Carthus stared at the dashboard in front of him, counting the minutes that stood between him and getting some sleep. There were still several hours left. Absence of such long trips at the helm was something he missed from his fighter jock days. Someone else would take the long haul, he just had to be in the launch tube ten minutes before arrival. To pass the time, he wondered about the source and reason of the disturbing distress call. [i]”‘Stranded. Planet is…’. Perhaps someone landed a survey team without knowing what wildlife lived there? ‘So many dead...’ Hungry wildlife, by the sound of it. ‘Oh, God…!’”[/i] He sneered [i]”If there is a god, you are being eaten by his creations. Why would he bother with helping you lot?”[/i] Given the screaming in the background, he doubted they would find anything besides scattered remains. They still had a day's trip ahead of them just to get there. He looked out the window, still not quite sure about who put it in the CIC. A full day. And most of it spent in this chair, with the same picture in front of him.

A warning light on his console flared up, alerting him about an anomaly with the jump drive. But before he could see what exactly was wrong, it became apparent by itself as the Monroe shuddered slightly before being violently jerked aside as it was pulled out of FTL. Having neglected the seatbelts, Carthus was thrown out of his seat like a rag doll. It took him a few seconds to pick himself up. Cursing the dull pain in his forehead, he ignored the threat being broadcast and strapped himself in, going over the ship’s basic systems. No damage. Not yet, anyway. He took a moment to look at some of the ships he assumed were the attackers. An assortment of junk with engines strapped to it. The ship shook again as a round hit them. Engines and guns, apparently. His fingers ran across the controls as the Captain entered.

“It’s Carthus with a ‘u’, sir.” he whispered under his breath at the mispronunciation of his name as he fired the dorsal, port-aft and starboard-bow RCS thrusters, sending the Monroe downwards relative to its position in a left spin. [i]”Just like a fighter, except bigger. Keep moving, don’t move in straight lines for more than a few seconds, the enemy that kills you is the enemy you cannot see.”[/i] Those were the basics, hammered into his memory by 55 years of active service. One of the ships was listing, its weapons firing at nothing. That would be the easiest to get past. Maybe if that ship got between the Monroe and the rest of the fleet, they’d stop firing to avoid further damage to one of their own. [i]”Worth a try.”[/i] he decided, arresting the spin and burning toward the vessel.

As the Monroe made its way toward its intended destination, Carthus kept making small, random changes in heading and attitude to throw off the enemy gunners and make it harder for their targeting software to compensate. This would also make any attempts of a boarding action harder, though far from impossible. On the downside, it also made the AI’s job of firing back equally harder. But it was a machine, it would find a way. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be there.

His original plan was shot to hell when another one of the enemy ships came into his view, filling half of the window. Despite their appearance, those wrecks were quite agile. Carthus turned the ship ninety degrees to the right and fired the forward thrusters for a few seconds, reversing around the mobile junkyard that cut them off, but that landed the Monroe just a few hundred meters from where they begun. Carthus tried a different direction, but a similar scenario played out. Perhaps crippling one of the ships would create a window large enough to slip through.

“So what’s the plan Captain? Can’t jump away and they aren’t too excited about us leaving this box of theirs either. I don’t think they’ll let us bounce around like this for much longer, sooner or later they’ll clip our wings and we’ll be at their mercy or stuck drifting away into space.”