The process for picking our landing spot wasn't any simpler than the dynamics for orbital injection. Just like getting to the moon isn't as simple as pointing the rocket up, landing isn't as simple as pointing the rocket down. Especially if you want to hit a specific target, like a sleeping celestial space dragon.

Luckily we had the Midnighters in our corner, as well as, surprisingly, the dragons. It turns out the landed knights had a quick study in Dame Redfang, who picked up orbital geometry faster than even the Midnighter priestess caste. I'd checked her numbers, though she'd melted a radio at my audacity to question her calculations.

After 31 revolutions around Raphina, I gave the order to begin our reentry burn. Maintaining orbit is a bit like the old Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy school of flying philosophy—in that you're constantly throwing yourself at the ground and missing. The planet always pulls you towards it, the idea is just that you're always moving so fast that the planet isn't there anymore when you fall. Reentry is just the opposite. Rather than aiming your rockets towards the planet, you just retro burn and let gravity do the work it's already doing.

"Chuck, your scene," I said, pointing to my wrangler chief. He'd made the space walk to transition aboard a few hours prior.

"Aye, boss," he said. The entire station protested as he engaged the maneuvering thrusters to bring the main engines around. "Starting burn."

"Strap in, everyone! Helmets on," I said, for all the good it would do. I twisted my own helmet on and secured the latches. Reentry was a hazardous maneuver at the best of time. And our material constraints meant that our testing had been limited. Scratch that, our testing hadn't even been limited. It had been simulated. Testing the heat-resistant ceramic tiles that coated the underside of the station was primarily done by putting them in front of the rocket motor test nozzles. They had a failure rate of about 1 in 50. Which was actually pretty reliable for goblin work. The inherent problem was that there were 692 of them lining the underside of the various modules.

The main rocket engines kicked on, rumbling through the ship. Below us, we were just passing the threshold from the decayed far side of Rava into the fresh pink and blue forests that still held life. Our orbital speed started to slow, and over the next half hour, the planet we'd been missing for the last day and a half became very much in our way again. In the viewport above us, one of the Myriad sections continued on, remaining in orbit. I hit my radio.

"See you in a few hours, John."

"Aye, boss. We'll be right back around. Spinefish will do ya proud."

The other section, Eileen's section, matched us burn for burn until the rocket motors cut off.

Speaking of burn, a pale flame licked out of my control console.

"King Apollo, I will now join the rest of my kin," said Taquoho.

"See you at ground zero, friend," I said.

"If the worst should happen, know that it was a privilege and honor to make this journey with you."

"Don't talk like that," I said. "We're going to get through this."

"I am proud to burn with you against these monsters. We Ifrit have long memories, indeed. This day will not be forgotten."

I glanced at the side of the module, at the viewport where non-Ifrit flames were starting to lick the outside of the window. "Might not want to talk about us burning together," I said, "Considering the very real possibility in the next few minutes."

The flame on my console shifted through an electrical cable running aft and disappeared behind the bulkhead. Myriad started to buckle and shake even worse as we started to build up a bow shockwave against the upper reaches of Raphina's atmosphere. My teeth chattered in my head, and the inside of the spaceship was a blur. Red flame washed out my view of the other module. System's flight data window still showed our altitude plummeting as Raphina was finally allowed to pull us in.

The radio crackled in my ear. "B-b-b-oss, th-th-things are l-l-l-ooking good h-h-h-ere," managed Eileen. I don't know how she managed even that. I was bouncing around so bad I couldn't even tell the buttons on my console apart.

I scrutinized every errant ping and crack, hoping it wasn't the critical heat shield tile that would allow the deadly heat of reentry to melt through the cabin. But eventually, after what felt like hours (but was really only a few minutes), the descent rate on my flight screen started to trend down. We were hitting thicker air, and it was slowing us substantially.

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Some of the vibration flattened out, and the black of space was replaced by the deep blue of an alien atmosphere.

"We're right on track, boss," said Chuck. "Little sister, you're coming up on your mark."

"Copy loud and clear, Chuck! Pufferfish deploying. Good luck down there!"

I twisted my neck to look out of the viewport, where the flame had cleared enough to see Eileens section of the station burst apart. Panels and parts of modules shot in every direction, some still red-hot from reentry. In their place, oblong shapes began to inflate—massive gas envelopes made from the sailcloth taken from the Midnighter ships. Beneath each one hung a wide platform.

"Separation successful! Good hunting," said Eileen.

The buoyant gas envelopes held a half-dozen floating platforms high above us as we continued toward the ground.

"Drogue chutes ready," I shouted.

"On your call, boss," said Chuck.

I hit the switch to deploy the massive parachutes. "Chutes out!"

Our view of the inflating airships was replaced with canopies of thick, white canvas, and I felt the pull of the parachutes twist the ship. There was a horrible shriek of shearing metal, and several of the warning lights on my console lit up.

"What the heck was that?" I asked.

Armstrong twisted in his seat to look around the frame of the window, then back at me. "That'd be the back quarter of our ship, boss," he said. "Their chute is out, they just ain't attached to us no more."

I grit my teeth. That module probably had close to 200 goblins in it. There was never any way we'd be getting everything to the ground safe. But at least we still had most of Myriad in one piece.

"Uh, boss? We got a problem," said Chuck.

I glanced at my flight data menu, which had begun to glitch and display weird symbols.

"Boss, incoming!" came Eileen from the other station. "Right below you!"

Uh oh

Someone seemed to flip the world from color to monochrome, and then something hit us from below. Myriad bucked, twisting us around with such force that my straps bit into me. The back of the compartment tore away, spilling material and goblins out into daylight by the dozen as the cabin depressurized. Our drogue chute ripped away and we started to plummet again. As the module spun, I caught flashes of a coal black body and broad, obsidian wings swinging around for another pass.

"Abandon ship!" I shouted.

My console burst into flames. I held my hand up against the blaze and struggled to loosen my straps with the other. A stronger hand knocked mine out of the way, and Armstrong tore the buckles off. Loose in the spinning module, we quickly found ourselves drifting towards the opening.

"Taquoho!" I shouted into the radio, "Deploy, deploy!"

Armstrong and I tumbled out of the wrecked module and into the open air, still miles above the surface. The air was filled with falling debris and goblins in space suits. We were high enough up that we'd asphyxiate before hitting the ground. Luckily, most of the goblins were in sealed space suits. Most. And I wasn't going to get notifications of how many we lost with null devils jamming up the System. I managed to get myself level in time to see the middle module above, chute torn, spilling out dozens of small, sleek, delta-winged jets on rocket-assist launches.

"King Apollo, we are deploying as requested, but our altitude is too high for the engines to cycle. We will attempt to correct this deficiency."

Our fourth-generation jet fighters were smaller and sleeker than the generations before—owing to their lack of an internal cabin. These lightweight deltas were operated entirely and exclusively by Ifrit union pilots, and each glowed with a different combination of colors as they dove, trying to get to air dense enough to feed their turbine engines.

Above, the winged null devil leveled out for another pass. It had stubby claws front and back, and a jaw disproportionately too large for its head. If I had to describe it, it looked like someone had tried to draw a dragon starting with the head but made it too big and ran out of room on the paper. But those deadly, gnashing jaws already had twisted metal debris sticking out. However ridiculous the thing looked, it was still an incredibly deadly predator capable of shearing through metal like cardboard.

"Got a fix, boss." came Eileen's voice. "On the way!"

Before the null devil could attack the rest of the Ifrit still disembarking from Myriad, a starburst streaked down from the platforms high above, curving towards the giant creature. It struck at the root of one of its wings with a massive explosion, knocking the null devil off course and severing one of the wings entirely. The null devils ate magic, so they must have been the highest concentrations of it. That made them a prime target for the magic-seeking missiles launched from our high altitude missile platforms—platforms manned by wranglers and scrappers with the new sub-job that pumped up their skills and accuracy by a factor of distance from their birth. And we were a long way from home.

Ifrit continued to pour out of the fighter module. Annoyingly, the null devil straightened out and continued its pursuit. It wasn't using its wings to fly, of course. It didn't need them just like the one at the City of Brass hadn't needed wings. I still didn't know whether they flew through some biologic organ, a rejection of physics, or just sheer will-power. But fly they did, and this one wasn't down yet. Fortunately for us, magic seeking missiles weren't our only toy to play with.

A railgun shot followed up after the missile, punching through the gut of the null devil as it opened its jaws to clamp down on the Ifrit module. The supersonic report of the gun put a crack in my helmet glass. The Null devil howled and sank several hundred chooms from the impact. Most of its guts sank even lower. The black smudge of the null devil's aura winked out. My radio exploded with cheers from the goblins in free-fall.

"It's not over yet," I said, looking at the nonsense on my flight data screen. I spotted a trio of black shapes coming at us from the forest on the horizon.

We hadn't won yet. We'd just rung the dinner bell.

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