Chapter 4 - The Breaking Point
The hallway erupted into pure chaos. Tracing lasers crisscrossed the air in blinding red and blue arcs, scorching the paint off the bulkheads and filling the hangar with the acrid stench of ozone and scorched metal. I dropped to one knee behind a heavy cargo container, squeezing off rapid-fire bursts that forced the leading Aegis soldiers to dive for cover.
"Mara, how much longer?" I shouted over the deafening chatter of assault fire. The container I was hiding behind was already taking heavy hits, chunks of composite alloy exploding outward in sharp, dangerous shards.
"Almost there!" Mara yelled back, her fingers a blur across the sparking holographic keypad. "The Aegis encryption is deeply layered—they built this station to keep people out, not to let things in!"
A heavy kinetic round punched clean through my cover, grazing my shoulder and sending a hot spike of pain radiating down my arm. I hissed, pressing my hand against the torn fabric of my sleeve as warm blood began to seep through.
Inside the containment crate, Smoke let out a sound that wasn't a growl—it was a piercing, resonant cry that sounded like a war horn echoing across an empty canyon. The moment the sound left his throat, the lights in the entire hangar shattered simultaneously, plunging the room into darkness save for the strobing crimson emergency beacons.
The Aegis soldiers hesitated for a fraction of a second, disoriented by the sudden blackout.
It was all the opening we needed.
Clang!
With a metallic screech that sounded like tearing steel, the reinforced viewport of the containment cage blew outward in a shower of thick, jagged shards. Smoke didn't just step out—he exploded into the room, his massive, dark-scaled wings unfurling with enough force to kick up a miniature hurricane of dust and loose debris.
The elite soldiers opened fire immediately, pouring concentrated streams of armor-piercing rounds directly toward him. But Smoke moved with terrifying, fluid grace. He swept his massive tail sideways, catching two of the commandos and sending them crashing through the drywall of the adjacent office.
He didn't kill them—just as he hadn't killed the guards back in my workshop—but his message was unmistakable: Back off.
"System override complete!" Mara screamed triumphantly, yanking her spike from the console as the main hangar doors began to grind upward, revealing the starry expanse outside and the massive silhouette of her salvage ship hovering just beyond the landing platform.
"Smoke!" I shouted, waving my arm toward the open bay.
The massive Sky Warden turned his head, his brilliant golden eyes locking onto me. For a second, the chaos of the battle faded away. He lowered his horned head, letting out a soft, familiar churring sound—the exact same sound he used to make when he woke me up in the mornings back in my garage.
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Then, the heavy blast doors at the opposite end of the hangar hissed open, and Commander Voss stepped into the room flanked by a dozen heavily armed shock troopers, his laser pistol leveled directly at Smoke’s chest.
"End of the line, scavenger," Voss sneered, his finger twitching nervously over the trigger. "Let's see how well your pet survives a direct plasma charge to the heart."
