They never saw the Fallen coming.
It was two in the morning and all of Amethyst was wide-awake. Alarms blared. Coven Leaders tried to locate their techeuns and apprentices. Petra hurried after Lylla and Vyda, trying to stay close to the rest, as she and her sisters followed Pinar against the flow of the crowd. The Silent Fang had attacked the space station out of nowhere. Everything was on lockdown. Escape had been ordered. Half the station had been blown to pieces and already many had been lost, sucked through large blasts in the walls, roof, and floor into the vacuum of space. A fire was consuming the east wing. The techeuns were being evacuated in escape pods.
"Where are we going?" Lylla yelled.
"There won't be enough escape pods for everyone!" Pinar shouted back over the noise. "We need to find the ships!"
"But the hangar bay is overrun!" Urula protested, "We just heard Mother Tyxis announcing that the Fallen-"
"Exactly! No one else will be there!"
"Except for the Fallen?"
"We can handle them- we're all fully trained techeuns. Except Petra."
"I was going to graduate this weekend!" Petra protested.
"Close enough, then." Pinar jammed a few buttons, and a blast door opened. She scrambled back as a hissing marauder took a swipe at her with one of its electric blades, pointing a finger at it to blast it to ashes. "Come on!"
The closer they got to the hangar bay, the more fallen there were to fight. When Pinar finally pushed open the last door, the hangar was… empty.
"Where'd they go?" Tal asked, confused.
"We have to get out of here. Now!" Pinar snapped, springing into action. The sisters scrambled into random fighters. Pinar took a single-pilot Zero and started the engines. The rest paired off into two-pilot TAC-717s. Petra squeezed into a suitable sitting space in Lylla and Vyda's. She hadn't passed her flight check yet. (but only because the instructor was a total idiot!)
The four ships exited the landing bay. Petra held on tight to a handle in the ship's inner hull. Suddenly, they saw why the fallen had withdrawn from Amethyst. Their command-ship, which belonged to the Wolf baroness Drevis, was preparing to make another nuclear blast.
Pinar shouted something over comms. Petra watched in slow motion as one, two, three, warheads spiraled through space toward what was left of the burning station. The resulting blast imploded the entire station, sending streaks of fiery debris soaring in all directions. She watched in horror as they collided with the few escape pods that had made it out in time and with her sister's ships. A dozen more explosions. Lylla screamed as the Zero and TAC-717s containing their other sisters erupted into white-hot flames. Jagged shards of metal and a large chunk of debris hurtled toward them at three klicks per second and collided, knocking out the windshield. She felt a sharp pain in her skull and was blinded for a few seconds as blood steamed down the left side of her face. She managed to open her right eye, but couldn't seem to feel her left. Pushing away the pain, she reached up and felt a shard of metal embedded deep in her left eye. Wincing, she looked around to see what else had been damaged and gasped.
The ship was plummeting downward. Vyda was unconscious, with her bleeding head down on the dashboard. Lylla was in a similar state, a shard of metal having pierced her neck.
"No, no, no!" She yelled. She pulled Vyda out of the pilot's seat and laid her on the floor. She pulled hard on the controls, directing the craft upward out of a fatal nose-dive into nothing, trying to remember what the co-pilot was supposed to do. She pulled three oxygen masks from a ceiling compartment and using her right hand, she strapped one onto Lylla's face, one onto Vyda's, and then one onto her own, while pulling back on the controls with her left hand. The ship slowly pulled out of its dive and leveled out.
"Petra…" Lylla rasped.
"Lylla! What do I do now? Where do we go? Oh, Lylla- you need help. You- where's the nearest-?"
As she spoke, Petra looked up and saw an Awoken Command ship appear, coming out of hyperspace above them. The radio flickered on with a static-y broadcast.
"This is Paladin Abra Zire of the Royal Awoken Armada. If there are any survivors of this destruction, please respond now. We are here to assist you."
"Right there," Lylla rasped, pointing toward a button. Petra held it down and heard a channel open up.
"This is Techeun Apprentice Petra Venj," She said, her voice shaking a little, "I'm flying a TAC-717 model 8A246Z12, and my two sisters are badly injured."
A few seconds passed before a response came. "I see you. We are opening the landing bay."
Petra pulled the stick backwards again and the ship accelerated, flying upward toward the slowly opening bay doors of the huge ship. Once inside, she followed the landing guide to an empty strip. Activating the landing gear, she slowly and carefully touched down. Turning the ship's engine off, she removed her masks and opened the door as a medical team approached. They loaded her sisters onto stretchers and rushed them off.
"Come with us," one of them ordered, "You also need treatment."
"Are there any other survivors that you know of?" A Corsair Commander questioned as she turned to follow.
"No," she responded, feeling terribly lonely, "We are the only ones."