Rayen’s POV – Zoan Mining Colony, Volara
The drills howled again.
Dust spilled like ash across Rayen’s shoulders as he slammed his chisel into the blackened rock face of Volara. Every strike sent a tremor up his arms, but his breathing was calm. Controlled. Rhythmic.
His body ached, yes — but there was strength growing in the ache now.
Kaelen had been pushing him harder. Not just physically, but mentally — testing strategy drills, memory tasks, logic puzzles hidden in simple games.
Rayen had begun to win them.
Today, after the work shift ended and the guards moved on, Kaelen sat in the shadows of the storage chamber, hacking into a Zoan terminal again — his hands still steady, but his face more drawn than before.
“You’re late,” Kaelen muttered, not looking up. His fingers danced over the projection of Zoan glyphs.
Rayen walked in slow. “Wasn’t trying to be early.”
Kaelen smirked faintly — then coughed. A dry, crackling cough that made Rayen flinch. He saw the blood speckle caught on the edge of Kaelen’s scarf.
The mentor waved it off.
“You shouldn’t be doing this alone,” Rayen said, lowering his voice. “One of the guards saw you limping yesterday.”
“That guard’s now seeing stars from a different outpost. I pulled some strings.”
Kaelen wasn’t joking. Rayen didn’t smile either.
But then something caught Rayen’s eye — the terminal. Faint bursts of decrypted text danced across it: file logs, miner shift maps… and something else.
Numbers. Long strings of coordinates buried beneath the other code.
Kaelen noticed Rayen noticing.
“Curious,” he said. “Even enslaved systems can reveal truths… if you ask the right questions.”
Rayen stepped closer. “Coordinates?”
Kaelen’s expression flickered. “Probably junk. Cross-sector pings. Echoes.”
But he moved fast — too fast — shutting the terminal down and pocketing a drive. Rayen didn’t push, but he memorized the glyph sequence before the screen went black.
He knew better than to confront Kaelen when he hid something. Instead, he filed it away. The pieces would come together eventually.
Later, during the pseudo-drills the guards forced slaves to perform — what they called “efficiency exercises” — Rayen watched Mako, Lira, and Tarek.
Kaelen had been guiding them too, slowly, subtly. Not all at once — but planting ideas. Coordination. Distraction tactics. Resourcefulness.
Lira had begun speaking more during their “rest” time, challenging Rayen with quiet debates about system weaknesses. “If you overload the power relay here,” she’d whisper, pointing to a crude map Mako had scratched on a crate, “you could fry their sensor array without raising alarms.”
Tarek, silent as always, took to the drills with a calm resolve. Every move he made during the formations had purpose. He began following Rayen’s lead without needing a word spoken.
Mako, ever quiet, handed Rayen a folded data-slip during one evening shift change. It was fragile, half-burned at the edges — but inside were schematics
Zoan power conduit lines. Maintenance tunnel paths.
A portion of Volara’s backbone.
Rayen looked at him. Mako just nodded.
That night, Rayen sat in the dim recesses of their shared barracks, staring at the strip of data and whispering the coordinates Kaelen had buried.
He didn’t know where they led.
But he felt something now — like the walls of the colony were no longer solid.
Like wires beneath the stone were humming.
Rayen didn’t sleep that night.
He stared at the ceiling, thinking of conduit lines, buried coordinates, and a quiet rebellion no one saw coming.
Mara & Maya’s POV — Aboard , Mobile Rebel Base
The stars blurred past the reinforced viewpanes of the , streaks of violet and amber warping across hyperspace. Within the ship’s core, though, there was no chaos. Just a hum. A rhythm. A heartbeat made of steel.
Mara stood before the large holotable in the intelligence deck, arms folded. She didn’t blink as the data danced around her — trade route disruptions, Zoan patrol movements, rumors of slave unrest. All scraps of information pulled from intercepted transmissions and stolen logs.
Her crew worked in silence. There were no ranks here, no military formalities — just trust and survival. Rebels born of fire, united by pain.
She shifted her attention to the latest data spike. Zoan distress signals had gone up by 14% in Sector Delta-4. A mining colony.
Volara.
Her jaw tightened.
“Zoan cargo hit three times last cycle,” muttered a tall woman behind her — Juno, one of the other rebel captains in orbit nearby. “The supply lines are fraying.”
“And more escape pods than usual,” added Rhen, her communications officer. “Slaves are getting out. Someone’s helping them.”
Mara leaned forward. Her voice was steady. “Or someone’s rising.”
Elsewhere on the ship, Maya
Inside, the boy who had been rescued from the last raid — barely nine, covered in bruises when they’d pulled him from that Zoan cage — now slept with soft beeping machines tracking his vitals.
She checked in on him every few hours. It wasn’t protocol. She didn’t care.
Sometimes she spoke to him while he slept.
“Your name’s yours,” she whispered once. “They don’t get to take it.”
She didn’t even know his name yet. He hadn’t spoken.
But today, he stirred a little. Turned toward her voice. Didn’t open his eyes, but didn’t turn away either.
And that was enough to make Maya’s throat tighten.
Back in the command chamber, Mara called a secure link with three rebel ships. The captains flickered into view on separate holoscreens.
“It’s time,” Mara said simply. “We need structure. A network. Cells that move together but can survive apart.”
Captain Vesh, a scarred, one-eyed strategist from the remnants of Titan’s orbit, leaned in. “You want coordination?”
“I want war,” Mara replied. “A silent war. Until it doesn’t need to be silent anymore.”
A beat passed. Then one by one, the captains nodded.
And thus, the seeds of the Rebel Cell Network
Later that cycle, Mara reviewed a list of decrypted Zoan comms. Most were noise — logistics, posturing, threats. But one caught her eye. A fragment of a distress signal from Volara.
“Unrest in sub-sector… unidentified signals beneath—”
The audio broke off. Static. Then a glyph that translated loosely as
It didn’t sound accidental.
She forwarded the clip to Maya.
Maya sat with the decoded log later that evening in the data analysis chamber. Screens surrounded her, flickering between Zoan glyphs and rebel decryption overlays.
Then something strange appeared.
One of the slave-trader logs — intercepted from a dead Zoan pirate vessel — had a voice fragment. Just a few seconds.
An old, gravelled voice speaking in low tones:
“Even enslaved systems… can reveal truths if you ask the right questions.”
Something in Maya froze.
She didn’t know the voice. But her mind did. Her body did. Her breath hitched.
She ran the clip again. Then dug into the scrambled transmission from Volara. Layered the two audios together. Ran waveform sync.
Match.
She played the clip again.
“Even enslaved systems…”
It was him.
She didn’t know who he was. But she knew he mattered.
Mara entered quietly.
Maya turned toward her, still pale. “This voice… It came from Volara too. Same pattern. It wasn’t random.”
Mara didn’t speak for a moment. Then she walked over and pressed a few buttons on Maya’s console, pulling up a nearly-forgotten codex: — frequencies used by the legendary strategist before the Zoans enslaved him.
The match flashed green.
Mara whispered, “He’s alive?”
Maya just stared.
Mara straightened.
Her voice sharpened. “Prepare a recon drop. No weapons drawn unless provoked. Stealth only.”
Rhen turned. “Who’s the target?”
Mara didn’t answer directly.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
She stared out the viewport — toward the dark star cluster hiding Volara.
“If it’s Kaelen,” she said finally, “we may have found something more important than a fleet.”
She turned to Maya, who was still watching the waveform loop.
“We may have found our firestarter.”
Rayen’s POV – Volara Colony, Lower Levels
The further Rayen descended into the maintenance tunnels of Volara, the more it felt like walking through the belly of a dying beast. The walls groaned with the pressure of heat exchanges, soot-black pipes hissed steam from their seams, and the dim lighting pulsed erratically as if mimicking a faltering heartbeat.
He crouched beside Mako, their backs pressed to a rusted panel that hadn’t seen maintenance in years.
“You’re sure it’s here?” Mako whispered.
Rayen didn’t answer immediately. His fingers ran across the wall, pausing over a subtle groove — almost like a scar etched by design.
He tapped thrice. The wall vibrated slightly, then clicked open.
“Yeah,” Rayen said, voice calm. “It’s here.”
Inside was a crawlspace — narrow, dust-choked, and stinking of burned circuits. They pushed through the tunnel until it opened into a hollowed-out maintenance alcove. And in the center of that alcove stood a relic: an ancient, damaged transmission array — Zoan make, but retrofitted with Human tech from before the invasion.
Its antennas were warped, its core fractured — but the glow of low power flickered within.
“Looks like it hasn’t been touched in years,” Mako murmured, kneeling beside it. “Still has some juice.”
Rayen nodded. “It was hidden on purpose. Someone planted it for the long game.”
They worked quickly. Rayen handled the external power re-link while Mako routed into the base code through a portable relay. The array coughed, sparked, then whirred to life with a soft hum.
Mako tapped in a rudimentary burst ping — an old resistance frequency. It would send out a three-second data burst using an encrypted cipher — nothing traceable, just a beacon.
“Ready?” Mako asked.
Rayen didn’t respond right away. He stared at the controls, then at the metal walls around them — the colony above, the lives being ground into dust, the three who now trusted him without ever saying the words.
He closed his eyes and pressed the sequence.
A pulse shot into the void.
No reply came.
But that wasn’t the point.
Later that night, back in their quarters, Mako sat cross-legged with his makeshift datapad — assembling a rough map of Volara’s conduits based on his stolen schematics.
Rayen sat across from him, eyes tracing unseen lines in the air.
“You really think someone will hear it?” Mako asked.
Rayen gave a small, half-smile. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
He leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees.
“But even if they don’t,” he said, “we’ve started something.”
Elsewhere, during a scheduled equipment drill, Tarek moved with brutal efficiency. His silence made him intimidating, but not unreadable. Rayen paired him with Lira — who scowled at the match but obeyed.
She challenged Rayen more these days — not in defiance, but in tests. Questions mid-drill. Traps in logic puzzles. She wanted to know what made him tick.
During a short break, she approached him while the others drank water.
“You’re not just trying to survive, are you?” she asked, voice low.
Rayen met her gaze. “No.”
“What, then?”
Rayen didn’t blink. “To win.”
That evening, Kaelen sat slumped in a corner of the mechanical deck. His hands trembled faintly as he adjusted the makeshift oxygen canister near his ribs. The virus was accelerating.
Rayen found him there — too late to stop the coughing fit.
“You shouldn’t be down here alone,” Rayen said, kneeling beside him.
Kaelen gave him a glance that managed to be both proud and irritated. “If I die in this hole, it’ll be doing what I do best. Spying on monsters.”
Rayen looked at the data module beside him. Kaelen had tapped another terminal — probably trying to intercept comm logs.
“You saw something,” Rayen said quietly.
Kaelen didn’t confirm or deny it.
Instead, he held up the module and said, “The system doesn’t care who we are. But it always logs where we are.”
Rayen raised an eyebrow.
Kaelen coughed once more, then said: “I buried something in a relay years ago. You just lit the fuse.”
Back in their quarters, Rayen gathered Mako, Lira, and Tarek.
He didn’t speak for a moment. Just looked at them, one by one.
“We’re not ready for escape,” he said. “Not yet.”
No one flinched.
“But we can prepare the grounds.”
He pointed to Mako’s schematics. To the weak points in the power grid. To the cargo drones they repaired daily.
“We can be quiet. Precise. We can bleed them.”
Lira smirked. “You’ve been planning.”
“I’ve been watching,” Rayen replied. “Same as all of you.”
Tarek just nodded.
And that was the beginning of something more than trust.
It was the beginning of belief.
As they parted for the night, Lira lingered by the door.
“You really think someone heard that signal?” she asked.
Rayen didn’t look back.
“I think,” he said, “someone needed to.”
screens. Around her, her crew moved like shadows. Engineers ran diagnostics. Signal interceptors tuned frequencies. Maya sat at the far end of the room, head bowed over a console, eyes flickering as she decrypted line after line of static-laced Zoan chatter.
And then, the signal hit.
A blip.
No pattern. No header.
Just a pulse.
Faint. Warped. Drenched in cosmic interference.
But unmistakably… human.
“Lock it,” Mara barked, her tone sharp enough to slice alloy.
The crew moved in sync. The signal was fed through redundancy dampeners and acoustic filters. Layer by layer, they scraped away distortion until what remained was less than a second of coherent audio — broken, fragmented, half-dead.
But it was real.
“Play it again,” she said softly.
It echoed in the chamber: a voice. Faint, male, buried under digital debris.
“…Volara…”
The name struck her chest like a memory.
Volara. One of the outer mining colonies. Remote. Forgotten. Mostly slave-run. Kaelen’s last known location.
“Run spectral comparisons,” Mara ordered. “Overlay it with this.”
She uploaded a voice clip Maya had extracted days ago — from an old comm log seized off a slave-trader ship. A man’s voice — weary but powerful. The same calm command that once echoed in rebel halls before the movement shattered.
Kaelen.
The machine ran the overlay.
94.3% match.
The room went silent.
Later, Mara stood alone on the balcony near the observation deck. The Ironsong drifted silently between the shadows of an asteroid belt, its hull cooled and darkened to avoid detection.
She stared out at the endless black.
“He’s alive,” she whispered.
She hadn't allowed herself to believe it, not fully. Kaelen had vanished years ago. Some thought he’d been executed. Others said he ran. Only Mara knew what he truly was — too stubborn to die, too clever to be caught.
A part of her ached — hope was dangerous. Hope made you hesitate.
But there it was now, raw and undeniable, wrapped in broken signal data.
Volara.
Inside the Ironsong’s war room, three rebel captains stood around the holo-table. They were lean, scarred, and tired — each leading their own faction cells across different parts of the galaxy.
Mara’s presence held them in check.
“We don’t have the resources to mount a full rescue,” Captain Lin said. “Not on a Zoan colony. That’s suicide.”
“I’m not suggesting a rescue,” Mara replied coldly. “I’m suggesting we send eyes. One scout. Quiet and fast.”
Captain Boran — the eldest of the three — narrowed his eyes. “Because of a corrupted burst?”
“Because of the man who sent it,” Mara said, voice hardening.
She uploaded the voice match report. It hovered above the holo-table like a burning sigil.
“If Kaelen is alive,” she continued, “we have more than a symbol. We have our architect back. The man who taught us how to fight.”
A long silence followed.
Then Lin finally spoke. “You’re not going to wait for consensus, are you?”
Mara smiled. “No.”
Elsewhere on the ship – Maya’s Quarters
The boy — the one rescued during the Earth raid — was asleep now. Curled up on the lower bunk, wrapped in a blanket too large for his frame. His breathing was shallow but steady.
Maya sat beside him, dagger resting across her lap. She hadn’t let it leave her side since they left Earth.
Her hands trembled slightly — not from fear, but from something else. She kept playing the voice message back on loop. Not Kaelen’s — the other one. The one from Volara. The signal Rayen had sent.
It wasn’t even a full sentence. Just a tone. A cadence. A determination that made her chest tighten.
She didn’t know why it mattered.
But it did.
It reminded her of fire. Of defiance.
Of something worth following.
Back on the Intelligence Deck
Mara reviewed the recon plan one final time. A scout ship — a single-pilot flyer, built for speed and stealth. No weapons. Just eyes and ears. The pilot would drop near Volara’s asteroid field, piggyback on trade routes, and listen.
Maya stood in the doorway.
“I want in,” she said.
Mara turned slowly.
“You’re not trained for stealth recon.”
“I don’t care.”
“This isn’t Earth anymore, Maya. This is the galaxy. Mistakes out here get entire cells wiped.”
Maya didn’t flinch. “Then train me. I’ll catch up.”
Mara studied her for a long moment.
“You don’t even know who you’re trying to reach.”
Maya looked away, uncertain. “I know he’s trying.”
That was enough.
Mara nodded. “For now, you shadow Soren. He’s prepping the recon vessel. Learn everything you can.”
Maya saluted — a clumsy gesture, more emotion than protocol — and vanished into the corridor.
Mara stood alone in the war chamber.
Kaelen’s signal on loop.
The ghost of a voice.
She whispered to the shadows: “If this is really you, old friend… I hope you’re building something. Because so am I.”
She looked to the star map.
A thin red line now blinked across Volara’s region.
Beneath it, in a script only she had access to, were the words:
FIRESTARTER PROTOCOL: ACTIVATED
Kaelen – Volara, Hidden Chamber Beneath Sector C-7
The hiss of steam masked his coughing — for now.
Kaelen leaned heavily against the rusted wall, an old med injector clutched in one hand. The virus inside him had progressed. He could feel it in his bones. Every breath was a struggle. But pain meant he still had time.
Just enough.
He tapped into the makeshift interface he’d rigged from salvaged Zoan modules. Data streamed across the screen — sensor logs, power fluctuations, encrypted pulses.
He saw it.
The signal Rayen had sent.
Weak. Untraceable to most.
But Kaelen recognized its pattern — imperfect, but filled with intention.
“Good,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “He’s learning to speak in silence.”
He didn’t tell Rayen yet. Let the boy think he’d failed — let him grow sharper from it. Because the real war needed warriors forged, not handed truth.
Kaelen injected himself. The serum burned through his veins.
He clenched his jaw through the pain.
One more day.
That’s all he needed.
? Rayen – Volara, Upper Ridge (Late Shift Break)
The artificial sky above Volara flickered. A glitch in the hologram. The real sky — sharp and cold — peeked through for a moment, before darkness returned.
Rayen sat on a broken transport crate, elbows on his knees, watching the stars glitch in and out of existence.
He had done it. He had reached out.
And silence had answered.
But not despairing silence — focused silence. Waiting. Listening.
Footsteps approached.
Lira stood beside him, arms crossed. “What are you thinking?”
“That maybe,” he said, “we’re not alone in wanting this to end.”
She sat down beside him. “You’re not. Not here. Not anymore.”
He turned to look at her. She didn’t smile. But her eyes — dark, stormy — held a different kind of warmth now. Recognition. Trust, perhaps.
She bumped her shoulder against his. “Don’t screw this up.”
? Mako – Volara, Workshop Tunnel Behind Sector D-2
Mako studied the internal power grid again. The sketches had grown more complex — patterns, pressure thresholds, conduit fail-safes. He mapped out where surges could be triggered. Where shadows could hide movement. Where escape could happen.
But more than anything — he studied Rayen.
The way he spoke during drills. The way others listened. The way Kaelen began to defer small tactical decisions to him.
It wasn’t loud.
It wasn’t obvious.
But it was happening.
Leadership wasn’t about command. It was about pull. Gravity. A presence that couldn’t be denied.
And Rayen… Rayen was already shifting the orbit of those around him.
Mako smiled faintly. And for the first time in months, he allowed himself a dangerous thought.
Maybe we will see the sky again.
? Maya – The Ironsong, Observation Deck
The boy was asleep in a hammock now, curled like a question mark. His small fingers clutched the hem of her sleeve, even in sleep.
Maya watched him, then turned to the window — space stretching endlessly outside. The Ironsong drifted silently beside a dying comet. Its tail streaked light against the dark like a blade.
She clutched the small audio device in her hand — the one with Kaelen’s voice.
She had replayed it fifty times.
Each time, something stirred in her.
Not memory — instinct.
“Who are you?” she whispered to the device. “And why do you sound like… like something I used to believe in?”
She didn’t understand it. But she knew this: her blade wasn’t just for revenge anymore.
It was for the future.
? Tarek & Lira – Volara, Communal Rest Zone (Post Drill)
Tarek sat sharpening a steel shard, his massive hands precise, rhythmic.
Lira sat across from him, her gaze steady. “You’ve been quiet. More than usual.”
He didn’t look up. “No need to speak. Not yet.”
“But soon?” she asked.
Tarek finally raised his eyes. “When it begins.”
Lira leaned back, arms behind her head. “He’s pulling us into his gravity, you know.”
Tarek nodded. “That’s what stars do.”
? Mara – The Ironsong, War Room
The image of Volara hovered above the holotable — marked, tagged, encrypted.
The signal had been corrupted. Weak. Likely unintentional.
But the code…
She leaned forward, tracing the old frequency band.
It was Kaelen’s.
No one else would use such a pattern. He had designed it himself — a way to say I’m alive without speaking.
And more — the metadata embedded in the pulse was non-random.
It mirrored early resistance fire-drill formations. The kind only someone trained would use.
“Not just Kaelen,” she said to herself. “Someone new.”
She turned to the comms officer. “Scramble a recon drone. Passive approach. No fire. No announcement.”
“Understood.”
Mara stepped away from the table, deep in thought.
If Kaelen had taught someone, if someone down there was learning…
Then the rebellion didn’t need another ship.
It needed a spark.
And she had just seen it flare into existence.
Kaelen — alone in the dark, coughing blood into his sleeve but smiling faintly as he watches Rayen spar with Mako on a camera feed.
Rayen — looking out across the colony rooftops, whispering toward the stars:
“Whoever you are, out there… we’re coming.”
Maya — standing before the Ironsong’s training deck, blade in hand, eyes steady as she steps into the ring to fight.
Mako — carving a hidden message into the back panel of a Zoan pipe:
“We are not machines. We remember. We rise.”
Lira and Tarek — walking through the tunnels. Lira whispers, “Soon.”
Tarek responds simply: “Yes.”
Mara — staring into the void, eyes fierce:
“If you’re out there, Kaelen… if you found our flame… then I swear, I will make the stars burn for them.”
This chapter was all about connection — the kind that isn’t built through orders, but through shared silence, mutual pain, and unspoken hope. Rayen, still in chains, begins to transcend them not by shouting rebellion, but by living it — training harder, thinking deeper, and beginning to lead through action. We see the subtle shift in the others around him — Tarek, Lira, and Mako — who don’t say it yet, but are already orbiting his quiet fire.
Meanwhile, on The Ironsong, Mara is piecing together ghosts of the past. The signal from Volara — weak, broken — is more than just noise to her. It’s legacy. It’s the sign that Kaelen’s spirit isn’t just alive — it’s evolving in someone new. And Maya? Her arc is about slow-burning purpose. She doesn't yet know Rayen, but she’s already listening to his shadow.
There’s a beauty in how this rebellion is beginning — not through speeches or armies, but through small acts of courage, quiet observation, and the undeniable pull of destiny. Everyone's path is now slowly converging. The next collision is inevitable.
And Volara?
It won’t stay quiet for long.Every revolution begins with a whisper, not a roar.”
This chapter was all about connection — the kind that isn’t built through orders, but through shared silence, mutual pain, and unspoken hope. Rayen, still in chains, begins to transcend them not by shouting rebellion, but by living it — training harder, thinking deeper, and beginning to lead through action. We see the subtle shift in the others around him — Tarek, Lira, and Mako — who don’t say it yet, but are already orbiting his quiet fire.
Meanwhile, on The Ironsong, Mara is piecing together ghosts of the past. The signal from Volara — weak, broken — is more than just noise to her. It’s legacy. It’s the sign that Kaelen’s spirit isn’t just alive — it’s evolving in someone new. And Maya? Her arc is about slow-burning purpose. She doesn't yet know Rayen, but she’s already listening to his shadow.
There’s a beauty in how this rebellion is beginning — not through speeches or armies, but through small acts of courage, quiet observation, and the undeniable pull of destiny. Everyone's path is now slowly converging. The next collision is inevitable.
And Volara?
It won’t stay quiet for long.
