With the royalist ships defeated and the republican cruiser sent home to deliver the offer, James and his forces were allowed to shift their attention to more pressing matters. It would take weeks, months even, before his dynasty officially joined the civil war, but the people of Nimbus needed help now.

Before the battle, the system’s penal colonies hadn’t even noticed his fleet. That had been deliberate, so that the arriving task force wouldn’t be warned by an alarmed garrison. Instead, having received the all clear by the colonial administration upon arrival, the royalist task force had lowered its guard and walked right into an ambush.

Now, though, Nimbus knew about Task Force Dragon. James was willing to bet the firework show had caused quit a stir.

Information lockdowns would go into place, certainly. Yet the penal workers would know something was up sooner or later, and somebody was bound to panic. Riots were a certainty, and deaths quick to follow on both sides. James was determined to prevent that.

Testimonies from C3 showed that the guards were lightly armed and few in number, much like in any other semi-automated prison. Guards in riot gear might as well be invincible to a rioting inmate, but a train marine would crack them open like a pinata.

—

Rino Capano had been a penal worker on station cee-six for six years. For six years he’d slept a maximum of six hours a cycle, eaten meals of synthetic protein and carbo-slurry, and worked back-breaking shifts drilling asteroids in a suit that should’ve been thrown in the recycler before he was born.

After spending years listening to the snakes talk about lavish rewards and early releases while shafting them with more shifts and worse food, he could read the signs. They were everywhere, so long as you could read them. In the intercomm announcements, the guards’ faces, the tone of officers’ voices and even the type of food that was served.

And right now, all the signs were telling him something was profoundly wrong.

Usually when you were treated strangely well, you were in for a shafting. Maybe they served juice along with dinner, or turned the heating on a degree or two higher. Good stuff, but never for too long. The happy times lasted minutes or hours.

Certainly not days…expect now.

It had been almost thirty-six hours since the quality of life jumped. Instead of a cool eighteen c it was twenty-two, and their meals were provided with little baggies of synthetic spices -the kind they dispersed on public holidays-. They were also shoving a shuttle’s worth of bullshit down their throats, stuff like ‘management is happy with your work’ spoken on the intercom with eery tones of happiness faker than the fishbites they served every seventh day of the month.

And everybody was waiting for the other show to drop. Life went on, dreary as always, but there was a certain anxiousness to everyone’s actions.

…

Rino had been in his bunk when the alarms rang.

Not the riot alarms, with which he’d grown familiar with. No, this was another kind of alarm that even the most hardened lifer was terrified of.

Hull breach.

A deep, groaning rumble passed through the entire station. Without a though he and his bunkmates jumped out of their beds, rushing to the plastic-covered red button next to their room’s door labelled ‘DO NOT PRESS’.

The man who’d been sleeping bellow him flipped the cover, and Rino pressed it down with all his strength. The door of their room sealed shut without further warning, the servos pushing it with strength that had often been used to crushed fingers, arms and spines. This time, much to their horror, the auto-seal door was seeing actual use for what it had been designed.

Seconds later the horror began.

They saw the guard that had been patrolling their corridor get thrown from right to left, as the air rushing out of the breach dragged him along with unyielding strength. His face had been looking in the other direction, blessedly preventing them from seeing the horrified expression of a dying man.

No other sounds came, yet they could feel the sealed room vibrate around them. It felt like an asteroid storm, the kind that killed entire mining crews in milliseconds, was peppering the entire station.Then the power went out. The strange whirr of the grav plates which they’d all grown accustomed to faded entirely, and they started floating.

“Oh, stars, we’re going to die aren’t we?” The newest inmate mumbled, hyperventilating.

In any other situation, Rino and the other two inmates would’ve laughed in his face and thrown out the most wicked jokes they could muster. But the woman was likely telling the truth. Even if she was a softie -she’d been dragged here for protesting or some other political ‘crime’- she knew what was happening.

A hull breach could be fixed. The station’s garrison had dealt with a few during its operaion. A few dozen or hundred prisoners would die, the breached section would be locked down and they’d resume ‘operations’ in a few hours. But never before had they lost power. The lights, maybe. The doors, sure. But the gravitic plates were on an entirely different system, heavily shielded and treasured. Nobody messed with them, even in a riot. They could survive explosions, bullets, fire and acid; untold centuries of engineering had gone into making them as rugged and reliable as possible.

The four inmates floated in silence, coming to terms with their impending doom.

“Man…I was up for release in six months.” The oldest of the bunch sighed.

The youngest after Rino laughed, a subdued, half-forced noise. “Nah, dude, they were never going to release you. I ain’t heard of nobody leaving in months.”

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“Yeah, whatever.” The oldest shook his head. “I was going to die one way or—”

They all paused, hearing a strange rumbling through the corridor.

“Footsteps?” The youngest mumbled.

“Magboots.” Rino corrected her. “Heavy magboots, the kind the guards wear.”

If there were guards here…Rino didn’t know how to respond to that. They couldn’t be here to save them, so what they hell were they doing?

The inmates were incredibly curious, yet none approached the little armored window of the door. Being so close to the void without protection, even sitting behind an airlock, was a sport best left to those who no longer cared about death. So they simply floated in the back and sides of their room, waiting as the footsteps got closer and closer.

Then heads started appearing. Men in some kind of armor passed through the corridor…walking upside down. Rino didn’t get good look on the group as they passed, but they looked foreign.

“Not guards.” The oldest muttered, his voice low as a whisper.

“Who, if not them?” The youngest asked.

“Pirates?” The second youngest proposed. “Raiders, maybe?”

“Why the hell would pirates attack us? There’s nothing on the station except a thousand tons of bulk steel and nickel.” Rino countered. “And how did they even get here? There’s supposed to be defenses enough to thwart an entire fleet from attacking us, right?”

Not one of them could answer his questions. Their knowledge came from rumours and propaganda, which was actually worse than not knowing anything at all. The kingdom could’ve collapsed for all they knew; the garrison had a total control over what little information went in and out.

Before anybody could say anything more, the mysterious armored figures reappeared. One of them, at least. This time they were looking right at them, though they could only see a shiny one-way visor peering down the armored window into their room. Nobody moved.

After a few seconds, the person waved at them to come to him. Nobody did, and the person shook their head. One of their hands shifted, and they brought a PDA into view. With slow, deliberate thrusts they tapped their finger against its screen several times, and then shifted it so that they could look at the screen.

Rino, is curiosity overtaking his fear, pushed against the wall behind him with his legs and floated towards the door. The writing on the tablet was shown in bold, clear letters.

YOU ARE BEING LIBERATED. REMAIN CALM.

—

James stood over the battlemap on the flag bridge, along with Captain Noriega and Colonel Guerr, overlooking the rapid developments of Operation Jailbreak.

The battlecruiser Vanguard’s Hymn, along with a pair of destroyers, was cruising through the system’s core where they could receive comms traffic from all marine units in the system the fastest.

Every other warship of the squadron was supporting a marine insertion, disabling defenses and jamming communications between the penal colonies.

Well, except one.

The sole destroyer that had been hit, ANS Bete, was on its way back to Pollux and the shipyards of Bridgehead Station. It would carry messages of their victory, along with POWs and marching orders for the merchant marine. Several freighters and transport craft were needed, to bring in food, supplies and experienced doctors and engineers.

Law enforcement, too. Governor Moore had presided over the reestablishment of a law enforcement agency. Many of its officers were still military police from the marine corps on loan, yet there were many recruits eager to join and the ducal police.

Until local policing could be done by local law enforcement -which was currently being smashed by veteran marine units- law enforcement officers of the duchy would be shipped in on a temporary deployment basis lasting two to six standard months.

“Admiral.” Colonel Guerr called his attention.

“What do you have for me, colonel?” James asked, seeing the barest hint of a grin forming on the hardline loyalist’s lips.

“We’ve captured Station C6, sir. C4 and C5 aren’t too far behind. I believe we’ll have them all in hand within a t-day.”

—

Rino and his cellmates had stayed trapped inside their tin can for four hours. They would’ve believed their ‘liberators’ to have forgotten about them entirely had they not had the wisdom to send a soldier every half-hour or so to check in with each cell.

Three hours after they’d sealed the door, power returned to their cell. The emergency battery-powered lights turned off, and the clinical bright lamps returned. Gravity too, which meant the new guy’s vomit-cloud -an unfortunate side-effect of panic and long-term floating in zero gees- promptly splattered on to the floor.

Four hours and five minutes in -measured accurately by virtue of the oldest inmate’s mechanical watch- the breach was patched and atmosphere was pumped back in to the corridor.

The doors remained locked, remotely, for a few minutes, soldiers passed by, one posted on each cell’s door. Then they opened all at once.

Visible in full, the mysterious soldiers-slash-liberators were truly terrifying. They wore thick power armor, standing two and a half meters tall. A mean-looking rifle sat on a maglock on the soldier’s back, its barrel peaking out of their shoulder. A shock batton was attached to another maglock on their thigh.

Then the one-way visor shifted, becoming transparent. Their mysterious soldier was a woman, looking profoundly tanned and visibly confident. Not the bumbling idiot’s kind -like the station guards- but the kind of a veteran soldier or law enforcement officer’s. Like Rino’s mother.

“Do you understand my words?” She asked, her words echoed by more than a dozen other soldiers standing outside their neighbouring cells.

“Y-Yes.” The youngest of their group answered, the rest following up with cautious nods and grunts.

The soldier smiled. “Good. I’m sure you’re all curious, and everything will be explained shortly. For now, the most important thing you need to know is that this station has been liberated by the Akritan Dynasty.”

…

There were hundreds of penal workers gathered in the cafeteria. Even the children -the precious few- had been brought out. The air was comfortably warm, and the ‘akritan marines’ were handing out ration bars and water. Rino had seen a handful of marines dressed lighter, carrying toolbags and escorted by animal-like robots. Doctors, or engineers. Nothing else made sense in such a situation.

Rino’s attention was immediately caught by one of the marines, who stepped on a table and took his helmet off. The whispers died down as he spoke.

“Hello, everyone. May I have your attention, please?”

You could hear a pin drop in the room, even packed as it were with several hundred people.

“Thank you. I’m going to have to ask you all to keep your questions to yourselves for the next few minutes, so I can explain some things quickly.”

Seeing no complaints, the man continued.

“My name is Victor Steele, and I am the commanding officer of the marine unit that was tasked with liberating this station.”

Rino memorized the man’s name.

“Many among are wondering why. You can thank your comrades from station cee-six.”

C6? What was so special about C6?

Steele looked around for a moment, sighing. “I see that you are unaware of their actions. In short, several months ago the majority of penal workers on C6 managed to escape by taking over several mining barges.”

Mumbling erupted from everywhere, but Steele pushed through.

“They were chased by warships of the Royal Leonian Guard Corps, as they fled to the nearby star system of Pollux. They were promptly placed under the protection of local Akritan Navy ships, and a short exchange resulted in the guard corps’ complete defeat.”

Rino was speechless. The sixers had managed to escape…and the guards had managed to keep that a secret? Starshit…

“I promised to keep this short, and I will.” Steele continued. “The Akritan Dynasty is at war with the Kingdom of Leonis. Or, at least, a part of it. It is an unfortunate fact of your position that none of you were informed; The kingdom is currently in the middle of a civil war, and you were under the control of the ugly side.”