Centuria Books · Shattered Orbit
Shattered Orbit — Read the First Chapter
The alien conqueror sent to seize her station becomes the first being in her life who refuses to leave her behind.
Chapter 1
The deck plating lurched with a violence that rattled Elara’s teeth against each other.
Klaxons screamed through the smoke-choked gut of Engineering Deck Four, raw and rhythmic, and the red emergency strobes turned everything into a stuttering nightmare. Elara planted her boots wide on the grated floor and threw her weight into the manual override wheel of the coolant pressure valve, her calloused fingers going white around the grip. Grease and cold sweat ran down her face, stinging the corners of her eyes.
Above the primary console, the holoscreen pulsed with a single clean notification.
EVACUATION PROTOCOL OMEGA COMPLETE.
OUTER DOCKING BAYS: EMPTY.
The air in her chest turned solid.
Her gaze cut to the telemetry feed. Forty-two green dots drifted in perfect synchronized formation away from the station, arcing hard toward the jump-gate.
The escape pods. Every last one.
The titanium wrench left her hand before she consciously let go of it. It hit the grating with a ringing clatter she felt in her back teeth. She slammed her palm onto the comms array.
“Command, this is Vance. Reactor pressure is stabilizing. I need the Sector Four lockdown lifted. Do you copy?”
The speakers hissed. Heavy and indifferent.
She drove her fist into the console’s edge, the metal biting into the heel of her palm. “General Aris. Open the blast doors. The core won’t breach—you have your window. Let me out.”
Dead air crackled back at her.
They had cut the encrypted channel.
Her eyes moved to the secondary monitor. Sector Four glowed a solid, unforgiving red. MANUAL LOCKDOWN. SEALED EXTERIOR.
Bile climbed the back of her throat.
The math assembled itself with cold mechanical precision. The Xylarion armada was eating through the station’s upper pylons. Command needed the primary reactor to hold structural integrity long enough for the pods to clear the blast radius—which meant someone had to stay behind and bleed the coolant lines by hand, or the core would vaporize sixty people mid-flight.
They needed their most reliable instrument. The Chief Engineer. The one who always fixed what everyone else broke.
She understood, with absolute clarity, that she had been expendable since the moment they promoted her.
Betrayal tasted like copper and engine fumes. Her jaw clenched so hard her temples pounded. She had always known this. Every time she had let herself believe someone would pull her out of a fire, she had burned.
No one is coming.
The old scar tore open clean.
If she didn’t fix this herself, she would die here. Alone, in the dark, under the thing she had spent her entire career keeping alive.
Another shockwave slammed through the station. The overhead scaffolding shrieked and shed a cascade of sparks and shattered plasteel across the deck. The Xylarion cruisers were initiating a hull breach—she could feel it through the soles of her boots, a low guttural vibration, plasma drills chewing through the outer armor.
Elara lunged for the heavy plasma cutter on the diagnostic cart.
She engaged the beam. It ignited with a blinding blue hiss, throwing sharp shadows across the primary bulkhead. The blast doors were three feet of reinforced titanium, but the magnetic locking pins had a seam, and the seam had a weakness, and Elara had spent eleven years learning every weakness on this station.
She dragged the cutter toward the bulkhead, her chest heaving. The air was thinning already—life support recyclers beginning to fail. Every breath came back a little less.
“I’m not dying for you,” she said through her teeth, pressing the torch to the locking mechanism. The metal screamed and glowed white at the edges. “I’m not dying for anyone.”
—
Three decks above, Kael’dran dropped the human soldier and watched the body fold.
The armor crumpled like dry foil. Kael’dran straightened, seven feet and two inches of Xylarion Warlord, motionless as the station yawed around him. The blood on his forearm hissed against the superheated surface of his obsidian scales. He flicked his wrist and his claws shed the gore.
Smoke and ionized flesh hung in the corridor.
He inhaled. Ozone. Coolant fluid. The sour reek of human terror. His prehensile tail swept behind him in a slow, counterbalancing arc as he stepped over the ruined barricades, his solid black eyes cataloguing structural integrity through the deck plates.
No glory in any of it. Only the mechanical execution of a tactical imperative.
The directive was simple: secure the power core. A functional human reactor would fuel the dreadnoughts for another solar cycle. Another cycle of the same empty war.
The Xylarion genome had been rotting for centuries—weaponized bio-engineering that had optimized them for slaughter and left them sterile, savage, accelerating toward an extinction none of them would live to see completed. Kael’dran was its finest product. A perfect blade. Incapable of creating life, devoid of a future, built only to hollow out lesser civilizations and die unremembered in the cold.
He dropped through a jagged breach in the floor plating. His armored boots hit Deck Four with a crash that buckled the grating beneath him. The heat here was immediate and oppressive, thick with vaporized heavy metals and the stench of overtaxed machinery.
The primary engineering blast door stood ahead of him. Sealed. Locked down from outside.
He didn’t bother with the console. He drove his claws into the seam.
The reinforced titanium shrieked—a sound like a living thing being split open. He planted his boots, coiled every muscle in his shoulders and back, and ripped his arms apart. The doors bowed, tore, folded back with the percussive crack of ruptured hydraulics. Scalding fluid sprayed across his chest armor. He didn’t blink.
He ducked through the mangled frame and stepped into the reactor chamber.
Through the haze of coolant vapor and strobing red light, his eyes found movement.
A human.
Small. Extraordinarily small. Five and a half feet of fragile bone and soft flesh, wrapped in a grease-blackened mechanic’s jumpsuit, a wild tangle of dark hair plastered to a sweat-damp forehead.
The human spun around. The heavy industrial plasma cutter came up fast, leveled directly at the unarmored junction of his throat.
Kael’dran paused.
The creature’s hands were shaking. The hazel eyes above the blinding blue beam were not. They were feral. Cornered. The eyes of something that had chosen teeth over throat.
He tilted his head. The joints in his thick neck popped.
A solitary engineer. Left behind by her own kind.
He took a slow, heavy step forward, claws flexing. He would sever her spine, shut down the core overloads, and signal the fleet. Efficient. Entirely meaningless.
“Back off.” Her voice came out raw, scraped down to its edges. She adjusted her grip, shifting her aim to the precise gap at his throat. She had noticed the weakness in his armor. In less than ten seconds.
His tail lashed in a slow predatory rhythm while he analyzed the weapon. The plasma beam would burn through his scales. It would cause pain. But she was twenty feet away and he would reach her in two strides, long before she could deal anything fatal.
He braced to lunge.
The universe ended.
The sound didn’t arrive—the force did. A kinetic event so absolute it simply erased physics for a full second. The crippled human heavy cruiser, burning in the upper atmosphere, had chosen its final act: ramming speed into the station’s central spire.
The impact tore through the macro-structure at every level simultaneously.
Gravity plating failed.
Kael’dran felt the deck leave him. The massive weight of his body became nothing, suspended in a churning void of shattering glass, bursting coolant pipes, and metal screaming against metal. The human was thrown sideways, the plasma cutter spinning away in a wild arc of blue light.
Then the emergency reserves kicked in.
Gravity returned at double strength.
The ceiling of the reactor chamber folded inward. Support girders as thick as his torso snapped with sounds like detonating charges. He twisted mid-air, combat instinct overriding the chaos, and hit the deck hard—claws gouging deep trenches into the metal to anchor himself as the entire sector began to compress.
He saw her through the destruction. Small. Thrown backward. Tangled in diagnostic cabling, a massive section of upper bulkhead tearing loose directly above her.
The floor gave way before he could move.
It opened like a wound—pulverized plasteel and severed conduits and the shriek of failing infrastructure. They fell together. Deck Four collapsed into Deck Five, which gave into Deck Six. The dark, dead bowels of the lower maintenance levels swallowed them in concrete dust and superheated steam.
A steel beam caught him across the shoulder and drove him down into the descending rubble. The crushing weight of the station folded over them both, and the darkness became absolute.
—
Elara couldn’t breathe.
Her lungs expanded. Nothing useful came back. The air was solid—dust and ash and pulverized material packed into every breath she tried to drag in. She choked, violently, a sound tearing out of her chest that she didn’t recognize as her own voice.
Pain flared across her left ribs like something lit white-hot and pressed flat. She was pinned. Right leg buried under a mountain of twisted grating. Left arm wedged against her side at an angle that made her shoulder burn.
Total darkness. The red strobes were gone. The klaxons were dead. The only sound was the slow, rhythmic groaning of millions of tons of unstable metal settling above her—the station’s final geometry resolving itself.
Panic hit her blood like ice water. Her heart slammed against her bruised ribs.
I am going to die alone in the dark.
She forced her jaw open against the hyperventilation. Stop. Assess. Fix it.
The air was thinning fast—life support severed. The ambient temperature was already dropping as the cold vacuum outside leeched through fractures in the outer hull. She could feel it on her face, the specific cold of space bleeding through solid metal.
She pulled her trapped leg. A hot, tearing sensation ripped through her thigh and she bit down on her lip hard enough to taste blood—bright and salt-sharp on her tongue. The debris didn’t move. Too heavy. No leverage, no fulcrum.
Something shifted in the darkness.
Heavy. The slow scrape of metal being moved against metal.
Elara stopped breathing.
She remembered the black eyes. The obsidian scales, the claws that had torn through three feet of reinforced titanium the way she would tear paper. He had fallen with her.
A sound built through the floor plating under her spine—low and guttural and alien, vibrating at a frequency that lifted every fine hair on the back of her neck. Rubble shifted violently somewhere to her left, the groan of several tons of steel being shoved aside.
He was alive.
She held her breath until her lungs burned and pressed the back of her skull against the cold deck and squeezed her eyes shut. If she didn’t make a sound, maybe the dark would be enough.
—
Kael’dran heaved the support pillar off his chest.
Three tons of steel rolled away into unseen debris with a crash that echoed through the dead space. He pushed himself up onto his knees, drove his claws into the mangled floor, and breathed.
His obsidian scales had held. His shoulder ached dully where the primary beam had struck, but the joint moved. He inhaled, cataloguing: vaporized titanium, hydraulic fluid, carbon scoring, oxygen levels dropping at an exponential rate.
His solid black eyes dilated, shifting into thermal and kinetic tracking. The lower decks spread before him in shades of residual heat—a tomb of dead machinery and severed power.
He would survive another three hours on the thinning air. Long enough.
He took another breath to catalogue the atmospheric compounds more precisely.
And then his lungs simply stopped.