Interdiction

Illustration © 2013 Sonya Reasor 

Noctilucent clouds guided me to the starport. Downsiders think that so many of the vistas we see in space are spectacular, and they are, but color like this is often lacking. Unlike the enhanced holovids, much of what we see is washed out to the unaided eye. Mostly, it’s white or black with infinite shades of gray.

Like the job.

I had been recalled from leave for a routine Interdiction patrol, an anti-smuggling run for the co-ops. Fringers don’t bow to LOW OrbIT corporate interests, but they aggressively defend their own. Home adheres to something resembling the rule of law unlike the rough justice meted out elsewhere in the Fringe Alliance. They even budget us for uniforms along with badges and guns. We inherited the orbital patrol cruisers captured in the last Fringe War. LOW OrbIT quality though a few generations back. We’ve updated the sensor suites to top of the line. We need them to go up against the corporation-sized budgets. LOW OrbIT tax law lets the interstellars write off smuggling as a double-shot of R&D and advertising with incentives for opening new markets. Weird since they counterfeit our tech then hide their own logos. It’s not so much business as usual as an economic extension of the last interstellar war.

Needless to say, Interdiction doesn’t get a lot of sleep. The other side has their best and brightest figuring out new and clever ways of conducting corporate espionage and sometimes outright sabotage. And they don’t mind trying something novel just to see if it will work. As long as it doesn’t blow up to where it hits the news feeds in the core colonies. At least in a way they can’t spin.

Just another part of the job.

LOW OrbIT claims jurisdiction around Home from high orbit outward. Interdiction claims everything inward from high orbit of Chang’e, Home’s farthest moon. Between is a no-man’s land of enforcement. Fortunately, LOW OrbIT can’t just park a navy cruiser up there. Unfortunately, they subcontract out violation detection to the tabloids and accept their footage before the Enforcement Committee. Those guerilla freelance operators are wizards at splicing additional footage directly into a feed. That’s why they are persona non grata and all their media is destroyed on sight. Interdiction was in the process of retrofitting a handful of patrol cruisers with countermeasure suites to prevent live-streaming and delayed retrieval from interplanetary space. The Ariadne was one.

The transport bus skirted the Stack Maze just beyond the starport fence. The sprawling, haphazard habitat of abandoned cargo containers forms the central distribution point for ninety percent of all smuggling into Home. To properly combat the problem would require razing it to the ground. Given that it also forms the central spine of the collective geography known as Petit Darwin, there is no political will to enact that solution. Nearly a million refugees fled the Green Revolution. Home doesn’t want them. Darwin doesn’t want them back. With no place else for the fugees to go, clearing the camps is not an option. But should we ever receive the order, I would be the first to bring the match.

I know this job from both angles. When I was granted asylum from Darwin, I had to smuggle in my niece, the daughter of my twin who had been killed at Blind Mouth Bay. I could have assumed my sister’s identity but that would have meant I couldn’t defect. Hanna had no negotiable skills. Elsa and I would have been just another pair of fugees scraping out a living any way we could.

I worked in LOW OrbIT Customs Enforcement on Darwin, so I knew all the tricks, knew what to look for, knew what the agents tended to overlook. I knew their soft spots, and exactly how to exploit them. Human trafficking is all about deception and misdirection, getting people not to look inside. And knowing how to offer the right bribe. 

I’d set Elsa up in the Stack Maze while I worked up her identity, fostered with a family I thought I could trust. A week before the cover I’d established for her would have allowed me to bring her out in my arms with no questions, she disappeared. Her surrogate family said she’d been kidnapped but my under the table investigation revealed they’d sold her, for what purpose I’ll never know. I was her only family. I should have been her guardian angel. She was all I had left of Hanna. Who sells a five-year-old?

My response was swift. I descended on the Stack Maze like a Valkyrie, claiming everyone with a whiff of involvement. Doctoring official records on Home is no mean feat though far easier than on Darwin. Some I had deported, others imprisoned on unrelated charges. A select few met a darker fate. People disappear from the Stack Maze all the time. Fugees killing fugees doesn’t interest the authorities on Home. Most consider it a public service.

By the time my vengeance had burned itself out, Elsa’s trail had gone cold, never to reignite. Five years later, I still combed the Interdiction reports and scanned the feeds praying one day she’d find her way back to me. Every six months I updated her age enhancement simulation just to be sure I’d recognize her although her face was emblazoned on my memory from the last time I’d left her in the Maze.

Even my vocal convictions weren’t enough to gain full acceptance from the Ariadne’s crew. I remained an affirmative action fugee in their eyes who had not earned her position despite being the best countermeasures operator in the squadron. Even though I was fully rated on sensors and command qualified, the Alliance didn’t trust a defector on a bridge. Had I not fled the Green Revolution, I would have made captain by now rather than being stuck as a lowly countermeasures tech. Five years of loyal service changed nothing. Only the captain paid me any grudging respect. She knew just how lucky she was to have me.

At the starport, I checked in for the next skyhook shuttle to orbit. At the last minute the kiosk informed me I’d been upgraded to a private conference compartment from the normal economy cattle car. I had three companions: Ursula Bonet, Aaron Gardner and Mercy Santos, the senior crew of the Ariadne. A moment later, my comm chimed with formal orders to attend a mission briefing on the way to orbit. I passed through the security scanners and headed to the gate after a quick diversion for coffee. I swiped my ID and was surprised to find I’d been given priority boarding.

I arrived at the conference compartment to find Lt. Gardner stationed outside the door, tall and lean like an Interdiction recruiting holo. Captain Bonet was up for squadron commander which meant he was next in line for command of the Ariadne. Technically, as senior sensor operator, he was my immediate supervisor as well as the XO.

“My orders are to report here for the mission briefing,” I said, reaching around him for the latch.

He shifted to block my entry. “Captain Bonet may want to consult your expertise. You are to advise when asked not offer your opinion. Understood, Anderson?” He puffed out his chest and loomed as if to emphasize his point.

“Perfectly,” I replied, looking up at him with a carefully neutral expression.

“Good. Now lose that coffee. This is a mission briefing not the mess deck.” He didn’t stand aside, just straightened his already perfectly pressed uniform shirt.

“Anything else?” I asked, belatedly adding, “Sir?”

“Don’t embarrass me.” He opened the door and strode in.

After dropping my coffee into the recycler, I followed. Inside, Captain Bonet and Marine Lt. Santos waited. Ursula Bonet was built like an asteroid miner, or a propaganda hero chiseled from the steppes of twentieth Terra during some great patriotic war. By contrast, Mercy Santos was a whippet of a woman whose blond hair and otherwise unremarkable features were flattered by the deep charcoal uniform so many mistake for black. Bonet studied her datapad. Santos nursed a cup of coffee.

“Thank you for joining us, Anderson,” Captain Bonet said when she finally looked up.  “Please, sit down.”

I did.

“We’ve received new orders,” Bonet began. “Control has instructed the Ariadne to establish a sector cordon using Marine listening outposts on Sin and Chang’e.”

The names of those two moons were why bored system surveyors shouldn’t be allowed access to mythological databases in my mind. At least Home hadn’t picked some unpronounceable Aztec moon god like some less habitable worlds I knew.

“I thought this was a shakedown cruise so we could familiarize ourselves with the new systems,” I said. Gardner glared as if to reiterate his earlier warning. I ignored him.

“Control moved up the timetable,” Bonet said. “You’re the only countermeasures tech in the squadron who’s already qualified on the upgrades, Andersen. I told them you were up for it. I want you to coordinate with Lt. Santos to integrate her portable arrays into our network. They’ll be our eyes.”

I was confused. “Don’t we already have arrays on both those moons?”

“We do but their positions are well known,” Bonet explained. “Control is afraid they’ve been compromised. So they’ve ordered us to set up an independent network for the duration of the operation.”

“Does that mean Specialist Andersen will be detached to one of the outposts?” Gardner asked hopefully.

“No,” Bonet answered. “We’ll need her to operate the new countermeasures suite on the Ariadne. Fill them in, Mercy.”

Lt. Santos took over. “The Alliance intercepted chatter about a new phase to the corporate labor smuggling that hit us so hard last year, this time with a twist. They say Happy Family R&D has reprogrammed some number of fugees who are genetically predisposed to betrayal. Sleeper ops that don’t know they’re waiting to be activated. Analysis indicates this could be a long game scenario. In the right place with the right connections, it would only take one slipping through to cause us grave harm.”

Santos studiously avoided eye contact. Gardner cast a long look at me. After five years as an outsider, I was used to it. But it still lit a slow fuse inside me, one I carefully snuffed out.

Santos continued, “We’ll drop off a squad on each moon while on routine patrol. They’ll overland into their designated positions.”

“Two man squads?” Gardner asked.

“Three,” Santos replied. “I want to avoid port and starboard watches.”

“We’ll need them fresh,” Bonet added.

“That means we’ll be patrolling with only one squad of ship’s troops,” Gardner observed.

“It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Bonet replied. She raised an eyebrow when he didn’t look satisfied. “We’re a patrol cruiser, Mister Gardner. Since when do we need Marines to do our job?” I aborted a smile before it could emerge.

Santos stepped in to save him. “I’ll be coordinating both squads personally from the Ariadne.”

“We won’t have long before LOW OrbIT detects those outposts and tries to shut them down,” Gardner pointed out.

“If our information is correct,” Bonet said, “We won’t need long.”

“I take it there’s still the potential for footage of this mission to end up with the tabloids,” I said, a statement rather than a question.

“You can count on it,” Bonet replied, turning back to her datapad. “So this one’s by the book. I’m uploading the operational data to your and Gardner’s pads. I want technical recommendations before we dock. Get to it.”

---

The skyhook shuttle lifted us to low orbit where we transferred to the electrodynamic tether that dropped us at the shipyard. Weightlessness felt like freedom after so long in a gravity well. No matter how hard we trained or how far the tech for artificial gravity advanced, going back to Home was always a strain. A reminder of where I no longer belonged.

Martin Ricketts, our weapons tech, was standing watch at the top of the Ariadne’s gangway when I arrived. “How was the trip up?” he asked.

I just rolled my eyes. “The Captain and XO are about a minute behind me,” I told him, giving him time for any last minute preparations though he would have been monitoring exactly when we docked. I knew he was hoping for a heads up on their mood. He’d gotten all he was going to get from me. I owed him nothing and had work to do before we undocked.

I’d read and reread Captain Bonet’s briefing in transit, eager to uncover any information I might glean from between the lines. The summary was simple. Happy Family, Ltd. had jumpstarted an old campaign they’d used against 7 Nations, one of the Fringe Alliance’s only homegrown interstellar corporations. Since the Green Revolution, Home had been battling human trafficking constantly. Large interstellars like Happy Family had taken advantage of the chaos of the refugee migration to undermine Home’s economy by sending in waves of operatives with desirable skills. They had infiltrated various subsidiaries then sabotaged them in a coordinated fashion months or years later. That was a key part of the reason I was never quite trusted. Everyone thought I was a sleeper.

But Fringers tended to be a bit naïve and conspiratorial in their views. They thought LOW OrbIT’s Machiavellianism ran rampant at all levels. They didn’t realize that Customs Enforcement had a vested interest in uncovering human trafficking schemes wherever they existed. It was in their charter as an independent agency. We all took the Defense of Human Rights clause in our swearing-in oath very seriously. Though, like Interdiction, Customs Enforcement was never adequately funded to do the job assigned. Most of Interdiction’s conflict with LOW OrbIT came down to a turf war exploited by politicians with personal agendas on the Enforcement Committee. Thus the prolific use of tabloid journalists to keep the general public on their side. Customs Enforcement was regularly undercut by the same tactics. And we all hated the traffickers as much as the tabloids who protected them.

If nothing else, corporate espionage operations took advantage of the deep-seeded distrust within the Fringe Alliance and kept us from benefiting from the tide of refugees that landed at our door. To counter the operations, Home had had to implement background checks and all manner of other security protocols that were anathema to the libertarian leanings of the Alliance. Liberty still kept their faith in social contracts, Anarchy in frontier justice. Neither of those worlds had the extent of the problem that Home did, or even a fraction of the fugee population. Not that Home had the ability to integrate that many refugees very quickly anyway.

And now some corporate espionage exec had dreamed up a fresh operation to exploit the desperation on both sides. It had to be promising for Happy Family to risk recycling a previously countered scheme.

I made my way down to my duty station, buried in the converted bay that had once housed the Ariadne’s gig. The space had been divided between the electronics for the countermeasures suite and a small immigration detention area. Once the seals were set, the holding area was beyond the Green Line, extraterritorial, as were the orbital immigration centers where detainees were routinely processed until Immigration determined their official status. Home’s charter was very liberal regarding claims of asylum once someone entered our territory. Technically, anything beyond the Green Line was nominal LOW OrbIT domain though strictly administered by Home Interdiction until immigrants passed inside. Only a command level officer could open the holding area once the seals were in place.

I snaked my way from the main airlock down into Marine country then through Engineering, careful not to snag a uniform sleeve on any of the exposed conduit hangers lining the narrow, leaden access corridor. My duty station was a console with a cramped acceleration couch wedged in an alcove across from the shielded control compartment for the Ariadne’s weapons systems. The safest place on the ship, Ricketts always said, surrounded by the bulk of the drives. That’s if you didn’t mind a hint of exotic radiation if the shielding leaked. These ships had been built by the lowest bidder, so it often did.

I settled into my workstation. Before I reviewed the operation parameters again, I fired up the new countermeasures suite on a self-diagnostic and calibration run then reviewed the install logs to see how well the shipyard techs had integrated it with our existing capabilities. I quickly found and corrected a dozen minor interface errors then tweaked the inputs based on a few eccentricities with our current sensor suite that didn’t appear in the manuals.

At some point, Ricketts was relieved from watch and climbed into weapons control. I barely noticed. When the overheads flickered with the crossover from station to ship’s internal power, I began my pre-flight crosschecks, linking my displays to the main sensor console on the bridge so Gardner could monitor my board if he wanted. Gardner was a micromanager. He’d feel compelled to check on me at some point rather than relying on me to do the job I was trained for. Which could have been his job had circumstances been different, though I doubted he could do mine.

Once we were underway, I set up the framework for a secure data distribution system linking the countermeasures suite to the portable sensor arrays the Marines would deploy on Home’s two outer moons. This was trickier. In addition to the standard spread-spectrum techniques, I implemented independent, rotating polarization filters for each signal. The hardest part was synchronizing the randomization. Fortunately, cryptography was one area where the Fringe Alliance’s tech exceeded LOW OrbIT’s. Fringers valued their privacy. Transmitter power was a concern, though the link budget worked out if we maxed the receiver gain on the Ariadne. Of course, that would leave us vulnerable to a host of other tricks. Through an iterative process, I worked it back to something within the mission briefing’s risk management parameters.

Sensors and countermeasures are like a chess game. You try to mask your actions, but rarely could you hide them completely. You knew the other side would detect at least some of what you did and they knew you knew that. So you guided their reactions based on what they could and couldn’t see. Instead of providing them with the clarity of black and white, you were hoping they’d fill in the story you wanted from the grayscale you provided as they were trying to do the same. Success often came down to who was a better storyteller. When you threw in counter-countermeasures, the interaction became a seductive dance, the impression of eroticism that led to lust. Lust led to mistakes.

By the time I finished setting everything up, we were approaching the first drop point. I checked Gardner’s positional displays and found Captain Bonet was using Sin as a shield against spying from both the normal traffic lanes and from the known external system vantages. I began analyzing our sensor sweeps to see if any other observers might be lurking. Nothing raised a flag. We dropped the first squad during a gravity assist maneuver without incident. About midway to Chang’e, they brought their array online and I integrated it into our local network. I programmed an optimized sector scan using the new array combined with our routine sweeps and all the supplementary system data I could link in from the Electronic Support Measures database.

Instead of slingshotting Chang’e, we transferred our residual velocity into a fast, stable orbit. Once again, in a relatively shielded position Captain Bonet inserted the second squad. While they were still in descent, the countermeasures suite chirped a warning.

“Captain, potential contact,” I commed up to the bridge, reading off its sector coordinates.

“What confidence level?” Gardner asked.

“One point one three sigma,” I answered.

“That’s well below the threshold for standard protocol…” Gardner began.

Captain Bonet interrupted. “Converging or diverging?”

“Converging. Now one point one four sigma.” Not a great convergence given the pattern search probability algorithm but it was something. I just hoped the signal didn’t degauss on me and disappear completely.

“Hook the contact on your display, Andersen, and stream the data directly to the bridge,” Bonet ordered.

“Captain, recommend we wait for second squad to go active for three sigma confirmation,” Gardner said.

“ETA of second squad in position and online, Lt. Santos?” Bonet asked.

“Two point three seven hours, optimal,” she answered. It was not a short overland and setup.

“Nav, estimate time to intercept at T plus point oh five and T plus two point three seven,” the Captain ordered.

A moment later Shay responded. “At T plus point oh five, TTI equal two point five four hours. At T plus two point three seven, TTI equal five point four niner.”

“Overlay both intercept courses on my display,” Bonet said. I mirrored the Captain’s display in a side window, as she knew most of the crew would. The first intercept point was just inside the gray zone of enforcement, the second approaching the Green Line of Home’s uncontested inner zone. If we waited, we would be overtaking the contact under acceleration rather than swinging in for a velocity match. That would severely limit our response options. With our orbital mechanics, there was no way to confront the contact head on, not that we would want to. Then we would be outbound while it was still inbound. Those were desperation tactics.

“Nav, implement optimal intercept to presumed contact on my mark. Three, two, one. Mark.” Bonet ordered. “Mr. Gardner, inform Control then run Andersen’s data through the ESM database. See if it spits out anyone we know.”

“Aye-aye,” was Gardner’s clipped response. He didn’t like having his recommendation overruled. He was always too much of a stickler for the book. 

“Gunnery, get hot,” Bonet continued issuing her orders, “I want firing solutions as soon as we come in range based on passives only. Sensors, do not paint that target until my orders. Let’s make sure we know what we’re dealing with. Engineering, give me whatever boost you can from the drives. Nose the red line if you have to. Stay sharp, people. This wouldn’t be the first ambush someone tried to get us to walk into.”

So we broke orbit and gave chase. Chase being more implied than actual in the early stages of our spiral arc. That gave me time to tweak the filters to see if I could get a confirmation of the target. I hoped so or we would be desperately out of position if another contact came in. I prayed this one was real.

Two hours and fifty-four minutes seems like a long time, and it is. A long, slow, tense time where everyone tries to stay focused on their jobs. Gardner maintained marginally time-delayed contact with Control. The only other patrol cruiser close to our position was the Thetis but she was still well outside intercept range even at high-G acceleration. Shay, our navigator and pilot, updated our intercept course based on my and Gardner’s sensor data as well as whatever drive optimizations Tarnat, our ship’s engineer, could give him. That left Santos to prep Panico and Sethi as a boarding party while Bonet kept us all sharp with drills and damage control simulations.

An hour away from contact, and the countermeasures suite still hadn’t closed to a one point five sigma confidence level. Whatever it was, there was still a fifteen percent chance it would turn out to be something other than a ship. While it didn’t seem high, it was much higher than any of us were comfortable with.

Twenty minutes from intercept, the second array came online. As I was integrating it into our network, the contact deviated from what had been a stable trajectory throughout our tracking. With the additional data from Chang’e, the confidence level closed beyond a four sigma level, a one in fifteen thousand chance it wasn’t a vessel of some kind.

A few seconds later, Gardner commed ship-wide, “ESM identifies the contact as Darwin’s Truth, a short haul freighter last seen on Harmony just over two years prior. Flagged as a known smuggler. Board on contact.” He tagged the particulars on the sensor display.

Captain Bonet began issuing new orders for intercept. With the course change, the contact would skate just outside Interdiction’s claimed jurisdiction. That didn’t mean we wouldn’t go in for a closer look, if nothing else to tag the contact and update the ESM database.

The timing was suspicious. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought someone had an inside track on our data. Harmony was a Chinese national colony. Happy Family had a major corporate headquarters there. This smelled of a setup. So I ran an analysis along the contact’s previous flight line to see if the course change was a diversion.

And there it was, buried deep in the noise, a second contact, seemingly adrift.

I signaled the bridge. “Captain, I have a second contact on Darwin’s Truth’s previous vector.”

“Confidence level?” Bonet asked.

“One point oh four sigma,” I said. Roughly a one in three chance it was a ghost. Probably equal that it was just ejecta to draw us off. I tagged and forwarded the signal to the bridge.

“Sensors, how long before we’re in range to add anything meaningful about Darwin’s Truth to the ESM database?” Bonet asked.

“Fifteen minutes at current delta,” Gardner answered. Meaning it could be longer if Darwin’s Truth had any untapped acceleration in reserve.

“Nav, if we maintain present course for another point one five, would we be able intercept Beta contact before it hits the Green Line?”

A moment passed. Then two.

“Negative,” Shay replied. “No solution on Beta contact before the Green Line if we maintain intercept course with Darwin’s Truth.” It was one or the other. I’m sure Captain Bonet knew that but she needed it confirmed. Plus it gave her a moment to decide.

“Nav, resume original course” Bonet ordered. “Re-establish intercept course with Beta contact.”

“Captain, if I may…” Gardner began.

“You may not, Mr. Gardner,” Bonet snapped. “Inform Control. Request they prepare interceptor missiles as backup if Beta contact turns hostile. Recommend Thetis calculate an intercept solution on Darwin’s Truth.”

Gardner may not have realized it but by cutting him off, Captain Bonet had taken all responsibility for the decision upon herself and freed her subordinates from any consequences of her order. 

A silence fell over the comms except for whatever terse voice traffic was required for us to do our jobs. Minute by minute we closed with the contact. Five minutes out, we had no visual confirmation. Captain Bonet ordered Santos and her squad to prepare for boarding. Two minutes, and still nothing. We readied the docking ring anyway. One minute, and the pattern search probability algorithm still hadn’t closed to anything closer than one point five sigma. My stomach began to sink. I could feel my crewmates doubts growing as dark as the coldscape beyond the Ariadne.

Then a smudge appeared on an external camera, a distortion of the star field partially eclipsing the disk of Home. There was definitely something there. The comms burst back to life with internal traffic and preparations. Using the visual input, we locked onto the target, though we could barely hold a three sigma threshold even then. Whatever countermeasures they were using were state of the art. Captain Bonet freed Ricketts to a return-fire protocol, meaning fire control was at his discretion if he detected any threat.

Per Interdiction protocol the Captain maintained distance at one minute out while Gardner and I analyzed the object in every way we knew how for anything threatening, exotic radiation, spurious energy spikes, increasing EM fields. Nothing. Gardner hailed it over an extended set of frequencies. Static. So he launched a sensor drone to get a closer look.

The object turned out to be the size and shape of a standard five-hundred displacement ton vacuum-rated cargo container like the ones used to build the Stack Maze. Though this one didn’t have any flat, reflective surfaces or stark discontinuities at the corners. It was coated with EM absorbing shielding layered over with an interspersed network of EM emitters. Together, they functioned much like an invisibility cloak, dispersing incoming radiation while mimicking the expected emissions of background signals. Kind of an analog of the noise-cancellation feature built into our comms. Clever and cutting edge. The internal processors had to be fast to keep up with our sensors. It was only the new countermeasures suite that had allowed us to pick up the anomalies that led us here. 

We had no choice but to board it. Once the docking ring clamped on, we could try to slow it or nudge it into position where a tug could pick it up before it hit the Green Line. Regardless, we had to know what was onboard before it drifted too close to Home. If they had to, Home Defense would dispatch interceptor missiles to destroy it. More likely we’d back off and let Ricketts take gunnery practice on it to break it up to where the system defense stations could handle the debris. First we needed to make certain no refugees were on board. That would be a PR nightmare. And just the type of trap Happy Family would set using a confiscated smuggler and a mercenary tabloid unit.

Search and seizure was the worst job in Interdiction. We never knew what new tricks the other side would come up with. Being half blind to start, we’d be completely vulnerable. Though most of the time we spent in the coldscape, that’s exactly how we felt.

At first, the boarding operation went smoothly. Shay matched velocities with the container, which wasn’t difficult since it seemed to have no maneuver drive. Gardner discovered an external hatch so we didn’t have to force-breech its outer skin. Bonet ordered Santos to extend the docking ring, which latched onto the exterior hatch then cut its way inside after deploying the temporary gasket that would form an airlock seal and would automatically reseal the vessel when the Ariadne broke away. Ricketts calculated firing solutions right up to the moment the docking ring made contact while I prepped for any countermeasures response.

The countermeasures suite detected a miniscule EM spike when the docking ring connected but Gardner chose to disregard it. No one else detected any change in the vessel’s status, internal or external. Santos and her squad boarded through the narrow hole left by the cutting torch.

Inside was a cramped maze of heavily shadowed, gunmetal gray passageways studded with access hatchways in the bulkheads, overheads and decks, just like the lower levels of the Ariadne only without the brightly colored warning labels. The boarding party made their way through by the numbers, a three-man overwatch formation. They met no resistance before they encountered an airtight hatchway into an internal cargo chamber. There was a viewport.

“Cryo chambers,” Sethi called out over the tactical subnet. “We’ve got fugees.”

“Burn your way in,” Santos ordered. “Panico, cover.”

Over the comms, I heard the distinctive flick of a plasma torch being ignited then cutting. A few seconds later shots and screaming erupted from the speaker before the channel cut to static. Then my world exploded.

The Ariadne shuddered and rocked sideways. Klaxons blared. Airtight hatches slammed shut. The artificial gravity and inertial compensation sputtered offline. The restraints on my acceleration couch tightened. The compartment dropped into darkness then flickered back with dim emergency lighting. My workstation blanked everything but the countermeasures suite which screamed to life with a combination of signals and warnings of broadband jamming, all of which we were powerless to counteract. In the chaos, my head felt foggy and light.

I opened a comm channel on the internal damage control subnet which immediately brought up an assessment screen. On the bridge Nav was offline. Sensors, offline. The Captain’s station, offline. I switched to Engineering, hoping Tarnat would reconfigure his workstation to take over command functions. Offline. Not damaged, not degraded. Nonexistent. As far as the computer network was concerned, those links had been severed. The only stations left were Gunnery, which scrolled up a string of degradations, and Countermeasures. My station.

I prayed that somehow the bridge or Engineering were operating on isolated networks, despite the damage control subnet being independent with its own alternate routing. Otherwise, the Ariadne was in deep. Then, LOW OrbIT basic kicked in. Take charge and integrate the largest network possible. If someone higher up the command chain survived, they would integrate our network into theirs later.

“All personnel, report,” I commed across the open network. “Andersen, Countermeasures, aye.”

“Ricketts, Gunnery, aye.”

Nothing further came across the communications network.

“As senior ship’s officer, I am taking command,” I said. “Computer, transfer command authority to Andersen, Carissa, Tech-Spec First Class.” I recited my command code and serial number. My board unlocked the command functions of the Captain’s console. With that I could reconfigure it to run whatever systems remained from here or delegate it elsewhere.

“Gunnery,” I turned my attention to Ricketts, “Damage report.”

“Gunnery aye,” Ricketts commed back. “Main turret offline. Rail-gun one inoperative. Rail-gun two constrained to non-lethal mode. Passive defenses only. Capacitors drained. Workstation degraded. Initiating damage control protocol.”

“Belay that, Gunnery,” I ordered as I hammered away at the command keys on my screen. “I’m reconfiguring Countermeasures as a bridge override station. I need you to set up as aux Engineering.”

“In current condition, that means abandoning all Gunnery functions,” he advised.

“Acknowledged,” I said. “I doubt we have the power to run any of the guns right now. Signal me when you are online.”

The damage assessment diagnostic popped up with its results. I read them over the network so Ricketts would know what we were up against. “Ok, here’s our status. Bridge, down. Engineering, down. Fusion generator, offline. Power supply, backups only. Main drive, offline. Attitude thrusters only. Comms, broadband omni-directional. Sensors, passive only. Countermeasures, minor degradation. Artificial gravity and intertial compensation offline. Life support on batteries. Our current power budget can handle comms, passive sensors, minimal life support and attitude thrusters, with a little to spare if we need it. You ready to take that over, Ricketts?”

“Aye, coming online…” he paused, “Now.”

“Transferring Engineering to your control. Set up the automated repair sequences. See if I missed anything and whether you can eke out any more power. I’m going to check if Gardner’s sensor drone is still up there. Maybe we can see how bad we’re hit.”

First, I initiated an automated distress call through the omni-directional comms. Not that it would likely do much good. My console indicated we were bathed in jamming at this point and we didn’t have the power to slice through it. Though Control had to know something catastrophic had happened by this point. If we couldn’t contact them soon, interceptor missiles would be up and on the way.

I reconfigured my board as the primary sensor station and integrated it with the countermeasures suite. I detected layered jamming plus what appeared to be a tight-band frequency hopping signal that was allowed to pass through a tailored filter scheme. Very clever. Also very exploitable by a piggyback maneuver. The narrow windows of clear spectrum opened a fraction longer than the signal passing through it. The spectrum analyzer could spot the notch before it fully closed with a little help from our cryptographic prediction algorithm. Each of those filters also set up a partially degraded area in numerous sidebands. Those overlapped. With a little added power, I might be able to punch a signal through.

After a minute of analysis, the countermeasures suite spit out a pattern that might just work at least at close range. The bandwidth would be low as we’d have to rely on a redundant packets scheme to cover data losses. It wasn’t great but if the sensor drone was still up there and functional, I should be able to construct some still pictures of the damage if it was in a good position. Moving it would be difficult. I just hoped Gardner has set it up with a default maneuvering pattern if it lost contact.

I sent the commands for the drone to open up its receiver and enter a deeply redundant data mode. I didn’t have it drop its filters completely, just to somewhere above the notched noise floor of the sidebands. A full minute later, I received an acknowledgement. Soon after, static-laden stills of the Ariadne’s exterior slowly began to fill in. The pictures were beyond words even as they grew clearer pixel by pixel. I piped them over to Ricketts.

“Holy…” was his only response.

There was a large, scorched crater in the Ariadne’s hull where the bridge should have been. The compartment itself was open to vacuum. Thankfully, nothing recognizable could be seen within the slaty shadows. Engineering, too, had taken a direct, high power hit. It lay sparking like a slowly bleeding electronic wound deep in the Ariadne’s side. The extended docking ring was bent but otherwise intact. We were still attached to the cargo container.

Silence fell across us like a pall. There was almost no way any of the bridge crew had survived. Bonet, Gardner, Shay, all gone in an instant. From the look of Engineering, I doubted Tarnat had fared much better. It was a miracle either Ricketts or I had survived. The baffling of the immigration detention area and the shielding for the countermeasures suite were probably the only things that saved us. Or the drives, like he’d always said.

Even now, the ship wasn’t close to home and dry. With only a handful of systems at our disposal, I was uncertain we ever would be. All of our directional comm antennas were twisted or completely sheared away. Our sensor arrays were pockmarked wreckage that resembled the far side of Sin, a broken web. Our last vector was taking us directly toward Home. A quick few taps on the Nav system confirmed this was still the case. Even if we survived, Home Defense protocol dictated that without communications, high-G acceleration missiles were already outbound. They would arrive in half an hour.

As an added bonus, the countermeasures suite detected that the cargo container was still sending an outbound signal. Likely a tabloid data stream which meant our deaths would be recorded and replayed for all of Home to see. Along with the deaths of any passengers onboard that cargo container who remained alive. Unless we could somehow reestablish comms to any friendly unit, or distance ourselves from the cargo container, we were doomed. We could blow the docking ring, which would condemn the boarding party if any of them had survived, but with only attitude thrusters, we’d never achieve minimum safe distance from the inbound missiles. We could abandon ship, but that would mean facing the blasts with the nearly non-existent shielding of a survival bubble.

I was uncertain whether any of these same thoughts were coursing through Ricketts’ head as I tried to shake off the images of the Ariadne that had almost completely filled in and were now crystal clear. My training kicked in a second time.

“Ricketts,” I commed over the open net, “What is the status of the capacitors for rail-gun two?”

After a second or two, Ricketts groggily replied. “Uh, that’s a no-go, Andersen. If we fire the rail-gun at this range, we’d take as much damage as the target.”

“Snap out of it, Gunnery. I’m not asking for recommendations. I need information.” I repeated my request slower and louder. “What is the status of the capacitors?”

I could almost hear him shake his head to clear it. “Capacitors are degraded. It looks like they discharged to prevent further damage when we took a power spike just before the main reactor went offline.”

“Will they hold a charge? Enough for one shot?” This was critical.

“Maybe if we had the juice. The power budget doesn’t support it.”

I sighed. We might get out of this yet. “Ricketts, I want you to start trickle charging those capacitors. Use every backup. Drain the batteries if you have to. Kill all ship’s systems, including life support. We’ll use the suits if it comes to that. Configure Engineering to automated damage control then cut it loose.”

“If we do that, the reactor could become unstable.” Which we both knew meant that if it was sufficiently damaged, it might not shut down properly but rather start spewing exotic radiation throughout the hull.

“A chance we’ll have to take. Just leave us enough to run the boards.”

Now he sounded a bit clearer. “What about the countermeasures suite? If I bleed a charge off the internals, that might speed things up.”

“Set that up but do not engage. I’m going to need power to the suite to act as comms relay to the sensor drone. That’s about our only chance.”

With our transmit capacity so far reduced, there was no way to overcome the cargo container’s jamming. That meant either gaining enough distance to where our transmitter’s small signal could overcome the jammer or shutting it down. Attitude thrusters would never get us far enough away. Pulling the plug on the jammer meant going into the container blind and hoping we could find the breaker before we met the boarding party’s fate. Given that they were Marines and we weren’t, that seemed unlikely.

I started configuring the countermeasures suite and the sensor drone to act as a comm relay. Less than ideal, but it beat the alternative.

Just then, a deeply distorted voice emerged not from the comms but from the countermeasures suite itself.

“Ariadne, this is Santos, respond.” Her voice sounded unsteady. The suite must have picked her signal out of the noise.

“Santos, Ariadne here. Good to hear you’re still with us Lt.” I said. I tagged her signal as friendly, ordered the countermeasures suite to clean it up and piped it through the normal comms.

“Andersen? Patch me through to Bonet.” Santos’ voice still sounded primitive and synthetic.

“Bonet and all senior crew are missing and presumed dead. It’s only me and Ricketts. I am in charge of Ariadne.”

“Then as ranking officer,” Santos said, her voice only slightly steadier as the countermeasures suite corrected the signal, “I assume command. Santos, Mercy, 1^st Lt.” She rattled off her command code and serial number.

“Negative, Santos,” I replied in my best LOW OrbIT command voice. “This is a ship’s matter. You aren’t in the Ariadne’s chain of command.” Technically, that wasn’t true. The Marines were beneath all other ship’s crew, regardless of rank, except on external maneuvers they commanded. And a Tech-Spec First Class outranked a Gunnery Tech, though just barely.

“Computer,” Santos said. “Log my last order as head of Security Section.” As Security Section Head, she had placed herself back in the chain of command. “Andersen. I want you to suit up and hit the armory. Meet me outside the docking ring in five. Ricketts will take charge of Ariadne in my absence.”

“What the hell are you doing, Santos? We’re in full damage control mode here. I can’t abandon my station.”

“You don’t give me orders, Specialist,” she snapped. “I’ve got two down, one injured. I need backup so I can check my people. These bastards knew exactly where we’d be. Now get down here before I lock out your board.”

She’d been hit. No wonder she sounded woozy. But her orders were suicidal. She had no read of the situation. I did. And I didn’t have time to play Marine if any of us were going to get out of this. So before Santos could consolidate her mistake, I said, “Computer, confirm Marine Lt. Santos’s location as external to Ariadne.”

“Don’t do this, Andersen,” she warned. Her voice sounded almost automated through a burst of distortion.

“You’re detached duty, lieutenant,” I replied evenly as I watched the computer confirm I was still in command.

“As soon as I set foot on that ship, your career is finished,” she hissed.

“Let’s handle the courts-martial after we all get out alive, shall we? Advise you return to Ariadne best speed.”

“Negative,” Santos growled. “I’m not leaving them behind.”

Ricketts floated into the passageway from the Gunnery station. He already had on a tactical headset.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going, Ricketts?”

“Following Mercy’s orders.” His voice had an icy edge.

“Request denied,” I said, trying hard to maintain my authority. “I need you here.”

“I’m not taking orders from a fugee while a Fringer needs our help,” he spat. I thought I’d become used to the barbs but that one stung.

“Have you both gone stupid?” I stared at him. “We’ve got missiles inbound and we’re attached to the target. Now, get back to your post, mister.”

“What are you going to do, shoot me?” He sneered. He knew I didn’t have a weapon. We didn’t need them at our stations. I could lock down the armory but that would be pointless. So I let him go.

“Twenty minutes,” I said, trying to maintain a semblance of command, “then I blow the docking ring regardless of your position. Get Santos out of there whatever you have to do.”

“Fringers are family,” he replied. “That’s something a fugee wouldn’t understand.” Like he would know anything about that.

“One second, Ricketts” I ignored his level stare as I keyed his comms into the same scheme as the sensor drone. “When you get to Santos, have her mirror this protocol. And if you find the plug for that jammer, pull it.”

Ricketts hand-over-handed himself down the passageway toward the docking ring. I brought up his camera feed on a corner of my display and set a timer running beside it. Twenty minutes started ticking down. If it hit zero, and they weren’t back on the Ariadne, both those bastards were on their own. It’s not like we were family. They’d made that abundantly clear.

I went back to reconfiguring the sensor drone, only occasionally glancing at Ricketts’ feed. Progress was achingly slow over what amounted to a constricted bandwidth connection with a low signal-to-noise ratio. What had taken seconds for Ricketts’s headset stretched into minutes. As I waited for each command confirmation, I watched Ricketts’ progress through his tactical headset. He skipped the EVA locker, going straight for the armory cabinet and bringing out a shotgun and a sidearm, a standard issue for security drills. He painstakingly loaded each weapon in the null gravity. Then he donned a flak vest and a grabbed a first aid kit before strapping on a helmet.

By the time I’d finished with the sensor drone, five minutes had burned off the countdown. Ricketts found Santos leaning against a bulkhead right outside the docking ring. The cargo container had maintained artificial gravity where the Ariadne had not. Ricketts brought out the first aid kit. Santos waved him off, indicating she’d taken care of preliminaries herself. Instead, he injected her with a combination painkiller/stimulant while she reconfigured her comms. Her helmet feed returned online, which I placed in a reduced window next to his.

I quickly reviewed Ricketts’ gunnery setup. Rail-gun two was loaded with an Electromagnetic Pulse charge locked onto the cargo container with an auto-target feature. If anything could shut down the jammer, an EMP would. With a hull breach, I’d need to achieve minimum safe distance before I set off the charge or I’d risk burning out what few systems the Ariadne had left. Ricketts had already mirrored Gunnery to my board with a simple command sequence to engage. There was nothing else do until the capacitors completed charging. 

Ricketts and Santos were leapfrogging their way through the cargo container in a standard move and cover formation now. Something niggled at the back of my mind. A stealth cargo container lighting off a jammer didn’t make sense to me. That just made it a target. At first I’d thought it was a clever way to ambush and destroy one of Home’s freshly upgraded patrol cruisers. But the more I thought about it, the less sense that made. In order to avoid detection, Darwin’s Truth must have left Harmony months ago and coasted in under limited thrust to avoid detection. That was a lot of time, energy and effort to trap one ship, with a pretty low risk-reward ratio. It seemed more likely this was a fallback scenario in case the cargo was intercepted. If a suspect vessel couldn’t be diverted from crossing the Green Line into Home’s uncontested territory, the standard response was to destroy it. That might get them video of us killing the passengers.

But the more I thought about that, the more something else didn’t fit. “They knew exactly where we’d be.” If nothing else, Santos operated by the book, as did Captain Bonet most of the time. That meant a textbook docking and a textbook boarding. The docking would have put the Ariadne exactly where concealed, shape-charged missiles could wipe out the bridge and Engineering, disabling or destroying the ship.

That the cargo container still had artificial gravity made even less sense. It was a significant power draw and hard to conceal. Unless someone wanted to limit the degrees of freedom for a boarding party. The boarding procedure would have made the positions of the boarding party equally predictable from our standard overwatch tactics. The jammer lighting off would make it an easy target for any inbound missiles. Which meant someone thought the passengers in those cryo-chambers were too valuable to be captured.

“Santos, pull back,” I shouted over the comms. “It’s another ambush.”

“Negative, Andersen, We’ve almost reached Panico and Sethi.” She ducked to cover and signaled Ricketts forward.

“There’s an automated defense system keying off our boarding tactics,” I argued.

“We swept the passageways on entry. We’ve detected no sensors, no EM.” She started forward to where Panico’s body lay sprawled.

“It’s a static system,” I yelled. “They only need passive sensors.”

“Clear off this frequency, Andersen, and let us do our job.” She checked Panico, looked at Ricketts and shook her head. Ricketts crouched and ran for Sethi.

“Santos, listen to me,” I pleaded. “There’s something about this cargo they want to protect. Something they don’t want discovered. That’s why they’ve made themselves a target. Why else would they fire up a jammer?” It was like a homing beacon for the interceptor missiles.

Santos didn’t respond. Instead she cut her communications link. Ricketts muted my incoming comms but allowed me to continue to see his camera feed. The last thing I heard him say was, “We’ve got children in here.” His helmet-cam zoomed in on the viewport of the airtight hatch. A little girl, maybe five-years-old, whose face I immediately recognized stared out at him. Elsa. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I screamed into the dead comms. No one heard. I watched Ricketts move into position to open the hatch that Sethi had cut through as Santos provided cover just as standard tactics dictated. I could only stare. As soon as the hatch cracked, Santos waved Ricketts to overwatch. I pounded my workstation in frustration. Santos slipped inside. All hell broke loose again. Ricketts’ feed went dark.

Instinctively, my arms shot up around my head as I braced for a second round of explosions, even knowing that if one came, I was dead. A shudder passed through the ship but nothing else. When I realized I was holding my breath, I let out a sigh and scrambled to call up the feed from the sensor drone to make sure nothing else had happened. Jets of air that instantly desublimated into an icy mist now leaked from Engineering. The self-sealing bulkheads had been compromised. The Ariadne might not have long.

I didn’t have time to dwell on it. Either I would be dead in a few minutes like the others or I wouldn’t. Like Elsa. Had that really been her? That changed everything.

I called up the log of Ricketts feed and freeze-framed the image of the viewport. There she was, staring back at me, frozen in time from the last time I’d seen her. She hadn’t aged a day. Had they kept her in cryo this entire time?

I glanced at the countdown clock. Ten minutes. Just enough time to rescue the survivors if nothing went wrong. What were the odds of that?

I didn’t care. I couldn’t leave Elsa behind again when there was the slimmest chance she was still alive. I released my acceleration restraints and grappled my way down the passageway to the armory. Hastily, I donned a vest and grabbed a shotgun, not that either had been much use to Ricketts. Old training. I ensured the shotgun was loaded then pushed off toward the docking ring.

Entering the cargo container, I came across a scene of slaughter. In the zigzag of passageways, first I found Panico, then Sethi, both sprawled where they’d fallen, shredded by auto-defense systems. I could see the blood stain where Mercy must have first been hit. Ricketts was next, holding cover just outside the hatchway. Blood leaked from multiple fatal wounds. That hatch was ajar to entry width. I pushed it farther open with the barrel of the shotgun and crept forward, weapon ready.

Inside the slaughter had grown into complete and utter carnage. Racks of cryo units lined opposite walls of the chamber three high, stacked like bunks on a LOW OrbIT cruiser, a dozen at least. Each observation port was laced with strings of automatic weapons fire. Interdiction Marine standard issue I had no doubt. Part of Happy Family’s forensic trap. Within each lay a small, sleeping face, some shattered by the impacts, others resting as peacefully as blond angels above torn and rent little bodies. One bed was open, gaping like a hole from an extracted tooth. One child was not where she was supposed to be.

I surveyed the scene. The ashen floor was a slick, swirling mess of brightly colored fluids, crimson and chartreuse, natural and man-made. In the center of it all like the focus of some ancient abstract sculpture or an iridescent crime scene lay Lt. Santos, her gray body armor studded with lines of rounds like decorative rhinestones, each terminating where one had found a weakness or seam. Her assault weapon had been cast aside, her arms now wrapped protectively around a precious package like a cocoon, her body shielding it like a shroud. There was no doubt she, like the others, was dead.

My heart leapt as something stirred beneath her. A small, damp cough emerged, familiar to anyone who had reawakened from cryo-sleep too quickly. I dropped the shotgun and pulled Santos’ body aside.

There she was, bloodstained but alive. My Elsa. Somehow she’d crawled to safety and survived. I had only Mercy to thank for that. Maybe we weren’t so different after all. I knew if Elsa was coughing, she’d be ok. As I scooped her into my arms, I prayed the auto-defense systems didn’t have a third and final surprise. Steering clear of anything resembling cover just in case, I spirited her back to the Ariadne as quickly as I could, securing the hatch behind me.

Regulations said she, not any of my fallen companions, was the priority. There was no time to retrieve their bodies anyway. Ricketts, Santos, Panico and Sethi, their sacrifice would serve the living, as would the rest of the Ariadne’s crew’s. Though they might not see it that way had they known my plan. I knew it was too late to prevent the tabloid footage from reaching Darwin’s Truth. Perhaps I could use it to my advantage. Happy Family had no interest in showing any survivors. Without any of the boarding party’s records, Control would have a hard time disputing my account. All they’d care about was that Elsa was in custody or confirmed dead.

Regulations also said that I should immediately install her in detention, beyond the Green Line, until my superiors could determine what to do with her. But I knew they would never accept her just like my crew had never accepted me. So I left that door unopened. For now.

Instead I tucked Elsa into my bunk and secured her with crash webbing then tended her to ensure she was uninjured. When I was confident she hadn’t been hit, that all the blood on her was Mercy’s, I injected her with a stimulant to ease her ragged breathing. She never said a word even when I brushed a few stray strands of her fine blond hair back behind her ear. What had they done to her?

I didn’t have time to find out. Her hollow, pale blue eyes followed me to the door just as they had the last time I’d left her in the Stack Maze. She’d been fussy that day not wanting me to leave. Never again after this time, my Elsa. Never again.

First, I had to get us out of here. Did I dare risk breaking contact with the container with the Ariadne in such fragile shape? Would the concussion of blowing the docking ring further compromise the hull? I didn’t know but didn’t have much choice. Either the undocking or the inbound missiles could finish Ariadne. At least with undocking I stood a chance.

So I held my breath and set off the separating charges. The small, explosive burst nudged the Ariadne. I fired the attitude thrusters under smooth acceleration and limped away, praying the container was out of pop-up missiles. Slowly, we drifted apart. I spun the Ariadne 180 degree to face our good side to the target then used the fuel gauge of the thrusters to extrapolate the distance we’d achieve before checking my countdown clock. Under five minutes. I hoped I hadn’t miscalculated.

Our velocity would top out just about the time the rail gun charged enough to open fire. Belatedly, I remembered to pivot the sensor drone into the Ariadne’s shadow and mirror our course. While the command confirmations took forever, the lighter massed drone easily caught up with us once it received my orders and moved to where we would shield it. I still needed it as a comm relay if the rail-gun actually fired and we somehow survived.

With the countdown clock ticking into single seconds, we were still short of minimum safe distance for the EMP charge. About a minute short. I was blind to where the incoming missiles were. They could be right on top of us by now. I couldn’t risk the wait. I keyed the auto-fire sequence.

The interior lights dimmed. Circuitry shorted throughout my compartment from the inductive backlash. The capacitors must have been more compromised than Ricketts thought. I prayed the relays would hold and my board would remain active.

It did. Until half a second later when I slammed into the restraints as we slewed and spun sideways. The Ariadne accelerated for three full seconds, the internal structure of the ship groaning like an old woman rising from her chair. I furiously commanded the sensor drone to maintain distance. No acknowledgement came back. 

What the hell? There shouldn’t have been a shockwave. Unless it wasn’t an EMP charge Ricketts had loaded in the rail-gun. Or the container had more undetected weaponry and we’d taken another hit. If we had, I had no idea how we’d survived.

I stared at the sensor display, praying it would clear. Praying the EMP had taken that jammer offline. At point-blank range, even the Ariadne’s systems would have suffered. Only the hardened interior of the countermeasures suite might have survived.

When the cloud of jamming finally lifted, there they were. A flight of warheads screaming inbound, still accelerating at several Gs. I blared our distress call through the sensor drone along with our encoded transponder, praying it remained undamaged.

I nearly cried when the missiles all veered off. When I checked the sensor display, there was nothing but an expanding debris field in the container’s last known position. The EMP must have triggered overload in the reactor. Or a self-destruct sequence.

Moments later I was contacted by Control. They dispatched the Thetis to secure the area and two tugs to haul the Ariadne in. I informed them that Ariadne maintained integrity and I would stay aboard as acting captain to see her home. Control concurred. Darwin’s Truth would slip away.

After that, everything became a blur. While I awaited rescue, I scrubbed the logs and constructed a story to support how I was determined to get Elsa off the ship and across the Green Line. It was all about deception and misdirection, getting people not to look where I stashed her. And knowing who to offer the right bribe. Back on Home, it wouldn’t take much to doctor the records just like the tabloids did. Elsa’s identity from five years ago was still poised to go online. I hadn’t had the heart to delete it. A few minor tweaks and she’d be mine again. Officially this time.

I’ll never know why of all of the children in that cryo chamber only she survived. Had the container approached just close enough to Home for the auto-warming sequence to engage and prepare its passengers for landing? Or was it some deeper part of Happy Family’s plan that used Elsa as the bait?

Either way, every time I closed my eyes, I could see the bodies of the others in their cryo chambers. All five-year-old children, all girls. All with identical faces. The same dimpled chin. The same baby fine blond hair. The same pale blue eyes, just like Hanna at that age. But I knew in my heart I’d rescued the original not a copy. And I would die before I let anyone take Elsa away from me again.

Text © 2013 Edward P. Morgan III

Illustration © 2013 Sonya Reasor (guest illustrator)