They did have SAMs. Lady Luck had been standing somewhere else this entire day. Apparently they didn’t want the ship intact after all, so what the fuck were they? Religious extremists claiming FTL went against God’s plan? Of course the pilot did what pilots do and seemingly did everything except turn the ship so the active shield segments were facing the threat, evidenced by a bang and the sound of shearing metal. Some of the missiles hit the shield after all and as soon as they did, the reactor output readout completely lost its marbles. She recalled one salvage job where the ship in question had power problems and was unable to scram their reactor, so they turned on everything that could draw power and blacked out their ship, causing the reactor scram to initiate automatically. If the FTL drive was ‘running away’ then robbing it of its power should do the same as long as they didn’t trip the reactors as well. Sitting at the shield control console, Vigdis entered the command to power up the remaining shield segments.

[center][code]
ERR: Insufficient power, FTL system priority!
<OK>
[/code][/center]
Of course the ship was designed to prevent this. A smart thing to do under any other circumstance except here. She would find the computer geek who thought this error window only needed an ‘OK’ button and not an ‘ignore’ option alongside it and smack some sense into him when this was over. When the noise kept rising, something in her mind went ‘Yeah, this is beyond hope.’ and she gave up attempting to handle the situation and instead strapped in for the fallout. Crap, where was the Jackal? Did she secure it when she disarmed herself or did she just leave it lying around somewhere? A glance confirmed the sling was tied around the frame of a machine beside the door. Good.

Then, an idea. Primitive and straight out of the ‘Geriatric’s Manual of Computer Repair’, but an idea nonetheless. “Breakers!” Vigdis yelled, figuring whatever damage would be caused by physically cutting the connection between the FTL drive and the ship’s power grid would be limited to the drive itself and wouldn’t hamper their escape attempts, but not even hoping there was enough time for it.
[hr]The unholy noise reached its peak and the room flooded with unnaturally bright light before turning into pandemonium. It seemed like half of the Really Bad Lights and their accompanying bells and whistles came on at the same time. The machine behind her seat crapped out a shower of sparks and some more alarms sounded. As Vigdis grabbed one of the three kilogram powder fire extinguishers affixed by the console to address that latest problem, the rest of the room didn’t seem to be faring much better. It was getting hot and she could see some of the cables were straining against their mountings as the current flowing through them created magnetic fields strong enough to move them. Something vile assaulted her nostrils. “Charred insulation. Smells like a failing grade to me.”

Having put out the closest fire, she returned the empty extinguisher back into the bracket and returned her attention to her assigned station, fielding a sea of warnings and errors - electrical resistance in the shield cabling reading infinite, voltage zero, temperature just below melting point. “Chief, we’ve lost the shields. Looks like melted or severed conduits.” Vigdis reported, anxiously waiting for a similar report on propulsion.