I kind of fucked up. Generally speaking, everything is relative in space. So while there had been plenty of talk of coordinates, it wasn't like the Flying Brick was actually sitting in one particular position. It had gone into the Rift at a certain momentum and had kept that momentum when it came out of the Rift. When you looked at the distance between stars, it was basically sitting in place, but on the ship-to-ship scale, the thing was cruising at a speed reasonable for a solar system. The computers of the Res-a-tesseract happened to know exactly where the Flying Brick was at any given point in time and which direction it was traveling. This meant that when we fell out of the Rift and found nothing, it wasn't terribly long before the Flying Brick was found on the ship's scanners. Of course, we were going one way and the Flying Brick was going in the opposite direction, which pretty much doubled the velocity relative to each other. Point was, it took over an hour and a half to catch up with and then rendezvous with the Flying Brick.

Despite having never had to dock with another ship in real life, minus the one time I did it to get my pilot's license, I found I was actually very good at docking. All those years of games had apparently prepared me for the slow, careful ease of the procedure. It took all of ten minutes to storm onto the Flying Brick, open up a duffel bag, stuff in a bunch of clothing, my Neuro helmet, and a bunch of the frozen prepackaged foods from the freezer, and storm back off the ship. Another thirty minutes of repositioning the ship and clambering into a hard suit, and I found myself spacewalking between the two ships, specifically the front lock of the Res-a-tesseract and the hole that had been cut into the cargo container mounted to the Flying Brick. This was a little bit more nerve-wracking now that I knew I wasn't in a video game, but the only thing that was gonna hurt me was my own stupidity. My goal was to not be stupid for once. Unfortunately, we were on a timeline and I had forgotten one very important thing: I had no idea how to tell which one of these identical one meter cubed crates packed into this very large cargo container was the one I needed.

It took another 30 minutes to close off the cargo hold of the Res-a-tesseract, deprive it of its atmosphere, and use the galley as a lock before I was back out into the cargo container attached to the Flying Brick, pulling apart the crates and shoving them downward, relative to me, into the open maw of the Res-a-tesseract. I cut the artificial gravity in the cargo hold down to something like 0.1 Standard, which was enough to make the blocks fall to the floor, but not enough to give them any sort of weight. Each new cargo crate sent into the Res-a-tesseract pinged around like billiard balls until they all settled down, only to be disturbed by the next large crate.

This sucked. I had been in the cargo hold for well over an hour with a general fear that I was basically gonna have to take every single one of these crates because I had no idea how to tell what was supposed to be in them. Theoretically, they were all supposed to be full of lead. One of them clearly had something else in it, and the process of unlatching each individual box and pushing it down into the Res-a-tesseract's open maw was taking forever, and then Sam comm-ed me.

"Uh, Grant? Another ship just showed up," she said, hesitation clear in her voice.

Well, fuck me sideways. Essentially time was up, and I'd swear that went a little faster than expected. Despite all the delays, there's no way it's been a full six hours yet.

"How far out is it?" I asked.

"Um, I don't know."

I grit my teeth. "There is a time to rendezvous in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, what does it say?”

"Uh, it's like 20 something minutes, but it keeps going higher," she replied.

Okay, there was some reasonably good news. At the bare minimum, I had 20 minutes, but they were apparently slowing down, or they had come off in the same way that we had and the distance between them and the ship was increasing, but then the time to arrive would probably show an infinity sign, not an actual countdown to how long it would take. Whatever, I grabbed the next crate and pushed. There was no way I had enough time to take all these damn boxes and there was no indication as to which one of these stupid freaking identical cubes I actually needed. It was amazingly frustrating. I unhooked the next crate and shoved down with as much force as I could only to have that one ping back and forth between the row of other crates that were still latched together, forming somewhat of a tube. It got to the entrance of the Res-a-tesseract, its momentum slowed considerably as it kind of bounced back and forth like the thing weighed nothing. Well, I suppose technically it did weigh nothing, more accurately, like that massed nothing. I think I just found my crate.

That particular crate is the only one I bothered latching down to little hooks in the floor before making my way up into the galley and ordering Sam to repressurize. It's one of those things that took entirely too long because the galley wasn't meant to function like a lock. There was too much volume where the air had to be pulled out and put back in and vacuum wasn't particularly great for some of the appliances. Then again, this really wasn't my ship and the payout for the crate was pretty good. Actually, that might be a problem in and of itself. If that ship was out here to blow me up, taking the damn crate back was a death sentence as well. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

I pulled off my helmet when I got onto the bridge and slammed my ass down into the pilot's chair. Sam stayed at the navigation console which was really the only other console in the room. While it was big enough to be called a bridge, it really kind of wasn't, not small enough to be a cockpit though. I watched the screen displaying the other ship and its various information. That ship was indeed slowing down. However. that just seemed to make it more menacing. I opened up the controls for the Rift Drive and entered our destination. Unfortunately, I was met with a warning that they could not be plotted, which caused confusion and panic to settle into my stomach. As I frantically tried to figure out why I couldn't plot a course for any actual star system. The answer was that the capacitors were empty.

"The capacitors are empty," I said out loud, which got Sam's attention.

"What's that?" she asked.

"I have no damn idea."

After a quick check on the other ship, I opened up the operations manual for the Rift Drive and started searching for the capacitors. Apparently, the Rift Drive required a lot of power and it had a large capacitor that stored up the power and released it when needed. And I, in my infinite wisdom while playing with some of the ship's systems, had turned off the switch to automatically start storing the needed power. I reactivated the damnable switch and swore when the system told me it would take about four hours.

Okay. So our best option was to just run. We only had to make it about four hours before the capacitors would be fully charged. Unfortunately, the Res-a-tesseract didn't exactly have great legs. By not great legs, what I really meant was that the ship essentially had the lowest-rated Grav Drive possible. It was a roll of the dice as to whether or not the other ship had better legs, but in this case, even slightly better meant we were never gonna get far enough. The ship's scanners showed the other ship to be a variant of a light cargo ship similar to the Res-a-tesseract. That is to say, it had space inside the ship, unlike a light freighter, such as the Flying Brick, which had its cargo space as an attached can on the outside. Point being, it was a very basic ship and I had no idea what was on it, not the people, not the armaments, and not the cargo. Armaments? This was a mercenary vessel, or pirate vessel, or something. Did it have guns?

"Sam, does this ship have guns?"

Sam looked at me like I had some type of parasite crawling out of my ear. "How am I supposed to know?"

"Well sorry, you've kind of been on the ship longer than I have."

"Yeah. Well, we haven't done any freaking ship-to-ship combat."

Fair enough, but that didn't actually answer the question. This probably wasn't the best time to be flipping switches, of which I didn't know what would do what, but the other ship wasn't getting close too fast. So as they say, “when in Sol,” it took me by complete surprise when one of the switches actually did something. The main screen popped up, a little green circle that had a three-point reticle in it. On either side of the screen were a couple groupings of numbers. Under each grouping was the word "stand by," which very shortly changed to "active." Was this guns? Specifically two of them? Where the hell were they mounted?

Taking over the flight controls, I moved the Res-a-tesseract so that I could hide the ship behind the Flying Brick. This was not an ideal situation. The Flying Brick and the Res-a-tesseract had virtually the same amount of displacement. The only reason why this was even a reasonable plan was that the Res-a-tesseract, being a light cargo ship, had that more ship-like shape, being longer and more narrow. The Flying Brick, being a light freighter, was really just a big box with another box attached to it. Again, hiding behind the ship would not be a particularly great idea unless you, like me, happened to have a tablet still slaved to the Flying Brick's controls. I couldn't do much in the way of manipulating the ship, but I could see what my ship saw. I set my tablet up against the console, sat back in the chair, and opened the operator's manual while trying to keep an eye on the other ship.

"Sam, get a suit on," I said.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because we are likely going to end up in combat. And if this room gets breached, you don't want to die."

She looked at me in horror before nodding her head and jumping out of her seat. Fortunately, the Res-a-tesseract had been stocked according to safety regulations, and Sam was currently trying to stuff herself into one of the soft suits. I suddenly became concerned she might not be able to get in one when I turned to see her stuffing her tail into one of the legs. I hoped the helmet would fit. Sam was currently displaying the untold drawback to horns and tails and extra body parts.

The other ship moved sideways. I kept myself hidden behind the Flying Brick. I'm fairly certain there was no way I could fully hide the ship, they were just too equal in size, but I'm sure I was confusing the other guys. They kept changing course, veering one way, then the other, then up and down, relatively. And all the while, I was able to keep behind the Flying Brick because I could use the sensors on my ship through the data tablet. While doing this, I continuously tried to flip through the operations manual, trying to figure out how to disable the safety overrides on the Grav Drive. The Res-a-tesseract was normally limited to Six Gs. That theoretically could be pushed. It would oversaturate the inertial dampeners, likely build up heat, and quite possibly irreversibly damage the Grav Drive and Power Core, but that'd be better than dying.

Finally, the other ship started accelerating, and that horrible little knot in the pit of my stomach seemed to grow denser as I noted that the acceleration on the other ship was 10 Gs. We weren't running.

"Are you ready for this?" I asked Sam over the suit’s comm channel.

She fumbled around for a moment before replying, "Not really, but I don't think we have a choice, do we?"

That was fair enough. The other vessel was coming in at us fast. The Flying Brick sensors said it was gonna come off just underneath the Flying Brick, a bit to starboard and aft respectively to my poor Light Freighter. I rolled the Res-a-tesseract and stuck her bow pointing straight above the Flying Brick, right where I expected the other ship to come out. The moment the ship was visible, I pulled both triggers while simultaneously pulling back on the joysticks to flip the Res-a-tesseract on its back. I had no idea what this thing was gonna shoot, but twin lines of tracers flew out at the enemy ship in a wide arc that completely missed. The thing was just going too fast. I didn't have anywhere near enough lead on it. A small red box on the screen popped up with a little tooltip asking if I'd like to lock on. Well, that would have been helpful. I accepted the prompt, and the green circle jumped across the screen and centered itself in a spot ahead of the enemy ship. Now, that was more like the games I knew.

"What's that?" came Sam's tinny voice over the suit comms. Sam was leaning over my chair and pointing at my screen as a small rectangular spinning blip seemed to be trying to point out something that couldn't actually be seen optically, at least not at the range we were currently at.

"I don't know," I said just moments before that little red rectangle started spinning the other way, popped up a tooltip, and asked if I wanted to lock on to the incoming missile.

"Yes!" I shouted at the screen as I jabbed the button for the lock. The little green radical popped directly over the incoming explosive as I pulled both triggers and filled the space between me and that thing full of lead or whatever the fuck this thing was shooting.

"Get in your seat and strap in," I yelled at Sam, who as far as I knew was still gripping onto the back of my seat, firing as I simultaneously pulled the ship back and tried to put the Flying Brick in between me and the incoming death tube. I had a brief moment of panic as the damn missile started moving, I had to jerk the ship all over the place trying to get the bullets in the path of the missile. There was a massive delay as whatever gun mounts I was using must have been in a fixed position of the ship and didn't have any gimbal of their own. A brief flash washed over the optical moments before a flash of relief washed over me. By some miracle, I managed to actually hit the damn thing. The pinging sound of little missile fragments caused me to hold my breath as I waited to see if the Electromagnetic Field and hull plating would prevent a puncture. The ship seemed to hold.

"Wow, that was terrifying," Sam said, finally plopping her ass into the navigation console seat. "But are we on fire or something? It's getting ridiculously hot."

I checked one of the temperature gauges. "It's probably the guns oversaturating the radiators or something. There should be an AC in your suit. Right?"

"Oh," was Sam's only response.

Now that I didn't have a death tube flying at me, I had a chance to actually look at the other ship, which unfortunately had managed to flip itself around, arrest its forward momentum, and was now heading back towards us. To make matters worse, the computer said there was another missile. I broke my attention away from the screen to look back down at the operations manual and started the process for overriding the safety measures on the Grav Drive. Hopefully, Samantha was locked into her seat because this was gonna be weird if not unpleasant.

"Ok. Sam, hold on to your ass," I jerked the ship back and around the Flying Brick, keeping my former light freighter in between the rest of the wreck and the enemy ship as I attempted to saturate the area between us and the missile with more bullets. I swear it didn't really seem like these things were flying correctly, the bullets, not the ship, that is. Again, the missile started jerking and jiving as it seemed to get closer and closer. As I was starting to wonder if I was gonna hit the damn thing, a large red prompt flashed up on my screen, and a quick look at it made me wonder. Just how smart are the missiles? I waited another second or two, throwing as much metal at the oncoming death tube as possible before jabbing the button for the prompt. I sent silent prayer to the stars as the red warning prompt went from saying, "heat sink reached max saturation, launch?" to "heat sink launched." I held my breath and the triggers, and waited. After a moment of delay, the missile dived downward. I didn't really have time to relax as the enemy ship was now on us. However, this time I was ready. I dropped the Res-a-tesseract straight downward as fast as the overridden Grav Drive would allow. One of the indicator lights for the inertial dampeners went from green to yellow, and the artificial gravity in the cockpit on the bridge cut out. Sam made an uncomfortable squeal as my stomach lurched and my head seemed to spin. The green targeting reticle started moving up around the Flying Brick, and as soon as it breached my former ship, I pulled hard on both triggers while simultaneously drawing the ship backwards at 8.5 Gs, pulling the bow of the ship up and the aft down. The space between our two ships was filled with flying projectiles, not just from the Res-a-tesseract, but from the enemy ship as well, who was completing a similar maneuver. The uncomfortable squeal from Sam grew louder and odder as she apparently had not strapped in, and she, along with everything else on the bridge, was in a weird free-fall as artificial gravity warred with centrifugal force in a battle of physics that I didn't have the math background to even start to comprehend.

A brief flash from the aft end of the enemy vessel caused my heart to skip up into my throat before it dawned on me that it wasn't us blowing up. It was them. I took my fingers off the triggers and gently followed the now ballistic enemy vessel, keeping the front of the Res-a-tesseract pointed at them. Sam was flailing about, trying to pull herself back into her seat as I tried to catch my breath and make my hands stop shaking.

"Well, that was... disappointing."

"What the fuck was disappointing about it?" Sam asked in an exasperated tone.

I looked at her as she was only now strapping herself into her seat. "Just, you know, in movies and videos and games and shit, there's more fire and smoke and stuff."

She looked at me like I was stupid. "What? It wasn't a big enough boom for you?"

"Yeah, I guess. Sorry, that's kind of dumb, isn't it?"

Looking at Sam, I suddenly realized that the artificial gravity in the cargo hold was likely off, and all those boxes of lead weren't strapped down to anything. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

"Oh, holy fucking shit," I said as it suddenly dawned on me how ridiculously stupid I am.

"What's wrong now?" Sam asked, her eyes scanning over the instruments, looking to see exactly what was going wrong.

"I shot first," I admitted.

"Ok. So the ship's fine?"

"The ship, I don't know.”

"So why does it matter if you shot…" Sam's voice trailed off as she realized the artificial gravity of my mistake.

Why the hell did I not think to actually talk first?

"Are you sane?" asked the girl who was accused of torturing and experimenting on people.

Fuck. I didn't have a good answer for that. The other ship had been slowing down to a leisurely crawl before I had started playing hide and seek behind the Flying Brick. To be fair, they hadn't sent me any messages. I paused, looked down at my console, and flipped through a few of the screens. "Well, they didn't send me a message or anything either," I said defensively.

I looked at Sam, who turned her gaze down to her console and grimaced. "Um..." She poked a few buttons, and I could hear her sucking air through her teeth over the comms. "Apparently, they want to know where we disappeared to because they were supposed to observe us," she explained.

Did that mean this wasn't entirely my fault? I mean, it was still pretty much my fault. I did start shooting and I didn't ask questions, but this wasn't entirely my fault. Right?

"You gotta be fucking kidding me," Sam half-yelled in exasperation as she unlatched her helmet. I don't know if she was yelling at me or herself, but as she pulled the helmet off and took a breath of air, her expression changed from one of annoyance to one of fear and panic as she attempted to thrust her head back into the helmet. I looked at the internal temperature gauge, 55.7 degrees. I could see her gasping through the visor. I was pretty well cooking in my own suit. So I wondered how long it'll be before the radiators caught up.

Well, shit, a mass murderer, a pirate, I guess even more of a pirate, and the company I keep is a deranged psychopath splicer who experiments on people and has a big enough bounty on their head to make a sizable chunk in paying off the Flying Brick. I know I wanted life to be a bit more interesting, but this is a little too interesting. I suppose the next step was to do a damage report. Well, no, that sounded wrong, was to take a damage report? I had to figure out what kind of damage the ship had taken, if any. We still had atmosphere on the bridge and all systems seemed to be working just fine, so all good news there.

I started by repressurizing the cargo bay. I really needed to go see what kind of damage all the falling crates had caused. They shouldn't have flown around too much, but I am certain that they had been a bit mobile. I should specify that I tried to repressurize the cargo bay. It wasn't working, which meant there was probably a hole in the goddamn cargo bay. There were also holes in engineering, which was kind of terrifying because literally everything important was in engineering.

I crossed my arms and grumbled as I stared at the computer screens. The galley still had pressure, so we were back to using that as an impromptu lock. Fortunately, the temperature was actually dropping at a reasonable pace and while it was still at sauna levels, it had equalized with my suit. So off came the helmet. Sam gave me a curious look to see if I'd start gasping for air before following suit. I'm not exactly sure what my expression was, but as she got her helmet off and looked at me, her eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open slightly, in an expression of fear and concern that I can only imagine matched my own.

"What?" she asked, as if she didn't immediately realize the hollow, horrifying silence.

"No blowers."