[68841] FrederikSSV Ergo Infinitum“Anyone in here need medical assistance?” Edouard asked as he pushed open the door to Frederik’s cabin.Frederik sat in the pop-up chair in his cabin, staring at the puddle of weave cloth his family heirloom Martian shawl had become on the floor when the hall had re-pressurized. He still heard Vis’s breathing, heavy with sleep, from behind the closed privacy divider of her bunk.He stooped to retrieve his family heirloom and instinctively wrapped it over his shoulders in the traditional Martian style. “She’s sleeping.”“She shouldn’t be,” Edouard’s warm demeanor had evaporated into a cold grumpiness.Frederik shrugged with his hands, tiredly. “We talked. She calmed down enough to get some rest.”“It’s my duty to clear her medically, ohlowyeh, so I am going to wake her up.”He nodded, heard Vis stir in her bunk. “I have some things to take care of—need me here?”“Nope. Should be fine.”Alone in the hallway, Frederik searched for the whereabouts of all the Absolute Horizons guests on his EAR, found what he was looking for, and went to Larsen’s cabin across the hall from Io’s.He knocked three times on the metal frame of the hatch. There was no response. Io’s hatch opened behind him, and he knew without looking it was Betty Blue, since Io was on-call. He knocked again, and Larsen’s cabin door opened.“Hao fa, Gray Top,”[80][Di Lingua]: Hello, Gray Top ↑ Frederik greeted. “We need to talk.”Gray Top had rings under his eyes. His mustache looked disheveled.“Is this about the space junk?” Gray Top asked. “I thought there was no serious damage—”“No. I need to talk to you about a conversation I just had with one of your colleagues.”Gray Top scowled and huffed. “Phuh, I don’t know what anyone told you, but unless there’s some kind of etiquette breach or delay in our trip, I am not going to—”“Drop the cut, please,” Frederik scolded, though he kept his tone calm and marginally professional. “We have a serious problem here. If what Vis said was true, then—”“I don’t care what you think you heard, unless it’s an immediate danger to you or your crew, it’s none of your business. Regardless of whatever fictions someone can spin up.”“We will arrive at your corporate junkyard in roughly sixteen hours,” he said inhospitably. “At that time, I will ask you all to leave Ergo.”Gray Top’s face flared red with anger, his nostrils flaring. “What?”Frederik crossed his arms and smiled. “Either have a conversation with me like an adult or find another way to get to Fengshen.”Despite his calm exterior, Frederik’s heart raced. His blood pumped with adrenaline. He was both energized and terrified. These Absolute Horizons people scared him. They had come armed and, if Vis was being truthful and not fanciful, Gray Top, Betty Blue, Red Cap, and Green Dragon were all well-trained operatives in violence. He was certain, however, that inaction had far worse risks than confrontation, and that he could be direct to swing things his way.“You can’t be fucking serious,” Gray Top fumed. “Ergo’s reputation would tank.”“Maybe, but if I explain why I kicked you off, Absolute Horizons can never use another Domot Get Grond Dey hauler. Your entire corporation will be blacklisted. That’ll mean you will pay more for less reliable service to get you to your…weather station,” Frederik shrugged. “It’s not like I am even asking for a lot…all I want is some clarification.”Gray Top glared at Frederik with an intensity like cut knives, but Frederik did not back down.“Ohlowyeh,” Betty Blue called out. She walked across the hall to position herself between Frederik and Gray Top. “Ergo’s crew has already sealed a non-disclosure contract. We can just sit down and talk this through.”“Fine,” Gray Top said through clenched teeth. “But there will be limits to what we can discuss.”Frederik bowed his head. “Acceptable. Find me in Control, whenever you are ready to talk.”As Frederik walked to the elevators, he heard Gray Top snarl at Betty Blue.“This better not be a fucking shakedown for more money.”***“Close the hatches,” Frederik suggested when Gray Top and Betty Blue arrived in the storm cellar.Gray Top huffed and crossed his arms as he floated to one of the rear acceleration flats and unfolded it, but Betty Blue pulled the thick storm cellar hatch doors shut. Each meter thick slab cantilevered down, sealing up Control in case of strong radiation—or in this case ensure sound did not travel to Ergo’s spin decks.“What is this about, Eff?” Io asked as she unlatched herself from the flat next to Kirk and floated up next to Frederik.Frederik gestured at Gray Top. “Why don’t you tell her?”“I have no clue what you think you heard and what you imagine I should tell you.”Io almost laughed. “Oke, Eff. This Upper will not be straightforward. You better just tell me.”“While I was stuck in my cabin, waiting for the spin hab to be re-pressurized and patched up, one of our guests—”“Which one?” Io asked.“Her name is Vis, but they called her Vermillion Special or some juan juye.”Io nodded along and Gray Top seethed.“Basically,” he continued. “She told me about what’s been happening to her for the last ten years. Secret Upper physics research, then some security issues that scared her, so she went to Ya Ke—”“What part of this is our business, ohlowyeh?” Kirk asked boredly from his acceleration flat at the front of Control.“The part where these people,” Frederik pointed at Gray Top. “Were part of an Upper black ops team.”A charged atmosphere permeated the room. Gray Top worked his jaw muscles silently, his mouth closed in a frown. Betty Blue’s eyes darted nervously between Frederik and Gray Top. Io, simply, sighed and clucked her tongue once as if to say “told ya.”Gray Top eventually broke the silence. “What do you want?”“I want to know if what Vis told me was true—did you really rescue her? Did she really work on secret military research?”“Yes. Dr. Silva was involved in some, need I remind you, highly classified research for the United Planets Navy, and yes, we were involved in a rescue operation in which retrieving her from hostile custody was the primary goal.”“Hostile custody?” Kirk asked.“Yes,” Gray Top said.“Should we be worried about these hostiles?” Kirk asked with a slight tremble in his voice.Gray Top worked his jaw like was grinding his teeth but remained silent.“Well, that’s just fucking great,” Io said.Betty Blue floated over. “Look, oke, it’s just our jobs to be concerned? Likely, there’s nothing you need to worry about.”Frederik crossed his arms. “And the alien derelict?”“Excuse me?” Betty Blue looked at Frederik like he had just punched her.“You know, in Mu Herculis. Uninhabited system with four stars, within a few light-years of Vega. The system where Vis claims she found a mummified extraterrestrial.”Betty Blue shot a confused look back at Gray Top. For an instant, Frederik saw the old man’s mask slip, and on his face was complete and total bewilderment.“I don’t… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Betty Blue answered.“Oke, I don’t know about aliens,” Kirk said. “But can we talk about the fact we’re smuggling a black ops team to a weather station?”“It’s a safe house,” Betty Blue said.“Whatever the fuck it is,” Io hissed. “Kirk’s getting at the fact that most of this crew are Spanning World citizens.”“So, this is a fucking shakedown, eh?” Gray Top said victoriously.“No,” Frederik said. “We deserve to know what we’re getting into, and what the stakes are. Why should we risk everything we have to bring a scientist to some Upper safe house? Is that even legal?”Gray Top sighed and shook his head. “For you, I wager the stakes are that big fucking payout we gave you already if you complete the contract.”“Ohlowyeh!” Betty Blue chastised Gray Top before Frederik lost his temper. “You know we have some…discretion here!”Gray Top waved his hand dismissively. “We can throw in another fifty thousand swawn to your contract, but only if this is the last time you interrogate anyone on my fucking team. And don’t talk to Dr. Silva about any of this again, ye? Forget what you heard, forget what we’re doing out here, and remember those painfully clear non-disclosure contracts you all sealed, oke?”Frederik looked over at Io, who nodded.“Do we have a deal, Kirk?”“That’s an awfully low price for my loyalty, Eff,” Kirk said calmly, but with an edge of anger.“What’s in this cargo we’re picking up?” Io asked.“Huh?” Gray Top asked, seemingly caught off-guard by the change of topic.“I asked, what’s in this cargo you’re having us pick up?”“It’s just regular supplies. Food, medical, water, entertainment, replacement parts for additive manufacturing, that sort of thing,” Betty Blue said.“Uh huh,” Io said with an eyebrow raised skeptically.“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Gray Top said. “We’re taking a United Planets citizen to a safe house so she can testify to the Interstellar Court about crimes she witnessed. Crimes that occurred within the Spanning Worlds and impact you fucking Independents. We’re not asking you to commit treason or betray any of your values, just to get us to our safe house and shut the fuck up about what you think you learned.”“With respect, ohlowyeh,” Frederik said, punctuating his words to drive his sharp point home. “Since we can’t verify anything either you or Vis said, and you asked us so nicely to never talk to your team again, we only have your word. That’s an added risk for us.”Gray Top threw up both of his hands. “Fine! Fine. Seventy-five thousand swawn, and no more fucking questions, oke?”Frederik clenched his jaw. He didn’t care about the extra pay, but the look on Kirk’s face told him it would be a losing battle with everyone else, but Io, if he kept pressing the issue. He shook his head and sighed.“We’ll take that deal.”***The atmosphere in the shared spaces of Ergo became charged with palpable unease following the renegotiation with Gray Top. Frederik avoided Vis as well as he could, and all the other Absolute Horizons operators avoided the crew of Ergo with militaristic precision. It gave Ergo an almost haunted feeling. He would see evidence there were guests—food, air, water, facilities, data, and compute were all being used at higher rates—but he never directly saw any of the guests. It was eerie and tense, but a welcome respite from direct confrontation. He was glad to put all his misgivings and guilt and worry into the furthest corner of his mind, and just focus on getting the job done as fast as possible.Frederik’s sleep debt was catching up with him as he sat, on-duty, in Control, watching patiently as Ergo was within one hundred kilometers of the junkyard space station to pick up Absolute Horizon’s cargo. He watched both streamed external cameras and simulations on the overhead display of the rotating and counter-rotating hub-like way stations of the junkyard—connected by a four-kilometer-long tether—as Ergo’s trajectory danced between the two spokes of the main spin gravity habitats.Each spin ring housed the guests and workers of the junkyard, ensuring they could live relatively free from bul hefushe—ionizing radiation—and with the comforts of spin gravity while working at a job site that was, intentionally, in an orbit that was tricky to get too. Placing these junkyards in strange orbits with low intersecting traffic minimized debris causing incidents, though that had not saved Ergo the trouble. Another space junk mitigating factor was the large, boxy grid formed between the two spin rings. Every fourth grid box held a cylindrical inflatable hab, and all others contained pill-box tensegrity working space made of blue green AlKapThil foil. These working spaces would flatten down in disuse or expand out to provide a voluminous shroud of variable diameter to catch the micro-debris produced during disassembly of heavy material.He shook his head, wondering which pill box had failed to prevent space junk escaping and hitting Ergo. Then he noticed a glowing dart-like silhouette of a military spacecraft. With a pinch, Frederik pulled up as much information as he could, saw it was some civilian military contractor—Grayson Services Group—designated as SCV Delightful Death. It had arrived at the junkyard within the last twenty-four hours. He frowned in disgust at the name of the spacecraft and wondered what nonsense they were up to with Absolute Horizons. “Mind if I take us in?” Kirk asked from the flat next to Frederik.“It’s all yours.”Ergo shuddered with each gentle tap of Kirk’s hands as a burst of reaction control rockets nudged the spacecraft along its winding trajectory to an inflatable habitat at the edge of the junkyard’s lattice—and on the opposite side of the junkyard from the Delightful Death.Right as Kirk killed the last few centimeters per second of relative velocity, and Ergo crawled the rest of the way to their destination, a message appeared on Frederik’s EAR. He waved it open. A seal code appeared. Beneath the multi-colored pattern of encrypted information was a public hash identifying the sender.[345-00-0001-000007635958558][Seal Status] Good[Signer] [1]“Absolute Horizons” [345-00-0001-000007635958558][Co-Signer][1]“Obialo, Frederik” [335-02-0223-022-720855][Signed][1]68841-23:36 JinLT[Verified][1]68842-03:56 JinLT[Request for Secured Communications Session]: Yes/NoFrederik accepted the request and pushed the stream window up to the overhead ink display. There was a flicker, a brief crackle over the sound system, and then the secured stream opened. A feminine face with titanium-white skin, hair to match, metal-gray eyes that had to be modifications, and a cruel crooked smile greeted him.Frederik held up his hand, palm up and in frame, and introduced himself. “Hao fa, Ya Ke Juliet Sierra zero-one-four.”[81][Di Lingua]: Hello, Ya Ke Juliet Sierra zero-one-four. ↑“Hao fa, SSV Ergo Infinitum,”[82][Di Lingua]: Hello, SSV Ergo Infinitum. ↑ she raised her hand into the frame, palm down, and then gave a slight bow of her head.Frederik reciprocated. “Oke, we’re ready to pick up the cargo.” ***Frederik sighed. He leaned into his acceleration flat on Control. Almost two duty cycles since the junkyard rendezvous, he could see the end of this job in sight.“Oiya, you oke, Eff?” Io asked.Frederik noticed that she was focusing her attention on the ink displays, which were showing the progress of Ergo’s burn as it moved further away from the junkyard, along with images from the exterior of the spacecraft. Her hands were delicately on controls ready to adjust their orbit manually as necessary. But Frederik spotted her glances drifting in his direction, the unmistakable worry tugging in the corner of her eyes.“You seem nervous,” she said.“Hmm? No, I’m fine. I think I am finally caught up on sleep.”“Never thought I’d see the day. Do you even sleep?”“You shouldn’t be so surprised, Io,” Frederik said with a chuckle. “You have seen me sleep.”“Ye,” she trailed off. “You still look nervous to me, Eff.”“Just eager to get these people off Ergo.”Beep. Bringggg. Squeeeee. Beep booooo.Frederik watched as the blood left Io’s face. He broke into a cold sweat. The horrible noise continued, echoing out in the halls of Ergo, through the elevator tunnel into both spin habs, and then echoed in every single cabin. Yellow warning lights flashed. Warning signs in a smattering of common written languages covered Frederik’s EAR. Emergency warning systems spoke in a fluctuating, dual-gender voice of a generic autonomous system.“Spanning Worlds Orbital Control in Ya Ke, Shu Exclusion Zone, has issued an extreme orbital hazard warning and is asking all traffic in the Ya Ke system to shelter in place. All in-transit craft should divert to the nearest port-of-harbor in a timely manner. All flight changes must be registered with local orbital control. Use of storm cellars is not required. This is a particularly dangerous situation.”Abject terror, anger, and despair rattled him. All this risk and work and danger—all to give Diya a little permanence—would be for nothing if they couldn’t get to Fengshen because of the orbital lockdown. There was danger, of course. Danger compounded by the fact Ergo Infinitum was knowingly smuggling a United Planets special operations team to a safe house in the Spanning Worlds. Cooperative Defense would not take that kindly, and an emergency orbital lockdown made it more possible they would find out.Beep. Bringggg. Squeeeee. Beep booooo. “Spanning Worlds Orbital Control in Ya Ke, Shu, Exclusion Zone has issued an extreme orbital hazard warning and is asking all traffic in the Ya Ke system to shelter in place. All in-transit craft should divert—”Frederik decreased the volume on the EAR interface as the auto repeated the warning. Ergo’s computer had already begun generating calculations for course changes to comply with the orbital emergency. Preliminary orbital paths appeared on the overhead ink display. His heart sank.“Looks like our recommendation is to head to Vas.”“Fuck, Eff, but what are we involved in? We gotta get to Fengshen, somehow.”Frederik’s eyes darted over the overhead display and churned through the possibilities. He took a deep breath and some of his fear left his body when he exhaled. A plan emerged among his burgeoning calm.“Not necessarily…see there.” Frederik highlighted an emerging set of possible trajectories with a flick to his EAR. He grabbed the suggested orbital plan from Ergo and tweaked it. As he moved it and prodded it, the delta-vee burned away from Ergo’s remaining budget. Only estimates, but enough to see the possibilities. He tweaked, prodded, and moved it until the orbital path intersected with where Fengshen would be along its own stable orbit. A new icon appeared, and Frederik selected it to develop a docking trajectory. Ergo’s computers crunched numbers, used slightly more accurate data, and in a few moments produced a viable orbital plan. It was a faster trip than heading to Vas.“There,” Frederik said self-satisfied. “We can head along this path toward Vas for the next thirty hours, and then burn to Fengshen here,” he highlighted the point of no-return. “It looks like it’s a faster path, anyway, so if the lockdown isn’t lifted by then, we can re-register our diversion and justify it because it’s shorter.”“Hmm. Very low margin of delta-vee left when we get to Fengshen,” Io rubbed her chin as she looked at the overhead display. “And what happens if we’re stuck at Fengshen, and the lockdown isn’t lifted? We’ll be entangled in all this spy shit with nowhere to go.”“True, but this is just our first crack at this. We’ll get a little more delta-vee left over without cargo or passengers too. We should re-run the numbers with that lower mass, and if the margins are still thin, well we still might get some propellant from Fengshen or divert to Vas or Horizon’s Edge.”“As long as we can our yansh out of there as fast as we can…. I don’t know, Eff,” Io shook her head. “If the lockdown isn’t lifted, we’ll be in a terrible spot.”“I know. Bailing to Vas barely seems any better, and I have never heard of a lockdown lasting longer than thirty-six hours.”“Ye, me neither—but what hasn’t gone wrong so far, Eff?”“We’ve just had a few setbacks.”Io laughed and shook her head. “That’s putting it mildly.”“A gah mot sabi,”[83][Di Lingua]: I know that. ↑ Frederik shrugged with his hands. “All we need to do is get our guests and their cargo to Fengshen, like we’ve done many times before, then we can go to Vas and forget about this—if we go to Vas and still have them and their cargo, what then?”Io frowned. “Guess getting them offboard as fast as possible has its benefits, but we should run this past the rest of the crew.”“Agreed, but we need to decide soon. Do we go to Vas or risk it and head to Fengshen?”***Sixteen hours into the lockdown, and it was not promising. Frederik suspected it would not lift before he had to decide what Ergo would do next. In the first hours, as the emergency lockdown fell across the system, comms traffic increased geometrically. Each spacecraft, each station, and each hab in the entire Ya Ke system became a node in a decentralized messaging network, picking up sealed signals and bouncing them along to their destinations. The idea of plentiful space traffic shaped the construction of the entire digital network, with a few satellites acting as hard nodes in the empty places between the moons of Jin, and the rest bouncing between spacecraft like Ergo. Most of the few hardlines comprised dedicated lines for K-Stations or Celosia—with a tiny number dedicated to the Domot Get Grond Dey hives. Ergo—more in the middle of nowhere compared to other places in Jin’s orbit—was one of a few shortcut nodes left in the system that could get signals around Jin, and each hour there was less space traffic, increasing demand of Ergo as a routing node.It created a great data bottleneck. Even access to non-local data archives calcified in the Jin system’s digital network. Adding more nodes to the network was necessary to improve bandwidth, but it was impossible if there was an orbital lockdown. Effectively, if not technically, Ergo was completely cut-off from anything that wasn’t direct radio communications, point-to-point, and the emergency broadcasts and orbital control transmissions.Frederik had managed, after several tries over several hours, to send a single message to Diya. Just a few words. A gah yu luv dey.Palli-palli. I love you, and I will get home as soon as I can. He did not doubt the message would get to her. He just had no way of knowing when.A consequence of the state of the Ya Ke messaging systems was that there was no clear picture of what had caused the lockdown. Before networks slowed to a halt, Frederik had seen wild speculation of an unregistered spacecraft that had attacked a CADSS orbital patrol around Shu. Before any official account reached Ergo, the networks had collapsed.Without external stimuli, there was not much to do but sleep to kill time. Before he went to sleep, he told Io. “Tell everyone we’re going to Vas.”“Are we going to vote on it?”“No, Io. This is the right call. No vote.”And then he went to sleep in his cabin. He woke up to someone knocking loudly at his cabin door.“Eff! Eff! Oiya!”It was Larsen. Frederik rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and slid down to the floor from the top bunk. “What is it?” He asked.He squinted at the bright morning light that came in from the hallway. Larsen was already half dressed in his bright yellow spacesuit, and he shoved an ink display into Frederik’s hands. “Wettin dey…”[84][Di Lingua]: What…? ↑ he muttered as he struggled to find some context for what was happening.“External system failures across the board, Eff!” Systems statuses on the ink display blinked yellow, or simply read “error.”“We didn’t hit more junk while I was asleep, did we?”“What’s going on?” Betty Blue asked from across the hallway.“Go back to your cabin, please,” Larsen said officiously.Larsen’s lip fluttered and his hand twitched.“We didn’t hit any more junk,” Larsen said softly as he leaned into Frederik’s cabin and looked around.“Vis isn’t here.”“Oke, well, no we didn’t hit more junk—I think our earlier patch work from that damage must have caused a failure on some of the control systems.”“What did Vasquez say when you showed him?”“I haven’t shown him yet—Eff, he’s asleep in zero-two. We have another main burn in only five hours. We need to get an EVA going now. You were closer.”“Oke ye, I’ll meet you in the airlock.”He handed Larsen the ink display, yawned, stretched, and then went to open his equipment locker to get his biosuit on. Then he joined Larsen in the airlock, went through the fifteen-minute depressurization sequence, and they stepped out into the dark void space, the stars hidden by Ya Ke’s bright starlight.The pair gecko grip walked their way out onto the safety ledge and Whipple shield on the spin-out edge of hab zero-one, hooked themselves to safety latches near the airlock entrance, and walked to the first system Larsen identified as throwing strange errors.Hab zero-one’s exterior looked like a disaster zone. There was dark carbon scoring, ablation, dents, and dings from their recent run-in with space junk. Off-colored white replacement panels patched over the most damaged spots on the otherwise pristine white reflective surface. This, however, was not what had caused Larsen to panic, and froze Frederik in his place at the sight of it.“I thought you said you patched it up?” Frederik asked angrily as he looked around at the mess of wires and patch kits sticking out from various access points across the entirety of Ergo Infinitum’s hull. Not just hab zero-one. Someone had pulled open hatches and panels across hab zero-one, Control, and even down the spine heading toward the main reactor and engine. Someone had accessed and re-wired Ergo’s systems in a jury-rigged mess, holding it together with gecko grip surfaces and AlKapThil foil. External sensor relay boxes, extra cabling, and alternative shunts were bypassing most systems. Everything looked secure, technically, but it was a messy job. A quick fix, immediate, repair-type of job.“I…I,” Larsen said. “It was not like this last time I was out here, Eff.”Frederik walked over to the nearest panel. It was at the lip of hab zero-one. He frowned down at it, bent over, and with a wave pulled up the EAR information. “Why did you open this panel? There wasn’t any damage to the reaction control systems, so why did you bypass its ASPMC?”“What?” Larsen sounded genuinely shocked, and he walked over next to Frederik. “I didn’t touch the pseudo mechanical systems at all, Eff. I fucking swear.”“Who did? Vasquez? Taliya? Ocampo?”“I don’t think so.”“Well, Larsen, there’s no one else who could have done this,” Frederik said wanly and irritated. He opened a radio channel to Control on his EAR. “Hey, Control, you there?”“Kirk here, ohlowyeh.”“What was the last seal to access any airlock for an EVA?”“Uh, hold on…uh…looks like it was Larsen.”Frederik frowned and looked at Larsen, who shrugged with his hands. Fear and confusion were clear on Larsen’s face as he scrunched it up. It was genuine. Rage boiled up in Frederik as he came to the only remaining conclusion.“Taliya, Io? You read me?”“Loud and clear, Eff,” Io responded.“Ah…ye! Got you on EAR,” Taliya yawned.“Get all our guests and gather them in the mess,” Frederik fumed. “We need to have a little chat.”He closed the connection before he could hear any protests and turned to Larsen. “Get started on cleaning this shit up. I’ll be back after we figure out who did this.”“Where are you going?”“Going to go have a chat with our guests in the mess.” Frederik walked along the inner curved surface of hab zero-one, and rested his hand on one of many tense wires that secured the spin hab to the central spine of Ergo. He pulled a safety clip from his waistbelt, clipped it around the wire, unclipped his safety hook from the umbilical securing him to the airlock, and used both hands to climb along the support wire and toward the Angel’s Seat. The mess was on the other side of Ergo, so he was going to take a shortcut through the Angel’s Seat.Between the fore of Control and the aft of the water tank, the Angel’s Seat was an open viewing platform with a pop-up, one-person airlock that led to Control. Frederik slipped past the lattice guardrail of the Angel’s Seat and gecko gripped himself to the roof of Ergo’s storm cellar, which acted as the floor of the Angel’s Seat. He pivoted and looked over at hab zero-two, unhooked his safety clamp, and headed to the other side to continue his trip to the auxiliary airlock—and then Ergo’s mess—when he stopped in his tracks.Ruck sacks and equipment boxes were all over, gecko gripped to the floor. These were not supposed to be here. There were vague impressions of shapes in the shadows of the Angel’s Seat, mere centimeters away from him. Before he could even curse, the vague shadowy lumps between him and the rucksacks appeared to unzipper reality as the shimmering void split down the middle like an AlKapThil sheet being cut in half. And then, he was standing in the middle of a circle of demonic figures clutching coilguns, a crumpled and sliced AlKapThil sheet at the feet in front of them. A loud screech split across his radio followed by a horrendous crackle then silence as his helmet and EAR systems cut off the sound automatically. His EAR splashed with warnings of lost connections and poor radio signal to Control.Something heavy slammed into the back of his knee from behind, forcing him to the deck and pressing his faceplate to the floor. Someone pulled his arms behind his back. Pressure on his wrists. A distorted voice distantly shouted at him inside his helmet.They pinned him to the ground. He was being pushed and bound and constrained. He looked up and saw a ring of armored biosuits. Each biosuit carved and stylized like an obsidian demon, complete with a grimacing face and teeth.Someone yanked at his left arm, where his seal bracelet was. His wrist pinched, and then someone took the seal out of his bracelet.“What’s going on?” He asked reflexively, though no one could hear him with his radio jammed.Through the crisscross lattice guardrail of the Angel’s Seat, he saw large plumes of rocket exhaust from the spin hab reaction control systems. He lifted off the ground until a foot pressed against his back, forcing him back down. Without warning or prior planning, Ergo was reducing its spin.When Ergo finished spinning down, someone in an armored biosuit pulled him off the deck and forced his feet to anchor with gecko grip. One demon pressed their faceplate against his, their shouting voice coming across as a distant murmur.“Open the airlock to Control, Obialo, or we’ll blow the hatch and let everyone in there die.”The demon pushed him toward the airlock and pointed. He pulled open the manual release to the Control airlock, which meant he had to hand-crank the mechanism, revolution by revolution, until the airlock was about a two-centimeter circular bump in the middle of the Angel’s Seat. From then on, the airlock pressure differential did the rest for him. It popped up, then fully extended, a demon entered the airlock leading into Control. Frederik waited in silence, held captive, until the pop-up airlock returned. A demon bound his hands behind his back and shoved him into the elevator, then down into Control.There were signs of a struggle. Kirk was holding his nose with his hand, along his cheeks and between his fingers blood was bubbling and undulating in microgravity. He held his other hand up and flat to show his surrender to the jet-black demon pointing a coilgun at his face. Projectiles had torn up some acceleration flats. Flotsam drifted around the empty space. There was a large ablation dent in the storm cellar shielding. “Oiya, what?” Kirk asked. “I surrender I surrender.”“Get back!” The demon replied. “I will fire another warning shot!”As Frederik exited the pop-up airlock, the demon lost patience and sent Kirk flying to the back of Control with a kick.“Nawa oh!”[85][Di Lingua]: Woah! ↑ Frederik gasped.With the click click of gecko grip, the demon pivoted, grabbed Frederik’s shoulder, and threw him toward Kirk. With his hands bound, there was little Frederik could do but brace. Bam. His biosuit helmet slammed into Kirk’s chin. His momentum carried them to the back wall, where they bounced before coming to rest on separate, twisted, acceleration flats.“Stay there!” The demon howled.More of the demons joined them in Control. Frederik kept pleading to get Kirk medical attention. Each plea ignored, until, finally a demon took a different tack.“Shut the fuck up, or we’ll airlock you.”Frederik stopped asking. Minutes later, Kirk woke up, but he babbled incoherently.“Yu gah gahdah lul tsow![86][Di Lingua]: Go fuck yourself! ↑ He needs medical attention!” Frederik finally shouted and cursed.Smiling demonic faceplates turned toward him. The inhuman armored faceplates showed no emotion and did not yield in the face of basic humanity, but, moments later, they brought Edouard, along with a demon escort, to Control where he looked over a concussed Kirk. Frederik’s relief washed over him as Ergo’s doctor quickly stabilized Kirk. Over the next hour, the hostiles brought the rest of Ergo’s crew to Control.Their captors barked a few commands. Mostly, the orders were to unseal certain systems to hand over control of Ergo entirely. They uttered threats of violence. Frederik urged his crew to comply, as he did not see a need for anyone else to get hurt. Kirk’s face had already swollen up, and his nose looked broken and badly bruised. Eventually, Ergo’s main engines rumbled. The thrust from Ergo’s main engines pressed him against the deck of Control. They were on the move. “Where are you taking us?” Frederik asked.Most of the demons paid him no attention, but the nearest guffawed at his pathetic request, turned and glared down at him through their pitiless black optics.“Who are you? What do you want?”The demonic face looked at him, and his skin prickled under the heat of the burning fury behind the glassy obsidian portholes on that faceplate. When they spoke, he could almost hear their cruel, wild smile at his pain and discomfort.“We’re going where you were always going, Obialo. We’re going to Fengshen.”