Free Web NovelChapter 701: Interracial Union
Twenty minutes passed the way tense minutes passed on a ship at combat readiness, slowly and loudly through the silence between conversations. People talked in the war room. Scenarios were floated and examined and set aside. The possibility of a trap came up four times from four different people, which meant it was living in everyone’s head regardless of whether they were saying it.
Kelvin had pulled up every piece of sensor data available and was running comparisons against anything in his database. The auxiliary arms moved independently of his main hands, pulling different data streams simultaneously, and even with all four working the answer kept coming back the same.
Unknown.
Then the object came into range of the fleet’s visual array.
They put it on the main display.
It was a ship. That much was clear. It had the fundamental geometry of something built to move through space with intention, a defined front, a propulsion section at the rear, structural framing visible along its midsection. But the details of it were wrong in the way that things were wrong when they had been through something serious. Whole sections of the hull were dark, the material compromised, edges that should have been defined and clean instead jagged and open to space. What should have been navigation lights along the exterior were mostly absent, a few flickering at irregular intervals like something that couldn’t decide whether it was still working.
It was not a large ship. Next to the Eternal Pyre it was barely a suggestion of a ship. But it was a ship.
"It’s been through something," Diana said.
"Recently," Kelvin said. "The damage patterns are fresh. Some of those hull breaches are still venting atmosphere."
"If there was anyone aboard they’d be dead," one of the Ares commanders said. "Depressurization across that many sections."
"Not necessarily," Mira said. "The inner sections look intact. If whoever was aboard got to the core compartments before the outer hull failed."
"If," Lucas said.
"Design," Seraleth said, leaning toward the display. "Look at the geometry. That’s not a transport configuration. The framing along the midsection, the way the propulsion is distributed, the reinforced forward section."
"It’s a warship," Lila said. "Or it was."
"Agreed," Jayden said. "Transport ships don’t need forward reinforcement like that. Whatever it was built for, it wasn’t carrying cargo."
"So a warship from an unknown civilization," Sophie said. "Damaged badly enough that it’s barely moving. Drifting toward us. No response to fleet signals."
"We’ve hailed it three times," Mira confirmed. "Standard identification protocols across every frequency we have and several we borrowed from the Conclave contact records. Nothing."
"Blow it up," one of the Ares commanders said. Not aggressively. Just the practical option stated plainly.
"There might be survivors," Seraleth said.
"There might be a weapon system waiting for us to get close enough," the commander replied.
"If it wanted to engage us it has had forty minutes to try," Lucas said. "At this speed, with this damage, it’s not a threat to the fleet."
"Not yet," the commander said.
Then Kelvin looked up from his display. All four hands stopped moving at the same moment, which was unusual enough that people noticed.
"There are life signs aboard," he said.
The room went quiet.
"Two," he said. "Distinct energy signatures. Both in the inner compartments, which tracks with the core sections still being pressurized." He turned the display so the room could see the thermal imaging. Two shapes, faint but readable. "One of them." He paused, looking at the reading more carefully. "The thermal profile, the temperature regulation, the biological parameters. One of them reads as human."
"And the other," Noah said.
Kelvin looked at the second reading.
"I don’t know," he said. "I genuinely don’t know what I’m looking at with the second one."
---
The debate that followed lasted eleven minutes and covered most of the available ground.
The case for destroying the vessel was straightforward and not without logic. Unknown origin, unknown cargo, no communication, drifting into fleet space, and one reading that might be human could just as easily be a biological component of something designed to look human enough to trigger exactly this conversation.
The case for sending a scout was also straightforward. One confirmed human-proximate biosign. If there was a person aboard a damaged vessel drifting in open space and the fleet destroyed it without checking, that was a decision that sat on the conscience differently than the alternative.
Lucas came down on caution. Not destruction, but caution. A scout ship with a full abort protocol, communication maintained at all times, any sign of a trap and they pulled back immediately.
Kelvin came down on curiosity, which surprised nobody, but his curiosity was structured. He wanted the readings on that second biosign. He wanted to know what it was before any other decision got made because the unknown was the actual problem and information solved unknowns.
Sophie said that if there was a human aboard then the question of whether to check wasn’t really a question, which landed in the room the way things landed when they were true and inconvenient simultaneously.
Aurelius listened to all of it and then looked at Noah.
Noah looked at the display. At the damaged ship. At the two faint thermal signatures in the inner compartments.
"Scout ship," he said. "Two people. Full abort authority, any sign of a trap they leave immediately, no arguments." He looked at the room. "Who’s going."
Seraleth and Lila said it at the same time.
They looked at each other.
Lila rolled her eyes.
---
The scout ship was small, an Ares short range vessel with a pilot who had the calm energy of someone who had done dangerous things enough times that the classification of dangerous had lost some of its urgency. He brought them alongside the damaged vessel with a steadiness that suggested the wreckage and the venting atmosphere and the flickering hull lights were simply conditions to be navigated rather than reasons for concern.
Jayden had invited himself. Nobody had explicitly told him not to go and he had interpreted the absence of an objection as permission, which Lila had pointed out was not how permission worked and Jayden had agreed and gotten on the ship anyway.
They floated in the scout ship’s forward viewport looking at the damaged vessel up close for the first time.
It was worse up close. The hull material was something none of them could name, not any alloy in human production and not anything that matched Harbinger ship armor. The geometry of the ship was subtly wrong in a way that was hard to articulate, not dramatically alien, just slightly off from what human engineering would have produced, proportions distributed differently, angles chosen for reasons that made sense to whoever designed it but didn’t immediately translate.
"Not human built," Jayden said.
"No," Lila said.
"Not Harbinger either," Jayden said. "Harbinger architecture is distinct. This was manufactured. Someone with hands and tools built this."
"The Conclave," the pilot said from his seat, not turning around.
"Maybe," Lila said.
"Docking point on the lower section," the pilot said. "Hull’s compromised around it but the mechanism looks intact. I can put you in there."
He did.
---
The airlock on the damaged vessel opened on the third attempt, which was three attempts more than it wanted to give them but one less than it would have taken to make them consider alternatives. They came through in oxygen units, propulsion systems on their backs for the sections where the ship’s gravity generation had failed along with everything else.
The interior was dark in the way that things were dark when the power running them had mostly given up. Emergency strips along the floor gave just enough light to see by, red-tinged and irregular, some sections of the strip dead entirely so that the light came in broken intervals.
They moved through the outer sections first. Past hanging wires that drifted in the absence of gravity, past panels that had blown off their housings and floated at various heights, past one section where the hull breach was close enough that they could see stars through the gap and feel the particular cold of uninsulated space on the wrong side of their suits.
"Control room," Jayden said, looking at what was visible through a doorway to their left. The layout of it, the orientation of the stations, the positioning of what were clearly display systems even without power running through them. "That’s not a cargo manifest station. That’s a tactical display."
"Weapons targeting," Lila said, from the doorway. She was looking at something on the far wall of the room. "The configuration. Whatever that system was, it wasn’t navigation."
"Warship," Jayden said.
"Was," Lila said.
"What happened to the crew," Jayden said.
Neither of them had an answer.
They moved deeper.
"Reading you clearly," Kelvin’s voice came through the comm. "The signatures are ahead of you. Maybe forty meters."
"Any change in the readings," Noah’s voice.
"Stable," Kelvin said. "Both still present. Whatever they are, they’re not moving."
"Unconscious maybe," Lucas said through the comm. "Or waiting."
"Helpful," Jayden said.
"I try," Lucas said.
The corridor narrowed as they went further in, the outer sections of the ship giving way to the structural core where the framing was denser and the damage from whatever had hit the vessel hadn’t reached as thoroughly. The air was different here. Not fresh, nothing on this ship was fresh, but breathable according to their suit sensors. The pressure had held.
"Door," Lila said.
Ahead of them, a sealed compartment door, the kind with a manual lock mechanism for exactly the situation of no power to operate the automatic system. They tried the mechanism.
It didn’t move.
"It’s sealed from the inside," Jayden said.
"Kelvin," Lila said into the comm. "Sealed door. Manually locked from the interior."
"The signatures are right on the other side of it," Kelvin said. "That’s your room."
Jayden looked at Lila.
Lila looked at the door.
"Melt it," she said.
Jayden put his hand flat against the door’s locking mechanism and let the heat climb. Not immediately. Gradually, finding the tolerances of the material, which was not any alloy he recognized and took more than he expected before it started to give. Then more. Then the mechanism softened and the seal failed and the door released.
He pushed it open.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The shots came from inside the dark room and hit the doorframe and the corridor wall and somewhere above Jayden’s head in the space of a second and a half, and both of them were already moving, Lila going left and Jayden going right, putting the doorframe between themselves and whatever was firing.
"What is shooting at us," Lila said.
"No idea," Jayden said.
Something discharged again from inside the room. Not a projectile. An energy pulse, the kind that left a scorch mark on the corridor wall that glowed at the edges for two seconds before cooling.
"I’m flanking," Lila said. "You draw it."
"Draw it how," Jayden said.
"Figure it out," Lila said, and was gone, moving back down the corridor to find another angle.
Jayden leaned into the doorframe and put return fire through the opening, controlled bursts of plasma heat that lit the dark room in brief orange intervals, giving him glimpses of the interior. Crates along one wall. Equipment he couldn’t identify. A figure behind cover on the far side.
A figure.
One figure. Moving with the trained economy of someone who knew how to use cover. Taking shots and returning them and not wasting movement.
Jayden pressed forward into the doorway. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
BOOOM!!
An energy beam hit him in the chest.
Not a small one. Not a warning shot. A full discharge from whatever the figure was carrying, and it picked Jayden up and put him on the deck six feet back in the corridor with a sound that echoed through the ship’s metal frame and a sensation in his chest that he was going to be thinking about for several days.
He lay there for a second.
From inside the room, came a voice. Rough. Frayed at the edges in the way that voices got when they had been through something that took a long time.
"What do you want from us!"
Jayden was already pushing himself up when Lila came through the secondary angle, her telekinesis hitting the figure with enough force to lift him off his feet and put him against the far wall of the room. Jayden crossed the distance in two steps and had him before he finished bouncing, both of them on the floor, Jayden’s forearm across his chest and the figure’s weapon arm pinned.
He was strong. Whoever this was, he pushed back with the muscle memory of someone trained to push back, and it took Jayden a full three seconds to establish the pin properly, which told him something.
Then Lila’s light hit the figure’s chest.
A patch on his torn gear. Worn. Dirty. Half obscured by whatever the last however-long had done to the fabric.
Three letters.
EDF.
"Stop," Lila said. "Stop. Jayden, stop."
Jayden stopped.
He looked at the patch.
Then he looked at the man beneath him. Red-rimmed eyes that hadn’t seen sleep in something that could be measured in days rather than hours. A face that was gaunt the only way faces got when the body had been running on less than it needed for too long. Gear that had once been standard issue and was now held together by the determination of the person wearing it.
Jayden eased off the pin.
The man sat up slowly. His hands were shaking, just slightly, the kind of shake that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with a body past the point of its reserves.
He opened his mouth.
And something hit Lila from behind with enough force to send her spinning sideways out of the doorway and into the corridor, her back hitting the far wall, her light cutting out as the impact broke her concentration.
Jayden turned.
Something was standing in the room.
Not in the doorway. Not where anyone had been a second ago.
Just there. Present in the space between one moment and the next, filling it in a way that made the room feel smaller than the room actually was.
Jayden stared at it.
"What is that?," he said. Not a question exactly. Just the word that came out when the brain received something it didn’t have a category for yet.
Behind him, the EDF soldier’s voice. Quieter now. The fight gone out of it entirely, replaced by something that sounded like the end of a very long road.
"My wife," he said.
