EJ’s heart sank. She’d been so focused on the prisoners and using them as a distraction so she could get off the Hollbrd that she’d forgotten about the innocent settlers who’d been duped and faced a very short lifetime of slavery. She gnawed her lip and shoved away the thought that she’d been acting a little too much like Faros to justify still being pissed at him. EJ would have used the prisoners, and maybe the settlers, the same way Faros used her.
She cleared her throat and gestured at the terminal he’d been at. “What did you find?”
Relief crossed the narrow face and he blinked all of his eyes. He’d no doubt imagined Nokx would eat him alive after bursting through the door. The young male trilled and moved his long, delicate fingers along the top of the terminal. “There are many ships around us. Most of them appear to be collaborating to surround the Hollbrd and have tried to board on the port side, and they have successfully entered sectors seven-alpha, twenty-rudik, and thirty-six-smizak. It appears that the Hollbrd is tethered.”
He blinked again, over and over, and a subtle tremble rippled through his feathers. EJ eased closer and nudged Nokx so he released the Klonz. She took the seat at the terminal, moving uncomfortably until she took the communicator out of her belt and placed it on top of the terminal so it didn’t press right into her guts. “Can you show me how you found that? And you said most of the ships around us are working together. Are there some that aren’t? That are fighting them?”
She clung to a small hope that the Sraibur was active and attempting to help, but there was no telling. Maybe the Slasu mother ship just hung back and waited for all the fighting to be over, so their incredibly expensive capital ship wouldn’t be damaged.
The Klonz hovered just behind her and point outed specific controls on the aged comms system as he murmured how to identify the ships on a radar screen. EJ’s heart jumped to her throat as she explained what was going on to Nokx. “There are two ships on the fringes. One looks like the Sraibur, though they’re only harassing the smaller Slasu ships. They haven’t confronted the mother ship.”
“And the other one? What is it doing?” Nokx remained in front of the terminal, with a good view of the door and in range to crush anyone who came through it.
“I don’t know who it is,” EJ said slowly. She frowned at the terminal, wishing she remembered more from her Fleet training, and tried to separate out specific comms channels using the few things she remembered about the standard interface. The Klonz brushed his feathery touch over the screen and isolated the second ship that slowly approached the Hollbrd and the chaos around it. EJ murmured her thanks and peered at the screen again as a signature tracker evaluated the mystery ship. “It looks like... Well, shit.”
Her heart sank as she studied the battleship that maneuvered around the Slasu and reinforced its shields as it approached.
Nokx tensed and orange flared through his scales. “What is it? More Slasu?”
“It’s a Fleet battleship,” she whispered. Sickness boiled in her stomach. “It’s newer than the ones I trained on. I’ve heard about the Aldrin-class battleships, but I’ve never seen one this far out. There’s no reason for the Fleet to be in ungoverned space, much less this far ungoverned.”
“What are they doing? Attacking the Slasu? Attacking the Hollbrd?” Nokx frowned, though he checked his wrist comms unit. “Are the Slasu attacking the Fleet ship?”
“It’s mostly hanging back, but it’s engaged some of the smaller attack ships.” EJ shook her head and moved the screens around, trying to isolate the comms emissions from the Fleet ship. The signals came back scrambled, though, no doubt from the advanced Fleet tech on the state-of-the-art battleship. “I can’t get anything from it; it’s too garbled.”
The Klonz reached for the flashing comms puck that rested on the top of the terminal, but froze when Nokx grumbled a warning. EJ frowned at the Xaravian and studied the Klonz. “Do you recognize that? Do you know what it is?”
“I saw a manual for something that looks like this,” he said quietly. “This is much more advanced, but I think maybe... It’s been activated but you won’t get as strong a signal unless it’s part of a larger system. It needs other channels to amplify