The Passage Through Planet Venza

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The Passage Through Planet Venza

(Before the Shattering of the Mirror)

By Scott L.

They called it Planet Venza.

The space around it had another name.

The Retribution Corridor.

Boats and their crews entered and did not return.

Not because they were judged, but because they were never heard.

The warlord Trumpox ruled the corridor with arbitrary force. His laser-guided missiles struck without charge or measure. He was not the Dragon, but he behaved like it — striking first, asking nothing, mistaking destruction for authority.

The corridor remembered.

Debris hung where trade lanes once ran.

Stations still glowed, unmanned, their lights cycling out of habit.

Silence pressed hard — not the peace of safety, but the quiet left behind when process was denied.

Into that silence, the R-A-R-Q starship blazed.

RARQ was Romeo’s UFO.

Not an escort.

Not a companion.

The ark itself.

Its engines cut a white line through the wreckage-strewn dark.

Trumpox’s laser-guided missiles answered at once.

Guidance beams locked.

One missile struck RARQ square on the forward arc.

The ship shuddered.

A shield-dissipating force with galactic field stabilizers snapped tight. The impact compressed instead of bursting. Force thinned. Energy passed across the hull.

RARQ kept coming.

A second missile followed.

Closer.

Heavier.

The hull rang like struck steel. Diamond-phase composite plating flexed, seams glowing for a heartbeat before settling back into form. The ship dipped, corrected, and held its line.

Inside, nothing broke.

Navigation stayed locked.

Life-support never flickered.

No alarms screamed.

RARQ did not dodge.

It held the line.

Then it moved.

RARQ adjusted course — not sharply, not in panic.

It rose and banked the way a living thing does when it knows the sky.

The ship did not muscle through the fire. It lifted through it. A smooth, arcing maneuver carried it up and over the worst of the blast pattern. Fields folded and unfolded like wings of light.

For a moment, it looked less like a machine and more like Pegasus breaking through cloud — scarred, steady, still flying true.

Laser-guided missiles chased empty space.

RARQ was already elsewhere.

Not fleeing.

Not attacking.

Simply carrying its burden cleanly through the insane storm.

This was not luck.

Noah’s Craft

Romeo had not learned survival from equations.

He learned it at a table.

Long before Venza became a killing ground, Romeo shared a simple meal with Noah. Bread. Water. The kind of silence where instruction could pass without force.

Romeo did not ask how to win.

He asked how to preserve.

Noah answered with his hands.

He showed Romeo how joints should flex before they snapped.

How frames needed room to move when force arrived.

How a vessel survived not by resisting impact, but by accepting stress and letting it dissipate.

Storms do not break ships, Noah said once.

Bad joining does.

Noah taught him to layer materials so failure never traveled straight through. To shape hulls and fields so pressure spread and thinned instead of concentrating. To build systems that failed slowly, giving life time to adapt.

Grace gave the purpose.

Engineering made it hold.

When Romeo designed RARQ, he chased neither speed nor firepower.

He chased continuity.

Inside RARQ

The first impact came without warning.

Juliet’s balance shifted and she moved toward him — not falling so much as being carried by the ship’s sudden turn. Romeo saw her coming and did not brace.

He opened his arms.

And with them, his heart.

She came into him easily, as if that space had always been meant for her. He held her not against danger, but through it.

For a moment, the universe narrowed to breath, closeness, and the quiet certainty that she was safe.

The deck tilted again. They went down together, landing in a loose heap. Low gravity turned the fall into a shared glide.

Juliet laughed once — soft, surprised — and Romeo felt it against his chest.

Then the second impact rolled them.

Slow.

Weightless.

Tangled just enough to matter.

They came to rest side by side, still close, still connected, as if the ship itself had arranged it that way.

Outside, the corridor burned.

Inside, there was belonging.

Beyond the cockpit lay the inner world. Sustained by petrodiamond coherence and careful design. Not illusion. Not simulation.

A real place, held slightly out of phase.

Light softened there. Depth existed without distance. Water flowed without weight. Juliet’s lagoon shimmered beneath a canopy of living green — a jungle shaped by memory and intention, where breath slowed and thought rested.

Not time travel.

Not escape.

Continuity.

Reality held steady while the universe outside tore at itself.

RARQ took more punishment.

Laser-guided missiles scored its hull, leaving dark arcs across the armor. The ship never broke formation.

Shielding dissipated force.

Stabilizers held alignment.

Structure flexed.

Stress thinned and passed on.

RARQ was not built to conquer storms.

It was built to carry life through them.

Trumpox fired again.

Nothing collapsed.

The corridor seemed to remember what it once was. Old transit rings flickered. Venzan architecture glowed faintly — art-deco lines returning like constellations recalled from memory.

RARQ emerged scarred.

Flying true.

Trumpox still lived.

The Dragon still cast its shadow.

The Mirror had not yet shattered.

But something had been proven.

Power could move through violence without becoming it.

Romeo did not look back.

Juliet’s hand found his.

They had not conquered anything.

They had not judged anyone.

They had simply carried life through a place where judgment was absent — and left without adding new ghosts to the silence.

The ending was not here.

But it was known.

And the ark, built of grace, workmanship, and love, moved on.

They passed through.

They lived.