Alex moved about the bare cabin quickly, looking for anything that could be used to batter the door down. The room was a functioning jail cell—meant for any colonists that got too out of hand, and that door was looking stout enough that he would need something with some serious heft to it in order to budge it.

He found what he was looking for with one glance at the bed in the room. The frame was made of a solid metal, most likely steel. It could be the battering ram he needed.

Alex was just throwing off the mattress when Rick intervened.

“Wait, Alex, look over there!”

Alex looked over to where his former brother-in-law was pointing, only to find a camera trained on them in the corner of the room. No doubt, the feed was going back to security, where Serrano and his men would be keeping a close eye on them. Even if they did breakout, Serrano would know almost instantly and be able to send his goons after them.

“What do we do?” asked Rick. “We can’t take out the feed either or it’ll be as bad as taking out the door.”

Alex thought for a moment before the idea struck him.

“I’ve got it. We’re going to use a little trick I learned while fighting in the Orbital Wars,” said Alex, opening up his P-com. He searched for an app that he’d used before, a rudimentary hacker application that was good enough to replace a camera feed (or put it in a loop) on a temporary basis.

“Found it,” said Alex as he moved closer to the camera. He placed his P-com right next to it to begin the process. “I’ve used this enough times to shut down a camera feed so my team could sneak into a rival baron’s section of the orbital ring. Works like a charm and it looks like this version is even faster than the one I used.”

Within a matter of seconds, the camera feed was hacked into, and Alex set it back into a previous loop.

“There, now they’ll keep seeing the same feed running in a loop every fifteen minutes,” said Alex once he was done. “It won’t fool them forever but it will certainly buy us some more time.”

“Assuming we can get out of this cell,” said Rick as he looked around. “You really think you can get this door open with that bed frame?”

Alex grinned. “There’s only one way to find out.”

It turned out to be much easier for Alex than he imagined. The frame was dense and heavy, making it the perfect battering ram once he’d pulled it up on its side. Using all his strength, Alex yanked the frame back and sent it crashing forward, creating a dreadful noise of metal on metal. The door took several, heavy blows before Alex used the last of his strength to shatter the internal sensor that kept it shut. The door sprung open at that point, giving them their freedom.

Alex turned to look at Rick, who was now staring at him.

“Door’s open,” Alex grunted, dropping the bed frame. “Let’s go.”

“Jesus, Alex, I always knew you were strong but holy shit,” said Rick as he looked at the door. “You were tossing that steel frame around like it was a pencil. It had to have weighed nearly a hundred and fifty kilograms. Sometimes I think you’re not even human.”

Alex didn’t have the right words to respond to that, especially as he remembered the report that Doctor Barnes had written up before he died.

And maybe both Rick and Barnes were right about something? What exactly was he if he wasn’t human?

That answer would have to wait. With the door now open, it was time to figure out how to strike back against Serrano. Alex stepped out into the hall cautiously with Rick following just behind him. Once they were out of the room, Alex pulled the damaged door shut behind them.

“Plausible deniability,” he explained to Rick. “If they see the door open, they’ll know we’ve escaped. If they see it closed, they’ll expect we’re still in there.”

“I can’t fault that thinking,” replied Rick. “Where to now? What about the girls? Oh shit, Nikki!”

Both of their companions had been left in their respective cabins. And god knows what had happened to them while they were incapacitated.

“Come on, let’s check it out,” said Alex. “Our cabins are this way.”

They worked their way back to section three of their cylinder, which took less time than Alex expected. For one, there was no one out in the main halls of the cylinder. Just about everyone had disappeared after the ship had been taken over by Serrano, and judging by the lack of any noise in the cabins, they weren’t even sequestered there either.

It was almost like this entire cylinder had been abandoned already, and Alex had to wonder if the same conditions were present on the other cylinder as well.

“This is getting just downright weird,” said Rick as they neared their cabins. “Where did everyone go? All the escape pods are still docked. No one has left the ship.”

“Probably huddling together in some spot where they think they’ll be safe,” said Alex. “It can get awfully lonely in those cabins, especially if you think your life might be in danger. There’s better strength in numbers.”

They arrived at Rick’s cabin first and entered slowly, taking the time to make sure that they wouldn’t be discovered by any of Serrano’s men. Thankfully, there were no cameras in these cabins so they didn’t have to worry about surveillance but what they found inside was troubling enough on its own.

Nikki was nowhere to be found. And judging by the remains of Rick’s I-Mate, someone had brought something hard and heavy down over her head, shattering the internal processor and ruining the realistic exoskeleton.

“What the fuck,” whispered Rick as he looked over the cabin. His I-Mate was destroyed, and the majority of his valuable possessions were missing, and that was even before asking the question of what happened to Nikki.

Alex didn’t waste much time in going to his cabin either. Inside, he found the same situation. Kristina had been completely destroyed, and it looked like whoever did it really relished the process. Jenna was missing as well and there was no clue what had happened to either woman.

“It had to be Serrano,” said Alex once he reunited with Rick. “We know he stole Sam’s companion, Adela, right? Maybe that’s what they’re doing now. They’re taking all the companions for the use of the gang as well as anything valuable they can find.”

Rick put a hand on his stomach. “It makes me sick to think about what they could be doing to Nikki right now. Alex, we have to find them.”

“There still might be hope,” said Alex. “My gut feeling tells me I’m wrong but maybe, just maybe they might be with the rest of the colonists. If we can find them, we can rule that out for sure though.”

“What are we waiting for then? We have to find them!”

There were only so many places that many colonists could gather comfortably. Several of the larger storage and meeting rooms on their cylinder could house that many people, but they still had to move quietly to keep from being discovered by Serrano’s men.

It was the third room they tried where they found the bulk of the colonists from their section. Opening the door to the storage facility revealed a mass of eyes, all of them frightened and huddling together to stay safe.

“Alex! Rick!”

The two men were met by Sam Reeves, who was waving his hand to get their attention. With him was another familiar face, that of Garrison, who looked much more frightened than the last time Alex saw him.

“Where have you two been?” asked Sam. “We noticed you weren’t with the rest of us, and we were beginning to think that Serrano did something with you.”

“He certainly tried,” scoffed Alex. “But it didn’t hold. We broke out.”

“I think I owe you two gentlemen an apology,” said an embarrassed Garrison. “If I had listened earlier, well, maybe we wouldn’t be in this predicament right now.”

“Can’t go back and change the past,” replied Alex as a smile grew on his face. “Or else none of us would be here. But we need to figure out the strategic situation. And we need to stop Serrano from getting away with this ship and the majority of our women.”

“How though?” asked Garrison. “They’ve taken all the guns. All the pulse pistols are sitting in crates in a storage room off the bridge, guarded by his people. There’s no way in or out without discovery, and he has the security of the ship completely locked down.”

“Not completely,” said Alex. “Or else Rick and I would have never been able to find you.”

He took a moment to detail their escape from the cell as well as the reprogramming of the feed that masked their exit.

“Is that something we can do on a large scale?” asked Sam. “Reprogram all the feeds on the ship so that we can organize a counterattack?”

Alex started to shake his head. “Our P-coms can only do individual feeds. They don’t have enough juice to take on the whole system without all of us picking a feed to work on. Besides, my feeling is that if we all tried to do it at once, there’s no way we’d escape discovery. It’s too risky. Eventually, Serrano is going to see us coming, and we’re going to have to be ready. Do we have any other weapons here?”

“Some people grabbed some cutlery from the kitchens,” replied Garrison. “That’s about it. There’s some personal knives going around but any other weaponry wouldn’t have been allowed to get on the ship back on Earth. All the heavy stuff belongs with Serrano now.”

“Then I think we need to even the odds a little,” said Alex. “Do we know how many of these shitheads are loyal to Serrano? The last I saw, it was no more than fifteen. Maybe twenty max.”

“I’d say that’s a fair count,” replied Sam. “But they seem to be the biggest men on the ship. The men that typically ran the prison yard back when we were all in it. It seems that circumstances haven’t changed much since then.”

“No, they have changed greatly,” replied Alex. “At least out here, we can kill them with impunity. At the end of the day, the only thing they’re going to understand is force. And we have a great advantage in that area right now.”

Garrison looked around the room before looking back at Alex. “I have to say that I don’t agree with you. We’re disarmed and scattered and Serrano is clearly on top. How do we have any possible advantages right now?”

Alex let out a smile. “We have the advantage of surprise. If we plan this right, Serrano will never see us coming.”