Sion: Year Zero

GPO Ship 115 bucks hard as the station behind it blooms into fire. Sion hauls the fighter off the debris line, thrusters screaming while the viewport fills with spinning metal and bright ion haze.

The blast wave slaps the hull, but the ship holds. On the nav display, the safest lane opens starward, away from the wreck and toward open traffic lanes.

In the hold, Melissa Hartwell stays sealed inside the prisoner pod, silent and contained. Her custody is intact, and that matters now as much as survival.

Sion punches the ship through a clean turn, slipping past a sheet of drifting wreckage. The flames shrink behind him, and the Milky Way returns in full across the black.

A new ping flashes on the console, an encrypted GPO priority channel asking for confirmation of the station’s destruction. One reply could lock in Hartwell’s fate, and possibly expose who else was waiting for this outcome.

Sion steadies the ship, then lets the nose drift back toward the ruin. The station is not a shape anymore, just a widening cloud of broken plates, glowing seams, and twisted frame.

A clean gap opens in the debris field, and his view clears. Space Station Alpha is fully torn apart, its core scattering into cooling fragments that spin away from each other.

The last bright flare collapses into ember-red shards. Nothing remains intact enough to doubt it.

The priority channel keeps waiting, a hard white icon on the console beside the wreckage. Hartwell stays sealed in the hold, out of sight and still under lock.

The ship rides the edge of the open lane, clear of the worst of the debris. The next move hangs on that waiting GPO signal.