Cira
Terra-Sol date 3814.237
A red notification flashed in the corner of Cira's display, pulling her attention away from the open control panel on the wrist of her cybernetic arm. Finally, she thought as she snapped the panel on her left wrist shut and spun her chair around to face the screen head-on.
Alert: unscheduled keypad access. Exterior air lock 2FP-A1 opened.
She slipped her holo-control cuff back into place over her wrist. When she touched the two cuffs together, they activated. A multicolored semicircle of buttons and controls spread out from the miniscule projector built in to each, and it only took a few practiced gestures for her to clear the warning. Another instantly took its place.
Motion detected inside air lock 2FP-A1. Security cameras active and recording.
Holding her breath, she watched the forward air lock at the lowest level in the port extension of the ship—one the crew only ever used for maintenance. Only when ze'd removed zir helmet did she exhale, relief loosening a multitude of knots across her shoulders. "You're late."
In the air lock, Riston looked up, directly at the camera, almost like ze'd heard her. The automated security system zoomed in on zir round face. For several seconds zir large dark-brown eyes seemed to bore into hers, serious and unblinking, and then ze lowered zir head and began removing the rest of zir suit, revealing the fitted—and illegally borrowed—white and pale-gray uniform of a PCCS ensign. It was a well-designed outfit, far more aesthetically pleasing than anyone had bothered to make the uniforms of any planetary military, and the colors always highlighted the deep brown of zir skin. Ze wore the uniform well.
Not for the first time, Cira wondered if it was more the uniform or the way Riston in particular wore the uniform that she admired. She wished she'd had any luck finding a way to legally get zem admitted to the crew so she could give zem a uniform of zir own, but two Terra-Sol cycles of searching hadn't turned up a single useful possibility. That left them both here again, sneaking Riston onto the ship and praying to whatever higher power might be out there that they didn't get caught this time, either.
After Riston shed the vac suit and meticulously replaced it in the storage locker, ze stepped up to the inner air lock door and tapped a command sequence on the keypad.
Personnel requesting entrance at air lock 2FP-A1.
Allow, alert security, or vent?
Cira should have been used to seeing that question by now—she'd lost count of the number of times she'd run through this protocol—but she shuddered every time the option to vent an air lock came up on her terminal. Getting vented into space without a suit must be like drowning in ice. Despite living on this ship her whole life, the concept terrified her. Or maybe it was because she'd spent her whole life in space that she felt this particular fear so keenly.
She hit allow and the door to the air lock opened, sliding into the wall.
Riston brought two fingers up to zir temple and saluted the camera. The smile ze usually gave her with the gesture was missing.
What happened, Ris? There was no way for her to ask or for zem to answer, especially now. In a few minutes, the rest of the bridge crew would return from Mitu, and Cira's stint as of Pax Novis's de facto chief of security would be over. All five of her strays were back on board, so there was only one last thing to do before she was relieved and sent back to her regular position.
Quickly, but with the efficiency born of repetition, her fingers skipped from one holo-control to another as she ran the system through the process of scouring the security logs and removing every alert, notification, and video log from the last six hours not part of the ship's standard operating procedure.
Twenty-three items selected.
Another flick of her fingers on the holographic panel.
Purge? This action cannot be undone.
Cira hit yes.
Twenty-three items purged.
Just like that, Cira Antares erased Riston and the others from existence. Again.
And none too soon. Her heartbeat stuttered when the door opposite her terminal beeped a warning and slid open. Her pulse didn't calm at the sight of her mother in full-on Captain Antares mode, either. The sharp-eyed woman missed little. Cira was almost certain there hadn't been anything on any of the terminal's displays to make the captain suspicious, but almost certain wasn't enough. Luckily—Cira supposed—she'd had an appalling amount of practice lying to her mother in the last four cycles.
Cira smiled and leaned back in the chair. "Afternoon, Captain."
"Ensign." Erryla's seriousness broke for a second, her brown eyes dancing and the corner of her full lips quirking into a lopsided smirk as she lifted a golden-brown box. "Catch."
Cira did, and nearly squealed when she saw the label. Vohtian priko seeds, the most glorious sour-sweet things she'd ever had, were so hard to come by. Between the drought, the blockade, the rationing, and the newly declared halt to intersystem perishable exports? There were places that now took Vohtian exports over intersystem credits. Exports were worth more.
Clutching the box to her chest, she sighed happily. "I take back every bad thing I have ever said about you."
"You'd better, or I'll take back the present." Erryla leaned over the console and peered at the updates scrolling in from throughout the ship. Even as she tapped the sensor on her wrist cuff to the panel on the console to take control of one of the screens and check for herself, she asked, "Any updates?"
"It was exactly as boring as it has been every other time I've sat here while you all go off and enjoy the oddity of planetary gravity." It wasn't even a lie. If anything interesting happened today, it'd happen later. And only if Adrienn had found anyone new while ze was station-side. She hadn't seen any unexpected crates or containers loaded into Novis's crew-use hold, but Adrienn could be sneakier than an S-Class gunship. It was part of the reason their refugee operation had succeeded for so long.
They used to rotate who went off ship, but ever since Cira had been assigned solo shifts at the security desk, she remained on Novis and Adrienn went down to whatever station or planet they'd docked at. Now, pretty much every time Cira was controlling access to the ship while the other officers were taking care of bigger responsibilities on a station or planet, one or more of her stowaways took the opportunity to escape for a while, too, something they'd rarely been able to do a cycle earlier. Sometimes only for a short break like Riston and the others had today, sometimes to leave the ship behind for good like two of them had on their last stop.
"The corporate goons have left the viewing area, and their shuttle should be docking at Mitu by now. The only other thing we're waiting on is the dockmaster's approval of the final security check, and then we'll be off." Erryla stood and ran her hand over her close-shorn, black hair. "Sooner the better. I don't like the vibe in this sector."
Cira thought of the grim look on Riston's face. Maybe ze hadn't liked the vibe much, either. "What's worrying you?"
"A lot. There's doubled security, the loading crew was watching for every single reg—even ones they usually ignore—and most of them were on edge. Others..." Erryla ran the tip of her middle finger along the bridge of her broad nose. "It felt like some of them were expecting the station to crack open at any moment, but there wasn't anything they could do about it. They seemed almost...resigned."
And Riston was incredibly good at reading people. If Erryla had noticed that, there was a good chance ze had, too. But what could've caused such a drastic shift in mood in this system? "Do you think this has something to do with the peace summit breaking up early?"
It had happened earlier that cycle, after an Araean battle cruiser was shot down, crushing a Pavonis outpost and killing almost 700 people. Arae had refused to acknowledge the incident.
"Maybe, but the last fifty quinquennial conferences didn't do anything. They've even broken up early before and nothing changed. For good or bad." Erryla scrolled through the alerts she'd missed while she was off ship. "I feel like people here are expecting a massive escalation."
"Maybe they'd been hoping the council would figure out how to end the war. Although we'd be out of a job if they did." Cira swallowed a sigh of relief when Erryla straightened as though everything she'd seen in the system looked utterly normal.
"Wrong." Erryla shook her head. "The war disappearing doesn't make the quadrant any smaller. Or safer. They'll always need us to deliver—"
The door slid open, and Commander Halver Liddens strolled in, broad smile on his face. Erryla nodded when he winked and swiped his ID chip past the security panel at the door on the opposite wall. With a smug grin, he asked, "Ready, Captain?"
"Depends." Erryla crossed her arms, but Cira saw the smirk her mother couldn't quite hide. "How many fines am I going to have to pay off because of your squad's antics?"
The door opened again, now revealing alpha shift's pilot, navigator, and security chief.
"Never mind. Don't tell me." Erryla waved her hands, shooing everyone onto the bridge. "Maybe if we get out of here before the angry mob tracks you down, I'll get to keep my credits."
Halver walked backward, pointing sharply. "Don't act as if I don't pay you back, Cap."
The others laughed as they filed onto the bridge after their commander. Erryla tilted her head, acknowledging Halver's point. "Most of the time you do, I'll give you that."
"And the other times, you pay because you know it's not my fault." With a salute and a smart spin, Halver disappeared behind the bridge's thick door.
Erryla didn't let her real smile show until he was gone. Whatever she found so amusing stayed in her head. All she said to Cira was, "I'll see you for dinner tonight, Ensign."
"Any requests?" Cira checked the screens for more alerts and hoped her luck would hold long enough to get out of the security office. "I can set dinner up before you and Mama get off shift if you have something in mind."
"You know how it is on station days. I might get off at the beginning of beta shift or it could be halfway to gamma before I get out of this box." She leaned in and brushed the tip of Cira's nose with the joint of her index finger. "I appreciate the effort, but go. You're off duty, Ensign."
"Aye, aye, Captain." Relieved, Cira left before Erryla thought of some other assignment to give her and headed straight for the medical bay.
It was a short walk; the team that designed the PCCSs must have thought the bridge crews would sustain an inordinate number of life-threatening injuries, because the med bay was only a corridor away. As much as Cira appreciated not having to go far to reach Adrienn's office, it didn't make sense to have medical a whole deck away from engineering, the second-most accident-prone area on the ship. The arrangement did, however, make Cira's stowaway conspiracy a whole lot easier to manage.
The on-duty nurse looked up as Cira walked into the over-bright, too-white room, but only said, "Ze's in zir office," before immediately returning her attention to her patient.
Nodding thanks the nurse couldn't see, Cira strode toward the first door on the far wall and waved the ID chip in her flesh-and-blood wrist in front of the door's sensor. A second later, the door split and slid open with a familiar shhhush.
"Have you seen your mother since breakfast?" Adrienn asked before she could speak.
"Only one of them. Which one are you looking for?"
"Meida, not the captain."
"Then I can't help you. Cap's the only one I've seen." Cira sat in the worn chair in front of Adrienn's desk. "Something wrong?"
"No, just a small glitch in the power running to a modpod of med supplies I've been tasked to keep an eye on." Adrienn shrugged and ran zir hand through zir brown hair. Ze'd recently started cutting it almost to the skin on either side of zir head, letting the middle section grow a few inches. It had taken Cira weeks to get used to the switch from zir shoulder-length locks, the last in a series of physical changes as Adrienn had slowly transitioned, but now it was hard to imagine zem with any other style. "Just wanted her to look at it before we left port in case we needed to grab a part before we cleared Mitu."
"Speaking of clearing Mitu..." Cira cocked her head and waited.
Ze shook zir head, no words needed. There weren't any new passengers for Cira and Adrienn to worry about. But Adrienn was still tapping at the arm of zir chair and avoiding her eyes. It was another few seconds before ze asked, "Do you ever wonder if it's worth it?"
"No. It's worth it." They'd given five orphans her age or younger a place to call home. Twelve others had been given a ride, a new name, and a chance at a real life. Maybe it wasn't much on a galactic scale, but it was something good for Cira to hold on to. There were days she desperately needed to feel like she was doing something to help others survive that chaos, when it got too hard to handle her guilt over having something as rare as safety and her anger at how little the quadrant was doing to help the children who hadn't asked to be born into this mess.
In some moments, she felt simultaneously crushed by privilege and strangled by the restrictions of her position. She'd been born into safety while the rest of the quadrant was consumed by chaos. It wasn't fair, and yet she could do so little about it. One day she wanted to go further, to push for institutional changes that would allow everyone in the PSSC the freedom to help when aid, succor, or even just a free ride could be offered. She knew, though, that she couldn't do any of this alone.
"You don't think so?" she asked, a little hesitant to hear the answer.
"It's—" Ze exhaled sharply, biting at the ring pierced through zir lip. "I'm a doctor. I love being able to help people, and I swore an oath that I would always do what I could, but the longer this goes on, the greater the probability becomes that someone will catch on or something will go wrong. The two of us are risking everyone on this ship—almost two hundred people. At what point does it stop being worth so many lives to help one more?"
Cira looked down at her hands, watching her mechanical fingers intertwining with her flesh ones. Jaelena had started this whole enterprise. Four cycles ago, Cira was a brand-new ensign and Adrienn a restless junior doctor. They'd intervened when a drunkard had been abusing a little girl, saving seven-year-old Jaelena. Adrienn and Cira had tried to get station security involved at first, but it had quickly become clear that leaving Jaelena there would mean more of the same for the underfed, badly bruised child, and that had been more than Cira could take. She had watched so many refugees—many of them children—disappear from stations where they had previously been fixtures, and she knew few of them had "moved on to a different home" like her mothers had tried to insist. Cira didn't know all the atrocities of the war, but she wasn't naive enough to believe that. Although she accepted that there were certain realities she couldn't change, Cira hadn't been able to look into Jaelena's gray eyes and refuse to help. Neither had Adrienn.
With a lot of subterfuge and more credits than Cira wanted to think about, they'd come up with a plan. It almost hadn't worked. Only Adrienn's quick thinking had kept the dockmaster from checking their last-minute addition to the cargo manifest. Ze'd been committed to this endeavor from the beginning and in it to the end.
"What happened?" Cira met and held zir hazel eyes. "Something must have happened. You wouldn't just change your mind and start questioning everything. Not after all this time."
"Jaelena died." Ze swiped up on zir screen and the text flashed to the wall display.
"No, she— What?" Cira stared, trying to make sense of it. Adrienn had highlighted Jaelena's name in bright yellow, but ze hadn't needed to. Her name was one of the first. Jaelena Aarin. Heart stuttering, Cira started reading the report, quickly skimming it for details.
Investigations are ongoing, but leaked video feeds from security stations and planetary defense networks have confirmed the truth. In apparent violation of the terms of warfare established in the peace summit of 3785, Pavonis S-class warships have destroyed most of the capital city on Oweba, the fourth planet in the Arae System. Hundreds died in the initial attack, and thousands have died since as medical personnel are limited and most of their supplies have been destroyed. From the timing of this attack, it can be hypothesized that the Pavonis Coalition ordered this as retaliation for the destruction of their research facility on Surka, a moon on the outer edges of their home system.
Names of those confirmed deceased have been listed below.
It sounds like Ladadhi. She shouldn't have looked up those vids after meeting Riston three cycles ago, but curiosity had eaten at her. There had only been around six weeks between learning about Riston's home city and Cira looking it up. Once she started digging for details, she hadn't stopped. She hated to think of herself as an expert on the incident, but she practically was. So much about the description of what happened on Oweba sounded like the reports immediately following the attack on Ladadhi, the attack that had left Riston an orphan. Now, another attack, too much the same, had killed Jaelena.
When Adrienn spoke again, zir voice was rough and thick. "She wouldn't have been on Oweba if we hadn't left her there. Now, she's dead. What good are we doing exactly?"
"You keep track of where we leave them." Cira said it slowly, eyes still on the scrolling list of confirmed dead. "Do you watch where they came from, too?"
"What? I— No. Not in detail." Adrienn tapped out a rhythm on the desk. "What'd I miss?"
Cira tapped her wrist to the panel on the desk, claiming control of the wall screen. The holo-controls expanded from her cuffs, and she quickly accessed her personal files to bring up a report she'd flagged and saved a cycle ago. She'd set up alerts in the system for a few dozen names and places, watching for moments exactly like this one.
"Jaelena's father was arrested and executed for murder. He remarried, but he never stopped drinking. One night, he came home after too many drinks and a bad night at the gologao tables, and he killed his wife and her sister who'd been staying with them. The wife was pregnant at the time."
Adrienn sat as still as a defendant waiting for a verdict. Ze barely breathed.
"If Jaelena had been there, she would've died. And it would've happened a cycle ago in a place she hated, where she was doing work she loathed, while her father stole all her credits and drank them." Cira tapped her wrist to the desk again. Relinquishing control of the screen automatically closed her files and deactivated her holo-controls. "So, do I wonder if it's worth the risk? Sometimes, sure. Mostly on the rare days we almost get caught. What I never question is if we're doing the kids we help any good. That is not a fact I have ever doubted."
"All right. Fair. You've made your point." Adrienn exhaled heavily and rubbed zir hand over the shaved side of zir head. "Then I guess I should ask if all's well with our ducklings."
"They're all safely tucked away, but Riston..." Cira shook her head. "There was a look on zir face I didn't like when ze came back on board. And ze was a lot later than the others—almost too late. I was starting to worry that either something had happened or that ze'd decided not to come back. I won't get to talk to zem in person until tomorrow, though. At the earliest."
"Station days," ze said. Like it was an answer in and of itself.
Which it was. "Station days. I'm off bridge duty, but I have training soon, reports to catch up on, and a shift in the kitchen during third watch."
"And who knows how the next few days will go."
"With how nervous Cap was about the state of Nea-gi?" She absently rubbed at her right shoulder, just above the connection point between flesh and machine. "I'm trying real hard not to expect the worst. Right now, though, it seems more prudent than paranoid to keep the sensors fine-tuned and the security team on alert."
"Great." Then ze lifted zir chin toward her arm. "Problems?"
"No more than usual." The latest technology may have given her better-than-human motor control in her hand and several useful but unnecessary hidden features, but nothing had yet been able to fix the fact that metal and muscle simply weren't designed to work together like this. Some of the smaller organizations for prostheses users were beginning to push for more radical integration of machinery to solve this problem, but despite how comfortable she was with her enhanced arm, Cira had no desire to have a collarbone, shoulder blade, and rib cage made of the same metal composite as the bones in her cybernetic limb.
Unlike most of those who used cybernetics, Cira hadn't been damaged by an explosion or accident; she'd been born with extreme damage to the limb. Erryla had gotten sick while carrying Cira, and they simply hadn't caught the infection in time. Her arm had taken all the damage, and Cira had been in prostheses of varying sizes and qualities since she was old enough to walk. At this point, especially with how well it responded to her neural commands, it was as much a part of her as her flesh arm. She barely thought about it at all until her shoulder started aching or some of the inner workings needed maintenance.
She looked down at her arm now, though, considering Adrienn's question for a moment before finally shaking her head. "I probably need to adjust what I'm doing in the gym is all."
"Maybe." Zir eyes were all doctor, carefully scanning her posture and the way her cybernetic fingers twitched against her thigh. "Let me know if it becomes constant."
"Promise, Doc."
"Good. Now go away. I've got a Chief Engineer to track down, an entire supply run to inventory, and a patient schedule to fix."
Cira said goodbye and left, waving to the nurses as she headed for the elevator.
Although Cira had lived in main-deck quarters attached to the captain's as a child, she'd voluntarily given up the prime spot when she'd passed the PCCS officers' exam. Halver now had the room directly across from medical that had once been Cira's, and she had a single suite in the starboard saucer section six decks above. It was still a better situation than most ensigns could claim, because when she'd tried to insist she was fine with a bunk-share like the other unmarried junior officers, the crew had refused to listen. She was the daughter of Captain Erryla Antares and Lieutenant Commander Meida Dalil-Antares, Chief Engineer. She was also both a child most of the crew had helped raise and the second-youngest ensign in PSSC history. According to the Novis crew, Cira had both earned and deserved the gift of privacy. They'd basically told her to shut up and say thank you.
She'd been guilt-ridden then. Now, the guilt she felt as she tapped her ID chip to the sensor by her door was less about taking up space that could've gone to a senior officer and more about what she was using that space for—her room had become the command post and storage center for her and Adrienn's refugee operation. Hoarded rations, extra clothes, and fixable but worn-out tech all eventually made it into Cira's hands, and through her, to Riston and the other stowaways.
Today, safely hidden in her room, she sat at her desk and tapped her cuffs together, bringing up their holo-controls and automatically activating the screen in the wall. With a few swipes of her fingers through the air, she had several news feeds up on the wall, priority given to the official PCGC feed and the most reliable local one from Nea-gi. More details from Oweba arrived every minute. Each update only made the situation bleaker. And bloodier. The cities on Oweba had once been a beacon of the Arae System, and Pavonis ships had utterly leveled several. Residents barely had two hours of warning. Evacuations had begun—every available ship had been commandeered and filled beyond capacity—but only one-third of the 6.5 million inhabitants seemed to have escaped alive. According to some sources, even that survival statistic might be an overestimation.
What worried her more was the tone of the reports. The PCGC feeds tended to be bare-bones, as stripped of bias as it was possible for something composed by a human being to be. Everything coming off Nea-gi, though, was laced with either panic or vitriol. Gory visuals of corpses half burned to ash vied with heartbreaking holo-captures of children crying for their parents. Descriptions of the attack were florid and vicious, filled with claims it had been both unprovoked and unprecedented. Neither was true. A space battle between Arae and Casseta warships had ended up destroying a Pavonis research station recently, and nearly every military leader Cira had ever heard speak would agree that was a crime deserving of punishment. As for precedent, well...all anyone had to do was search for pictures of Ladadhi, a crime that could be laid at Arae's feet.
All of it taken together proved Erryla was right. Tensions were high on Nea-gi and probably throughout the Primis system, and this latest loss in Arae—which was currently a Primis ally—would only inflame passions further. A month ago, the voices in Primis calling for peace had been almost loud enough to drown out the warmongers. That likely wouldn't be the case anymore.
She was about to switch to a new feed when a white box rose from the bottom of the screen—a fleet-wide message. It was flagged as a priority, but not an emergency. Intrigued, Cira brought up the notice.
Pax Feris has missed her latest check-in with the Pax Class Governing Council. If any PCCS has had recent communication with Captain Adriano or any officer on board Pax Feris, report it to Control immediately.
Cira shook her head, torn between amusement and disgust. Had her mothers seen this yet? Regulations said alerts like this would only go out three days after the missed check. No computer was perfect, after all, and comm systems could fail, but there were other ways to get a message out if the circumstances called for it. Clearly, Captain Botran Adriano hadn't used any of those methods. After another six days, he, along with every senior officer on his ship, would be held in dereliction of duty, not a lightly held crime in this fleet.
No one would tell her what happened to spark the intense dislike Erryla and Meida had for Botran, but the enmity had lasted more than a decade. News that Feris's captain had apparently failed at check-ins, the most basic task the job required of him, would only validate everything they'd been telling Cira for cycles. Her favorite was a story about when Botran had gotten to the final interview stage of recruiting an agricultural expert before realizing someone planetside had, as a joke, filled out an application for a cow. Smirking, and wanting to see what new tales the bulletin would bring to light, Cira sent the news to her mothers with the subject line, I guess you were right all along.
They were good judges of character, her mothers, something Cira liked to believe she'd inherited from them.
Reminder: Junior officer combat training begins in five minutes.
Cira blinked and glanced at the chronometer in the bottom corner of her display. Somehow, she'd eaten up almost an hour scanning the news feeds for details on Oweba. Not even the first thrums of the thrusters easing the bulk of the ship away from the limited gravity of the station had pulled her attention away from the constantly refreshing information on her screen, but she felt the motion now. She always did. Some people claimed they never noticed the faint vibrations once they'd been on board more than a few days, but Cira always knew, and she'd been born on this ship.
Now, she wished she'd kept that sensitivity today. If she had, she wouldn't be tripping over her own feet as she stripped out of her duty uniform and changed into the less restrictive training clothes. Today was a sparring day, of course, not a weapons day. She'd be drenched in sweat and trying to duck under the instructor's perfectly aimed blows within the next hour. Weapons training, when she'd spend most of the assigned shift sitting at a control panel and running through dozens of battle simulations, wasn't scheduled for another two days. With the rising tensions in the quadrant, though, Cira wouldn't be surprised if the captain ordered extra training sessions for everyone.
As she raced toward the elevator that would take her down to level ten, she hoped they wouldn't need to use any of the skills the combat instructors drilled into them. She hoped, but given the look Erryla had come back wearing, doubt had begun to seep in.
PSSC Internal Alert
Terra-Sol date 3814.130
Officials from the Arae, Draconis, Casseta, and Tau Ceti systems have officially withdrawn from the intersystem peace summit more than two weeks early. Although no official statements have been released by either the military or government leaders of these systems, it
is widely believed the destruction of a civilian
deep-space research station on the moon Surka
is behind their abrupt departure.
The last time any group abandoned the peace summit early resulted in an escalation of hostilities that resulted in the overthrow of the original government of the Alula system. PCGC officials have upgraded the watch alert for all stations, outposts, and vessels to a level one even
though there is no word yet as to how this may impact security surrounding the deep-space stations or which shipping routes may become inadvisably dangerous. Reports will be sent on priority channels as soon as additional details become available.
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Exactly one Terra-Sol cycle after the verdict and sentence was handed down, The Stowaways were executed on Paxis Station under the sentence of both illegal passage and acts of sabotage.
On Terra-Sol date 3812.318, three Pavonis citizens were caught illegally stowing away on board Pax Portis. In the months between their capture and the trial on 3813.130, investigators were able to determine the means by which The Stowaways snuck on board the ship. For security reasons, that information was never revealed. The reasons for their subterfuge, however, was.
A smuggling ring that stretched between four systems
had been attempting to gain a foothold on a Pax vessel, and the three had been put in place in order to install a security loophole in the ship's computers that could be exploited at each port. During the trial, all three confessed to the plot and also led PCGC investigators to several additional branches of the syndicate. Despite the defendants' cooperation and the interventions of the Intersystem Legal Council and Refuge Center (ILCRC), a guilty verdict and a death sentence was handed down for each.
The youngest of the three, whose name was never released or listed in any publicly accessible court documents, was seventeen at the time of their initial capture.