Chapter 3 – Orbital Decay

The sensation of weightlessness was gone, replaced by a terrifying, accelerating plunge.

The Moon, previously a distant, silent witness beyond the stadium glass, was now a jagged landscape rushing up to meet them. The artificial gravity grid of the Crown Circuit arena had failed, but that wasn’t what was pulling them down.

The lunar gravity engine—the very prize they were fighting for—was actively dragging the entire orbital structure out of the sky.

Leo’s body slammed against the glass wall of the arena as the massive sphere tilted on its axis. Alarms shrieked through the stadium, a cacophony of human sirens and Orathi klaxons. The holographic crowds vanished, instantly replaced by stark, glowing emergency evacuation routes.

Below him, the combat floor was a chaotic storm of floating debris, referee drones, and shattered metal, all tumbling toward the reinforced glass floor facing the Moon.

"Vance!" Leo shouted into his comms, his voice cracking. "Vance, do you read? The containment grid is down! The whole structure is dropping!"

Static answered him. The catastrophic shift in gravity was scrambling all external telemetry.

He looked for Varessa.

The Orathi Champion was a pale blur amidst the falling wreckage. She wasn’t fighting the drop; she was surfing it. Her purple fins flared in short, controlled bursts, creating micro-gravity wells that deflected heavy debris away from her path. She slammed her three-clawed feet onto the side of the central scoring pylon, anchoring herself as the arena pitched violently again.

Her four golden eyes scanned the plunging stadium, calculating trajectories not just for herself, but for the massive chunks of metal raining down around her.

Leo engaged his thrusters, fighting the pull of the lunar engine. His human tech was screaming, the G-force indicators on his HUD flashing deep red. He couldn’t out-fly a planetary gravity well, but he could angle his descent. He fired a hard lateral burn, aiming for the relative safety of the central pylon where Varessa had anchored.

As he closed the distance, a massive section of the VIP viewing deck tore loose from the stadium’s inner wall. A slab of reinforced steel the size of a shuttle plunged straight toward him.

Leo banked hard, his thrusters groaning, but the debris was too large, the angle too tight.

Suddenly, a localized gravity well erupted directly in front of him.

The air distorted, rippling with violet energy. The massive steel slab hit the invisible barrier and violently sheared to the left, missing Leo by inches. The shockwave spun him out of control.

He crashed into the central pylon, his armor sparking as he slid down the metal surface. Before he could fall further, a familiar, heavy magnetic tail wrapped around his thigh, locking him in place.

Varessa stood above him, her exoskeleton humming with a dangerous, crackling static charge. The friction of the dropping arena and the extreme output of her fins were overloading her armor’s capacity to ground the electricity.

"You are flying like a panicked animal, human," she hissed, the double-tone of her voice tight with strain. She didn’t look at him; her eyes were fixed on the rapidly approaching lunar surface through the floor glass.

Leo gritted his teeth, grabbing the pylon to stabilize himself. "Your people just broke the grid. The whole stadium is falling."

"The Empire does not break its own arenas," Varessa snapped. She adjusted her stance, her fins glowing brighter. "The lunar engine has surged. The parameters of the dispute have changed."

Leo looked down. The craters of the Moon were massive now, the grey dust visible in stark detail. The stadium was entering the upper bounds of the lunar atmosphere, the friction beginning to superheat the outer glass shell. A dull, orange glow began to spread across the transparent walls.

"We have to brace," Leo said, his mind racing through survival protocols he hadn’t used since the Daedalus burned. He couldn’t save the stadium, but he could try to survive the impact. "If we hit the surface at this speed, the glass shatters, and the vacuum takes us before the crash does."

Varessa finally looked down at him. Her primary eyes were cold, calculating the odds. Her secondary eyes tracked the growing heat signature on the glass.

"My exoskeleton can withstand the impact and the vacuum," she said, her voice terrifyingly calm. "Your suit cannot."

The unspoken reality hung heavy in the superheated air between them. She didn’t have to save him. If he died in the crash, the match was nullified, but the Empire would retain their current percentage. She owed him nothing. The courtship flush from Match One was a liability she was currently trying to erase with cold, Orathi logic.

Leo felt the familiar, suffocating weight of guilt press against his ribs. Don’t leave us, Leo. He swallowed the phantom taste of ash. He wasn’t going to beg. He wasn’t going to make another person carry the weight of his survival.

He reached down to uncouple her magnetic tail from his thigh. "Then secure yourself, Champion. I’ll take my chances with the thrusters."

Before he could release the lock, Varessa’s hand clamped down over his.

Her grip was iron. The static charge from her armor bit through his glove, stinging his skin. Her golden eyes locked onto his, the pupils blown wide in the dim, red emergency lighting.

"Do not insult me by choosing death when I have already paid the price to keep you alive," she said, the words vibrating through his chest plate.

She didn’t wait for his response. She hauled him up, pressing him hard against the pylon.

"Vector," she commanded.

She flared her fins to their absolute maximum. The localized gravity well was so intense Leo felt his internal organs shift. She was creating a protective bubble of manipulated physics around them, fighting the pull of the entire moon.

The heat inside the stadium became unbearable. The glass floor below them began to spiderweb with glowing red cracks.

"Hold on," Varessa grunted, her dual hearts hammering a frantic, deafening rhythm against him.

The stadium hit the lunar surface.

The sound was a physical blow, a concussive wave of tearing metal and shattering glass that knocked the breath from Leo’s lungs. The world dissolved into a blinding flash of grey dust and orange fire.

The impact should have crushed them. But inside Varessa’s vector, the kinetic energy was warped, shunted around them in a localized bubble of distorted physics. The G-force was agonizing, but it wasn’t fatal.

When the roaring finally stopped, and the dust began to settle in the low lunar gravity, Leo found himself pinned beneath the Orathi Champion amidst the wreckage of the central pylon.

The stadium was gone. They were lying in a massive crater on the surface of the Moon, surrounded by jagged shards of glass and twisted metal, all bathed in the harsh, unfiltered starlight of the vacuum.

Leo gasped, his suit’s life support kicking into overdrive to scrub the sudden spike in carbon dioxide. He looked up.

Varessa was straddling him, her hands braced on either side of his helmet. Her ivory armor was scorched black in places, the luminescent scales dull and smoking. The static charge was gone, spent in the massive effort to shield them. She was breathing heavily, her chest heaving against his.

For a long moment, neither of them moved. The silence of the lunar vacuum was absolute, broken only by the sound of their own frantic breathing in their comms.

Then, slowly, Varessa pushed herself up. She didn’t offer him a hand. She simply stood, her three-clawed feet locking into the lunar rock, and surveyed the devastation.

Leo scrambled up, checking his suit seals. They were intact. He was alive. Again.

He looked at Varessa. She was staring out across the lunar landscape, her posture rigid, her four eyes tracking something in the distance.

"The impact," Leo said, his voice raspy over the comms. "It wasn’t a malfunction. The lunar engine pulled us."

"Yes," Varessa said flatly. She pointed a sharp, ivory finger toward the horizon. "Look."

Leo followed her gaze.

Miles away, jutting out of the grey dust like a jagged metal spine, was the massive, subterranean structure of the lunar gravity engine. It was the heart of the territorial dispute, the machine that controlled the Moon’s orbit.

And it was glowing.

Deep within the engine’s core, pulses of raw, violet energy were surging upward, radiating outward in concentric rings that disturbed the lunar dust.

"That’s not normal," Leo said, his pilot’s mind analyzing the energy signature. "The engine is supposed to be dormant until the Circuit is complete. It’s only supposed to draw minimal power to maintain orbit."

Varessa didn’t answer. She began to walk toward a massive, relatively intact section of the stadium’s telemetry array that had survived the crash.

Leo followed, his magnetic boots crunching softly on the lunar surface. The sheer physical presence of the Orathi Champion walking ahead of him, her armor scorched but unbroken, was a stark reminder of the power disparity between them. He was a fragile bag of water in a tin can; she was a living weapon.

They reached the telemetry array. The screens were shattered, but the core data drive was still pulsing with a faint green light.

Varessa slammed her fist onto the access panel, crushing the lock mechanism. She reached in, her claws delicately extracting a thick data-slate. She interfaced it with a port on her forearm armor.

Her four eyes flicked rapidly across the raw data streaming onto her HUD.

"The engine did not malfunction," she said, her voice chillingly devoid of emotion.

"Then who triggered the surge?" Leo asked, stepping closer to see the data, though he couldn’t read the Orathi cipher.

"No one triggered it," Varessa replied. She turned to face him, the data-slate glowing faintly in her hand. "The engine surged because it received a massive influx of external power."

"From where?"

Varessa looked down at her own chest, then at Leo.

"From us."

Leo frowned, confusion warring with the lingering adrenaline of the crash. "What do you mean, from us?"

Varessa tapped the slate. "The data log from Match One. And the fragmented log from Match Two, right before the crash. The telemetry array wasn’t just broadcasting biometrics for the audience. It was siphoning energy."

She pointed to a line of code translating on her HUD.

"Every time I flared my fins. Every time we shared a vector. The kinetic friction, the gravity distortions, the biological stress… the arena wasn’t just a stage. It was a turbine."

Leo felt a cold knot form in his stomach. The implications of what she was saying began to assemble themselves in his mind, piece by terrifying piece.

"The Crown Circuit," Leo said slowly, "is supposed to determine who controls the engine. We fight, we win a percentage, the engine stays stable."

"That is the lie we were told," Varessa said. "The data shows that the engine has been absorbing the energy of our combat. But it is not storing it to maintain the Moon’s orbit."

She brought up a localized map of the solar system, projected from the data-slate into the vacuum between them.

The Moon was highlighted in red. A dotted trajectory line extended from it, pointing straight toward the blue marble of Earth.

"The engine is using our energy to slowly, incrementally, alter the Moon’s trajectory," Varessa stated.

Leo stared at the projection, his breath catching in his throat. The cold logic of the numbers was undeniable. The engine wasn’t a prize to be won.

"It’s not an engine," Leo whispered, the realization a physical weight crushing down on him.

"No," Varessa agreed, her golden eyes reflecting the grim trajectory line. "It is an orbital cannon. And every time we fight, we are loading the gun."