Zyn kept a wary eye on the robots and the silent individual standing behind them. The person might have spared them, but he wasn’t na?ve enough to believe that it was done out of sympathy. They would demand answers; it was the only reason to keep him and his people alive. Once they gave those answers, their lives would hold no value.
Despite knowing that, he had to cooperate and delay in hopes that his people could make a break for it. If their ship held together long enough, it might be able to make it to a nearby world. That was a big if, however. The Astryx didn’t call this area of space the Dead Zone for nothing.
The species of the Astryx held the belief that the Concord destroyed many of those worlds out of spite when the war with the Alliance began. Zyn didn’t believe that to be true. According to the few preserved records of his people from that time, the Concord Imperium withdrew its terraforming efforts to focus on the war that they were rapidly losing.
That most likely doomed those worlds that were in mid-transition, not that the members of the Concord Imperium back then had cared. Some of those worlds had indigenous populations before the terraforming efforts began, while others had Concord member species transported to them as workers. Most, if not all, would have died during the terraforming process or after it had been abandoned.
Some might have survived, however, and the worlds might have recovered. A thousand years was a long time, and ecosystems were rather resilient, if they weren’t completely eradicated.
Tahl’ka let out a pained grunt as Zyn tied off the bandage, putting a rough splint on the broken leg.
“You’ll live,” Zyn spoke reassuringly.
The man nodded, his face a mess of sweat and pain.
Zyn pressed a cellular accelerator against the man’s bare thigh. It would help his body heal faster, but he would need extra food to offset the healing. Tahl’ka winced again, and Zyn wished he could do something for the pain. Their pain meds were in short supply, and they would render the ka insensate for hours. He needed the man awake enough for someone to assist him to the ship if they managed to break free.
He stood up and checked on the others. Tahl’ka had been the most injured, but another ka had suffered a broken foot while three others had suffered sprained ankles from the increased gravity. Even he limped around tenderly, mostly from a sore knee caused by hitting the ground.
All things considered, they came out of the fight better than he could have hoped.
Once Zyn made sure all of his people were situated, he hobbled over to the wall where the individual was.
The person turned toward him as he approached.
Zyn stopped well shy of the barricade. He didn’t want to risk their captors using the gravity systems against them again. Honestly, he wasn’t sure how they managed it in the first place. The IFF should have prevented the AI from doing that.
The ship AI shouldn’t have been able to fight against the reprogrammer either, so something was seriously wrong. He should have ordered an immediate withdrawal as soon as Vo’tek said something was off, but it was too late to go back now.
He let those worries fade to the back of his mind as he straightened and addressed the stranger. “Thank you for allowing me to treat my people.”
The stranger didn’t respond. Zyn knew his trade common wasn’t the greatest, and he cursed under his breath in eiraxin. “Stars, I should have worked on my language skills.”
“You really should have,” the stranger responded in perfect old Eiraxin.
Hearing a dead language come from the mouth of a stranger surprised Zyn, causing him to jerk backward and his knee to flare in protest.
“Can you understand me?” Zyn asked in eiraxin.
***
Jacob had been staring at the leader, not sure how to proceed. While he was still angry and certainly had questions, he had time to think.
What did he do with these people after he got what he wanted from them?
Killing them seemed like the obvious answer, but he wasn’t a murderer, despite how furious he felt. It was one thing to kill someone in self-defense, but he wasn’t in danger anymore, so he found it hard to justify that level of violence now that they were essentially prisoners.
They had also done him a favor, even if it had been inadvertent. While losing Melody was a huge blow, with the AI gone, he was now free to do whatever he wanted once the ship was repaired. He no longer had to worry about Melody’s hidden directives charting the course of his future.
That little problem had been on his mind since he first learned he was inextricably tied to the same core that housed the AI. It felt bad to say, but with Melody’s death, it was like a weight had been lifted off his chest.
Turning them over to the authorities seemed like the most sensible option, but that meant securing them for transport that could take weeks.
He could do that, but he wasn’t going to make a separate trip to Vorlos just to deliver people who may or may not face consequences for their actions. He wasn’t sure they would actually accept prisoners either. The third option was to contact Hallik to see if he could shed some light on the problem, and possibly determine if they were criminals, in which case he could have the bounty hunter collect them.
That seemed like the best option, but it still required him to secure this group for an extended period of time and keep an eye on them constantly until Hallik arrived. That seemed like a colossal waste of his time, and he couldn’t trust the station AI to do it. The damn thing had failed him twice already. He also suspected that Hallik wouldn’t give him the answer freely. The man wanted to use the station as a staging ground, and this problem seemed like the sort of leverage he could use to get Jacob to agree.
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That brought him back to the first option, but the thought of having to kill them made him a bit sick to his stomach. He mentally marked that as a last resort if he couldn’t find another way to handle his uninvited guests.
Jacob sighed internally as the leader spoke Trade-Common so badly that he could barely make out the words. Then he caught the man swear under his breath in some form of eiraxin. Since he could actually understand the man better in that language, he chose to respond.
“You really should have,” Jacob said in eiraxin.
The man looked shocked, but he quickly recovered.
“Can you understand me?” the leader asked in what sounded like eiraxin, but was different enough that Jacob had to take a moment to parse the words.
“Yes,” he replied.
“How is it you speak old Eiraxin?” the man asked.
“I’m not here to answer your questions; you’re here to answer mine.” Jacob snapped. “Let’s start with how you got aboard my ship?”
“Your ship?” the leader asked with a raised eyebrow.
Jacob thought he saw the ghost of a smile cross the man’s face.
“My apologies, Captain. We believed this vessel to be a derelict. Had we known it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have boarded it.”
Jacob wasn’t buying that bullshit for a second. “How did you even learn about the vessel?”
“We picked up a transmission from the station and came to investigate.” Going by his sensor readings, at least that part was truthful.
That wasn’t good. If this group knew about the ship, who else might? That just made dealing with them even more complicated.
“Why?” Jacob pushed.
“Why? Why, what?” the eiraxin man asked in confusion.
“Why did you come to investigate the station after it sat abandoned for so long?”
“If you knew anything of galactic history, I would think that obvious. Are you perhaps a new species to the galactic stage, or perhaps a small group of eiraxins trapped on some world that was abandoned? We could assist with your rescue if you are.”
Jacob didn’t bother responding to the man’s questions. Most of what the man was saying was complete bullshit. He could tell that much through his sensors as they monitored their bio-signs. Some of it was fear, of that he was sure, but he kept getting heart rate spikes when the leader answered his questions. Those spikes didn’t come from the leader, though. That man was as cool as a cucumber. No, they came from the other soldiers with him.
At first, he wasn’t sure if they were just more bounty hunters, like Hallik, but the more he watched them, the more certain he became that they were soldiers. It was the way they carried themselves. They were trained, but it went beyond that. Hallik’s men had training as well, but you could see their rough edges when they interacted with each other. The way this group operated reminded him of soldiers deferring to a senior officer, similar to some of the movies he could still remember.
Jacob knew that wasn’t exactly a good way to measure this group, but it was the best he had.
“And if I contact a friend of mine to confirm everything you said, they won’t tell me you are lying?”
The leader’s heart rate spiked for the first time since their conversation began. He also frowned. “That would be ill-advised, Captain.”
Jacob couldn’t help but laugh. “I don’t think you’re in any position to threaten me.”
“It’s not a threat, Captain, just a fact. If a representative of the Astryx finds us here, my people and I will be arrested, but I will be forced to tell them why we were here, which includes telling them of the existence of this vessel. Not that they will need me to tell them after they see it for themselves. Are you aware it is a capital crime to be in command of a planetary conditioning vessel per the Astryx Codex?”
Jacob frowned inside his virtual space. He hadn’t heard of this Astryx entity, but he assumed they had taken over for the Alliance at some point, or the Alliance had changed into the Astryx.
The leader continued. “Perhaps we can reach a mutually beneficial agreement instead?”
“You want to negotiate after attacking my ship?”
“As I said before, I was—”
Jacob cut the man off. “If we’re going to negotiate, cut the crap. I know you’re lying.”
“Very well,” the man replied stiffly. “We planned to take this vessel, but we weren’t doing it out of malice. We need it to save our people from extinction.”
Based on the biological responses of everyone present, that was true or at least they believed it to be true. The eiraxin leader’s response was also cleverly worded to tease out what Jacob knew without directly asking. Jacob was familiar with that trick because he had a manager once who liked to phrase things in such a way to catch his employees in a lie.
From his virtual space, Jacob ground his teeth in annoyance. There was no getting around the follow-up question, mostly because he needed to know, which would prove he didn’t know what was going on in the galaxy.
“Explain,” Jacob replied flatly. He was annoyed about being caught in the word trap, but he wasn’t about to be sucked in by the emotional manipulation aspect of the man’s plea.
“I would need to know what you know to begin.”
Now that he knew what type of man he was dealing with, Jacob wasn’t falling for the same tactic twice. “Start from a year ago. That’s more than enough to get me caught up.”
Hopefully, that response threw the eiraxin man off.
The leader nodded and started explaining what had been happening to the eiraxin people in the last year. It sounded very much like a society under the thumb of an uncaring ruler, but it didn’t justify what they were doing about it.
Jacob stopped the man mid-speech. “So instead of working with the Astryx, your people are rebelling against them?”
“It’s not that simple,” the leader bristled slightly at the admonishment. “We’ve tried for decades to atone for what our ancestors have done, but nothing we do is enough. So we are looking for a way to escape from their grasp. You could help us with that.”
Now they arrived at the truth of the matter.
“Nope, not interested,” Jacob replied.
“What?” the leader asked in shock. “But you’re eiraxin, you have to help us.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” Jacob shot back, not bothering to correct the man’s misunderstanding. The last thing he needed was getting humanity involved in whatever the hell was going on with these people. “And don’t bother trying to use that codex or whatever against me. I believe you’d be in just as much trouble as I if that came to light.”
“So we just die here, then?” The eiraxin leader demanded.
Jacob had no time or patience to let them take up space until Hallik arrived, or he got around to bringing them in himself; he just didn’t want to deal with them any longer than he had to. There was also a critical project that required his attention, and he didn’t want them aboard where they could disrupt it or cause other problems. He had enough of those to deal with already.
“Leave. Go back to whatever hole you crawled out of and never return.”
The man ground his teeth at that, but remained calm. “We can’t. Our ship’s phase coil would never survive the trip back.”
That wasn’t really Jacob’s problem, but if fixing it meant getting them gone quicker, then he would oblige.
Jacob had located the vessel with one of the maintenance drones while he was conversing with the man, and he had to agree. The phase coil was on its last legs. At least it looked that way. He couldn’t be entirely certain because the phase coil aboard their vessel was far more advanced than the phase coils aboard his own transport.
Removing it took a bit of effort, but the shuttle’s phase coil was easily accessible from the hold, so he didn’t need to send his bipedal drone down to do the work.
Once it was removed, he sent the drone to the station with the device. It would analyze the unit and should be able to repair it or create a new one.
“I will make repairs to your phase coil, then you will leave. Gather your people and follow me back to your ship. Don’t try anything stupid, or you will find my patience has run its course.”
The man nodded and urged his people up. Some had to be assisted, but that was the price they paid for attempting to kill him, even if they might not be aware of exactly what they did.
Jacob watched them to make sure they left the weapons. Not that the guns would do him any good, but he didn’t want them to have them either. He knew letting them go would cause problems later, but he planned to be prepared for whatever came his way, hopefully.
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