The docking bay door exhaled—a soft hydraulic sigh that echoed in the cavernous space like a last breath. Lyron Leigh stumbled through the threshold, propelled by the guard's final shove. His legs, weakened by two days of deliberate starvation, nearly buckled beneath him. Nearly. He caught himself with a desperate half-step, denying them even that small indignity.
The pod bay stretched before him, a cathedral of gunmetal gray and harsh white light. Thirty evacuation pods lined the walls like metal seeds waiting to be scattered into the void. The air tasted of recycled oxygen and machine oil. Cold. Everything here was cold—the floor beneath his feet, the filtered air in his lungs, the eyes watching from behind reinforced glass.
Above, separated by transparent aluminum and the insurmountable distance of class, the observation deck framed his audience. Of course they were watching. An execution demanded witnesses, and the wealthy always had front-row seats to the suffering of the poor.
Lyron lifted his gaze.
Damien stood closest to the glass, that familiar smirk carved into his pale face like a monument to petty victory. Weak. That's what he'd always been—a coward wearing noble's silk, a man who needed conspiracy and subterfuge because he'd never won anything through his own merit. If it weren't for that hereditary title, for the accident of birth that placed him above common humanity, Lyron would have broken that smirk across his fist months ago.
Beside him, Octavia. Baron Octavia Vel Soran, with his crystalline blue eyes and that nauseating aristocratic bearing—head held high, spine impossibly straight, every gesture calculated to remind the world of his superiority. There had been a time, Lyron remembered with bitter clarity, when he'd admired this man. Watched him from across training halls and mess decks, thinking: That's what nobility looks like. That's grace under pressure.
What a fool he'd been.
Grace? No. Octavia was a statue—beautiful, cold, and hollow. A man so consumed by entitlement that he couldn't conceive of losing anything, even a woman's attention, to someone beneath him. The conspiracy, the fabricated evidence, the theatrical trial—all of it orchestrated because Lana had smiled at Lyron instead of him.
Hatred kindled in Lyron's chest, spreading like fire through dry timber. His hands clenched into fists behind his back where the magnetic cuffs still held his wrists together. In his mind's eye, he saw it clearly: launching himself at them, shattering that pristine glass, dragging them both down into the violence they deserved. Damien's smirk cracking under his knuckles. Octavia's perfect posture crumbling as they tumbled across the deck.
But they were armed. He was restrained. And his execution was already bought and paid for.
His eyes found Lana last.
She stood apart from the two nobles, her emerald eyes—the kind poets spent lifetimes trying to adequately describe—fixed on him with an expression that might have been remorse. Or guilt. Or simply the discomfort of watching a man die because she'd been too persistent in her affections.
"Beautiful things are dangerous", his mother used to say while working their farm on Terrahold III, sweat on her brow, dirt under her nails. "The prettiest flowers have the deepest thorns."
Lana Sorovine was exactly that—a red plum hanging low on the branch, ripe and sweet and absolutely poisonous to touch. From the moment she'd approached him in the starship's common area, all soft smiles and lingering glances, he'd known. Trouble wore expensive perfume and silk dresses, and it left broken commoners in its wake.
He'd rejected her. Again and again, as kindly as he could, he'd turned away her advances. Not because he didn't feel the pull—he was human, and she was stunning in the way that made men forget their better judgment—but because he understood the mathematics of their situation. A baron's daughter and a commoner farmer-turned-entertainer? That equation only ever solved for disaster.
And yet, disaster had found him anyway.
Now, staring up at her through layers of glass and unbridgeable social distance, Lyron found he couldn't summon the hatred she probably deserved. Maybe he should have just given in. Maybe if he'd accepted her attention, played the role of grateful peasant honored by her interest, Octavia's wounded pride would have found a different target.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
The word tasted like ash.
All those nights composing poetry by the dim light of his bunk. All those hours practicing verses in the cargo bay when his shifts ended, dreaming of the Grand Imperial Theatre on Helios Prime—the greatest stage in all seven galaxies, where the Empire's finest performers brought emperors to tears and earned themselves fortunes and immortality in equal measure. He'd been close. Six more months on this voyage, then planetfall, then auditions…
Now his dreams were dying in real-time, and there was nothing he could do but watch them bleed out.
Behind him, the magnetic cuffs suddenly released with a sharp click. They clattered against the deck plating as Zelrec, the guard who'd been his escort from cell to execution, stepped back. The performance was complete. The prisoner had been seen, judged, and found wanting. Time for the final act.
A rough hand between his shoulder blades propelled Lyron toward the nearest pod.
He didn't resist. What would be the point? Instead, he walked with what dignity starvation and despair had left him, crossing the fifteen meters to Pod Seven like a man approaching a particularly uninspiring gallows.
The biometric scanner glowed faint blue beside the pod's entry hatch. Lyron pressed his palm against the cool surface, feeling the familiar tingle of laser-light reading his genetic signature, confirming his identity one last time for the record.
A holographic display materialized in the air before him:
LYRON LEIGH
Designation: Crew (Entertainment Division)
Status: CONVICTED - TREASON
Sentence: EXILE - INDEFINITE
Pod Assignment: Seven
Emergency Retrieval: DISABLED
The image showed his face—gaunt now, after two days without food, stubble darkening his jaw—but still recognizably him. Same brown eyes that his mother always said were "soulful, like an old poet's." Same sharp cheekbones that Lana had once traced with one finger while he'd tried to compose a verse about starlight.
Regret, thick and choking, surged up from somewhere deep in his chest.
'If only I'd been less attractive.' The thought arrived with bitter irony. 'If only my face had been forgettable. If only she'd never noticed me at all.'
Maybe this was his punishment for hubris. For leaving Terrahold III with dreams too large for a farmer's son. For believing that talent and determination could overcome the accident of birth. The universe had a way of reminding commoners exactly where they belonged, and apparently, Lyron's place was drifting alone in the infinite dark until his oxygen ran out.
The hatch unsealed with a pneumatic hiss, splitting open to reveal the pod's interior.
Cramped. That was the only word for it. Two meters long, barely one meter wide, with a single acceleration seat bolted to the center and surrounded by blinking instruments and emergency supplies. The walls were lined with sound-dampening foam that had yellowed with age. It smelled of rubber and stale air and the faint chemical tang of the life-support systems.
Lyron climbed inside, his movements awkward in the bulky suit they'd given him—standard evacuation gear, at least they'd followed protocol on that front. He lowered himself into the seat, feeling the cold press through the suit's insulation, and reached overhead for the oxygen tube. His fingers fumbled briefly before connecting it to his suit's intake valve with a soft click.
Air flooded his helmet. Processed, recycled, but breathable.
The hatch began to seal, servo motors whining as the curved door descended like a closing eyelid. Through the narrowing gap, Lyron caught one last glimpse of the pod bay, of Zelrec walking away without a backward glance, of the observation deck where his audience still watched.
Then the seal completed with a hollow thud that resonated through the pod's frame.
Darkness.
For three heartbeats, Lyron sat in perfect blackness, listening to his own breathing rasp in the confines of the pod. Then the interior lights flickered on—pale emergency lighting that cast everything in shades of sickly yellow-green.
He pulled the helmet from its storage clamp and fitted it over his head, locking the collar seals with practiced twists. The suit's internal systems came online, filling his ears with soft electronic chirps and the steady rhythm of air circulation. Strange how comfortable it felt. How normal, like slipping into a second skin.
At least the Empire's starship safety codes mandated individual evacuation pods for every crew member, regardless of rank. Without that policy, he'd be experiencing vacuum death right now—explosive decompression, boiling blood, the thirty seconds of consciousness before brain death. Instead, he had a coffin with life support.
Twelve hours of oxygen. That's what the standard reserves provided. Twelve hours to drift through the void and pray—to whatever gods still listened—that another ship might pass by. That some captain, driven by humanity or boredom, might check their sensors and notice one lone pod broadcasting an emergency beacon that couldn't actually call for help because it had been deliberately disabled.
The odds weren't worth calculating.
The control panel flickered to life, bathing his face in the cold glow of half a dozen screens. System diagnostics scrolled past in cascading green text. Life support: NOMINAL. Thrusters: DISABLED. Communications: DISABLED. Beacon: OFFLINE.
Then, centered on the main display:
LAUNCH SEQUENCE INITIATED
Numbers appeared beneath it: 10… 9… 8…
Lyron watched the countdown with a strange sense of detachment, as if this were happening to someone else. Some other poet who'd dreamed too large. Some other fool who'd refused a beautiful woman and paid the ultimate price.
3… 2… 1…
The explosive bolts fired.
For a fraction of a second, Lyron felt nothing. Then momentum caught up to physics, and he was moving—thrown backward into his seat as the pod rocketed away from the starship's hull on pillars of compressed gas. The g-force pressed against his chest, squeezed his ribs, made his teeth clench against the pressure.
The screens came alive with external camera feeds.
Six different angles, six different views of the universe: The starship—Graven Herald—rapidly shrinking astern, its massive bulk still majestic despite the cruelty of its crew. Stars scattered across the void like spilled diamonds. A distant nebula, purple and rose-gold, where new suns were being born in clouds of stellar matter. The endless, perfect blackness of deep space—beautiful and utterly indifferent to his suffering.
The pod's emergency thrusters flared once, twice, then fell silent as the automated systems stabilized his trajectory. Now he was coasting, carried by Newton's laws into the infinite nothing.
The Herald's engines ignited—twin blue stars of fusion fire—and the ship began to accelerate. Lyron watched it pull away, growing smaller, becoming a bright speck, then a pinprick, then a memory. In less than three minutes, the vessel that had been his home for eight months vanished into the darkness, leaving him utterly alone.
Alone with the stars.
Alone with his thoughts.
Alone with twelve hours of oxygen and a lifetime of regrets.