Before Semo can follow up, Clay spouts blood from a tight group of new orifices. Without even looking back, Semo is pretty sure that Angel is the cause. Nobody shoots like that living shadow.
Shifting his attention, Semo attempts to introduce Yaris to his shiny alien blade.
Right on Hugh's tail into the bridge, Luis is lining up a shot at the priority target, namely Yaris, when Hugh takes a hard shot from Kovos' little phaser. Luis' reaction is swift and almost instictual- nobody does that to his captain- and he moves between Hugh and Kovos and pulls the trigger. Kovos goes down, hard, and he isn't coming up soon. Imediate threat to his captain removed, Luis quickly takes inventory, and notices that:
1. Yaris is still alive and plugged in, though injured and
2. The spook is missing.
He shrugs off the later, figuring Davis probably came up with another brilliant plan to save the day, leaving them stuck with the dirty work. Classic CIA, he thinks as he readies himself to circle around the commad chair and finish the job. This needs to end, now.
Luis sidesteps right to bring his sidearm against Yaris. Her golden optics are the only emotionless thing about her face, which is twisted in pain and hate.
"You should have buckled u-" she manages before Luis shoots her three times.
Angel snaps his sights to Yaris, but Stanhill is faster. He sweeps over Kovos, but the old man is down for the count. The bridge looks clear and nobody's been pasted to the wall.
---
"I'm through!" One-Ton shouts at Davis. He unfurls a long cable off a wall mount - Davis remembers the shipboy toting a similar patch cable when they boarded - and tosses one end to Davis.
"Touch your end to what you just ripped out!" the engineer orders. He takes his end of the cable and makes contact with the severed conduit just as Davis does the same on his end.
There's a bang and a flash. Davis knows nothing else.
---
Back on the bridge, Yaris' eyes blow out of their sockets. Her dying body arches back as the power slated for the cruise engines is shunted into her skull. The thin cable can't handle the load and blows out at its floor connection, whipping around like a startled cobra. Yaris slides off the command couch onto the bridge floor. The blood around her ruined eyes is black and caked on. The back of her scalp is burnt away, leaving just her charred skull and the still-sizzling plug. Her gunshot wounds continue to pool crimson on the deck, which suddenly cuts out its holographic display. The bridge returns to its native blank chrome-and-steel state.
The cruise engine warmup cuts out with a painful whine. You have the distinct feeling that you've just traded an imminent death-by-physics for a death by Imperial boarding party.
"What... what just happened?" signs Swims-in-Black with his good hand.
"Clear!" Hugh shouts as he sweeps the room one more time. "Stanhill, get the ship under control, I'll handle the crew! Doc, start hacking the transponders!"
He snatches the first aid kit from Luis and bows down to work on Swims-the-Black. He's not as good as the Sarge at patching people back together, but he should be able to stabilize the Whirr captain, at least.
"Save your strength, Captain. We'll get you out of this mess."
Hugh pulls Swims' hand away from the wound and realizes that he doesn't know what any of the Whiirr's broken parts do. He opts for the generic "keep pressure on it" and "stop the bleeding". He wonders about painkillers but decides that the shaggy captain can still talk, so he can deal with it. Better to be in pain than to find out it's poison. Besides, he could use the painkillers for himself right now.
Meanwhile, Luis takes stock of the command couch. It's taken two bullets and God knows how much power got shunted through its connections, but Luis knows it's their only hope. He sits down and tries to remember as much as he can from his short visit to the bridge. Unfortunately, the holographic controls don't appear to be... appearing.
"Between your... legs, flip the right toggle..." Swims manages. He talks Luis through rebooting the bridge systems and bringing the manual controls online. Now these look vaguely normal, Luis thinks as panels in the couch armrests slide open to reveal a battery of switches and stubby yokes. The holographic viewscreen reboots but only covers from 6 o' clock to 2 o' clock high - there's a significant blind spot below the ship and to the rear right. It's enough to figure out that Akamu is drifting backwards on a low angle in the direction of the Gateway and its Imperial guardians. You're less than a million miles from the Needleship now. The range, delta-v, and other navigational information comes up onscreen in a tsunami of angry glyphs.
At present speed, you'll pass the Needleship in 15 minutes and skip past the Gate in 30 more minutes - missing it by over 100,000 miles laterally. If you pulled a Yaris and stopped the ship, you'd still overshoot the Needleship by several thousand miles. It'd certainly raise suspicion, but the fact that you're coming in ass-first and haven't fired engines might be raising that same suspicion.
"Time is vital," Swims says. "Perhaps I should take the cha-" he tries to get up, lets out a pained shout, and sits back. "Or you seem to be doing fine," he tells Luis. "Unfurl the vox array." Luis follows the Whiirr's instructions and a secondary station rotates out from a wall sconce. It's a communications/navigation station.
"Urrr... we got... the first vox to stop right before you came up. We should be getting an imperative any second now. If they keep to regs, they'll vox a third imperative accompanied by laser transmission in case our vox is out. Then they'll dispatch vessels to force us to stop."
To add to the chaos, the redskinned shipboy clatters up from Engineering. "Top, located the kid!" shouts Mellish, grabbing the boy in case he wasn't aware the mutiny was quelled.
"No, no!" shouts the kid. "One-Ton and Davis, they're hurt!"
"It never rains..." Hugh murmurs to himself. "I'm going to see if I can patch them up. Stanhill, Doc, you got your orders. Sarge, I need everyone accounted for - and go find us some spacesuits!"
"Clear!" Hugh shouts as he sweeps the room one more time. "Stanhill, get the ship under control, I'll handle the crew! Doc, start hacking the transponders!"
"On it." says Max, slinging his SCAR-H and moving over to (what's left) of the communications terminal, pulling out his laptop and attempting to jack in.
"Any help with this may hurry our exit..." asks Max politely to Swims.
"...We're looking to ghost the ship with false transponders."
"You mean decoys?" asks Swims-the-Black, "Or do you wish to display us as a different vessel? If they're searching all vessels, the latter does not help. As for the former, we should have five drones loaded and ready to go. But only fire them once we're on full burn... if we're going to full burn..."
---
The painkillers dull the pain in Hugh's arm. He clatters down the steps to Engineering. Smoke hangs in the engine chamber, a thin fog of fried electronics and sizzled flesh.
Davis lies crumpled eight feet from a sparking panel on the engine core. His hands are badly burnt but Hugh guesses the majority of the damage was from electrocution. A long, thin cable stretches from a wall conduit. The conduit's been crudely hacked into. Fire still licks along the patch cable near its connection point on the conduit. One-Ton looks like he was blown clear off the wall and hit one of the support beams that crisscross the engine room. Massive black bruising on his knee indicates a bad twist or a broken leg. His hands are charred pretty badly too.
Hugh does what he can. Davis comes around in a coughing fit and finds that nothing appears to be broken, raw meat on his hands aside. Hugh manages to bring One-Ton back to the living as well. The bearded man's frizzled hair still stands on end.
"Shit... cruise engines'll be *cough* offline after that. Gotta... gotta fix 'em." The engineer tries to get up and finds that his leg is indeed broken.
"Gaahhh!" He lies back down. "Okay, fuck it... center panel, don't mess with the holos. Turn that key, crank the right lever down- NO, that's a slider, I said lever - yeah, crank that down and tell whoever's flying not to turn the ship till I say so."
Hugh does what he's told and finds that he's floating.
---
In fact, everything in Akamu gradually becomes weightless. The cockpit is now a chaotic ballet of spent brass, globules of blood, and drifting corpses.
---
One-Ton breathes a sigh of relief and easily monkeys his way to the sparking access hatch and the twisted mass of spaghetti Davis yanked free. "I gotta reconnect all these, it'll be a few minutes."
Luis doesn't mind the gravity shift - he's strapped into the command couch. Sensors - heat, optical, radar, God knows what - paint the oncoming situation in what little remains of Akamu's rear view.
The Needleship is visible on telescopes, and at magnification indeed looks like a needle. Sensor pings show 3 lumbering assault ships and three pairs of interceptors. At least ten other vessels are in a holding pattern relative to the Needleship, all waiting their turn for the boarding parties.
Semo finds microgravity terribly unwieldy, but in his frantic bouncing from wall to floor to ceiling throughout Akamu's interior, he accounts for everyone.
One-Ton, Davis, and Hugh are in Engineering. Mellish, the shipboy, and Taylor are holding in the crash couches. Max, Stanhill, Swims, and Arketta are on the bridge.
Personnel accounted for, Semo looks for vacuum suits. The suitlockers yield fourteen spacesuits ranging from stark white to dingy gray. There are also clip-on packs that appear to be suit repair sprayers, safety lanyards, and maneuvering belts.
Once Semo gets the hang of bouncing around in null gravity, he makes his way back to the bridge to report. "All hands accounted for, sir. Fourteen suits located."
"You mean decoys?" asks Swims-the-Black, "Or do you wish to display us as a different vessel? If they're searching all vessels, the latter does not help. As for the former, we should have five drones loaded and ready to go. But only fire them once we're on full burn... if we're going to full burn..."
"Decoys. There's no way we're going to ghost our own signiature." replies Max.
The gravitic impellers are still offline with no word from One-Ton when you get the second transmission from the Needleship via vox:
*Freighter Akamu, this is the Imperial Needleship Golden Harbinger, you have not responded to our imperative. Please come to a stop relative to us NOW and make ready to be boarded.*
"Got it!" calls One-Ton over the intraship vox. Your insides lurch as gravity gently pulls you back to the decks. The tinkle of spent brass is in stark contrast to the drips and plops of blood. "Cruise engines are back, you've got as much power as I can give 'em. I'm getting to my couch."
Swims-the-Black painfully crawls to the curved wall opposite Max's station and unfurls a third seat from the wall. He settles back, signing as he straps in. "Luis, when the time is right, pull back on both yokes until the Gate glyph lies on your yellow flightline. Max, don't fire the drones until Luis engages cruise engines. We'll lose our flightline, so keep us centered on the Gate glyph. On... *cough*... my mark, pulse the code for Jang-xur to the Gate, then pulse the abort once we're through."
The minutes pass like days. Two of the ships in the queue power up and continue their way to the Gate as Akamu hurls its way through the void. One of the assault ships finally breaks off and starts a slow intercept - it should meet up with you a few hundred to a thousand miles past the Needleship.
You finally get the tightband transmission from the Golden Harbinger. A pulsing red light's easily answered by a click from Max, and the transmission arcs across the bridge viewscreen:
*Imperial Needleship Golden Harbinger orders full stop from freighter Akamu. Failure to acknowledge by vox or laser will result in pacification.*
To punctuate the message, one pair of interceptors arc their way towards Akamu.
From the displays, it looks like you have three minutes until the assault ship matches speed. The two interceptors are taking an intimidating but ultimately lazy course - they won't be a threat for five more minutes at their current speed.
You can see the Harbinger now without magnification, just a silver gash in the pure black. You'll pass it in just over two minutes.
"As you know, my... my language is not *cough* suited for this," Swims says. "Now would... be a f-fine time for your men to reply to the comm pulse."
If no further orders are forthcoming, Semo will find his way to a couch once the grav comes back. It does so, and he crashes to the deck, hard. Fortunately, the Samoan's kinda like that old Timex slogan: "takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'." Still, his shoulder aches a bit as he slides into the couch.
Max routes the message from engineering through the ship's vox antenna.
"*crackle* hailing Golden Harbringer, repeat Akuma hailing Golden Harbringer, acknowledge your last but unable to comply. Main engines are nonfunctional, repeat non-functional. Please advise. Do you copy?" except substituting in the appropriate Imperium vox slang for Terran radio slang.
As the response comes in, Luis nods to himself, and checks the relative positions of the Akuma and the Harbringer. As he does so, he moves his hands over the controls without touching them, practicing the movements Swims-in-Black has instructed him on the way a musician practices fingerings without blowing into the instrument. When the time comes, he wants to be as ready as he can be.
Luis checks the scopes. It'll be close, but Akamu will have drifted past the Harbinger by several hundred miles by the time the assault ship catches up.
"You need... suits..." Swims signs, clearly at his limit for pain. He's stable and he's tough, but he's going on almost 20 minutes with no painkillers. "Lanyards snap.. into airlock clasps... all very basic."
"Get your suits on," Arketta tells Semo and Angel. "I'll help you with the seals and bring the spare launchers."
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