It took another hour of walking and elevators and motion floors to reach the Wardian.
The General and Wardian were in a private room. It was enormous—as big as a city block on Belvaille. The walls were too far away to see what was on them.
The guards finally released my shackles, all of them coming off with a click simultaneously.
The soldiers left, taking the wagon and chains with them.
“Hi,” I said good-naturedly.
The General wore his usual scowl, the Wardian had a beatific grin.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, as if I had pondered my many choices.
“Sure,” I answered.
He turned his back and began striding across the massive room. I followed, with the General close behind me, his breath on the back of my neck.
“Why is it you think we’re here, Hank?” the Wardian asked.
I thought this would be a good time to broach the demands of the resistance.
“Well, I guess the Dredel Led. And I suppose it has something to do with the…somewhat illegal activities on Belvaille,” I said delicately.
The Wardian turned to face me and for the first time wore an expression of utter bewilderment.
“What?” he asked, dumbstruck.
I looked back at the General, whose face was so creased with frowns I was waiting for him to fold away into nothingness.
“Er, well, you all came and made some arrests and—”
The Wardian’s face showed no sign of recognition and he turned to the General.
“Random screenings,” the General responded casually.
The Wardian regarded me, surprised.
“You think that this fleet,” he began, and he activated something in his hand. With that, the whole edge of the room, the wall and parts of the ceiling and floor, scrolled away, showing the immensity of the armada arrayed around us. It was quite jarring, as it looked like we were exposed directly to the void with nothing in between. “You think that,” he said, pointing, “is here because of…crime?”
I rubbed my wrists where I had been handcuffed, thinking how to respond.
“Maybe we could have hired some police instead? The fuel costs to deliver these ships here likely exceeds the entire economic output of your space station for the next thousand years.”
“Hm,” I puffed, feeling not only stupid, but that I had no business speaking to a Wardian on a dreadnought about anything whatsoever.
“No, we are here because of a ship we have been tracking for some time via your station’s telescopes. A vessel of the Boranjame.”
“What?” I asked, shocked.
“A convergence is happening in this area. Whether the Dredel Led made the Boranjame come investigate or the other way around, or if news of a level-ten mutant interested them, we don’t know. But we have to stand our ground.”
So they knew about Jyonal, or maybe my own false classification. I didn’t ask him to clarify.
“Our intercepted relays lead us to believe the Boranjame may use this opportunity to expand into our space. If they did, they would pass here on the way to some of our populated worlds.”
The Boranjame were the big boys of the galaxy, literally and figuratively. They were the most powerful empire by far and rarely lost a war.
Then it hit me.
“You plan on fighting them?”
Boranjame ships were literally planets. The race existed only in deep space. When they moved into a new region, they stripped apart all the local worlds for resources and made their ships even bigger—or built new ones. A dreadnought was as large as a metropolis, but it was a far cry from being planetoid.
“You need to evacuate us,” I said urgently.
“To where?” The General sneered. “Any place we take you would be their first stop. They won’t bother with this space station, it’s too small.”
“They will if you’re standing here shooting at them.”
“We have another ship just like this one ready to Portal in, as well as the entire 2nd and 8th fleets. We are just the tip of the spear.”
“Look, I’m no Wardian, but can even fifty dreadnoughts take out a Boranjame ship?” I asked. “You can’t fight a planet.”
“That’s a common misconception. Only their royalty have ships of that size,” the General said. “And they won’t dare send a royal vessel on an exploratory mission. Their other vessels are much smaller. Only fifteen to thirty times the size of this dreadnought.”
“What are you going to do against that? Dent its hull?”
The Wardian took a deep breath and turned to look out at space.
“The Colmarian Confederation’s defense, Hank, is you. Mutants. It’s why we aren’t invaded more often. Any attacking species that attempts to occupy us knows they will have to deal with randomly dispersed mutations. Our Navy can’t remotely cover all our territory. Not even a fraction of it.”