Star Alliance Fleet Group · the flagship
Song Chen came to the bridge under the guard of a body of soldiers.
"Leader!" The captain drew himself up the moment he saw who it was, then bowed and said by way of apology, "We came too late."
"No matter. That you came at all is enough for me. See all the wounded settled. Then go to the coordinate planet and bring back every one of our soldiers who made forced landings there and have gone into hiding. And then withdraw from here at once!" Song Chen said coldly.
"Yes. I have already sent a fleet to bring them off, and to make sure every one of our crew is brought back safe!" said the captain.
"Every one of our crew…" Song Chen murmured the words, and something in her eyes dimmed.
Song Chen went on to ask, "Apart from us, you found no one else?"
"No." The captain shook his head.
"And after you arrived here, what did you find?" Song Chen asked.
"There seems to have been a small engagement. There are the wrecks of thirty-odd enemy interstellar warships," the captain answered.
"Look for those warships' black boxes. I want to see everything that happened here," Song Chen ordered.
"Yes!"
Song Chen sat in the captain's chair and rubbed at her temples with her fingers.
Before others she was no Zhao Chengcheng; 'he' was the Leader of the Star Alliance.
He closed his eyes and called back the words Zhao Chen had given him then.
"You hide yourselves well and leave the rest to me. Whatever happens outside, you're not to meddle, and you're not to come out. Trust me. I'll see you safely back to your universe!"
Zhao Chen's face had been very grave and earnest then.
Zhao Chen would not explain his plan, but Song Chen had agreed all the same.
In the end Song Chen and all her soldiers had been put into a compartment.
The compartment was cramped, a magazine for storing munitions.
It held their few dozen people without any trouble.
After that came the waiting, silent waiting.
In that pitch-dark compartment, every link with the outside was cut.
For at Zhao Chen's insistence, every piece of communications gear they carried had been handed over; it would not do even to switch it off.
So in that compartment they could know nothing at all of what happened outside; even the passing of time could not be known there.
How long it was, there was no telling.
Then came a knocking from outside the compartment.
And then the door was opened.
But the sight before their eyes was past believing.
The corridors they had passed on their way into that compartment, the walls of the ship, were gone.
What lay before them, of all things, was the surface of a planet, all sand and craters,
and soldiers of the Star Alliance's interstellar marines.
These soldiers, finding Song Chen and the others inside the compartment, at once got them into simple outer-space suits,
so that they could live in the environment outside.
Song Chen still remembered the sight when she stepped out.
She stood on that planet… learning afterward that it was really only the surface of an asteroid.
She looked back at the compartment they had been in all this while.
Broken walls and ruin…
Before her there remained only the wreck of a starship, no better than a heap of scrap iron.
And in just such a wreck, who would have thought there lay hidden a compartment still whole, and in that compartment the very Star Alliance Leader whom those people dreamed of catching!
"Leader…"
A very small voice sounded at her ear.
Song Chen opened her eyes.
She saw the captain.
Who was also the overall commander of this rescue mission, the commander of this fleet.
"We have recovered the black-box data from the wrecks of the enemy warships. Please look it over." The captain laid several black-box records before Song Chen.
Song Chen began to read them.
Very soon she understood Zhao Chen's plan completely.
The corners of her mouth rose in spite of herself.
That's you all over.
A crosser-over, same as me, and you could think up a plan this good.
At the very start of his plan, Zhao Chen had set a dozen-odd shuttles to fly out on fixed timings and fixed courses toward the border space beyond the star system,
while he himself took the T3 Fox-Hunter-class Medium Interstellar Destroyer and fled in another direction.
In the end, what he made the enemy believe was this.
That he was using the T3 Fox-Hunter-class Medium Interstellar Destroyer as bait, to draw the enemy after him,
while the real Star Alliance Leader had long since boarded those shuttles and fled toward the star system's border space.
But the truth was this.
Song Chen had never once left the T3 Fox-Hunter-class Medium Interstellar Destroyer.
And everything that followed, the T3 Fox-Hunter-class Medium Interstellar Destroyer ramming, breaking up, falling and exploding, was a sequence Zhao Chen had set in advance.
As was the section of wreckage holding that compartment: where it would finally fall, and the place it would come down, were both of Zhao Chen's reckoning.
The enemy would never have thought that their quarry, the Star Alliance Leader, would be inside the wreckage of a section of an interstellar warship that had already crashed.
And that was what let Song Chen survive until the Star Alliance's relief fleet arrived.
In the data of the black-box records, and in some of the images, Song Chen saw what that battle had been.
The written records were all of that man, and all described him like a demon.
In the images there was nothing but a blurred picture of him.
Silently, Song Chen kept a copy of every one of those images.
"Delete every record connected with these," Song Chen said in a low voice.
"Yes," the captain answered.
"Oh, right. How did you find us?" A question suddenly occurred to Song Chen.
Every piece of communications gear they carried had been switched off.
And they had been hidden in the wreck of a starship, fallen onto an asteroid.
How could the relief fleet have found them so quickly?
The captain answered: "After we arrived here, we found a small number of enemy warships. While we were destroying them, we picked up a faint signal of some kind. Its band is one only our Star Alliance uses. So we followed the signal here, and found your position with life-detection gear."
A faint signal?
Song Chen frowned.
Had not every device on her been switched off?
Wait.
Song Chen seemed to have thought of something.
She felt in her pocket.
And sure enough, her fingers found something small there.
She took it out to look: a little thing like a USB stick.
She activated it at once with the starship's equipment.
And then a familiar voice sounded.
A small figure of light appeared before them all: a sweet little girl!
"Mama, Yaya missed you so much!" Yaya popped up all of a sudden.