130 Old Enemies

Jayde exited the small prison medbay. In front of Jayde was a sign giving Jayde her position on the starship. She was currently in the axillary engineering compartments on deck seven. To Jayde knowledge, there was only one starship that had medbay and security located on the same deck in the axillary engineering compartments, and that was the Heavy Frigate Falcon.

To confirm her suspicion, Jayde looked at the bottom right-hand corner of the sign, seeing the name of ship 'Raptor' printed, she smiled grimly to herself. This was the flagship of the Xi Corporation, they had spent hundreds of trillions of credits building her.

'Raptor' was the accumulation of decades of research and was considered the top of the line starship in the whole of the Federation. Her overall length was two hundred and forty meters. With a beam [1] of 140 meters and a draft [2] of fifty-eight meters, she wasn't the largest frigate, but she was built to handle any situation she faced.

The 'Raptor' had thirteen decks. Ten were for human habitation while the last three were for the engines and weapons systems. She had a crew complement of forty-eight officers, two hundred and eighty enlisted crew, and seventy flight and maintenance crew.

Equipped with phasers, mega-phasers, and over six hundred mark VIII antimatter torpedoes, 'Raptor' lived up to her name, she really was a bird of prey in space.

Currently, Jayde was on deck seven, which had the sickbay complex, security complex,forward bay observation lounge, as well as the eighty escape pods, it was also where the four landing bays were located. If Jayde hadn't been equipped with the neuro restraint she would have made a break for it and tried to escape.

Recalling the semantics of the 'Raptor', Jayde tried to figure out if there was any way she could escape from Lawrence. She would need to get to the main computer room to hack her way into the computer system to deactivate the neuro restraint, once that was taken care off, she could use one of the many service crawlways to get to the shuttle bay.

Running through each deck in her head as she made her way to the turbolift at the end of the corridor, Jayde made a mental list of what each deck comprised off.

Deck one contained the bridge and docking port.

Deck two had the combat information center as well as the officers' observation lounge.

Deck three was the officers dining room and gallery with an open observation lounge as well as the flight crew bunkrooms and squadron office complex.

Deck four comprised of the officers quarters, recreation lounges, gymnasium, and main cargo bay.

Deck five there were only the junior officers' quarters, crew quarters, crew dining room and well as general system rooms

Deck six contained the officers quarters, bunkrooms, science lab, arboretum, chapel, shuttle bay as well as the main computer core if she remembered right.

There were access points to the computer core on all the decks, but for Jayde plan to work she need access to the main computer core.

Satisfied that she had the beginnings of an escape plan, Jayde now just had to wait for an opportunity, she needed everyone to be distracted. With the crew distracted she could make her way to deck six.

Jayde was one of the top hackers from her batch initially, Xi Corp had been training her to enter their intelligence sector, but she had achieved excellent results in combat and her sniper skills were the best out of everyone.

With her combination of combat expertise, sharpshooting, and leadership qualities they had changed her specialization and moved to her special black ops. She was sure that they had forgotten about her computer mastery. Jayde had never lost her interest in computers, she had kept her skills up to date.

Neither would Vice President Xi or Lawrence know that she had hacked into Xi Corporation computer banks a couple of years ago and 'liberated' the full semantics to the 'Raptor', besides the designers of the starship Jayde didn't think there was anyone else who knew the starship as well as she did.

The door to the turbolift opened as soon as Jayde walked close enough to activate its sensors, walking into the turbolift Jayde moved closer to the wall. It was useless for her to try and escape using the turbolift as it was voice activated.

"Deck One. Bridge," Lawrence ordered.

The doors to the turbolift closed, then opened a couple of seconds later. One couldn't even feel the turbolift moving. Jayde stepped out of the opened door onto the bridge of the starship. A pang of nostalgia hit Jayde. One thing she had really missed on Doha was flying, and the 'Raptor' had been one of her dreams, she had spent months putting together a daring plan to 'liberate' the starship, but those plans were quickly discarded when the Centauri scientists came out with a better design.

There was something so exhilarating about commanding a starship, Jayde really missed the feeling of standing on a bridge of a starship, hell give her a fighter or even a shuttle and she would be happy flying through space.

As Jayde and Lawrence entered the bridge, the captain stood up from his command chair and walked over to them. Jayde's eyes widen ever so slightly seeing the captain. Captain SG312, was one of Xi Corporation's special gravity breeds, he was from one of the low gravity batches created.

The corporations had long been experimenting on creating humans adapted to different environments. Xi Corporation had a number of resource-rich planets that had a much lower gravity than Earth. The cost of running normal gravity habitats and well as the cost of starships to create artificial gravity was enormous.

To increase their profits, they had created a batch of humans adapted to low gravity environments. The man standing in front of Jayde was the embodiment of all the research and testing Xi Corp had done in creating a low gravity human.

He was just over seven foot tall. His body was reed like thin, it looked more anorexic. Due to the lack of muscle development, low gravity humans couldn't operate in normal gravity. SG312 was encased in a special exoskeleton suit, which gave his weak body support and extra physical strength just so that he could walk in normal gravity.

While remarkably graceful in low gravity environments, in normal gravity they were slow and clumsy, the greatest danger to them was their bones were so brittle that even the slightest fall could shatter their bones, which is one of the reasons that had to wear the special exoskeleton suit. Jayde had read one of the research papers done on low gravity humans, it had described how their hearts and lungs struggled in operate in a normal environment.

The reason Jayde was so surprised to see SG312 wasn't due to him being a low gravity human, it was due to their run in two years ago. Jayde and her team had received intel that Xi Corp had decided to remove the local indigenous population of a newly discovered planet rich in Mithril, a rare metal that was used for starships' hulls. Mithril was silver in color and was extremely light and durable.

The indigenous people on the planet had evolved from an avian species, their technology was equivalent to old earth bronze age. What had enraged Jayde was that their species was so unique, never before had the Federation come across a bipedal race that could fly.

By the time Jayde's fleet had arrived, SG312 had already bombarded hundreds of settlements from space. Seeing that the population on the planet had been reduced from a couple of million to just over a hundred thousand, Jayde had immediately ordered her fleet to open fire.

After an intense three hour battle, Jayde fleet had destroyed most of the starships attacking the planet below. SG312 was the leading admiral assigned to the mission. Jayde had ruthlessly attacked his flagship. Jayde had noticed a shuttlecraft escaping from the hole-ridden flagship, but with one of her ships under fire, she had to let it escape as she turned to attention to rescue the starship under fire.

She had heard through the grapevine that only SG312 and a couple of his senior officers had escaped from the battle, they were the only ones out of over a thousand sent to wipe out the planet's population.

Xi Corporation had lost trillions of credits in that disastrous operation, while Jayde and the Centauri had gained a lot of valuable resources from salvaging wreckages left behind. The planet had fallen under the Centauri protective umbrella.

With so few survivors left on the planet, Jayde has managed to set up a small mining operation in a deserted location. She built a small base on the moon and left a couple of warships to patrol the sector.

What surprised Jayde was Xi Corporation hadn't terminated SG312 for his failure but instead had made him the captain of their flagship. But then he was one helluva commander, she thought.

Jayde had been his only failure.

SG312 glared at Jayde hatefully, he wanted to grab her and tear her apart. She had cost him everything, but he dare not make a move against her. He was on thin ice as it was and couldn't afford another mistake.

"Captain," Lawrence greet SG312 cordially.

"Vice President Xi is waiting for you in the captain's briefing room," SG312 informed them curtly.

Nodding Lawrence then indicated for Jayde to proceed him to the briefing room. Jayde and Lawrence walked over to the electronic door. Once there Lawrence pushed the small button next to the door to announce their arrival.

"Enter," Vice President Xi voice sounded through the intercom.

With his order, the electronic door swooshed open.

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Notes

[1] Beam – the nautical term for a ship width at the widest point as measured.

[2] Draft – the nautical term for a ships height.