Taking SPACE

JAIL?

"Well, I was planning to drive the mobile station to some random police precinct and hand the whole mess over to them like I did with the survivors of the battleship," Michael said.

Catherine began to pick at her fingers. "I guess that works, but it sounds...sloppy."

"I know," Michael answered. "But like you said, I don't want to kill them if I don't have to, and we have no other way to deal with them."

A beep drew Stevens's attention to one of the small hologram screens he had brought up; he looked it over and took a deep breath. "If possible we need to think of one."

"Why?" Daniel asked.

"How come it's always you that asks why?" Steven quarried, as he passed the image he was looking at over to Michael.

"Because I'm curious and I'd like to know!" Daniel said.

Michael sent the picture to one of the view screens. "What exactly are we looking at Steven?"

"One of the bots from the spear-like weapon you injected into the chemistry lab is currently mapping the station's layout, this is not just a chemistry lab." He zoomed in on part of the ship's layout to some type of small mechanical factory. "I wouldn't know what this is producing except for the fact that the pirate ship we had had one of its end products."

No one knew what he meant until he flicked a picture of a black case that the small bot had taken, up beside the factory image.

"Assassination drones." Michael breathed.

"Yes they are building the entire things there including the miniature Dynovamators. This is no small time drug lab this is a full-blown black-market piece of work. You can't just drop something like this off at a police station. It would have serious consequences for them."

Daniel tapped his chin. "So, then we destroy it."

Steven shook his head. "There's at least one hundred souls living on that thing I doubt more than half of them have committed crimes worthy of incarceration much less execution. Besides I can easily convert that factory into a normal drone factory and it has the supplies to make at least forty of them. This is something we're going to need if we plan on doing exactly the type of stuff we are doing now."

"Whoa stop right there. It did feel good to take care of Cox, but I am not sure we should continue, much less seize control of a factory," Stephanie answered. "And while we might be able to drop the poor slaves off somewhere, I want nothing to do with dealing with hardened criminals that are obviously willing to enslave others. One wrong move and we could all end up dead."

"Well, I for one think we should continue," Catherine told her. "I don't know if you guys know, but three shootings happened last night. If I had to guess, I'd say Daniel is right about a crime war. I believe it's kind of our responsibility to try and stop it. But I also don't think it's right for us to be the judge and executor of these people, nor can we just drop them off at some random precinct. We need a definite way of punishment."

Stephanie let her hand drop and absentmindedly began to play with one of the command seats controls. The room filled with electric grinding noises as the seat rose a few inches in the air only to drop back down and rose again. After a few times of this Stephanie said, "Surprisingly I agree with you about trying to stop it, Catherine. But I haven't a clue what to do."

Steven sucked air and his eyes flashed wide open.

Everyone's attention swung to him and Michael worriedly asked, "What's wrong?"