Junebug lolled in semi-conciousness. Although the cocktail of drugs her armor’s trauma pack had delivered meant that she wasn’t in pain per se, the disruptive pharmacologics meant that her experience was fragmentery at best. She had a confused impression of Neil talking to a giant lizard and to another man she felt she should have known, but that seemed less important than whether or not she had reloaded her plasma rifle. The Colonel would tear a strip off her hide if she didn’t lead by example with a fully loaded weapon. Motivated by this abstract impulse she tried to move her arms only to discover that neither of them seemed to cooperate. 

It was the trauma pack. She must have been hit. That didn’t seem important, though she really should ask Munroe to show her how to cut the basic trauma cocktail with combat drugs. Better to go out swinging anyway.

“What was that Captain?” Neil asked, his face almost comically concerned hung a few feet away from her, free from any context. Had she spoken aloud. Where was she? 

“Careful,” she wheezed and closed her eyes shut as waves of dizzying nausea swept over her. She wanted to tell him not to trust the lizard man, and also ask what the lizard mans name was and what he was doing here, but the thoughts and words swirled together in the chemically induced haze that lay over her mind. If she didn’t get to a medicomp or a doctor shortly the trauma meds would give out. Unfortunately that was as impossible to communicate to Neil in her present state as astrographic mathematics would have been. 

“How did you get us into this again…” she murmured before blackness swallowed her. 

Taya hauled furiously at the controls, but no matter how much she struggled the Highlander didn’t deviate from its course. Tears of frustration burned in her eyes, Junebug and Neil were depending on her and she didn’t know what to do.

“Aye thars nay yise tearin the control yoke oof,” Loney advised in his irritating brogue.

“What else can I do!” Taya shouted, the Terran Cruiser had come out of the shadow of the gas giant as they lifted. The massive capital ship was half a kilometer long and bristling with weaponry. Reinforced black hull plating made it a shadow against the stars though its electronic signature screamed at any vessel large enough to mount a sensor suite.

“Are the vessels from the planet still closing?” Taya asked looking down at the attack board. As if summoned by her words four lances of brilliant white blue energy erupted from the cruiser. At the end of each beam an explosion blossomed as the fleet grade weapons tore Gnorlac hired gunships into thinly dispersed ion sheets. 

“Thatd be a no lassie,” Lonney stated without inflection. The notion that such a beam could have ended the Highlander was as plain as it was chilling. For whatever reason the Terran’s had locked her with a graviton beam rather than a targeting array. Lesson learned Taya let go of the controls and let the Highlander fall completely under the sway of the big ship. THere was no point in tearing the freighter to bits trying to get out of a beam that could have moved a good sized asteroid with ease.  A slit opened in the side of the cruiser and the Highlander, like a piece of krill in some ancient ocean, was drawn into the things maw.