Chapter 1: Demi CHAPTER 1 DEMI Captain Demora Kim never expected to be a mechanic on board her own ship. She didn''t have the qualifications--she wasn''t an engineer or a technician. She studied cartography at the Galactic Cluster Fleet Academy, which didn''t really apply to repairing hardware. But things always broke on the GCF Starship Horizon, often leaving the closest person available to fix the problem. In this case, she''d told the crew that she''d meet them down at the mess hall for ramen night soon. Classified war intel was coming through, and she just needed a minute. But a minute didn''t suffice, because the message wasn''t processing at her private station. So she''d walked down the hall from her quarters to the bridge, though at the path''s end, the elevator tempted her to just leave and go get ramen.

However, she did the responsible thing--the captainly thing--and stepped forward. Two doors slid open, revealing the large--and empty--bridge of the Horizon. Through the wide front window, a blanket of space and stars lay ahead. In front of that, a floating hologram of the ship''s statuses projected from the large square data table. Normally, she''d head right to the captain''s chair near the back of the rectangular space. But instead she turned immediately to the corner comms station. She knelt down to the access panel, a sheet of alloy covered in magnetic decals of rock bands spanning nearly three hundred years--a giveaway that Lieutenant Lynn Kohli was both the ship''s communications officer and resident music buff. Demi unlatched the panel and slid it off to expose wiring and hardware, then got onto her back for a look.

There it was. Just as she''d suspected, the chip that drove routing of incoming classified messages had simply fallen loose. It happened every few months, like many other things on the Horizon, because parts wore down, got damaged, needed haphazard fixes. Ten years stuck in a mysterious gravity well would do that to hardware. Demi traced her finger along the edge of the chip until she got to the exact right angle to lock it in, then pushed. It clicked into place. She sealed up the panel and stood up, then tapped the console to process the message right here on the bridge. Stuck, then unstuck.

Kind of like the Horizon itself. And just like the Horizon, the chip saw war when it got unstuck--here, in the form of communications regarding the ongoing civil war with the Withdrawal Movement. Demi went to her seat and glanced at the clock, a reminder that her skeleton crew were down in the mess hall. A captain and her crew of seventeen didn''t exactly fill a starship built for seventy-two. But when things actually worked, Demi found the empty ship a peaceful, almost stable environment for the greatest of scientific endeavors: to restore the photonic engine that brought them home. Such a project proved a blessing: scientific progress and a reason to stay far away from the front. None of them needed the turmoil of the war; they''d seen and lived worse. Because those seventeen people down at ramen night were more than just crew members.

Getting trapped with no outside communication or support caused all sorts of things to claim the lives of their colleagues. And when other spacecraft got pulled into the well, distrust and sabotage took more of them until Demi forged truces between the often at-odds groups. Then the well grew unstable, eventually imploding neighboring ships, and panic took over: skirmishes over supplies, emergency repairs that wouldn''t quite hold, and long, empty nights debating whether it was worth it to go on. No, they weren''t just crew. Or friends. Or family. They were survivors together. Demi lingered on that when the wide holographic display shifted from ship status to an incoming classified message about a war she wanted no part of.

Or at least, it started to. CLASSIFIED--FOR YOUR EYES ONLY appeared before dissolving to the sight of Galactic Cluster Minister of Defense Cabell. Cabell opened his mouth before the image froze and a system warning appeared, along with a schematic of comm array hardware. Primary classified decoder failing--rerouting to secondary array This issue had nothing to do with a loose chip. It flashed several times before Rerouting successful appeared and the message played out. "To all fleet captains. I apologize about the mass outreach, but it was the most efficient way to reach all of you given the rapidly unfolding situation. An incident occurred on the central mining station of the gas moon Ark Getru in the Nedotia System.

" The image changed from Cabell to the station itself, a diamond-shaped conflux of alloys designed for mining gas and supporting a massive civilian community. "This is a select edit of security footage. I am warning you that this is not easy to see." It started out innocently enough, a view of a factory floor where staff stood lined at machines, holding pumps and nozzles. Then the image shook, the feed becoming blocks of colored and distorted pixels for a moment. Then everything moved--workers, equipment, hardware, safety helmets, all of it flew in a strange way, a sudden jolt that tossed everything toward the left side of the image. It took Demi a second to realize what happened. The people didn''t fly horizontally; no, the station tilted .

And the people dropped due to gravity. Suddenly, ramen night seemed so very far away. The footage changed to a courtyard view of a park near the station''s upper floor. Residents milled about, some walking along the gardens, some seated around a fountain with a picnic blanket, and others playing with pets or children. Then the same thing happened--first, a massive shake, then everything lifted and flew to the left side of the image. Except this time, the yellow clouds of Ark Getru rotated nearly ninety degrees, as if someone turned the background sideways. And against those clouds, tiny dots began to trickle from background buildings and structures, a line of specks floating helplessly out of the station, like insects crawling out of a flooded rock face. The image switched again, this time to a flying security vehicle hurtling toward the station.

A nonhuman voice spoke, her words tinted by both concern and curiosity as a single explosion fired off near the station''s lower levels. Soon another bomb went off, and another and another, until the station''s multiple rings of stabilizers and magnetic repulsors--originally designed to work with Ark Getru''s significant magnetic fields--all exploded, a one-by-one line that created systematic rings of destruction around the station''s middle and bottom. The repulsor tech that defined the very existence of the Ark Getru central mining operation simply vaporized. And with it, the gas planet''s natural gravity pulled at the superstructure, first causing it to tilt on its axis before a rapid descent into the whirling gaseous core of the planet below, leaving the security vehicle''s camera to stare at an empty location of puffy clouds and several blinking beacons. Seconds ago, the pilot''s voice cried out. But now her vehicle hovered, the only noise the panicked radio chatter over her comms. " Internal view. Surface view.

External view ," Cabell said as he faded back in, his broken gaze betraying his otherwise stoic voice. " There is more recorded, of course, but it''s not necessary for our purposes ." One explosion wouldn''t do it. A dozen well-placed bombs wouldn''t do it. This required a massive coordinated operation, and Demi guessed possibly seventy or eighty bombs were needed to take out the station, her mind racing through the logistics necessary to attack one of the Cluster''s most historically lauded resource stations. And how the hell did someone get past security? " Here are the facts of the event ." As Cabell spoke, text appeared across the hologram: Ark Getru population statistics, demographics, mining output. One line in particular was highlighted-- Exports impact 15% of Cluster non-FTL propulsion .

Demi figured that in a war over resources, anything impacting Cluster-standard faster-than-light systems was probably pretty important. Though not as important as the bold words at the bottom of the hologram, a line of characters with the most harrowing, stark text any captain could ever see: Estimated destruction rate: 100% Estimated casualty rate: 100% Just like what happened to ships in the gravity well. The damage was the same, the only difference being that in the well, implosion crushed people instead of tossing them into the atmosphere. Demi thought she''d left that level of destruction behind. But in a way, it felt like it followed her home. "Prime Minister Kentworthy put out a statement on behalf of the Withdrawal Movement neither confirming nor denying involvement. However, our intelligence believes this attack was in response to our last attempt at negotiation--specifically, the claim that the WM lacked the organization to produce coordinated efforts and should release territory as such. It is likely that similar large-scale, quick-strike attacks are in the works.

" Cabell bit down on his lip, hesitating for several seconds, and during that span, a gnawing realization hit that, unlike what Demi witnessed in the gravity well, this was self-inflicted, a byproduct of hubris and stubbornness playing with risk. The Cluster bluffe.