The desert of Koroz had no end.
Just flat dry land in every direction and a sky the color of old iron. Then a small ship appeared in the distance. It dropped lower as it crossed the desert and as it came closer a massive shape rose from the ground. A shipwreck. So large it looked like a building. So old the desert had started to swallow its edges.
The ship landed at the port outside the wreck.
Soldiers stood in a line waiting.
The hatch opened and Kalex stepped out smiling.
He was not what dangerous people usually looked like. Medium height. Easy face. The kind of person you trusted before you thought about whether you should. He was the best thief in sector 17 and he carried that fact lightly.
One soldier stepped forward. "He is waiting for you."
Kalex nodded and walked in.
The corridors of the Nezerat empire smelled like metal and old power. Kalex walked without hurrying. He had delivered things to worse places for worse people. This was just business.
He pushed through the final door.
King Nezerat sat in a chair built from salvaged parts surrounded by soldiers who looked permanently unimpressed by everything. He ran the largest smuggling operation in three galaxies. He looked exactly like someone who did.
He looked at Kalex. "Do you have it?"
Kalex reached into his bag and pulled out the scroll. Old. Worn at the edges. He held it out.
Nezerat took it.
"Where is my ship?" Kalex said.
Nezerat nodded at a soldier beside him without looking up. The soldier moved and Kalex followed him out through a side corridor toward the landing bays.
Behind them Nezerat turned the scroll over slowly in his hands. He did not fully open it yet. Just held it. Feeling the weight of something he had spent years trying to find.
The scroll of wisdom. Written long ago by a gathering of species who had put their differences aside long enough to do one thing together. Magicians. Wizards. Scholars. Researchers from different worlds who had compiled everything known about FIWE into one document. Every legend. Every fragment. Every piece of ancient knowledge about the paradise world and the Crown at its heart. They worked together for years. Then disagreement came. Then fighting. Their children inherited the conflict instead of the knowledge. The scroll moved from hand to hand across generations until the Holo museum in the Nexus galaxy locked it behind glass and called it history.
Nezerat had other ideas for it.
He was still holding it when the laser came through the ceiling.
Then everything happened at once.
Ships burst through the upper sections of the wreck firing wide. Soldiers dropped on ropes from above. Outside the sound of engines and bikes and boots filled the desert air. The attack came from every direction at the same time.
Nezerat's soldiers pulled him toward the back of the throne room immediately. In the landing bay on the other side of the wreck the soldier escorting Kalex turned and ran back toward the fight. Kalex stood alone in front of the ship Nezerat had promised him.
He looked at it for one second.
Then he got in and flew away.
Nezerat moved fast through the back corridors toward his personal ship. Almost there. The noise of the fight getting smaller behind him.
He pushed through the final door onto the landing platform.
Someone dropped from above and landed in front of him.
Hit the ground and stood up straight. The soldiers beside Nezerat moved forward and went down one after another and then it was just the two of them on the platform in the Koroz heat.
Akada Urgoy looked at Nezerat.
He was not young. The years were in his face and his hands and the way he stood. But he stood like someone who had done this kind of thing many times and never once found it hard to start.
Nezerat looked back at him.
Neither spoke.
Nezerat moved first.
Akada met him.
Then black.
15 YEARS LATER
The scrap yard at night was quiet in a way the rest of Tofah was not.
Xammy walked through it with his bag on his back and another dragging along the ground beside him. From somewhere across the settlement the sound of the ceremony carried over on the still night air. Music. Voices. Celebration filling every corner of the place.
Xammy ignored it and kept walking.
He reached the far corner of the yard where an old tarp covered a shape nobody had ever asked about. He pulled it aside and stood in front of his ship.
Fifteen years of pieces collected quietly. Connections made in early mornings and late nights. Progress hidden under the same tarp through every season Tofah had. Nobody knew it was here. Nobody had thought to ask what the garbage boy was doing in the corner of the scrap yard for fifteen years.
He opened the hatch and went to work on the last part.
Across the settlement the ceremony hall was full and bright.
Zoa II stood at the front in his Commander uniform receiving what he had trained his whole life to earn. Around him the people of Tofah celebrated.
One chair sat empty.
Marie Enther looked at it. Then at her husband.
Borg said nothing. His face said enough.
Emma Urgoy sat beside Marie and did not look at the empty chair at all. She knew exactly where Xammy was. She always knew where Xammy was.
Borg leaned to a soldier and spoke quietly. The soldier nodded and left.
At the front of the hall Zoa II began his speech.
Back in the scrap yard Xammy connected the last piece.
He checked it. Checked it again. Then he sat in the cockpit and put his hand on the panel.
He hit it once.
The engine turned over. Coughed. Then caught. A low steady hum filled the ship around him and Xammy sat completely still listening to fifteen years of work finally making a sound.
He laughed once. Short and quiet and completely to himself.
Then he turned it off and climbed out.
He looked at the Tofah sky. Purple and pink nebula fading into dark. Stars everywhere.
He had one thing to do before he left.
He moved fast through the outer corridors of the castle toward the ceremony hall. He found a side entrance and slipped through and looked across the room until he spotted Emma near the far wall.
He crossed to her quickly.
She looked at him the way she always looked at him. Like she had been expecting him and was not surprised by the timing.
"Tonight," he said quietly.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she nodded.
"Mom," he said.
Emma glanced toward the front of the hall where Marie sat beside Borg. The speeches were still going. The room was still full.
"Go," Emma said softly. "I will tell her."
Xammy looked at his mother from across the room for a moment. She was watching Zoa II at the front with the face of a mother watching her child succeed.
He turned back to Emma.
She put her hand briefly on his arm. Just for a second.
He left.
He moved fast back to the yard. Climbed in. Started the sequence.
He did not see the soldier in the upper window.
The soldier saw him.
The alert went out as the ship began to lift. Xammy heard nothing but the engine and the wind and the feeling of the ground falling away beneath him.
The ship cleared the walls of the settlement.
Soldiers on the ground stopped and looked up. People from the ceremony came outside and looked up. Borg walked out and looked up with an expression that had no name for what it was watching.
Inside the ship Xammy shouted.
"Goodbye Mom. Goodbye Tofah. Goodbye Aunt Emma."
He paused.
"Goodbye brother. Goodbye Dad."
That one came out quieter. Not happy. Just honest.
He looked forward at the sky and set his face.
Then a fragment of metal hit the hull and something in the stabilizer gave out and the whole thing began to fall.
Xammy hit the eject system.
He came out above the ship and looked up at the Tofah sky for one second before the parachute opened. His ship fell in pieces toward the ground near the edge of the settlement. Around him on the way down he saw something else falling. Something larger. A ship. Coming in fast and wrong. Trailing smoke. Not trying to fly anymore. Just trying to survive the landing.
It hit the ground with an impact that shook the air.
Xammy landed seconds later.
Soldiers were already running toward him.
Borg reached the crash site before most of them.
He stood at the edge of it and looked at the broken ship and what was inside it and went very still.
They pulled Akada out carefully and carried him to the palace. No crew with him. No Sensen II anywhere in sight. Just an old man in a broken ship who had crossed the cosmos to get back to Tofah and barely made it.
Borg walked beside him the whole way saying nothing. Akada said nothing either. Just breathed. Just held on.
They put him in a room and treated him through the night.
Xammy spent that night locked in his own room listening to silence and thinking about everything he could not change.
In the morning Zoa II came for him without a word.
They walked through the corridors together. Through the door. Into the room.
Akada lay in the bed. His eyes found Xammy immediately across the room.
"Everyone outside," Akada said. His voice was low and slow and cut short by every word. "Except Xammy. And Emma."
The room cleared. The door closed.
People stood in the corridor outside and heard nothing because Akada was speaking too quietly for doors.
"Xammy." He looked at him directly. "You are the only one I trust to find FIWE now. The universe is falling apart. Take this."
He held out something small. A card. Old looking. The kind of thing that looked ordinary until it was in your hand.
Xammy took it. "What is this?"
"Just take it. It will guide you when you reach the ship." He stopped to breathe. "Reclaim the Sensen II. Continue the quest."
"I want to stay."
"No. Go now."
Emma was holding Akada's hand. Crying quietly. She looked at Xammy across the bed and nodded once. Then she looked back at Akada and said softly. "I am here."
Xammy stood for one more moment.
Then he opened the door.
His father stood in the corridor. Other faces behind him. All of them watching. He moved past without stopping.
He found his mother around the corner.
She looked at him and he knew immediately she had heard everything. She held out a bag already packed. Then she looked at the card in his hand.
"That will activate the AI on the Sensen II," she said quietly. "Now go."
Footsteps behind him. He turned.
Borg stood there. His face was controlled the way it always was. But something behind it was different.
"Wait," Borg said. "I have something for you."
He gave him a ship. The best one he had.
Zoa II stepped forward and held out a dagger without a word. Xammy took it.
He looked at his family standing together in the corridor. His mother. His father. His brother.
He did not say anything.
Neither did they.
He turned and walked toward the landing bay.
They watched him go.
When the ship rose above Tofah and climbed into the stars and the purple pink nebula faded around it until there was nothing left to see they were still standing there looking up.