The beep of a single alarm.

Shrill. Incessant. Deliberately offensive.

Impossible to ignore.

Breaking the surface of her dream, Jinsin Koel came to gasping. She dragged in chilled air—a sanitised mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and way too little water vapour. The drone of air scrubbers and the noise from the nearby budget laundry poured into her skull, driving back the last of her nightmare.

"Shit." She hauled herself half upright, T-shirt damp on her spine, sheets in a heap beside her bunk. The panic of her dream—fire, sirens, whirling lights—replayed, until the beeping that had woken her drilled back into her consciousness.

She turned to the nearby tech-littered desk to backhand her discarded wrist com—only to freeze part way into the assault.

It wasn't her usual hellish alarm sounding.

Incoming call.

"You are kidding me." She snatched up the device; got an eye-load of herself in the dimmed screen. Bloodshot brown eyes outlined in yesterday's ink. A blue-streaked tuft of black hair standing upright and a clump plastered to her forehead. Her face looked like the rear end of a zormet bug: pasty and moist. Seeing the caller ID, she decided her supervisor could just frigging deal with it.

It was her first day off in sixteen days. Why the hell was Demtong calling her?

"What?" She ditched diplomacy; she was off-duty no matter what. Despite her best efforts—a dozen shots of synth tequila in some trance-club dive—she hadn't achieved dreamless oblivion that past night, just more pain. Her eyes felt like they'd been left out in the planet's arsehole sun for a week. Her throat was as desiccated as the landscape outside Tirus 7's post-war dump of a spaceport.

Cez Demtong's florid face appeared onscreen. His brassy hair stood on end, as if he'd been pulling at it since waking. His cat-like eyes bulged out of his round skull, implants from a feline-human alterant. Retirement gifts from his past job as an Enforcement officer, along with the old laser burns puckering each temple. "You're on duty. Report immediately to Dock 12."

"Yeah, like that's happening. Droe's on call today."

"Four words, Koel: Xykeree goddamn battle barge."

Jinx jerked up straight, fumbling her com. "Roaches?" Her stomach rolled, no after effect of backworld liquor. "Tell me you're joking."

"Legal has just approved landing under some damn humanitarian code. The ship's damaged, needs immediate repair. One condition of safe harbour is a customs inspection. I need you, Jinx, not that zork-snorting prick Droe."

"Humanitarian code? Dem, those cyborg cockroaches butchered billions. Their fleet nearly ended humanity. Screw Legal. Let the bugs float away in their barge and die."

"Formation War's been over fifty years, kid, and the long-range coms are down, have been for a year, so we can't get a read on this from upper management or Coalition military heads. We're fucked, running blind on standard protocols. That means, until we're told otherwise, those aliens are to be considered ordinary space-faring folk just like you and me."

"If we were flesh-eating psychopaths."

"Best get that shit out of your system now, CI. You'll be boarding their vessel in twenty minutes."

"Jee-zus!" She punched off the connection; dove into the carnage of her room to hunt down her entire customs inspector uniform, not just the token pit-stained shirt she'd been fobbing her supervisors off with for the past two years. Her job was routine crap most days, an endless line of try-it-on morons, cargo holds, and illegal tech and pharma. But verbal abuse and falsified shipping documents would be the least of anyone's problems today. A Xykeree battle barge? What the hell?

Ignoring the jump of her gut, she grabbed up her grey regulation pants and snapped on her wrist com. That stifling dream she'd just woken from, one that had started and ended with aggravating alarms, she hoped it hadn't been an omen. A treaty had been struck with the Xykeree after decades of bloodshed, after five desperate species had formed the Coalition to defend their territories, but few had forgotten the war, its body count. A roach military vessel in a Coalition port was a political shitstorm waiting to break, and Tirus 7 was light years from being a centre for diplomacy. Locals knew about mining and illicit drugs, not inter-species treaties.

And with no long-range coms, no one with any kind of damn clue would be running the show.

Shit—it was going to be a typical day on Tirus.

Suppressing a grimace, Jinx slapped down the fly of her pants and considered her supervisor's order to follow standard operating procedures. As far as she was concerned, that meant starting her day with a blinding headache.

She'd needed that day off.

Sleep was not her friend. Not right now. If it wasn't one screwed-up dream, it was another. The other.

Endless screaming.

Not alarms. Human this time, an echo in her throbbing head—one that came with a sense of panic and suffocation.

She was losing her damn—

"Ah, fu—" she ruthlessly cut herself off verbally and mentally. Consigning her last thought to the bin inside her head marked 'psycho shit', she lunged under her bunk for her boots.

*

Fifteen minutes later, she strode onto A-Deck, the port's top level. Its off-white expanse of plexcrete and steel swarmed with dock workers, suited executives, traders, and freight haulers, as orderly as a ship hold plagued with vermin. Side-stepping cargo bots, one arm in her unlaundered shirt, she tried to yank her hair back into a regulation knot. Fresh curses burned her tongue.

According to the mass of staff bulletins that had accumulated on her com overnight, an issue had developed with the planet's satellite array and there'd been a sandstorm the day before that had damaged other systems and backed up flights. The port crowds were already building and tempers with them. Now, thanks to Legal and their humanitarian codes, a wounded alien battleship was taking up a quarter of the top deck.

It was officially going to be a bitch of a day.

Flagging the braid, she settled for a lopsided ponytail. Dragging on the rest of her shirt, she covered her non-reg, lime-green singlet that declared 'Spank Attack kicks acoustic ass!' just before she reached her supervisor.

"You look like crap, Dem."

He cast his cat eyes over her, his almost square hulk somehow managing to top her meagre frame by a few centimetres. "That uniform regulation? It looks like you found it in a trash unit."

"What do you think my room is on what you pay me?" She looked to the industrial, dock-side airlocks lining the deck's walls, to the collection of unsmiling people hovering outside the nearest one. Sweat slicked brows. Hands rode holstered sidearms. Hostile crews were nothing new on Tirus; the port had the pleasure of hosting tech and pharma smugglers, scavengers and other unsavoury salvage operators, and even the occasional predator pirate crew. But they were easily understood foes. The Xykeree were something new, a potential diplomatic nightmare with no official protocol. They'd also featured in more than a few B-grade horror movies since the war, cautionary tales involving a lot of human burger meat. "I get a bonus for this? Danger money maybe?"

"You get an escort."

"I noticed. I'm grateful."

Unfortunately, she didn't think Tipp Olsen and Joe Rolli from Port Enforcement were ready to diplomatically manage a battle barge full of weaponised arthropods. Olsen, all buttoned up in his beige, armoured jumpsuit and carrying a standard-issue shock rifle, appeared to be in a filthy mood—more so than usual. His gangly, heavily tattooed partner, Rolli, was similarly prepared but looked like he'd just taken the edge off his nerves with pharmaceutical help.

Jinx wrinkled her nose. Even from a couple of metres away, she could make out the younger officer's dilated pupils behind his helmet's face shield and smell the tell-tale sweetness of the local drug of the moment, zorcalitim—zork or Z to the junkheads who used it.

But her escorts' nerves and questionable self-medication weren't all she noticed. Now awake and adrenalised, her mind wanted to take in everything—and remember it.

Eidetic recall: a gift from her mother's otherwise ghetto genetics, and most likely the reason Dem had dragged her into this mess. It'd taken her less than ten minutes to ream the local data net for everything it had on class 4-M W90 'Bullhead' battle barges. She now knew the layout and hide holes and the military capabilities of such a craft and its crew. Olsen and Rolli had reason to be nervous.

Everyone did.

She eyed the crew of engineers and technicians moving equipment, tubing, and air scrubber parts across the docks' loading bay. According to the landing documents, the Xykeree had taken damage to their environmental systems and engines. Her friend Soha Wilkirk, Tirus' local expert on warp systems, was among the approaching techs.

Jinx ditched Dem to intercept her friend before the tech could join the sweat-a-lot crowd by the airlock. "Spill."

The tall blonde atypically had a crooked braid and one pant leg tucked into a boot, clearly having also dressed in a hurry. Regardless, she filled out her orange overalls in a way that pleased the general public but annoyed the sensible tech herself. She looked down at the data pad she carried, then shrugged, a one-arm deal that screamed fake nonchalance. "A class four military vessel with a damaged X90 Imperial warp drive. Not something you see every day."

Jinx met her much taller friend's gaze, wary blue eyes behind a slim heads-up-display visor. "I've read the landing docs. Tell me everything they don't say."

"You mean like the vessel's crew claiming local pirates tried to burn a hole through their rear casing, but the standard fuselage on a 4-M Bullhead is a high-grade deut-hex composite, a material only a 5K Torc laser cannon could blast through?"

Jinx arched a brow. "Since when do pirates attack battleships and use military-class weapons?"

"They don't. The void rats around these parts can barely run their basic systems let alone their weapons. And aiming something like a Torc near the engines risks destroying a ship before it can be raided. Bad for business."

Jinx glanced to the scarred open hatch of the airlock. She didn't like what she was hearing, but then she was human and therefore biased. The Xykeree had laid waste to whole worlds, had harvested them like mech locusts. But that'd been decades ago. If the roaches were lying about why they needed to land at a Coalition port now, it wasn't clear what they hoped to gain. Tirus 7 might've been a defensive base in the past conflict, but it was now the arse end of nowhere.

"Soh, do me a favour and have a good look at the landing footage. Let me know what damage you see."

"Sure. You boarding now?"

"Protocol says I have to. Got to make sure the bugs aren't smuggling dangerous tech, chemicals, or biologicals that could melt your face off." Jinx winced as her morbid quip set off a flood of recall: burnt-out streets and half-decomposed bodies, wartime horrors unearthed in her pre-inspection data dive. She forced the images back.

But it took her an uncomfortable moment.

When she was wired, the ability to store vivid sensory information was no gift, spontaneous recall cascades a disorienting side effect.

And possibly the result of other, less useful genetic traits—which she wasn't thinking about now. And preferably never.

Blocking replays of her recent violent dreams, she shot Soh a dry glance. "I survive this, you and your tech buddies owe me. Eth Pit at eighteen hundred. A vat of ja-ja juice with my name on it."

"I hear ya." Soh's smile lacked the tech's usual enthusiasm for drunken debauchery. "Jinx, that ship has enough fire power to take out a small moon."

"Uh-huh, and it's crewed by carnivorous bugs hardwired into robotic death machines. Lucky me." Choosing not to think too hard on what she'd just said, Jinx gave Dem a rude hand signal, finally deigning to acknowledge her supervisor's ever more urgent get-your-arse-moving gestures. "I'll be fine, Soh. The roaches signed a treaty that bans human barbeque, remember?"

"Just be careful. If you think anything is off..."

"We're on a dirt ball populated with inebriated mine workers, their dodgy employers, and a whole bunch of criminals." Jinx walked backwards a few steps before turning to stride off towards her morning's assignment and latest reason to quit her job. "When is something not off on this planet?"