A notification trilled from one of the engineer's consoles and he looked back at the captain of the Song Brother's freighter. The raiel shook his head and gestured for the engineer to handle it. Crewmen were dispatched to the failing system. The damage from the croabarbos breacher ships had been internal as well as external. The hull hadn't been the only system compromised. Raiel ships are designed to intertwine like that of an organic organism. One single nervous system, pulling from various organs. The damaged systems were causing other sub-systems to fail.

They'd been doing emergency repairs ever since they left the battlezone.

Hitman gave Liam a bleak look. "I'll be honest. I'm surprised we've made it this far."

Liam gave Scott a sidelong look, but kept his thoughts to himself. They were on a tight timetable and, despite The Songs begging for forty-eight hours to perform much-need repairs, Scott refused to accept any more delays. Liam couldn't blame him, but with each new system failure it was starting to look like they'd be dead in the water before they reached the rendezvous point. They'd left Raiel Space with a jarring passage through the sound barrier, and had successfully avoided detection by The EC's Third Fleet. Aborting the mission at this point in the plan could prove catastrophic.

Liam wasn't ready to give up just yet.

With a sigh he turned to Scott and signaled for his partner to meet him in the hall. The team watched them leave with mild curiosity. After fighting the toads, a bond had formed between them born of shared adversity. They trusted his leadership now, but both Nubia and Hitman were used to working alone and it would take a little while still before they stopped wanting input on the big decisions. Liam wasn't sure he wanted them to lose that skepticism. There were still scenarios where it would come in handy.

In the hallway, Scott leaned against a wall, fingering the hilt of his plasmatic edge. Despite his cool exterior, Liam realized his partner was anxious.

"What's going on, Spider?" he growled. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"What am I looking at? I just noticed you look—"

"If you compare me to one of those stupid little house cats, I'm gonna—"

"Stupid? They're adorable," Liam countered. "I think they used to be called 'human's best friend'. Even prehistoric earthers recognized the sacred nature of cat cuddles."

"Liam, I'm about to put you through this bulkhead."

"Aww, you're so cute."

Scott growled and closed the distance between them. Liam placed his hands on the big felarnian's chest.

"I yield, brother. I'm just jerking your chain." Having already wound up the big man, it was time to dive into his argument. "I think we need to let them stop for repairs."

Scott glared down at him for a few moments then pushed away, nearly knocking Liam off his feet.

"You're probably right," he snarled. "This hunk of junk is about to fall apart... we're gonna be late."

"Maybe we can make up time once they get those holes patched up." Liam made an effort to stay optimistic under the weight of the felarnian's pessimistic gaze. "We have a window of five standard earth days. If you give them forty-eight hours, we could still make the tail end."

"You hope. This isn't some shit we can aim blindly for and hope for the best. Don't treat it like one of your reckless plans."

"Not my plan, remember?" Liam pushed past Scott, mildly stung by the backhanded comment. "Besides, I hardly miss, kitty."

Scott was on him before he could react. He slipped out of the headlock and drove an elbow into the bigger man's side. Barely slowed, Scott hoisted him into the air and tossed Liam down the hall as if he were merely a beefy child. The wall made a reverberating sound when he hit and Liam fell to the floor laughing. Scott rushed forward, but stopped just shy of arm's reach. His look of rage became confusion, confusion became apprehension.

"Don't tell me you hit your head," he snarled.

"Nah, but I definitely hit a bulkhead."

After a moment's pause Scott started laughing too. Laim pushed to his feet, the pain in his back already becoming a dull sting as his body healed the damage.

"You've really got to work on that temper, partner. Or next time I'll have to shoot your ass."

They both laughed even harder though each knew Liam wasn't joking.

The repairs took a little less than forty-eight hours and the crew pushed the vessel hard to make up the lost time. Liam and Scott stood by the damaged bulkhead, discussing the other half of their plans. The door to the command deck opened and Monch hurried out.

"We have a problem," he said nervously.

"Again?" Liam and Scott groaned in unison.

When they followed the squim back inside, they were greeted by the magnified image of a large space station orbiting a darkly colored ice-planet. Liam felt a weight leave his shoulders. Despite everything, they'd made it. He checked his datapad, comparing his data with the information from the ship's network. Somehow, they were smack in the middle of their target arrival time. He nodded at Scott's raised eyebrow.

"We've made it," he grumbled. "What's the problem?"

"Our sensors are detecting a barrier around the station," Pornim sang. "We're in the process of analyzing its functions. It is likely a security detection web, but conflicting signals suggest it might also be a heat fence."

"A ship this size can withstand the pressure of a heat fence," Liam said when he noticed Scot's ears droop. There was no need to bring attention to the warrior's limited knowledge of defense installations.

"Under normal circumstances, we could scramble the detection software and bull through the fence," Pi remarked. "But in our current condition, our heat sinks might not hold long enough to disperse the radiation and our systems will overload. We'll get in, but we won't be able to get out."

Scott snarled and punched the wall, startling the command crew. Pi and Pornim seemed unperturbed by his outburst. Liam and the rest of the team were used to it.

"What are our options?" Liam asked the room at large.

The crew looked to their bosses, unwilling or unable to give their opinions. Nubia took a moment to ponder. Blockade merely shrugged. Like Scott, the bruiser's skillset revolved around ground warfare, leaving them woefully unhelpful in these sorts of matters. On the other hand, Hitman had a strange sparkle in his eyes. He rubbed his chin then punched data from the freighter's sensors into his datapad. He looked up with a smirk on his lips.

"I have an idea," he said.

The strike shuttle had been equipped with an experimental jamming algorithm that wouldn't mask its presence, but make it look a lot smaller on radar and sonar. If preliminary testing proved positive, they would create a larger version for the micro-station. It would add another layer of security after their clandestine home had almost been discovered by a Pale Garden warship. They were still too small of an operation to go toe to toe with Belladonna's armies, and, if they hoped to one day be large enough, they needed to avoid any more close calls.

Liam studied the beeping of the device with no real metric to be sure it was working outside of: beeping means good and not beeping means bad.

"Here they come again," Nubia hissed.

"I see them, but all we can do is fly straight. If we take evasive action, they will think we're more than just a wayward probe."

"Won't visual confirmation confirm that anyway? We should just shoot them down."

"The jammer is based off of Cheshire. They can't get visual confirmation, that's why they keep coming back! Now let me fly. You're distracting."

"Let you fly? You just punch in coordinates and watch the instrument panel." Nubia scoffed. "I watched you do it about thirty minutes ago."

"Yeah, I let the autopilot do its thing until something happens. Then it will be my turn." He turned away from the instrument panel. "We don't want it to be my turn, Nube."

"Don't fucking call me that," she snapped.

"Yeah, sorry. That would be a horrible nickname."

"The two of you relax," Liam said, standing and squeezing in beside them. He watched through the reinforced windshield. "They're on us."

A swarm of short-range surveillance drones slowed and encircled the strike shuttle, adjusting speed and trajectory in order to match theirs. Liam's skin crawled as more than a dozen cameras twitched back and forth, taking visual readings for the flying machine.

Through clenched teeth he said, "I just had a terrible thought. What happens if they move in for a closer examination? If their sensors are detecting a much smaller signature, they might crash into our hull by mistake."

As punctuation to his concern, a drone did just that, smashing its nose and rotor on the windshield. The sound made everyone sit a bit straighter.

Raven: What the fuck was that?

Scott and Blockade were in the cargo hold, doing a weapons check in case they had to secure the landing zone.

"Something hit us," Hitman whispered. "We'll be okay."

The words scrolled across Liam's optic lenses while he stared out at the other machines with apprehension. Beyond, the station loomed before them. Two-thirds the size of a grid port, Station-Z11221 could hold a small city. Without more intel, he had to assume it was a small city. One the Pale Garden secretly funded through their connections within The EC. One Patricia had infiltrated more than a year ago in order to learn the nature of Project: CTRL. One the team was there to extract her from and sabotage.

As one, the drones veered off and docked with a nearby drone factory in synchronized orbit just outside of the barrier around the station. This close he couldn't see the barrier, but the shuttle's sensors were beginning to chirp as they detected the overlapping lines of infra-red.

"How are we looking?" Laim asked.

"Our shields should be able to handle the heat fence... I mean we might lose a backup engine. We'll probably lose a backup engine." Hitman did a hasty system check. "I'm pretty sure we'll get through with just a blown engine, or two." The last was said under his breath.

Nubia glared at him for a moment then looked over at Liam as if expecting him to do something. Liam shrugged.

"We've got this. Scott and I once did an orbital drop onto a hostile world surrounded by an old heat fence. We survived."

"What about the ship?" she asked.

"We didn't really need it after insertion. We were there to deactivate the powerplant that powered the fence. The place was a nuclear facility, three miles square, and–"

"Boss. The ship?"

"We lost both engines and it crash-landed in the nearby bay." He smirked. "Keyword: landed. We didn't have a top notch pilot like Hitman here. It was Scott, me, and an autopilot AI."

"They stopped production of those things for a reason. They're too stupid to think on the fly. Makes them useless in emergency situations and a liability in combat."

Liam marveled at Nubia's knowledge of ships. It did her well in her time as a pirate and would do Eagle X well in the future.

"I can get us to the station with or without the engines, but I'd prefer the former," Hitman remarked.

"Same," Nubia grumbled, sitting back in her seat and fastening her safety harness.

They could only adjust their speed sparingly if they wanted to continue to fool the sensors and drones into thinking they were a lost EC probe. The real thing was designed to avoid collision with space debris and celestial bodies, but its movements would be slow and deliberate. Liam would have liked to stop and scan the barrier now that they were so close to it, but Hitman wiped his brow and forged ahead. As a precaution, he fastened his own harness.

"Going in, big guys. You might want to tie yourselves down."

Raven: We heard.

The sensors beeped as they crossed the threshold. Five seconds later it stopped as they were through and inside. The team released a collective breath. The readings were wrong. It wasn't a heat fence.

"That was... unexpected," Nubia sighed.

"See, you've gotta have faith," Liam chuckled.

"That's easy for you to say when you're a super soldier, when it would take a rocket to the chest to put you down."

Raven: I've shrugged off a rocket before.

Blockade: Me too.

The look on her face warned that if Liam chimed in, Nubia would throttle him. He turned to regard the station and a new alert trilled. This one was more urgent.

"What now?" Liam said. His carefree facade slipped for a moment, stressed from the constant delays and unexpected setbacks.

"It's Renegade's signal," Hitman said, punching in commands to the instrument panel. The shuttle banked right. "It looks like the barrier is using a variant on the heat fence to block communications coming from the station. We're picking up over a thousand messages from a few hours ago."

"All of them?"

He consulted the display screen. "... yeah. All were sent at or around four hours ago."

Nubia checked the ammo clips of her pistols. "I know what that means."

"Trouble," Liam agreed, checking his Embrine rifle.

In Liam's experience, only disaster, panic, and holiday festivities caused so many to send messages all at once. He was too much of a skeptic to assume the team had arrived during a station-wide celebration.

Hitman took them along the curve of the giant donut shape until the trilling alert became a constant whine. Following the signal he guided them towards the station's surface and a small hangar door yawned open. The security scanners along the walls ignored them as they entered through the station's gaiar shield. The strike shuttle oriented itself to the station's gravity and Hitman brought them in for a landing beside a mid-range scout transport and a small collection of supply crates.

Through the windshield Liam saw a felarnian, xnean, and a human female come out of hiding. He'd only been expecting Patricia, so her companions should have raised his suspicions, but he was more concerned with the barricade and armed constructs guarding the hangar entrance. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He had the feeling things hadn't gone as Patricia had expected either.

"Heads-up, team. There are no visible hostiles, but I need everyone's eyes open. This feels wrong somehow."

Nubia nodded and left the cockpit. Hitman gave the all-clear and released the locks of the loading ramp.

"You want me on the ground, Spider?" he asked, tapping the shotgun beside his chair.

"For now, stay here and monitor our exit." Liam leaned forward and studied the ceiling of the space. There were drones up there, but they were all inactive. "I'm not sure why, but I feel like we're being watched."

"I'm on it."

Liam patted the pilot on the shoulder as he ducked out of the cockpit and down the short hall to the lift. He hopped down, rather than wait for it to rise, then hurried through the cargo hold and down the ramp. Stepping around Blockade's bulk, he was nearly knocked to the ground as Patricia jumped into his arms. She purred as she rubbed her furry cheeks against his and he held her, not realizing how much he'd missed the warmth of her body. It was strangely platonic like missing a beloved stuffed animal. Patricia was his safe space and emotional support and, from the way she clung to him, he was much the same for her.

"Wow, Raven," Nubia whispered. "You didn't get that kind of greeting."

"I didn't need it.," Scott growled, though Liam glimpsed a hint of jealousy in his voice. "Enough of that already. What's the sit-rep? And what's with the fucking bird?"

Scott thumbed his finger towards the two Liam had glimpsed through the windshield.

A nondescript xnean male whose bearing and demeanor screamed unimportant which instantly raised Liam's suspicion. He'd never met an actual special diplomat, but he imagined they'd be as forgettable as this man seemed to be. Liam wondered if he were being psychically manipulated.

A human woman so beautiful he initially thought of plastic surgery, but then settled on makeup and genetic modification. At a second glance she looked familiar.

"Team, this is Chillard and Onika Fwendi. Chilly and Onika, this is the army I promised you."

Scott caught Liam's eye and raised an eyebrow. Liam shrugged.

"An army?" he asked from the corner of his mouth.

Patricia took Liam and Scott aside to give them a condensed version of what she'd found, leaving the others to load the strike shuttle with the crates she'd collected during her time undercover. She managed to keep the technical aspects to the bare minimum, but it was still quite a lot to process. Scott recovered first.

"We have to kill this thing. If The Pale Garden could drop it or others like it on the new colonies directed by AI, they could take over planets in a matter of days. Fresh reinforcements, fresh workforces, fresh armies." He growled. "Can you imagine trying to fight a fleet of cutters run by one of these unshackled monsters?"

"The Garden isn't the only threat," Liam said. "Earth Conglomerate with this kind of tech could be just as dangerous. The original colonies were pulled back into the fold during the time of corporate expansion, but most of the modern colonies are private ventures by corporations. They could use these AIs to militarize entire populations against their will. Not only do we need to take this Mastermind-308 out, but we need to wipe the records on this project."

"We need to burn this place down."

Liam stared at Scott for a heartbeat then nodded. "Yeah. This tech can't leave this station."