Intergalactic

„The whole docking area of the station is crawling with troops!“, Elias whispered with urgency into the hyperspace comm unit hidden behind a fake wall in his private quarters. „What the heck is Erulas thinking?“

„Desperation, I figure.“, the disembodied voice of his contact officer answered. For security reasons, Elias had no idea what the other man’s name or even rank was. If he was ever compromised, he couldn’t give up information that he didn’t have.

Elias was livid, barely keeping his voice low, the metallic tang of recycled air he usually barely noticed biting in his throat. „This isn’t one of the planets. A show of force? Seriously? They’re lucky nobody has decided to blow them up yet.“

„They are betting on pirates being cowards. Let’s be honest, few of the people there are ready to die for the sake of the station. They’ll defend their own, be it crew or property, but not start a battle with trained soldiers if neither of that’s threatened.“

Elias looked around nervously at ordinary sounds of activity from the nearby hallways. He was taking a considerable risk calling in from the station and not from a shuttle on the other side of planet Aethel as he usually did. But the situation left him no choice - marines occupied the docking bay and didn’t let anyone launch.

„Is HQ in contact with Erulas about this? Any of the backchannels maybe?“, he inquired, biting his upper lip.

„If so, nobody told me.“, the officer without a name answered after a brief moment of thought. „I’ll find out and come back to you. The usual spam message as a sign you should call me?“

„Yeah. Not sure how much Erulas is tapping into the station’s communications.“

Elias dropped the call and quickly put the wall covering the comm unit back into place. If anyone on or near the station was monitoring, they now knew that there were at least two hyperspace comms on Binary Bloom, even if they couldn’t break the encrypted channel itself. They would not have pinpointed the exact location in this short time, however.

He stood up and paced up and down in his quarters for a minute. They were spacious for the pirate outpost, a perk of having them at the far end, which suited him just right anyways. He was in the smallest room right now, furnished as an office and small library. Behind the single door was the living room, with attached sleeping room, kitchen and bathroom. All the heavy furniture in his quarters was fixed to either floor or walls. While the last time the gravity generators had failed on Binary Bloom was before he came to the station, his training had told him to be ready for all possible circumstances so that if it ever came to an attack or major sabotage on the station, he could act. For the same reason he had put the office into the room that had no windows, where most similar quarters on Bloom would have put the bed.

He went to the living room, and continued onwards without stopping. „Time to pay Yezz a visit.“, he grumbled to himself, grabbing a light jacket from the entryway on his way out into the pirate station.