The command from Warlord Krell's flagship, "Obliterate it!" was not a shout Bolt could hear, but a wave of murderous intent that washed over the Nyxwing's bridge, cold and absolute.
Eva didn't need to hear the words; the sudden, terrifying bloom of dozens of targeting locks painting their tiny vessel on the holographic display told her everything.
"Shields to maximum!" she yelled, though there was no one to hear but the silent, slumped form of Bolt beside her and the soft, increasingly frantic Aethelgardian chimes of the ship's alert system.
"Evasive pattern Delta-Nine-Gamma!"
The Nyxwing, almost an extension of her own desperate will, responded with breathtaking agility.
It jinked, pirouetted, and dived through the star-dusted void, trying to present the smallest possible target as the first salvo from the Executioner's Blade erupted.
Lances of crimson energy, powerful enough to gut a standard cruiser, tore through the space they had occupied scant heartbeats before.
The shockwaves buffeted them, even through the advanced inertial dampeners.
Eva's fingers danced across the luminescent controls, her mind racing, processing a thousand variables a second.
She pushed the Aethelgardian ship harder than she ever had, harder than she thought possible. Its unique, partially organic structure groaned under the stress, the internal lights flickering.
She could feel Bolt beside her, a dead weight, his powerful transformed body utterly still, the silver light of the Ahna'sara a tragically faint glimmer in his fur.
"Bolt, wake up!" she cried, her voice cracking.
"I need you! Please!"
Only his ragged breathing answered her. She was alone.
A volley of concussion missiles, faster and more agile than the energy beams, streaked towards them.
Eva threw the Nyxwing into a gut-wrenching spin, diving towards the fractured, glowing surface of the wounded Heart of Orion itself, hoping its chaotic energy fields might offer some interference.
Several missiles detonated prematurely, confused by the Heart's erratic emissions, but two slipped through.
One impacted their aft shield, which flared brilliantly then collapsed with a despairing whine from the ship's systems.
The second struck the port engine nacelle. An explosion rocked the Nyxwing violently, throwing Eva against her restraints. Shards of crystalline circuitry showered the bridge.
A searing pain shot through her left shoulder as a piece of jagged metal, torn from a bulkhead, embedded itself there.
"Argh!" She gasped, fighting through the agony, her vision momentarily blurring. Warning lights blazed across her console like angry red eyes.
Main power fluctuating. Port engine offline. They were crippled.
Through the viewport, Krell's flagship loomed, a vast mountain of vengeful metal, already lining up for the killing blow.
Its forward batteries glowed with malevolent promise.
This was it. Zero hour.
Then, just as the Felid Warlord was about to unleash the final, obliterating volley, the Heart of Orion screamed.
It wasn't a sound, but a wave of pure, unadulterated cosmic agony, a psychic shockwave that pulsed outwards from its wounded core.
The very fabric of space around it seemed to twist and ripple.
Perhaps it was a reaction to the Despoiler's earlier assault, a delayed spasm of its tormented energies, or perhaps, in some impossibly vast consciousness, it sensed the tiny spark of the Ahna'sara in Bolt, the only thing that had offered it a moment's solace, now about to be extinguished.
This chaotic, unpredictable energy wave, born of the Heart's own pain, swept through the immediate vicinity.
It slammed into Krell's flagship with brute, impartial force.
On the Nyxwing's struggling sensors, Eva saw secondary explosions blossom across the Executioner's Blade's hull.
Its immense shields flickered and buckled under the assault. Its targeting locks on the Nyxwing dissolved into static.
The orderly, disciplined intent Bolt had sensed earlier fractured into alarms and shouts of confusion on the Felid bridge.
The Nyxwing, caught in the same wave, was tossed like a storm-wracked boat.
But its Aethelgardian design, attuned to empathic and energetic frequencies, somehow resonated differently with the Heart's outburst.
The ship shuddered, groaned, but its core integrity held, almost as if the Heart's raw energy, while chaotic, recognized a sliver of kinship with the vessel carrying the Ahna'sara's echo.
Bolt's unconscious form even seemed to glow faintly for a moment, a soft, protective silver.
Krell, his face a mask of incandescent fury on Eva's damaged tactical display, was forced to divert all his attention to his own vessel's sudden instability and the Heart's terrifying, unpredictable spasms.
The order to destroy the insignificant gnat that was the Nyxwing was, for a precious few moments, forgotten in the face of a much larger, more immediate crisis.
Eva, bleeding, her vision swimming, saw her chance. A fleeting, desperate window.
"Not… today… you oversized furball," she spat through gritted teeth, adrenaline and sheer defiance momentarily overriding her pain.
With her one good arm, she wrestled the Nyxwing's controls, pouring her will, her desperation, into the empathic interface.
The remaining engine whined in protest, but it responded.
She aimed the crippled ship towards a dense, swirling cloud of incandescent gas and fractured Progenitor debris that had been thrown off by the Heart's convulsion, a chaotic shroud near the nebula's core.
The Nyxwing limped into the obscuring cloud, vanishing from Krell's momentarily scrambled sensors just as his ship began to stabilize.
Silence, then, on the bridge. A broken, precarious silence. Eva slumped against the controls, her breath coming in shallow gasps, her vision blurring rapidly.
Bolt lay still, the faint silver glow around him fading. The Heart of Orion pulsed erratically in the distance, a wounded titan.
Krell's flagship, damaged but still overwhelmingly powerful, was out there, momentarily distracted but undoubtedly still hunting.
They had survived. But they were crippled, deep in hostile territory, with their protector unconscious and the fate of the galaxy bleeding light years away.
The firestorm had passed over them, but its embers still glowed, threatening to reignite at any moment.