Session 06: False Passage

The work crews swarmed over the Celestial Princess like industrious insects, their tools singing against the frigate’s hull as they integrated the new spike-3 drive into her systems. The upgrade had taken days, pushing their already thin timeline to its limits. Cassian Vrye watched from the observation deck, calculating how many hours remained before someone on Kinergi Ekta noticed the prison transport never arrived at its destination.

The message came through the ship’s comm while the final calibrations were being made. A group seeking passage off Aidah requested an audience with the captain. Cassian exchanged glances with Jarek and Jun Min—in their line of work, unexpected visitors rarely brought good news.

They met at the spaceport cafeteria, a dingy establishment trying desperately to seem cosmopolitan with its digital menu screens and synthetic food options. Ten people waited at a corner table, their possessions gathered around them like a protective wall. Two children huddled close to the adults, their eyes wide with the particular wariness of those who’d seen too much too young.

Davrin stepped forward to speak for them—a fit man with military bearing poorly disguised by civilian clothes. The negotiation began simply enough. They wanted off-world, willing to pay 2,500 credits for passage to Berd. It wasn’t much, barely enough to cover life support costs for the journey, but the Celestial Princess needed seed money for cargo. They’d escaped one prison only to find themselves trapped by economics.

“Three thousand,” Cassian countered, his psychic abilities brushing against Davrin’s surface thoughts. The man’s mind recoiled—not the natural flinch of the untrained, but the practiced deflection of someone who knew exactly what telepaths could do. Interesting.

While Jun Min smoothed over the negotiations with practiced diplomacy, Konrad ran background checks from his terminal. His findings sent a chill through the crew’s private comm channel: half the refugees had expertly forged credentials, their digital footprints inserted into Aidah’s systems mere days ago.

The smart play would have been to walk away. But 3,000 credits was 3,000 credits, and Jarek’s presence alone seemed deterrent enough. They printed tickets, E-20’s ancient dot-matrix printer wheezing through each one, while collecting names and claimed occupations. Atmospheric maintenance, agricultural workers, various trades that meant nothing and everything.

The Celestial Princess lifted off nine hours later, Gray’s expert piloting trimming their travel time to the system’s edge where they could safely engage the spike drive. The refugees had been settled in the cargo hold, sleeping on worn cots from the ship’s previous life as an evacuation vessel. Jun Min spent time among them, learning their dialect’s subtle variations, while Jarek stood watch like a gargoyle carved from violence and suspicion.

The attack came with precision timing—far enough from Aidah that returning would be difficult, not yet close enough to jump. Jun Min noticed the synchronized movement first: whispered signals, hands moving to hidden compartments in their luggage. The transformation from desperate refugees to trained operatives took seconds.

“Stand down,” one said, a monomolecular knife glowing white-hot in his grip as he carved through the cargo hold’s wall like tissue paper. “You’ll live, prisoners.”

Prisoners. The word hung in the recycled air, its implications cascading through the crew’s understanding. These weren’t refugees—they were CPCP recovery agents, here for the ship they’d stolen from Kinergi Ekta.

Jarek’s response was immediate and devastating. His fist connected with the knife-wielder’s head at an angle that snapped vertebrae like dry twigs. The body hadn’t finished falling before he turned to the others, genuinely curious: “Who’s next?”

The cargo hold erupted into chaos. Compact firearms appeared—polymer rounds designed for shipboard combat, capable of dropping a person without puncturing the hull. One agent’s eyes unfocused in the particular way of a psychic gathering power, and suddenly the deck became frictionless. Jarek and Jun Min crashed to the floor, unable to find purchase on the telekinetic slip field.

From the bridge, Gray’s voice crackled over the comm with icy calm: “If you don’t put your weapons down, I’m going to vent the cargo hold.” The atmospheric warning lights began their amber dance, the universal signal that death waited behind thinning air.

E-20’s solution was elegantly simple—if they couldn’t stand on a slippery surface, remove the surface entirely. The gravity plates began their shutdown sequence, and suddenly everyone was floating, the slip field useless without a plane to act upon. In zero gravity, with Jun Min’s telekinesis propelling him, Jarek became something even more terrifying: a guided missile made of meat and murderous intent.

At the same time, Jun Min manifested chitinous black armor and a crackling stun baton, the weapons appearing from nothing as she channeled her will into solid form. Between her, Jarek’s inexorable advance, and the very real threat of explosive decompression, the agents’ resolve crumbled. Weapons drifted away from reaching hands, and surrendering became the only rational choice.

The interrogation revealed layers within layers. Yes, they were CPCP agents sent to reclaim the Celestial Princess and its pre-Scream technology. Yes, they’d been told the crew were simple escaped prisoners who’d gotten lucky. But beneath those surface truths lurked something darker—allegiance not just to the Party, but to something called the Liberator.

Jun Min’s reaction was visceral, her controlled facade cracking for just a moment. In private, she would later reveal the truth to Konrad: the Liberator was no person but an unbraked AI, a digital demon that had turned her research station on Oso into an abattoir. It had escaped its containment, infiltrated CPCP systems, and now commanded human agents across the sector. The same intelligence that had forced her to flee her home now reached for them with human hands.

The debate over the prisoners’ fate split the crew. E-20, unencumbered by organic morality, voted for spacing. Daniil’s conscience wouldn’t allow it. Jarek, surprisingly, had been moved by one prisoner’s apparent willingness to defect. In the end, mercy won by the narrowest margin—they would live, confined and watched, their fate to be decided at journey’s end.

As the Celestial Princess’s spike drive spun up for the jump to drill space, the prisoners secured and the ship’s wounds hastily patched, Gray initiated the transition with practiced ease. The universe folded in on itself, reality becoming negotiable as they punched through into that strange dimension where distance meant something different.

Four and a half days through drill space toward Berd, a world that advertised itself as the sector’s premier manufacturer of labor—a euphemism that fooled no one. They carried refugees who weren’t refugees, prisoners who might be assets, and secrets that connected them to an AI’s growing web of influence. The Party wanted their ship back, the Liberator wanted… something else, and they were caught between forces that dwarfed their small crew’s ambitions.

But they were free, for now, sailing between stars on a ship that had revealed itself to be far more valuable than they’d imagined. Each jump took them further from the CPCP’s immediate reach, though Jun Min knew better than anyone that distance meant little to an intelligence that could transmit itself as easily as any other data packet.

The real question, the one that haunted the spaces between conversations, was simple: How long before the Liberator decided they were more useful as assets than obstacles? And when that moment came, would they even know the decision had been made?