I knew just when the stupid lizards popped the seal on our hull. Bradley and I were hiding just down the corridor in an engineering maintenance locker. That was a fancy name for a really cramped closet. The air pressure change made our ears pop, and it dizzied me for a few seconds. It only took the Revaulo’s another minute before they had widened the hole to be big enough to climb through, and the hot, humid air they liked best came with them.

I heard them speaking in their guttural Revaulo language, which again I didn’t understand.

I should really set aside some time to learn that.

“What are they saying?” I mouthed the words at Bradley. I only let out the barest breath of a whisper. We were standing so close together our noses were almost touching and I wasn’t sure if it was his toes I was feeling or mine, but he shushed me.

He freaking shushed me!

I gave him a look that told him exactly what I thought about being shushed, but in the dark, smelly, cramped closet, the effect didn’t come across as particularly indignant. The Revaulos continued to murmur about more stuff I didn’t understand, but then I heard footsteps. There were slits in the locker and I could just make out the shadow of their scaly tails waltzing down our corridor. I reached out with my power and heard three heartbeats just outside our little cubbyhole. Pushing my power out further, I could just make out another set of three heartbeats heading off in the other direction. The odds were three to one, the magic ratio. This was probably their whole boarding party.

Bradley stared at me, looking for some sign that I had gotten the information we needed. We had been around each other enough for him to tell when I started using my mojo. I held up two fingers, then one, and hooked my thumb behind my head to show they went the other way. He nodded and pulled an industrial-sized laser cutter out of a pouch and powered it on. The thing lit up the inside of the closet with a static crackling glow as the beam stabilized. He bought it for maintenance, not combat, but we didn’t really have much time for Bradley to load up with the big guns.

He counted down from three on his fingers, and when he put down the last digit we both sprang out of our hiding place. Screaming as much of a pissed off battle cry as I could muster, I clubbed the first thing I saw up-side the head. The Revaulo flopped backward and hit the ground. A second one raised and leveled his plasma gun at my squishy bits, but Bradley tackled him, his laser cutter slicing its tail clean off in the process. The Revaulo howled in pain and embarrassment, but I didn’t care. It was invading our ship and trying to kill us.

The third lizard had spun slowly, but aimed carefully. His plasma burst hit Bradley as he lay on the ground, wrapping up the now-tailless Revaulo. Lucky for him, the lizard took the brunt of the hot plasma, but Bradley still got burned and struggled loose from the mess of arms, legs, and flopping tail. His leg was bleeding, and he had a gash above his left eye from the lizard trying to scratch at him.

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I hadn’t stood idly by. The Revaulo I had clubbed was out cold, snoozing on the metal floor thanks to my little psychic addition to the staff-assisted uppercut. That had given me ample opportunity to wake it up as a temporary minion. It shambled to its feet and charged its plasma gun wielding buddy. The two scrapped for a few seconds while Bradley took his laser cutter to the de-tailed one’s soft underbelly.

My minion didn’t feel any pain, and quickly won against its friend. A few seconds later, I had two new (ish) minions ready to play with the second half of the boarding party. Nobody wants to shoot at their friends, and that made them hesitate. My minions didn’t. The second fight was even shorter than the first, and although I lost one to a gooey plasma mess, I had five mostly functional lizards on the payroll.

“We can’t escape in our ship,” Bradley said, panting and wincing in pain.

I kind of felt bad that I didn’t take a scratch, but only kind of.

“They’ve got an awesome, amazing, non-shot ship. Let’s take that,” I suggested.

“My thoughts exactly. We’ve even got the extra Revaulo argon fuel still aboard. Care to get your shambling horrors to load it up for us?” I nodded, and that’s exactly what we did. There were some interesting questions that came over the radio, but I used one of our dead guys that still had a working voice box to call off the reinforcements. We wanted them sleepy and lazy when we jumped aboard their ship.

I didn’t know this little fun fact, but they build Revaulo ships for small crews. I guess their philosophy was to have lots of engines and lots of guns with only a few actual people. Here, it really worked to our advantage. There were only another five lizard-brains aboard their ship, and they were all spread out. A few knocks on a few heads and we had ourselves a shiny new ship, with a bucket load of fuel. Now we just needed to figure out how to fly it, and how to get away from the rest of the squadron without them getting wise to our little impostor.

That was where having one little minion still living helped tremendously. I poked around in his brain, doing more than a little unavoidable damage while I was at it, but got what we needed and a little more. These guys hadn’t hired the Valraithi Pirates to help boost their numbers, they were the hired help. The Valraithi were just so damn rich; they didn’t have any way of fencing all their ill-gotten gains in the traditional sense. They had instead made some back-alley deals with the Revaulo Space Port to launder their hot money. That little detail was worth its weight in gold already since I was absolutely not above blackmail, but the best part was that this guy knew which planet was the next pickup site, and it was right on the far side of the gap.

All we had to do was decrypt the coordinates in the computer without the rest of the ships getting wise, but I had completely forgotten about the hive intellect. As soon as Bradley detached the anchor holding the Revaulo airlock to our now busted ship, my minion started fighting back against my control and every single Revaulo ship started to turn ominously in our direction.

Oh, boy.