Date July 13, 2116 Time 3:28 Human Circadian Standard Location FRS Nightingale, Miril Nebula

Time, Sam knew, wasn’t on their side.

But there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

Even after hours of repairs, the Nightingale was dead in the ether. They had life support, emergency lighting, and the ability to open and close interior doors, but that was about it. Imani’s initial report indicated that the pirate’s virus had melted key components in their skip drive, quantum communicator, internal and short-range com systems, main light controls, and airlocks.

Sam wanted to meet the genius that had designed a ship with those systems interconnected. She had a few, descriptive, words for them.

They couldn’t even collect the bodies of those poor souls the pirate had ejected from the Dolos, without risking the airlock being unable to re-close.

At least Sam was certain help would come.

The First Responders Corps knew their last location, before their quantum beacon cut out. The loss of that signal alone would send one of their sister ships scrambling.

To a new dispatcher, a ship having an unexplained half hour break in its quantum communications’ signal might not look like a big deal, but every person who had ever actually responded to a call knew how little time a crew had on a dying ship. The Nightingale had been out of commission far longer than that.

In the meantime, she could trust her highly-skilled crew to repair the bits and pieces of the Nightingale they had the stored parts to repair, and wait for a tow back to Sapcedock 59 so they could have their docking bay doors pried open without the risk of venting atmosphere..

While Sam worked on the most miserable report she’d ever had to write in her life.

She wanted it ready to hand in, the moment help arrived. Lukas’ best chance of survival depended on the pirate’s quick apprehension. The more information she could compile, the better.

The captain sat on the darkened bridge, and skimmed what little she’d already been able to put down.

A single intruder, in and out in minutes.

The apparent massacre of the entire crew of the Dolos.

The kidnapping of one of her oldest friends.

How had she let this happen? How…

No.

Not the time for guilt. Guilt wouldn’t help get him back.

She took a deep breath, and focused on the facts.

Her crew, minus Lukas, was safe. Stranded, but safe.

All she could do was wait, write, and pray that whatever cobbled together nightmare of a personal skipper their intruder used to get out of that med room left a clear trail in its wake.

Sam grimaced.

That...thing...was another worry altogether.

The existence of technology that let ship-less individuals dive through the fabric of spacetime was technically not something Sam was supposed to know about, but it wasn’t exactly a large leap from what was already on the open market. From the rumors she’d heard, the captain suspected the Coalition Guard had had the tech for at least a decade, and almost religiously scoured the black market for parts that could be used to make them.

Probably to stop crap like this.

Probably

She doubted there were many people—criminal or upstanding—with the resources and technical acumen to make one from scratch, but in this case, it was the only possibility that made sense.

There was no other way out of that room. No second door, or ceiling panel, or even a vent big enough for a toddler to crawl through, let alone two full grown adult Humans.

Still, Sam and the rest of the Nightingale crew had spent hours searching the ship, just in case. Every room. Every cabinet. Under every bed. They’d even pulled the med room shelves away from the walls, just to be sure there wasn’t some loose panel hiding a trap door no one knew about.

But there was nothing.

With only two physically possible explanations left, Sam had used one of their few working scanners to check for organic residue in the med room, on the horrifying chance that the intruder had inexplicably decided to vaporize them both instead of letting herself be captured.

Thankfully, there wasn’t a trace of that.

So, it had to be a skipper.

Which left the captain with loads of other questions, but if it meant there was a chance her friend was still alive, she was going to cling to that hypothesis with everything she had.

Lukas couldn’t be dead.

It wasn’t fair.

...Neither was the universe, but that was beside the point.

The Nightingale was supposed to be a place Lukas could heal after...well, after everything. And he’d been doing so, so well too. As far as Sam knew, he hadn’t had a panic attack in months, and she’d even seen him cautiously glancing out the mess’ portholes a few times when they ate together. He was finally feeling safe in space again.

And then...this.

How was she supposed to tell McKenzie?

The captain forced the thought to a back-burner in her brain. She had to, or she was going to start crying on the bridge.

Besides, there were more immediate worries.

“I think I’ve got it,” Hamid crawled out from underneath the communications panel with a half-satisfied, half-exhausted look on his face. He kicked a pile of discarded, half-melted wires as he rose. “The quantum beacon’s still fried. We’ll need to risk a spacewalk if we want to fix that before reaching a spacedock. But we should at least have internal and short-range communications back. I’m going to boot those systems up now, if that’s okay?”

Well, Sam would say the timing was perfect, but she’d been running through those logistics in her head for hours. Really wore down the coincidence.

Still, the captain sighed in relief. “Yeah, go ahead. Thank you.”

He nodded, then pressed the button on the comm panel to connect to the engine room. The smell of burnt wires drifted up from the comm, panel, but the screen and controls responded to Hamid’s hands. “Imani, this is Hamid, can you hear me?”

After s pause, Imani’s voice came out clearly over the intercom.

“Here, Hamid. Sounds like you’re having some luck?”

“Some, yes,” Hamid confirmed. “I’m going to check in with Jill via her spacesuit’s com next. If she can hear us, then we can make contact with other ships as they get close.”

“Beautiful,” the relief was clear in Imani’s voice. “Nice work on that.”

“Thanks,” Hamid smiled tiredly. “Hope I never have to do it again, but it’s good to know I remember how to rewire this thing.”

“Do you remember how to rewire anything else? We could use another set of hands down here.”

“He needs to rest first,” Sam interjected. “He’s been under that panel for hours.”

“Understood,” Imani sounded disappointed, but also resigned. “I’m starting rotating shifts down here as well, if that’s okay? It will slow down repairs, but we have enough problems without somebody falling asleep mid-weld.”

“Permission granted,” Sam agreed. “Thank you. Talk to you soon.”

She gave Hamid a nod; he disconnected the channel. “Jill next?”

The captain hesitated. “There’s no risk of the virus transferring to her suit through our coms, is there?”

Hamid shook his head. “From what I can tell, the virus is gone. Looks it was designed to erase itself completely after one use. Probably to mess with investigations into its source.”

Good.

Then they wouldn’t be a risk to their rescue party.

Sam nodded. “Alright, let’s check in with Jill then.”

“One sec,” he pressed a few buttons; twisted a knob on the control panel; then nodded to the captain. “Try now.”

Sam pressed the corresponding button on her chair. “Jill? Can you hear me?”

...No answer.

Hamid gave Sam a worried glance; tried again. “Jill, if you can hear this, please respond.”

Another pause, then to Sam’s relief, the head medic’s voice came through.

“Sorry, I was elbow-deep in the main airlock. You’re clear as a bell.”

Ah, good.

The captain crossed to the com station. “Any sign of a virus in the ambu-shuttles?”

“Not a trace,” Jill said. “We can still load everybody inside those if we start losing life support, but with the docking bay doors shorted out, they won’t do more than buy us time.”

“It shouldn’t come to that,” the captain grimaced. “Please keep working. The more we can repair before our rescue arrives, the less time we’ll have to spend at Spacedock 59.”

“Say no more. I hate standing still.”

Sam gave a dry laugh. “That makes two of us. Thank you.”

“Any time.”

She nodded, and Hamid ended the transmission.

“I’d like to run a couple more checks before I rest,” Hamid offered. “Shouldn’t take long.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “How long is long? You only stopped working for prayers. I know you need to get some food.”

“Thirty seconds,” the officer promised as he turned back to the controls. “Now that we know the external com is working, I want to see if that distress signal is still repeating.”

Oh.

Yeah, there were a few reasons that could be important.

“Is it?”

“...Yep, it’s still playing,” Hamid’s shoulders slumped. “I was hoping it might’ve changed. That, maybe, she hadn’t actually killed them all, and they could’ve been trying to contact us once she left. But, um, there’s no sign of that.”

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Sam sighed.

It was a good thought.

But it wasn’t a day where luck was with them.

The captain gave him a grim smile. “I think they were all dead far before we got here, Hamid. There was never anything we could do for them.”

That was a better thought than that they might’ve been alive when those airlocks opened. She was clinging to that thought.

“I know,” Hamid nodded. “I was just hoping. Are you okay on your own in here?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Sam nodded back. “I may not be able to rebuild the comm system from scratch, but I know the basics. Basil will be back in half an hour, and thanks to you, I can call for extra hands and have them here in under thirty seconds if needed.”

Or, call for an evacuation, if it came to that.

With one last nod, her com officer headed out the door; towards the direction of the mess hall.

Sam looked around the now-empty bridge. It seemed so...dead...when she was alone. Mary was out on a patrol with the other security team members, scouring the ship top to bottom for signs that the pirate had left them any nasty surprises in her trek through their corridors. So far, they’d found nothing, but it was far better to be safe than blown up. And she’d sent Basil to bed two hours before. His species slept in bursts, and he needed shorter shift rotations to accommodate that physiology. Still, she suspected he would have tried to go down to the engine room to help, if she hadn’t specifically ordered him to rest.

So much of the crew was going to be worn ragged by the repairs. Even Sidney was still running back and forth through the ship, ferrying messages for whoever needed them.

...Which wasn’t really necessary anymore, was it?

She sent out a quick ship-wide message that the internal comms were working again, and after a round of updates from Sidney, had them headed off to get some food as well.

Sam felt a bit guilty for not helping with the repairs, but she reminded herself that although she could pilot nearly any ship she got her hands on...she hadn’t exactly aced the mechanical side of her training. Her efforts were much better spent compiling a thorough report, and keeping watch over the functioning portions of the bridge, until help arrived.

Besides, they needed at least a skeleton crew of semi-rested people ready to jump into action if their situation suddenly grew worse. Especially pilots.

If they had to evacuate on the ambu-shuttle fleet, they’d need every pilot possible to guide them to a safe distance.

But they hadn’t reached that point, and Sam was still hopeful they never––

The half-working sensor panel across the room beeped.

Sam quickly crossed; scanned the readout screen eagerly.

Relief rolled over her in a wave.

Distortion or not, that was definitely a Coalition Guardship.

And a big one at that. The kind that looked more like a swarming hornet’s next when fully activated, given the fleet of smaller vessels which would swarm out of it in the presence of any significant danger.

The kind that existed exclusively to combat pirate armadas.

Made sense that they’d be the closest help. Pirates tended to operate in the outskirts of Coalition space, and they liked to skirt the edges of Isolaitionist territory, knowing that the Guard couldn’t follow them there without inciting an incident. The fact that there hadn’t been a Guardship within range to assist them during the initial onslaught had been a fluke.

Still, it was a bit startling to see. The Nightingale normally dealt with the Guard’s accident-investigative branch, which scooted around the galaxy in tiny vessels the size of the Nightingale's ambu-shuttles. It was disconcerting to watch what basically amounted to a brightly-colored warship crawling ever closer to her comparatively tiny vessel.

But she wasn’t going to be picky about their help.

Sam saw the other vessel’s hail pop up on the com panel; she crossed the room, and answered it.

Her smile faded as a man wearing an eye-stabbingly red uniform blinked into the center of their viewscreen.

His hair was short-cropped and bright blond. His eyes were a startling cobalt blue Sam knew many people would swoon over.

She wasn’t among them, but it was true in theory.

“Hi there,” the man’s bleached-white teeth flashed in a smile that didn’t reach his cobalt eyes. “I’m Captain Daniel Card, of the C.S. Fenrir. And who might you be?”

...Of all the freaking captains in the freaking Guard...

Sam tried not to let her disgust show.

She knew that name.

Everybody knew that name.

She recognized the Daniel Card from decades of photos and videos taken by the media. Mostly as a child-sized prop in the background of Henry Card’s campaign rallies, but also from a smattering of stories about the man as he grew up in the headlines from an adrenaline junkie teen with a penchant for bar fights, to an influential captain in the Coalition Guard.

Rumor was his antics hadn’t exactly ended when he took up the job...but no credible witnesses ever came forward.

At least this Card didn’t go on talkshows once a week, spouting xenophobic drek like his siblings, but Sam had no doubt how the man’s politics leaned. One glance at his bridge crew was all she needed to understand that.

All Human.

All male.

All white.

That didn’t happen by accident. Not in 2116. Especially not in an organization like the Guard.

But the Nightingale wasn’t exactly in a position to refuse help. And Lukas needed the Guard’s search dogs set on his trail as fast as possible.

Sam put on her best diplomatic smile, and kept to protocol. “Captain Samantha Healy, FRS Nightingale. Thank you for coming. Our life support is fully functional, but we’re going to need a tow back to Spacedock 59. Our skipper needs to be completely replaced, and we can’t––”

“Mind telling me what happened?” Card said it like a demand, his smile still on his face, but looking more fake by the second.

She’d been getting to that.

But she she bit her tongue.

The faster they got through this part, the faster that giant Guardship with top-of-the-line tracking equipment could start scanning for traces of their attacker’s skips.

So, Sam relayed everything she knew. The distress call. The ship that their half-functioning sensors claimed was still adrift near their own. The distortion that kept them from sorting out much more than that, before everything went to hell.

Card cut in mid-sentence when Sam got to the transmission from the Dolos’ “captain.”

“What did this person look like?”

Rude. But frankly, kind of expected.

“As I said, the image was extremely distorted, but according to reports from witnesses in the infirmary, she appeared to be Human,” Sam replied. “She was white, with short-cropped blonde hair. She spoke in English, in an accent vaguely American, but difficult to discern beyond that. Could have been from a colony instead. She claimed there were other crew members who needed help, but given what happened, I believe that was just part of the ruse to get us to drop shields.”

“Have you sent anyone aboard?” There was a slight tinge of panic to Card’s eyes that Sam didn’t like.

Sam shook her head. “We never got the chance. The pirate managed to slip a virus past our firewalls. We’ve been doing damage control ever since. To be clear: it appears the virus is completely gone. We’re not a threat to your ship, but we can’t leave ours without either having someone force the doors open from the outside, or cutting a hole through the hull.”

“Ah, okay,” the man let out a deep breath; his shoulders drooped with perplexing, but obvious, relief. “Sit tight. There’s a Responders vessel en route. We’ll keep watch over you until they can tow you back to Spacedock 59.”

...Wait.

Sam’s brows arched in surprise. “You aren’t going to tow us yourself?”

Card grimaced. “Normally we would, but we’re already on a time-sensitive assignment. A really important one. This detour is going to put us behind as it is. We’ll secure the Dolos, and protect you from any pirates that might try to take advantage of a stranded Responders’ ship...but as long as your life support is operational, then we can’t spare any extra time or resources to tow you ourselves. Sorry.”

...What the fuck?

“I...” Stay diplomatic. “Do you have any auxiliary vessels that could––”

“No, they’re all tied up in our main assignment,” the man was clearly trying to sound apologetic. “We...well, we really weren’t expecting to have to do this today.”

“Mind if I ask what you were expecting?” Sam asked.

“I do mind, actually,” The remnants of the man’s fake smile dropped. “I’ll be honest: we’re not officially here. Once you skip out of this nebula, I’ll deny our paths ever crossed. Got it?”

Dread crept up the back of Sam’s neck.

What the hell had they stumbled into? Was the Coalition Guard conducting a sting? Against who?

“But what about the investigation––”

“Oh, that’ll still happen,” Card assured her. “My ship and my name won’t be attached to the reports, but I promise the investigation with be thorough. Easily the most thorough we’ve ever conducted. Just wait for it.”

Sam’s nose could’ve been filled with wax, and she still could have sniffed that one out.

...From Card’s tone, it was pretty clear to Sam that ‘not officially here’ could easily turn into ‘literally not here’ if that asshole got offended.

How sure was she that her crew was out of danger?

It didn’t matter who led the investigation, just as long as it happened, and was a priority.

She’d still file a full report back at Spacedock 59. Card could throw a fit about including his name if he wanted to, but Sam was not letting her friend’s case get sidelined so that golden boy could avoid a little tarnish.

Lukas needed help as fast as possible.

“Alright,” Sam kept her plans to herself. “Then I suggest you start your investigation by retrieving the bodies of the Dolos’ crew. The pirate ejected them from an airlock. And check the surrounding space for skip specks. Starting with ones in and around my vessel. One of my crew was abducted by the person who knocked us out of commission. Took him right out of the infirmary. From a locked room, with no other exit. If there’s any hope of finding out where they went––”

“We’ll look,” the man cut her off again. “But I can’t make any promises. Someone who can do that is probably pretty good at covering her tracks. And your crewmate...well...do they have any skills she might find valuable?”

Sam nodded, knowing exactly what the man meant. “She abducted Doctor Lukas Vond. He’s my medical director, and head trauma surgeon.”

And a man whose wife and daughter deserved to have him back. And a good friend. But she got the distinct impression this guy wouldn’t give a damn about any of that.

The man made an almost approving nod. “Ah. Well, that makes sense then.”

Her eyes narrowed. “How does that make sense?”

“Did he have any trackers on him?” He blatantly sidestepped her question. “Or in him?”

“No,” Sam answered. “She left his badge behind, which was where Lu...where Doctor Vond kept his emergency tracker. Subdermal trackers are optional in the First Responders, and he’s never opted in.”

“A shame,” Card sighed. “Well, the good news is that he is likely still alive. With a skillset like that, your doctor is a valuable commodity. Whatever Kel’s endgame is, she will probably only kill him if he causes trouble.”

Sam blinked. “Kel? Who’s Kel?”

Instant regret.

That’s what plastered across Card’s face.

“You already know who did this?” The infuriating answer was already clear.

“I...have my suspicions,” Card hedged. “Look, the specifics are above your clearance. All you need to know is that if the person who attacked your ship and took your crewmate is who I believe, then she’s...confused.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed. “She was coherent enough to kill a ship full of people, set up an ambush, and kidnap a man without leaving a trail.”

“I didn’t say she was delirious,” the man hedged. “You work in medicine; I think you understand why I can’t say more. She isn’t well. And she needs help, just as much as she needs to be stopped. That’s all I can say.”

That wasn’t nearly enough.

Was Card saying this was some Guard member in the middle of a breakdown? Was that why he was being so sketchy? Was he seriously just trying to avoid embarrassment when there were lives on the line?

Sam wanted more information. She needed more.

...But whatever this nightmare really was, it was clear she wasn’t going to get any more intel from him. Not on a recorded channel, at least. And the more time they spent arguing, the farther away Lukas would get.

“If there’s anything you need from us to help find this...Kel...please let me know,” Sam said instead. “Doctor Vond...Lukas is a friend. A good friend. Anything I can do to help bring him home, I’ll do it.”

When that fake smile creeped back onto Card’s face, Sam knew exactly how likely he was to keep her in the loop.

“Of course,” Card lied. “You’ll be the first to know.”

After a few more polite unpleasantries, Sam ended the transmission, took a deep, furious breath, and picked up her tablet.

She had some new additions to make to her report.

Including a copy of the automatically-recorded conversation she had just had with that shady asshole.