Page 8

Wolves Without Fangs

SAVVINE

T he stars fell away as Savvine banked the Ash Talon hard to port, the inertial dampeners struggling to keep up with her sudden vector shift.

Outside in the black, a trio of Lombardi defenders peeled from shadow, their hulls sleek and jagged like blade-fish.

Savvine’s larger Corvette-class fighter followed close behind and on the hunt. It bristled with linked auto cannons, defense cannons, keel-mounted rail guns, and jammer fins.

‘Contact. Three fighters. Intercept vector initiated,’ Dia, on comms, confirmed from her console, already rerouting power to shield modulation.

‘About time they showed up,’ Yani, Savvine’s choice head gunner, muttered, locking in targets and spooling up the rail guns. ‘Permission to light ‘em up, Cap?’

‘Freakin’ scorch ‘em,’ Savvine ordered, her voice as calm as steel.

The void erupted in a flurry of tracer rounds and ion fire.

The Ash Talon surged ahead, rolling between scout fire as Savvine weaved them through engine eruptions and flak.

Her hands moved with a dancer’s precision on the dual-stick helm, fingers flying as she re-balanced power between forward shields and aft thrusters.

‘Cut power to dorsal shielding,’ she murmured. ‘Bleed it into port-side ion cannons. They’re trying to flank!’

‘Got it!’ Calyx, second gunner called, rerouting.

One of the Lombardi fighters slashed across their nose, peppering them with plasma bursts.

Savvine swung the Ash Talon into a spiral, then flipped the bird into a half-roll and burned upward, right into the belly of the attacking fighter.

‘Yani, now.’

The rail guns thundered.

The Lombardi craft exploded, shards spinning into oblivion.

Another zipped in from above, but Dia was already there, jamming their targeting with a cascade of synthetic noise.

‘They’re losing lock on us,’ she said.

‘Good,’ Savvine snapped. ‘Take their eyes out before we take their throat.’

But the assailants didn’t get the memo.

It swooped in from their flank, not gunning, launching.

Savvine caught sight of a cylindrical projectile, long and spined, with red hazard glyphs glowing along its shell, spinning toward them.

Dia’s voice broke. ‘That’s not standard ordinance.’

Savvine’s stomach dropped.

‘That’s a Hades -class banshee. That’s -.’

Her utterance fell off, shock rendering her speechless.

‘Illegal as hell,’ Yani grumbled. ‘Where’d they even get that?!’

‘Forget where! Take it down!’ Savvine growled.

Calyx dove. Savvine hauled hard starboard and kicked the ventral rail guns into overdrive. The Talon shuddered as the cannons locked onto the banshee warhead.

‘On my mark,’ she breathed. ‘Three.’

The projectile drew closer. Too proximate.

‘Two.’

She felt the heat rising in her palms. This was it, no second chances.

‘One. Fire.’

Yani’s rail guns roared. Calyx’s point defense artillery bellowed.

The projectile cracked apart mid-space and detonated.

A sphere of searing white light expanded like a nova, and Savvine jerked on the throttle hard to race them away from the blast surge.

‘The shockwave’s too immense,’ she whispered as the triad of Lombardi ships got caught in it.

The banshee didn’t care about allegiance.

Its detonation vaporized them with savage, blinding finality.

The Ash Talon rocked with violence, hull plating groaning as the dissipating remnants of the shockwave slammed over them.

The HUD screamed red. Internal lights flickered.

A pressure leak burst below deck.

Silence fell.

No one stirred until Yani let out a series of expletives.

‘Damn that was close.’

The Ash Talon limped forward, systems failing, flames licking along one side of the port wing.

‘Reactor’s holding,’ Dia muttered, clutching her shoulder. ‘But just.’

‘Main cannon’s fried,’ Yani added, blood trickling from a cut on his brow.

‘I’ve lost rail gun two plus a thruster,’ Calyx said. ‘I can nurse us home, but we’re gonna rattle like a tin can full of rocks in a hailstorm.’

Savvine didn’t answer.

Her jaw clenched behind the re-breather seal of her HUD helmet, and her eyes burned with fury as the scorched and broken wreckage of the Lombardi interceptors drifted by.

‘That was a Hades -class weapon,’ she hissed. ‘No way the Lombardis had that in their arsenal. Someone gave it to them. Who in the Wildlight deals in death-tech of that caliber?’

No one answered.

Because they all suspected the truth.

The Signet Group.

Ex-prisoners. Former rebels. Now privateers in all but name. Mercenaries to the highest bidder. Everyone praised their precision, their delivery, their damn honor.

This was no glory.

‘They can’t play both sides,’ Savvine muttered. ‘They don’t get to sell weapons to our enemies, then claim neutrality.’

She stared out at the black, burning void, chest ablaze.

‘They won’t make a market out of our fight for survival,’ Her voice hardened. ‘I won’t let them.’

Dia raised a chin at her. ‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll freakin’ find the head of Signet, Alexandr whateverthefokk they - call - him is and tear him a new one. We have families, children, entire clans getting wiped out because of them. I’m unsure if he realizes it’s the little people, the innocent, who are harmed by his callousness. Fokk him!’

‘You’ve never met the man to do so,’ Yani teased.

‘ Fokk you too.’

‘I’d do it with pleasure.’

Yani’s flippant answer broke the tension, and the crew tittered.

‘ Merda , what’s with the lame lines and hitting on me?’ Savvine murmured, shaking her head.

‘We can’t help but shoot our shot with a beautiful, badass, Chief of Security.’

Savvine rolled her eyes. ‘I’m all of that?’

‘ Naam , and more,’ Yani winked.

Savvine huffed, for she never thought of herself that way.

She was a simple woman who sought peace for her loved ones and perhaps the embrace of a man’s arms around her at night, whispering sweet nothings in her ear, and rocking her to sleep.

None of the men on the Venantia Eterna made the cut for her.

They had either married young per their mafia family traditions, or were sluts, literally.

The few single ones mainly were obsessed with their looks, their gym training, their freakin protein diets and eye liner.

She wanted a rugged, down-to-earth man who didn’t need to rehearse his charm or check his reflection every ten minutes.

Someone who spoke less and meant more. Who carried silence like a weapon and his touch like a promise.

A man who’d been through fire, not just a turf war, but an inferno that burned clean and left only grit and truth behind.

She didn’t want perfection. She craved real.

‘I’m telling you,’ she muttered, typing a report on the battle for the general into her commtab. ‘Each time I turn a corner, someone’s trying to flirt like it’s a sport.’

Yani gave a snort-laugh. ‘That’s because it’s all athletics. On the Venantia , where the women are either locked into family alliances by age eighteen or too busy flicking their hair and pushing out their tits to carry a conversation, you’re a standout.’

Savvine shook her head. ‘Most of the male capos are the same, and I don’t want a preened peacock with tribal abs and nothing upstairs in my bed.’

‘You require a man,’ Yani said, earnest now. ‘One who beholds you in battle mode and still craves your softness. One who understands how to hold your back and your secrets.’

Savvine’s grin faded to something thoughtful. ‘ Naam . Someone who doesn’t flinch when I raise my weapon. Who sees the blood on my palms and still reaches for them.’

Dia bumped her shoulder. ‘Maybe the universe discerned your need.’

She raised a brow. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘We all witnessed the footage from your racer cam.’

‘You mean the kinai from this morning?’

Dia waggled her brows. ‘Yup, the one who caught a missile with his bare hands and threw it back like a javelin in the Underworld Games? Yeah. That one. We saw the stills.’

Savvine had only released photos of the man, no holos, and not of him in his wolf form, to her team to help them ID him.

However, thinking of him heated her. A scorching need coiled deep in Savvine’s stomach again, uninvited and unwelcome.

Fokk , she’d spent years building walls, soul armor, and cool control.

Yet one man cracked it all in less than thirty seconds.

Her mind reverted to how he crouched on her hood, the glint in his eye, the smirk, the two-finger salute. The way her blood surged, like her body already knew what her intellect didn’t dare to admit.

‘I didn’t even get his name,’ she whispered.

Dia smirked, eyes twinkling. ‘Maybe you will, very soon. The universe has a way of delivering what you need.’

Savvine returned to her report, forcing a smile, but the hum in her skin remained.

Soon huh?

As the Ash Talon limped home, battered but not beaten, she mulled over him .

She also thought about their recent skirmishes with the Lombardis, the needless destruction of a frigate gone, friends lost, and fighters who wouldn’t return home.

It wasn’t enough to keep surviving, not like this.

She had to find a way out of this hellish spiral and needed it fast.

First, though, she required proof of the banned weapons and intel on the source of the illegal ordnance that the Lombardis were fielding like they owned the stars.

She leaned back in her seat, eyes on the black stretch of space outside her canopy, contemplating, calculating, and planning.

‘ Vaffanculo ,’ she whispered, thinking of Signet. ‘Also fokk the Lombardis.’

She’d drag their secrets into the light if she found they conspired to arm against her and those she loved.

If she had to, she’d take her evidence to Eugene, the Syndicate Commission, and, hell, to every holo-news stream in the flotilla.

She was done playing defense and waiting for the next knife in the dark.

She was ready to go to war.