Masters of the Metaverse novel

[Merkwerkee]

never gonna get this published, alas

Prologue

Spoiler

Mya Kaldegga walked quickly towards the door of the briefing room where she had called the meeting.

It had been less than 30 hours since she'd gotten news of her father's capture, but even so, she couldn't afford to wait any longer. While the Resistance sources within the government claimed that said government was planning to take their time and make a show of his execution, they were moving as fast as they could to get him to the fortified prison planet designated PV-3 before said trial. One of the first planets to be designated as such, it and the system it resided in had been reinforced and upgraded for centuries so as to be all but impregnable; if Mya wanted her father back, she and her team would have to go and get him before he reached that point.

Mya paused outside the door to the briefing room and chewed her lip for a moment. She'd gone on other raids before, of course; she'd been born on a Resistance base and had grown up helping the Resistance in any way she could. This, however, would be her biggest mission to date and she couldn't afford to fail. Not now. Not with her father on the line.

She took a deep breath and pushed the door open. Three people looked up; the fourth – one of the two human males - merely continued to stare at the tablet in front of him, poking it occasionally while the information on it reflected in his glasses. The two women in the room continued to stare at Mya; one gave her a flat, unemotional stare while obsessively running her fingers up and down her weapon and the other - the only non-human in the room, a yellow-and-black scaled Hosh - nodded to Mya decisively. The last man merely gave Mya a bored once-over before going back to the disassembled gun in front of him, which he began to clean with a practiced ease.

Mya nodded back almost by reflex and walked up to the end of the table nearest the display board. With a few taps on her tablet, the larger display lit up with the rough schematics she'd received less than two hours previously. Three heads swiveled to the display, impassive expressions firmly in place as the mood in the room sharpened with tension. The man with the tablet tapped at something, and the rough schematics became more detailed on both Mya's tablet and the display. It still wasn't the precise outline that they'd need once they had boots on the ground, but it was lightyears better than what Mya had acquired.

She nodded to the man with the glasses and set both her hands on the table. This was it; once she started the briefing, it would all be real. She would have to lead these four people - each an expert in their own fields - on a mission that was very likely to kill them all.

No pressure.

Mya sucked in a deep breath and released it slowly. She could do this. She had to do this.

She turned and faced the room at large, forcing herself to meet each person’s eyes at least once. "Thirty-four hours ago, we received a distress beacon from AC3-67h, my father's android companion. Both she and my father have been captured by the United League government; the exact details of that capture are currently unknown and not particularly relevant. What is important to know is that while he was held captive on the Capital class warship the Prism-5 for approximately twelve hours, he has since been transferred to a specially modified Capital class warship given the temporary designation Dungeon-1."

Mya turned slightly to gesture at the display board behind her, tapping on a section near the center of the ship to highlight it.

"The Dungeon-1 was retrofitted with a high-security detainment section, gutting some of the crew spaces to make room. We do not currently have exact specifications as to what that entails, but that's where they're holding my father."

She tapped the engineering section, moving the highlight from the detainment section to the new focus.

"Normally when the United League wishes to upgrade a warship, they simply build a new one in the highly-classified Capital shipyards; however, on such short notice they had to pull into one of the less-secure shipyards - one which we had an agent in. While the ship was being retrofitted, our agent managed to sneak on board and introduce an anomaly into the engines which should strand the Dungeon-1 two-thirds of the way through its route to the prison planet PV-3."

Mya tapped at her tablet, and the schematics were replaced by a section of simplified star charts. Mya reached over and selected four systems, highlighting them before turning back to the room at large.

"While normally a ship can take any route to reach its destination system, PV-3 has been so heavily fortified and secured that only a few vectors of entry will not meet with immediate reprisal from satellite-mounted cannons. While that restriction provides a great deal of security for the planet itself, it means that ships going to PV-3 must pass through one of these four systems. Twelve hours ago, I sent a team to drop a passive monitoring beacon in each of the marked systems. When the Dungeon-1 drops into the system, it will have to pause and repair the anomaly our agent set up. At that point we'll have less than two hours to get there, get on board, and liberate my father."

Mya swiped at her tablet, and the schematics of the ship once again filled the display screen. She tapped at an exterior section, highlighting it.

"When we arrive, we'll have an extremely limited choice in how to get onboard; the United League has set up buffer circuits throughout the ship that disperse translocational magic except in very specific, heavily guarded areas. Trying to translocate in would be asking for a quick death.”

Mya zoomed in on the selected hull, pulling up an approximated cross-section. “Instead, the hull is thinnest here with a crew corridor just inside that should be relatively low-traffic. The plan is to blow our way in through the hull to that corridor. Once we're inside, we'll acquire more specific schematics and security blueprints from the mainframe; after that, we get to the security section and release my father, then exfiltrate back to our ship and escape."

It all sounded so simple when she laid it out step by step. Get in, find out where to go, go there, get out; four easy steps. Mya knew better, of course. She'd been an active participant in a number of such "easy" plans and the only reason she was still alive was because she was one of the few translocationists active in the Resistance who was capable of moving whole ships. Magic and power went hand in hand in the United League, and anyone capable of magic was earmarked for military service from the day they were born in a state-sponsored hospital. They either served an enforced period commensurate to their power level, or they washed out to be monitored by the United League every day for the rest of their lives.

That reason, among many others, was why the Resistance had existed in various forms for more than a hundred years. Their current base, and everyone in it, belonged to the latest iteration to bear the name; Mya could only hope they'd be more successful than those forerunners.

Either way, she needed this mission to go according to plan. Her father's life depended on her getting it right.

"Any questions?"

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 1

Spoiler

With a stride slightly longer than was comfortable and sweaty palms, Mya Kaldegga strode down the corridor with her head held high and shoulders kept square only by pure force of will.

The plan to rescue her father had gone off with several hitches; while they'd managed to get to his cell in relative stealth, their exit had been explosive, and the tracker embedded under her father's skin had been a nasty surprise. Still, they'd managed to get away cleanly with the most wanted man in the galaxy, and that had to count for something.

For someone whose bounty was in the several millions, Lothar Kaldegga looked remarkably unconcerned as he strode along beside Mya. A wide jaw, dark eyes, and full lips were features they both shared. He was several inches taller than her, and with brown hair and overgrown goatee still shaggy from his days in confinement, Lothar did not quite fit the image the whole galaxy was familiar with. The United League’s wanted posters had him with his preferred hairstyle, while the highly romanticized picture common to the Resistance - one that Mya had used over and over again to prove her relation - also had him crackling with traces of lightning. Even dirty from prison, an aura of power lingered around him, almost like a cloak. It was very easy to believe that he was the most powerful elemental magic user in several generations.

If he had chosen to, Lothar could very likely have risen to great heights within the United League's government. The United League valued magical power above all else, and to rise past any sort of middle management required at least some amount of magical talent - though elementalists dominated the very top ranks, the occasional translocational magic user did sometimes make it into the upper echelons. Those without magical talent were barred from all positions of power within the United League, with a very few specific exceptions that did not have any real political power to effect change.

This, of course, meant that no non-human was allowed to have a say in the government that controlled a large portion of the galaxy. No alien species to date had been found to have any form of magic; a few of them had had to fight to even be considered sentient, and at least one of them had lost that fight. No alien was allowed to hold any position of command, and most of them were considered second-class citizens if they were considered citizens at all. Of the four species currently known to humanity - three acknowledged by the United League - only one had even vague pretensions to citizenship, and that was because they were a warrior culture who were known for tearing limb from limb anyone foolish enough to dishonor them. The other two did not have even that much protection, and were - by and large - used as unpaid labor.

Things had been this way for hundreds of years, apparently; Mya's education while growing up had been mixed, to put it generously. Fostered by whoever wasn't on a mission when her mother was required to leave whatever base they were living in at the time, Mya had learned a great deal about the peculiarities of each of the four major alien species, and had picked up a number of skills she would bet a great deal were not taught in any United League education center. But history? Especially United League history? That was something nobody had really wanted to discuss with a seven-year-old. She knew the United League had led - or was leading? - a war of aggressive conquest and expansion, and that the Resistance had formed at nearly the same time the war started as a response to the authoritarian wartime powers and draconian measures that were put into place. Luckily, she at least knew a bit more about the Resistance itself; people had been very willing to tell her stories about that when they learned her name.

The Resistance had continued in many different forms and iterations over the years; when Lothar had joined, more than twenty years ago, it had been a ragtag, loosely-affiliated collection of various teams in different quadrants of the galaxy. He'd deserted his post and stolen away with a single friend, fighting off an entire battalion of the United League's finest soldiers along the way - or so Mya had been told. She'd never found anyone who knew the specifics.

Currently, the Resistance was somewhat more well-organized; with eight bases and almost 3,000 full-time residents spread across them, the Resistance now had the manpower to mount reasonably significant raids on tactically important targets. Until the capture of Lothar - the public face of the Resistance for the last two decades - they'd mostly confined themselves to quick hit-and-runs on as many targets as they could manage, to keep the United League's fleets from concentrating on any one area. Lothar's rescue had been augmented by a larger-than-usual raid on a weapons stockpile 15 systems away that drew off most of the heat.

Mya had yet to see the results of that raid; while her orders had been to preserve Resistance lives over stealing or destroying weapons, her orders tended to be treated as suggestions unless she was leading the action personally. An entire year of building the Resistance back up into a viable fighting force had showcased that time and time again.
Mya had started her reorganization when she'd somehow ended up the most senior Resistance member left alive on a small moon base orbiting Arctorious. There had been a number of older members, of course, but the name Kaldegga carried a lot of weight, and so they had deferred to her. She hadn't really wanted the responsibility, but she'd decided to try her best and had managed to evacuate most of the base to a safer way station she'd heard rumors of on Themicon IV.

One of the older Resistance fighters had mentioned in passing that she'd been a credit to her father in getting them all out, and in that casual remark a seed had planted itself in her head. What if that was the way to reach out to the man she’d idolized as a child?

Her father had never been around much when she was young; her mother certainly hadn't married him, but she had confirmed him as the father of her child and given Mya his last name instead of hers. Lothar had been an almost mythical figure in her childhood, the stories of his exploits one of her favorite things to listen to as a child, and she'd grown up knowing that he was going to be the one who finally overthrew the United League and freed them all.
When she was old enough, Mya jumped at the chance to join him on a mission. She'd been just one face among many at that point and hadn't had enough courage to approach him directly. Then the mission went straight to hell, with over three-quarters of the Resistance agents who'd gone on it dying in a raging firefight and Lothar himself only escaping by the skin of his nose on a United League lifeboat.

Mya had to be glad she hadn't introduced herself then. She felt terrible about not owning up, that she didn’t want him to associate her with the overwhelming failure the mission had been but had pushed through the feeling. She'd figured that all she needed was a bit more training, a few more successes, and then she would be able to hold her head high to speak with her father for the first time.

She'd gone on a few more missions after that, most of them being moderately successful, and then had signed up for another mission with Lothar. Once again, it had been an unmitigated disaster; an alarm tripped too early meant back-up arrived for the United League almost a full half-hour ahead of schedule, with a second wave hard on their heels that nobody had accounted for in the mission briefing. Lothar had left Mya and the rest of the Resistance agents to hold them off as best they could while he escaped to attempt the mission objective and destroy a United League tax archive. To this day, Mya wasn't sure whether or not he'd succeeded; by the time she and two of the last fighters had managed to throw off their pursuers, Lothar had escaped to fight another day.

Mya hadn't known what to try next until that remark from one of the new residents of Themicon IV. If the two score people she'd managed to get to follow her to Themicon IV were willing to follow her for her father's name, then perhaps other people would as well. So Mya had gone out into United League controlled space and started recruiting. Forty people had become four hundred, and one base on Themicon IV had extended to another base on the moon of Predileth. She'd started by trading on her father's name, and had done whatever it took to get people on board. She'd begged, borrowed, swindled, stolen, and wheedled her way into more and more recruits - which had brought its own set of challenges.

She'd set up minimal chains of command for the bases she'd had, then passed out orders to start acquiring supplies. She'd found utterly amoral or sympathetic merchants who didn't care where their cash came from, she'd marked supply depots for raids, she'd even managed to find a hacker to set up a dummy corporation that let them purchase food in bulk as long as they were careful about it. She'd managed to find space on inhospitable planets or unlikely places for bases and stockpiles, and had done a lot of fast talking to sway more than a dozen merchant ship captains to give them a reasonable amount of mobility between bases.

It had been an uphill battle to get people to listen to her. Mya herself was barely an adult, with no formal education; it was Mya Kaldegga who was a force to be reckoned with. Time and time again, potential recruits were only even interested after she said who her father was, and many joined only for the prestige of working with a Kaldegga.

What had surprised Mya the most had been the responses she'd gotten from the nonhuman species; while neither the Kala'Kah nor the Hosh were, on the whole, inclined to give her the time of day - with very few exceptions - a race of insect-like aliens known as the Yttarr had been very receptive, and a number of hives had joined the Resistance outright. Mya hadn't approached the tiny silicate-based species known as the M'Pell, but they'd simply started showing up at the Resistance bases she'd set up and claimed they were there to help.

Mya had been almost ready to approach her father again when she'd gotten the news of his capture. While he hadn't formally been part of the new Resistance, he was the face of it to the galaxy at large and, moreover, the father Mya had been doing it all for. Leaving him to die on the United League execution block had never been an option.

And now here they were, walking side by side down the hallways of one of the Resistance's older bases. Mya could only hope her nerves weren't visible to any onlookers - of which there were many, with Lothar's personal charisma and reputation ensuring that every single living body on the base had turned out to gawk.

“Did you see that? It’s Lothar Kaldegga!”

“Shit, she really IS his daughter.”

Mya felt her ears turn red, and lengthened her stride down the corridor. Fortunately, the base’s design didn’t let anyone stare for long; Mya had chosen this location specifically for its many twists and turns, each hallway carefully baffled with choke points and destructible cover for a fighting retreat. The whole place was a vortogg’s nest; hallways twisting up and down and left and right with as much sophistry as Mya had been able to manage in its design so as best to conceal both her numbers and her supplies from any possible spies. No hallway was straight for more than 10 meters, all doors were built flush with the corridor to prevent enemies from using doorways as cover, and the hard defensive points were equipped with tiny charges that would collapse them in the event they were overrun.

All these precautions would have been useless - not to mention hazardous - if this base had been located on any other planet. On any other planet, the United League could simply bombard them back into space dust from orbit, but not so on Sarcorxious. Once a garden world, the planetary governor some 40 years previously somehow managed to piss off a middling-high level UL bureaucrat who had, in retaliation, reclassified the planet from Agrarian Garden to Industrial - High Value Planet in the span of a few months. Not 10 hours after that classification change cleared, the first of the predatory manufacturers had arrived to start plundering.

In the space of five years the surface of the planet had become uninhabitable; radiation from industrial machinery combined with the constant motion of mining ships through the atmosphere to create atmosphere-high dust storms that had in turn led to a 90% die-off of all native flora and fauna. Surface water dried up as water tables were removed for drilling and cooling efforts, and the magnetosphere went crazy when the drills hit the mantle of the planet. All the former residents with any sense had retreated underground, into the played-out mines and used-up industrial areas; most of the population survived on cobbled-together water reclamation efforts and hydroponics in the spaces left behind by heavy industry.

All these factors, combined with the fact that the storms scrambled all sensors within the atmosphere, had made the place into an ideal location for a base. When Mya had come to scout it out, they’d welcomed her with open arms - a gun to the face. They’d warmed up considerably when she’d told them about her plans, though. The people of Sarcorxious didn’t have much to share, but they kept the base supplied with food and water, and one of the M'Pell who’d agreed to help staff the place had a way with electrical components that let them harvest power from the storms that raged frequently overhead. All in all, it was one of her more stable and secure bases - which was, of course, why she’d chosen to bring her father here.

Lothar was silent as they walked, eyes shuttered and face unreadable, and Mya felt worry open a pit in her stomach. What if he didn’t approve of her choices? What if he was judging her base and finding it lacking? What if she’d taken him to one of the prettier bases, on a world that still had surface water? He did look like he could use a wash, with hair lank and greasy after his captivity and still smelling strongly of the metal restraints his captors had used to bind him. Maybe if she-

“Is this your base?”

His tone was neutral, implying nothing, but Mya felt ice shoot down her spine anyway and she straightened just a little.

“One of them.”

She did her best to match his tone, to repress any hint of defensiveness. He was to be their leader; he had every right to question their dispositions.

One of Lothar’s eyebrows went up.

“One of them?”

She nodded, coming to a stop next to a choke point that would let them talk out of the flow of traffic. “Yes, of course. Concentrating our resources into one location just gives the United League something to shoot at. I’ve managed to set up bases on over half a dozen worlds, and fallback outposts on a dozen more.”

The fallback outposts were presently unmanned, of course; she’d had to scrape the bottom of every barrel she could think of, trade on her father’s name more than she cared to dwell on, and generally do whatever was necessary to man the eight bases she had managed to pull together. The outposts were booby-trapped to keep scavengers and the United League from raiding or trashing them, but in the case of an emergency evacuation at one of the active bases they could be used as shelter to regroup.

In truth, most of the bases had only the bare minimum population - including this one. While there had been an inordinate number of gawkers on their way so far, that was only because literally every single person on the base had turned out to see the famed Lothar Kaldegga. Some of them more than once; Toron’Mkesh - one of the few Kala’Kah on base - had tried to be sneaky and use alternate routes to be “coincidentally” in the same hallway as Mya and her father no less than three times. It would have been more effective if he hadn’t been the only Kala’Kah on base with the distinctive pale mauve fur color; hopefully her father only thought they had a number of purple Kala’Kah on base and not that he was being stalked by one proud yet intrigued alien warrior.

Lothar’s eyebrow went back down.

“How many is ‘over half a dozen’?” her father asked, his forbidding façade slipping back into place, and Mya quailed internally.


“Eight, father.”

She kept her voice steady with an effort. Eight bases. Most of them only-just-staffed. Less than three thousand souls, all told. A small drop in a very big ocean, when you looked at the territory the United League controlled with an iron fist.

And all of them inside United League territory. She’d hijacked the feeds from a few drone ships, the kind that the United League sent out to explore new systems so humans didn’t have to; they weren’t particularly hard to tamper with, given that they were completely useless for anything but system exploration and no-one really guarded the data tethers to the ships, but so far none of the ones they’d taken had sent back anything useful. Oh, they’d found a few rich systems the industrial capacity of the United League would drool over if Mya had been foolish enough to send that data on, but the Resistance didn’t have the capacity to exploit those places yet and the drone ships hadn’t returned any systems capable of sustaining life - and a base - in the long term.

“Eight.”

She couldn’t read anything from his tone of voice; she didn’t know him well enough to say whether he was angry or pleased by the note that colored that word. They were practically strangers; he’d seen her face to face less than a handful of times in the years she’d worked with the Resistance after her mother had died, and spoken to her exactly once.

The anxiety in her chest threatened to crush her ribcage as the silence stretched for several long moments, and then his mouth twisted on one side into a dangerous smirk.

“I can work with that.”

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 2

Spoiler

The entire engineering capacity of the Sarcorxious base consisted of several hallways dotted at intermittent intervals with makeshift laboratories and half-finished (but meticulously clean) machine shops. The din was incredible, with haphazard soundproofing keeping it from disturbing the rest of the base. Anyone who wanted some quiet while they worked had to hang their own doors, and some were better at it than others.

Mya huffed a sigh as she turned yet another corner, dodging a shower of welding sparks with practiced ease. She had to visit this section more often than any other part of the base to mediate disputes between the mechanically-minded, and it never got any less grating.

Her father was still in the quarters they’d put together for his use; for all he’d been kept sedated while on the United League ship on his way to sentencing, he hadn’t been particularly well-treated before that point, and while the medics had done what they could in the week since he’d arrived, he was still recovering. Of course, that hadn’t stopped a few of the more enterprising members from visiting in the hopes of offering “comfort,” but Mya had posted one of the very few Kala'Kah at this base in front of said door for precisely that reason.

Not that my father would mind the company, she thought drily as she ducked under a beam that had been shaken loose when M'f'dtch had blown up their laboratory.She made a mental note to put it on the roster for repair - though she suspected it still wouldn’t be fixed if she did.

She knew her father’s reputation better than she knew the man himself; her mother had been one of many, many people to enjoy the company of Lothar Kaldegga both in the Resistance and elsewhere. Her father likely wouldn’t thank Mya for preventing amenable visitors from indulging him until the medics cleared the activity.

At least she didn’t have to worry about one of the other Resistance members manipulating him in that fashion; he didn’t tend to stay with his sleeping-mates overly long, and never long enough to form that kind of attachment. Her mother, one such bedmate, had been philosophical about it; she’d ruffled Mya’s hair whenever Mya had asked where her father was and set Mya on the nearest male or male-adjacent freedom fighter with promises that her father would come to fetch them both when the galaxy no longer strained under the yoke of the United League.

Mya paused next to one of the security hardpoints, breath catching in her throat as a wave of sadness swept over her. Her mother hadn’t always been around, and the life of a resistance fighter was a life constantly on the run, but she’d always had time for Mya no matter what else was going on if she was present in the solar system. She’d died almost five years ago in a raid on a United League outpost - a raid that had been put together hastily as retaliation for a civilian massacre the United League had instigated.

Mya hadn’t been able to mourn her properly for almost six months; the United league had cracked down in the wake of the raid and sent the rest of the Resistance scrambling just to stay one step ahead of the warships. But eventually she’d had time to process and liked to think she had come out stronger for it; that was what she told herself, anyway, and ignored the times like now when she had to stop and breathe through painful memories.

She was just glad her father hadn’t been around to witness it; she rather suspected that he wouldn’t be able to remember her mother’s name if someone had a gun to his head. Mya would rather remember her mother with the people who knew her. Not that there were any on this base, but that wasn’t a problem she had time to think about now.

Mya pushed off from the hardpoint and continued forward, winding her way towards the unseen heart of the base: Room IC 7-0. The mess hall might be the stomach, mouth, and ears of the base, but IC 7-0 was home to one of the more unusual kinds of M'Pell; one who could sit still for longer than a frakkin’ nanoclick. M'Pell were small, round, and vaguely crablike; they moved largely by modulating their surface tension and friction - literally bouncing from place to place - and originated from a small planet two arms spinwards of the base that would be largely unremarkable save for the preponderance of a very rare metal in the crust of their planet. The United League had declared the M'Pell non-sentient and therefore the planet was open for business, and that had been that. Fortunately, a few had gotten off planet to contest the ruling before the industry ships moved in and had repopulated themselves through genetic shenanigans made only more complex by the fact that their composition was 87% silicon.

None of the M'Pell alive today had ever even seen their home planet, something that seemed to make them sad - at least, as far as Mya could tell. It was hard to read them due to their lack of a face. Still, their affinity for electrical fields and non-carboniferous chemicals made them excellent engineers, and while they were paradoxical in their extreme suspicion of outsiders - especially those on two legs - and their enthusiasm for new things, Mya had managed to cajole a few of them into working with the Resistance as engineers and scientists. M’t'fdlth was one such M'Pell.

M’t'fdlth was methodical in a way few M'Pell were and had spent their first six months on base painstakingly assembling a system of computers, antennae, satellite dishes and - to one particularly annoying Yttarr’s eternal consternation - a highly metallic wing casing that allowed them to use the great storms themselves as a sort of signal amplifier to get remote access to the United League’s Inter-System Communications System. It didn’t work when the storms were directly overhead, but the rest of the time it brought in a signal stronger than any truly public access point. With that boosted signal strength, M’t'fdlth and Mya’s father’s old friend, Victor Cloud - self-proclaimed genius hacker, not that he’d given Mya any cause to doubt him - had been working diligently on the next phase of her plan.

Reaching the otherwise unremarkable door to IC 7-0, Mya waited a moment while rough, hand-assembled genetic scanners passed over her skin with a tingling that made her break out in goosebumps. She hated the feeling, but it was a necessary evil. As the scan completed, a number pad with the first 26 octal digits of the M'Pell numbering system slid out and Mya entered her personal code. Lights played over the pad as the mainframe matched DNA to the entered code, and then it flipped back to lie seamlessly with the wall as the door slid up and out of her way.

Both Victor and M’t'fdlth were watching a screen when she came in; from the look of it, it was one of the spikeball tournaments from Helicon IV, and Mya resisted the urge to snort. Victor was addicted to the highly competitive and dangerous sport, and she shouldn’t have been surprised to find him trying to instill a similar love of it into a captive audience. At least they started a job before he sidetracked everything, she thought as she noted the complex “processors in use” signal flashing from one of the other screens. Hopefully today would be the day.

Mya cleared her throat loudly and, when that garnered no attention, sighed loudly before speaking.

“Glad to see you’re only using our best and brightest computer equipment for all the important things in life,” she snarked at a slightly higher volume than she’d intended in order to be heard over the commentator.

Victor whipped around, guilt pinching at the corners of his eyes and a gamin grin pasting itself across his face. Clearly, he hadn’t been expecting her quite this soon despite having sent her a message about results several hours before.

“Mya! You’re early.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “You sent the message to me three hours ago.”

He paused, eyes flicking toward one of the other screens in the room, and winced. “Yes, well.”

Victor hit pause on the spikeball display - a rerun then, for which Mya was glad or she’d never have been able to pry him away from it - before seating himself neatly the wrong way around in a chair propped in front of one of the less-busy screens. M’t'fdlth followed at a more leisurely pace, rolling across the floor before jumping into a specially made bucket seat with a short *bzpt* noise.

“Okay, so, you asked me to find the capital shipyards -”

Mya frowned. “Your message said you’d already found it,” she interrupted, and Victor waved a hand impatiently.

“As good as found it; as soon as that data finishes crunching, we’ll have exact coordinates. But I can give you the approximate location now.”

He seemed to be content with that, but Mya wasn’t, so she waved a hand at him and raised her eyebrow again.

“And?”

He blinked, then spun around to sit properly in his chair as his hands began to dance lightly across the keyboard.

“M’t'fdlth found it, really,” he said and paused to stretch out a hand to the much smaller alien. M’t'fdlth obligingly reached up and tapped the outstretched limb with one of their own more pincer-like appendages.

“Right on. Anyway, they had the brainwave to hack archived solar canvassing data streams. Turns out security is much lighter on a bunch of dusty old records than the more recent stuff; who knew?” He shrugged and tapped a few more keys to bring up capital ship schematics.

Victor caught Mya’s look of surprise at the highly classified documentation and grinned. “Just a little souvenir I picked up while we were saving Lothar’s sorry ass.”

Mya felt her lips tighten at the flagrant disrespect in the man’s words, but let it pass. As one of his oldest surviving friends and one of the few foolhardy enough to join her on her desperate mission to get him back, Victor had the right to call her father just about anything he wanted.

Didn’t mean Mya had to like it when he did it, though.

Oblivious, Victor plowed on. “So, if you look here and here,” his hands moved over the seams of the armor-plated hull steadily, tracing lines that lit up under his touch, “the schematics call for Rubensian welds instead of the more standard flex-lined welds. Means the ship is about 87% less likely to shatter under asteroid impacts to an unshielded hull, but you need a class IV pulsar to get the stream right or the seams will shatter as you made them.”

Victor turned to another screen, this one full of single-line data entries as far as Mya could tell. “M’t'fdlth applied that to the old archive data and got about 16,000 returns - pulsars aren’t that common, especially that class of pulsar. Then we threw out the ones that were completely inhospitable - solar storms, Gdansk radiation fields, you name it. The kind of stuff that melts a ship as soon as the translocationists drop into realspace.”

His hands flicked over the holographic keyboard under the display and the number of entries dropped dramatically. “That got rid of half of the list; more recent, non-classified census data got rid of another third because wherever the ‘yard is, it’s definitely classified out the ass.”

He jerked a thumb at the flashing screen behind him. “That’s chewing through the last suspects using the backdoor M’t'fdlth managed to open in their astrogation repository. When we find a match to the last data set, that’ll be the place.”

M’t'fdlth cheebled, lights flashing over their otherwise dull grey skin for a moment, and a speech program came up on the console in front of them.

“Yes, and we would have been finished two hours ago with that if you had not gotten diverted by new data in your entertainment siphon.”

The words were delivered in a standard cadence by the computer, but Mya was familiar enough by now with the M'Pell to know the sickly yellow flashing in small groups of dots across M’t'fdlth’s carapace was the M'Pell version of giggling.

Victor held up his hands in mock innocence. “I didn’t hear you complaining!” he protested, carefully feigned injury painted across his face.

Mya shook her head at him. “You’re lucky Gruul doesn’t fit in here with all this equipment; she’d have made sure you finished your work before you got distracted,” she responded dryly, and Victor sobered.

“True,” he said, and turned back to his console to hit a few more keys.

The screen behind him cleared instantly, the image of a sullen, blue-white star revolved slowly on the screen, a flaring cone of radiation tapering off each end of the star and an enormous donut of solar debris ringing the center. Victor turned in his chair again and rested his chin on the headrest. “There it is. CP 1919, more colloquially known as Zwicky’s End, sitting as it does at the terminus of Zwicky’s Corridor - one of the most heavily patrolled United League trading routes in the galaxy. If the shipyard’s anywhere, it’s there.”

Mya looked at the screen for a long moment, drinking in the sight of the maelstrom that was to be their next target, before drawing herself up and nodding to Victor.

“Send me the coordinates and any data you have on the system - I don’t care how old it is. We have to strike hard and fast to keep our momentum going.”

She turned on her heel and started to leave, but Victor’s voice checked her mid-step.

“Those shipyards are likely filled with penal laborers and slaves.”

His voice was neutral, but his eyes looked clear through to her center, and she clenched a fist on reflex before taking a deep breath and forcibly relaxing her fingers.

“We do what we have to do.”

Victor’s eyes shuttered. “Whatever you say.”

His voice was still neutral, and he returned his attention to the console in front of him.

For one ludicrous second, Mya wanted to scream at the older man, to tell him that the needs of the quadrillions who lived under the thumb of the United League had to come before the lives of a few million, and that she could only save so many - but he wasn’t the one she needed to convince. And he certainly wasn’t the one she needed to persuade. Without another word, she turned on her heel and left.

It was time to go and see her father again.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 3

Spoiler

Mya walked down the winding corridors with her head down, mind whirling with arguments and justifications.

The distance between IC 7-0 and her father’s quarters was definitely not a short one, and it took her a significant amount of time to walk it - long enough that Mya had plenty of time to cool off from Victor’s parting shot. The man had obviously been worried about the Resistance’s reputation, which was fair given that most of the non-Rim planets in the League thought they were all terrorists, and had been trying to warn her of the consequences of blowing the place up while it was still filled with forced laborers - innocents, in other words.

And he had a good point; committing atrocities would only give the United League leverage to turn possible support away from their cause. Mya had had to work hard and talk fast to get the forces the Resistance currently had without any major actions to her name. Killing everyone working the shipyards would be unlikely to get them any more support, and so simply blowing the shipyards to kingdom come with all hands aboard would have to be a last-ditch solution.

The cold, hard fact of the matter was that the Resistance simply didn’t have enough ships to move the number of workers likely to be present at the shipyards. Each base had exactly enough ships to get all the inhabitants out at any given time - if they were crammed uncomfortably full - plus maybe one or two extra ships used for basic supply runs, and that rotated with the on-station ships every third outing to minimize the chance that the United League would peg them as ferrying supplies to rebels. Mya’s own excursion to save her father had taken a full quarter of the ships on base. With what they had, it simply couldn’t be done.

Then, too was the fact that translocationists - people who magic allowed them to transport people and ships between locations in the blink of an eye - didn’t exactly grow on trees. Anyone born in the system was marked by the United League for military service, first and foremost. It was only after they washed out or retired that they went to work on civilian ships - under the watchful auspices of the UL, of course.

Of course, they were attacking a shipyard. Mya’s eyes narrowed as she turned that thought over to examine it from several angles. On the one hand, they really didn’t have a good place to stash more ships, especially the enormous Capital-class ships that the shipyard produced. Additionally, they’d have to commit every translocationist in the Resistance to be sure they could take as many flight-capable - if perhaps not wholly finished - ships as humanly possible.

Most of the translocationists that had joined up with Mya’s Resistance chapter had received about as much training as Mya herself had. Ol' Saunders had gotten out of the Navy an embittered old man, and the training he gave Mya had taken place exclusively on an ancient junker of a ship. He claimed to have assembled the thing himself, to make sure the United League hadn't "tainted" any of it, but Mya had never been sure how true that claim was. Either way, he'd trained a lot of translocationists who'd been kept off the grid up until his demise at the hands of heart disease.

His training style had been...idiosyncratic, to say the least, and Mya had supplemented it over the years with a certain amount of trial and error. She could fly any ship the Resistance currently laid claim to, which --- up until this point --- had been enough. Translocating things that were not ships was dicier, and she'd never tried a ship the size of a Capital-class cruiser. To be fair, the Capital-class ships were as big as a ship could get and still be translocatable.

Still, the point remained; if Mya went ahead with the plan she'd given her father, then she'd be risking the entire Resistance's mobility. Most commercial translocationists were under constant surveillance by the United League, and recruiting more would mean having to sneak them away from those feeds. And, to be honest, most of the commercial pilots wouldn't want to leave their state-sanctioned surveillance. When translocational magic was the only game in town when it came to faster than light travel, you could almost name your own price when it came to hauling cargo. Almost; for the more lucrative hauls, it wasn't uncommon for ships to undercut each other for a profit.

It was a risk, and a big one. If the raid went sour, the Resistance could lose up to 80% of its mobility and cripple future plans for want of pilots and transport.

On the other hand, the place made capital warships. Planet-crackers, with shields enough to fly through entire Oort clouds and come out on the other side ready for prolonged battle. Getting even one of those ships would even the playing field considerably between the Resistance and the United League, especially if they could keep it concealed for use in targeted strikes. Depriving the United League of the ability to make more while simultaneously increasing their ability to destroy the ones the United League had currently by a thousand-fold was a powerful incentive, even beyond the reputation boost it would give them. And, if they blew up the station using stolen ships, they wouldn’t have to acquire, carry, and plant any explosives.

Though that would make her father an almost mandatory team member. Mya’s steps faltered at the thought. She’d only just rescued him from the clutches of the United League, and here she was already considering throwing him back into danger. The thought made guilt clench uncomfortably in her gut, and she could only ease it a little through the knowledge that her father would never stand to be kept safe no matter how much Mya wished differently. Still, he was their best elementalist, if not their only one, and he was the only one with enough power to completely obliterate the shipyards and all their currently unknown safeguards and securities.

Mya paused, stepping out of the flow of traffic along the better-traveled hallway she’d been walking along since leaving the engineering section. Security plans. They didn’t have security plans for the shipyards. She grimaced; without those plans, they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of pulling any of this off. Pulling out a small tablet, she made several rapid movements to unlock it and access her deepweb connection. A small display in the corner flashed a warning; it was a custom notification system built by M’t'fdlth to warn users when a storm was approaching that would knock out access to the ISCS. Mya had less than three minutes to find the information she wanted before she’d have to wait until the next storm-window opened.

Fortunately, she only needed two.

Typing as quickly as she could, Mya pulled up the interface Victor had coordinated for the Resistance to use to access things they should not, strictly speaking, be able to access, and typed feverishly into it as M’t'fdlth’s warning steadily counted down. Victor could likely have found the information faster, but she didn’t want to bother him until she knew it was even possible. He was her father’s friend, after all, so anything that went through him would likely be reported to Lothar. Still, she had a good thirty seconds left on her timer when she got an answer for her request.

Security plans held in physical disc on Nottagan. Favor repaid. The message was short and to the point, Mya’s contact on the darknet not being a particularly verbose person at the best of times. But it told her all she needed to know and she resumed her walk with a grim smile as she idly scrolled through the information she’d pulled up before the storm cut off her access.

Nottagan was a planet fairly deep inside United League territory, discovered back when they still had people doing the surveying of uncharted planetary systems, and as such it was heavily developed. Any greenery left on the surface of the place was in carefully cultivated gardens kept by the rich and powerful. Most people contented themselves with the required-by-law - but not provided by it, naturally - single potted plant per living unit. The air purifying units required by the loss of plant life would not have been able to keep up otherwise, and a good third of the planet would have choked to death long ago thanks to the lack of free oxygen in the atmosphere. It was one of a number of administrative hubs for the United League, part of the vast machinery required to keep a bureaucracy in motion, and only notable for the percentage of military traffic it handled. There were more secured sites on Nottagan than there were on nearly every single other administrative planet the UL maintained.

Other than that, the planet was wholly unremarkable. Its number one export was paperwork and number one import food, and that was about it. The only real kicker was that it was a humans-only planet. Unlike a number of older planets, Nottagan had chosen not to import the cheap labor offered by Yttarr hives or the mighty strength found in Hosh slaves. Even the tiny M'Pell were forbidden from staying, though they were usually killed rather than unceremoniously deported like the other alien races.

Mya scowled at her tablet and closed the information on a picture of a shattered M'Pell, its opalescent insides coated in a thin film of cyan liquid and pincers curled up like dead spider’s legs, as she approached her father’s door. The thought of someone doing that to M’t'fdlth, M'k'tch, or even the ever-annoyingly-underfoot M'k'qlk, made her want to hit something. Preferably something belonging to people who thought it was okay to shatter M'Pell.

Her expression was apparently a bit more murderous than she’d thought, because Toron’Yfer - the Kala'Kah she’d stationed outside her father’s door - straightened into a defensive position as she approached. Mya shook her head to get the image of the poor M'Pell out of it and stowed her tablet away to give the much larger being her best approximation of Respectful Greeting To A Warrior. She didn’t have the arms, tail, or ears to really do it properly, but the Kala'Kah had seemed to approve of her attempts when she’d gone to negotiate with them.

She’d gotten lucky on her approach to the Kala'Kah; not three days previous to her visit, the United League had offered a grave insult to a highborn Kala'Kah - and, by extension, to their entire clan. That, combined with her willingness to at least attempt the proper forms of their greetings and salutes, had gotten her foot in a door which would otherwise have been firmly shut to those who would dishonor the law by breaking it. She hadn’t come away with many recruits - even in a situation where honor demanded they get satisfaction from the UL but power and politics said they couldn’t, not many Kala'Kah were willing to accept the reduction of honor that rebellion would bring them - but the twoscore warriors who did choose to follow her were invaluable. Their ability to ignore elemental magic combined with their superior fighting skills had saved more than five hundred Resistance members already and would hopefully save more before the fight was through.

Toron’Yfer paused a moment before relaxing and inclining his head towards her in a gesture that conferred the right of first speech. Mya nodded towards the door the large, cat-like alien guarded.

“Is he all right?”

Toron’Yfer paused again, weighing his words carefully as many Kala'Kah were want to do, before answering.

“He lives and has eaten recently, though he was displeased at his confinement and the solitary nature thereof.”

The translators always handled Kala'Kah speech very formally; Mya suspected it was because the UL had set up the translators once, upon first meeting the Kala'Kah, and had never updated them again. She’d quietly set some of the M'Pell to fixing that oversight by annoying the various species on base into telling them what words meant and then using their special relationship with all things electric and silicon to update the translators on the fly. There hadn’t been a big shift yet with the Kala'Kah, but the Yttarrans had gotten considerably more respectful when, as one of them put it,’[The translators] stopped sounding like a bunch of hicks from Mudwasp Swamp.’

Toron’Yfer’s news meanwhile, while not surprising, was a little disheartening, and Mya sighed.

“Yes, I suppose he must be. Still, your duty here stands fulfilled; I have word from the medical staff that my father is cleared of their restrictions.”

While the translators had yet to update, Mya strove to keep her speech as formal as the Kala'Kah themselves spoke. It seemed to translate better - contractions and colloquialisms always made their tails lash, a sure sign of Kala'Kah distaste or disdain.

Toron’Yfer appeared to consider her words for a long moment before prowling off down the corridor without further acknowledgement. Mya let him go; Kala'Kah farewells were reserved for battles without hope of victory, and even among themselves conversations ended when there was nothing left to say. Mya herself considered it an improvement over the long, drawn-out farewells favored by much of the socially conscious portion of the human population, and smirked a bit at the thought as she turned to face the door. With some trepidation, the smirk sliding off her face, she knocked once. Twice.

“Come in,” came the brisk response, and Mya pushed open the door.

The quarters given over for Lothar Kaldegga’s use while he was on-base were the most opulent ones available. That is to say, there was a bedroom with an attached bathroom and a sitting room with a large vidscreen. The furniture was old and made over, though enormously comfortable for all that, and the vidscreen had a crack or five in it. The bathroom, too, was more bare concrete with fixtures than luxury tile-lined washing space. Still, it was a bathroom he didn’t have to share and rooms that could have fit more than half a dozen of the bunks used for the rest of the base’s population (according to species).

Lothar himself didn’t appear too dissatisfied with the conditions, lounging on the couch with the remains of a hot dinner someone had brought growing cold on the table in front of him. The vidscreen was playing some old film or documentary, but Mya didn’t have time to see what it was before he clicked the screen off as she entered.

“What do you have for me?”

Lothar leaned forward as he spoke, discarding the picture of ease he’d been projecting in favor of focusing his attention on her, and Mya felt her collar grow hot. She still wasn’t used to the idea of her father - THE Lothar Kaldegga - being present on base and listening to what she had to say. She had to swallow down her nervousness before she could even think of replying.

“We have a location for the capital warship shipyard, and a location on where to obtain the security plans for said shipyard.”

Mya held on to her composure with both hands as Lothar’s eyebrows slid together with an almost-audible click, and he leaned back against the couch with his arms crossed.

“Why do we need the security plans? We know where the shipyard is; we don’t need the exact layout to destroy the place.”

Mya counted to ten in her head.

“Because we’re not just going to destroy it. We’re going to destroy it with every ship it’s currently making.”

Lothar’s face cleared and he leaned forward again, a predatory gleam in his eyes. My was at once elated and vaguely terrified that he was actually listening to her.

“Tell me the plan.”

His voice was sharp, and Mya exhaled the breath she’d been holding. At least he wasn’t rejecting the idea out of hand; she’d half-expected him to, and she’d had a half-dozen arguments for why he should at least hear her out bubbling away in the back of her head when she’d walked in the door.

“We steal some shuttles from one of the supply planets and stuff them with every translocationist we have. We fly in and split into teams with one translocationist to each team. Depending on how many ships are ready enough to fly, we’ll get teams to each one to prep them. On the way, we start herding the workers ahead of us into the ships. Once we have the ships, we take off, turn around, and you and whoever else we have who can man a weapon will take the place out.”

Lothar’s frown had reappeared and grown progressively deeper as Mya had gone through her plan, and by the end he’d re-crossed his arms too.

“Why do we need to bother with the workers? However many are in this shipyard, there are trillions more who are counting on us to get rid of the United League.”

Mya blinked at the sudden sense of déjà vu. Hadn’t she said almost those exact words to Victor almost an hour ago? Perhaps she was more like her father than she thought. Mya brushed that train of thought aside and returned to the matter at hand.

“We need allies. We need propaganda to stir the complacent masses up against the United League. We need people to crew the warships once we have them. We need more manpower in general,”

Mya counted off on her fingers as she spoke, and with every point, her father’s frown eased a little - though it never disappeared in its entirety and he was silent for a long moment as she finished counting down.

“Fine. We’ll do it your way. But the ships are the priority, and anyone who falls behind gets left behind. Clear?”

Mya swallowed.

“Crystal.”

She stood as her father leaned back against the cushions once again and reached into one of her pockets to pull out a small tablet - not hers, but one she’d pulled from stores. She held it out to him.

“The medics have cleared you for general activities. I took the liberty of getting you something that can hook up into this base’s communications system, and I’ll arrange a guard for whenever you want to sleep, but otherwise you have run of the base.”

She paused for a moment.

“Please try and not piss off any of our non-human members, I worked hard to get them here and they pull their weight.”

He took the tablet and she turned and left without waiting for a response.

She had a theft to organize.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 4

Spoiler

They were four hours into the mission, and with the sniping coming from the passenger compartment every fresh hour felt twice as long as the last.

“Now, who-all died and made you God of the world?”

“It’s funny that you say that, dearest, because…”

Even as she expertly guided the small ship between the asteroids that made up the system edge of NT-876 - the system where the planet Nottagan and several other paltry attempts at colonization were located alongside secure, long-term data archives - the voices coming from the seats behind her were enough to set Mya’s teeth on edge. The team she’d assembled to infiltrate the Nottagan facility and steal the shipyard security plans was the best team she could find on short notice, true enough, but that didn’t mean the clash of personalities hadn’t become grating very, very quickly. It was enough to make her think longingly of the other people she could have pulled to help her in this mission, whatever their own personal foibles.

As much as she’d wanted him to come along, though, forcing Victor Cloud to come to Nottagan without Gruul had seemed decidedly unfair. The Hosh had been as good as her word back on the capital ship, when she’d promised to protect him no matter what, and had become a second shadow for the smaller man. A second, well-armed and armored, distinctly yellow shadow with her sturdy Hosh armor and sword belt. Victor, in his turn, had seemed to welcome it, and seeing the two of them walking the corridors together had become a common sight in the days since they’d returned from the rescue of her father. Victor had even managed to con one of the structural engineers into expanding IC 7-0 to allow the much larger Hosh to fit, a move which had raised not a few eyebrows but which M’t'fdlth - the only other permitted user of IC 7-0 - had accepted with surprising equanimity.

Mya hadn’t even asked him to come; she didn’t want him to say yes just because of her father. She’d spent enough time leaning on Lothar’s reputation to get as far as she had with the Resistance. Now that he was watching her, she had to prove to him she could stand on her own two feet.

“Now why would you say a thing like that?”

“On account of the fact that if’n you think…”

So, while Mya missed the unsurpassed expertise with computers her father’s oldest friend brought with him, she had elected instead to bring Carcen. Carcen was a gangly, blond-haired man who permanently looked like he’d just stepped off a particularly agrarian farm where perhaps inbreeding didn’t just happen between the animals. This impression was heightened by the permanently wall-eyed ocular implant he had instead of a left eye, a piece of equipment most people wrongfully assumed was inoperative. In point of fact, Carcen was sharp as a razor and twice as likely to cut you. He had broken the micromotors in his implant himself when he’d upgraded the thing with advanced remote connection hardware. Combined with an upgrade to the datafeed to his brain, Carcen could hack nearly any computer just by looking at it hard enough. In theory, anyway.

The flip side was that he wasn’t as subtle as Victor and tended to have difficulties accessing remote systems. That, added to the fact his depth perception was so shot to hell he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a blunderbuss - and all the charming personality of a cheese grater - meant that he tended not to be assigned to missions likely to see combat. Not that you’d know it from the stories he liked to tell during mealtimes; one would think he single-handedly brought down the Butcher of Messae himself - with a single bullet, to hear him tell it - though Mya knew from the mission reports he’d only been marginally involved with that action.

“Now, now, no need to be vulgar about it.”

“I’ll give you ‘vulgar’, you two-faced lyin’, snakewise…”

It was, in fact, that exact story he’d been telling his seatmate that had brought on the current session of snide comments and pointed remarks. Reela Nerae - though if that was their real name, Mya would buy a hat just to eat it - was a beauty with a silver tongue and a deep and abiding hatred for the United League for what it had done to their sister. They’d gone straight from the UL station where they’d gotten the news to the bar where Mya had been trying (unsuccessfully) to recruit a forger named Kinbaugh. By the time Mya left, not only had Kinbaugh agreed to join up, but a small gang of toughs, that called itself The Slashboys and had been inhabiting several booths at the bar, had volunteered to join up as well. The Slashboys had gone on to become the core of the base personnel on Themicon IV, and Reela had become one of their top grifters.

In truth, Mya had been lucky to find them on base - their work normally had them going from planet to planet, keeping an ear to the ground about opportunities for the Resistance and keeping a small but steady trickle of volunteers coming to their more accessible outposts - but the heat had gotten too much in the sector they’d been working in and they’d come back with the latest round of volunteers. Mya had offered them a place on this mission, and they’d agreed eagerly. Mya could only hope they wouldn’t regret this choice enough to leave.

“Kn-knock it-tuh off.”

The slow stutter came from their third passenger, a large bruiser of a man everyone called Stumpy. Mya had asked him once if he’d minded, and he’d assured her that he liked it, and so she’d left it at that. Stumpy was missing most of the fingers from his left hand, a state of affairs he’d declined to explain or rectify. Instead, he had a specially made work glove filled with hyper compressed bioplastek pellets and stiffened with plates of the same material. Mya had personally seen him knock three teeth out with a single punch while wearing the thing, and the make of it was sufficiently similar to flesh and bone - save for the density, naturally - that it passed unremarked by most security scanners.

“Oh yeah? Y'all got somethin’ to say ‘bout the highfalutin’ con here? Maybe - ”

“Do please leave the sweet dear out of this, I would hate for him to be misled by wheat-chewing hicks from -”

“Stumpy said it and now I’m saying it: Knock it off,” Mya gritted out. “Save your mating displays for when we get back to base and you can indulge yourselves at leisure.”

There was a sudden, thick silence from the passenger compartment that only lasted for a breath before Carcen opened his mouth.

“You offerin’, then? Cuz I know a few tricks I’m shore you’ll like. ‘Specially with how I hear that-”

“One more word out of you and you get to explain to my father why this mission had to be aborted,” Mya snapped, her patience at its end.

Silence reigned for several long moments, though Mya could almost hear Carcen grinding his teeth. She sighed.

“Let’s go over the plan one more time before we hit Nottagan-controlled space. First, I land the ship at Nottagan Spaceport 312 and we clear customs with the cargo. Then - ”

“Then it’s my turn to slip away and do some real work while you boys do all the sweaty lifting.”

Reela’s voice was playful, with a suggestive lilt, and Mya could almost hear Carcen’s blood pressure rising.

“I tool around town a little bit, determine which of the four high security information archives in the area has the plans, and send you three a message to meet me at the most convenient bar to our target. And if I happen to pick up something more than information, well, that would just make all our lives easier, wouldn’t it?”

Mya snorted but didn’t argue. Carcen spoke up next.

“While y'all are gettin’ the information, we-all will be unloadin’ the cargo. Once we get the word as to where we gotta go, we-all will meet up at the bar and get the information from Reela. Reela’ll stay somewhere convenient while Stumpy 'n I’ll head in to the place so’s I can get a, heh, eyeful and get what-all we came for with maybe a bit more be-sides.”

Carcen paused for a breath and Stumpy jumped in.

“C-Carcen 'n I will get-tuh-tuh what we c-c-came for, then we m-m-make our way out-tuh. We head straight-tuh-tuh for th’ ship 'n we all getuh-tuh the hell out-tuh-tuh of Dodge.”

It always took Stumpy a while to say things, but you never needed to tell him twice what you wanted done. Mya appreciated that about him, and while she hadn’t been able to get a straight answer about why he stuttered, she’d posed the problem to M’t'fdlth, and the tiny M'Pell had come up with a tap code modifier to Stumpy’s comm system.

Instead of the more usual verbally activated microphone and transponder, M’t'fdlth had set up a system in the glove on his good hand that would let him touch his pointer finger to various points on his thumb to play pre-recorded messages about what was going on. Stumpy had gotten very good at manipulating the thing, though hearing a robot voice say “I am under attack” followed immediately by the same voice saying “sorry” three times - the agreed-upon signal that he’d messed up his previous message - had been pretty common for the first few weeks.

Mya nodded to herself, knowing that nobody could actually see the action.

“And I stay with the ship and keep an eye on trackers and comms, keeping the engines warm to make a quick getaway as needed.”

A rising tone on the communications board sent tension crackling through the air. They were being hailed by orbital Nottagan control; Mya could only pray that the hacked-together identity and flight plan would hold up under scrutiny.

“Showtime.”

She reached over and hit the button to accept the communication.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 5

Spoiler

Victor POV

The door slid closed as Mya stormed out, and Victor exhaled, letting the tiredness show on his face for a moment. The girl was trying to take on the whole world, and the only role model she looked to…well. Just because the man was his oldest friend didn’t mean that he hadn’t seen the slow decline Lothar had gone through in the past few decades. They’d started out wanting to save the universe together, and they’d teamed up more than once; Lothar coming to Victor for things he couldn’t get or access, and Victor doing whatever he could to try and ensure everyone got out safely.

Except he hadn’t been nearly as successful as he should have. Too many mistakes, too many rash choices early on, and they’d lost a lot of friends. Lothar blamed the United League, blamed their policies and corruption, blamed their stranglehold on freedom and started slipping deeper and deeper into the abyss. His heart had hardened, strangled by hate and rage, and now… now even Victor wasn’t sure if there even was a line he wouldn’t cross anymore.

And the worst part was that Victor knew it was his fault. He’d been young and arrogant and thought he and Lothar could take down the entire United League themselves. When he’d helped plan those first few missions, he’d made promises he couldn’t keep. Like the attack on the control tower on Urdon VII: he’d assured everyone that the base’s systems were nothing, and it’d be only a matter of moments to disable them and gain complete access. It had only taken him twelve seconds, which was still about five minutes faster than it would have taken anyone else to even crack the first layer of security, but it was still seven seconds too late to prevent the alarm from sounding. And they’d lost six people in the ensuing firefight. Victor still had the scars on his torso from the flames that had nearly claimed his life.

And that was just one of the first two dozen or so missions where he’d let everyone down. There were so many little mistakes, so many oversights, so many rash actions that he wanted to blame on youth, but were in fact just carelessness. He’d had to learn patience and caution at the expense of so many other people’s lives. The whispers of “coward” didn’t bother him anymore. It had been three long years since any mission he’d been involved in had a single casualty on their side. He’d even managed to get Lothar out without so much as having to fire a single shot. He’d take being called a coward. It was better than the alternative.

The door slid open again and Victor turned to see Gruul poke her head through the door. “Victor. You haven’t eaten in twelve hours.”

He winced, glancing over at M’t'fdlth and shrugging. “Boss says it’s time for food.”

The M'Pell flashed at him in a sign of dismissive acknowledgement and Victor grabbed his tablet as he headed out into the hallway. Gruul’s expression was somewhere between disappointment and amusement. He smiled at her.

“Was working on something for Kaldegga Jr. She asked me to find something completely impossible to locate.” A small notification flashed up on his tablet, and his thumb poked it as they kept walking. “Naturally, I found it.”

“What was she looking for?”

“The capital shipyards.” The readout on his tablet started moving, and he glanced down while he continued to walk. “Mya wants to burn it down, send them a message and ‘keep our momentum going’.” He lowered his hands, the air quotes more for his benefit than Gruul’s, and glanced back down at his tablet.

Gruul gently steered him around a corner, moving him out of the way of a maintenance worker as she did so. “What are you working on?”

He blinked, looking up at her as his attention snapped back to himself. “Oh, I put a tracking program on Mya’s tablet a week or so ago, to ensure I was kept in-the-loop with what she was planning.”

The look on Gruul’s face caused him to stop walking for a moment, feigned innocence on his face. “Come on. She has this annoying habit of not asking me for my advice and trying to handle everything herself.”

“She is more than capable of doing so, Victor.” Gruul’s tone was admonishing. “You agreed to follow her lead when you joined the mission to rescue her father.”

“Yes. And during that mission, I did.” He paused, seeing the look on Gruul’s face, and then shrugged. “For the most part, anyway. I may have short-circuited some of her plans for a heroic firefight or four and kept us all alive in the process.”

He glanced back down, his brow furrowing. “But it’s not that mission anymore.”

Gruul didn’t respond, but instead grabbed Victor by the back of the shirt to prevent him from walking straight into an arguing pair of humans. She growled at them, and they glanced up before startling and disappearing into the surrounding tunnels. Victor hadn’t moved, his vision locked on the tablet. Gruul gave a small sigh.

“What is she working on now, then?”

“She’s talking to her father. It’s… going about as I expected it to.” Victor sighed as Gruul guided him into the mess hall and sat him down at the nearest table. His eyes were still glued to the readout on his tablet.

“She still thinks he’s a hero, you know.”

“I know.”

Victor stopped to look up at his companion’s face for the first time in several minutes.

“He was, once.”

Gruul didn’t respond, and Victor sighed, looking back down at the tablet.

“But now he’s someone who will blow up an entire planet if given the chance. I’d heard the stories. I’d wanted to dismiss them as just another rumor, the United League using the great boogeyman of Lothar Kaldegga to cover up another industrial accident or supernova or… anything but the fact that he’d actually done it.”

There was a long pause, as Victor hoped Gruul would fill the silence, but she continued to just watch him, and he sighed again. “I don’t know how to get him back anymore. I don’t even know if there’s anything left of my friend to get back. So… at this point, my main goal is to try and save the kid he didn’t even know he had and see if she can be the hero her father used to be.”

They both sat in silence for a few long minutes, and then Gruul stood up and walked away silently. Victor continued staring at the readout on his tablet, not even noticing that his companion had left. When she returned, she set a plate of steaming food before him and slid into a seat across the table, golden eyes trained on his face. Silence reigned at the table for another long moment before his brow furrowed, and he poked at his tablet.

“Well, isn’t that interesting.” He looked up at Gruul and smiled. “She’s going to try and evacuate the shipyards before she blows them.”

“Won’t that be much more difficult?”

Gruul tapped a claw on the table, drawing Victor’s attention away from his tablet.

“Eat.”

Victor blinked, and then grabbed a fork and started shoving food into his mouth, his attention back on the small screen in front of him. Gruul shook her head, but seemed content with the fact Victor was putting food in his mouth.
Victor continued to alternate between his food and the programs he was running, until the light reflecting off his glasses changed dramatically and he frowned.

“Damned storms.”

He looked up at Gruul. “She’s actually going about this intelligently. Trying to find the security plans for the station so she can evacuate the workers ahead of the attack. Sent off a message to some of her contacts ahead of the network shutdown, asking them to track it down.”

He paused, chewing his food thoughtfully. “Interesting that she didn’t just come to me about this, though.”

“She is trying to do it herself. She wants to prove herself to her father.”

Victor shook his head at that, staring down into the tray.

“What… even is this?”

He looked up at Gruul and then shook his head more forcefully.

“No, on second thought, don’t tell me.”

He looked down at his darkened screen for a moment, chewing on his lip.

“Still. Doing it yourself would be fine, but she’s just sending out something I could do in minutes to people who won’t be able to do much at all.” He sighed. “I think we’ll just make this a teachable moment.”

“Victor.”

He looked up at Gruul, trying to keep his face neutral.

“Yes, Gruul?”

She looked back at him, studying his expression, and then sighed heavily.

“Be careful.”

Victor chuckled as his gaze dropped back to the tablet in front of him.

“Am I ever anything but?”

He poked the screen back to life, and Gruul leaned back to keep an eye on the rest of the room as he worked. After 45 minutes, during which she reminded him to keep eating no fewer than twelve times, he finally nodded, leaned back, and smiled.

“There we go.”

“What did you do?”

He smiled at her.

“That’d be telling.”

He held up a hand as she glared at him and smiled again. “Don’t worry. She’ll get to assemble her team, brief them on the mission, and enact her plan. She’ll just find that it’ll be significantly easier than expected and be able to withdraw nearly as soon as she arrives without any danger to herself, her team, or any of her contacts.”

He stood up, stretching his arms.

“So, how much do you know about spikeball?”

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 6

Spoiler

Mya POV

Mya sat in the pilot seat and listened to Carcen’s increasingly bitter complaints as he and Stumpy unloaded the cargo from the ship. The boxes of heavily processed, low-spoilage foodstuffs were both weighty and unwieldy, even with a cargo shifter to help. Two meters to each side, and packed as densely as possible with food, they had to be pulled from their three-high stacks in the cargo bay to be moved out to the designated loading zone – where they had to be stacked three high back to front or the Nottagan authorities would make them onload the improperly stacked crates and try again.

Getting through Nottagan traffic control and landing customs had been nerve-wrackingly easy. While all their credentials were faker than a human-Yttarran wedding invitation, the cargo and contract for it were actually genuine. Reela had gotten them for a song from one of her contacts who ran a legitimate cargo-hauling business; paying the man off with just a hundred credits more than he would have gotten for the trip was all it took. Apparently Nottagan was so boring that even the thinnest excuse was enough to make subcontracting a better option than going themselves, and the only thing Nottagan exported was waste - which, granted, there was a market for on agrarian food worlds - but it didn’t pay much and made your ship whiff a bit if you didn’t seal the cargo hold properly.

If they didn’t have to depart in a hell of a hurry, Stumpy would bring in the large canisters that were stacked conspicuously nearby onboard to make it look like they’d taken the usual export cargo on; leaving without cargo or passengers would be a bigger red flag than rushing everyone on board and making a hard burn for the translocation point. If they didn’t have to burn these identities, Mya would prefer that they didn’t. They weren’t the best work, but passing muster in a bureaucratic hellscape was no mean feat and their faked cargo-hauler credentials had demonstratively done that in the short term. At the very least, being discovered long after they were gone was preferable to being shot down immediately.

The communications board in front of Mya flashed - Reela was calling in, and just in time too, as Carcen checked the last box of foodstuffs out of their inventory. Mya hit the toggle to open the line, and Reela’s voice issued somewhat tinnily from the speakers.

“Fair Trade Public House, city grid 57 cross 86.”

The channel closed immediately, and Mya was left to stare in slight bafflement at the quiescent comm suite.

They had all agreed to keep active transmissions as short as possible; both Carcen and Stumpy had hard-encrypted one-way audio feeds, sure, but sending and receiving messages was something that the United League loved to monitor closely. Keeping the messages short and sweet would keep the United League’s surveillance systems from backtracking the signal to more sensitive areas. It was Reela’s tone, more than their message, that had Mya confused. She couldn’t claim to know the con artist well; Reela was out and about far too often for that. Still, for the times she’d known and worked with them, they’d kept a calm and slightly jocular demeanor when not engaged in trying to hook someone else. Which made it all the more puzzling why the message had come through cold and angry.

Things had been going too well. Mya could only hope that whatever had annoyed Reela wasn’t going to tank the whole mission.

Mya stood up and stretched before walking towards the cargo section. Both Carcen and Stumpy were sweating heavily as they rested against one of the bulkheads, though only Carcen looked unhappy about the fact. Stumpy noticed her first and gave her a nod, which drew Carcen’s attention to her and he scowled.

“If you’re wantin’ us t’ move somethin’ more - ”

Mya cut him off with a quick wave.

“Reela reported in. Your rest stop is the Fair Trade Public House, near location 3.”

She spoke loud enough for them to hear, but not loudly enough to carry outside the cargo compartment. It was, thankfully, enough to make Carcen stop complaining immediately as the man brightened and elbowed Stumpy.

“Y'hear that? We kin fine'ly get to th’ good part!”

You’d never know Carcen had been anything but enthusiastic about the plan, the way he was grinning at Stumpy. Stumpy, in his turn, didn’t respond verbally but instead chose to nod at Mya once again, a gesture she found obscurely comforting. Stumpy had a way about him that suggested the inexorable motion of a glacier; it might take him a while, but he’d get to where he was going, and if anything stood in his way, he’d plow right through. That aura belied his actual speed, of course; Mya had eyewitness testimony of Stumpy laying three guys out flat in the time it took to drink a shot.

Mya returned the larger man’s nod and headed back to the pilot’s seat. Sitting and waiting was always the hardest part of any kind of operation; if Mya had her way, she would have accompanied the ground team into the secured archive to try and extract the disk. Unfortunately, genetic scanners were frequently employed in places like this, and she was her father’s daughter. Their genetic profile was too similar, and even the partial match would be enough to trip the alarms - a fact she had learned the hard way when trying to crack a security office on Astran I.

So she was confined to the ship for this trip, monitoring the feeds from Stumpy and Carcen and ready to pull their bacon out of the fire at a moment’s notice. She reached over and tapped a few commands into the communications board, and Carcen’s voice filled the cabin.

“An’ so there we were, trapped in th’ middle of th-”

she turned the volume lower; Carcen was spinning one of his tales again, and Mya had had just about enough of them on the journey to Nottagan. Depending on how the trip went, she’d likely have to hear more of them on the way from Nottagan; it was almost enough to make her wish he’d get shot somewhere non-vital. His complaining was annoying, but his exaggerated stories made Mya’s teeth itch with the urge to correct him.

Mya leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. This was the least dangerous part of the mission, and she had some time to think before they started the infiltration.

Of course, her mind immediately went to her father. The man was like the empty spot left behind by a lost tooth; her thoughts went to him over and over, and it was still somehow both tender and sore. She hadn’t heard much from him in the few days it had been since the medics had cleared him for general Resistance work around the base; mostly a few glimpses in the mess hall, a nod if they passed in the hallway, gestures she might expect from a passing acquaintance she was on good terms with. From her father though - as much as she didn’t know the man - it felt strange. Wrong. Whenever they’d been on the same bases in previous years, he’d never so much as looked at her; now she merely rated a nod?

Of course, it’d taken a hell of a lot to get even that far, hence this mission. If she could just keep that momentum up, now that he was finally seeing her at all… well. That’s why she had put together this mission so quickly, without her usual care. She had to keep pushing the Resistance towards victory, or her father would simply leave her behind again. She’d go back to being one of the faceless crowd, and this time she wouldn’t have her mother there to buoy her up again. She’d be alone.

And that scared Mya most of all.

The communications board flashing brought Mya out of her reverie, and she straightened up as she turned the volume higher. Reela’s voice and a background murmur were now coming through Carcen and Stumpy’s feeds, in addition to their voices.

“ -on’t know what she thinks she’s playing at.”

Reela’s voice was flat and nasty.

“If she already had it done for us, why lead us on with a stupid plan? Why bother wasting our time and hers when a courier would’ve done the same job with less fuss?”

“Yyyou said V-v-v-”

“She said the courier said compliments of Victor Cloud.”

Carcen’s voice had a nasty edge to it.

“Way I see it, she weren’t told that her daddy sent his ol’ friend after her. Way I see it, her old man ain’t figurin’ on her bein’ able to do it, and ask his partner to do it right.”

The others remained silent as he hawked and spat, and Mya was at once desperately wishing that the audios included a video component and being deeply glad they didn’t.

“Way I sees it, now that her daddy’s back she don’t know what a girlie ought who ain’t ready t’ be out from daddy’s wings just yet.”

He made a contemptuous noise.

“Princess ought be back up in her tower where she can do th’ most good with what she got - she ain’t get them aliens t’ help just on account a’ she asked ‘em to, y'know.”

He snickered crudely, though the other two remained silent for a long moment.

Then there was a heavy thud and Carcen swore loudly.

“We n-n-need tuh-to get-tuh back tuh-to th’ ship.”

Stumpy’s voice was as chilly as Mya had ever heard it.

“Do let’s.”

Reela’s voice wasn’t as cold as Stumpy’s, but it definitely wasn’t what you’d call warm or friendly.

Mya turned the feeds almost down to nothing as the sounds of the crowd faded, her stomach churning like a storm-tossed sea. A courier? Did that mean they had the drive? And what did Victor have to do with any of it?

Her mind reeling, Mya sat silently in the pilot’s chair and waited for the others to return.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 7

Spoiler

The silence in the halls was thick with tension as Mya stormed down the winding corridors of the Sarcorxious base.

A few people had turned up when her ship had docked, concerned about their early return, but now the halls were empty. Not that they were exactly bustling in general - the base had been designed in a fit of optimism to hold several thousand people; as of now, less than four hundred really inhabited it - but the first few people she’d snapped at had scuttled off and she hadn’t seen anyone since.

Mya was dimly glad of the fact; she knew that she’d worked hard to bring people here, and that she’d be angry with herself later if she drove any away just because she was in a bad mood. On the other hand, seeing no-one on her way down to IC 7-0 meant she didn’t have anyone to vent her spleen on and so it fed on itself, the flames of anger mixing with the crackle of irritation to the point where she was sure that if the elements obeyed her instead of the fabric of space, she’d have been sparking at her fingertips.

As it was, she was only breathing metaphorical fire when she pushed open the door to IC 7-0. M’t'fdlth was, thankfully, nowhere to be seen, but Gruul was there. As was the actual target of her ire.

“Cloud.”

Victor Cloud twitched at the sound of his name but turned to face her calmly from where he’d been working on something at his preferred terminal.

“Mya.”

His neutral tone and informal form of address infuriated her, and she stomped over to shove a small data drive - already carefully backed up twice over to secure locations on the server - into his chest. Hard.

“You thought I couldn’t get it? You thought, what, that I was too weak to get it without your help? Too stupid?”

Memories of men and women ignoring her carefully reasoned arguments rose up to choke her. Nobody had been keen to follow her until they learned her name - who her father was. If she couldn’t do a stupid retrieval mission on her own, if her father thought she was too incompetent to do what had to be done, he’d -

“I do not believe that is what he thought.”

The calm, measured voice of Gruul broke through Mya’s spiral of panic and snapped her back to the present. Hating herself for even thinking her father would leave her again, she rounded on the much larger Hosh.

“And how would you know? Were you in on this too? Did you think I needed coddling like Cloud?”

That seemed to strike a nerve. Victor was out of his seat and between Mya and Gruul in an instant, forcing Mya’s attention back on himself.

“Enough of that. This was all my idea, and she had no idea what I was doing. Don’t be mad at her just because she happens to be handy.”

Mya glared at Victor for a few moments before she sighed, feeling all her anger flood out of her. It wasn’t right or fair to snap at Gruul, and she’d apologize for it later. Instead, she slumped down into the chair Victor had recently vacated.

“Just- tell me why. Why you thought it was a good idea to set me up as a laughingstock. Why you thought having one of your contacts on Nottagan pull the drive for us was the best use of time and valuable resources, when I already had a team prepped and ready to go."

Why you didn’t trust me to do the job went unsaid.

Mya ran a hand through her hair, remembering the irritated look on Reela’s face as they handed over the supposedly super-secure drive that a punk in a bar had just delivered to them without prompting. She remembered Carcen’s scathing remarks about how the useless princess Kaldegga had to have her missions spoon fed to her, only good at getting with the aliens and serving diplomatic tea on base, and Stumpy’s eloquently raised eyebrow when his words failed him yet again.

Victor looked pained.

"I wasn’t trying to make fun of you, I was trying to prove a point.”

Mya snorted.

“What point? The fact that I’m still the useless nobody who gets left behind when the mission’s too hard?”

Victor scowled.

“No. The point that you don’t have to do it alone anymore. You don’t have to prove to your father or anyone else that you can do it all by yourself. You have people who support you here; if you’d just asked me for help, you wouldn’t even have had to go to Nottagan!”

Mya frowned reflexively as a point niggled in the back of her mind.

“You know Nottagan, you know the place is - ” she paused to slide a glance over to Gruul before resolutely looking back at Victor “ - unfriendly. I couldn’t ask you to go out again, and this was a hard disk - not networked. I didn’t think you could access it remotely. No need to bother you.”

The niggling point blossomed into a full suspicion and her eyes narrowed.

“In fact, I didn’t bother you. I didn’t tell you I was going to Nottagan.”

Victor looked at her steadily, unrepentant, and said nothing.

Mya stood abruptly.

“I have to go. I need to analyze these plans and come up with a strategy to take the ships.”

She gave both the other people in the room a sardonic smile.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure to run it by other, more competent people first.”

She strode to the door, ignoring Victor’s gusty sigh and a murmur from Gruul behind her as she walked out. She had to pull a plan together before her father heard what a useless waste the previous mission had been.

Mya quailed internally at the thought and walked faster.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 8

Spoiler

Victor POV

Victor stood in the doorway, watching as Carcen repeated the story for the sixth or seventh time.

“And then th’ princess just blinked, lookin’ down at th’ disk like she’d no idea why she was holdin’ it. It was priceless. She’d built th’ mission up to be some big ordeal, and an old hack who ain’t even brave enough to leave th’ station went and did the whole thing for her like it ain’t nothin’. Ha!”

Carcen looked around, waiting for the laughter which wasn’t coming, and then shrugged.

“Any which way, it was mighty funny.”

Victor smirked as a few different people started standing up to leave. They’d seen Victor in the doorway behind Carcen as soon as he’d arrived, but the younger man was too wrapped up in himself to have noticed.

“Hey, I haven’t even told you about her face when she realized she’d have to explain herself to the old man…”

“You’re an idiot, Carcen.”

The young man spun around to stare at Victor, shock evident on his face.

“V-Victor! What are… what are you doing? Where did you come from?”

His body tensed up as if he was ready to fight, and Victor merely sighed.

“Y’heard that?”

When Victor didn’t reply, he stuck his chin out defiantly. To Victor, it just made him look even more wall-eyed.

“Wanna do something about it, or are you just the coward everybody knows you are?”

“Do you expect that to get a rise out of me?”

Victor’s face was unreadable, and the younger man snarled wordlessly at him.

“You think that calling me a coward to my face is going to shatter my resolve, bring me to my knees and ask for your forgiveness? You think I haven’t heard it a thousand times before from people who were bright enough to properly secure their networked devices before mouthing off at me?”

Victor slid his hand into one of his many pockets, and thumbed a button.

“What d’you…”

Carcen’s words were cut short as he spasmed, his hands flying up to his implant as he screamed in pain.

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

Victor walked forward, sliding a foot behind Carcen’s right leg and shoving him, hard, in the chest. The younger man, already off balance from the worm Victor had put in his integrated eyepiece, fell to the ground and landed heavily on his ass. He didn’t stay there for long, however, as Victor’s right foot slammed into his nose and sent a spurt of blood sailing through the air, and his head hit the floor of the cafeteria with a heavy thud. Adjusting his glasses from where they’d come askew on his face, Victor stepped forward, pressing a foot into Carcen’s neck. Not hard enough to cause any damage, no, but hard enough that the man started squirming under him.

“Now it’s time for you to listen.”

“Grk…” Carcen’s voice rasped through his windpipe, and Victor pressed down harder.

“Just because you bought a fancy gadget that lets you hack things by looking at them doesn’t make you anything, Carcen. You’re just a big mouth attached to a pathetic sack of wasted potential who doesn’t take enough precautions.”

Victor held up his tablet, showing Carcen a diagram of the younger man’s implant.

“Ten characters, and only using characters from UL Standard? You have a networked terminal wired into your brain that anyone could have hacked into at any point. The only reason no one did it before is because usually you’re not even worth that much effort.”

Victor leaned forward, pressing more of his weight onto Carcen’s neck.

“But now you’ve pissed me off.”

Carcen writhed under the older man’s foot, striking at Victor’s ankle and knee with blows that were on the pathetic side. Victor eased up on the pressure - he was here to teach a lesson, not kill the other hacker - and pushed a button. Carcen immediately spasmed again, and Victor sighed.

“This implant is even more of a security risk than you’d think, from the so-called security you had on it. It’s wired into your muscular system, which doesn’t even make sense. With the right inputs, I could make you dance and there’s not a damned thing you could do about it.”

He leaned over and met the younger man’s eyes squarely, ignoring the tears beginning to leak out of them.

“Stop struggling, shut your mouth, and listen for once in your life.”

Carcen’s eyes were filled with hate, but he finally stopped struggling and glared up at Victor. The older man simply glared back at him.

“Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to move my foot off your throat, and you’re going to stay there and then we can have a chat about appropriate behavior. If you try anything else, we’ll see just how hard you can punch yourself. Nod if you understand.”

Carcen glared at him for another long moment before his head nodded, and Victor stepped back. Carcen gasped, rubbing at his throat, but didn’t move.

“What do you want, old man?”

“For starters? I want you to learn how to properly encrypt your data.”

Victor pushed another button on the tablet, and another window opened up on it. Carcen glanced at it for a second before letting out a series of expletives.

“It doesn’t matter that this is just personal data; any exploit is a total exploit. This? Using an off-the-shelf encryption program from four decades ago, which wasn’t even good then? You might as well just have posted these images all over the base for how accessible they were. A lack of security like that will get good people killed, and put you into even more trouble than you already are.”

While Victor had his own share of data troves hidden in networks across the galaxy, he made sure that each one was constantly and consistently updated with the latest security patches, bug fixes, and encryption protocols. He’d had one cracked - once, and he’d been a much younger man then - and the results had been disastrous. His mind still flinched away from the death toll, and he squashed the urge to step on Carcen’s neck again.

“What are you going to do with those?”

Carcen’s voice was angry, but Victor could hear the fear behind the charade.

“If you don’t cause any more problems? Nothing. This was me illustrating a point.”

Victor closed the window on his tablet.

“No one else will see these pictures, or the video recordings, or the dozens of horrifically awful poems you’ve written.”

He shook his head.

“We’re in a resistance against an organization that spans multiple galaxies and has uncountable methods of discovering, tracing, and cracking into networks. You’re going out on missions to find information they don’t want us to know, information that could take them down, and you’re basically putting a direct line into it from a network that’s as secure as your underwear drawer. Which is another place I dearly wish I hadn’t found a way into.”

“You… what?” Carcen’s mask of rage fractured for a moment, replaced by confusion.

“It’s not important. What is important is that your networked devices are basically openly broadcasting to anyone who’s looking hard enough - and believe me, the United League is always looking hard enough - and you’re not even trying to hide or secure them. And any time you access one of our systems, you leave a nice little hole that someone outside could use to break in here and find everything we’re working on, every mission we’re planning, and every world we have a base on.”

Victor’s expression darkened significantly.

“You’re putting thousands of people at terrible risk because you’re too damned arrogant to do things properly instead of quickly.”

“So what? No one can access our network here, we’re safe.”

“You were just out on Nottagan, Carcen!”

Victor’s voice rose to a volume the other man had never heard before.

“You walked through a spaceport filled with security measures and network probes and it’s a damned miracle none of those broke into your implant or your tablet. And no, they didn’t. I already checked.”

Victor stepped forward again, pulling up another window.

“This is the log of every network you automatically and ignorantly connected to or brushed up against during your seventy-four minutes on Nottagan. Fifteen of these actually connected back to your implant, and six of them connected back to your tablet. If anyone had been paying even a small amount of attention, they could have dropped a trojan into either system and traced us back to this base.”

Carcen blinked, looking at the logs.

“But… how? I would have noticed this. My sniffers-”

“Your sniffers are part of what was sending so many connections - because you didn’t take the time to configure them properly.”

Victor squatted down, his face mere inches away from the source of his ire.

“You risked everyone here because you didn’t, and the only reason we’re having a chat instead of you floating out through space is because you got lucky.”

“What do you want?”

Carcen looked into the eyes of Victor, fear clearly evident on his face.

“I want you to learn how to properly encrypt your systems. I want you to read through and understand all the security protocols that we have in place. I want you to do your damned job, instead of me having to do it for you. Until you do - to my satisfaction - you refuse any mission anyone tries to send you on, because you’re a liability I’m not willing to risk. If you disregard this request and try to leave anyway, you’ll discover that none of the ships on this base will launch while you are onboard, and that all network access outside of this base has been revoked.”

“You… you can’t do this!”

Carcen’s voice cracked from fear, but Victor could see the anger rising into his eyes again.

“You don’t have the authority!”

“Then try it, Carcen. Try your luck. See if you can break through the systems I’ve put in place on this base.”

Victor glared back at him, and the younger man eventually backed down, averting his gaze.

“I’ll see you around, Carcen.”

Victor straightened back up, shaking his head at the form below him, before turning and heading back out the door he’d come in. Gruul was waiting for him just outside, and he grimaced before turning to head back towards IC 7-0. They walked in silence until they arrived at the door, and then Victor stopped and sighed, turning to look up at the Hosh.

“Okay, Gruul. You think I went too far?”

She looked down at him silently for a few seconds before speaking.

“I do not.”

“Then… what is it? Do you think I’m out of line? Do you think I should have gone to Mya about this?”

Once again, there was a lengthy pause before Gruul responded.

“You think you do.”

Victor sighed, throwing up his hands in exasperation.

“I don’t understand what that girl is doing half the time. She’s got good ideas, and is going about things the right way, but then she just flies off the handle for no reason.”

“You treated her like a child, Victor.” A pause. “And took your anger out on the hacker she chose to bring on her mission instead of you.”

Victor glared up at the larger figure.

“Well, she’s been acting like one since we got her father out of that cell.”

He scowled, opening the door and walking in.

“Plus Carcen’s been on my radar for a while. I just finally got around to talking to him about it.”

Gruul didn’t really have eyebrows to raise, but her tone made her disbelief clear anyway.

“And so you chose now, as he was speaking about the mission he was just on?”

The room was empty, which Victor was glad of, and he stormed over to his chair and collapsed into it in lieu of addressing her comment.

“What do you think I should do about Mya?” he asked, deliberately letting the matter of Carcen drop.

Gruul stared back at Victor silently for several seconds, and Victor groaned in exasperation. “

Fine! I’ll go talk to her.”

He glanced over at the computer screen he was sitting at and paused, his brow furrowing.

“Riiiiiiiight after I figure out who is trying to connect to our network from Itchylgoron VII.”

Victor’s fingers started flying across the keyboard in front of him as he began tracing the connections, and he didn’t even notice when Gruul stood up and left the room. It was several hours later when he finally stopped, shaking his head. It had been a United League investigation team tasked with tracing network signals and breaking in as far as they could. It looks like they’d caught a sniff of the resistance network during the mission to Nottagan and traced it back to their base, but had gotten lost in the shell networks Victor had set up around them and hadn’t made any progress.

Victor made a mental note to thank M’t'fdlth for their help in setting those networks up, and also to rework the way their ships accessed the network in order to prevent such a breach from happening again.

Victor’s stomach rumbled, and he snapped back to reality, realizing that he was completely alone in the room. He blinked and pulled up the access log to check when Gruul had left. Nearly seven hours ago. No wonder he was hungry. He stood up, locking his terminal, and stretched. He had to admit that while it was a bit demeaning for Gruul to be treating him like a child, there was also something comforting about it.

He made another mental note to figure out how he felt about it and then address that as he moved towards the door, and then stopped. He still needed to talk to Mya, and that probably needed to be his priority. Victor sighed heavily, dreading the argument that was sure to come. But it had to be done.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 9

Spoiler

Mya POV

Mya had gone directly to the quarters she shared with nine other humans after leaving IC 7-0; the team had arrived back on base later in the evening on their return from that joke of a mission, and she’d gone straight to confront Victor about what he’d done. By the time she’d gotten to her room, everyone was already bundled up and, if not actually asleep, then doing a pretty decent job at faking it.

She hadn’t bothered to undress and had thrown herself down on her bunk - the bottom one, closest the door because she was the one most likely to get woken up in the night for something urgent - fully clothed. She’d spent several hours tossing and turning, too keyed up wondering what her father would think of her for sleep to even start to approach, before finally giving it up as a bad job. She’d tried putting on her pajamas about thirty minutes in, hoping the comfortable shirt and loose pants would help her to get to sleep, and didn’t bother getting dressed beyond putting on her shoes as she slipped quietly out of the shared quarters and made her way to her office.

Well, what used to be her office. Technically, with her father’s arrival, it had become his office, but Mya was pretty sure he’d never even set foot inside. Which, in hindsight, was probably for the best given the number of people she’d had to deal with just that day who had popped in simply wanting to talk to the Lothar Kaldegga. It was mostly dominated by a large desk, a wobbling edifice put together out of the scraps of whatever the builders had left over after they finished the custom bunks for the Hosh and Kala'Kah. The top was two pieces of flat board nailed to some supports that might once have been table legs but for the accident of a drunken Resistance fighter named Burt who’d been thrown through the table’s surface. The desk was an eyesore, but it was big, and it worked, and there wasn’t anything better available.

The only other point of note in the room was the somewhat more solid side table that had been looted off a luxury yacht belonging to some government bigwig’s wife. Not only was it a beautiful piece of turned heartwood, but it also had a built-in coffee maker that rose elegantly from the back and dispensed coffee from the mouth of a small, ornamental swan. Mya personally found the thing ridiculously gaudy and overdone, but she couldn’t deny her boundless gratitude for a nearly endless supply of fresh coffee.

Especially on a night like tonight.

Mya sighed as she rubbed her forehead, looking at the various tablets she had spread in front of her. If she couldn’t sleep, might as well do something useful, and she’d spent the last few hours doing a penetration analysis of the security plans she’d ferried back from Victor’s contact on Nottagan. Mya reached out and grabbed the cup of coffee she’d pulled when she’d first arrived, and grimaced at the tepid temperature. When people weren’t constantly interrupting her, the hours slipped by almost unnoticed.

At least working through the night meant nobody had had the chance to ask her about Victor’s little stunt. Her fingers tightened reflexively on her cup as the still-raw anger she felt at the older man chose that moment to surface, then cursed as some of the coffee landed on her lap. Pursing her lips, she set the cup down with exquisite gentleness before pulling the nearest tablet closer. Pouring coffee all over the plans she’d acquired — however she acquired them — would not help with planning.

The display on the tablet hadn’t changed since the last time she looked at it. Security for the shipyards was tight as a miser’s wallet; rotating, semi-randomized guard patrols, electronic safeties and countermeasures, physical reinforcing of vulnerable points in the station, primary, secondary, and even battery-powered tertiary surveillance systems, complex baffles on exhaust vents, and a whole host of other problems that the Resistance would have to work around to get the workers out.

The workers themselves were another variable; while the security plans didn’t detail the exact composition and count of the current worker population, they laid out considerations for more than seventy-five thousand non-security staff who had access to nothing save the internal quarters designated for them. Twelve-hour shifts of workers would be escorted back and forth between areas by armed guards, with special maintenance parties only allowed to work section by section, as permitted by the guards. No worker could open any door except the ones that led from the worker common areas to the worker sleeping areas; food was provided in the common worker areas, and no worker was sent anywhere unescorted if, for some reason, they had to go to a section outside of their assigned areas.

The external defenses were just as impressive. There was everything from point defense lasers that didn’t require an elementalist’s backing, all the way up to super heavy gun emplacements designed to amplify elemental magic almost as much as a capital warship could. Shields surrounded the whole place like a cocoon, with the only unshielded point being the enormous solar siphon that was so close to the pulsar it was almost in the corona, and trying to get in that way would be like hopping from the fire back into the frying pan.

Mya huffed in frustration and dropped her tablet to press the heels of her hands into her throbbing eyes. She had to be methodical about this or everyone died. She dragged her hands down her face as she stared up at the ceiling and mentally categorized what their plans required.

One, they had to get access to the station. The place did have protocols for visits from the brass or the military, people wishing to inspect the place, but those were scheduled far in advance and involved ships far sleeker than any rust bucket employed by the Resistance could ever even pretend to be. So that option was out, and even thinking about a direct assault would just get everyone involved killed. The only other way on and off the station was the regular material deliveries. The shipyards required a lot of raw or partially manufactured materials to make the capital ships, and the supply vessels also dropped off organic components like additional labor or food supplies.

So, the best option was to hijack one or more delivery vessels on scheduled runs to the shipyard. Preferably ones that were designated to arrive at nearly concomitant times. Preferably ones that were transporting organic materials so it would be easier to sneak as many Resistance fighters on board as possible. Mya leaned over and made a note, adding the caveat that their best hackers needed to be in the first group to land on the ‘yards or this whole thing would be over well before it started.

Two, they had to get the workers moving ahead of the Resistance translocationist teams. Problematic, especially with the security set up the way it was; the best she could do was to warn the workers ahead of time and have them ready to go when the flag came down. Mya frowned and checked the security plans to see what kind of species would be laboring there. She was completely unsurprised to find a majority of the laborers were Hosh, with the second largest faction being humans pulled from the penal system. Interestingly, general maintenance was all done by Yttarr; no accommodations for Kala'Kah were listed, and neither were any for M'Pell - though the last didn’t surprise her, given that most United League bureaucrats and citizens alike tended to regard the M'Pell as some kind of child’s plaything rather than a sentient species.

Mya narrowed her eyes in thought. The thing about Yttarr was that, without its wing-casing, one Yttarr was visually - and, crucially, genetically - indistinguishable from another Yttarr. It was the combination of Queen and Comptroller pheromones that caused an Yttarr’s wing-casings to develop the colors and patterns distinct to each hive. It was those colors and patterns - as well as their unique metal-based composition - that made Yttarr wing casings highly sought after by the United League’s upper crust. Jewelry, fashion accessories, decorative body armor, sculptures, and more - the one percent could not get enough of what could be done with Yttarr wing casings. The high demand, combined with crippling debt from predatory lenders, caused most Yttarr to remove their wing casings and sell them at a pittance for the good of the hive. The casing would grow back, of course, if the Yttarr ever got enough nutrition to molt properly, but it was rare to see an Yttarr with an intact wing casing. As a consequence, it was just as rare to see an Yttarr who could actually fly. Without the protective casing, the wing membranes dried out and tore with the lightest touch.

Mya had integrated several dying hives into the current iteration of the Resistance. One of the United League’s favorite punishments for the Yttarr - be it for a real failing or some imagined slight - was killing the Queen of a hive. The Queen didn’t rule the hive, nor even truly direct it, but she was the only true female in the hive and the only one capable of laying eggs. When a hive’s Queen died, it was only a matter of time before the hive proper followed her into oblivion. The hives currently present on three of the eight populated bases - including this one - had approached Mya as a group. Their Comptrollers - the word didn’t translate well, meaning as best as she could figure “one who directs the Hive,” but “Comptroller” was the closest the translators could get, apparently - had all met and decided that if their hives were going to die, they would do so giving the United League a black eye. So they’d come to Mya, and Mya had given them places to set up shop.

All the Yttarr on base still had their wing casings, though the colors had faded from their usual brilliant iridescence thanks to the lack of Queenly pheromones. But if Mya could convince just one Yttarr to remove their casing and somehow sneak said Yttar onto the station… Mya scowled as she jotted the idea down.

The problem was that wing casings were culturally significant to the Yttarr, and at least a quarter of an Yttarr’s day was spent cleaning and maintaining it. She didn’t want to set the precedent that an Yttarr’s wing casing was as disposable as an old coat - she’d had to come down hard on M’t'fdlth when the M'Pell had taken Khaleev’s casing for use in the ISCS connection, though the fact that Khaleev had broken the part M’t'fdlth had been planning to use instead had been a mitigating circumstance - but she might not have a choice, if she needed one to sneak aboard the shipyards.

Grimacing, Mya pulled her mind back to the matter at hand.

Three, they had to get on board the ships. With any luck, there’d still be boarding ramps available so the United League wouldn’t have to waste translocation specialists just to get their ships built. For the more fully complete ships, two teams would have to get on board - one to get to the bridge and fly the thing, and the other to start pulling workers aboard. Each team would also need a tech specialist to disable any fail safes and alarms onboard the ship, or they wouldn’t get very far.

Four, they had to launch the ships. For the nearly complete ones it would be easy, but for the ones with hulls still open to space, they’d need to disengage the building protocols. The ramps would shear off and they could close as many sections as possible to vacuum, but that would take precious time they probably wouldn’t have. The least-built ships would have to be taken first, though tech specialists would not be as high of a priority to the teams assigned to them as the systems would still be slaved to the shipyard’s mainframe which would have been disabled before they even thought about taking ships.

Of course, that assumed they had enough translocationists to take enough ships to force them onto the half-built ones. While ships didn’t amplify translocation magic like the circuits for elemental magic did, they did allow the translocationist to feel the shape of the ship they were transporting and give them a baseline for the translocation calculations.

Mya herself had never even attempted to transport anything that large before - or anything so full of people. Her record was a luxury yacht that had held thirty other Resistance fighters as they'd headed for a supply raid on an agricultural world; she'd done it once in but not out, with the ship destroyed - and most of the fighters killed - by the unexpected presence of a United League training ship in the system. She'd been lucky to escape with her life, and had never pushed her limit that far ever again.

Most of the other translocationists in the Resistance were on par with - or weaker than - Mya. It depended on how many ships were working, but she might only give the orders for the space-worthy ships.

Five, they had to destroy the station. That’s where her father and all the other elementalists they had would come into play; they would have to fire the weapons systems into the heart of the station itself to begin a meltdown on the reactor. Mya rubbed at her forehead as she wrote; she would be on the team with her father, there was no doubt about that, and for the best chance of success they’d need to be in the most complete ship - which in turn meant their team would need the best hacker to go with them; Victor. She was sure there were probably worse things, but for the life of her she couldn’t think of any right now.

Six, they had to escape. That meant random jumps to any of a number of prearranged systems, then two more jumps before rendezvousing in one of the new systems the hijacked drone ship feeds had given them that the United League hadn’t gotten.

Seven, they had to…

Mya was so absorbed in her thoughts that she hadn’t noticed another presence in the room until the other person spoke.

“So.”

The voice was cold, disdainful, and Mya looked up only to freeze like a penemth in a spotlight. Her father stood tall on the other side of the desk, arms folded, the door closed behind him. His expression matched his tone, and Mya couldn’t speak for the vice that was crushing the lungs in her chest.

“Couldn’t even do a simple retrieval mission. My old friend had to step in and do it for you.”

He looked down his nose at her, as if from a very great height.

“Useless. Pathetic. I’m surprised you even managed to get me out of the United League’s ship. But then, you didn’t do a very good job of it, did you? You didn’t manage to keep those technicians from seeing your crew, you couldn’t keep yourself from being shot, you injured your own teammates, you didn’t take the ship even though you managed to get onboard. You couldn’t even get the tracker out of my leg before they followed us.”

Lothar stepped forward and slammed both hands on the desk, the piece of furniture so afraid of him it didn’t even dare wobble when he did.

“You’re weak. Pitiful. Your mother would be ashamed of you; I wonder if we even really share a bloodline at all. You’re no Kaldegga.”

Mya flinched away from his words, writhing under Lothar’s withering glare as she tried to think of excuses.

I tried to do what you wanted, father.

I got you and my team out safe, father.

I didn’t lead them here, father, I led them away.

All that emerged from her mouth, however, was a strangled whine.

“Father, please-”

Please don’t leave me.

Lothar Kaldegga sneered, face twisting into an ugly mask she didn’t want to recognize -

but saw sometimes when she looked into a mirror

her mother always said she looked like her father

“You’re no daughter of mine.”

Mya keened softly as Lothar turned and strode out the door, leaving her completely alone. She was a good daughter, she could do better, she could -

A loud knock at her door had her jerking awake, drool and tears drying on her face and on the tablet she’d fallen asleep on. Her father was nowhere to be seen. Mya grimaced as she wiped the traces of tears from her face.

“Come in,” she called, trying desperately to look like she hadn’t just woken up from an unpleasant dream and had, in fact, been awake and planning all along.

The door opened, and in walked Gruul.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 10

Spoiler

Gruul POV

Gruul could tell Mya had been sleeping. Crying too, by the looks of it. However, she made no mention of it. At least it confirmed her suspicions.

“Sit down.”

Mya offered, pointing to a nearby chair which Gruul looked at dubiously. She shifted her seven-foot frame, moving her tail clear of the doorway,

“I will stand.”

Mya shrugged,

“Suit yourself.”

“Mya Kaldegga, I have concerns.”

“About?”

“This plan.”

Mya sighed.

“Gruul, I get that you don’t want casualties. But this is war and that means people are going to get hurt. Now, I’m going to try my best, but if you’re asking me to promise that no one dies… I can’t do that.”

Gruul blinked.

“I am not unaware of the costs of war. I know them, in some ways, better than you.”

“Well, good.”

“Just because I am aware of them does not mean that I must accept them as needed. Why make many cuts where one will do? Have you never wondered why my people do not use guns or bombs? Why our weapons are our own hands and the blades we carry in them?”

Mya shifted and rubbed her eyes.

“Gruul, please. It’s either too early or too late for a philosophy lesson. If it’s not about the casualties then what are you here about?”

Gruul folded her arms.

“Your father.”

The other woman stiffened slightly.

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“What about him?”

“I know what it is to desire the closeness of a clan.” Gruul replied, “I know what it is to seek the reassurance of a bloodline and to be willing to do nearly anything to find it again.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed you and Victor have been spending time together. Half the base thinks you’re knocking boots,” Mya said mildly.

Gruul cocked her head.

“Victor is a man who understands that blood is not a desirable result. He is also somewhat incapable of managing his own health beyond staying out of the way. Forgetting to eat is not an effective adaptation.” She paused. “I am not familiar with “knocking boots.””

Mya waved her hand.

“Okay. Never mind. You were saying?”

“Would you prefer me to speak openly or continue to make allusions?”

“Just get it over with.”

“Mya Kaldegga, you are not your father. And while you see this as a failing on your part, I would suggest that it is perhaps an adaptation that will allow you to surpass him. If you are not blinded by your desire for your own bloodline to echo the family you build yourself.”

Mya stared.

“Is that what you wanted to say?”

Gruul nodded.

“Yes. This plan of yours is rash and foolish. It may also be the correct one. If it remains yours and not your father’s. Lothar Kaldegga is many things, but he is not the one that I follow. You are.”

She moved toward the door.

“To attempt to become a version of the past means that you become the mistakes that have already been paid for. I would rather pay for my own.”

Gruul left without waiting for a response.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 11

Spoiler

Victor POV

Victor rounded the corner, only to stop short in surprise. After looking for Gruul for over half an hour, he’d eventually given up and decided that he couldn’t put off his conversation with Mya any longer. So he was stunned to find his wayward companion leaving Kaldegga’s office, and took a moment to compose himself before calling out to her.

“Gruul. Didn’t expect to find you here.”

The Hosh looked over at him, her expression impassive, and Victor made a point to glance at the door Gruul had just left from.

“What brings you here?”

“I had concerns about the attack on the shipyard. I have voiced them.”

Victor nodded, slowly. “Yeah, I was coming to do much of the same.”

“Do not let me keep you.”

She stepped past him, and disappeared around the corner.

Victor sighed. A part of him had hoped Gruul would have stuck around, if only to keep Mya and himself from biting each other’s heads off. He walked up to the door and knocked upon it gently. There was a pause for a moment, and then he heard Mya call out to enter. Victor pushed the button and the door opened, and he saw Mya’s eyes narrow as he entered her field of view.

He held up his hands in front of him as he stepped into the room.

“I’m just here to talk, Mya.”

She didn’t respond, but did lean back in her chair. Victor noted that she seemed to be trying to hide her expression in the shadows — and that her eyes looked red and swollen, neither of which seemed prudent to mention.

“What do you want, Cloud?”

He sighed.

“I came to apologize, Mya.”

He kept himself from wincing at her scoff, mostly because he’d been expecting it, and pulled out his tablet. He pushed a button and set it down on the desk in front of her.

“I monitor every terminal on this base. Every single one.”

He saw Mya’s eyes flicker down to the tablet in front of her for a second, and then glance back up at him, irritation still clearly smoldering in their depths.

“I learned a long time ago that even people with the best of intentions still make mistakes. So I track everything that goes in and out of this base, and what everyone is doing on each terminal.”

He reached out and pushed a button, and the screen changed to a long list of access logs.

“By doing this, I have prevented sixteen different people from leaving a trace that the UL could use to locate our network, in the last week alone.”

Mya’s expression was still thunderous, and he shook his head sadly.

“Yes, I understand that you’re angry about me organizing the retrieval of the security data. You put a team together for a mission and then had it done for you when you arrived, which you feel undermined your authority. For that, I do sincerely apologize.”

He looked up at her, making eye contact and holding it for a few long seconds.

“I do not think that you are incapable of leading this resistance, Mya. If I did, I wouldn’t have come back with you and your father. But I do think that you’re so concerned with what Lothar thinks that you’re trying to carry the entire weight of the Resistance yourself, and you’re getting sloppy as a result. And that will get people killed.”

“So, you’re just going to babysit me, then? Keep the precious Kaldegga princess safe and secure?”

The words dripped with venom as she spat them, though Victor sensed that they hurt her more to say than she was letting on.

He forced himself to wait for a moment before responding, letting his heart rate slow back down.

“No, Mya. But I am going to treat you the same way I treat your father, who you seem determined to become.”

“What does that mean?”

Her voice was still angry, but Victor thought he heard a bit of a waver in it that hadn’t been present a moment ago.

“Lothar’s idea of a plan usually amounts to ‘How much power do I need to throw at this thing to make it blow up?’”

Victor closed his eyes, the anger bubbling up in the back of his throat.

“So I made it my job to make sure I planned out everything else to keep him and all the people he took with him safe.”

He opened his eyes, letting his irritation shine through.

“I made sure that everyone had been evacuated before he assaulted the network relay on Hylfflyr, and kept the UL security teams running in circles trying to figure out what happened as he punched his way through the command bunker on Praxos. I plotted the course his translocator took to Alokraid II, including five unnecessary jumps into and out of the system to draw the UL out, despite his insistence that he wanted to fight them head-on, because it meant that everyone who went out on that mission came back alive. I kept him from learning about the prison on Rilgos for over three years, because he would have burned the place down with everyone inside the second he found out about it, just to send a message, and instead used that time to break every security measure they had and organize a riot that got all the prisoners out without a single casualty.”

Victor’s eyes were locked on the table in front of him because he didn’t want to risk seeing Mya’s face and losing his resolve.

“But he’s not stupid. He figured it out eventually, and came to me asking why I’d betrayed him.”

He saw Mya open her mouth to speak out of the corner of his eye, but Victor simply kept talking over her.

“Accused me of working with the UL, accused me of helping them maintain their stranglehold on all of us. I told him that he was an idiot if he believed any of that, and that I’d only been doing everything I could to keep us all alive. And so he told me that if I was unwilling to do what had to be done, he’d do it without me. And then he left, taking that robot of his and immediately getting himself captured by a damned bounty hunter.”

Victor tried to stop himself at this point, but the words were tumbling out faster than he could contain them.

“I’m the one who kept him out of the UL’s clutches for the last fifteen years, because I was the only one who was concerned about our safety and the safety of those we’re trying to protect. They called us terrorists from day one, and I guess he eventually gave up trying to fight that label and just leaned into it.”

Victor stood up and stalked over to the ridiculous bird coffee dispenser, the roiling emotions under his skin too much to sit still. He’d been there with Lothar almost from the start, and yet he never would have predicted where they’d both ended up today. He sucked in a breath and blew it out slowly as he put a cup under the swan’s beak and watched it fill with coffee. He couldn’t not tell her.

“He blew up a damned moon, Mya. He took a capital ship, pointed its weapons at a populated moon, and blew the whole thing to hell.”

There was silence for a few long moments, and then Victor hung his head.

“Do what you want, Mya. I’m going back to IC 7-0 to monitor the network activity. If you want my help planning this thing, you can find me there.”

And before she could answer, he picked up his tablet with the hand not holding coffee, turned, and left.

Gruul was waiting in the hallway when the door slid closed, but Victor didn’t say a word the entire trip back to IC 7-0. He slid down into his chair, feeling every one of his many years, and ran both hands down his face. And then, without saying another word, Victor started pecking at the keyboard in front of him, tracing network connections and doing everything he could to avoid thinking about anything else.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 12

Spoiler

Mya POV

Mya sat blinking at the closed door for several minutes as her brain tried to catch up with what had just happened.

Gruul’s assertion that she followed Mya and not her father had been… heartening, in a way. The larger alien had joined the Resistance before Lothar had been rescued, though, so it rather made sense. And of course the shipyards mission was going to remain Mya’s; it was her best chance at getting into her father’s good graces, and maybe open him up to the idea of them being a family like Mya so desperately wanted. Was Gruul worried that Mya would try and fob the mission off if it started to go sideways? Or that people would now more naturally look to Lothar for leadership because he was handy?

Beyond that, though, the most she’d been able to make of the rest of Gruul’s speech was that the Hosh and Victor weren’t actually knocking boots like the rest of the base thought they were. If Mya was the kind of person who bet on other people’s love lives, she could make bank with that little nugget; as it stood, Mya had seen what happened when a superior got in on a pot and decided to try skewing the odds in their favor, and it never ended well, so she’d sworn that off.

Mya hadn’t been left to come to any terms with any of that for long before Victor Cloud had walked in through her door.

Victor Cloud had started talking before her brain could catch up. Her mouth had responded on automatic, too caught up in surprise to filter the last, angry remnants of her dream, and whatever she’d said had hit a nerve; Victor’s expression had pinched like he’d bitten a lemon, and the diatribe that had come boiling over floored her.

Victor had done this before? Gone around behind the back of her father to save lives? But then why had he done it to her? Hadn’t she planned well enough? Had she done something wrong? Mya’s brain had latched on to that fact nearly to the exclusion of all else, running through scenarios and what-ifs until she’d felt about ready to throwing up - until the last thing Victor had said had penetrated. Her father had blown up a moon? Before she could ask him to elaborate further, Victor had already picked up his own tablet and slammed out of the room.

Which left her here now, trying desperately to work her way through the information that had just been dumped in her lap. She rubbed her eyes viciously, commanding her brain to function. First, Gruul had said that she followed Mya and not her father - with the caveat that if Mya became her father, that could change. Then Victor had come through with a couple apologies - why did he think she cared about him spying on the whole base’s tech network? He was head of technical security in all but name anyway - and maybe Mya should change that.

Both of them seemed convinced that Mya was trying to emulate her father. The thought filled her with a certain kind of dread. She didn’t wish to become her father, to supersede his position in the Resistance and in the world in general. Her magic was disjointed, imperfect, and of a wholly different sort than his, and she certainly didn’t channel his commanding presence. No, she simply strove to be good enough for her father. Good enough that he wouldn’t leave her behind again, good enough to be worth keeping his name. That was all.

As for Victor’s part in the old Resistance, it made a certain kind of sense when she thought about it; a lot of people who’d been waffling about joining up with her group had suddenly jumped on board after she’d recruited Victor. At the time, she’d just thought it was them taking it as a confirmation of her claim to the Kaldegga name. Apparently it had been the exact opposite. Victor had been the one doing the planning, making sure people lived through her father’s plans, and they’d followed him when he’d given her his tacit approval.

And the moon thing… Mya remembered, with a rising sense of horror, the rumors that had been flying around while she’d been desperately trying to pull together a team to rescue her father. Whispered words about the destruction of an entire planetoid, and the complete eradication of the religious order that had inhabited it. Sideways glances blamed the Resistance for it, but Mya hadn’t put any credence in them. The only thing powerful enough to destroy something that big was a Capital-class ship with a high-powered elementalist, and at the time the Resistance only had one of those things.

Victor had seemed certain, though, that her father had been the one to do it. And when she’d mentioned stealing the capital ships, her father had looked almost… longing. Like he yearned for something he’d held before. Victor was rarely wrong about these things…

Mya gave up trying to figure things out and pushed herself to her feet. Barely remembering to grab her personal tablet, she shouldered her way out of her office and started down the hallway toward IC 7-0. The hallways weren’t terribly crowded, which probably meant it was late rather than early, and while Mya did garner some second glances and side-eyed looks, nobody interrupted her march toward the tech section.

She hesitated for a moment outside the slate-grey door. Going in there would mean a confirmation of too many things she didn’t want to think about, but not going into the lair of the most technologically savvy people on the base would be a disservice to those selfsame people. Mya straightened up and punched in her access code.

As the door slid open, the first thing to catch her eye was the dusty yellow scales and black patterns of the Hosh leaning up against the far wall, head no longer endangered by low ceilings. Gruul returned her gaze levelly, and Mya nodded. She couldn’t see Victor’s face straight away, but the layout hadn’t changed much since she’d last been in here - ceiling height improvements notwithstanding. She walked over to the obnoxiously large monitor that faced directly away from the door and leaned on it.

Victor’s face tightened as she came into view, but he otherwise didn’t react, and Mya took a long breath before speaking to try and cudgel her brain into working.

“Victor.”

His eyes flicked up to meet hers, but he made no other response.

“First, let me say that I really don’t care about you spying on my tablet or anyone else’s. The only reason I haven’t made you head of cyber security is because I didn’t even think about it. We haven’t had a problem, so I didn’t think, and that’s on me. From here on out, you’re it, and if anyone has a problem with what you’re doing, they can leave.”

Victor’s eyebrows had risen steadily for his hairline throughout her little speech - an impressive feat, given how far said hairline had retreated. Still, he didn’t interrupt, and so Mya bulled forward.

“Second, I had a plan to get the security data. Maybe it wasn’t the most elegant plan, but it did call for a certain amount of stealth. I wasn’t going to just shoot my way through the place and pray the data would still be good when we got to the shipyard. And you just… short circuited the entire plan. Without telling me.”

Victor looked pained.

"It’s not that I didn’t think you weren’t capable. And your plan would have worked, it’s just… I could do better. So I did. Without telling you, because you didn’t ask me.“

He held up a hand as Mya opened her mouth, ready to refute that.

"No, no, I know Nottagan’s full of speciesist dickbags. Gruul couldn’t have come. But… you still could have asked me. I am the tech guy, I can do things remotely.”

Mya closed her eyes.

“And you did it for my father.”

A beat.

“And I did it for your father.”

Mya sighed deeply, feeling the exhaustion of too many hours awake settling into her bones.

“It can’t happen like that again. I don’t mean never take my plans - ”

Light flashed on his display as the security plans and the notes she’d written on them earlier were brought up at a brightness her tired eyes didn’t care for. She gave Victor a Look, which he returned with a bland stare.

“I mean, if you can think of ways to improve them, come to me. Message me. Let me know in some way, shape, or form. I may not always act on your suggestions, but I promise to listen to them thoroughly and sincerely consider them,” Mya huffed.

Victor shrugged, toying with his keyboard in a way that suggested idle boredom, but that the rapidly changing screen proved was intent work.

“I’m not the man with a plan. I can make great plans superb, good plans great, and bad plans workable, but I don’t come up with them on my own. Lothar was always the ideas man.”

The price of her father’s ideas hung in the room for a long moment, silence hanging in the air, thick enough to cut with a knife. Mya took a deep breath and straightened, looking first at Victor, then at Gruul.

“You both told me that you think I want to become my father, that I want to emulate him, but the thing is - I don’t. I’m not an elementalist, and I’m not even a particularly good translocationist. I just… I just need to be enough. Enough that he doesn’t leave what I’ve put together here.”

Enough that he doesn’t leave me behind went unsaid.

Gruul straightened from where she’d been leaning on the wall and walked over to put herself eye to eye with Mya.

“Do you know why I joined?”

Mya blinked.

“Because the United League destroyed your whole clan?”

Gruul’s tail lashed, but she gave no other signs that such a casual reference to her past dismayed her.

“That is part of it, but I am not the only Hosh to whom that has happened. Yet I am one of the few Hosh in the Resistance.”

She leaned towards Mya, her large yellow eyes almost hypnotic.

“I joined because you asked me to. You spoke to me as an equal, and asked for my assistance.”

She stood to her full height, towering over Mya.

“It is a rare thing, to find that in one of your species. And so I have joined the Resistance to follow you. Not your father.”

“Same. I looked after your father for years, and the moment I stopped, he went and got himself caught by bounty hunters. I joined your group because you seemed to be determined to do it better, and you’ve had some pretty solid plans so far.”

Victor didn’t look up from his computer screen as he spoke, which Mya was profoundly grateful for. She wasn’t sure she could’ve maintained her composure if both of them had been looking at her - how did the old saying go? The mortifying ordeal of being known?

She took a deep breath and asked the question she’d been dreading since she walked into IC 7-0.

“Is… Is it true? About the moon?”

Victor closed his eyes and sighed.

“Yes. It is. I asked him when we broke him out. He didn’t say anything, but I could see it in his eyes.”

Mya hadn’t even noticed, too busy trying to keep from throwing up out of nerves. Her father had done the unthinkable, and yet -

“Why did you try and rescue him, if you suspected?”

For the first time since she’d walked in, Victor blanked his screen and leaned forward.

“He asked me to leave, told me to quit messing with his plans. In a straight-up confrontation, I can’t win against him - so I agreed and left. But I didn’t stop monitoring him - he didn’t ask me to do that, after all, and he kept that android with him.”

He leaned forward a little more and rested his face against his folded hands.

“It’s harder to hack something sentient, but I managed to get snippets every now and again and - it looked like he was doing better. I saw my old friend, the man I set out to save the galaxy with. I’d hoped the change was permanent, but…”

He didn’t need to finish. All three of them remembered the casual ease Lothar had shown in torching the unfortunate guards on their way out of the ship, and the callous disregard he’d shown for the slower members of the team they’d assembled to free him.

Mya sucked in a breath and closed her eyes for a second before she forced them back open. There would be time to deal with that later; there were more important matters to discuss now.

“For good or for bad, I’m not my father. I’m not the one the galaxy knows as the face of the Resistance, and I’m sure as sure not the kind of powerhouse he is. On paper, he has to be the leader. I don’t think he’d stand for anything less; anyone else tries to take charge and he’d walk out. So. He gets the best of whatever we’ve got - housing, furniture, offices, whatever - and we do what we have to do. Victor. I need - ”

“A supply ship to the shipyard scheduled to make a run in the next fourteen days that is big enough to hold twenty eight teams and old enough that a small delay between launch and translocation won’t be a red flag to the United League shipyard security?”

He flicked a key and his screen came alive as Mya’s tablet flashed with an incoming message notification.

“Done. Heavy Is The Hand is an older solid goods cargo hauler designated to make a delivery down Zwicky’s Corridor from Smelting Facility 0607 in twelve days. She’s been having problems with her maneuvering engines recently, and has a recorded average of about twenty minutes between getting checked out of dock and making the translocation point to jump from. It’ll be close, but I’m pretty sure we can take her.”

Mya nodded, eyes scanning the ship specifications Victor had sent to her tablet.

“Right. And we need a way to sneak some live cargo onto base three days before that. I’m going to see if I can persuade the Yttarr to help. They can lay down the groundwork to help get as many workers offstation as possible when we take the place.”

Victor made another swipe across his keyboard, and a different file popped up on Mya’s tablet. A bulk organic materials hauler, set to leave Paradign V with several hundred tons of food two days before Heavy Is The Hand was scheduled to leave the smelter. It wasn’t quite what she’d asked for, but if it was what Victor had, it was the best they were going to get.

Mya sighed and deactivated her tablet screen before stowing it in her pocket.

“I’ll tell my father what he needs to know. He seems more willing to listen to me. Thank you - both of you. I’ll try and be worthy of the faith you’ve placed in me.”

Without waiting for a response, Mya turned and left. Her head hurt from everything she’d just learned - and from a distinct lack of sleep. Changing direction, she headed for her quarters; if she had to face her father, she wanted to do so with a far clearer head than she had right now. She’d tell him in the morning.

She was asleep before her head hit her pillow.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 13

Spoiler

Gruul POV

The door slid shut behind Mya, leaving Gruul alone with Victor. He had already returned to his work, his eyes flicking back and forth between the screens. Gruul sat in silence for a time, just watching him, before clearing her throat.

“Victor.”

“Mmm?” he barely looked up as he reached for a nearby cup of something warm that she had left out for him, ignoring the coffee cup that he’d set beside his keyboard. Well, it had been warm about an hour ago.

“What does ‘knocking boots’ mean?”

Victor started choking.

“What?”

Gruul blinked at him.
“It is something that I have heard several times before. I was not certain of the meaning.”

He attempted to mop up the puddle of liquid that was seeping dangerously close to his computer.

“Uhh. I mean. It’s a human expression. It means uhh… well… uh, it means… coupling?”

“Oh. Sex.”

Victor’s shock seemed to stop his choking.

“Ah, well. Yes. I didn’t know if you would uhh… know that term.”

“Why would I not know what sex was?”

He shook his head.

“Doesn’t matter. Where… where, uh, did you hear the phrase? The knocking boots one?”

She shrugged.

“Around the base. People whisper. They seem to think that because they cannot see my ears that I am unable to hear. There are rumors about you and I. That we knock boots. Or have sex, rather. Mya also alluded to the fact that we are spending time together. I suppose people have theories.”

Victor looked like he was melting from the inside.

“I mean, I never… I’ve never said that to anyone. I don’t even think of… I mean, it’s ridiculous!”

“Is it?”

He blinked.

“What?”

“Nothing. You are dripping onto your console.”

Victor cursed and pushed back from the desk. Spinning in his chair, he started rummaging around for a cloth or towel of some kind. Gruul sighed and walked over to a cabinet marked ‘IN CASE OF SPILLS’. Producing a dry cloth, she dropped it in Victor’s lap and returned to her seat.

They sat in silence for a time. Victor seemed happy to pretend that the previous conversation had never happened. Gruul decided not to press the issue. It was not an unexpected reaction. The knot in her stomach shifted and settled in.

“What do you know of the translation protocol?”

He looked up.

“Standard programming. Complicated and basic at the same time. Why?”

“I do not like it.” she looked back toward the door, “It makes me sound like an alien. Like a creature. It takes away my heart. I cannot speak with this programming. I cannot be heard. I would like to learn your language. I would like to learn to use my own words and my own voice.”

She turned toward him.

“Would you help me, Victor?”

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 14

Spoiler

Mya POV

Mya woke with a start, her neck immediately protesting its current scrunched-up position.

The crick in her neck notwithstanding, she felt better than she’d had in a while. The nagging headache behind her eyes had mostly gone away, and her stomach felt like it wanted real food again for the first time in too long (or whatever the cafeteria was serving today; calling it “real food” might be something of a stretch. Still, it was probably better than nothing).

She felt better inside, too. Her father still loomed large, especially after everything Victor had told her, and yet… he didn’t seem quite as large, for some reason. Maybe it was the knowledge that she had someone - two someones - who trusted her enough to follow her lead, without him. Maybe it was the possibility that what she was doing now was already enough to convince him to stay.

Maybe it was just getting a good night’s sleep.

Mya stood and stretched, massaging the back of her neck where the crick stubbornly persisted. She hadn’t gotten changed before falling asleep last night, but as she’d been in her pajamas and boots anyway, it didn’t matter much. She sniffed her shirt and grimaced before heading over to the communal dresser to see what was clean today.

One change of clothes later, and she began making her way toward her father’s rooms. She’d told both Victor and Gruul that she’d inform her father of the changes to the plan - and she would. The thought made her stomach roil, and she grimaced and changed course; she’d inform him of the updated plans immediately after breakfast. While throwing up would not be the most dignified end to that conversation, fainting of hunger in front of her father was probably worse. Doing neither would be the most optimal result, of course, but with the way her track record had been trending recently -

So engrossed was she in her thoughts that Mya failed to notice the person coming the other way, turning around a particularly sharp bend in the meandering corridors that made Sarcorxious such an excellent strategic asset. She tripped, they tumbled, and together they both went down in a heap. The other party in the collision made several sharp clicking noises as Mya groaned, and a few seconds later a cheerfully robotic voice sounded out far too close to Mya’s ear for comfort.

“Fellow Mudhopper! Many apologizes for disturbing you on your way!”

Mya blinked and looked up into the brightly colored multi-faceted eyes of one of the sixty or so Yttarr on base, and something clicked in her mind.

She waved off the claw it politely proffered when they regained their feet first; while the Yttarr had quickly picked up on the polite mannerism, Mya had unofficially banned any non-Yttarr in the Resistance from accepting that kind of help after the third time she’d found an Yttarr with no arms trying valiantly to go about its daily assigned tasks, using only its legs and proboscis. Fortunately, they regrew any missing limbs whenever they molted, but until then it wasn’t a pretty sight.

Plus, their four-clawed hand analogues were very sharp. Mya pushed herself to her feet and nodded her thanks as the Yttarr dropped the hand they’d been holding out.

“Fellow Waveskimmer -” ‘Mudhopper’ was only used for those who did not have the wings to fly, and Mya could see this one’s casing was well intact “ - I find myself in need of speech with Comptroller Mudkheson. Where might he be found at this the hour of the day?" Mya asked politely.

Yttarran grammar was odd, but easy to pick up if you spent more than ten minutes or so talking to one. And contagious; Mya tried to never schedule a meeting with a Kalah'Kah directly after a meeting with an Yttarr because the two grammar structures were almost totally incompatible with each other (and it drove the Kalah'Kah nuts).

She also hoped that the structure would become less obtrusive as the M'Pell updated the translator software. It was already far superior to the libraries the United League used, but still far short of ideal. And, if Mya wanted a lasting co-operation between all the species after the United League fell, said translation software needed to be the best it could possibly be. Or better.

The Yttarr paused for a long moment, antennae waving and the colors in its eyes swirling. Mya suspected that the eye color of an Yttarr had a similar meaning to the light patterns that the M'Pell projected whenever something amused or angered them, but she hadn’t managed to crack Yttarran color coding yet.

Finally reaching a decision, the Yttarr clicked briskly and waited for its translator to finish before starting to move away.

"Of course! Follow me.”

Mya followed the Yttarr, noting with a brief kind of sadness that while the curling fractalized patterns on its wing casing were as perfectly formed as ever, the color on the shell was a muddy yellow-grey. Normal Yttarran wing shells could be all the colors of the rainbow - vibrant reds, lush greens, royal purples, brilliant oranges, and all the combinations in between; the fact that the Yttar on base did not was yet another reminder of the crimes the United League was guilty of. Yttarans could choose to join another hive, but no drone ever took that choice unless both the Queen and Comptroller were dead and even then, they didn’t tend to live as long as a natural-born hive member.

Mya had never been quite brave enough to ask why; the loss of their Queen was a deep enough slice of grief as it was.

It didn’t take them terribly long to reach the Yttarran section of the tunnels; while the other sections of the base were reasonably mixed when it came to alien species, the Yttarans had specifically requested a portion of the base to make their own, and Mya had granted it to them on the condition that everyone else be still allowed free movement through the section. They’d agreed, and as she walked through the corridors given over to their use, Mya could see why they’d made the request.

Where the rest of the base was comprised of reasonably utilitarian tunnels leading to square rooms of various sizes and uses, everything in the Yttarran section appeared to have been remade into octagonal shapes. Doors, the rooms she caught brief glimpses of, and even the hallways had been reshaped to some extent, though their original configuration was more obvious. And on every flat surface she could see, etchings had been inlaid into the very material. Spiraling, fractalized designs that at once managed to be mathematically perfect and yet somehow organic reflected light in a rainbow of colors that would have been stiff competition with any Yttarran wing casing.
Mya couldn’t help her gasp of surprise; she hadn’t had a reason to be in these halls since they were first putting the base together and Khaleev had run afoul of M’t'fdlth. She’d only seen the start of it then; the rounding off of some of the corners of rooms and doorways. This was so very far beyond that, the mind boggled.

Her guide had walked a few paces beyond her before stopping as well, turning to look at her with eyes that spiraled with brilliant greens and yellows.

“Is something the matter, Fellow Mudhopper?”

They inquired, the translator somehow managing to convey polite puzzlement despite its somewhat limited pre-programmed tonal capacity.

Mya gestured around her expansively.

“Many apologizes; I have not been to this the halls at a high frequency and was pleasingly surprised with all these the changes that have occurred between now and then.”

The Yttarr’s antennae quivered.

“The Comptroller will be much pleased. Continuance.”

With that, they turned and started walking again, and Mya fell in behind.

It wasn’t long before they came to the Comptroller’s chambers. Unlike the other chambers, this space was simply a point where the hallway widened until it could no longer be called a hallway but a room, and then narrowed back down to a hallway on the other side. There were a steady stream of Yttarrans following the curve of the hallway forward to the large combination desk and throne where the Comptroller sat, and here they communicated briefly, and then the Yttarran in question would simply follow the wall back into the hall on the other side to do whatever it was they needed to do.

The Comptroller himself - when Mya had met with the three who’d joined her, they’d all introduced themselves as male, though she wasn’t strictly certain how much that really encompassed them - was larger than the Yttarran workers, and had antennae almost as long as his whole body. He also smelled overwhelmingly of what her brain insisted was freesias, even as far back as the entrance of the room. She could only thank her lucky stars that she wasn’t one of the 20% or so of humanity who reacted to Yttarran pheromones by sneezing.

Mya and her guide joined the line that moved swiftly towards the Comptroller, and in hardly any time at all she stood before him as his long antennae waved in her direction. He regarded her for several moments before his second pair of hands reached up and prodded his translator box, which came to life with a crackle.

“ -ogizes, I forget on occasion that I turn it off to conserve the charge. What brings Comptroller Mya to the presence of Comptroller Mudkheson?”

Mya blinked as her guide’s antennae went stiff and quivering. She hadn’t realized they’d re-designated her since her last visit, especially not with that title. She also made a mental note to put additional charge packs for Yttarran translators as a priority for the supply acquisition teams; if the Comptroller felt the need to conserve charge, clearly there had to be a shortage somewhere.

Still. It was something to ponder later.

“Comptroller Mya would like to request the aid of Comptroller Mudkheson and the Sarcorxious Hive.”

If they gave her the title, she might as well use it.

A brief susurration whispered through the room, like the fluttering of many pieces of paper in a breeze. Comptroller Mudkheson flexed his antennae.

“Comptroller Mya, the Sarcorxious Hive stands to obey your commands. Why make this the request?”

Mya looked him straight in his multi-faceted eyes - though she wasn’t exactly certain that had the same meaning for the Yttarr as for humanity - and took a breath.

“Comptroller Mya wishes to destroy the United League shipyard. Comptroller Mya wishes to save what workers can be saved before this the destruction. Comptroller Mya wishes to request the aid of Comptroller Mudkheson and the Sarcorxious Hive in warning the workers and preparing them for the what must be done. Comptroller Mya would make this the request some workers to make the remove of wing-cases to be in uniformity with the Yttarr already present on the shipyards.”

The susurrus behind her became a windstorm, punctuated by clicks and taps and, in at least one instance, a harsh buzz. Comptroller Mudkheson waved both his antennae like they were in a high breeze, and the smell of freesias thickened to the point where Mya was glad she hadn’t managed to make it to the mess hall before coming.

It took several long moments before the room quietened again, and Comptroller Mudkheson leaned over the desk portion of the desk-throne to address her.

“What guarantee does Comptroller Mya have to give that these that go will become these that return?”

Mya frowned.

“Comptroller Mya cannot make such promises. Comptroller Mya cannot promise she herself will return from this the mission.”

Comptroller Mudkheson’s antennae jumped erratically.

“Comptroller Mya would risk herself on this the mission? Despite Comptroller Mya’s importance to the Resistance Hive?”

Mya shrugged, the gesture probably lost on the aliens around her who lacked both shoulders and collar bones.

“Comptroller Mya has this the necessary magics to enact the plan. Comptroller Mya will not ask of others anything she is not prepared to do herself if this the action can be done by herself. Comptroller Mudkheson and the Sarcorxious Hive overestimate Mya; if she falls, there will be another to stand and be Comptroller for the Resistance Hive.”

The windstorm was back, though this time lacking in the harsh buzzing noises that had accompanied the first one, and with a great deal more tapping and clicking. Mya settled back on her heels, content to let the Yttarr discuss amongst themselves until they were ready and in agreement about what they wanted.

Five minutes ticked by. Ten. Finally, after the fifteenth minute passed, the noise began to lessen. The assembled Yttarr stopped shuffling and waving their antennae as frantically, the taps and clicks dropped away, and finally Comptroller Mudkheson returned his attention to her, though he didn’t speak for several long moments after the room had become silent.

“Comptroller Mudkheson and the Sarcorxious Hive will aid Comptroller Mya in this the mission. Workers Khoron, Khaleev, Khitash, and Kham will report upon this the appointed day with their wing casings removed that they might service the needs of the Resistance Hive. Additionally, the Sarcorxious Hive would like it to be known that the Comptroller Mya is the only representative of the Resistance Hive recognized as Comptroller, and there will be none others without formal investiture such when they meet these the standards.”

Mya blinked, not quite sure what to make of that statement. Did they expect a Resistance leader to treat any member as less than a person?

“Comptroller Mya thanks Comptroller Mudkheson and the Sarcorxious Hive for their offered assistance, and requests that the enumerated workers present themselves to this the docking area in eight cycles of time for the specific instructions. Comptroller Mya also advises the Sarcorxious Hive to begin these the preparations for moving; after this the action, there can be no returning to Sarcorxious Base. All persons not involved will be moved safely to other bases before this the action begins.”

Comptroller Mudkheson made no verbal response, but the workers around Mya started moving much faster than they had before she’d arrived. A tug on her leg brought her gaze down, and a different Yttarr than the one who’d led her here - as far as she could tell, anyway - made a “follow me” gesture when it saw it had her attention.

Mya nodded and followed the Yttarr out.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 15

Spoiler

Gruul POV

Gruul walked quickly down the hallways, pointedly ignoring the stares that she was drawing. She was well aware of her imposing size and appearance. Contrary to what most beings thought, she did actually try to tone it down, especially around members of Mya’s growing Resistance. She hated that she might unintentionally confirm their already well-cemented biases about Hosh… and aliens in general. Unfortunately, her emotions were not cooperating at the moment.

Outside the door, she paused. She really didn’t have to do this. She could just carry on like she had been for the past few days. But, in spite of how much her people had liked to remind her that she was unusual, the pure efficiency of the Hosh was still present in her blood. And something needed to be done.

The door slid open. Victor sat, his face illuminated by several screens, his eyes moving back and forth. He made no indication that he had seen her enter and Gruul knew him well enough to know that he hadn’t.

She sighed.

“Victor.”

No response.

“Victor.”

“Mm?”

“I need to speak with you.”

“One second.”

Gruul growled quietly to herself. The protocol did nothing with it. It had no way of understanding what it meant. That was part of what she hated so much about this damned computer taking her words and making them palatable for others. Hosh had a richer emotional life than many people gave them credit for. The small growls and rumbles were as important as the words that accompanied them, if not more so. If she had been able to speak freely, and if he had been able to understand, Victor might have picked up on her distress and frustration. As it was, the only indication of the scream building in her chest was the fact that her tail had begun to twitch.

“Victor!”

He jumped, knocking his chair over as he stood up.

“What?”
Gruul fixed him with her eyes.

“I have made a decision.”
"Holy hell."

He paused, closing his eyes for a moment as he breathed in and out to calm himself back down.

"Nearly scared me to death. What happened?"

“I have made a decision regarding my request for your help.”

Victor colored slightly.

“Ah. That. Yes, well… it’s not that I don’t want to help. I do. I’m just trying to build a cohesive lesson plan and I keep getting interrupted. But I’m planning on finishing it up tonight. Tomorrow night by the latest. And then we can -”

Gruul held up her hand to silence him.

“You do not have to. I have made an unfortunate request of you. I have asked you to do something that you are either unable or unwilling to do. Perhaps that will change in the future. However, at this moment, I do not wish to continue… living in hope.”

Victor blinked and Gruul found herself wondering if she should say everything that was on her mind. Better not. She had her own suspicions regarding his hesitance. Confirming them, while very Hosh, was not something she was prepared to do right now.

“I will teach myself,” she continued, “I will find a way. You may do what you like with your time.”

Victor opened his mouth to speak but Gruul was already moving toward the door. She paused at the control panel, her emotions getting the better of her.

“I have felt like a creature before, Victor. Like an outsider and an alien. But never with you. Until now.”

There was no word in the human language for what she truly wanted to express. There was only a sound. A sound that she had heard the night her clan died. It was a sound that she herself had made. The cry of the one.

She kept her mouth shut as she left. She doubted that the translators would have even tried.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 16

Spoiler

Victor POV

Victor froze as the door shut behind Gruul, replaying the conversation in his mind. She had asked for help, and so he’d started working on a lesson plan, something to help ensure that when he taught her, it was complete and accurate. She’d seen him working on it, amidst everything else he was doing to help Mya with the attack on the shipyards. He was sure she’d seen him working on it. So her reaction just now had stunned him.

A noise from his computer startled him back to reality. He blinked, the screen in front of him scrolling quickly through a number of different responses to questions he’d asked, and his fingers flew across the keyboard as he dove back into his work. He was collecting and collating data, sending it to Mya as it came in in small sections that would be easy for her to parse through. She’d given him free reign to plan the technical side of the operation, and he was sorting through their personnel and slotting them into teams so that different aspects of the plan could be carried out from multiple locations at the same time. It would keep the United League busy as they got conflicting signals from different sides of the base at the same time, and it would also ensure that there were at least three redundant teams for any one aspect of the mission. Victor wasn’t taking any chances, not with the amount of lives they’d be putting in harm’s way.

As he worked, his mind drifted back to the conversation with Gruul. He went back through it in his head, over and over again, trying to figure out why she’d reacted the way she had. She’d come in, tried to get his attention, and then yelled at him before telling him that she no longer wanted him to teach her and left. And then… she’d said she felt like an outsider. And that it was his fault.

Another message came through, with readouts of the different vessels they’d be taking, and Victor focused in on the computer systems of one of them. The ones in the specs weren’t going to be powerful enough, so they’d have to move some equipment from IC 5-2 into it. He sent a note off to the engineering team in that room, asking them to move the equipment as soon as possible, and then glanced over at the readouts for the engineering teams and grimaced.

Carcen was one of the few who could handle the hacking for the mission, and he had at least taken Victor’s lessons on security to heart, so he’d need to be on one of the advanced teams… But Victor was hesitant to use him so soon after embarrassing him. The man was a problem, and Victor didn’t want to have to depend on him right away, but with an operation of this size, there was no choice.

Victor shot off a message to Mya, telling her that he’d need her to talk to Carcen in his place as he himself was busy with a few other issues and didn’t want personal differences to jeopardize the mission. Mya was better with people than he was, so it’d be more likely to work out that way.

Victor’smind once again drifted back to Gruul. She was angry at him, and he’d never seen that before. He’d seen her disappointed and annoyed, when Mya hit her in the back with a grenade during the mission to rescue Lothar, but this was so much worse. He’d have to deal with this sooner rather than later. But first he had to ensure that the evacuation routes he’d plotted out were sound. He set up a few simulations, running and testing the routes for any possible issues, and then ran his hands over his face. It had been fifteen minutes since Gruul had left. It seemed like an eternity ago.

An urgent alert showed up on his terminal and he glanced at it. One of the technicians was looking for clarification on one of his requests, and his system had flagged it as mission-critical. He started working on it, and then the simulations spat out several errors.

He looked down at the clock again. Another three minutes had passed.

He looked back over at the door, which was still closed. Something about this was wrong. Something about this was very wrong, and he wasn’t sure why it bothered him so much.

He looked down and saw that he’d accessed the security recordings for the room he was in, and had pulled up the recording from a few days ago without even realizing it. He watched the conversation between himself and Gruul play out, when she’d first come to talk to him. He saw himself splutter and spill a drink when she asked him about “knocking boots.” But this time, he wasn’t watching the spill - he was watching her face.

Victor had spent enough time with Gruul, up to this point, to know when she was interested in something. Her expression was different, her tail twitched a bit more, and her tongue started moving a bit faster. But this was something different. Her expression wasn’t interested, it was… different. Longing? He blinked, watching as he mopped up the spill and her expression melted away. Her larger form seemed to diminish a bit, and her tail’s twitching stopped entirely. It was as if she had deflated. He rewound the tape, listening to what they had said.

Victor heard himself splutter with surprise. “I mean, I never… I’ve never said that to anyone. I don’t even think of… I mean, it’s ridiculous!”

Her voice was soft, her face already starting to fall.

“Is it?”

He paused, looking at her eyes in the security camera. She looked… sad. Sadder than he’d seen her in a long time. The expression reminded him of her face when she’d told him that she would teach herself. And then the nagging voice in the back of his head finally burst through the distractions and yelled at him. She was… disappointed. Because she felt rejected. Because… she’d been hopeful that maybe it wouldn’t always just be a rumor.

An alert sounded on Victor’s terminal, notifying him that the adjustments he’d made to the simulations had made improvements, but were still far from complete. He stared at it for several seconds, then closed his terminal down and stood up. Everything he was working on could wait. He moved towards the door, opened it, and walked out into the base at large.

—

Gruul was not proud of herself. Sitting with her back against a bulkhead wall, she replayed her previous conversation with Victor in her head and felt the shame rising. She might actually be a fool. She growled to herself, a rumble of disgust at her own inability to control her feelings. Hosh were supposed to be efficient and detached, emotions downplayed so that the most optimal outcome for all would be readily apparent.

She had never been a very good Hosh.

After leaving Victor’s room, Gruul had considered going back to her own quarters. But the idea of going back there made her feel like crawling out of her own skin. She needed to be away from people. Away from noise. Away from… him. She’d done too much, gone too far, said the wrong thing. And likely this was the moment that would ruin everything.

It had been such a stupid request. In the middle of a fight for survival, right at the apex of everything, she had decided to ask to learn how to speak. Ridiculous. She was a fool. What was worse… she was a fool who likely just ruined the closest relationship she had had since her clan died.

Gruul looked down at her arms, at the intricate tattoos that laced the muscles and climbed to circle her face. To many they looked like natural scale markings, especially since they were uncolored. But Gruul saw them for what they were: blank canvases. Empty outlines that she would have painted the color of sunsets in if she had had someone to share them with. She had thought that joining Mya’s revolution might be the start of that. She had believed that the friends she seemed to be making could be the beginning of a new story, one filled with all the colors that had died the night she became a slave. She had hoped that the connection she felt with Victor would be her new chapter.

Her tail twitched with emotion and Gruul suddenly saw herself the way everyone else did: a seven foot tall lizard. A monster. An outsider. An alien. Just a creature playacting at being human. Maybe that was why she had wanted to learn to speak with her own voice. Maybe that was why, when she heard the rumors, she had found herself becoming brave. Because, the truth was, no matter how calm she was in the face of battle… it was in the quiet in-between that she felt most afraid.

Gruul sighed. She would sit here in the dark a little longer. And then she would feel strong enough to put on the mask and get back to work. And she would apologize to Victor. She owed him that much.

—

Victor paused, lowering his tablet as he collected himself. One thing people in the base seemed to forget was that it was impossible to hide from him. When he’d arrived at the base, he’d added an extra 150 cameras to the hallways, and then set up a number of automatic programs that would track everyone’s movements. He’d kept them out of the personal chambers, but nearly every other room had at least two cameras in it. There were a few blind spots, simply because the hallways weren’t uniform, and the Yttarr areas had proven… complicated to properly monitor, but if you disappeared from the cameras for any length of time, an alert would be given, charting your last known location and your direction of travel.

It was how Victor knew exactly where Gruul was. She’d been with him when he’d installed the cameras, so she knew where the blind spots were. In any other case, he’d have left her alone in this blindspot, as this was the one she tended to go to when she was upset about something. But… he couldn’t just let this one go. This was his fault, and he had to make it right. He just hoped that she’d be open to hearing what he had to say.

Victor cleared his throat, announcing his presence, and stepped around the corner.

—

“You know that I smelled you all the way down the hall?”

Gruul shifted.

“I knew you were coming. I helped you install the cameras, Victor.”

She looked over at him.

“I want to apologize. My outburst was unfair. You are busy. There is an invasion to plan and you are important to that plan. My request was… selfish. And unreasonable. And I apologize for speaking harshly to you.”

Gruul sighed and looked down at her hands. Her tail was tucked behind her, thankfully, so Victor couldn’t see its movements. But she felt them. She braced herself for his response, waiting to hear the words she knew were coming. But it was better to have it all out now. As she had said before, she no longer wanted to live in hope. It was the Hosh way after all: accept things as they are and adapt yourself to survive.

“Do you mind if I sit down?”

Victor indicated a spot on the wall next to her. When he received no response, he sat, keeping his gaze ahead of him.

“I knew you could smell me. Just… wanted to be polite.”

There was silence for several long moments as he organized his thoughts.

“I didn’t understand, Gruul. I didn’t understand what you had asked me.”

He paused, thinking. “No, that’s not true. I did understand. I just didn’t understand why. Not until today.”

The silence hung for another few long moments, and then he sighed.

“It just surprised me, that’s all. I… value you, Gruul. Very much so.”

His tablet blinked, a series of alerts going off, and he simply set it in his lap and turned it off. It was the first time she’d seen him turn it off since she had known him.

“I just don’t think I knew exactly how much until it was clear that I’d… left some things unsaid. Or not read between the lines.”

Gruul blinked.

“Do not feel obligated to say things that you do not mean, Victor.”

He looked at her, his eyebrow raised.

“Have you ever known me to do that?”

“No. But then… I am not always adept at understanding people. I am… not human, after all.”

Victor sighed, returning his gaze to the wall opposite him.

“I’m not particularly adept, either. It’s… much easier to understand computers and systems. They… function in predictable ways. People are complex, panicky, and make choices based on impulse and emotion, rather than logic.”

He paused, looking down.

“Most of the time, I thought that was just a failing I had to account for in my planning. But…”

He trailed off, his point lost. This had all been so much easier in his head.

“I have never known your plan to fail. Even when it does not work as you intended, it does not fail.”

Gruul looked over.

“You might not understand the people you plan for. But you understand what must be done. And you try to make that happen with as few people being hurt as possible. That is why Mya relies on you.”

She sighed. “So… say what it is you wanted to say, Victor. I will listen. But do not feel that you need to say anything that is not true simply to spare my feelings. I was… abrupt before. And I allowed myself to become… carried away. I did not listen to you. I should have.”

“Say what I wanted to say.”

He chuckled to himself.

“I don’t suppose you’d accept vague hand gestures and grunts in place of words, because that was about as far as I’d managed to get.”

He looked over at her, trying to gauge whether or not she understood, and then shook his head.

“Sorry, let’s try this again, with more… honesty. I find that I have come to depend on you, Gruul. You offer me a level of… comfort and stability I greatly enjoy, and you’re fantastic company to talk to, or bounce ideas off of, or just to sit and watch security feeds with.”

“You would never eat otherwise.”

“...that is only partly true.”

He winced, turning his tablet back on and pulling up a screen Gruul hadn’t seen before.

“I had an issue a few years back where I kept passing out while working, because I wasn’t eating enough. So I had some biometric sensors implanted that will send an alert to my tablet if I’m in danger of this happening again.”

He shook his head. “It’s… not something I’m proud of. But the work I’ve been doing always seemed more important.”

She nodded, “I understand. You are a driven person. And you feel that you have much to make up for. Even when you don’t.”

His tablet started going off, popping back to life as the alerts that he’d ignored started flashing, and he set the thing down, its face to the floor.

“I…” He trailed off again, closing his eyes. Gruul could see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.

“I didn’t really understand what you were hinting at when you asked if it would be a bad thing if we were… knocking boots.”

Gruul felt herself freeze, “I did not mean to imply…”

He could see her stiffening, and raised a hand.

“Do… Hosh do personal contact? I… will admit that I never learned much about your race.”

She looked at him, “Are you asking if we touch?”

He drew in a breath, holding it for a long moment.

“I was asking if it would be weird if I reached out and touched you right now, as a way of comforting you. Humans do this with… people they are close to. Not… physically close to, but emotionally. And… honestly? I don’t have a firm answer on whether or not it would be a bad thing. I was flustered in the moment, but… I’ve spent so many years just working to build a better universe for everyone, I kind of forgot to eat. Or, in this case, to spend any time finding out what a better universe for me would even look like, and who else would be there with me.”

He raised his right hand to the bridge of his nose, pinching hard as he exhaled.

“I’m bad at this.”

He paused, and then looked at the larger figure next to him.

“I like you, Gruul. I’m not quite sure how much, or what any of this means, but I want you to know that I enjoy your company very much and I’m happier with you around.”

For a long moment Gruul said nothing, her eyes simply watching his. Her tail flicked behind her back and she hoped he didn’t notice. Finally, she took a deep breath and nodded.

“I understand. You are a good man, Victor. And a good friend. And I appreciate that you care for me enough to say these things. I think that whatever world you build will be the right one. However it turns out.”

She stretched her legs, “Do not feel that you have done anything wrong. You have not. And I will say… that I enjoy your company as well. I am… hopeful that what has happened today has not damaged that in any way.”

He nodded, a smile evident at the corner of his mouth.

“Unfortunately for you, it’s going to take a bit more than an argument and a bowel-loosening roar to push me all the way away.”

He grimaced as he got to his feet, his tablet back in his hands.

“Will you come back to IC 7-0 with me? I’ve still got a ton of things to work through in the next few days, and I’ve had a few ideas that you might find… enlightening.”

He reached down to offer her a hand up.

“Of course” She accepted his hand and got to her feet, “Give me a moment to gather my things.”

Gruul turned and began to pick up her sword and tac-belt. As she did so, she thought of the question that Victor had not asked about the Hosh, the one she was glad he had not considered, as it meant that he would not be looking for the answer.

He never asked if they cried.

She gave him a small smile as she approached, “I am ready to hear about your brilliant plans.”

He pulled a second tablet out of his pocket, handing it to her.

“I thought about your request again, and figured that this might help.”

She glanced down to see that there was a program installed on it. As she opened it, words started flashing on the screen rapidly, from one to the next, and she looked over at Victor.

“It’s… designed to help you learn. You might not get it immediately, but it should help. And I figured that if you’re reading over my shoulder as I work, I can help you pick out bits and pieces as well. It’s… not the perfect lesson plan I was hoping to come up with, but it’s… something.”

Gruul stared at the screen for a moment, “It is wonderful. Thank you, Victor.”

She paused briefly and then reached up to her neck and pulled a small device off before handing it to him, “Could you turn it off? The translator program. Just for a moment. I want to… show you something. I tried to learn a few words. On my own. But I do not know if I am saying them correctly.”

Victor glanced down at the device and winced.

“Oof. This is one of the earlier models, back when they were designed so that the Hosh couldn’t actually turn them off themselves.”

His expression darkened as he glared at it.

“I can absolutely understand your frustration with this.”

She held up her hand, “I will not be able to understand your verbal response. So if I do not say this correctly, you must tell me somehow.”

Victor reached down and flicked the tiny switch that disabled the translator, and then nodded at Gruul.

She cleared her throat and then opened her mouth and spoke in a voice that was both warmer and fuller than he was used to, “Hello, Victor.”

His eyes widened with surprise, and he smiled at her, raising both hands with his thumbs up. “Hello, Gruul!”

She blinked at him and shrugged. But she did smile back.

He flicked the translator back on and handed it back over to her.

“Well, you’re able to speak clearly enough. Now we just need to work on your aural recognition, and expanding your vocabulary. This shouldn’t take too long at all.”

He paused for a moment, and then nodded as he glanced back down at his tablet.

“I swear, some of these guys couldn’t find their own ass with both hands.”

He muttered to himself as he started walking back to IC 7-0, but stopped after a few steps, looking back at her.

“Can I expect you in a bit?”

She nodded, “Of course. I will find you shortly.”

He smiled back at her, and then turned the corner, head buried back in his tablet. Gruul watched him go. It wasn’t until Victorhad turned the corner that she let her expression fall. She took a beat, adjusted her sword, and then stepped back out into the light.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 17

Spoiler

Mya POV

After leaving the audience chamber of Comptroller Mudkheson, Mya headed straight for her office to begin the laborious process of readying the base for abandonment while simultaneously prepping for the assault.

It was no easy task; she sent the start of the bug-out orders through the base-wide intranet connection and, almost immediately, one of the engineers poked their head in the door to lodge a complaint. That ended up setting the tone for the next several days; from organizing the stripping of all non-essential mechanical equipment from engineering rooms IC 1-0 to 4-9 to reworking rosters - and then reworking them again when Victor began sending her technical specialist assignments - was an uphill battle. Everyone wanted Lothar’s approval for her orders; fortunately, he responded to the messages Mya forwarded to him at least once a day and seemed to be content with letting her orders stand.

Mya at one point spent an entire day organizing for as much specialized furniture to be taken out as possible; the other bases had some, but much of it was custom-made and she would rather they had as much as possible ready and waiting if they got back from this mission with the amount of people of other species as she thought they’d pick up.

Most of this furniture consisted of the specially lengthened and reinforced bunks for the Kala'Kah and Hosh, though all the M'Pell on base were adamant that their little baskets lined with crim fur should also be taken to the other bases. Mya couldn’t even look at the things without getting a static shock, but the M'Pell seemed to regard them as some sort of full-body massage chair. Fortunately, they weren’t very big and were easy to stack, so they’d gone to the base in the Gavonne system along with twenty nonessential personnel and some of the more esoteric components from IC 6-5 (Mya wasn’t sure what they were, what they did, or who had made them - and at this point, she was too afraid to ask).

Ship after ship left under the cover of the Sarcorxian storms, bearing bulk foods, medications, equipment, furniture, and people - and returned with weapons. Fighters. Specialists. Translocationists. Elementalists. There were hard-faced veterans, grinning imps with unsettling glimmers in their eyes, a few older folk with kind faces and wicked ways with a shotgun - all in all, they amounted to less than a third of the usual population of the base, but Mya had to find room and board for them all in the midst of tearing everything useful out of the base.

Before she knew it, a week had gone by and she still hadn’t seen her father except in the briefest of passings at mealtimes. It wasn’t like she was purposefully avoiding the inevitable conversation with him, she’d just been busy. Very busy. Too busy to go find her father to give him an update on the plan that he may or may not approve of. A plan that involved most of the active resources in the Resistance he headed. A desperately vague outline of a plan that would probably see a lot of their people dead.

Mya sighed as she sent off a message asking him to please drop by her office in twenty minutes, if he had time free. She’d have preferred to see him immediately, but Victor had sent her a message earlier this morning with a technical assignment and a personal request that asked to be the one to fill said specialist in on his part in the plan.

After having heard the gossip about the fight between Victor and Carcen in the mess hall, Mya agreed.

She was now regretting that decision as her door opened and a roll of body odor preceded the body to which it was attached. Carcen looked like he hadn’t slept or bathed since Victor had knocked him down a few pegs. The bag underneath his organic eye looked like he could pack enough clothes for a week into it, and his skin had an unhealthy grayish tinge. As a stark contrast, the metal of his - still wall-eyed - ocular implant gleamed with a new, expanded casing under the snap lights that were currently lighting Mya’s office - and the actual ocular portion now had a working guidance laser in it. Apparently he’d taken Victor’s dressing-down at least somewhat to heart. Mya only hoped he’d upgraded the software as well as the hardware.

She regarded him coolly as he walked up to her desk (the thing was too big and unwieldy to get out of the base and frankly Mya wouldn’t be sad to see the last of it) and stood at something that might be called attention, if the species that called it attention lacked a spinal column. Mya let the silence stretch for several long minutes while Carcen got increasingly fidgety, and Mya finally spoke just as he opened his mouth to say something.

“Victor Cloud has assigned you to team Red Four for the upcoming assault on the United League capital shipyards. Your job,” she said, cutting off whatever response he’d been about to make to that, “is to break into the interior shipyard systems and keep security teams either completely scrambled, out of the way, or both, until the signal is given to get on to your team’s assigned ship and depart.”

Mya leaned back in her chair as he frowned in thought for a moment.

“Victor Cloud, y'said? Him’s the one what sent yuh them there orders?”

Carcen sounded doubtful, almost fearful, and Mya had to wonder what had really gone down in the mess hall as she nodded an affirmation to the question.

Carcen’s face broke into a positively fiendish grin.

“Hot damn! I knowed he’d seed he needs m’ par-tick-you-lar talents. ’M one ah th’ best, y'see,” he told Mya in a tone she immediately disliked.

“I kin get inta a system faster'n a boy kin get it up, as ’m sure ye’d know alla ‘bout,” he said, with a broad wink and a completely unsubtle once-over.

Mya gave him a look that could freeze boiling water.

“That’s not part of this discussion, nor any discussion I ever intend to have with you in the future.”

Carcen put a hand to his chest, playing at being wounded while still grinning like she’d said something funny.

“Ain’t no way t’ be, sweetcheeks. Why, I could - ”

A heavy hand landed on Carcen’s shoulder and his face went a pinched white as the sizzle of burning flesh was loud in the sudden silence.

Lothar Kaldegga - slightly early for the meeting Mya had requested, but she wasn’t about to complain - looked contemptuously at the taller man whose shoulder he gripped in a hand coated with the elemental energy of fire.

“I’m sure I didn’t hear you back talk to the coordinator of the most decisive mission in Resistance history, did I?”

His tone managed to be at once as cold as the depths of space and lightly conversational, and Carcen squeaked desperately as he shook his head no.

“And I certainly didn’t hear you proposition the head of this base, my daughter, like some common floozie, while she is executing her duties, did I?”

Carcen’s terrified gaze bounced frantically between Mya and Lothar as he turned the approximate color of old cheese and shook his head desperately, a grating whine starting in the back of his throat. Lothar released his grip with a disgusted expression and Carcen didn’t even wait to be dismissed before bolting out of the door - to the medics, if he had any sense; even in the brief instant between her father letting go and Carcen legging it, she’d seen the burned-through handprint in the material of Carcen’s shirt and the raised red skin beneath it. The sight warmed her heart, and she had to work to keep the smile that threatened to break her composure from sliding onto her face.

Her father didn’t bother watching Carcen go, and instead turned his attention to Mya.

She ducked her head a little.

“I had it handled, it’s not my first mission with him.”

She could feel his gaze sharpen.

“He’s a problem, and lucky that I was in a good mood today. You’re saying he’s been a problem before?”

He didn’t add and you didn’t take care of him?, but Mya heard it loud and clear anyway and winced internally as the warm feeling dimmed somewhat.

“No, he behaved within acceptable limits before now. I can’t put my finger on when, exactly, he became a problem, but it happened recently.”

Yeah, when he had his little throwdown with Victor, she thought. She’d never say as much to her father, though; Victor was one of his oldest friends.

Her father merely raised his eyebrow and settled into a stance that was far more professional than Carcen’s had been. If Mya didn’t know better, she’d have said he’d actually been a professional soldier at some point. As it stood, she did know better; he’d been involuntarily drafted like every other magic user was, but his power had ensured that “professional soldiering” was never required of him while he was under the United League’s thumb, and after he’d slipped that leash professionalism, was the last thing the Resistance required of its members.

Mya tapped a few holographic buttons on her tablet before spinning it around so her father could read it easily.

“In five days, four Yttarran plants will be sent on a bulk food delivery hauler directly to the shipyard. They’ll slip out and join the other Yttarran on base and prep the workers to be ready to run when we start the attack. Two days after that,” she flipped to another screen on the tablet, the plans for the smelting ship taking the place of the personnel lists on the view, “we take this ship, Heavy Is The Hand, from this waystation, which is its last stop before our target. We replace the crew, bring the ship back to this base for final loading, hop to a point with the same approach vector to the shipyards as the waystation, then we hop to the shipyards. Once we land, Victor gives M’t'fdlth the signal and they’ll use the systems here on the base to light up the shipyard’s network while our tech specialists weaken it from the inside. We’ll have ten minutes from then to the base going dark and M’t'fdlth bugging out and scuttling the base behind them - less if the United League sends ships here sooner than we anticipated. At that point, Carcen takes lead on security scrambling while the rest of the teams continue with their objectives. As soon as we touch down, Blue teams will scramble for the nearest freighters on dock. Flight records say there should be at least twenty making deliveries that day, of various kinds, and we need at least ten of them to evacuate all the workers.”

Mya paused for a moment to fiddle with the controls on her tablet, clearing the screen before bringing up the security floor plans and continuing.

“Red teams will target the capital ships; whichever ones we can’t take will go down with the station, so we’re aiming for the most complete and advanced ones currently still in drydock.”

She highlighted one of the ships on the screen.

“This is the one we’re aiming to put you on; according to what information Victor has been able to safely skim from their systems, it has upgrades to the weapons systems that should boost your output by another 16%. Each ship has docking tubes so the workers can get on and off without the use of a translocationist, and our job is to hold those entrances against whatever base security manages to get through the scrambling and get as many workers onboard as possible until we get the all-clear from the freighter teams. We undock, turn, fire, and leave immediately. Rendezvous after that is in this system,” she swiped the ship schematic aside and brought up an unremarkable system with a single yellow star in the center “which we have removed from the United League’s drone ship charting data; there’s nothing in it of value, but the United League can’t follow us there.”

Her father was quiet for several long moments after Mya finished speaking, and she let him have the time to think. When she laid it out step by step, it sounded so easy. It would, in practice, be anything but; with lives on the line, she couldn’t afford to miss any kind of feedback - especially from someone with a great deal more experience than she had.

“It sounds solid. However, I’m concerned about getting the workers off. It would be much simpler, and much faster, to simply take the ships, blow the station, and leave.”

Concern wrinkled his brow even as his voice remained neutral and he brought the shipyard schematics up on the tablet to trace a route between the freight bay and the drydocks with his forefinger.

Mya held out her hands, partially in conciliation and partially in beseechment.

“If there is a way to destroy the United League’s source of their most powerful ships and save the people they are grinding under their heel at the same time, we are morally obligated to at least try. We’re trying to get rid of the United League, not become them.”

She thought his eyes widened for an instant behind his polarized glasses before a neutral mask slid back into place. Drawing himself up, he nodded to her.

“Let’s hope that kind of idealism doesn’t get too many of our people killed,” he said with a warning in his voice before sweeping out the door.

Slumping back onto her stool (her chair had gone in the last round of furniture removals), Mya dropped her head into her hands. It would be much safer to do as Lothar said; much faster and quieter to simply run in while everything was confused from the network assaults and just fly the capital ships out of there before turning and burning. It would keep more of their own people safe.

Gruul floated across Mya’s mind, the proud Hosh neutral in her appearance but not her opinions, and weighed against her father’s disapproval of the margin for error introduced by trying to get the workers off. Gruul had lost her entire clan to the United League, but that hadn’t turned her bitter. Not in the ways that mattered. And there were a lot of her people in the shipyard; Mya owed it to them, and to Gruul, to at least try.

Resolved, Mya straightened up and pulled her tablet back towards herself. She had work to do.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 18

Spoiler

Draven POV

Thea leaned back in her seat, “So tell me again. What’s the mission brief?”

Draven sighed, his brown eyes reflecting her own, “Come on. You know I can’t. That’s why I keep telling them to put you in charge.”

She shook her head, “You can do it. You just need to slow down. Take it one piece at a time. Tell me what we’re doing here.”

Thea glanced back at her twin, his dark hair sticking up the way it always did when he fell asleep running piloting simulations. She wasn’t surprised, hers did the same, which was why she kept it pulled back. That and it was less likely to get in her way during training or combat.

Draven always made sure his translocation calculations were flawless even when the mission wasn’t as important at this one. It was a big part of why Thea knew he would be a good leader for their group, why she was glad that Mya had given him command on this one. It was also why she was making Draven run her through things before the rest of the team showed up. Altanna wasn’t so much the issue, though the hacker did seem inordinately annoyed whenever Draven looked to his sister for guidance. It was more Brix. He was a good gunner and she trusted him to cover their backs. If only he wasn’t such a spectacular asshole on top of it.

“So go ahead. Walk me through it.”

Draven shook his head, running a hand through his hair and wincing as he realized how much it was sticking up.

“You couldn’t have told me about this?”

“I absolutely could have. You could also cut it. Or pull it back. Now, go. The mission, Drav.”

He nodded, trying to pat down his hair, and opened his mouth to speak. And then the doors opened and Altanna walked in, Brix close behind.

Thea smiled at the newcomers, giving Draven just a few extra seconds to get himself together.

“You’re early.”

Altanna shot a look over her shoulder, her pink hair swinging, “Yeah well, it was either that or listen to Brix expound on the virtues of polishing your gun again.”

She sat down at her station, twisting to look at the rest of the team. The black square tattooed on her scalp was visible on her tanned skin, her hair flipped over toward her right ear. She was about a head shorter than Brix and a quarter of his weight, but any bookie would have extremely close odds on a fight between the two.

“It’s important.” Brix cast a meaningful glance toward Thea, “You know. Keeping all your equipment in working order.”

Draven snorted but covered it with a cough. Thea punched his shoulder as she stood up, “Right. As long as you’re here, I think Draven’s ready to get us started. Right, Drav?”

Draven nodded, closing his eyes for a moment to sort everything out. “So, we’ve been tasked with hijacking Heavy Is The Hand and bringing it back to Sarcorxious so that the assault teams can use it to storm the United League shipyards.”

Brix snorted.

“Yeah, yeah. We know this. Get to the good parts.”

Both Thea and Altanna glared while Draven ignored him and kept talking.

“There are four major parts to this mission. First, we’ll need to get on board the freighter as it’s refueling at the R’Cahn XXII waystation, without alerting anyone. Second, we’ll need to remove the crew.”

He glanced over at Thea.

“That one will be left up to Thea and Brix. Third, we’ll need to secure control over the ship, both mechanically and electronically, and ensure that the United League doesn’t get any indication that their freighter has been compromised. That’ll be on Altanna.”

He glanced over at the woman, and she nodded at him.

“And then, finally, I’ll jump us back to Sarcorxious through a number of pre-planned relays, and get us there before our mission cut-off time so that the assault can proceed as planned.”

Draven closed his eyes and took a long breath, steadying his nerves. He’d gotten through all of it.

“Any questions?”

“How long will we have?” Altanna’s voice snapped his eyes back open.

Draven glanced over at Thea, and he saw Altanna’s green eyes narrow.

“We have thirty-six hours from when the freighter docks with the waystation.”

Thea smiled and put a hand on Altanna’s shoulder, “Not a problem for someone with your skills. Right?”

From her spot by Altanna, Thea looked over at Brix, “What about you? Any flashes of brilliance? Meaningful insights? Actual questions?”

The burly man merely winked at her.

“Not now. But maybe you can ask me about it later, while we’re on downtime?”

Altanna rolled her eyes. Thea took two steps forward and brought her eyes level with the gunslinger’s.

“Brix. If I was on downtime with you, there wouldn’t be any time for questions.”

She raised an eyebrow at him, a faint smile on her face.

Brix grinned.

“You’re damn right there wouldn’t be.”

He reached down to one of his rifles, taking care to flex as he did so, sending ripples across his various scars and tattoos.

Thea smirked, “Why don’t you go get a head start then?”

Draven buried his face in his hands to keep from laughing out loud as Brix stood up, a shit-eating grin plastered as wide across his face as any of them had ever seen, and sauntered through the doorway into the hall. As the door closed, he finally dropped his hands, his body shaking with laughter.

“DA really bought that?”

Thea shrugged, “Seemed to.”

Altanna frowned, “DA?”

“Dumb as.” Draven nodded towards the door he’d just left through. “Dumb as Brix.”

Altanna stared for a moment and then looked back toward the door. She suddenly burst into laughter and flicked on her vid screen, “Fantastic. This might actually be more fun than I expected.”

Thea leaned over her shoulder and Altanna froze.

“Show me where we are?”

She pointed.

“Here. And the freighter is there. We get in close enough and I’ll be able to remote hack into the system. Turn off the alarms. Cameras might be an issue but I have some ideas.”

Thea flashed her a brilliant smile, “Of course you do.”

Altanna flushed a bright shade of pink at the praise. She glanced over at Draven who was watching with a bemused expression on his face.

“What?”


“Nothing. Just doing the… leadership thing and watching to make sure… things are going well?”

His face flushed, and he turned back to his own vid screen.

“I’ll be going over the coordinates if you two, uh, need anything.”

Thea walked over and squeezed his shoulder.

Leaning in, she whispered, “See? I told you. You can do this.”

She gave him a smile before heading out the door to retrieve Brix.

—

“Hoo-ee. Look at the size of the cannons on that thing.” Brix leaned in close to Altanna’s vid screen. “Guns like that and you could do some serious damage.”

“Back off, Brix.” Her voice was sharp and her expression sour at his proximity.

“Don’t you have a tool to go polish somewhere else?”

“I’ve got a tool right here.”

Altanna rolled her eyes and flicked her pink hair out of her face as Brix adjusted his firearms suggestively.

“Hey, don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it.” He paused, “Oh right. You’re…”

“Supremely uninterested. Correct.”

“Brix.”

Thea’s voice cracked through the air, and the gunslinger’s head spun quickly to face her.

“Is there a problem?”

“Nah, no problem. I was just offering to help ease some tension.”

He smiled at her.

“Same offer stands for you.”

“Save it for your downtime.”

Thea brushed past him, “We ready?”

Altanna’s fingers were flying across the keyboard.

“Cameras should be going offline in fifteen. Just getting enough of a loop to splice in while we set up something a bit more robust.”

Draven nodded.

“Okay. As soon as that’s done, I’ll transport us onto the refueling platform and we should be able to sneak aboard.”

He glanced at Thea.

“You have the uniforms?”

She nodded and hefted up the set of four maintenance overalls that nearly overfilled her arms.

“All four.”

She glanced over at Brix.

“Though none of them seemed quite large enough for him. Might be a little tight in some spots.”

Brix winked at her, and Draven struggled not to laugh. The pants were clearly too small. Translocating them onto Brix would be an utter delight.

“Just let me know when we’re good, Altanna?”

The hacker nodded.

“Three more… and done. We have a ten minute window. Let’s move.”

Draven nodded, concentrating for a second, and then everything shifted. He’d always been good at translocation. It was just math, when you got down to it. When adding, you sometimes had to carry the one, and this wasn’t much different. Except in this case, he was carrying four of them through space while also carrying four uniforms that he’d land them in when they arrived. His professors at the academy had told him that something like this was impossible to perform, as the math didn’t work. So he’d simply demonstrated by translocating the loudmouth of his class out of his pants and into the middle of the lecture hall. Draven grinned. Getting detention had been totally worth it.

The four of them arrived on the refueling platform, taking the place of the four technicians who suddenly found themselves at a bar, a full pint in front of each of them. It wouldn’t be long before they raised an alert, but Draven was hoping they’d at least take the time to finish their drinks. Should buy them a few minutes. That had been Thea’s idea, and he trusted her on it.

Altanna whistled as she inspected the uniform.

“Nice. Fits me like a glove.”

Brix winced, bracing himself on the railing.

“What are you talking about? My boys can’t breathe, and this thing is halfway up my ass.”

He glared over at Draven, who had buried himself in his tablet to hide his face.

Thea glanced over, “Could be worse. Could have been one of your rifles up there.”

Altanna grinned as she poked at the control panel in front of them.

“Door should be open in… now.”

There was a hiss of decompression and a maintenance hatch on the side of the freighter opened up.

Thea stepped forward, “Okay then. Brix, cover the back. Should give you enough time to extricate yourself.”

She then pointedly avoided looking at his face, knowing the expression he’d be making, and locked eyes with her brother.

“You good?”

Draven swallowed nervously and nodded.

“Yeah. Stay safe.”

Thea grinned at him.

“But that's no fun.”

She gave him a wink and nodded toward Altanna, “Take care of each other.”

Thea turned and climbed into the maintenance hatch, flicking the switch on the side of her gauntlets as she did. She wasn’t an elementalist, but her gauntlets were designed to make her look like one. They amplified the kinetic force of her strikes, giving her strength nearly to match that of a Kala'Kah, if she focused. And since most people immediately paused and prepared for fire or lightning when they saw her, it made closing the distance to hit them all the easier.

Altanna watched Brix climb in behind Thea before turning back to Draven, “Lead the way.”

Draven climbed into the hatch. The maintenance corridor was little more than a vent, and he quickly found himself having to crawl forward on his hands and knees. He tried not to think about Altanna’s view of him as he worked his way into the ship, turning right at the first junction. He paused for a brief moment, glancing to the left as he did, but Thea and Brix had already disappeared down that crawlspace. Altanna cleared her throat behind him, “We’re sort of on a timer here.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Draven felt his cheeks burning as he turned and crawled down the passageway, and was glad that she was behind him and couldn’t see it. After a few minutes, Altanna put a hand on his heel and Draven came to a halt.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Just give me a… got it.”

Ahead of them, a fan slowed down.

“We have a minute before that’ll kick back on. We need to get past the fan and then turn right.”

Draven nodded and then heard her continue.

“And Draven? Your ears turn red when you blush, you know? Just saying. Team leader.”

He nearly smacked his head into the shaft in surprise, and heard her laugh behind him. Draven kept moving forward, trying to focus on where he was going and not on Altanna’s teasing. He came to the fan in a few seconds and squeezed past it.

Altanna was right behind him, and a few seconds after she cleared the fan, it started back up. She smiled at it.

“Shouldn’t even affect the airflow too much. Let’s keep moving.”

They wound through the passages for another few minutes, and finally she touched his heel again. They were in front of a vent that opened up into a room with a number of computer terminals in it. Draven didn’t recognize the systems, but Altanna nodded with satisfaction.

“We’re at the tertiary hub. Should be able to gain complete access from here, and it doesn’t have any permanent staff listed.”

She looked at him.

“Can you get us through the grate without a sound?”

Draven nodded and held out a hand for her to take. Altanna looked at it and he felt himself flush again.

“It’s easier if we’re connected.”

“Connected, huh?”

An impish grin played across her face, but she took his hand before he turned any redder. Draven concentrated for a moment, and then they were on the floor of the room. Altanna stood up, brushing her uniform off.

“Nice. Just keep an eye on the door for me, will you?”

Draven moved to the door as she plugged into a terminal and started working. The hallway was clear, and he didn’t hear any sounds from it. Hopefully Thea and Brix hadn’t had any difficulties. Thea knew what she was doing, much more than he did, but that didn’t mean he didn’t worry about her. She was older than him by seven and a half minutes, though sometimes it felt like years.

Altanna glanced over at Draven and shook her head, “Please tell me you’re not wishing your sister was here.”

Draven spun around, blinking at the sudden question.

“Why? Are you?”

He knew it was a mistake as soon as he said it. Altanna whipped around, “Excuse me?”

Draven raised his hands, “Sorry, I just– I mean- you two- get along. And I just… I mean, I think it’s good. You know?”

He wondered what shade of red his ears were currently.

Altanna blinked at him, “I’m… not sure what you think you’re saying. So, I am going to assume that this is a brief moment of psychosis brought on by extended exposure to Brix. I’m going to let it go. This time.”

She looked back at her terminal, shaking her head and muttering to herself.

Draven exhaled slowly, trying to calm himself down. “Good job. Real smooth. Nice and supportive brother you are,” he muttered under his breath.

“You say something?” Altanna’s voice sliced through the air so sharply, he expected it to cut his cheek open.

“Just making sure the hall is clear.”

“Mhmm.”

She unplugged her terminal.

“I’ve got control of the systems and disabled all outgoing communications. Any incoming ones will be routed to my terminal and then automatically responded to.”

She glanced back at the terminal, a look of irritation on her face.

“It’s an older system, so I’d thought the mechanical controls would be tied in, but they must have retrofitted it up to spec some time in the last six months. We’re going to have to go to Engineering for mechanical control.”

“Engineering?”

Draven thought back to the ship layout in his mind.

“That’s on the other end of the ship!”

“Yeah. And it’s where your sister probably is right about now, so we’ll both get what we need.”

She glared at him.

“We can either go back through the vents or try our luck in the halls. Your call, team leader.”

Draven looked up at the vent, and then out at the hall. The vent was safer, but the halls would take half as long. And Thea and Brix should have secured those first. He sighed.

“Halls. We’ll go through the halls. As you said, we’re on the clock.”

“Mhmm.”

Altanna flicked a holographic control on her tablet and the door unlatched.

“After you.”

Draven took one look through the crack between door and frame before moving out into the hallway. It was just as quiet as before, though he was afraid the sound of his heartbeat was echoing through the halls. Altanna gave him a look from the doorway, and then rolled her eyes and started walking.

“We’re wearing uniforms, Draven. Just act like you belong.”

Draven winced, falling into step beside her. The trip through the halls was uneventful, though every time they passed a door, he felt his heart stop for a moment. But Thea and Brix had done an excellent job. There was only one sign that they’d even been through the halls ahead of them, as he saw when they rounded one corner and found a scorch mark and a large dent just below head height in one of the wall panels. Draven recognized the impact. Thea had left more than one in the walls over the years, especially since he’d jury-rigged those kinetic gauntlets for her. He just hoped she was okay.

“Shit.”

Altanna sounded a mixture of impressed and worried as she hissed out the curse. Draven looked over and saw that Altanna’s eyes were locked on the scorch mark. They flicked over to him, and for a brief moment, he would have sworn he saw fear in her eyes, but the mask of indifference and annoyance was back up before he could even react.

“Let’s keep moving.”

Draven quickened his pace, drawing even with her, “She’s fine. You know that, right?”

“What? Is this some twin intuition bullshit?”

He smirked, “Partly. Also, I’m pretty certain that she would let Brix get shot before herself. Only because… well, let’s face it. He would totally step in the way.”

She smirked.

“DA, huh.”

Draven shrugged, “It seemed to fit. I mean, the way he keeps going after her when she’s clearly not even interested.”

Altanna looked back down at her tablet, her expression carefully neutral.

“Yeah, sure. Left.”

They rounded the corner, and found the doorway to engineering open already. Altanna paused, her head cocked.

“Yeah, that’s not good. Door gets left open for more than a minute, alert goes out to the bridge.”

Draven pushed up to the doorway and looked inside. The door was halfway into the room, a fist-sized dent in the middle of it, and the engineers were huddled in the corner, covered by Brix. He had a rifle in his hands that was absolutely compensating for something, but for once he seemed alert, his eyes focused on the walkway above. Draven couldn’t see Thea, but knew she’d at least entered the room. He scanned the walkway above frantically, trying to catch sight of her, and then there was a yell, and a few shots, and a body landed in the middle of the room with a sickening thud.

“Four up here!”

Thea’s voice rang out, though Draven still couldn’t find her in the room. Brix shifted his weight, pulling a pistol out of his belt and throwing it over towards the doorway. Draven caught it, barely, and then motioned for Altanna to move to the wall on the other side of the door. A few more shots rang out, and then there was a yell and a thump of fist hitting flesh.

“Three!”

Brix turned to the engineers and barked at them.

“Stay here! The door is covered. You move, he’ll shoot.”

His eyes locked with Draven, and the translocationist swallowed, knowing that order was for him as much as for them.

Altanna peeked into the room, “Speaking of the door. What part of ‘shut the door behind you so the alarm doesn’t go off’ wasn’t clear?”

Her fingers were flying across the tablet in her hands.

“We have about five minutes to clean this up and get up to the bridge before they send out a signal.”

“Sorry!”

Thea’s voice rang out from above, and another yelp was promptly cut off.

“Hand got forced a little bit here.”

“Looks like you did the forcing.”

Draven caught a flash of movement on the walkway above him and fired off a shot. It went wide, but Brix reacted almost immediately, putting another shot up there that landed clean in the middle of the security guy’s head. There was a brief scuffle, and then a large, distorted form came tumbling off the balcony above. It landed heavily, and then half of it rolled off to reveal another dead security guy. Thea got to her feet quickly, breathing heavily, the bruises on her hands already beginning to swell.

“One more. Got into the access corridor above.”

She looked over at Altanna.

“Lock him in. I saw code panels.”

“Got it.”

The hacker nodded, and then smiled.

“He’s got enough air for twenty minutes in there, but there’s no way he’s getting out unless he has a cutting torch with him.”

“Good.”

Thea looked at her brother.

“Bridge?”

Draven nodded.

“Lead the way.”

Thea shook her head, “Nope. You.”

Brix growled at the engineers.

“Ship exits are locked. You stay here, you get to live. You try and be a hero…”

Thea crouched down next to the bravest-looking engineer.

“Don’t make me do to you what I did to them.”

She smiled sweetly and glanced over at the bodies behind her.

“You’re smarter. Right?”

The engineer nodded, clearly terrified, and Thea stood back up, looking at Draven.

“Right.” He glanced over at the hacker.

“Fastest way there?”

“Straight for three corridors, left, and then straight until you reach it.”

“Typical.” Thea rubbed at one of her hands, wincing slightly.

“Designed for efficiency, not for protection. Door probably won’t even be reinforced.”

The four of them started moving, with Brix pulling up the rear. There weren’t any surprises on the way to the bridge, and the bridge doors weren’t even closed when they arrived.

“Something’s wrong.” Altanna paused, pressing herself into a doorway for cover.

“That door shouldn’t be open for anything other than senior personnel entering or exiting.”

“Drav, stay here. Keep her covered.”

Thea moved up to the doorway cautiously, and then peeked her head in.

“Empty. Escape pods?”

Altanna shook her head.

“Locked those down before we even boarded, had the engines fuse themselves. They’re closets now.”

“Maintenance access?”

“Not to the bridge, they’re not that stupid.”

Brix cursed as a round caught him in the shoulder.

“Fuckin’ behind us!”

He fired off a few shots as he ducked into a side hallway. Several security guys emerged from rooms behind the group, and the hallway immediately filled with gunfire. Thea pushed Draven into the room that Altanna had ducked into, and then occupied the doorway in front of him.

“Get me behind them.”

“What? No!”

He shook his head.

“I don’t have a clear line, and I haven’t…”

“Do it, Drav.”

She put a hand on his forearm. “You don’t need the math. Just feel it.”

“Are you mental? Translocating to a spot you can’t see…” Altanna’s eyes were wide.

Thea cupped his face in her hands, bringing her forehead to touch his own.

“Come on. You can do it. Just breathe.”

Draven gulped, and then closed his eyes and concentrated. In a blink, Thea was gone. He opened them to see Altanna staring at him.

“What the hell did you just do?”

A yell and a thud cut her off, and the gunfire slowed as the forces suddenly had to contend with a combatant well within their perimeter. Brix emerged from the hallway, his bullets catching many of the security guys in the back as they turned, the gunfight ending nearly as quickly as it had begun. Bodies littered the hall and Thea emerged from the carnage, dragging a man with a broken nose and Captain’s stripes into the room with Altanna.

“Thanks, Drav.”

“Are you serious?” Altanna looked between the two of them.

“You just moved her down three hallways without line of sight?”

Draven nodded, and she shook her head.

“You’re both bloody mental.”

Thea grinned at her brother, “Told you you could do this.”

Brix entered the room, his left hand pressed against his shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah. Nice move, kid. Now let’s get this ship moving so I can get someone to stitch this stupid canyon in my arm up.”

They moved into the bridge, Draven keeping his focus from drifting back to the hallway behind them. His sister was brutally efficient when she needed to be, and he’d learned a long time ago that he didn’t have the same strong stomach as she did. But then, that had always been the way; Thea making things safe for him while he pretended to be brave.

The bridge was older than he’d expected, but the translocationist controls were up to spec. Draven slipped into them, pulling up a system map, and glanced over at Altanna.

“Are we clean?”

She looked up from her tablet, which she’d already jacked into a nearby terminal.

“Yeah. Alarm made it here, but they couldn’t get a signal out. Looks like they set up the ambush after they realized how trapped they were.”

“Good.”

He looked over at Thea.

“Take her back to Engineering? She needs mechanical control. We couldn’t get it remotely.”

His sister smiled at him, threw up an exaggerated salute, and led Altanna back out of the bridge.

Brix moved up to sit in the captain’s chair, pulling out a wad of combat gel and starting to shove it into his wound.

“All right, kid. Not bad.”

“Thanks.”

Draven was already plotting the route they’d take the freighter on, and was glad that the gunslinger couldn’t see his face, because he was sure it had flushed again.

“Thank you for covering my sister.”

“You kidding? She’s a firestorm.” He whistled.

“Probably could have handled it all herself if she wanted. Gonna take a real man to tame that one.”

Draven left that one unanswered, shaking his head in amusement. DA indeed.

Then a notification flashed up on his terminal, and he triggered it to see Altanna’s face on his screen.

“Systems sorted, team leader. Ready for transport on your mark.”

Draven saw her smirk as he felt the blood rush to his ears again, and he toggled the screen back to the coordinates.

“We jump in three, two, one…”

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 19

Spoiler

Gruul POV

Gruul leaned against the wall, her eyes shut, listening to the words around her. She had switched off her translator (thankfully, Victor had given her an upgraded version of her outmoded technology) and was now swimming in a sea of voices.

Victor had mentioned increasing her aural recognition abilities, and it seemed to Gruul that there was no more efficient way to go about doing this than total immersion. Every day, she made a point to go somewhere and just… listen. To try and find a foothold among the foreign syllables to pull herself up with. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not even to Victor. Though, to be honest, she found herself mentioning less and less to him lately.

Gruul knew she was avoiding him. She wasn’t proud of the fact, but there it was. It wasn’t that she was abandoning him. Not exactly. They still spent time together, still did all the things they had always done. But then she would find an excuse to duck out early. Or stay away a little longer. Combat training. Weapons maintenance. Or even just that her communications link hadn’t alerted her. That last one had given Victor something to do for half an hour before he pronounced the programming complete and utter shit.

If he had asked if she was avoiding him, Gruul would have said no. It would have only been a half lie. The assault was imminent. She did need to practice her swordswork, that was accurate enough. Mya had brought her on for a reason, so she said, and Gruul was painfully aware that pretty much no one else on this entire base actually thought it was a good one. So this was a chance to make them see. And it was a chance to help them understand that Mya was a far more capable leader than her father.

Gruul would not be the reason she failed.

Mya had been receptive to the idea. When Gruul had asked to be assigned to their command group as a fighter, the younger woman had simply nodded and accepted her. Gruul thought she had seen a strange look flash over Victor’s face but she wasn’t sure what. Another example of her inability to read humans.

Battle tactics were far simpler.

It had started innocently enough; Victor asking her to look over a proposal, glance over a display, read a map he had just pulled up. He would question her as to her opinion on things, her take on a hypothetical scenario, and she would answer, thinking nothing more of it. And then one day she found out that her idle suggestion had grown into a complete battle plan that would be implemented on the orders of one Victor Cloud. She stopped talking after that.

It wasn’t her place. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. While Mya and Victor, and likely even Lothar, seemed to respect her experience as a warrior and trusted her to cover their backs in any situation, the vast majority of the rest of the resistance still viewed her as a creature in the zoo. A seven foot tall lizard. And no one listens to the animals anyway.

So Gruul had turned her attention to helping support Mya and Victor, to proving her worth in other ways. But even that hadn’t gone as she intended. Maybe that was why she felt herself pulling away.

I like you, Gruul. I’m not quite sure how much, or what any of this means…

Truthfully, she had been aware of the rumors for much longer than she had let on. She knew that when other people thought of her, they immediately thought of him too. She knew that some of them laughed when they did so. The absurdity of it. The sheer audacity. But isn’t it funny? The lizard and the absent minded professor? She had heard the jokes too. She heard them even more now. She could understand them in two languages now.

It hadn’t bothered her. Much. The jokes, the looks, the constant awareness that very few people on the base even knew that she was a warrior or could even begin to comprehend what she could do with a sword and an opponent. To be fair, she hadn’t shown them. But still, the majority of the resistance thought of her as Victor’s… something. The level of their relationship seemed directly proportional to how one viewed aliens and their place in the universe. And for a while, she was able to ignore the voices. To push away the chatter and just get on with being part of Mya’s Resistance. To simply be Victor’s friend and portable cover.

But things change. Sometimes, when you’re not even looking.

Gruul had given up on hope. Years spent alone, the last of her clan, enslaved and cast out as nothing more than cosmic refuse, had taught her that hope was for the people who had futures. She had accepted her lot and was prepared to surrender to it. And then the world changed. She was freed. She was found. And a young woman with an earnest face had learned her name and used it as she asked her to come along on an insane rescue mission to save Lothar Kaldegga. His name had meant nothing to Gruul. Her own had meant everything.

So she went. She went and fought and helped secure Mya’s father. And somewhere along the way, she found a soul that seemed to reflect her own in unexpected places. This maddening combination of hesitation and barbed comments. A man more at home at a computer terminal than among his own kind. A man who was brilliant but saw himself as a failure because of the downfall of others. And somewhere, deep inside, in a place she had thought was lost, the beginnings of a connection started to form. She had wondered what it would be.

Now she knew.

If he had asked her if she was avoiding him, Gruul would have fixed Victor with a look and told him no. But it would have only been half the truth. Because, while she wasn’t proud of it, she was. She was stretching the bond, seeing how far away she could move before it snapped. She knew that everyone thought of her in terms of him. But now she knew that he didn’t.

I like you, Gruul. I’m not quite sure how much…

It hadn’t been unexpected. But it had still been… more painful than she would ever admit.

Gruul heard approaching heart beats, a familiar rhythm closing in. She opened her eyes and straightened, turning the translator back on as she did so. Mya, Lothar, and Victor were coming down the hall. She adjusted her sword and checked her armor.

Time to begin.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 20

Spoiler

Mya POV

Mya consciously kept her hands still as the shipyard loomed larger and larger in the front viewport.

They'd been hailed on entry to the system, and, thanks to some diligent hacking on Victor's part, had managed to give the appropriate passcodes without being shot to pieces. Still, if the shipyard had even the slightest hint that they weren't who they claimed to be, it would take but a fraction of the firepower she could see dotted along the flanks of the station to reduce them all down to space dust fine enough to be indistinguishable from the stuff already spinning lazily around the pulsar at the heart of the system.

The shipyard itself was enormous, dwarfing every space station and orbital base Mya had ever seen in her life. Two "wings" spread out from the gaping maw of the central landing pad and control center, and a siphon stretched from that central section towards the star below it. Mya could see the energies swirling around the siphon, the polarization of the viewscreen giving her an almost idyllic view of the maelstrom. Each wing had a number of enormous doors, each set marking a bay that would eventually disgorge a capital ship; three on one side, four on the other. Mya knew from the plans that the rearward side would have doors set mirror to this one, allowing for fourteen massive construction bays to fit within the smallest amount of space possible.

Intellectually, Mya could appreciate the sheer amount of time, effort, and resources that had gone into the thing; even more so, considering what they were planning on doing with it. Physically, she ached to have some kind of control over their approach; the idea of being helpless in the face of the station had her teeth on edge. As much as she wished to be, however, Mya wasn't in the pilot's seat for now - as one of the few who could possibly fly a capital ship, she needed to stay fresh. The thought made her clench her fists reflexively; the problem was that, until you tried to translocate a certain size of ship, you didn't actually know if you could do it or not.

And Mya had never tried to translocate a ship the size of a Capital warship.

If she tried, and failed, her father -

Mya stood up abruptly from her seat on the bridge and turned on her heel to walk back towards the cargo compartment, fists clasped tight enough at her sides that she could feel her fingernails digging into her skin. She would translocate the ship. That's all there was to it. Failure wasn't an option, so she would simply not fail.

Only Gruul noticed her leaving the bridge; Victor was too caught up in the opening stages of cracking the network - port sniffing or something - while simultaneously keeping the traffic disguised as routine maintenance checks, and her father only had eyes for the station. Gruul's cool gaze followed her out, but the much larger Hosh didn't stop her or alert the others - a fact for which Mya was profoundly grateful. She didn't want to disturb Victor in his work, and her father would likely demand she stay to oversee matters.

Slipping down the scant corridors between the bridge and the cargo section of the ship was the work of a few moments, and Mya paused just for an instant to gather herself before she walked into the large cargo space. Meant to haul several hundred tons of refined metal, the space was positively cavernous for the hundred-odd people gathered inside of it, and yet the room managed to feel unbelievably close. Tension crackled in the air - not literally, as she'd given the orders for all elementalists to remove their bracers and other focuses until after they'd landed so no unusual signals would ping the shipyard sensors - and the muttered conversations between teammates did nothing to ease the feeling.

Of course, all the muttered conversations came to a screeching halt when Mya walked in, but after a shake of her head to the room at large, conversation resumed - albeit more quietly. Mya looked around, taking stock of the people she'd assembled. Here was Draven's team, all four heads bent over a tablet that showed the interior security set up of the station - Mya had only distributed that file after their current ship had been brought back to base, on Victor's suggestion. Any sooner, and they would have risked it leaking and tipping their hand.

Over near one of the struts was the team Stumpy was on, the big man towering over everyone else in the group like some form of strange beach umbrella. In the back was Carcen's team, the man himself contriving to skulk and sulk at the same time, and very determinedly not look in Mya's direction.

Mya started walking around the cargo hold, working her way clockwise around the room. It wasn't much - a word here, some quiet reassurance there, a quick handshake or a slap on the back. Small, probably meaningless gestures - but they made her feel better about not being the one piloting. It was something tangible she could do here and now, and at least a few people she talked to seemed to appreciate it. She'd never heard of her father doing such things, but he often had other things to be doing that were more important - which was fine, she could do this much.

Her thoughts were interrupted when all five of the Kala'Kah stepped in front of her, arranged loosely in a wedge-shaped formation. They'd each been assigned to different Gold teams - their combat expertise was well-known, which meant in turn that putting them all together would make the group as a whole vulnerable to any specifically anti-Kala'Kah techniques. Mya had made sure to give them people who could cover their backs - but they'd gathered up to speak to her all together. Toron'Yfer, Toron'Mkesh, Toron'Seval, Toron'Kevah, and Toron'Etal - all of them on the purple spectrum for Kala'Kah, with Toron'Mkesh's light mauve hide being the palest of all of them.

Mya waited for a long moment for them to speak, before realizing with a start they were waiting on her to speak first. She drew herself up and gave them the best approximation she could of Lone Warrior To Group - the best she could without injuring herself, anyway - and nodded to Toron'Seval who stood at the front of the group as the most honorable one among them. To her surprise, he - and the rest of the Kala'Kah - returned her salute with one she'd never seen directed at a human: Subordinate To Honored Commander.

She blinked, taken aback.

"Do the warriors of the Kala'Kah stand ready?" she asked, mostly out of a lack of anything else to say. It was, honestly, something she'd heard in an old historical vid once.

Still, the Kala'Kah seemed to appreciate it; Toron'Etal's ears pricked forward and Toron'Yfer's tail curled just a bit. It was Toron'Seval who answered her, though, as was right for the foremost in the group.

"The warriors of the Kala'Kah stand ready and willing to face down those without honor."

He took a deep breath and stood a little straighter before closing the last few steps between himself and Mya. He extended his upper right hand towards her, and she had to blink before taking it; she didn't know any Kala'Kah nonverbals that required contact - especially not with just the one arm.

He shifted her grip a little, taking her forearm and forcing her to transfer her grip to his wrist before he pumped their joined hands up and down once before releasing her and taking a step back.

"I take my leave of thee; may the time ahead bring great honor."

So saying, he turned and stalked back to his team in that sinuous way only a Kala'Kah could manage.

Mya didn't have time to process what Toron'Seval had done, because it was Toron'Etal's turn to do the exact same thing. Four more handshakes, four more phrases of farewell and well-wishing. By the time the last - Toron'Mkesh - had completed the ritual, Mya's brain had managed to catch up with the sequence of events. She wasn't sure where the Kala'Kah had picked up handshaking as a human gesture of farewell - though the forearm clasp was a very old tradition - but their words had left her feeling cold. To have all five Kala'Kah take formal leave on this mission left a cold knot in her gut and questions buzzing around in her head. Had she made the right decision? Would the Kala'Kah have been better assigned to a single group? Had she missed something on the security plans? Did -

Her thoughts were pulled out of their frantic downward spiral when a loud tone played in her ear. Wincing, she slapped at the comm-bud making the noise and the whining cut off. No channel opened - the characteristic hiss of static was absent - but a cheerful voice did pipe up unexpectedly.

"Look down!"

Mya looked down to see four M'Pell bouncing gently at her feet, each one slightly smaller than a softball. M'k'qlk, M'k'tch, M't'ptk, and M'r'nlt; she could only pick out M'k'tch from the other three by the chips in their outer skin from where they'd come off the worse in an encounter with a faulty door. The other three she knew because she'd approved Victor's personnel assignments.

"Don't worry about those silly cats. They're just thinking they're not going to come back! And maybe they aren't, but that's okay. We'll all see the new day when the United League falls."

Mya couldn't figure out which one of them was talking to her - she wasn't sure if the M'Pell simply couldn't be bothered to change the text-to-speech voice they'd found on the computers, or if they just thought they were being hilarious by all speaking with one voice - but she knelt down to address them all anyway.

"Don't call them that, even if it is a more amusing word to say. And we all have our ways of dealing with what's coming. How are you four holding up?"

M'k'tch's lights changed from sickly yellow to copper-tarnished green for a few moments, letting Mya know exactly which one of them had made the tactless "cats" comment, before her communicator buzzed with the voice program the M'Pell used.

"Yes, yes, many apologies. It will not happen in the future. What will happen in the future is… fun!"

All four of the M'Pell flashed with brilliant yellow luminescence and bounced even higher, and Mya laughed as she stood. All four of these M'Pell had gotten into trouble before for what they thought were very minor games played with the network back on the base, and the chance to have an unrestricted go at human computer systems had had them flashing with glee when Victor had given them their assignments. Mya herself was a little doubtful about putting them on the opposite wing of the shipyard - Carcen’s wing - but Victor wouldn't need the help and it was each to where they could best serve.

Brushing her knees free of dust, Mya took one last look around the cargo bay. The tension had eased somewhat in the air, becoming more focused - less like an explosion waiting to happen and more like a lightning bolt ready to be loosed. Oddly satisfied, she turned to head back to the bridge.

Walking onto the bridge, on the other hand, was like plunging into an ice cold pond. They were on final approach now, the gaping maw of the cargo hangar looking like some sort of awful creature that was preparing to swallow them whole, and for an instant, mindless panic gripped Mya. Who were they, to challenge anything that created an edifice of this scale?

The order to abandon the mission was on the tip of her tongue when she noticed Gruul looking at her intently. Sucking in a deep breath and letting it out slowly, Mya reminded herself why they were here and what was at stake, beyond their own lives. As the stars winked out all around them, occluded by the interior of the station and the closing bay doors, she straightened up and set her jaw, giving Gruul a slow nod.

She’d been inclined at first to allot another gold support squad with Gruul at the head - the proud Hosh was nearly as good a warrior and leader as the Kala’Kah who’d been trained all their lives for it, but then Gruul herself had specifically requested to be assigned to the command squad as their fourth member and second combat support. Mya had acquiesced after only a token argument. She remembered exactly how much damage Gruul could do with her sword from their mission together to rescue Lothar, and Mya felt obscurely comforted by her presence now.

As the bay doors finished closing behind them, and the viewscreen filled with the fog of atmospheric gasses being pumped into the berth, Mya took a deep breath and gave Victor the nod.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 21

Spoiler

Victor POV

As soon as their allocated translocationist dropped them into CP 1919, Victor's screen lit up like a fireworks display with hundreds upon hundreds of network calls, layers of antivirus programs and firewalls, and a heavily encrypted trunk connection to the ISCS. If Victor had had any doubts that they were headed for the right place, this kind of activity would have put them to rest immediately - never mind the frankly mind-bogglingly-large station looming up out of the stellar plasma cloud like a particularly toxic fungus.

Fortunately, he'd calculated the margin for error to be less than 3% and had come with the best pre-loaded software he had. Victor's hands flew across the keyboard as he carefully redirected the automatic connection attempts by the shipyard network. Most of them he simply rerouted into the shell he'd made of the freighter's main computer - one carefully scrubbed of all traces of the Resistance’s presence. An automated routine started scanning the incoming signals, analyzing them for weak spots and active entry points, while another monitored the handshake between the shell and the station. The few signals that he did not shunt into the shell were carefully fed into one of his more specialized programs; while feeding the initiating system exactly the data it expected, the program would also start sneaking packets with the acknowledgement signals that were, separately, harmless, but when a critical mass of them accumulated on the target system, a simple radio signal would be enough to set off what for a normal system would be a devastating virus.

The whistle of the communications array was enough to make everyone on the bridge freeze for one startled second. They'd been expecting it, of course; in addition to the network security protocols, the shipyard also employed live security personnel and a randomized password generation system that would make a supercomputer weep at trying to guess the correct password for the day and ship. Fortunately, Victor had come prepared; while the password was always a random assortment of letters, numbers, and symbols, they were always human letters, numbers, and symbols. His signal sniffer managed to separate out the thread that was coming along the communications line and follow it back to the repository where the authentication protocols would test the provided password against the one it would be expecting; if any of the alien languages had been included, the backtrace would have been impossible.

As it stood, it was merely difficult.

And Victor was one of the best.

"Password." The voice was just the slightest bit buzzy, automated, and exactly what Victor had hoped to hear. With a human, he'd never get away with this trick - the sampled voice was too robotic, with not enough difference in the tonality. It always sounded like the person they'd sampled from was a brain-dead zombie, and that would set all kinds of alarms off.

If it was used on a human.

Victor keyed up his program and initiated it with the password he'd grabbed from the shipyard itself not twenty seconds earlier. "Z-Z-H(R-J^K-8-8&LPN~FDG-Y%A_A-PLZ-T-T-*\)*-U-L-#-NZT." The sampled voice of the original captain of the freighter fed back down the channel to the shipyard, and tension crackled over the bridge. If this didn't work, they'd be atomized before they could even begin to contemplate jumping out of the system. The seconds stretched like taffy; one, two, thr-

"Password accepted. Please dock at portside berth 27."

The line cut off and everyone on the bridge started to breathe again. Not that Victor was idle in his relief; with the handshakes cleared and communication protocols established, he now had heavily fettered access to the shipyard systems. They were still outside of the firewalls proper - big, intimidating edifices full of tricks, traps, and snares for the unwary that he could probably hack manually if he had to, but that would take far too long for their plan - and would remain so until they'd docked properly and given up control of their "ship" to the main systems of the station itself. That hardline access would give the Resistance the opening they needed to crack the firewalls enough to let M’t'fdlth in to wreak absolute havoc.

Victor spent a brief minute wishing that the little bouncy ball of an alien was there with him. M’t'fdlth was probably the best coding partner he'd ever had, able to keep up with him in terms of actual coding speed even if they lacked the intimate knowledge of how humans worked, and that gave Victor an edge in hacking United League systems. Plus the alien's sense of humor was surprisingly dry, the invariant voice of the speech program they used rendering them deadpan in the best of ways. And it really helped to have a partner to bounce ideas off of whenever he got stuck on something - not that there'd be time for that during this mission; microseconds were the space between life and death here - but he could wish.

Victor grimaced as one of his programs was quarantined by an antivirus sweep and he began altering registries to make it look like a false flag. While he was wishing, why not wish for root access to the station systems? It'd be more useful in the short run. He huffed a breath as the quarantined program was deleted and all the progress it had made reset; that would put him back thirty seconds or more. Docking access could not come soon enough to suit him, though the danger would increase exponentially when they were enfolded within the bowels of the station.

Still, there was a great deal Victor could do in the meantime, and he didn't intend to waste any second of access. There was too much riding on him and his ability to control and confound the security systems on the station; even partial restoration of systems to shipyard personnel could be disastrous. He'd had too many people die on his watch to rest on his laurels for even a moment, and his fingers once again flew over the keyboard as he initiated a number of sneaky programs to piggyback on the limited connection to the network. They would begin to map the system from inside and store it for him to access and forward once the hardline connection was established.

Victor noticed, distantly, when Mya stood up abruptly from where she was sitting and stalked off, but a covert glance at Gruul netted him a subtle shake of the Hosh's head; whatever had set Mya off wasn't something he had to deal with, then. Victor gave a small nod back and returned most of his attention to the console in front of him.

He waited until the doors to the bridge had wooshed closed before speaking quietly.

"Think she'll be alright?"

Gruul moved from where she'd been leaning on a nearby bulkhead to lean instead on the communications console next to the workstation he was using.

"The waiting before a mission begins is… difficult. Doing something will aid her concentration for what is to come, even if it is as simple as walking."

Her voice was as measured and matched his in volume. If she herself was nervous, it didn't show, and Victor decided not to pry further. He simply nodded and returned his attention to his console.

Program after program blossomed under his fingertips - most of them he'd prepared beforehand, but several had to be compiled on the fly to better disguise themselves in the structure of the coding already present on the station. As the station loomed larger and larger in the forward viewscreen, Victor's access to the shipyards increased as well. It wasn't just the fact that proximity to the shipyard improved signal strength, though that was part of it; several of the programs he'd instantiated on the United League's servers were slowly chipping open more access ports for him to use, allotting more bandwidth to his requests, and misrepresenting the increased network traffic simply as solar activity.

In no time at all, it seemed like they were on final approach, and while Victor's ears heard the bridge door whoosh open and closed again, his attention was entirely on maintaining the virtual shell he'd set up to mimic the Hand's actual computer. Getting this close to the station had increased the number of queries to it by several orders of magnitude, and he was having to constantly load balance between resources devoted to that shell and the ones he'd set on the shipyard itself. Fortunately, one of his programs had unlocked a cache of logs of connections to other ships that had docked here within the last 48 hours, and he was able to manipulate the state of the virtual machine to match the expectations of the station crew.

Five minutes to docking, and the pinpricks of light that represented other stars were winking out around them. The connection was nearly a torrent now, still heavily shackled and monitored but much better than he'd hoped to have at this stage. Three minutes to docking, and the doors were closing behind them. Two minutes to docking, and the lights of a docking cradle almost a third of the distance across the hangar turned on. One minute to docking, and the pilot was guiding them in.

The gentle thunks of docking equipment echoed through the hull, and all the hair on the back of Victor's neck stood on end. He'd been expecting it, but this was the first ship he'd ever been on that had actually docked somewhere; normal "docking" was simply a matter of setting up a synchronous orbit at an allotted speed and distance and translocating to your destination. This felt more solid, somehow, more final - almost irrevocable, though that was likely just his imagination. Ships came and went from here all the time, after all.

He didn't have the luxury of time to indulge his nerves, however; the hiss of atmospheric gasses being pumped into their docking cradle was almost lost in the silent datastorm that poured onto his workstation. Whatever automated systems had engaged the docking clamps had also connected the main data cabling to the shipyard systems. The connection was blinkered, fettered, and monitored, and an open invitation Victor didn't bother to resist. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mya nod, and gave her a nod in return.

Showtime.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 22

Spoiler

Victor breathed out slowly through his nose as his eyes stayed glued to the mirrored camera feed he'd managed to get up in one corner of his workstation.

Behind him he could hear Lothar pacing, and he knew if he turned around he'd see the man stalking up and down the far side of the bridge. The plans they'd gotten for the shipyard hadn't indicated how much clutter there was in the huge hangar they'd landed in, and Blue Seven was taking longer than expected to make their way to a hard mainframe access point.

In addition to the enormous berths designed to allow cargo ships of all sizes and configurations to dock and undock without having to pump atmosphere to the whole bay every time, there were also almost-labyrinthine stacks of cargo containers. Bundles of girders were piled in some arcanely haphazard fashion next to enormous crates of ludicrously small logic circuits, while plumbing fixtures were stacked six-high near complex engine pieces so covered in grease, it was hard to tell where their attachment points were, and all manner of other things both large and small turned the hangar into a maze.

On the one hand, it made it much easier for Blue Seven to sneak around undetected, even with Victor's worm in the security systems temporarily disabling facial recognition sequences on the cameras. On the other hand...

"Weren't they supposed to be done by now?"

The grumble was low, yet still perfectly audible across the bridge. Victor didn't turn at the sound, and a moment later he heard Mya start murmuring to her father.

Lothar had been getting increasingly edgy as the minutes ticked by, his pacing starting almost as soon as they'd landed. He wasn't a patient man, and even the few minutes more it was taking Blue Seven to reach their objective were a few minutes too many. Fortunately, Mya had taken it upon herself to ride herd on him, an endeavor Victor remembered trying in times past without fondness; once Lothar got to a location, he wasn't content to wait and tended to rush in, flames burning, before everything else was ready. Too many times he'd gone on ahead and left Victor to pick up the broken bodies of the Resistance members who'd tried to follow him, only for the whole mission to go up in smoke once he reached something he couldn't handle alone and didn't have any back-up left to support him.

No, Victor didn't miss those days.

Victor blanked a portion of his screen on the opposite side from the camera feed and used the black glass as a mirror to take a covert look at the other side of the bridge. Both Kaldeggas were over there now, conversing in voices too low to carry - to his human ears, anyway. He didn't need Gruul shifting beside him as Lothar hissed something venomous at his daughter to know that the alien could probably hear every word. Lothar had stopped pacing and was looming over Mya, speaking rapidly, and Victor had to be impressed by the casually confident stance Mya maintained. He'd've believed it, too, if his angle didn't give him a clear view of her wringing her hands behind her back. He wanted to snap at Lothar, but now wasn't the time to start a fight.

Fortunately, Victor had other ways to help.

He flipped the blank portion of his screen back on and began typing feverishly. He couldn't clear the hangar - while the schematics had shown this area to be blank floor, that was clearly not the case now, and cargo handling wasn't on the list of systems he had access to right at the moment, but if he redirected that like so, then changed this status code and rerouted-

A large, scaled hand landed on his shoulder.

"Breathe," Gruul commanded, and Victor released a puff of air he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"Sorry," he muttered, eyes glued to the screen as code rolled by.

Gruul huffed.

"The team you have chosen - you chose them because you thought they could achieve this objective, yes?"

Victor's hands slowed on his holographic display.

"Yesssss...?" he said, dragging out the last syllable deliberately as he raised an eyebrow.

"Then let them have the chance to do so. You would not have picked poorly, and I trust your judgment."

Gruul’s hand slipped from Victor's shoulder, and he obscurely missed its warmth. Taking a deep breath, he nodded to the proud warrior who had taken a step back to regard him with calm eyes; Gruul was correct in that Blue Seven had been loaded out with two of the best hackers behind Victor himself and that asshole Carcen.

Victor loathed Carcen, both professionally and personally, and it had been immensely gratifying to see him going around in bandages after getting his assignment from Mya. Victor's enjoyment had dimmed somewhat, however, when he'd gone back through the security tapes later to see what had happened and found Lothar using his elemental powers on a member of the Resistance - a man who, technically, was on the same side as him. It wasn't the first time, of course, but… a man who'd blow up a planet might not stop at simply injuring someone with his powers, and Victor had a little ball of dread in his stomach that got bigger every time Lothar lost his temper. It was only a matter of time, really, before he went off the handle and torched someone, and Victor wasn't sure what he'd do when that happened.

Still, the fact remained that Blue Seven was both eminently capable and - Victor glanced one more time at the camera feed on his monitor before flicking it onto one of the tablets he'd stacked nearby - imminently active. The feed showed the team casually approaching the wall where he'd identified a computer hardpoint; in less than two minutes, they'd be accessing the mainframe through it. Less than thirty seconds after that, either all hell would break loose or they'd feed the active connections through to Victor's tablet to begin phase two. Either way, it was time to report to their positions in the cargo hold.

He reached down and snatched up his tablets in quick succession, storing all but one in the voluminous pockets of the tech uniform he was wearing. Straightening, he nodded to his team.

Time to head for the bay.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 23

Spoiler

Mya POV

Mya let out a breath she hadn't consciously been holding as Victor stood up from his station and nodded.

The Blue team that had been designated to secure the unloading hangar had been hand-picked to be the best of the best at what they did, but Mya's brain hadn't been able to let go of the worries and what-ifs. Her thoughts had raced a mile a minute as time ticked by, stretching the fifteen minutes it had actually taken into fifteen agonizing hours. If the security twigged too early, if another ship came in, if they were detected in the network… if, if, if. And her father had been… displeased with the delay. It had taken some pretty fast talking to keep him from taking matters into his own hands, but she’d managed to get him to stick to the plan.

For now.

She shook her head and felt cold sweat dislodge itself to trickle down her back; suppressing a grimace at the sensation, she turned and nodded to the first of the Red teams that were waiting behind her.

Mya would have preferred to have been the first team out; not only was that team most likely to be discovered by dint of the amount of time they'd be in the hallways, but it would give her something to do, somewhere to move, and a purpose to put all her nervous energy into. However, the ship her team was aiming for was third on the closer wing of the shipyard and so her team would be the second to last Red team to depart Heavy Is The Hand. First up, heading for the furthest ship in the opposite wing was Terrance's group. Terrance was a tall man, somehow contriving to not gangle as most men of his height did. He was one of the other four translocationists in the Resistance who could even possibly contemplate moving an entire capital ship more than one hop at a time, and he nodded to her respectfully as his team quietly exited the freighter.

The other three members of his team followed suit in nodding to Mya as they passed, and Mya in her turn made sure to meet their gazes squarely. Underneath her bland technician outfit, Mya was certain she was sweating through her clothes, but as long as she projected enough confidence, perhaps no-one would notice. It was one thing to have doubts on the approach, but there was no turning back now and every single person had to believe that she believed they could do it. Any doubts now would get people killed.

The next team up was Carcen's; when the time came for M’t'fdlth to stop their external assault on the shipyard networks, Carcen would be responsible for maintaining the scrambling of the network in the further shipyard wing. Mya hadn't been terribly happy about having to trust Carcen to do the job, but he was the only one besides Victor who could hack fast enough to keep the shipyard admins from re-establishing the security communications structure. M'k'qlk and the other M'Pell were not experienced or focused enough to keep the admins from simply routing around their intrusions and noise, but their support would hopefully give Carcen the edge he needed to keep a lid on things.

Carcen refused to acknowledge her as he went by in what was unmistakably a deliberate snub. Mya kept her face even as she felt both Gruul and her father stiffen beside her; she really didn't care what the man thought of her as long as he did his job, and the apologetic looks she got from the other three humans of his team was more than enough evidence to show his opinions were far from universal. The team leader - an athletic young man named Kalledon, who had a way with the ladies and a thing for the gentlemen - even went so far as to apologize under his breath as he passed. Mya accepted it with a shallow dip of her head, though by that point Kalledon had already gone past.

Mya looked back along the line of Red teams into the cargo hold. Once the Red teams had finished debarking, three Gold teams would follow them up before the Blue teams started dispersal. She could see the bouncing forms of the M'Pell, the first of the Gold teams that would be heading out, bouncing nearly as high as the heads of the people beside them - who, in turn, didn't seem too sanguine about the small rocks bouncing around their heads with alarming snapping noises whenever they hit the floor. Mya's heart clenched a little; she'd talked with M’t'fdlth about it once, and they'd told her that most of the M'Pell who'd joined up were no older than mid-to-late teens in human terms and that was why most of them couldn't sit still for overlong. Actual children, and yet you'd be hard-pressed to find any M'Pell older - the United League had destroyed nearly all of them in the course of plundering the M'Pell homeworld for its resources.

M’t'fdlth themself was apparently not that much older, in their mid-to-late twenties according to their estimate, but when Mya had raised concerns about letting actual children fight, M't'fdlth had reassured her that they were keeping track of things. Only those who were of legal age to fight would be allowed to volunteer for missions at all, and the younger ones kept out from getting too underfoot in the bases. The volunteers would just be excitable, apparently, and Mya certainly couldn't disagree now as one particularly enthusiastic bounce came down on Red Five's leader's foot, eliciting a yelp. Mya suppressed a sigh and lamented that all she could do was trust M't'fdlth's word and try to keep the M'Pell safe anyway.

With Red teams Four and Five out of the way, Red teams Two and Three stepped up. Red Two would be aiming for the second of the ships on the further wing, one that had been noted to be of an experimental alloy and supposedly nearly 12% lighter than a regular Capital ship. It had been set up specifically so that Radonne was the translocationist slated to take the ship. Radonne was excellent at close-in ship maneuvers, but jumping great distances tended to be hit or miss for her. The less she had to try and shift, the better the chances were that she could actually do it. She didn't meet Mya's eyes as she passed, but her older brother Gadonne nodded seriously in answer to Mya's raised eyebrow and the rest of their team followed them out without a murmur.

Red Three was larger than the other Red teams; while Mya had assigned four to nearly all the other teams, Red Three included two medical support personnel who’d volunteered for the assignment. The translocationist for the team, a man named Alejandro, suffered from light-induced seizures and the two medical personnel had argued their way onto his team to hopefully prevent it from being a problem. Mya nodded to the two of them as they flanked the shorter translocationist, and they nodded back respectfully. Rumor on the base had it that all three of them were very close, and Mya was willing to concede to a lot for a translocationist who could move a Capital-class ship.

More people shuffled forward; Red One was heading for the closest ship in the furthest wing - without a translocationist, their orders were to grab an experimental translocational buffer circuit from the main engines and fall back to the hangar bay to rendezvous with the Blue teams there. Corper was the engineer in charge of that team, and the stout, cheerful-looking redhead gave Mya a thumbs-up as they headed on by. Corper's team would likely be among the first ones finished with their assigned task and would help direct the workers onto the ships the Blue teams had secured for use as transport when they had stowed the circuit. Mya returned Corper's thumbs-up with a firm nod and the team trooped away under the unseeing cameras in the hangar.

Red teams Nine and Ten were next; they'd be heading for the furthest ship down the near wing of assembly hangars. Their translocationist was Palimona, an older woman with a tight bun and a severe expression. If Mya hadn't known better, she might have taken her for a record-sorter or other innocuous bureaucrat; as it stood, Mya had seen what exactly Palimona could do with the plasma shotgun just peeking out from its concealed holster on the woman's back and had nothing but respect for her. Both Red teams had an extra brawler in place of a technical specialist, under the assumption that the fighting would be heaviest in the near wing as that's where Mya's team was heading. The bounty for capturing Lothar Kaldegga had almost tripled upon his escape, and Mya was banking that when they figured out he was here, the United League would concentrate fire on him and the team he was with.

Which was why there was an entire Red team of fighters designated to back them up. Mya nodded to Stumpy as Red Eight moved up to the door. Stumpy, Richard, Gage, and Leesii were a mixed group of fighters; Leesii had a dab of elemental magic she channeled through the lead-weighted baton she wielded with careless ease, despite its mass. Stumpy had his special glove, of course, and both Richard and Gage were decent marksmen; Richard also had a background in starship repair and was under orders to take anything he deemed important from the fourth ship in that wing. Mya's team - Red Seven - would be aiming to take the third ship along, and Red Eight would fall back to that ship when the time came to bug out.

Mya took a deep breath, looked back out over the waiting Blue and Gold teams one last time, then set her eyes forward as she stepped out of the Hand's cargo bay.

[Merkwerkee]

Chapter 24

Spoiler

Victor POV

Victor kept his head down as their team proceeded along the wide corridors of the shipyard. Blue Seven had taken care of the security at the checkpoint between the cargo hangar and the manufacturing portion of the station; with a hard-point access to the station's systems, it had been most efficient to set up a feedback loop in the machinery and then simply lock the security forces inside their own fortified offices. It wouldn't hold them forever, of course, but it was plenty enough time for all the Red teams to slip by. Depending on which approach the hackers on Blue Seven had used, it might even keep the security people trapped long enough for M’t'fdlth to set all hell loose.

Either way, bypassing that security checkpoint had been easy. Everything that came after it was considerably harder.

Mya had gotten one of the more cosmetically inclined Resistance members to do a very careful makeup job on her father. Facial recognition was sophisticated enough to see through most commercially available face-changing gadgets, and the general consensus was that low-tech would probably be the most likely to work. So Lothar's goatee had been enhanced with a carefully sculpted full beard, and a frankly impressive number of small synth-skin inserts had been strategically spotted all over his face to give him a round, cheerful face complete with dimples. And then the specialist had dusted him up with a foundation that - in addition to evening out his color - contained a compound that would reflect infrared and prevent the IR sensors from telling real faces from fakes.

All in all, a thoroughly competent job, and Victor had made a note to send the specialist a gift basket for making his job that much easier. Most people target the algorithms when trying to defeat facial recognition software, and the code was hardened against exactly those kinds of attacks. Victor knew better; with the makeup changing Lothar's face so dramatically, it was easier and safer to target the facial recognition database that the algorithms predicated their matches on. It was backed up to six different locations to ensure one was already ready in case of failure; what it couldn't handle was the sudden input of several hundred petabytes of things that could be faces but weren't.

Victor had breathed a little easier when that program blinked a finished confirmation on his tablet. He still had a monitoring tag on the security alerts from that system, but he doubted the thing could tell face from feet now.

The most harrowing part of walking the corridors was the sheer amount of foot traffic. Pallets of parts and materials came from the cargo bay in a steady stream, and empty cargo haulers went back the other way down the wide corridors that had very clearly been designed with this purpose in mind. Cleaning crews and other work parties scurried along the edges, the paint lines on the floor clearly marking where it was safe to walk and where one could be reasonably certain of being run over by a cargo hauler. Security teams patrolled the corridor as well, prowling in semi-random patrols and keeping an eye on the walking crews and riding haulers alike.

Surprisingly, for all the personnel manifests they'd stolen, the vast majority of the crowd around them was human. Human security, humans running the cargo haulers, humans with tool belts and serious expressions, humans in white coats with small tablets they were industriously typing away on; none of the security was anything but human, of course, and the people in greasy overalls were mostly human as well, with only one or two Hosh looming up out of the crowd like particularly muscular statuary. There were groups of Yttarans as well - all of them missing their wing-casings - but none of those groups contained any humans at all, and those groups also seemed to be confined to mostly janitorial duties, if the cleaning implements every Yttaran carried were any indication.

Victor would have rolled his eyes at the blatant speciesism if the gesture wouldn't have tipped off the guards. As it stood, their group stood out mostly by dint of Gruul, and they were already receiving higher-than-average scrutiny for it - Victor's programs reported 43% more turns in their direction by monitored body cameras than any other human-only group. Still, they'd chosen their disguises well - their overalls were just as worn and grubby as any other workers', and Gruul had a couple of shabby utility belts in place of her preferred distinctly Hosh-styled armor. He didn't think she looked any less dangerous for it - knew for a fact that she had the pieces for a wicked plasteel sword secreted away in the pouches of those belts - but it annoyed him that it was necessary.

Still, they weren't actively challenged as they split off from the main cargo corridor and began moving through the rat's nest of hallways that marked the start of the actual drydock section of the shipyard. Around each main berth was a warren of service tunnels, access points, finishing rooms for special stuff, forgeworks hooked into the star below them, and all kinds of other machine shops and workrooms that were the last step between whatever came in by hauler and what was actually bolted onto the ship.

It had been almost twenty minutes since they'd left the Hand at this point, and the first of the Red teams had a nearly forty minute head start on them. A quick flick of Victor's fingers on his current tablet was enough to assure him Red teams Three, Four, Nine, and Ten were nearly on schedule - some kind of all-stop from a cargo hauler collision had put Red Three and Four a little behind, but not so much so that he'd need to wait on them before signaling M’t'fdlth. Another flick brought up the monitoring program he shared with Blue Seven's tech specialists. Four green indicators winked up at him from starboard cargo berths 17, 19, 23, and 24, while two gleamed from portside cargo berths 25 and 22. As he watched, port berth 19 also lit up green, and he minimized the program with a quiet sigh of relief. They needed at least 10 empty cargo ships to get the workers off, and the more they had control of by the time the signal went out, the quicker they could load the workers up.

As they moved into the service corridors out of the main cargo way, they encountered more and more nonhuman workers. Most of them were Hosh, their brilliantly colored scales surprisingly eye-catching against the nearly uniform grey of the shipyard walls. There were some Yttarans skittering down the ceilings above the other workers as well. Unlike the ones in the main corridor, these Yttarans had straps of cargo pouches slung carelessly across their backs instead of the janitorial equipment they'd seen the others carry, and the heavy pouches bounced with audible crunches against the dried-out flight wings left unprotected by their missing wing-cases. The Hosh, too, seemed distinctly more worn than Victor would have thought, scale patterns often disrupted by ropey scars - scars which Gruul was notably missing. Victor saw more than one Hosh catch sight of Gruul and pause in whatever they were doing before moving on; whether that was for her lack of scars or her peculiarly muted coloration, he didn't know, but none of the Hosh seemed inclined to call security on them. No shouts followed them up the narrower halls, no alerts pinged his tablet. They just stared for a few seconds.

Victor wasn't the only one to notice the attention Gruul was attracting. Mya hadn't exactly been what Victor would call “relaxed” since they'd left the Hand, but she'd managed to keep most of it off her face before. Now, there was pinching around her eyes that spelled tension, and her lips grew thinner with every Hosh who paused to look their way. If she'd been her father, Victor would have been concerned that she was about to let loose and start killing a path clear to their target; as it was, he was reasonably certain she wouldn't do that without at least consulting them first.

Lothar himself seemed immune to the tension in the air, striding along like he had every right to be exactly where he was going and keeping both hands in sight. He wasn't quite at the front of the group, but his position behind Mya chivvied her along slightly faster than her legs really allowed for, and Victor could see the effort she was putting into extra-large strides to keep her father from pushing her along.

Gruul drifted casually up from her position at the rear to walk beside Victor, and they carried on side by side for a few steps.

"It's my color," she murmured finally, quietly enough that Victor almost missed it.

He raised an eyebrow.

"Your color?" he muttered back, equally as soft.

Gruul had more control than to let her tail lash, but her tongue flickered out briefly to taste the air before she answered.

"Yes."

They walked a few more steps in silence before curiosity got the better of him.

"What about your color?"

Several more seconds trickled by; they were only a few minutes away from the workshop they'd chosen as their breakpoint for Victor to signal Sarcorxious Base before she finally answered.

"Because I haven't got any."

Victor glanced over at her and frowned. She was yellow mottled with black, that wasn't no color. Granted, he was pretty sure he'd seen a green Hosh with purple and yellow markings on their way here, so it also wasn't the most colorful, but it was more than nothing. He didn't get the chance to ask more as Gruul faded back to her rear position as a security team marched by looking alert, if not actively alerted. They paused at a door in the hallway, and two of the team swept the room while the other three waited outside.

By the time the security team had finished sweeping the room - apparently a workshop for fine interior finishings, if the glimpse Victor caught through the closing door was anything to go by - Mya had led them to another door further along the corridor. A swipe of Victor's card, upgraded to all-access two minutes after he'd gotten it, had the door opening and all four of them ducking into the room.

It wasn't dusty, by any means, but there was an air of disuse about it that made sense; the workshop would have been used to do finishing work on engine parts - work long since completed, or they would not have chosen this ship to try and steal. The majority of the Red teams were heading for nearly-finished ships, with only a few ordered to steal from or sabotage the more unfinished vessels. Which made this workshop, out of all the others for this section of drydock, the least likely to see them disturbed.

Gruul stopped by the door and Victor went immediately over to the workbench itself. Along with all the tools stowed around it in neat arrays, it also had a hardline connection to the mainframe so that engine pieces could be tested by programs run on and maintained by the best computing equipment on the station. Of course, that's not what Victor was going to use it for, but there was no way the designers of the shipyards could have known that.

Mya and Lothar had come to a stop in the middle of the room, this time with their roles reversed. Now Lothar was the one standing calmly while Mya paced, and unlike Lothar, she didn't vent her spleen on any of her teammates, instead keeping out of Victor's line of sight - a concession he was grateful for as he navigated his way through the openings and weaknesses left by the programs he'd been running since they'd been berthed. The firewalls weren't quite crumbled cheese - the limited amount of damage he'd been able to do in his time on the station hadn't been that much - but there were cracks and exploits that hadn't existed two hours ago.

And, as any hacker worth their salt knew, any exploit could become a total exploit.

Especially when you had help.

Victor pressed a button, sent a signal, and listened as alarms started to scream.