Night-Owl Trucking

Thursday, 12:17am

The sleek silver vessel listed starboard, drawing a lazy spiral through the vacuum as she bled atmosphere into the cold, unforgiving black. She was the shining centerpoint in a glittering constellation of debris, drifting amid a self-made nebula of prismatic gas and flame. A dark shape lurked ten-thousand meters off, hardly more than a silhouette against the stars. The small, brutally angled hunter devoured the intervening space in a burst of its sub-light engines, and latched its jaws on the neck of its wounded prey. The TFR Endeavour lurched underfoot as her hull suffered a fresh breach, and invaders began to climb through from the predator's venomous bite.

"What hit us?!"
"—show fire on decks three through seven, venting—"
"Power down across the ship, Captain, and we're—"
"Life support critical in Hydroponics!"
"—losing atmosphere on Four and Five! Where are—"
"Coolant spike in Reactor Three!"
"Automatic bulkhead failure on Seven, get a crew—!"

The ship jolted sharply to one side, and her overworked grav-system struggled to compensate. Captain Somteul Pak watched in helpless fury as her crew stumbled and fell from their stations while the red-alert klaxons shrieked overhead. The stocky woman ducked beneath a raised hand, hiding her face from a shower of fat yellow sparks. "Will somebody shut off that damned alarm?" she bellowed. The power flickered and died, leaving the bridge swallowed by a moment's darkness before the dim red emergency lights flickered to life.

"Thank you," the Captain grunted to no-one in particular as she pulled Helmsman Dafydd* to his feet. He mumbled a pained Sorry, Ma'am before he climbed back into his station and fastened his emergency harness. The bridge control consoles and the main viewscreen winked back online with a sluggish, static-drenched reboot. Pak turned to survey her senior officers and repeated her question in the heavy, suffocating silence, "What hit us?"

"Two separate events, Captain," Lieutenant Commander Index examined his tactical instrumentation, keying up a readout on another screen. "The first looks to have been a kinetic weapon strike..." He squinted in disbelief, the dim blue and white light from his display shining in his magenta-lensed eyes. "Almost like a bullet, Captain. It went through our shields at a sizable fraction of lightspeed, and—" He scowled in new-found concern, "It tore a hole clean through the shuttle bay above Engineering."

"And what was the second?"

Major Jakarta Kirana interrupted the tall blond man's next sentence, "—We've been boarded, Ma'am!" The security chief held a finger to the communicator fixed behind her ear, listening for a moment before scrambling into motion. She talked quickly as she filled pouches on her bandoleer, fastening detonators and multitools to her belt, "That second hit was an airlock being punched into the Science bays. Special Projects," she added before Captain Pak could verbalize the question on her face. The short, red-haired woman checked her holstered plasma sidearm, and drew a beam rifle from the locker beside her station.

"Miss Jefferies, hailing frequencies!" Pak leaned over the arm of her captain's chair and pulled her control console open. She keyed the intercom and barked an order, "All hands, prepare defensive measures! We have been boarded for reasons unknown, and—"

A shriek of feedback cut through the air, interrupting the Captain's message. An alien tongue rolled across the bridge, shaped by guttural syllables and harsh clicking consonants. A moment later, a cold, mechanical voice ground out of the speakers set around the bridge, sending an unsettling vibration through the soles of their boots. Give us the one like us... or be destroyed.

Pak and her crew exchanged confused glances and muttered questions. "The one like you?" the stocky woman's soft confusion echoed throughout the ship. Pak gestured to her communications officer, then set her jaw and glared at the main viewscreen as she raised her voice, "Attention, unidentified aggressors: stand down. We can assist you in your search. We are an exploratory research vessel, not a ship of war. I repeat, stand down."