“This way!” Hiau says sharply.

  Making the turn, the two sprint down the corridor, expecting an opening for Lym’s gunship to come through. The scene consisted of scorch marks, blood stains, and a wrecked industrial environment.

  “Why are you doing this?” demands Lym as she ran. “What reason—”

  “Because they will kill all of us!” replies Hiau between breaths. “Every single last one of us will be killed if they finish this!”

  Just as they arrive at the opening, unexpectedly, they find themselves running head-on into a large squad of armed troops. Instinctively, Hiau takes on a defensive position, but Lym recognizes them as some of the Ulminhans. Leading the charge is Vertan.

  “Vertan!” she calls out. “Are you alright—”

  “Lym!” Vertan shouts back with alarm, eyeing Hiau. “Behind you!”

  He and the Ulminhans all drew their arms and pointed their weapons directly at Hiau. In response, Hiau raises all of her hands in the air to signify that she is unarmed.

  “Stay back!” Vertan screams back. “Don’t move! Don’t even think of laying a hand on her! Lym, come over—”

  “Vertan!” Lym exclaims as she slowly approaches them with an extended hand, attempting to signal the Ulminhans to lower their weapons. “It’s alright, she’s with us now, you can lower your—”

  “Lym, what are you talking about?” Vertan exclaims incredulously. “She’s been hunting us! She’s hurt you! Move aside—!”

  “I’m defecting!” exclaims Hiau, her arms still raised. “I swear it on my life, you can kill me if you don’t believe me.”

  “She’s telling the truth,” says Lym. “She crashed her own ship for us out there, she's helping us get to the gateway.”

  Hiau nodded at the statement, her eyes widened with uncertainty towards Vertan. Vertan looks over to Hiau. Then back to Lym. Then back to Hiau. The rifle he was currently using never once wavered from its position pointed towards Hiau’s face, which sat squarely within his crosshairs. He wanted to blast the bitch’s head clean off of her shoulders for what she had done to Lym. It was so clearly obvious who she is, what she is, and what she represents. After being the direct force of danger towards them, he’s supposed to believe Hiau that she wants to help them now, all of a sudden, of all times?

  But Lym remained unwavering in her stance. Something was different here. It is true; Lym could easily have taken Hiau out beforehand. There should never have been a need for them to warn her of something behind her for any reason at all; she would have seen it coming light-years away. That must mean that the two have been together for at least a while.

  But there wasn’t a lot of time to think deeper about it.

  An explosion rings out elsewhere across the ship. There’s seemingly nobody around left alive to meaningfully deal with the ongoing destruction of the ship. They need to move, now. Or, risk going down with the entire place.

  “Fine, I trust your instincts,” Vertan finally replies before motioning for the rest of the troops present. “Everyone, let’s move back out to the ships! We’re running out of time and air here.”

  Despite the confusion, everyone obliged to Vertan’s command, and quickly led the way back to the waiting Ulminhan ships outside of the larger vessel’s starboard side. After an extended period of wreaking havoc to the other ships of the fleet, Lym’s gunship zips back towards their position in anticipation of their arrival.

  Hiau finds herself in a momentary state of relief. This is short lived however, as she finds Vertan eyeing her with a dirty suspicion.

  Somehow, despite her enormous strength, she finds herself caught off-guard when he grabs her back for a moment. For a split-second, she feared what he might do to her as he brought her ear down to his level.

  “You try anything funny and lay even a finger on her, I’ll kill you,” his unwavering voice said coldly.

  Despite that he is a normal individual who is supposed to be beneath her, the straight manner of which he said this made her genuinely believe that somehow, some way, Zviedal will do it, just like he had already done everything else. It felt like it had everything to do with holding up his word over a stated boundary as much as it was vengeful resentment.

  And then, just like that, he let her go, and the group continued to make their way back the way they had come through the doomed vessel. Broken flights flicker here and there, and fluids of varying sources leaked through cracks, faulty pipes, the walls and ceiling. Sparks here and there would burst or flow similarly. The Ulminhans all looked around in awe at the absolute destruction wrought to such an overwhelmingly powerful warship in such a short span of time. Here and there, they wouldn’t even be walking entirely within it anymore, but have to hop across short spans of space, floating through zero-gravity before reentering on the other side, the ship’s systems barely holding itself together, still running without operators.

  Arriving at the entrance from which they came, the Ulminhans quickly boarded the awaiting ships, waiting anxiously, nervous of getting hit by something themselves. Lym’s gunship flies into view, and likewise, Lym, Vertan, and Hiau rush on board. With the doors clicking themselves closed, and with the hiss of pressurized air, the ships depart from the doomed vessel just as a final implosion destroys it for good. Flying haphazard debris barely misses them on their mad dash away from it.

  In the distance, General Hiau’s warship seems to have met a similar fate. The once majestic behemoth now lay in ruins, and Hiau watched as she left everything she knew behind. She had made careful measures not to become emotionally attached to anyone that she worked with, and yet it still caused her to pause for a moment, watching every single one of her troops and crew perish in such an inescapable fate.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Elsewhere, the several Coalition vessels that did manage to survive and didn’t find themselves completely torn up into ruins turned in an attempt to engage their small convoy of four total ships. From here, the three Ulminhan vessels followed Lym’s gunship, and all performed evasive maneuvers to avoid being struck by cannon fire, twisting, turning, and diving, their smaller forms allowing themselves to outmaneuver the larger ships.

  Making the final dash for it, the four ships widen the distance from the battlefield above the planet, and close the gap between them and the gateway, which remained open and operational in front of them.

  The unthinkable happens.

  A shot from one of the Coalition ships’ macrocannons fires directly at the gateway, and strikes the massive ring. For a moment, a hiccup in time and space seemed to occur as the gateway attempted to restabilize itself. The only thing that saved the gateway from complete destruction altogether was its sheer size in comparison to them.

  And then another shot.

  And another.

  Another.

  Another.

  Some of these rounds miss, and some hit. But it was clear that the gateway can only take so many hits before catastrophic damage. It can’t hold up forever. Past a breaking point, the consequences will rip apart everyone present across spacetime.

  It became clear that they would rather everyone here die than have Lym reach Happia.

  Another shot rings out, and preemptively, Lym moves to intercept the shot, turning her ship back to face them. Firing at the round, she destroys the massive shell, the opposite direction of which she fired, providing enough force to prevent it from making it to the gateway.

  The chatter across comm lines becomes mad chaos.

  The Ulminhan ships, knowing they can’t keep up, instead attempt to provide cover fire, firing back with what little they did have onboard in the general direction of the surviving Coalition fleet in any attempt to distract them from what occurred at hand. The gap continued to widen between the two, and attempts to meaningfully hit any desired target on either side became increasingly more difficult.

  Despite all of their best efforts, slowly, the gateway deteriorated. Every now and then, another shot might hit the massive structure, weakening its frame, and it began to waver from instability. It too seemed like it was barely holding on to its life, struggling to reconfigure, recalibrate, and restructure itself to accommodate for the damage.

  But the Coalition ships flew ever closer up to it, trailing behind Lym, Vertan, Hiau, and the Ulminhans.

  If one were to view the carnage over the horizon of the planet, one would see the endless sparkle of debris begin to coalesce into a partial crescent in orbit in front of the colossal gateway ring.

  The guns of Lym’s vessel drummed ceaselessly, relentlessly spending round after round as each ammunition canister is spent in succession. Only with such overwhelming firepower saturating the Coalition’s warships straight back could they stand a chance at survival. Beams of concentrated and condensed energy flashed ferociously across the empty vacuum in an attempt to penetrate the enemy’s powerful projected shields and their obscenely thick armor. Every now and then, a shot might make it through and send upheaval spewing up and out into space.

  But at last, a shot comes ringing straight towards them, nearly head on.

  In a moment’s instinct, Vertan yanks on Lym and throws her into the back of the gunship with Hiau. In the next moment, the resulting impact throws them all off course. Being of Happian nature, the gunship survives, even if heavily damaged from a head-on strike, and already, its systems began to flicker back to life in its struggle to survive. Outside, its hard exterior appeared to immediately heal and recover, as though injuries closing up. Masses of mechanical bits moving in organic fashion scurried to repair the vessel, the temporarily immobilized vehicle healing itself from its wounds.

  On the inside however, was another story. As different parts that had been knocked out of place slowly moved and shuttered themselves back into reconfiguration, Vertan lay unconscious, with his head bloodied from the impact earlier. Lym and Hiau on the other hand were able to recover more quickly, and remain conscious at hand.

  “Vertan!” Lym screamed, rushing to his aid. Immediately, she scrounged her ship for what little medical aid she had on hand. Were they even compatible with him?

  Hurriedly, Hiau attempts to figure out how to pilot the gunship, but is met only with confusion once she enters the still self-repairing and reconfiguring cockpit. Nothing made sense to her, even as she moved quickly to figure it all out.

  From the corner of her eye, what she assumes to be the communications line is attempting to relay a message. Trying a few of the nearby buttons until she found the right one, she picks up the line.

  “Hang tight!” an Ulminhan voice exclaimed from the other side. “We’re coming!”

  Shortly afterwards, a bump could be felt throughout the ship. And then twice more.

  From the outside, two of the Ulminhan ships have pressed against the gunship from each side, one on the left, and one on the right, securing a tight grip. From the front, the third ship pulls up into position facing them to push, and steadily, they all turn back towards the gateway, and the Ulminhan ships push them onwards, picking up speed.

  Just as they made it up to the gateway, several final shots from the Coalition pummeled at the gateway, and they vanished through to the other side just as the entire structure began imploding for good.

  Too weakened to continue holding itself together, the gateway collapses, folding inwards onto itself in a cascading series of implosions. It began both sucking things in and spewing other matter out, and soon, the newly formed cosmic phenomena began pulling at the remaining Coalition ships, the debris, and eventually the planet with its gravity.

  There was no escape for everyone present.

  It continuously grew and grew, simultaneously decaying as it did so. Eventually, after tearing the planet down below to shreds and absorbing it completely, there was nothing else in its immediate vicinity for it to consume, and it began decaying and shedding itself off until the final collapse was akin to a dying star’s supernova.

  The resulting phenomenon reached out to the rest of Gateyard Olmona. The array of other gateways, particularly the functional ones, resulted in a cascade of chain reactions, each setting one after the other off. The entire place ground to a halt, energy flowing to other sectors began getting cut off, and the colossal structures monitoring energy redirection from the black hole ceased their movements.

  The black hole in the center continued to gain ever more mass as it consumed everything in the vicinity. The structures put in orbit to reflect its trapped energy back towards itself remained as they are, and with nothing to release it, the pressure built up until a massive explosion finally took out the entire place.

  Gateyard Olmona, in a short span of time, has ceased to exist. The sectors of which it serviced are now either left in the dark or pummeled with similar cosmic storms.