[One's PoV]

  “I repeat—the Empress is dead. He took her down.”

  The message rolled across Aquarius internal channels.

  Yet even if they hadn't announced, it was impossible not to know.

  Nearly every public channel, news streams, civilian feeds, and pirate relays were broadcasting the same shaky, smoke-filled footage from Chicago.

  One stood in the hangar bay with the sound of those feeds buzzing through his helmet.

  How the hell did he activate that armor? One wondered, staring at nothing for a moment while the hangar’s chaos surged around him.

  He’d watched Oliver fight since Aquarius was born, five years of battles, retreats, miracles, and improvisations that should have ended in death but never did.

  Daedalus-1’s voice snapped him back to the present.

  “We finished the improvements,” Daedalus-1 announced, stepping out from behind a holographic console. His eyes were bright with exhaustion and triumph. “You should depart. Now.”

  “Now?” One asked, confused. “Shouldn’t we wait until they finish the mission?”

  Daedalus-2 appeared beside his partner, still wearing insulated gloves, a tool belt hanging heavy at his waist. He didn’t bother hiding his urgency.

  “Teleporting something that large isn’t that easy,” Daedalus-2 said, nodding toward the bulk of the hangar’s newest monstrosity. “If we delay and the situation shifts, the jump window might cost us minutes to reach orbit. Minutes we won’t have.”

  Before One could respond, the base’s warning system initiated a new alert.

  “Alert. Ork vessels approaching Earth.”

  The announcement echoed through the hangar’s speakers. Around him, technicians froze mid-step. A drone jerked in the air as its stabilizers corrected.

  “What’s happening?” One demanded, opening a channel to the Hermes.

  “With the Empress down, they’re in chaos,” Hermes-3 said. “Some generals are demanding full invasion—immediate deployment into major cities. Others are attempting to authorize maximum-destruction weapons. We’re seeing contradictory fleet movements.”

  One’s stomach tightened beneath the armor.

  Chaos.

  That was what he feared the most. Not a disciplined enemy, not a predictable doctrine—chaos meant desperation, and desperate armies did terrible things.

  “Nausters locked into combat around Luna,” Hermes-4 reported a clean, fast voice over the internal channel.

  One didn’t answer immediately. He was already moving, boots pounding up the ramp toward the staging line where three massive frames waited. Even powered down, they radiated menace.

  “Hippeus are waiting for your command, One,” Hermes-3 added. The word waiting sounded wrong. Nothing in this hangar was waiting. Everything was rushing.

  “We’re ready,” One replied, stepping toward the central mech. His voice came out calm because he forced it to.

  To his left and right, Two and Three climbed into their respective cockpits. The boarding hatches sealed behind them.

  He paused at the edge of the ramp for half a heartbeat, looking up at the central machine. Its cockpit aperture yawned open, lit by the cold glow of internal diagnostics.

  He climbed in.

  The hatch sealed. The outside noise dulled into a muted roar, replaced by the hum of life-support and the whisper of systems coming online.

  The cockpit wrapped around him, harness locking across his chest, displays blooming into view like layered sheets of translucent glass.

  He exhaled once.

  “Powering up.”

  The three mechs awakened together. Their cores ignited with a low, rising thrum that traveled through the cockpit floor.

  “Safety check initiating.” One announced.

  “Validating!” Daedalus-1 shouted back across the bay intercom.

  Daedalus-2 cut in immediately, crisp and louder. “Weapons OK.”

  “Defenses OK.”

  “Energy OK.”

  “Systems OK.”

  The readouts on One’s visor reflected each confirmation. The mechs were not at maximum, but they were alive. The kind of alive that wanted a battlefield.

  “Ready for departure,” Daedalus-1 finished.

  The comm channel hissed again, cutting through the hangar’s controlled rhythm. A new voice, one of the Nau commanders, broke in, strained and trembling beneath professional restraint.

  “We have a problem. Ork ships are too close, we can’t hold them. We need Hippeus now!”

  The urgency was raw in the transmission, the kind that turned words into noise and noise into action.

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  One’s eyes flicked across the tactical overlay that Hermes fed him. Red marks swarming at the edge of Earth’s orbital band, trajectories converging, defensive arcs already bending under sheer volume.

  “How long until we’re there?” One demanded, opening a direct line to Hermes-3.

  A pause, long enough to be terrifying.

  “Best case: five minutes,” Hermes-3 answered.

  Five minutes. In orbital combat, five minutes was a lifetime. Five minutes was an entire defense net collapsing.

  One keyed the external speaker, his voice filling the hangar with command-grade force.

  “Accelerate the hangar. We need to leave now.”

  Engineers sprinted away from the launch corridor, boots skidding on oil-slick plating. Maintenance drones tore upward, clearing the airspace. Overhead cranes froze mid-swing, then snapped into safe-lock positions as warning strobes bathed everything in pulsing red.

  The colossal doors at the far end of the hangar began to move.

  “Gates open!” Daedalus-2 announced.

  The view beyond the doors was a blinding wedge of sky. For a moment, it looked almost peaceful, a bright, indifferent world outside the panic of the hangar.

  One felt his mech’s core rise in pitch, the restrained power humming.

  “Hippeus, initiate departure,” One ordered.

  He shoved the throttle forward.

  The mech’s repulsors screamed to life, dumping heat into the hangar floor.

  Every mecha available surged forward in a tight spearhead formation.

  One pushed harder.

  Acceleration pressed into his body through the harness. The cockpit dampeners fought the G-forces, but it still felt like being pinned by a giant hand.

  Cloud layers sheared past. The sky darkened rapidly. The horizon curved. Then the last thin veil of atmosphere fell away.

  Stars sharpened into view.

  “We’re approaching the Gates,” One announced.

  The Gates weren’t doors in any human sense. They were satellites. Built frames in Aquarius orbit, positioned like anchor points for controlled mecha teleportation. In the ideal configuration, four of them would synchronize, folding a stable corridor through space to a fixed destination.

  A transmission cut in from the Gate station, tight with strain. “Gates still charging. It’ll take a few minutes.”

  “A few minutes isn’t something we have,” One snapped back, eyes flicking over the tactical overlay. “NEA ships are getting torn apart. Our fleet is locked in combat near Luna.”

  Silence, seconds that felt like a cliff edge.

  Then the Gate commander answered, voice careful, weighted with the kind of warning that only comes when someone is about to do something they were never meant to do. “We can open a smaller jump. Two satellites instead of four. It won’t carry all the Hippeus.”

  One didn’t hesitate. “Do it. Open what you can.”

  “Understood,” the commander said, and the next words sounded almost like an apology. “Brace yourselves. It’ll be uncomfortable.”

  The satellites ahead shifted. Two of the four rotated into alignment while the others remained dim. Between the active pair, space began to deform.

  The portal’s surface looked like black glass under tension, threaded with pale arcs of Energy.

  It was smaller than it should have been. Unstable. The edges shuddered, not quite holding their shape.

  One drove forward anyway.

  The mechs tightened formation, accelerating toward the opening. The portal grew, but not enough.

  One committed.

  The moment his mech crossed the threshold, the world turned inside out.

  It wasn’t like normal teleportation. This was transit through a forced fracture, and the sensation was brutally physical. His stomach dropped upward as if gravity had been inverted. His inner ear screamed that he was falling and spinning at the same time.

  The mech shuddered as if scraping against invisible walls.

  One clenched his jaw and held steady on the controls, forcing the machine through.

  A hard snap of sensation, and finally One burst out the other side.

  The violence of the jump still echoed in One’s bones when the cockpit stabilized, and the stars snapped back into place.

  He was hovering in open space.

  Behind him, Earth filled half the sky. An enormous blue arc rimmed with white cloud bands, beautiful in a way that made the destruction in its orbit feel obscene.

  Around One floated nine other mechs, the ones that had made it through the Gate. Their thrusters burned in controlled pulses, keeping formation. No chatter. No celebration.

  Ahead was their enemy.

  An Ork armada stretched across the orbital lane like a swarm of wasps. Thousands of crude, jagged warships filled the darkness with engine flares and weapon fire.

  Their guns were already firing at full power. Lines of red and green laser fire lanced through space in constant streams, striking the NEA fleet. Human ships burned in silence, their hulls torn open, their defense fields collapsing, stuttering before detonating into expanding spheres of debris.

  One’s tactical display filled with hostile markers so dense they blurred together.

  He inhaled slowly, forcing calm into his lungs.

  “Prepare yourselves,” he said over squad comms.

  No one answered.

  They didn’t need to.

  The silence wasn’t fear. It was focus. Ten mechs, thousands of NEA ships, and tens of thousands of Ork vessels. The numbers weren’t just bad, they were cosmic.

  What are we supposed to do here?

  It was the question One felt pressing behind every heartbeat.

  And yet, faith held.

  Not blind faith. Not hope. A calculated belief, forged from years of impossible survival.

  We still have the weapon, One reminded himself. We need time. We buy time.

  A voice crackled into the channel. One of the Hippeus pilots.

  “Sir. More ships approaching.”

  One’s gaze snapped toward the edge of the tactical radar. New contact signatures bloomed, arriving from a vector that wasn’t Ork.

  “Prepare for contact!” One ordered, his hands tightening on the control grips as he watched the first ships leave jump.

  However, they weren't Ork. No, they carried medals.

  The symbols painted on the incoming hulls were unmistakable. York markings, crisp and bright. Sleek warships, disciplined in formation, their weapon arrays already positioning into firing stance.

  One exhaled, a long, involuntary release of tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying.

  His comm system chimed.

  “This is Fleet General John York, opening communications channel.”

  For a fraction of a second, One couldn’t speak. It wasn’t awe—he’d heard the name too many times for that to be the only feeling.

  Before One could respond, reality fractured again nearby—another jump event. More vessels slipped into orbit, their hulls marked with Enceladus insignias.

  A second voice cut across the open channel, crisp and authoritative.

  “Open channel initiated. Admiral Orton of the Republic of Enceladus.”

  With York and Enceladus arriving, the Hippeus weren’t a desperate wall anymore. They could finally do what they’d been built to do.

  He switched to the squad channel, his voice sharpening with a commanding edge.

  “Hippeus—hunt.”

  The pilots responded without speech, their machines breaking formation and surging forward. Seven mechs accelerated into the black, thrusters flaring bright, angling toward the densest clusters of Ork ships.

  One watched them go, then turned his attention to the last two frames in formation.

  “Two. Three. Switch to [Hyper Mode].”

  [Hyper Mode Active]

  [Connectings mechas]

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