"I always assumed you'd be the one visiting me in jail."

The way her teasing made the man in the cell stop abruptly in his boredom related workout made her grin with amusement. He turned to her with a surprised expression as she moved to lean her elbows on the bars separating them, then seemed to recover himself. "I guess I never told you about Toulouse then…"

"You've been in jail before?" She found that hard to believe, even though she was looking at him in a jail cell. The last time she'd seen Commander Benjamin Wood he'd been the poster-boy for clean cut duty. She barely recognised him now, his brown hair was scruffy and the shadow at his jaw and the grime on his pale skin alluded to how long he'd been locked in his cell.

"Technically." Wood shrugged as he got to his feet. She raised a pointed eyebrow at him. He ignored her. "Ali, what are you doing here?"

Alice Turner wasn't surprised that he got straight to business. "I had to see if the rumours were true," she admitted. A smile played briefly on his lips that Ali couldn't help but share. They'd met a little under a year ago now, when she'd broken onto the ship he ran security on and he'd thrown her in the brig. As much as she wanted to joke about the fact that she should be first in line to kick his arse, she knew they were on limited time. They didn't have time to reminisce. "Wood, what's going on?"

He sighed as he rested one of his own hands on the bars. Now Ali had to look up to hold his gaze because he was about half a foot taller than her. He scrubbed a hand over his face. "How long have we got?"

Ali pulled the sleeve of her dark coat back far enough to check on the data from the technology woven into her top. "Less than ten minutes," she said as she returned to her previous pose. She had snuck in unauthorised, no one knew she was there, yet.

He bent his arm slightly so he could lean in to lower his voice. "I've spent the last four months undercover - part of a series of threat assessments - we've found a growing number of movements across the sector. They're using Barker's playbook on power and demands. Ali, these groups are beyond dangerous now. A war is coming, and you will be dragged into the middle of it."

Despite the worry that she could hear in his voice she had picked out one surprising detail. "Me?"

He didn't look like he wanted to explain but also that he knew he couldn't hold back. "Some of these groups are older than either of us, but they've galvanising; building alliances and readying public demands. Soon there'll only be two options: wiping them out or giving into their demands." Ali glared at him to get to the point. "To eliminate the threat of hybrids," Wood quoted.

"Krekt, krekt, bollocks," she muttered to herself as she rested her head on one of the bars, using the cold metal to calm her temper before she revealed her presence by shouting and stomping out her frustrations. Not again.

Her head shot up as she felt him press his fingers into the back of her hand - where it was loosely wrapped around one of the vertical bars above where her elbow was resting on a horizontal one - not that far from his. Her confusion disappeared a second later as she realised he'd started a data transfer. Both of them wore tops that covered the palm of their hand to give them easy access to the technology embedded in the fabric. "How'd you know it was me anyway?"

Ali giggled softly. "I might've been reinstated but I still have all my old contacts. You've been MIA long enough for me to guess you were on some sort of assignment and the description matched." Since their assignments had diverged they had kept in touch - and had become good friends - until four months ago when she hadn't heard anything from him since he'd told her he wouldn't be able to for a while.

"Undercover isn't MIA," Wood argued and Ali raised an eyebrow at him as if to silently call out his bullshit. He glanced at their hands before letting go of hers. "That's everything I have."

Ali turned her wrist enough to see the display but if she were honest she wasn't sure what she expected it to tell her. She'd need to download it to a console on her ship and disseminate it properly. She turned back to her other sleeve before sighing as she pushed herself off the bars again. "I'm guessing you don't want busting out of this joint then?" Even though they were probably even in saving the other's lives, it felt wrong to leave him behind. Of course Ali was counting, she knew Wood was too. All he had to do was say the word and she'd break him out of jail without a second thought.

"Want, yes," Wood gave a wry grin, "but my cover isn't blown yet, there's still a chance I can do more work here."

Ali nodded once and pulled the dark hood back over her blonde hair. She missed her trusty green jacket, but it was far too vivid to pull off a stealth mission wearing it. Then she stepped back into the shadows to depart from the prison block.

Ali wasn't sure if she should be worried by how easily she made it back out and onto the busy streets. Peshtar, especially in the early evening, looked every bit the metropolitan black market it was. A multicultural paradise, well, so long as your paradise involved an unhealthy dose of back-stabbing, malpractice, embezzlement, fraud and scams. Though, Ali reflected, at least it was upfront about it. Peshtar was in a co-orbit with Oran and the whole sector knew that if your business was legitimate you went to Oran, but if it required leeway, you went to Peshtar.

"Get what you needed?" A lanky, turquoise jetran asked as she slunk out of the shadows to join Ali. The tentacles from her head splayed over her black leather jacket. She looked completely at home in a street of crooks and scoundrels, who were all making space for her don't-screw-with-me vibe.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Ali nodded to her second in command; Commander Rila. They could understand each other courtesy of the sophisticated translation algorithms embedded in their uniforms that synced to a device of the wearer's choice; Ali had a patch that sat just behind her left ear, Rila had a subdermal implant. "All quiet out here?"

Jetra didn't laugh like humans did, their amusement was shown by how relaxed their voices became as they spoke. Rila's tone was liltingly comfortable as she said, "no problems at all."

"You know, that doesn't reassure me," Ali admitted as they set off down the street towards their exit point. Rila said nothing but there was a knowing look in her fully coral coloured eyes. Ali's grin broke through at the familiar feeling, they both knew these kinds of streets far too well. The main street they were walking down was crowded but moving quickly as most people ignored the neon signs and overly-bright billboards above them. The crowds made Ali's skin crawl, she expected someone to attack her, whereas she knew Rila was more comfortable where she could get lost in a sea of anonymous faces.

They followed the flow of the crowd until they found a quiet alleyway off the beaten track. Ali was about to open her comm when Rila closed her hand over Ali's to stop her and applied just enough force to keep her walking. Three of them behind us. Ali didn't even turn as she allowed Rila to lead. She scoffed to herself, everyone knew you couldn't sneak up on a jetran, they were telepathic. Though two women in a side alley probably looked like easy pickings regardless.

They turned a sharp corner and Rila planted herself against the wall whilst Ali unhooked the energy pistol at her belt and braced herself on the balls of her feet. One of the humans came first and Ali just shot him in the thigh and he dropped to the floor, crying out in pain and clutching his leg. On cue Rila launched herself, elbow first, at the tuthum. He grunted in pain as his trunk reached to grab her tentacles. He didn't have a chance as Rila had already gracefully twisted around him with an arm up to block before she snagged it around his neck and pivoted to put him between her and the other human. Who was nervously looking between the two women as if to determine who he should try and shoot first.

Ali had had her pistol trained on him ready for him to do something stupid, but as the group dynamics of their assailants started to fall into place she moved to aim her gun at the side of the tuthum's head. The human dropped his weapon instantly. Ali promptly ignored him to turn to face the tuthum - who had a scar that started above his left eye and ran down his trunk. "Do I need to shoot you? Or will you play nice and leave us alone?"

He grunted at her as he held her gaze for a moment. "We want to play nice with you."

"You really are a masochist, aren't you?" Rila asked as she leant into his ear, her tone unnaturally sweet.

"Just leave," Ali said, her pistol still firmly pointed at his head as Rila let go and quickly stepped away from him as she grabbed her own weapon. The tuthum regarded Ali and Rila for a moment longer, weighing up their options before ordering the two humans to follow him as he made to go back to the way they had come. They would have been slinking if it weren't for the drastic limp one of them had acquired.

Ali and Rila watched them go before Ali tapped the button on the inside of her left palm to activate her comm. "Faraday, we're ready to come home."

Both women felt the pull of the Faraday's beamer before they rematerialised on the ship. "Never a dull moment, captain," Rila quipped.

~-x-~

The Faraday was a spaceship in the United Space Exploration Program (USEP), which was a collaborative effort between numerous species and what the human space exploration programs had been absorbed into. The ship was part of a fleet at the forefront of the technological advances that not only allowed space travel to be conventional but that enabled data gathering and understanding.

Ali had been it's captain for almost a year now. After helping USEP neutralise a threat to the sector she had been reinstated and offered the position. It had taken her some time to adjust from two years living as a less than reputable loner but she had worked hard to understand the way her senior staff worked together. Now she was a part of their cohesive team and had built up firm friendships and trust with them.

After a quick detour to change back into the rest of her uniform - the technologically woven top had been too useful to change - she headed to the Faraday's main data lab. Whilst all of the specialist terminals in the ship had access to all the same data from the scanners, instruments and databanks, the data labs were specifically designed for the handling, processing and analysis of large quantities of data. Ali pressed her right hand to one of the terminals to create a connection to the data stored in her pale lilac uniform top and watched as the display lit up with the data it was downloading.

As the scale of what they were facing dawned upon her she used her comm to call down her senior scientist to help her at least work out the critical details for now. Once the channel closed Ali had to admit she couldn't quite believe she'd been foolish enough to think four months worth of data would be an easy thing to sift through.

A rough timeline was starting to coalesce in Ali's head when Lieutenant Olkant Plekar joined her. She turned to greet him as she saw his tentacles snag the chair before easily pulling himself up into it. The vellurians were an aquatic, cephalopod species. Their anatomy was similar to that of an octopus with eight tentacles and a bulbous head. Most vellurians chose to wear a waterloop - a kind of neck brace - that contained the same tech that was woven into USEP's uniforms.

Olkant himself was a burnt-orange colour. His eyes had horizontal pupils surrounded by beige sclera and excluding his tentacles he stood a bit under four foot tall. "What are we looking at?"

"Four months worth of data from an undercover operation."

"Looking for?"

If Ali were honest, she wasn't sure. She knew she should send this straight to Security Core at USEP HQ, they would know. That was probably why Wood had given her the data, but she knew he'd expect her to look at it first, she couldn't then ignore it. "Hopefully we'll know it when we see it." Olkant's stare bored into her before his three pairs of eyes - each more wide set than the pair above - blinked in order from top to bottom as he appraised his captain. Ali held his stare for a moment before he turned to the console and without further ado they set to analysing what they had.

They followed the information trail Wood had given them from shipments of supplies and weapons, through many underground groups, meetings and low profile crooks before eventually they came to the same conclusion. "S-Core needs someone to finish the job," Olkant declared.

Ali sighed as she sank deeply into her chair in defeat. The problem was she just couldn't see a way that Security Core would pull that off without breaking Wood's cover. Or if they could do it in time, assuming they even tried.