failed. It warned him that he'd only get two more attempts. “I'm going to get the password and make sure the slaves are safe. They'll tell me what's going on on the station once they're free,” he whispered. There was a determination in his tone that sounded dangerous.
Ayan had heard it before on the First Light right before he ordered them to mercilessly obliterate a light carrier. She eyed the log being uploaded from the amulet. Captain Gammin didn't just use the control unit and slave implants to kill people, he used them to administer drug cocktails that made certain members more suggestible, rendered female members of the crew mostly unconscious and boosted alertness in others. The crimes Captain Gammin committed using the devices were endless and according to what she was seeing he was constantly adding new slaves to his crew. The most common use for his amulet was torture, mostly on a young woman named Nerine.
She found the serial number of the other controller and brought up a cross section of the Palamo. A red dot designated the amulet's location, it was in one of the hangars.
A glance back at Jake's status told her that he'd managed to deactivate the Captain's control unit. “Kneel,” she heard him demand.
“Jake, we have a brig. We might need him for more information. He could be a member of a larger group,” Ayan said hurriedly. She watched the rest of the exchange and cringed as Captain Gammin tried to bargain with Jake. Captain Valance's heart rate jumped, his neural statistics indicated a level of anger that would have most Freeground officers relieved of duty and suspended for a month.
“He won't do this again.” Jake whispered over the private comm as he pulled the trigger.
Ayan looked away just in time to avoid seeing the mess his sidearm made of the man.
“What is it?” Jason asked in a whisper.
She shook her head and forwarded the whole record of Jake's boarding action to Jason. The display listed a new contact on the tactical map, a thirty four meter hyperspace capable ship. “Oz, do you see this?” she asked.
“It's up on my screen. My birds are on patrol, the party's over so I can spare a pair,” Oz replied over bridge communications.
“I'll have Chief Frost hit them with EMP rounds. There's a slave controller on that ship, I want it disabled before we bring it aboard,” Ayan informed him.
“All right, once it's disabled I'll have a Uriel haul it into landing bay two.”
Frost came up on her display; “Somethin' for my gunners to shoot, lass?”
“Aye, disable only. Use EMP rounds.”
“Done and done,”
For the space of three seconds five heavy gunnery turrets opened fire, sending hundreds of EMP railgun rounds towards the small interstellar ship. A flare of electromagnetic bursts obscured it for several seconds as the rounds discharged and the Triton’s tactical system noted it as inert when the vessel came back into focus.
“There you go, Oz. Have it brought in then take the command chair. I'm going down with four squads to meet whoever's on board personally.”
“Already tired of commanding a carrier?” Oz asked with a chuckle.
“No, I want to see what kind of scum they dislodge from that ship and meet it personally. Jason can fill you in on what we're seeing up here.”
“All right, on my way up. Chief Vercelli has Flight Command.”
“Going to offer him the same treatment Jake gave Captain Gammin?” Jason asked as she stood.
“Nope. This one's all yours once we get him to the brig. We need information about these people and the sector we're in.”
He genuinely smiled. “Time to put all that interrogation training to work, oh boy. Do you want me to start communicating with the rest of the raider ships and seeing if any of them want to join us now that our Captain has made a mess of their captor?'
Ayan smiled at him over her shoulder. 'Always the clever one. Just make sure we have enough room for fighters once the ships are finished landing.'
It only took Ayan a few minutes to change into the combat vacsuit that the fabrication centre had made for her. It felt like a second skin and she couldn't help but smile a little as all the improvements her and Laura had developed during their time together at Special Projects came on line.
She left the head gear retracted into a hood and strapped her sidearm on as she made her way to one of the main lifts. Two squads were waiting for her when she arrived. The other pair were already in the main hangar.
She was the subject of many sidelong glances at first. Of all of them she was the shortest, but she wore the same armour and had seven slashes on her cuffs, designating her rank as the same as the Captain's. He'd appointed her to the position without telling her and left her to seek out her own place on the ship. It led her to test her skills and get some practice at commanding the Triton in simulation and to her surprise she managed to take control. It wasn't easy, far from it. The Triton was designed as a multi-role close combat carrier and mission platform. It had the capacity to run several operations all at once, acting like a mother ship with sub crews.
Lucius Wheeler had never used the vessel to its full potential in any respect, and it was becoming plain to her that Jake had every intention of doing just that. Oz increasingly took care of day to day operations while Jason organized the security office like an intelligence unit. The Chiefs Jake had appointed were getting better at their jobs and respected the help offered by the former First Light crew. The only Chief that didn't directly benefit from their military experience was Frost, the Gunnery Chief. He was already amazing at his job even though he was a mess off duty in many respects.
Ayan couldn't help but muse about how it felt like a month had passed since she arrived aboard the Triton. It had actually been fourteen days and she had done so much it boggled her mind. With the right direction the crew made fantastic accomplishments and responded very well to her clarity and positive reinforcement even though three in ten often required more training. The largest project she'd participated in was the construction of two replacement engines in the main hangar. When they had settled into the obscured portion of the asteroid field they would replace the pair that Wheeler and the Saviour had ruined.
The one thing that bothered her about the two weeks was the little time she'd had to spend with Jake. She felt as though they were drifting, as though he was becoming less and less open to her as time went on and she was often at a loss for words. Being told she was his biggest problem was the ultimate statement of how far they'd managed to drift apart. She suppressed the wave of emotion as it threatened to overtake her and set her expression in a stern, hard stare.
“If you don't mind me saying so, Ma'am, it's good to meet you. My name's Sean Orlando.” introduced the lieutenant standing beside Ayan.
'I'm glad to meet you too.' She had read that he was one of the surviving military officers from the Enreega system. The details of the taking of the Triton and the refugees from Enreega kept her up far later than she'd prefer to admit a few nights beforehand. The stories were a compilation of several journal recordings volunteered by the crew threaded together with Jacob's accounting.
He was surprisingly articulate. The intelligence and expressive quality of Jonas Valent was in there along with a more sardonic wit and a sort of confidence that came from experience. It was all recorded before Jonas Valent's memories surfaced. That's what struck her.
He spoke of taking a turn for the better when he decided to rescue instead of steal a cargo train filled with slaves. Seeing so many people stowed away for transport, mistreated and left in a barely liveable cargo hold while the hauler dragged them between solar systems was like a personal insult to him. He wished he had remained behind and ensured that the Galleon hauling the slaves was actually destroyed and decided to check arrival logs whenever he made port.
So much had happened to him and the crew of the Samson since they had made that decision, to rescue the slaves instead of steal them for Regent Galactic. It was just as Jacob said in the log; “Some decisions change everything that follows. If I didn't turn away from profit and choose to help those slaves find their freedom I wouldn't have taken the Triton, been in a position to take people on from Enreega and I wouldn't have met Ayan in her time of need.”
That was one of the things that touched Ayan, that she was a consideration in possibly the most influential chains of events in his life. The story that Security Chief Stephanie Vega had pieced together from other people's
