Frozen Stars – Prologue
"Intruder alert! Intruder alert!" Sirens blared through the chaos of a space station under attack. "Intruder alert!" Red lights intermittently cast the glorified broom closet that counted as the security hub in this civilian research facility into stark, deep shadows. "Intruder alert!"
Bulma Briefs hastened into the room and brought up the main security interface while she was still tying her kimono belt around her waist. "Intruder alert!" Then again, one look was all she needed to assess the situation. Because they were completely, utterly, royally fucked.
They hadn't been alarmed when five round capsules that reminded Bulma of over-sized tennis balls had approached their station, and why would they? Spacecraft styles were even more numerous than friendly species in the United Federation of Planets, and while they were at the edge of Federation space, they still were far, far away from dangerous territory like the Neutral Zone. The worst thing they had to worry about out here was making sure the new researchers who'd never been to space before opened the airlock doors in the right order. Surely the newcomers were friends.
Except that they weren't, and Bulma's carelessness had doomed them all. Because space-suited strangers had emerged from the capsules, and they'd emerged shooting. They'd taken over the hangar and captured the techs working there before the chief of security, who now stood next to Bulma wringing his hands, had even realized they were in danger. And now the intruders were making their way through the station by literally punching through doors that were designed to withstand the vacuum of space, and they weren't interested in diplomacy. "I'm so sorry, Dr Briefs, I didn't..."
Bulma didn't blame the man. Despite his red uniform jacket, indicating that he served in the Security branch of Starfleet, he was a glorified caretaker. His job was going through his security protocol checklist every day, making sure the automatic fire extinguishers and the blast doors and the dozens of other systems necessary for survival on a space station worked, and occasionally playing training videos for new research personnel arriving from Starfleet. He had no idea what to do in a situation like that, and he couldn't have seen any of it coming, just like Bulma hadn't seen it coming. But she did blame herself. She was the lead researcher. This was her project, her station, her people. She should have known. She just should have. And now there was only one thing to do.
She pressed her thumb onto the touch pad of a panel that she'd hoped she'd never have to open, then punched the big red button. Instantly, the incessant wailing of the sirens and the automated computer voice changed. "Evacuate station. Evacuate station. All personnel, proceed to Hangar Bay 2 immediately. Proceed..."
"But Dr Briefs..."
Bulma didn't have patience for fools on the best of days, and today emphatically was not the best of days. She stood again, grabbed the man by the scruff of his uniform, and pushed him towards the door of the security hub. He struggled without any real conviction against her grasp, then protested weakly, "But you can't. You're the lead researcher, if you're captured..."
She had thought about that for roughly point three seconds while assessing the situation. Then she'd decided that it didn't fucking matter. Her people, and the data automatically transferred to the escape shuttle's hard drives when she'd given the evacuation command, were more important than her. And if the worst happened, she'd find a way out. She always did.
"Dr Briefs, you really can't..."
One good push between the shoulder blades, and he was out in the corridor leading to Hangar Bay 2, eyes wide and shocked and uncomprehending. Bulma slammed the emergency button that closed the blast door between them with an almost deafening hiss, cutting off his angry protest when he realized what she was doing. Oh, well, Bulma sighed with the resignation of a woman who faced impossible odds and had just run out of fucks to give. He'll get over it. Preferably in the safety of the escape shuttle she was cut off from now. But that was all part of the plan, wasn't it?
For a moment, sheer, unabashed terror washed over her. These intruders weren't here for nice cocktails with umbrellas or to get a look at the mediocre collection of vintage movies in the station's databases (long-term research assignments were very boring, usually), and there was a good chance that her heroic plan might end up with her being very heroically dead at the end, with a nice closed-casket funeral back on Earth because there was no body to be found. But she couldn't think about that now. She had a job to do.
Strapping herself in properly this time, she sat down in the chief's chair, pulling up the cameras covering every angle of the station's interior until she finally found the intruders. They were wreaking havoc in the – thankfully empty – mess hall, slowly making their way towards the core of the station where Bulma waited for them like a spider in the center of her net. Only that Bulma's net sucked. The station had absolutely no defensive systems, even though it was a Starfleet operation, because nobody had thought it would need any. The only tools at her disposal were the cameras that were being punched out or shot down by the intruders every chance they got, and the standard civilian anti-emergency systems every space station needed because space was fucking good at killing people. Blast doors against pressure loss. Automatic firefighting systems. Automatic temperature controls. Triple backed up atmospheric regulation. Radiation shields. Point defense to destroy space debris and small meteorites. More radiation shields because there really was a lot of radiation in space. And somewhere in that list, there had to be something she could work with. She was a genius, after all.
Her ingenuity was temporarily put on hold when one of the intruders, a shockingly broadly built man with hands the size of baseball gloves, pried the mess hall door leading towards the station's core apart with space-suited hands, because that should not have been possible. Those doors were made of warship-grade materials, made to snap shut in a fraction of a second in case of pressure loss, and he tore them open like a ration package. It just… it just boggled the mind. And then Bulma had an idea.
For a moment, the lumbering giant in his space suit hesitated, motioning for his smaller companions to join him at the door, and Bulma waited with bated breath. Then he stepped through the door he'd pried open, and Bulma pushed the button. For an agonizing moment, nothing happened, and then the pneumatic doors sprung into action despite their rough treatment, and crushed the man between their serrated edges.
"Yes! I got you, asshole!" Bulma couldn't help but cheer despite the gravity of her situation, because she needed that win, and she needed it now, even as her ever-active brain already considered other ways to fuck those guys up and slow their progress through the space station. But then the man who'd been crushed by the blast door began to move again, rolling his shoulders as if they were just a little sore before prying apart the door again, and Bulma cursed with vicious abandon. If that hadn't stopped them, then no weapon at her disposal – and she was using the term weapon loosely – could. She couldn't even vent the compartments because they'd punched through a good number of walls on their way in, and not only did she not want to compromise the station's structural integrity, she also didn't know where they kept their prisoners.
The prisoners… There'd been three techs working in Hangar Bay 1 where the intruders landed, but Bulma barely had had time to think of them while she tried to usher the rest of her personnel to the escape shuttle in Hangar Bay 2. She'd thought that there was nothing she could do for them, but if she still had control over the doors… just maybe… but she needed more time for that. And the next little surprise she had in mind for the intruders might just give her that time.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard as five space-suited forms regarded the blast door warily for a moment. Then one of them – an almost slight figure compared to the others, even in his space suit and body armor – shrugged and began punching through the walls again, which was a smart strategy. If they made their own holes, she couldn't use the pneumatic doors against them, and if they severed any important lines… well, they still wore space suits, and fuck anyone who didn't. But it also slowed them down, and that was just what Bulma wanted. And what she was doing right now would hopefully slow them down even more.
Since the very beginning of space flight, fire had been one of its greatest dangers, sometimes killing astronauts before they'd even left the perceived safety of Earth behind. Which was why Starfleet was positively anal about smoke detectors, heat sensors, ventilation systems, and a multitude of different fire extinguishing systems. If smoke or heat rose above certain threshold values, they automatically went off, dousing whole rooms in fire extinguishing foam that could quench even the explosion of a good, old-fashioned rocket booster. In theory, those threshold values could not be tampered with, because there was always that one fucking moron who thought that the fire alarm going off was just so inconvenient when he tried to nuke something in his microwave, and then had no idea why half the space station burned down. Practically speaking, Bulma had just gone and re-programmed the thing to react to the space suit power sources the intruders wore, and it should go off just about… now.
The mess hall turned into absolute mayhem as every fire extinguisher in the room opened its valves and dumped foam onto the unsuspecting intruders. Visibility went down to almost zero, but Bulma could see them flailing on her heat sensors, trying to get through the wall faster, only to be greeted by more foam in the briefing room they'd just entered, their power cells like homing beacons for the fire extinguishers. "You're busy now," Bulma murmured with an almost sadistic smile, but she was already pulling up a broader view of the station. If the heat sensors worked on the intruders, then they'd also work on… "There you are."
Three un-space-suited, humanoid-sized heat sources were huddled in a utility closet near Hangar Bay 1, and they just had to be the prisoners. They had to be, because she was betting the lives of the rest of her people on it. But she just couldn't leave anyone behind. Except her, of course.
Bulma took a deep breath, then opened an intercom channel, hoping that the space-suited assholes gnawing through the intestines of her space station hadn't severed that line yet. "Briefs to Hanger 1 personnel."
"Ma'am! Ma'am, is that you? Please help us, they threw us in here, and we can't..."
Bulma didn't recognize the shaking voice over the grainy emergency intercom, but it was all the confirmation she needed. These people were frightened, and they needed her help. "It's me. I have control of the doors, and I'm gonna get you out of there. Make a beeline to Hangar 2, the shuttle is still there, but you gotta haul ass. I have you on sensors, and I'll open the doors for you as you go. Got it?"
"Got it, ma'am." The woman hesitated for a moment, already sounding calmer, more rational. Like she had hope now, when before, there had been none. "And thank you. We'll thank you properly when we get there."
"Buy me a beer when we're back on Earth and we're good." Bulma didn't tell her that she wouldn't be on the shuttle with them, because it didn't matter, she just punched the button that opened the door, sparing only a quick glance at the intruders to make sure that they were still very, very busy. "Now run."
Two hours later, everything was over, and Bulma knew it. She'd fought valiantly, with every weapon at her disposal, blast doors, fire extinguishers, venting compartments to vacuum, shutting corridors off with radiation shields, jacking the artificial gravity up to eleven, even blowing a fucking hole into the side of the station by remotely disabling the safety systems on their reactor – she'd have to complain to Starfleet about that one, how people hadn't managed to kill themselves yet with that kind of shit security, she had no idea. She'd even figured out a way to shoot at the intruders with the anti-meteorite point defense. But none of it had done any lasting damage to them, and now they stood in front of the security hub doors, ready to punch their way through them, ready to capture or kill her. And Bulma's only solace was that the shuttle with the entirety of her crew and all their research data was almost two hours away, fully stealthed, and almost untraceable. Space was vast, and finding something that didn't want to be found there was hard. She was even done with the emergency database wipe, and there was nothing to do for her anymore, except face what was coming with dignity.
She'd toyed with the thought of triggering the self-destruction sequence built into any Starfleet facility earlier, but now that the time had come, she found that she couldn't do it. These guys might kill her, yes, but maybe, just maybe, they'd capture her alive, and then she had a chance to escape… and Bulma liked life way too much to throw away her chance at it, slim as it might be, and no matter how angry she was at the bastards who'd gone and taken apart her life's work during a single night.
It was dignity, then, but unfortunately, dignity was in short supply. She was drenched in sweat since she'd lost access to the temperature regulation systems a while ago, her blue hair sticking to her skull, and since she'd been thrown out of bed by the intruder alert, she was wearing only a kimono over her nightgown instead of a space suit. If these guys decided to shoot at her, or just plain old toss her out of an airlock, she was toast. So it was time to garner a little goodwill with them, if that was at all possible. Her attempts to hail them had been met with stony silence so far.
She unbuckled herself from the security chief's chair and furtively ran her fingers through her hair, sparing a last glance at the single exterior camera she still had access to. The gas giant Alfrmyke with its countless moons that formed such intriguing gravity patterns that Bulma gladly would've spent a lifetime studying their interferences turned uncaringly in the distance, red, brown and green clouds swirling in beautiful paisley over its storm-torn surface. For a brief moment, she allowed herself to acknowledge how much she loved this planet, this station, this line of research, how much she wanted to uncover Alfrmyke's secrets, and then she sighed deeply, stuffed it all into the deep recesses of her heart, and slammed the door shut with the finality of a blast door hissing closed. Because it was over, and she knew it.
On legs shaking as the adrenaline rush ebbed off, she walked over to the blast door leading to the hallway where the intruders were waiting, knowing that she might be dead in a matter of seconds – if she was lucky, of course. Courage, Bulma. Courage, and dignity. She took a deep breath, and activated the intercom. "Uh… this is Dr Bulma Briefs. I'm the lead researcher of this station, and I… I surrender."
Tinny laughter filtered through at least two sets of speakers answered her, and her stomach turned to ice. She hadn't had time to be afraid before, she'd been too busy considering all the ways she could fuck up those guys, but now she was all out of ideas, and cold dread began to settle where her fighting spirit had been before. "If you're serious about that, open the door."
Bulma didn't even allow herself to think about hesitating as she punched in the code with shaky fingers, and it hissed open with terrifying finality. She'd made sure that the corridor had atmosphere – she wasn't completely stupid – but still, standing with her hands in the air, in front of five terrifying strangers in space suits who could kill her by having an overly active trigger finger, or tearing a hole in the walls, or just giving her a good punch, was absolutely unnerving. She couldn't see their faces through their mirrored visors, couldn't read their body language through the bulk of their space suits, and just for once in her life, she had absolutely nothing to say. Her mind was completely blank.
Then one of them – the smallest, who she was about seventy percent sure was the leader of the group judging by the way the others deferred to him and looked to him for guidance – stepped forward and raised his hand, opening his visor with the hiss of atmospheric pressure equalizing. Bulma's first thought was that he looked… shockingly human. The intruders had been faceless creatures in space suits for so long that she hadn't spared a thought to what might hide behind their masks, but the man who now examined her with impossibly dark eyes in his aristocratic face wouldn't have looked out of place on Earth at all, down to his spiked black hair.
He assessed her for a moment, the same way she was assessing him, his eyes grazing over her messy hair, her flushed face, her chest heaving with the intensity of her breaths under her kimono, her bare feet on the cold metal of the space station floor. Then he smiled at her, cold, arrogant, and terrifyingly self-assured considering the fact that Bulma had almost as thoroughly ruined his day as he had hers.
"Now step out into the corridor." His voice sounded deeper in person, the danger just bubbling behind the surface more evident without the distortion of the speakers, but Bulma couldn't help the small grin rising unbidden on her lips. They'd learned from their mistakes, and now feared her and her door controls. Still thought she might set a trap for them, even though she was all out of tricks now. It was… satisfying, and with that final thought, she stepped out into the corridor, towards her captors.
His smile widened fractionally when he saw that the door didn't crush her, the proud, triumphant look in his eyes intensified, and he stepped forward until her nose almost touched the collar of his space suit and she was forced to look up at him. "Now I've got you." His gloved fist gathered the fabric of her kimono on her chest, pulling her towards him. "You've been such a pain in the ass, and now I've finally got you."
She tried to be smart, she really did, but she just couldn't help herself. "Oh, go fuck yourself."