The first transmission we got upon re-entering normal space was as follows:
"
WANTED
Alan Ledford, Jnenyfnnr kwonrennta, Sann Treleance
for
CRIMES AGAINST ALL SENTIENT BEINGS
Reward for capture authorized by the Tribunal, crimes were committed in the course of the Yotia conflict, contact Mission Ship Resiliant"
"Crimes against all sentient beings" was the tribunal's way of saying 'war crimes', essentially, and everyone would take that fairly seriously. While there'd been a great deal of arrests closely after the war, they'd since died down. Lately, however, there'd been somewhat of a revival. Likely it was due to Dr. Fallon's confession and the subsequent addition of a number of new suspects including myself and my guest on board. Obviously they'd gotten ahold of Steve, too, as his name was missing and if Dr. Fallon had mentioned the three of us, he'd likely have mentioned Steve too. That and the fact that a mission ship was docked with Reil station indicated to me Steve was no longer on the run. He was apparently cooperating more fully than the doctor had, as the latter had obviously not told them about our contingency plans. Thanks a lot, Steve.
The Resiliant, as my sensors identified the ship, was apparently on loan to the Exile Peacekeepers, which would just make this all the more tiresome.
Yes, you read the wanted transmission correctly, the crimes I always suspected I'd be found out for have nothing to do with the Resonator, at least I didn't know they would when I started working on it. It was, and always had been, about Yotia.
I'm tired of dancing around the subject. The whole point of the journal was to keep an accurate one, after all, so here goes.
Our work on the resonator, as I've mentioned quite a few times in the bitter tones of an old man that only I can truly muster, was a dismal failure - to us, the research team. Our higher-ups, on the other hand, were delighted. It failed for us and succeeded for them when we attempted to power one of the early versions up, and it vanished.
It did more than vanish, it was replaced with nothing. The very same nothing that makes up the Yotian Anomaly to this day. At first we didn't even bother reporting it, as to us we'd made a terrible mistake. The prototype which was destroyed in this fasion was much smaller than the weapon that won the war, and so only a very small part of the counter upon which we'd been assembling the device was now a gateway to the void. It had just seemed best at the time to learn from our mistakes and attempt to refine our work. Only none of them worked - each just removed itself from the universe in more and more spectacular ways. We'd made the call to cease research, as we were worried that eventually we'd find our entire workspace gone and we still didn't have enough information to be able to reverse the phenomenon. It was at this point that Steve, objecting to ending the project, called in one of our superiors from the military. Project Archetype was, technically speaking, an Exile (though we weren't that at the time) military project. I was the only one there who was actually in the chain of command, however, and the brass had other concerns at the moment than research, so we'd been handed over and told to do whatever the Ulix wanted us to do and then been left alone. When one of the Marshalls came into our lab and saw the destruction we'd wrought purely on accident, it finally occurred to them how much damage they might do if they were trying to do so on purpose.
That's when Archetype broke up. Dr. Fallon categorically refused to allow his research to be used in such a way, and the rest of the team agreed. Except for me, I had orders to take one of the prototypes from the lab and bring it to command for evaluation as a weapon. I refused them, and was instead put on the front lines of the war as punishment. It wasn't an official reprimand - word of this new weapon was to be kept utterly secret, and so they couldn't say what I'd done on record - but there was the general feeling that they hoped I'd die out there.
Somehow, I suspect through Salient Steve, they got ahold of the research data. The Ulix never realized what was going on, indeed they had seemed positively delighted that more attention was being paid to their Resonator and that a working duplicate would be created soon. They had no idea what we had in mind.
I saw the results first-hand. My ship was an escort vessel for the ship that launched the weapon at Yotia IV. I saw the void-field that I'd seen so many times before in the lap set itself up, then I saw it grow. We knew it got bigger, but on the scales we'd been dealing with it this happened very slowly. The weapon landing on the planet was designed to set up a field to encompass the entire thing, and it grew quickly. Before I could do anything, the ship I was escorting was enveloped, as well as the ships escorting it. Including me.
I came to several days afterward, drifting along in a Merchant cruiser that I still have with me to this day. The war was over, my homeworld now belonged to someone else, and Alan Ledford was dead. I could go anywhere I wanted. I started up a freelance career.
But the Resonator never left my mind.
<!--Ledford's confession will be taken into account.
-->Our first act upon arrival at Reil was to look as inconspicuous as possible. Merchant ships are very common at stations, especially at stations that don't orbit a star system or planet of some sort. Reil was one of these very rare stations. They're exclusively trading posts, and they tend to make a whole lot of profit, but there are not inconsiderable overhead costs. Without a stable gravity well to anchor a Lane to, just getting traffic there alone took up a great deal of energy for instance.
Mission Ship Resiliant was currently hovering ominously near the station. The station was bigger, but not by much. The mission ship was not docked; it clearly wanted to be able to move the instant anything looked awry. I set our course toward the station.
"I hope Sann still checks these boards." Jenny said, quietly.
I pointed out that he'd have to be a lunatic to do so.
"That doesn't seem to be stopping us."
Touche.
--
Docking at the station was uneventful. Jenny had reluctantly agreed to stay on board my ship while I went inside to 'check out the job market'. I was only recognizable on sight to a very few people, and the chances that one of them would find themselves here, spot me, realize that I had a bounty on my head, and then turn me in before trying to get even more money out of me were fairly low. Jenny, on the other hand, was somewhat of a spectacle. Even she might be able to pass unnoticed in the bustle of a busy trading post like this one, but the both of us would not - an Exile traveling with a member of the Last Great Race was almost explicitly what the wanted transmission had been warning about. I was of course travelling under an assumed name.
Reil station, like a number of stations, did not have public access to their computers via comm. This was a rather cynical attempt of them to get you to actually come aboard if you wanted to get a job. Their hope was that you'd buy something, but it usually embittered freelancers and overworked their traffic control people. I'd had to take the risk of getting caught. So long as I kept to myself and didn't enter any of the bars that marketed themselves toward freelancer captains (nearly all of them) I was unlikely to be noticed.
I finally found a panel that had access to the job boards. I patched into my ship's computer to make it look authentic and starting crafting a wanted ad. I came up with some garbage about needing things delivered to Anjart station and The Birthplace of the Last Great Race and finally to Exile. I stuck the word 'resonate' in there in much the same way Salient Steve had. I hoped that would be enough. After posting, I got back up and started walking to where we had docked.
About three seconds later, all hell broke loose.
Jenny told me, once I finally managed to return to the ship, what had happened. There'd been an unexpected hyper arrival - hyper being illegal in this particular area, this was very unexpected indeed - and the arrivee looked less like a visiting vessel and more like a weapon that had been launched from afar. That wasn't the reason for the evacuation of the station, though. I was looking out of the viewscreen at the reason.
A deep scar in space, filled with a nauseating swirling violet, was slowly growing. I looked on in disbelief; someone somewhere had launched a weapon which only a very few people in the universe knew how to make. Judging by the way that Resiliant looked to be getting the hell away while the getting was good, it wasn't the tribunal. It hadn't been me, obviously, it hadn't been Jenny, Dr. Fallon, while very knowledgeable about it, would never have let anyone construct one knowing what it would be used for, and Salient Steve had no clue whatsoever how to go about doing it. That left...
Sann appeared on the holo, which was definitely strange as I usually have to manually approve such a transmission. He said only "Follow me" and then vanished.
One of the strangest things I've ever bore witness to happened then. The swirling vortex began to shrink. The deep void within folded in on itself, growing in brightness until the filters of the viewscreen had to kick on to prevent me from being blinded. The sensors had a moment to record a small metallic object before it vanished into hyperspace.
There had been a secondary transmission masked under Sann's holo. It contained coordinates. Given that everyone else in the sector was currently occupied with either getting out or panicing, I figured it was my best chance to find out what was going on. I punched in the coordinates and went hyper after him.