Yue

 24th January

20:36 GMT

"Ahoy the station."

Whoever's running this clearly knew that I was coming, but there isn't a marine squad ready to greet me as the air puffs out of the breach in the hull. There don't even appear to be any alarms. And whatever lunatic designed the internal defence-heavy warships, they don't appear to have repeated that style here. A weak plasma shield snaps into place to seal the hole, and blast doors begin to close to block the flow of air from the adjacent sections. Contrary to what science fiction tries to tell you, hull breaches don't actually lose air all that fast. Certainly not fast enough to move a person when the artificial gravity is set to Earth normal. After all, the difference in pressure is only 1 atmosphere. Still, air would continuously leak out, and functioning responses shows that at the very least someone has been doing recent maintenance.

Ring, any recent exhaust trails or other signs that there have been ships around here?

Trails found. Displaying.

Uh… Locally available FTL systems and thrust residues. Nothing really stands out, though tracking ships in precise terms isn't a simple matter. Tracking a ship moving at FTL is easy enough once you have any sort of FTL sensor, and often tracking where it used to be isn't all that difficult with sublight sensors. A ship at FTL is doing something clever with spacetime, and that will usually give some indication that it's going on. Whereas trying to detect that such a voyage happened at some point might well involve trying to triangulate radiation emitted from a point that has since been moving at light speed away from that point. It's doable, especially with a power ring, but it doesn’t give a lot of detail.

"Illustres to Lanterns Xor and Stewart."

"I hear."

There's a momentary delay before John responds.

"You find something?"

"One active space station in good repair. Investigating now."

"You might wanna wait-."

"I'm already on board. It started shooting as soon as I appeared."

"And you didn't just fall back? Where were they gonna go?

"They've got an anti-Lantern interdiction field. So while I could get away, coming back would be a little more difficult. Look, the gunnery wasn't anything I couldn't handle."

"…uy and Hal all over again."

"Didn't catch that, Lantern Stewart. But how are things at your end?"

"The prisoners are in custody, though they're keeping them away from the people Xor dropped off earlier." For a moment, I consider correcting him to 'Lantern Xor', but… We're working together. Being pedantic about designation protocol would be a little rude. If he keeps doing it I can always have a word with him later. "I'm watching the same station as Xor right now, from the other side of the system."

I pull a phasing drone out of subspace and send it through the closest blast door. It travels through without any difficulty. Hm. There are defences that it's worth putting on a ship that are worthless on a station. But I suppose I don’t have any real evidence that the people who repaired this place are the Black Circle. Random merchants who didn't turn off the defences? Unlikely but possible.

"Anything interesting?"

"It's a lump of rock. An asteroid with the station concealed inside. Not sure how they're hiding their heat signature, unless someone's been selling them cold guns."

"Mr Snart is a very clever man, but he can't be the only person in the universe to figure out how to apply energy in opposition to molecular vibration."

I have the phasing drone fly back through the blast door, then have it fly through a different one. Still no problem. I then engage my armour's stealth systems and have it fly back. There aren't any monitoring systems inside this corridor, the stealth systems will prevent external monitoring and since the counter-phasing doesn't appear to have activated in response to me vanishing… I move away from the blast door I was closest to and fly though the one on my right.

"I wouldn't be so sure about that. The last time I saw anyone else with that sort of tech they had to use a machine the size of a house. And it wasn't anything like as efficient."

"Okay, but even if they've got that technology, cold guns don't work through construct barriers. Lantern Xor?"

"I hear."

"I know you weren't keen, but the armour I made you is climate controlled. A full powered cold gun would kill you."

"I will wear the armour."

I nod. "I realise that it's offensive to your sense of honour, but-."

"No. Now I am not a prisoner, it is not dishonourable to wear the armour of my new unit."

"I'll remember that. Though I would like to point out that -outstanding charges or not- you were an Orange Lantern from the moment you called your ring."

Okay, let's see. The 'rooms' on the exterior side are where the exterior guns pull back into when not in use. Interior side wall is thick, designed to resist overpenetrating shots taken at the guns. Or overloads or misfires from whatever they're using to generate or contain the positrons, because antimatter isn't exactly the most discerning of materials. Corridors are relatively narrow, so they aren't designed to have crew running up and down them during combat. Probably just a maintenance team, which might actually be maintenance robots. In addition, there aren't any markings on the walls to indicate where this is. This is starting to look like a largely automated station.

"I hear."

And if it is… I'm overdue an Ice Fortress replacement. And the guns are disguised when not firing. I mean, if the League really insist I could replace the positron beams with cold guns… Actually, that's not a bad idea anyway. I mean, keep a few, but positrons are only really good as an anti-armour weapon. Against most other things a cold gun would probably outperform it, and without having the 'antimatter' tag which for most people would immediately mark it down as a superweapon rather than what it is: a reasonably powerful gun that's still less dangerous than each of Superman's eyeballs.

"Any ships around?"

"Yeah. They've got basic stealth systems, and I think they've got quick-fire drives."

Which means they can do FTL jumps automatically to get away the moment something goes wrong. They'll probably be stuck for a while after that jump, and…

"You could track the jump, right?"

"Probably, if I wasn't distracted while they did it."

Probably be able to wipe their computers…

"I'm going to suggest that you do that, and have Lantern Xor storm the base. If it's designed for stealth then it probably isn't all that well defended. He might well be able to secure the computer core before they can react, and when the ships rabbit you can track them down."

"I'd feel better if it wasn't just me. We could have a local fleet or two standing by to receive them. Quick jumps aren't exactly quiet."

"If you think that's best."

Ah, another doorway towards the interior. I send the drone through it, being mildly pleased that it isn't blocked. I'm not going to complain about this being easier than I thought it would be. I phase through, and float down the corridor into-.

Alert! Gravity distortions detected!

What.. the.. Hell am I looking at?