[center]In collaboration between [@DX3214] and Eventua…

[h3]Glory At Elfydd’s Door[/h3][/center]

It had been a strange couple of weeks, and Chicago couldn’t help but feel tense. One after another, visitors-turned-crewmates had been arriving at the station – originally little more than a monitoring buoy with some basic life support systems and quarters attached – which in turn had steadily grown and grown. New modules had been grafted on of every kind, and already Chicago’s workload had doubled as his growing and cooking skills had expanded to try and support another fifteen people.

The kitchen was the change that felt most immediate, their storage bursting with MREs and other temporary supplies while they waited for further expansion to the station’s internal recycling and hydroponic systems, but…

He shivered. It should’ve felt warmer, with so many more bodies.

As he entered the monitoring station – what had once been the hub of their little station, but now just rested at the ‘height’ of it like the head of some strange sentinel, or like their station was some sort of huge mushroom – his gaze was drawn to the main viewing monitor. While there were a couple of the new guys present, he did at least recognize Harish and Amelia, both of them with their curled, billowy hair.

Harish snapped his fingers, gesturing for Chicago to come closer.

“It’s been a mess, man.”

“Oh? Didn’t the launches go ahead?” Chicago asked.

“No, weirder. We had the ‘Wait In Gold’ stick around and open its own gate a few seconds after the rest of the envoy fleet, to who knows where, then maybe two minutes later we had, well… probably easier to show you, honestly.”

His attention was drawn to one of the smaller monitors. It clearly displayed the new app they’d installed last week to measure gateway activity, and there was the timings – four gates opened in the space of about ten minutes, two of them [i]entering into[/i] the Annwn system rather than leaving it.

Photo & radar imagery was bouncing back to them from one of the vessels out on the wider patrol orbit of the gate, maybe some four hundred thousand or so kilometers away. The gate had definitely opened, and stayed open, long enough for something to appear – signals in a range of wavelengths, but the object they originated from couldn’t have been more than 10 meters across at most.

By the time the patrol vessel had drawn within range, however, the gate had closed again as mysteriously as it had opened.

Chicago looked to Amelia for some sort of answer, but all she could do was bite her thumb.

“Someone knows we’re here.”

[hr]

“Avalon will know what we’ve seen, at least,” spoke up one of the new monitor staff, “but it’ll likely be a couple of hours before we get clear instructions back.”

“What about the ships that went through to Sol? We going to ask them to come back?” replied the other.

“No- Captain Larson’s said they’ll just be keeping the local fleet on a tighter patrol and keep their sensors up. Should be fine – whatever probe they spotted is likely just some sort of basic exploration, you know?”

“Yeah, but what if-”

Chicago closed the door despite his morbid curiosity, so it was just him and Amelia in the kitchen. She had been sat with a cup of terrible instant coffee for the past twenty-five minutes, slowly sipping at it as it inevitably got cold.

“Hey,” leant down slightly, the dark saucers of his eyes meeting her own narrow green ones, “I know the coffee they give us out here is pretty shit, but, you never know. One day we might have a diplo living here and then we can get some bone-fide arabica, right?”

Her eyes shifted, slightly, meeting his gaze before she took another awkward sip.

“Sorry,” she whispered, “I just… ever since the gate opened, it’s…”

“Yeah?”

“It’s so stupid. This station has been here for what, three hundred years? I took this job so I could get paid to hang out with friends from uni and read a fuckton of books. And now… [i]of course[/i] it had to be me.”

Chicago just nodded, sighing.

“Yeah… but, you know, whatever happens we should be okay- we’re no threat to anyone here.”

He couldn’t quite parse the expression she gave him at that, when suddenly there was a hammering at the door.

“Open up guys, the gate just opened again!”

Chicago opened the door, the metal handle feeling even colder against the sweat building on his palms. The monitor was just about visible to them from the door and he wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like.

“Chicago…? What is it…?” came the voice behind him.

“...Please tell me I’m reading that wrong.”

[hr]

In the void of space, the stars shined uncaring, and the gate glowed as it was activated and from it came a fleet. First, a few handfuls a dozen at best seemed to appear. But soon they arrived in mass dozens upon dozens until a fleet of a hundred ships at least appeared. At their helm was a giant vessel called in the Vusarian language: [i]‘Spirit of Glory.’[/i] written in the runic alphabet they used.

The fleet soon began to spread into several smaller fleets combined of dozens hoping to secure the area around the gate. Its larger contingent led by its Dreadnought, headed towards the monitoring station.

Ships near the gate soon began to be approached by the fleet. Being caught close to the quickly spreading fleets. The ships close by soon began to be boarded by the force or were attacked for not answering the hail it was being sent to them.

The monitoring station flared with warnings, detecting the fleet that appeared as it attacked anything close to it. But it moved extremely quickly towards their position, and soon they received a hail from it; A single voice spoke to them, and their comms were heavily distorted. The person sending the message sounded like he was using an old RAM radio and he said. [b][i]“Urukatan, nisvas nekeer malukar izaae ma!”[/i][/b] The language seemed like none from a standard earth-related tongue as it continued speaking until it broke into a silence seemingly awaiting a response.

The fleet that approached was filled with large vessels. But most were rather uneven in size. Some ships were mostly, destroyers fitted for war, others for support; meanwhile, cruisers were bigger serving an equally split purpose of war and support in some way. The fleet soon began to slow down as it approached its target in the listening post, weapons in range.

[hr]

Nobody quite knew what to say.

Well, except for Harish, who looked dangerous close to breaking out the station’s very limited supply of alcohol.

[i]Better that then something else, I guess.[/i]

“They… they just turned tail and ran away?! They… fuck. [i]Fuck![/i] Those bastards, what are they even paid for?!”

The ‘battle’, if it could be called that, had lasted less than an hour. The invader’s demands had been broadcast, but patience was evidently not one of their virtues – attempts to signal back had been met with violent force, destroying two of the Table’s vessels outright before any response could be coordinated.

The six remaining vessels had done their best to fight a retreat, with the two Shield-Carriers – gleaming bronze and blue, a contribution from the shipyards of Causeway on Bran, their hardy drone swarms providing a flurry of kinetic rounds and lasers to provide as much defensive cover as they could – but against such overwhelming numbers they were outflanked from above, and as far as the team at Elfydd’s Door could tell, the fleeing vessels had been destroyed or disabled at range soon afterwards.

Now they were stuck watching and waiting, as the demands of the strangers blared over the radio.

At last, Chicago stepped forwards and hit a button to call down to engineering.

“We’re going to want low power mode, please.”

“What?”

“When the escorts tried talking to them they treated it like a threat – or a challenge, maybe? – so I say we power down. Make it clear we have no weapons – or at least we’re not able or willing to use them. We’re just here.”

“And what if they plan to kill us anyway? Or mutilate us, or who the hell knows what else?”

Chicago took a deep breath. He hated how quickly a thought like this had come to him, but the feeling of a hand on his shoulder reassured him to say what needed saying.

[color=077B0A][b][i]We’ll all be okay.[/i][/b][/color]

“Lock the doors, keep them sealed. We cover the entrances to engineering, and if it looks like they’re going to try torturing people or something, we overload it – take a bunch of them with us.”

A cold silence filled the air. Panic or a dead-eyed stare seemed to be the only two feelings that would reach anyone’s faces.

“...you know it’s true. We don’t know who these people are, but if they’re as violent as some of the people we learnt back in history class, I…” he glanced at Amelia, who looked like she was about to be violently ill, “we don’t want to suffer like that.”

The crew’s singular security guard drew his firearm – a hefty, ugly-looking revolver – and for a moment the room lit up with screams. In a sudden panicked movement he stepped back slightly and raised a hand to calm down.

“Hey, hey, everyone! Stop! I’m not going to shoot anyone, I’m just checking the rounds – I’ll stay in the engine room. If time is needed, I’ll buy what I can.”

[hr]

The ships soon began to advance, opening fire into the station's defences that may prove a hassle or against any ship that could oppose them. With their approach, several vessels began to anchor and board against the station. The station quaked as the ships began to forcefully dock in positions to invade several metallic harpoons latching against it.

The airlocks soon began to be blown torched, and the cameras showed they would soon be forced open by men wearing heavy armour with gas masks and thermal goggles. The soldiers soon began to round up people en masse in the lower decks, and they began moving up through the station towards the central command. The nearby sound of brief but heavy gunfire echoed up the stairs, as something within the station ruptured and gave an unnerving tremor throughout the floor and walls. 

Amongst the units leading the charge, an officer busted into a kitchen, gun raised, shouting in his tongue. [i]“On your knees!”[/i]

The message didn’t need to be understood word for word to be followed, and in less than a minute the crew of Elfydd’s Door had been rounded up, hands behind the backs of their heads as they hit the ground on their knees.

Chicago wasn’t quite at the front, though he was close enough to see one of the raiders enter, dragging the corpse of the security guard and one of the engineers behind him, their bodies ravaged by bullets. A couple of the crew got to their feet in a fury but were quickly beaten into submission, while someone else just wept. The guard’s expression, blank-eyed, overlaid in Chicago’s mind against the nervous confidence he had entered the fusion engine’s room.

The last engineer, face bruised and bloody but still breathing, followed behind and winced with every step before taking a crouching position with the rest of the crew. This was all thirteen of them, now. The faint smell of piss to Chicago’s right… one of the younger new guys, a viridian with paler green skin.

He wasn’t sure, in honesty, if it would be better to know exactly what commands they could follow that would actually save their lives.

The Vusarian boarding crew kept things under control making the crew as compliant as they could be with threats from their commander, a man with similar gear as the rest of then, heavy armor with projectile rifles, but wearing a bright red cloak soon shouted in Vusarian pointing at the group [i]“Exaiga, uto is a nis umar”[/i] (translation: “Alright where is your commander?”)

The crew could only stare at the corpses in shock, or glance at the guards with the detached look of the defeated. No one had the wits about them to respond.

Chicago glanced at Amelia, who was staring at the floor with an intensity that the thought suddenly crossed his mind – and to his dying breath he could never put his finger on why, exactly – that if he ever got the chance to invite her for dinner back home, he’d have to be careful to get a take-away she already trusted.

A gun was soon pulled by the commander of the invaders aiming in Chicago's direction as he said in Vusarian. [i]“I said, where is your commander?”[/i] the loud breathing of the respirator drowning most of the other noise.

His vision turned to size up the leader of the soldiers. In his heavy armour and goggles he gave the impression of a monster, a killer machine, more than any kind of human being.

“I…! We don’t understand you! What do you want?!”

Several of the soldiers soon turned their heads towards him; the commander of the group seemed frozen. While looking at he soon did a small head tilt indicating confusion before saying in his tongue. [i]“What did you say?”[/i]

Chicago couldn’t help but squint his eyes a little, as the sign of a furrowed brow from the leading soldier mirrored his own.

“We. Don’t. Understand. You.”

The commander seemed to groan; he soon holstered his pistol, taking out his helmet. His red hair was a display, it was cut short and his eyes glowed gold. He picked from his belt what looked like a radio and said in his language. [i]“Captain… we may have a problem down here…”[/i]

[hr]

Two hours later.

“A different… language?” A commander asked the other group of commanders inside the dreadnought. The room was dimly lit and the round table was made out of very smooth stone. The walls were bolted metal including the tiles of the floor which were more smooth. “Yes, some of the other ships are stating the same about the vessels they boarded.” A commander, an old man with a white eye and a red eye, his beard was greyed but he still kept himself sharp replied. “So same as the old tongue?” A middle aged man with black hair, a sharp nose and a cut on his lips, his sulfur eyes seemed tired as he said. “Not likely it does not look similar to what the scholars try to decipher.”

“So…” The group of commanders turned to the other side of the room, a woman in a maid uniform. Orange eyes glowed, her face looked sharp and her eyes scanned like a predator for weakness. Her hair was a ponytail to not stay in front of her. Her voice was authoritative as she soon said. “...Our scholars are working on deciphering their language right now, our captain definitely won’t like our plans to be delayed, nevertheless bring the captains of the captured ships here and the one from the station a scholar will be sent to help with these people.”

Meanwhile at the station.

The amount of people were partially emptied except for anyone that seemed important or curious. Two guards talked with each other, one saying. “They look odd…” The man had silver eyes and had a gashing scar across his face. He was built tall by his companion, meanwhile a man with glowing green eyes soon said. “A bit rude, nobody complains about our heights compared to someone born in Vusary” The man rolled eyes saying. “It's a very different situation. I mean look at them, it's a bit uncanny, don't you think?” his companion looked back at the small group of captives sitting at the floor before looking back and saying. “I mean… Skull size, a bit of height, the eyes… and others… but except that it's not that different from us.” “Well with one exception, that is getting a bit of attention don’t you think?” Once saying that both turned to the Viridian unlike the rest he was sitting on an impromptu table surrounded by the rest of the thirteen guards and one scholar.

One of the girls stared at his eyes saying. “He is somewhat cute.” “His skin looks like something someone would vomit you call that cute?” One of the other guards with a pointed look at him. “Hey don’t be rude!” She called out. “Is this due to the star's light?” A guard said with curiosity to the scholar who checked the man’s skin. “I don’t know, I've never seen that happen before, I do know you can go pale if you don’t get too much sun but not this.” “I've been sitting here in the sun for an hour. That should already give a hint but it didn’t so it isn’t that.” A soldier on the other side of the room was also paying attention. “Modification? I heard our ancestors used to do that to make us.” a female soldier said while eating a bar of nutrition taking another bite. “I don’t know why you would like to be green if that is the reason. Also, don’t eat close to the equipment.” He replied to her hearing that she smiled with a light shrug she then offered to the Viridian the bar saying. “Want some?” Her jungle green eyes glowed to him with a wide smile almost like she did not care he was a prisoner.

The viridian – evidently a few years younger than everyone else in the crew, all of whom had been allowed to take up more comfortable sitting or crouching positions rather than their original hostage stances – raised an eyebrow.

He glanced over his shoulder at the others before nervously reaching out to snap off a chunk, awkwardly avoiding a couple of dirty looks. Trying to ignore them, he turned back to her and, smiling politely as he chewed on the bar, just said: “Tasty, thank you.”

She seemed to beam at him eating.

[hr]

Meanwhile, the situation aboard the Spirit of Glory was more… uneven.

Survivors of the local ships they had defeated had been taken into captivity, including a number of gremlins – visibly the love-children of pugs, frogs and beetles. Initially they had assumed the creatures were some kind of pet or hazard, until they heard one speak.

Its voice had a short, rasping gumminess to it, and it didn’t speak their language, but after it began pointing out key objects or individuals and repeating terms – and in turn seemed to pick up their own words for those terms with shocking speed – it became apparent that what they were dealing with was a ticket to their real obstacle.

“Hey! Hey!” One of the scholars said approaching one of the gremlins he soon said. “Repeat that for me” He points at a random object.

The gremlin, who was a mottled green fellow with eyes like gravy boats viewed from above, glanced at the loose nutritional packet by the bowl they had given him.

“Nutrient packet,” he said in flawless vusarian, before gesturing to the “bowl.”

Soon he was off, standing slightly hunched over on three of his limbs to use the other three for rapidly pointing out objects one by one – “Cable”, “Monitor”, “Gun”, “Trousers”, “Gremlin”, “Badge”, “Chair” and so on – before at last stopping to stare at the scholar with a sheen to his eyes.

Understanding the possibility one of the scholars quickly grabbed a phone nearby with a voice on the other side saying. “Can I help?” “I request contact with the bridge captain!” The scholar replied to the man on the other side of the call, he seemed to sigh soon saying. “One minute.” After a moment of silence a feminine voice. “Yes?” “We may have figured out a quick way to understand the language of the natives in a shorter time. This may cut our stay time for a while.” He replied, sounding excited, and soon the voice replied. “How long?” “Two weeks I hope…” He replied after a silence he soon heard the woman say. “The captain said go ahead, he is excited.”

[hr]

Chicago wondered if, in some recess of the mind of an ancestor from what remained of Delhi, they had feared the Gateway. True, they had been escaping the doom of Earth, but…

Now, to be trapped in this cramped, dark hold – sweating and hot with the warmth of dozens of other prisoners from both the station and the captured ships, just barely illuminated by stripes of dim light and the reflective visors and gun-barrels of their captors – he couldn’t help but wonder if they might have been better staying behind.

…

He glanced over at Amelie and gave her a torn smile – something in the defeated look of her eyes flickered slightly, as she kept her head down. Seeing Harish likewise gave his heart a shot of resolve – if nothing else because an attempt by him to stand up to a guard who had been rummaging through the crew’s things had gotten him a black-eye and a broken nose, and there was a distinctly ‘pissed off’ energy to all of the captives.

[i]...No,[/i] he corrected himself, [i]that’s selfish. My ancestors fought to save themselves and their loved ones, and I wouldn’t have lived at all if they hadn’t made it…[/i]

The ship rumbled – from the edges of his vision came the spiralled fringe of a kaleidoscope thought lost to time, and just as quickly there was rest and darkness. Wherever they were now, it was not home.

A hand on his shoulder, one that no one else could see or feel.

[color=077B0A][b][i]They survived it. We will survive this.[/i][/b][/color]