Admiral Williams sat across from Captain Tay, waiting for Captain Sullivan to arrive.

'Tay, we will find him. We know exactly where he was going, we know where the shuttle was lost. They obviously didn't intend to kill him and they must know how many of their people I hold. Nothing he tells them is useful against us unless they start handing him tools and let him work on their own ships. I suspect that no species in the galaxy would be that stupid.'

Tay grinned briefly, aware that it would be the last mistake they made. Xeno's never seemed to realise just how powerful their technology was, or how an engineer with nothing to lose might act. Still, these were just words and she needed more. 'Admiral, I sent him out there. I want him home.'

The Admiral had a clear idea of Tay's feelings. He had sent out people that didn't come back, but Tay, despite everything, was new to the reality. It didn't matter if they recovered the Chief or not, this was going to hurt his new Captain. Growing up was always painful.

Roaden was left alone with the Interrogator, an Intec that seemed happy to just sit behind his desk and wait. Its mask shielding any emotions, its body still. The room smelled old, unwashed and neglected but it didn’t appear to hold any of the devices that had crossed Roaden’s mind. Finally, it spoke, ‘Sit down, Chief. I am your interrogator and we will, I’m afraid, be spending quite a lot of time together. I have a name but since you humans have no sense of smell worth a damn, you will simply call me ‘Sir’. Is that clear?’

Roaden vaguely remembered training, far too long ago and far too short, for being held, prisoner. Since they were mostly about laws that didn’t apply and for a world that felt very far away right now, he decided to wing it, ‘Intec, I will call you that the day you complete officer training in the HOF. You are Intec to me, or I will use some of the many other names I can think of right now. I am Iri Roaden, Chief Engineer on the Curiosity, Human Offensive Force, and I have a service number written down somewhere. If you let me get back to the ship, I’ll be sure to send it to you.’

The Intec didn’t respond immediately, until with a hiss from its mask, it sank back in its chair. ‘Chief, you are everything I dislike in humans. Arrogant, individual and defiant, so sure of your morality. But I have studied you, I have been paying attention. Yes, we held human slaves, for all the good they did the fools that captured them, but so did you. Yes, we are pirates, hunting where we will, taking from those who forced us to the very edges of space. We hide our worlds. Did you think we hid them from you? You, child soldiers of the Galaxy. You are only the latest of their atrocities against us. I do not expect you to believe me, indeed I don’t expect you to care that much but, as I said, I have studied your people. You seem to be able to put the parts together, to see to the core of things in a way that escapes most of you Aliens. That is your task, Engineer. We will assemble this history for your people or we will both die here.’

Roaden was getting more confused by the minute. As torture went, he had met worse nonsense at the bar. If this thing was serious, all it was going to do was feed him all the information an Intel officer could dream of. Propaganda? Really? He was supposed to turn on mankind, put on a pirate hat, and run around with this crowd? These guys must be truly fucked if they expected that to work. All he had to do was smile and nod until Tay arrived with whatever bits of the Fleet she had persuaded or stolen to come and get him. And all that ‘we will both die’ crap. Sure, try and involve me in my own torture. Make me care about the one holding the knife, about the things I will force him to do. Every human child had been trained against that shit for the last ten generations. Compliance is not culpability, cruelty is not kindness, pain is not love...lessons from a bitter Earth. Fuck you, Pirate. If I burn I will take you with me.

Tay had transferred to Captain Sullivan's ship, the Curiosity being too big and too new for this mission. He came to see her in the Engineering department where she was, frankly, hiding. They had recovered the Chief's shuttle and she was dismantling the wreckage, looking for anything that might help. ‘Tay, how are you doing? Anything I should be telling the Admiral?’

Tay shook her head, ‘It was simple enough. They were waiting for him, breached the shuttle, and grabbed him. Most of the damage was done afterward since he would have been dead if he was still on board.’ She looked at Sullivan, ‘Captain, they knew he was on the way, they knew exactly where to find him. How?’

Captain Sullivan smiled bitterly. ‘Well, with the vast resources of my department, with our subtle wiles and sheer genius, I have discovered that dark magic. Bork’s government put out a press release, giving out the exact details of his arrival to the entire universe. Or, at least to anyone paying attention, such as the Intec. Unfortunately, we weren’t. It never occurred to anyone that the first-ever visit by a human might be important or at least a visit by someone of his rank. Bork explained it to me while he made the tea. We were stupid, and I’m afraid the Chief is paying the price.’

Tay had been speaking often with Ben, as they tried to settle the recovered people and rebuild Oz into something special. He had insisted that she begin to learn the language, assuring her that no-one would fully trust her if she kept using the translator. So far they had worked down quite a long list of swearwords and right now seemed the perfect moment to use them all.

Roaden was taken to a new cell, without any handy toys to play with. If he had to be honest it wasn’t a cell really, just a bog standard crew compartment with a bloody big lock on the outside. These Intec made the worst kind of enemy, the ones that were a little too clever for the obvious and a little too stupid for the strange. If he pretended to be ill, well he guessed that the three heavily armed guards would drag him back to the medbay. If he made something explode, they would do the same. Other than the interrogator no-one seemed inclined to talk to him, so seduction was off the board. What was waiting for him was a pile of documents, a translator, and a notebook? Great. He always loved homework.

The documents were basically just a chronology, a long list of stuff that happened. It held no context, only one event following another. From the dates, if they were to be believed, they went back around eight-hundred years. Some were from the central galactic government, some on scraps of random paper. It looked like a family history assembled by some blind old lady with hoarding issues. Not really his field. However there was bugger else to do here, so he began to trawl through them, eventually finding the earliest paper. It looked like some kind of fairy-tale, some origin myth. He began to translate it, the software struggling with the archaic dialect. He shook his head, thinking that of all the outcomes of his capture, of all the fears he had and with his future so uncertain, this was the most unlikely. Any half-competent AI could do this in minutes. Why use him?

Tay finally finished matching the weapon signatures from the destroyed shuttle to actual weapons, then matching those weapons to any known Intec ship. All she found was that it was an Intec Cruiser, probably less than forty years old and not slave-built. The energy output was well above any of the half-assed stuff thrown together by slaves. This was from a shipyard, that meant there was an Intec shipyard out there and one that was making decent ships. Time to talk to the Admiral again.

She met Captain Sullivan first since this was his ship, then they called the Admiral. He was, as he liked to tell them frequently, up to his armpits in a war, so they tried to keep it short. ‘Admiral, we have something important for you. Somewhere out there, hidden from anything we have discovered so far, is an Intec system making good ships with decent weapons. No slaves, no stolen parts. The weapon signatures are consistent with a good, comprehensive, and competent shipyard. We need to find it. If they have moved to a war footing, we may be facing a lot more opposition than we expected.’ The Admiral waved his officers to silence, ‘You are sure? That seems like a lot of inference to draw from a bit of battle damage on a shuttle?’ Captain Sullivan was ready for that, ‘Sir, we checked. I’m telling you straight that the information that Captain Tay discovered is accurate. We need to find and eliminate that shipyard, and then we need to find out why the Galactic government is feeding us bullshit about these people. None of their intelligence has been accurate, we have gotten better Intel in four months than they have to offer? Really? They have been dealing with them for hundreds of years. Something is beginning to smell.’