War Fleet: Resistance

that.
As she’d wished for, the steel bars over the front door had been mangled and wrenched inwards by the explosion. The door had also been blown inwards, meaning they had a clear entryway. Part of the caged door still spanned the base of the entrance, and so Kota would have to vault over it. She looked at Singh, noting that he was much larger than her. Technically as a sergeant, she should send him in first.
But she’d never been one for technicalities, and she knew it made much more tactical sense here to take the lead. “Cover me,” she said. She tucked her rifle against her waist and held down the safety as she vaulted over the remains of the bars and forward rolled across hard tile into the hallway.
“Stop right there,” a voice chittered before she could look up and raise her rifle. “Any sudden movements and I’ll kill.”
An Arstan crocodile-man stood in a doorway into a much larger room. He leaned against some stone stairs leading up onto a mezzanine, kept there by several thin concrete pillars. The Arstan had a rougher face than the guards, and his snout was longer. They said that the older an Arstan got, the more their snout grew.
The alien had a pistol in his hand, pointed right at Kota. Singh took the opportunity to tumble into the room, rolling to the side of where Kota stood. The Arstan panicked, turned the gun on Singh, and let off a shot, which hit the wrangled metalwork behind.
Kota turned the opportunity to raise her rifle and turn on the sight to create a laser pinpoint on the lapel of the white robe that the alien wore. “I think it’s you that should lower your weapon,” she said. “Fleet Admiral Frega, I presume. Singh, check the reference.”
Singh glanced back at the amber glow the shot had burned into the metal behind him, let off a sigh, and then raised his watch, looking up and down between it and the Arstan. “It’s him.”
“No guards, Frega?” Kota asked.
The sides of the Arstan’s mouth folded up into what looked like a grin. “I sent them out to check out the commotion outside. Sons of Hastara, I wanted to retire from this.”
“Your defense station sent out reinforcements to try and stop us kidnapping you.”
“No,” the Arstan replied. “They sent out police ships to arrest me and five other Arstan officials. And it’s not a fully-fledged defense station, just a way of policing this house arrest. You would have thought our federation would give better protection to those who’ve served the military for so long.”
Kota glanced around. “You mean this isn’t a retirement home?”
“You humans aren’t the only ones who have to deal with politics, you know. Things are complicated right now in ways you can’t even possibly imagine.”
Kota turned to Singh. It shouldn’t be her having this discussion with the fleet admiral, but the captain. “Truss him,” she said.
Singh moved forwards, a Marine-standard spool of carbon-reinforced titanium wire in his hand. He took hold of the Arstan’s massive-fingered hands and pulled them hard behind his back.
“There’s no need for this,” Frega said. “I’ll come peacefully. Something tells me I might be better off with you than here.”
“Protocol is protocol,” Kota replied, and she kept her rifle trained on Frega as Singh nudged him towards the door.
Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard back from the other two. She raised her wrist to her face again and spoke into the watch. “Connery, what’s your status? Report in.”
There was static on the line, and Kota feared the worst. She couldn’t hear Connery’s voice at all. “Connery?”
“Sorry, sir,” Connery replied; his voice came out broken. “We had to engage the enemy. There were four of them, plus another five from the house. But we had good cover, and they came staggered, so we brought them down. They didn’t seem like regular troops, sir.”
“Meet us at the Extractor in ten minutes,” Kota said. “We have Frega, and we’re ready to take him back to the ship.”
“Affirmative, sir.”
Singh was watching here, waiting for an order. She nodded to him, and he pushed Frega out through the hole. Kota followed behind and emerged to the freshness of the air, since the smoke had trailed away.
“Kota, are you there?” Olsen’s voice came alarmed over the comms channel.
“Affirmative, sir,” she replied.
“Abort mission and get back immediately. We’ve taken heavy damage and are powering up to FTL-warp.”
Shit. Nothing was ever so easy. “But sir, we’ve got the target.”
“Then make sure you get him here in ten minutes, because I don’t think I can give you more time.”
Kota didn’t even take time to assess the situation. “Frega,” she said, “if you don’t keep pace, we’ll shoot you in the head. No questions. Singh, you heard Olsen, get moving.”
She then opened up the comms channel to Connery. “Those ten minutes, make them one. If you don’t make it, I’ll have to leave you behind.”
Ten minutes? Damn, could the Extractor move that fast? Granted, ships left planets more quickly than they entered them. But the longer it took for them to get there, the tougher it would be for Redrock to pull this off.
As she kept sprinting, she opened up one last comms channel. “Redrock,” she said. She almost said ‘Babes’ over the open channel before she caught herself. She’d never live that down. “Get the ship ready. We’re gonna need to move fast.”

23
The Okranti arrived at its destination — the site of a brilliant, flaring amber sun. Captain Kraic, commanding officer of the Okranti, looked out of the curved 360-view window on the observation deck of the topmost CIC module, with his hands on his hips. This was Kraic’s favorite room on the ship. Such beautiful sites he’d seen since he’d joined the Navy. He would have seen nothing like this on his homeworld of Krsst, a swampland always blanketed in a fog so thick that you couldn’t see more than a mile on the clearest day. And the