“Landing party to Dunkerque. Come in, Yili. Come in, Moo.” Zony was doing her best to stay quiet, but the commlink she was using wasn’t keyed. The only way she could transmit was by voice.

The temperature aboard the Barker’s Asteroid station had dropped nearly 12 degrees in the hour since the colonel and Chief Engineer had teleported back to the ship. The gas mixture in the air was well within tolerances, but if the temperature continued to drop, Zony had already calculated they had less than an hour left before conditions went from uncomfortable to dangerous.

“Lieutenant?” Austin whispered. “I’m getting strange readings from my environmental sensor.” Commander DeMay checked his, as did the other members of the Dunkerque’s skeleton crew.

“How can this be right? How could the life support systems be mixing sulfuric acid and bromine?”

“Because we have company,” Zony replied. “Those are the same readings we got before we were attacked on board the Dunkerque the first time.”

“What kind of company?”

“The wrong kind. Check those crates and see if there is anything in here we can use to track atmospheric trace elements. If one of those bugs finds us in here, we’re sunk. That blaster pistol isn’t going to be enough.” Zony activated her commlink again. “Dunkerque, this is Zony. We are detecting alien life forms aboard the station. Repeat. There are alien life forms aboard this station. Do not approach Barker’s asteroid! Repeat–”

Meanwhile, only 200 yards away, the starship Dunkerque was sliding sideways through space towards the space station’s 175 edge airlock.

“Relative velocity now four feet per second. Manual activation of soft lock in ten.. nine.. eight..” Yili was completely engrossed in her readouts and controls. She didn’t see the movement behind the nearby reactor dampening systems. Colonel Moody had arranged to sit in the room on the other side of the hallway, but at the proper angle so he could keep an eye on what was going on in main engineering. Yili was visible only a few yards away through both hatches.

Moo didn’t see the movement either.

A control panel suddenly lit up nearly 200 feet below the surface of asteroid Scorpion One Three. Long quiescent circuitry hummed to life and began walking through the checklist to activate the auxiliary power systems built into the same subterranean chamber.

Power poured into the larger systems built under the floor panels of the installation. A terminal display lit up with fast moving schematics of all manner of electronics: Short Range Sensors, Long Range Sensors, Electronic Counter Measures, Missile Tracking, Weapons Capacitance, Targeting Suite, Fusion Reactors.

A transceiver indicator began to blink, notifying the empty chamber there were operational instructions being received from a remote location. Quietly and with silky smooth precision, the entire asteroid began to pivot in space. As it did so, the leading edge of another Sentinel weapon became visible to the tracking sensors of the viper mines surrounding the half-mile-wide jagged rock.

As its passive sensors began gathering information on point X-Ray Tango, the dark shape of a thoroughly alien ship winked into existence only ten miles off its surface. The 150,000-ton warship hovered in space for a moment and then activated her cloak before fading into the blackness, revealing the starfield once again.

Motion sensors snapped to life aboard the abandoned station, and the outline and ship designator of DSS Fury appeared on the installation’s targeting display. Moments later, DSS Constellation also appeared. One by one all the Perseus ships appeared as they approached point X-Ray Tango.

More circuitry activated, and the weapons system began tracking the decreasing range. In twenty seconds, it would acquire lock.