Juarez just turned and glared at me. No doubt he thought my question was the height of idiocy.

“What do you think? Do I sound good?” His voice was tense and frustrated. He wasn’t good, not by any stretch of the imagination. In hindsight, I should have known better than to ask.

I stifled a frustrated sigh, giving him a stern look instead. “Look, I didn’t take you for a boot private with anger issues. Deal with your shit. I can't afford to do this right now. You read me?”

“I read you.” He nodded stiffly, impassive faceplate locking with mine for a moment. He seemed to be reining in his rage, so I felt a little bit more comfortable not hovering over his shoulder. After our moment of mutual understanding, I turned my attention to other matters and decided to check in on the Bridge. With the jammers down we had comms again, but a cursory check revealed they were only back up in Engineering. I damned whoever was on the other side of this conflict, they wanted to make my life a living hell, apparently. There was no way a bunch of portable and localised jammers could reach across the whole ship, so whoever set them up hadn’t even tried, was my guess. Instead, they’d probably just put jammers in every compartment where there was fighting, effectively shooting us in the foot when it came to coordinating a proper defense. The sheer cost of that was staggering, I guess funding wasn't something these people lacked.

I'd have to go to god knows how many places all over the ship where there was heavy fighting, find the jammers and then get rid of them if I wanted to restore communications entirely. That was entirely unfeasible for one man, or even one squad. It would just take too long. I examined my tacmap with concern. There were red and black hazard lines painting all of the Bridge, Medical and even a large chunk of Officer Country. I didn’t like that one bit. If comms were still down in every one of those key sections, we could very well have already lost them to the enemy. Without the ability to call the Bridge or those posted to guard it, I had no way to know if that was true, or how bad the fighting was up there.

It had crossed my mind that the bomb threat could’ve been a ploy by the enemy, but I don’t think any of us wanted to risk being wrong about that. If we stayed and it went off, well I didn't want to find out what kind of bomb it was and neither did anyone else, I was certain. Probably, it was the kind that you didn't walk away from.

I tried to reach Sergeant Hoffman, and surprisingly, I actually managed to ping his suit. It took me about ten seconds of waiting before my suit cheerfully informed me his vitals were in a bad state, specifically multiple lacerations and blunt-force trauma as well as eighteen separate bullet wounds in a tight spread over his sternum. There was a note that he was combat ineffective. I didn’t have to think long on what that meant. He was dead. Our suits were tough, but not that tough. They could shrug off a few rounds, if you didn't have them all hit you in the same spot, but eighteen in such a small area? Not a chance in hell.

“Hoffman’s dead. Chen, with me. We need to leave, now.” I said.

"Bugging out." Chen said behind me as I leaned into a run.

I bolted for the the escape pod’s entrance that Carver and Larsen had disappeared into. It was a traditional airlock affair, but both doors were wide open now. A glance at my sensor feeds revealed no signs of enemy contact nearby. Sonar, thermals, it was like they’d just disappeared. I knew they hadn’t, if only because they couldn’t have gotten off the ship that fast, but I was tired of their ninja bullshit and being half-blind because of their ECM.

I considered the state of the battle for a moment, the recent conflict lending me a kind of accelerated-time-sense that you sometimes find in combat. I concluded this battle was definitely a defeat. The enemy’s training and willingness to remove and sanitise their own dead between encounters with us was a telling clue. I knew there were special armour modules that black ops units used to fry the occupant and melt the armour’s storage and memory. Hell I’d used one myself once. My suspicion was that we were dealing with something like that. Either they were some kind of unsanctioned black ops unit, or they were just a highly trained force with a scary level of access to our gear and warships. I was leaning towards the latter, unfortunately. The fact they were onboard told me this wasn’t a sanctioned op, hell the dead bodies told me that much. As for what they wanted? I had no idea. I was already speculating as it was, with a lot of questions and almost no solid answers to speak of. There was no way in hell I was going to drag one of those crispy bodies inside to get my answers though. I didn’t have time for that, nevermind the fact it was a good way to get killed. With a potential bomb threat onboard, seconds mattered.

“Chen, get in here!” I yelled, sticking my head out the open exterior hatch more out of habit than an actual need to do so. My eyes searched for and found Chen, but I noticed he wasn’t moving, he was like a statue. My friend was still crouched by the debris I’d hiding behind by only moments before. His weapon was still resting on a mass of scarred and battered debris, but he was acting strange. He was rooted to the spot, staring up at something in the corner of the room, frozen stiff like he was in a trance. Chen fidgeted with his rifle, but didn’t move it, he didn’t move almost at all, in fact, all his movements were small and jittery.

“Damn it, Chen! This is not the time for bullshit. Get in the fucking pod!” I roared, half-raising my rifle as I leaned around the hatchway to get a better look at things. I put a burst into the corner of the room that had enchanted Chen, large marks tearing into the metal as my weapon reached out and touched the spot he was watching.

Thankfully, he was shaken from his odd stupor by the gunfire. Chen whirled, half running and half stumbling into the pod with his squad automatic weapon in his hands. As soon as he cleared the threshold, I ducked back inside before closing and locking the airlock and the exterior hatch. I was reassured by the satisfying clunk and whir of the locking mechanism. Escape pod hatches were thick and the seals were solid, it felt good to have an extra layer of steel between me and all the horrible shit on the ship, like dirty bombs and enemy infantry.

Shaking my head, I ducked back into the escape pod and waited by the closed hatch.

“Juarez, our pod is full, good luck.” I told him over the network.

“I was about fifteen metres to your left ten seconds ago, I know that, dumbass. See you when we’re picked up.” He said.

I rolled my eyes at his response and double-checked the seal on the pod’s hatch. It read as green so I figured we weren’t in danger of sudden decompression, flying debris and weapons fire notwithstanding.

“Launch us, ASAP. Comms blackout and retrorocket firing in accordance with protocol. I don't want to be picked off by our own guns because we decided to talk to each other too soon.” I told Carver. He just gave me a half-assed salute without turning to face me.

Unperturbed by Carver’s lacking response, I turned to Chen as the big man lowered himself to sit on the floor with deliberate care, his SAW resting next to him. “Chen. What did you see? What the hell was all that?”

I hadn’t seen or heard anything, but I didn’t believe Chen was crazy enough to just stare at a spot on the wall with a dirty bomb onboard that could blow at any time in the middle of combat. That was the type of crazy stunt I’d expect from recruits with a death wish or a mental defect. That didn’t rule out the fact Chen might be nuts, of course, but he didn’t have a death wish, I knew the type well. I’d never seen anyone snap personally, but I did know it could happen without much warning and under extreme stress. Maybe Chen was one of the unlucky ones. I doubted we’d have a head doctor around for a while, at least until we were recovered by the SAR teams and debriefed.

Before I forgot, I dug into the ship’s network and accessed my team’s personal directory in the ship’s database. Most of us had a few shows or a large library of books in our personal directories for long voyages and I was no exception. Seeing as how it might be a while before we were rescued, I queued the transfer of the team’s files to our escape pod.

Hopefully, it would finish before we had to leave. We had backups back home, of course, but they were back home. They wouldn’t do us much good if we were stuck in this thing for a week or two, or even longer. There were a lot of technical manuals as well as movies and such to keep us entertained in our personal files, stuff I doubted any of us would want to go without. Entertainment wasn’t exactly a priority, but the team’s morale was about to be. I had a spare moment, so I used it. With that done, I put it out of my mind.

Focusing on my surroundings again, I found Chen was slumped down on the floor now, leaning against the wall with his helmet off and eyes closed. His forehead was soaked in sweat and his hair was matted and damp. That by itself wasn’t unusual after combat, but there was something about him that definitely was unusual at that moment. My eyebrows furrowed in concern before I asked him what was on my mind.

“Talk to me, what did you see out there?” I crouched down next to him.

He opened his eyes and met my gaze. The look in his eyes was confused, a bit haunted, even, but no words came out of his mouth.

“What did you see, Chen?” I repeated.

“I don’t know. I don’t… I saw a shimmer, but it was like it looked at me, I could swear it was thinking. I could feel its hunger. What the hell was that thing?” He was pale, unsure of himself, halfway to terrified, I realised. Needless to say, he also sounded like a basket case and wasn’t making much sense, but I didn’t want to rule anything out yet. Space was a strange place. It could be that he really did see something, or he could’ve snapped, or he was perfectly fine and just a victim of some kind of toxin or poisoning. I wasn’t a doctor, shrink or some kind of lab-coat wearing nerd.

“I don’t know what you saw, it's about to be a hell of a long way away. Don't sweat it.” I squeezed Chen’s arm and nodded to him, then moved off to check on the rest of my team.

Larsen and Carver were hunched over two different consoles chattering back and forth, bickering about retrorockets and comms. They were still working on the pod clearly, but I hadn’t forgotten about the weapon of mass destruction sitting somewhere on the Spear. I was surprised, actually. Both at the fact that it had been detected by the ship’s A.I. and that we’d actually had time to do anything besides watch it kill us all.

I frowned. “Are you two done? We’re still docked, you realise that, right? I really don’t want to stick around. Infantry combat I can handle, but a dirty bomb? No thanks.” I asked from across the pod, unease creeping up on me.

While it wasn’t strictly true that our armour was impervious to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats, our suits were sealed and gave us a modicum of protection. That however, did not mean we could just stick around. A modicum of protection did not mean complete protection, and I had no way of knowing how long it would take until a lethal dose from that bomb killed me. Maybe some Marines were still on the ship, ignoring the order to try and find and defuse that bomb. Maybe Santa Claus is real, all I knew was that I wasn’t a fucking idiot and I wanted to stay well away from something that had the word ‘bomb’ attached to it.

Chen’s odd behaviour, our ship being the victim of a perfect ambush in the massive void between stars and Engineering being taken by people using our own gear did nothing to improve my mood, either. It was all suspicious as hell and too perfectly orchestrated to be coincidence. Something strange was going on and someone was behind it all. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t get to play investigator anytime soon, in fact I probably never would. If we were lucky, we wouldn’t see the Spear of Midnight again until it was recovered and cleaned up. The far more likely fate for the ship was that it would sit out here dormant until whoever attacked us co-opted it for their own purposes. We’d probably never lay eyes on it again. That just felt wrong to me, maybe because ti was the heavy cruiser's first real deployment.

A sudden shout interrupted my thoughts and it took me half a second to process what was said.

“We’re done, go!” Larsen shouted as she gripped a handhold attached to the wall.

My eyes darted around for a handhold close-by and in that split-second my eyes latched onto one two steps away. I lunged for it, hoping.

“Launching!” Carver called out as he gripped the sides of the console.

I didn't make it. A moment after the words left Carver's lips, the escape pod lurched and I was knocked off my feet before slamming into the wall with incredible force. I slammed into a hard surface and registered that I was pinned to the wall for a fraction of a second before I realised I couldn't breathe. My lungs had been compressed so much that the air had left them. I mentally cursed the day I ever decided to take command of Carver. I was very thankful for my armor’s padding. Unarmored, or without such material built-in to my suit, I might’ve broken bones or developed serious internal bleeding from the impact, maybe even snapped my neck. As it was, I saw stars and my body bitched at me quite angrily. I'd have bruises later, I was sure. A few seconds passed and I felt the pressure on my body abruptly vanish. All I could do was groan as I picked myself up and looked around. I felt like shit, but a quick medical scan told me I was in fighting shape, despite a few bumps and bruises.

“A little warning next time?” I glared at Carver, leaning against the wall to stand up again. I forced air back into my lungs, all the air in them having been pushed out by the sudden acceleration.

“I did! I did!” Carver insisted.

A moment of silence carried my glare across to him. When I had my breath back, I resisted the urge to smack him and chose the kinder option.

“One second isn’t enough of a warning, you dick.” I said, pushing myself upright again.

“Well, you said you wanted to launch as soon as possible.” He threw his hands up.

“Not into a fucking wall, you-“ I bit down on my retort, growling instead of saying what was on my mind. “Nevermind! Keep me posted."

Calming down a bit, I stared at Chen who looked more lucid by now. The faraway and wild look in his eyes was more absent than before, but he was still spooked.

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“Chen. What did you mean by that? You saw a shimmer?”

“I thought I saw something, so I stopped. It was like… a heat haze, only it looked at me. I could feel it judging me, like it was making some kind of decision on whether to eat me. Do you think it was alive? I don’t know how to explain it...” He trailed off, disturbed. So was I. Whether by the possibility that what he was describing was real, or that he was nuts, I wasn’t sure yet. It’s a scary thing to see your friend lose their mind in front of you, I hoped that wasn’t what was happening to Chen.

“Alright. Don’t worry about for now. We’re nearly free from this death trap of a ship.” I told him.

I didn’t know if Chen was telling the truth, but I knew that he thought he was. Since I’d met him, he’d struck me as the dependable and positive type, not someone prone to breakdowns or mental gymnastics. That sort of thing was screened for on an annual basis by an army of Corps-approved psychologists, psychiatrists and other specialists, but it did happen.

I hooked into the pod’s feeble sensors and cast a longing look towards the aft end of our escape pod, back towards our distant cruiser we’d called home only days ago. I couldn’t see it of course, not with the laughable optics on the pod’s exterior, but I knew which direction it was.

“Carver, is that thing blown yet? Is the Spear a radioactive hellhole now?”

“Not yet. A lot of escape pods just launched though.”

“Alright, let me know if it blows up, I guess.” Edward turned back to Chen, noticing as Larsen took as seat beside them.

“Edward, what was that thing?” Chen asked. He looked exhausted.

“Hell, I don’t know, you’re the one who saw it. Look, forget about all that. You’re alive and we’re far away from it now. Send me your suit recordings, we’ll see if we can make sense of things.”

I didn’t know what else to do. I’d heard about some of the crazy conspiracy theories surrounding the military and space in general, but I didn’t have a clue if any of it was accurate. Paranormal activity, dimensional rifts and mythology were all above my pay grade, if any of that stuff actually existed. If it did exist, it was probably classified to the heavens. I’d done one or two classified projects in my time both before and after my demotion to Corporal, but they’d been relatively mundane projects, rather than earth-shattering.

Chen nodded tiredly, seeming to exhaust himself completely with that one small motion. He let himself drift off to sleep as he lay slumped on the deck. I watched him for a while, then decided to let him rest and turned to the rest of my team.

The exhaustion hit me then as well. It had crept up on me gradually, but I realised that I was probably as exhausted as Chen. I pushed myself against the bulkhead next to him and looked over at Larsen. She didn’t look half as bad as Chen, but she was likewise coming down from an adrenaline high after a good fight. That was enough to drain anyone under the best of circumstances.

Carver looked tired, but he was busily digging into something on the ship’s computer, despite that. His fingers blurred over air in front of the flat touchscreen interface. We didn't use something as delicate and complicated as a holographic projector, though those did exist for other less critical applications.

No, instead our ubiquitous implant technology allowed us to have things projected in the air in front of us via neural trickery. This did come with the side effect of being unable to see what work was being done on any given console without the right codes, but rarely was that an issue.

The old manual interfaces, 'keyboards' I think they were called and 'touchscreen' systems had been phased out a long time ago. Who wouldn't want to move away from a system that required specialised design considerations for variable gravity, pressure, temperature that needed cleaning as well as a whole host of other considerations. Our control interfaces today from the largest console to the smallest datapad were all self-contained and designed to operate in a vacuum in the event of decompression. I'd had the misfortune of needing to use a weapons console while in hard vacuum once. I could attest to the fact that while they weren't the easiest things in the world to use without gravity or an atmosphere, they didn't stop working under those conditions either.

I assumed Carver was in good enough shape by the way his fingers danced in the air and the thick silence that surrounded him. I watched him for a few moments but boredom reached up and slapped me in the face. Carver was probably fine. If he wasn’t fine, well, I’d probably hear him bitching about something in short order.

I turned to Larsen again, her eyes were closed, chin tilted slightly up as it rested against the bulkhead. Sweat soaked her hair and skin. She was fine, though. A quick look at her vitals confirmed it and I moved on to the next member of my team, myself.

I reached up to scratch my nose and stopped myself just in time. I’d almost forgotten I was wearing my helmet, exhausted as I was. I undid the locks and placed it next to me. With a great sense of relief, I settled against the wall across from Larsen. Chen had the right idea. The floor was comfortable even if it was as hard as steel and far from warm. I didn’t really feel any of that through my armour, but I was happy enough with being able to rest and stretch out my legs.

I sighed as my mind unspooled, the fatigue from combat slowly and gradually dissipating. “Hey Vic? When we get home, remind me never to accept an offer to serve on the ‘latest and greatest’ ship. An old rust bucket in a shitty fringe system will do fine, I think.”

“Sure.” She laughed softly. “You know, this isn’t half bad. We’re alive, aren’t we?”

“Could be worse.” I agreed.

My peace was interrupted by a fast-talking Carver who didn’t seem to understand that some of us might want to sleep.

“So, I figured out what that bomb was. Well, bomb isn’t an accurate term, but whatever. It wasn’t a dirty bomb.” Carver interjected, holding up his datapad to us. He’d taken his helmet off like the rest of us. I suppose we all instinctively knew any kind of loss of pressure was certain death at this point at this point, helmet on or off.

I looked over and squinted at Carver’s datapad briefly for a moment, then concluded it was all a bunch of bright light to me. Codes or no codes, half the time I only ever saw gibberish on his datapad. I mentally shrugged.

“Oh yeah? Let’s hear it.” I told him. Larsen opened her eyes to Carver’s grave expression. I hadn’t thought it was that bad, but now I wanted to know more. It was a desperate, reluctant kind of want. I didn't want to know, but I needed to know.

Carver looked relieved, but also serious. Not the worst combination, I suppose. At least he wasn’t looking like he wanted to run for the hills, because there were no hills here, and more importantly, if Carver started panicking over something now, we were probably all screwed.

“Modified Sarin gas. Not a completely original compound of course, but there was some kind of radiological component. I’m not sure how much gas exactly, but they had a tank of the stuff hooked up to a very modern looking bomb in the port flight bay. You know what that gas can do even in tiny amounts?” He asked.

“Fuck me.” Larsen exhaled in shock.

I paled for a moment, Carver's words sinking in. “I know enough to know I’m glad we left when we did. That stuff is fucking scary. I thought it was outlawed.” I grimaced.

Carver nodded slowly, mirroring my expression. “It was, officially. I’m pretty sure they had enough to kill everyone on board at least a hundred millions times over and that’s not an exaggeration. Why they needed that much, I don't know. Any smart enemy would only bring as much as they needed to do the job.”

"Yeah, that one's got me scratching my head too. Lucky amateurs, maybe?" I said.

"No, I don't buy it. They had to have something else in mind." Carver replied.

"So where'd they get it?" Larsen asked as she wiped sweat from her brow.

Carver shrugged. “No idea. Most likely, they made it and smuggled it onboard. There are very few places that could do this and all the legit ones are heavily regulated. The greatest concentration was situated near the Bridge, but a sizable portion was inside the environmental system’s filters. I think it’s safe to say the entire bridge watch is dead along with the entire crew. If it was the original compound, maybe I'd give us better odds, but I'm almost certain that the modifications involved making sure it could get through seals and filters.”

"How can you know that? You've barely looked at it." I asked, incredulously.

"I know, okay? Trust me. It would be pretty stupid to use a chemical weapon that can't even get through a sealed vacsuit."

I contemplated the news Carver had shared. There were plenty of cleaner ways to kill the crew of a ship while leaving the ship intact. X-rays were a known hazard that had been weaponised, so was neutron radiation. The more mundane option of 'bullets' would also work just fine. I supposed when all your options worked equally well, you picked the one that was easiest to deploy. I didn’t have a damn clue what their purpose was in modifying an ancient chemical weapon to modern standards and using it on our ship. I was stuck trusting Carver when it came to all of that.

I frowned. “Okay, to recap, it was sabotage, an ambush. Maybe they tried to capture the ship? Gas wouldn’t have done any good against sealed battle armour or vacsuits if it wasn't modified, but it would’ve definitely been enough to pull the ship from patrols for a while and make anyone not in armour a corpse. What do you think?”

Carver considered my question. “I guess we’ll never know, will we? I’m certainly not going to be able to figure it out now. Anything I could say would just be conjecture. I just don't know enough.”

I grunted, not liking the idea of playing into enemy hands. I liked even less the fact that I had no idea who had just taken out an entire cruiser in minutes or how they’d found us. I could see that Larsen didn’t think much of the situation either.

Carver suddenly threw himself at one of two consoles in the pod's main living area. "Damn it! Just what I was afraid of."

"What? What's wrong?" Larsen asked.

"The retrorocket's toast. It's not firing. Comms aren't working either. I'm getting only minimal power. Not enough to reach anyone." His fingers were a furious blur and his eyes and implants were probably moving at a similar pace. I waited a few moments.

"Well?" I asked him.

"Well what?" He snapped at me.

"Did you get it fixed?"

"It's barely been five seconds! I can't even tell what the damage is yet."

"Well, hurry up, damn it. That's an order."

We all waited in tense silence for a minute or two, but finally Carver pushed off this console and made a disgusted noise.

"Fuel line works, conduits work, the retrorocket's fuel intake is damaged and our comms cables work, but not at full power. Why didn't I pick up on this before? Damn it! Here we are stuck in an unarmed pod and we can't even use the only two things we need to survive. Brilliant." Carver threw his hands up, then walked off into another room.

"So you can get it fixed right?" I called out.

"No, no I can't and because of that we're now facing a slow death from dehydration." Carver said in exasperated and panicked tones.

"Calm down, okay? We can get through this, we're not out of options yet."

"Well, we're out of good options, aren't we?" He responded bitterly.

I glanced at Larsen and Chen. They were listening intently.

"Maybe, but we have options. Don't give up just yet, not until we try everything."

While the pod’s food and water were good for months, if we weren’t found soon, we probably never would be. In other words, after about a week, we were utterly fucked. We did have options, but they weren't ones that would lead to being saved. It was more like how we wanted to go out. I suspected everyone knew that but there was no sense in saying it out loud.

"Sure, sure. Do you want to try praying our way back to Earth?" Carver replied, shaking his head at me. "Well, I suppose if we're stuck out here I can at least solve a mystery first. Do you mind if I have a peek at your suit recordings, Chen?” Carver motioned with his hands in a grabbing gesture, his foul mood practically flowing from him like water.

At Carver’s question, I took another look at Chen. He looked less panicked than Carver, but that wasn't exactly reassuring. Something strange was going on with him.

“Sure. I’m feeling fine now, I think.” Chen replied calmly, looking alert and awake, almost excessively, if such a thing can be said.

“Fine?” I asked indignantly, my ire rising. “It’s hardly been a few minutes. How can you go from looking like you’ve seen a ghost to ‘fine’ in less than ten minutes? What the hell is going on with you?”

“I don’t know!” Chen laughed incredulously, joyously. That set off alarm bells for me. Every red flag in the book. “I don’t feel like someone was examining my soul under a microscope anymore, though.”

“Send us your suit recordings. Hell, send all your vitals too.” I insisted. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you were high.” I glared at him with suspicion and I had to make a conscious effort not to move my hand towards my sidearm, which was riding low on my hip.

“Alright, but I don’t know what you’ll find. I feel fine.” Chen insisted, quite level-headed by all appearances.

“Yeah, and that worries us.” Larsen pointed out, frowning.

“Was he exposed to the gas? Or something else?” I asked, directing the question to Carver.

“What are you, stupid? Sarin gas doesn’t make you see things, or act nuts. Sarin gas just kills you.”

I rolled my eyes. “I know that dumbass. I’m grasping at straws. Do some digging anyway and let me know if something comes up. I’m going to have a look around.” I got up, letting my rifle hang from a small strap on my armour.

Despite my intention to look around, there wasn’t a lot to look around for, but there were a few different rooms in the pod and it had been years since I’d looked at one from the inside so I felt like doing it.

The next hour passed quickly after that and we settled into a comfortable silence as we immersed ourselves in studying Chen’s suit recordings and vital signs. Disappointingly, there was nothing in there that shed any light on recent events. I decided to spend my time inventorying the small pod and poking around for something more interesting to do than busywork.

I tallied up all the things you’d expect, after a thorough but mind-numbing search. About three months of food and water for four people and our rifles and twenty-one spare rifle magazines between us. That and all the usual stuff you’d need to survive in space for a time like a pair of vacsuits and hand tools. The list I compiled was longer and more varied than you might think, but in many ways it was much shorter than I’d have liked.

The hours passed quickly, then days. Days turned to weeks and soon it had been a month. By the time the seventh week had rolled around, rescue had become not just unlikely, but all but impossible. I could feel the boredom getting to me. There’s only so many rounds of cards you can play and movies you can watch before you begin going nuts.

I didn’t know where we were when we abandoned ship, but we were supposed to go out and patrol the frontier of human space beyond the fringe. The odds of being found out there were drastically lower than the more densely populated regions of human space. We had to have drifted far from the ship’s initial position by now too. If we’d ejected near the Core Worlds we’d probably all be enjoying a cold beer already, but as things stood we didn’t know when or if we’d ever be rescued. I was already beginning to lose hope.

After some discussion, the four of us decided to place ourselves in the pod’s stasis chambers, to reawaken someday, or not at all. We knew the odds of waking up were stacked against us and not by a small margin, either, but no one felt like starving to death or going crazy from the isolation. I certainly didn’t see much point in laying around and eating all the food until we started fighting over who got the last human thigh.

Standing in front of the stasis pods, naked and frankly freezing from the frigid temperature, we looked at the marvels of technology with a wary eye. There were four bulky cylinders fixed to a wall taking up all the space from floor to ceiling. A small screen above the pod’s door gave a readout of the occupant’s vital signs and the time in stasis elapsed.

I examined the tall, bulky pods with some amount of trepidation, though I did my best to pretend I wasn’t fazed. Honestly though, the thought of not waking up and being frozen alive scared me more than combat.

Fear was something you couldn’t show to those under your command. It created doubt and doubt created chaos and distraction. In other words, it absolutely destroyed a unit’s discipline and combat effectiveness to see their commander standing around pissing his pants in fear or panicking. That was one of the first lessons I’d ever learned about leading soldiers and it was foremost in my mind at that moment. I had to keep it together, at least until we all went into our pods.

“I’ve never been in one of these things before. Does it hurt?” I asked, an open question to the others.

“We’ll be fine.” Carver said. “You won’t really feel anything. You’ll fall asleep and if no one comes along… well, we just won’t wake up.”

I nodded to him, trying to speak firmly and confidently. “I’ll see you when we wake up then.” What went unsaid was that I hoped we would wake up, but there was no sense in voicing that thought, it would only cause problems. Besides, each of us was probably thinking the same thing at that moment.

I climbed into the pod in front of me gingerly, as though it might malfunction if I moved too suddenly. The rest of my team did likewise and I heard the soft sounds of doors closing as they each sealed themselves in.

The latches and locks clicked shut as we were entombed in our stasis pods. I felt a sharp prick in my arm and then, very quickly, the hiss and whir of the pod around me began lulling me to sleep. The specially formulated stasis drugs blanketed my mind in a dark, sleepy haze, but I had time enough to wonder a little bit as I fought the drugs in my system.

Would we ever wake up? Had we just given up our last days of existence for a quiet and painless death? Was I about to have my last conscious thought? I had no idea. All I knew was that our fate was now in the hands of whoever reigned over the black, unforgiving cosmos. I just hoped whoever it was kept me breathing, because I didn’t relish the thought of dying like a frozen sardine. When I died, I wanted a chance to fight back and take a few bastards with me.