After target practice, Nick and Damian went back on the ship. Damian headed to the bridge to set their course while Nick spent the rest of the day in the common room, where Fleith introduced Nick to his favorite movies, Bvanthian romcoms. Nick didn’t understand any of the jokes, but the plentiful slapstick was entertaining enough. For some reason there were a lot of cakes, and they tended to explode.

The next morning, Damian gathered the whole crew, minus Evech, who Fleith said was sleeping, in the bridge. Nick sat in one of the chairs along the wall.

“We entered Kreeth space this morning,” Damian said. “We’re running dark, passive scans only. They don’t usually patrol this far out in the system, so I think we’re still hidden.”

“Gri point three is far from civilized worlds,” RX-9 said. “The Marquesses of Gri rarely bother to patrol out here.”

“Wait,” Fleith said, “Wasn’t the Gri system where…”

Damian nodded. “Yep.”

“Where what?” Nick asked. “What happened?”

“The Battle of Gri 2,” RX-9 said. “The turning point in the Kreeth Separation War, it paved the way for the emergence of the Kreeth Dominions as an entity independent from the Ishtani empire.”

“That’s hardly the most important part,” Fleith said, buzzing unhappily.

“What is the most important part?” Nick asked, getting impatient.

“See for yourself.” Damian tapped some buttons and the windows on the main screen were replaced by a singe camera view. Nick gasped.

A wrecked ship hung in space, a metal globe, pocked by craters and crisscrossed by scorch-marks with a massive rift, canyon and scar all at once, tore halfway through the ship, space visible through the crack, a halo of wreckage and tortured metal in perpetual orbit around the great corpse. A smaller haze hovered around the wreckage, like grains of sand stuck to a bloody wound. Nick squinted and realized that some of the smaller debris had a distinctive shape: four limbs and a head. 

“Are those people?” Nick asked

Damian nodded. 

“How-how big… what is that thing?”

“War World,” Fleith said in a hushed tone.

RX explained, words advancing steadily, like marching soldiers, “Built in the last days of a dying empire, intent on ensuring unity through force if all else failed, the War Worlds were truly massive battle stations, larger than most moons, with a dozen flagships inside them and the industry needed to make more. Only seven were ever created. They are more than a warship. They are fleet, army, and population base, all in one.”

“The Indomitable,” Fleith whispered.

“The Indomitable was dispatched to put down the rebellion of the Kreeth military forces,” RX continued. “The defense of these systems had been entrusted to the Kreeth armada decades before, and the emperor didn’t take kindly to treachery. The War World was ordered to scour the three inhabited planets of this system before it ever entertained offers of surrender. Instead, it was met by the combined might of a dozen star systems. It was not the only ship to fall that day, but it was the biggest.”

Damian entered another command, and the view spread outward, the War World shrinking to the size of a softball. Dozens of ships lay dead around it, like splintered metal twigs.

“It was the first time a War World had ever been destroyed,” Damian said solemnly. “The empire’s big boogeyman was broken.”

“The destruction of the Indomitable made clear to the galaxy that the days of the Ishtani were numbered,” RX said. “There was no coming back from that. For the Kreeth, it is considered the first in their history of great military victories. Leading the battle flung the Marquess of Gri to a position of prominence in the Dominion. They have only declined since.”

“You think that’s important?” Damian asked.

RX nodded. “I reviewed the documentation last night. Traditionally, a Marquess’s higher honor is on account of their location near the edge of a realm. They are often called upon to defend the borders, and so are the most esteemed of the system-level nobility. Gri was once the outer edge of the Dominion, but centuries of expansion has left them far from the frontiers. I have sources who claim that the Marquesses of Gri have fallen out of favor in recent years.”

“Thus the secrecy around this research facility?” Damian asked. “He doesn’t want to risk another noble stealing the credit from him?”

“Credit, at the very least,” RX said. “The Dominate is not particularly stable, as political systems go.”

Damian nodded. “That’s why our employer thinks that there are no backups.”

“Our employer?” Fleith asked.

“Shadow ops from Weinag,” Damian says, “Don’t tell them I told you. They want us to steal the plans for them and destroy all other copies.”

“Do you know what kind of weapon they’re developing?” Nick asked.

Damian shook his head. “That wasn’t included in the files they gave me.”

“They have to know,” Triskar said. “They wouldn’t go to this much trouble if they didn’t think it was important.”

“I’m sure they know more than they told me,” Damian said. “But that doesn’t particularly concern me. They told me how much they were going to pay, and that’s all I need.”

“I usually like a firmer plan than ‘this will make us money,’” Triskar said.

“I have some thoughts on that,” Damian said.

He tapped some buttons and a dozen images appeared on the screen in quick succession, ending with a shot of a grey dome arching above a metallic landscape.

“Where is this?” Triskar asked.

“This is an exterior view of the unnamed research stations we’re trying to break into,” Damian said. “As to where…” He zoomed out, revealing the ruins of the Indomitable. 

“They built onto the side of the ruins?” Triskar asked in disbelief.

“The War World had neutronium-gravity,” Fleith said. “They may have been trying to avoid using venlite. Using less energy would make them less detectable.”

“The hull also serves as cover from scans,” Damian said. “Anyone who sees them out there would think they’re just an oddly-shaped patch of debris.”

Triskar still didn’t look convinced. “They built on the side of an ancient war machine?”

“You have to admit it’s clever,” Damian said. “But also foolish.”

He worked the keys again and the view spread out, shifting from a real image to a blueprint-like diagram showing the station from the side. Semi-circular lines drew themselves around the station, arching outward and growing fainter farther from the center.

“This is a representation of the station’s sensor array,” Damian said. “Curtesy of our employer. There are a few interesting things here. Number one: if we try to fly up to the station, we’d be discovered and shot down before we got within two hundred yards. Even with the nearby debris field, they will find us.” 

He continued, “Number two, however, is that they have made the understandable mistake of treating the ruins as solid ground. They’re perched on top, looking for attacks from the sky, but they didn’t think of someone coming up from below.”

Triskar sighed. “So that’s what you want to do?” 

Damian nodded. A map appeared on the screen. “We’ll approach from the far side of the ruins, fly in close along the skin of the ship, and land here.” A dot appeared on the screen. “In one of the berths. From there, we walk under the station and cut our way in, here.” A dot appeared on the blueprint. “I think that’s a closet. Its just a few hallways away from the central computer room, here.” Another dot. “Where we’ll add a com node to let Fleith onto the computer system. Once he has what we need, we remove the node, sneak back out and no one will ever know we were there.”

“Until they notice all their research is missing,” Fleith added.

Damian smiled. “Yes. But we’ll be on the other side of the galaxy by then. Scott-free.”

“You want us to crawl through a centuries-old ruined space ship?” Triskar said. “Is there an atmosphere in there?”

Damian frowned at the screen. “There was originally, and the gravity still works…I’m not sure how much could have escaped from the cracks in the hull. We’ll assume it’s a spacewalk and wear suits.”

“The ruins could be dangerous,” Triskar said. “We don’t know if all the defense systems are down, we don’t know how much of the ship has been damaged…”

“How long until we get there?” Nick asked. 

Damian grinned. “Half an hour. We’re already coming in to the debris field. You up for this?”

Nick nodded. “Let’s go.”