The bridge of the Vezhiran's Promise glowed with opulence—walls decorated in sweeping panels of different shades of blue, white and gold coral with polished obsidian trim, and subtle glimmers of crystalline embedded into the walls and ceiling that shimmered like frost.

Screens flickered projecting charts, profit ledgers, fleet movements, and comms across the open-air platform. The ship was less a vessel of war and more a mobile throne room of enterprise.

But now, the war had come knocking with plasma, rail guns, torpedoes, and overloading ships.

"Redirect all auxiliary power to the laser defence network!" Oryss-Vezhiran barked, his usually soft, cultivated tone cracking under pressure. The merchant-lord clutched the obsidian rail of his dais, watching as warning glyphs flooded his display.

Explosions flickered across the void, Aegirarch's rogue ships diving in suicide spirals—hauliers slamming into his cruisers, their cores deliberately overloaded.

Dozens of them were lost, each detonation swallowed vessels whole, scattering debris like broken coinage across the battle.

Oryss's comm flared with static before resolving into the fractured voice of Vaelos-Xhialis. Her calm mask was still there but trembled at the edges.

"Oryss. Kelbor. They're everywhere. My outer screen is gone. We can't intercept the hauliers fast enough—they're using an advanced v.i. against our systems."

Kelbor-Threxul's voice chimed in a second later, gruffer, but no less controlled. "They knew our escape vectors. He seeded them with ghost ships."

Outside, one of Oryss's escort destroyers vanished in a silent bloom of flame. A nearby haulier tumbled into view, its remnants splintered and spinning leaving a debris trail.

"This doesn't make sense," Oryss muttered. "Why commit to this scale? Even Aegirarch's can't afford this kind of loss."

"He's not trying to preserve anything," Kelbor said. "His burning everything down to ashes. He'll be the only Grithan left after this."

Vaelos interrupted, a siren flaring in her background. "Something just hit the Sable Crown. Deck integrity collapsing. I—"

The feed cut.

Silence.

Oryss blinked. "Vaelos?"

Nothing.

A clone on his bridge turned. "Long-range telemetry confirms. Sable Crown is critical. No surviving signals from the rest of her fleet."

Kelbor said nothing for a moment. Then, quietly "She has over a thousand clones aboard am sure they can hold off her capture."

Oryss exhaled through his mandibles, slow and shaking. He turned toward his fleet's command net. "Withdraw all vessels and try to break contact, fall back to Route Zurrak"

Another clone spoke up. "Zurrak was compromised. We lost contact with the patrol drone six minutes ago. Hostiles likely already waiting."

"Then Morgash Path. Anything just move."

Kelbor's voice returned, weaker now. "I can't. They're already inside, one of the hauliers rammed my port side had boarding pods. My internal systems are going down I can hear them in the lift shafts."

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Oryss closed his eyes.

Kelbor's last words came through with a terrible clarity. "It was a pleasure doing business, Oryss. You still ow—"

The signal died.

The bridge was quiet.

Only static and the low, rhythmic pulsing of damaged klaxons filled the air. The ship shuddered under another impact. Lights flickered, sputtered, and dimmed.

Oryss straightened himself and moved to his exo-suit. His exo-suit, trimmed with the deep blue and obsidian symbol of Vyrmora his clan symbol, was cracked.

He reminded himself calm always be calm even as the universe turns against you.

One clone officer, helmetless and wounded, turned to him. "Our flagship is the last vessel. Our ammunition is nearly depleted. All remaining escort ships are destroyed, or we lost contact."

Oryss tapped a command glyph. Holographic lines showed hundreds of enemy ships now swarming the remains of the fleet.

Suicide hauliers continued to drift, rigged to detonate on proximity. All that remained of his dynasty's power was crumbling in slow motion.

"Re-route the energy grid," Oryss said. "Keep life support going and weapons system going until the very end. I don't want to go without a fight."

The clone nodded.

From the observation screen, the dark expanse of space stretched infinitely—cold, silent, and indifferent. The debris field had grown vast, a drifting testament to each retreat, each lost vessel, and each fallen clan member. Every shattered hull was a coin spent, every fireball a ledger closed in blood and ruin.

Now, all of it had become part of a growing graveyard—an orbiting monument to failure that marked the slow, inevitable collapse of his clan and the doom of their grand expedition.

He opened one last channel. Not encrypted or secret. Just a general, open line for all to hear.

"This is Oryss-Vezhiran. Last claimant of this expedition. Let the record show we were betrayed, not broken. We dealt fairly and died profitably."

No one responded.

The ship's main engine began a slow shutdown. Without power, the Vezhiran's Promise drifted forward—its massive frame still regal even in death as it drifted forward.

Hours dragged on as more enemy ships—over fifty by now—drifted alongside his, each one offloading wave after wave of rogue clones into his vessel like a plague without end.

The sounds of battle never ceased. He felt them in the bones of the ship itself—the dull thrum of rail gun fire, the concussive jolts of breached bulkheads, the sharp shriek of rupturing metal. He didn't need to check the monitors. The violence was all around him.

More of his clones were dragged back, some barely alive, most already corpses. He winced—not out of compassion, but at the sheer cost.

The thought of how many galactic units it would take to replace them twisted his gut. And that was assuming he lived long enough to even start calculating replacements —something that seemed increasingly doubtful with each passing minute.

The bridge stood still, waiting.

"Report," Oryss said.

"Multiple hull breaches. Decks Six through Eleven have fallen. Our internal resistance down to three clusters."

"So we've lost?"

"Confirmed."

Oryss turned toward the centre of the bridge and descended the steps of his dais. Each footfall echoed in the hollow chamber.

"How long until they reach this section?"

"Minutes."

Oryss considered the odds. He wasn't a fool. He had survived dozens of market collapses, political assassinations, and hostile takeovers by simply being smarter, faster, and more valuable alive than dead. But now?

Now, value meant nothing.

He stood before a control panel and keyed in a sequence. The wall behind the dais opened, revealing a small alcove.

It contained a luxury escape pod. It could carry him far from the battlefield. Far from this mess.

But the clone beside him turned. "Your escape routes are compromised. Enemy ships surround all ejection corridors. Probability of interception 100%."

Oryss stared at the pod.

"It seems I've lost"

The clone nodded once.

A distant explosion shook the ship, closer this time. Bulkheads groaned under strain. One of the overhead lights burst, showering sparks.

Moments later, the door to the bridge hissed open.

They entered.

His forces returned fire with precision, but even from his vantage point, he could see the numbers thinning—steadily, inevitably—against the relentless surge of enemy troops breaching through every weak point.

Eventually, the fighting fell silent. The enemy pulled back, giving his clones a moment to regroup. Weapons were reloaded, wounds hastily patched.

Those too far gone were executed—waste was inefficiency, and there was no room for sentiment. Their armour and rifles would serve others better.

Moments later, warning lights flared across several sections of the command deck. Sparks covered sections of the room as segments were being carved open—the second breach was coming.

Oryss-Vezhiran slipped into the armoured shell of his escape pod, not to escape, but to observe. He simply watched as the inevitable drew closer—minute by minute, second by second.

Then the breach came.

Explosions rippled through the chamber as debris and shrapnel burst inward, flooding the deck. Through the smoke and fire, he saw the black-armoured clones surge forward like a tidal wave.

His blue-armoured clones—met them in a final, hopeless clash. They fell one by one, drowned beneath the weight of the enemy's numbers until nothing remained.

And then there was only silence.

He watched, trying to be calm and composed. He stood with arms at his sides as the enemy turned toward him. Weapons levelled—each one trained directly on him.

A single clone stepped forward. "You are Oryss-Vezhiran?"

"Yes."

"Aegirarch sends his official take-over notice."

Oryss didn't move at first. Then, with a sigh, he nodded. "I should have killed him earlier, but he is an effective worker."

He saw the first impacts scatter across the exterior of his pod—brief flashes of light against the metal skin. Moments later, concentrated fire breached the interior. That was when time seemed to slow.

The first shot struck his exo-suit and ricocheted harmlessly. The fifth didn't. It tore through him.

Agony surged through his body—raw, electric. The suit's systems kicked in, flooding his veins with stabilizers and stimulants, struggling to keep him alive. It wouldn't matter.

He didn't fight back. There was no point in resisting what had already been written in the stars.

His eyes drifted across the scene—the shattered screens, the corpses of his clones twisted in death, the flickering glow of status displays, and the once-pristine architecture of wealth and power now reduced to ruins. All of it drifting, collapsing into the cold embrace of the void.

As darkness crept in and death reached for him, one final thought took root.

Aegirarch wouldn't survive for long there was something worse in this solar system.

And in the darkness of the dying ship, the echoes of a once-great dynasty vanished with the drifting of debris.

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