Impressively, the showboat—as Alysa had grown to think of her prisoner, survived at least ninety seconds of exposure to full vacuum while being severely wounded. Alysa might have hoped for that outcome, but she hadn’t expected it. By the time she had gotten him aboard the Impact, severe frostbite had set into his head, chest, lower extremities, and groin due to the ebullism of his blood and fluids from his wounds. Without question, he absolutely had one-hundred percent frozen eyeballs. They had swollen outside of his orbital sockets and were pointing in opposite directions through the frosted glaze covering them.

It was at that point that Alysa had restrained and gagged him, all the while suffering shocked looks from the three space marines and one astounded pilot that gestured at the corpse-sickle and said most politely, “Ma’am, you are completely nuts if you think this space rock is coming back to life.”

Alysa didn’t argue. She could see his Essence still weakly circulating in his Core.

Within sixty micro-gyras, he was completely healed. Ironically, Alysa looked down at the bound, cowering figure with envy of his roach-like survivability– Alysa’s train of thinking paused…That thought, of a ‘giant roach’ had brought up something on the edge of her memory…something horrifying that ended in a fight… but more than that, something hidden … But, like trying to bring a dream into the light just after waking, she couldn’t hold onto the full remembrance before it slipped away. Mentally empty-handed, Alysa was left with only a sense of salvation and ominous feelings–

Alysa shook the memories away, looking back at the defeated commander. At first, she had been afraid he might use his Attunement to bend space to get out of his cuffs, or out of the strike-borer entirely and away.

He never even tried.

Thinking about it, he hadn’t teleported out of his EVA, so he was likely bound to things touching him. There was probably also a maximum distance he could bend space. Covering hundreds of thousands of kilometers was likely beyond his current abilities. Alysa could feel that the commander was not very much further than her in Cultivation. Most likely his first Attunement... comparing the few glimpses she remembered of Josh and Sen, he seemed to fit at the same level as them. Assessing the Essence moving along his Meridians and in his Core, it vastly outshone hers... perhaps by a factor of five or ten. But something told her that wasn’t all that much when dealing with levels of Attunement.

Upon his first waking, Alysa had taken his gag off and attempted a minimally violent interrogation... “Who are you?”

“I am Battle Leader Yabana of the Kaizuko. Now you know who will kill you when my men come for me!” He then spit a glob of congealed blood onto Alysa’s left boot and continued. “I assume you are the leader of the force that attacked my Caravel. You will all pay for that you bunch of fatherless backbiters! And you!” He pointed at Alysa with his chin. “The way you slide around during combat, you must prefer the comfort of these slimy-skinned frogmen compared to the caress of a real man!”

After that, Yabana became significantly less helpful. All his further comments included assumptions about her parents’ marital status and critiques of her sexual preferences with various species.

After two micro-gyras, Alysa stuffed the gag back in his mouth and kicked him in the head until the annoying noises stopped.

Someone with more patience than Alysa would have to question him further... but she had learned that the man was not competent in any sense. And his ineptitude made Alysa confident someone else had given Yabana the information about when and where to attack the Hegemon-4. It was also most probable the same person was using Yabana for their own gains, but who and why? What was their game?

Command’s intelligence officers would need to find out. Getting answers to those questions was why she hadn’t ended the foulmouthed cur right there and then.

Four gyras later he was still unconscious. Unconscious again was a more accurate description. Lying on the passenger compartment’s deck plates, defensively curled up next to Alysa’s chair—his shredded crew jumper had been accessorized with a dry gag, electromag shackles on his wrists and ankles and Alysa’s boot-print stamped heavily on his head. Needless to say, Alysa’s next conversations with him had been equally unfulfilling.

Alysa blew out a breath and sat back in the blacked-out cockpit. They were currently veiling the Impact near the backup rendezvous in the gravity well of a massive solid-core planet. The ship floated among the shattered pieces of one of the planet’s former moons. Orbiting in the broken satellite’s rocky tail as it was stretched by gravity into a jagged ring around the shere. The Impact calmly drifted while its occupants anxiously awaited for pickup.

Honestly, they weren’t waiting for exfiltration but rescue. After leaving the wreckage of the Caravel, eighteen ships had given pursuit over the last four gyras. Some had been too damaged or poorly piloted to keep up. Some were off searching other sectors and out of range. Despite Kadal’s impressive piloting skills at evading them, seven remained, and there was no way the slow-firing Impact could take them all on.

As overpowered as its attack capabilities were, the Impact only had one shot left. Alysa was hoping that whoever was coming to the backup rendezvous could do the heavy lifting and blast them out of this tight spot. Otherwise, all they were doing was leading their rescuers to their own death. It was another weight she didn’t want to carry.

Waving her hand through tiny drops of respiratory fluids from Yabana’s drool, Alysa watched the seven Kaizuko ships stop their formal pattern search and spread out, surrounding the EXFIL coordinates. They then set up in a multi-vector firing line and just sat there with weapons powered up.

Waiting...

“Damn it all...” Alysa muttered to herself.

The Kaizuko knew the location of the backup—information that was only known by her, Kadal, after she had told him, the B.A.H. Command, and the exfiltration team.

There was a traitor on the inside.

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It was a serious complication, but it wasn’t a surprise—not really. Turncoats were a reality in the galaxy no matter who one served with. If the fates allowed it, Alysa would find the traitor, squeeze a confession from them, and then put paid to their miserable existence. For now, she had to sit tight and try and help whoever was coming.

Sensing Essence stirring, she looked down and saw Yabana’s Core start feeding Essence to his Meridians—Alysa’s boot hit his face three times hard, sending him back into his unconscious hole.

Kadal looked at her, and she honestly was surprised. “What? He can take it. He’s tough.”

Kadal smirked and gave a knowing nod, confirming—at least to Alysa that yes, the loser definitely deserved it.

But a thin smile crossed Alysa’s lips and spread to her eyes as she thought about their arrogant prisoner. Then a genuine chuckle came from her mouth. The other four in the cockpit stared at her, seeming to break with their reality. After all, they knew the situation and emotions were tense as a drumhead.

Alysa came clean. “I was just thinking... Yabana will likely die on this ship with us from his own rescuers’ fire. I can’t think of a better end for the pile of void guano.”

They all shared a short laugh at that.

Vangar then significantly lightened the mood. “There really are worse ways to go out than laughing at the fact that he’s a battle leader in this condition. Imagine his interview for the job. ‘Mister Yabana. What are your qualifications for the position of battle leader?’ ‘Well, sir. I am able to insult the legitimacy of my opponents while simultaneously pissing my pants. This function I am able to perform once a day and twice on our day of rest, sir!’ ‘...Fantastic! You’re hired.’” They shared a real laugh at that as they waited for the axe to fall.

A short time later, the passive sensors of Impact lit up as they registered a direct transmission from a ship exiting hyperspace about 1.5 million kilometers away. It was way outside the Kaizuko’s established ambush perimeter, but too close to go unnoticed by them. Well, at least it was two against five now...

Kadal signaled that the voice communication was being received on the Hegemon’s battle frequency. He patched it through to her headset, and an aquatic, digital voice spoke, “This is Raptor. All friendlies, please keep the lanes clear. We’re coming through.”

Without needing a second for communication, Alysa and Kadal set off in a flurry of arms and hands, activating Impact’s console as fast as possible. They needed to restart all active systems and fire the reverse thrusters as quickly as possible, or they weren’t going anywhere but a cold, weightless grave.

Alysa shouted to her team for the first time, real fear fueling her actions and feeding her voice. The Kaizuko were one thing, but Katak on a strafing run with the Raptor was another, entirely!

“Battle stations! Seal your EVAs! This entire quarter-sector will be a kill zone of cluster-fission bombs slinging condensed osmium shrapnel when that lunatic Katak comes through on his strafing run! He’ll be moving close to one-third the speed of light, and we won’t even know we’re dead until they stick a fork in us!”

Unlike most fast-attack vessels that carried low-mass plasma cannons to enhance their speed, the Raptor went much too fast for light or particle-based energy weapons.

Most research physicists doubted energy weapons would even work at the speeds Raptor moved. However, what she lost in the particle weapons department, Raptor more than made up with rear-deployed, atomic fission shrapnel detonators.

Explosives released with the inertial speed of the Raptor! They would hit and detonate long after the Raptor had passed to a safe distance. ‘Long after’ in this case was relative, as the ship was moving at fractional-C. Unlike other ships, Impact had the necessary speed to escape without issue… they only had to get to the ship in time.

Still, a brilliant smile could be seen through Alysa’s EVA visor as she and Kadal scrambled to safeguard the Impact. those poor Kaizuko bastards wouldn’t even know what hit them! If they had to go, this was a proper way for a space marine to meet their end!

She had time to yell to her team one last instruction and lower their individual blast visors, then the Raptor was upon them. The whole forward viewport lit up at 10,000 lumens while Impact’s blast-shield doors were still closing.

*****

It would be a lie to say that Josh was only slightly anxious when they slipped out of hyperspace, but Katak followed their instructions precisely. His task was to identify enemy targets, plot an intercept and then ‘step on it.’ Josh couldn’t have asked for a more perfect transition from hyperspace to Raptor’s full, sub-light acceleration as the vergei didn’t seem to miss a beat between his transitions.

The plan was relatively simple. A return to normal space also meant a return to the normal effects of acceleration, something they’d planned to use against the treacherous Techno-Lord.

Unfortunately, Estra was no pushover, literally. In the one second between Ishan’s buckling in and the ship exiting hyperspace, Estra realized that she was the only one not strapped in for the transition. Something that would typically not be needed. Immediately she had activated an internal capability, magnetizing her extremities and leaving her hanging in the center of the cabin in the shape of an X. Her quick thinking and action prevented her from being turned into a thin layer of paste on the Raptor’s rear wall.

Sadly for her, the countermeasure wasn’t enough. The twenty-second acceleration phase lasted about nineteen seconds too long and immediately overpowered her skill. Slowly at first, but with the accelerating force only the Raptor could generate, Estra was pushed back and impaled on the rear bulkhead by a steel rod from an EVA hanger piercing her center body mass. A thin, pastel-pink fluid ran from Estra’s chest and started collecting into a puddle against the back wall.

After Katak deployed the nukes and reached a minimum safe distance, he decelerated the attack craft and moved for his sidearm—as every competent pilot would with a known enemy aboard. Even his fast actions needed to be faster. Estra had survived the impact, and though her limbs dangled limply at the sides of her hanging body, her eyes were glowing a fierce yellow that was steadily growing in intensity as if she was in some way charging up to blast everyone in the cabin with heat vision—or, as Josh figured out only after Sen had already jumped to his feet while drawing his sword... to detonate herself!

Josh and Sen charged Estra, weapons drawn and with the speed of doubly Attuned Cultivators. Everyone in the compartment seemed to be moving in slow motion—everything but the flashing eyes of Estra which was rapidly increasing in frequency as an electronic whine from the back of her head cut through the air.

As the harsh light in Estra’s eyes went solid and the ear-splitting shriek from the back of her head plateaued, Josh was only halfway across the distance. The earth shield he had started to form was only one-third the way across the diameter of the cabin and wouldn’t protect anyone. Sen was one step in front of Josh. Close enough to ineffectively pierce the already impaled Techno-Lord’s heart with his bastard sword.

Estra was going to blow the ship and send them all into the void...

A bestial roar filled the cabin as Ishan’s leaping body passed by both Josh and Sen on all fours. Moving as fast as Josh could track him, the Tiger Affin crossed the intervening space and drew a twelve-inch knife to sever the silvered torque circling Estra’s temples in one motion. Estra’s eyes, clearly wishing death on the Tiger Affin hadn’t diminished when his next cut severed her thin neck.

The tension was still thick in the cabin as Josh and Sen halted and looked around for other dangers before turning to Ishan and catching their breath. “How are you so fast, Senior?!”

Ishan cradled Estra’s head like a baby and smiled down at her as he replied, “Sirs, I’m a Brahma Beast Affin and I’m old enough to have fought with the Techno-Lords in the Biosynth Wars, back before I was wise enough to catch on to their ways, at any rate.” He looked Josh in the eye with a complex look. “There is a thing or two I would know of you both, maybe when we’re done here, we can trade some tales over a cup of Razor whisky?” Winking to Josh and Sen, he turned back to Estra’s still functional head and spoke in the sweet high voice reserved for infants through a wide smile. “Darlin’, you really thought you were faster and smarter than me, didn’t you? Sorry, not a chance.”

Seeing everything was under control, Katak reported on the battle outside the Raptor. “Seven bandits off the grid, two severely damaged and considered destroyed by Impact.”

Seven digital screens appeared in the air in front of them, playing video in slow-motion footage of each bandit vessel. Given the Raptor’s speed, there were significant gaps in the images displayed. However, it was unquestionable that the first five attack craft hit by Katak’s strafing run had been turned into fields of random, scattered debris no bigger than confetti from a ticker-tape parade. The view of the sixth and seventh ships showed the craft lined up had been blasted with a pulse of four columns of blue-white energy that led back to another ship designated as a friendly vessel. The attack had transformed the two remaining enemy ships into scrapped metal rings with 50 percent of their mass just plain gone. Gaping holes were all that remained of the center of each ship. The resulting donuts slowly rotated on a tilting axis in the void without any apparent controlled activity.

“Receiving a message from Impact. Patching through to internal comms—”

“Katak! You crazy bastard! My eyebrows are singed off ! I don’t know if I want to kill or kiss you!”

In his submerged-digitized voice, Katak replied, “Glad to see you made it safe, Lieutenant! What are your orders, ma’am? And if I get a say... I vote for the latter.”