Chapter Text
I. Kinn
Kinn is just stepping out of the shower, still woozy from the steam and rubbing the water out of his eyes when the Carrier’s proximity alarm starts blaring. It cuts off almost immediately, like someone’s finger slipped on a button by accident, but the damage is already done. Kinn is wide awake, tense and alert.
A few minutes later, while he’s toweling his hair dry with one hand and struggling to put on pants with the other, he gets a message from Arm on his personal line.
Code Black, command center.
Kinn isn’t yet fluent in the nuances of Peacekeeper code as it’s currently in use in the Uncharted Territories, but Black is the highest it goes. The alarm might be turned off but whatever triggered it must still be out there and posing a danger, and as the highest ranking officer on board, his presence is required in command in case of an emergency.
His uniform put to rights, Kinn spares a glance at his bed and takes a moment to curse the stars for not giving him a fucking break every once in a while. He hasn’t had a moment’s rest in months. He’s tired down to his soul; he just wants to sleep. But his lot in life is to go from one emergency to the next, putting out fires left and right for the glory of High Command. The curse of being a Theerapanyakun.
Kinn straightens up, closes his eyes and breathes out. Just one more hurdle and he’s home free. He’s going to handle whatever fresh hell this is, he’s gonna do it fast, and then he’s going to point the Carrier homeward and spend the entire trip there sleeping. That’s the plan.
It’s a good, solid plan – and it gets derailed as soon as he walks into the command center.
“We received a distress signal from Yao Station,” Arm informs him before he’s even done saluting. “A Leviathan has been stolen. The hijackers jammed all communications to and from the orbital station and sealed off the docking bays before they took the ship and left.”
Kinn bites back a groan. He only just got here. It's been less than an hour since he docked with the Carrier; he barely had time to get settled. His hair isn’t even dry yet. And now he has a situation on his hands.
This has to be some kind of record.
“Control collar?” he asks.
“Bits of it are floating all around us, Sir,” Arm says with a wave of his hand. “The hijackers disengaged it just before they went into starburst.”
That explains the proximity alarm – the Carrier is orbiting Lat Yao. The fuckers not only stole a prison ship, but had the guts to fly it right past the Command Carrier, close enough to trigger its proximity sensors.
This is already shaping up to be a political nightmare. Not just because of a stolen prison ship – though that is a problem in and of itself – but because it got snatched from right under their noses. That’s not a good look for the Peacekeepers – not in the Home Systems and certainly not out here in the Uncharted Territories, where their name doesn’t carry the weight it deserves.
Kinn sighs and leans on the main console, frowning at the star chart and the clusters of red dots that pop up and disappear between one blink and the next. In a corner of the main screen, a tracking algorithm churns out data faster than the eye can process, spitting out potential starburst exit points for the stolen Leviathan. An admirable effort on the technicians’ part, but one that isn’t likely to pan out. There's a whole lot of universe out there. Needle in a haystack doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Even so, a slim chance is better than no chance at all. Luck is still a thing, though Kinn hasn’t had much of it lately. What he’s had, though, was a lot of opportunities to get really good at damage control.
So that’s what he does.
“What do we know about the Leviathan?”
Arm pulls up the ship’s information on the screen. “Her name is Falla,” he reads off the file. “She was reinstated three years ago by order of the Grand Chancellor and fitted with a new Pilot. Her previous service record–”
“Wait,” Kinn interrupts, turning to face Arm. “Reinstated?”
Arm blinks. “It says so in her file. Is that not–”
Kinn cuts him off again. “How many prisoners were on the ship? Show me the list.”
Arm scrambles to comply, scrolling through the logs and pulling up the relevant files. “Uh, it looks like there was just one prisoner, Sir.” He opens the file and pauses, blinking at the screen.
Kinn leans over his shoulder to look. Frowns. “That can’t be right.”
--
II. Porsche
In his twenty-three years of life, Porsche has seen more than his fair share of trouble. Some people might say most of that trouble was self-inflicted, but some people need to mind their own damn business. It’s not Porsche’s fault that he grew up poor and had to make ends meet by whatever means necessary. So what if some of those means were illegal? He has a little brother to look after and he’s not going to let a stupid thing like the law get in the way of that.
Which is how he ended up here – lost in the innards of a freaking Leviathan, probably hunted by the Peacekeepers, but more immediately by an angry Luxan with a fuckoff-big qualta blade and a thirst for blood.
Porsche had no idea what he was getting himself into when that pretty lady with the shimmering face tattoos approached him outside the bar, but these assholes and their Luxan bloodhound don’t know what they’re in for either. He may not have a gun-blade, or superhuman strength, but he’s crafty and this is a big ship. Lots of places to hide and lots of shit to break if he has to go on the offensive. Besides, it’s just three against one, and one of those three is a kid. The odds aren’t that stacked against him.
He has no idea where he’s going or where he even is, but he managed to lose his pursuer some time ago and the steady background hum of the ship’s systems helped calm him down enough that he’s no longer running on adrenaline and pure panic. He has the space to think now, beyond the next step, the next second.
He turns the corner into what looks like another empty hallway. At one end, there’s a door; at the other, more empty hallway ending in another turn. Porsche stops to listen for a moment. No distant sound of footsteps; just the steady hum of the Leviathan’s engine-guts churning and a faint mechanical chittering.
A faint mechanical chittering that’s getting steadily louder and seems to come from the open end of the hallway, beyond the bend.
Porsche has no idea what that could be – security drones? more random engine noises? – but he’s not sticking around to find out and no way in hell is he going back the way he came. The closed door is also not an option, so he looks around for a place to hide.
There’s a vent in the wall he’s pressed up against. It’s near the ceiling but not too high for him to reach and probably wide enough that he could squeeze his shoulders through. Only one way to find out.
The gate covering the vent opens easily. He sets it on the ground and pulls himself up, feet first, into the vent. The slide in is easier than he would’ve imagined: the vent shaft is angled slightly downwards and there’s enough room that his shoulders barely touch the sides. He wiggles around, careful not to slip too far down, and finally manages to roll over on his front.
He pulls himself up to the open mouth of the vent shaft and peers out and down into the hallway. The mechanical chitter is louder now; Porsche can distinguish different beeps and pitches. Whatever is making that noise can’t be a security mech, so that’s a relief. He cranes his neck to see further down the hallway and that’s when they come into view.
The little critters – the DRDs.
Porsche should’ve figured that’s what the noise was. It’s no wonder the DRDs are out stalking the corridors: intruders boarding a Leviathan, blowing past its security measures and severing the control collar mid-flight had to have done some damage to the ship. Not to mention the damage the Luxan and his qualta blade did, chasing Porsche through the hallways and shooting at him.
The cluster of DRDs are coming around the corner into the hallway. One of the little drones breaks off from its group and stops right under the ventilation shaft where Porsche is hiding, its little eye-stalks moving slowly from the grate Porsche left on the ground and up towards the open shaft. Porsche holds his breath and lets himself slide further inside, praying to whatever gods are listening that the DRD can’t scale walls.
It can, but Porsche doesn’t get to find out, because his foot slips and he slides down the inside of the ventilation shaft with nothing to grab hold of or slow his fall.
His scream as he goes down probably echoes through the entire ship. So much for staying hidden.
--
III. Pete
“Hey, so, not to put pressure on you or anything,” Pol starts as soon as the call connects, his voice crackling with static interference. Reception is terrible this far out in the Uncharted Territories, even with priority subspace access. “But Khun Noo has been asking about you every hour on the hour for the past couple of days and it’s starting to drive even me up the wall. So please – put me out of my misery and give me something to appease him with.”
Pete laughs into the headset and course-corrects a few degrees. His fuel is a little low, but it should be enough to get him to the next checkpoint. He keeps an eye on the deep space radar, but it’s more out of habit than anything. This stretch of space is completely uninhabited; the worst thing he might run into would be a stray asteroid.
“I sent him a message right before I left the base, must have been an hour or so ago,” Pete says.
“It would’ve been better if you’d called instead,” Pol points out. “You know how he is about messages.”
Pete sighs. “I really couldn’t. Secret mission, secret base, you know how it is. But you can tell Khun Noo that I’m safe and on my way back.”
There’s a loud noise on Pol’s end, followed by a burst of static that makes Pete wince and drowns out what Pol says next. Pete only catches the tail end of it when the reception clears.
“--tell him yourself.”
“What?”
“I said–”
“PETE!” Tankhun’s voice comes through the headset, far too loud for comfort and with the buzzy quality that comes from speaking too close to the receiver. A moment later there’s a click and a new window pops up on the holoscreen in front of Pete, giving him a slightly laggy but very close up view of the least flattering angle of Tankhun’s face. “Oh, my dear Pete, I missed you so much! Are you okay? You look so gaunt – have they not been feeding you there? Those monsters – starving my Pete! Oh, I will have words with my father about this – they can’t take you away from me and keep you there for weeks and not–”
“Khun Noo,” Pete cuts in, a touch more forcefully than he normally would, but he knows that once Tankhun picks up steam, he’ll keep ranting until he exhausts himself and Pete won’t have a chance to get a word in edgewise. “I’m fine, really. The mission’s over and I’m on my way back. I’ll be home in just a few days. Even sooner if I can rendezvous with the Janus – I know Commandant Kinn is eager to return to the Home Systems too.”
It’s never not disconcerting to watch Tankhun shift between expressions like flipping pages in a book. He goes from furious to elated in the blink of an eye.
Pete braces himself for… something. There’s always something with Tankhun.
“That’s such a good idea, Pete!” Tankhun gives him a brilliant smile and claps his hands once, like he’s come to a decision. “I’ll tell Kinn to wait for you; that way I’ll have both my brother and my favorite bodyguard back with me on the same day!”
Oh, hell in a handbasket.
Pete sputters and starts to flail. It’s pointless to try to change Tankhun’s mind once he’s set on something – and it doesn’t take much to make him fixate in the first place – but Pete has to at least make an attempt.
“Please, you really don’t have to, Khun Noo! I’m sure I can make it to Lat Yao on time, please don’t inconvenience the Commandant on my account.”
Tankhun dismisses his concerns with a wave of his hand and an airy “don’t worry about it”, already moving offscreen, presumably to call his brother and tell him to put his long-awaited time off on hold while Pete drags his sorry ass to the rendezvous point.
Great. Just great. That’s sure to land him on Kinn’s shit list.
Pete hangs his head and groans. He catches a flicker on the holoscreen out of the corner of his eye and it snaps him out of his mortification. A message from command.
On the call screen, Pol has moved into view and is opening his mouth, no doubt to tease Pete, but Pete’s focus is already on the blinking alert.
“Hold that thought,” he tells Pol and opens the message.
A lot of things happen at once.
Pete catches the beginning of the message – high security channel, restricted only to emergency alerts, Code Black – before the entire holoscreen flashes red and then goes dark. Everything goes dark, then a beat later explodes into light and a sound so deep it knocks the air out of his lungs. The Prowler rattles with him inside it like a toy house caught in a hurricane, coming apart at the seams, pulled in different directions.
The hull cracks. In the hollow silence after the boom, Pete can hear the metal splinter and groan, the air hissing out. The cockpit isn’t sealed – and why would it be, when the entire Prowler is designed to be nothing but an airtight coffin armed to the grills? For a delirious second, Pete wonders which is going to kill him first: the cold, the decompression, or the lack of air.
He’s pulled out of contemplating his gruesome end by something snapping outside the ship, hitting the hull and dragging down the entire length of the Prowler with a piercing screech. Pete grits his teeth and covers his ears, but it doesn’t help. The sound scrapes the inside of his head raw until it feels like his brain is going to start leaking out of his ears.
Abruptly, it stops.
Dead silence.
Then the Prowler shakes violently, nearly dislodging Pete from his seat even with the harness holding him in place, and begins to move, pulled in by some inexplicable force. Pete scrambles for the controls, but everything is dark, dead, unresponsive.
There’s nothing he can do.
He’s trapped in a metal box, floating in dead space, reeled in like prey by something that took his entire ship offline in a flash and nearly tore it asunder.
There’s nothing he can do.
He screams.
--
IV. Porsche
The ventilation shaft doesn’t go on forever, though it certainly feels like it. Porsche has excellent reflexes, but they don’t help him much when he comes out the other end at almost breakneck speed. His fingers barely graze the end of the ventilation tube. He tumbles down into the waiting darkness below.
He’s incredibly lucky though, in that what awaits him at the end of his fall isn’t a hard floor but some sort of liquid instead. It has the weirdest consistency of anything Porsche has ever felt, both viscous and airy, and it’s freezing fucking cold – and, as Porsche realizes when he comes up for air, it’s not even wet.
It smells something awful though: sharp and metal, like stomach acid and fuel, but the stink is mostly harmless and it’s not even the worst thing he’s ever had to smell. He used to work the late shift in a bar, when the factories let out. This doesn’t hold a candle to the kind of gross stuff he’s had to scrape off floors and bathroom sinks.
At least this smelly gunk doesn’t seem to stick to skin, though it’s definitely doing something weird to his jumpsuit. Porsche shakes his arms to get the stuff off his sleeves and hears something plop in the fluid surrounding him. In the dim light that seems to emanate from below somehow, he sees it’s a piece of his sleeve.
Great. If he doesn’t find a way out of this pool of stink soon, this weird jello is gonna eat the clothes right off his body. For a stupid second, he can picture it: himself, running through the hallways with his bits dangling free, dodging shots while an angry Luxan shouts obscenities at him in his guttural language.
It’s such an absurd image that, in spite of the situation, Porsche starts laughing.
And doesn’t stop.
It’s like a pressure valve opening – there’s no stoppering it once it’s let loose. It spills out of him in a rush, all the tension and fear and adrenaline flushing out of him until he’s left gasping and hiccuping, tears running down his face, but feeling lighter than he’s ever been since this whole mess started.
Eventually, the laughter subsides to giggles and he gets his breathing more or less under control. The hiccups are a lost battle – it’s been like that for him since he was little. Once they start, it takes nothing short of an act of god – or his mother distracting him with stories – to make them stop.
He waddles around for a bit in the pool of Leviathan goop, trying to orient himself. It’s difficult to see anything in there; there’s light, but it’s dim and it seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. The fluid amplifies some of it but not enough for Porsche to see the limits of his enclosure. He picks a random direction and starts swimming.
He quickly grows tired. For all that the fluid is light and airy when he’s floating aimlessly around, it resists him as soon as he starts moving with purpose. It’s like swimming in sand. After only a handful of stubborn strokes, Porsche is out of breath.
He stops. Glares at the goop eating away at his clothes.
“From the bottom of my heart,” he says, “FUCK YOU!”
As if summoned by his screaming rage, a beam of light cuts through the dim and lands a hand’s breadth from where a piece of Porsche's ruined sleeve is slowly and quietly melting away to nothing.
“You okay in there?” a voice shouts from somewhere up above.
Porsche lets out an unholy screech.
--
V. Kinn
The call with High Command is off to a good start.
The Grand Chancellor is apparently “busy with important state matters”, his secretary informs Kinn, but the Vice Chancellor has his whole afternoon free and would be more than happy to entertain a call from his nephew.
“Kinn, you look well,” Vice Chancellor Gun greets him when the call connects. “I see the Uncharted Territories agree with you. I’ve heard good things about your progress with the peace talks.”
Kinn tamps down on his rising frustration. His uncle is a consummate politician; he eats, breathes and shits PR-approved soundbites, but underneath the smoke and mirrors of his public persona, he’s a despicable sonofabitch with a black hole for a heart. There’s no love lost between them and they both know it. Why play the role of a caring family member when there’s just the two of them here, Kinn doesn’t know and doesn’t care to know. He has questions that only High Command can answer and time is of the essence – and if his father is unavailable, then uncle Gun will have to do.
“This isn’t a social call, uncle,” Kinn says. “We have a situation. A Leviathan has been stolen from the docking bays at Lat Yao.”
“Oh?” Gun raises an eyebrow. “Well, thank you for informing us, nephew; it’s good to be kept in the loop with the goings-on in the borderlands. But is this really the kind of situation that needs to be brought to our attention? We have bigger concerns here than the whereabouts of a single prison ship.”
Kinn’s eye twitches. “Her name is Falla,” he says through gritted teeth. “She was reinstated three years ago on father’s orders. She, and four others.”
He pauses, takes in the subtle shift in his uncle’s expression.
“So you see,” he continues, “this is exactly the kind of situation that concerns High Command.”
On the call screen, Gun shifts and clears his throat, jaw tight. “I see. The Leviathan must be captured at all costs, then. We cannot let its cargo fall into the wrong hands.”
It’s not the first time, not by far, that Kinn hears his uncle refer to the beings in the Peacekeepers’ employ as lesser, mere objects to be stashed out of sight until there’s a use for them. It’s not even the first time in recent memory, but it’s still jarring to hear it – the lack of empathy, of humanity, in this man that raised two sons of his own and helped his father raise him and his brothers.
Maybe that’s why they all turned out the way they did. Taking in poison with every breath from the moment they were born had to have twisted something in them beyond repair.
However distasteful he might find it – might find him – Kinn has a job to do and his uncle is just a source of information. As soon as he gets it out of him, Kinn will be on his way to catching the Leviathan and he won’t have to think about the rot inside his own family.
“It might already be in the wrong hands,” Kinn says. “We know next to nothing about who orchestrated the theft, other than they’re skilled enough to have disabled the security measures of a hi-sec prison and taken off with a Leviathan, all in under an hour.”
“They had to have had help from the inside,” Gun says.
Kinn shakes his head. “If they did, then they took their inside man with them. But none of the station or prison personnel are missing, and they all cleared interrogation.”
Gun hums and narrows his eyes. “But you have something, don’t you?” he says. “A lead.”
“Perhaps,” Kinn acquiesces. “Falla was transporting a single prisoner, but there’s no official record of them. On paper, Falla transported nothing, nowhere. The only reason I know there even was a prisoner is because the DRDs log all resource allocations. There was a single occupied cell; standard temperature and air filtering, standard meal times – for one. This narrows it down to about three dozen possible species and about a billion names.”
A muscle in Gun’s jaw twitches. “And?”
“And I need a name,” Kinn says.
The expression on Gun’s face twists into something nasty; then, a beat later, it smooths out into the placid look he reserves for public addresses and political debates.
It’s his “you won’t get anything out of me” look. Kinn has his work cut out for him.
“You understand that the mere existence of these five Leviathans is the highest of state secrets. The identities of the prisoners is above that. I hate to say this, nephew, but you simply don’t have the clearance.”
Kinn’s mouth twists into a smile. “But I have enough clearance to know the names of the other prisoners and the whereabouts of the other four Leviathans. And that none of them have ever so much as been delayed at checkpoints, let alone attacked or hijacked. So you understand why I need to know exactly what I’m dealing with.”
There’s that crack in Gun’s composure again, that twist in his expression that betrays his anger. Kinn has seen it before, but never directed at him. This isn’t the first time he challenged his uncle or questioned his reasons; they’d had much more heated arguments in the past, some of which ended with Kinn getting his way, but never before had his uncle looked at him with such venom.
Whatever this is, it must be about more than just the well-beaten path of uncle and nephew butting heads.
“What you need to know,” Gun says with barely contained fury, “is that you have the full force of the Armada at your disposal. Use them as you see fit. Retrieve the Leviathan. Destroy it if you must; the cargo too. Whatever it– takes.”
And with that, his uncle ends the call.
Kinn leans back in his chair, stares at the “call terminated” message on the holoscreen and replays the entire conversation in his mind. Every word, every nuance of tone, every minute shift in his uncle’s expressions. Something went wrong somewhere. Something went catastrophically wrong.
Everything about this interaction played exactly like all the other arguments they had throughout the years. Kinn would come with a demand or a proposal; his uncle would oppose it. He’d fight tooth and nail to have it his way. Sometimes he’d win, other times he wouldn’t, but there was always a very clear point of contention in all of their arguments. Except today.
What had set his uncle off today? In the past, Kinn had come to him with demands far more outrageous than the name of a prisoner of war. Just who exactly had they spirited away on a black ops prison ship that his uncle didn’t want him to know about? Unless…
Unless.
This had to be it. This had to be the reason why his uncle shut him down so abruptly, why he looked moments away from losing his entire shit – he didn’t know.
Whoever this escaped prisoner was, the Vice Chancellor of the Peacekeepers had no knowledge of them.