Kel

Date July 9, 2116 Time 4:54 p.m. Location Merili Nebula

Airlocks were a blessing.

Piling the corpses of her captors into one of those air-tight rooms spared Kel a perpetual assault to her sense of smell as she investigated her former prison. The stale scent of blood still lingered, but it was better than the horrors or bloat and rot.

She did not eject them. Not yet.

The bodies might create a good distraction, should she need it.

Though she preferred to finish her work, and leave, long before that became necessary.

Which, thanks to some laughable negligence on her dead captors’ part, she could do with ease.

Kel looked down at her freshly-donned armor, discovered in a storage room a few doors down from the operating theater where she had spent so much time.

The familiar symbols etched into the red and yellow exterior plate armor comforted her, slightly. A beautiful phoenix on the right shoulder guard. A collar of carved flame, where the retractable helmet could deploy at the push of a hidden button.

She had lived in this armor. Trained in it.

…Been captured in it as well.

She only wished she remembered how. If she did, perhaps it would relieve some of the gnawing tension in her gut. The thought that, at any moment, she might wake once more on that operating table.

Would she ever truly feel secure again? Or had these monsters robbed her of that as well?

To her ire, she could only find a handful of her weapons. Anything she had built herself was simply gone. Likely being studied in another location, or sent somewhere to be mass produced. The thought of her enemies being able to turn her work against her people made Kel shudder, but at the moment, she had no way to prevent it.

However, she was able to salvage all of her knives, and one of her older, standard-issue guns. The device was intended more for shock-value, given its projectile nature. It would be untraceable, unlike any weapons she might have liberated from the former occupants of the facility.

And who was to say Kel wouldn’t need a bit of shock and awe during her mission?

Best of all, her abductors had apparently missed the emergency personal skipper hidden in a compartment in the left shoulder of her armor.

Armed with that untraceable method of transport, she would be able to reach her safe house without issue.

At this point, it was the only place she could be absolutely certain remained uncompromised.

Back in the control room of her former prison, Kel retrieved a ration bar from a box she had found in one of the vessel’s storerooms. She didn’t have time to stop for a real meal, but the rations at least ebbed the ache in her stomach, and forced back the last vestiges of dizziness.

As she ate, Kel crossed back to the control room’s main counsel, and returned to her work.

Hacking the ship’s systems had taken some time, although not nearly as much as she had anticipated. The basics of the facility’s computing system ran on software very similar to that which Kel had been trained to infiltrate years prior. She could not access everything, and most of what she could access seemed to be isolated from any external servers, but it did not take long to find a backdoor into their communication and navigation systems.

Nothing about her in the main computer.

Or her team.

Kel suspected that research was stored in the small trove of data chips and tablets she had discovered in various rooms of the ship. Her former captors likely manually delivered that data to their leaders, or used some hidden receiver Kel had not yet discovered to send the information, to keep it off the far-more public Coalition beacon system.

A smart move.

If frustrating for her efforts.

Hopefully she could take all that data with her when she left.

Hopefully she would not be discovered before she had a chance.

The Dolos, as the mid-sized horror chamber was supposedly named, was registered in the computer as a private “cargo transport.” It listed a crew complement of eight, mostly technicians for a fleet of “cargo bots,” of which Kel had seen none in her excursions, as well as a pilot and single security officer.

Given that the final corpse count in that airlock clocked in at fifteen, most of them in medical garb…it seemed a fair assumption that the only “cargo” the Dolos ever carried was Human.

Its navigation system contained, seemingly, far more accurate information. Information vital to properly calibrating her personal skip. Especially if she needed to take supplies with her.

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She would do a trial run, before attempting anything grandiose. Her personal skip was programmed to return her to the last departure point, unless she entered new coordinates in the interim. She could easily use it to scout her safe house, retrieve the scouting skipper vessel kept there, then skip back and forth from that ship to her former prison, to strip it of anything valuable before making her final escape.

If, of course, time was on her side.

She was the last living occupant of the Dolos, but that would not remain true forever.

Though she was fairly certain she did not need to rush.

Seclusion kept secrets, and what they were doing to her was most definitely a secret.

Even if she had set off a silent alarm with her hacking, or a straggler had managed to send out a warning before she descended upon them, the probability of a warship being less than three day’s skip from her position was unlikely. Ships of that size needed far larger, more stable wormholes to dive through than a single-person device or scouting skip, and larger wormholes typically took far longer routes through subspace.

And if they did come, she doubted the Coalition would send a vessel on anything resembling a direct route.

After all, the Coalition was a society which, on its surface, claimed to be above subjugating any intelligent species, let alone one of their own. If the general population discovered what had been done to her, and potentially the rest of the Embers, there would be an uproar.

At least, she could only hope.

The average, baseline Human, Kel’s studies had taught her, often disappointed when it came to following through on their outrage. It was part of the reason they needed more decisive leaders. Ones that would not let such travesties go unpunished. Ones that understood true justice.

She prayed those leaders amongst her people were still free.

Given her own capture, and the lack of memories surrounding that event, there was a horrifying chance that the entirety of the Embers of Prometheus’ colony and government had already been overwhelmed and subjugated.

Were that to prove true, she might be the only Phoenix left to rescue them.

A tall order, in a hostile universe. Even with her abilities.

But one only death could stop Kel from achieving.

She tossed the empty ration wrapper on the floor, and went to collect another, before resuming her survey of the Dolos’ communications records. Incomplete or not, there was enough of a chance to glean useful information from them to be worth the time.

If she found nothing useful soon, she would download the files onto a commandeered data chip, and simply take it with her, along with the other, much-needed supplies left for the taking on the dead vessel.

Food.

Technology.

Weapons.

And of course, she could not forget medicines. Even if she did not have any use for most of them, they would likely make for great currency, should she be unable to settle this matter quickly.

Gather supplies.

Establish a secure base of operations.

Gather allies, to augment any skills she might be lacking.

There were very few of those.

She was, after all, a Phoenix. She was strong, and intelligent, and healed quickly, and…

She paused.

…But she didn’t heal instantaneously, did she?

The aches across her tortured body were testament to that.

A new tenseness formed in her stomach. One that had nothing to do with hunger or physical pain.

Overconfidence would lead to ruin, and a return to that operating room.

Kel had spent her whole life studying tactics. Soldiers, no matter how powerful, were in many ways only as strong as their support team, and the war which she was about to wage was full of dangers. As much as she hated to admit it, there was a high probability that she would receive an injury impossible to treat on her own.

Which meant, at the very least, she would need to enlist a medic to the cause. Someone with a great deal of skill, capable of treating practically any injury single-handedly if needed.

Without someone like that, one misstep––one stray bullet, or lucky blade––even if not immediately fatal, could easily bring her campaign to an abrupt end.

That could not happen.

Her people needed her.

She could not fail them.

But she also could not conjure a medic out of thin air. What was she supposed to do, put out an advertisement for a surgeon willing to become a fugitive to save people they had never met?

Her connections were gone. Her resources scattered. If the fallback colony was not yet compromised, there was no telling how long it would remain that way. She could not risk going there for aide.

And she did not have any funds to hire someone, or even bribe someone to keep quiet about a one-time operation. She did not even know where to begin to look for such services in this hostile space.

Kel glanced around the control room, her eyes landing on the sticky pool of blood belonging to a person she had assumed was once the pilot. She closed her eyes, and gritted her teeth.

Why had she killed them all?

Why had she not had the forethought to keep at least one of the doctors who experimented on her alive? Information-gathering aside, at such a critical juncture, a captive medic would have been better than no medic at all.

Perhaps even preferable. They could not compromise her operations if they couldn’t leave their workspace.

She could always lure one of the Coalition’s First Responders vessels to her location, couldn’t she? Those soft hearts reportedly answered any siren’s song sent their way. She could modify her personal shield to encompass another person, skip aboard the answering vessel, grab the first medic she saw, and…

Kel’s eyes shot open, and she furrowed her brow.

Was she truly willing to do that to someone?

Did she have a choice?

Truly, she would not have even questioned it if one of her recent “doctors” was still breathing. They had demonstrated no qualms about treating her as an object. One of them meeting a similar fate would only have been justice.

But taking an innocent person would not be justice, not matter how desperately she needed assistance.

...So.

That left her with one final option.

One which, after a moment’s thought, actually sat quite well with the soldier.

These researchers were not working in isolation. There had to be others. Once the supplies were transferred and she was back at her safe haven, she could scour their logs for hidden files; review every scrap of data she could find for mentions of their accomplices. They had to have slipped up at least once.

Kel would exploit her enemies’ mistakes. She would capture one of her enemies, and turn them into an asset for her cause.

...Perhaps, if the person had any kind of conscience––a good person, simply caught up in the propaganda of their society––she could even make them realize the truth about their leaders, and slowly turn them into a willing ally.

Not a likely outcome. Yet one which Kel’s idealistic side refused to discount.

It was the most viable option.

She just needed a name.