[right][sub]location unknown[/sub][/right]

It felt like a giant toddler grabbed their ship and kept shaking with it before tossing it on the floor angrily. Kelsie and Julianna were flung across the bridge a couple of times before everything went silent again. “We are through!” David yelled at them.

“Ffshweve?” Kelsie spat out some blood, she must have bit her tongue. “Gui-a-a?” She looked around to find the young scientist’s body floating near the door. “Shiz.” Kelsie pushed herself, grabbing her and landing softly on the ceiling. The girl was unconscious but breathing steadily. The bigger problem was a broken bone that was sticking out of her thigh. “Om elp e,” she blabbered, still not able to control her tongue correctly.

David looked back and cursed. “I’m a bit busy here!” 

Kelsie looked out of the window. She expected to see Ellara in the distance and the Undefeated fleet, ships rushing in to help them. But the planet that flashed by occasionally (the ship was still rotating, albeit a lot slower now) looked like a dead wasteland. There were some unidentifiable objects floating around them and David was doing his best trying to avoid them using only the maneuvering thrusters. Kelsie pushed Julianna’s body into a seat, strapped her in and moved to David. “Whele ae ui? Wat ae dzose ings?” Her mouth kept filling with blood and her tongue was swollen. She could only hope it was still in one piece.

There were pearls of sweat popping on David’s forehead. “No idea. I’m trying to get the ship under control using the auxiliary thrusters, but we are still too fast. The main drive is offline and the thrusters weren’t designed as brakes. There is some mess outside that I try to avoid, but it’s nearly impossible.” As to confirm his words, the ship quaked and a couple of metallic bangs resonated through the hull. “Shit. That was something big.” 

Most systems went offline when the reactor died, and scanners and proximity sensors were among them. Kelsie floated closer to the window, trying to see what was outside. The ship wasn’t spinning anymore, so she had a stable view. There were certainly a lot of [i]things[/i] outside, most looked like some sort of wreckage, but there were several roughly round objects that looked intact. It was hard to guess their size and purpose, but they looked about twice as big as the Chimera. 

“Can’t we caull somefone?” Even if they ended up in a wrong Gateway, they should be able to contact the fleet on Ellara and get some help. 

“We need more power. The emergency backup is not going to last long powering the thrusters this way.”

“There is… a backup generator,” a quiet voice whispered behind them. Julianna was deadly pale and covered in cold sweat. 

Kelsie reached for a small first-aid kit mounted on the wall. “Hang oun, I will gif you somefing for tha pain.” Automated painkiller dispenser touched Julianna’s leg around the wound and she sighed in relief. Still, it wasn’t a solution. Eventually, they will have to do something about that bone sticking out of her thigh.

“I wasn’t aware that these ships had a backup generator.” David turned to them. 

“Hey, schouldn’t you be drifin the ship?”

“We are out of the wreckage field and the thrusters are set to maximum deceleration, nothing more I can do now.”

“Are you having a stroke?” Julianna gave Kelsie a suspicious look.

“Mah,” Keslie shook her head. “Bib my pongue.” 

The young scientist smiled faintly and turned her head to the cockpit window. “Hmm. You said we were out of the wreckage field. What are those things then?” She pointed at one of the circular objects that still hovered in their field of view.

David glanced at it and shrugged. “Some of these huge balls keep following us around. Not much we can do about it. So, what about that backup generator?”

“Following us? Interesting.” Julianna wiggled a bit in her seat to get a better look and immediately winced as she moved her injured leg. “Crap. The generator. It’s mine, an experimental fusion reactor. I brought it along in case I got bored.”

David laughed. “You do know normal people bring a book?”

“I’m not really a bookworm,” she smiled faintly. “It’s in compartment 39-B, I need to go there and start it.” An attempt to move made her grit her teeth.

“Yea, you are not going anywhere. Lispy here will go, you can guide her on the radio.”

“Tzhat’s [i]Gualdian[/i] lispy to you, dumass.” Kelsie was already headed towards the bridge exit, grabbing a radio. The internal comm system on the entire ship was down, but the walkie-talkies could work independently.

Fortunately, the hallway behind the bridge was still pressurised and it was easy to manually open the door. Kelsie smoothly floated towards a small storage area, pushing herself off the occasional railings on the ceiling or walls. Another door forcibly opened revealed a tiny room filled with boxes, lined with lockers on one side. Kelsie maneuvered herself in front of one locker, peeked in, and rejoiced. While the combat exoskeletons were stored in the far back of the ship, there were a couple of simple spacesuits kept near the bridge in case of emergencies. And some emergency this was. 

She quickly put one suit on and grabbed two others, bringing them back to the bridge to David and Julianna, just in case. It turned out to be a smart choice, because when she returned to the hallway and wanted to continue to the compartment with the reactor, she noticed that the next areas were either losing atmosphere fast or were already completely depressurised. In order to get there, she had to vent the atmosphere from the hallway, trapping David and Julianna on the bridge.

There was one advantage to wearing a spacesuit (other than being able to breathe in the vacuum of space, of course). It had magnetic boots, so she no longer had to float around. Zero gravity always made her stomach rumble and air acrobacy she had to do to move from one place to another made it a lot worse. 

“Fukin’ ell.” After fighting with a bent door for a few minutes, terribly missing the servos on her combat suit, it finally opened and she could enter the rear section of the ship. Or what was left of it. She stood by the door, staring at the stars where the engineering section used to be. It was all gone now, the main reactor and everything around it. [i]How did we even survive this?[/i] It was a miracle the whole ship didn’t blow up. “Ey, guys. The enchineerin is gone.”

“You can’t get there?”

“No.” One of the huge circular objects following them flew by, just a dark spot in the night sky. Was it some sort of an alien fighter? Was some tentaclish monster watching them, wondering what the hell is that piece of flying garbage doing in their home system? No communication could be established even if they had power. The communication array was cut clean off the hull. “I mean itz gone. Heading to the backup leactol.” 

Spacewalks were scary even under normal circumstances, but there was something eerie about traversing around a huge hole in the side of their ship. Fortunately, the storage facilities on the left side of the ship were intact and Kelsie soon entered through the door marked 39-B. 

The reactor didn’t look very fancy, just a big box with some cables sticking out. Julianna guided her to attach the cables to right places both to the reactor and to a large socket in a wall. Then she forced Kelsie to open a huge fuse box and ‘rewire the power conduits’, whatever that meant. The wires were tiny and looked all the same, and the thick spacesuit gloves made precise work with them incredibly difficult. Kelsie used every curse word she could think of, inventing several new ones, glad that when she turned her radio off nobody could hear her.

Finally, it was time to turn the reactor on. Apparently, all Kelsie had to do was flip a switch. One would think that a fusion reactor would have some more intricate controls. “Okay, guys, stauting it now.” The reactor lit up and started vibrating slightly. If it weren’t in vacuum, she could probably hear a quiet whirring of the electromagnets and capacitors. All she heard now was Julianna and David yelling at her into the radio to shut it down immediately. She quickly flipped the switch back and everything went still. “What happened?”

“Come to the bridge, now.”

Hmm. Kelsie would scratch her head if she weren’t wearing a helmet. She was fairly certain that the wires were in the correct place just as Julianna instructed her. Maybe the ship was too damaged to handle it? In any case, without power they were getting deeper and deeper in trouble. 

She left the compartment back into the place where the engineering used to be, looked up to see if the odd alien ball was still there and froze in place. The thing was there all right, hanging in space right next to the Chimera, but it was no longer circular. It seemed to have split around the equator, the halves sliding a bit up and down, revealing a ‘belt’ - a stripe that was previously hidden and was now bristling with pointy objects. Even though they looked alien, there was no mistaking them - they were guns, cannons of some sort, aimed at the Chimera and ready to destroy it. The whole thing was surrounded by a faint blue glow, pulsing slightly, most likely indicating it was charged and ready to go.

“Uhhh, guys?” Kelsie hesitated, talking quietly into the radio. “Are those alien balls going to mulder us?” Why was she whispering?

“Not if we remain without power apparently.” Julianna’s voice was weak and trembling.

Awesome. Without power there was no way to maneuver the ship, they were just a piece of debris flying through space. They couldn’t even broadcast a ‘we come in peace’ message, since the communication array was destroyed in the explosion. “Hello.” Kelsie waved at the alien weapon quitely floating in space, not really surprised it didn’t react in any way.

The problem with getting back to the bridge was obvious - in order to enter she would have to vent the atmosphere. And without power there was no way to repressurize it. Kelsie was already running on borrowed time, her spacesuit still had hours of air left, but once that was gone, there was no way to refill it. A shitty situation to say the least. She decided to stay just outside of the door, there was no reason to rob David and Julianna of precious oxygen.

“So, what are our options?” At least her tongue seemed to be working properly again. Under more normal circumstances Kelsie would sit on the floor, resting her back against the cold metallic wall, but that was not really possible in zero G, so she just stood there awkwardly, boots locked to the ground, arms floating around.

“To die quickly or die slowly?” David sighed.

Neither one of those sounded very tempting. “Come on, we are the Undefeated. We don’t give up.” That didn’t sound convincing at all, not even to herself.

“We have no power. No propulsion safe for a few nearly depleted maneuvering thrusters. No life support except for this small bubble of already thin air in here and a few spacesuits. No way of communicating with anyone. There are huge alien weapons chasing us ready to destroy us if it seemed for a split second we have gained control of the ship. Which is a wreck freely flying through space.” David didn’t even bother with sounding ironic. “How could we possibly get out of this?”

There was a long eerie silence.