Republic Ascendant — Chapter Four
Book two in the Empirefall Chronicles follows the story of the fall of the Rew Confederacy and the rise of the Rogers Republic.
CHAPTER Four | “Reach”
Arg Homamanous stood on the obsidian dais of the Grand Assembly Hall on Rew Prime. The stained-glass ceiling arced high overhead, filtering afternoon light through shifting panes of violet and gold. Reporters packed the lower tiers. Broadcast nodes blinked red with live feeds. And above it all, banners of the Confederacy hung limp in the still air.
He was not a large man, even by Eukary standards, and yet power clung to him like static. His uniform was pristine, collar high and starched, the sigil of the High Command heavy on his chest. His face, however, betrayed the storm beneath; tight, drawn, cheeks hollowed from sleepless weeks.
He stepped forward.
“This is not the first time a frontier colony has spoken out of turn,” he said, his voice measured and cold. “Nor the first time a dissident movement has raised banners it did not earn.”
The audience was silent. The feed was not. Across the Confederacy, his voice rang.
“But never before has a rebel ship seized one of our own.”
He paused, letting the weight settle.
“They killed our citizens. They destroyed our property. They disrupted the lawful flow of commerce. This is not a protest. This is war.”
Reporters scribbled notes. Commanders in the shadowed tiers did not move.
“And to those who dare call the Rogers Republic a democracy, I ask: where were your votes when the Republic’s Flame murdered the crew of K-79? Where was your law when K-79’s captain abandoned his post?”
His voice climbed.
“This shall not stand. As Grand Admiral of the Rew Confederacy, I am invoking Article Nine. All Republic vessels are now classified as enemy combatants. Quarter will not be given. Surrender will not be accepted. No Republic captain will live to see another sunrise.”
He turned slowly, facing each camera.
“We are not weak. We are not afraid. And we do not negotiate with children dressed in the clothes of their parents.”
His final words fell like steel.
“Let them burn. One by one. Until nothing remains.”
Adra Rogers watched the live feed from her desk in the fortified comm tower of Rogers Cradle. The transmission ended, and the silence left in its wake felt louder than the speech itself.
The room was stark, brushed steel and sand-colored stone, built into the cliffs above the sea. The wind outside howled as it always did in the high caverns of the cradle, but inside, she sat motionless, back straight, fingers steepled beneath her chin.
“He didn’t stutter,” said her aide quietly.
“No,” Adra murmured. “He didn’t.”
She stood and paced to the viewport, watching gull-like predators rise on the coastal winds.
“The mask is off. He’s made it clear. There won’t be another warning.”
“Do we respond with a message?”
Adra turned back, eyes sharp. “No. We respond with fire.”
She tapped a control on her wristpad and brought up the tactical dossier.
“Send orders to Republic Flame. Confirm their target. Full engagement. No retreat.”
The aide hesitated. “You trust Captain Vorr with this?”
Adra paused. “He’s unorthodox, sure.”
Her aide swallowed, continuing, “He couldn’t cut it in the Rew Navy.”
“He’s the perfect captain to carry the flame into the dark.” Adra paused again, letting the decision hang in the air. “But we might need a backup plan.”
In the quiet of his cabin, Vorr opened the encrypted communique waiting in his personal queue. It was flagged as the highest priority. He read it twice.
The Republic Flame will receive two fireteams of Marines for a deep-penetration strike into Confederate communication network. Gendara’s Moon must be eliminated. Priority ground-strike to secure vaulted drives. Secondary objective results in the complete elimination of the facility from orbit.
You are more than a captain now. You are the flame our people follow. -Adra Rogers
Vorr closed the message with a silent exhale and leaned back. The hum of the Flame’s systems pulsed faintly through the walls like a distant heartbeat.
He didn’t want to be a symbol. Symbols were dead men.
Sighing, Vorr stood, and crossed his day cabin towards the egress to the conference room where his officers waited for him.
The briefing room aboard the Republic Flame still smelled of sealant where the inner joints had been reinforced to military standards. The little ship continued to change every day with fresh welds, new wiring, and the stench of something scorched behind a bulkhead; truly the odor couldn’t make up its mind on what it wanted to be.
The Flame was a ship born for war, rushed from drydock and reassembled from older vessels en route, some parts barely compatible with others. She creaked and hissed like a bug testing its new exoskeleton.
The room was dim, save for the rotating projection of a tactical star chart spinning slowly in the display on the front wall. Half the crew stood in partial armor, others in oil-streaked jumpsuits or loose fatigues, their attention locked on the flickering image. Blue Republic tags blinked softly across the sector’s edge, dwarfed by the wide arc of yellow Confederate beacons that surrounded them like a noose.
Captain Kele Vorr stood at the head of the table, hands clasped behind his back. His shadow stretched long in the low light, and his expression was stone.
“The operation to capture Kilo-79 got their attention,” he said finally, his voice low but carrying. “Now we’re going to blind them.”
He tapped a control, and the map re-centered. The schematic of an old relay station bloomed to life; triangular towers, sunken installations, narrow access corridors cut into bedrock. Antenna arrays rose from the ground like the bones of some long-buried beast.
“Our new target is here,” Vorr continued. “Gendara’s Moon. Confederate deep relay node. This station relays encrypted military traffic from the Belt to Rew Naval High Command. Take it out, and we blind their chain of command across four sectors.”
Yarra Wen let out a soft whistle. “Is there no redundancy?”
“I wasn’t given that information,” Vorr said, stopping further questions.
A quiet murmur rippled through the room. Lieutenant Kes Maru, her uniform sleeves rolled to the elbows and streaked with residue, leaned against the table. “There’s a lot of valuable info in a place like that, are we just levelling it?,” Maru asked, arching a pale brow.
“We’re not,” Vorr said. “We’re taking on some Marines before we leave the yard.”
“Do we even have room for that?” Maru muttered.
“It’ll be tight,” Vorr conceded. “But that’s why they built us out of modular cargo containers, we’re adaptable to mission profiles.”
A long silence followed. The map spun slowly, indifferent.
Finally, Vorr added, “I won’t pretend this’ll be as easy as Kilo-79. But I’ve read your reports. I’ve walked this ship. I believe we have a crew who won’t blink. We have a crew that won’t crack.”
“We’re ready, Cap’n.” Kira agreed with a strong hand clap, clearing the air in a typical Panatharn style.
Orbital doctrine dictated a day–night cycle that matched the ebb and flow of work parties and contract crews. Vorr had never understood why “night” aboard ship demanded the dim running lights, but traditions died hard.
One mercy of the gloom was how little it bled into the observation blister. The galaxy hung above him in narrow bands his eyes could truly see and even so, it stole his breath.
At berth, with the gravity well powered down, Vorr floated at one of the highest points above the station’s pull. The reduced G still claimed him just enough to draw him back to the decking after each slow push to the apex of the bubble canopy. It was an indulgence he allowed himself in the quiet hours, an oddity to —
He felt her on his lattice.
He would never probe; that restraint had been hammered into him at the academy. Even so, passively, he sensed Kira moving toward him beyond the dogged, airtight hatch.
A tuft of ginger-auburn fur edged around the door as it creaked open. “Cap’n?” she whispered, as if the blister itself might echo.
“Kira,” he answered, etiquette momentarily forgotten as warmth flushed along his neural pathways. His mind scrambled for an excuse for this breach of protocol; this was his refuge, her timing, anything.
Instead of waiting for his response, she closed the distance herself, eyes searching his in the dim. “Kele,” she breathed, just as softly. “You can touch me.”
He caught her upper arms, thumbs fitting over the curve of her powerful biceps, and they found each other’s mouths. Heat rose under his skin; he kissed her thin lips, then along her cheek to the pulse at her neck, tasting salt along the thin fur covering her body.
Kira gasped, fingers tight with passion at the base of his skull. “With your lattice,” she said, guiding him.
What began as simple hunger; her strength, her stance, the way her uniform couldn’t quite hide the cut of her form — deepened as he opened himself to her mind. Compassion flooded back, steady as tide; a core of iron in velvet. Fear and trepidation in him loosened, pushed aside by the warmth of her conscious presence, and he held both: her body in his arms, her thought cradled in his.
Her breath hitched into a quiet cry. She pressed a palm to his chest, not to stop him but to steady the rush. The thin fur along her forearms was damp, darkened with sweat, and only then did he realize he’d let his own stimulation bleed across the link.
“By the Seven, Kele.” She dragged in air, pupils wide in the low light. “What was that?”
“Lattice stimulation,” he managed, breath ragged, the collar of his uniform cooling wet against his skin. “We shouldn’t have done that.” A scold, automatic, and then the truth slipped after it. “Because of the crew.”
“I know.”
“I want to,” he said, feeling the weight of her disappointment settle on him like gravity returning.
“I know.”
He drew her in, wrapping his arms around her as the blister’s transparent curve framed a river of stars. Gently this time — carefully — he reached back along the lattice and held her there too, a quiet embrace of thought that didn’t spill, didn’t blaze, only warmed.
She tipped her face up to him and smiled. “When this is over,” she said, certain as time itself, “you are mine.”
Three days later, the Republic’s Flame skimmed the upper atmosphere of Gendara’s moon, hugging the curve of its shadowed side. The surface below lay barren and jagged, a palimpsest of overlapping craters and ancient lava plains. Thermal shadows jittered across the sensors. No signal. No pings.
“This feels eerily familiar,” Estal Jenks said, fingers sweeping his console. “No transponders. No heat.”
The bridge was quiet. The kind of quiet that wrapped around the bones. Vorr stood with his hands clasped behind his back, gaze pinned to the main plot. “Not even a Confederate handshake?”
“Nothing, sir,” Estal confirmed.
“That doesn’t mean it’s empty,” Vorr said, careful and calm. “Chief Maru, make sure our Marine friends are apprised.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Sir, I’ve got a ghost-bounce, it looks like radar with Republic encryption headers,” Yarra said, pressing a headset cup tight to her ear.
“Keep your ears on it, Lieutenant.” Vorr swallowed the knot growing in his throat. Ghost-radar wasn’t impossible, and there was no reason to think another Republic ship was out here.
“I’ll work it down for you, Captain,” Yarra replied, clearly happy to take her mind off the carnage that was about to be unleashed below.
“Lieutenant Nehl,” Vorr called as he brushed her gently over the lattice. “Ready to take us from silent to hot on my mark.”
Qira glanced up from her station, meeting his eyes. “Aye, sir.”
He didn’t speak, didn’t shift, only listened to the hush of a ship coasting through nothing. Like a conductor waiting for the downbeat, he could feel the orchestra around him poised to play their song of death.
Maru reached for him through his own lattice and felt the Captain’s pulse: slow, level. Vorr sent back steadiness, cool water over hot stone, letting it spill through the crew chief to the teams laced beneath him.
“Lieutenant,” Vorr said to Qira, sending another wash of calm. “Now, if you please.”
The dark serenity of silent running snapped like a bone. Alert klaxons bellowed. Control boards rolled into red-shifted light. Forward of the command deck, the railcannons slid out on armored sleds, doors that had masked their throats slamming clear.
Radar and lidar went from whisper to shout, active pulses painting the night. Jamming pods bloomed, kneading the spectrum, while deep subspace pings rang the gravity well like a bell.
The Republic’s Flame woke. Rearing for a fight.
“Chief,” Vorr snapped. “Marines away, if you please.”
The hull groaned as she dropped into the moon’s thickening mid-atmosphere. Storm fronts boiled over the crater fields, lit by the strobe of lightning the Flame’s own friction helped to summon.
Inside the forward-most cargo container, a repurposed crate still ghosted with faded Interspecies Medical Collective markings, the assault team watched the ready-red stop pulsing. The emerald drop-light flared and held.
Xendu Hess, the burly Marine captain, was Amite by birth only. His bulky frame and well-toned muscle, a riot of inked expletives, stood in cheerful defiance of the servile docility expected of most Amites. Xendu took pride in being a contrarian to his race, and a very loud one.
“Let’s go, fur-babies!” he barked, stepping into empty air and letting the gravity chute seize him. Most of his team were Pantheras revolutionaries; the nickname had stuck by day two.
One by one the Marines stepped out and let the chute take them, forty-five seconds of controlled fall. Air rasped over plating. Lightning stitched the clouds in white veins.
Ahead, the relay station loomed. Half-buried in volcanic ridges, its dish array stood like shattered glass, petals cracked and useless.
“That’s weird,” Shiira, his Gunnery Sergeant, murmured on their private channel.
“Keep the team on mission,” Xendu said. “We get to thinkin’ and we get dumb.”
Back on the fireteam net, Shiira’s voice went crisp. “Team One, push to secure locks. Team Two, outer security.”
“Reaper One-One, pulse jammers firing,” Lieutenant Nehl cut in over command. “If they had ears on, they don’t now.”
“Understood, Lieutenant.”
“Flame Actual wishes you good hunting,” Nehl added, then clicked off.
Xendu paced the lead fireteam through the landing valley. It was filled with black glass under white powder, ash drifting like sifted bone. The relay station sat in the ridge like a tooth filed to the root and half-buried in slag. Low outbuildings scalloped the compound’s edge, their corners eaten by years of gritstorm.
“Two, set perimeter here,” he ordered.
The squads ran their circles in silence, prisms of IR and lidar painting arcs that came back empty: stone, dead angles, nothing that breathed.
“No heat. No drones,” Shiira said. “I don’t like it.”
“It ain’t ours to like, Sarge,” Xendu answered, and flicked a chain of hand signals.
Team One slid along the left wall toward the recessed blast door. The control panel was stone-dead—no polite glow, no handshake prompt. The air smelled of glass dust and a rancid sweetness that said old blood was near.
“Go,” Xendu whispered, knife-sharp.
Private Dava, nineteen and as steady as a metronome, knelt and set an old Rew tap like she’d done it her whole life. Leads checked, charge seated, breech armed. Shiira leaned over her shoulder, gave the smallest nod.
“On your mark,” Dava said.
Xendu watched the valley mouth, gauging the wind’s angle off the roofline. Lightning fluttered again. Just over a mile away, a band of lightning started again.
“Now.”
The shaped charge coughed; the door puckered inward with a dry scream. Pressure equalized on a sigh, not a blast. Xendu tasted metal at the back of his tongue.
“Go.”
They flowed inside.
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