Spes Hominis (backpost)

Posted on Sat Mar 14th, 2026 @ 12:49pm by Lieutenant Commander Alph & Ramielos Volsunga & Master Chief Petty Officer Gaz & Uhlan D'Darius Tebok & SubCommander Saa
Edited on on Sat Mar 14th, 2026 @ 12:49pm

2,743 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Masters of the Stars [2]
Location: The Kennel, Lower Dock
Timeline: MD03 - Morning

Saa's thoughts raced ahead of her as she swam, reaching the improvised containment area long before her hobbled body was able to. She'd spent most of her time in sickbay reading reports as they came in. The most startling being Ineel's metallurgical analysis, which had confirmed part of the incredible testimony the prisoner had given the science team: that although some of his equipment was centuries or even millennia older, the main components of his powered body armor had been manufactured no earlier than thirty-eight thousand years into the future, according to his timeframe.

Thirty-eight thousand years!! Saa had reeled when that little item of information had crossed her datafeed. She wondered how the Temporal Prime Directive would apply to their situation. Another thorny problem for Captain Rovak that she felt glad wasn't hers.

But even as she swam in these reflections, she was aware that other, deeper thoughts were driving her on. An analysis of the prisoner's technology may have been her official reason for this visit, but there was another layer beneath that, a subtler stirring of something other than mere curiosity, given voice by a single word that echoed back at her from the polished tritanium bulkheads:

Xenos.

But there wasn't time for that, for worry and doubt. She knew better than to fear words. She had a job to do, and a team waiting for her to lead them in building his cage.

---

Lower Dock - 2115

Saa brooded at the edge of the construction site like a silver scorpion, the four mechanical legs of her EVA thruster suit down and mag-locked to the assembly deck as she monitored the data feeds from the teams and drones working in the null-gravity space in front of her.

The skeleton of the ‘kennel,’ to use the popular designation of the detention unit now taking shape here in the neutral gravity of the lower dock, was gradually emerging: a reimagined exozoological containment unit, originally designed for acid-spewing megafauna in another sector, now modified by her own and Gaz’s active paranoia. The structure was ridiculously overengineered, with more structural reinforcement alone than most warp cores she’d ever worked on. But she was inclined to think that there was no such thing as overengineering under these circumstances, given the nature of the structure’s sole intended occupant.

A short distance across the assembly area, within a heavily reinforced force-field enclosure, Ramielos Volsunga knelt in the meditative posture he’d adopted since yesterday. The augmetic warrior seemed strangely quiescent now, no longer actively testing his confines, no longer threatening to break out in berzerk fury at any moment. Just there. Just watching.

Volsunga knew they were building a cage for him, but by now he knew it was practicality rather than gloating that they did it within his field of view. He wondered what manner of xenos the grey creature floating around was, it didn’t have the abhuman appearance of most of the other beings he’d seen.

The prisoner had finally dressed, Saa had noticed—wrapped in the simple grey jumpsuit that the Medical department had replicated for him. Perfectly tailored to his hulking measurements though it was, the way he wore it struck her as somehow incongruous at first glance, though she couldn’t say why. As she worked, her unconscious mind continued to work on the problem and, to her surprise, eventually solved it for her, dredging up the answer from a resemblance to some half-forgotten image from one of the human fairy tales she’d been exposed to as a child. He looked like a knight forced to don peasant rags.

Saa resented the analogy. She didn’t owe him any recognition of pathos. Ignoring the prisoner, she kept her focus on the data scrolling past her snout, checking the diagnostics for anomalous energy readings as the team within the kennel brought its primary generator online. Most sections of the kennel had been manufactured separately. As soon as the field was in place, they could begin phase-welding the larger sections together.

Something was off, though. A properly aligned SIF field shouldn’t read like that.

Grumbling, she opened her comm. “Ensign Alaka’i, what’s the issue with the power fluctuations?”

A very young dolphin voice answered through her interface. “Uh–sorry, ma’am, there’s a K-variance in the coil assembly. We’re stabilizing.”

Saa squinted at the readings.

“...Stabilizing how?” she asked, sensing a premonition.

“Almost got it!”

“Wait a second. It’s the neutronium casing, you have to compensate for the natural gravity field or–”

Too late, there was a sparkling incandescence surrounding the kennel, followed by the soft wff of a misaligned structural integrity field folding in on itself. The sections of the structure began to float away in opposite directions.

Saa was grateful for the opaque faceplate of her EVA suit.

“Reset,” she said calmly. “Tebok, can you please ride herd on those pieces before they wander off? Mr. Alaka’i, please inform Mr. Gaz that we’ll need the extra field coils after all.”

"Maybe supervising manual labour would be better left to someone with hands." Volsunga said to Saa, his impression was that she was in charge. He didn't feel any need to resist taking a dig at his jailers.

Saa’s jaw tightened.

The words came over the comm pickup in her suit a fraction flattened by the field between them, but the contempt in them survived transmission perfectly. She rotated her suit’s forward cluster a few degrees and looked over at him through the tinted faceplate.

“Maybe incarceration would be better borne in silence,” she replied.

Across the work zone, Ramielos Volsunga looked at her, it was either acknowledgement or a warning. With him, the distinction still felt academic.

“Then we will both be disappointed.”

Saa cut the channel without answering. Around her, the work bees and suited engineers were already moving to recover the drifting kennel segments, magnetic grapples flashing out like cast harpoons as Tebok and two dockhands reeled the larger sections back into place. A rectangular brace section rotated lazily past the forcefield, close enough that Volsunga could have reached out and touched it if the barrier had not been there. He only watched it pass.

That, more than the jibe, irritated her.

He should have been raging. A dangerous prisoner was easier to think about when he behaved as expected. Instead he had spent the better part of a day kneeling in patient stillness, observing every weld, every field test, every security layer with the calm focus of a craftsman inspecting a rival’s work. It made the whole proceeding feel less like construction and more like examination.

“Chief Gaz is on approach,” said Alaka’i over the engineering net, sounding as if he were trying to make himself small enough to vanish into static.

“Of course he is,” Saa muttered.

A maintenance sled came skating through the null-gravity space from the upper gantry with all the graceless momentum of something piloted by a man who trusted inertial dampers more than he trusted geometry. Gaz stood on its rear platform with one hand on a rail, toolkit clipped to his belt, the extra field coils strapped down behind him.

He brought the sled alongside Saa with a final corrective jet and took in the half-dispersed cage sections, the sheepish work crew, and Saa herself hanging motionless like an offended arrowhead.

“I take it,” Gaz said, “you want the extra coils after all.”

“Mr. Alaka’i decided it for me.”

Gaz glanced toward the young dolphin in his own little maneuver frame. “Ensign, when your chief engineer says ‘compensate for the gravity field,’ she isn't suggesting improvisation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On the bright side,” Gaz went on without enthusiasm in his voice, “now we know what happens if we don’t.”

Saa gave him a look. “Your talent for extracting educational value from embarrassment remains unparalleled.”

“It’s why they keep me around.”

Volsunga had turned his attention to the newcomer. “This one at least has hands.”

Gaz looked over at the forcefield enclosure. “And this one at least has clothes today. We all make progress.”

For the first time, Volsunga actually made a sound in response, a short, rough bark of sound. Almost like a laugh. Several of the nearer crew flinched. Gaz did not.

“That thing speaks too freely,” Volsunga observed.

“Occupational hazard,” Gaz said. “Try not to kill anybody about it.”

Saa did not like how quickly the exchange had become casual. She pushed away from the deck with a hiss of maneuvering jets and drifted down toward the principal generator housing, bringing the relevant diagnostic panes up across her visor. Gaz followed with the practiced economy of someone who had spent half his life repairing other people’s disasters.

Together they rebuilt the field geometry the way it should have been done the first time: secondary compensation ring, offset through the neutronium casing, then a staggered stability test before bringing the primary emitters fully online. The revised field went up with a low, satisfying hum, its surface barely visible except where reflections from the assembly floodlights crawled over it like pale oil on water.

“There,” Gaz said. “Now if it collapses on itself again, it’ll at least have the decency to warn us first.”

“Phase teams, resume,” Saa ordered. “Slowly this time. If anyone feels inspired, resist.”

The kennel began to take shape in earnest. Section by section, the containment unit was brought inward and locked onto the frame: armored wall modules, internal emitter housings, environmental feeds, restraint hardpoints they all hoped never to use, and enough redundant power routing to keep the thing sealed if half the dock went dark. It was a brute of a design, ugly in the way only competent emergency engineering could be.

For a while, the only sounds were the clipped exchanges on the work net and the intermittent crackle of phase-welding arcs.

Then, unexpectedly, Volsunga spoke again.

“What are you?” He asked

Saa assumed at first he meant Gaz.

“He's very busy operations chief,” she said. “One currently occupied with building your home.”

“No.” He shifted slightly, not rising from his kneeling posture but angling his head toward her. “You.”

She hesitated.

That question had already become a small sore point among the humans aboard the station. The humans had taken it personally; the dolphins, if anything, more so. A man from Earth’s future who did not know what a dolphin was seemed, to them, like a kind of cosmological insult.

“I am a delphinid,” she said at last. “From Earth.”

His brow furrowed. “No.”

She turned in place to face him properly now. “No?”

“Earth has no such beings." Volsunga stated plainly.

The welders continued to flicker around them. Somewhere aft, a cargo manipulator clanged against a brace and somebody swore. But for a moment the whole dock felt oddly still.

“On your Earth,” Saa said carefully.

Volsunga’s expression changed, not softening exactly but settling into something less combative. “On Holy Terra there is only mankind.”

Gaz looked from one to the other and wisely said nothing.

Saa gave up on pretending this did not interest her. She drifted a little closer to the field, staying well outside even the theoretical reach of a man his size.

“Only humans?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to everything else?”

He studied her faceplate, perhaps trying to see her eyes through the tint. “I do not know. The oceans are gone. The sky is made by engines. The old world died long before my people kept proper record.”

There was no boast in it. No triumph. Only recital.

Saa found, to her annoyance, that this was worse.

Behind her, Gaz resumed tightening down one of the power couplings with deliberate noisiness, an act of courtesy so transparent she might almost have thanked him for it later.

“And you,” Volsunga said, “are from a world where beasts speak.”

“We prefer ‘people,’” Saa replied automatically.

A pause.

He inclined his head by a fraction. “Very well. A world where people take many forms.”

“Most worlds do.” Saa countered.

“Not mine.”

It was such a simple statement. Not bitter. Not wistful. Just factual. That, too, irritated her. It invited pity by refusing to ask for it.

She broke eye contact first and returned to the diagnostics. “Field integrity holding at ninety-nine point seven,” she said into the work net. “Bring in the inner shell.”

The last and heaviest sections moved on tractor guidance, settling around the reinforced core of the kennel like armor plates around a sarcophagus. Once the final seam was welded, the whole thing looked less like an animal enclosure than a bunker someone had decided, out of caution bordering on superstition, to put inside another bunker.

Gaz whistled softly. “I’d hate to be the thing this was originally meant for.”

“It should have the same complaint about him,” Saa said.

“Comforting.” Gaz laughed.

When the external systems all read green, she keyed a secure channel to dock control. “Containment transfer in five minutes. Medical standby, Security standby, nonessential personnel clear the assembly radius.”

As the work crews dispersed to safer distances, Volsunga rose smoothly to his feet inside the forcefield, the motion so controlled and effortless that it sent a ripple of unease through the remaining observers. Out of armor and wrapped in plain grey fabric, he still looked built for violence in the same way a torpedo looked built for travel.

He glanced at the finished kennel, then back to Saa.

“You fear me.”

“No,” she said, "I fear what you might do to all these people. Good people, who don't solve their problems with killing, or believe things they're told without finding out if they're true. I fear fanaticism and mindless violence. On Earth, those things are gone. You though, you're nothing to be afraid of. It's only the effect of you that could be fearful. You're a relic of a future that will never exist here. That's why you're locked up, and I'm happy to be the one to throw away the key." The universal translator managed to communicate some of her contempt.

"I pity you, and what whoever made you did to you. I pity that you can never undo what you've done, and maybe you'll never want to. Maybe the kindest thing to do would be to just space you."

The bluntness of it seemed to please him.

“Good,” he said. “Pity is honest.”

“That doesn’t make it pleasant.”

“No.” His gaze moved over the cage one last time. “But it is human.”

Saa frowned despite herself. There were layers there after all, and she resented discovering them.

“Step to the rear of the field,” she ordered.

To her mild surprise, he obeyed.

The transfer itself was executed with exhausting caution: overlapping fields, gravitic shepherding, internal seal checks, power isolation redundancies. At every stage Saa expected some sudden explosion of resistance, some berserk lunge to validate all the ugly expectations the station had been circulating since his capture.

None came.

Volsunga entered the kennel under his own power, turned once in the center of the chamber as if assessing a temporary billet, and then, with that same grave, martial precision, went down onto one knee.

The inner field closed around him.

The outer shell sealed.

On her display, the kennel’s status changed from ASSEMBLY to CONTAINMENT.

Only then did Saa let herself exhale.

Alph's voice came over the comm. "Ops to construction team, we are reading containment status. Can you confirm?"

"Can confirm. It's together. Whether he stays contained is another question." Saa told the android.

Gaz drifted up beside her, following her gaze through the armored viewport toward the silent figure within.

“Well,” he said. “That could have gone worse.”

“It still might.”

Gaz grunted, he'd known her long enough now to see the gears in her head turning. “You think there’s more to this walking warcrime?”

She kept looking at the prisoner.

There was a knight in peasant rags inside a box built for monsters, kneeling as though it were a chapel, or a cell, or perhaps simply another battlefield waiting to begin.

“Yes,” she said at last. “That is exactly what worries me.”

And inside the kennel, watched by forcefields, scanners, and the most overengineered walls on the station, Ramielos Volsunga lowered his head and waited.

 

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