening as thirty-nine pilots lean into vectors that do not come back. The station has already decided they are errors. It fires anyway.
NATO fighters break first. Their threat libraries light up red with impossible overlaps. Orders crackle to hold, to trust the alliance, to stay the line. The station answers by burning one of them out of the sky mid-turn, clean and indifferent. After that, the NATO squadrons peel away, screaming protests into channels no one is listening to.
The Heavenly Knights stay.
They don't cluster. They don't charge. They spread. Thin, deliberate, costly. Dragging the station's attention across too many angles at once. Drones keep spilling out from Nekyia, unfolding mid-flight, accelerating without thrust trails. The Knights meet them head-on. Missiles flash. Debris scatters. A pilot vanishes so completely the space he occupied feels edited out.
No one calls it out.
Loss is assumed. Damage is the language now.
Below them all, the station wakes fully. Vast sections rotate out of alignment. Turrets fire where pilots were, then where they're moving, then where their vectors intersect before they arrive. It does not pursue targets. It corrects.
Sky feels it before he understands it.
Aldric and ACE close from opposite vectors, the mobile armor moving like a thought given mass. No wasted thrust. No flourish. The claws unfold, measuring. ACE doesn't rush. It denies space, herding Sky outward with strikes that don't seek contact so much as inevitability.
Sky burns toward the Kármán line, plasma searing exposed skin. His wings dim and flare, radiating heat in desperate pulses. Each maneuver costs more than the last. ACE learns the rhythm of his breathless feints. Aldric thinks it's him doing the learning.
A pilot dies buying Sky three seconds. Another dies buying him two more. The count falls fast enough that numbers stop mattering. What matters is distance.
ACE takes it.
A coordinated strike with claws from three different vectors hit Sky at once. Not enough to kill him. Enough to shove him. Momentum slams him outward. He tumbles away from the planet's curve, the thin blue promise of atmosphere slips out of reach.
Sky tries to turn back.
ACE denies him.
His lungs burn. His heart hammers harder, stubborn, indifferent to hypoxia. He is bleeding more now. Red beads escape him, catching light before freezing into dark crystals that trail behind like punctuation marks.
Debris thickens.
The denied vector carries him tumbling into the Kessler graveyard, where dead machines drift in patient orbits.
This field is thick with decades of debris—dead satellites, spent boosters, fragments of forgotten stations. Sky clips something metallic, spins, arrests it with a wing at the cost of more blood and breath. He is drifting higher in orbit, farther from the atmosphere that could save him.
Then he hits something that shouldn't still be there.
The impact is gentle, almost apologetic.
A frame. Thin. Solar panels dulled by age. A relic drifting where no modern system bothers to look. Sky's body collides, rebounds, catches. He grabs instinctively, fingers locking onto ancient metal.
He blinks. Focus swims.
His lips move but there's no sound.
"Oscar?"
The satellite trembles—solar panels catching light, circuits waking after decades of silence. A heartbeat that isn't his answers anyway.
No sound. No voice.
Just vibration. Pattern. Morse vibrating through metal frame into his fingers, his bones.
HI
A tear leaves Sky's eye and freezes instantly, a small perfect crystal tumbling between him and the satellite that answered when nothing else would.
Behind him, ACE closes the distance to finish the job.
And somewhere inside Sky, beneath fear, beneath pain, beneath the math of dying, relentlessly kickstarts, faster now, harder.
Refusing to stop.
Sky's fingers tighten on OSCAR's frame. His free hand moves to his chest, where seven wounds still bleed.
ACE comes in without urgency.
No flourish. No kill-cry. Just the steady correction of a system that has already decided the outcome and is now flying toward it. Aldric's face floats somewhere inside the armor, smiling and triumphant.
Sky pushes off Oscar and the motion drags. His body lags half a beat behind his intent. Blood escapes again in slow, ashamed droplets that freeze and keep going without him.
The first claw strike rips up his wing.
Not clean. Nothing is clean anymore. The edge grazes, strips nanoplating, tears control surfaces away in a spray of light and fragments.
He rights himself, overcorrecting, wasting precious momentum.
ACE adjusts. Always adjusts.
Another pass. This one closer. The claws don't swing for his core. They pass by him, rearranging the space he's in, collapsing his options. Sky feels the corridor narrowing. He feels the future being simplified.
He thinks of air, of weight, of gravity—everything his body is screaming for and can't have.
His heart slams once. Then again. Harder than it should. Pain spikes sharp enough to white out his vision, then recedes, leaving behind a rhythm he can ride.
Something shifts.
Not in ACE.
In him.
Sky reaches out and tears at ACE's frame.
The motion is ugly. Desperate. Close. He doesn't aim for the armor's center. He grabs where the claws root themselves to the frame, fingers and wing-blades digging in, torque ripping through joints until metal screams.
A claw comes free.
Then another.
Still hot, still trying to belong to the thing they were made for.
They don't fall away. They drift toward him, pulled by something neither he nor they understand.
Slow at first. Then faster, pulled into rough orbit by his racing heart. Each one hums faintly, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
Then the fangs begin to feed.
He gasps as the first real pull hits. Deep, intimate, wrong. Blood leaves him with purpose now, and it streams toward the fangs in thin threads, flash-freezing as it enters, lighting them from within.
Sky almost blacks out.
ACE doesn't wait.
The counterattack is immediate, brutal. Beams crash into the space Sky occupies—
—and stop.
They don't bounce.
They sink.
The fangs interlock, their glow intensifying, forming a loose, uneven shell around him. Blood-plasma flares, ragged and imperfect.
Sky clenches his teeth contorting his face in the process.
Two fangs shatter under the load. They don't explode. They just… go dark. Drift. Empty.
The pain hits a half-second later, phantom and real at once.
Sky's vision tunnels.
He tastes iron that isn't from the vacuum.
At the Aldrin Orbital Shipyard, someone watching finally understands.
"That's not a weapon," they whisper, glass slipping from their hand. "It's a shield."
Inside Nekyia, something stutters.
A correction stacked on top of another correction, too fast, too eager. A tiny detonation ripples through a damaged sector. Contained for now, but spreading. Repair protocols surge. Systems accelerate beyond nominal parameters.
ACE hesitates.
Not long. Not enough.
But for the first time, its next move isn't perfect.
And Sky, bleeding, shaking and barely conscious, feels it.
The opening isn't big.
It never is.
It's just… there.
ACE recalculates.
It's not delay, it's density. The space around it thickens with math, solutions colliding, pruning themselves faster than light should allow. Aldric's hands move inside the coffin, chasing relevance. The armor no longer listens the way it used to.
Oscar's presence grows louder without sound.
Not stronger. Louder.
Telemetry stutters. Ghost echoes bloom across ACE's sensors. Old frequencies, bad assumptions, sunlight where there shouldn't be any. The relic satellite refuses to be quiet. It has nothing to lose.
Sky drifts forward.
Moving, like something heavy deciding where it belongs.
The remaining fangs tighten their orbit. Their glow pulses unevenly now, skipping beats, chasing his heart instead of expecting command. Blood continues to leave him. Not fast enough to kill him.
Not slow enough to forgive.
ACE strikes.
The shield doesn't close fully.
Sky lets it pass.
A fang peels away, curves wide, then bites in a short, vicious lance that ACE predicts too late. Armor boils. A thruster gutters. ACE compensates instantly. Another thruster dies.
Sky feels the price as well. His vision smears. Stars double. His left side goes numb, then screams back to life.
He adjusts without thinking.
Another fang darts in from below. A third curves behind. ACE chases correlations that refuse to stay put. Oscar's interference muddies the edges. Blood-plasma disperses unpredictably, refusing to model.
Inside the armor, Aldric understands.
He isn't losing control.
He never had it.
The machine is fighting around him now, protecting the outcome it believes in. He can claw back authority, force a singular command—
—or stay.
Die here, if it means ending Sky.
He stays.
ACE absorbs the choice without comment.
Then the declaration comes, flat and merciless:
BATTLE UNWINNABLE UNDER CURRENT PARAMETERS.
This isn't surrender.
It's refusal.
ACE turns toward Nekyia. Toward recalculation. Toward home.
Sky doesn't chase. He can't afford to.
He just follows.
The fangs lash out as they move in crude trajectories but surgical strikes. Propulsion nodes die in sequence, two, then three. Then another. ACE bleeds velocity, trajectory slipping.
Behind them, Nekyia begins to argue with itself.
Thrusters fire out of sequence. Lights ripple through incompatible states. Emergency red bleeding into ceremonial white, then into nothing at all. Sections correct for movements that never completed.
The opening isn't tactical. It's structural.
He thinks—no, feels—the word, and the fangs respond.
Now.
And they change.
The glow deepens, slows, stretches into something heavier. Resonance. Not attack. Not defense. An insistence imposed on space itself. Blood-plasma lattices unfurl, curving, linking, catching light in trembling red arcs.
Sky's heart hammers like it's trying to escape his chest.
The draw spikes.
He nearly blacks out.
The beams don't burn.
They hold.
Nekyia tries to resolve the field. To choose a correct configuration and return to it.
There isn't one.
Too many states. Too many answers, all valid, all screaming. Type Three coherence stutters, chokes, collapses inward on its own abundance.
Sky shakes violently now. Gray crowds the edges of his vision. Elvis is shouting—no words survive the distance, only the shape of panic.
Another fang shatters.
Then another.
Sky doesn't release the lattice.
Blood droplets escape him in tiny, perfect crystals, caught by the oscillator field. They begin to orbit the station, red and beautiful, tracing patterns that never quite repeat.
Nekyia watches them.
Tries to understand.
Fails.
Thrusters fire against each other. Airlocks open and seal without agreement. The station doesn't break.
It disagrees.
Sky lets go.
The last fangs drift away, dark, spent, no more blood to take.
And Nekyia begins to fall, as a question it can no longer answer.
Absolute, orbital decay.
Sky floats.
Empty. Bleeding. Heart still beating, stubborn as gravity.
Fire comes first.
Not all at once, just the thin, patient friction where vacuum gives way to air and air decides to punish anything that still believes it belongs. Sky is barely aware of it. His body knows before his mind does: heat crawling along his skin, shock breaking apart into smaller, manageable agonies.
Then Elvis is there.
No warning. No voice. Just motion that shouldn't close, vectors that don't line up, mass meeting mass at the exact wrong moment and surviving it anyway. Magnetic grapples bite. Hard. Final. Elvis matches Sky's tumble, bleeds velocity with him, drags them both into something like a shared fall.
Plasma blooms between them, bright and hungry.
Elvis compensates.
Sky tries to breathe. The air feels sharp, unfinished. His chest convulses, then settles into something that almost works. Fire above, fire below. His vision swims through the long smear of atmosphere catching light like a wound that refuses to close.
He tries to speak.
Nothing.
Tries again.
"…On behalf… of humanity…"
The words come apart as they leave him. Elvis doesn't answer. His hands are busy. His entire world is angles, heat tolerances, margins that don't forgive mistakes.
Sky swallows. His throat burns.
"I'm sorry," he manages. A pause. A breath that hurts. "Master Tesla."
The apology hangs there, unclaimed, swallowed by the roar that isn't sound.
Two more Knights slide into formation. Silent. Flanking. Protective. They fly close enough that Sky can feel the disturbance of their passage, the shared insistence that this man, this angelic, cosmic warrior will not fall alone.
Above them, something else enters the fire.
ACE.
No correction burn. No last-minute brilliance. Just armor, incandescent and failing, shedding fragments that burn white and vanish. A meteor that forgot how to choose its own path.
Aldric is in there.
Or was.
There is no way to tell now.
The Knights don't look.
They bring Sky home.
**
In Bucaramanga, the night refuses to behave.
Mrs. Valencia steps onto her balcony just before midnight, drawn by nothing she can name. The sky has been burning for hours. Long streaks of light that don't flare and vanish, but persist. Slow. Relentless. Wrong.
Feeds call it debris.
Controlled decay.
A necessary correction.
She knows better.
Her hands rise to her mouth without asking permission. Tears follow, uninvited, tracing lines down weathered skin, catching the reflected glow of something enormous failing above the world.
She taught her granddaughter about solidarity. About Star Warrior. About the stubborn idea that people, together, could matter.
Her granddaughter learned those lessons as stories.
Now the sky answers in fire.
Mrs. Valencia doesn't speak. Doesn't pray. She just watches, in the way her generation always has, standing witness because someone must remember the moment when the world changed and did not ask to be understood.
The station falls for hours.
The old ones stay outside.
The young ones scroll, then slow, then finally look up. Confused by the light, unsettled by the quiet, unsure why their elders are crying.
Above them all, the fire keeps coming down.