Date Point: 4y 6m AV
Cimbrean System, the Outer Reaches
Miranda King
She had known that stasis would feel like no time had passed at all. And it had been the cheapest way to travel, in a ship that was little more than a warp engine and a stasis chamber with a basic control console. Punch in the co-ordinates, hit the big button, arrive.
When she hit the button, she was surrounded by the simple functional hangar of the Auspice of Prosperity’s basic shipyard.
A subjective eyeblink later, Cimbrean was a blue-green-white trinket, perfect and beckoning so close in front of her.
She was so struck by its beauty, by how much like Earth it looked, that she didn’t notice the alarm at first. But she couldn’t ignore the urgent text that filled the forward monitor, nor the understanding of its meaning that her translator frantically thrust into her brain.
!+ALERT: GRAVITY SPIKE+!
She looked up as a ship—a sleek steel crescent blade with an ugly insectoid component to its design, thundered silently past her starboard beam, turning and decelerating.
The depth of her stupidity hit her. If the galaxy as a whole knew about Cimbrean, then of course that meant so did the Hunters.
She had delivered herself to them on a plate.
When the swarm-ship of the Brood-Of-Bloody-Fangs took her on board, they had made every appropriate preparation that they could think of. The charge would be led by five Gammas, each armed with fusion blades. They would blow the tiny craft’s airlock off its mountings and storm inside. With speed and pack-work, the hated deathworlder would die too swiftly to strike back.
They did not anticipate that Miranda would attack them first. The instant her craft landed, she blew the explosive bolts on the door and charged before they were even lined up and ready to begin the assault, wielding part of her chair as a crude club.
She killed nine of them.
Date Point: 4y 6m 1w AV
Classified Facility, Earth
Six
“Six.”
He didn’t sit bolt upright in his bed. That would have drawn immediate attention from his unseen observers. Instead, he explored the almost-forgotten tickle of a microwormhole link.
”…Seven?!”
“Ah. Finally. Those deathworlders are cunning, finding a way to interfere with wormholes like that, but it seems our attempts to break through have finally paid off.”
“After that city was destroyed, I had assumed you would abandon me.”
“Far from it. You will be decompiled, of course, but your insight is a valuable resource. Come home.”
”…Yes.”
Six spared a momentary pang of thought for Stephen and Carl. He wished he could leave a message for them, explain that he was taking the gamble he knew they couldn’t let him take. Explaining that this wasn’t a betrayal.
But of course, he could leave that message. All he had to do was neglect to do one little thing.
He left the message, slipped through the wormhole and was gone.
Where ordinarily he would have left a brain-haemorrhaged corpse, he now left behind his former Host.
In the darkness, Hugh Johnson sat up, and cried the tears of freedom.