At first it seemed like there might be no further survivors. The ripping torque of the missle strike had started seams the length and breath of the Hikendorf. Most of her crew had been outside working on the repairs, killed outright or suffocated when their air bottles ran out, but enough had been inside without suits when rents suddenly appeared in the hull. Probably the only reason anyone was alive at all is because a number of the internal partitions had been closed as a reaction to damage from the previous attack. Those survivors, such as their were had been in the core of the ship, where the flexion as tons of dust had been converted to heat energy had been minimal, the way the core of a branch might survive a greenstick fracture. Sabatine helped supervise the move of Alliance spacers up and onto the commandeered mining ship. There didn’t seem to be much fight in them. That was probably to be expected. A minute ago they were facing the likelihood of a slow death by asphyxiation, RCN custody, a term in a prisoner of war camp or a prison hulk, probably seemed like a vast improvement.

“Sir, sir!” one of the prisoners called, pulling on the arm of Sabatine’s suit. How he had deduced she was an officer in a faceless sexless rigging suit she had no idea. Perhaps he was just observant of how the other RCN treated her. Danzetti lifted his submachine gun to deliver a butt stroke. Sabatine held up her hand to forestall the action, not only did she not want a random spacer brutalized, she wasn’t that confident that Danzetti knew enough about guns to have the saftey on. The last thing they needed was for him to accidentally trigger a burst that ripped them all to shreds as rounds ricochet around inside the corridor.
 
“What is it spacer,” she asked, not friendly but not openly hostile. The man’s name was Pollock, or Pollack judging by the faded name tape of his fleet green uniform.
 
“I was wondering what the chances were that I could list you know, rather than prison or whatever,” he burbled nervously. Sabatine cocked an eyebrow, a gesture that was totally invisible inside her helmet. It wasn’t unusual for crews of captured prizes to be given a chance to sign aboard the winning ship if they were short of crew, which every naval vessel was of course. Spacers didn’t typically have ideological or political loyalties and saboteurs were disincentivised by the fact that the were all, very literally, in the same boat. There just weren’t enough experienced spacers to crew the warships of the fleet and the merchant service simultaneously. He must have mistook her lack of verbal response for skepticism.
 
“We have a communications officer, he ran off when you…” he blurted out, finching back as the Alliance Lieutenant stepped forward with a snarl. Danzetti hit him in the face with his submachine gun. He got to hit someone and it was an officer, a banner day for the power room tech. Sabatine wasn’t shredded by an accidental discharge which pleased her also. The lieutenant staggered back, clutching a bloody nose and cursing like a spacer. Sabatine’s eyes widened as they met Kaiden’s.
 
“Danzetti, watch them, you Pollock, where is your comms room?” she demanded, pointing her own weapon at the spacer unintentionally. He cringed back against the bulkhead hands raised.

“One deck down on the starboard…” but Sabatine was already running, or at least shambling as fast as she could in the cursed suit. Kaiden was on her heels clearly reaching the same conclusion as she had. Every major Alliance fleet unit would have a code book which held the various signals and encryptions the Fleet used to keep its communications secure. It wasn’t a physical book of course, but it was a separate computer that could be physically firewalled to prevent digital intrusion. The Alliance hadn’t known that the RCN was coming, why would they? The odds of a single corvette driving off two destroyers were beyond astronomical. Therefore they would have had no reason to purge their computers before Sabatine dropped through the hole in the hull. She pounded down the companion way a step ahead of Kaiden, caroming off the steel wall in her haste. They hit the deck below at the same instant, Kaiden’s longer legs closing the distance. Halfway along the hall a thin man in an Alliance warrant officers uniform was heaving at a hatch with a prybar. The impact of the missiles must have torqued the hatch, trapping the communication’s officer on the wrong side. That hadn’t been a priority before, but now he had to sanitize the equipment before it fell into RCN hands. He turned to see the two RCN officers emerging from the companion way, his face contorting with frustrated hate. Dropping his prybar with an echoing clatter he whipped a pistol from his tunic pocket with surprising speed. Sabatine stared in dumb amazement. Kaiden’s shove knocked her to the deck a moment before the pistol cracked. It struck the facing plate of the companionway and ricocheted wildly, drawing white sparks. Awkward in her rigging suit she struggled to raise her own weapon.