The voice had been Myyaelae’s. Her hackles rose instantly. Get clear?

All at once, eyes swung past the dreadnaught to the one emergency transport straining against gravity a handful of inches off its support cradle, ragged edges of torn tethers flapping as it rose. It was strictly a short range rescue vessel– no weapons, no armor, no way to fight or defend itself, but as she watched, it turned slowly in the frigid air, maneuvering thrusters firing in bursts, bringing the ominous embers of the transport’s massive main ignition assembly into view.

And then the weight of the Gnarian’s words hit her full force.

Get clear!

There was hardly time to swallow. A single thought caught fire in her mind.

Move!

Time shot past like an arrow, every borrowed second poured into the Horus lacing, the reverse-engineered Coralate weapon that was her only hope when it came to breaking Gilgamesh’s grip on her dead arm. Teeth bared as metal flickered, flexed, shimmered at the edge of fluid.

The thrusters fired in the next instant.

Locking all maneuvering rockets at full and jamming the main assembly to max turned the rescue transport into one giant, unstable flamethrower. Wide tongues of plasma-hot helium 3 exhaust reached out, bit into and washed across Gilgamesh in blinding waves, bathing the dreadnaught in a tide of fire that pushed past to lick at Tessa’s already scorched skin, burning into the fabric of her uniform. She screamed as the flame overwhelmed the Cygnan’s autonomic defenses, turned half of the thing to glowing slag in an instant. Gilgamesh reacted violently, pivoting, swinging, fingers of one massive, metallic hand biting into the transport as the other loosened suddenly, dropping Tessa to the floor that lay hard and cold far below.

Reality spun sickeningly as she fell, and then the ground reached up to meet her, fire-sore jaw cracking against deck plating as darkness shot into her eyes, played starry along the hazy ache, pain blossoming and then receding in the face of numbing shock. Reality seemed to throb and pulse nauseatingly around her, closing in and pulling out again as she watched the burning dreadnaught wrestle with the transport, tearing at flaming thrusters with melting, frenzied fingers. In its harness of liquid steel, the Cygnan’s blue skin caught fire instantly, bubbling and popping, its scream ripping air with vicious, mind-shattering vibrations that penetrated the mind like the sharp blade of a tiny knife.

Within seconds, the struggle was over. Little remained of either the dreadnaught or the transport, just piles of slag and beaten metal, the struggling fires barely burning across tortured and glassy steel, flickering as they tried to keep the deadly cold at bay.

Somehow, working, moving beyond sight, beyond sound or memory, Tessa found her way to the shattered cockpit of what had once been the transport, stared half burnt, half-frozen, half-dead into the smashed and blood soaked interior. Her butchered arm hung limply at her side, blood matted, cauterized and frozen. Myyaelae was gone.

In a moment, it won’t matter. came the broken, tired thought. None of it, none of this will matter. In a moment, the timer on the implosion wake matrix would click over and swallow all of Erebus, all the ruin and death and secrets, leaving nothing but a cold, empty hole in the alien ice. There would be nothing, no records, no sign of struggle. Nothing.

Dimly, she felt the odd stirrings of life, of regrets moving within her, memories of Dimitrov urging her to move, to live, to turn her eyes to the Seindrive that sat crouched against a debris pile in the center of the bay, like her, burnt and beaten but still functional, still ready to fly.

In the faint, crackling haze, she thought she heard Myyaelae’s voice, a gentle whisper that rose up to move mountains within her, triggered a cascade of light in her dimming, dying soul. Vaguely, she listened, and as the words played along her mind, she felt that light growing, filling her with the strength she needed to move again, to turn and put the first, stumbling foot on the debris strewn path of deck plating that would lead to freedom.

Go, Tessa. You have to go. Get out of here before it is too late to save even one of us.

She swallowed. The Gnarian had saved her life again, had used the transport as a last bid to save her, paying for her escape with his own existence. At the very least, she had to try, had to make some semblance of an effort to get clear in time, to escape and survive, if only to prove that Myyaelae’s sacrifice had not been in vain.

She closed her eyes, pulled in a deep breath, and as her eyes drifted open again, she ran.

She ran, and she put every last ounce of fight she had left into it.