[PROXIMITY ALERT — UNKNOWN DEBRIS DETECTED]
[DISTANCE: 12,000 KILOMETERS]
[COMPOSITION: METALLIC — HULL ALLOY CONSISTENT WITH CIVILIAN FREIGHTER CONSTRUCTION]
The klaxon ripped through the Fortune like a physical thing. Red emergency lighting replaced the corridor's normal dim white, turning every surface the color of old blood.
He was off the bunk and moving before his brain caught up. Boots on, sidearm grabbed, up the ladder to the bridge in eight seconds flat. Webb's muscle memory — the body knew combat stations even if the mind inside it was still fumbling.
Okonkwo was already in her chair. Demos had his hands on the helm, mandibles pressed tight against his jaw. The sensor console painted the viewport with overlays — green for the Fortune, red for everything else.
A lot of red.
"What am I looking at?" Okonkwo's voice was flat. Professional.
"Three vessels." Demos tapped the display. "Kowloon-class freighters, same configuration as us. Destroyed. Hull breaches consistent with mass accelerator fire — concentrated volleys, not random hits. Someone targeted their engines first, then their escape pods."
The viewport told the rest. Wreckage drifted in a loose cloud across thirty kilometers of space. Hull sections spinning in the slow rotation of zero gravity, trailing frozen atmosphere that caught the distant starlight and glittered. Cargo containers — medical supplies, from the markings — tumbled empty and breached among the debris.
And the escape pods. Punched through. Deliberately.
"This wasn't piracy. Pirates take cargo. This was extermination."
"These are the convoys," Okonkwo said. Not a question.
"Confirmed. Transponder fragments match the three previous escort runs. They were destroyed in sequence — oldest wreckage is approximately six weeks old. Newest is... twelve days."
Twelve days. The Fortune's predecessor had died less than two weeks ago, and someone had posted the job listing the next day. Nolan filed that thought and let it burn.
"Get us out of here. New heading, sixty degrees port, take us around—"
"Captain." Demos's voice changed. The turian subvocals that carried calm a moment ago now carried something colder. "The debris field is arranged. These hull sections aren't drifting naturally — they've been positioned. We're in a channel. It narrows ahead."
Silence on the bridge. The kind that weighs.
"A funnel," Okonkwo said.
"Whoever did this left the wreckage as bait. Ships investigate, slow down to scan, and the debris constrains their movement options. Classic ambush topology."
Okonkwo's hand moved to the engine controls.
"Full burn. Get us to the relay, forget the—"
Two contacts bloomed on the sensor display. Red icons resolving from the debris cloud at eleven and two o'clock. Frigate-class. Armed. Running hot.
"Contacts! Two vessels, frigate tonnage, emerging from debris shadow at bearing—"
The comm crackled. A voice — human, male, bored in the specific way of someone who'd done this enough that it was routine.
"Freighter Distant Fortune. Cut your engines and prepare for boarding. Surrender your cargo and all passengers. Resistance will be met with lethal force. You have thirty seconds."
Okonkwo looked at Nolan.
Not at Demos. Not at the sensor display. At him. The look said: you brought something onto my ship I don't understand, and right now I need it.
He looked at the sensor overlay. Two frigates. Each one carried more firepower than the Fortune had hull integrity. No weapons systems on a Kowloon-class — they were cargo haulers, not warships. Running wouldn't work; frigates were faster. Surrendering meant... he looked at the escape pods floating in the debris. Surrendering meant dying.
The System interface pulsed.
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: HOSTILE — 2 FRIGATE-CLASS VESSELS]
[EMERGENCY CONSTRUCTION OPTIONS:]
[POINT DEFENSE TURRET — ANTI-MISSILE — 50 MP]
[BARRIER GENERATOR — KINETIC — 75 MP]
[CURRENT MP: 96/100]
Ninety-six points. Enough for one turret and nothing else, or the barrier and nothing else. Not both. The turret could handle missiles but not direct cannon fire. The barrier could absorb hits but wouldn't stop incoming ordnance.
"Turret first. Stop their missiles, then run like hell and pray."
"Captain, I need access to your dorsal hull."
"What?"
"External hull. Topside. I need to get something up there, and I need you to punch the engines the second I say go."
"Webb, this isn't—"
"Twenty seconds on their clock. Do you want to end up like those pods?"
Okonkwo's jaw set. She hit the intercom.
"All hands, brace for evasive maneuvers. Webb, dorsal access hatch is deck three frame forty-two."
He ran.
Down the corridor, up a ladder, through a maintenance crawlspace that smelled like hydraulic fluid. The dorsal access hatch was a manual wheel lock designed for external hull repairs in drydock. He spun it open. Emergency magnetic boots — standard equipment in the crawlspace locker — clamped onto his feet.
Vacuum hit him as the hatch opened. No sound. The debris field spread around him in every direction, glittering and silent, and the two frigates hung in the dark like sharks waiting for blood.
He pressed his palm against the Fortune's hull.
[DEPLOYING: POINT DEFENSE TURRET — ANTI-MISSILE]
[COST: 50 MP]
[MP REMAINING: 46/100]
The heat bloomed in his forearm. The hull shivered under his hand. Metal assembled from nothing — base plate bonding to the Fortune's dorsal plating, swivel mount, sensor cluster, quad-barrel mass accelerator array designed for close-in weapons defense. Five seconds. Faster than the dig site turret. The binding was at sixty percent now; the system responded quicker.
[CONSTRUCTION COMPLETE: POINT DEFENSE TURRET — MARK I]
[STATUS: ONLINE — AUTO-TARGETING HOSTILE ORDNANCE]
The turret's sensor pod spun once, calibrating, then locked toward the nearest frigate.
"Go!" he screamed into his omni-tool's comm channel. "Full burn! Now!"
The Fortune's engines lit. The acceleration slammed him against the hull — the magnetic boots held, barely, his body pressed flat against the plating as g-forces tried to peel him off. He grabbed the hatch frame with both hands and pulled himself back inside.
The first missile salvo hit at the six-second mark. Four Javelin-class torpedoes streaking from the lead frigate, their drives painting white lines across the dark.
The turret spoke. Rapid-fire bursts — he could feel the vibration through the deck plates even from inside. Two missiles detonated short, their warheads cooking off in orange blooms. A third clipped a debris chunk and spiraled into the void. The fourth got through.
Impact. The Fortune bucked. Hull alarms screamed. Emergency bulkheads slammed shut somewhere below him. Through the still-open hatch, he saw atmosphere venting from a breach in the port cargo bay — crystallizing instantly into a trail of ice particles.
"Hull breach, cargo bay two!" Demos's voice on the intercom, strained but steady. "Non-critical. Bulkheads holding."
"Relay approach in forty-five seconds!" Okonkwo.
The second salvo came. Six missiles this time — both frigates coordinating. The turret tracked, fired, tracked, fired. Three kills. A fourth damaged and tumbling. The fifth and sixth punched through the defense envelope.
The barrier. He needed the barrier.
[BARRIER GENERATOR — KINETIC — 75 MP]
[CURRENT MP: 46/100]
[INSUFFICIENT MANDATE POINTS]
Forty-six. He needed seventy-five. Twenty-nine short.
The missiles were eight seconds out.
He grabbed the crawlspace frame and braced. Nothing else to do. No system trick, no clever play. Just physics and luck.
"Brace for impact!"
The first missile hit amidships. The world became noise and violence — metal screaming, the deck heaving under him, sparks fountaining from a ruptured conduit. The second hit aft, close enough that the shockwave threw him against the bulkhead. His shoulder took the impact. Something cracked — the bulkhead, not the bone, but the difference was academic when pain bloomed white-hot across his collarbone.
"Relay contact!" Demos shouted. "Transit in five — four — three—"
Blue light. The gut-wrong lurch of relay transit. Then silence.
The Fortune drifted in unfamiliar space, hull bleeding atmosphere from two breaches, point defense turret a mangled wreck on the dorsal surface — the second impact had torn it half off its mount. Emergency systems blinked and wailed.
But they were alive.
He sat on the crawlspace floor, back against the bulkhead, shoulder throbbing, and looked at his hands. The palms were bleeding again — deeper this time, the crescent marks from his nails reopened and joined by new cuts from grabbing raw metal during the impact. Blood pooled in his lifelines.
[MP: 0/100]
[SYSTEM RESOURCES: DEPLETED]
[NOTE: POINT DEFENSE TURRET DESTROYED IN TRANSIT. NO RECOVERABLE COMPONENTS.]
"Zero points. Zero defenses. A damaged ship in hostile space."
Okonkwo's voice on the intercom.
"Webb. Bridge. Now."
He climbed down from the crawlspace. His shoulder screamed with every rung. The corridor's emergency lighting made everything red.
On the bridge, Demos stood at the sensor console. His cracked mandible worked silently as he stared at the dorsal camera feed — the wreckage of the turret, bolted to the hull, clearly built from nothing, clearly impossible.
Okonkwo sat in her chair. Arms folded. Face unreadable.
"That thing on my hull."
"Point defense turret."
"Point defense turrets don't appear out of thin air, Webb."
"This one did."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
Demos turned from the console. His turian eyes — sharp, predator-focused — fixed on him with an intensity that went beyond professional curiosity.
"What are you?"
The question hung in the recycled air. The Fortune creaked around them, wounded but flying. Through the viewport, unfamiliar stars offered no comfort.
"Someone who just saved your ship," he said. "That's enough for now."
Okonkwo stared at him. Five seconds. Ten. Then she turned to Demos.
"Get me a damage report. I want hull integrity numbers in fifteen minutes."
"Captain—"
"Fifteen minutes, Demos."
The turian left. His footsteps echoed down the corridor with a deliberate weight that said this conversation isn't over.
Okonkwo waited until the footsteps faded.
"I don't know what you are. I don't know how you did that. And right now, I don't care, because we're alive and that's more than the last three convoys can say." She stood. "But when we reach Haven's Point, you're getting off my ship. And if I ever see technology like that again without an explanation I believe, our next conversation happens through gunsights."
She walked past him. Stopped at the hatch.
"Your quarters have been moved. Berth seven, frame sixty-two."
"That's the one next to the airlock."
"Yes, it is."
The hatch closed. He stood alone on the bridge. The sensor display showed clear space — no pursuit, no contacts, nothing but the long dark between relay jumps.
His shoulder pulsed with every heartbeat. His hands dripped onto the deck plating. The system display read zero across every resource.
Three days to Haven's Point. Three days to regenerate, recover, and figure out how to turn a dying colony into the first piece of an empire that might — might — save the galaxy.
Through the viewport, a dim speck on the navigation display pulsed with their destination marker. Haven's Point. A mining colony running out of time.
He sat in the captain's chair — Okonkwo's chair, technically, but she wasn't here and his legs weren't cooperating anymore — and watched the stars scroll by.
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