“Any casualties?” Vitor asked Captain Ramirez.
“Three people injured, nothing severe though. They should be back in action in a couple of days. If it wasn’t for the triple armored crew areas, it would have been much worse.”
“How much damage did you suffer?” Vitor asked with his next question.
“All things considered, we only suffered minor damage. We do have a dozen spots open to vacuum, but the bot is quickly patching the exterior holes while my people seal the interior ones. I expect to be fully operational in four or five hours.”
Vitor nodded and turned to one of the other screens. He had invited all of the captains to an after-action report to make sure they were still able to continue. “Captain Bloomright, what about your casualties?”
The Talon’s people had been engaged by the enemy, unfortunately, he knew that ground combat tended to have a much higher mortality rate than that of the Navy.
Bloomright looked slightly shaken up, but she was quick to respond. “Three dead, one in critical condition that isn’t likely to survive, and another severely injured. The crew aboard the gunboat surprised us with laser rifles. If it wasn’t for them making a mistake and thinking our augment gear was disabled, I think the losses might have been much higher. The ship suffered some damage, but nothing that will prevent us from continuing.”
“Sorry for your losses,” he said solemnly. After having lost people of his own, he knew how she probably felt.
The woman nodded at him. “Thank you for the kind words, Captain Krieger.”
While he would prefer to give the captain time to come to terms with the loss, he needed to know if this gamble had been worth it. “What of the ship and container?”
“My people are going through it now to try to find any identifying marks. So far they haven’t had any luck and the computer was wiped before we boarded the vessel. A computer forensics expert might be able to recover some data from the device, but I doubt they would find anything incriminating. My people will go over every inch of that ship, but I’m not expecting them to find anything. The only thing we can say for certainty is that the engines are Omni Class 2, which basically tells us nothing since every corporation within the STO runs them if they have the capital and this company obviously did.”
“No transponder?” he asked in confusion.
She shook her head. “Not that we’ve been able to locate. I know that would normally put this ship firmly in the category of being a pirate, but there is no way pirates are running around with tech like this. If they were, the STO would have been wiped out years ago. This is top-of-the-line tech. Even the suits the pilots were wearing were more advanced than anything I’ve come across.”
“Have your engineers send the scans over to me. I might have better luck identifying the suits.”
She nodded. “As for the crate, my people have taken every precaution they can. An x-ray scan was able to penetrate the exterior, but not very far into the shielded interior. It did confirm that there were no traps or sensors on the insides of the walls though. The engineers are setting up a small dark room and vacuum chamber to prevent any light or air to the work site in case of optical triggers. Once that is done, they will drill a tiny probe hole through the weld just large enough to put a pinhole camera through. We should know more after that.”
After confirming with the others at the meeting, Vitor decided they had spent enough time loitering in this system. He ordered them to form up and they all started moving toward the next jump point. They would remain in the system until all of the ships were completely repaired, but he didn’t want to do that near the battle site.
Halfway to the next jump, he got a comm request from the Talon. Vitor accepted the request and Captain Bloomright appeared on screen. “My people have gained entry into the container, and you’re not going to believe what’s inside. It’s people.”
“People!” Vitor said in shock. “What? How?”
“Stasis pods,” she stated. “At least a dozen, if not more. The tiny camera doesn’t have the best quality so we can’t be certain. We won’t know the exact count until we cut open the doors.”
“Alright,” he said with a tired sigh. “If your people think it's safe enough to proceed, then do so. Just don’t activate any of those pods until after we ensure the next system over is clear.”
“I will let my people know.”
After Bloomright cut the connection, Vitor sat back in his seat and rubbed his temples. He didn’t miss the glances his people threw his way, but he wasn’t concerned about looking unflappable in front of his crew. They had seen him at much worse and had still stood behind him. A bit of agitation and exhaustion was nothing.
This mission was supposed to be a simple snatch and grab according to Kane. While not easy, it shouldn’t have been too difficult for six ships to pull off if the pirates didn’t have much in the way of defenses. Now he had shadowy corporate nonsense and human trafficking to add to his worries. It all stank of a much larger operation going on out here and he was starting to suspect they might run into more resistance than they had planned for.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Vitor couldn’t dwell on what-ifs. A captain’s responsibility was to act with the information they had on hand. He had done so and the pirates had easily been taken care of. There was nothing to indicate that the ships arriving to pick up the crate of human popsicles were going to be from some corporation.
Had he known, he would have approached that situation much differently, but hindsight is twenty-twenty.
The fleet arrived at their jump point and they were ready to go. Captain Ramirez had sent a message over an hour ago, alerting him that Resolve was as good as she would get without a shipyard. Vitor let the other ship keep his repair bot since theirs was lost to the missile. He already had a new one printed and ready to go for Eden’s Might anyway.
The ships did their best to sync up their jumps and one by one flashed into FTL.
Three days later, they dropped out of FTL in the next system. Unlike the previous one, passive scans showed nothing. That didn’t mean they were alone, it just meant if anyone was in the system, they were not sitting at the usual jump points. Since the fleet was still in a combat stance, they slowly moved through the system, looking for likely hiding spots of pirates or structures of any kind.
Eventually, he sent a tight beam to the Talon to find out what they learned during the FTL transit.
“Captain Bloomright, tell me you have some good news?” he asked as soon as the woman appeared on the screen.
“I do. My people managed to get the container open. Other than the sixteen pods, it only had a fusion reactor along with the fuel source and the static field generator.”
“Sixteen, not twelve?”
“Correct. And they are all occupied.”
“Alright, I think this system is clear. Go ahead and wake one up. Let's see if we can finally shed some light on what’s going on out here.”
***
Jallen gripped the handle of his pulse rifle as the engineers and medics pulled out one of the pods and moved it to a secure area. He and the remainder of his team followed along while others kept an eye on the rest of the popsicles inside the once-sealed crate.
He itched to demand answers from whoever was inside the stasis pod, but that wasn’t his duty. His duty was to protect the engineers and medics in case the person inside got belligerent. He would prefer something a little more lethal for that, but he had his orders.
Once the pod was in place, it was quickly reconnected to the ship’s power and the engineers cleared the room as the medics fussed over the pod's settings.
“Is there a problem,” he asked after waiting ten minutes for something to happen.
“Well, no. Not with the pod anyway. It’s just the interface is non-standard, so we are double-checking to make sure we don’t make a mistake reviving the individual.”
“Non-standard?”
“He means old,” the other medic stated.
“How old?” Jallen asked.
“Pre-FTL maybe,” the first man said with a shrug.
Jallen was well and truly confused. “What? How is that possible? I didn’t think someone could survive that long being in a stasis pod.”
“They wouldn’t have,” the same medic stated. “The first and second-generation stasis pods were notorious for failing, which killed the people inside more often than not. This is not a first or second-generation pod though.”
“It’s not? I thought you said it was old.”
“I said the interface was old. Someone cobbled this thing together from spare parts, but the actual stasis pod is a newer model, so it should be fine.”
“Pirates,” Jallen muttered, getting nods of agreement from the two medics and the rest of his team.
“Alright,” the first medic said. “The reawakening sequence has been initiated. It’ll take twenty minutes or so.”
It was the most boring twenty minutes of Jallen’s life, worse than watching paint dry. There was a soft hiss and a pop as the lid popped open and rotated up with a bit of help from the medics.
Two thin arms poked out from inside the device and a rail-thin man pulled himself into a sitting position with great difficulty. The man blinked his eyes and looked around in confusion. With a raspy, long unused voice, he spoke. “Who- Who are you?”
“We’re a mercenary outfit,” Jallen stated. “And we have some questions for you.”
The man started shaking his head. “No, no, no. You need to put me back. If they find out we’re missing, they won’t deliver on their promise.” the man said in a panicked tone as he struggled to try and close the lid. The medics easily prevented that by grabbing his arms. The man was so weak and frail that he wasn’t able to resist.
“What promise?” Jallen asked
“Please, just put me back.”
“I can’t do that.”
The man burst into tears and Jallen had to wait until he recovered enough to speak again.
“You’ve doomed our families.”
“You’re not making any sense. Why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me what’s going on.”
It took a while but the man did eventually start talking.
“I was an engineer for a company called Protogen, until it was purchased by a larger company. Our company made life-support systems. Not that it matters anymore,” he muttered darkly before continuing. “I never knew what company purchased Protogen, but they liquidated all of the company assets. That included the employees, despite our vocal protests against being sold off like just another piece of equipment. Our entire families were taken hostage and we were sold in groups so whoever bought us could maintain control over us. Those without families were taken as well, but I can’t tell you what happened to those individuals. After being rented out to pirates, I ended up on some station where I was forced to install the same systems I helped build when I worked for Protogen.”
“Do you know where this station is?” Jallen interrupted the man.
The man stared at him blankly. “Do you really think they tell their slaves where they are?”
Jallen cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Please, continue.”
“Once my work was done, they started feeding us less and less and soon we were barely getting enough food to make it through the day. That’s when I was pulled away from my family and told if I didn’t cooperate, my family would not receive any more rations. A few other people were getting the same lecture as I was. I assumed we were being sent back to our owners since our work on the ships was already complete. I stepped into the pod closed my eyes, then I woke up here.”
The story was a heartbreaking one but Jallen made sure to school his face. “Did they say anything about who the corporation was? How were you supposed to know it was the correct people that woke you?”
“The pirates said to look for a logo composed of two half circles, one red, one black.”
Jallen racked his mind but was coming up blank on any corporations with a logo like that.
“That’s all I need to know for now. Take him to the medical center and get him treated.”
The two medics nodded and helped lift the man out of the pod.
He radioed everything he had learned to the Captain before contacting the engineers to bring in the next pod. It was going to be a long day.