Only in defeat can one know the true measure of a foe.

  – Old proverb

  NAVEN

  Naven knew the hit was serious when he felt the artificial gravity fail.

  “What happened? Apex, did you see anything?” Sallus leaned forward in her chair, fingers flying over the console, but the only reaction was a slight change in the pulsing lights.

  A moment later, the lights went out, and the dim emergency lighting – set in thin tracks along the ceiling – flickered on.

  Apex remained silent.

  Unbuckling his safety harness, Naven kicked off toward the door. “Is the reactor down? Is Apex even awake?” This gave him some uncomfortable memories about the time Apex had briefly shut down. This time, they weren’t in the safety of a dock… and it had already lasted more than a second or two.

  “He’s offline.” Sallus looked over the lights. “We have a lot of damage. The reactor doesn’t look to be damaged, but it shut down for some reason. We’ll have to restart it manually.”

  Naven paused right at the door, levering it open by hand. “I don’t suppose your fancy big reactor is a hot-start?” He gave her a hopeful look, even though he had severe doubts about it.

  The elf’s frown answered before her words. “It’s a very new reactor, but we didn’t have room for a hot-starter. Better than what it came with, but it’s still going to be rough. With the power out, our comms are down, too.”

  A long exhale left the Navy man as he tried to figure out their best options. Sensors down meant they had no idea what was out there… or if it would take another shot. Apex was out, so even if they got the reactor up, they couldn’t fly the ship. They were adrift in space, helpless, with an unknown enemy.

  “All right, let’s get started on getting the reactor up,” he finally suggested. “Maybe once we have power back, Apex will wake up. Even if he doesn’t, most of the crew really isn’t ready for extended work in zero-G, we’ll need to restore power and gravity before we can get proper repairs underway.”

  Sallus grumbled as she came up behind him. “If I’d been able to launch the way I wanted, I’d have had a fully-trained crew of dozens on the ship. Let’s go, I know how to get the reactor going again. I’m surprised we haven’t had any more attacks yet. You think they’re going to try boarding?”

  “Hard to say.” Naven pulled himself along the handholds in the corridor as he thought. “We haven’t had any other attacks, but that doesn’t mean they’re keen on boarding. They might be waiting to see if we’re playing possum like Apex did to Gristlemaw… though how would they know about that yet? We left immediately afterward. Unless there’s a fast lane nearby…”

  “My question is how none of us, including Apex, saw it coming.” Sallus eased up beside Naven as she spoke, helping him with the next door. Without power, they had to be unclamped and opened by hand, which wasn’t difficult but was quite tedious. “He was even being more cautious than usual. None of us saw it coming. It’s either a random collision by chance, or one of the old stealth cannons, but I’d thought they were all decommissioned ages ago.”

  Naven glanced back as they neared the reactor chamber. “Decommissioned… like all the Draconis vessels were? Like you thought Gristlemaw had died? You aren’t the only one who can dig up old fossils, you know.”

  She gave the spacer a glare, but Sallus couldn’t argue with that. Instead, she pushed herself off to drift upwards toward the top of the massive, quiescent sphere in the chamber. “Go close off the valves to everything but the main fuel tank, we’ll need the pressure.”

  Part of him wanted to smirk, but Naven was in too much of a hurry to do that. This ancient ship had been refitted with a modern reactor… but that just meant getting it started was going to require a lot of struggle, especially with only two – possibly three, if Gertrude had the knowledge – working on it.

  Hopefully, they could get it started up before they were found.

  It was so close.

  But not quite successful.

  The reactor roared to life, and within minutes, Naven felt the tug of the artificial gravity ramping up to its default level of one gravity. He landed on the floor lightly, with Sallus thumping boots to the metallic surface a moment later, her ponytail finally drifting down to drape properly. Lights flickered to full life, finally giving some illumination to the cramped engine room.

  Naven was just outside of the engine room when the whole ship shuddered with a loud CLUNK through the hull. He knew that sound. It had taken hours, but there were boarders on the way. And with this crew… he had to look at Sallus, who shook her head.

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  “There’s no way we can fight off trained marines, even if they’re smugglers. Only about five of us have any combat training at all.” She sighed. “My spells could handle a number of them, but… that’s just a delay. We’ll have to surrender.”

  “Probably,” Naven agreed. “Even if we could repel them we’d lose most of the crew. I hate to say it but… most of the crew aren’t bad people.”

  She smirked in reply. “As opposed to me, who clearly is?”

  He didn’t have a reply to that, just creasing his brow with a grumble. Naven had to admit Sallus, despite her ruthlessness, had a certain charm. He could see how she’d gathered so many people here. But he was only here to curb her excesses.

  Though he wondered if the incoming marines were Enforcers or not. He was technically Coalition military, and if they caught on to that he’d be shipped out as a traitor or at the very least guilty of espionage. This could get very, very ugly.

  “Apex, I don’t suppose you’re awake yet, buddy?” Naven’s question was a little quavery now, as he heard more thumps and clattering noises deep in the hull. He quickened his pace toward the bridge, alongside the quiet Sallus. He knew that look on her face by now. She was thinking, probably trying to come up with some kind of plan that would get them out of this.

  Naven was, as well, but the only options he could think of required control of life support, and even that wasn’t guaranteed to work.

  They needed a real crew.

  He shook his head. He shouldn’t be thinking about how to repel Enforcers. If these were cartel members, that would be one thing. Law enforcement, though? Could he command a crew to kill them just to save his own hide?

  Naven rubbed at his cheeks, trying to figure out a way out of this if they were Enforcers.

  He wasn’t given the chance. With a loud hsss-BANG another door blew off its hinges, and the boarding crew revealed itself to be uncomfortably ready for trouble. The man skidded to a halt, grabbing the railing to slow himself while holding his free arm up in a gesture of surrender. He saw Sallus doing the same, arms rising sharply as she stood still. He didn’t blame her.

  Trained marines of some kind had been expected. Enforcers, maybe, given the traffic in the system. That would have been normal.

  What Naven did not anticipate was the fully-armored, muscular orc that stomped into the corridor, taking up most of the space all by himself between the breadth of shoulders and the pressurized armor suit. The faceplate protected the identity, but everyone knew the build of orcs. Especially when the armor was apparently custom-fitted to the frame like this one.

  The plasma torch was still in his hands, but Naven could see a rifle mounted on the marine’s back. The torch hadn’t even been necessary – Apex’s internals didn’t have a lot of defenses, and the doors had been powered and unlocked by the time the marines had docked. Nobody had been able to even lock and secure them before the boarding.

  “Are those… Emerald Troopers?” Naven muttered, staring as another orc in sleek green armor eased in behind the first. The armor looked new… a model he wasn’t familiar with, but definitely not the old surplus he’d expected out here. It looked like the rumored Emerald Troopers, but that didn’t make sense.

  “No,” Sallus assured him. Then her clarification drained any hope from the man. “Like I said, they use this stuff in making their elite troops. These are the prototypes, if you need a term for them. The results of the super soldier developments that weren’t quite up to standards, but weren’t flawed enough to be failures. I guess we know we were on the right track now, don’t we?”

  Naven hadn’t wanted to believe what she said, but the evidence was right in front of him. Certainly they looked like the all-orc shocktroopers that he’d heard about. He did not want to test the thought that they might be pretending, so turned and headed down the corridor when the troopers motioned for him to move. Sallus walked beside him, her face creased in a thoughtful frown.

  Apex still had not responded. Naven wasn’t sure if that’s because the dragon was still ‘unconscious’ or because he was staying silent and planning on murdering the entire boarding crew. The latter would be something he’d do, he realized. Though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how Apex would do it, with what limited abilities he had to manipulate the inside of the ship. Turning off life support wouldn’t do anything to marines in pressurized suits.

  More troops met them further down the corridor. They’d used a multiple ingress strategy, which wasn’t surprising for trained marines. Several of the cultist crew members were being ushered forward, all heading toward the mess. Naven recognized what they were doing. Gathering everyone together so they could get a count.

  And possibly execute.

  He muttered aside to Sallus, “I hate that you’re being proven right.”

  She didn’t smile back or give him any acknowledgment. It was a little late for him to be realizing that the depths of the corruption here were more akin to what Sallus claimed than what Naven believed. That was a sobering realization for him.

  Naven spotted Rena and Gertrude easily as he stepped into the mess, the two orc women easy to spot. Shortly after he arrived, Filo stumbled in, and the rest of the crew – in varying states of anger or melancholy – filtered in slowly, where they were forced to line up just as expected.

  He looked at Sallus with a raised eyebrow, but she just shook her head. She’d noticed as well, but it wasn’t any plan of hers. That was worrying, because there was one crew member that stood out… or would have, if he were here.

  Pan was conspicuously missing.

  “Seventeen crew. No sign of any others alive. There can’t have been more than twenty.”

  The gruff voice of one of the marines reached Naven’s ears. The smaller, slimmer person he was talking to was just outside of the mess, wearing a pressure suit. Naven couldn’t tell if it was a human or an elf, or even if they were male or female at this angle. The suits used were pretty new, but weren’t exactly form-fitting.

  “Twenty? For a vessel this size? That makes no sense.” Male then. The voice was slightly shrill, but definitely male. The leader then… or the employer. The orcs seemed to listen to him, and he didn’t enter until every member of the crew had been pat down thoroughly.

  Not that any but Sallus had weapons. It really did look like a pitiful crew to experienced marines like this, he was sure.

  The leader stepped into the mess hall to look about, and finally opened the visor. Voice no longer muffled by the suit, he cleared his throat as he looked across the gathering.

  “It appears our informant was right. As strange as the situation sounds.” He gestured to the far end of the line.

  “Bind them and bring them to the ship. We will interrogate them there.”

  Crucial Insight