Ascension 8.2

The Starshatter was of a similar, but slightly different layout to the Harbinger, which Mishka had commanded as a Colonel. The various bays were laid out in a strange, and to her mind, somewhat inefficient configuration, with the foundries separated from the main hangar by a storage bay - meaning that it would be an unnecessary pain to repair any ships damaged in fighting.

Like, say, the fighting they were engaged with against her static ground defences, currently making the ship rock and shudder.

Her ground-based defences wouldn’t win, of course, years and years and years to prepare didn’t mean much against a warship built in a proper foundry by hundreds of skilled arteficers. She’d cause some damage, probably more than any ship had sustained since the Corvidian War, but in the end the Battlecruiser would destroy the town and the surrounding areas she’d converted into massed battery.

And then they’d figure out that she wasn’t down below anymore.

Mishka reached into her pocket and brought out her watch, flicking it open. Twenty seven minutes, thirty six seconds. Plenty of time. Well, enough time. If things went to plan. She snapped the device shut and continued to crawl forward through the ventilation tunnels, which in the event of a boarding would have been locked down, but they hadn’t realised that she’d Displaced aboard, thanks to Mishka’s very intimate knowledge of a Battlecruiser’s sensor systems and defences, and thus their vulnerabilities.

The ‘bridge’ of an Ursulan battlecruiser was not located at the top of the ship. It was located in the heart, the most heavily shielded and armoured section of the vessel. That was her destination. Not because she was trying to take over the ship - that was virtually impossible with even a disrupted connection to the Nexus, but in order to cripple those systems.

She passed a grill which looked down onto a corridor just as a trio of Ursulans went rushing past, all wearing the yellow cloaks of the arteficing division.

“What do you mean, the tertiary generator’s are down?” snapped one of them, a man with very long, and rather artfully braided twintails. “How the hell did the Traitor manage that?”

“Some kind of pulsed-phased mana-laser,” said another. “Went right through our shields, like they weren’t even there—overloaded them: prognostication array is basically down.”

“How- oh, of fucking course, I bet the Colonel didn’t bother shifting the standard shield harmonics, did he? Which, of course, the Traitor knew,” muttered the third. “Overconfident, prick. This is the Traitor we are dealing with, one of the best minds in the Ascendency, not a bunch of mud-fucking primitives!”

Their voices passed from earshot, and Mishka continued onward, crossing another two junctions before reaching a wide, empty corridor.

She waited for a moment, straining her ears before carefully swinging the grate up and dropping ten feet down onto the familiar brassy plating of the decking.

How many years had she spent walking down corridors like this one? Centuries. Although she’d eventually been permanently stationed on an Orbital, most of her time before that had been aboard ships of various sizes, first as a Marine, then as part of Command, then Intelligence. The gentle pulse of mana screens showing ship readouts and maps, the scent of cinnamon in the air designed to replicate Ursulon Prime’s atmosphere, the ever so faint hum of the engines, the air-temperature several degrees cooler than what most species preferred…

It felt like home.

Mishka crossed to a door labelled ‘Auxiliary Science Bay 7,’ and keyed it open, raising her other hand as she did so. There was an ursulan woman in it, wearing a red, but less ornate cloak than her own, halfway through entering something into a terminal. She was young, a Lieutenant, and by the way her eyes flicked to the embroidery on Mishka’s cloak with confusion, rather than recognition, told her that she probably had been a cub when Mishka had been de facto second in command of the Ascendancy and had appeared regularly on broadcasts.

“Gen-” she began, halfway to a confused salute before Mishka’s stun blast took her in the chest and she crumpled.

Mishka closed and sealed the doorway behind herself, then moved to the centre of the room.

Auxiliary Science Bay 7 was, by itself, fairly unremarkable. It was slightly larger than 6, and slightly wider than 9, but apart from that it wasn’t unique except for one, key, fact.

It was directly above the bridge.

Of course, there was six meters of heavily reinforced and alchemically-altered mithril between the two, but Mishka had a solution for that - specifically, three metal spikes which she set up in a triangle on the brassy metal floor. She interfaced them with her bracelet, and made a few last minute adjustments before activating them.

Of all the weapons she had made during her time in the Watchmaker’s snared town, these were amongst the most complex. The massive cannons and missiles had been just brute force, and built on a such a scale to avoid having to be particularly intricate and careful in her design.

Besides, she didn’t actually want to shoot down the ship, just give the appearance of it.

But the metal spikes were far more complex.

Ursulanaium-7, as the specific mithril-alloy that made up the superstructure of all Ursulan ships was known, was just about the most thaumically inert material in the galaxy. There were a few others, Ursulanium-9 and an alloy the Architects used that her people had never been able to replicate, but they were either far more finicky to make, or else limited in quantity.

That meant, in effect, that magic naturally had very little grip upon the metal, which combined with ursulan arteficing applied as part of the shipbuilding process meant that it was very, very difficult to Vanish. Difficult, but, if you were an ursulan who knew the ins and outs of making the material, not entirely impossible. The tools required to do it, however, necessitated a degree of immense precision, and Mishka had to monitor the devices constantly as they began to evaporate a triangle of metal beneath them, buzzing and rotating gently in place as they worked.

One meter, two meters, three meters, four meters, five meters…

Mishka reached into her cloak and pulled out a runed cylinder, pushing down the lever and flicking the pin out, watching as the readout inched towards the six meter mark on the bracelet.

She dropped the grenade in, turned away, and activated the noise and light cancelling field on her armour.

The world went black and perfectly silent for a moment, but through the soles of her feet she could swear she felt the flash of light and noise.

She deactivated the field to the sound of screaming and shouting below her. Mishka took a deep breath and prepared herself before jumping down the triangular chute she had bored directly into the bridge.

She landed next to the command chair to see the dozen or so Ursulan’s manning the stations shouting and swearing and summoning golden light to heal their eyes which, although it was technically a non-lethal grenade in that it hadn’t outright killed them, that was only because of their bio-alchemically engineered resilience.

Mishka did, however, interrupt their attempts at self-treatment, and began dropping them with short bursts of crimson energy.

She was about halfway through her attack, one and a half or so seconds since she had landed in the centre of the room, that the Commander, wearing a red cloak similar to her own but, again, less elaborate in its embroidery, hurled a blast of fire at her.

Mishka shielded on instinct as she turned towards him, quite impressed that he had apparently felt the force of her landing and had the wherewithal to launch an attack. She prepared to stun him, but before she could he removed his hands from his now healed eyes, which were a slightly darker shade of red than her own. Slightly darker, and familiar.

“Alexi?” said Mishka.

Her creche-mate, her brother.

Mishka had spent a long time thinking about her attack on the cruiser. Decades in relative time. Lonely, constant morning turning over schemes and plots and plans in her mind, looking at schematics of Battlecruisers, how their systems interacted, which would have to be disabled to let her get aboard undetected, which would have to be manually sabotaged, as well as statistical divining for how many people she might encounter on the bridge.

For the most part, her plan had been going smoothly. The Ursulans hadn’t been interested in the least in the rickety ship she’d sent the colonists away on; she’d overwhelmed their sensor grid, damaged the Nexus connection, and slipped a Displace through; she’d gotten Astrid and Sisi to a ship that couldn’t be easily tracked; she’d made her way through the ship while they were still trying to deal with the static ground defences; and now she was poised to take out most of their systems at the heart of the ship, which would give her enough time to get to the Ascension chamber.

But she hadn’t banked on meeting her creche-mate.

“Traitor,” he spat, as behind him the two other crew-members who were still standing lunged for weapons. Mishka might have been a trained marine, but these red-cloak wearing ursulans clearly hadn’t come up through the ranks the same way she had. They, for understandable reasons, weren’t going to try and fight her on an even footing - they were going to let untold millennia of magi-tech that had gone into Ursulan Disruptors try and deal with her barriers.

She dropped them with stuns on instinct, shooting either side of Alexi’s hastily conjured shield.

“You’re- you’re not in Command,” said Mishka.

Alexi had been an arteficer. A damn good one, who had been credited with an improvement in the sub-light Whisper Drive that had increased efficiency by a whopping 2.1%. That might not sound like much, but when the Whisper Drive had already had thousands upon thousands of years of refinement it was particularly impressive.

“You’ve been away too long,” said Alexi, taking a step to the left, inching towards a hidden sidearm that Mishka knew was located next to the science console.

Mishka blasted the console, and the sidearm, into slag.

“Don’t,” said Mishka. “You’re no match for me in a fight Alexi, you know that. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“How can you live with yourself?” said Alexi. “How could you betray us!?”

“I would not allow the Ascendancy to forever sully itself,” said Mishka. “Alexi, they wanted to use the Shard to-”

“I know what it’s for!” he spat. “The council released the plans, a few months after you betrayed us for- for what, the fucking xenos?”

“Aliens aren’t our enemies-”

“Ancestors help us, you really have fallen in love with them, haven’t you?” he said. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been up to? I’ve been tracking you for years!”

“Been up to?” said Mishka. “What have I done but help people?”

“You cavort with primitives,” he spat, jabbing a finger at her, his face contorted into a look of pure hatred.

“I interacted with people,” said Mishka. “People who have done us no harm, who do not bear the sins of the Eternals. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that we have become no different to our enslavers!”

“We do not enslave!” snarled Alexi. “We are nothing like the Eternals!”

“No, we just murder!” said Mishka.

She took a deep breath. She didn’t have time for this. She should just stun him and move on. But this was Alexi, who’d sat with her and played Ursulan chess by the little river that ran behind their creche-home; who she’d gossiped with about boys and girls when they’d been in their forties and just beginning to turn towards adulthood; who had held her when she’d cried and sobbed about being forced to swim in the ocean open.

“Alexi, please, I’m not a traitor,” she said. “I did what I did to save the Ascendancy. We could be such a force for good in this galaxy. We could shape it into a kinder place. Our past doesn’t have to be our future.”

“You would defile and dilute everything we have worked to achieve?” he said, incredulity warring with hatred on his face. “What happened to you Mishka?” He shook his head. “You were the best of us! You were going to be Marshal when Vladimir retired!”

“Conscience, Alexi. I found my conscience. Oh, I justified it with ‘risk’ and ‘inelegance,’ but that’s what it was.” She had no more time to waste. A Dreadnought would be on its way. “I hope that in time you’ll be able to see that I did this, all of this, for our people. I don’t want to fight you, I want to hug you, but I will if I must.”

Alexi’s body tensed, sensing the shift in her. Of course he did, they were as close as two ursulans could be - family, by their standards. For a moment they stared at one another, then he launched a blast of crackling golden lightning straight at her.

Mishka parried and responded, and the bridge became a swirling maelstrom of elemental and esoteric and thaumaturgic power. Mishka was surprised by how good he’d gotten, and found herself struggling with her deliberately limited repertoire of spells. They’d sparred occasionally, mock-duels were normal activities at creche reunions, and either Mishka had gotten a lot worse at fighting since then, or he’d gotten a lot better, because around four seconds into their battle she was half a second too slow and a jet of ultra-cooled air struck her in the chest, sending her staggering back as the armour she had crafted dispersed the worst of it. Still, it was incredibly painful.

She countered with a blast of golden aetheric lightning, the most deadly piece of magic that she had used on the ship thus far.

The duel grew more brutal, with Mishka forced to abandon her attempts to stun him. She started breaking out the really nasty stuff: blood curses, molecular destabilisation fields, and deontic waves that Alexi struggled to counter and dispel until he slipped up, and a curse slipped through.

Alexi dropped to the ground, screaming in agony as his blood began to boil in his veins. Mishka’s stomach churned, and she stunned him. She decursed him as quickly as she could, and was forced to carefully heal the worst of the damage, but even with her efforts he was going to need extensive healing and rehabilitation.

“Fuck,” she swore, rubbing her face.

She shouldn’t have resorted to that kind of magic. She was better than him, she should have just worn him down…

Mishka centred herself. She didn’t have time for this. He would live, and recover — eventually. That was the best she could do.

“I love you,” she said, kissing him on the brow before standing and moving over to the command chair.

An error appeared on the mana-screen as she tapped at it, but it accepted a back-end access code that Mishka was not supposed to know. But she'd been Secretary of Intelligence, it had been her business to know things she wasn't supposed to.

“Warning: Bridge Lockdown Engaged,” came the ship’s database over the vox-boxes. It wouldn’t be just on the bridge, Mishka knew that it would be broadcast across the ship, and that the crew would, very quickly, figure out that the command hub had been compromised.

They’d try to break into the bridge, which would take quite a bit of time and draw the marines — people she really she didn’t want to have to fight — away from their various posts and leave a path towards her true target clear, the main medical bay, and the Ascendance Chamber within, and with enough time to carry out the only chance she had of saving this galaxy.

Mishka took a precious moment to make sure her creche-mate was lying as comfortably as could be, before launching herself back up through the hole in the ceiling she had made.

---

A.N. I just uploaded the last part of this story on my Patreon as of the 10/1/2026. The eBook will be coming as soon as I finish editing it and get my girlfriend to proofread it for me!

If you liked this, you might also like my fantasy adventure novel, Shattered Moon, which you can read be read in it's entirety here on Scribblehub or as a free member on my Patreon, and is also now up on Amazon, Kobo, and my Patreon to buy as an eBook.

Or you might like Lions After Slumber, a portal fantasy / Isekai set in a world in the middle of a period of colonial expansion.

I also have another story, Marci of the Dreadfort, which will be posted on Scribblehub as soon as I can get a cover organised.