"Attention all hands," I said in a shipwide broadcast. "Prepare for boarders. Repeat, prepare for boarders."

  I paused for a moment and thought about that. I was getting a sense of deja vu, and it wasn’t from my previous command. I tapped the shipwide button again.

  “Right. I already told everyone to prepare for boarders. This is me telling you the shit is about to hit the intermix chamber and we have livisk boarding ships on the way. So get ready to give them a good old fashioned CCF welcome.”

  I could only imagine the level of pants shitting going on all across the ship as a result of that simple broadcast. I felt like I was about to lose a little bit on my command seat, but I managed to hold it together.

  Barely.

  It helped that I’d been through this before. I turned over and glanced at Rachel, who hit me with a smile.

  "So do you get a punch on a card for going through this more than once?" she asked, arching an eyebrow and cocking her head to the side as she hit me with a shit-eating grin.

  I flipped her the bird. I figured if we were already to the point livisk were boarding us then it was also to the point where I didn’t have to stand on decorum.

  "I'm putting the ship into lockdown," I said. "We’re going to have, oh, let's call it thirty seconds before everything is locked down entirely?”

  The lights started to flash a yellow color. Not quite the deep red of a red alert from ancient movies, but it was pretty damn close. It was also still enough to see by, even in the twilight that meant we'd gone to auxiliary power and the mains had been shut off.

  But auxiliary power was more than enough for me to get a good look at what was happening in the holoblock. It was more than enough for me to see those ships moving towards my own like so many locusts moving towards a crop.

  Only they didn't intend to destroy. No, they intended to board and capture and enslave, and I had no doubt that livisk woman was going to be looking to capture and enslave yours truly in particular.

  "Not going to go out and mix it up this time around, Captain?” Rachel asked.

  "I know you're trying to bleed off some nervous tension, Rachel, but I could really do without the color commentary."

  "Sorry. You know I deal with bad situations with humor,” she said.

  "I totally get it," I said, hitting her with a grin.

  "What about Olsen?" Sanderson asked from her spot at the comms station.

  I smiled at her. "It's noble of you to think of your counterpart in a moment like this, but he made his choice to go out there. He’s going to have to deal with that choice."

  I tried not to sound too satisfied as I said it. The idea of him escaping the CIC in the middle of battle only to find himself in the middle of a livisk boarding operation warmed the cockles of my cold, dead heart.

  No, that wasn't quite right. My heart wasn't quite cold and dead yet, but it was getting there, and if I didn't play my cards right with the livisk then it would be at cold and dead sooner rather than later.

  "As you say, sir," she said with a shrug, as though it didn't matter to her.

  I glanced around the CIC to see if anybody else was going to speak up for Olsen, but nobody did. Nobody seemed to give a damn. If anything, Rachel seemed relieved if the smile she hit me with was anything to go by.

  It was a feeling I could understand, even if I felt a little guilty. Let the little bastard nepo baby go out there and deal with the blue sparklies on his own. Get a dose of how things worked out in the real galaxy.

  The time hatch moved down. The livisk boarding ships moved closer and closer. Weapons started going off again as they got in close, which had me blinking. They weren’t supposed to do that on auxiliary power.

  "Nice surprise there, Smith," I said, blinking. "I didn't realize we had enough power for weapons."

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  "We don't have much," she said. "Just a few batteries with enough charge to get off a few shots.

  "Understood," I said.

  Auxiliary power wasn’t nearly enough for us to run weapons, gravity, and life support at the same time on Early Warning 72. On a bigger ship it would be very possible, but the picket ship was small enough that our auxiliary power wasn't up to the task of a sustained battle. The people who designed these ships probably never conceived of a situation where a picket ship would be caught in a sustained battle on auxiliary power in the first place.

  One of the gunboats disappeared in a brief flaring of fire as its engines went up, and then it turned to so much cooling interstellar debris that would join all the other debris that’d been floating around out here minding its business for billions of years.

  There'd even been some eggheads who thought we might find evidence of previous interstellar civilizations from our system out here. If ever there was going to be a spot where it would be preserved, then it would be out here in the Oort Cloud.

  Which was hardly a comforting thought as I considered the idea of our own ship becoming so much debris floating out here. That might be a hint to some far future alien civilization that rose on Titan as the sun devoured the inner planets that there'd been another species occupying the Sol system once upon a time.

  "Are you going to be okay, Bill?" Rachel said in a quiet voice.

  I turned to look at her and forced a smile.

  "Why wouldn't I be okay?"

  "You've got that far-off look," she said with a shrug. "The kind of look you get when you're worried about something, but you don't want to look like you're worried about something."

  "Yeah, well, I have plenty to worry about,” I said. “But what can you do?”

  There were no more miracles in the holoblock. No more weapons that came to life at the last moment and schooled the livisk on what a bad idea it was to sneak up on our ship. No, those assault ships attached to our own and loud thunks reverberated through the hull with enough force that I could feel it even in the CIC which was cocooned safely in the middle of everything.

  "They're here," I said, in a suitably creepy voice.

  "You need to stop doing that," Rachel said.

  I stood and walked over to the holoblock. A couple of waves and I’d pulled up a tactical view of the ship. There were four glowing red spots where the livisk assault ships had attached to Early Warning 72.

  I tapped a yellow area of hallway next to one of those glowing red dots. The feed from that hallway popped to life and I got a look, and a listen, at what was going on there.

  There was no need to go out into the fray like last time. Which was probably a good thing considering I didn't have any power armor to keep my ass from getting shot off this time.

  “Sparklies coming through the wall at bulkhead 42," a voice said.

  I didn't recognize that voice. Then again, there were a lot of people on the ship who I didn't know all that well. One of the side effects of a ship where there were a bunch of people who had a bunch of busy work. I didn't have a good reason to talk to a lot of people about that busy work.

  "They're coming in," a voice shouted.

  I manipulated the view in the holoblock. I tossed the view of our ship and the livisk ship over to a corner of the block. There was no point in keeping that up there. Not when there was no ship-to-ship combat going on for the moment.

  They weren’t going to shoot at us when their people were onboard. I hoped.

  Bulkhead 42 flared red on the display as enemy troops entered through a hole they’d cut. A few other areas turned red as well as livisk entered through those points as well.

  "I need troop reinforcements to section 37 close to bulkhead 42,” I said, my eyes dancing around the block as I manipulated the controls. “I’m closing the blast door to 42. Anybody who has the ability needs to get on the other side of that blast door. We're going to make the livisk work for it to get through that thing.”

  I did the same thing to other areas, sending out instructions to people who were close to where the livisk were making their incursions. I closed the blast doors in each of those spaces, thankful there were actual blast doors on this ship.

  Then again, you had to be able to hold back the force of a potential explosion. The designers were probably more worried about a technical malfunction than boarders, but the end result was the same.

  "It looks like they're trying to envelop us here in the CIC,” I said, frowning as I looked at livisk progress.

  "Envelop us?" Rachel asked.

  I pointed to each of the points on the ship where one of the assault ships had attached.

  "They've opened up a line of attack equidistant from the CIC. Or it would be equidistant if one of their assault ships hadn’t been blown to the stars. Looks like one spot was left open. Either way, somebody in that livisk ship knows exactly what they're doing taking on a CCF picket ship.”

  "Almost like they expected to be going up against a picket ship," John said.

  There was something to his tone I didn’t like. I glanced over at him. I was well aware that everybody dealt with a situation like this in their own special way, but the last thing I needed was Rachel's husband breaking down or accusing me of being an enemy agent when that couldn't be farther from the truth.

  "I already told you I didn't have anything to do with any of this,” I said.

  "Right," he said, shaking his head and blinking. Suddenly he was the old John again. Mostly. Maybe.

  I turned back to the display and got ready to deliver more orders. I needed to look at the bigger picture and pray everybody out there dealing with the combat up close and personal, and without the benefit of power armor since we didn't have any on the ship, managed to make it through this okay.

  Even as I looked at the big picture and knew there wasn't a chance they were going to make it through this okay. We’d be lucky if any of the crew survived, barring a miraculous rescue from the Terran Navy or the CCF that I didn’t really think was coming.

  "Perhaps today is a good day to die," I muttered to myself.