The shuttle nded in the mostly intact hangar aboard the refueling station and he waited for the air to be sucked out of the ste bay on the shuttle. Some of the loose debris floating through the space pinged off the shuttle's hull lightly, sounding like hail.

  Before the air was pletely removed, Alexander radioed the pilot. “Branston, you may want to just float nearby with your static field up. There is a whole lot of junk floating around, and I don’t want to risk you or the shuttle if some of it es tearing through this space.”

  “You won’t hear me argue,” the man stated. “You gonna be ok by yourself?”

  “I should be. I just want to che the stru bots and see just how much damage Eden’s Fury took.”

  “You’re the boss. Ping me over the radio when you’re ready for a pickup.” That st response came out extremely muted ihinning atmosphere of the cargo bay but he caught it anyway.

  Alexander gave the man a thumbs-up before stepping off the shuttle. The thin walls of the hangar had more holes in it than Alexander could t. He sighed internally at the damage, even though the hangar was never designed with an atta mind. Even if he had armored the walls, he doubted they would have held up.

  The door to the airlock that led to Eden’s Fury had a few holes through it and was nonfunal. He suspected as much after seeing the rest of the damage but it still annoyed him. Alexander moved over te rent in the wall where something had struck the station and ripped a rge gash in the hangar wall.

  With a bit of effort, he mao expand the hole and squeeze through. The only problem was that he was now outside the airlod the station. Alexander pushed himself across the space betweeation and the ship. As he floated through space, he took in the damage he could see.

  The station looked mostly fiher than the hangar. Most of the fire had been focused on the Fury and not the station itself. He would o go into the ore ste to see if the smelter survived the attack. If it didn’t he was going to o purchase a new one from STO space. The stru bots were also in there, hiding behind the unprocessed ore. He hoped that had been enough to protect them.

  With a flip, he nded feet-first on the hull of the ship and didn’t even pause as he started walking to the missiion of Fury’s hull. It was easy to get ihe ship from there since Alexander had left the door open to prevent anyone from pressurizing the ship and trying to seize it.

  sidering the melted metal trails marring that bulkhead as well, it robably good that he had.

  Upoering the ship, the first thiiced was that it wasn’t nearly as dark as it should be. All the holes let in the light of Y6X-3H2’s star, casting ominous blue-white beams of light through the interior. It would have giveerior of the ship a rather calming feel if not for its source.

  Fury’s reactor was dead, or Alexander would not have risked ing aboard. How it had survived the fight, and not melted down was beyond him, but Lucas had used it to great effect to cripple or ht destroy more ships than should have been possible. It proved his theory that he could pump energy straight from the reactor into a ser, but Alexander wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It shouldn’t have worked for more than a shot or two. And it was extremely dangerous.

  Css 4 fusioors were not meant to have that muergy drawn from them like that. It teo disrupt the flow of psma uhe reactor ecifically desigo hahe extra load. Normally, the power version unit was desigo handle verting the heat of a reactor into usable power. What Alexander did was bypass the safety interlocks that ehe unit didn’t pull too muergy from the rea to cause it to fail.

  Causing it to fail is essentially what Lucas did. He drew too much power from the core and the rea couldn’t be maintained any longer and it simply fizzled out. It was safer than a core breach, but reactivating a reactor that was safely shut down, versus ohat went offline uedly were two very different processes.

  The first only required you to reihe fusion activation crystal and ruartup sequehe sed required you te the entire core, and the fuel lines, open up the core to check for damage, and then do a partial restart and proper shutdown sequence before eveing to the startup seque was weeks of work.

  Alexander wasn’t here to do that today. Purging a core and fuel lines on an undamaged ship took two weeks. And there was no point starting the process on the Fury until it was repaired. He still pnned on repairing the ship, even though it was even worse off than it was the first time.

  He was going to go about it a bit differently this time around though.

  The only reason Alexander was on the ship today was to see if the core was intad check the ser.

  Wheered the engineeriion, he found the reactor room to be nearly untouched. It wasn’t for a ck on the enemy's part though. There were numerous dents in the walls where rounds had nearly e through. When he examihe walls, he found that they had been triple-armored by the previous owhe armor had been cleverly hidden behind normal bulkheads. It would certainly add bulk to the ship, but he could see the appeal of proteg the reactor like that. He wondered if he could do something simir but with newer, lighter materials.

  It seemed even now this ship still had some surprises hidden away. He wasn’t too ed about that though, he would find them all wheripped it down to the frame to start from scratch.

  As for the ser, he wasn’t sure how Lucas had hit anything with it toward the end of the fight. Most of the outer g had melted inte blob at the bottom of the turret, along with the blown or shot-out super-capacitors. The artificial gravity must have remained active for most of the fight.

  Alexander couldn’t see the dition of the part that sat outside the ship, but going by how distorted the pieetal closing off the old opening was, it probably wasn’t great. Pumping power directly from the reactor was a no-go unless he found much better materials to hahe heat. He didn’t want to risk the sers melting like this during a battle with people aboard.

  After exiting the ship, he floated back over to the station and used the scaffolding to climb his way to the ore hangar.

  The rge hangar door only had two holes puhrough it, but they ran almost the entire length of the door. Uhe airlock, the ore door cm-shelled open, so the damage didn’t have much of an effe them. They were also thicker and desigo take the abuse of rocks boung around, so they were very much still w.

  Whe ihe first thing he could see was the smelter sparking violently. He hurried over and disected the power to the unit. It had taken three direct hits but was somehow still operational. He would o pull the service panels apart whe time and see if he could repair the damaged parts without repg them.

  One of the robots had been crushed by a rge k of rock. It seemed like one of the pirate’s rounds must have struck the rock, dislodging it in the zero-gravity enviro, which sent it careening into the robot.

  While annoying, one dead robot wasn’t all that bad. The other five were still undamaged. He repced their chips aivated them. Then he pinged Branston to e and pick him up. They had some ships to recover.

  ***

  Viter slowly opened his eyes, his head ounding something fierce, which let him know he was alive at least. The room he found himself in ainted white. A hospital maybe? It wasn’t the med bay aboard the Dawn, that he knew for sure. The STO Navy didn’t paint the interior of their ships, except for direal lines on walls and floors. Most corridors were bare metal, coated to prevent oxidation but that was it. The outside of their ships was much the same sihe paint didn’t st long with all the UV radiation in space. He khere were coatings to prevent that sort of thing, but someone in aher thought it was a waste of money or a waste of time to splurge for something like that for warships.

  Some of the noisier areas, like the mess, sported sound-deadening panels on the walls, but that was the only sotion Navy ships got as far as aesthetid fort were ed.

  Wheurned his head, he saw a man snoozing in a chair across the room. The man wasn’t wearing Navy-issue clothing. That meaher he was captured by pirates, which seemed unlikely sidering the pristiate of the room, or by whoever lived on Eden’s End. her was a good prospect for a man in his line of work.

  When he checked for the iable handcuff keeping him restraio the bed, he found his hands weren’t restrained. When he moved his feet, he didn’t feel anything there either.

  His surprised gasp woke the man in the chair.

  The man jerked to a standing position and saluted him. “Sorry, Captain. Had I known you would wake up so soon, I would have had someone repce my watch.”

  Vitor narrowed his eyes at the man. Going by the proper salute and the man’s jump to attention, it wasn’t a great leap to realize the man once served in the Navy. He was too young to have retired though. “What is your rank, soldier?”

  The man swallowed. “None, Captain. But my former rank was First Lieutenant. You just call me Branston.”

  Why did that name ring a bell for him? He tried to shake the fog out of his head. His mind was usually sharp, even before his m coffee, but this was different. “Yed me?”

  “You and the rest of your crew were sedated for the trip back. It was for your safety,” Branston stated.

  Vitor s that. “I’m sure it was. …How many of my crew survived?” he asked, dreading the answer, but he o know.

  “Um… thirty-six,” the man spoke quietly.

  Vitor let his head fall ba the pillow and squeezed his eyes shut. That was less than a quarter of his crew when the Marines were included. That loss alone might see him stripped of his Captaincy. The loss of a top-secret ship certainly would. Assuming he ever got bae. “Are we prisoners, sves?”

  “Huh? What? …Uh, I don’t think you’re prisoners. And you’re definitely not sves.”

  “Are you in charge here then?”

  “No… Oh, Alex did ask me to radio him when you woke up.”

  “Alex? Alexander Kane?” Krieger asked.

  The man nodded and held up a fio ask for some time. Vitor blinked in surprise at the gesture. The man may have been navy at one point, but he hadn’t been for some time if he used mannerisms like that in front of a superior officer. Not that Vitor was his superior.

  Vitot treated to a one-sided versation as the man radioed someone. “Hey, Alex, yeah, he's awake. Ok, I’ll put you on speaker.”

  The speaker otle handheld radio crackled to life, but it sounded slightly muted to him. “Captain Krieger, I’m gd you made it. You had us worried for a bit there.”

  “You know who I am?” he asked.

  The man oher side of the radio chuckled. “It was written oag of your suit.”

  “Ah… And I assume you are Alexander Kane. Were you the one who rescued me?”

  “I was one of the people that came to your rescue. You’ll have to excuse my absehere is a lot of work to be doer the attack.”

  Vitor decided to take an educated leap with his question. “Find anything of i while you’re roaming my ship?”

  Alexander ughed. “I was hoping you wouldn’t figure out where I was. But I guess they don’t give and of a ship like this to idiots. I must say, it’s quite the vessel, Captain. I don’t believe I’ve seen anything quite like it. You wouldn’t happen to know how they made this armor do you?”

  Vitor wao shake his head at the man’s gall. “Fraid not. Even if it wasn’t top secret, which it is,” he pointedly reminded Kane, “I wasn’t one of the engineers who came up with it.”

  “Hmm, that’s a shame,” was all Kane replied back.

  “So what now?” Vitor asked. “You pn on keeping us prisoner while keeping the Epsilon’s Dawn to yourself?”

  “Stars above, no!” the man stated over the radio. “I thih know the STO would not look too kindly on me for doiher of those things. And I have no desire to be beled a pirate.”

  “Does that mean me and my people are free to go or tact STO and?”

  “Well, sure. There’s just a minor problem there. We don’t have a Q array in the system. So tag them isn’t really an option. I give you your ship back, but I don’t have the facilities to repair something like this. And we don’t have any FTL-capable ships. Well… One of the damaged pirate ships might still be FTL-capable, but I don’t o be the oo tell you why flying a ship without a transponder into STO space is a bad idea. That means uhe Navy es here looking for you, you might be stuck with us for a bit.”

  “A bit?” Vitor asked. “How long is a bit?”

  “Hmm. Lemme think real quick… Probably arou months, give or take a month.”

  “What! That’s ridiculous. You’re tellihere is no other ship that take us home et word to the Navy?”

  ***

  Alexander felt bad about lying to the man, but he had already had Damien ask Captain Shall if he would be willing to assist. The man had categorically refused to help anyone who had any e to the STO. It didn’t seem like the etric Captain was willing to leave at the moment anyway. Especially with how hot local space was, and how angry the pirates were likely to be after this defeat.

  It robably for the best, Alexander didn’t trust Shall anyway. He already had him on video iing his workshop and the lo his ste area. He didn’t care if the man was the uo Damien and Lucas, if he stole anything, he was getting locked up.

  Captain Na wasn’t an optioher, as Destiny wasn’t back yet, and he somehow doubted Mingyu would be willing to transport STO people after what they did to him and his crew.

  Putting the radio away, Alexander picked up the piece of broken armor he had recovered from outside the ship. He held it up to his chest and he couldn’t tell the differe a ghere was no doubt in his mind, that the armor was made from pure carbon but he wasn’t vi was the same as his body. He would need further testing to verify that.

  Either the STO had stumbled upon this design by act retly, or they had finally mao reverse-engi based on that alien ship Dr. Lund had spoken about. If everything checked out, this was clear evidehat his body was of alien in. While Alexander didn’t like jumping to clusions it seemed obvious that it was the same. The real question was, who were these mysterious aliens? And if they were so much more advahan both humans and Shi, why were they hiding?

  Although… Now that he thought about it, maybe they weren’t hiding. If the STO was able to reduce their jump signature based on some alien design, and practically go unnoticed in space, who’s to say the aliens weren’t doing the same thing, only better?