Chapter 1 - The Outcast

Guardian Transmission Log - 25J-47-FQ3 / Unidentified User

-Possible Network Error / Fragment Capture

"The Reef didn't always have a name. The asteroid field that surrounded the Solar System was once called the Kuiper Belt. During the Golden Age, many of its larger chunks were mined for precious metals and fuel for the colony ships that would carry Humans past the expanse of the System. All that remained were barren rock and rubble.

No one had ever thought the remaining wasteland would be a shelter from Humanity's greatest enemies. And yet, that refuge would become a place of compromise, deceit, power-struggles, and ultimately one of the greatest tragedies to pollute the Light.

It is not certain that the Awoken fully understood the result of their indifference towards the Light and the Darkness. They claim to have transcended both, exalting themselves above either position in blatant arrogance. It was only a select few who stood up against tradition and the politics of convenience. I was one of them, and I was determine to change my destiny for the better.

This is the story I will tell. This is the story i lived to find true."

- End Fragment Capture

The Reef

Asteroid Cluster 27-H

Year of the Queen 2717, Month of Yen

The warning klaxons aboard the ancient frigate resounded through the main cabin, only to die out when the local power conduit failed to keep them going. The lone occupant swore out loud and donned on her life-support helmet. They found us again. Finishing up clearing out the storage bins for supplies and securing them in her backpack, Henrietta Millan secured the bulbous helmet to her suit's collar and immediately heard the voice of her shipmate over the comm.

"Scout ships are inbound, Etta. We need to bolt."

"Are you still in the engine room, Rand?" she asked, already starting for the cockpit. But before he could answer she nearly bowled him over at the cabin's entrance.

Rand Vinyar gasped but held up his hand to halt her progression to the cockpit. "No need. I signaled the others to regroup at Camp Bravo. We can use the shuttle to slip out of sight, but I'm afraid this place is compromised. As long as we can shake our pursuit, we should be fine."

Etta frowned. "And who is our pursuit?"

Rand snorted. "Who do you think?" He made the unspoken hand gesture: thumb, middle, and pinky finger raised with the index and ring finger lowered.

The Queen's Guard. "Dammit," Etta swore. "I thought this sector had been swept clean three days ago."

"They must be stepping up their patrols," Rand offered. He shook his head. "We need to move, now."

Etta turned around and started for the docking collar. Their shuttle was a hunk of junk, but it was almost impossible to detect in the midst of a debris cluster— and The Reef was full of them. As she turned down the last short corridor, she found herself growing frustrated. More so than usual. The ship they had found would have been the perfect hideout. It had plenty of O2 reserves and its thick hull would have blocked nearly any sensor probe an Emissary's ship could have sent out. It didn't matter that the jump drive was dead, only that the ship could maintain atmosphere and heat for an extended period of time.

Then she narrowed the focal point of her anger. How were we found? She paused to think, and this time Rand did bump into her. She shrugged off his pull of her arm and stopped short of entered the docking collar. "What did the sensor readouts say, Rand?"

Even through the slight opacity of his visor, she could see his face scrunch up. "Why does that matter? We've been found and we need to get off this ship."

"Did the energy signatures match the patrols' profile?" Etta asked, starting to suspect something she didn't want to assume. "You know the Guard's ships run quieter than civilian's, right?"

"I know," he said with a child-like tone. "We don't have time to double check the sensors. I saw what I saw and activated the alarm." He put his hands on his hips exasperatedly. "Look, if we don't leave now we're going to be dragged off to the Canyon, and I know you wouldn't last long in that prison."

"And why is that? Because I'm a half-breed?"

"It's because your a refugee, Etta," he said bluntly. Rand paused slightly, shook his head dismissively, and grabbed her arm again. "Let's go."

But Etta shrugged it off again, this time more forcefully. "Don't touch me," she said through clenched teeth. His stance told her he was about to make his move, but she needed to be sure. "You aren't a refugee like me, are you?" she accused, while taking a cautious step backward.

Rand squared his shoulders. "No one is like you, Etta," he said with a slightly darker tone.

Even through the visor, she could feel his gaze work up and down her slender form, and it sent a chill up her spine. "You don't have to do this, Rand. You don't have to live like this."

"You have something special going on," he added, not even hearing Etta's reply. Rand lowered his voice even more, completely removing his deceptive façade of a fellow refugee she once found trustworthy. "And that sort of uniqueness will pay handsomely with the Slavers Guild."

Etta slowly shook her head. It was all a lie. He is a lie. Rand is a bona fide Awoken trafficker. Etta had bought Rand's story when she ran into him at Camp Bravo. He seemed so genuine in his plight's story, but his lack of 'roughing it' made her doubt his background more and more. Reef refugees were, by nature, living off of the broken ships and asteroid stations that littered the Belt. Creature comforts, of which Rand knew plenty of, were few and far between. Only those that had joined with outlaws and thieves knew of the things Rand spoke.

But Etta had wanted to believe him, wanted to hope the best for him. He had proved himself a competent shipmate, but his leading them to this particular ship had been a miraculous find. A find, she could only now assume, that was given to him by the Slavers Guild as a trap for her.

Etta had done a tremendous job at hiding her identity of being half Awoken and half Human by taking numerous precautions, but Rand must have heard from someone at Tsavo Station of her true nature. Which meant that that particular refugee camp was no longer safe to hide in.

"So what was your plan then?" Etta asked. "You were going to pilot the shuttle right into the belly of a Guild ship? Knock me unconscious in the back of the head and hope oxygen deprivation doesn't kill me during a cold-shirt transfer?"

Completely gone was his artificial demeanor. Rand reached behind his back and stepped sideways. "Something like that." The weapon he produced was a short-barrel pistol and he waved it to direct her down the docking collar. "Move."

Being barely out of her teens, Etta still knew a thing or two about self-defense. She learned so much from other refugee women that had experienced bondage and suffering at the hands of slavers. It was a sad truth that the civility of ancestors past was gone with the Light from the fabled "Traveler".

But with defending herself, timing was everything. She knew that if she stepped into that shuttle, her life would no longer be in her control. He would have all the advantages, and she would become a victim of trafficking like many other Awoken females had become.

"I don't need to shoot you, Etta, but the Guild's recent raid on a medical frigate did provided us with a healing tube…" He trailed off and waved his hand.

"You're a worthless condu slug, you know that?" Etta could feel heat behind her eyes as her anger boiled. She stepped onto the lip of the doorway, grabbed the frame of the docking collar's oval hatch, and paused. She waited for Rand to stick her in the back with the tip of his gun, and he obliged. Idiot. Only untrained, undisciplined traffickers gave their captives a precise placement of their weapon by pressing it against them.

Etta's movement was swift and sudden. She raised her heel up in a sweeping arc that clocked the back of Rand's helmet. As he fell forward, he put a hand on Etta's shoulder, while the pistol slipped past her side. She pinched his hand with her left arm and pushed the pistol outward with her right hand, causing Rand to shriek as his fingers bent at an angle they were never intended to go.

The gun fired, and the bullet hit the interior wall of the docking collar, breaking the atmospheric hold in both ships. She pried the gun loose and it was immediately suck out of the gaping hole in the collar's wall. Etta knew that the dying hulk of the ship wouldn't automatically keep the O2 levels balanced, but the shuttle they had brought would indeed resort to safety protocols and seal itself off from the docking collar all together.

Rand must have been thinking the same thing. With his grip still on her shoulder, he pulled her back into the airlock room and bolted for the shuttle. The doors were already starting to close, but Rand threw himself forward, twisting in the air, and managed to get mostly through the gap. His right leg, below the knee, was caught in the closing doors. With a sickening thud and a cry of absolute pain, Rand's leg was severed. The leftover appendage started to slide across the collar floor towards the venting hole in the wall.

Etta didn't have time to waste. She got to her feet and started running for the cockpit. He suit gave her a maximum of one hour's worth of air but it depended on how heavily she breathed and how much she moved. Rand, you worthless piece of—

Another alarm went off over the comm system, signaling that the shuttle had indeed departed. Etta swore out loud again, and flew through the final doorway to the cockpit. The oval shaped viewport wrapped around to cover a good peripheral of port and starboard. The asteroids outside were still as they had been, but with the shove off of the shuttle, the ship was now rotating slowly, making her an easy mark for a Guild vessel. Her frigate was now her only means of avoiding capture.

She glanced over the controls and found the energy reserves dangerously low, but an engine restart was possible. Closing her eyes and hoping for the best, she pushed the sequence button. With a stutter and a non-musical change in pitch, the frigate roared to life. Several readouts on the console to her left lit up in the red instantly, but the controls came to life in her hands and she waited a moment for the ship to warm up.

That moment ended when a glimmer of light from behind one of the asteroids caught her eye. Kicking the drive on, she accelerated slowly. The cumbersome craft immediately tended to drift to port, causing Etta to work the controls more feverishly. But when she steered towards port, the ship responded amazing well. Note to self.

Slowly gathering speed, the frigate pushed through the nearest opening of debris and into the asteroid cluster. The floating rocks were of completely various sizes, some as big as a star cruiser and some were this size of one's fist. Both, given the right velocity, could be deadly.

Brilliant flashes of light played out from the distant source of the glimmer and Etta knew the enemy craft was firing long-range ion missiles. She check her sensors and found the incoming ballistics not even registering on the screen. She pulled up in a long, swooping arc and piloted the frigate back through the hole in the debris. The Guild ship was taking pots shots to try and disable her ship, that she was sure of—only ion missiles lit up like the burning lamps on the Queen's Day Parade. They were costly weapons, and she wondered how much of a price was truly on finding an exotic female such as herself. She cursed at Rand again.

The frigate traced back through the path their shuttle had taken through the debris field, but didn't do well to avoid running into parts of ships that scrapped along her hull. Recklessly plowing through the narrow clearings, Etta took advantage of the frigate's toughness and made it through to the other side.

This particular cloud of debris from the ships long since vacant was spread out several kilometers wide, while still encased inside the asteroid field itself. When the ion missiles detonated prematurely, it was only a few hundred meters behind the frigate against a piece of a cruiser that had drifted in the way. Checking her sensors, Etta knew that the Guild ship would not be too far off.

She pulled the nose of the frigate up and leveled off, hoping to see a glimpse of the shuttle Rand was piloting. If he knew what was good for him, he would latch onto an asteroid and wait for the fight to be over. But her sensors beeped a warning and she knew the Guild was catching up—fast.

Taking the frigate deeper into the asteroid field, Etta was beginning to wonder if she would get out of this whole thing alive. A life at the hands of slavers was no way to live, and she rather die than become their latest victim.

The cumbersome craft drifted through the field, but Etta found the larger floating rocks moving too fast to set down on and hide. The ion missiles must have caused a chain reaction and now this whole place just got a lot more deadly. The once peaceful cluster was now a moving minefield.

And things were about to go from bad to worse.

Her sensors didn't even register the Guild ship dropping in behind her. All 300 meters of the repurposed Awoken destroyer was a scuffed up version of the ship's once-mighty glory, but it could still live out its name's sake when pressed into action. The flash of ion fire illuminated an asteroid just off to port from the frigate, bathing the rock in purple disabling electric current. She steered to starboard, but the movement was so sluggish that the next ion blast caught the frigate on its keel. Half of the console lights winked out of existence and the controls momentarily froze, sending her on a collision course with a large chunk of rock in the near distance.

Etta gritted her teeth and hastily typed in commands to override the life-support systems to supply enough power to propulsion. Another blast sent even more asteroid chunks in all directions, and the view outside the cockpit was filled with the objects. The frigate's console lit up with collision warnings as Etta finished her task.

The steering controls loosened just in time, and Etta pulled hard to port, using the ship's natural tug in that direction to get clear of the hazard in her view. In the frigate's wake the large chunk of rock hurtled to fill the space Etta had just vacated.

The destroyer still had enough servos operating, though, to pull out of the rubble and steer clear of the most devastating impacts. Smaller pieces of rock ricocheted and dented the Guild ship's hull, but it stayed on Etta's tail nonetheless.

"C'mon!" she pleased to no one in particular. Her only hope now was to try to crash-land on a hollowed out asteroid or seek cover inside the ship debris field several kilometers upstar from the last one. She pushed the engines as hard as she could.

Etta soon found a decent way of piloting the frigate. Whenever she needed to bank right, should would corkscrew to flip herself 180 degrees and just turn to port. The gambit was working to keep the destroyer's ion cannons from hitting her again, right up until she reached the edge of the clearing between asteroid field and ship debris.

The dual impact from the ion blasts felt so foreign to Etta. There was no jarring, sudden stop, just an abrupt halting of all the frigate's functions. The engines died and the gravity slowly left, allowing her to feel weightless in the cockpit. Every glowpanel, console screen, and control light winked out, leaving only the dim purple haze from the beacons the Queen's Guard had set up for asteroid navigation to shine.

Etta knew she was dead. Her only choice would be how she would go out: by her hands or theirs. She was certain that if her comm unit still worked that the Guild would be taunting her until they would board. Frustrated, she slammed her fist against the non-functioning console. If anything on this bucket of bolts worked, I could at least use the self-destruct! Then I could take a few of them with me.

Her momentary sense of justice came in a way she never would have expected. From the debris field she was now drifting towards, several pinpoints of light danced through the haze of burned out ship hulks. Through the viewport overhead, she could see the destroyer come into view, preparing to board, but suddenly pausing.

The pinpoints then gathered together to form a V-shaped flight pattern, and the destroyer immediately pulled away from the frigate and launched its chaff mines.

With the frigate's sensors dead, Etta stood up and tried to see which way the destroyer was heading, but it vanished out of view. When she faced forward again the five pinpoints had resolved into fast-moving scout ships. The shape of the vessels were angular, sleek, and deadly. They easily dispatched the chaff mines with precision shots of void cannon fire. Moving too fast to really catch who was piloting the ships, the unmistakable yellow against purple "Mark of the Queen" was clearly visible on the fuselage of the nearest scout ship.

Etta took a deep breath of relief. If there was one thing the Queen's Guard hated more than refugees it was the Slavers Guild. The Queen's Guard was made up of mostly female Awoken, and their viciousness in how they dealt with trafficking made Etta wonder how that evil was still happening out in the Reef.

She could only see the dim reflections against smaller rocks that hinted at the battle that was waging behind her ship, but it was over in a matter of minutes. A crackle from her internal comm unit, made her doubt the assumed outcome, and she expected to here Rand's voice in her ear. But again, Etta found herself breathing a sigh of relief.

"Unidentified Frigate, this is Guard Patrol Valencia. Please state your condition and your affiliation," came the crisp, professional voice of a female Awoken. "You will not be harmed."

Etta checked her suit's diagnostics. Thankfully, the ion blasts didn't reach her only means of surviving hard vacuum. "I'm okay. My ship is completely non-functional, and I currently have approximately 45 minutes of life-support available."

There was a fairly long pause over the comm. "State your affiliation."

Etta frowned. She didn't know how much information she should give, but when three of the scout ships descended in escort formation in front of her, she had no choice but to be honest. "Refugee of the Awoken, Outcast Brand."

There was another long pause.

The Outcast Brand was given to the offspring of Awoken that had defied the Queen in a way the Court deemed inappropriate. It was a way to "protect" the Awoken people from the sons and daughters of outcasts so as to never face such problems from them again. Even now, it was a practice fading into tradition of generations past, and one that some felt was unjust.

"Stand by, Refugee."

Unseen from her angle, the last two scout ships tethered to the frigate and began towing her towards the debris field she was facing. "Thank you, Valencia," Etta acknowledged.

"We will escort you to a nearby asteroid station where you can exact repairs. We can detect no lifeforms aboard the outpost, and we cannot send a response team. Please carry out your maintenance quickly. Valencia, Out."

Etta slowly nodded to herself. In all honesty, what this Guard Patrol was doing was above and beyond what any Emissary or Guard had done for her, ever. Maybe there is still hope for the Awoken.

Still, she wasn't out of trouble just yet. There was no telling what scavengers and refugees had left in the abandoned asteroid station. As long as she could make repairs to the frigate, she could get back to safety.

But where is safe for me anymore? Now that Rand had teamed up with the Slavers Guild, it was almost a guarantee that any refugee camp she had stayed at might be compromised. She blew out a frustrated breath. It was salvation on the asteroid station or nothing.

Steadying herself against the cockpit walls, she started towards the O2 pressurizers in the back of the ship. Her suit's headlamp automatically flicked on and she set about preparing herself for an extended stay on the deserted outpost.

She only hoped she could live long enough to find Rand Vinyar—and kill him.