Upon a sub-space station nestled within the Orion rift housed the prison complex which held some of the galaxies’ more sinister folk. Of them was one 50-year old whose crime I still do not know. All I did know was some seriously powerful people hired me to get him out. To that end, I’d had to do something super high profile to get the Orion rift authorities on my radar. I figured smuggling – y’know, the scientific designation still eludes me, I’ll just stick to its street name - quintessence dust, the most highly unstable enriched portal fuel would do the trick. It’d been banned in all the star-systems under the Polaris banner. Did I mention it was unstable? I’d gotten a shipment of it onto a train, all 18 canisters. At least that’s what the pill-suits told me. For the life of me, I didn’t remember how I got there. All I knew was I went from meeting some off duty pill-suits (they didn’t do a good job blending in) who gave me the job, paid me half and told me all I needed to do was get arrested and they’d make sure I got sent to the sub-space station prison. Mission accomplished, I guess. I’d have a contact on the inside, provide me with tools and all the help I needed to pull it off. That’s the last thing I remember. Next thing I know, I’m waking up from a nap on the train to a ton of Portal Control Special Forces (PCFs’), guns in my face. I remember having coffee with the suits I met just a day prior. They must have put something in it. Look, the job had sounded sketchy from the get-go, I must admit that. But I was desperate.

“The quintessence dust’s radiation causes short-term memory loss,” said the prison’s physician.

She had a scanner-bot put up imaging of my brain, heart and other organs that I could not quite recognize onto a panel in front of her. I was strapped to a bed, from my shoulders down to my ankles, with cables plugged onto my bare chest and temples.

"Figures…” I grumbled.

I wanted to be sent to the Orion rift prison and that was exactly what I got. Here’s the tricky part – remembering who the hell I was here to break out. Everything I’d been able to piece together was fragmented and came back in brief flashes. I guess I had the neurologist-bots who helped me piece everything together to thank. Well, almost everything. The Ensipio sub-space station, I came to find out, wasn’t just known for its prison, but a planetary-sized casino, as well. On board the craft that had shuttled me and other prisoners, I’d been able to catch a glimpse of some of the patrons’ crafts either on their way to or departing from the varying degrees of games of chance which the casino offered. So think of the sub-space station as a collection of three tennis balls held together by sticks poking through each ball. Actually, tennis ball isn’t exactly the right shape, I guess it’s more of a ‘not quite a cube’, so hexagon is the closest to describing it.

I drew a picture of it once. The smallest hexagon, at the top, was the prison. You got the casino in the middle, and beneath it, the residential/business area and they were all enclosed by an artificial gravity field.

The prison was a long distance away from the other two appendages of the station for obvious reasons. Though some might argue that building a prison there was crazy in the first place altogether.

No Galactic Senators representing the area ever complained though, the casino and business district were a huge investment boom as well as a huge net for… well, net income.

“Hey. Newbie.” It was my roommate, Wrench, snapping me out of my thoughts. It’s spelt as ‘Wrench’ but actually pronounced ‘rank’ apparently. He was a cyborg. Most of his left side shone a green-ish silver from his neck, down to his hip.

I assumed his left leg was made of Arinthium metal, as well. I’d never had the heart to ask how he’d ended up that way. He looked cool, all things considered.

He threw a packet of crisps my way which I caught without even looking in its direction but seeing it hurtling towards me out of the corner of my eye. I sat up from the top bunk and opened the bag up. This had become our little ritual – stealing snacks for each other. Snacks and information.

“Whaddaya got?” I asked.

Wrench and I were on a floor somewhere in the middle area of the prison which had – that I knew of – 18.

“We’re heading out soon, more chop-work.” He grumbled.

Two days a week we’re shuttled down to the residential area of the sub-space station to disassemble wrecked ‘havoc crafts’ as they were called due to their propensity for utter destruction. Some of them were at least thirty feet long. Inmates were placed on sections of the crafts, under the supervision of these 10-feet tall deterrence robots that would subdue you without a second thought by sending thousands of jolts of electricity up and down your body if they perceived you to be attempting an escape.

We were equipped with helmets, goggles, blowtorches, to use to dismantle parts, and also wrenches and crowbars if we needed to pry anything loose, which we literally always did. The one they had us working on today was a craft that had been cut in half presumably by an explosion.

The half we were working on was about 15 feet long and as high as a two-storey building and also suspended in the air, having been placed and firmly secured on two side-by-side platforms that would enable us work on all sides of it. 

Wrench and I were attached to harnesses connected to a drone-bot that would move us to any section of the craft we requested it to. I used my blow torch to create a circle around an electric panel that still seemed to be operational and dumped it in a pile of other devices inside a bucket also attached to a harness of its own, after taking it out of the havoc craft’s wall, wires and all.

A deterrence-bot hovered past us, making its patrol around the halved havoc craft. There were about fifteen prisoners working on different sections of it.

“Ever been in one of these?” I asked Wrench. “Can’t say that I have,” he pried an assortment of cables and breakers loose and tossed them in the scrap pile.

“Drone-bot, take me a bit higher.” The cables on his harness started to pull him up slowly. “A little more,” he requested. “OK stop.”

I moved my goggles up onto my forehead and took a drink of water from the flask on the end of a rope loosely tied around my neck.

“What about you?” asked Wrench. “Oh yeah, tons of times and never for a fun reason.” I chuckled lightly.

“What the hell did you even do out there? You don’t seem like a soldier.”

“Oh,” I couldn’t help but laugh at the image forming in my head of me valiantly serving the Polaris imperial army.

“Definitely not a pill-suit. I uhh… let’s say I was a freelance procurement agent.”

He shot me a long look from above. “You some kind of thief?” Wrench enquired. “‘cause that would explain why you’re doing time here. Was it some big score that got you caught?”

I decided not to deny his assumptions. After all, I couldn’t let anyone find out I had an escape plan in the works. I could at least tell half-truths for now until I was sure I could trust him.

“I was umm… smuggling this shipment of - believe it or not - quintessence dust.”

"Seriously? You know that shit will kill you, right? It’s insanely radioactive.”

“Oh believe me, I found that out the hard way.” I rubbed my temples with my thumb and index finger. “I got it from Point A to B quite magnificently, avoiding all the scanners and detection tech. and then some interested parties wanted to get it off my hands. Turns out they were cops.”

“Well that sucks.” Was all the response I could get out of him. The image of the pill-suits stayed in my mind.

A piece of an idea began to take form. A few pill-suits did hang around the prison, guarding only one section of the bottom floor. I’d only been able to learn this thanks to Wrench, who heard it from some other prisoner who heard it from another part of the grapevine and so on and so forth.

I knew my escape was contingent on one thing: being disguised as a guard. During the next few weeks in the Ensipio prison, I dedicated my efforts at two things: the first was judiciously creating a routine well under public view.

I wanted to be seen as many times as possible in as many places as possible. The second was learning the appointed shifts, posts and patrol patterns of the guard-bots, human security personnel, and the pill-suits on the first floor.

There was a guard common area where they hung out, there was a grand hall where they mustered for briefings. I’d had the opportunity of ‘sitting in’ on one impromptu address from the Assistant Warden regarding a visit from an Orion rift Senator, one evening, when some of the prisoners had been tasked with refilling the water dispensing machines in the hall with bags of ice for cold water and buckets of coal for hot.

I remember thinking ‘It must suck to be a politician, ‘cause wouldn’t she rather just visit the casino?’ The prison was designed so that entry and exit could only be achieved by the topside. It was made that way to make escape a hell of a whole lot harder.

My day got interesting when I was having breakfast in the cafeteria and someone slipped a napkin right into my bowl of soup. Fortunately, I picked it up before it got too wet. It read: Scrap yard duty, golden bangle. It was cryptic. I guess it had to be, just in case any guards ventured upon it.

I squeezed the napkin and pushed it into the soup, making sure it melted in the semi-liquid. This must be my contact on the inside. I finally felt like my escape was making decent progress. On the second day of scrap yard work for the week, I set out on the transport that would shuttle us down to the residential area of Ensipio containing the havoc-craft scrap yards.

Wrench had been assigned to a different craft from mine, per my request. I needed him spying on some prisoners that stayed on the lower floors closest to where the Pill-suits guarded.

I also wanted him out of the way when I met the contact, needed to play that close to the chest. After all, I couldn’t be sure that at any moment he wouldn’t blow the whistle or hijack the plan and make me take the fall while he got out. “Why can’t you do it?” He had asked.

“I told you, I can’t suddenly break routine. A tightly established pattern of behaviour is sometimes the best alibi,” I implored. “The first floor might be an important part of the plan. I need to know everything I can about it.”

He didn’t protest further, seeing that it wasn’t such a big ask. Wrench had started to figure out my intentions of escape and I’d come clean and brought him aboard after he threatened to blow the whistle unless I did.

We’d managed to dismantle the halved havoc craft all the way down to just a fraction big enough to only require just six people. I was one of them, and a few hours into dismantling scraps of the craft’s engine, there still was no sign of a prisoner in a golden bangle. Working on the havoc craft did make me think of something: getting out of the sub-space station via the prison was impossible. The only space-crafts that docked there were designed to prevent the very thing I was trying to do. They physically could not travel farther than Ensipio.

And the only way they could be operated was by scanning a chip within the prisoners’ cuffs and if any passenger/prisoner of the craft wasn’t wearing one, the pilot-bots would not take off.

Something else I’d need to figure out. My all-time favourite thing about the Orion rift prison was the amount of camera blind spots that it had.

On the floors which Wrench and I were allowed access to (three of them), he’d discovered 2, 1 and 3 spots, respectively.

He’d shown me all of them, further cementing the trust I was gaining in him. The blind spots would be vital in successfully obtaining and changing into the pill-suit uniforms. I’d finally picked the day.

Wrench and I would be getting out with or without the aid of the inside man. And I was more than ready to forget about the job. It had brought me more than a fair share of trouble. At the scrap yard, I kept my eyes peeled for a golden bangle and I had finally decided to give up until I spotted it, half-thinking it was a hallucination and my brain was just showing me what I wanted it to or that the quintessence dust had messed my head up more than the doctors thought.

It was on probably one of the worst wrists it could have been on: a deterrence-bot’s. I kept my eye on it as it circled the havoc craft engine I and a few others were working on. I unplugged the cables attached to my harness and started to free-climb the engine, placing my feet in the nooks and crannies of the large engine and using them as steps. The deterrence-bot was a few feet below me, slowly making its rotational hover in the right direction.

It would circle to the other side and that’s where I needed to be. I climbed all the way up to my hover-bot and practically leapt onto it.

“Hover-bot, go forward.” I commanded. The hover-bot did just that. I now had the attention of the other prisoners.

They watched me like some sort of spectacle or the scrap-yard break time entertainment. It was the other deterrence-bots I needed to worry about. Fortunately, they were a long distance away from where I was. The smaller the group of prisoners, the lesser security assigned to them and our group had only been assigned the one wearing the golden bangle.

"Stop,” I told the hover-bot. I re-attached the cables onto my harness and back onto the bot, then carefully placed my feet on the engine.

The deterrence-bot would be nearing the corner at any moment and I had some ground to cover if I was going to catch it. I kept climbing down towards the point I estimated would put me right next to it if it hovered past.

I could see it now. I climbed down faster.

“Hover-bot, lower me down!” I yelled. The cables whirred and I felt my stomach sink as I made rapid descent right as the deterrence-bot was approaching.

“Stop!” I was about to fall right onto it.

I grabbed hold of a part of the engine to stop myself and as I did stop, the deterrence-bot’s red rectangular eyes met mine and suddenly its hand was clasped around my neck and it had me pinned against the engine.

“SURRENDER. SURRENDER.” It commanded in a deadpan, monotone voice and an unmoving straight line of a mouth.

“I surrender. I surrender. Please. It was an accident.” I cried out, choking.

After what felt like a really long time, the deterrence-bot let go of my neck and resumed its patrol like nothing had even happened. I watched it go, with my left hand rubbing my neck and with my right holding the golden bangle.

“Trying to get me killed…” I leaned my head back, panting. I didn’t bother covering up the huge red bruise around my neck from Wrench.

My trust in him was officially cemented. I filled him in on the note and the strangulation. The bangle itself was placed on the desk in our cell, with both of us staring right at it. I picked it up, examined it in different angles, made the light hit different parts of it. I wondered why this had been placed on a bot, racking my brain for any hints as to what its purpose could possibly be. I put my wrist through it and saw Wrench tilt his head.

“What?” I asked. “Did you see something?”

“Yeah. Something definitely moved right as you put it on.” He gestured to see my wrist so I obliged. He cradled it in his good hand and with his prosthetic, felt the metal. His eyes lit up. “This is Tritonian tech. It’s some sort of recording device. I just need to figure out how to activate it.”

“What should I do?” He tapped the bangle at the base.

“Face it towards the wall and make a fist.”

I pointed my open palm at the wall and then made a fist. Nothing happened. I made a more laboured attempt at fist making/punching the air and suddenly a beam of white light shot out of a hole at the topside of the bangle and cast an image on the wall.

There was now also a display on the top of the bangle. I swiped and scrolled a white dot on the display which had just that: the dot and a bluish-white background. But then I saw words.

“No way,” I exclaimed. “What?” “How the hell does this thing know my name?”

“It’s powered by an A.I.,” Wrench explained. “It’s a rare Tritonian wrist computer. They use it for all kinds of stuff.”

On the display were the words ‘Rone Reeders’: my name. I double tapped it and a loading screen appeared on the display.

“There’ll be an option to let you project it on the wall.” Wrench said.

I tapped an icon to display a set of options and sure enough there was one that would let me be able to project imaging onto any surface I pointed the bangle at.

I took off the bangle and set it down on the table, facing the wall. There was now an image of a young woman on the wall. She was dressed in Triton Imperial gear, their ceremonial dress and her hair was in a ponytail.

The background surroundings didn’t give anything away. There was only a grey metal wall behind her and she was seated. Wrench and I shared a look, wondering what fresh hell we’d stepped into.

“My name is Thirlia Coxand,” said the woman in the video. “I am one of the lead architects contracted to design the Ensipio sub-space station prison. My husband and partner who brought me on board the project discovered a terrible secret about the prison while preparing its renovation. On one of its floors, a syndicate operating on the authority of forces high up in the Polaris military were housing Tritonian prisoners of war. And not only that, they were turning them, making them into spies. When he found out, he threatened to blow the whistle.

The syndicate figured it’d bring too much attention to get rid of him completely, so instead, they framed him for a slurry of heinous crimes not limited to treason and threat to galactic security, and ruined the reputation he’d spent a lifetime building. To top it all off, they threw him in the very prison he helped design, like some sick twisted prank. Through a third party, I was able to make contact with him.

Together, the three of us devised a plan to get him out. And you – Rone Reeders – are that plan. You come highly recommended in both the Tritonian & Polarian underworlds, it is impressive you’ve been able to adapt to both. I’ve heard what might be tall tales but the sources which provided me with them are people who I trust with my life. I know about the siege on the asteroid Zarte cabin, I know about how you singlehandedly recovered the crown orb in it. Escape, some might say, is your expertise.

You are the best chance Andrert has. Please help us.”

The video ended and I turned off the projection.

“That was uhh…” Wrench began.

“Yeah…” I ran my fingers through my hair and exhaled deeply.

What on earth had I stumbled into?

“You raided Zarte? I heard about that on the news, never thought the day’d come I’d actually meet the guy who did it.” He couldn’t keep the glee out of his voice. "That’s a story you have to tell me.”

“Maybe someday,” I chuckled, “over a really good home-cooked meal.” I slumped into bed after hiding the bangle.

“Get some sleep,” I said, “It’s gonna be a long day tomorrow.”

After examining the other files left in the bangle by Thirlia, I discovered a full blueprint of the entire prison, fully detailed, down to the specks of dust in corners the sanitation-bots could not reach. The floor with the Pill-suits, as I suspected was guarding the detention centre we needed to break Thirlia’s husband out of.

To that end, Wrench and I needed to figure out a reason and also a way to finally get down there.

"We could start a fire,” Wrench suggested, “Protocol for that is to gather all prisoners to specified muster points until it is extinguished. We could use the blind spots, that way even if it doesn’t work, the source can’t be tracked back to us.”

“We can’t risk something that’ll trigger a full-on lockdown,” I warned. “If we’re going down there, it will have to be for an authentic reason. I like the scale of your idea, though. We do need to start a fire, and I’ve got a very particular kind on my mind.” I couldn’t help but smile.

“Am I gonna like this plan?” Wrench enquired.

“Not one bit.” I laughed.

“Senator’s gonna be here in two days. Do we have enough time to prepare?”

“Can’t say for sure,” I retorted. “Pressure makes diamonds, eh?”

The day finally arrived. The prisoners were gathered and addressed by the Warden. His appearance was telling of just how auspicious the visit was as he rarely graced us with his presence. We assembled very early in the day, just after breakfast.

Wrench and I had gone over the plan time and again prior to the day. All I had to do was wait for the right moment to initiate phase one. We returned to our cells, while the Warden took the Senator and her attachés on a tour.

We were let out in the afternoon to roam in the prisoners’ mess hall. My opportunity arrived. I made my way towards one of the guards standing with his back to the wall and keeping an eye out on all the prisoners. Wrench kept his eye on me.

“Excuse me, sir.” I said to the guard, my hands in my pocket.

“What do you want, Reeders?” This one knew my name. I’d made it my mission to get close to a few of the guards specifically for this very purpose.

“It’s my cellmate,” I gestured with my neck in Wrench’s direction, twenty feet away, sitting on a bench, “the cyborg over there.”

“Yeah, what about him?” asked the guard, impatiently.

"I think he’s planning something, sir. Some sort of attack on the Senator that’s visiting. Maybe also an escape.” I pulled my hands out of my pocket. “I found this.”

I handed the guard the golden bangle.

“He had it hidden in a hole in the wall.” The guard’s eyes widened, he knew exactly what it was. He picked up his radio from his utility belt and pushed the speaker button.

“Deterrence-bots, activate protocol Charlie-North-Sierra-Golf-9,” he instructed. “Apprehend and detain prisoner A-750. Lethal force not authorized. I repeat: lethal force not authorized.” The bots erupted into action.

Weapons drawn, they marched in the general direction of Wrench. Prisoners got out of the bots’ way, away from Wrench who just got on his knees and put his hands up.

There was an alarm blaring now. The deterrence-bots stood in a semi-circle, the four of them with guns pointed right at Wrench who knelt there with his hands placed on his head.

The hall was in pandemonium with prisoners and guards alike either yelling confusedly or barking orders. Human guards put cuffs on Wrench and escorted him out of the hall, presumably somewhere they would interrogate him.

I was suddenly getting cuffs placed on me too. Three guards marched us into an elevator, but the deterrence-bots didn’t get aboard, they returned to the hall to lead the prisoners back to their cells, as instructed by the guard I’d given the bangle to.

“What is that?” asked a different guard. “Contraband. And something more, it would seem. We’ll see what the Warden has to say about it.” The guard said, holding the bangle, while staring daggers at Wrench.

I couldn’t tell what floor we were on, one of the guards was blocking my view of the display screen on the wall. When the doors opened, we were shoved out of the elevator and into a room with nothing but two chairs to which we were seated in and cuffed to.

Some time passed. One of the three guards left and when he returned, he was with the Assistant Warden, the visiting Senator (I surmised that she insisted on seeing the threat to her life with her own eyes. Gotta love politicians), her attaché, two pill-suits – the Warden’s personal guards and a deterrence-bot.

The Assistant Warden had the bangle in his hand. He twirled it around, all the while looking from me to Wrench and back again. He walked with the air of nobility, a self-confidence and sense of control of everyone and everything in his sight.

“I’m told you are planning an assault,” he said to Wrench in a Tritonian accent.

“That’s right,” Wrench responded without hesitation.

Suddenly, he burst free of his cuffs and disarmed the guard to his left while blocking shots that came using his prosthetic arm.

Arinthium metal was newly discovered and rare enough that only a fraction of a handful of people understood its sheer durability.

He caught everyone by surprise and the room scrambled as he plummeted into all three guards one after another. The pill-suits were quick to react: firing at Wrench but only hitting him in his Arinthium-enforced torso as he manoeuvred so that the shots did just that.

The deterrence-bot, also catching the whole room by surprise, suddenly fired at the pill-suits. They grunted and slumped to the ground, dead.

“What the hell?” I exclaimed.

Wrench broke off my cuffs, then gestured for the Assistant Warden to have a seat in the chair, while the Senator occupied the other.

I found some other cuffs on the guards and bound our hostages, while keeping my eye on the deterrence-bot and the Senator’s attaché, who’d been crouched behind it, but was now slowly rising and making her way towards us.

“No frickin’ way,” I said. “You here to micro-manage?”

“Orsa.” The Senator bellowed. “What is the meaning of this?”

The attaché began stripping one of the pill-suits.

“Yeah, I don’t really feel like explaining myself to either of you,” said Thirlia, spitefully. “Key card’s in his left pocket.”

I took the key card and then gagged the Assistant Warden and Senator, using my ripped T-shirt, then changed into a suit; a translucent, yet navy blue overall bearing the Orion rift imperial flag blended with the Polarian signet on the chest, with a utility belt, boots and helmet.

I then joined Wrench and Thirlia at the door. Wrench would play our prisoner and we were transporting him to the first floor, if any one asked. We made our way into the elevator.

The bot would stay behind and watch them. I cocked the rifle in my hand then inserted the key card into the lock on the elevator wall panel. A thought crossed my mind.

"Was the deterrence-bot my inside man?” I asked. She half-smiled and that answered my enquiry.

“You know the lay of the floor?” asked Thirlia.

“Memorized every inch of it,” Wrench responded.

I nodded confidently, pointing my rifle at the door. I watched the numbers get lower and lower until we got to 1. The doors opened and I opened fire immediately, aiming at the camera directly in front of us, to the right, whereas Wrench’s two pistol shots took out the first set of pill-suits, two of them, standing on either side of the elevator’s door.

We stepped off the elevator and Wrench, using his Arinthium arm, punched the door repeatedly, sabotaging it so that it would not open for whoever came down after us.

We carefully made our way down the hallway, Thirlia in the middle, Wrench and I on either side of her. The cells on either side of us had long doors that went all the way up to the ceiling for some reason; this was the solitary confinement area of the facility. Our destination was the holding cells for prisoners Polaris were turning into spies.

It was essentially a grand hall with cubicles where the prisoners were cuffed to slabs in braces from head to toe, drugged, tortured and shown hypnotic imagery for hours on end. The first floor was by far the largest in the entire facility.

Wrench and I engaged more guards; they were placed in patrolling pairs of threes and twos all over the floor. We arrived at Thirlia’s husband’s cubicle after making a bunch of turns in the holding cell area.

It was essentially a black cube about 10-feet high and wide enough for just two people to sit inside of.

“Andrert.” Thirlia whispered, “Can you hear me? It’s Lia.”

“Lia?” he yelled.

“We’re going to get you out of there, just hold on.”

All around us, visible through observation screens on the doors, there were catatonic prisoners, some drooling and all speaking in incoherent chorus. 

There was only one guard here, a different kind of deterrence-bot than I’d ever seen. It had two heads, and six arms, all holding guns. I felt my heart rate quicken and we all placed our backs on the cubicle, trying to leave its view.

“It hasn’t seen us yet,” I said. “You open that door and that’ll change.”

Thirlia frowned but she knew I was right.

The bot was about 20 cubicles down the front of us, slowly moving to the next row.

“We need to lead it away from this row.” Wrench offered.

“Alright, I’ll go around, distract it. Let’s meet back at the entrance.” I got up and surreptitiously took a left turn and paced quickly past more cubicles with catatonic prisoners inside them.

Once at a comfortable distance I fired my rifle multiple times to which the deterrence-bot responded—

“INTRUDER! SURRENDER! SURRENDER!” Followed by quick stomping as it came rushing towards where the shots had come from- me.

I ran farther away, widening the distance between us and then turned in an arc past more and more cubicles, they seemed endless. An alarm was blaring.

I ran to catch up with the others and as planned, they were at the entrance to the facility. Just as I reached them, gunfire erupted.

The bot had somehow taken a path that would cut me off, it must have hovered over the rows of cubicles while tracking me.

We all took cover behind a wide control deck. Pill-suits reinforced the bot, we were pinned.

“Any one hit?” I yelled.

“Lay cover!” Thirlia bellowed. Wrench and I fired shots but the bot fired back, barely stopping from the impact of our guns’ blasts.

The pill-suits took cover as shots ricocheted and hit some of them. Thirlia made a beeline for a wall, 15 paces to the right, away from the deck we took cover behind, and placed four devices in a rectangular shape upon it about the length of a door.

Her husband sat next to me, ears covered, barely blinking. He was in bad shape. The wall exploded and my heart dropped expecting us all to be pulled out into the cold vacuum of space then thankfully remembered the gravity fields surrounding Ensipio.

The deterrence-bot had us pinned and still hadn’t run out of bullets. We’d taken out the pill-suits but for one. In the hole in the wall, I could see people through the door of a craft, they must have been Thirlia’s extraction team.

“Reeders!” she bellowed over the gunfire.

Thirlia threw one of the explosives to me and I caught it.

“It’s magnetic!” she cried out. I peeked out the side of the deck, nearly getting my head blown off, and retreating back into cover.

A bit of the hair on the side of my head had burnt off from a shot. “Cover me!” I yelled at Wrench. He readied his pistols, then fired over the top of the deck, not getting up.

The bot focused fire on his position, hitting him in the shoulder without Arinthium.

Wrench collapsed and cried out in pain but he’d bought me enough time to roll the grenade right at the deterrence-bot’s feet. It attached to its foot and blew up its entire left side, shrapnel hitting the remaining pill-suit as he cried out.

The deterrence-bot now had its back to me as I approached, all the while firing at its heads.

It took at least six shots to blow it up and it fired back, hitting me in the thigh and stomach.

I felt a cold unlike I’d ever before. I was bleeding out, fading in and out of consciousness.

Thirlia and her companions retrieved us. We got on board their craft and it made its way swiftly out of Ensipio, portalling right out of the Orion rift system when we left the sub-space station’s gravitational pull. I was placed on my back, on a table, and someone was trying to treat my wounds.

To my right, there was a screen with story board art – it told the tale of the war; two boys playing on a beach that was coloured navy blue and green: the colours of the Orion rift galactic flag.

One represented Triton, the other – Polaris. The two planets had mined for the most valuable galactic resource: portal fuel, shown through the boys digging in the sand. Polaris had run out of the resource and needed to mine from the other: Triton, shown by one boy’s shovel breaking and needing to borrow the other’s.

But Triton didn’t want to share and so Polaris had tried to take it by force. Tried and failed, then resorted to outnumbering the boy by calling for help from their friends, which denoted the splitting of the galactic senate and Orion rift star system into three: those siding with the respective planets and those that chose to remain neutral in the whole debacle.

Nine planets in total. Triton held the monopoly of portal fuel pricing seeing as how only they could produce and mine it.

There were many who would do anything to change that. Hence, the syndicate’s efforts at placing spies in the Tritonian territories so as to gain influence on mining operations.

I suspected I wasn’t anywhere close to being out of the woods having thwarted such a high stakes and grand-scale operation.

Thirlia and Andrert were kind enough to see to it Wrench and I had the best medical care. Andrert himself had required some serious therapy but was on the mend.

They couldn’t thank us enough. Wrench got an upgrade on his prosthetic arm: trading in his Arinthium metal arm for Geurapedics machinery: nano-tech infused prosthetics that connected with the nervous system.

I thought it was only fair that we split the second half of my payment which Thirlia kept her word on.

Last time I saw any of them, I’d woken up from surgery in a hospital, millions of star systems away from Ensipio. We’d said our thank yous, goodbyes and the payments and splits had been made.

I planned to meet up with Wrench a year later, get that home-cooked meal we’d talked about back in our cell.

He punctually showed up at the run-down apartment I was staying in, the kind of place that didn’t ask too many questions, just perfect for wanted men. “I’ve never asked you this, but,” I paused, “why were you in Ensipio?” There was a long silence. We’d just finished our meals and the question had somehow just fallen out of me. Then--

“My daughter worked in a factory on Utromiadisk - small planet just on the outskirts of the rift. I hadn’t done a good job watching over her for a long time, being in and out of trouble with the law and all… I just wanted to keep it as far away from her and her mother as much as possible.

We’d finally started reconnecting, even got a place together for when she’d visit me. Her mom, we’re not together anymore. She loved her work: every time I see one of those hover-bots, I think: ‘maybe she made this one.’

Some Polaris forces engaged a Triton armada, got blown to bits and came crashing down on multiple planets. All she could do was call me and her mother, tell us… her dying words. I think I went crazy, ‘cause I remember stealing a craft and portalling there right after.

Whole place was ablaze. Without thinking, I ran straight into what remained of the factory and uhh, that’s how I ended up like this.”

I placed my hand on Wrench’s shoulder, supportively.

“Tritonian, Polarian, I didn’t care. After I got out of the hospital, I wrapped my hands around the neck of any and every bastard involved in this godforsaken war. Had a crew, we crossed out a few names. Well, I used to.

Our luck ran out one day and they wound up dead, while I wound up imprisoned.”

A silence fell upon the living room where we sat side-by-side on a sofa, with bottled drinks in our hands.

“On Triton, I worked for an organization tasked with procuring cargo lost in space. More often than naught, some of the cargo we found, we kept.

One day, I kept something that belonged to some really bad people. They weren’t very happy about that,” I chuckled.

“The crown orb.” Wrench said.

I nodded.

“Actually, stealing the crown orb was more the means to my desired end.”

“I’m confused. What did you steal from the really bad people?”

“The bad people’s leader’s wife,” I said bitterly. “Kinda fell for each other, ran away together and a few years later, I come home, the place is a mess, she’s gone and then I get a message: join his crew on the Zarte cabin heist if I ever want to see her again.”

"Well where is she now?”

“Kinda everywhere, I guess. She wanted her ashes spread out in space.”

"Shit.”

“Yeah. Apparently, he would rather see her dead than happy.”

“You ever get the guy?”

I paused.

"No,” I sniffed. “Not yet.”

With that, I downed the last bit of my drink, remembering why I had even taken the Ensipio job in the first place. The payment would finance two things: information on where to find him and how to get me there. “You wanna cross off a few more names?” I asked Wrench.