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Syndicate.”
     
    “What does this have to do with us? So we’re fighting the Syndicate?” Eddie huffed as he tapped his boot against the floor.
     
    “Will you wait and listen, or interrupt me?”
     
    Eddie let out an annoyed squeak as he remained silent otherwise. The voice continuing.
     
    “The Syndicate with their stolen craft, weaponry and planets converted to slave labor was a terrible force. They didn’t abide by the rules and slaughtered whoever opposed them, down to the children. They knew Union space better than the Planetary Defense force did, they could cut off supplies and use them for their own forces as the war waged on. As the dust settled the Syndicate was on top. They took the home system of Quarst from the first race the Dovark. The Planetary Defense force and the Union had one move that they had prepared in case the Kalu won, a final solution. The destruction of every military and the majority of civilian controlled factories, armories, bases, ships and shipyards under their control.”
     
    “With the Union under their thumb and the PDF gone the Syndicate still wanted more. They turned planets and systems into their private kingdoms, exacting a toll for them to not cite retribution. They rebuilt what they could and took the name of the Planetary Defense force. They abducted people, even people that hadn’t found, inter-system space travel such as you Kuruvians, and the Sarenmenti.” The voice paused.
     
    “So now do you want to throw your life away, just another death that continues the Syndicates greed, or will you learn all there is to know about engineering and bring these bastards to justice and free your planet from them?”
     
    Eddie remembered the young anger that filled him them, an anger that throbbed deeply within him still.
     
    “I’m with yah, let’s see how these bastards like it.” Eddie said the last words under his breath as hope overtook that anger. Resilient had saved his life that day and given him a purpose. Eddie’s people were largely blinded to the truth of the PDF and they didn’t really care, they were curious and as long as they satisfied that curiosity they didn’t care who was in charge.
     
    Now after forty painful years he truly was an engineer, he lived and breathed star ships, and he now had a group that hadn’t been blinded by the Syndicate yet. If they held onto that ray of hope they might be of some use to Eddie and Resilient.
     
    He went through the different feeds showing all of the squad pods, now all of them having to be put into the implantation chair by force. Nasty business that was he thought to himself rubbing his ring finger that had been changed into a universal jack for him to use the engineering systems better.
     
    In his scanning he stopped as one pod filled with the normal squad of twenty weren’t screaming at all or nursing their implants. Instead they were filing out of the room telling the others it was fine. Not one person had been forced into the chair so far.
     
    Eddie backed up the feed as the first one to come out sat against the wall leaning on his ports as if they weren’t there. Eddie wriggled in pain at the thought. “Might not be as smart as I thought.”
     
    The second came out, heading straight to him. They talked to the others before retreating to the wall. Eddi focused his pickups on them.
     
    “…Set back my planning for breaking out.”
     
    “I think we have a winner!” Eddie whispered to himself as if speaking any louder might mean his imagining what he heard as he played it again. A maniacal grin spread across his face as he did a small jig something that none of his engineers would have imagined.
     
    “There’s hope for these humans yet Res.” He said with a grin as he tapped the panel, his face split in a Kuruvian grin.
     
    “If all goes well we’ll be roaming for ourselves instead of to their tune.” He said to the panel in front of him tapping the metal housing to a tune. He continued