The figure on the Victory's bridge screen belonged to an alien species. She had distinctly feminine features and appeared taller than the average human man, though her build was somewhat slender.
Of course, perhaps it was her bearing that made the difference. Despite her height, she didn't seem frail at all. Her entire body radiated the strength of a female leopard.
She had pale purple skin, long dark green hair, and silver eyes with the look of a great cat. Her features and facial contours were a little sharp, but she was undeniably an alien beauty who fit human aesthetic tastes very well.
She was a Gumeiyan.
The crew aboard the Victory had already been tense, and now they were even more so.
The Gumeiyans were an extremely rare minority, and most people knew little about them. But the woman on the screen was plainly no ordinary person.
When traveling the cosmos, the people you least wanted to mess with were women, children, and the elderly who dared to travel alone. Everyone had heard that piece of streetwise wisdom, passed down for thousands of years.
And this chance encounter really was unnerving. A nondescript pleasure craft had appeared on a remote, deserted route in a war zone. More importantly, the ship hadn't been detected until it was less than a million kilometers away. In space combat, that was practically point-blank range. If the other ship was armed, it could cripple them before they had a chance to react.
The feeling was terrifying. It was like seeing a little girl in a floral dress, basket in hand, strolling unharmed through a battlefield littered with corpses, calmly picking her way through a hail of bullets as if she were off to gather mushrooms, passing soldiers covered in dust and the stink of