Kaelar knew he hit the jackpot when he caught up with representative Chalto’s ship, and it was docked at an unidentified station. Better yet, the man had locked out the hangar controls for some reason.
Originally, he had just intended to board the representative’s ship, take the eiraxins into custody, then space them somewhere along the route back per representative Naal’s instructions to act as he saw fit. Falsifying the records wouldn’t be difficult. Now he had an even better opportunity. He could pin the borganian representative’s death on the eiraxin passengers. Doing everything in his power to lower the standing of those wretched beings would certainly earn him more favor from Naal. It was hardly a secret that the man despised the eiraxin.
“Captain, three small vessels are approaching us on a collision course.”
Kaelar knew the people aboard the station would have to try a different tactic after their outdated void cannons failed to so much as deplete his shields, let alone punch through them. He found it amusing that such a devastating weapon designed by the eiraxins back during Concord’s height was effectively useless now, thanks to a t’uk innovation, the shield. T’uk superiority trumped eiraxin ingenuity once again.
“Redirect one of the energy cannons and destroy them, but maintain fire on the shielded portion of the station.” The weapons would have been the primary target, but they were impotent, so he left them be and focused on the station’s shielded section to knock it offline. That was likely where the AI or power systems resided, and once those were offline, he could take his time destroying the rest of the station along with Chalto. He also couldn’t split his fire too much and give the station shields time to recharge. They were already proving to be far more durable than he expected.
After studying the scan of the station, it wasn’t hard to figure out why. Some mad idiot had stuck a bunch of small shield generators so close together that the fields overlapped by over seventy percent. It was a ridiculous waste of power, but the massive station had more than enough.
Kaelar made a mental note of the technique. He could mention it to his superiors, and maybe they could find a better way to implement the same type of overlap without so much wasted power. If they did, he would receive even more merit.
The first ship exploded as the energy cannon cut straight through the vessel.
Kaelar snorted in derision. They weren’t even shielded.
He was about to turn his focus back to the station when the ship shook violently. The lights turned red, and warning indicators flashed across the tactical display.
“Warning!” the AI announced. “Shield integrity at forty percent.”
“How is that possible!” Kaelar demanded right before watching the third ship vanish as it activated its phase coils. It reappeared only a few dozen feet from his vessel, leaving no time to target it.
He didn’t even have time to brace himself as the maintenance ship slammed into the shield.
The lights flickered and went off for a moment before coming back on. Who in their right mind would stick an FTL drive on a maintenance ship and use it to ram the vessel into another vessel? It was insane!
After the lights flickered back on, the AI’s warning was much more chilling. “Shields offline!”
Before Kaelar could order a retreat, the front half of the bridge vanished. The air whipped past him as it fled into space, but Kaelar didn’t suffer for long. The next void cannon shot removed the rest of the bridge from existence, and soon, the rest of the ship joined it as the station vented its ire on the vessel.
***
Jacob stared at the screen in shock as the enemy ship started taking damage. It looked like some invisible creature was taking perfectly spherical bites out of the vessel. Soon, all that remained was a bit of dust, some debris knocked loose during the attack, and the remaining atmosphere dispersing into space.
Katherine’s ecstatic voice broke him from his stupor. “And that’s how you handle a superior enemy that you can’t damage!”
“Holy shit, it worked,” he said in surprise.
He knew about the drone ship’s FTL drives, but they weren’t anywhere near as robust as the one aboard the transport. They were meant for really short hops, and even sending them from one side of the station to the other had pushed them beyond their limits.
“Of course it did,” she said defensively. “I wasn’t about to let some alien scum kill me.”
Jacob couldn’t exactly argue with that, but he also knew that sort of thinking was extremely dangerous. They may be aliens, but they were also individuals. Some were certainly assholes, while most were probably fine. He decided that correcting her mentality toward all aliens was a future problem to address. He didn’t want to alienate the woman right after she stepped in to help. If it wasn’t for Katherine’s quick thinking and plan of action, he doubted he would be here to complain anyway.
He popped back into his apartment and told the AI to remove Katherine’s temporary access. It was quiet now that the others had finally moved out and expanded their own living spaces. The adrenaline of the fight made his hands shake, and he clasped them together to still them.
“Stupid simulation,” he muttered.
He hadn’t felt jittery at all when in the body of the drone, but it all sort of hit him the moment he appeared in the apartment, except for any guilt for helping Katherine kill their attackers. Considering it was the first time he had ever been forced to kill, he thought he would feel something. Remorse maybe? He didn’t even feel upset that he didn’t feel anything toward their deaths, which was interesting. He decided he could unpack that later.
“Station, give me a damage report.”
The AI displayed a scale model of the station. A line of red outlined in orange, and then yellow, showed damage leading from the outer edge of the station all the way to the shielded section. The enemy vessel had been indiscriminate in its attack. What he found odd was the red area where the representative’s vessel was parked. It showed the most damage.
“AI, can you give me a security view from inside that hangar?”
A small window appeared, and Jacob enlarged it. The hangar was a mess. Holes were punched clean through the outer door, venting the entire room, while molten trails cut through the floor. They all converged on the diplomatic vessel parked within, which was now listing to one side on a partially melted landing strut. Other than that, the ship appeared unharmed.
He was about to order the AI to send maintenance units to that hangar and get it sealed back up, but he stopped himself. There was something more going on here. The representative had issued a lockdown on the station, and it was clear the ship had attacked them first, before turning its fire on the shielded section of the station. “Send some drones to make sure the ship won’t tip over completely, but don’t stabilize it for now.”
“Acknowledged, Captain.”
Jacob was done playing nice; it was time to get answers. He also needed a ship to go after Franky, and there was only one option on the station.
With the drones heading for the damaged ship, he switched his attention and started scanning the station security feeds for any of their crew who might not have made it back to the representative’s vessel in time.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
He found more than one floating in a hallway, dead. The atmosphere in those sections had been lost during the attack, and those individuals hadn’t made it to safety. The AI had said the attacking ship was a t’uk vessel. They were one of the species that controlled the Concord Imperium. That left the lau as the only members of the Concord Imperium who hadn’t graced this little slice of space.
Jacob didn’t believe that having two out of three Concord founding species at his station was a coincidence.
Eventually, he found one person who might be able to answer his questions. Two eiraxin women were wearing emergency breathing kits and hurrying to an airlock. One looked quite a bit more terrified than the other. It was the calmer of the two that he set his sights on.
“Xing’che, I think it’s time we finally had a chat.”
***
“Is it over?” Uht’ra asked as she shook like a leaf ready to blow away in the wind.
“I don’t know,” Xing’che admitted as she rubbed her arms to try to warm herself up. The venting oxygen felt like being stuck in a windstorm, but it was preferable to being stuck in a full vacuum.
They had received the order to return to the representative’s vessel, but Xing’che had ignored the request because she knew what a recall meant. She decided to see if she could force Captain Jacob’s attention by approaching one of the drone blockades. They hadn’t even made it out of the cafeteria before the station started to shake and alarms started blaring.
If it hadn’t been for the extensive study she did regarding old Concord military stations before sending Commander Zyn’rak out here, they would both be dead. Thankfully, the emergency oxygen kits had been exactly where she expected them to be. Once they could breathe safely, she had been able to guide the two of them away from the damaged section of the station.
The pair were staring through the airlock door to the section they had just been in only moments before. The corridor now sported a gaping hole, less than twenty meters past the hatch. Had they been in there when the weapons fire passed through, they would both be dead despite the breathing masks.
Xing’che was so fixated on how close they came to dying that she didn’t even realize they had company until she turned around to take stock of their situation.
She let out a scream of surprise before she could stop herself. Uht’ra spun at the noise and started as well when her eyes landed upon the form standing there quietly watching them.
“You wanted my attention, now you have it,” the suited figure said coldly.
Xing’che did her best to calm her racing heart and put on the air of dignity that she always tried to maintain, but it was hard.
“J—Captain Jacob, I presume?”
The suited drone stared at her in silence.
When it replied, it ignored her question. “This attack is your fault, isn’t it? I told the last idiots you sent that I wanted nothing to do with you or your little rebellion, yet here you are, bringing them to my door.”
“What is he talking about?” Uht’ra asked innocently.
Xing’che wished he hadn’t just blurted that out.
“It’s nothing,” Xing’che said as she clasped the woman’s arm gently.
Uht’ra jerked back with a hiss of pain, and a single bright drop of blood welled up on her arm. “Wha—” she tried to ask before staggering back and collapsing against the far wall. She stilled moments later.
“Did… did you just kill her?” Captain Jacob asked in complete shock.
Xing’che steeled herself and looked at the captain as she carefully removed the ring that hid the poisoned needle. “You did this,” she said, leaning on what she knew from speaking with Franky’dee and how violent and aggressive her ancestors were.
“Really, you’re going to turn my words against me?”
“It’s no different than what you are blaming me for, Captain Jacob. I never intended to lead a warship to this station, and I don’t even know how or why it was here. You came here to confront me, and when you did, you exposed my people to danger, forcing me to act. I might even argue that what you did was worse. You don’t need to feel bad for Uht’ra, however. She was a traitor to the eiraxin people and would have met this fate sooner or later.”
Xing’che never had time to find out why the younger woman had betrayed them, but the why didn’t matter anymore. Uht’ra’s actions led to the deaths of over twenty eiraxins working under Xing’che to free their people from bondage.
Since Captain Jacob was so incensed, she doubled down on her tactics to prove that she wasn’t some disposable member of eiraxin society. “I could say the same about you and this station, or did you think your secret would stay safe forever?”
Xing’che knew she was on shaky ground, but her options were limited with this surprise visit. She expected to have a one-on-one conversation with the captain, the same as she had with that disgusting Franky’dee, but he had shown up out of the blue, giving her no time to get a measure of the man.
“Is that a threat?” Captain Jacob asked more in confusion than anger, which threw her off for a moment.
Xing’che knew she couldn’t trust everything she knew about their ancestors, but it was all she had to go on. She also knew that people could change.
“No, I’m just pointing out a fact,” she said, switching gears to try to steer the conversation in the direction she wanted it to go. “My guess is that representative Chalto contacted the ship that appeared and attacked. Maybe because he recognized that you have a planetary conditioning vessel sitting at this station and being repaired.”
Once again, she didn’t get the response she had been expecting.
Jacob laughed, but it sounded more demonic than happy as the distorted noises came through the suited drone’s speakers. “You don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on, do you?”
“I already said I didn’t,” she bristled in annoyance.
The figure nodded awkwardly. “We’ll see soon enough. In the meantime, you are under arrest for the murder of that poor woman. You can come along quietly, or I can lock this section of the station down and open that airlock behind you. Your choice.”
Xing’che’s heartbeat sped up, but she narrowed her eyes. “You wouldn’t dare.”
In answer to her question, yellow lights began to flash, and a door farther up the corridor began to close slowly.
“I suggest you hurry,” Captain Jacob added coldly.
Xing’che ran for her life. The captain seemed like the type of person who cared for others, so she assumed she could play on those emotions, but she had been wrong. She couldn’t remember the last time she had read a situation so badly or had made so many false assumptions.
She slipped through the door just before it closed, but didn’t even get a moment to catch her breath as the next one started to flash and close, forcing her to sprint once again.
***
Jacob watched the woman through the cameras situated in the security center. The moment she stopped, he activated the next door to stop her from having any more time to plot and scheme. There was no way she would have made it to the next intersection if he hadn’t been deliberately slowing the doors, but she didn’t need to know that.
He hadn’t known what to expect when he first confronted her, but the casual way she murdered her associate certainly wasn’t it.
When she said she didn’t know what was going on, she hadn’t been lying. Catching her by surprise had actually broken the woman’s composure, making her easy to read. That didn’t change the fact that she had something to do with why the t’uk ship had arrived. He knew that because the station had captured the entire conversation representative Chalto had with the t’uk captain over local comms.
After running the woman ragged for another twenty minutes, she finally reached the security cells. Xing’che didn’t even protest when he opened one of the doors remotely; she simply walked inside and collapsed on the cot, heaving for breath.
He sealed the door behind her and went to inspect the damage.
Why couldn’t people leave him well enough alone?
All Jacob wanted to do was fix Melody, then go about his business, but people kept stepping on his toes and slowing down his work. After learning about the Sovard Accords, he knew his position as a captain of a planetary conditioning vessel would come back to bite him at some point, but it still annoyed him that he couldn’t just be left alone.
Conflict wasn’t really one of Jacob’s strong suits, but he had tried playing nice, he had tried ignoring the problems, but that wasn’t going to cut it. If he wanted to be taken seriously and left alone, he would need to take a more active stance to ensure his autonomy. Unfortunately, that attack had highlighted a glaring problem that he didn’t even know about. The station was essentially toothless against anything with shields. He didn’t know how long it would be until that judicator person arrived, but he needed to come up with some way to protect himself and his fellow humans before that happened.
The first step on that agenda was to have a face-to-face with the representative, but the man currently held a dangerous card that Jacob could no longer let stand. He sighed. He had avoided taking this action because it would shut down the fabrication center and any non-essential systems. Unfortunately, he hadn’t come up with any other solution to block the representative from enforcing even more lockout protocols on the station.
“AI?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“I need you to do a complete diagnostic of your systems.”
“This will take a few days, Captain. I will need to halt all of the automated repair and production operations in the meantime as well. Manual control of those systems will still be available, however. Do you wish for me to proceed?”
“Yes,” Jacob replied.
Silence greeted him.
Jacob had stumbled across this option when trying to find ways to remove the diplomatic credentials from the AI, but it was complete overkill, which is why he hadn’t considered using it until now. It was a band-aid approach at best, and not a permanent solution to the problem, but Jacob had a plan. By the time the AI came back online, he would make sure there was no longer any AI access in that section of the station. That wouldn’t remove the current restrictions, but it would prevent Chalto from adding any more.