Starcalled · Gabriel Alvarez

Book 1, Chapter 2: A History of Bad Behavior

June 24, 2018·40 min·3 clips

On a restricted deck, Elona and Captain Landris discover a second human, a woman, kept hidden in cryogenic stasis.

The transfer begins under guard. A dozen featureless Colonial helmets keep Osborn in sight as pulse rifles stay trained on him, and the soldier leads him toward a holding area where Adi sits chained and muzzled. Nobody is settling in. Osborn checks the damaged ship, asks whether it can be repaired, and presses Adi about the flight computer Vedran gave him, because both men know the wrong hardware could lead the enemy straight back to Varisanan. Adi rejects the concern. He says he does not need the computer, insists escape will be simple, and meets the Colonial officers' gaze without giving them much to work with. The guards are not impressed. A shuttle escort follows, with the pilot shoved forward, a rifle barrel at his back, Corbin's optic sensors tracking him as he moves, and the sense that every corridor is part of a larger containment chain. On the Colonial side, orders move through the deck in clipped bursts: medical assessment, tissue sampling, organic material collection, beam scanner retrieval, and a sweep of the ship before anyone decides what the human actually is. Kron and Elona clash hard. She wants the wounded handled, the captain notified, and the medical bay ready for surgery, while he argues from the front line, describing assassins, casualties, and the human pilot who shot down gunships and killed soldiers during the fighting planetside. The argument turns personal. Kron frames the pilot as dangerous frontier scum and an enemy because he is not Colonial, and Elona pushes back by reminding him that humans are protected species and that the crisis is bigger than his anger. Then the ship opens again. Behind a panel and into a chamber that exhales icy fog, they find a row of cryostasis tubes, all empty except one, where a human woman in a Terran Navy Scientist uniform sleeps in suspension under the name Foster. That changes the room. The reveal turns the prisoner problem into a larger asset, and the final instruction is blunt: reactivate her.

As heard by us

A brisk space-opera chapter that moves from a prisoner transfer to a cryostasis reveal.

Starcalled opens under hard pressure, with Osborn marched past Colonial helmets and pulse rifles while Adi Kanadarian waits chained nearby. The episode keeps its footing by shifting from field tension to medical orders and corridor briefings, so the stakes stay immediate even as…

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Why you'd press play

A prisoner transfer, a chained ally, and a cryostasis surprise.

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