A few minutes before Youri climbed the steps of the makeshift platform, out in orbit above Terria, an uneasy calm still held, the kind of quiet that comes right before something breaks it entirely. Every able citizen with access to a media feed was locked onto their screen, watching the broadcast unfold — including the two operators on duty at Central Command, both hunched over the same data pad, until an alarm tore through the room without warning, sharp enough that one of them nearly dropped his cup.
One of them snapped his head toward the main screen and spotted it immediately: a massive red contact blinking dead center in orbital space. Confused, he turned toward the viewport instead — and felt the shock hit his whole body at once. A ship had appeared directly in front of Central Command. Not just unexpected. Unprecedented. Given the deliberately unpredictable drift pattern Central Command maintained in orbit, no vessel without a live signal relay should have been able to so much as glimpse it, let alone close the distance entirely. And yet there it was — massive, nearly matching Central Command in scale, long and broad, its silhouette closer to a manta ray than any ship either of them had trained to recognize. Its bow tapered to a sharp point, and two enormous engines sat mounted at the rear atop a pair of sweeping wings.
The shock finally broke loose enough for the nearer operator to move. He lunged for the comms, trying to raise the command building directly. Under any normal circumstance, the Central Command lobby would have been packed wall to wall with soldiers at their stations — but with the execution underway, most of high command had traveled down to Terria for it, leaving only a skeleton crew behind. Worse, even most of that skeleton crew had wandered off to the main hall to watch the broadcast, leaving just the two of them at their posts. The second operator bolted for the exit, already shouting that he'd go round up everyone else, while the one left at the comm station stared at his console, unable to understand why he couldn't raise anyone down on Terria at all.
"This is Central Command, do you copy? This is Central Command — there is an unidentified ship hovering in orbit. Repeat, unidentified ship hovering in orbit!"
He'd barely finished the sentence when a section of the massive ship's hull split open. He turned back toward the viewport just in time to catch it, his eyes flickering with disbelief at what he was seeing. A synthesized voice cut through the panel beside him a moment later.
"Manual identification complete. Unidentified vessel designated Tarstenia. Flagged as highly dangerous — registered to Archon Patricia Mastrov. Standing bounty on the Tarstenia's crew: five million zells."
The operator sat frozen at what he'd just heard. Within seconds, every technician who'd wandered off to watch the broadcast came sprinting back into the lobby, dropping into their stations in a scramble. Central Command finally shifted into full alert, sirens blaring across the length of the station as the situation escalated into open combat readiness.
Then two orbitons launched from the Tarstenia's open hull, and the entire station snapped into a panic trying to identify them. Nothing worked. Every scan came back empty, and it became clear, fast, that whatever these machines were, nobody on that station had the first idea what they were capable of. Two images resolved on the main screen, one for each unit.
The first stood tall and sharply angular, a pair of massive structures sweeping up from its shoulders into a wide V-shaped silhouette that seemed built as much to intimidate as to function. Its head was small and narrow, two thin antennae rising from the crown, its legs slim and segmented, the whole frame drenched in black with veins of green worked into the plating like something still faintly alive underneath. Its eyes burned a deep red even through the low-resolution feed. The only piece of data that came through clean was a single name pulled from its transmitted signal: Hyperion.
The second unit cut a very different silhouette — more slender through the frame, with exaggerated hips and thin, elongated limbs that moved with an unsettling, almost liquid grace. A wide ring floated behind what looked like a beaked faceplate, flanked by a pair of wing-like protrusions on either side, and its head tapered up into a narrow, angular helmet. Where Hyperion was black and green, this one was finished in orange and gold, bright enough to catch the light even against the dark of orbit. Its designation came through as Theia.
It didn't take long for the alarms to spike again — both orbitons broke straight toward Central Command at full burn. In response, the station launched its full counter, a platoon of more than twenty-five Lex-unit orbitons streaking out to intercept. Hyperion, standing just beside Theia a moment earlier, vanished in a single motion. An instant later, streaks of light and sparking impact scars bloomed across the Lex units one after another, each one detonating in sequence until the entire platoon had been wiped out almost before anyone on the station registered the first explosion.
Every remaining gun on Central Command swung toward Hyperion at once. The station's main cannons opened fire the instant they finished charging, and five additional battleships launched as the situation spiraled entirely out of anyone's control, their own laser batteries adding to the barrage, the whole of Central Command throwing everything it had at a single standing target. Hyperion didn't move. It simply stood there and absorbed it, its eyes flaring brighter and brighter until they blazed pure red — and then a single beam of green energy erupted outward, blinding everyone watching, wiping the screens white for a solid few seconds.
When their vision finally cleared, blinking against the afterimage still burned into their eyes, Hyperion stood exactly where it had been a moment before.
Without a single scratch anywhere on its frame, not one mark to show for the sheer weight of everything that had just been thrown at it.