The Ashen Legacy

 

A continuity of the TOP VOTED Space Opera : The Shattered Crown! READ HERE!

 

The ark-ship Pale Ember drifted in the corpse-light of Auriga Prime’s debris field. Jonah Voss—no relation to the late Chancellor, though he’d worn her surname like armor—was the last living soul who remembered Auriga’s oceans. The Syndicate’s bombs had spared his underground bunker, but not his family. He’d carved their names into the Ember’s hull: Maggie. Eli. Baby Rose.

Now, three years after the Detonation, Jonah knelt in the ship’s gutted cargo hold, welding a thruster array salvaged from a Crythari warship. His hands were blistered, his ribs ached from weeks of zero-G, and his ration tablets tasted like burnt plastic. But the nav console’s last flickering screen offered a single hope: Eden-9, a terraformed moon in the Lyra System, where the galaxy’s bureaucrats sipped synth-wine while the Ashen starved.

He just needed to get there.

——

Eden-9’s orbital docks reeked of ammonia and entitlement. Jonah’s patched-up ship drew sneers from customs officials in spotless uniforms. “Ashen?” the lead inspector snorted, scrolling through Jonah’s forged credentials. “Your people are ghosts. Ghosts don’t get landing permits.”

Jonah slid a Crythari plasma pistol across the counter—his last heirloom. “Ghosts don’t need permits.”

The docks spat him into Haven City, a metropolis of glass spires where fountains sprayed water stolen from dying worlds. He slept in a hostel run by a Ringer, a lunar prospector named Mack Boone, who’d lost an arm to a mining laser. “Heard about Auriga,” Mack grunted, handing Jonah a lukewarm beer. “Don’t wave that sob story here. They’ll eat you alive.”

Jonah spent weeks hustling. He sold battle plans scavenged from Syndicate wreckage. He fought in underground mech-pits, piloting a junked Aurigan exo-suit. He even auctioned vials of Auriga’s soil—“The Last Dust of a Dead World!”—to collectors with too many credits.

No one cared.

Then he met Dr. Lian Park, a disgraced xenobiologist whose lab had been shuttered for “ethical overreach.” She’d cloned extinct amphibians from DNA fragments, a feat that Eden-9’s government deemed “unnatural.” Her lab was a closet, her equipment scavenged from dumpsters. But when Jonah showed her a holo of Auriga’s biosphere pre-war, she didn’t pity him. She understood.

“I can’t rebuild your oceans,” Lian said, examining a vial of Jonah’s soil. “But I can give you algae that’ll chew through radiation. You’ll need capital, though.”

Jonah laughed until he coughed blood. “I’ve got nothing.”

Lian smirked. “You’ve got a story. And in Haven, stories are currency.”

——

Harlow Graves was Eden-9’s most infamous loan shark, a man who’d financed rebellions and crushed them for fun. His penthouse overlooked the city’s slums, its windows polarized to blur the suffering below. Jonah expected demands, threats. Instead, Harlow served him whiskey aged in pre-war oak barrels.

“I collected Aurigan art,” Harlow said, stroking a sculpture of molten glass—a refugee’s last work before the Detonation. “Brutal stuff. All fire and teeth. Tell me, Jonah: Why beg for a corpse?”

Jonah drained his glass. “Because graveyards are full of people who gave up.”

Harlow’s loan came with strings: 300% interest, a biometric tracker in Jonah’s spine, and the right to seize any tech developed from Lian’s research. Jonah signed in blood.

——

The Ember’s rebirth began in Drydock 7, a haven for smugglers and anarchists. Dax Rivera, a Crythari defector with a talent for hotwiring warship AI, joined first. Then came Zoe Kincaid, a teenage hacker who’d burned down Eden-9’s surveillance grid for kicks. Lian’s algae bloomed in makeshift tanks, its chlorophyll modified to metabolize heavy metals.

But Eden-9’s government noticed.

Chancellor Elias Pike sent enforcers clad in black exo-suits, their visors etched with the Eden-9 crest: a dove clutching a neutron bomb. They raided Drydock 7, smashing algae tanks and dragging Dax to a detention ship. Jonah fought back with a salvaged plasma cutter, severing an enforcer’s arm before Zoe jammed their comms.

“They’ll keep coming,” Zoe hissed, wiping code from her brow. “Pike’s not just scared—he’s profit.”

She was right. Pike had auctioned Auriga’s coordinates to mining guilds, its debris field rich in Syndicate alloys. Crytharis’s corpse would be next.

——

Jonah’s war moved underground. He siphoned funds from Pike’s offshore accounts, using Zoe’s malware. Dax jury-rigged a fleet of junked drones, their bellies stuffed with Lian’s algae bombs. They struck mining outposts, collapsing tunnels with biotech that turned metal to rust.

But Pike had a nuclear option.

The Eden-9 Armada, a fleet of planet-crackers, mobilized to seize Auriga. Jonah’s crew was outgunned, outmanned, and out of time. Then Harlow Graves called in his favor.

“I own a private militia,” he said, flipping a coin engraved with a phoenix. “They’re yours. But I want a cut of whatever grows in that graveyard.”

——

The Battle of Auriga’s Belt was a slaughter in reverse. Harlow’s mercenaries—battle-scarred veterans from a dozen dead worlds—ambushed the Armada’s flagship, boarding it with antimatter charges. Zoe hacked their targeting systems, turning point-defense guns on their own fighters. Dax unleashed the algae bombs, their payloads eating through hulls like acid.

Pike’s surrender came via a blood-smeared datapad: “You win, gravedigger. But corpses don’t stay buried.”

——

Rebuilding Auriga took decades. Lian’s algae scrubbed the atmosphere, its genetically engineered roots stabilizing the tectonic plates. Dax and Zoe raised geodesic domes where cities once stood, their frameworks built from Syndicate wreckage. Survivors trickled in—Ashen who’d drifted in cryo-pods, defectors from Eden-9, even Crythari stragglers.

Jonah never removed the tracker in his spine. On the day Auriga’s first rainfall in a generation kissed the soil, Harlow found him staring at the graves of Maggie, Eli, and Rose.

“You’ll outlive us all, gravedigger,” Harlow said, lighting a cigar with a Syndicate lighter.

Jonah let the rain soak his face. “That’s the problem.”

——

Epilogue
The Syndicate’s whisperers still trade in dark corners. NEMESIS’s code infects drones near Crytharis’s corpse. And Pike’s successors eye Auriga’s rebirth with hungry eyes.

But in the soil of the dead, something green grows.