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This is Lucius Arcturus' entry to the Inspired by Images of EVE Competition. More details and links to all entrants can be found at Starfleet Comms. This contest makes use of the following image, which has been copied here in accordance with Starfleet's creative commons license.

Lights flickered on and gadgets whirred to life in the previously dark room, as though it were waking up from a long rest. Viewscreens lit up with colorful status reports from a variety of industrial and planetary assets. A cheerful woman’s voice could be heard, reading the news from Dodixie and its adjacent systems. The lights and screens illuminated a small and sparsely furnished set of rooms; rooms that had not seen activity in some time. Viewports in the walls looked out into the space around the station. Occasionally a ship could be seen in the distance, either approaching the station carefully to dock or slowly turning and then disappearing into a speck of light in the distance as it warped to its next destination.

A door slid open in the office and a young man entered. He was clean-shaven with dark, closely-cropped hair and light skin. He wore simple clothes of recent Gallente fashion. He squinted slightly as he entered the now brightly lit room, as though his eyes were adjusting to the light, and a look of irritation flashed across his face. “Dim the lights”, he said weakly, “and turn down the audio.”

The suite’s computer systems obeyed and softened the lights and newscast. The man sat down at the desk. He turned towards one of the viewscreens and tapped it a few times. After a moment, a woman’s face appeared. “Report, Shana,” the man said to the screen, the irritation still present in his voice.

“Oh Malcolm…I’m so sorry you got podded. It’s over. I got my scanner and I’m getting out. Look.” The screen switched to a view of the outside of a Helios, and then widened out to a vast expanse of space. Malcolm could see a large, oblong structure, awash in blue light from the solar system’s pulsar star. It was surrounded by smaller arrays and silos, all in various stages of destruction.

Malcolm’s small crew of pod pilots were wormhole residents, scanning down and collecting the incredibly lucrative remnants of the long-extinct Sleeper race. They had been doing this for some time and had become adept at it, possibly to the point of complacency. During a routine op the morning before, one of Malcolm’s crewmembers had spotted scan probes on his directional scanner. Malcolm had ordered the crew back to the starbase to avoid any unpleasant encounters with hostile strangers. “Get in your scanners and find where they’re coming from,” Malcolm ordered. “It must be a new entrance.”

While the pilots switched their ships at the starbase’s maintenance array, Malcolm absently hit the directional scanner again and his blood froze. He hit it again to confirm, and then again. A dreadnought was present in the system.

“Do you see that?” Shana’s voice came over the fleet comms with a worried tone.
“Yes…” Malcom said with a slight hesitation. “It’s probably someone closing their entrance into our system. The other ships are just guards.”

Just as Malcolm’s pod had finished moving into his Cheetah, the starbase alarms sounded in his brain. He focused on the source and saw the massive Revelation come out of warp almost right on top of the starbase. As he watched in mute horror, the stern of the ship began to move and change position, as if it were assembling itself. It was a siege module. The bow of the dreadnought glowed for a few seconds until it was almost too bright to look at. The light then dissipated as it was released from the ship’s turrets and blasted one of the starbase’s smaller defensive guns, causing massive damage.

Malcolm ordered his crew to board their combat ships and engage the enemy. He continued shouting orders as he took control of the base’s guns and returned fire on the Revelation. A multitude of smaller ships appeared and defended the dreadnought, resulting in a dogfight outside of the base’s defensive bubble.

The strontium bay is full, Malcolm thought. Just need to keep them occupied until they get bored. Malcolm had managed to keep firing for an hour or so, his crew more or less evenly matched with the enemy fighters. Just as it appeared that he would be able to break down the Revelation’s armor, a second dreadnought appeared next to it. Malcolm’s heart sank. He would not be able to fight off both.

In the dim light of his quarters, Malcolm was silent as he watched his remaining ships and belongings get torn to shreds or stolen by the attacking forces. Only Shana was left; the rest of his crew must have either escaped or been podded as well. “I’m leaving the system now, Malcolm,” Shana said softly, her voice barely registering to him. “There’s nothing else we can do. I’ll get in touch with you when I find my way back to empire space.” Malcolm didn’t respond. He clicked off the monitor and stood up absently. He opened a drawer in the desk and took out a small package before walking to an adjacent room in the suite and sitting down on his bed. He stared off into space, sighing occasionally, while he slowly opened the package in his hands. It was full of a spare set of implants, which he always kept around in the rare event that he was podded. He methodically plugged each one into his cybernetic jacks before laying down and staring listlessly at the ceiling for the better part of the night.

* * *

Malcolm piloted the small Rifter-class frigate through the dying wormhole and aligned to the next one in the pipe. After wallowing in anger and self-pity for most of the night, Shana had messaged him. She had managed to find an exit to known space, and contracted the bookmarks to him at a nearby station.

Malcolm didn’t know exactly what he was doing. The starbase was gone; its remains certainly looted by now. The attackers may even still be there, either mopping up or setting up shop themselves. But he felt some need to go back. He had lived in that system for a long time. He hadn’t even taken the time to put a proper scanner together – he’d found the Rifter sitting in his hangar at the Vylade station where his clone was, probably an antique from his old days doing odd jobs for the Federation Navy.

Malcolm entered his home system through the last bookmark in the entrance pipe. Thank you, Shana…made it here somehow, he thought. He activated the Rifter’s warp drive to take him to the location of the sacked starbase. The warp only took a few seconds but felt like an eternity. When he arrived, fully expecting to be greeted by a new starbase set up by the attackers, he saw nothing. No ships, no structures. Nothing except for a small asteroid a few dozen kilometers from his ship.

Malcolm started approaching the asteroid to get a better look. Almost immediately, his ship lurched and he could hear a grinding, clanking noise somewhere in its bowels. The engines stopped, he thought. The ship lurched again and slowly began drifting towards the asteroid. I’ve never seen a tractor beam this powerful, Malcolm thought. He realized he was much more calm than he should have been in a situation like this.

As his ship neared the asteroid, Malcolm could get a closer look at its surface. He saw only an endless expanse of docking platforms. Hundreds of ships, Malcolm thought. Thousands even. They look like Sleeper drones. But they would never be this far away from their stations. As he got closer, several of the ships approached his vessel. Here we go, Malcolm thought, expecting the worst. But she Sleepers did not attack. They simply approached and flew alongside his ship, as though they were escorting him. Where are we going?

Home, came the response, in a quiet, calm voice in the back of his mind. Malcolm would have gasped if his mind had been in control of his body and not the ship, and his mouth hadn’t been filled with the amniotic fluid of his pod. We’re going home.

How can you speak to me? Malcolm thought. Where are the pilots who evicted me? He heard no response. His ship was closer now to the structures on the asteroid’s surface. He was nearing not one of the platforms, but a huge opening on the surface, like a cave. It was so dark it looked like a giant, gaping mouth that fully intended on swallowing his shop whole.

As his ship entered the cave, his camera drones flickered out, one by one. Malcolm was disconnected from his ship and opened his eyes in his pod, seeing just the pink emergency lights and the many cables of his neural uplink. We are home, the voice said as the ship came to a halt.

The pod went dark.