That isn't exactly an easy task for me to go into your armor's data storage and start rooting around. Standby…let me see if anything stands out.
Jason dragged Fendra over to the airlock hatch, ignoring her as she tried to kick out at him with her bound feet, and pulled the plasma rifle off the anchors on his back. There was an icy, hard lump in his stomach as he realized that all the ships were probably getting ready to depart, and he had no idea where Lucky was. For all he knew, his friend has managed to get aboard the other battleship and suffered a catastrophic malfunction.
Found it. There is no code. All security protocols have been overridden by the ConFed tech teams, every hatch in the ship is currently unlocked to allow the teams unfettered access.
"Accommodating of them," Jason said, walking to the airlock and commanding the hatch open. As Cas had assured him, the locks released with a clank, and the hatch swung wide open. He dragged his prisoner in closed the hatch behind him, commanding the lock to cycle. As the atmosphere was pumped out of the chamber, he toyed with the idea of breaking com silence and seeing if Lucky might answer a coded burst transmission, but quickly discarded the idea as needlessly risky. He'd trusted his friend to go off alone, knowing the risks up front, so he needed to continue trusting that Lucky was able to handle whatever was thrown at him.
Once the lock cycled and the outer hatch opened, Jason grabbed the handles on the back of Fendra's suit and carefully stepped out onto the hull. After commanding the outer hatch to close and the lock to pressurize, he pushed off the hull and drifted out into the void. Once he cleared the fifty-meter mark he deployed the twin repulsor jets on his back and fired them at fifty percent power, sending them streaking away from former Eshquarian battleship.
After shutting off his repulsors and drifting, he turned and allowed his optics to begin picking out targets. Even from this distance his sensors were easily able to see that all the ships in the formation were powering up their main reactors and engines. He began shutting down extraneous systems to save his power. Now he had nothing to do but sit and obsess about the danger Lucky could be in. Great.
"That's the last of them," Kage said.
"That was quick," Doc said. "The whole formation moved out and jumped into slip-space within three hours. We're sure there's nothing left lurking in the system?"
"Nothing on passives and every known ship was accounted for," Kage said. "Let's go ahead and send out a coded query."
"Transmitting," Doc said.
The Phoenix was hanging in space, drifting imperceptibly away from where the formation had been parked. Doc, piloting the ship, hadn't bothered to set the maneuvering jets to station keeping, reducing their chances of being spotted. Over the course of the mission, the ship had wandered only a few kilometers from the last nav point, and the more sensitive forward passive arrays were still aimed where the pride of the Eshquarian Imperial Navy used to sit.
"Picking up a response from the captain's armor, no sled and no battlesynth transponders detected," Kage said. "Sending the location to you now."
"Twingo! Bring the main drive up!"
"On it."
“So, what does this mean?" Crusher demanded. "Has Lucky been captured?
"I've told you every single thing I know about the situation," Kage said wearily. "If you were so worried about them, why didn't you go?" The line worked in shutting him up, as it had the last seventy-six times Crusher stormed onto the bridge demanding an update.
Geltens, the name for Crusher's species, were temperamentally ill-suited for extended EVA missions, the warrior caste especially so. There were physiological triggers that no amount of training or familiarity could overcome if they were floating around in the void for very long, and a Galvetic warrior having a panic attack on a covert mission was something you definitely wanted to avoid. These facts didn't assuage Crusher's guilt at staying behind, however, so whenever Jason and Lucky left the ship for a long EVA, the big bastard made himself an utter nuisance to the people trying to manage the ship.
"Main drive is up, the captain's position is locked on…let's go get him," Doc said.
"Less talking, more doing," Kage said without looking up. "I don't need a detailed explanation of every damn thing you're doing over there all the time. I'm busy over here, too. You don't see me making announcements every time I flip a switch."
"He's trying to be like Jason," Crusher laughed, and then started pretending he was flying the ship while mocking his crewmate. "Look at me! I'm the captain! I drive the ship!"
"And to think I walked away from a high salary and a position in a prestigious institute of learning to come back out here and be abused by you morons," Doc muttered, executing the script command that would allow the ship to fly itself to the armor's squawking beacon. Without having to worry about being detected, they were able to move in under what appeared to be Jason and Fendra in less than five minutes. Kage opened the back of the ship up so they could just float into the cargo bay instead of taking turns struggling down through the maintenance airlock.
By the time they all reached the cargo bay, Jason was closing up the rear pressure doors and raising the ramp back into place, the atmospheric barrier shimmering as dust particles from inside the bay impacted it. Once the ship was closed up, Jason grabbed Fendra's suit and dragged her into the middle of the bay. It was only then that the others saw that she was tied up with
