Chapter 18 Lonari
LONARI
Terranus V looks like it’s daring you to come closer.
From orbit, it isn’t pretty in the way death-worlds get romanticized by idiots who’ve only ever seen them on curated holos.
It’s a scabbed sphere of ash-colored landmasses and bruised cloud bands, with storm systems that spiral like they’re trying to drill into the crust. Lightning freckles the atmosphere in weak, sickly flashes.
Even the planet’s terminator line—the edge of night and day—looks jagged, like the light itself gets cut up trying to land.
The Nun’s Tooth drifts in under stealth, engines throttled low, hull cooling vents sealed tight.
The bridge air smells like warm circuitry and coolant and the faint tang of recycled breath—crew anxiety, contained.
Screens glow dim, filtered, signatures masked.
We’re a shadow sliding behind another shadow, and my hands are steady on the helm because if they aren’t, I’ll start imagining Jordan’s face framed in drone cameras, her throat bared to a man who thinks murder is an accounting practice.
Renn stands behind my chair, posture rigid, eyes pinned to a tactical overlay. Jessa is at the boarding control station, fingers flexing like she’s itching to tear something open. Mira and the tech team are hunched over their consoles, reading signal noise like priests reading entrails.
“First ping’s up,” Mira says, voice low. “We’re seeing a relay net. Ground tower, two orbiting sats, one mid-alt repeater. It’s not Alliance standard. It’s corporate kit stitched with merc upgrades.”
Morazin’s style: clean enough to look legitimate until you rub your thumb against it and feel the counterfeit.
“Drone swarms,” I say.
Jessa grins, feral. “Finally.”
A bank of launch bays opens beneath us with a muted mechanical sigh, and dozens of micro-drones spill into the black like glittering insects.
They fan out in coordinated arcs, their sensor suites blinking in patterns I can’t see with the naked eye but can feel through the rising texture of data on my screens.
The drones’ feed stitches together a map: relay frequencies, line-of-sight channels, reinforcement request routes, dead zones.
Renn points at a cluster of signal spikes. “Those are Morazin’s reinforcement channels.”
“Yeah,” I murmur. “He’s screaming for help.”
On a side monitor, the broadcast feed is still live—Morazin’s platform, the drones circling, the ticker chaos crawling across the screen like a wound. I catch a glimpse of Jordan in restraints and something in my chest turns to a cold, focused hatred so pure it feels clean.
“Find the relay nodes,” I say. “Then we kill his voice.”
Mira’s fingers dance. “Two orbiting relay sats are within pod range. Third is a repeater we can flood.”
I glance at Jessa. “Pods.”
She snaps her comm open. “Boarding pods one and two, you’re up. Targets: relay sats alpha and beta. No hero entries. Punch in, sabotage, punch out.”
A chorus of confirmations returns—hard voices, excited.
“Cyber flood on the third,” I add, nodding at Mira. “False traffic. Make his ‘help’ requests bounce into dead space.”
Mira’s mouth curves. “With pleasure.”
I watch the tactical overlay as the boarding pods detach—sleek, dark capsules that accelerate without flashy flares, riding silent vectors toward the relay sats. They look like falling teeth.
Renn leans closer, voice tight. “Boss, Morazin’s got patrol drones.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s why we’re not fighting his patrol drones. We’re fighting his infrastructure.”
Soldiers fight what’s in front of them. Criminals fight what makes the front possible.
The pods hit the first relay sat with a soft, controlled impact. No explosion, no big show. Just a brief glitch on the relay’s signal as the sat’s skin gets cut open like fruit and my people slide inside.
Seconds later, Mira’s console lights up.
“Alpha sat is compromised,” she says. “Signal dropping.”
On the overlay, Morazin’s reinforcement channel line flickers—then collapses.
The second pod hits beta.
Another flicker.
Another line dies.
Morazin’s calls for backup start bouncing. I can see it in the routing logs—requests pinging out, then returning with dead acknowledgments like the universe itself is shrugging.
“Third repeater,” Mira says, eyes bright. “Flooding now.”
She injects false traffic into the mid-alt repeater: a storm of meaningless packets designed to look like legitimate corporate chatter. The repeater tries to parse it, tries to prioritize it, chokes on it. Morazin’s “priority” requests get lost in the noise, swallowed by an avalanche of nonsense.
Renn exhales. “He’s cut off.”
“Not fully,” I say, eyes on the map. “He’ll have local comms. Ground jammers. Drones. But help is gone.”
Jessa taps her earpiece. “Boarding pods report. Charges planted. Alpha and beta relay sats will cook themselves in two minutes.”
“Good,” I say. “Make sure they’re off before the fireworks.”
My gaze flicks back to the live feed.
Jordan is still on that platform.
Cameras still rolling.
Shooters still closing.
And then—there. On a lower band of the signal spectrum, I see it: a weird interference pattern, like a comm tower choking and rebooting in short spasms. It’s not random.
It’s familiar.
Mira sees it too. Her head snaps up. “Boss. That’s… that’s not our jammer.”
“No,” I murmur, and my mouth tightens.
Mira zooms in, overlaying the interference with our own signal analysis.
A pattern emerges: tiny spikes and dips in a rhythm that looks like a heartbeat someone is forcing into a machine.
Jordan.
She hacks like she fights—quiet, surgical, with redundancy and spite.
Mira’s eyes widen. “That’s her signature. Diagnostic handshakes buried in maintenance pings. She’s using corporate infrastructure as a lever.”
My chest tightens.
“Use it,” I snap.
Mira nods, fingers flying. “Triangulating off her interference. She’s near the main broadcast platform. There’s a ground comm tower twenty meters east, and a relay junction under the scaffolding.”
Jessa grins. “So she’s painting us a target.”
“She’s giving us a beacon,” I correct, voice low. “Because she knows we’re coming.”
Renn’s eyes flick to me, sharp. “You sure she knows?”
I stare at the interference pattern pulsing like a flare in the dark.
“Jordan doesn’t hope,” I say. “She plans.”
I key my encrypted channel. “All strike teams. Ground insertion on my mark. Target is broadcast platform ridge. Priority: Jordan. Secondary: Morazin alive.”
Confirmations snap back.
I feel the ship’s hum beneath my boots as we adjust orbit, dropping into a stealth approach vector that hugs the planet’s curvature.
“Atmospheric entry,” Renn warns.
“Controlled,” I say. “No flares. No proud descent.”
The Nun’s Tooth dips.
The planet rises.
The hull begins to vibrate faintly as we skim the edge of Terranus V’s atmosphere, and the air on the bridge seems to thicken, smelling faintly of heated metal as the ship’s skin warms.
My comm pings—Jessa again. “Charges on sats alpha and beta detonated. Relay sats dead.”
“Good,” I reply. “Morazin is alone.”
Down on the platform feed, chaos blooms.
Jordan shifts—small movement, almost invisible if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
She’s not just sitting there waiting to die.
She’s wriggling. Sliding her bound hands behind a scaffolding strut.
I watch her disappear partially behind a vertical support like she’s trying to crawl into the architecture.
A tech on Morazin’s side shouts. A shooter steps closer.
Then a comm tower indicator on the feed spikes—and drops.
Jordan has yanked something. A manual conduit. Forced a reboot.
Morazin’s drones jitter overhead, their stabilizers whining as their signal path stutters. His jammer system hiccups—briefly blind.
It’s only seconds.
But seconds are oxygen.
“Go,” I growl.
Jessa triggers the ground insertion.
Boarding shuttles detach from the Nun’s Tooth and plunge toward the ridge under signature dampeners. On my tactical overlay, our teams streak down like dark comets.
Renn’s voice is tight. “Boss, Morazin’s shooters are closing.”
On the live feed, one of Morazin’s men raises his rifle. Another steps into a clear line.
Jordan’s body is half behind scaffolding, half exposed.
Morazin shouts something off-mic—furious, clipped.
A rifle cracks.
The sound is sharp even through the broadcast compression.
Jordan jerks.
My breath stops.
She collapses sideways, hitting the platform hard enough that the rig rattles. Blood appears—dark and immediate—spreading along her side.
Not a clean kill shot.
A graze.
But serious.
My claws dig into the armrests of my chair. The bridge seems to tilt with my rage.
“MED TEAM READY,” I bark into comm. “NOW.”
Dr. Senn’s voice comes back, grim. “Trauma bay prepped. We need her breathing.”
“She’ll be breathing,” I growl, and I don’t know if I’m threatening the universe or begging it.
Morazin’s shooters move in to finish her.
Cameras keep rolling.
The audience feed is screaming.
Morazin’s voice rises, trying to reclaim narrative even as his infrastructure collapses.
“—this is order—this is stability—”
He’s still talking.
He wants the kill on camera.
He wants fear.
He’s about to get something else.
Our first ground team hits the ridge perimeter—silent takedowns, EM disruption bursts. Morazin’s local guards drop without screams, stunned or choked out, because we don’t announce ourselves. We erase.
I don’t take the front entry.
Hero entries get you killed.
I take the side.
A service corridor cut into the ridge—utility access for the broadcast generators. My people breach it with a quiet plasma cutter, slipping inside like smoke.
“Side entry confirmed,” Jessa reports. “We’re in the scaffolding underlayer.”
I stand from the helm chair. “I’m going.”
Renn’s eyes widen. “Boss—”
“I’m going,” I repeat, and he knows better than to argue. Not now.