After a very violent and bloody night, Erma and the rest of the Ekosiaki Home Guard managed to partially restore in the planet. We see Erma receiving an invitation from Hitzok's aidee for breakfast, but she is still bitter about everything that happened last night, including the way how Erma acted against her fellow Ekosiaki comrades, causing her to butt heads with the top brass of the Ekosiaki military forces, especially when they wanted to have the rebels executed in site, something that Erma blatantly refused. Erma blames her behaviour due to her conservative traditions, and she will send an apology. The Hitzok's aidee ask Erma if she likes Ekosiak and the only thing Erma can say is she is more worried that the whole Ekosiak solar system is so prone to chaos compared with her native homeworld rather if she likes the place or not, and the only thing she and her men can do is fixing the aftermath of the events, rather than find a way to prevent them. Hitzok's aidee doesn't agree with her, but he understand her anyways and he told her at least her presence in Ekosiak managed to make the whole situation less damaging for all the sides involved. Erma ask what's the current situation and he answers her the things are still somewhat hot in some places.
One of those places is the Ek-Yo space station, when it was seized by the rebels and taking the civilian population as hostages, but there is someone who is still trying to fight against them and that person is Lt. Denka, a female security guard of the station. Unluckily for her, she is surrounded by the rebels in a distant corner of the station, with only a gun and her spacesuit, and they are waiting for her when her air supplies run out or when she is run out of ammo, but they don't want to forcely trying to face her straight out as they could damage the station if they do so. Meanwhile Denka managed to enter the station via an airlock and she found an uninstalled AI processor core, along with the remaining destroyed robots and the main computer as well.
After linking with the robot's AI core, Denka found out that it's still intact and the core, named CZL28, managed to get an audio link with her and it asked what happened with the station. Denka tells CZL28 that the station was seized by rebels and it also turns out CZL28 wasn't installed on the robots due to maintanance. CZL28 asks Denka for her identification code and, after confirming her indentity, CZL28 requests Denka to link it to the Net. The AI managed to analyze the current situation, and Denka asks it if CZL28 could do something, but the AI requests to be fully connected to the Net, not to mention asking permission for complete independent operation via her approval.
One of the first things CZL28 does is to get rid of the rebels who were stalking Denka by blowing out the airlock before they could put their helmets, blasting them to the space and deafining the remaning ones with a very loud noise, while jamming their communications. The rebels quickly tried to find out who was the responsable of all those events, but the noise is so loud that prevents them to hear each other, something very useful for Denka for taking them out quickly. Unfortunately for Denka, the rebels destroys the comm links of the ship, so CZL28 cannot help her anymore beyond other than warning her than one of them was approaching to her. The rebel soldier finally found Denka and she shoots her in the gut, but Denka still managed to blown his brains out. Despite receiving a gunshot, Denka survived the attack, but her arm was broken, while CZL28 tried to help her, will warning her than a friendly ship will come to the station soon. Meanwhile, she used the airtank from the dead rebel's body as a spare, while CZL28 tells her she should take a rest for a while. Later on, the crewmembers of the ship managed to take care of the remaining rebels, and they managed to find Denka, who was lost consciousness, but she was fine anyways.
While this happened, Col. Hitzok returned to the base, after recovering from his wounds and surprising all the members of the base, Hizok said that he already monitored the events and congratulated his men for their good job. He is reported by his men that Erma was interrogating Shato, who surrended himself for the murder of Aito Kho.
Shato reminded everyone that unless requested, the EDF will not meddle in Ekosiak, a policy that will continue under Dea, who became the new secretary now that Shato was arrested and Erma will escort Shato to the Ahnomia solar system so that he could be handed over to the EDF authorities for his crime, and Hitzok decided to leave Erma alone with Shato, so she could deal with him.
The story ends when Erma asks Shato what really happened and why he asked her to escort him to Ahnomia. He tells Erma he murdered Aito and he also intervened illegally in Ekosiak politics by murdering him, even if it was for a good cause and now Shato is in hands of Erma now.
Tropes:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Subverted: Denka ordered CZL28 to attack the rebels with her permission, and he received a specific verbal command for doing so.
- Boom, Headshot!: This is how Denka kills the rebel who found her, but he managed to injured her as well.
- Counter-Attack: Both Denka and the armed rebel shoot at each other at the almost end of her story. The rebel was killed and Denka was injured.
- Eye Scream: Of the electronic kind, as the rebels destroyed the sensors who allowed the Net to pinpoint their localization, preventing CZL28 to help Denka anymore.
- Flat Character: Despite being the protagonist of this issue, Lt. Denka has no worthwhile features to speak of. The only thing we know about her is her sex and her job, and we didn't even know her species or her face.
- Loud of War: CZL28 uses the alarms of the station to slow the rebels down for a while, since they cannot speak to each other this way.
- Visible Silence: During the scene when CZL28 uses the alarms of the station, we only see the speech balloons, but without text, since while the characters might be talking aloud, they can't hear each other, so neither can the readers.
- You Are in Command Now: Dea became the new EDF secretary in Ekosiak, despite not being a native from that planet, after Shato was arrested.
