Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Epilogue

Index of Coalition Terminology:

Daion Echoes through Transglass

By Amanda Flieder

www.amandaflieder.ca

Copyright © 2020 Amanda Flieder

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, and recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine. To perform any of the above is an infringement of copyright law.

Chapter 1

1-1

“You lost?”

Leo startled out of marvelling at the lines of ships in Dock. He was entering one of the commercial areas, a cavernous room full of cross-traffic passing into and around a central grouping of dome structures housing stores and restaurants. Far above, the entire ceiling was covered with transglass holoscreens showing the view of space outside this section of Dock 12.

He blinked at the woman who’d just spoken to him. “I’m not lost, no. I just –”

“Great. Then move,” she interrupted, nodding her head to indicate her preferred direction for him to be out of the way. She was directing a skid pallet of crates and, by standing at this entrance gawking, he was blocking her from getting through.

“Sorry,” he said quickly. He nearly tripped over his own feet dodging the indicated direction and she was smirking at him in a really cute way when he stopped to turn and look at her. “Sorry,” he repeated.

“Do you always apologize twice for the same thing?” she asked, her deep brown eyes crinkling at the edges and a dimple appearing in just one of her dark brown cheeks. Her hair was black and styled into rows of braids that twisted into a tidy knot at the back of her head, and she was almost the same height he was.

The pause after she’d spoken became uncomfortably long as he realized she was actually waiting for him to reply. “Uh, yes, sometimes” he admitted. “Sorry.”

She snorted a laugh at his expense and he immediately wondered how to keep her talking to him. “Are you on one of the crews?” she asked with a casual gesture at the ships overhead, saving him the trouble of thinking up a conversation topic.

“I am. I’ll be on Dockland,” he answered, looking back toward the holoscreens. “I don’t know which one it is. We leave in a week.”

“Dockland is third from the end on 7C,” she said. “That’s where I’m going right now. Throw your bag on the load. I’ll take you out and you can help me get these supplies stowed on board.”

“Really? I mean, yes, that would be great.” He unshouldered his belongings and shoved them up on top of the crates. “My name’s Leo Deshkarlew. Do you work here in Dock?”

“Trevor Shandlie, and sort of,” she said, shrugging one shoulder while returning to the controls of the skid pallet.

“Sort of?” he asked.

She started walking, the skid pallet following like an obedient pet, and he had to jog a couple of steps to avoid getting bumped by the equipment.

“Right now I’m paid by the hour to move parts and supplies around Dock. Usually I’m a shipside installer, operator, and in-situ trainer for ScanReads. I came in with TS Decrete three weeks ago and volunteered for explorations, but I haven’t gotten any response to know if I was accepted to a ship yet,” she explained.

“With those qualifications I’d be surprised if you didn’t get assigned to a ship.” Leo didn’t bother keeping the fact he was impressed from coloring his tone. She looked about his age – so mid-to-late twenties – but was already a trainer! “I only just graduated from Academy a few months ago,” he said. “Then I volunteered and was assigned to Dockland. The first ship I’ve ever been on was for the six days transporting to Dock.” He couldn’t help looking up as he said it. “I don’t even know which one it was that brought me here,” he added.

Trevor chuckled. “Stars align, Leo, you really are a green-grass landsider, aren’t you? This is all 7,” she said, gesturing up without even glancing. “7 is dedicated to exploration and over distance research ships. Transporters are on 4. Then you’ve got 1 and 9 for personal use ships, and 2, 3, 5 and 8 are corporate and private Coalition ships. This is standard numbering for every Dock,” she instructed, shaking her head at him for not knowing. “You need to read up your regulations so you can at least sound a little bit like you know what you’re doing once you’re shipside.”

“What about 6?” he asked after noticing that was the only number she hadn’t mentioned.

This time she burst out laughing, and then choked to a stop when he only looked at her in confusion. “6 is bad luck,” she said without explaining any further.

He was about to ask why using the number 6 was bad luck, but Trevor’s smart chimed and her attention turned down to her wrist. She touched her smart with a finger, scrolling whatever she was reading as she walked, then smiled and glanced up at the holoscreen ceiling.

“Good news?” Leo asked.

“For me it is. Might not be for you, though.” The lone dimple appeared in her cheek as she smiled and looked sideways at him. “I just got assigned to Dockland for a one standard year exploration contract. We’re going to be working together.”

The bridge looked empty when Leo came up the ladder. He still felt like a bolt calling the wide staircase a ladder, but he’d been corrected every time he called it ‘stairs’ for these first two weeks on board.

“Buildings have stairs. Ships have ladders.” The chair at NavCom swivelled to reveal Trevor smirking at him above the stiff collar of her standard Coalition uniform. She’d noted the hitch in his strides and – being the main person correcting his terminology since meeting him three weeks ago – she knew exactly what thought had caused the pause.

Dockland was an old ship, making the bridge spacious because it had been constructed for the needed equipment and controls to be three or four times the size of the consoles now in place. The same illusion of extra room was found around every work station, as well as down in the engineering decks and throughout the maintenance corridors. Coalition ships constructed now were overall larger and needed smaller crews, but the old systems Dockland was constructed with required more people even after multiple upgrades. That meant in spite of constantly looking larger during working shifts, living conditions felt cramped and provided only basic necessities.

Working on the bridge during the shift before Captain’s, however, left roominess to spare and a gorgeous view of the planet they were currently scanning set against a blanket of stars. Leo paused and admired the view. Ship construction designs started using transglass panel holoscreens for viewing outward from the bridge at least fifty standard years ago, allowing command centers to be constructed in structurally safe locations deep inside the ships. For new ships, all images were provided through exterior hull recordings. That three-sixty spherical imaging he’d gotten trained for at the academy paled in comparison to this wide section of transglass windows in Dockland’s hull. Anyone on the bridge could see outside the ship.

“You know, I met you in Dock that day and really liked talking with you those few times during the week before leaving on this exploration,” Leo said, talking over his shoulder while watching the planet’s horizon. “I actually thought I was getting some kind of reward when I was assigned as your partner on our first week working together. For our second week working together, though, I wondered if I was being punished.” He turned and walked to where Trevor was sitting. “Tea for you,” he added, setting the second cup he was carrying on the console beside her elbow. Her smirk widened into a grin that he’d called her a punishment and also because he’d brought her tea. “But now,” he continued, “on the first cycle of my third week being shipside with you, now I think it was fortune and fate.”

1-2

Trevor snorted a chuckle. “How do you figure fate and fortune play into it?” she asked.

“Because I’ve learned more about systems and tech from you in the past two weeks than I did during the last two standard years at Academy,” Leo said, sitting at the work station beside hers. “And now I’m almost certain that means I’ll get promoted before you, because now I’m so educated and so smart.” He smiled at her. “It must be fortune and fate working in my favor.”

“No, apparently you’ve now become delusional,” she said. “Your landside-loving brain officially has space rot.”

“You think so?” he asked, pausing before taking a first sip of what they called coffee on Dockland.

“The evidence is overwhelming.”

“And you’re qualified to diagnose a space-rotted brain because…?” He let the question hang.

“Because I am, and always will be, so much smarter than you,” she said. She picked up the tea he’d brought her and leaned back, stretching out her legs under the console and crossing them at the ankles. “And being smarter than you means I’ll get promoted first.”

She held up her cup and he tapped his lid into hers, as if the poly cups were mugs of ale they could actually clink together. They sipped their beverages in hopes the liquids might be hot, their mouths encountering the disappointment of tepid reality at the same time. After carrying the cups here from the galley, Leo had been holding less hope about the drinks’ temperatures and that knowledge provided him with slightly less disappointment.

“If you’re so smart, my dear Analyst and senior scan team member, why are you sitting at NavCom?” he asked. He decided it was a better idea to drink the so-called coffee while it was still warm and braved a mouthful, swallowing fast so it had less time to be in contact with his tongue.

“Mollin and Hodahvay finished ReadScans for this rock. You and I are babysitting NavCom calculations for our shift.”

“That sounds great!” Leo said brightly as she sipped her tea. His voice was perfect, but he couldn’t get the look on his face to line up and the sarcasm was overly obvious. Trevor only rolled her eyes. He’d been hoping for a chuckle she’d have to try and suppress due to having just taken a drink; even better if she’d been unsuccessful at suppressing the chuckle. Cleaning up the console because he’d made her laugh while her mouth was full would be a nice change. Usually it was the other way around and she was helping him wipe off the controls.

“So where are we going now?” he asked. His worst subject had been Modern Navigation, and this equipment was probably twenty standard years older than the oldest systems he’d trained with at Academy. His best subject had been Technology History, but these systems were still over a hundred standard years newer than anything from those classes.

“Looks like Buccaneer got IL, so we’re on our way to L,” she said.

“What?” Leo stared at her.

She shrugged and gestured to screens in front of her seat. Whatever writing was on them, it made even less sense than a ship getting ill and their new route being to a planet named Ell. All the planets their exploration group were assigned to had been numbered, and no Coalition planets had single syllable names. He leaned over the screens and squinted at both sets of information. The scrolling info was gibberish that had resemblances to the last time NavCom was calculating a route, and the stationary info… wasn’t in a language he could read.

“Here’s our scurvy-filled bucket,” she said, rotating her seat enough to point a finger at the screen of stationary info without having to change her posture. He stared at the line of letters and spaces highlighted by her touch. His brain picked out all the needed letters for their ship’s name in one of the clusters of letters, but that was the only resemblance.

“I don’t get it,” he finally admitted.

Trevor sighed and sat forward. “That skinny, redheaded, walking wall of freckles, Hodahvay, he likes pranks and his pretty, holocinema star-looking partner, Mollin, lets him do them, right? The virus Hodahvay wrote for our shift is harmless because it only affects the screen readout – I already ran the diagnostic check – but I’m sick of dealing with his garbage so I’m leaving the readout like this for Captain’s shift.” She sighed and glared at the readouts a little harder. “At least, I’m leaving it until later when my desire to not get chewed on by Captain is larger than my annoyance with Hodahvay and we write an antivirus,” she said. Trevor set down her cup and pointed at two spots, using one index finger from each hand even though the spots were close enough to have used fingers from one hand. “You can find ship names by the capital letters. All the words are in order, but the letters in each one display in reverse alphabetical order, see? The planet numbers just got translated into some ancient writing that stayed common in backspace sectors.”

“So… o-n-l-k-d-D-c-a is Dockland, and we’re going to ‘L’, and u-r-n-e-e-c-c-B-a is Buccaneer who are going to ‘IL’,” he said, spelling out the lettered order of the ship names she was pointing to. “Making this” –he looped his arm up between hers to point at the potential ship name on the line above Buccaneer’s– “Oscareous?” he asked, turning his head to look at her and close enough he could have rested his chin onto her shoulder. She locked eyes with him, and then looked pointedly at his arm in the middle of hers before staring back into his eyes with her brows peaked in a silent question. “What? You’re nicer to me when I flirt with you,” he said innocently.

“I’m nicer to you when you bring me tea.”

“That’s flirting, too,” he said, shifting his voice into a whisper which wasn’t at all whispering.

“What if I break your arm?” she asked. “You still think its flirting?”

“You asking before breaking it makes me think the right answer might be yes,” he said, the hopeful tone almost making the statement into a question. “And I don’t have a clue what these letters you’re saying are numbers actually are.”

“Stars align, Leo, I should not have told you I thought you were cute if the end result was you getting uppity like this. You’re from the Central Worlds, so it’s not much of a surprise you don’t know uncommon shipside things.”

“Yeah, but you did tell me and all of last week nearly killed me. I know a lot of commonly uncommon shipside things, I just don’t know how to read numbers written as letters.”

“Nearly killed you? So what, did you die between yestercyc and now? I’m not teaching ancient writing to you; just trust me that Dockland is going to planet fifty.”

“I did say last week nearly killed me, so no, I’m not dead, I just realized last night that Coalition regulations really fall off the charts for our situation. And I trust you.” He dropped his hand from the screen, breaking into a smile when she let his palm stay on her knee.

“Regulations still apply completely while we’re on shift, though,” she reprimanded him. “Educated and cute you might be, but you’re still not smart if you think any different.”

“My family’s rich, too.”

“Oh really?”

“They own both a condominium apartment mortgage and monthly commuter transportation debt. My dad even almost has a job again, so I might soon be able to claim my bi-weekly pay all to myself. Doesn’t that level of opulent prosperity make you inclined to bend regulations?”

1-3

Trevor cupped Leo’s cheek in one hand, her smile full of silent laughter one of the most perfect things he’d seen since getting assigned to Dockland. Then her fingers traced along his bottom jaw in a way that sent a tingle down the length of his spine. He leaned closer. She covered his face with her hand and shoved him into his chair with a laugh.

“You were a bad idea a week ago when I said you were cute and are a terrible idea right now, making you also a current waste of my time,” she said, picking up her tea and leaning back in her seat again.

“But you still think I’m pretty, right?” he asked.

“You already know the answer to that.”

“Yeah, I know. But it sounds better when you say it.”

She slanted a look at him and then shook her head. “I liked you more the first two weeks after we met when you were scared of me. I think I even liked you better last week when you couldn’t talk without scrambling the sentence. This confidence thing you’re starting this week with is just…” She held up one hand and made circles in his direction, as if she was washing an invisible window between them. The gesture, combined with the look on her face, clearly indicated that she was trying to find a single-word insult for describing all of him.

“Something you’d like to try getting used to because you find it appealing?” he asked hopefully, before she could come up with something negative. Her hand dropped and she studied him for a moment.

“Not what I was going to say, but okay.” She turned back to the screens, not quite quick enough with her tea to cover the little smile pulling at her lips.

Leo could honestly say he’d met lots of women like Trevor. She had his favorite combination of thick black hair, deep brown eyes, dark brown skin, sarcastic humor and quick comebacks his emotions usually tripped on and fell for. And, at the end of the week in Dock after meeting her, he’d been smitten enough to want to keep talking to her. Then Captain had assigned them to be a scan team and Leo’s wish of talking more to Trevor came true.

Usually smitten was as far as these things got for him because few women he found visually attractive stayed attractive once he learned more about them. Plus, it was impossible for him to stay attracted to anyone who didn’t return the interest. That one time, though, the person he was interested in stayed attractive the more time they spent together, and then she’d smiled the same way Trevor just did at something ridiculous he’d said. That other woman had been Lindsay. She’d left him behind three standard, Central World years ago.

At the end of three standard years being registered, they’d deregistered because (in Lindsay’s words) Leo wasn’t ambitious enough. Two weeks after leaving him, he learned she was moving in with a mutual Academy classmate who Leo had bested in every class except the one that mattered: Leo’s social class was way below the status his classmate’s family enjoyed. No amount of ambition would get Leo into the class Lindsay had decided she needed for passing through life.

The last he’d heard about her had been two standard years ago, right after he’d found out his Academy education would qualify him for explorations, and what he’d heard had only been a relationship registration announcement on a news page he was scrolling over. Her lips had been smiling in the announcement’s still holo, but he knew Lindsay well enough to see little signs in her face and posture showing she wasn’t happy. Likely she had access to enough income now to make up for things like joy and integrity, but based on that photo he doubted it. He’d silently wished her the best and scrolled to the next article.

The first week after meeting Trevor, when they were still in Dock, had been great for Leo. By the end of their first week shipside he absolutely liked her too much, of course, but had been blissfully assured by his low self-esteem that the attraction was one sided. Add in the fact she was mid-caste due to growing up shipside, so at least half the galaxy’s caste system above him, and it meant how attracted he felt was a distraction which would end very soon.

That is to say, he was assured the attraction was one-sided until the last cycle of their first week working together shipside.

In the hallway on the way back to living quarters, after they’d gone to the galley together for dinner, she’d first teased him about his skin being the exact shade of dark beige as their uniforms so it was hard to tell if he was dressed for work or not, and then complimented him as cute. He’d been shocked enough to stammer and ask her if she meant it. She’d laughed in that perfect way of hers and repeated that she thought he was cute, and then asked if he was really such a bolt that he hadn’t noticed she was attracted to him.

After that, he’d messed up every sentence whenever he was trying to talk to her about anything for all of last week. On the walk to the bridge for his shift this cycle, he’d gotten tea for her and then silently practiced what to say for the entire walk from the galley to the bridge. Now, finishing his coffee and chatting easily with Trevor about whether or not they should write an antivirus for Hodahvay’s latest prank, he wondered why he’d taken a week to remember how much he liked talking to Trevor.

This shift gave them eight uninterrupted hours babysitting NavCom for the regulation’s required six routes to the next planet, which would be presented to Captain for selection of what she considered the best course. Their conversation – momentarily disturbed only by recalculation commands and the actual work they were here for – spun off into more about their families and personal interests than any conversation they’d had for the past weeks. For Leo, it was perfect.

“So what kind of people are you usually attracted to?” Trevor asked, point blank, a couple hours into the second half of their shift.

“Usually women, and I like smart, funny, pretty, sarcastic, and mean,” he answered easily, ticking off each point on his fingers.

“Well, I got woman and mean covered pretty well,” she said.

“Smart, funny, pretty and sarcastic, too.”

She blushed just enough for him to notice and a little smile pulled at her lips again. “You keep saying stuff like that and I’m going to be too flustered to be mean,” she muttered.

“You told me last week your brother is mean, too. We could vid him and he can be mean to me on your behalf?” Leo offered. “But only by vid. I don’t need to deal with that in person yet.”

“Charlotte would be way too mean for your delicate, landsider feelings.”

“Even with all the training you’ve given me these past two weeks?”

“I have not even begun to be mean to you yet. These past couple weeks were just me finding out if you can handle someone being minorly mean.”

“My family is lowest caste and I’ve been bullied most of my life. I can handle minorly and majorly mean,” Leo said as if boasting. “I don’t handle it well, of course, but I’ve got Coalition health benefits to cover therapy now so I can handle it,” he added, flashing a grin at her. She had to cover her mouth with a hand to hold in the last mouthful of tea from her lunch, chuckling after swallowing it. “And now you know what kind of people I usually get attracted to, so what are your weaknesses?” he asked.

1-4

“I don’t have a list,” Trevor said. She dropped her head to one side as she considered her answer. “Honestly, my first two serious relationships showed me that someone cute is fine to look at, but often not fine to have a relationship with. My third one confirmed my mom was right when she told me to look for someone I like talking with, not someone I found interesting getting talked at by. My last relationship we were just too much alike and fought all the time. I guess now… I like looking at people I think are cute, but I get attracted to compassion and that excitement that bubbles up when people are interested in learning something or they have a passion they love talking about.”

“So keen minds packaged in above average bodies, supported by souls who thrive on rescuing young animals,” Leo replied, keeping his tone level as he nodded in an attempt to look and sound sarcastically sage. “But, wait, you said you were attracted to me, though?”

“Dockland doesn’t have a huge population. I had to lower my standards,” she said, quickly and completely off-hand.

“Now it makes sense,” he said with a wide grin.

She studied him with serious eyes for a moment and then tilted her head slightly to the side. “Leo, you do realize I only had to lower them a few decimal points off perfect to accommodate you, right?” Her tone was earnest and hit him completely off guard.

“Uh,” Leo said, unable to think of anything as an answer to that. He dropped his stare to look at the screens they were monitoring, cleared his throat, and tried to ignore the blush heating his face. “Well, at least I’m still assured I have room for improvement,” he said, pretending a lot more bravado than he felt as he flashed a quick grin at her.

She just chuckled and shook her head at him, about to say something when suddenly her brows pinched down and she frowned slightly. “Wait, you said before that you didn’t need to deal with Charlotte in person ‘yet’?” She stared over the console screens in front of her to his station. He shrugged and continued compiling the Routing Options Report on one screen while going over Trevor’s antivirus on the other.

“I guess I assumed that liking you this much, and possibly having the attraction reciprocated, means at some point it would be nice to meet your family, too,” he said. “I’m not planning on it; that would be a little much a lot too soon. But it’s a potential goal for some distant, as-yet fuzzy future.”

Trevor didn’t answer right away. She was staring at him, biting her bottom lip, when he looked up to smile over his screens at her. His stomach flipped when she smiled back.

“So that means you, at some point in our future, also might be thinking about giving me a tour of the landside condominium property associated with the mortgage you were bragging earlier in our shift about your parents owning?” she asked.

“You know how it goes with families. You show me yours, I show you mine…”

“You think that only applies to families?” she said, mischief dancing across her lips.

“Hopefully not, but the alternatives it applies to right now I think are better as another potential goal for an unknown, distant and fuzzy future,” he replied, waving his fingers in the air like a children’s magician as he spoke.

“Sounds good to me,” Trevor agreed. “And speaking of right now, have you proofed the antivirus so we can give Captain our report in proper language and not get chewed on at the end of our shift?” she asked, getting back to finishing off the summary of the sixth route so he could include it in the report.

“Sort of,” he said, looking down at his screens.

“Sort of?”

“I’m rewriting the implementation into an option,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“At the start of our shift you said you wanted Captain to see how annoying Hodahvay is being. I figured presenting the Routing Options Report in their gibberish, and then providing the switch to engage the antivirus should do it,” Leo explained.

“And that way Captain still retains access to the gibberish version whenever she needs it. Like for that remote audit in three months she advised us to collect data and proof for because she’s arguing with Senior Coalition that Dockland’s systems are too outdated and susceptible to corruption,” Trevor said, smiling at the idea.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Leo agreed. “Plus, we might be able to stop wasting so much of our time fixing corruptions if Captain decides she wants more evidence for the audit.”

“Pretty, educated, kind, and surprisingly devious,” Trevor said with a sigh, fluttering her eyelashes at him. He beamed a smile over the console screens and was rewarded with another laugh from her.

Their plan for getting out of constantly wasting hours fixing corruptions, which it turned out Hodahvay was helping Mollin create, worked perfectly. Captain ordered them to monitor the issues and create the solutions, but they didn’t have to waste time implementing anything because Captain wanted to see every corruption in the before and after states.

Three shift cycles later, sitting in the galley and talking after dinner, Trevor covered Leo’s fingers with her own and smiled while finishing her story about the Analyst she’d been training on TS Decrete before meeting Leo and getting the contract on Dockland. Leo had left her touch lingering for a moment before lacing his fingers between hers. They’d stayed that way for almost an hour, talking and laughing and holding hands.

That week they talked about everything. He told her about growing up landside, happily making the most of what little his lowest-caste parents had for him and his two siblings, and how he’d lucked into a scholarship giving him access to his Academy education and exploration training. She told him about growing up shipside, picking up school where she could and jobs when she needed to, how her transient family made the best of everything and how her experience building and testing ReadScan systems and ship flight simulators had gotten her the opportunity to become an in-situ trainer.

They’d talked political views, personal moments, and jokes that would have gotten them called bolts with anyone else but they each thought were funny. They even laughed about how weird-to-them the reversed naming conventions were between landside and shipside living; what Leo had always considered masculine names, Trevor knew as feminine names, and what Leo considered feminine were all masculine to Trevor.

Five weeks into the exploration, they were walking back to personal quarters after dinner together and discussing their interests and thoughts about if they – in some potential, distant and fuzzy future – wanted to have children. For Leo the answer was an easy yes; he’d never been able to picture his life without having children. Trevor hesitated, though, before confirming the thought had crossed her mind but she hadn’t put a lot of thinking into it.

“Well, that’s not like it’s a decision you need to make right now,” Leo said with a smile. “Distant, fuzzy future,” he intoned, making the magic-fingers gesture and staring down the hallway like there was a horizon at the end of it.

1-5

Trevor elbowed Leo gently and he laughed. “Plus, having kids isn’t actually a concern right now if you and I do decide to have a relationship,” Leo said. “Lindsay didn’t want children when we were together because she felt we were too young, and I just never bothered to stop taking repression.”

Trevor burst out laughing. “Really, Leo? You haven’t been touched by anyone in three standard years and you’re still taking repression?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said with a shrug. “It’s one pill a cycle and takes a month to be fully effective. I just take it with the rest of my cycly shipside supplements.”

“You do know you don’t have a twenty-eight cycle body rhythm to keep under control even when you’re not sexually active, right?”

“Yup,” he replied with an easy smile and a shrug.

“So you’re already ready in case of surprise sex. Makes sense.” She rolled her eyes. “You know it actually only makes sense if you have surprise sex,” she added, leaning her shoulder into his and talking out only one side of her mouth.

“Eh,” he said. “I can’t get fully interested in someone quickly enough for surprise sex. Physical attraction will get me talking to someone, but a person has to be worth talking to for me to get sexually attracted.”

He stepped behind her, making room in the hallway for two members of the crew to pass them. Neither of the other crew members walking toward the galley noticed the gesture, and they continued past Leo and Trevor without any interruption to their conversation.

“So is this where you tell me that you like talking to me?” she teased, pulling his hand so he’d come back to walking beside her.

“Pfft,” he scoffed, squeezing her fingers gently. “That’s the biggest understatement of the exploration. I love talking to you.”

She stopped suddenly. He paused to face her, the apology for having said such a bolt thing already on the tip of his tongue.

“Leo, I really want to kiss you,” she said before he could say anything. “Can I?”

He choked back the apology as his mind scrambled to catch up and understand what she’d just said. “You want to…?” he started, and then shook his head to see if that would help straighten out his thoughts. “Really?”

“Yes,” she said, laughing quietly. “Are you going to make me ask again or can I kiss you now?” she asked.

“A kiss? I mean, yeah. That would be… I would like that. Very much. All right. Yes.”

She was still chuckling when her hand cupped his cheek and then her lips touched his. Leo’s heart pounded against his ribs as the entire galaxy vanished around him for the perfect seconds of kissing Trevor, the sounds and lights of Dockland returning in a rush as it ended.

“Phew,” she whispered. “I didn’t expect you to be that good at it.”

“Kiss me again?” he asked quickly.

Trevor shook off from holding his hand and wrapped her arms around his neck to hold on tightly as she kissed him one more time. Leo stroked her back and shoulders with his hands and then hugged her close, holding on to the embrace after the kiss ended and smiling when Trevor held their foreheads together.

“So does this mean I’m not a bad idea anymore?” Leo asked carefully.

“Nope, you’re still a bad idea,” she said with a chuckle. “But I’m starting to think you might not be a total waste of my time.”

“I could get used to that,” he whispered.

“So, what would you say if I told you I wanted to ride you like a bicycle?” she murmured.

“What’s a bicycle?” he asked.

Trevor laughed hard, stepping back and shaking her head at him. “You are still such a green-grass landsider sometimes,” she said, chuckling and smiling widely. “You look it up and then let me know.”

“I will,” he said, still distracted by the taste of her kisses remaining on his lips.

She backed away a few more steps along the hallway. “And, Leo?” she said through a chuckle. “That’s your cabin. Just right there.” She pointed at the door he was standing beside, laughing out loud when he blinked at it and then took a startled step back. She turned around and kept walking. “You get back to me about the bicycle,” she called over her shoulder.

“I will,” he promised. She waved without looking back. He watched her all the way down the hall until she turned the corner toward her cabin and stepped out of sight. “I wonder what a bicycle is,” he muttered to himself, and then he unlocked his door and went in so he could use the search on his comp to find out.

Stars align, ancient history had a lot of great innovations. Leo was certain whoever had come up with the idea of a two wheeled vehicle powered only by the operator hadn’t been thinking of it the way Trevor now had Leo thinking about it, though.

However, regulations clearly stated no fraternization between crew members, unless the relationship was exclusive, established, and Coalition registered.

Rather than swipe the holoscreen of his comp closed and message Trevor immediately agreeing to her offer of riding him like a bicycle, Leo’s hand hovered over his personal copy of Coalition regulations. Up until fifteen minutes ago, he and Trevor’s relationship could have gone on for the rest of their lives as great friends. Maybe as great friends who wondered sometimes if they might have had a successful romantic relationship, too, but definitely continuing as great friends none the less.

He picked up the dedicated handheld and scrolled into the menu to select the section on relationships between exploration crew members. He knew regulations were in place for a reason and, even if that reason wasn’t clear to him, there definitely had to be a reason. Then again, Captain knew he and Trevor had been flirting because she’d caught them holding hands over an extended dinner and she’d just smiled at them and winked before pointedly not looking their way again as she got a cup of tea and left to return to the bridge. So... maybe the threat of removal from Coalition employment stated as the only recourse for unregistered fraternization wasn’t as strictly enforced by Captain as Leo was worried about?

He swiped off the dedicated regulations handheld, hesitated but swiped closed his comp’s holoscreen, and then just sat and stared at the cabin’s ceiling. His smart chimed with a message from Trevor.

<Did you search up bicycles yet?> she asked.

<I did, yeah> he replied. His stomach twisted into a knot as the seconds ticked by and she didn’t respond.

<So you’re going back to being scared of me again?> She’d added a holoimage of a mouth aggressively biting air and then bouncing as it made exaggerated laughing motions.

<Yeah> he replied, then added <Regulations on crew relationships, though>

<No way to get to an established relationship if it never starts> she messaged.

“I know, but regulations are pretty clear on this one,” he told his empty cabin, his voice as depressed sounding outside of his head as the feelings were inside his chest. <It’s just a big step> he messaged.

<So think about it. I never said you had to get back to me tonight>

<You’re sure?>

There was a long pause and then his smart finally chimed. <You’re worth waiting for> she messaged.

Chapter 2

2-1

Leo smiled at his smart. <I will definitely get back to you when I have a solid answer> he wrote, and then smirked as he deleted the last part to edit the message so it said <I will definitely get back to you when I have a hard answer> before sending it to Trevor.

Her reply was fast and just a sound file: the ding-ding of a bicycle bell. Leo laughed and decided to have a shower. By the time he dried off, finished his usual nightly routine and climbed into bed, he already knew he wanted to take up Trevor on her offer. First, though, he needed to talk to her about how serious she was for this relationship to get to a point of being established. With her qualifications and status, losing her contract on Dockland only meant she’d likely get another, similar contract or hourly job within a week. For Leo, losing this position meant being sent home and likely never working for Coalition again, so his only option would be the same unreliable jobs his parents had and a lowest caste, landside life weighted by poverty-enforced debts.

A bad sleep and another of Hodahvay and Mollin’s pranks made the start of the next shift miserable. Getting a chance to talk to Trevor seriously, despite that she was tossing around bicycle puns like free candy at a Central World parade, improved the cycle considerably. She agreed it was a good idea to wait a bit longer for sex as they adjusted to their new situation of being together in a budding relationship. Then, a couple of weeks later when they decided to become established, Leo didn’t have any hesitations.

The cycles and weeks passed easily into months. The only irritant being Hodahvay and Mollin’s pranks becoming progressively more complex, and thankfully less frequent, as Captain changed their security access permissions for the systems they targeted. Once Leo and Trevor weren’t being forced to fix systems before Captain’s shift multiple times a week, they started to use solving the pranks as games to break up the tedium of planetary scans and over distance travel.

When the audit arrived, Captain had more than enough evidence to support Dockland getting upgraded, and to get the new systems and equipment on an expedited schedule. It put the exploration on hold for two standard months, but as much of Dockland as possible was upgraded to current interfaces and system sets.

Trevor’s contract was extended for the additional months, and her experience as an installer meant she was working the entire time in Dock. Using her connections, she even got Leo a temporary apprentice position so he could learn the fine arts of stripping cables and carrying equipment and tools to the right locations for the people actually doing the work. The hours were long and the pay was identical to his Analyst position, but he saw Trevor more often than just after her shifts, and he didn’t have the reduced wage from being on standby that most of the crew received.

Dockland’s new systems had the same generation holoscreen console interfaces Leo had learned with at Academy, and the console supports were the same smoothly transparent pillars as had become standard in the past thirty years. The console interfaces displayed between supports came with the optional vertical holoscreens projected above when needed.

Surprising to Leo, the upgrades were unfamiliar technology to Trevor, and he found himself in the strange situation of training her. It only took one shift for her to get comfortable with the interfaces and she learned the systems way faster than he ever had. He proclaimed it was because she’d grown up shipside and knew every previous generation of the systems back-to-front and front-to-back, even if she teasingly argued her ability to learn so fast was because her intelligence was a great deal higher than his.

Six months into Dockland’s exploration, and eight months working together, her question about how exclusive they were made him laugh. Not because of any secret doubts he was harboring, but because the cycle before he’d filled in his information for the Exclusive Relationship Registration submission and had been mentally stumbling over the timing of when to ask her to add her details.

She’d laughed about the form and said “not yet”… which wasn’t a ‘no’. Especially when she threatened to gut him and anyone he might look at as relationship material going forward because she hadn’t signed. He was pretty sure she was kidding, because her next question had been if he’d put any thought into stopping repression, but she’d been holding a knife while cutting some snacks so joking about gutting him at that moment was the right level of mean added to dark humor he loved about her.

The one standard year completion for the exploration loomed a little closer every cycle, the half-filled registration waiting patiently for Trevor’s info, and their exploration routing taking them further from recognized Coalition sectors where every planet was already scanned. They came to a world that had been home to an ancient colony, long disappeared, and completed their scans to include the useless technology that was found. Trevor was quieter than usual during those ten cycles in orbit.

Dockland travelled to the next planet, uninhabited and without any historical signs of life, and took up scanning. Leo couldn’t help but notice that Trevor continued getting more distant and professional whenever they were working. He tried to talk to her about it, first jokingly and then seriously, and she brushed off and avoided every attempt.

They came to another planet with evidence of more recent but still abandoned habitation. As the required orbits were finishing up, Captain received Dockland’s list of possible next planets to scan and – as she usually did – saved it to Dockland’s announcement file so every member of the crew could read it.

Leo tried using the list of potential planets they could be going to as a way to start a conversation, but Trevor stopped reading at planet seventy-four (or ‘LXXIV’ in the numbering Trevor had introduced him to and Leo pronounced phonetically as ‘Lexxive’ to try and make her laugh). She didn’t speak to him for the rest of the shift except for one or two words relating completely to work. After a full eight hours of silence, with only two months left in this exploration, she went back to her cabin alone and locked the door.

Walking to the galley by himself, Leo’s brain recycled over the past month for what he’d said and done with a fine filter, looking at everything for anything which would make Trevor shut him out. Mollin and Hodahvay passed him in the hallway, too embroiled in their own conversation to notice anyone was around them, and Leo mumbled his usual apology when Mollin accidentally bumped his shoulder. They were talking about planet seventy-four, wondering excitedly if Dockland would finish ReadScans here on sixty-eight in time to get assigned to seventy-four because three other ships were also near completions.

Mollin and Hodahvay were way too excited. Their conversation broke through the Trevor-shaped fog clouding Leo’s thoughts. He decided while he was in line at the galley he should look into planet seventy-four a little closer because, now that he was listening to things outside of his head, almost everyone in the galley was buzzing about the possibility of going there.

It wouldn’t be hard to look up the information. After all, everyone had access to the existing research about the planets all the exploration ships were scanning. Not much use to Coalition for someone on the crews to not notice something important or to ignore regulation protocols regarding first contacts.

Again.

2-2

Content Warning: I know I said I'd do warnings for the big terror attack and the violence / injuries in this story, and those are still at a distance from now, but I feel there needs to be a warning here for the history of the Daions because of the plague and then mistreatment the survivors went through. These happenings are not presented as detailed accountings and this summary of the history in this story's universe forms part of its current politics. This warning is here so you know the flavor of this chapter part.

Leo shut off his personal comp hours later. He’d been good at history, but the refresher he’d just given himself left a queasier feeling than he could attribute solely to the quickly eaten galley meal.

The last two worlds with signs of habitation Dockland had scanned were Daion worlds. The first was one of their historical First Landing Colonies, and this one Dockland was scanning right now – planet sixty-eight – had been a home world. Planet seventy-four had also been a Daion home world but, more than that, it had been their Central World.

The very first explorations out of Coalition controlled space had been one-way. The ships had been huge, designed to separate into components capable of landing on habitable planets and becoming shelters for the explorers. They’d carried building materials, housed active, mechanized farms because seed foods were all that were available at that level of technology, and they’d contained stable populations of all the living things needed to establish colonies and then enable them to thrive and grow. Early forms of Advanced Cryo were utilized so living beings could survive the dozens of standard years required for interstellar travel prior to modern over distance technology.

During the Fifty Year Revolt, many colony communications were disrupted and some lost, and a few entire colonies were lost along with the records of them. Some of the most distant lost colonies were close enough together they began communicating with each other when they lost contact with Coalition. They formed their own system, evolving into a people who called themselves Daions after multiple generations passed.

Scientists, innovators, farmers, artists, teachers, adventurers, every discipline deemed necessary for a colony’s survival along with the natural progression of expanding technology, medicine communication, and education… Daion worlds flourished just as well as Coalition worlds. Some historians argued Daions ended up better. A few hundred standard years after the Fifty Year Revolt, New Coalition started calling itself Coalition and history reduced those tumultuous centuries into a few pages within childhood school books. A few hundred standard years after that, new explorations were started – with more advanced technology – and Coalition ships travelled back out into what they thought at the time were uncharted and unexplored sectors.

Stumbling into Daion controlled space had been a chance encounter. Voice and vid communications, as well as history data exchanges once political relationships became friendly instead of tentative, confirmed Daions as descendants of Old Coalition lost exploration colonies. The news was top page for weeks, and search results now still brought up pages and pages of articles. The first formal meeting, face to face, was between allied political leaders for signing the Agreement of One Cause. Coalition Public Face travelled to meet Daion Voice, their highest members of both governments in the same room for document signing, vid ops, and still vid and still holo images. (Leo even found an announcement about a planned holocinema, but it was never made.) Daions were publicly recognized as equals, although there were thick private opinions about ‘upstart colonizers’ on more than a few Coalition worlds.

Some Daions had started getting sick before that first formal meeting, though. Over twelve hundred standard years had passed since those colonizers had left Coalition sectors for their one-way journey, and the immune systems of their descendants had been exposed to so many other things Coalition peoples hadn’t encountered that Daions were hailed as a better evolution. It was true their immune systems were heartier, something medical exploration had planned to study because of the benefits to populations the galaxy over, but their immune systems weren’t impervious.

The initial people who got sick barely raised any attention because they weren’t prominent people, and their sicknesses were the results of in-person meetings for trade business which wasn’t entirely legal. Due to the business being illegal, and Daions being descendants of lost Coalition colonies, proper isolation and cleansing protocols for meeting new species or visiting unknown planets were ignored.

After the agreement was signed, due to the large number of high profile people at the week-long schedule of meetings, the much higher number of sick started to get a lot of attention. Viral warfare verbiage was thrown around and denials were just as loud. It turned out a common cold virus in Coalition space was an airborne, lethal plague in Daion space. A vaccine was developed as quickly as possible, but the kill rate had been… beyond count. Daion civilization collapsed and survivors were (as the history books written by Coalition stated) absorbed into Coalition.

Not absorbed in reality, though, Leo thought glumly. The thick opinions on some worlds reared up in ugly ways throughout Coalition, running rampant that Daions viewed themselves as superior because Coalition medical scientists admired their immune systems. Daion culture was different, their ways deemed other, and the people were ostracized on some worlds and subjugated on others. Radical factions of Coalition populations simply assumed lies and opinions as fact, their point of view dictating that Daion people had been rightfully punished through the plague by some higher power for the original colonies having never returned after losing contact. It became a normalized view on some worlds that medical reports stating Daion immune systems were superior was publicly admitted self-proclamations of secular superiority over all Coalition peoples. The radical factions argued it was due justice to undermine, degrade and abuse the plague survivors for the opinion-based views many Radicals imposed.

To Leo, the whole argument against Daions was a bolt situation, but it had the partially positive outcome of bringing about Coalition’s response of New Wave. Radical factions were – and Leo had to quote his dad on this one because the history, surprisingly, wasn’t as polite – as isolated as they should have been in the first place. Daions who survived the abuse on those Radical worlds were granted refugee status on other worlds, but the damage had already been done.

So much damage had already been done.

Populations in the billions had been reduced to thousands. Those thousands had been marked irreparably when their worlds were placed under Non Settlement laws, meaning they weren’t allowed to return home. Radical views were thinned on Coalition worlds which claimed to offer safety, but radical opinions had been advertised enough to become ingrained through repetition. To admit being Daion now was an immediate track to a life of the lowest caste in Coalition space. Many made the best they could but, overall, it was apparent in the census reports for the past five standard years that Daion people were disappearing. Probably into extinction, Leo thought sadly.

Leo and most of the crew on Dockland hadn’t been born yet when New Wave started, but nobody on board was dumb enough to think New Wave planning for isolating radical groups would actually fix the situation. Now there were rumors of even more radicalized beliefs than had gotten the Radicals isolated, with the gossip and hearsay working into New Wave sectors. That’s why a lot of people – Leo included – had volunteered for these explorations.

Senior Coalition could call explorations whatever they wanted to, and right now they were going with something pleasant like ‘New Colony Viability’, but every planet on the list for being scanned had been discovered before and each one had a reason for having military viability. Daion planets were extremely valuable due to having so many developed assets left behind, and enforced Non Settlement laws protecting them, so Senior Coalition wanted to get to everything before any of the Radicals could. Planet seventy-four had the potential to be a world of opportunity as long as nobody acknowledged they were rooting through the hundred standard year old mausoleums every building had become.

Planetary grave robbing was, apparently, a great way to accumulate developed resources and technology.

2-3

Leo pushed back from his desk. He needed some air and his personal cabin had gotten very small during the research he’d been doing. The bland walls surrounding his desk and bed broke for the closed door to the main hall and then for the open door giving a view into his clean, the mirror above the sink taps reflecting clearly the nausea he was feeling. His name and Trevor’s were announced on the intercom before he had a chance to stand up, and the ship-wide message requested both of them to the bridgeside immediately.

Leo quickly changed back into his uniform and hurried to the bridge. The bridgeside was Captain’s private and was segregated from every other place on board. Leo waited on the bridge, outside the bridgeside door, for Trevor. They’d both been called so were required to enter the Captain’s private together.

It was a challenge not to pull nervously at his sleeves as the minutes stretched out. In his head, Leo tried to come up with good arguments for not registering his and Trevor’s relationship yet. It was the only reason he could think of that they’d both be called on.

Trevor entered the bridge, looking even more worried than Leo (if such a thing was even possible) and took up her station beside him as their arrival was announced through the bridgeside intercom. But she didn’t stand too close beside him. They walked in when the door opened, Trevor first as she was the senior member of their scan team, and then stood awkwardly side by side as the door closed behind them. They were facing two people, Captain and… a stranger?

Captain was sitting at her wide desk, the wall of transglass windows behind her seat providing the same planetary horizon view as on the bridge. Removed equipment for system interfaces now controlled by the upgraded desktop had left even more extra room, which was currently filled by a large plant and a small, separate work station, but none of the holes in the walls from removed securement bolts had been covered or filled, and the sterilpoly flooring had mismatched new patches where removed equipment had left gaps. Leo remembered Captain had ordered the small work station, but Dods, Chief Navigator, had put the plant in here to try and add something with colors other than the grey floor and walls or the dark beige uniforms everyone wore.

With silvered hair cut short, skin a lighter shade than her uniform, and no jewelry to be seen on her person, Captain Tallishen Os matched her bridgeside decor perfectly. Her shipside decorating didn’t hold function over fashion, there simply wasn’t a ‘fashion’ part included. The lack of decoration in the surroundings made the colorful, expensive, and extensively flamboyant outfit the pale-skinned, bald stranger was wearing appear so out of place as to look ridiculous.

“Explain this,” Captain ordered Trevor and Leo, tossing the handheld she’d had in her lap onto her desk and not bothering with introductions.

As the senior member of their team, Trevor stepped forward and picked up the thin frame holding an active holoscreen. She scrolled it and then handed it to Leo, a question on her face he didn’t know how to answer yet.

“This is the scan report from our most recent shift,” Leo said quietly, only to Trevor.

“Louder, please, for the rest of us,” Captain ordered.

“This is Dockland’s ReadScan report from our most recent shift,” Trevor said clearly, setting the handheld on top of Captain’s desk.

“What about this?” the stranger asked, pointing at another active handheld on the desk. Trevor picked it up and looked at it, scrolling slowly. Her eyebrows were pinched together when she looked at Leo. He stepped closer and read over her shoulder.

“This is our scan report from five cycles ago, just after we arrived in this orbit, but…” Trevor’s voice trailed off as she scrolled the report. Leo completely agreed with her confusion. He picked up the handheld Trevor had just set down so they could compare the data side by side. “These are identical?” Trevor asked.

“That’s the same question I had,” Captain said. She frowned up at the stranger when he inhaled to speak, her quick hand gesture stopping him from interrupting the collaboration between her two Analysts. His face reddened from the pressure of unsaid words building up angrily behind pinched lips.

“No, wait, this says it’s ours, and has our time and info stamps, but look,” Leo tapped a finger to the screen he was holding, highlighting what he wanted Trevor to see.

“That’s not the reading we had a few hours ago,” Trevor said. “I remember because you pointed out how high the reading we got was. How high it should be in this report, but isn’t.”

“This has the correct date and time stamp, but it isn’t the scan report from our last shift,” Leo said, looking at Captain after a glance at the stranger.

“So what happened to our report?” Trevor asked Leo, and then also looked across the desk to Captain.

“We were expecting you would tell us,” the stranger accused, glaring at them.

Leo and Trevor scrolled through the identical reports again, seeking something else they could add from more than thirty seconds of observation. Some of the spacing in the corrupted report wasn’t a perfect match, indicating whoever had copied it hadn’t had access to an original file. That appeared to be good, as in at least it looked like Dockland’s new control systems hadn’t been corrupted into the records. But their latest report being a forge of their old one implied the live part of the system was corrupted.

“Have anyone else’s scans of their most recent shifts had this corruption?” Trevor asked.

The stranger glared at Captain but she didn’t look up to notice. “No,” Captain said. Leo and Trevor stared at her, both of them with their brows creasing together. They’d heard the hesitation in her answer but didn’t know why the hitch was there. She sighed and shook her head. “Not from Dockland,” she added. The stranger frowned harder at Captain for divulging this extra bit of information. “I need to speak to my team in private.” Captain didn’t look up at the man beside her.

“This holovid has the highest security in –”

She tapped a control on her desk and the stranger blinked out of existence. “Dockland’s new systems came with a life sized holovid upgrade I’m finding I regret agreeing to more every time I have a vid with anyone Senior Coalition.” Captain sighed heavily. Before she could continue her desk controls chimed for another holovid request. She declined and muted the keys.

“He was Senior Coalition?” Tevor asked, her voice as shaky as Leo’s guts suddenly felt.

“Don’t lose too many skin tones over it. He’s low tier, mostly annoying, and only represents the small group overseeing explorations. What I wanted to tell you two, and that small group doesn’t want me to, was that this has happened on four ships so far. Influences don’t seem to extend to all fourteen ships involved in this exploration, yet, but I noticed a pattern he disregarded as soon as I said it,” Captain said.

“What’s the pattern?” Leo asked.

“So far Buccaneer, Oscareous, Dockland, and Shiner are the only affected ships.” Captain’s steady gaze shifted between the two analysts in front of her.

“Those are all the possible ships close to being assigned to scanning planet seventy-four,” Trevor said after only a moment. Leo was close enough to hear her swallow after speaking, as if she had planned to say more and then barely stopped herself. She’d done that twice during their shift earlier, once each time she’d said something to him.

2-4

Leo looked at the screen in his hand, supposedly showing the latest scan he and Trevor had completed. He scrolled to the top of the report. It had the first date and time of being submitted to Captain, and the second date and time of having been submitted to Coalition Oversight.

The handheld was system linked, so Leo swiped out of the report and opened the ship’s system to look into recent archives. The original report saved in records was uncorrupted. The copy of the report saved in Captain’s backups was also uncorrupted. Trevor had been reading over his shoulder and tapped the corner tab of Captain’s backup copy to see the file transfer details. The file size after transfer was less than half of what it should have been, and the time in transfer was almost three seconds longer than usual.

Trevor used the handheld she was holding to look up the copied report and found zero anomalies in the details. The original report from five cycles ago was uncorrupted.

“Well?” Captain asked when they both stopped going through the information at hand.

“You go first so mine makes sense,” Trevor said. She and Leo each walked around opposite sides of Captain’s desk so they were standing on either side of her, taking turns leaning forward as they explained the quick findings to prove the transmission to Coalition had been corrupted and not any of Dockland’s systems.

“How did this even get caught?” Trevor asked when they were done.

“The report came up as a redundancy error after being submitted and we were advised to re-preform the scan. We’ve had to do it before, but never for you two. When I queried the advisory, the bolt from Senior Coalition who just spoke to you requested a secure holovid to inform me three other ships had been affected for a similar shift offset so far. But only in our exploration group, none of the others have reported a clustered disruption.”

“And you said it’s only affecting the ships in line for scanning planet seventy-four?” Leo asked Captain. She nodded agreement. “What’s wrong?” Leo asked Trevor.

Looking at Captain had put Trevor in his line of sight on the other side of her, and the handheld Trevor held was shaking. Leo hesitated in reaching around Captain when Trevor quickly hunched, dropping the handheld onto the desk and shoving her hands into her pockets.

“Go ahead, Analyst. Not having a relationship registered isn’t the same as keeping it a secret,” Captain said to Leo with half a smile.

“I’m fine,” Trevor argued. She wasn’t able to glare at Captain, and likely didn’t want to anyway. Glaring at Leo would have meant looking at him. Her tone dropped the temperature in the bridgeside and her eyes could’ve burned holes into the desktop, though.

“Really? You’re fine?” Captain asked, dropping sarcasm like tossing lead-acid batteries into low orbit. “Say ‘planet seventy-four’ without clenching a fist,” she added. “Your behaviour the past month has been noted and for the past two weeks flagged as out of normal for you, Analyst. Both by monthly mental health reviews and by crew observations.”

Trevor hissed out a quick breath as if she’d been punched. The accusation in the glare she threw at Leo felt like a punch.

“Wrong target. He hasn’t said a thing. But in case you forgot, you usually have onboard friends and they’ve been worried enough about you to talk to me.” Captain’s glare was sterner than anything Trevor could plate because grandmothers who also earned exploration-red Captain’s stripes on their shoulders had a lot of practice at that kind of thing.

“I’m fine,” Trevor stated through gritted teeth.

“Maybe it’s a latent Daion defense?” Leo asked quickly. It was a desperate attempt to get Captain’s attention off of Trevor. Trevor didn’t like anyone but close friends and family seeing her upset, and being centered by a person in authority because of being upset would only make things worse for whatever was going on inside her head.

“What?” Captain asked, spinning her chair so she could stare in confusion at Leo. Her mind mostly likely still focused on Trevor’s behavior and so his question made no sense.

“The altered reports. I was doing some reading about the history of planet seventy-four before Trevor and I were called here, and Daions went fully defensive at the end of the plague. There have been other defense systems that exploration scans have triggered unknowingly. Maybe this one is latent rather than assertive?”

“How do four altered reports grow into a defense system in your mind?” Captain demanded. Leo swallowed. The theory he’d thrown out there was only half an idea wrapped up in a gut feeling, and the gut feeling was only the caring one about getting Captain’s attention off of Trevor.

“Well, delays and stall tactics could be something to give a longer preparation time for an assertive system to start or… something?” Leo finished vaguely. Captain stared at him, waiting silently for an intelligent theory to come out of his mouth. “I mean, I’m just saying so far the corrupted reports have only affected ships after they’ve communicated the forty-eight hour notification of scan completion to Coalition, right? We’ve all gotten the response with solar system coordinates and planet location per solar order for planet seventy-four. A passive system that monitors communication regarding this Daion world could be capable of interrupting transmissions –”

“And potentially corrupt with misleading reports as a delay tactic to provide time for a large scale planetary defense system to power up,” Captain interrupted to finish the sentence. She leaned back in her chair and stared up, folding her hands in her lap. “Well. This line of thought is more ominous and precarious than anything I’d wanted to deal with on this shift,” she told the ceiling.

“Was there any consistency in the shifts used to make the corrupted reports?” Leo asked.

“The only consistencies were each corrupted report being from within the past eight cycles, and replacing the most immediate completed shift.”

“So all the corrupted reports were copied from among the earliest scans for the planets we’re each at,” Trevor added.

“Exactly,” Leo agreed. “I’d assume from that, the delay was meant to pick the maximum believable separation between reports.”

“But then it’s not a Daion defense system,” Trevor stated. “Whoever did this needed to know ships would be required to repeat scans, so this had to be set up after Coalition started maintaining redundancy checks. That means this was set up after the fiasco with Coliander.” Trevor shook her head to the negative as she spoke, the half-formed idea Leo had suggested taking up residence in her own thoughts and not making sense.

“Coliander’s Captain sure destroyed the best way for having a cycle off work without anyone in Senior Coalition noticing,” Captain lamented, sharing a quick grin with the crew members standing on either side of her. “Did you two know those redundancy checks run for every new report and go through verification against every report filed since the RedunSystem was implemented? Senior Coalition is even paying for people to manually submit older reports so they can catch data previous to RedunSystem initiation being submitted. But you’re right, the RedunSystem has only been operational for twenty-something standard years, and Daion worlds were depopulated long before that.”

“But the corruption is still only affecting ships given lists with planet seventy-four. So… if it’s not Daion, what else could it be?” Leo asked.

“I’m trying to figure that out,” Captain said. “Give me something short and in writing. Summarize our thoughts on this in a way I can support as Dockland’s position during more communications with Senior Coalition,” she ordered. “The only recommendation I have right now is for Coalition Oversight to include planet seventy-four in their canned response to more ships in our exploration group, and maybe a couple of ships from other explorations. If the clustered disruption spreads to those ships for their next ReadScan reports, we can start theorizing about some kind of possible Daion defense system. Anything you two can think of to add, include it in your summary.” She nodded to herself and waved a dismissal at them. “Oh, and,” she said, stressing the ‘and’ so much that both Leo and Trevor stopped and looked back from half-way to the door. “You two should probably register before we recall at the end of this exploration. There is zero way of ensuring you get assigned together if you sign up for the next exploration and you’re not registered.”

“File saved,” Leo said quickly, sliding in the agreement before Trevor could say something he wasn’t prepared to hear.

2-5

The hallway at the base of the wide ladder up to the bridge was lined with brightly lit privates, single work stations available for anyone to use, the broad windows into each giving the hall an illusion of being wider. Leo and Trevor stepped behind the thin transglass of the first empty one and rolled the hanging door closed. It was a neutral space to work in. Otherwise they’d have to go to one of their cabins and…

The silence in the private was almost thick enough to have a flavor when Leo walked further in to stand behind the desk with Trevor. She was already working on the report. It only took a few minutes to draft a summary Captain could use, but they both hesitated on saving it to her shared folder.

“The worst that could happen is we’re right and there’s some kind of strange Daion defensive threat someone else will have to deal with,” Leo said. His hands were stuffed into his pockets and his stomach was twisting at the thought of sending the summary. For some reason, it felt true about the stall tactic, but calling it a threat felt…

“Daion defense systems were set up for defensive reasons. They were never the threat,” Trevor stated quietly.

“I know, right?” Leo agreed.

The quickness of his reply startled Trevor into looking at him. He didn’t notice, though, because he was staring at the screen and rereading their summary.

“A whole civilization was wiped out due to not following proper first contact protocols, and the survivors abused and then othered so badly that now they’re dying off or hopefully going into hiding,” he said. “All because of the crass assumption that recent evolutionary divergence must mean resilience against the same viral infections. Everything built back then meant to protect Daions from coming into contact with Coalition populations is treated like some big threat now, as if they’d been aggressors and are now doling out posthumous offensive strikes. I keep thinking we need to word this summary differently so it doesn’t even hint at snippets of Radical conditioning, but other than recommending Coalition leave the planet alone…” His voice trailed off and he shrugged, shoulders slumping further down after the motion was complete than they had been before.

“Maybe we should recommend that?” Trevor asked carefully.

Leo scoffed a single laugh and cocked half a smile at her. “If there’s a weapon on that planet, or even the potential of one, Senior Coalition is going to want it. Our recommendation of leaving planet seventy-four alone would be deleted by the first member to read it.”

“You’re right,” she admitted, her posture slouching to match his. “Unless it is just a useless, latent defense. Something set up in the final days in preparation that Coalition ships would come back one day and meant to stall scanners and give remaining Daions time to evacuate?”

“That” –he stopped after the first word of starting to argue, her idea sinking past his initial theory and deeper into the history he knew– “that actually sounds more like something Daion culture would have developed.” He took his hands out of his pockets so he could cross his arms at his chest. It was his usual pose when thinking. “Dockland’s new control systems didn’t replace or corrupt the below decks operation room. The system linking to the old satellites predating modern NavCom still works fine. I bet we could do a search and be able to see if there are any active, automated evacuation or launch preparations occurring if we use the consoles down there.”

“How do you even know the below decks system is active?” Trevor asked.

“You’ve been avoiding me fairly often the past couple of weeks so I’ve had a lot of spare time,” he admitted without looking at her. He held his arm over the desk to transfer the file to his smart and then swiped his hand through the holoscreen to close the comp. “Come on. I’ve only ever seen Lastin in there and right now he’ll be sleeping. He’s the one who showed me how to run the satellite console. If there are satellites around planet seventy-four, we can do a sweep and add any findings to our summary. It’ll only take an hour.”

Trevor was still at the desk when he rolled open the door.

“Or I can go myself and save the file to your personal to review before saving for Captain,” he mumbled toward the floor.

“Only someone using an old satellite system wrong would think it takes an hour,” she said, coming around the desk. “Obviously I need to set up the sweep.”

He smiled at the floor. This conversation was the most she’d said to him in the past week, and calling him incompetent with the antique system was the closest she’d been to getting mean in the past month.

He led the way down to the below decks control room. The consoles were a much previous generation to the old control system recently upgraded out of the bridge. Equipment down here was thick, clunky, and closely packed, each panel for the satellites hummed after being turned on, and all of them actually required physical touch and pressure to operate. Everyone on the crew was fairly certain the reason Captain hadn’t upgraded this room was because it was now a Coalition Historical Site and there were laws against disrupting those. Even the floor in here was covered by old fashioned sterilpoly tiles, cut to fit with glue in the seams, instead of the usual spray-in-place sterilpoly flooring that was everywhere else in Dockland.

Trevor sat in the rigidly affixed seat in front of what Leo thought of as Satellite Viewing and Control and flicked on the switches to power up the panels. She was smiling about using the hands-on equipment, and chuckled as she pointed to the transglass screen providing a progress bar for how long remained until the system became completely live. A ridiculous four seconds passed before the screen flickered and the panel menu options appeared on the backlit display.

“Imagine living in a time where this was considered top-notch technology,” Trevor mused, shaking her head at having to use a combination of a remote, pressure sensitive pad on the console top and the touch activated transglass screen to navigate the menu options. Every selection she made had an audible tick noise, as if the visual highlight of selecting the option she wanted wasn’t verification enough of the choice. After setting up commands for what they needed, she still had to use the manual keypad, switches, and pressure pad to finish approving and initiating the commands.

Honestly, Leo loved the old equipment. He wasn’t adept at using it, but had found the laughably clunky handheld which contained the control room’s user manual – and had an actual glass screen, not even transglass – tied to one of the other consoles. And that didn’t mean tied as in the usual meaning of being linked; it was actually locked in a case welded to a physical chain which stopped the handheld from being taken further than one meter away from the console. The whole below decks control room was like stepping into an interactive museum simulation, except all the equipment for operating the outdated satellite system was functional and remained part of an old, refitted ship deployed as a scanner on exploration.

Chapter 3

3-1

“Here we go,” Trevor said. She already had the system tuned to the satellites in Daion space and was keying in the final code needed to start the sweep.

“Oh, wow. You’re really good at this,” Leo complimented. He watched her fingers ticking quickly on the controls.

“My grandpa kept a couple of consoles this old when I was little. I learned satellites on this stuff.” She tapped a final tick and a progress bar appeared at the bottom of the screen of readouts. “You really don’t think of Daions as being other, do you?” It was a question, but she said it like a statement. Her fingers remained busy on the pressure pad and touch screen, pulling up more options and initiating a background scan so the sweep would be monitored for interference once it started, keeping her eyes busy so she didn’t have to look at him while she was talking to him. Leo hadn’t known the old equipment had the ability to monitor and verify itself; he wasn’t that far into reading the user manual.

“I guess not. I mean, people are just people, right? Coalition history is only one version of what happened back then,” he said, completely absorbed in what she was doing and not really listening to what she was saying.

“I’m not talking about in the broad, historical meaning. You – yourself – you really don’t see Daions as being other, do you?” Her hands stilled on the controls as she waited for his answer. He looked down at her fingers, his grip tightening on the back of the seat she was sitting in as he assembled the thoughts of his own truth into something he could verbalize.

“I can’t see someone as other from having lived inside the same glass jar with them. You know my parents never grew up with anything, and what they could afford after having us kids was more of the same amount of nothing. We’re lowest caste. We got by, but it meant we lived the same caste and class and in the same Central World purlieus as a lot of displaced Daions. I even got standard education with a few in my school and classes. To my family, me getting a scholarship that paid for my Academy education was a really big event. Me coming out here on explorations as Analyst even more of one. I mean, I wear this uniform and suddenly I don’t have security vidcams following me through markets.

“Back at home, though, without my uniform, I’m still lowest caste. I worked the entire time I was in Academy so I could afford to eat and rent a room to sleep in because the scholarship only paid for direct school costs. It’s just buckets on buckets of bolts that Daion survivors were scattered around Coalition space as lowest caste rather than being granted access, rights, and free passage back to their home sectors carried on a big apology. That treaty of equality or agreement or whatever it was… it might as well have been written with water on a hot stone. If Coalition had ever actually honored it, Daion descendants would have returned to their homes on their worlds rather than getting to the point right now where they’re disappearing from my parents’ purlieu and going… away, I guess. They’d be living on Daion worlds and this mock-up ‘exploration’ wouldn’t even be here, in Daion sectors, pretending we’re looking at uncharted worlds. We wouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be here.”

Trevor was breathing heavier than he could understand when he finished what felt to him like ranting. Her bottom lip was firmly pinched between her teeth and her eyes were searching his face. Her expression stayed pinched even when her lip popped free of her bite.

“You really mean that?” she asked quietly.

“Well…” He paused and did a quick internal scan. “Yes. I firmly believe what I just said.”

“Would you still believe it knowing I was an eleven month gestation? And that my kids will have eleven month gestations?” she asked.

Leo looked at her in confusion. Standard gestation for Coalition babies was ten months. Something in the early forms of space hibernation, during the historical phase of utilizing Advanced Cryo before the technology for over distance travel was developed, altered the genetics of those first explorers way back when explorations were one-way trips. Because of the altered genetics, Diaons had longer gestations for pregnancies. It was theorized as being a main part of the reason for their immune systems being stronger.

Suddenly it all clicked. Trevor had talked about her transient family life and they’d both laughed about her grandfather’s distrust of modern technology despite being a shipside installer. How tightly knit her shipside family and community was. The strange celebrations and slang they had. All those things she’d easily passed off as differences in shipside verses landside cultures because Leo had only lived landside until his assignment to Dockland.

“You’re Daion?” he asked. He kept his voice to a murmur because they hadn’t bothered to close the door and, although this specific room was usually unused, this part of the ship wasn’t. Even trying hard, he also couldn’t keep the note of hopefulness from sneaking into the question.

“You’re asking that like you have some kind of fetish,” she stated.

“What? No!” He held up both hands as if trying to ward away her words. “It’s just… never mind. This would sound so bad outside my head.”

“Sounding like a bolt has never stopped you before,” she reminded him.

“True,” he agreed, straightening up and shoving his hands into his pockets.

“Don’t let sounding like a bolt stop you now, Leo. It’s currently just a fact about you,” Trevor said.

Leo nodded reluctantly. “All right... I guess what I was thinking, and it’s going to sound bad, but you being Daion are makes ‘us’ easier for me,” he said. “I mean, my family isn’t much in the galaxy. You were, and remain, way above my class. You’re this awesome, smart enough to be honors level, beautiful woman from middle castes, and I’m the lowest caste scholarship winner who starved and barely slept for six years while working full time on nights, taking extra classes to keep my points up, and surviving on the hope I’d get to wear this uniform one day. I only got the scholarship because my mom’s work runs a lottery and I met the requirements to enter the draw. I won my scholarship out of a corporate lottery. It’s the only way anyone from my caste gets into Academies,” he explained, folding both hands into a ‘thumbs up’ and tapping the ends of his thumbs into his chest. “We might be the same caste if you publicly admit, I guess, but when it comes to class you and I aren’t in the same one at all,” he added with a shrug, his hands falling to his sides.

3-2

“I never went to Academy, I’m not in any class, and shipside is its own caste.” Trevor’s voice was small. Leo scoffed a laugh and sat in the hard seat next to hers.

“The analogy doesn’t change about you being amazing, and shipside castes are firmly middle as far as Coalition society is concerned.” He lifted her fingers and she didn’t pull her hands away from being cradled between his. “I knew the only reason you and I have been running a relationship this long is because you wanted to stay in it. You’ve got every option, every opportunity to get out of it whenever you want. Call me selfish or a bolt, but knowing this about you now, I feel like you’re maybe a little more willingly stuck with me than I thought. And I guess it’s safe for me to assume this is why you’ve been getting more distant from me the closer we get to planet seventy-four?” he asked, getting the hoped for nod of agreement from her in reply. “Well, I might be a selfish bolt currently saying stuff that sounds awful, but now I feel less like you’re wasting time with someone who’s easy entertainment while you’re on Dockland and more like you actually picked being with me. Maybe even that... you want to be with me for longer than just this year on Dockland?”

Tears leaked out of her eyes in spite of the fact she was smiling at him. “Your brain is a half-full bucket of space rotted bolts if you think anything other than that I picked being with you.”

He smiled, relief flooding over every other sense of emotion. “Probably only a quarter-full on my best day,” he said, the quick joke making her chuckle.

“I’m going to find Lindsay when we’re back to Dock in a few months and punch her. Right in the face. Break her nose and give her a bloody lip. She messed up your confidence fiercely.”

“Yeah, well… it, um…” He paused and took a deep breath. “It’s not, uh, easy to stay confident while you’ve been so emotionally unavailable these past weeks. I guess I can stop worrying now?”

She nodded, pulling both her lips in to pinch between her teeth as she laced her fingers into his, and then she smiled nervously at him. “I didn’t know what your opinion was for this Daion Central World scan. I was scared to ask, especially since we’d gotten so committed that we’d decided to stop using repression a few months ago. I mean, the thought that you might be thinking like everyone else? I couldn’t…” She sniffled and blinked back tears. Leo squeezed her fingers gently. “Everyone on board seems so excited to ransack this planet,” she continued. “It’s like… stars align it is so much like they want to rip apart this whole world and steal everything. Like some ancient pirates discovering a tomb with a few memorial shokes. They only see the gold the shokes are made of, not that the shokes are there to honor and remember the dead. But instead of shokes, its whole cities, whole worlds...” Her voice trailed off.

“Not everyone on board,” he said, squeezing her fingers in his again.

She squeezed back and nodded, breaking into a smile. “You have no idea how relieved I am right now,” Trevor said, sniffling hard and trying to stifle a sob. Leo shook off her hands with a chuckle and leaned forward to pull her into a hug.

“Probably half as relieved as I am. I was really starting to think we were over,” he said into her ear.

“You are not getting rid of me that easy,” she laughed the words, the sentence interrupted by a couple quiet sobs. “Especially now.”

“I know, I know,” he said, rubbing her back. “Two months until we’re done this exploration. Charlotte won’t even be able to beat me senseless in Dock because you’ll have already done it if I break your heart.”

“No,” she said, wiping her face on her sleeve as she sat back from him. “Well yes, but not that. I was trying to wait until after my quarterly physical so I had confirmation.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked, grabbing her hand.

“Nothing, now, I guess,” she said, smiling at him. “I was actually something that happened sometime in the past seven or eight weeks, but I really only realized completely about two weeks ago. But it sounds like it’s not going to be a problem now. Or, at least, not the problem I was worried about.” She chuckled nervously.

“A problem from seven or eight weeks ago, but really only two weeks ago, and you have to wait for your quarterly…?” He stared at her in silence for a moment. “Wait, are you…?” A slow smile pulled up the corners of his mouth. “Are you… pregnant?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“You think so or you hope so or you know so?” he asked in a rush.

“I’m pretty sure. My quarterly is next week. So I guess that’s when we find out for sure,” she replied.

“That’s really exciting news. How excited am I allowed to be? Wait, you need to sign the relationship registration. We need to get that filed, like, yesterday,” he said, every sentence coming out so fast they were nearly on top of each other. She laughed that he was so excited he forgot to use shipside terminology.

“You want to know how excited you can be? Well, I need you to be this excited,” she said. He laughed loud enough someone down the hall looked their way. The crew mate smiled and continued on their way when the couple only kissed. The below decks control room was one of the few places on board with enough semi-privacy to allow for a kiss to be uninterrupted by other people passing by.

The console beeped beside their elbows and Leo and Trevor broke the kiss to look at the screen. The results of the sweep showed much more than what they’d been hoping to see.

“Oh… oh no. That’s bad,” Trevor whispered as the live feed played on the transglass screen.

“That’s really bad,” Leo added after watching a few seconds more.

Trevor’s fingers ticked along on the pressure pad and the screen, converting the data on the screen into a file. She saved the file through the upgrade hardware block bolted to the satellite panel to make the file compatible with her smart. Rather than waste time taking the file up to the bridge, Leo revised their summary and saved it directly to the share folder on Captain’s personal. A moment later, Trevor added the satellite results to the same folder. They shut down the console, the novelty of how much time it took a lot less endearing now, and then raced off at a run to get back to the bridge.

3-3

Captain was either still in the bridgeside or had gone back in there when she’d received their short report. Trevor and Leo waited impatiently, working hard to keep the sweep results from showing all over their faces as they were side-eyed by the rest of the bridge crew members on Captain’s shift. It wasn’t odd for people to come in to talk to Captain when they were off shift, but it wasn’t normal for them to come twice, not be requested as present by Captain and yet arriving at a run the second time, and then wait despite being told by lead crew members they wouldn’t be seen because Captain was having an important vid.

It was also really, really not normal to hear Captain’s voice elevate past the privacy sound dampening built into every bridgeside. Leo and Trevor were the closest to the door and couldn’t make out any of the specific phrases she was yelling, but definitely heard the words “survivors”, “no” and “twin star” quite clearly.

They glanced at each other for the last one. Usually in the tone Captain was using, someone’s ears were being referred to as the two stars orbiting the empty space at the center of a bistar solar system. The door to the private slid open. Captain was on her feet and leaning on her fists on top of her desk, poised to yell. Her inhalation paused as her eyes flicked between Leo and Trevor already standing there and staring across at her.

“You two get in here,” Captain barked. She shoved up to a straight posture and squared off with the same Senior Coalition member Leo and Trevor had seen earlier. They hurried inside and the door swished closed behind them.

“Analysts?” he demanded, incredulous, stabbing a finger toward them as they stopped nearby Captain’s desk. “This is a secure meeting between senior staff members of –”

The sound of his voice blinked out a split second after his image did. Captain tore off her smart and slammed it onto her desk.

“Arrogant! Ignorant! Greedy!” Her clipped tirade of elevating insults stopped at the tone of her smart synchronizing with her desk panel. “Annise,” she said. Her voice was nearly calm. The chiming of the outgoing vid request lasted only a second.

“Hi! I…” the finely-dressed woman appearing in Captain’s office glanced at her smart. “I’ll have to vid you back, this is –”

“Because of me,” Captain interrupted. The woman paused in the motion of disconnecting the holovid. “That rotted bolt is trying to vid you before I do. He still hasn’t figured out I have you as an instant contact.”

“Oh, for the love of Tallix! Why am I being brought into another one of your arguments with that petty and greedy little…” Her exasperated voice trailed off as Captain expanded the width of the holovid field to include Leo and Trevor. “Whoops. Please, excuse my language,” she said, her entire presentation of self almost instantly transforming to the same demeanor as on all of the public vids and images of her. As in the images, her skin was a luminous dark brown, her hair silver, and her clothes were as full of color and current fashion as any other member of Senior Coalition, just completely without fringe or decoration. It struck both Leo and Trevor at the same moment that, seeing her here on Dockland, her looks and fashion choices complimented Captain’s sparse bridgeside rather than clashing with it.

Trevor tried to clear her throat and instead made a strangled, squeaking noise. Leo marvelled about her having enough spit left to make an attempt at clearing her throat. He was pretty sure even his stomach acid had dried up.

“You can drop the publicity vid pose, Annise,” Captain said, not even looking up as she continued manipulating her desk panel. “These two are the ones who’ve provided me with the information I’m vidding you about right now, and that – because he’s this exploration’s Reporting Member – Ahonnon is attempting to block getting to you uncorrupted.”

“First off, Tallishen, I need to actually receive the information you’re –” she was interrupted by her smart chiming.

Trevor and Leo watched as the woman Captain called only ‘Annise’ brushed her fingers above her smart and lifted them, transferring the file from her smart onto a holloscreen in front of her. It looked like the summary they had written for Captain. Trevor’s breathing got ragged and Leo felt her fingers slide across his palm and then grip tightly to his hand. He squeezed back just as hard. The impatient pinching at Annise’s lips relaxed as she quickly scanned the summary, and then her eyes widened as she read the sweep results.

“This can’t be right,” Annise whispered. Captain remained silent as Public Face Annise Lillan – the highest member of Senior Coalition – re-read each word of the summary and then scrutinized the sweep results. “This has to be a mistake,” she added at the end of the second time reading through the information.

“It’s a satellite sweep from Dockland’s below decks control room. You and I both know those results can’t be tampered,” Captain stated.

“I’m allowed to say I’m shocked your paranoia paid off for once?” Public Face asked, a very un-Public Face smirk turning up the edge of her lips.

“You can say whatever you want as long as you take this seriously,” Captain replied. “I sent this as an unmarked file within this holovid because of the corruption mentioned in the summary these two wrote.” She nodded toward Trevor and Leo. Public Face glanced at them, the smirk she’d given Captain softening to a polite smile. “I guarantee that Ahonnon scrubbed Dockland’s name from the summary and sweep while I was vidding with him,” Captain continued, “and I know he added his own words into it because I watched him try to look like he wasn’t typing.”

“You two authored this report?” Public Face asked. Trevor and Leo managed to nod agreement. “Is the copy I’m holding accurate?” She twisted the display on her smart and her holovid image was replaced with a large version of the summary and sweep results. The Analysts read the files completely.

“That is our reporting to the letter, Public Face,” Trevor confirmed.

“You both say so?” the voice of Public Face asked.

“That is our reporting, Public Face.” Leo surprised himself by being able to speak a full sentence.

“You know Dockland’s below decks control room is only going to give you facts from the satellite sweep,” Captain stated.

“Of course I do. I sat beside you learning those systems. Or are you failing to recall that far back?” Public Face replied.

3-4

“I’m just making sure you remember,” Captain said, a grin pulling up the corner of her mouth.

“Oh please, Tallishen.” The image of the reports flicked away and Public Face’s holo was again standing in Captain’s private. “Do you really think it was a coincidence Dockland, with its antiquated and incorruptible connections to functioning pre-InsterStel satellites, was included in the exploration group for Daion worlds?”

“It’s been twenty standard years since you got politically heavy. A lot can change and get forgotten in that time.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it. I, unlike you, still have my full faculties.” Public Face winked toward Trevor and Leo before holding up a hand against the side of her mouth to block Captain from seeing her mouth moving. “Space rot,” Public Face said in an exaggerated whisper aimed to Trevor and Leo, pointing not very subtly toward Captain with her other hand as her voice came clearly through the bridgeside’s speakers. Leo cracked a grin at the wordplay at the same time Annise’s smart chimed again. “Oh look, Ahonnon’s ‘official’ report is here,” Annise said, even adding the air quotes with her fingers.

She swiped up the report from Ahonnon. It slid beside the report Captain had sent rather than replacing it.

“Dual holoscreens in a smart?” Leo blurted from complete surprise. He knew that development in smart technology was supposed to still be a standard year away from being reliable enough to use!

“This smart is equipped with tri holoscreens, actually,” Annise said, off-handed. Captain peaked an eyebrow at Leo, trying hard to not laugh when he looked like he was attempting to swallow his tongue after speaking out of turn to the highest member of Coalition’s government and single most politically powerful person in the known galaxy (a galaxy of which more than three quarters was known). Annise was busy frowning at the changes in the second report, asking Trevor and Leo to both verify each of the differences she found as she highlighted them.

“Well?” Captain asked impatiently when Public Face seemed to have stopped reading and was only thinking. Trevor blinked in shock at Captain’s tone. Annise sighed and brushed her hand through both reports, closing the files, and then holding her thoughts in contemplative silence for two more long seconds.

“This definitely isn’t the report you sent me, although the similarities lead me to believe there was an extensive amount of plagiarism involved,” Public Face said. “However, this work of fiction by Ahonnon has been sent to” –she checked her smart– “fifteen Senior Coalition members. Will you two agree to be on record?” she asked, looking at Trevor and Leo.

“On record how?” Captain asked before either Analyst could reply.

“On record as in I’ll save this entire vid and use it as evidence for Ahonnon’s attempted corruption of Coalition exploration reporting. Your crew members’ involvement starts and ends with confirmation of reading the initial report and stating its authenticity prior to knowledge of there being corruption, and in denials of authoring the changes found in the corrupted summary.”

Captain nodded her agreement with those terms to her crew members. Public Face was smirking again after Leo and Trevor both independently agreed.

“Perfect. Thank you, all of you.” She moved as if disconnecting, but the link stayed active. “And Tallie? I’d like a reporting for how you’ve trained your crew to this level of loyalty and open disclosure.”

“Ha! It’s a Captain’s secret. Come back shipside and I’ll show you.”

“It may come to that,” Annise said, her countenance growing suddenly serious. “Shaverrim was on the list of Senior Coalition members Ahonnon sent the corrupted report to. In your below decks control room, is Dockland still…?” she let the question hang.

Captain grinned at Public Face. “That’s not even a question you need to ask about my ship, Annise.”

“Good. Break off orbital scans. Route to planet seventy-four immediately and establish communications with the population. Our old agreement states clearly we aide and defend Daion worlds in event of threat” –she swiped up on her smart and put the satellite sweep result on the holloscreen– “and these thousands of people packing into what have to be evacuation centers need to be contacted immediately to determine if I’m dealing with trespassers in a Non Settlement sector, or honoring the agreement to protect Daions against Radicals. History has shown Coalition failing Daions more than once. If those people you found really are the rightful population of that world, I want that habit broken.”

“Understood,” Captain stated, her expression as serious as the one on Public Face. The holovid ended for real and Captain turned to her Analysts. “Do you know of anyone else on board who’s familiar enough with the below decks control room systems to run the sweep you two did?”

Leo and Trevor looked at each other. “I guess… well, Lastin showed me how to work it, but Trevor was quicker with the systems than Lastin or me,” Leo said.

“Who showed you?” Captain focused on Trevor.

“My grandfather, when I was a kid. He’s an installer and had old consoles. I grew up shipside,” Trevor replied.

“All right.” Captain’s fingers danced across her panel and then stopped. A moment later both Leo and Trevor’s smarts chimed. “You’re both now on my shift and your orders are in that message you just got. Go and get all the below decks control room systems turned on and ready for use by the time I get there.”

“I only know how to turn on maybe three of those panels,” Leo admitted hesitantly. His eyes were getting wider with every short sentence he was reading in Captain’s new orders.

“I could maybe power on half of them, but –”

“They all turn on,” Captain interrupted Trevor. “Figure it out. Go.” Captain was already working on something else.

Leo and Trevor left the bridgeside and jogged back to the nearest lift that would take them down to the same deck as the below decks control room.

“Any idea what any of those ones even do?” Leo asked, pointing at the dusty panels furthest from the door. Trevor only glanced and shrugged. She was turning on the panels she knew how to as he picked up the nearly ancient handheld and powered it on.

“What do you need that for?” she asked.

“For this,” Leo said, pausing on a page and reading. Then he left the handheld on the console it was chained to and walked to the dusty panels across the room; the same ones he’d asked Trevor about. He flicked the needed switches to start the process of turning the first one on.

“Neat,” Trevor said. Leo shot her a quick smile and brushed off his hand, leaving white finger smears on his uniform, as he walked back to the handheld. “Does that old thing say what those panels are even for?” Trevor asked him as he picked it up.

“It’s all abbreviations. I turned on the ‘P.D.E.W.’, and now I’m going to turn on the ‘L.R.P.W.’… any idea what those might stand for? You’re the one who grew up shipside.” He was flicking switches for the second panel mentioned when he asked.

“Not a clue,” she admitted.

3-5

“Oh, hey, look at this,” Trevor called, grinning at Leo and pointing at the panel she’d just turned on. He came over for a quick glance on his way back to the handheld and stopped to stare.

“Oh wow! That’s got to be first or second generation InterStel!” he said.

“Right?” she asked, as excited as he was. “I bet this even still has signal distance delay!”

“It does! Look, right there” –he pointed at the corner of the display screen– “the option to have messages time stamped. So this is first generation InterStel. Wow.”

They grinned at each other before Leo turned away to get back to the handheld.

“I knew Dockland was old, but I didn’t know Dockland was this old,” Trevor said. “I bet this control room was latest tech when this ship was built,” she added. She’d already moved to the next bank of panels, her angle of sight giving her a partial view of the backs of ones she’d just powered on. She flicked the needed switches and then squinted at the first panels. “Stars align…” she muttered, walking closer so she could look down the InterStel panels’ backs to the flooring.

“What’s wrong?” Leo asked as he walked to the third, completely unfamiliar panel along the bank he was turning on. The antique handheld said this one was called the P.O.R.A.

“These lines have conversion couplings,” Trevor said, tracing fingers along one of the connections on the back of one panel. Her eyes followed the cables to the floor and she saw the dark, half-crescent of an unfilled securement bolt hole at the bottom of the panel backing.

“Makes sense with how many times Dockland has been upgraded,” Leo said, shrugging as he flicked the switches and pressed a button to start power coming into the panel he was turning on. The screens of the first two were still scrolling through their start-ups.

“No, not converting up. These couplings convert down to the hardline tie-ins,” she said, staring at him and holding his gaze when he finally looked her way. “These InterStel panels weren’t an addition to this ship, Leo. They were an upgrade.”

“What? No,” Leo said, shaking his head as he came over to stand beside her. “Every registered ship prior first generation InterStel communication was decommissioned and destroyed as part of New Wave Anti-Martial Items laws back – what? – almost a hundred standard years ago.”

He studied the couplings, his complexion paling as he leaned over the gap between panel backs to scrutinize the cabling Trevor had just been studying. He also saw the edges of multiple bolt holes, and that the hardline cables by the floor looked more like the still images from his Technology History classes than the majority of cables he’d seen when apprenticing during Dockland’s upgrades.

“But… every ship prior first generation InterStel was destroyed by the end of demilitarization,” he repeated quietly, straightening so he could see the look on Trevor’s face clearly. She definitely appeared as close to throwing up as he felt.

“What were those abbreviations you said were for the panels you turned on?” she asked.

“P.D.E.W. and L.R.P.W.,” he said. “The one I just powered on is P.O.R.A.,” he added.

The first panel he’d turned on beeped as ready. He and Trevor slowly turned to look at the dusty screen. Right out of one of Leo’s Technology History classes, the backlit, transglass screen shone dully with a rotating, two dimensional representation of the three dimensional space around Dockland. The nearby planet, when visible, was shown as a skewed horizon.

Readout displays back during the time before first generation InterStel hadn’t been able to maintain three dimensional viewing without time delay for converting data and creating the hologram imaging used in present day, so the rotating disk method had been developed for monitoring near space to take advantage of the instant replay of two dimensional images on two dimensional screens. It was almost hypnotizing to watch.

Leo glanced down the sides and then leaned far over the P.D.E.W. console to look at the panel back. This row of panels fit smoothly against each other and were flush with the curve of the wall behind them... as if made to fit this wall specifically. The P.D.E.W. was at the end of the row and had a snap cover on the exposed side, so he crouched down, snapped it open and looked inside. The dust was too thick to see if there were old bolt holes at the base of the panel, but how the couplings looked like they were installed in cables that were the same on each side instead of the floor side looking older, he doubted he’d find holes if he moved the dust. And he didn’t find any when he did move some.

The second panel Leo had turned on beeped as ready. He snapped the cover back into place and stood up, wiping his hands absently and spreading dust across the front of his uniform. He and Trevor both looked at the backlit transglass. This display was of a directional, three dimensional image of long-range space directly in front of Dockland. Leo didn’t need to walk the two steps and brush away the dust with his sleeve to know what the screen readout would say, but he did anyway.

“What are those?” Trevor squinted at the unfamiliar numbers below the familiar star tags.

“Targeting distances,” Leo said at a whisper. “L.R.P.W. is the abbreviation for Long Range Pulse Weapon.”

Trevor laughed and slapped his arm as if he’d said something funny. Leo didn’t laugh, his arms hanging at his sides as he stared at the screen.

“P.D.E.W. stands for Primary Direct Energy Weapon,” Leo said. The smile fell from Trevor’s face. “And P.O.R.A. is the abbreviation for Primary Optics / Radar Assembly,” Leo added.

“Are you joking me?” she asked, her voice trembling. He shook his head to the negative, swallowing hard.

“Look at the conversion couplings, Trevor. Each connection is what it should be. I’d gamble actual currency there isn’t a standardized coupling in this room, except for the connections requiring them.”

She scoffed and looked at the backs of the InterStel panels again, this time using the little pocket torch she always carried to look at them at lot closer than they had before. “Okay, so they’re all different but perfect for the cables they’re in. So?” she asked, fidgeting with her sleeve and then knocking away dust smeared on her uniform.

“Since when does Coalition do things right when they upgrade?” Leo asked, finally looking away from the L.R.P.W. screen to hold eye contact with Trevor. “We’re only now getting the worst of the hardware problems smoothed out since Dockland’s upgrades, and those were installed in the first half of this exploration. You know as well as I do Coalition does things standardized, even when standard isn’t optimal for systems.”

“These couplings being right doesn’t mean Dockland is a pre-InterStel ship,” Trevor argued.

“That’s actually exactly what it means,” Captain said.

Leo and Trevor spun to face the door. Captain was standing there with a bleary-eyed Lastin beside her; he was in the process of yawning widely and wasn’t in uniform. Red pillow grooves on his face and messy brown hair above blue and black workout clothes proved he’d obviously woken up only minutes prior to being here with Captain right now.

“Dockland is one of two registered ships rushed out of construction backlogs and commissioned into service during final assembly only months before demilitarization was formally announced, a year before first generation InterStel was available,” Captain said. “They returned to the assembly yard for complete refitting and InterStel upgrades. The conversion couplings you two are discussing are all shipyard factory grade, the same as any other assembly yard modification or in-construction revision to include InterStel.”

“Dockland’s records show it was commissioned with InterStel, though. It can’t be pre-InterStel,” Trevor argued, her knowledge of Dockland and understanding of how Coalition maintained ship registrations debunking the thought that Captain was telling the truth.

“Is that what the records say?” Captain asked. “Okay. Sure,” she continued, with no evidence of agreement in her tone, expression, or posture. “Dockland had a revised construction plan which opted to keep every panel bank supporting weapons after Coalition completely demilitarized and made every ship mounted offensive weapon system illegal for newly constructed ships. And then Dockland was commissioned without issue. That makes sense.”

Chapter 4

4-1

“There would have been no way to pass a commissioning inspection with weapon panels, though,” Leo said quietly.

“At the time Dockland was commissioned, before demilitarization, navigation and targeting used the same core systems. Removing one made the other useless,” Captain replied. “Weapon panels couldn’t be removed without a complete rebuild, and that was only feasible for ships still in assembly yards. Most operational ships were allowed to retain weapon panels as long as they disarmed weapon functions, whereas ships actually in construction were rebuilt without weapons and weapon panels.” Captain rested a hand on the door frame and smiled at the ship in general, as if she and it were mutual conspirators of something they were both proud of. “Someone decided after Dockland was upgraded with InterStel technology that Coalition records should forget its actual commissioning date,” she added, her smile including Leo, Trevor and Lastin when she focused back on the below decks control room. “The first inspection on record includes InterStel, but that’s not Dockland’s commissioning inspection.”

What she was saying made sense, and triggered one of Leo’s memories from a Technology History class when his instructor lectured about demilitarization taking a standard decade, maybe even a full twelve standard years, to be completed. It took another few decades for disarmed ships to become outdated, being replaced with new construction that didn’t include the weapons panels per the natural order of things.

Leo stepped out of Captain’s way when she came into the control room to start powering on a bank of panels he and Trevor hadn’t touched yet. Trevor looked like she wanted to keep arguing, but instead joined Leo as he ducked his head and quickly got back to work. Lastin yawned again, still standing in the doorway and attempting to blink himself awake, as he looked around to see where everyone else was working so he could begin in a different place and expedite powering on the entire below decks control room.

A few passing crew members noticed the strange activities and news spread quickly that something interesting was happening. The hum of equipment within the panel banks was broken by the beeps and ticks of Leo, Trevor, Lastin and Captain setting every panel to operating status. A growing group of onlookers was gathering in the hall outside the below decks control room when Leo looked up from confirming the life support system panel was running properly per the checks listed in the antique handheld.

Never someone who liked being the center of attention, and definitely someone who noticed when he was being watched, Leo quickly set down the handheld and glanced around the room for somewhere to look other than at the people in the door. Luckily Captain was sitting at one of the panels close to him, and the screen displays were ones he recognized from his Academy classes.

“Is that NavCom?” Leo asked, looking over Captain’s shoulder at the live screens he’d only ever seen vids of before now.

“It is,” she said. “I think this one is fourth generation.”

“No, it would have to be fifth. Fourth didn’t have the progressive readouts that became common during first generation InterStel,” he said, pointing to the side of the screen where initial starting points and travel progress information were all blankly waiting. Leo felt a nostalgic pang that the current bridge controls meant these systems would likely never again provide a display of routing information.

When he remembered she was there, he realized Captain was looking up at him, eyebrows raised. “How do you know that?” she asked him.

“He’s an educated man,” Trevor said, obviously boasting as she finished entering data for the current date and time into the last of the three NavBank panels.

“My Academy training,” Leo said, using the fastest explanation possible as Trevor’s answer meant the people in the hallway were looking his way again. Aside from making him the center of attention sometimes, this was one more point Leo loved about Trevor: she was mean to him on their own time, but remained glowingly proud of him all the time.

“I didn’t realize learning about old technology was part of standard Academy training,” Captain said, turning back to the antique NavCom and continuing to enter commands.

“I took a lot of Technology History classes for the extra credits I needed to meet my scholarship’s requirements. But, to be honest, it was my favorite subject,” he admitted.

“Really? You’re going to love this, then,” Captain said. Her hands paused above the controls. “Lastin, are all NavBank panels live?” she called, not looking away from the readouts on the screens in front of her.

“Yes, Captain,” Lastin answered after visually confirming.

“Trevor, are the long and short range monitoring systems all live and confirming updated auto-calibration to the time and cycle you entered into each NavBank?” Captain asked. Trevor’s glance at Leo before she turned to the required displays was questioning, unsure why Captain was asking about NavBank updates auto-calibrating the weapon panels, but unwilling to say so out loud. She checked what the screens were displaying.

“Yes, Captain,” Trevor answered.

Captain’s fingers jumped back into motion, tapping commands on the related pressure pads and screens. She barely glanced to check she was on the right pad. Leo watched the NavCom screens, mesmerized, and leaned closer over Captain’s shoulder in disbelief of what his eyes were seeing: initial readings populating the display of the progressive readouts.

“You have got to be joking me,” he whispered.

Captain chuckled and kept manipulating the controls. The crowd of crew members clumped in the hall outside the below decks control room buzzed with quiet mutterings. In total, Lastin, Trevor, Leo, and four more of the crew knew enough to help Captain with operating the antique systems. The eight of them could barely cover the demands of all the panels, and some of the console seats were left empty. Those empty controls were monitored by whoever was close enough to glance at them on the way past while ensuring correct operations of more important systems.

“I can’t believe this old system calculated a course that quick,” Leo said, chuckling through the words, speaking loud enough for the nearest crew members in the hallway to hear because he was so distracted by the readouts he’d forgotten people were there.

“This generation of NavCom has pre-planned routing hard programmed in,” Captain started to explain. “The supporting systems only calculate for getting Dockland to the nearest route and then, now you can see it’s calculating for any projected anomalies along the route,” she continued, pointing to a progress bar filling with green across the bottom of the screen.

“Projected anomalies?” Leo asked.

“These systems were current likely two or three decades before real-time long range monitoring became reliable. Pre-planned routes were programmed using known conditions and cycles.” The words came out of Captain’s mouth calmly, but Leo’s heart sped up at the implications of what she’d just said.

“You mean…,” Leo’s voice faded, but he swallowed hard and tried again. “You mean the route safety is a guess based on conditions programmed over seventy standard years ago?” he asked, going a bit pale as he cringed away from the console he’d just been looming over.

“It’s a best guess based on hard observations from the time the program was written,” Captain said, grinning over her shoulder first at him and then including everyone else. She chuckled when all of her crew members she could see wore the same frightened expression as Leo. “Don’t worry,” she assured everyone as the green bar finished filling and a few of the progress readouts flashed to show slightly different numbers for minor course corrections. “There were barely any problems with using hard programmed routes for hundreds of standard years,” she added.

“Ha-ha!” Dods, Chief Navigator, spit out the terrified laugh and then quickly covered his mouth with his hand. His normally white skin had paled to almost ghost-like and his blue eyes were wide open.

“If hard programmed routes were actually safe, then the current live, long range NavScans never would have been developed.” Trevor said the sentence everyone else was thinking.

“That’s true,” Captain agreed. Leo watched Captain tap out a final approval and then sit back and fold her hands over her stomach. She smiled at the screen in front of her. “But this is quicker.”

4-2

A collective whimper shuddered through the crowd of crew members as the deck hummed under their feet. The over distance engines powered up for the usual two second count and then Dockland smoothly transitioned to full speed for inter-stellar travel.

Leo’s stomach was a hard knot and he startled when Captain swivelled the chair she was sitting in with a loud squeak so she could address everyone in and nearby the below decks control room.

“I spent three cycles down here when I was a Tech, reprogramming this NavCom when the previous bridge control systems were installed,” she explained. “When Dockland was upgraded in the first half of this exploration, I confirmed the reprogramming was still operational. This NavCom provides routing, but then relays the pre-programmed route through Dockland’s bridge controls for verification prior to initiating the course. The hard programmed routes are simply a lot faster to calculate than the ‘measure every variable in all of space in real time’ routing modern NavComs do because there’s only one defined path to verify as safe to traverse.”

The collective sigh from everyone but Captain was laced with nervous and relieved laughs. She chuckled along with her crew, getting more than a few wide and sheepish smiles in reply.

“You seven just became my lead shift in here,” she announced to the crew members who had gotten the below decks control room powered on and operating. “Each of you, except Leo, pick one person from the crowd in the hallway who’s good at learning and start teaching them what they need to know for monitoring your consoles while you’re sleeping. You get one shift off and then I expect you back here to operate what are now your stations and begin to train someone else. Our route is five cycles, and there needs to be three competent people per station by the time we reach our destination.”

She made eye contact with each of the six others, getting a chorus of ‘yes, Captain’ in reply.

“Leo,” she said. He straightened his shoulders and focused on her rather than staring at the scrolling NavCom display numbers. “You seem to be good at using that handheld. Take the rest of this shift to get fully familiar with it. On your next shift, train two people at a time for it so there will always be someone in this room who can look up information. We have two hours left in this shift everyone, let’s use them well.”

The next five cycles passed in a blur of double shifts and live training exercises. Leo fell into the pattern of long hours working and short hours sleeping due to the amount of practice he’d gotten during his Academy years, and every cycle he woke up exhausted but excited to be using the antique systems. Trevor seemed to barely notice the change in working hours. Her apprenticeship in construction yards and then years of working shipside installation and training contracts meant she was used to schedules requiring double shifts.

During the first couple of cycles, grumbles from the lead bridge crew about Captain spending so much time below decks made their way as rumors to the lead crew in the below decks control room. Trevor suggested Captain offer them positions training to be alternate lead crew members in the below decks control room, and the grumbles stopped hours after Captain smirked and communicated the offer through the intercom. The double shifts expected of the below decks lead crew weren’t a recruiting incentive.

Captain had frowned when Leo’s first chosen pair to get trained on the antique handheld was Mollin and Hodahvay, but he knew she couldn’t argue his logic. They were two of the fastest crew members for learning new consoles and systems, so would likely be among the fastest to learn these old panels and handheld.

Under the threat that Captain would eject them into open space at over distance speed if they even thought about corruption pranks, Mollin and Hodahvay had been waiting for Leo at the start of his next shift. At the end of three cycles, they had taken over training duties on the handheld, plus Hodahvay had started learning primary optics and radar and Mollin was starting to learn short and long range weapons systems. (Trevor had raised questions about teaching Mollin anything to do with weapons, but Leo convinced her it was only a problem if they went back in time to before demilitarization.)

No longer tied to the handheld, Leo received two full cycles of instruction directly from Captain for operating NavCom. It was exhilarating to learn the pre-programmed routes over-rode current safety regulations, which is how their route was five cycles of over distance travel and not the six cycles it should have been. However, it was terrifying to understand their route would have been twenty-six hours longer except the pre-programmed routing factored Dockland’s structural and radiation shielding capabilities, so right now they were traversing illegally close to stars and dangerous anomalies.

For those two cycles of NavCom training, time had flown by and Leo barely noticed the length of the double shifts… at least, until the shifts ended and he was hungry and tired and so mentally drained he joked with Trevor about expecting a final exam once they arrived at Daion Central World.

Per Captain’s orders, the lead crew slept on a short shift and started minutes before Dockland dropped out of over distance nearby planet seventy-four. One of Trevor’s friends was off shift and opened a live holostream on her smart looking toward the planet out one of Dockland’s small hull windows. Trevor linked into the vid, swiping it up to her smart’s holoscreen so the below decks control room lead crew could all watch. They gathered around her just in time to witness the first five ship components launch from surface to low orbit for final assembly.

Her friend zoomed in on the view and Trevor pointed out personal ships which had been repurposed into impromptu assembly yard worker rest points, and that three transporters were bringing up duplicate components.

“What do you mean about duplicates?” Leo asked. His confusion was visible on the faces of other lead crew members who weren’t familiar with ship construction.

“It means more launches to complete multiple ships,” Trevor answered. “I’d guess to assemble a fleet, and not a single ship.”

“So how many ships are they assembling?” Leo asked. In the vid with the personal ships as reference, the components looked small.

“That’s impossible to guess with only five components up,” Trevor said. She used her confident tone, but even Leo could tell none of the parts seemed like they would assemble into ships large enough to evacuate the number of people he and Trevor had seen through the satellite network.

The components were clunky, the visible wall thicknesses of attaching parts similar to what Leo remembered from working on Dockland during upgrading. He wondered how old the tech was these people were assembling as the vid continued to show transporters positioning components in the large area between worker rest points. Activity around the components suddenly doubled.

“They just saw Dockland,” Trevor said. In the vid, the transporters disengaged from the now-orbiting components and dropped back to the planet in bright plumes of atmospheric burn, a few rest point ships following.

4-3

Dockland established a high orbit above the hastily made assembly yard. The final ships returning to the planet surface disappeared from visual monitoring once they’d slowed enough to lose the flaming tails marking their passage back to the landside construction site.

“I guess that proves there are people here,” Lastin said. He chuckled, first in disbelief but sounding nervous when he stopped, and then ran his fingers through his hair.

Captain had ordered Leo and Trevor not to disclose their report’s findings. Right now was when the majority of people on Dockland were finding out why getting to planet seventy-four was so important that the order to route here had come from Public Face directly. Lastin had been one of the people theorizing settlers being landside, but he’d been a minority of Dockland’s population in thinking so. Most people on board believed a weapon had been found.

The voice intercom between the bridge and below decks control room toned. Everyone hurried back to their assigned consoles, glancing at the intercom speaker nervously and waiting for the expected orders from Captain. Trevor swiped her smart’s holoscreen closed and disconnected from her friend’s vid.

“Bridge crew, scan surface and open comms for all InterStel channels.” Captain was on the bridge for the initial contact with the landside population, so they heard the order through the open intercom link. “Below decks control room, scan and sweep surface, and open comms for both InterStel channels not bridge monitored,” Captain ordered.

Leo glanced a smile at Trevor as he settled into the seat at NavCom. She was trying to scrub the rough feeling of needing sleep out of one eye with her fist while using the other hand to start the satellite sweeps Captain requested. Leo waited from his seat in front of NavCom, watching across the room to where Trevor was working, Lastin beside her and punching in the commands for engaging the old landscan sensors. The odd terminology Leo had only heard before in Technology History of ‘punching in’ commands had finally stopped sounding like a joke now that his hands ached from using the antique systems for more than half the week.

Captain kept the intercom link open. “Initiate message send,” she ordered. The bridge InterStel Officer promptly deployed the pre-recorded message from Captain across all of the bridge channels as the below decks InterStel Officer punched in the commands to send off the message on the first of two channels so outdated they weren’t recognized by the bridge control systems.

Everyone’s smarts chimed with a message from Captain being saved to each member of Dockland’s crew. The file was a transcript of the message she’d just ordered sent landside.

Leo read through it quickly. The message was a goodwill greeting and a warning. It requested viable and verifiable identification of the peoples now apparently inhabiting Daion Central World. The goodwill part of the message was that – if appropriate identification was provided – any action by Dockland would be in accordance with current laws and Daions would be treated respectfully per the agreement signed many, many standard years ago. The warning part stated failure to provide identification would be viewed as evidence of illegal settlement and illegal settlers would be detained landside for removal to Coalition Central Worlds and fair trial.

“Message sent, Captain,” the bridge InterStel Officer stated. The below decks InterStel Officer huffed, muttering about how ridiculously long it took to operate the old InsterStel as she switched to the second channel and began punching in commands to send the message again.

“Message sent, Captain,” she confirmed a few moments later.

Leo closed out of the transcript file. He yawned out of pure exhaustion and swiped the screen on his smart to begin scrolling through news pages. He hoped the distraction of whatever else was happening in the galaxy would stop him from thinking about the all-channel message making its way to the planet and initiating the wait for a response.

For the past few cycles, the news pages Leo had checked were dominated by releases of information pertaining to the latest investigation of corruption in Senior Coalition. The name ‘Shaverrim’, which Public Face had mentioned when Captain first reported to her about planet seventy-four being populated, was popular in the articles and often got mentioned as belonging to a person suspected of being an Isolated Radical sympathizer. But, Coalition Games were also getting underway – the opening ceremonies happened a few standard hours ago – so the news articles Leo scrolled right now were definitely split.

Coalition games happened every ten standard years, but corruption investigations in Senior Coalition were relatively common, happening every three to five standard years. Usually investigations were due to some minor scandal or another coming to light and then quickly disappearing from head article positions. Leo was interested in this investigation only because he had been part of triggering it.

He and Trevor had both also already received written notifications thanking them for their testimony and politely removing them from any further parts of the investigation. Captain had smiled about it when they’d showed her.

“I guess Annise liked you two enough to keep you clear of the politics,” was all she’d said. It felt anti-climactic.

Except now Dockland was here, a full three cycles ahead of any other ship, staring down at the cause of the investigation and as deep into the politics as any crew could get. The next ship to arrive would be Shiner. Captain had frowned about that, but hadn’t shared her thoughts for explaining the expression on her face. Buccaneer and Oscareous, the two starting from furthest away, would both arrive on the fourth cycle.

The bridge received the response to Captain’s message first, but it was a mess of static and tones when they tried to play it back. The second channel of the below decks’ InterStel provided a calm, male-sounding voice requesting identification of the people on Dockland before agreeing to transmit any information of those on the planet. Leo could picture the grin Captain would have after listening to that message. Probably, he thought, it would be the exact opposite of the sickened stare Trevor was throwing at InterStel’s antique panel speakers.

Captain saved her pre-recorded reply into the below decks InterStel Officer’s shared file, and then saved a transcript of this next message to the entire crew. Leo opened it quickly to read that this message provided Dockland’s registration and standard crew information, already complied and prepared for sending landside at a moment’s notice.

Leo quit scrolling the list of crew names and jobs when Captain informed the whole ship in a single announcement that contact had been made with a landside population. She finished by saying she was moving stations to the below decks control room to continue the conversation.

Trevor still looked to Leo like she was going to vomit on a console, but now she was staring at the intercom speaker as if willing Captain to take back the announcement of coming below decks.

“What’s wrong?” Lastin asked Trevor. He was the closest person to her and the way she’d jerked to stare at the panel for InterStel and then at the intercom speaker had caught his attention.

“I… what?” She snapped her attention to Lastin and then shuddered, as if a full-body quiver could shake away whatever thoughts she was having. “Nothing,” she said, clipping the word short of its ‘g’ in her haste to spin back and stare at the satellite screens.

Leo didn’t believe her for a second, and obviously neither did Lastin, but Leo was all the way across the room so couldn’t very well call out for Trevor to publicly share whatever was making her so uncomfortable. Leo was grateful on Trevor’s behalf that Lastin knew better than to ask again.

4-4

Captain jogged into the control room as her second message finished transmitting. She nodded approval to her Officer regarding the speedy use of the first generation InterStel in spite of the lack of efficiency in the system, and then joined the rest of the below decks crew members in anxiously waiting for the next reply.

It took nearly ten minutes to come, and was in written form. The response was a draft, the production of a final version interrupted by the sudden evacuation, but it was still the announcement the majority of Dockland’s crew had been hoping for and contained a listing of thousands of names. All of the people listed were in Coalition census files as registered Daions, and the announcement legally reclaimed this Central World using recent New Wave changes to historical and hereditary ownership laws. Under Captain’s orders, the document was transferred to the file upgrader so she could save it into her smart. Leo caught a glimpse of her smart display as she saved the document again, this time to the shared file she had with Public Face.

“Open the channel for real time communication,” Captain ordered.

Seconds passed, the hurried ticking of entering commands into InterStel for switching to live data transmission and receipt loud in the quiet humming of the control room. Leo could see Trevor’s shoulders tightening from across the room, her uniform crinkling at the collar. He tapped a finger to NavCom’s rough pressure pad, careful not to activate it but hard enough to jar his aching knuckles until he realized he was hurting himself and stopped.

“Ready for real time communication, Captain,” InterStel Officer confirmed as she passed the first generation microphone to Captain.

“Daions of the Central World, as Captain of this ship I offer the use and service of Dockland in accordance with, and under stipulations per, the Agreement of One Cause,” Captain said into the microphone. It was the size of a smart, but wirelessly tied to only InterStel, and it could only perform voice communication actions. Leo couldn’t help but grin about using such old, clunky technology for something as important as Captain was doing right now. A second passed, and then another.

“Captain of Dockland, I respectfully greet you. Our only request is to be left alone by Coalition.” It was the same voice as had replied to the first message. Leo could see Trevor’s shoulders hunching tighter, but she didn’t turn away from the panel she was at so he couldn’t see her face.

“I understand,” Captain replied. “However, because of the current political climate in the galaxy surrounding Isolated Radicals, I first need to confirm if you’re aware there are three other Coalition ships converging at the coordinates of this world, and that the next ship to arrive has senior crew members known to sympathize with Isolated Radical ideals. With your permission, Dockland could remain in high orbit as a supportive and defensive asset to your construction and assembly yards, and what appear to be your main evacuation centers. This crew also has members who can aide and support construction and assembly should you choose to continue evacuating.”

Another two second delay. And then a further four seconds.

Static crackled for a moment and then the landside voice returned to Dockland’s speakers. “As you’re the first of four Coalition ships, our evacuation will continue. It’s more than somewhat ridiculous for us to stay and be arrested and our presence erased before we can have our Central World reclamation verified and provided with full Coalition support,” he said, the final part about Coalition support obviously mocking. “But while you’re talking to me, Captain, please explain why your Coalition ship would be needed to defend us from those other Coalition ships. Maybe tell me what possible defenses you could even provide,” the voice stated. His tone was unmistakably taut, although he made a good attempt at sounding cavalier.

“As historically proven, Coalition intentions toward Daions have been publicly civil and overwhelmingly abusive,” Captain said. “My orders, the reasons Dockland are here, were to confirm your population met legal, Daion reclamation of this world and, if so, to ensure mistakes of the past are not allowed to repeat. I cannot in good faith ensure the intentions of the other ships currently on course, but” –her smart chimed and she smiled at the short, written message she received– “I assure you that your claim is recognized and supported by Coalition’s Public Face and therefore by Dockland and all of legitimate Coalition. As for what support and defense Dockland can immediately supply, I assume the use of this generation InterStel means you’re using Daion tech current to the time of the plague. Do you have intact records of Coalition technology per the Agreement of One Cause information exchange?”

A two second pause.

“We do,” was the suspicious reply.

Leo watched Captain glance around at each of the people in hearing distance, her empty hand clenching into a fist. It was the most blatant display of a full stomach of nervous butterflies Leo had ever seen Captain exhibit, and it was followed up with a sigh dropping from her lips heavily enough it left a terrified crater in the center of his gut. What could she possibly plan to say which was so bad it was making her look like that?

“Dockland is an original, Class Nine Odyssean Gunship,” Captain stated into the smart-sized microphone.

Leo felt the terror in his stomach solidify and drop all the way down to his feet, sending nothing but cold fear in a ripple back up through his entire body. She couldn’t possibly mean... after letting Mollin learn the weapon systems...?!

“Original construction from Assembly Yard 6 of the Tannis solar system, Aerestarkian quadrant,” Captain continued. “Dockland carries a full complement of long range ammunitions and fully charged, particle beam battery short range offensive systems,” Captain added.

In a unified jerk, everyone in the control room recoiled from everything they were close to. Leo didn’t want to touch anything. He didn’t want to be on this ship. He didn’t want anything that –

The crew member at the long range weapon panels, Teal, shot up to her feet and darted three steps toward the door. Lastin caught her and shoved her back into her assigned seat, his glare only slightly more controlled than her panicked stare up at him. Teal swallowed hard and perched at the edge of her seat furthest from the panels controlling what was, as far as Leo knew, likely a collection of armaments only rivalled by the defense systems of Coalition’s Top Central World.

“How can I trust you not to use your weapons on us?” The landside voice sounded as frightened as the crew in the below decks control room looked.

“At this moment I can only give you my word I and Dockland are here to support and defend whatever course of action you choose, in accordance with the Agreement of One Cause.” Captain’s voice was calm, and nothing about her posture or bearing had changed from before revealing what type of ship Dockland was. Leo put his trust in his belief Captain knew what she was doing and stayed firmly in his seat in front of NavCom, his hands clenched into fists in his lap and as far from NavCom as possible.

“I can’t trust your word,” the voice replied.

Trevor stood stiffly and walked to Captain. She looked like she was about to cry as she approached the most senior officer on the ship, but she also didn’t look like she had any tolerance for argument as she held out her hand for the microphone. Captain’s brows wrinkled together in the middle, concern in her eyes, as she gave the microphone to Trevor.

4-5

Leo watched Trevor inhale a shaky breath and hold the clunky, antique microphone in front of her mouth. “You already trust me, Charlotte, and as your sister I’m telling you to trust Captain and her requests and orders to Dockland’s crew,” she said. “Captain’s word is as honest as mine.”

“Trevor?” the voice asked, incredulous.

“Charlotte, please…” Her voice broke before she could continue. “Is this the news you and Mom were waiting to tell me until after I was done my contract?”

A sigh almost as heavy as Captain’s came through the speakers. “Surprise?” Charlotte said. Trevor’s brother turned the single word up at the end so his voice made it a question.

“You can trust Captain. You can trust Dockland to help make this world a home for our people again,” she said. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Trevor! What are you doing on that ship?” a new voice demanded.

“I’m fine, Mom. This ship is that standard year contract job I told you about. The Analyst job on explorations, remember?”

Dods, lead bridge crew Chief Navigator, excused himself through the people crowding the door and walked in from the hallway. He settled one hand onto Trevor’s shoulder while holding out the other for the microphone. Trevor handed it to him, her dark brown eyes holding the same roiling emotions as his light blue ones.

“Shelly Dods. I know you’re in the operations room down there, too, little brother,” he said.

“Abagail?” A new voice who must be Shelly replied after a moment.

“It’s me, Shelly,” Dods confirmed. “You need to tell people down there that Captain – that Dockland – really is here to help. That some of us up here just want our Central World back, too. That Captain will do everything she can to help us.”

Leo watched the scene with his heart pounding. Dods and Trevor stood shoulder to shoulder and both looked to Captain, tears freely rolling down Dods’ cheeks as Trevor wiped hers away with her sleeves. Captain looked between her two crew members, both publicly admitting to being Daion without having to, volunteering to speak up and support her in spite of the personal ramifications and without any promise of their actions having success later.

“To the ends of space, Dockland will defend this world,” Captain vowed to the two descendants of the survivors in front of her.

Leo jumped in his seat as a burst of static sounded over the antique InterStel.

“Captain of Dockland,” Charlotte’s voice returned to the speakers, “Daions accept your offer of Coalition cooperation.”

Dods handed the microphone back to Captain.

“Confirmed,” Captain said into the device. “Dockland awaits your initial requests for assistance. And, from me personally, thank you for your trust in us.”

“They’ve closed out of the channel,” InterStel Officer announced after the expected delay.

Leo watched Captain nod and hand back the microphone to set into its charging dock. He had a split second to wonder if now would be a good time to discretely check on Trevor, but the opportunity passed in a blink the moment Captain started talking again.

“Maintain channel monitoring in case Daion’s initiate formal communications again on this system,” Captain told InterStel Officer. “Until then, you two” –she pointed a finger at Trevor and Dods– “come with me. We need faster communication than this crater aged InterStel and I want to believe the people you know who are landside have smarts you can vid and save to.” She led the two crew members out of the below decks control room, barely slowing as the small crowd in the hall quickly parted to let them pass. “Vid your family members and any friends. Get me the dedicated surface contact who speaks for all Daions.” Her voice quieted below easy listening volumes as the trio walked away toward the nearest lift.

One of the crew members from the hall, someone Leo had spoken to maybe once during their entire time on Dockland, came to stand behind Leo’s seat at NavCom and thumped a heavy hand onto his shoulder.

“That is rusty, my friend. I can’t even imagine how bad you’re feeling right now,” the crew member said. Loudly. A quick glance confirmed every person in the room and hallway looked to where he was standing over Leo. Leo felt the center of his chest start to shrink and tighten, but he kept his shoulders square and stared at the screens in front of him.

“What is it I’m supposed to feel bad about?” Leo asked, keeping his tone innocently curious while still matching the crew member’s volume, surprising the guy into pulling his hand back.

“Well, I mean, your relationship,” he stammered. “It’ll be over now you know what Trevor is. I mean, plus the lying for, what, this whole standard year? Pretending she was Coalition? You… you must feel…?” his voice got quieter and his bearing twitched out of confident posturing as Leo starting laughing hard enough to fold forward over NavCom to the point he almost bonked his head on a screen.

“Yeah, okay,” Leo said between chuckles as he sat up to keep watching the screens he was on shift to monitor. “Because in this whole standard year together we never once talked about our families,” he said in a mockingly sarcastic tone.

Across the room at the short range weapon console, Mollin snorted a laugh. “Grab a broken single-suit and crawl outside the hull to record some nova readings on a handheld, Trecker,” Mollin said, shaking his head as he stood up. “Even better,” he added, walking toward Leo and shining a perfect holocinema star smile at Trecker as if he’d just had a wonderful thought. “You should go and repeat what you just said to Captain. After her formal upholding of the Daion-Coalition Agreement, I’d bet you she loves hearing about Daion harassment and Coalition ‘rightful supremacy’ conversations.”

Mollin said it with air quotes and a tone of voice as if he was excited about the idea, but his face had turned deadly serious when he stopped close enough to touch Trecker. Mollin held silent eye contact with Trecker until the crew member became uncomfortable and shuffled out of the below decks control room. Leo held up a fist toward Mollin as he continued watching NavCom screens display the latest information for the high orbit being established from the bridge. Mollin knocked a fist up into the bottom of Leo’s before turning to walk back to his station’s screens.

“Aren’t you two supposed to be deadlocked rivals bordering on enemies?” Lastin asked from NavScan, a few consoles away from Mollin.

“Of course,” Leo said. His chest started to loosen up as most of the observers found something more interesting than him to look at: Trecker’s retreating back.

“But that rivalry is a private, between-us sort of thing,” Mollin added. “Not something for outsiders to infringe on.”

“Kind of like an unspoken and deeply buried affection, but with hate at the core instead of love,” Leo continued.

“I think that sums it up nicely,” Mollin agreed. Leo shared a smile with Mollin and, for the first time since being assigned to Dockland, realized that over the months the holocinema star looking Analyst had become his friend.

Lastin and the rest of the below decks control room lead crew members laughed, almost all of them turning to their smarts to save quick, personal messages to Captain about Trecker’s verbal misdemeanor. Leo saved his own messages, one about Trekker to the Captain’s shared file for crew members and one to Trevor just to check in if she was all right. He didn’t expect and answer from either message sent, and didn’t receive one.

Chapter 5

5-1

The hallway crowd was disbursed the next time Leo looked toward the door, but tension in the room still prickled at his skin. Below decks was as quiet as when people were watching, and the lead shift crew members Leo worked with were each as focused on their panels as they had been a few cycles ago while still learning.

He felt just as focused in this moment, and knew it was because – half an hour ago – their part in this exploration had been only as Dockland’s crew: Coalition employees and contractors working on an old and refitted scanner ship. With the conversation between Captain and Daions, these people in the below decks control room had been elevated from random, low positions to lead crew members of a pre-InterStel gunship tasked with upholding the reestablishment of a vulnerable population; their jobs now could even include defending those who were landside. The last half hour had completely changed each person’s situation from knowing they were an unnoticed one of many who worked together into a single entity crew.

Each person here now owned part of the potential to alter the course of what would become recorded history.

It was a lot to take in. Especially considering that, even if not altering recorded history, they’d at least get a detailed footnote as having existed beyond a few decades of census records and a questionable ship registration history.

Unless, Leo thought, their support of this Central World and the Agreement of One Cause turned into an utter failure and the part Dockland was playing out on behalf of Coalition re-establishing positive relations with Daions saw all of them erased from every record by greedy bolts in Senior Coalition like Ahonnon and Shaverrim... His mind raced quickly to the risks and negatives, everything bad forming into long a mental list as fast as he could think things up.

The readouts on the screen in front of him stabilized into NavCom’s predictable scrolling for being in orbit around Daion Central World. Leo tuned out his inner dialogue of everything that could go terribly, horrifically wrong and tapped his smart to bring up news pages as a distraction.

The first article was about how Public Face had disbanded every Advisory Chair of Senior Coalition based on investigation initial findings. The investigation had elevated into a full probe, and the disbanding had only happened three standard hours ago. The related vids showed Coalition Tower Defenders escorting Advisory Chairs off of Senior Coalition properties, and had repeating images of Public Face announcing temporary replacements would be the winners of previous public elections on all but the five Central Worlds (which Public Face would represent herself). Rather than appointing internal Senior Coalition members, Annise was assembling the heads of planetary governments as selected in free voted elections to represent their worlds among the highest Senior Coalition level.

The next page’s head article was twenty minutes old and boasted many leaders had chosen to remain on their planets, and then listed the names of whom those leaders were sending to Senior Coalition seats as hand-selected officials in their steads. The bottom of the article noted Shaverrim and at least thirty others were still targeted by the probe even after being dismissed from Advisory Chair positions.

Leo whistled quietly at this bold move by Public Face. He couldn’t remember ever before a time when Coalition had seen the most senior members replaced in a single cycle.

Except that one time.

That one other time had been a mass assassination, and the whole Tower’s population had been killed and replaced. But that time hadn’t been initiated by someone internal to Senior Coalition, they’d just all been killed in the morning and the building fully occupied with rebelling forces by the afternoon. The event was recorded as the final stage instigating the Fifty Year Revolt prior to the establishment of New Coalition. That was the only other time Leo could recall where the most senior members were replaced in a single cycle.

His hand was shaking as he scrolled to the next article.

The next page confronted Leo with the latest in Coalition Games world medal counts as the head article, followed by the announcement of Advisory Chairs being purged and the resulting re-population. He shook his head at the ridiculousness of the two things competing for article space on the same page.

An hour before the end of the shift, Captain saved a written, full ship announcement to everyone on board that all personnel not willing to be a part of defending Daion Central World would be provided with faultless lifeboat transportation off Dockland and out of Daion space. The announcement was endorsed by Public Face.

Leo stared at the offer, wondering how many people would leave. Trecker, the crew member who’d attempted to claim Leo and Trevor’s relationship was a lie, was in the hallway outside the below decks control room again and loudly announced his decision to depart to the few others who were there; that his life and career were too important to waste on Daions. A few people in the control room stood and picked up the things they’d brought with them for this shift.

“Really, Danny?” Lastin asked one of the people he’d picked and trained over the past five cycles.

“I have three young kids and a husband waiting for me outside Dock,” she said. “My dad is sick now, too. I can’t risk not going home because this situation goes really badly and I’m in prison somewhere, and I can’t afford to lose this job if it only goes moderately badly. My family needs too much right now.”

Lastin’s imposing posture reduced to a slouch and his flare of anger drained away when confronted with her reality. The others who were leaving the below decks control room wore the same tight expression on their faces as Danny did. He shook her hand as she passed him and wished her good luck with her family.

She pulled him into a hug and thanked him for the opportunity of training down here, which had given her the privilege of hearing first hand Captain’s conversation to establish Daion reclamation of their Central World. History might be re-written to remove Dockland and all of these Daions if this situation didn’t go well, but Danny promised it was an honor she would always remember.

By the half-way mark of the next shift, ninety-two of Dockland’s five hundred and sixty-eight member crew had chosen to report to the first lifeboat designed to comfortably fit one hundred people for up to a month. All of Dockland’s lifeboats were capable of over distance travel using the same routing systems as Dockland, as well, so anyone taking up Captain on her offer would be safely in Dock after three weeks at most. From there, and being faultless, they’d be able to sign on to different ships for other explorations. Most wouldn’t even lose funds, and their employment records would only show that they were transferred.

Two lifeboats had been prepped for launch during the shift when Captain made the announcement. Both were kept ready and in hold until the end of the following shift, in case of anyone deciding slower that they didn’t want to risk career and potential, personal ruination. Only one more person joined the ninety-two. The second lifeboat was being returned to a ready storage condition as the first one launched.

Leo couldn’t help smiling when he woke up to the ship-wide, open hold warning alarm. He and Trevor had filed their Established Relationship Registration and Captain had issued them a shared cabin an hour later, so he was waking up curled with Trevor in a bed actually big enough for them to sleep side by side without being squished. Plus, Dockland felt lighter with the knowledge that negative voices would no longer be weighing down conversations. It might be part of what Trevor liked to call his sensitive, landsider emotions, but as he looked around their shared cabin and saw their few personal effects combined, this old gunship felt comfortably home.

5-2

“What are you grinning about?” Trevor asked, sleep making her voice wispy.

“I’m just happy,” he said, hugging her a little closer.

“And yet you went to sleep scared of the dark.”

“No, I went to sleep scared of all those things like sleeping, walking, eating, and defecating around an enormous amount of ammunitions.”

“Same thing,” she said through a yawn. “So what changed? You finally grow a spine?”

“No, not at all,” he said, deadpanning it perfectly and making her smile in that slow, sleepy way she had in the morning. “I realized this is the same ship we’ve been on for a standard year and it hasn’t blown up yet. Chances are good it won’t just because I now know the potential is there.”

“Good job figuring that out, sweetie,” she congratulated him in the most condescending voice possible. The open hold warning stopped alarming as Trevor stretched.

“Sounds like it’s time for you to get ready for your quarterly physical.”

“Speaking of, I expected my Mom to have vidded about that by now,” she said, glancing at her smart. It chimed for an incoming vid request as she was looking at it. “Okay, there she is.” Trevor answered with a grin, keeping the vid on voice only.“Hi, Mom,” she said, yawning again.

“Where are you? I can’t see you. Are you up yet? You have your physical today, don’t forget,” her mom answered.

“You can’t see me because I answered voice-only. We just woke up. I’ve got an hour until my physical.”

“We just woke up?” Trevor’s mom demanded, making her daughter chuckle.

“Established relationship forms signed and filed yestercyc. Captain assigned us a shared cabin and we moved in before going to bed.”

Her mom made the same excited noise she had for finding out Trevor was going to have a pregnancy check during today’s physical, and then yelled at Charlotte (who must’ve been minimum in another room) that Trevor and Leo were registered now. He grumbled a reply the couple didn’t hear through the vid and got yelled at by his mom for being older than Trevor and not yet having someone to be registered with.

“I’ll vid you after the physical to tell you the results, okay mom?” Trevor said over top of Charlotte’s reply that under Daion law relationships didn’t have to register, and that he’d been more than a little busy organizing Daion populations on multiple planets and leading the reclamation of their Central World to bother around with any romantic relationships.

“What time will you be done?” her mom asked Trevor, ignoring Charlotte’s reply completely.

“Usually the physicals only take half an hour.”

“Okay, so I’ll vid you in an hour and a half.”

“No, mom, I’ll vid you. I can’t get vids during physicals because my smart will be monitoring.”

“Oh, yes. Okay. They have to check the baby.”

“No, mom, they’re checking me, remember? I’m the person getting the physical?”

“For the baby, you have to be healthy too, right?”

“Okay, Mom, whatever. I’ll vid you after, in about an hour and a half, okay?”

“Okay. I love you. Oh, I’m so happy! Charlotte! Your sister will vid us in an hour with the results for how healthy the baby is!”

The vid disconnected before Trevor could argue with her mom. Leo was laughing as she growled with the frustration of dealing with family before her morning tea.

“She’s going to be like this with you, now, too. Still think it’s funny?” she asked, glaring at him with an ‘I’m warning you’ stare.

“That’s okay by me. My mom is terrifyingly similar and will be worse with you than she is with me because you’re the mother of her first grandchild. So just consider this chuckling as my pre-meeting-my-mom-in-person apology. My dad will apologize in person for her when you finally meet them.”

“Fair deal,” Trevor said with a grin and rolled out of bed. Leo followed her into the clean a few minutes later so they weren’t fighting for elbow room at the sink and then they got dressed for breakfast together.

Leo haunted the hallway outside the below decks control room while Trevor went for her physical. He didn’t have to be here, everyone who had been working double shifts for five cycles had been given a full cycle off before coming back onto regular single shifts, but he genuinely liked being around the old equipment. He was asked a couple of questions about the satellite control panels and helped those fellow crew members navigate the antique handheld to find what they were looking for. The distraction was welcome as he waited and wondered how Trevor’s physical was going.

Forty-five minutes after her physical started, his smart vibrated his wrist. Time for a celebration swim! the written message said. Meet you at our pool, was added to the first line while he was still looking at his smart.

You’re really pregnant?? he wrote back, unable to keep his wide grin hidden.

Yup! I have to vid my mom. 17 missed vids on my smart in the past twenty minutes… see you at our pool.

Trevor included a holoheart around the final written message.

“What’s with the grin? Did you win the bridge crew’s pool for what cycle and time Shiner sent their first threat?” Hodahvay asked as he slid into the seat for the consoles he should have been at for the past forty-five minutes since his shift started. Captain’s distrust of Shiner had spread through Dockland’s reduced crew quickly.

“Trevor’s pregnant. She and I are going to be parents,” Leo replied. Saying it out loud, hearing the words as a definitive statement, was one of the best things that had happened so far this cycle… possibly this standard year. A chorus of congratulations rose up from everyone in the below decks control room, and well-wishes for Trevor’s good health followed Leo as he left to go and meet with her as promised.

He stopped at his personal comp to save a quick message to his parents’ shared file and update them of this latest family news. He re-watched the last file they’d saved, the one he and Trevor had received together this morning while getting dressed, and he smiled for a second time at the excitement of both his parents in their reply to finding out he and Trevor were registered and possibly pregnant. His mom had been even more overly happy than Trevor’s, but only by a slight margin. Leo chuckled as he waved a hand through the holoscreen and exited the comp.

The margin between who’s mom would be the worse meddler was either going to widen or converge, and it was going to be annoyingly wonderful to find out. Leo changed for swimming and decided on his way toward this deck’s pool he needed to talk with Trevor about creating a shared file for only their moms so the two women could commiserate privately once Trevor and Leo started telling them to butt out and back off.

5-3

Content Warning: This section has violence and injuries mentioned, with some blood details.

As Captain predicted, Shiner passed the destination proximity radius without sending the regulation required Notification of Arrival message twenty-five hours in advance. Captain still ordered the standard Receipt of Message reply to be sent. The lead bridge crew InterStel Officer, Chester dan Broque, hesitated on sending the reply, winning him a small grin from Captain.

“Let’s make Shiner uncomfortable, dan Broque,” she said.

He went through the motions of sending the message and then smiled back at Captain as if he was in on some kind of private joke. She checked her smart and scrolled pages, seemingly scanning reports and news feeds while waiting for Shiner’s reply.

Captain stopped scrolling and sighed at her smart’s small display. “Replies come faster when messages are sent to the correct receiver,” she stated.

The members of her lead bridge crew all looked toward her as she slid the page up from the little display onto her smart’s holoscreen. A live link from Dockland’s InterStel console clearly exposed the message had been sent to and received by Shaverrim, the disbanded Senior Coalition Advisory Chair, and not to Shiner’s Captain. Chester dan Broque lost more skin tones than looked healthy for a man who was already so pale.

“I’ve been wondering why you didn’t take the lifeboat offer. Thank you for answering my questions before anything important happened.” Captain brushed her smart and the holoscreen closed. InterStel’s bridge console suddenly blanked except for flashing a single word: LOCKED. “Security to the bridge for a social disturbance,” she ordered into her smart.

“This is going to be a war and you picked the wrong side!” dan Broque spit the accusation as he stepped back. He suddenly slid forward, dropping into a low fighting stance, and slammed a fist into the shining console support.

Captain watched, only mild amusement on her face and her arms crossed loosely in front of her body, as his expression shifted away from righteous anger laced with superior indignation toward something else entirely. His bottom lip quivered and his shoulders hunched forward instinctively, the defensive posture turtling around his crumpled and quickly-swelling hand. The tight fist dan Broque had slammed into the first console support, intended to pass through and shatter both supports in an effort to render InterStel useless, was now a loose collection of broken bones held together only by torn skin and damaged soft tissues. There was a brown-ish smear where he’d made contact and the blood left behind was discolored by the blue tinged lighting inside the support.

“That probably would have worked on a standard Coalition ship. You obviously have the training to hit it hard enough to break both supports,” Captain said to him. His wide eyes lifted from his ruined hand and stared at her in shock. “This, however, isn’t a standard ship,” she added as the requested security personnel arrived.

“There was a problem, Captain?” the lead of the security pair asked, looking around curiously at the apparently calm situation on the bridge, her eyes resting on the injured crew member last.

“Escort dan Broque to cryo detention,” Captain ordered. “Medic can see to his hand once he’s unconscious and before he enters detention. See to it that his files, records, communications, and accounts are all frozen immediately. His rank as an officer of Dockland is rescinded as of now pending inquiry findings. Initiate detainment as soon as he’s cleared by Medic.”

“You can’t do that,” InterStel Officer whispered.

“You just proved yourself a threat to the safety and lives of my entire crew, and to every Daion on the allied planet we’re orbiting, by attempting to destroy Dockland’s InterStel interface. The action you just took is in direct treason against Coalition regulations, a direct order issued to Dockland by Public Face, and the Agreement of One Cause. You also claimed this situation will become a war. Consider your detention my first official response to a presented militaristic threat.”

He laughed as the security pair flanked one to each side of him. “You Central Worlds people don’t know anything about war,” he said, spitting the words.

Captain smiled at him coldly. “I’m from the Aerestarkian quadrants, not the Central Worlds. My pre-Academy education encompasses all eight standard years of what used to be Yard 17,” Captain said quietly. The officer’s burst of confidence crumpled as quickly as his hand had. Captain held his gaze a moment longer and then looked to the security team. “Detainment now,” she ordered.

“Yes, Captain,” the lead of the security pair acknowledged. Captain walked over to the locked console as the ex-officer was escorted from the bridge.

“That, uh” –Chief Navigator Abagail Dods chuckled– “that was a good bluff.”

Captain arched an eyebrow as she unlocked and scanned the console to ensure none of the systems had been corrupted.

“I mean, it’s not like you actually grew up in the middle of the Yard 17 Occupations, right?” he continued.

“Believe whatever you need to so you can sleep during your off shift, but trust me completely when I say the only person in Coalition more qualified than me for Captaining a gunship during a war is currently sitting as Public Face,” Captain replied.

Lead Analyst Shawna Capero cleared her throat, adding her own nervous energy to the conversation. The shine of her console reflected on her glasses and straight, black hair. “Don’t current regulations state all shipside console supports be made of soft-assemble poly? So they dull shatter for safety in the event of a force collision or impact to avoid crew member injuries?” Shawna asked into the thick silence.

Captain snorted a single chuckle. “These consoles are rated for operations in accordance with what a gunship requires, Shawna. If Dockland is involved in a force collision or impact which renders them structurally inoperable, the consoles being inoperable would be the least of our concerns.”

The two bridge officers shared a quick glance before turning back to their own consoles; Dods staring at Dockland’s orbital positioning intently as Shawna watched the latest launches of Daion fleet components being maneuvred into position for the ships they would be assembled into. Moments later a written ship-wide announcement provided the information that, for this shift, Captain was acting InterStel Officer for the bridge and a selected person joining the lead crew would be announced upon acceptance of the promotion.

5-4

Trevor and Leo theorized why the change in bridge personnel had occurred so suddenly as they changed out of swimming clothes before going for lunch. Unknown to either of them, the ideas they came up with hedging the closest to the truth were the ones they believed to be the most ridiculous… until Captain requested a private vid with Trevor. Twenty minutes later, Trevor and Leo were standing beside Captain at the opposite shoulder to Dods, watching the reflective dot pass out of the assembly yard and grow into a small shuttle through the interior hold view windows and exterior transglass hull section windows.

Leo wiped his palms on his pants – again – as the shuttle approached the hold where the first lifeboat had been. These types of shuttles were optional attachments to the component transporters lifting pieces of ships from the landside construction site to the spaceside assembly yard. Leo had never been around assembly yards before, but Trevor explained that usually the shuttles were used for prominent visitors or landside-based inspectors and auditors to witness assembly processes first hand. Coming to Dockland’s position in high orbit meant the small shuttle would need a refuel prior to returning to the assembly yard for attachment to a transporter returning to the planet’s surface.

The open hold warning alarm sounded and a few seconds later the large door separating the interior of the ship from the vacuum of space cracked open. Trevor smirked as Leo wiped his palms on his pants one more time.

“Are you planning to throw up before or after they’re onboard?” Trevor whispered out the side of her mouth closest to him.

“There are benefits and drawbacks to both, you know?” he replied quickly. The smile he flashed at her disappeared as fast as it had arrived on his face and he blew out a sigh after turning back to stare, wide-eyed, through the windows.

“They’re going to like you,” Trevor assured him. Without looking at her because he was lost in his own thoughts about how meeting her family could go terribly wrong, Leo nodded and straightened out his uniform. Again.

The hold doors began closing as soon as the shuttle flew in. The small shuttle was dwarfed by the large hold as it set down in the middle of the lifeboat landing markings. The open hold warning alarm silenced a moment after the shuttle maglocked to the deck. Atmosphere began returning to the hold while the shuttle operator was going through standard onboarding protocols. Leo heaved a worried sigh and stared at the nearest door control, nodding to himself when the red light of the controls being locked out flicked to the amber rating of the conditions inside the hold now being non-fatal.

“Hey, look, at least the hold won’t kill me,” he joked quietly. Trevor rolled her eyes as she picked up the small duffle bag by her feet, and Captain’s lips turned up in a small smile.

The door control flicked to blue, meaning standard environment conditions were achieved on the hold side, and chimed as the automatic locking disengaged. Dods swiped the controls and the door slid open for Captain to lead the way toward the shuttle and the people stepping out of it. Trevor and Leo followed Dods.

Two women and two men left the shuttle and approached Captain, Dods, Trevor and Leo. One woman was young, she had a pale complexion and was wearing the uniform of a commuter ship transport pilot. The other woman was older, with dark brown skin and lines of silver in her black hair, and was wearing casual clothes. The oldest in the group was one of the men, wearing installer’s overalls, and he had the same dark complexion as Trevor along with hair as grey as Captain’s. The other man was younger and looked almost exactly like Dockland’s Chief Navigator, Abagail Dods.

Captain stated the required, formal greeting between allies as they were still walking. It was completely ignored by everyone but the shuttle’s pilot, and she just laughed quietly at the attempted formalities.

“Trevor!” Trevor’s mom called, waving and then hurrying forward ahead of the group from the shuttle the moment she realized her daughter was among the small greeting party. “I thought I would have to request you or sneak away to come looking for you!” She beamed a smile before closing the final steps to wrap Trevor into a crushing hug.

“Captain decided this was easier and less of a security risk,” Trevor laughed, squeezing back just as hard and – for lack of a better term – snuggling into the mom-hug she’d been a standard year without.

“Hey, there, Ducky!” The oldest member of the shuttle group smiled warmly and Trevor transferred from her mom’s arms to his.

“You really called me that in front of Captain?” Trevor asked from inside the older man’s embrace. Leo guessed the older man was around the same age as Captain, although Captain had a much straighter posture, and he had the same eyes as Trevor. Also, true to everything Trevor said about her grandfather’s distrust of modern technology, he wasn’t wearing a smart.

“Hey, Abigail!” Dods and his brother, Shelly, exchanged a hug as Captain and the pilot introduced themselves due to the mutual understanding there wasn’t anyone around who would do the service for them.

“Mom, Granddad,” Trevor said, stepping back and resting a hand on Leo’s arm. “You’ve already met him on vid, but this is Leo in person.”

They both turned to stare at him, assessing him from head to foot in a glance lasting (from Leo’s position) for about three and a half millennia before Trevor’s mom made her excited squealing noise and broke into an enormous smile. Trevor’s grandfather only shook his head at his daughter and shrugged at Leo as the younger man was crushed into a welcoming hug.

“Trevor! He’s so much more handsome in person!” she announced while Leo was still in compression, the intended whisper almost loud enough to echo in the essentially empty hold. She stepped back and cupped one palm each of both Trevor and Leo’s cheeks. “All your babies will be so lovely!” she said, brimming over with grandmotherly pride.

“One baby, mom. I’m having one baby,” Trevor corrected, holding her mom’s hand against her cheek.

“Oh, yes, right now. But look at him,” she said, pushing on Trevor’s face so she was forced to. “Soft brown skin, deep green eyes, and those straight shoulders… you two will have lots of children,” Trevor’s mom said, releasing their faces so she could wave her hands in a broad gesture, miming her expectation of a brood of grandkids wider than her arms could reach.

5-5

“We need a still holo and a still vid. This is a big moment! Here, right here. Come on, Daddy L, you too.” Trevor’s mom paused in organizing where the members of her expanding family should stand to take off her smart and hold it out to Captain. “Could you please? Just a couple each still holos and still vids,” she said, bustling back to stand between Leo and Trevor so she could tuck an arm around each of them. Trevor’s grandfather stood on Trevor’s other side and draped one arm across both women’s shoulders.

Captain dutifully captured the stills and gave the smart back to Trevor’s mom.

“I’m Dennis, Dennis Shandlie,” Trevor’s mom introduced herself to Captain while they both still had hands extended. “But you already knew the Shandlie part with Trevor here on her contract. And this is my dad, Lissa Shandlie.”

“Tallishen Os,” Captain replied, shaking Dennis’s offered hand. “Captain of Dockland,” she added.

“Oh! I thought you sounded familiar! We spoke early yestercyc when you arrived in orbit.” Dennis squeezed Captain’s hand between both of hers as if the brief communication where they hadn’t even spoken directly to each other had made them long-term friends. Leo chuckled.

“I warned you about her,” Trevor muttered, a sly grin pulling at her lips.

“I like her,” Leo said.

“That’s only because she said you were pretty,” Trevor argued.

“I do like women who say I’m pretty,” he agreed, smiling at Trevor and suddenly fully smitten with how perfect she looked tucked under her grandfather’s arm.

“Hm,” her grandfather said. “Last time I looked at anyone like that, we ended up having three kids together,” he said, pitching his voice so it sounded as if he was giving sage advice.

“Let me get through one baby before planning more, please,” Trevor chastised him, saying it loud enough to include her mom.

“I’m okay with planning more,” Leo offered, lifting a hand just above his shoulder to volunteer for the task. Lissa burst out laughing and stepped away from Trevor to pat Leo heavily on the shoulder.

“I like you,” the older man stated. “Don’t eat this one,” he advised Trevor.

“I can’t guarantee anything if we get stranded spaceside while I’m pregnant,” she replied easily.

“You two! As if anyone gets stranded spaceside anymore! There are more scans and trackers and readings than anyone ever needs,” Dennis said, cascading into the middle of the conversation to hug protectively around Leo’s waist.

“It’s fine,” Leo assured Dennis, squeezing her tightly. “I know she loves me enough to only take off one of my legs, so most of me will get through to a restock station alive,” he added. Lissa burst out laughing again.

Captain led the combined Daion and Coalition group to the next hold. The lifeboat there contained the nearest meeting room, and the boat’s systems were linked to Dockland while it was still in the hold. Charlotte joined the meeting as a holovid, ensuring designated representatives with authority to speak on behalf of both Daion and Coalition peoples were present during negotiations. At the end of half an hour, the few needed details were sorted out and Captain’s original idea for exchanging personnel to replace Dockland’s lead bridge crew InterStel Officer was agreed to completely by all parties. Then it was time for the shuttle to return landside.

“You sure you can get by without me?” Leo asked, smiling at Trevor. They were in a lifeboat private Captain had unlocked so they could speak personally.

“I did fine before you,” she reminded him. “Plus, there’s nothing in this Coalition ship even coming close to a hot mug of Daion tea,” she added, snuggling into the hug he held his arms open to offer. “Do I need to worry about you being solo up here?” she asked. He snorted a laugh.

“You made Lissa promise you he’d make sure I was all right.”

“Mom told you to start calling him Granddad.”

“But he didn’t. His person, his name, his decision,” Leo argued.

“We’ve got five minutes to talk and you’re going to pick it with me?”

“How else am I going to keep you angry enough to remember me for three whole cycles? I’d have to be there to only annoy you, but anger…” he sighed and then kissed his fingers as if he’d just completed a masterpiece.

“You’re a bolt,” she stated. “Kiss me?” she asked.

He answered quickly, pressing his lips to hers and pulling her body close so he didn’t waste any time on what – with him – could turn into a long and clunky verbal agreement. They ended the kiss gently and stayed close, foreheads resting together.

“You promise it’ll only be three cycles?” she asked.

“Our only options are: one, Shiner being the other pre-InterStel ship and Dockland getting overpowered so all of us evacuate using the lifeboats and Daion fleet; two, Captain winning any confrontation and the safety of Coalition and Daion peoples to co-exist is locked down in history; or three…” his voice trailed off. She leaned back looked at him, more worry in her eyes than he felt he deserved. “Or three, the whole universe gets sucked up in a cosmic implosion of time and space and none of this matters, anyway,” he finished. She laughed quietly, blinking back tears and only sniffling once. “Kiss me again before we leave the boat?” he asked. She agreed as silently as he had, the fearful tears neither wanted the other to see safely hidden behind closed eyes.

Trevor scrubbed her face with the cuffs of her sleeves while Leo used his fingers and then wiped his hands on his pants. Neither of them was tear stained, and both were dry-eyed, when they locked hands together and bravely smiled before parting to begin carrying out Captain’s orders.

After confirming three times that she really did have everything in her duffle she needed for three days landside, the third time getting glared at for asking again, Leo waved goodbye to Trevor and Dennis through the shuttle and hold windows. Lissa chuckled when Leo’s hand didn’t drop until after the hold doors sealed closed and the shuttle was zipping away.

“Three cycles isn’t actually that long, you know,” Lissa chided.

“It’s a lot longer when she’s not here, though,” Leo said.

Lissa nodded and patted Leo heavily on the shoulder. “Come on. You promised me a tour of this old ship before I have to start my shift,” he said.

“Right,” Leo agreed, finally looking away from watching the shuttle grow smaller. “Where do you want to start?”

Lissa picked up his small pack – a shoulder bag similar to Trevor’s duffle – and looked up and down the hallway they were standing in. “Let’s start with your favorite place on board,” he said.

“My favorite place?”

“It’s always a good idea to start off a tour on a positive,” Lissa said.

“That makes sense,” Leo agreed. “In that case, we’ll start off going this way.”

Leo led Lissa to the below decks control room first and introduced him to the crew members assigned in there for this shift, showing him the antique equipment and consoles. They took a long route through the ship on the way to the bridge so Leo could give Lissa a general sense of Dockland’s layout, and then went for Captain to review Lissa’s capabilities for joining the crew as her lead shift bridge InterStel Officer. As Leo expected – and Captain surprisingly didn’t, but definitely looked happy about – the shipside System Installer who had trained Trevor knew more about Dockland’s InterStel than Captain did.

Captain assigned the older man to a room only a few cabins away from Trevor and Leo’s, and Leo agreed quickly to sharing a table at the next meal when Lissa offered the company. It was a lot easier to worry about Trevor working in the assembly yard and keeping landside accommodations when someone else who loved her could explain away each of Leo’s concerns (which were rooted in simply not knowing what she was doing). Lissa provided more facts and information than Leo could imagine about the general operations of ship construction and assembly. Nothing to wonder about for why Trevor’s already a talented trainer at her age with Lissa as her grandfather, Leo thought, smiling at the family resemblance.

Chapter 6

6-1

Hours had passed since Dockland’s first reading that Shiner had crossed the twenty-five hour radius. On the bridge, Captain’s expression was grim as she ordered Lissa to send the acknowledgement reply which dan Broque had purposely misdirected to suspected Isolated Radical sympathizers.

Shiner’s Captain and crew likely already knew Dockland had set their approach time, Shaverrim would have communicated with them after the previous InterStel Officer’s betrayal, but Captain doubted anyone on Shiner realized Dockland could track them in real time. She assumed including the accurate timing of Shiner’s new arrival after its minor course alteration would definitely make that Captain more uncomfortable than he would enjoy feeling. After all, Shiner was registered for scanning so was equipped with current generation InMon for approaching completely unknown worlds undetected by all technology in use by and in Coalition.

Verification of tracking Shiner’s approach had the potential to make a lot of people very uncomfortable, especially if Shavverim was contacted by Shiner about Dockland’s updated acknowledgement. Current generation InMons didn’t account for pre-InterStel monitoring technologies.

“Modified acknowledgement of Shiner’s twenty-five hour radius notification sent,” Lissa said. His voice was as steady as his hands, the holoscreen under his calloused fingertips monitoring the automatic confirmation of the message being received and setting the system to record the lengthening delay in what should have been the regulation, automated response.

In the below decks control room, Leo scrolled through news pages during a lull in activity as everyone waited for Shiner’s response. There was only an hour left in this shift and Leo wasn’t scheduled to work again until after the next shift, but hanging out in the below decks control room was better than sitting alone in his and Trevor’s room. The nearby short range weapon display showed scrolling numbers similar to the initial point progress bar over on NavCom. This screen provided distance ranges and energy readings in real time, continuously adjusting for Dockland’s orbital position, the assembly yard activity, and the surrounding star and planetary rotations.

“Hey, Leo? Come check this out,” Mollin said. Leo glanced up from the sports head article he’d been staring at without reading to where Mollin was standing with the antique handheld. Both of them were off shift and not required to be here, but Mollin liked nosing around in the antique handheld and Captain liked how familiar he was getting with the old systems. Leo swiped out of his smart and stood, stretching his stiff hands and fingers as he walked over to Mollin.

“What is it?”

“I noticed that wall panel earlier today and just found the page for it,” Mollin said, first pointing at a palm-sized, faded, orange triangle on the wall by NavCom and then angling the handheld so Leo could read at the same time.

“Wow. People were paranoid pre-InterStel,” Leo said, scoffing a quiet laugh as they scrolled the page.

“Yeah. And look at this,” Mollin pointed. “I never saw NavCom written as ‘Navigational Comp’ outside of museums until six cycles ago.” They grinned at each other. Mollin’s grin slipped at the edges and then fell when he looked back down at the handheld to continue scrolling. “Do you think…? I mean… this is really some kind of unbolted situation we’re in right now, you know?”

“Which one?” Leo asked, scrolling up when Mollin stopped reading to look at him. “We’ve got the situation where Daions have re-established their Central World and a hundred standard year old treaty has gone live. Then there’s the situation where the outdated, refitted, upgraded scanner ship we’re assigned on is actually an illegal, fully armed, pre-InterStel gunship. Then there’s the situation where Captain is some kind of Public Face secret general and a Yard 17 Occupation orphan and soldier, hand-chosen to command this illegal, fully armed, pre-InterStel gunship in the event of military conflicts occurring decades after Coalition demilitarization.”

“I’d, uh, kind of lumped all of those together,” Mollin said after a moment.

“I see,” Leo said. He reached the bottom of the page and tilted the handheld back so it was angled for only Mollin to read. “Breaking them apart makes the whole cluster easier to think about,” he said, adding an encouraging smile.

“You learn that trick from the one to one time Captain gave you on this old NavCom?” Mollin asked, trying to smile back.

“No, from another student back when I first started at Academy. He saw me struggling and offered the advice to break everything up into component parts so the big, overwhelming everything of being there was in small enough pieces to handle in the moment each component needed to be dealt with.”

“What about pieces that don’t break down small enough to handle?” Mollin’s question was almost too quiet to hear, but amplified easily into Leo’s understanding through the fear in Mollin’s gaze.

“Those are the pieces friends help you with,” Leo said, settling a hand on Mollin’s shoulder. “And it helps me to remember that most of those big pieces are the ones Captain handles.”

“And we help her,” Mollin replied, holding up the handheld.

“Absolutely,” the crew member at NavCom stated, not looking away from her screens.

“To Captain,” another crew member said, halfway across the room at Satellites and holding up her poly cup in a toast.

“To Captain,” the rest of the crew members on shift in the below decks control room replied, each raising their hands or whatever drinks they had in poly cups. Those with cups drank from them; those without – like Leo – touched their fingers to their foreheads in respect.

“To Captain.” Mollin was the last to say it, and his reply was the softest. It was the first time he’d realized his fear was shared, and that his belief in Captain was held just as strongly by everyone on Dockland.

Leo scrolled back to where he knew Mollin had stopped reading. “Finish the page and then see what else you can find in there that might become useful. Pre-InterStel people were paranoid, so maybe your corruption-causing mind can find more things they had as normal and we would never look for because we’ve never had to worry about them.”

“Do you think we’ll actually need more stuff like this?” Mollin asked.

“I doubt it,” Leo answered. “But it’s better to be prepared than it is to be surprised,” he added, the advice from his fellow classmate about exams suddenly very applicable to real life.

“My evil genius skills are needed,” Mollin said, mockingly serious as he turned back to the handheld. “I must answer this calling,” he added, posing dramatically with the handheld.

“I can’t think of anyone worse to do it,” Leo teased, patting a hand on Mollin’s shoulder supportively.

“Thanks, Leo,” Mollin said, his smile this time a natural gesture instead of being born from nervous bravado. Leo grinned wide as he backed across the control room to the empty seat he’d taken at P.D.E.W.

“Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week!” he announced, attempting a bow but encountering the seat with the backs of his knees before he expected to and mostly falling. The laugh was needed in the control room, so he didn’t bother correcting anyone who thought he’d pulled the antics on purpose. He settled in and started watching the rotating display again.

“Captain, this is Teal. Shiner is undergoing course adjustments,” Teal, the below decks crew member monitoring L.R.P.W. targeting readouts at the station beside where Leo was sitting, stated into her smart. Leo’s gaze snapped up to lock onto her. He relaxed after a moment, relieved that Teal didn’t appear nervous about the other ship’s course change she was seeing on the long range weapon screens.

“Begin an off-schedule, all-direction P.O.R.A. sweep now and confirm the courses for Buccaneer and Oscareous. Report back with updated routing information for all three ships once you have it.”

“Yes, Captain,” Teal acknowledged.

6-2

Teal moved seats to the empty one in front of P.O.R.A. Her motions on the controls were accompanied with the ticks, beeps and tones everyone working in the below decks control room had gotten used to hearing.

Leo leaned his elbows onto the edge of the P.D.E.W. console and opened a news page. Head articles were all about Coalition Games now, and he had to scroll down to find anything about the full probe into Senior Coalition. Sitting like this put his smart’s holoscreen in front of the rotating, short range weapon display. The live updating of world medal counts and game scores looked like a weird, slow parody against the background of rapidly scrolling numbers.

“Captain, this is Teal.” Leo stopped scrolling medal counts to listen. “Buccaneer and Oscareous’s courses remain unchanged from previous sweeps. I’m saving the updated course for Shiner to your shared file now,” Teal reported to Captain through her smart.

After the expected amount of time, everyone’s smarts chimed for the received report from Captain. Leo swiped into the report and scrolled over it to see Shiner’s updated arrival time. The course info didn’t really mean anything to him, modern navigation still wasn’t one of his strengths, but Captain wanted everyone on board to know when to expect the ship that was currently registered as Coalition but appeared to be operating under the orders of a disbanded Advisory Chair. By this new course, Shiner was fourteen hours and thirty-seven minutes away.

Twenty minutes before the shift ended, Teal initiated the scheduled, all-direction sweep and then saved the updated report into Captain’s shared file. The longer report gave a complete listing of all manned ships within an eight cycle radius, so took longer to read before Captain saved it into everyone’s smarts. Leo spent the last few minutes of the shift first confirming the countdown until the three other Coalition ships arrived, and then scrolling through the list of people the report was sent to. It felt affirming to him about the no-fault decision made by people on the lifeboat to see all of their names, and affirming of the Agreement of One Cause to see all the names of contacts Captain had curated on the planet’s surface.

Leo smiled at his crossover when she came in, chuckling at her blinking surprise because he was supposed to be relieving her at the start of the next shift. It was a quick matter to assure her nothing was wrong; he was only there due to boredom because of the changes made to the bridge lead crew, and due to his own nervousness about Shiner’s expected arrival during his next shift.

Leo left at the same time as the rest of this below decks control room shift and, as agreed before leaving him on the bridge, he met Lissa at the galley for a meal together. The conversation was surprisingly good, and the stories about Trevor were just as great as Leo had expected. Leo provided his own family stories, enjoying immensely how honestly Lissa laughed at the funny bits and sympathized with the struggles. It was easy to see the family resemblance about Trevor’s humor, wit, and intelligence. When Leo mentioned the similarities as a compliment, Lissa had grinned and quickly stated Trevor got her mean streak from her grandmother. Leo made the older man smile widely by raising a poly cup in honor of what sounded – to him – like a wonderful woman’s memory.

Later, vidding with Trevor from their shared personal cabin, they each chatted about how the first few hours had gone since parting. Trevor was almost bursting with excitement. Charlotte had stepped away from organizing the evacuation to give her a very quick tour of the city before coming back to the landside headquarters. After this vid Leo was planning to try and rest before starting on his regular shift cycle in a few hours, and Trevor was taking over her grandfather’s position with the other installers in the assembly yard working on the small evacuation fleet. Plus, Captain had upgraded her security in alignment with her duties, so now Trevor was reporting progress for her team directly to Charlotte and Captain.

She looked positively smug that the upgraded security was – technically – a promotion. “See, educated boy? I told you that me being this much smarter than you would get me a promotion before your fancy Academy learning,” she said, almost singing.

“It’s only a promotion if it’s permanent,” he reminded her.

“You keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile, I won our little wager.”

Leo considered – in detail – the favors required of him if he conceded. He looked up the bookmarks she’d saved on his personal comp with the screen turned so she could see the images. He had to admit, conceding the wager looked pretty good from every angle detailed on the page.

“Okay, I think I can be convinced to agree to having lost,” he said. “But only on one condition.”

“You are in no way, in a position where you can add conditions now. You lost,” she argued.

“I did. But you’re in no way in a position where you can collect any winnings,” he reminded her. “So I’ll agree to having lost as long as I can add cycly interest to what I owe you.”

She chuckled and then smiled at him. “Fine. But I won so I get to pick what the interest adds up to,” she said with a wink. He tapped the rarely used icon he still kept on his smart and the sound of a bicycle bell rang. “I love you. Go to sleep,” she said while laughing, and then she disconnected the vid before he could answer.

I love you two, too, he replied in writing. He added a hug holo image around the words, modifying it to shift back and forth with a heart, before sending it to her. She replied with only the usual holo image alternating between a blushing smile and a vomiting face. It was her favorite reply whenever he sent her anything blatantly romantic which had the potential – he knew – to make her feel too flustered to be mean. He swiped off the lights, smiling at the alternating holo image she’d sent him as it dimly reflected on her empty pillow.

Five hours later Leo rolled off his bunk up to his feet, swiping his smart to both turn off his waking alarm and set his saved messages, updates, reports and orders to autoscroll slowly on the mirror in the clean as he stumbled through his regular washing routine to start the cycle. He hadn’t slept well, but the autoscroll dumped enough adrenaline into his system that he didn’t feel like he needed any caffeine. (He still picked up Dockland’s version of a coffee along with his breakfast, though.)

Lissa was already in the galley when Leo arrived. Trevor’s grandfather was sitting at an otherwise empty table with a mostly empty plate in front of him, frowning at the poly mug containing tea he was attempting to drink. His hopeful look toward the poly cup, wishing for the second tasting to improve the flavor, had disintegrated into resigned disappointment as Leo carried his own breakfast between tables toward Lissa.

“Do you think Shiner really found a course that shortened their arrival radius by four hours?” Leo asked the older man as he sat down across from Lissa.

“If Dockland’s all-direction sweeps say they did, then they did,” Lissa replied with a shrug.

“That means the evacuation fleet won’t be ready,” Leo said. He expected an emotional response from Lissa, but Trevor’s grandfather only nodded and scraped a final bite of his breakfast onto his fork.

“They weren’t going to be ready even with the four hours,” Lissa said. “Don’t look at me like you didn’t already know that. Nothing goes perfect in assembly, even when it goes well. How much you hope won’t make perfect happen. Now eat. You’ll want a full stomach for today.” He punctuated his point by eating the forkful he’d loaded and then stabbing the now empty fork toward Leo’s full plate when Leo didn’t immediately start in on breakfast.

6-3

Leo picked up his fork and started eating because – face it squarely – Lissa was right. The group Trevor had volunteered onto was under orders to focus on sealing hulls and ensuring operation of the over distance engines. Component transporters were pressuring completed sections of fleet ships with safe atmosphere from their own systems, and Dockland’s remaining seven lifeboats had all undergone tethering connections being added to their life supports. It was a small hope Leo had been clinging to for believing the fleet would be prepared for safe departure in the time they had to finish assembly; Daion installers had already decided life support was a system they could finish once out of orbit and on course. Getting away from being a group of easy to target and capture, planet-bound people was the main focus.

Leo’s plate was empty and the countdown for Shiner’s arrival was now two hours and thirteen minutes when breakfast was over. In the lift from the galley deck to where Leo parted with Lissa, the older man going to the bridge for InterStel and Leo to the below decks control room for NavCom, Lissa declined the offer of using Leo’s smart to vid with anyone landside. The installer explained – mockingly slow in a play of being condescending – that he still expected to speak with them after all the happenings of this cycle were finished. Leo nodded and agreed, waving as the lift doors closed and left him alone.

He knew Lissa was right and there shouldn’t be anything to worry about, but knowing didn’t stop the scroll of potentially terrible outcomes from running through his mind. Captain behaved distrustfully toward Shiner’s crew and, despite Daions currently doubling activity to complete evacuation ships, all of Dockland’s lifeboats were ready to launch from their holds instead of dropping landside to fill with evacuees. A lot of the tension in Leo’s shoulders came from knowing Dockland’s lifeboats were prepped to evacuate rather than for helping with an evacuation.

The walk from the lift to the below decks control room was short, but for Leo it was just enough time to vid Trevor and save a record. He assumed she’d either be working or sleeping right now. If he was forced to risk currency on it, he’d gamble she was working. Lissa had bragged unabashedly (at every opportunity) about what a gifted installer Trevor was, and Leo knew her work ethic when things were important, so he already had the short message planned when he tapped her contact for a vid request. It was a plan she completely ruined by accepting the vid request.

He blazed ahead with the quick monologue as if talking only to her personal recorder for her to watch the saved message later. The skin around her eyes was swollen from lack of sleep and even her hair looked tired, but she smiled and then chuckled when she realized what he was doing. He wrapped up the message speech with how much he loved her.

“You’re a bolt and you’re wasting my time. I’ll see you soon,” she promised. “Three cycles, remember?” she added.

“The new cycle started so technically only two,” he argued. Her brows dropped into a scowl, her tired mind ready to fight at the drop of a pin over whatever space rotted things he decided to poke at. “I’m only making sure you stay angry at me,” he added quickly and beamed a smile at her when she glared at him.

“Go to work,” she snapped, swiping out of the vid. He messaged her a holo heart, getting only a vomit image in reply as he stopped beside his crossover.

Nothing had changed during his single shift away. It was a fast conversation with his crossover and then Leo dropped into the seat in front of NavCom to monitor the scrolling numbers in the progress bar showing the initial course starting point.

He couldn’t focus on the news pages he looked up with his smart, and the few conversations in the control room were muted and awkwardly short. His smart dinged for a message and he felt a smile pull at one side of his lips at the holo of a heart around a shuffling, single-suited zombie from Trevor. He looked closer at it when the vid hitched, usually meaning she’d changed the coding quickly, and realized she’d added a large bolt stabbed into the zombie’s head, half hidden by the oversized helmet with his name on it. (He’d never known what a zombie even was until coming shipside, but out here apparently it was funny for corpses in single-suits to revive after death and walk around smashing up ship systems. Trevor said zombies were the reference for where the term ‘space rot’ had come from.)

“Do you think this is what it was like going into battles back before demilitarization?” Mollin asked. It was a question pitched loud enough to be asking anyone in the room, but he was looking at Leo.

“I don’t know,” Leo answered honestly. “But this is definitely the way I felt walking into Academy the first time with only my lottery-won scholarship and good enough test scores behind my entrance,” he added, swiping away the holo of stumbling death as he turned to face Mollin and his question about battle.

Lastin, stationed at the long range weapon panels beside where Mollin was sitting at short range weapons, cleared his throat nervously. “I was, um, just thinking that this waiting, it’s a lot like waiting for my mom’s surgery outcome when her heart failed suddenly a couple of standard years ago,” Lastin said, quietly adding to the conversation.

In halted admissions and hesitating sentences, the below decks control room lead crew members each put out a short tale of fearful waiting or of facing down some unknown they’d been terrified of. Nobody seemed to be boasting, and nothing said could be mistaken as a pridefully modest confession. Everyone was just scared, and it was easier to be scared together. They talked together about other times when they’d gotten through these feelings safely, instead of silently worrying alone about what might happen this time.

Captain had made it a generally known secret among Dockland’s remaining crew that there was another pre-InterStel ship out there from before Coalition demilitarization, but she didn’t admit to knowing where or what it was. She assured everyone it wasn’t Shiner, a difficult assurance to believe when Shiner was the only ship arriving in a comparable time frame to Dockland and from a similarly distant starting point. When this worry got mentioned, Leo chuckled gently. His own anxiety about it at breakfast had been squashed by Lissa’s level-thinking advice.

Everyone in the below decks control room stared at Leo when he chuckled. “We don’t have to worry about Shiner being pre-InterStel because we can all look up Shiner’s construction and assembly records,” Leo said, repeating exactly what Lissa had told him earlier. “I did, at breakfast before this shift, and Shiner is only twenty standard years old.”

Mollin scoffed. “Yeah, but –”

“There isn’t any ‘yeah, but’ to add,” Leo said, interrupting Mollin. “If you look up Dockland, you won’t find anything specifically wrong. What you will find is a lot of information that, knowing what we all know from living on the ship, doesn’t add up correctly if you really think about it. It’s all spot on for registration audits, but none of it is right. Shiner’s records don’t have any of those gaps or weirdly worded sentences. It’s a twenty standard year old ship designed and built for scanning. The blunted, smooth shape and the lack of transglass in the hull tells us just by looking at stills of it that Shiner is new construction. Dockland’s lifeboat holds look like misplaced water pontoons and our unevenly bumped hull has just as much transglass window panelling as it does normal glassteel. Even upgraded, Dockland looks old. But Shiner doesn’t.”

6-4

Relief flowed through the control room. Leo glanced over his shoulder when relieved comments came from what should have been the empty space and hall behind him. He hadn’t realized there were people gathering outside the control room in the hall now that Shiner’s arrival time was approaching. A grin pulled at his lips as he turned back after noting a few heads bowed low over smarts. People were looking up the records to make their own comparisons between Shiner and Dockland. The relief ran thicker as those doing the immediate comparisons shared the quick results of their searches with anyone close to them.

Mollin stood and walked over to pick up the old handheld, then leaned over NavCom as if sharing looking up something to show Leo. “Why did you say you were still scared if you know Shiner isn’t a threat? Or are you just pretending so all of us who didn’t know would feel better?” Mollin asked in a whisper only Leo could hear.

“Not being pre-InterStel doesn’t stop Shiner from being a threat,” Leo replied at the same volume. He didn’t move from staring at the antique screen. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to draw attention to by looking like he and Mollin were talking about more than a system question.

When Leo glanced up at him, Mollin was staring hard at the words he was randomly scrolling through. His holocinema star looking face was pinched and his mouth dropped in a worried frown at the corners. Leo could only guess that Mollin’s mind was now racing along multiple anxiety paths of exactly how many standard Coalition systems on a scanner ship could be weaponized if properly corrupted.

Mollin eventually nodded and set down the handheld. “Thanks, Leo,” he said, voice distracted, before going back to his assigned station.

The scheduled sweep report confirmed Shiner was an hour away, and that Buccaneer and Oscareous were still arriving a full cycle after Shiner per their original courses. Trying not to stare at the control room counter as it ticked away the seconds, Leo felt like the next cycle was eons away from now.

“Hey, Leo?” Lastin called. He was pulling at the cuffs of his uniform’s sleeves when Leo shook out of his thoughts and focused on looking at Lastin. “Can you… is there something in that old handheld about errors in readouts from this panel? Or something like that?” Lastin asked.

“What kind of errors?” Leo asked, quickly standing up and walking over to the P.O.R.A. screens Lastin was beside because any distraction from staring at the counter scrolling through seconds and minutes was a welcome distraction. Except maybe the distraction provided by the array clearly stating long distance targeting ranges, Leo thought as he stopped to see what Lastin was asking him about.

“This error,” Lastin said, pointing at one of the result readings from the most recent sweep.

Leo read the line and then the lines above and below it. He swiped up the most recent scheduled report from his smart to compare the previous odd reading to the latest one. Honestly, the only readings making clear sense to Leo were for the other three ships they were actively tracking, a couple large asteroids Dockland had already been avoiding in this sector, and a few ships in their exploration group which he’d known the locations of well enough to assume which readings belonged to them. The rest he’d guessed were other ships in their exploration group, privately owned ships passing by the sector, and the usual lumps of matter found in space in the forms of stars, planets, moons, rocks, Coalition and Daion satellites, clouds… the usual.

“I don’t understand enough from these readings to know why you’d think this was an error,” Leo admitted. “I’ll go back six sweep reports, though, and try searching in the handheld for anything similar.”

Lastin fidgeted with his sleeve cuffs again. “It’s a gut feeling more than anything. But I really think there’s an error or something might be reading wrong,” he admitted.

“I’ll do some searching,” Leo said.

“Thanks.” Lastin actually looked relieved, so Leo decided on his walk back to the handheld that he would search based on the last twelve sweep reports. He was entrenched in digging through the information in the handheld when his smart chimed for a new file in his shared folder. The file had been saved to him from Mollin, and was a list of possibilities for weaponizing corruptions Mollin had thought up. The list was longer than expected and reading it made Leo grin.

“Save that to Captain,” Leo said, swiping out of the list and going back to the handheld without looking up.

“You think I should?” Mollin asked.

“I’d preface it with what the list is about, but yeah, I think you should. There might be something your malicious mind thought up that hers hasn’t.”

“True. I am a better evil genius than she is,” Mollin said. He brushed some imaginary dust off his uniform, posing and preening under the self-provided compliment.

Mollin quickly typed up a sentence explaining what the list was about, modified a few of the notes so they would make sense to someone who wasn’t an Analyst, and saved the updated list to Captain’s and to Leo’s shared files. A few minutes later Mollin’s smart chimed and he smiled at the display on his wrist.

“She thanked you?” Leo asked.

“She did. And she complimented me because she hadn’t thought of four of the things on my list.”

“Really?”

“I think this is a compliment?” Mollin said, his tone turning it into a question. He saved a still vid of Captain’s message to Leo’s file: Good Work. I hadn’t thought of 4, 7, 8, or 11. Remind me next cycle to impose a security lock on your system user code.

“That’s some high praise considering the context,” Leo said. He and Mollin shared a grin across the control room before they both turned back to what they’d been doing.

Leo couldn’t find an error aligning with the readings Lastin had asked him to look up. What he did see, though, now that he’d isolated the line for review across twelve reports which gave him twelve progressive points… he set the handheld down and turned back to NavCom. He’d learned to run scenarios two cycles ago and, since three cycles ago, knew how to bring up navigational information without the information becoming a programmed request. As the pit forming in his stomach expected, and his brain hoped against with every cell, it looked to Leo like Lastin’s noted error wasn’t an error at all.

Rather than waste time forming a report, Leo used his smart and captured a still vid of the console screens through his smart’s holoscreen image of Lastin’s most recent sweep report. The twelve ‘error’ points made a line of brighter NavCom dots on the map he’d displayed on the backlit screen. Leo made sure the reading on his smart’s holoscreen was highlighted for easier reference. He saved the still vid into Captain’s shared file and then exited out of the route plan so it wasn’t on the screen in plain sight.

Captain’s reply was a single, written word: Understood.

Leo didn’t know what it was Captain understood, but the sickened look printed to his face was easier to explain with another glance at the counter than it was by telling anyone in the below decks control room about his suspicion that the second pre-InterStel ship would be arriving about an hour after Shiner.

6-5

Content Warning: This section includes description of a terror attack against a large population, depicting destruction of structures and persons.

Everyone’s smarts chimed and the report from the latest scheduled sweep showed Shiner had made yet another change in course. This latest change added an additional forty-five minutes to their route. Leo checked the still holo he’d captured and saw that, now, Shiner would arrive only fifteen minutes in advance of what Leo was gaining confidence in being the second pre-InterStel ship.

“Lastin?” Leo called, lifting the handheld off his lap and setting it aside. “I can’t find anything similar to what you’re thinking are errors. I guess keep making note of it and we’ll see what comes up,” he said. The tone of his voice almost convinced himself he didn’t have a still vid on his smart right now that showed NavCom routing of the ‘error’ following exactly along Dockland’s pre-programmed route here.

The control room population quieted as the minutes dragged on into the extra time Shiner had added before their arrival. Mollin revised his list with more evil genius ideas, again saving it to both Leo and Captain. Leo was impressed, both with the creativity of the list and with Captain’s reply threatening to have Mollin detained if he attempted returning to regular Analyst duties before she could have Lissa upgrade all Dockland’s security programming on bridge accessible systems. Around the rest of the below decks control room, the lead crew murmured through quiet vids to friends and family at home and on the no-fault lifeboat, filling the spaces between ticks and tones with subdued chuckles and warm words. The population of off-shift people in the hallway was slowly and steadily increasing and Leo heard murmurs of similar conversations out there, as well.

The quiet was broken when Captain announced through Dockland’s public intercom that Shiner was decelerating from over distance travel speeds in Daion Central World’s solar system. She ordered Dockland’s crew to be ready for anything and informed them she was now sending her pre-recorded, Public Face approved message to Shiner’s Captain. The message invoked the threat of immediate consequences if any of Shiner’s crew acted in non-compliance to the standing orders from Public Face, or committed any actions outside of or in opposition to the signed Agreement between Coalition and Daion leaders.

Leo hadn’t bothered to listen to the specific wording of Captain’s message to Shiner when she’d saved it to Dockland’s crew earlier, but he easily guessed the main points because she’d also saved to every crew member the summarized notes of which sections of the Agreement of One Cause were applicable in the current situation Dockland was facing. Reading those notes was keeping his breakfast close enough to his throat without needing to twist his stomach further by listening to the full message.

Before a reply from Shiner could be received, everyone’s smarts – and the ship systems dedicated to emergency communications – screamed out a single tone in unison. The forced news, delivered in standard four-second delayed real time, showed only the Central Tower structure housing Senior Coalition. Windows at the topmost floors burst out in showers of flame and smoke, the starting point of a cascade of explosions dropping methodically down the structure. The explosions were midway down when the top began collapsing.

People visible in the image-only holovid screamed silently. Debris from the multiple buildings comprising the Tower structure flew or crumbled into the recorders and vidding devices. The forced news images flickered through uncounted, disappearing live feeds until settling on a stable aerial view. The orbital device magnified at uncontrolled entry speeds to a point ensuring the Tower’s final collapse filled the holovid, and then zoomed out as secondary explosions blurred the image.

The orbital view was rendered useless and the holovid snapped to a distant landside source. Rising plumes of flames dominated the skyline where the graceful Central Tower buildings had spired moments ago, the sky itself lost to sight behind clouds of rolling, black smoke. Emergency measures hadn’t even begun to react. A flow of people from buildings nearest the Central Tower appeared as a slow-moving wave of darker hues racing away from the billowing explosions pounding closer to them until they, and their buildings, were engulfed.

Dockland’s InterStel toned over and interrupted the silent holovid. All the emergency feeds blanked as the ship’s internal system overrode and cut off the external transmission. Leo blinked at the blank screen of his smart and choked on breathing as his usual icons popped back into place as if Coalition’s Central Tower hadn’t just fallen.

“–twin stars to believe Coalition is defined by one Central World building complex!” Captain’s familiar voice roared over Dockland’s intercom, the argument apparently already in progress. Leo cringed at the rage in her voice. His gaze, and everyone else’s in the below decks control room, snapped up to lock onto the intercom speaker.

“Daion resources are Coalition resources! If your Public Face had seen the coming war with Radicals as the very real threat it is, these steps wouldn’t have been necessary!” an unfamiliar voice responded. The sentences spoken sounded chopped, something Leo knew from working on the bridge meant they were being received in short sections from multiple channels, which required constant InterStel Officer inputs to keep up with the shifting frequencies.

“Murdering millions of people isn’t a step,” Captain growled, her voice free of chops.

Leo looked around the below decks control room. He wasn’t the only one close to vomiting as he tried to force his brain to hear what Captain was saying. Someone on the bridge interrupted the forced news source and this argument is on intercom now for a reason, he thought. Senior Coalition structures on a Coalition Central World being destroyed had been interrupted for this argument. Leo had to figure out why. People he could see in the hall outside the control room were staring this way, moving closer with their heads cocked to listen, which meant the bridge conversation was only shared with the below decks control room.

“There isn’t anything Dockland can do. By presence, as Captain of Shiner and New Alliance Emissary, I claim this sector as New Alliance territory under the control of Supreme Shaverrim!” the unfamiliar voice declared.

“The standing Agreement of One Cause, upheld by Public Face, clearly states –”

“That antique Agreement has no authority in New Alliance territory,” Shiner’s Captain interrupted, openly gloating. Leo’s thoughts raced around the images of the final Central Tower explosions seared into his thoughts… Captain was engaged in yelling at Shiner’s Captain and Lissa’s hands were busy keeping up with the multi frequency communications with Shiner. But Lissa was the only one at a control console with the authority commands to override a forced news frequency. Trevor’s grandfather was the only one who could have activated the intercom to here. Why to the below decks control room? Why to where Leo would hear?

“What is this?” Lastin asked loud enough to include everyone in the control room. He was pointing at the readings around Shiner in the rotating, close-range display. Almost everyone only turned to stare at him, eyes empty from shock, as Leo stumbled to his feet and jogged the short distance to stand between Lastin and Mollin.

The readings Dockland was taking from Shiner were altering with every rotation shown on the screen display. But not only the readings for positioning relative to Dockland. Leo forced the thoughts he could control to focus on the numbers right there in front of him. To analyze the pattern he knew was there but the whole Senior Coalition complex vaporizing screamed on a silent replay over and over in his mind…

All their readings are decreasing. He locked that fact into his focus and stared harder at the numbers. Everything for Shiner but the horizontal and vertical sizes are getting smaller.

Chapter 7

7-1

“Dockland exists,” Captain’s voice interrupted Leo’s thinking. “This exploration exists. All Coalition worlds exist! You are in violation of Coalition non-settlement law by claiming this sector!” Captain was shouting again.

Shiner’s readings were smaller and smaller as the distance between Shiner and Dockland read smaller and smaller.

“Come on come on come on,” Leo muttered, hitting his fist to his forehead in an attempt to clear his thinking so he could figure this out. Why did Lissa want him to hear this right now?

“Coalition exists therefore the Agreement of One Cause stands!” Captain declared. “Your claim to speak on behalf of an unrecognized New Alliance for control of this sector is illegal. Recognized, legal, Daion settlements on this Central World ensure Coalition protection of this world!” she continued.

The situation clicked in his brain and Leo grabbed Mollin by the shoulder and shook him. Lissa wasn’t playing the argument for Leo! “Mollin?” Leo said, but Mollin had the same blank stare as almost everyone else in the control room. “Mollin!” Leo yelled. The Analyst blinked and focused on Leo. “All of Shiner’s readings are decreasing,” Leo explained. “All of them. Energy, velocity, range, activity… everything. Why?”

“I don’t… I don’t know,” Mollin stuttered.

“Coalition is your Public Face and she no longer exists,” Shiner’s Captain interrupted. “You’re a trespasser in New Alliance territory,” the stranger’s voice announced boldly through the intercom.

“Your list! The evil genius stuff,” Leo reminded Mollin, shaking him again. “Everything decreasing but size. Everything but size! Why?” Leo demanded.

“That’s… it’s…” Mollin swallowed hard. His fingers started wiggling as his eyes blinked faster, as if he was operating an invisible screen. “Controlled shutdowns reboot faster,” he blurted.

“Your skull is hosting a space rotted bolt if you actually believe Coalition is limited to and defined by one person,” Captain retorted over the intercom, her voice clear.

“What?” Leo asked Mollin. The reply didn’t make any sense.

“Controlled shutdowns,” Mollin repeated as if that explained everything. “Uncontrolled power failure requires more time because systems aren’t prepared but a reboot is fast.”

Suddenly it made sense. This system corruption had been on Mollin’s evil genius list, one of the top three. Leo spun and stared at the readings around Shiner. Each scrolling number was already starting with zeros. Leo leapt into a five-stride sprint that threw him into the wall beside NavCom. All the decreasing readings but one hit zeros on his third stride. Everything in the control room went silently dark in the blurred moment his hand slammed to the small, triangle-shaped panel the paranoid pre-InterStel designers had constructed into this control room specifically.

Somewhere in Dockland on this level, someone screamed. Everyone’s smarts were off. All of Dockland’s systems – lights, life… power – everything was gone. The count Leo started in his head the moment his hand hit the small pressure panel on the wall above NavCom continued silently until the screaming panic in the halls leaked into the voices of people around the below decks control room.

“Eight, nine, ten, eleven,” he yelled, the numbers evenly spaced and spoken strongly enough to hold back the terror surging in from the hall.

“Twelve, thirteen,” Mollin added his voice to the count.

There wasn’t any way for anyone else to know what they were counting about because Mollin and Leo were the only two who’d read the page stored in the antique handheld, but Lastin joined starting on fourteen. By twenty the entire lead crew was calling out the steady increments loudly enough that – when Mollin and Leo stopped at thirty and Leo lifted the pressure off his palm – voices echoed the counting from down the hall along with the rest of the below decks control room lead crew.

“Come on come on come on,” Leo murmured in a rush.

Every panel in the below decks control room flashed on, their back-lit switches flickering and their screens’ initial start-up progress bars shining as dim lights against the darkness. The usual humming of antique electrical equipment filled the silence. Leo let out a loud whoop and sprang away from the wall. Mollin jumped up from his seat and caught Leo into a tight hug, both of them laughing hysterically.

“You are the greatest evil genius!” Leo yelled, pounding a hand into Mollin’s back. A chorus of questions demanded to know what had just happened, and why only the panels were turning on, and Leo and Mollin ignored them. “We need a relay yell to the bridge,” Leo said, releasing his friend from the hug.

“What?” Mollin demanded.

“Shipside childhood games. You’re not allowed to play using the intercom, so you have to relay yell messages to your friends,” Leo explained quickly for the simple shipside communications system Trevor told him she’d used as a kid before she and her friends were deemed old enough for smarts.

Lastin was the first to nod understanding and then looked at Leo. “Saying what?” he asked.

“Uh… Power interruption pressure panel triggering battery system shielding was successful and… no, that’s too long, um…” Leo wracked his brain. “Relay yell to bridge. Below decks is live. Captain and Lissa needed,” he said. Someone in the hallway yelled the message away from the control room as Leo powered on the old handheld for more light.

“Handheld,” Mollin said, freezing in place and pointing at the clunky frame and glass screen in Leo’s hands.

“What?” Leo asked. The screens around them loaded, most flashing errors because they were tied too tightly into Dockland’s new systems and could no longer function independently.

Mollin darted around the control room from panel to panel, nodding to himself and laughing triumphantly when he encountered screens showing the errors he apparently wanted to see. “This is perfect! We can only control life support and weapons,” he said, stopping in front of Leo and beaming a wide smile at him.

“I’m not following,” Leo admitted.

“Me either. At all,” Lastin agreed.

“Shiner modified their scan system. They did a controlled shutdown and then used the scan system to project an electromagnetic pulse to wipe out our electrical in an uncontrolled shutdown. They can reboot quickly, but we need more time. It’s not hard to do, really, if you just –”

“Less evil genius, more solution,” Leo interrupted. “You, get life support stabilized,” he said to the crew member stationed at that panel as Mollin collected his thoughts. She nodded and got to work, the ticks and tones of her actions a sudden comfort causing a ripple of reassuring whispers in the hall as circulation fans quietly buzzed into action.

Mollin inhaled deeply, still smiling at Leo. “Dockland is a registered Coalition ship. All our onboard handhelds are programmed for standard Coalition links. It takes an hour to get Dockland fully online from an unplanned shutdown, but handhelds can reboot in thirty seconds at most,” Mollin said in a rush, pausing to breathe and holding out his hands in a gesture for Leo to finish the idea.

“And that means any standard, linked handheld on Dockland will power up and link to the nearest online Coalition control system.” Leo felt the smile spreading across his face.

“Shiner did a controlled shut down.”

“So they’re going to reboot in a few minutes!” Leo whooped again. “Go! Find a handheld!”

“But, if Captain is coming down shouldn’t we wait for her to decide –”

“She will want you already hacked into Shiner’s systems and ready to corrupt,” Leo interrupted. “She’s an evil genius, too. Just go.”

7-2

Content Warning: fear, and bodily injuries.

People’s smarts were coming back on as Mollin darted out of the control room. Leo set his to max brightness and then snapped it off his wrist. “Everyone, we need some emergency lighting. If you can, snap your smarts to the walls,” he said, doing exactly that as he said it.

A line of people had strung together along one side of the hallway outside the control room; crew members who had been drawn by the counting and then stayed due to the glow from the panels. A few stood and snapped their smarts to the walls, providing hopeful lighting in the otherwise perfect blackness.

“Leo?” Lastin called quietly. “Shiner’s readings are back to what they were before the pulse.”

“We knew they’d recover a lot faster than they think we will.”

“They started moving,” Lastin said.

“Captain and Lissa shouldn’t been too much longer. The lifts not working will add a couple minutes,” Leo assured everyone he knew would hear him. Lastin continued watching the hypnotizing rotation with dedicated intensity.

“Leo?” Lastin called after a moment, his voice strained but still controlled.

“Yeah?” Leo asked, trying to make his own voice sound calm and grateful more than anything for the standard year of bolt conversations with Trevor which had given him the talent of controlling his tone so well.

“There’s something… I don’t…?” Lastin’s voice was shaking too much to finish the question. Leo left the old handheld on, adding its glow to the dim light from NavCom’s screens, and strode over to see what Lastin was looking at.

Shiner’s non-engine energy readings were spiking. Their speed and course were bringing them closer to matching Dockland’s orbit and their hull size was… Leo leaned closer to the screen. Shiner’s hull size was increasing along their horizontal. As he watched, energy readings dropped back to normal and their horizontal hull size remained at the new measurements.

“What just happened to them?” Lastin asked.

“I don’t know,” Leo said, shaking his head to the negative. “But look!” He pointed to where the assembly yard flashed in the rotating scan.

“Ha!” Lastin blurted the single laugh and slapped Leo on the shoulder. Two of the component transporters already had energy readings and were starting to move. “I wonder how they got transporters moving so soon?” Lastin wondered, the question obviously rhetorical.

“Yards have accidents that send out pulses all the time,” Mollin answered. Leo spun and smiled at the top of Mollin’s head. It was the nearest part to Mollin’s face to smile at because the Analyst was looking down and concentrating at keeping his smart in the center of the handheld’s frame.

“What are you doing?” Leo asked.

“I corrupted my smart after coming on Dockland so I could synchronize with system linked handhelds and get into bridge systems without being flagged for external access. My smart’s got a bunch of corruption tech and syncing was a faster way of corrupting systems to prank you and Trevor,” he said, distracted by what he was doing. “But, with Dockland offline, I have to keep the screens physically aligned or else I lose the link. I’d have to waste time bypassing Shiner’s external access security through the handheld if I don’t use my smart.”

“You’re terrifying,” Leo stated.

“I know,” Mollin grinned back and then swiped up. The holoscreen from his smart appeared above the handheld showing a standard ship’s bridge interface starting page, the identification stamping for Shiner in the bottom corner.

“What are you into?” Leo asked.

“Enough that I wish I’d been sent on exploration assigned to Shiner. What do you want to see?”

“I want to know why Shiner’s horizontal size just increased,” Leo said. Mollin got to work navigating through the standardized systems as Lastin plucked at Leo’s sleeve to pull his attention back to the short range weapon panel screens. Lastin’s hand was shaking as he pointed to the red proximity circle that had appeared around Shiner.

“Docking bounders,” Mollin whispered, his voice no longer working.

“Relay yell! Brace for impact!” Leo yelled as loudly as he could. The relay echoed down the hallway and – Leo hoped fast enough – around the ship. “Which way will the impact send Dockland?” he added, aiming the question toward Lastin.

“Landside,” Lastin replied. He hadn’t moved yet to grab onto the safety rails or to drop into the nearest seat with a restraint.

Leo slapped the back of Lastin’s head. “Buckle into the seat!” he ordered.

“Why?” Lastin asked. He gestured to the gap on the screen between Dockland and the distorted planet surface flashing past in the rotating view as everyone else in sight set to buckling in, holding on, or wedging against.

“Dockland is a Class Nine Odyssean,” Leo stated loudly. “This ship is not some thin-skinned scanner! Shiner’s bounders will be lucky to dent the hull!”

“We don’t have engines or navigation, though. They don’t have to damage Dockland. Gravity will,” Lastin said, his eyes wide as he stared at the hypnotizing rotation of the screen. He didn’t move to hold onto anything.

Leo wrapped one arm tightly around the nearest safety rail and the other tightly around Mollin. Mollin tucked the linked handheld between their bodies and grabbed onto the safety rail with his other arm. They entwined as solidly with the safety rail and each other as they could, wrapping their legs together as if pitted as opposing combatants in a wrestling match.

Sound boomed through Dockland and everything jerked hard. Floors buckled, walls heaved, and the hull crinkled without tearing along the line of impact. Then there was nothing but the same near silence as before. Hull sensors flared and the screens everyone had mostly ignored for the past cycles became the focus of attention.

“Report!” Captain’s voice yelled from a distance, almost angry, the demand coming from somewhere in the hallways on the same level as the below decks control room.

Leo turned his head and forced his eyes to focus on the needed screens and not on where Lastin’s body had been tossed by the impact. Nothing in this control room had been built to dull shatter. “The hull…” Leo croaked. His lungs burned but he was able to force a complete inhalation. “The hull is intact!” he yelled. It wasn’t nearly loud enough, but the shout was relayed.

Mollin was gasping, trying to pull in a full lung of air. They’d both been slammed against the wall and had the wind knocked out of them, but fast checks proved they were otherwise only bruised.

A bad thought occurred to Leo. He blinked and then stared at his friend. “The link?” Leo rasped.

“Still an active link,” Mollin confirmed. They finished unwrapping from each other, stumbling from a secondary hit.

Mollin held on to the safety rail and Leo grabbed the handles mounted on the hull integrity monitoring panel. He stared at the rotating display for short range scans beside him. “They’re pushing us,” Leo announced.

“They’re pushing us!” someone braced in the hallway door yelled.

“What systems are live?” Captain’s voice called, closer now.

One voice croaked ‘life support’ at the same time another wheezed ‘weapons’.

“Life support and weapons!” The same someone started with yelling, but quickly their volume dropped to speaking as they shifted out of the door frame.

“And a live link to Shiner’s systems,” Leo said, looking back to see Captain stepping into the below decks control room.

7-3

Content Warning: fear, and bodily injuries.

Leo was panting and wincing, and completely grateful to see Captain had arrived. She was bleeding from a cut in her forehead and one of her arms was hanging loosely in a bad way.

“Mollin has a live link into Shiner’s systems through a handheld and his corrupted smart,” Leo explained. “Are you all right?”

“I was on a maintenance ladder for the initial impact. Do you have control of any of Shiner’s systems?” she asked, glancing toward Mollin and then scanning the room. Her boots crunched over the broken glass which had been the antique handheld’s screen as she limped past panels for NavCom and knelt to press her fingers against Lastin’s throat.

“I’ve cut into Shiner more than I ever did or could here,” Mollin confirmed, cocking half a smile at her.

“They’re still close to us?” she asked Leo. Another bumping jerk shook Dockland.

“Yes, Captain,” he said with a nod, not looking away from the hull integrity screen. “Is Lastin…?”

“He’s alive for now. Mollin, deploy their dock locks and then format Shiner’s entire control system set,” Captain ordered. Mollin blinked at her, frozen. “Relay yell. Captain’s order: all crew evacuate to lifeboats,” she ordered over her shoulder to the first person in the hallway. “You two, ensure Lastin is taken directly to Lifeboat Medic,” she added, aiming the order at the two nearest crew members.

“Captain, I –”

“Mollin, Shiner has lifeboats,” she interrupted his protest. “Deploy dock locks and set every system on Shiner into a complete format.” Captain stood and limped to the L.R.P.W. panels, dropping into the seat Leo had tried to make Lastin strap into.

Mollin sat in the seat beside Captain and hunched over the handheld. Leo buckled the straps to hold Mollin in the seat, freeing the other Analyst to continue corrupting Shiner as he'd been ordered to. Captain started programming commands Leo hadn’t seen before into the L.R.P.W. panel.

“How did you keep the control room live?” she asked as she punched in commands.

“The power interruption pressure panel on the wall by NavCom. Mollin found out about it in the handheld,” Leo answered as he turned to Captain. “It triggered the switch for the shielding on the battery system and control room’s power source.”

“Good thinking.”

“Too bad it didn’t shield Dockland’s main power,” Mollin muttered.

“No way of keeping that size of illegal shielding out of inspections,” Captain answered.

“Relay yell to Captain! P.W. door overrides manually engaged! Doors locked open!” was a distant call in the hallway.

“Acknowledge that, Leo,” she said. He yelled confirmation for her into the blackened hall. Everyone who’d gathered there was gone now. The evacuation order had sent them – and the light from their smarts – away to the lifeboats.

“Shiner’s dock locks deploying,” Mollin stated.

Leo buckled Captain into the seat and then grabbed onto whatever was solid and close. Shiner attempted to retreat out of range of their magnetic locking system, but they were too close and the attraction overcame the engine thrust. The impact of the locks slamming Dockland’s hull knocked Leo down to his knees, but his grip on two handles on the integrity panel (which, now that everything was shaking around again, he realized were there for this exact reason) stopped him from getting tossed to the floor.

Everything was shaking from Shiner locking onto Dockland... “Mollin? Can Shiner pull us back into safe orbit?” Leo asked quickly.

Mollin didn’t reply as he swiped to another screen. Metal groaned and Dockland vibrated. Mollin growled wordlessly and shook his head to the negative. The metallic groans and vibrations stopped with a touch of his fingers to the handheld display. “Dockland is too massive for their engines. We’ll rip both ships apart,” he said through clenched teeth and swiped back to the screen he’d been in before. “But our crash trajectory will miss the assembly yards now. And all Shiner’s emergency control systems are now locked,” Mollin updated.

“Why lock the emergency control systems?” Captain demanded. The extra step between dock locking and system formatting seeming like a waste of time they didn’t have.

“So they can’t use their manual emergency release to drop the dock locks before the format finishes,” Mollin replied.

“Good thinking,” Leo said when Captain didn’t.

“And… Shiner’s lifeboats are now isolated from the format,” Mollin added.

“You’re kinder than I am,” Captain muttered.

“I’m not a murderer,” Mollin admonished her.

The hard lines of Captain’s face softened into a smile she gave to only him. “That makes you a better person than I’ll ever be,” she praised him quietly. “Everyone who is still here is in violation of Captain’s orders! Get to the lifeboats! Both of you!” she barked. “Start another relay yell for a full evacuation on your way, make sure you yell up and down ladders and into open maintenance hatches,” she added.

“Full evacuation means you, too,” Lissa’s voice yelled from somewhere in the dark hallway. “Leo! You still in there?”

“Yes, InterStel Officer!” Leo called back.

“Is Captain injured?” Lissa was closer now.

“Yes, InterStel Officer,” Leo answered, yelling quickly before she could order him not to reply.

“No wonder she’s taking too long,” Lissa admonished. A moving light in the dark hallway announced Lissa’s arrival. He glanced around the dimly lit control room, his eyes following the spot of light created by the pocket torch he always carried, and frowned at Captain’s one-handed attempts to finish the commands she’d started. “You two, stop standing there being loyal, mutiny up, and drag her to your assigned lifeboat. Now,” Lissa ordered.

“I’m not finished,” Captain snapped back. Leo and Mollin backed up a step from where they’d been standing as Lissa closed the distance to get in beside Captain.

“And you won’t be if you keep trying to do it with only one hand.”

“You’re out of line, InterStel Officer,” she threatened.

“And you’re out of time,” Lissa replied in exactly the same tone Captain had just used. He reached over her and released the buckles holding her into the seat, and then wedged his pocket torch between two knobs on the next console over so it was shining at the controls where Captain was working. He stepped close beside her and leaned over to elbow her good arm off the controls so he could start entering commands.

“You’re in insubordination of a direct order to evacuate, InterStel Officer,” Captain snapped as she attempted to push aside Lissa’s hands.

“Yes I am,” he replied, unmoving from the console he’d usurped from Captain. “But you’re too injured to perform your duties and I’m the next ranking bridge officer, so get out of that seat. And I already told you two to mutiny up and get her to your assigned lifeboat,” Lissa ordered, not even glancing back.

Captain’s frown cracked into a small smile aimed at Lissa, then she nodded to the two waiting Analysts. Leo and Mollin quickly helped Captain stand and followed her to the door. They passed the frame of the old handheld, dangling from its chain, the jagged edges where the glass screen had been looking like a maw of broken teeth gaping down at the shards on the floor.

When Leo looked back from the hall, Lissa had plunked into the seat Captain had vacated and was manoeuvring the L.R.P.W. controls even faster than Captain when she’d been performing demonstrations while training crew members. Leo decided to leave his smart snapped to the wall. It wasn’t a bright glow, but it was extra light added to Lissa’s small torch and the dim panels. Leo wasn’t sure if the smart’s glow would help Lissa with whatever he was doing, but he figured any extra light in the dark was a good thing.

7-4

“What’s so important he has to stay behind to finish?” Leo asked, catching up to Captain. Mollin was leading the way using his linked smart and handheld to light the hallway ahead.

“If we crash landside with all ordinance, Dockland will take half the planet out with the explosion,” Captain replied through gritted teeth. “He’s ensuring all munitions are launched into safe orbits. Dockland crashing will be an extinction event for anything living on the surface of this world, but at least the world will still be here to resettle again later.”

Leo’s stomach roiled and he choked back against vomiting. Mollin had said their crash trajectory would miss the assembly yard, so Leo hoped that meant Dockland would miss the landside population as well.

Far away in Dockland’s corridors, distant voices called and repeated the original evacuation order. Leo added his voice to the yells at every ladder and open maintenance hatch.

Captain’s limp was getting worse; her injuries were deeper than just what Leo and Mollin could see and the glance they shared when she stumbled to rest against a wall proved they both knew it. “Can I help you?” Leo offered gently. She looked at him and then nodded into a slouch. He pulled her good arm over his shoulders and, by her direction, grabbed a handful of uniform by her opposite hip in a spot which didn’t make her pain any worse but still gave him a second way to help support her weight.

A few turnings and a couple of ladders later they joined the back of the line for their lifeboat, luckily the same one Captain was assigned to. The hallway and hold were lit by the lifeboat’s exterior lights. Waiting in line, Dockland shuddered in a way Leo had never felt before. It was as if the ship was tingling along a spine it didn’t have. Captain shook with the ship, bowing her head, but then straightened and faced forward with a grim smile.

“Dockland just demilitarized,” she murmured to Leo and Mollin.

“That’s good timing. Shiner’s format just finished. All systems over there are blank, except the active dock locks. I excluded those so they won’t disengage,” Mollin updated Captain, not looking up from the handheld. His voice was shaking.

“Good work, Mollin,” Captain said.

Leo counted along with the minutes he could see on Mollin’s smart, actively ignoring how the ship would periodically vibrate while they moved forward into the hold, until too much time had gone by. He knew Lissa was assigned to the same lifeboat because their cabins were so close together, but so far Trevor’s grandfather was nowhere to be seen among the final few arrivals Captain had ordered to line up in front of her.

“Mollin? Vid me,” Leo requested as they reached the bottom of the ramp into the lifeboat.

“We’re both standing right here,” Mollin answered.

“Lissa, Trevor’s grandfather, he has my smart.”

“No, you left it snapped to the wall,” Mollin corrected. Captain huffed in mild annoyance and sent the vid request from her personal smart.

“Where are you?” she demanded when Lissa accepted the vid. The view was of him standing, reaching up to where Leo had left his smart snapped to the wall.

“Don’t worry about me. You just make sure everyone else gets to their lifeboats,” he replied, casually tucking his hands into his pockets. It was easy to see the weapons panels to one side behind him, each screen flashing reloading requirements.

“Leo, go get that space rotted –”

“You can’t get here,” Lissa interrupted the order. “Shiner’s dock locks shifted during their first lifeboat launches. Probably people over there panicking and they didn’t decompress their holds properly before opening exterior doors. It happened at the same time our ordinance dumped. Dockland’s hull failed in multiple places along the pushed sections. The life support lock-ins for this room and this deck’s personnel access points triggered due to the vacuum.”

Captain transferred from leaning on Leo’s shoulder to leaning on Mollin’s. She nodded to Leo and, with the light from a flickering smart someone had dropped and left behind during evacuation, he took off at a run toward the below decks control room. As Lissa had said, emergency doors had sealed both hallways and the maintenance access between the lifeboat hold and the deck the control room was on. The smart in his hand faded, the flickering screen flashing once then terminating as he ran back to where Captain and Mollin were waiting at the bottom of the ramp.

“All emergency doors to the deck are sealed,” he confirmed.

“You all go,” Lissa said. “I have Leo’s smart here. I’ll vid my important people and make my goodbyes,” he assured them.

Leo dropped the broken smart as Captain tried ordering Lissa to find another evacuation route. This time, when the smart hit the hard decking of the lifeboat hold, it broke into pieces. A small crystal component winked and sparkled in the lifeboat lighting as it skittered at a hard angle away from the rest of the parts.

“Wait,” Leo said, interrupting the argument Captain was losing against Lissa, but not looking away from the spot where the tiny crystal component had disappeared into shadow. “What generation of Class Nine Odyssean is Dockland?” Leo asked Captain.

“Seventh,” she replied. Leo popped one of his fists into the bottom of his other and smiled widely at her as he grabbed the handheld away from Mollin and started quickly backing away in the same direction he had just come from.

“It should still work,” Leo said quickly.

“Wait, what should? Where are you...? Leo!” Captain called, the same questions coming from Lissa through her smart.

“Go. Just go! We’ll be fine. There’s another lifeboat!” he called as he turned to start jogging away.

“What are you …? Leo!” Captain hollered.

He almost felt like he was dancing as he spun to look back right before ducking out the interior door for the hold. “Tech History was my best subject! Just go!” he yelled, waving the handheld, and then he turned away, raced past the hold windows, and disappeared from their view into the dark hallways.

Leo found the walled-over access port faster than he expected to. Breaking into it broke the handheld, but the antique fiber cabling powering the below decks control room glowed enough for him to see where he was crawling along. He followed the sealed, armored, cable run all the way to the below decks control room floor.

“Hello?” Lissa’s muffled voice demanded between the patterned pounding Leo was using a disconnected coupling end to knock into the access port. At some point during refits and upgrades, the control room had been re-floored and the sterilpoly tiles had hidden the tunnel’s portal access so Leo hadn’t realized it was there until now. After some scraping and tearing sounds, followed by banging and crunching sounds, the smooth hub Leo could see and knew was the mount for the portal wheel began to turn.

“Before you yell at me,” Leo said as the portal hatch lifted to expose Lissa crouched in the tunnel gap just below the floor. Lissa bit back the yelling he was set to do the moment he saw Leo’s face. “Dockland is a seventh generation Class Nine Odyssean,” Leo said. He crawled up into the tunnel gap and then turned to slam and lock the hatch.

“So?” Lissa asked.

“I loved reading about these in my second standard year at Academy. They were the only Odyssean generation ever made with this feature,” Leo said, helping Lissa climb out of the tunnel gap. Sterilpoly tile pieces cut with the knife Lissa kept in his pocket and chunks of poly floor base that looked kicked apart were scattered nearby. “First generation InterStel and demilitarization made the feature obsolete, so it was never carried forward into future designs. But this generation of this gunship,” he continued, pausing to rip back more of the flooring than Lissa had torn up, “has this!” he finished with a flourish, crouching down to point at a flat, manual panel on the floor. It was a grey rectangle split by a red circle in the middle. He pushed on the two sides of the rectangle simultaneously, activating the pressure pads, and a round column at a height nearly the same length as his hand slid up from the outside edge of the circle. “Wow,” Leo stated breathlessly, stopping to admire what his efforts had produced.

7-5

“Looks like the handle for a manual hand crank,” Lissa said, not impressed.

“Well, yeah, this is,” Leo agreed. “But,” he said, drawing out the word as he gave the handle a shove and started rotating the circle in the floor. Heavy decking scissored closed across the top of the tunnel gap, covering the small pit completely and interlocking in the same pattern as emergency doors. Leo kept cranking and a smooth, third, thinner section of decking slid across the top and then lifted to be level with the floor under the current flooring. It hissed as the mechanical autoseal inflated.

“So, rather than escape the same way you got in, we’re both now stuck in here?” Lissa asked.

“The lifeboats already deployed.” Leo gestured at the integrity screens which were now flashing that all bay doors had been manually released and all bays were empty. “Which is exactly what we need, or the emergency system for this lifeboat won’t initiate,” he said, pointing at the floor he was standing on.

Dockland’s hull groaned and screamed under the gravitational pull yanking both ships toward the planet. Leo dropped into his seat at NavCom and set a course for projected, safe atmospheric entry in between clicking himself into the seat’s safety harness.

“You’re going to want to buckle in, too.”

“Dockland doesn’t have engine control from here!” Lissa yelled.

“No, Dockland doesn’t,” Leo said, nodding agreement as Lissa clicked into the safety harness where Mollin usually sat. “But this lifeboat was designed to save Dockland’s command crew and has its own engine with enough solid fuel for a single atmospheric descent,” he added. “Wow,” he said with a chuckle as command entry points he’d read about appeared on the antique screen.

Leo couldn’t help but smile at the flashing confirmation message. His eyes were shining with nervous excitement as he punched in the final command and handed over timing control to NavCom’s automatic systems. External temperature warnings flashed on all the screens applicable to that monitoring, and incorrect atmospheric entry warnings flashed on every other screen. Exactly as they needed to.

“Come on come on come on,” he murmured once all the panels went black.

Shiner’s thin hull was never meant for atmospheric entry. It began ripping open into a ballooning, shower of shrapnel, creating so much drag it ripped open Dockland’s heavy outer hull around each dock lock. From the lifeboats in high orbit, the two big ships combined into a single, extinction event meteorite burning down through the outer atmosphere. Unlike the component transporters, the speed of approach wasn’t slowed by the engines and the flare of entry never dimmed as the wreckage plummeted.

As designed into the hull, Dockland’s forgotten sensors tied to the active life support system detected the gravitational increase and presence of external atmosphere. Component pieces separated as the ship fell. Antique, automatic methods, created by builders paranoid enough to believe such war-required crash measures were necessary to limit damage to a planet, deployed and ripped apart Shiner in the process. Dockland’s half-burnt parachutes and anti-inertial explosions spread the crash site across a narrow swath of land and ocean stretching a third of the width of the planet’s largest continent.

The measures also reduced the crash severity to locally devastating. A marked improvement from the single, life eradicating impact everyone in orbit had expected.

Far above Daion Central World, blanketing around all sides of the lifeboats and assembly yard, Dockland’s dumped ordinance formed a drifting minefield clouding any attempt of evacuation. Or, in the case of Shiner’s lifeboats, secure containment against any attempt to escape.

Captain ignored her injuries and settled at the bridge controls of Lifeboat Three. She entered the needed codes with her one good hand and smiled as the upgraded console supports shifted color from the familiar white to the same muted blue as Dockland’s bridge. Then the displays of the actual controls of this particular lifeboat activated, replacing the previous displays and filling what nobody had ever noticed were empty areas.

“Mollin?” she asked. “Confirm ordinance is linked.”

He tentatively approached the holoscreen now covering what had been a blank wall and watched all of Dockland’s discharged weapons shift in what could only be a pattern of priority from red to blue.

“I think so, Captain?” he said, turning the statement into a question.

“They’re all blue?” she asked, her hand busy at the controls.

“Yes, Captain,” he answered.

“Then they’re linked. These controls are typical to Dockland’s upgrades, and to the panels you trained on while working in the below decks control room. Create an ordinance net around Shiner’s lifeboats and ensure that, even if they sacrifice one boat, they won’t be able to get through in any direction. Ensure Dockland’s lifeboats and Daion’s evacuation fleet are outside the net.”

“Yes, Captain,” Mollin replied, sitting at the console supports Captain pointed him to.

“Dods?” she called. After a moment, her lead shift Chief Navigator stepped into the small bridge. “Mollin is ensuring Shiner’s crew remain in orbit so they can be collected for their trial. Establish communication with all Dockland lifeboats and Daion fleet ships and coordinate orbits and in-event evacuation routing. Mollin, you have the bridge. Dods, I’ll be in medic.”

“Yes, Captain,” Dods and Mollin replied together.

“Captain?” Mollin called when she was only a few steps out the door. What looked like an old generation of scanner ship with external, antique similarities to Dockland was approaching into visual range as it decelerated from over distance speeds. Lifeboat Three’s transglass window provided a view of it moving to pace along at a higher orbit above all the lifeboats, ordinance, and assembly yard.

Captain’s smart chimed for a vid request. She huffed, almost a growl, and unsnapped her smart as she limped determinedly back into the bridge. The device paired automatically on InterStel’s console support.

“What,” Captain said flatly in greeting to her oldest friend a moment after Public Face appeared on a transglass wall screen.

“What. Did you do. To my favorite ship,” Public Face demanded. Behind her, a bridge nearly identical to the one on Dockland was in a bustle of activity.

“Annise, this is Dods. Chief Navigator, meet Public Face,” Captain said, making the introduction as if she was already annoyed at the conversation. “When Dods is finished with his existing orders, he will provide you with a complete reporting of his personal observations from the cycle and time you request until you arrived here. After Dods, Mollin – this Analyst right here controlling ordinance – will provide you with the same level of detailed reporting from his personal observations. I’m going to Medic. Mollin has command.”

“You look awful, Tallishen,” Public Face stated, her voice nearly gentle. “Do you need assisting Medics from Lockhead?”

“No. My crew is fully capable.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“That’s my answer,” Captain replied. “I’ll vid you once I’m out of Medic. Mollin can transfer all Dockland’s records and recordings you request. Probably more than I want him to have access to, considering the events of this cycle.” She added the last sentence with a small grin in his direction.

“Didn’t you die fifteen minutes ago?” Dods blurted at Public Face, unable to keep the question in any longer.

“The tower complex housed the bureaucracy of Senior Coalition, not all members. The loss of life and damages will be investigated and appropriate charges for such acts of war will be pursued.”

“Annise, don’t practice your speeches on my crew,” Captain reprimanded her oldest friend.

“Why don’t you go get set and sewn already,” Annise snapped.

“She gets reports that are just as full as what you’d tell me,” Captain warned Dods and Mollin as she turned to leave the lifeboat bridge.

“She gets so rusty whenever she’s injured,” Public Face said, sighing. “Must be the space rot.”

Tallishen Os, Captain of Dockland, gestured rudely with her good hand over her shoulder as she limped out of the bridge. Annise Lillan, Public Face of Coalition and Captain of Lockhead, the last remaining pre InterStel gunship, laughed in reply.

Half way to Medic, Captain saw one of Trevor’s friends and requested for them to attempt contacting Leo’s smart. The vid request flashed as unable to connect. She asked them to keep trying for as long as they felt was required before continuing on her way.

Epilogue

Trevor crouched to adjust her son’s jacket, making sure the brilliant green of the collar trimming complimented Lott’s eyes as well as she believed it should. She also checked that his shirt was staying tucked. The full-faced frown he directed at her was achingly similar to the expression his father wore every time she’d fussed about his appearance and she smiled to see the resemblance. This little boy in front of her was growing out of everything again and she hadn’t had time to shop for a new shirt after realizing this one was too small only an hour before they’d had to leave the house. If she’d known yesterday…

She never thought she’d one cycle live landside, but here she was, counting hours and days. Here we are, she corrected the thought and hugged her boy.

“Why do we have to do this right now?” Lott complained, making her smile as she released him and stood.

“Because this is the right day and time for coming to Dockland’s Memorial for the annual service,” Charlotte answered, frowning at the nephew who’d been named after him.

“Get that look off your face. My grandson is not the only Shandlie man in this family who complains about dressing up formally for services,” Dennis said, chastising her son. Charlotte quickly stopped fidgeting with his own collar. “I’m almost there. See you in a minute or two,” Dennis added. Charlotte disconnected the vid he was having with her before she could add anything else. Trevor shared an understanding smile with her brother before she looked down to once again to confirm her son was staying as dressed as he was supposed to be for the ceremony today.

“Mom! Look! I found Dad’s name!”

Trevor lifted her gaze to where their two daughters were standing with Leo. Their youngest girl, Tia, was pointing at the wall excitedly as the older one, Livy, attempted to dig the toe of her shoe into the stone and steel walkway around the tribute area of this memorial park.

“I would’ve found it first if your big head hadn’t been in the way,” Livy muttered.

“Neither of you would have found it if I hadn’t pointed out which panel to look at,” Leo said with a laugh and started herding both girls back toward the rest of the family.

“I’m surprised you even remembered where to look after all these solar years missing the annual service,” Lissa accused from where he was sitting on the nearby bench. His voice was pitched to sound condescending but the smile on his wrinkled face proved he was joking.

“I only missed the last one and you vidded me the whole thing,” Leo said.

“Need to make sure you remember how everything goes,” Lissa teased.

“I do recall all of it. I remember that Dockland entered atmosphere there and started breaking up” –he pointed up in one direction– “and then our lifeboat was safely and automatically ejected per my atmospheric entry requirements in that direction” –he arced his arm overhead– “meaning we landed –”

“Crashed,” Lissa interrupted with his usual correction to the story.

“Crashed way over there,” Leo finished, pointing toward the horizon in what was a horizontal, ninety degree angle from the elongated damage left behind from both Dockland and Shiner.

“Was it a scary crash, Dad?” Tia asked. Livy had been the one to ask in previous years, but she had the story memorized now and didn’t see the need.

“Terrifying. I was just lucky Granddad L was with me or I probably would have passed out from how scared I was.”

“Ha! Liar,” Lissa said. “Your dad was so excited to eject the control room out of that antique ship. I don’t think he even noticed the rest of Dockland and all of Shiner falling in flaming shrapnel and rubble around us.”

“That sounds about right for you,” Trevor agreed, tucking an arm around Leo’s waist and hugging him.

“You should have been there. You would have loved it,” Leo said, smiling at his wife.

“It also would have saved me those three additional days of worrying while Lockhead was scanning for life signs and recovering the few survivors along the wreckage path, half a continent away from where you two bolts were.”

“I’m still just glad I got my smart working and you answered my vid request before Granddad L had to start eating me. I don’t think he’d have stuck to just taking a leg. He was getting awfully hungry.”

Lissa clicked his teeth and then winked at his great-grandkids, getting them all giggling at once. Livy perched beside him on the bench and leaned her head onto his shoulder.

“What is wrong with you two?” Dennis declared the question toward her father and son-in-law as she hurried into the center of the group to start hugging everyone in reach. All three grandkids raced to get into reach of her, Lott’s shirt coming untucked in the process. “Nobody in this family eats anybody else. All these scanners and sensors and satellites all over every world and all of known space, nobody gets stranded,” she stated, finishing her usual tirade by beaming a smile around at all the adults while the kids stayed snuggled close to her. “See, Charlotte? See how good I look with grandkids? You two need to start adopting.” Charlotte rolled his eyes as his partner laughed.

The familiar tone sounded from Dockland’s old intercom system, signalling fifteen minutes until the start of services. The crowds around Dockland’s Memorial Walls of Crew Names drifted toward the hall where Coalition’s Public Face would be giving her guest speech in person this solar year. It wasn’t the first time Annise had been invited, but it was the first time in the eleven solar years on Daion Central World that had gone past – which counted as close to 12 standard years – where Senior Coalition had returned to a point of stability strong enough for her to be present.

It was fitting this was also the solar year her speech would include unveiling the memorial dedicated to Talleshen Os, Captain of Dockland, who had ensured Coalition history was not repeated where Daions were concerned. Captain Os had gone on to General a successful campaign ensuring first New Alliance Radicals and then Isolated Radicals were demilitarized, and all inciting persons brought before Senior Coalition members for the still ongoing trials. Captain Os’s son and grandchildren were already seated on the hall’s central dais.

Leo waved toward where Mollin was standing by Captain’s family and already looking up to where Leo and Trevor would be sitting. Mollin had been watching for them and now grinned and waved back, pointing out the Shandlie family to Annise when she questioned who he was greeting. Public Face also smiled and waved.

“Exploration Captain’s stripes look good on his shoulders,” Trevor noted, watching Mollin on the large holoscreen above the dais after they were done with the distance greetings. They had plans for dinner together before Mollin had to go shipside again. It was a visit they were all looking forward to. Leo and Trevor hadn’t seen Mollin in person since he’d signed on under Os and gone shipside on Lockhead right after Daion reestablishment.

“I think he likes it a bit too much that he was made Lockhead’s Captain, though. I’m surprised anyone but Os trusts him around that much ordinance,” Leo replied quietly, making her chuckle as she nodded agreement.

“We can blame Annise if he turns completely evil and tries to take over the galaxy,” she murmured.

They found their seats as Charlotte reached the dais. He greeted Public Face and her selected personnel, welcoming them personally from his position as Daion Voice prior to the speeches and services starting.

“It’s hard to think this all happened eleven solar years and three kids ago,” Leo added as they got their children settled, gesturing widely.

The crashed portions of Dockland and Shiner hadn’t been removed from the wreckage sites, the trail of destruction had instead been preserved and converted over the solar years into hiking paths and multiple memorial gardens and buildings. This main hall, seating tens of thousands, had been constructed by integrating the largest debris. Hanging, protruding, scorched and twisted sections of hulls and decks permeated the walls and floors.

“Four kids,” Trevor corrected him.

“Pretty sure we only have one, two, three,” Leo said, pointing at Livy, Tia, and Lott’s heads as he counted each kid.

“Four,” Trevor added, pointing at her belly. Their girls groaned in unison about another baby coming. Lott looked up at his sisters in confusion before silently staring at his parents with a clear demand for one of them to explain.

“What?” Leo asked Trevor, momentarily shocked. Then his usual grin pulled up the corners of his lips. “You’re pregnant?”

Index of Coalition Terminology:

Advanced Cryo

Common method of cryogenically suspending animated tissue from aging and / or dying, during extended time periods, while preserving pre-suspension physical capabilities and mental faculties. Used historically for medical suspension of living tissues during treatment development, and for interstellar space travel prior to the development of over distance technologies. Used currently for transport of both publicly dangerous criminals from point of capture and / or trial to point of detainment, and for critically injured persons from location of collection to location of treatment.

Clean

Single room providing personal bathing, washing, and toilet facilities

Glassteel

Glass and steel alloy commonly used during Coalition ship hull construction due to its durability, and heat and radiation shielding properties

Holoscreen

Interactive holographic screen displayed above or within the device generating the interface

Holovid

A three-dimensional representation of the source within an adjustable field (field size determined by recording device capability) composed in three dimensions for the viewer. Commonly used during two-way, live communications to present the person and / or items being communicated with. Also utilized for one-way communications where the holographic projection may or may not be live, and is limited to predetermined interaction, or is not interactive.

InMon

Indiscernible Monitoring equipment shielding, and related system set

InterStel

Interstellar Communication, and related system set

L.R.P.W. (Long Range Pulse Weapon)

A weapon that used pulses of electricity to fire a projectile, or operated by transferring electric current from a mine or projectile to the designated target, used for in-space planetary mine nets or launching long-range attacks against statically positioned targets (ie: space station or landside objectives). These systems are illegal per Coalition demilitarization.

NavCom

Navigation Computer, and related system set

P.D.E.W. (Primary Direct Energy Weapon)

A ranged weapon which damaged its target with highly focused energy, typically laser and/or particle beams, and used during close-range combat and for reducing matter around the exterior of the ship to sizes which do not threaten hull integrity. These systems are illegal per Coalition demilitarization, with matter reduction uses outdated since the implementation of NavCom’s avoidance systems (eighth generation).

Private

A single room work station with a closing door for privacy, with or without desk comp, intended for one (1) or two (2) person use

P.O.R.A. (Primary Optics / Radar Assembly)

A short range system for live monitoring of the immediate area around the entirety of the ship, used for docking operations, close-range combat, and pin-point location positioning of matter within 50,000 km. These systems were retired from service when HoloOp (Holographic Optics) technology, and related system set, was reliably integrated for shipside uses.

Smart

An interactive personal device, typically worn on the wrist or forearm, used for personal health and wellness monitoring, communication, and media consumption

Sterilpoly

A soft, sealed polymer designed to be self-sterilizing for all known micro-parasites, viruses and bacteria. Use in ships requires a maximum time of 20 standard minutes from contact to fully sterilized per regulations, with current spray applications averaging 10 minutes. Typically used as low-impact flooring and furniture coverings in public structures and ships, and available in every color and transparency.

Transglass

Transparent form of glassteel