"Okay, then," I said, frowning as I got a good look at what was going on all throughout the corridors of 72. "Maybe today isn't a good day to die."

  "The day is still young," Sanderson said.

  "Young for you," I said, looking to the backup comms officer and grinning. "This is late into the night for us, and I'm chasing the hair of the dog."

  "You should've taken a hangover pill," Rachel said.

  "Nonsense," I said. "I didn't have nearly enough to drink to justify getting knocked on my ass by one of those things."

  "Maybe so," Rachel said. "Still, you might be a little more clear-headed."

  Something clanged against the blast door again. That’d been going on for the past ten minutes, and it was doing more of a number on me than the lingering effects of a couple of drinks at what was supposed to be the end of the day.

  "I'm bloody clear-headed," I said, turning to that door and growling. “But I really wish somebody would do something about that noise!”

  In the holoblock I could see what was happening again and again all throughout the ship. The same scenario played out every time. The livisk would approach a group of people who were fighting back, and they would blast them with stun weapons.

  I knew there were probably a few members of my crew who were getting killed by the stun setting on those things. The dirty little secret of weapons like that is there was no such thing as a true stun weapon. There were weapons that could disrupt your nervous system, sure, but any weapon that disrupted your nervous system to the point of knocking you out was also a weapon that could disrupt your nervous system to the point of accidentally killing you.

  Still, most people seemed to be taking a nice long nap rather than taking a permanent nap.

  On another screen I pulled up gas filled the corridor. Livisk covered in masks or rebreathers of some sort appeared through the fog, firing their weapons at anybody who refused to get down as the gas choked them out.

  The semi-artificial intelligence on 72 was able to show me that those people were being knocked out rather than killed. Again, there were probably some who were going to suffer from long-term health effects, because that was the kind of thing that happened when you got hit by knockout gas and there were enough people on 72 that the statistics were going to catch up with at least a few of them.

  But still, it seemed like they were going for captives rather than for killing people. And if they were going for captives? That meant the people being captured didn’t have much of a chance to live long enough to feel those long term effects.

  Taking captives meant they were trying to catch people they could sell into slavery. I wasn't sure if we’d go to the livisk home world for the honor of working in one of their infamous reclamation mines, or if we’d find ourselves stuck on one of the numerous outlying moons or planetoids that made up their far-flung empire.

  I'd even heard stories of places where they didn't allow people to mine something useful like water. No, captives just went digging through dirt and rock to no purpose until they keeled over dead from exhaustion.

  The bastards. It was like the worst hits of all of the nastiest stuff humanity had ever done to each other.

  There was more clanging on the door.

  "I really wish that would stop," I growled. Then I looked over to Smith and her rifle.

  "That's loaded for livisk, right?"

  "It is, sir," she said.

  "Does it have a full auto setting?"

  "It does, sir," she said.

  "And it's the special casing that dissolves against the bulkhead but goes through flesh?”

  "Of course, sir," she said, "I wouldn't have anything else. That other stuff is only as a last resort when we want to go with whatever we’re killing.”

  "Yeah, and we're getting pretty close to a last resort," I muttered, walking over and grabbing her rifle.

  "Sir?” she said.

  I walked over to the blast door and stood back just a little bit. I hefted the weapon and said a quick prayer of thanks to various gods nobody really believed in these days that I'd kept up on my training both with hand-to-hand combat and with weapons after my first experience getting caught in an active and dynamic realtime boarding situation.

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  "Override Stewart 000 Open 0," I said. The code was tied to my biometrics, so it's not like it mattered that it was a joke code almost everyone in the fleet used.

  The computer dinged.

  "There are enemy combatants on the other side of the blast door. Are you sure?"

  "I'm sure," I said.

  The door slid open, revealing a very surprised and perplexed-looking livisk who was in the process of raising something that looked like an oversized metal crowbar to bring it down on the door again. I'd timed it so they’d be in the middle of raising it rather than bringing it down.

  “No thank you! We don’t want any more visitors or well-wishers!” I said. And then I opened up on them. Full auto.

  The rounds slammed into the group of livisk. They went down in a hail of bullets with special casings that smacked harmlessly against the bulkhead behind them.

  "Close the door, 72," I shouted, letting out a laugh.

  The door slammed shut before any more Livisk could move up to take advantage of the opening. And there was no more banging. I could finally hear myself think.

  Silence greeted me on the other side of the door. I turned to look at red and blue shift. They were all staring at me like I'd just grown a second head and a third arm and decided to run for President of the Galaxy or something.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Holy shit," Rachel said.

  I walked over and put Smith's weapon down next to her. I grinned as she stared at me with her mouth hanging open.

  "You were right. That baby packs a punch! It's a damn shame we're only going to be able to get away with that once."

  "Holy shit, sir," Smith said, staring at me.

  "All in a day's work, Smith," I said, winking at her.

  I walked over to look at the situation on the holoblock. The livisk were going through the ship brutally and efficiently. It probably helped that the people they were going up against weren't exactly the cream of the crop of the CCF.

  I know that's a theme I kept returning to, but it was also a theme that was absolutely true. It was a theme that was making this a cakewalk for the sparkly blue aliens as they went through the ship and stunned people.

  "I suppose we should be thankful they're only using the stun setting," I said.

  The ship tracked all the crew. They were bright green if they were in good working order. They turned yellow if they were knocked out. And they were a bright red on the holographic representation of 72 if they died.

  There were far more green than yellow right now, and not all that many red. That was a relief, but there were more and more yellow as the siege wore on.

  For some reason engineering seemed to be getting a miss from the invaders for the moment. That was a relief. They were busy enough back there with trying to keep the ship from blowing up.

  I pulled up the view from a corridor that was about to get hit.

  "If you have any sort of rebreather, put it on," I said. “They like to go through with gas to knock people out before they use some sort of stunner on you.”

  That probably did more harm than good. The people gathered in that particular corridor started looking around like they were wondering where my voice was coming from. Which had me rolling my eyes. We were on a ship. Ship-to-ship communications was totally a thing. It shouldn't be a surprise that I was giving them orders in the middle of a crisis, and yet there they were acting like that's exactly what it was. A big fat surprise.

  One guy did pull out a rebreather, not that it did him much good. No, the livisk poured down the corridor as they fired on them. No gas this time around. It didn’t help that the livisk did have armor and my people didn’t. They were overmatched for the defenders on Early Warning 72.

  Stun blasts flew through the air faster and fiercer than the weapon blasts from our own people, and a moment later it was over. The rebreather was still stuck to that guy's face, but it wasn't going to do him a damn bit of good since he'd also taken a stun blast right to the face.

  "Son of a bitch," I growled. "This isn't going..."

  And then I trailed off because I finally caught a glimpse of what I'd been looking for this entire time. I couldn't help but smile despite how serious the situation was.

  What can I say? Getting a look at the strange alien I'd already met on one occasion back on my old ship sent a shiver running through me. For all that it was a shiver I didn’t want the rest of the bridge crew to see.

  John was already giving me weird looks as it was.

  She was striding through the corridors with purpose, looking like she owned the place.

  Who the hell was I kidding? She totally owned this place right now. I was starting to think no amount of fighting against these assholes was going to be enough. No rescue had appeared out of foldspace to pull our balls out of the vice.

  The more time went on, the more I was starting to suspect Harris really had decided to intervene in any brewing rescue attempt to solve his little Captain Bill Stewart problem.

  "We have company," I said, staring down at her walking through the hallway.

  I knew she was on the ship, of course. I'd known from the moment she stepped aboard. I could even point to which of the landing craft she'd landed on.

  It was a touch-and-go thing when Smith started firing with weapons that shouldn't have had any power left. A lucky thing for yours truly that she didn't accidentally hit the assault ship my livisk friend was on. Otherwise I might be going crazy right about now.

  Or maybe that was something that took a little time to set in when your livisk was killed.

  Either way, I was slightly relieved and slightly terrified. Also? Slightly annoyed that I was slightly relieved she was still alive.

  She was the enemy, damn it.

  "Looks like your friend has decided to join us," Rachel said, looking over my shoulder.

  "Are you going to be able to handle this?" John asked, coming up next to me.

  Which wasn't strictly protocol. He was supposed to stay at the helm, but seeing as how our thrusters had been disabled and there wasn't much maneuvering he could do? I was willing to forgive him.

  I watched as she strode through corridors that had been full of human resistance a moment ago, but now it was full of people taking a nap if the ship's systems were to be believed.

  Better napping than dead, I guess. Though other views from corridors closer to where the assault ships connected to 72 showed livisk pulling alive but knocked out humans into those assault ships.

  "I guess we're about to find out," I said, nodding to the holoblock. “Because she's headed right this way."