I stared at the holodisplay for a long moment, and then I looked at all sorts of emergency notifications that suddenly came flooding into the CIC as the ship’s computer caught up with what we were seeing from that external display that came from what the foldspace sensors were picking up.

  Funny how you could see that your ship had been mortally wounded a moment before the ship actually realized it was mortally wounded because of the sensor feed from the outside being just that much faster than all the diagnostic systems in the ship.

  "Shit. That's not good," Olsen said.

  I looked at him. I felt a rare moment of camaraderie with the little shit, but only for a moment. Still, he was saying something all of us were feeling.

  "Yeah, that's not good," I said, staring at the plume of ionized gases flowing out of the reactor and willing it to come to a stop. But me sitting there and willing it to come to a stop wasn't enough to make it actually come to a stop.

  Instead I opened a line of communications back to engineering. I prayed as I hit that button that there was still an engineering back there for me to open a line of communications with.

  I had visions of gases filling important compartments. Of people staying at their stations as radiation doors or vacuum doors went down all around them to keep the damage from spreading to the rest of the ship.

  The problem being that there was a certain point where there was no containing the damage and keeping it from spreading to the rest of the ship.

  "Mr. Argyle, are you there?".

  Everybody in the CIC turned to stare at me. It was a long stare. They knew if Argyle wasn't there then there was a good chance we were well and truly fucked.

  Well, more fucked than we already were, that is.

  "Mr. Argyle," I said again, "I know you're probably busy back there, but it's time for us to earn our pay instead of reading technical manuals."

  That was a joke shared between the two of us. He always talked about how he was going off to a quiet corner of engineering to read technical manuals, with those technical manuals actually being data slates that had pictures and videos of women wearing varying degrees of clothing.

  Usually less clothing than more.

  I briefly wondered if Argyle had decided to go out the way he lived: hidden in some quiet corner of his little fiefdom looking at the digital equivalent of nudie magazines carrying on a tradition that had been part of some engineers' work going back centuries.

  I breathed a sigh of relief as the comms line sprang to life. Though there was a crackle to the line. Not good. Everything should be clear and crisp.

  "This is Argyle here, Captain. Afraid I don't have much time for my technical manuals right now. It's like you said, we're earning our pay back here today.”

  There was a sigh of relief from everybody on the bridge. Rachel started to clap, but then she stopped when she realized nobody else was doing the same. Still, I felt that palpable relief the same as they all did.

  "What can you tell me, Argyle?" I said. "Keep it brief. I know you're probably busy down there."

  "They managed to punch a hole in one of the main plasma conduits that's feeding into the reactor, sir," he said. “The magnetic interlocks have been ruptured and we’ve got a coolant leak.”

  There was a pause. “Um. Pretend for a moment that I don’t have your engineering background, Argyle. Is that bad?”

  “Nothing I can’t get fixed up under normal circumstances, sir, but it’d be nice if you could get that livisk ship to stop wailing on us long enough for me to slap some duct tape on the reactor.”

  I grinned despite the severity of the situation. “That depends on you. Can you keep power to the weapons?”

  “We still have enough to send power through the ship for a little while longer, but I'm going to have to shut down that conduit if we want to avoid a containment breach."

  "Got it," I said. “Keep at it, Mr. Argyle. We need mains for as long as you can give them to us.”

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  "No need to tell me that, Captain. I'll be on it."

  "I know you will," I said.

  I looked at everybody in the CIC. Their looks said it all. They knew exactly what that meant, the same as I did.

  Shutting down the reactor would mean going to auxiliary power. Going to auxiliary power meant we weren't going to be able to throw around any of the big weapons for much longer. Not being able to throw around the big weapons for much longer meant we’d be dead in the stars, and that would probably lead to us being quite literally dead in the stars before too long.

  I bit back a couple of curses and hit a button that opened up communications to the rest of the ship. I took a deep breath. I wasn’t looking forward to making this announcement. It was the second time I'd had to make this announcement in the course of my professional career, and it was something no captain ever wanted to do once, let alone twice.

  Damn it.

  "Attention all hands."

  I paused and licked my lips. I glanced around me. Rachel nodded. John was still tense, his hands on the controls. Olsen looked like he was still on the verge of losing the spaghetti he'd had earlier in the evening, or maybe he was going to lose whatever he drank earlier all over his console.

  Olsen seemed to be as big a fan of drinking heavily when he thought nobody was looking as he was surreptitiously checking his stock portfolio when he didn't think anybody was looking.

  "This is the captain speaking." I continued, forcing myself to go ahead with it. Even though every fiber of my being screamed that I didn't want to do this. “We are on the verge of losing mains, and there is the possibility the livisk will be coming to us.”

  There was also the possibility they weren’t looking for prisoners and we’d just become so much wreckage floating around out here in the middle of nothing, but I didn’t get that feeling.

  “Prepare to be boarded. I repeat, prepare to be boarded. Gather weapons. Stuff that will punch through livisk skin. If you have any sort of armor then put it on. Again, prepare for boarders."

  I took my hand off the communications button and it closed off. I stared at the holoblock, and I felt hollow inside. The second time this had happened. What were the odds?

  Though, as I looked at the Vornask class ship hovering there in the holoblock, I realized the chances were actually pretty damn good. I'd had this livisk living in the back of my head for the past year. I hadn't said anything about it because I was worried somebody would take away the small command I still had left to me, and now I was going to lose that command because I hadn't said anything about it.

  I'd led her right to me. Damn it.

  I had a moment of pity, and then I put it out of my mind and sat up straighter. This might be happening to me for the second time, but I knew what to do in the middle of a boarding. My crew knew what to do in the middle of a boarding as well.

  I might have a crew with careers that were circling the drain, but they’d all had careers. And we had a fair share of veteran starfarers out here who’d been in a scrape before.

  I clapped my hands together.

  "Well? What are you all waiting for?" I asked. "We need to get our shit in gear. Those livisk are going to be paying us a visit sooner rather than later, and we need to roll out the welcome party for them."

  "I'd like to roll out a countdown for them," Rachel muttered, "But there's no planet for us to beam down to. No transporter for us to beam with, for that matter."

  I turned and hit her with a grin.

  "Yeah, that's the problem. If we survive this then we're going to have to get on the physics nerds in Fleet Research about not having that ready for us."

  "We're not close enough to a planet to beam down to it anyway," she said. "And all the livisk will understand our language, so they'll know what it means if the computer is counting down.”

  "You're damn right they will," I said.

  I turned my attention back to the holoblock, and then I reached down to my chair and pulled out a weapon that hidden in a side compartment. The thing was massive, with an oversized barrel and an even more oversized cooler to prevent overheating. I went with an energy weapon rather than projectiles since those tended to do better against armored livisk.

  I got a couple of wide-eyed looks as they realized what I had been stored in the side of my chair.

  "Always be prepared," I said, hitting everybody with a grin. "That's always been my motto, especially after I had one ship boarded.”

  And then, to my surprise, everybody else started pulling out weapons from their own storage compartments. Smith had a massive blaster that I wasn't sure if it was a pistol or a rifle. John had a pistol that had a large enough bore and enough power that it would be able to take out a livisk if they decided to pay us a visit. The only person on the CIC who didn't have a weapon ready to go was Olsen, and he was looking around, his eyes wide, like he didn't know what to make of all of us packing heat.

  "You're all crazy," he finally muttered when he realized I was looking at him expectantly.

  "And yet we all have weapons on us as the ship is about to be boarded," Rachel said, trying to keep her smug satisfaction to herself. I knew she had to enjoy saying that. Had to enjoy taking him down a peg.

  "We're all going to die," he said. "We're all going to die."

  Meanwhile, the Red crew was getting weapons out of a locker in the back of the CIC, because even if we didn't have weapons in our personal storage space? It was always a good idea to have weapons ready to go on all parts of the ship. We might be a picket ship who was supposed to be in safe space, but that didn't mean there weren't weapons ready to go.

  "I hate that we're doing this again," I said, carefully putting my own pistol down on my armrest that didn't have my control panel in it.

  I looked over to the holoblock. Weapons continued to rain down from the livisk ship. Emergency warnings continued to pile on top of each other, letting me know the ship was dangerously close to a containment breach.

  All I could do was hope that Argyle’s expert assessment of what was going on with the reactor was more correct than the ship's artificial intelligence assessment of what was going on with the reactor.

  Otherwise? Our ship was about to blow, and there wouldn't be a friendly countdown to let us know it was about to self-destruct.