“A Skug vessel?” Follee whined.
“Move!” I swatted him with my gun. I’d wasted one Skug. I hoped there weren’t others aboard.
“Get in,” I commanded the two of them. Pushing buttons on the keyring remote, I got the airlock opening. Follee scurried in to the small pressure chamber beyond. Dumb fucker. If he hadn’t stopped to play peekaboo with that stupid eel, maybe we’d have had that extra minute to get to Bantam. Yeah, and maybe be blown up in the meantime. All real useful conjecture, Rusco.
I darted into the mutant craft’s airlock after Blest, dragging the Skug last. He didn’t look good, his tusked face a pasty white and drenched in sweat. We sealed the door and re-pressurized the chamber. Then we scrambled out the back into the cargo bay. Blest combed the periphery, hobbling on his one good leg. Nobody seemed to be around. The other Skugs who’d manned this vessel must have gotten baked back in the station.
According to the suit sensors, the air seemed breathable so we took off our helms. We shuffled to the bridge, Follee helping me drag the Skug down the hall. A bloody slime pool trailed from his bleeding wound. His breath came as a tortured rasp.
“You can fly this shitbox?” I barked at Follee.
“Y-yeah, I think so. Not so different than an A2X.”
“Do it! What are you standing around waiting for?”
He scrambled to attention, flicking controls on the console while mumbling under his breath.
“We can force this mutant to show us how to run this thing,” I said, “if I have to wake him from the dead and shove his teeth into the nav panel myself.” I looked down at the control panel in growing disgust. Lots of green and red lights flashing amid myriad dials, more intricate than Bantam’s console, packed with symbols and script incomprehensible to my eyes.
Follee got the craft moving out of the hangar. Some of the Skugs had tuned into our escape. Their ships lifted off after us.
I grimaced, uttering nasty words. Wren and Noss had Alastar up and running, limping along at impulse speed. Christ, their warp was still inactive. What could they do? Skugs took pursuit, three of them, and now one of Mong’s Warhawks lifted into the fray. My heart dropped. I looked out onto a dead hope as the station slipped behind us, a massive grey cube with broken antennae and cannons fading in the rear viewport.
The logical course was to engage the Skug light drive and warp out of here, drive away the memories with a lot of drink and Myscol. But the memories of Wren played in my mind, and how they would haunt me to the end of time. The times she’d saved my ass and aroused my passion and caressed my body. As much as Alastar was doomed without light drive, I couldn’t leave Wren or Noss to die.
With a roaring oath, I smashed my fist on the console aside Follee and ordered him to speed after Alastar. He blinked in confusion. To avoid my wrath, he set the craft chasing after her. I manned the warp if things got dicey. I shot beams of fire at whatever came out of the hangar.
An echoing boom struck our hull, high and aft. Echoing hits raked our hull. My eyes squinted at the grey panels above. Blest licked his lips, clutched the table with a white-fisted hand.
“Dodge them!” I bawled. “Follee, keep them away from Wren and Noss!”
Follee was no fighter pilot. Our shields were getting hammered. But he maneuvered with confident hands clicking the toggles and pushing sliders, guiding the Skug beetle on a tortuous course after the beleaguered Vega 6. Blest watched in white-faced horror.
Although we were Alastar’s rearguard shield, I saw she was getting hit hard by fiery blasts. Follee hailed her on general frequency. “Noss!” He blurted out in a hoarse voice. “Do you read me? Noss!”
Noss’s voice came fluting over the com, a faint-edged staticky rasp.
“About the warp…reboot the time relapse circuit. I know that ship! It must have flaked out while on course to The Dim Zone. The reboot will recalibrate the light drive…”
Despite Noss’s maneuvering and Wren’s fire, Alastar was taking too much damage. We looped inside each other’s paths. Suddenly there was a wild swarm of enemy ships all around us. Skugs, Warhawks, green, red, yellow, blue beams flaring in all directions.
Fareon fire flashed in wild torrents. A complete soup bowl of chaos. I saw a Skug ship explode in front of our starboard viewport. Then it took out another of its kind, rolling, burning, flipping end over end to splatter shrapnel against our hull. The junk clattered like hail stones. Our heat sensors beeped out warnings as temperatures rose. A thin, robotic voice called out in some guttural tongue, which I guessed was something like, “Danger, Will Robinson, danger. Hull integrity at 30%!”
I targeted anything that moved. Another Skug vessel caught fire and exploded in a blazing ball.
Sudden triumph dawned as the light-drive trails on Alastar gleamed from her stern. A rainbow color blazed from her like a light highway turned to infinity. She stretched to a pancake, then was gone.
I howled in glee. “Follee, get us away—”
But my voice faltered as the cabin lights dimmed and the bridge went dark. The ship lurched. A hell of a whump hit our starboard side, knocking us tumbling end over end.
I picked up my feet, scratching my head where it had struck the console weapons’ board.
Mong’s warship loomed in our viewport. We yawed
