The alarms didn’t stop, and if anything they got louder even more,the whole cabin bathed in flashing red while Ren gripped the armrest hard enough to hurt and watched his bag get flung clean off the overhead rack. "We have lost primary thrust," the pilot announced over the comm, voice way too calm for someone admitting they’d just lost primary thrust on a ship full of people. "Emergency landing protocol engaged, all passengers remain seated and secure your restraints immediately."
’What remain seated,’ Ren thought, watching sparks spit out of a wall panel two rows up where the emergency lighting strip had cracked open. ’Sure. Great advice. Very helpful, thank you so much.’
The ship dropped out of the starlane hard enough to knock the breath out of him, and through the viewport Ren caught his first real look at where they were headed, a pale cratered moon ringed by a thin belt of drifting rock and debris, sitting right on the edge of a stretch of space the nav display kept flashing in blinking red letters across the main screen: UNCLASSIFIED TERRITORY, MONSTER PRESENCE CONFIRMED, ALL CIVILIAN CRAFT ADVISED TO DIVERT IMMEDIATELY. Of course it would be that. Of course.
The landing itself was rough but survivable, more of a controlled crash than anything that deserved to be called a landing, the hull screeching against rock until the whole transport finally skidded to a stop in a cloud of kicked-up dust, and by the time it settled Ren’s ears were ringing and half the cabin was already screaming. He unbuckled himself, grabbed his bag, and pushed toward the exit hatch along with everyone else, because staying inside a smoking ship felt like a worse idea than stepping out onto a moon full of things that ate people.
Outside, the air recyclers in his suit kicked on automatically, filtering out the moon’s thin, freezing atmosphere, and the ground crunched like old snow under his boots as he moved. The terrain stretched out in jagged silver rock formations lit by a distant sun that barely counted as daylight, scanner drones from the wreck already spinning up overhead to sweep the area, and Ren was still taking it all in when he saw something big move between two rock spires in the distance, something with too many limbs and a low wet growl that carried across the open ground like it wanted to be heard.
"Everybody back inside," someone shouted, and the crowd surged toward the ship, but the exit ramp had jammed half-shut in the crash and only a handful of people managed to squeeze through before the growling thing broke into a dead sprint straight at the group still stranded outside.
Ren didn’t think, he just grabbed the nearest kid, a girl who couldn’t have been older than twelve and stood frozen solid with fear, and shoved her behind a boulder just as the creature slammed into the ground exactly where she’d been standing a second earlier. Up close it was worse than he expected, six segmented legs, a body armored like some nightmare crustacean, a mouth full of teeth arranged in overlapping rings instead of rows, and when it turned toward Ren next every survival instinct he owned screamed at him to run. His body didn’t run. His body moved.
It happened faster than thought, his hand snapping out on its own while a blade of pure silver-white energy formed around his forearm like it had always lived there, like his body remembered something his mind had never learned, and he barely registered ducking under the creature’s claw before the light sliced clean through one of its legs. The thing shrieked and staggered back, thrashing hard enough to crack the rock beneath it. Ren stared at his own glowing arm like it belonged to someone else entirely. ’What. The actual. Hell.’
"Sentinel," someone gasped from behind him, voice cracking with disbelief. "He’s a Sentinel, he’s actually a Sentinel—"
The creature recovered fast and snapped its ringed jaw at him, and Ren barely had time to react before instinct took over again, his body sliding into a stance he’d never once practiced in his life, the energy blade flaring brighter along his arm like it was feeding off something buried deep inside him he hadn’t known was there. He drove it forward and the creature finally went down for good, collapsing in a twitching heap before going completely still.
Silence dropped hard over the crash site. Every surviving passenger was staring at him, the kid he’d shoved behind the boulder peeking out with her eyes gone huge. Ren lowered his arm and the second the light faded the exhaustion hit him like a truck, fittingly, and his knees nearly buckled under him. ’Okay,’ he thought, breathing hard, ’that was not supposed to happen, I’m supposed to be a spoiled rich villain with zero combat training, not whatever the hell that was.’
But some old, stubborn part of him, a part that felt like it belonged to Rafayal and not to Ren, already knew the answer, whispering it up from somewhere buried deep in blood and bone. The Miller bloodline hadn’t just given him a beautiful face and a ruined reputation. It had given him rank.
A rescue beacon crackled to life somewhere near the wreckage, the transport’s automated distress signal finally cutting through the moon’s heavy interference, and Ren barely had a second to process what he’d just done before a new voice broke through the static, clipped and sharp and painfully familiar. "Report your status and confirm survivor count immediately," the voice said over the comm, and Ren’s stomach dropped straight through the floor because he recognized that flat cold tone anywhere in the galaxy. Yegard’s rescue fleet had picked up the distress call first.
’Jesus Christ you’ve have got to be kidding me,’ Ren thought, again, louder this time. ’I left the Capital four hours ago. FOUR HOURS.’