Chapter 40

LOCATION: PETROV STATIONSYSTEM: GLIESE 667

DATE: 2398

Mingyu moved with purpose down the corridor, not quite jogging, but close to it. The trial for Kovalenko and Hoffman was scheduled to start the previous week. Then both men suddenly took their own lives on the same night. It was too suspiciously convenient.

Someone had killed the two senior Captains and had the power to make it look like suicide. Knowing that was bad enough. The fact that the only people who knew of the trial were Zhang, Weiss, Liu, Yuchen, and him meant it had to be one of his fellow Captains. He had grown up alongside these people, and while he didn't necessarily like all of them, he thought they were trustworthy. Now he couldn't even say for sure if his best friend Xu could be trusted anymore. The thought made him sick to his stomach.

The issues didn't stop with the former captain's deaths.

Something was happening aboard Petrov Station, it was a subtle shift at first but became more noticeable by the day. He couldn't quite put his finger on what the change was, but he could feel something was wrong. Almost like when he could tell something aboard the Destiny wasn't working correctly. He chalked it up to having lived here his entire life.

Mingyu wasn't taking any chances after the murder of the two captains. He had been quietly getting his family to take some vacation out of the system over the last couple of days. It had cost him a significant sum to charter the cruise, but his growing unease made him feel like it was justified.

This morning when he attempted to comm Eva Wu and ask her if she noticed anything out of the ordinary. There was no response. Even if the woman had been busy, there should have been a comm acknowledgment from the system. The only possible reason there wasn't one was if her comm had been broken, or the system was down.

He couldn't even conceive of a reason for the retired first mate to have damaged her comm. That meant the Qcomm was offline. As there was no report sent to his comm alerting him of this outage, he had to assume someone had disabled the Qcomm relay station aboard Petrov. The only reason someone would have to cut off external communication at the station was to keep it isolated. And that didn't bode well for anyone aboard.

His destination was just ahead so he picked up the pace slightly and knocked on the door.

He could hear someone moving about inside while he scanned the corridor for trouble. He didn't see any. Everyone seemed completely oblivious to what was happening. Mingyu wanted to warn them, but of what? At the moment, he only had assumptions and conjecture. Besides, any warning he gave would only cause panic.

The door opened and the friendly face of Eva Wu greeted him with a smile. "Mingyu, dear. How nice of –," her words cut off as she looked into his eyes. "What's wrong?"

Despite the tense situation, he couldn't help smiling. The woman never missed anything. "Trouble."

"What sort?" she asked.

"The kind that necessitates us leaving the station, immediately."

Her trust in him was such that she simply nodded her head and shut the door to her apartment. "I needed a walk anyway."

Eva rested her hand on his arm while the pair walked toward his hangar as fast as the older woman could move.

"Smile, boy, you're bringing unwanted attention." Mingyu stiffened at the rebuke. Eva hadn't called him a boy since long before his father retired. He relaxed the frown on his face and his furtive glances. They would either make it to his ship on time or they wouldn't.

Eva being Eva smiled and waved to people she knew as they passed. There was no hint of urgency in her actions. He only knew she was tense by the near vicelike grip she held on his arm.

"I heard your family went on vacation?" she asked casually.

"Yes. They all left a few days ago."

"That's good. It can get quite stifling staying in one spot for too long."

He nodded, the worry beginning to grow in his gut again. It had been two hours since the comms went offline. And there hadn't been a single station alert or announcement. That meant someone in ops had to be involved in whatever was going on. A coup perhaps? He couldn't even begin to guess who would be behind something like that.

The elevator rapidly ascended to the Na's personal hangar. It wasn't any fancier than other hangars, but it was large.

"Now that we're in your hangar, what's going on?"

"I honestly don't know. First Kovalenko and Hoffman died."

"They're dead?!"

He nodded. "Both on the same night, both supposedly committed suicide."

"Seems like you don't believe that to be the case?" she asked as they walked across the spacious hangar to Destiny's ramp.

"They were both about to be tried for financial crimes against the station. The only people who knew this were the rest of the Council."

Eva sucked in a breath. "You think someone on the Council killed them?"

He nodded. "And that's not all. I don't know if you've noticed anything weird in the last few days or tried to comm anyone today, but mine isn't working."

She frowned and released his arm to tap at her comm. After a few tries she let the arm fall away. "I've been sticking close to home this week because my hip has been bothering me, so I haven't noticed anything. My comm isn't working either."

"I figured as much," he said as he started to ascend the ramp.

One of his people rushed out to meet him.

"Is the ship ready to go?" he asked.

"It is, Captain, but there's a slight issue." seaʀᴄh thё nôvel_Fire.ηet website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

"What issue?" Had someone noticed him trying to leave already?

"Well, you scheduled that field trip for the orphans today. And they showed up about an hour ago."

With everything going on, he had forgotten. Ever since Kane had left, he had taken a minor yet more active role in the development of the orphans aboard the station. It was partly to atone for not doing enough to support Kane while he was here.

His first instinct was to hurry the orphans off of the Moonlit Destiny so the ship could leave. But he didn't know what was happening aboard the station. Asking them to go back into an unknown situation would be a truly cowardly thing for him to do. But he was at the mercy of STO law here. Taking them off the station without their consent would be as good as signing his death warrant because he would branded a kidnapper.

"Ask them if they would like to go for a quick trip." Asking them if they wanted to go meant the decision was now in the Headmaster's hands. Passing off this decision to a man who didn't have all the information was a shitty thing to do, he knew that, but it was the only option that didn't end up with him dead.

The man radioed up to the bridge where the question was forwarded to whatever crew was showing the children and Headmaster Wong around. Soon a response came back.

"The Headmaster has agreed."

Mingyu didn't know whether he was relieved or disappointed by Wong's choice. He didn't let any emotion show on his face as he nodded to the crewman. "Close it up and get us out of here."

Eva stopped him before he could get too far. "I think I'll go have a chat with the Headmaster and fill him in."

He patted the woman on the hand. "Thank you." Mingyu couldn't afford the time to speak with the man at the moment.

The two parted and he hurried to the bridge as the ship started to come to life.

"Report!" he shouted as he entered the bridge.

"Ship systems are all green Captain. But I can't get ahold of anyone in the control room."

Dammit, things were moving faster than he thought if the control room wasn't responding. He hurried over to his seat and strapped himself in. His bridge crew saw that and hurried to strap themselves in as well. He didn't expect any violent maneuvering, but it was better to be safe. He would send out an all-hands alert as soon as the ship was free of the dock.

Mingyu furiously typed in a series of commands on his console, overriding the control room. Soon the lights in the hangar began to flash amber as the air was pumped out of the massive space. The codes he used were given to each family in case of catastrophic station failure. It let them take manual control of any station system from a nearby terminal, but it didn't give them access to the entire station.

His screen flashed red as someone from control attempted to lock down the hangar. But the code overrode that. If he hadn't been certain the station was under siege, he was now.

Deciding not to wait any longer, he input the command to open the doors. The remaining air and dust in the hangar was sucked out through the opening doors. Then he heard the landing clamps release as the landing rockets fired up to push the ship off the deck.

The entire time his console kept flashing red as attempts were made to keep him from exiting the station.

As the ship backed out of the hangar, he pressed the intercom button. "All hands, this is Captain Na. Strap in for possible high-G maneuvers! I repeat, strap in for possible high-G maneuvers!"

He hoped Eva had gotten to the Headmaster to explain the situation to him. He was sure the children were terrified of what was happening at the moment, so he was going to have to rely on Eva and the Headmaster to keep them calm.

Mingyu watched the holo of the ship systems as areas turned green, alerting him that people were secured and ready. One even popped up in the mess hall. That was good. That meant Eva had gotten their visitors to the only room with enough secure seats for them.

"As soon as we're clear of the station, burn hard for the transit point. I don't care about saving fuel, just get us out of here as fast as possible."

The pilot acknowledged the order and soon enough Mingyu was pushed back in his seat as the ship lurched forward. The Moonlit Destiny wasn't the fastest ship around, but it was a solid workhorse and could take the strain of a full burn for as long as it needed to.

They were less than ten minutes from the station when his sensor operator spoke up. "Captain, our sensors are picking up multiple jump signatures at the transit point. None of the new arrivals appear to be running transponders."

That worry in his gut turned into a dark pit. It was worse than even he had thought. The only ships that didn't run transponders were pirates.

"Can we slip past them?"

After a minute, the woman shook her head. "They jettisoned something at the transit location. My sensors are reading it as a large mass. But it can't be much bigger than a cargo container."

Mingyu didn't know what the hell the pirates had launched into space, but he knew what it was for. There was a reason people needed to clear a system before jumping to FTL. A significant enough gravity well would disrupt the warp sphere causing it to dump you back into normal space. Even a station as small as Petrov was enough to have an effect. It could be brute forced with enough power, but he would have to turn off every auxiliary system aboard the Destiny and somehow route that power to the FTL drive.

That wasn't going to happen without spending weeks to rewire the entire ship.

He sent a new vector to his pilot, and the man turned to look at him. "You're sure, Captain?"

"Get us there."

The ship angled up and away from the ecliptic plane of Gliese 667 and away from the standard jump point. People used the standard jump points because the math required to calculate your own jump point was tricky and an error could get you killed.

There was no navigation data for a jump from where they were heading, but he was already doing the math as the ship rocketed forward.

"Sir!" the sensor operator practically screamed. "The pirates have targeted us and started firing kinetics!"

He had hoped they would have more time before the pirates calculated his flight path. It seems not. "Do your best to track them and relay the paths to the pilot. Avoid them at all costs, but keep us on this heading!" He didn't have time to start his calculations over again.

The two crew acknowledged him as they set about the arduous work of keeping them alive while Mingyu broke out in a sweat as he raced through the complicated mathematics of jumping from inside a gravity well.

The transit point had only been an hour away at their current speed, so the kinetic rounds didn't have far to go to get to them. And the weapons were traveling much faster than the Destiny.

"Brace!" the sensor operator yelled and the ship jerked hard to the right. He heard a tink sound followed by a whistle of air being drawn out of the bridge. The emergency lights went red and bulkheads across the ship slammed closed to keep the decompression to a minimum. Mingyu cursed himself for the oversight in his panic to leave. He had been out of the military far too long. Flying into a possible combat situation with safety doors unsecured was something rookies did.

"Where were we hit?" he asked without stopping his work.

"Aft ore storage," the sensor operator stated.

"They are firing another volley, Captain," she said with only a slight waiver of fear in her voice this time.

"We should be at the destination before they arrive," he responded robotically as he finished the flight calculations and forwarded it to the pilot.

The man didn't even bother looking them over as he started firing up the warp drive. It was now a race for time. The ship leveled off and faced toward their destination as the deadly projectiles hurled toward their position.

If he had miscalculated this, the warp bubble wouldn't form and they were all dead.

The warp bubble flickered fitfully around the ship, the gravity nearby almost enough to overwhelm it before it finally stabilized and the Destiny shot into FTL only moments before a volley of projectiles flew through the space they had been occupying.