Airlock 14D turned out to be a seldom-used exterior port, an auxiliary personnel egress in case of emergencies. Getting there was simple enough; doing so without being detected by the Knights Hospitaller was another matter entirely.

“There’s only one option,” Rook informed her. “You’ll must perform an EVA and bring your friend in by tether.”

Samara looked over the schematics of KHS St. Jean Baptiste, tracing the route from the airlock to their current position. “Too far for a tether,” she said at last, “I must use a maneuvering unit.”

“Risky,” the Avatar said. “Doing so increases the odds of being spotted by their Security.”

“Then we’ll just have to risk it,” she informed him. “I don’t know how Xeno found a suit that fit him but given his health we must get him inside as fast as possible. Just keep the engines hot while I’m out there, we might need to break orbit in a hurry.”

“I still don’t understand how his presence aids our mission,” Rook said almost petulantly.

“He’s never said for certain, but I’m almost positive they designed Xeno to be an Intelligence expert,” Samara explained. “His implants allow him to pick up stray signals that even most ship sensors miss, and he can combine seemingly random bits of data into a coherent whole. His skills could prove invaluable to us.”

“And yet the same individuals who had hoped to use him to their advantage abandoned him,” he pointed out, unwilling to let the matter drop.

She glared at the Kikush in disgust. “You fucking aliens,” she sneered, “you just don’t get it. Of course they abandoned him! Why wouldn’t they, when the cost of a human life is so damn cheap to your kind?” Rook protested, but she cut him off at the virtual knees. “I’ll bet they had half a dozen others waiting in the wings to take his place,” she continued, as the anger and frustration continued to build. “There hasn’t been a single patron race of the Protean Clan that wasn’t willing to trade in our flesh to get what they wanted, and in our desperation we went along with it. Why? Because we had no other choice.” Samara shot him a look filled with pure venom. “So I’ll thank you to keep your opinions to yourself once he’s on board. But you might want to spend the odd moment or two considering just how far you’d go to survive, if you were in our shoes.” She stared daggers at his monitor, daring him to make something of it.

Rook was silent for several long moments as he processed that. “There is a maneuvering unit in storage that should be suitable to your needs,” he said finally, sidestepping the topic entirely. “I will see that it is prepped and ready for your use.”

Samara snorted. “You can prep my suit while you’re at it,” she threw over her shoulder as she exited the compartment. She wasn’t sure why she’d let Rook get to her like that, and from a long-term strategy outlook it wasn’t smart to antagonize him, but hearing him so casually dismiss Xeno as if he were nothing but a failed experiment had punched an all too familiar emotional button. There wasn’t a Protean anywhere that didn’t look upon someone like her old friend and reflect, “There but for the grace of Mother Terra go I.” Every surgery, every gene splice was a gamble, and you prayed with all your might that you’d be one of the lucky ones...knowing all too well just how risky those odds truly were.

That kind of existential fear will eat at you, and given her own recent brush with death, hit a little harder than she’d realized.

Back in her own quarters, Samara puzzled over the cryptic note Xeno had transmitted to her. The warning was obvious enough, but as for the rest, she could only assume that he had been planning his own escape for some time now. It wasn’t difficult to see why; while the Knights would take care of his physical and emotional needs while he was their patient, the Quatrième who’d greeted her reaction was all too common. To most, she and her fellow Proteans would always be freaks, willing to take insane risks to reap some dubious benefit. Normals would never understand, could never understand the motivations that drove them into the Clan’s waiting arms, and if there was any such thing as Justice or Luck in the universe, they never would.

Though she knew better than to believe that.

So Xeno wanted out and decided that he was unlikely to get a better offer than hers. Was it desperation that drove him? Fear of dying by inches, bit by bit, until the end finally came? Did he hope to go out in a blaze of glory? He knew the risks, knew what she was asking of him, and had still signed on, yet she hungered to know why. The odds of him sharing that bit of information with her were unlikely in the extreme, leaving her to ponder his motivations on her own, though she’d likely never know the truth.

Enough of this, she thought to herself. She had a mission to prepare for. Hopefully, it would be a simple snatch job, in and out, but she knew better than to count on it. The Universe had a perverse sense of humor and loved nothing better than throwing huge monkey wrenches into the plans of mere mortals. The Demon Murphy was alive and well and cackling with mad glee.

Samara pulled up the schematics once more, and went to work.

The KHS St. Jean Baptiste was for all intents and purposes a freighter, built on similar lines and designed for maximum interior space and durability. Her engines were underpowered and her defenses nonexistent, hence the reason they parked her out in the middle of nowhere. While Kappa Velorum technically belonged to the Zi’aziaf, one of the many minor races in the Perseus Arm, the binary system boasted no planets, just a dust accretion disk and a few scattered asteroids. It was utterly worthless, and the only reason the Zi’aziaf had claimed sovereignty was to deny it to anyone else. The Knights paid a handsome fee for its use, and as long as they didn’t exploit the system for their own purposes, they left them alone.

Drifting across the long axis of the hospital ship, Samara kept a close watch on both her position and any stray emissions that might leak from her maneuvering unit. She’d dialed the power down to a trickle to keep the power well below their ability to detect her, lengthening her journey, but it was by far the safer option. While the Knights might be a humanitarian organization, they were also warriors, and she wasn’t looking to test their mettle in combat.

She was saving that for a more appropriate target.

As she neared her target Samara began tapping on the brakes, reversing thrust in gentle bursts to slow her rate of travel. Airlock 14D was located dorsal side amidships, and as she drew nearer, she could see they had activated the emergency lights, guiding her in. She assumed Xeno had cut them out of the circuit somehow, but she was willing to trust his expertise on that account. He’d put a great deal of preparation into this.

She braced as her arms and legs contacted the ship’s hull, flexing as she killed her forward momentum. Seconds later her tether was out and snapped into place as she negotiated the airlock’s outer hatch, positioning herself in front of its portal and peering inside…only to spot four space-suited figures awaiting her arrival.

“Xeno, you bastard,” she hissed, cursing his failure to warn her. Taking a single individual back to the ship was simple enough, escorting four was another matter entirely. She couldn’t even radio him and demand an explanation for fear the transmission would be noticed by the Knights, which left her only two options. She could turn around right now and abort the mission, or she could grit her teeth and do what needed to be done.

Put that way, the choice was simple, but when this was over she and Xeno would have words.

The emergency lights turned from amber to red, signaling the hatch was opening. Samara backed away, giving it a wide berth as it slid silently open, the lights turning green as it locked in place. The shapeless bulk of space suits normally made it difficult to determine an individual’s identity without peering into their visor, but given Xeno’s unusual shape it was easy to make out which suit was his. He stood before the group, nearest the hatch, and as she floated to a halt, she grabbed onto him for an anchor and pressed her helmet against his.

“You couldn’t have warned me?” she shouted, necessary to carry the sound of her voice through the helmets, the vibration just loud enough to make herself heard.

“No, I couldn’t,” Xeno shouted back, though his voice sounded distant and muffled in her own helmet. “Talk later. Leave now.”

“Asshole,” she snapped, before breaking contact. All right, this was a complication. So what was she going to do about it?

Forcing herself to stop and think, she quickly realized the problem wasn’t as insurmountable as it had first appeared. She’d have to tow all four of them back under her own power, that much was obvious, but as long as they did as they were told it was still doable. It was still a mighty big “If”, but she’d make it work. She had to.

Detaching her tether from the airlock, she began looping it through the other four suits. She had no idea who the other three were, but at least they seemed to understand what she was trying to do and let her get on with it, without “helping”. That seemed to show they at least understood the basics of suit work: in a situation like this one person took charge while the others turned into rag dolls, going limp and letting her do all the work. As she tied each one off she briefly touched helmets to insure they understood, before moving onto the next. With the last passenger secured, she floated back to Xeno.

“You ready?” she asked. Instead of shouting back, he gave her the thumbs up, and with that she took a moment to get her bearings, before tapping the maneuvering unit on her back. Pulling away from the airlock, she activated the camera mounted on the rear of her helmet, watching with a critical eye as one by one the others were being hauled along behind her. If they were the types to panic and do something stupid it would happen now, but each one was relaxed, letting themselves be moved by her efforts alone.

The trip back to Rächerin felt far longer than the trip in had been. Samara worried over her charges like a mother hen, taking an even more circumspect route than before to avoid detection. Rook was probably starting to grow concerned, given the radio blackout and the time it was taking her, but there was nothing to be done. It would take as long as it took.

It was a shame she couldn’t enjoy the moment. Samara rarely had the opportunity to savor something like an EVA, to simply take in the view, to just be. Her life seemed to consist of constantly being ten minutes late to a meeting, rushing from one place to another, always in perpetual motion.

What was the saying? I’ll rest when I’m dead.

Almost three more hours went by before they arrived at Rächerin’s airlock. The mission had been almost textbook, with no surprises other than Xeno revising the passenger list, and there had been no signs they had detected their little jaunt. That couldn’t last, however, as eventually someone was bound to notice they were missing four of their patients. When that happened it was best if they were somewhere else; far, far away from this system.

Planting her feet and locking in her tether, Samara pulled the others into the airlock one by one, slapping the hatch control with her palm as the last one cleared the hull, before cycling the air pumps. Xeno and the others were struggling to stay on their feet; given their likely physical limitations, that could be a problem. As the lights turned green and the inner hatch slid open Samara had already yanked off her helmet, shouting into the intercom, “Rook! Get us out of here!”

His image appeared on the display. “Engines are hot, and I’m getting clearance from the bridge to disengage docking clamps. Stand by one minute for departure.” He gave a pointed look to the others within the compartment. “I will see to making the arrangements regarding our...guests.”

“Yeah, you do that,” she said, her mind already onto the next item of her agenda. Xeno was struggling to remove his own helmet as she reached up to assist, cracking the seal and pulling it free as she glared at him.

“Why the mystery?” she demanded. “You don’t throw in this kind of wrinkle at the last second, and you damn well know that!”

“It was necessary,” he wheezed, leaning against a bulkhead for support. “You have my word, I will explain everything, but first we must get settled in. None of us are used to this kind of physical effort. We must rest.”

Considering he looked even worse than usual, she was prepared to take him at his word, but he wasn’t done yet. “Also, one set of quarters will need to be rigged for Isolation,” he continued. “Persephone, dear? Please show yourself.”

One of the suited figures raised a hand, giving a tentative wave. “It is necessary for everyone’s safety,” he explained.

“Okay…” Samara drawled, surprised by the request. “And the others?”

“Standard quarters will be fine,” he assured her. “The other two are Gideon, and Kalypso.” Each raised a hand as he introduced them. “I will gladly bring everyone up to speed, but we must rest.”

As much as she wanted answers, they weren’t going anywhere. “Rook, you get all that?” she asked.

“Indeed,” the Avatar affirmed. “Your quarters will be ready momentarily. We will see to your needs, and then...I believe we would all like some answers.”