The corridors of the Leif Erikson were oddly quiet as Tessara Vren made her way through the ship, her boots muffled by the carpeted floors. She moved slowly and deliberately, planning every junction and calculating every door alcove. Her neural implant was feeding her a steady stream of data directly to her optic nerve, overlaying it on her vision. Once, she was almost caught by a group of enlisted personnel, but she slid into a door alcove and they walked past without a backwards glance, chatting blissfully. With a deep sigh, she spun back out into the corridor and continued moving. As she got nearer to engineering,she left the corridors and dove into an open jeffries tube, then began crawling her way through the maintenance tunnels. Three more meters. Down a ladder. Left turn. Third hatch on the right. She opened it just a crack, waiting to hear the voices. 

Main Engineering. Two people were halfway through a systems check by the sound of their voices. She opened the hatch slowly, guiding it silently until it lay open. The two crew members were chatting idly about coolant cycles. Tessara counted the seconds. They both had their heads leaned down towards their consoles. She dropped silently from the hatch onto the floor behind them. The first went down easy with a quick hypospray hit to the neck. The second managed a “Hey! Who the hell ar–” before he took the butt of her disruptor to the back of his head. Both of them slumped limply to the floor. 

She crossed noiselessly to the main console, tapped in a stolen override code, and then scanned the system status.

Warp Core: STABLE.

Power Routing: NOMINAL

Shield Matrix: IDLE

She typed in a false alert – a coolant leak in Junction 6D. The computer snapped into action, and the warning klaxon began blaring through the room. 

WARNING. COOLANT LEAK DETECTED. EVACUATION PROTOCOL ACTIVE. EVACUATE MAIN ENGINEERING.

The remaining staff were cleared out in seconds, and Tessara sealed the doors behind them. Once she was alone, she turned her attention to the warp core. Its steady, bright blue pulse cast long, hypnotic shadows across her face as she moved to the magnetic constriction system. She didn’t want a full breach, just enough to turn the drive off. One rerouted relay, one buffer reversed. A cascading series of diagnostics all triggered silently by her implant. 

The steady blue glow began to stutter. 

She stepped back, raised her head slightly, and touched her finger to her temple. A sharp ping ran silently past the Leif Erikson’s scans, undetected. Moments later, an Orion Interceptor decloaked off the Leif Erikson’s port bow, sleek and dangerous, its wings curving forwards menacingly towards its pointed nose. The ship powered its weapons and fired a volley across the Leif Erikson’s bow.  

The Leif Erikson pitched gently as the bright green bolts of energy streaked through space, just off the front of the ship. Captain Scott Bowman jumped to his feet as the strange vessel appeared before him without registry, warning or pretense. “Shields up, Red Alert!” he barked. 

“I’ve got no response, Sir.” came the reply from the tactical station. “Power distribution is all over the place!”

Scott’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “Helm, emergency warp now, get us out of here. We can regroup and come back for our people with full force.”

Ezra’s hand flew across the console. “Captain? We can’t go to warp. The intermix chamber is offline.”

“What in the hell is going on up there?” Scott shouted, dropping his fists to his side. 

The internal comms came online with a small whistle and a buzz. 

Captain Bowman, I assume by now you’ve met my friends. 

“Who is this, and what have you done to my ship!?” Scott demanded into the silence of the bridge. 

I am a ghost, Captain. One you let go. You and your crew took quite a lot from me, and I intend to get it back, so here is the deal. You surrender yourself and your ship to me, and I’ll let most of your crew live. Refuse, and I’ll blow every airlock on this ship and walk through your frozen, lifeless bodies and take it. I’ll give you thirty minutes to comply. 

The comms cut out again, suddenly. 

The air inside the smuggler’s compartment was growing stale. Garion paced furiously around the space not occupied by Bema or Vail, mumbling angrily to himself, his tricorder gripped tightly in one hand. He stopped facing a wall, shouted, and kicked it hard. It made a dull echoing sound. 

“Will you just sit down?” Vail asked, her hand covering her face, “You’re gonna drive me nuts if you keep that up. It’s not helping.”

“Who builds a cell without a backup control inside?” Garion asked, wheeling around to face her. He threw his hand up in the air. “What happens if they accidentally lock themselves in?” 

Bema hadn’t been paying much attention to either of them, as he was staring at the corner of the ceiling, examining one of the squares that comprised it. He could swear this one tile was just a shade different than the rest. “Vail,” he said, finally turning his attention back to the other two, “Can you grab Grumpy over there and come here? I think I’ve found something.” 

Garion stalked across the small cell, then looked up to where Bema was pointing. “What am I looking at? Is that a water stain?”

“No.” Bema said, shaking his head. “It’s been like, two hours without a coffee man, relax. I think it’s a hatch. Vail and I are gonna boost you up there so you can see.”

Vail bent down, lacing her fingers together as she did. “C’mon Beckett, up you get.” she said, looking up at him. 

“Are you sure?” he asked, looking doubtfully at her hands.

“Try me, grease monkey.” she said with a smirk. Garion stuffed the tricorder back into its holster and put his foot into her hands. With a coordinated effort, Vail and Bema hoisted the Chief Engineer upwards towards the ceiling, until he was within a foot of the panel. From this close, he could see what Bema had been talking about. A hairline seam ran around the perimeter of this square, like a maintenance hatch or access panel. He felt around with his fingers, and found a small indentation. With a push and a twist, there was a sharp *click* sound, and the panel swung inwards, revealing a small dark crawl space behind it, lined with conduits and cables. It was barely a meter tall, just enough room for one person to squeeze through. 

“Look, an escape hatch.” he said sardonically, earning a groan from his mates. “It’s pretty tight, but I’ll scout it out. Don’t worry, I won’t leave you behind.” Then he pulled himself upwards into the tunnel and vanished from their sight.

The crawl space was dark and warm, filled with dry dusty air from decades of being forgotten. Garion crawled on his hands and knees, pausing every so often to wipe sweat off his brow. He knew it hadn’t been far from the galley to the hold, but there was no guarantee he was headed in the right direction, although his guts told him he was. The smell of old food and mold was getting worse, so he knew he must be getting close. Soon enough, he came upon another grate, looking down at an angle onto the dirt covered tables of the ship’s galley. He opened it as quietly as possible, then scuffled himself around so he was feet first, and dropped down onto the floor below. 

The first thing he noticed upon straightening up, was the unmistakable sound of voices coming from the corridor. Two, maybe three, speaking in conversational tones. Garion crept forwards to the doorway, and listened to what they were saying.

“…still sealed tight.” said a gravelly voice, which sounded Nausicaan, “Tess said no noise until the signal.”

“Yea, well, I say vent the air and be done with ‘em.” said another voice, meaner, and more high pitched. 

“We wait.” said the first voice sternly, “Or she’ll skin us both for it.”

Garion pulled back from the doorway, mind racing. Who the hell were these guys, and why were they guarding the door? Who was she? He tapped the combadge on his chest. “Garion to Bema. Can you hear me?” 

Silence. The cell was definitely shielded from communication. He tapped his combadge again. “Leif Erikson, this is Lieutenant Beckett. Can you hear me?”

Still nothing. Whoever was behind this must clearly be blocking comms between here and there. He grunted in frustration. There was no way back up into the shaft now, without making too much noise. His mind continued to race. Wait – noise! That was the answer. He searched around the galley quietly until he found what he was looking for. A heavy meat tenderizer. He picked up a steel ladle from a trolley and crept back to the doorway. He took a deep breath, and tossed the ladle against the wall, where it clattered loudly to the ground. 

Footsteps. Fast and Heavy. 

“Oi,” barked a voice, loud and impatient, “What the hell was that?” 

The Nausicaan thug stepped into the galley with one hand on his disruptor, scowling menacingly. Garion swung. The tenderizer fell with a sickly thump against the back of the thug’s head, and he collapsed sideways onto the deck, already out cold. Garion didn’t miss a beat, scooping the sleeping thug’s disruptor from his belt, and in one smooth motion, rounding the corner into the corridor, weapon pointed down the hall.

The second thug barely had time to turn around before Garion fired at him, and the bright green bolt of energy hit him square in the chest. He fell to the floor, stunned and twitching. “Two for two.” Garion said, letting out the breath he had been holding. He made his way down the corridor to the open control panel once again. Moments later, there was a loud clang of metal as the locks were released, and he swung the door to the smuggler’s hold open, an expression of extreme smugness on his face. 

“Good news,” he said, as the other two emerged into the corridor, “We’re not dying in a box.”

“Ooh, even better news.” Vail said, stooping to relieve the stunned thug from his weapons, “You brought us toys.” She handed Bema one of the disruptors. 

“Let’s move.” he said, then added “quietly.”

The trio picked their way back down the corridor and past the unconscious Nausicaan. They stopped short when they came upon a long cracked observation window, where they saw the Leif Erikson, but in between them was the sleek, dangerous looking hull of an Orion Interceptor, painted in jagged hues of green and matte black. Under the wing, Bema noticed a familiar symbol: A stylized green dagger set in front of a crescent moon. It was unmistakable, even from this distance. 

“That’s the Emerald Razor symbol.” Bema said, more to himself than anything, “We saw the same one on the wall in that safe house on Freecloud.” 

Vail nodded in agreement. “Looks like that Orion woman caught up with us after all.”

Garion knelt down beside a still functional auxiliary console, tapping into the freighter’s subspace comm relay. After a signal loop through a shielding bypass, the signal was hard-encrypted. He tapped the console, and then spoke. “Leif Erikson, this is Lieutenant Beckett. The hold was a trap, but we’re free now. I can see the Orion Interceptor off the port bow. We’re going to find a way to help from here.”

There was a tense pause, and he was afraid the message hadn’t gone through, but then Captain Bowman’s voice crackled through the old speakers.

Understood, Lieutenant. Good to hear you are all safe. Tessara has sealed herself into the engineering bay. She’s taken the warp core offline. We are working from our end.  

The three let out a collective sigh. 

“What’s the plan, Sir?” Garion asked, turning to Bema. 

Bema didn’t look back at once, he just continued to stare out the window at the Orion Ship, prowling the space between them and the Erikson. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “We find a way to hit back.” he said, turning to face them.