The Pratrock Takeover

Overview

A corporate acquisition and an armed boarding action, executed as one operation, in the hours the crew were off-planet raiding 07-Delta Station. They came home to a fait accompli.

This is the event the whole chapter has been building toward without naming: the moment the quiet arrangement at MacMillian Station IV stopped needing to be quiet.

What Happened

• The station manager was already dead. Julija Borja led the crew through service passages to arrest Wilton Agramunt; her badge failed at his door and Six breached it with the vibro-axe. Agramunt was behind his desk with a blaster wound to the head and the weapon on the table beside him. Kate Broadbeck lay unconscious on the floor.
• Solveig Kaufer announced the acquisition over station-wide comms while the crew stood in that room: MacMillian acquired by Pratrock Dynamics, all personnel to return to their quarters.
• Through the residence window the crew watched drop ships detach from newly arrived transports and attach to the station hull. The station registered the tremors as they locked on.
• Borja took Agramunt’s data pad and comm link and ran for her office. Six killed two armoured Kinetic Logistics guards outside the security and Marshal’s offices with faceplate shots in a single round.
• Borja packed a duffel with memory sticks, reports and a laptop. Six cut Holger Graeme and his team out of the locked security office; Graeme confirmed total lockdown, the gate controlled, all ships grounded. Marlo Petrak was released from the holding cell.
• At Docking Bay 36 the crew cut in, fuelled and powered the ship under fire from ten armoured soldiers and backpack-deployed combat robots.
• Julija Borja was killed — helmet off at a terminal, knifed in the neck by Daniela Akkermans, who came through a door behind her.
• The umbilical was severed and the magnetic seal broken; the decompression tore three combat robots into vacuum. Ronin Sanchez flew out through weapon locks, and Shackleton Magellan used the alien cube to tear a vortex open beside the station and take the ship out of the system entirely.

Participants

See frontmatter.

Outcome

The crew are fugitives from a station that changed hands while they were away, carrying a dead Marshal’s evidence, a bound prisoner, and demonstrated FTL that does not use the Republic’s lane network. Left behind: Holger Graeme and his security team, Kate Broadbeck, and every other person aboard.