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“Pilot, can you outrun them?”
A nervous laugh tore out of Miya at the absurd question.
“Fuck!”
That didn’t sound promising. Miya had hoped for, ‘We’ll handle it, no problem,’ or something equally reassuring.
“The good news is that they don’t want us all dead,” Miya reasoned out loud. “Otherwise, they would have turned us into Swiss cheese already. They’re not hailing us either, so I’d say they want to board us. That’s what gives us some time.”
“Fucking… fuck! I told HQ we needed a military spacecraft for this mission!”
The Commander wasn’t talking to Miya, but she found herself trying to calm him down. Someone with brawn needed to stay level-headed on this ship, because she sure as hells wasn’t going to be of any use once piloting was out of the picture. “HQ were probably going for an inconspicuous look with this cargo ship. Not wanting to attract unwanted civilian attention and all that–”
“Commander,” his comm crackled, “the assassin talked right away. Said those after us are here for him, and to prepare for a fight. And… to free him.”
“Like fuck we will! They want him out, they’ll have to go through us first, whoever the fuckers are!”
“Actually, Commander… The assassin just told me we should free him so he could helpusagainstthem.”
Miya gulped. Sounded like the offer the prisoner had made to her, right after implying he’d be among the killed himself otherwise.
But if that were the case, why wasn’t this ship blown to bits already? Why board them just to kill everyone in here? It surely wasn’t because this ship was worth preserving.
“Varga, tell everyone except Garfis to gather at the assembly point, fully armed,” the Commander ordered. “Pilot, give us as much time as possible. Afterwards, lock yourself in here and wait until I tell you it’s safe to open the doors. Understood?”
“Um… sure.” That was the best answer Miya could give while undertaking evasive maneuversandunavoidably thinking about the worst-case scenario.
What would happen if the Commander didn’t give her the all-clear because… he was dead?
No, Miya was overreacting. She had a military unit of ten protecting her ass. She would be fine.
Time to do her part by giving their pursuers a run for their space credits.
Eighteen minutes. That was for how long Miya managed to keep the bad guys from attaching their ship to the hull. She would be proud of herself… if she wasn’t too preoccupied with panicking.
This was happening. They were getting boarded by who knew who.
They were all going to die!
Miya took a look at her protectors in the onboard camera next to the main airlock. They were already in position, armed to the teeth and tusks. Even the pumped-full-of-painkillers Garfis had a blaster within reach of the bed, Miya saw on the camera inside the infirmary.
Everything was going to be fine.
Two seconds later, Miya was already checking the ship’s exact location and the distance to the nearest habitable planet reachable by an escape pod.
A quick check showed the recently colonized planet Xera was pretty close, and there were 20 escape pods aboard, each capable of carrying one person.
Miya took a deep breath before exhaling slowly. There would be no need for an escape pod. The soldiers could handle any threat, just look at the size of their blasters and their muscles that had muscles!
All would be fine.
‘Let me out of here, or we will all die,’ the prisoner had said. The same guy who the ten soldiers Miya was currently relying on, were guarding with their lives. The same guards who were so afraid of asinglealien to have weapons trained on him while keeping him drugged, cuffed, blindfolded, and locked inside a cage inside a restricted-access cargo hold.
They were all going to die!
Miya was out of the pilot seat in a flash. She stepped on the passenger seats and removed the panel covering the vent on the ceiling. Tight and full of poke-y cables, the vents on this ship model were a bitch to crawl through when doing basic repairs.
Miya felt a familiar vibration under her feet. The main airlock had just been breached.
