The sudden light of the sun was blinding. Junebug stood like a statue, unable to move or even breathe. She had the disturbing sensation that her heart wasn’t beating. They were on a dune, an almost shear wall of falling sand. In the distance smoke rose from the shattered mesa where, a second ago she would have sworn she stood. Two brass casings hung suspended in the air beside her ejection port, held in the air by nothing Junebug could determine. Saxon stood beside her, equally imobile, his wrist mounted cannon was frozen in mid muzzle blast, the small hyper velocity bullets frozen a few inches from the muzzle. 

With a sudden crack the muzzle blast completed and the suspended bullets vanished, the casings fell to the sand below her feet and Junebug staggered her mind reeling. She had been shooting at someone, hadn’t she? But that had been inside a spacecraft? Recent memories were confused and garbled and she could remember little since being thrown into the alien ship. Taya fell to the sand beside her, a small pistol in her hand and her eyes wide and staring. No ne seemed able to move but after a moment Junebug’s hands moved on their own, mechanically stripping the half empty clip from her stolen rifle and replacing it with a fresh one. The action snapped shut and the sound seemed to free the others from their temporary paralysis. Saxon leaped to his feet, bearing his teeth and letting out a sibilant screech of rage. He really was quite attractive in a primal sort of way Junebug observed. Neil stepped into view and helped Taya to her feet.

“What happened…” Taya gasped, her eyes wide and terrified.

“We used the lifeboat,” Neil explained, he was calmer looking that Sayeeda felt he had any right to be. Whatever had happened they clearly weren’t in a lifeboat she thought mulishly.

“What lifeboat,” Taya asked, clearly desperate for something she could make sense of.

“I told you they had control over time,” Neil explained, looking a little uncomfortable.

“AID, replay past thirty seconds at 2x,” Junebug instructed, speaking only with a considerable mental effort. Her helmet obediently began to replay footage, she saw the doors blowing off their hinges and the muzzle flash of her own weapon as she opened fire. Saxon stepped from behind cover to add his fire to hers. Junebug saw herself reload, catching a glimpse of Taya, eyes squeezed shut, firing her pistol the direction of the door. Sayeeda leveled her rifle and opened fire, her view point rocking with the violence of the long automatic burst and then… she stood on the dune.

“It froze us in time, just for a second,” Neil was saying, “enough that the rotation of the planet bought us clear.”

Junebug’s mind shied away from the implication of the statement and she mentally shrugged, trying to fight her way clear of the mental apathy that whatever had just happened had induced. To the eyes of the enemy they must simply have vanished, although that might be hard to be sure of in the chaos and confusion of their attempted breach.

“Cyckali,” Saxon hissed, his Hexagallion mouthparts doing a better job of rendering her last name than either her given name or her nickname. She turned to see him pointing away down the trough of the june. Perhaps a half a kilometer away there smoked a metallic object that shimmered with heat. Her helmet magnified the view to show Canek’s tank. It lay on a pool of glass, its composite armor all but glowing with heat energy. The turret was completely gone, lifted by the force of the blast when one of the anti-tank artillery shells had found the fusion bottle. Junebug had seen the sight to many times to hold out any hope. Her mouth worked and she began to laugh. They had no money, no parts to fix the Highlander, their employer was a cloud of vaporized carbon, they were in the middle of the desert with no transport and an unknown number of well equipped enemies were certain to hunt them down as soon as they realised they weren’t hiding on the ship somewhere. The almost hysterical laughter echoed of the quiet dunes, broken only by the distant crack of fracturing metal as the stricken tank collapsed in on itself.