By now, the air had finished evacuating the compartment, so I didn’t have to worry about random things becoming shrapnel if the leak got worse. We still had gravity, so I didn’t bother with the mag-boots just yet. I made my way to the keypad, and typed in the standard override. A temporary air-shield popped into place, telling me that there was air on the other side of the bulkhead. Whether the air was breathable was anyone’s guess, and we could have new leaks at any moment. So I was keeping my helmet shut.

The alarms hit my external mic the moment I stepped through the air-shield. I ignored it, and sealed the hatch. Heading towards the bank of escape pods, I cursed. The ‘graze’ had slagged the escape pods in this section. I could try and traverse the ship, head to the starboard pods, or go aft to try and find pods that weren’t disabled or already launched. Or I could try and find my own way out. Pulling up the Cumberland’s schematics on my HUD, I considered, and saw that Secondary Flight Bay A was close, just one deck down and one section aft. The closest (working) escape pods, according to the damage control readouts, were starboard, or well aft. By the time I got there, the pods would be gone, or the ship blown up from under me. According to the readouts I was getting on my engineer interface, the bay was intact, and there was a standard scout ship in the bay. I used the nav software to map a route to the flight bay.

The ship had seen better days. Signs of battle damage were everywhere as I made my way through the corridors. A power conduit overloaded in this section, killing two crewmen. A third was moaning in pain nearby, her suit compromised by plasma burns. Probably didn’t do anything good for her legs, either, by the look of it. Quickly, I injected a dose of the nano-meds into her by the burn site. It wouldn’t be enough to completely heal her, and would do crap all against the suit damage, but it was a start. While the nano did its work, I turned to the two dead crewmen, and began checking their gear for anything I could salvage. Another ten doses of nano-meds, a second plasma thrower (with three more clips), and a blaster carbine, 20 shots with four spare clips. It was more powerful than my plasma thrower, which was a Good ThingTM. The real prize was a set of four minidrones, which I could control from my basic deck.

“Ugh.” The woman was coming around. Still looked to be in pain, but she looked like she’d be able to keep moving, which was a bonus. As I got a good look at her, I realized her collar inside the suit had officer tabs on it.

“Ma’am! Engineer’s Mate Johnson. Your suit’s leg is compromised, and we have leaks in the ship. I’m going to need you to switch with one of these men. The lower half of their suits are still intact.”

The woman nodded slowly, and opened her suit seals. Her leg still wasn’t fully functional, so I had to help her slide the emergency suit off a set of legs that I probably would have spent more time admiring if she wasn’t an officer. Or wounded. Or we weren’t on a ship in the middle of a battle. Imminent death is NOT as big an aphrodisiac as some make it out to be. Not until the danger has passed, at least.

When her suit was sealed, and she was back on her feet, I took a moment to observe the officer. My HUD brought up her file from the ship’s roster. Lieutenant Ramirez, Beta shift helm officer. She was average height, and had a better plasma thrower than mine in a holster on her hip. She also had a blaster carbine, so we’d be fairly well off if it came to fighting. “Thank you, crewman. What’s the situation?”

“Unknown. The nearest evac pods were damaged when the X’thari beam grazed us, and there’s an Abandon Ship going out. I was making my way to the Secondary Flight Bay, to try and get out on one of the shuttles.”

“Good. Lead the way. If they haven’t blown the ship by now, the X’thari are probably boarding, trying to salvage her.”

I nodded, and began leading the way, following the map my nav software gave me. “Not much we can do about that, ma’am. If we were in Engineering, I could rig something that would deny them the ship, but…”

“But there’d be no walking away from that one, and we have no idea whether engineering is still accessible. I agree. Our priority is to get away and report Cumberland’s loss to the Fleet.”

We lapsed into silence as we made our way through the ship. As we got closer to the cargo bay, we saw more signs of damage. An emergency bulkhead was fused shut, emergency welds, by the look of it. Not something any engineer would do, but I could see a Marine using it as a brute force solution. We had to slip through one of the service conduits to get around it. Fortunately, the hatch in the service conduit was still open. Probably the marines (and the X’thari) didn’t know about it. As we came back into the corridor, we began to hear sounds of fighting. Blaster carbines, like the ones we carried, and another sound, probably X’thari beam weapons. Damn, they were already on board. Not wanting to wander into a firefight, I sent one of my drones ahead, to get a view of the corridor.

The buglike carapaces of X’thari warriors greeted my eyes, but fortunately we were behind them. A group of ten were hunkered down behind some debris, blocking one side of the corridor. They were busy fighting a group of marines down the hall. Couldn’t get numbers on the marines, but they were clearly getting pushed back. And who knows how many more X’thari there were in the bay. We’d need these Marines to help get any escape moving.

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I looked at Lieutenant Ramirez, and she nodded, and counted down with her hands from three. I doubted either of us had done on-ship combat training since basic, unless you count drills (you shouldn’t), but training was training, and I followed her lead. Ducking around the corner on one knee, I felt Ramirez’s suit against mine as she stood over me, allowing us to present as small a target as we could and both fire.

Blaster carbines are nasty weapons, and one hit should take any man not in security armor out if they’re hit center mass. Even the Marine armor could only take a few hits before the wearer was coming back KIA. The damned X’thari took five shots to take down. Each. Still, between Ramirez and me, we managed to bag three. The Marines, with their higher-powered weapons (and better skills) used the crossfire’s distraction to eliminate the other seven in short order.

“CEASE FIRE!” As the last X’thari fell, a man’s voice (clearly a Marine) called out over the close-range combat bands. As we approached the door to the flight bay, we saw five marines, led by a Corporal, from the insignia on his suit, come around the barricade to meet us.

Lieutenant Ramirez nodded to the Corporal. “Report!”

“Corporal Knight reporting, ma’am! We were engaged with the boarders when the Abandon Ship call came in. We couldn’t disengage without giving them the run of the ship, and ship comms have been offline since that big blast, so we didn’t know how far the evac has gone.”

“Good job, Corporal. Johnson! Use those drones, and give me a view of what’s inside that flight bay! We need to know what we’re dealing with.”

“Aye aye, ma’am.” I got to work, engaging the stealth field on one of the drones, and sending it through the doors into the flight bay. What I saw was a mixed bag of news. On the plus side, there was the scout ship. Designed for long range recon, it was lightly armed and armored, but fast and had good stealth abilities. Even better, it had a short-range transition drive, allowing for instant escape, if we could get clear of the local gravity fields. It had life support for ten people for three weeks, though it only had a single head, and no cabins.

The bad news was that the bay was literally crawling with X’thari. I didn’t bother counting them, since the computer did it for me. Sixty-five enemy warriors. So, a brute force approach was out. There was also a X’thari lander there, and I could see that the airshield was still functioning. I shared the feed with the group, so they could formulate a plan.

One of the marines grunted, “Blow the shield, and send them all into space. The bugs need to breathe same as us, don’t they?”

Ramirez shook her head. “Their carapace works as a basic enviro-suit. Not a full seal, I think, but enough to give them time to get to their ship. We need a distraction. Something to pull them all close together so we can turn the tables.”

We reviewed the feed again, this time with an eye towards what the marines called ‘field expedient mayhem’. There. “I’ve got a pile of incendiaries here, ma’am. I can rig the drone to cause enough excitement that the drones will need to check it out. If one of the marines can nail the drums with their rifles, we’ll have a nice explosion, and take out a lot of them. Then we drop the air shield, and give them something else to think about while we get to the ship.”

“How long to prep the scout ship for flight?”

“By the books? Twenty minutes. Maybe ten if I cut corners. But we’ll want to be on our way there before we start warming up the engines. That’s guaranteed to draw attention. It will take me another twenty to arrange the airshield failure. Those safety protocols are not meant to be overwritten.”

Corporal Knight said, “I can make the shot on the drums. That’ll get us our boom. But half an hour at the earliest is a lot of time for shit to go wrong, Lieutenant.”

Another of the marines spoke up, “I cross-trained on the scout ship during basic. I wouldn’t know what corners to cut safely, but I can run through the remote checklist, and fly locally. I’m not qualified for Transition calculations.”

“Fortunately, I am,” Ramirez said. “All right, Weatherly, you start prepping the ship by remote. Do everything except warming the engines. We’ll start that the moment Johnson’s distraction starts. Johnson, give me airshield control and that distraction.”

“On it!”

The next twenty minutes were a flurry of computer code as I tried to get the air shield and the drone to do things they weren’t intended to do. In fact, they were actively programmed to AVOID doing what I needed from them. Still, twenty-five minutes after we started work, both Weatherly and I nodded at the Lieutenant. We were ready.

I turned the drone’s stealth capabilities off, and made it fly up and down into the metal drums full of incendiary fuel. Ships no longer used oil or gas like old blue-water navy ships, but small ships like the scout we were going to steal couldn’t support big tokomak reactors, so they carried some high-energy reactive fuel to get the high power thrust they needed. Fortunately, we had a bunch of the stuff sitting out ready for fueling incoming ships.

The metal clangs of the drone drew the X’thari warriors’ attention, and about half of them began moving in that way. They didn’t try shooting the drone, because even idiots knew what happened when you shot the bright red drums, and no one wanted to make that kind of (usually fatal) mistake. Explosions on board a ship were absolutely no fun.

Fortunately, Corporal Knight was a good shot, and ensured that thirty-two X’thari warriors got a very good education on why one does not shoot the high-explosive drums. At the same time, Weatherly started the engines warming up. That would take a minute until they were ready. Just as the warriors turned to face the new ‘threat’, I sent my command to the bay controls, killing the airshield. Unfortunately, it also killed the gravity in the bay, as circuits disrupted by battle damage blew out under the strain.

The result was quite emphatic. Anything that wasn’t tied down in the bay went out the bay doors into space. Only a few X’thari were left, those who had been lucky enough to grab hold of their ship before they were thrown out of the bay. The marines made short work of that. Fortunately, null-grav maneuvers were still taught in training, because stuff like this happens. Getting to the ship was only moderately risky once the atmosphere finished evacuating from the compartment behind us. A firm jump in the right direction, followed by magnetic grapples to reel ourselves in, and we were at the ship.

The lieutenant entered her command codes, and we all got into the scout ship and pressurized. Lieutenant Ramirez and Weatherly set up in the cockpit, going over final preparations for launch, while I linked my deck to the ship computer, and used it to download any logs we could still get out of Cumberland. They were patchy, but oh well. I felt the ship move, and then we were in the black.

The Lieutenant called back from the cockpit, “We’re away! Stealth looks to be holding. The X’thari ships aren’t coming after us. They seem to be… oh god. They’re shooting the lifeboats!”

That brought a bunch of mumbled curses from the rest of us, but no one objected when the Lieutenant kept on course, and got us running. There wasn’t anything one scout ship could do against a pack of Mothak cruisers. Once we were clear of the cruisers, the Lieutenant abandoned stealth and opened the throttle to full, racing for the heliopause, and transition. Once the computer said that we were safe from the X’thari cruisers, everything turned to black.

You have completed the Beta mission.

Thank you for playing Dreams Amongst the Stars!