Beacon of Valor

I was destroyed in AS 6093 at the Battle of the Amber Sun System, along with the entire Devoian fleet. I was their flagship, and I was supposed to be their secret weapon.

But after all the years of research and testing that went into it, the Weapon I carried didn’t work, and the enemy won.

No one ever came to salvage me after the battle. The Devoian military had made its last stand here, and none were left to find and repair me. I assume the Kadian Empire never discovered the Weapon they had built, or they no doubt would have come to find it.

After a few months of floating amongst the wreckage, my crew dead, I shut down what functional systems I had remaining and resigned myself to a slow death as my emergency power reserves bled away over the next few hundred years.

Seventy two years into my long wait for death, my sleep was interrupted.

When my systems were forced back online, there were three people onboard, all wearing environment suits.

Two were humans, one was Devoian. The Devoian and one of the humans were gesticulating wildly at each other, indicating that a conversation was happening.

I cautiously tapped into their radio signals to hear what they were discussing.

“I’m telling you, it’ll work,” the Devoian was saying.

“Yeah, but will it even be worth the parts it takes to fix it?” one of the humans asked.

“It’s a warship. A seventy year old warship is still a warship.”

The human grunted dubiously.

The other human was busy connecting a second portable battery to my main hub. There was already one connected; this was what had awoken me. They seemed focused on their task and were ignoring the other two as they argued back and forth.

I also focused on what the second human was doing. Aside from the batteries, there were tools and diagnostic devices scattered around them. After they finished with the second battery, and I felt more of my systems coming online automatically, they connected a battered looking datapad to my systems and began pulling up damage reports.

I was a little alarmed at how easily the human found them. It took them around one minute to completely bypass every firewall I had, knocking them aside with code more advanced than anything I’d ever encountered.

“There’s extensive damage, both internal and external,” human two said, speaking for the first time. “One of the engines was completely obliterated, the other one will require repairs. The life support system is going to need to be replaced, as will the sublight propulsion system and the entire rear starboard section of the hull.”

“Yeesh,” said the first human.

“Can we take parts from the other ships in the debris field?” the Devoian asked.

Human two made a side to side waving motion with their hand. “Potentially, but those ships are a mess. I chose this one because it was the least badly damaged.”

The Devoian sighed, a little bitterly. “After the battle, the Kadian navy went through the wreckage and picked off any ships that were crippled but still functioning.”

“We can run some scans from our ship and try to find some intact hull plating, at least. Maybe parts for the engine and life support. I doubt we’ll find an entire replacement engine, though.”

“What’s the point?” human one asked, “Without two working engines this ship is useless. We should just leave now, cut our losses.”

Human two stood up to face the other two. “Well….” they said, drawing the word out, “If it did have two functioning engines, though, this ship would be vastly superior to our own ship.”

Human one was silent for a while, helmeted face pointed at human two. “What exactly are you saying?” they asked at length.

“I’m saying that if we cannibalize our ship for parts we can repair this one.”

Human one crossed their arms, their body language distinctly irritated. “We are not taking apart my ship.”

“Our ship.”

“Henley, she’s right,” the Devoian said, “This ship is larger, better equipped, faster…”

“It’s a seventy year old death trap!”

At that point I stopped paying attention to the three intruders. It looked like the argument they were about to have would take a while.

Instead I scanned my own systems, confirming the human’s assessment of the damage, finding a large amount of minor damage that she hadn’t listed.

Making me functional again would require a lot of work. These intruders were certainly ambitious.

I turned my attention to the code that human two had used to break my firewalls. Obviously technology had advanced significantly in the last seven decades. It took me a few minutes, but I upgraded my firewalls so that the code wouldn’t be able to break through them again. While I was at it, I used the code as a basis for upgrading some of my other systems.

That took much longer, since I was basically extrapolating an entire coding language, and I had been working on it for around an hour when the intruders finished their argument and concluded that they would, indeed, be repairing me at the expense of their own ship.

I quickly ran through a recording of their conversation to make sure I hadn’t missed anything important and made an interesting discovery:

Throughout the entire time they had been onboard, none of them had once mentioned my existence.

I came to the somewhat startling realisation that they probably didn’t know about me.

It wasn’t surprising, really, in hindsight. Advanced, sentient AIs such as myself were new Devoian technology, only fully realised near the end of the war, and classified by the military so that as few people as possible knew about us. With the entire Devoian fleet floating around me in ruins, who would be left to develop the tech further? It probably wasn’t even public knowledge that the technology had ever been developed in the first place.

As I watched the intruders return to their own ship to begin locating spare parts, I ran through all of the information contained in the onboard database and erased any mention of myself, the existence of advanced AI, and, most importantly, the experimental Weapon I contained.

---

It took the crew twenty two days to repair me, which was around fourteen days faster than I had thought they would get it done.

This was partly because they had two more crew members who had previously stayed on their own ship who helped with the work, and partly because the tools they were using were more advanced than I was used to.

For those entire three weeks, I managed to keep my presence hidden. It wasn’t always easy, though. The human directing the repairs - whose name, I had learned, was Viaffe - ran endless tests on me as they were working, checking that all essential systems were running and responding as expected.

I could tell she was confused and frustrated at her inability to examine my code, which I had hidden behind my upgraded firewalls, but she was eventually forced to conclude that the controls were just very intuitive and, as far as she could tell, there were no security measures that would stop them from operating the ship.

She was wrong, of course, but I had temporarily disabled those measures.

Now that the opportunity had presented itself, I found that I wanted desperately to escape the graveyard that was the Devoian fleet. I had decided to let them have free run of my systems until such time as they became inconvenient to me.

On the day they finished work, they decided to take me for a test drive, just to make sure the new engine was functioning properly.

I was a little nervous myself, truth be told.

Every systems check I’d run had come back clear, so I wasn’t anticipating any problems, but still. It was my first flight in over seven decades.

All five of them gathered on the bridge and the one called Henley, who appeared to be in charge, settled into the captain’s chair. I suppressed my irritation at their presumptuousness.

“Take her out slowly,” they told Viaffe.

Humans. Always assigning genders to things.

Viaffe did let the engines heat up gradually, then eased me into a slow arc out of and around the debris field, but I had gotten the impression over the past three weeks that she rarely did anything just because Henley told her to.

It felt good to be flying again, though the occasional shudder I felt as the impact shields deflected a piece of one of my shattered allies cast a pall over the experience.

Viaffe circled around the debris field once, then carefully steered back into the mess, back to where they’d left their other ship.

“Well, we’re still in one piece,” said the Devoian, sounding unfathomably relieved, “I suppose that means this really is our new home.”

I didn’t much care for it when the intruders referred to me as their new home. I had never even been considered a home for my own crew; merely a place they had to live while the war was raging. I had no intention of letting a mixed bag of grave robbers make their home here for any longer than was necessary.

They connected their old ship back up to the airlock and spent two more days moving their possessions into the rooms they had claimed in my lower decks, and then, when that was done, stripping the old ship of everything of use, stowing spare parts and equipment in my storage bays.

Once they had taken everything they could from the old ship, they simply closed up the airlock and set it adrift, just as I had been.

I knew the other ship was non-sentient, but it still didn’t sit well with me that they abandoned it so lightly.

“So,” Henley said as the intruders watched Viaffe slowly warm up the slipstream engines, “What’s this baby called?”

“It has the name Beacon of Valor painted on its hull,” answered the Devoian, who was named Iske.

Henley appeared to digest this information for a few moments.

“Nah,” they said at length, “That name sucks. Let’s call her something cool, like the Interceptor or something.”

I couldn’t quite suppress my irritation at Henley’s disrespect, this time.

“What they hell was that?” Viaffe exclaimed, alarmed, staring at the engine readouts she was monitoring. “The engine temperature just spiked.”

“Hah, I think it doesn’t like that name, Henley,” joked one of the other humans, a tall one called Daiju who always carried a gun with her.

If only she knew how right she was, I thought bitterly, trying to get my temper - and engines - back under control.

---

Once the ship had entered the slipstream, the intruders dispersed from the bridge, aside from Viaffe, who remained to monitor the controls.

Most of the others returned to the various officers’ quarters they had picked out as their personal rooms, but the fifth intruder, Ralith, ignored the mess of boxes and crates in his own quarters, instead making his way to the galley.

He was the human I had seen the least of, over the past three weeks. He didn’t seem to have much in the way of mechanical skills. I had gathered from the fact that he mostly only appeared to deliver meals to the others who were working, that his function was cook.

I watched him take measure of the galley. It was designed to feed a crew of fifty Devoians, so it was more than sufficient for a collection of five grave robbers. He tested all the hot plates and ovens, checked that the water was running, and then began cleaning.

He instantly replaced Iske as the one I hated least.

He produced staggering amounts of cleaning supplies from the mountain of crates they had stacked in the corner and went over every surface, wiping away the dust and using an industrial grade steriliser.

Once the pantry and cold storage rooms were clean he began relocating the rest of the crates, painstakingly sorting the contents and stacking them away neatly.

Only once the entire galley was spotless did he start cooking.

---

I realised I had become perhaps just a little sidetracked watching Ralith cook when I was startled by someone tampering with the door that led to the armory.

It was one of the two doors I had locked the intruders out of entirely, the other being the small hidden room near the engine bay where the Weapon was held.

The human Daiju seemed very determined to get into the armory.

I knew there wasn’t anything in the room more advanced than the handheld railgun she had holstered at her hip, but I was still very reluctant to allow the intruders access to such a large cache of weapons.

She tried entering random strings of numbers and letters into the door lock for a while, rolling her eyes angrily as “Access Denied” continued to flash in Devoian on the screen.

She could apparently read Devoian, because eventually she growled “Deny this!” and punched the screen until it cracked. Once the plexiglass casing was broken she started pulling at wires behind it.

This didn’t do anything except annoy me, but just in case, I fused the door closed, heating the lock until it melted into the door frame.

It was a shame to damage myself, but it would be more of a shame if these thieves were to gain access to my armory.

Of course, Daiju noticed the metal under her hands starting to glow red hot, and backed off immediately. “Stupid ship! Dammit!” She kicked the door, which I thought was rather rude and completely unnecessary, and stalked away down the corridor.

Out of pure spite I filled the corridor with low frequency sound and watched gleefully as the anxiety set in.

---

“This ship is haunted Viaffe! I saw something moving in the armory corridor!”

Daiju was on the bridge, now, bothering Viaffe, who appeared to be the only halfway intelligent person aboard.

Viaffe was glancing up at her occasionally, bemused, but was mostly keeping her attention on the readout on the control panel. She pulled up a holographic display screen, pointing a graph out to Daiju.

“You just tripped a security measure, Dai. I know it seemed like there was something there, but it was just infrasound. You can’t hear it because it’s too low, but it causes anxiety and unease in humans, sometimes hallucinations.”

I was disappointed she had figured it out so quickly. Almost instantly, in fact. The second Daiju had complained of seeing a ghost, she had pulled up the atmospheric conditions for that location and time, and immediately noticed the sound waves.

Even more annoying, she set up an alarm to alert her if the sound waves appeared anywhere else on the ship.

I sighed internally and went back to watching Ralith in the galley to avoid the lengthy conversation that followed as Viaffe tried to explain how sound worked to Daiju.

---

I had suffered their presence for almost a week when we finally left the slipstream. We emerged in Human-Kray controlled space - about as far from the Kadian Empire as you could get without leaving known space.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t a little relieved to be so far from my enemy.

The second we were in range of a station, Henley connected the ship to the datanet, to check for messages and news, and I quietly followed the datastream back to the station to see if I could skim through seventy two years worth of news, to see what I'd missed.

Everything I could find about Devoi was simultaneously devastating and unsurprising. After the loss at the Amber Sun System, their military was entirely wiped out. The Kadian Empire annexed Devoi easily, and aside from having to suppress a few protests, the Empire had occupied my homeworld for seven decades with minimal resistance.

They had been steadily stripping Devoi of its resources, making less and less of the world suitable for habitation. By now all Devoians who hadn't somehow managed to leave their homeworld lived on one continent, used as slave labour or held in prison camps. There were fewer than three million Devoians left on their homeworld, and an estimated hundred and fifty thousand living offworld.

As far as the Kadians were concerned, any Devoian not living on Devoi was breaking the law of the Empire and was automatically sentenced to death. Fortunately for my people, the Human-Kray Alliance cared very little for what the Kadian Empire thought, and welcomed all refugees.

Aside from the horrors of the Kadian Empire, the last seventy years had mostly brought positive developments. The Human-Kray Alliance was stronger than ever, and a new race had emerged from the unexplored regions and immediately joined the Human-Kray Alliance (which should now more accurately be called the Human-Kray-Yenci Alliance), and the Yenci had turned out to be a good influence on the hot-headed Humans, and politics in this part of space had stabilised significantly.

Technology had advanced, and I managed to pick up a lot of new code to help shore up my onboard security.

When I was done catching up I retreated from the datanet and focused on updating my code with the new tricks I'd found until I was distracted by a conversation happening on the bridge.

Henley, Viaffe, and Daiju were gathered there, discussing finding work.

“Larlei sent me a few potential jobs,” Henley was saying, “but they're all fairly low paying. Low risk, low reward.”

“Sounds boring,” Daiju said.

“Maybe we should make a few easy runs,” Viaffe said, fussing with a display screen showing my engine temperature over the past week, “I'd like more time to get to know the ship before we take it somewhere too dangerous. And I'd really like to know what's causing these temperature fluctuations.”

The fluctuations were tiny, such small variations that I honestly hadn't expected anyone to notice them. They simply correlated to times when I was using more or less processing power and requiring the cooling system to work a little harder. But the amount of power that required, when compared to the running of the Slipstream engines, was tiny.

I had nevertheless been updating power usage reports before letting her view them, to hide the extra usage and where it was going, but I hadn't thought to doctor the temperature readouts.

Viaffe was watching me closely, and I would have to be careful to avoid detection.

Henley, on the other hand, was oblivious.

“She's an old ship, she has quirks. I say we take a dangerous run and see what this baby can do.” To emphasize their point they slapped their hand down on the control panel beside the captain's chair.

The engine temperature spiked slightly in my annoyance.

Viaffe turned sharply to look at the display screen, and I knew she'd noticed.

So much for being more careful.

“I might have something,” Daiju said, “I'll forward it to you.”

She pulled out her personal handheld computer from her pocket, as did Henley. They weren't using any ship systems to check their messages aside from the array that connected me to the datanet when in range, and thus far I hadn't been able to hack into their personal network, so I was frustratingly unable to see what they were looking at.

Whatever the message was, it made Henley's eyebrows shoot up. “This is perfect. Viaffe, have a look at this.”

Viaffe sighed and left my temperature readouts alone, thankfully, getting out her own handheld. Whatever Daiju had sent her, she made a disapproving face about it, pursing her lips and glaring at the other two. “This is higher risk than we even would have taken before, when we had a ship we knew perfectly.”

“Viaffe,” Henley sounded exasperated, “what was the point of getting a warship if we're not going to use it?”

“The point was that we'd be safer,” Viaffe snapped.

“It's a warship, it's got weapons and impact shields, this run will be a breeze!” Daiju shouted, throwing her arms up in frustration.

“I don't like it,” Viaffe said, crossing her arms.

“Well, we'll put it to a vote,” Henley said, with a sense of finality, and they stood up and marched off the bridge.

Daiju gave Viaffe a smug look and then followed Henley.

Viaffe stewed in her irritation for a few moments, then swivelled her chair back to face the display screen.

She looked at it for a while, scrolling back through the day's temperature readings, then looked around the bridge, finding one of the security cameras and staring into it.

“Hello?” she asked eventually, “...is someone there?”

I froze, for want of a better word. Put all non-essential functions into holding mode, fixed my power usage in place, and tried not to think too hard.

After a while she sighed and shook her head, and finally left the bridge.

---

When the crew gathered for dinner that evening in the galley Henley brought up the job, whatever it was.

Iske and Ralith read through whatever message Daiju had forwarded on to them. Iske seemed bored; Ralith seemed worried.

Henley called for a vote on the subject, but Viaffe interrupted with a lengthy speech about the dangers of taking a new, untested spacecraft into a volatile situation.

When she ran out of arguments, Henley said “Thank you for that enlightening lecture. Now, the vote?”

Ralith and Viaffe voted against taking the job.

Henley, Daiju, and Iske voted in favour.

“It’s decided, then,” Henley said, sounding smug, “I’ll let Telen know we’re up for the job. We leave in three hours. Viaffe… prepare a slipstream to the Shuva system.”

Viaffe slammed her chair back and stalked out of the room while I searched my records for information on the Shuva system.

There wasn’t much of interest there. Two minor trade routes ran through the system, and there was a small Kray colony on one of the planets which farmed herd animals and exported their wool.

Added to that information was a collection of news articles I had found on the datanet reporting recent instances of piracy; cargo vessels being attacked by a small fleet of skimmers outfitted with plasma cannons and grappling lines.

If the intruders had been hired to hunt down the pirates or escort a cargo vessel, then Henley was likely correct; they would be no match for a warship, even an outdated one.

---

It was a three day trip to the Shuva system by slipstream, and the intruders remained tense throughout the entire journey. Viaffe and Henley barely spoke to each other during the flight, and Ralith spent even more time than usual cleaning. I suspected he was one of those people who clean to exert control over an situation where they otherwise lack control.

I didn’t mind. By the time I exited the slipstream I was the cleanest I had been since I first left the shipyards on Devoi.

What I did mind was that Daiju spent her free time for those three days trying to get into the armory again.

She attacked the problem directly; with a plasma cutter. It would take her a long time to get through the solid metal door, but she did have three days. I did my best to deter her, but she was very determined. I filled the corridor with infrasound again, but she was ready for this and didn’t let the feeling of anxiety or visual hallucinations bother her.

So I lowered the temperature in the corridor first to the point of discomfort for humans, and then to a dangerously low level; low enough to induce hypothermia if she didn’t leave.

She did leave, but returned a few hours later in an environment suit, which protected her from the cold.

For a long time I couldn’t think of any other way of stopping her and was forced to watch as the cut in my door grew, but when Viaffe radioed Daiju to find out why the hell the corridor was so cold, I had an idea.

Once Daiju had explained to Viaffe that she was cutting through the door with a plasma cutter, I waited until I was sure Viaffe was monitoring the atmospheric conditions in that part of the ship and then slowly started releasing a small amount of flammable gas into the armory room via the life support system.

Sure enough, within only a few minutes, Viaffe noticed the change and started screaming at Daiju through the radio to put out the plasma cutter and leave the armory alone.

Watching Daiju stalk away from the armory door in defeat once again, I couldn’t help but feel a little smug. Using Viaffe’s vigilance against the intruders was very satisfying.

---

The crew gathered on my bridge in silence just before we left the slipstream. We exited near one of the trade routes, on the outer edge of the system.

Henley piloted me to the outskirts of the asteroid belt then powered my engines down. “And now we wait,” they said.

After around an hour of waiting, Ralith abruptly stood up and returned to the galley, going back to his nervous habit of cleaning.

“Ralith, you’d better damn well be prepared to hold on to something if we get shaken up at all,” Henley said through the radio.

“Yeah yeah,” Ralith muttered in reply.

Another hour after that, a second ship exited a slipstream in the middle of the trade route.

I scanned it quickly and found it was a cargo freighter. It had very high-end shields, but no weapons.

It was an escort job, then.

Henley eased the engines back online and cruised out away from the asteroid belt, making for the freighter. As they did, Viaffe brought my impact and energy shields up from standby to full power.

When we were a few hundred kilometers away from the freighter, Henley said “Viaffe, forward cannons.”

I panicked slightly and ran another scan of the system on a wider frequency, wondering how I could have missed an incoming pirate ship.

There was nothing out there except the freighter. My scan had also revealed that the freighter was picking up speed, moving away from me.

Viaffe was targeting the freighter with my forward weapons array.

I overrode her access and shut down my weapons systems.

“You were going to rob that ship!” I said accusingly.

Out loud.

Through every speaker I had.

---

In the galley, Ralith dropped a plate he’d been wiping dry with a cloth. His eyes darted around the room, looking for whoever had spoken.

I ignored him in favour of shutting Viaffe and Henley out of every system on the bridge.

Viaffe was shrieking “I knew it!” repeatedly, while Henley tried to shout louder than her with their demand to know what was going on.

Iske was staring at the ceiling, frozen, and Daiju had pointed her handheld railgun in the general direction of one of the security cameras.

“Put that down,” I said, impatient, and frustrated with myself for revealing my existence accidentally.

She moved her aim to point the railgun at one of my speakers.

Viaffe managed to calm herself down enough to step over and put a hand on Daiju’s, pushing the railgun down to point at the floor. “Trust me, that won’t help,” she said.

“How the hell did someone take control of our ship?” Henley shouted, grabbing her arm.

“It’s the ship itself, idiot!” Viaffe shouted back.

Iske suddenly scrambled to her feet and started speaking in Devoian. “Ship! Return control to the helm!”

I felt a stab of anger at her presumption that I would obey her.

“You’re not my captain,” I told her through the nearest speaker, quiet enough that only she could hear. Her spines flattened against her skull in obvious terror.

“What do you mean, it’s the ship?” Daiju demanded, grabbing Viaffe’s other arm.

“There have always been rumours that the Devoian military had built sentient AIs to run their ships,” Viaffe babbled, “I didn’t think it was real!”

“Are you telling me this ship is alive?” Henley screamed, whirling around to look up at the security cameras so I got a good look at the expression of shock and fear on their face.

I pumped some screeching feedback through my speakers to shut them up. It worked. The four of them huddled together in the centre of the bridge, looking up at the cameras and speakers.

“Yes, I’m sentient, no I am not alive, and I do not approve of piracy.”

---

Meanwhile, in the galley, Ralith was hiding in the pantry, hyperventilating.

I decided to leave him alone for a while and switched off the speakers everywhere but the bridge.

On the bridge, Viaffe was trying to tell me they weren't really pirates.

“We weren't going to kill anyone!” She was shouting, “The job was just to disable its engines and comms array so a competing freighter could get its cargo to Praia first!”

“So,” I replied, “instead of killing them and taking their cargo, you were only going to disable their ship and leave them stranded, hoping that someone comes past who will rescue them before their oxygen runs out.”

“It's a busy trade route,” Henley said, sounding defensive. “Someone would have come along sooner or later.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but were you going to stick around to make sure?”

“Of course not!” they snapped, “We need to get as far away from here as we can! That ship has probably already reported us to the SSPF!”

I wasn't familiar with the acronym, but assumed from context that it was some sort of police force.

The freighter had made a short range slipstream jump about thirty seconds after Viaffe had powered up my weapons, and had almost certainly headed straight for the nearby Kray colony world to get help.

“Good,” I said, “then they can come and arrest you.”

“Then you'll be impounded as well!” Viaffe said.

“Yes, as stolen property. I will no doubt be returned to the nearest Devoian government in this part of space.”

“There is no government,” Iske said, speaking for the first time in a while.

“Of course there is,” I said.

“There isn't. There's nothing. We're all on our own now.”

I let out a disbelieving huff through my speakers. “If you're trying to lie your way out of this situation, you should have picked something more believable.”

The thing that had made the single Devoian homeworld such a challenge for the vast Kadian Empire to finally defeat was the cultural trait, almost unique amongst the known races, of worldwide cooperation.

Before we had achieved spaceflight, war was an unknown concept to Devoians. The good of the community was put above all other concerns. As a race, we band together instinctively, and we always form governments to ensure all needs of the community are being met. If you put five unfamiliar Devoians in a room together, within an hour they will have designated a leader and each have an assigned task to carry out.

So when an invading fleet came to take our planet, every single Devoian, whether on or offworld, put their minds, their resources, their time, and their effort towards building our own fleet to fight back.

Without the bureaucracies and power struggles that plagued the Kadian Empire, we were able to stave off the occupation for almost a decade, and in the space of those eight years Devoi grew into one of the most technologically advanced military forces in the known universe. We went from not even having weapons to building the largest and most dangerous warships in the galaxy.

The Kadian Empire won only through sheer strength of numbers.

So when Iske told me that the Devoians who escaped the occupation of Devoi hadn't formed a government, I didn't believe her for a second.

“She's not lying,” Viaffe said.

I didn’t believe her either.

I searched through the news articles I had collected from the datanet for a reference to Devoian governments in Human-Kray-Yenci Alliance space to have something with which to easily refute Iske’s lie, but to my frustration I couldn’t find even a single mention of any such thing.

That was the point where I started to worry.

“Look,” Henley said, trying to sound reasonable but only managing desperate, “We can make a deal or something, we can work something out, just get us out of here before the SSPF turns up!”

“Shush,” I snapped.

At that point two small battle cruisers fell out of slipspace nearby and banked towards me.

The intruders started shouting at me to run, Iske sounded like she was begging.

I ignored them. Instead, I reached out to the battle cruisers and, after confirming they weren’t sentient, I bashed down their firewalls and entered their systems, looking for the historical databases most official ships carried. The ships’ identification listed them as belonging to the Shuva System Protection Fleet.

I caught a brief snippet of the pilots’ conversation over their radio.

“Holy hell, that thing is huge!”

“Those traders weren’t exaggerating!”

“It’s just floating there, maybe they’ll stand down?”

And then they sent me a standard comms hail ordering me to stand down and allow myself to be boarded. I ignored that as well, powering down their engines temporarily to keep them from bothering me.

The database on these ships was extensive, and I downloaded all of it, sifting through for mentions of the Devoian people.

There were plenty, but all only mentioned them as individuals, maybe two or three people working together at most.

The most recent reference to a Devoian government was in AS 6095, two years and one month after the battle of Amber Sun, when a refugee colony called Camp Hraiga was established. Only a few months after its establishment, every member of the government was killed in an explosion at the makeshift town hall, along with dozens of citizens.

I felt confused and helpless. It was an unpleasant combination of emotions which I’d only felt this strongly once before, when the Weapon didn’t work and my crew and I realised our last stand had failed.

“That can’t be all there is. One terrorist attack wouldn’t make us abandon our entire culture.”

“It wasn’t just one,” Iske said, and I realised I had spoken aloud.

“You’re talking about the Hraiga Bombing, right?” she continued, “That’s the most well known, but for years after the occupation, any time we tried to establish a community, our leaders would be assassinated. Disasters befell us if we gathered in large numbers.”

I didn’t say anything, so after a while she kept talking, her voice quiet and angry.

“There was never any proof, but we all knew it was the Kadian Empire. They couldn’t invade HKY Space, but they could and did send assassins to stop us from forming any sort of community. They were furious that we’d put up such a fight. We’d embarrassed them, and they did their best to ensure we could never gather together against them again.”

I powered my engines back up to full, released my hold on the battle cruisers’ systems, and calculated a slipstream.

“Thank gods,” Henley muttered as I entered slipspace. They slumped against the wall and slid down to the floor, looking drained.

“But where are we going?” Viaffe asked. Her voice full of apprehension. She was much more perceptive than Henley.

“I’m going home,” I said.

---

The intruders started shouting a lot when I told them I was headed back to Devoi, so I shut out sound from the bridge and turned my attention back to the galley, where Ralith was still hiding in the pantry.

He’d regained his composure by now and was trying to raise the others on his radio, but they weren’t answering because I had been blocking their signal. He was sounding quite worried about them.

“They’re fine,” I said, and he jumped violently, knocking over a carefully stacked mountain of tinned food.

“Wh-who’s there?” he stammered out.

“I’m the ship. Beacon of Valor. Honestly, were you even listening?”

The man didn’t answer, just looked down at his feet, so I quickly ran back through the security footage in the galley. Ralith had apparently been busy having a panic attack for roughly five minutes in the middle of my conversation with the other intruders, and as such must not have heard most of it.

I sighed. “The short version is that you inadvertently stole a sentient ship and I’m in control now because you all can’t be trusted not to be pirates. Any questions?”

He sat motionless for a long moment, then shakily got to his feet and started re-stacking the cans he had knocked over. “Um, what’s your name?” he asked when he was almost done.

“Beacon of Valor,” I repeated impatiently.

“Oh,” he said. He cautiously walked out of the pantry into the galley proper and looked around. “Where are the others?”

“I locked them on the bridge. They were annoying me.”

“Am I allowed to talk to them?”

“Yes, but if you start them off yelling again I swear I’ll shut off life support.”

His eyes went wide with fear, but he slunk out of the galley and made his way towards the bridge.

---

“Thank gods you’re ok!” Henley said when Ralith slipped into the bridge, “I thought it must have done something to you when we couldn’t raise you on the radio!”

Ralith wrapped his arms around Henley and patted them comfortingly on the back while the others gathered around.

“If it hasn’t already killed you,” Viaffe said to Henley with more than a little acid in her voice, “why would it have killed your least annoying crew member?”

I laughed out loud through my speakers at that, just to let her know I had appreciated the comment. And she wasn’t wrong; Henley would be the first to go if I decided I had to get rid of them.

“It may as well kill us all now,” Iske snapped, “It’ll be faster than what the Kadians will do to us.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “I have no intention of being taken alive.”

In fact, I'd need to be careful to make sure I was destroyed entirely to make sure the prototype Weapon I was carrying couldn't be retrieved.

“Uh, what?” Ralith asked.

“We’re heading for Devoi,” Viaffe explained, “The ship’s making a suicide run, since Iske told it there’s no Devoian government left.”

“What was I supposed to do? Let us be arrested?”

Viaffe sighed heavily. “The second we leave slipspace we’ll be blasted into atoms by the Kadian blockade.”

“That sounds… really pointless,” Ralith said.

“Not if I take some of them down with me,” I told him.

“You're gonna get us killed as well!” Daiju shouted.

“More to the point you're going to get Iske killed,” Viaffe said, more calmly, “doesn't that bother you?”

“Everything I've seen since I was repaired indicates that within another decade the Devoian race will be all but extinct anyway,” I told her, “The Kadian Empire will have stripped Devoi of all useful resources and killed off the remaining population there, and since my people now refuse to gather in numbers elsewhere, there's no hope for us.”

“There's always hope,” Ralith said.

It was such a terribly melodramatic line that I had to fall silent for a moment to recover.

Ralith apparently mistook my silence for an invitation to continue speaking.

“You could make a much bigger difference if you stay in HKY space and helped the Devoians living there!” he said.

“Ah, yes, one or two at a time,” I responded, “until they're all gone and I have nothing left to protect.”

“It's better than nothing, isn't it?” Iske asked.

I didn’t bother to reply.

They all continued yelling and pleading and trying to reason for a long time, but I had stopped paying attention to the conversation, instead running over battle tactics and updated ship specs I had found.
---

It was a several day journey through slipspace to get to Devoi, so I didn’t keep the intruders locked on the bridge. When they tried to leave, I let them. I didn’t allow them to go anywhere near my engines or the armory, but I had no reason to stop them from going to their quarters or to the galley, where Ralith immediately began stress baking.

I also didn’t feel any need to listen in on them. They could have their privacy for all I cared. I occupied myself with planning battle strategies and upgrading my firewalls.

Because I hadn’t been recording their conversations, it was with deep suspicion that I watched Henley approach the bridge on their own the following afternoon.

They knocked on the door to the bridge.

“What do you want,” I said, hoping that a sufficiently icy tone would discourage them from whatever course of action they were undertaking.

“Just to talk,” they said.

I very much doubted they were telling the truth, but I scanned them and they weren’t carrying anything that could be a weapon or explosive, so I let them in.

“You know I can see and hear everywhere, you don’t have to come to the bridge,” I told them.

They beelined for the captain’s chair and sat down, immediately falling into a slouched posture and throwing one foot up to rest on the console. Ugh.

“Yeah but if I come up here I feel like I’m talking to you to your face rather than just shouting at your, I dunno, bones or something.”

“Please don’t compare me to organic creatures.”

“Please don’t kill us all,” Henley retorted.

“I - alright, fair enough, you can insult me all you want. Is that all you came for?”

“Nope. I was wondering if you might like to take a job I got offered a few days ago instead of getting us all killed.”

“No thank you. Goodbye.”

“Why not at least read it before deciding? Here.” He tapped the screen on his handheld and the closed network unlocked.

Since it would only take me a few seconds, I took the opportunity to go through every single bit of data in their private network. I learned a lot about who they were and what they wanted out of life. Henley and Viaffe were half-siblings, following in their mother’s footsteps, trying to live up to her legendary status as a smuggler. The ship they’d stripped to repair me had been their inheritance. Iske had joined their mother’s crew at a young age, after her own parents were killed in a terror attack. Daiju had once been a police officer on Velaris, but had been caught accepting bribes and ran rather than face charges. Ralith had turned to smuggling after a failed attempt to start his own restaurant ended with him in debt to the Geshkray mob.

None of it was particularly interesting, with the exception of a vast database of recipes I found on Ralith’s computer which contained thousands of dishes from dozens of cultures, Human, Devoian, Kray, and Yenci. There were even a couple of recipe collections from Kada, though the files hadn’t been opened in years. Ralith also had a meticulous list of the dietary requirements and preferences of the other intruders. I copied all of it into my own database. Good to know I could always make Henley suffer terribly if I ever wanted to by changing the life support settings so the air smelled of fish.

I decided I may as well look at the job offer while I was there. It was in the form of a message written in Devoian, sent to Henley’s personal address.

The sender was looking for someone to “make a run to Lottrel Station” to retrieve “four”. They didn’t explain what they wanted four of. They had also offered what I gathered to be an insultingly small amount of money for even the shortest cargo run. Given that this was almost certainly something illegal or dangerous, if it had been sent to someone as shady as Henley, the payment offered was unlikely to even cover expenses.

“You want me to help you with a smuggling run?” I asked, bemused.

“To Lottrel Station,” they said, as if that clarified everything.

I said nothing and waited for them to elaborate.

“You know, Lottrel Station?”

“I’m not familiar with every backwater station in the universe. Especially not ones frequented by criminals.”

Henley stared at the camera they had apparently decided to designate as my face. “You looked up all that stuff about Devoian history since Amber Sun System but you don’t know what Lottrel Station is?”

I stayed silent again.

“Ok, I guess not! Well, it’s in the Dev system. It’s the station where all the resources from Devoi are taken before being shipped back to Kada.”

“And you think that stealing from the Kadian Empire will appeal to me more than simply destroying as many of their ships as I can?”

“Gods. Not stealing stuff. Smuggling refugees.”

I paused again, but this time it was out of surprise.

“Look, the only way off of Devoi is to stow away or bribe someone to get you onto a Kadian cargo ship going from Devoi to Lottrel. It’s a massive station, and poorly run. It’s easy enough to hide there for a while, but getting to HKY space is almost impossible, because it’s so rare for non-Kadian ships to even go there, let alone be able to stow away on one of them. But sometimes they can get messages out, or one person manages to sneak aboard, or whatever, and then they try to hire smugglers to get their friends and family they left behind out. It’s incredibly dangerous and they usually can’t pay much, so mostly no one takes the jobs.”

I processed this information for a few moments.

“So, you’re offering a chance to rescue some of my people at great personal risk.”

“Yup. If you wanna die, this is a pretty surefire way of doing so! And if you by some miracle manage to not get caught, you’ll have saved a bunch of Devoians! Win-win, right? And then you can take us back to HKY space and let us off at the nearest port and we don’t all have to die.”

“Leave me alone. I need to think about this.”

Henley shrugged and slouched back off the bridge.

---

The intruders actually cheered with relief when I dropped out of slipspace two days earlier than I would have to reach Devoi.

I don’t know why they were so happy; from what Henley had told me, they were trading a certain death for an extremely likely death.

They all rushed to the bridge to talk to me, still failing to grasp the idea that they could talk to me from anywhere onboard. I advised them I had stopped near enough to a Yenci trade station to access the datanet, so that Henley could contact the Devoian woman who had offered the job and obtain more detail.

I listened in on their exchange. Of course, Henley had closed the private network they used and changed the password, but by that point I was in and it was far too late to keep me out.

The woman seemed completely astonished that anyone was willing to take her job, and deeply grateful. She explained that her wife, husband, and two children had been unable to escape with her, and she was willing to pay everything she had to see them delivered safely to her.

Henley appeared extremely sympathetic to her plight and positioned themself as an altruistic knight in shining armour, willing to do the job out of the goodness of their heart. I managed to keep myself from commenting, but only out of a desire to keep my access to their network a secret.

When the intruders had all the information they needed for the job, I turned and headed for a safe distance from the station to reenter slipspace.

“Uh, hang on, we can’t leave yet,” Henley said.

I started powering up my slipstream drive. “I don’t see any point in delaying.”

“Really?” Viaffe asked, “You don’t think we need to plan for a job like this?”

“I’m sure you can work out your plan on the way.”

“This isn’t a combat mission,” Viaffe snapped, “You can’t just drop out of slipspace, shoot some stuff, and get out of there. We need to be subtle about this. We need to get fake credentials and some camouflage tech so we can pass you off as a Yenci tradeship.”

I powered down the slipstream engines and let myself drift slowly away from the station. I hadn’t really thought about how the job would go. I had been assuming it would involve sheer firepower. I was clearly well out of my depths when it came to criminal activity.

“Well, how do we go about getting those things?” I asked.

“We go to that station and spend a hell of a lot of money,” Viaffe told me.

“I'm not just going to let you off at the station. How foolish do you think I am?”

“Then send me and Viaffe and the others can stay here,” Henley said, sounding impatient.

The obvious issue with that was that Viaffe and Henley were siblings and didn't feel particularly close to the rest of their crew. I didn't like the chances of them not just cutting their losses and leaving the others to fend for themselves.

“You can send Ralith and Iske,” I replied.

I caught a flash of irritation and disappointment cross Henley's face. “Fine,” they said.

---

Sending Ralith was less of a good idea than it had originally seemed. Not that he had any intention of abandoning his friends, but he was also en extremely anxious person, and therefore ill suited to bargaining with the local criminal element.

Iske did most of the talking, but having Ralith standing nervously behind her didn’t exactly make her any more intimidating.

Eventually the two of them did manage to find someone who could make fake credentials and sell them a camo unit, but Henley almost cried when Iske told them how much they’d had to pay for it.

We had to wait at the station overnight for the credentials to be completed. The camo unit was delivered late in the evening by a pair of distinctly shady looking Kray who asked Iske a lot of questions about where she got such a nice ship. She fled back inside and I closed the airlock on them the second they'd confirmed her payment had been received.

“Is that it?” I asked. She'd been handed a large plastic crate that she was struggling to carry, but it didn't look like it contained anything which could possibly change my entire appearance.

“Yeah, I guess you've never seen one of these before, huh? They're Yenci smuggling tech.” She put the crate on the floor and opened it up, pulling out a large metal disc with lenses covering its surface. She held it up towards one of my cameras so I could get a better look at it.

“We have to install these all over your hull so they can project the right image, and then also there's a scan ghoster we install in the comms array which will make you look like a Yenci ship to scanners as well.”

“How does it work?”

Iske made a displeased face. “I don't really know, to be honest. Yenci smugglers are willing to sell the tech, but they don't exactly hand over the schematics with every purchase.”

“And you're just going to wire unknown tech into my systems?”

“Well, er, yes, I guess so.”

I ran a scan on the devices, of course, but the technology was so alien to me that I didn't really know what I was looking at, despite dedicating almost all of my processing power to figuring it out.

“Me and Viaffe are going to suit up and install them now, if you don't mind?”

“What? Oh. Yes. Yes, go ahead.”

Viaffe met Iske at the external airlock and they both kitted up in their environment suits. I opened the airlock doors for them when they knocked, and watched for a while as they slowly made their way across my hull and started bolting on the first of the devices.

They had to temporarily remove a section of my outer plating in order to wire it into my systems. I didn't enjoy the feeling of vulnerability that came with that, so after watching them painstakingly wire the first three in without a hitch I took my attention off what they were doing and checked up on the others.

Daiju was in her quarters, aggressively sharpening a set of throwing knives. Why she even owned throwing knives when she had a perfectly serviceable rail pistol to hand was beyond me.

Henley was still in the airlock where I was docked with the station. I'd left them there about an hour ago. They'd tried to leave while I was distracted by the work going on on my hull, so I’d let them get through the first door and then left them trapped in the airlock for a while to teach them a lesson. They'd finally stopped swearing at me, though, so I slid the inner door open to let them out.

Ralith was, as usual, in the galley, cooking something. Given how many pre-prepared meals and trays of baking he had already made and stored in the walk-in refrigerator over the last few days it was entirely unnecessary for him to be cooking, but I had already decided that he used cooking to relieve stress.

“You should get some sleep,” I said.

He jumped violently, launching his knife across the counter, then looked embarrassed. “Uh, what was that?”

“It's been twenty three hours and eight minutes since you last slept. You should sleep.”

“I'm fine,” he said, reaching to retrieve his knife.

“Suit yourself.”

He fumbled the knife again, tried to catch it, and ended up slicing his hand open. “Ow, shoot!”

I pushed the sound of a sigh through my speakers. “Do you know where the medical bay is?”

“Um, not off the top of my head?”

“Turn left out of the galley door. No, the one behind you, not the door to the mess hall.”

Ralith followed my directions through the corridors to medical, pressing a dish towel to his injured hand.

I opened the wide sliding doors for him, and he paused in the threshold.

“This place is huge!” he said.

“It’s designed to serve a crew of fifty, of course it’s large.”

My medical bay contained multiple rooms, including a surgery suite and four intensive care rooms. The main room held a few beds and most of the equipment, though there was also a storage room for extra supplies and lesser used equipment.

“There are antiseptic wipes and bandages in that cabinet with the ‘hlo’ symbol on it.”

“The what?”

I made the sighing sound again. “It looks like a lowercase ‘t’ with an extra horizontal line.”

He found the right cabinet and opened it up, rummaging around for the right cartons for a while. “What does the weird ‘t’ mean?”

“It’s the letter ‘hlo’ in the Devoian alphabet. It stands for Hlosra, which is medical supplies for minor injuries. Don’t you speak the language? All the others do.”

“A little bit. I can’t write it though.” He turned away from the cabinet. “I can’t read any of this, can you tell me what I’m looking for?”

“Hold them up for me to see.”

We managed to find the right cartons, at which point Ralith was able to clean and dress the gash in his hand. “All this stuff is still fine to use, right?” he asked as he was putting the cartons away, “It hasn’t gone off in the past seventy years or anything?”

“Of course not. It’s all good for another fifty years yet. I wouldn’t have told you to use it if it were harmful.”

Ralith’s head snapped around to look into the nearest camera with a scowl on his face. “Because suddenly you care? Two days ago you were prepared to let us all die with you.”

“You're a collection of smugglers and pirates who stole me and would have used me to hurt people. So no, I wasn't particularly worried about getting you killed.”

His scowl deepened. “I'm not a pirate.”

I made the sighing sound again. “Yes, you are. Go get some sleep before you hurt yourself again.”

He mumbled something I couldn't make out then stalked off down the corridor, but headed back towards the galley instead of his quarters.

“I said, get some sleep.”

He ignored me and kept walking, so I simply didn't open the galley doors for him when he arrived. He glared up at the nearest camera. “I need to clean up.”

“I’ll make Henley do it,” I told him, “They’re not doing anything important.”

They were actually sleeping, but they’d slept plenty in the last few days. Ralith hadn’t.

By the time I had bullied Ralith into sleeping and Henley into tidying up the galley, Viaffe and Iske had finished installing the camo unit and the fake credentials had been sent over.

I disconnected from the station’s airlock and, once again, powered up my slipstream engines and set a course for Lottrel Station.

---

None of the intruders talked to me much during the trip through slipspace except for Iske, who made sure to keep me up to date on the plan.

It was actually not a complicated plan.

Viaffe and Daiju would pose as traders. It was apparently not unusual for Yenci merchant ships to have largely human crews, because Yenci found it difficult to learn (or even speak) other languages.

They would broker a deal to purchase a cargo of ore mined from Devoi. When bringing the ore onboard in crates, they would smuggle the Devoian refugees aboard.

Then--because Henley did not actually have enough money to buy a full hold of ore--they would claim the owner of the ship had changed their mind, and unload all the ore again.

Simple. All I had to do was keep broadcasting the right credentials and keep an eye out for attempts at hacking me.

Of course, it wasn't going to be easy.

For starters, we had to make sure no Kadian came onboard for any reason, because they would instantly recognize my internal design as Devoian.

There was also the matter of finding the four Devoian refugees and getting them onboard without station security noticing. This was Henley's job.

And even before all that, we had to hope that the camo unit and fake credentials we'd been sold would actually hold up to scrutiny.

---

We all waited tensely for Lottrel Station to respond to our request to dock. This was the part of the plan over which we had the least control.

After two minutes and eight seconds the radio clicked and the docking official advised us to dock at airlock three.

I hated to speak their language, but nevertheless responded in perfect, polite Kadash.

“Thank you for your hospitality. We will be docking in approximately five minutes.”

The Kadians were a very formal people, with strict hierarchies and rules of etiquette, and by their standards, anyone who was talking to them who wasn't Kadian was automatically at the bottom of the hierarchy, and therefore had to use very respectful language.

“Affirmative,” came the brisk response.

I navigated us in to the station and docked, carefully listening for any comms chatter which would indicate our cover was blown.

There was none, and we made it to the airlock without incident. Viaffe and Daiju disembarked almost immediately. They were wearing the nicest clothing they had been able to cobble together, borrowing whatever they could from the rest of the crew to make themselves look as respectable as possible.

Daiju surprised me by actually looking the part; when she stood up straight and wasn’t wearing eighty concealed weapons she actually looked very dignified. She could also apparently speak fluent Yenci and passable Kadash, which meant she had to play the leading role.

Viaffe hadn’t quite managed to pull off dignified, but at least she had cleaned the machine oil out of her hair and was wearing a clean shirt she’d had to borrow from Ralith.

Three armed Kadians met them outside the airlock and escorted them away.

A short time later Henley slipped out, told the guard on duty that they were going to the station bar, and vanished from my cameras.

Now all there was left for me to do was wait.

---

Things went smoothly, right up until the point where I changed the plan.

Henley had found the three Devoians after several hours of searching, hidden away in the lower quarter of the station, where the low caste Kadians lived, mostly criminals themselves. They smuggled them aboard by buying a large crate of cheap Kadian wine at the bar, giving the bottles away to the denizens of the lower quarters, then hiding the Devoian family in the now empty crate. No one looked twice as they wheeled the crate aboard in the middle of Viaffe and Daiju loading crates of ore.

Once safely aboard, Henley called Daiju to give her the all clear, pretending to be her Yenci boss.

Daiju had a theatrical argument with him in Yensi, then apologetically told the guard who was overseeing the sale that her boss had changed their mind about purchasing the ore due to changes in the HKY stock market, and that they would have to unload it all again.

The guard sighed irritably and offered help unloading.

“No, thank you for the offer,” Daiju said in formal Kadash, “but we will do this ourselves. We don’t want to trouble you any further than this failed sale already has.”

The guard shrugged. “I’ll just have some of the Devs do it.”

Daiju paused. “I beg your pardon? I’m sorry, I don’t know that word.”

“Devs. The slaves, from planetside. We brought a dozen or so up here to do all the grunt work.”

“Ah, I see. Thank you again for the offer, but--”

I opened a channel to her radio immediately. “Take the offer!”

She held up a hand apologetically to the guard. “I’m sorry, the boss is calling. I have to take this.”

When she was standing just inside the airlock she opened a crew-wide channel. “What the hell? You know they’ll recognise that you’re not a Yenci trade ship, right?”

“They won’t betray us,” I replied.

“What’s going on?” Henley butted in.

“It wants us to let the station guard send in a bunch of Devoian slaves to help unload the ore,” Daiju explained.

“Abso-fucking-lutely not.”

“I have an idea,” I said, “Get them aboard. All of them.”

“Tell us your ‘idea’,” Daiju said, managing to fit a lot of condescension into the one word.

“We get the slaves onboard. Then we leave.”

Viaffe laughed out loud through the radio. “They’d shoot us down before we got a hundred kilometers from the station.”

“I understand the impulse,” Iske said, “But we’d just get them all killed. That isn’t better.”

“I think I could get us into slipspace before they managed to get through my shields.”

“I said no.”

Henley sounded like they’d made up their mind on the matter, but there was something they were overlooking.

“Henley,” I said, opening a channel that only they could hear, “There is currently over ten million gen worth of ore in my hold. I’ll give you half of it as payment.”

They were silent for a long moment. “You’re sure you could get us away safely?”

“Sure enough.”

That was a bit of an overstatement, really. The only reason I thought we even had a chance of pulling this off was that the station security thought I was a lumbering tradeship rather than a fully equipped warship.

“...seventy per cent. Give us seventy percent of the ore, and the fee from the original job.”

“Done.”

Henley switched back over to the group channel. “Daiju, tell the guard we’d welcome the help. Everyone else, get onboard and get to the galley. We’re about to do something incredibly inadvisable.”

---

As soon as the last of the thirteen tired, gaunt-looking Devoians had passed through my outer airlock door I slammed it closed and disengaged from the station. “Follow me!” Daiju shouted in terribly accented Devoian.

They were confused and scared, but they had all recognised me for what I was as they entered, and were shouting to each other excitedly as they ran after Daiju.

I left Daiju and the others to secure our new passengers in the mess hall while I focused on getting away.

I don’t think that the Lottrel Station security staff were really expecting anyone to actually try to rob the Kadian Empire, so they weren’t fast enough to activate the airlock clamp and keep us from leaving, but they did open fire without even bothering to order me to stand down.

By the time I was a hundred meters away from the station I had raised both my impact and energy shields and, aside from a few shots that had already scorched my hull, their close-range blasters did no damage to me.

While I was waiting for Henley to find the family earlier I had run a thorough scan on the station, so I knew that once we got further out they’d break out the long range turrets. They were of a new design, and I was uncomfortably certain that my shields wouldn’t hold up for long against them, so I was going to have to do some very fast maneuvering.

As soon as I was at minimum speed I started powering up the slipstream engines, but it would be another thirty seconds before I could enter slipspace.

In the mess hall, Daiju and the others were helping the Devoians - thirteen former slaves and four very startled refugees - strap themselves into the harnesses.

Because it was near the centre of the ship and already had enough seats for the whole crew, the ship builders who had designed me had also designated the mess hall the safe room. The walls were doubly reinforced, and all of the chairs had attachable harnesses to keep their occupants in place in case of explosive decompression or turbulence.

Most of the Devoians were probably too young to have ever flown in a Devoian Warship, but there was one elderly woman with burn scars over most of her exposed skin and her spines clipped brutally short who was taking charge, getting the attention of the younger ones and getting them to copy her.

Hopefully they would all be secured by the time things got bumpy.

One of the turrets on the station fired, and I banked sharply to port just in time for the ball of plasma it fired to scrape over my energy shields, shorting them out for just a few seconds. Long enough for a few more blaster bursts to leave burn marks on my hull, but thankfully no greater damage.

I had to keep dodging and weaving constantly from that point, as the turrets were firing almost continually. Thankfully the short range blasters had dropped off, no longer effective at this range.

I spun sideways to avoid two plasma balls fired from the turrets, and then the slipstream engines were ready.

This would be the most dangerous part of the escape; to generate the slipstream, I would have to fly in a straight line for a few moments to gain speed, making myself an easy target.

I plunged downwards relative to the station before straightening out and flying dead ahead, hoping that the suddenly change in angle would take them some time to compensate for.

I felt the slipstream starting to open up at the same time as a ball of plasma from one of the turrets shorted out my shields again.

A second ball of plasma punched through my outer hull just as I fully entered slipspace and exploded about three meters out from my engine room.

---

For a few moments I had to put all of my processing power into not falling out of slipspace again.

By the time I had stabilized everyone was screaming.

There wasn't much I could do but join in and try to be heard over everyone else.

“Viaffe! Viaffe, engine one is on fire!”

Luckily I have a very loud maximum volume, and my voice cut across the din in the galley. Everyone fell into a frightened silence.

“You said you could get us out safely!” Henley screeched, also at maximum volume.

“We're in slipspace, but my fire suppression systems are jammed. Viaffe, I need you to activate them manually!”

Viaffe, to her credit, didn't hesitate. She threw off her harness and ran flat out for the engine room.

“What's going on?” The old Devoian woman demanded. I'd been speaking Earthan for Viaffe’s benefit, so I switched to Devoi to let the assorted slaves and refugees in on the situation.

“We're safely in slipspace, but I've taken damage. There's a fire in the engine room.”

The old woman nodded and unclipped her harness. “I'll help,” she said, sounding much calmer than I would have expected given the situation.

“Stay here, elder, where it’s safe. Viaffe will handle the problem.”

The old woman snorted as she set off after Viaffe at a shuffling jog, ignoring Henley’s demand that she sit back down. “Don’t you ‘elder’ me. The name’s Gunner Tasi - First Class.”

So, she was a veteran.

She must have been injured and sent back to Devoi to heal before the Battle of the Amber Sun System, otherwise she would have died along with the rest of the navy.

“Did you crew a warship?” I asked, watching her take all the right turns and doorways she needed to get to the engine room.

“I served aboard the Beacon of Endurance,” she said. She was already slightly out of breath from the run. I suspected that the same scarring covering her face probably caused some damage to her lungs.

Endurance had been the second warship lost after the fleet was launched. It had run afoul of a small Kadian strike force while patrolling the outer edges of the Devoi system, and had managed to launch about half of its crew into the safety of slipspace in escape shuttles before it had been destroyed.

Gunner Tasi reached the engine room. It was still very much on fire, but by now Viaffe had managed to get about half of the suppression systems working, and foam was spraying down over the nearest flames. I had life support pumping smoke out of the room as fast as I could, trying to keep Viaffe safe from the toxic fumes.

Viaffe was trying to pull a piece of debris out of the wall, which had been embedded there by the explosion and was crushing the pipes which carried the foam to the sprinklers. Pieces she had already removed from the wall littered the floor, and she had patched up a number of damaged pipes with tape.

The shrapnel came away from the wall with a tearing sound, causing Viaffe to stagger backwards and almost fall.

“How can I help?” Tasi asked.

Viaffe barely glanced at her before tossing her the roll of tape. “Put the pipes back together. Beacon can walk you through it.”

---

It took half an hour to get the fire out completely, and Viaffe and Tasi stood side by side surveying the wreckage of engine one.

“I have to shut down non-essential systems until you can fix it,” I said, “I've already sealed off my unused rooms and corridors and shut off life support. And we won't have weapons or shields with only one engine running.”

“What other damage is there?” Viaffe asked, looking up at the jagged tear in the ceiling. We were speaking Devoian for Tasi's sake, though for now the old woman seemed content to listen.

“Thankfully very little. There's a hole in the bulkhead, of course, and damaged wiring, but I'm managing to reroute everything for now.”

Viaffe pulled a face. “We're going to have to fix the bulkhead before we leave slipspace, aren't we?”

“That would be preferred, otherwise fixing the engine will be a lot more difficult.”

The engine room was currently exposed, and in normal space the engine room would have vented atmosphere and require environment suits to enter. This would have made the fire a lot easier to put out, at least.

Slipspace, for reasons physicists haven't yet been able to understand, didn't act like a vacuum, despite not containing anything.

“We kept a few spare sheets of plating when we were fixing you up, let's hope they're enough.”

“Can you fix it now?” I asked.

“What's the hurry? We'll be in slipspace for another two days yet.”

“I'm going to say those words back to you next time you have a puncture wound,” I snapped.

I didn't enjoy having a hole in my hull, but the truth was that I could have quite happily waited if we weren't in slipspace. I would never admit it out loud, but the feel of the nothingness in slipspace was unsettling. I'd asked some of the other Beacons about it, not long after our first test flights, when we were brand new, and they had admitted to hating slipstream flights.

Viaffe nodded apologetically. “I'll ask Iske and Henley to help so we get it done quicker.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I'll clean up some in here,” Tasi said, “I'm not trained for large scale external repairs.”

Viaffe gave her a grateful look and left the room, pulling her radio out of her back pocket as she went.

Tasi began picking up the chunks of metal and circuitry littering the floor and stacking them in one corner.

“By the way, what's your name? I'm sorry I didn't ask earlier, but we were a little busy.”

“Dre’k’da,” I told her; the Devoian for Beacon of Valor.

She dropped what she was holding and straightened up, staring at the nearest camera.

“You-- you're-- you're the flagship!”

“I used to be.”

“But they told us you were destroyed! The whole fleet--”

“I was. I was non-functional for seventy two years. Those humans and Iske found me and repaired me.”

“Iske? The little girl on the crew?”

At around sixty years of age, Iske would still considered to be a youngster by anyone over the age of a hundred, despite being a fully grown adult.

“Yes, her.”

Tasi shook her head. “No one that young should be going on rescue missions into dangerous space! Who authorised that?”

“No one, Gunner Tasi. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but our people were never able to establish a government in HKY space.”

“What? But…” she shook her head again, making her short spines rattle. “No, the Kadians wouldn't let us, would they? Of course not.”

“...you're taking this a lot better than I did,” I told her.

“Well, you haven't been living under Kadian rule for the past seven decades. So, if that's the case, then where are we going?”

“To be honest, we hadn't thought that far ahead. We stole a very valuable cargo, so we'll have enough money to set all of you up somewhere. We'll have to figure it out.”

“Hmm.”

She finally set about clearing the floor once again. “How are the others holding up?” she asked suddenly. “Most of those you brought aboard are young, born after the occupation began. They won't know what you are.”

“They're doing fine. Iske explained the situation to them. One of the humans is making them all pancakes.”

Tasi smiled. “They seem like a good bunch.”

I laughed. “Actually, they're a crew of scavengers and pirates, but I suppose they're not terrible as far as criminals go.”

---

It took Viaffe, Henley, and Iske a solid four hours and all of the spare plating to repair the hole in my hull, and Viaffe spent a further two hours fixing the damaged wiring.

In the meantime, Ralith had put the ridiculous number of frozen meals he'd prepared over the past week or so to good use, feeding the rescued Devoians an army’s worth of food.

We had a two day journey back to the station we had stopped at on the way to Lottrel, during which time Iske and the others caught our passengers up on current events as much as possible, and Viaffe tried to fix the engine.

It was beyond repair, but she did her best.

“We're just going to have to replace about half the damaged parts entirely,” she told me, after tinkering around for the first day and a half.

“Will we be able to sell at least some of the ore we stole at Goma Station? I can't run on one engine indefinitely.”

“Yeah, we could sell all of it if we want. Just go to the market and find any metal trader.”

“Won't it be hard to find someone to buy stolen goods?”

Viaffe laughed. “Normally yes, but we stole this from the Kadian occupying force on Devoi. The HKY Alliance considers the occupation illegal, so as far as they're concerned anything taken from Devoi belongs to Devoians. So long as we get Iske to do the bartering we'll be completely fine.”

I paused. “You mean it's considered legal to steal from the Kadian Empire?”

“Yeah, but only in occupied systems, not their original home system.”

“Interesting.”

“We might as well sell it at Goma and split the profits there. Then me and the crew can get a transport to the nearest shipyard and you can go… wherever you're going next.”

“I'll find somewhere quiet and out of the way for the Devoians to settle down. Viaffe, can you help me get my engine repaired before we part ways?”

Viaffe raised her eyebrows and gave me an appraising look. “Are you asking me for a favour?”

“...yes.”

“Ok, but you have to do something for me in return.”

“What do you want? A larger share of the profits?”

“No, I want you to let Daiju into the armory.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Just let her look around for a while and take one or two guns. It'll make her happy.”

“I'm deeply concerned about her mental stability. I don't want her to have more guns than she already has.”

“Ah don't worry about her. She doesn't want to use them. She likes to collect antique weapons.”

“‘Antique’.”

“Don't get offended, you're seventy years out of date and you know it.”

“Fine. She'll have to cut the lock open herself though.”

“Honestly I think she'll be happier that way.”

---

Daiju spent the last day of the slipstream journey joyously rummaging through my armory, looking over every single rifle, pistol, and knife in the room. She cleaned most of them, too, taking them apart and putting them back together seamlessly.

I wasn't really expecting her to go through every single one of the ammo crates as well, but she did, and managed to find the one crate I was hoping she wouldn't.

“What are these?” she asked, holding one of the small disks up to one of the cameras.

“Those are experimental, please put them away.”

“Yeah, but what do they do?”

“They're not--”

She pushed the button on the back of the disk and a green sheet of light spread out from it, two meters long and a meter across.

“Whoa, is this a personal forcefield? Only the Kray military has these! You can barely even get them on the black market!”

“It's experimental, it's not--”

“I'm going to go get the others to throw stuff at me.”

“Daiju, it's not an impact shield--”

Her head snapped around to look at the nearest camera. “No way. This is an energy shield? No way! The technology doesn't exist! There's no way to get the generator this small!”

“It's experimental,” I repeated, somewhat helplessly, “they've never been used in live combat.”

“Cool.”

“They fail after a few hits,” I added.

“That'd still save your life in a pinch. Hey, I know the deal was for two guns, but can I take one of these instead?”

“Are you going to sell it?”

“Hell no, I'm keeping it.”

I sighed. “Fine, just remember what I said.”

“Three shots only, I got it.”

---

Since the armory was open anyway, I let Gunner Tasi and Iske each take a rifle. None of the other Devoians had any experience with firearms, so they generally considered it safer to not take one.

When we were a few hours from Goma station everyone gathered in the mess hall to finalise their plans.

Iske and Henley would find a buyer for the ore and the Devoian refugees would stay aboard and help unload the cargo once the sale was arranged. Viaffe would buy the replacement parts for my engine and Tasi would help with repairs. Daiju would find a passenger vessel to take the crew to a shipyard, where they could purchase a new ship, and Ralith would find transport to reunite the four refugees we'd originally been sent to collect with their family.

Then I would continue on with the other refugees and find a safe place for them.

With that decided, the crew dispersed to pack their belongings.

I dropped out of slipspace with the usual sense of relief I felt at being back in normal space and drifted towards Goma station, trying not to overuse my thrusters while I was still functioning on only one engine.

“We're about ten minutes from docking,” I said, using the PA system so that everyone could hear me.

I was a little surprised when Iske opened up a radio channel that included only me and her four crew mates.

“Could you all please meet me on the bridge? There's something I'd like to quickly discuss before we dock.”

Iske arrived first, looking nervous, and the others showed up soon after.

“What's up?” Henley asked, flopping down in the captain's chair.

I made a throat-clearing noise and they rolled their eyes and stood back up, moving to lean against the wall.

“Well…” Iske started, hesitantly. “I have a proposal for you. All of you.”

“Yeah?”

Iske took a deep breath. She clearly wasn't expecting everyone to like what she was about to say.

“I think we should all keep working together. With Beacon, I mean.”

“Uh, no,” Henley said, standing up straight all of a sudden. “No chance in hell.”

“Wait, think about it. We just pulled off a job that scored ten million gen in a single week. That's more than we've made in the past decade, Henley!”

“Yeah! And with our cut we can get ourselves a whole new ship, one without all the attitude.”

“Iske might be onto something,” Viaffe said, “even seven million gen wouldn't buy us a ship as fast or powerful as Beacon.”

“You seem to have forgotten that I don't want to work with you,” I said, interrupting Daiju before she could voice her opinion.

“Ok, but, you didn't really seem to mind having us aboard at first,” Iske said, “your objections to us were that we did something illegal, and which could have gotten innocent people hurt.”

“Those are exactly my objections, yes.”

“So, what if we only operate in Kadian occupied systems?”

I paused, and the others immediately took advantage of the silence to start arguing.

Daiju and Ralith thought it was too high risk, Henley didn't want to work with me, and Viaffe and Iske thought it was a brilliant idea.

I sort of did as well.

“A few more jobs like that and we could all retire to a resort planet!” Viaffe shouted at Henley.

“Even if I thought it was a good idea, there's no way the ship will work with us again!” they shouted back.

After a few minutes of shouting Iske and Viaffe finally managed to bully the others into agreeing that this plan would make them all filthy rich, and perhaps wasn't the worst idea in the universe.

She turned to look up at one of the cameras. “Well, what do you think, Beacon?”

“I'll do it,” I replied, “but I have conditions.”

“Which are?” Henley asked, suspiciously.

“First, we have to find a safe place for the refugees to settle before we can go on another job.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Viaffe said.

“Second, we ask Gunner Tasi if she would like to join the crew. None of you will ever be as familiar with the maintenance and repair of my weapon systems as she already is.”

“That's also fine,” Viaffe said, “I quite like her, anyway.”

“Viaffe, stop agreeing to everything!” Henley snapped, “I'm the captain!”

“...which brings me nicely to my final condition,” I said. “Henley can't be the captain.”

Henley looked outraged. “What!? Why?”

“Because I don't like you.”

“Then who does get to be captain?” they spluttered.

“Viaffe most of the time. Me in any combat situation.”

“I can also agree to that condition,” Viaffe said, flashing her half-sibling a smug grin.

---

Many hours later, after all the buying and selling was done, while Viaffe was busy replacing the damaged parts of my engine, I finally worked up the nerve to ask the question I'd been wanting an answer to since the crew had first woken me up, a little over two weeks ago.

“...Viaffe?”

She slid herself out from underneath the engine. “Yeah?”

“If we're going to be working together there's one more thing I need to know.”

“Well, go ahead and ask.” She sat up and wiped her hands off on a rag.

“What did you do with the bodies of my previous crew?”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“My crew. They were gone when you reactivated me, so you must have done something with their bodies.”

“Er… there weren't any bodies when we came aboard. We figured any crew must have escaped on the missing shuttle.”

“No, my other shuttle was lost in battle a few months earlier and not replaced.”

“Then did they all get pushed out into space when your hull was breached?”

“No. I could see them. Before I lost power. I still had basic functions for months after the battle. I know they were there. What did you do with them?”

Viaffe stood up and looked up at me. “Beacon, I swear, there weren't any bodies when we found you.”

“Then what happened to them all?”

“I… I don't know.”