The metal deck lurched violently as the ship was thrown about, rocked by an explosion far larger than anyone on board would have liked. The artificial gravity held, and no atmosphere alarms sounded, but the explosions were nothing but bad news for the loyal crew.

“Hardy!” a yellow-and-orange jumpsuited woman screamed, short-cropped ginger haircut slick with sweat, as she clung to a bulkhead with one hand, and struggled to hold onto a wrapped bundle with her other arm, disregarding her toolbox as it slid across the deck and away from her, toolbelt jingling on her hips.

“Over here, Marilyn!” a gruff voice hailed from up ahead, through an airlock that had been jammed partially open by some power failure. Marilyn regained her footing, and clutching the bundle with two hands, ducked under an extended door bolt, slipped through the yellow-chevron-painted airlock, and stepped into a place she hoped she’d never have to walk.

Red strips along the walls, and reinforced pexiglass walls told her that she was in the brig, a secure holding area for the criminal element, such as there could be on board a spaceship. She looked around, and quickly located another red-plated security door open; this time, it was because a man in a red jumpsuit and black body armor was waiting for her, face creased in concern underneath a black helmet with an inpenetrable blue visor.

“Is he alright?” Hardy asked, as Marilyn drew close.

“He’s fine!” the ship engineer nodded. “Lets go!”

Hardy backed up, and Marilyn followed him into the security area, where the door sealed behind them. She found herself looking at a room in disarray, the table and floor covered with empty donut boxes and security equipment from unlocked lockers that had popped open with the recent ship-wide tremors, respectively.

As tempting as it was, she refrained from scooping up a stun baton or a taser, instead trusting in Hardy to protect her and their son from danger. The security officer led his wife through the mess, and over to another red-plated airlock, this time a more muted, gentle red of warning, and not the bright red of Security.

It hissed open, revealing a small pod; big enough to fit two people in sequence, a second, currently recessed metal airlock told a story of what it’s purpose was.

“In here, dear,” Hardy invited, gesturing inside. Marilyn slipped inside, and looked around. The pod was very simple, a basic control panel for the technologically-challenged, and simple padded chairs with harnesses to fit all sizes. She wasted no time in placing her bundle into one, and doing up the straps. The pods were designed for two, but they could hold more at a stretch, and if she or Hardy had to go without a seat, so be it.

There was muffled shouting, and the faint buzz of laser discharges, just as Marilyn finished placing her child into the harness, and Hardy looked up, worried, as he drew his own taser and stun baton from his belt.

“They’re coming,” he muttered.

“Why are the Syndicate doing this?” Marilyn asked, knuckles white as she clutched the shoulder of the chair.

“Bloody space-dollars,” Hardy muttered, igniting his baton. “It’s always about the space-dollar. Stay here, Mar, I’ll take care of these jokers.”

“Hardy, don’t,” Marilyn implored. “Get in!”

“And go where?” Hardy asked. “We’re in Superspace - who knows where we’d end up if we launched now?”

“Hardy, who cares?” Marilyn clutched his arm in an attempt to pull him inside. “As long as we’re together!”

There was a smash of reinforced glass, and harsh barks of synthetically-filtered commands from the break room proper, and Hardy acted. He shook Marilyn loose, and firmly pushed her in the chest. She stumbled backwards, long enough for Hardy to hit a button, causing the white metal doors of the escape pod to slide shut with a click, and lock, red LEDs confirming the air-tight, indestructably firm seal.

“No!” Marilyn ran up to the door, thumping it with a fist, before sinking to her knees. She heard a clink of tool on ground, and saw her screwdriver had tapped against the tiles at her feet.

The engineer stood up quickly, and muttering to herself, ran to her own control console; it bleeped an “access denied” command, thanks to her lack of security ID, but she was an engineer. There was no place truly out of reach of a competent engineer - every door had a lock, and every lock had a maintenance panel just begging to get hot-wired.

Her son began to whimper, as she sifted through wires and looked for the one she wanted. She spared the back of the seat a glance, humming a lullaby loudly in an attempt to silence her child, trying to shut out the sounds of shouting and gunfire from outside the door.

“Sshh, baby,” she murmured. “Mummy’s just going to step out to help Daddy keep the evil Syndicate away from you...”

There was a spark, a zap, and the door unlocked itself, going slack. Marilyn quickly repatched the wires, and closed the panel roughly, grabbing her crowbar and setting it to the seam; with a creak, she pried the doors open proper, allowing the unfiltered sounds of violence to seep into the pod.

The shouting and loud noises set the child into complete upset, and he began to cry loudly. Marilyn, standing in a doorway now held open by her own bare hands, spared her son a look.

“I’ll come back for you,” she said quietly. There was a shout of pain, and she recognized the voice, even as a blood-red-hardsuited man fell over, smoking from his joints.

“Who’s next?!” Hardy challenged loudly, his voice labored.

Marilyn didn’t waste time, and shoving her tools back into her belt, abandoned the door and ran outside, scooping up the laser gun from the syndicate operative’s twitching hands, and joining the fray as the door gave into automated pressure once more and closed itself.

Unbeknownst to the child, there was one more presence watching on, calculating risk and monitoring the situation.

UMLAUT, the resident AI, gauged the ongoing firefight in the brig’s break room - while Officer Hardy and Engineer Marilyn were putting up a valiant fight, it was a losing one; it was just one trained officer and one civilian crewmember against a team of three elite syndicate operatives, non-lethal crew-control weapons versus weapons designed to melt and destroy exclusively.

UMLAUT had no more cyborgs left to deploy to aid the humans, and no way of incapacitating the operatives without killing the two loyal crewmembers. And when they fell, the child in the escape pod would be next.

The ship was in superspace. But uncertain death was better than certain death, and so UMLAUT made a decision.

With a clunk, the escape pod doors relocked themselves, and the control panel beeped as invisible, digital fingers pushed buttons through a network connection. There was a hiss, then-

WHUMP

The pod was suddenly flying, weightless. The child screamed in terror as the world went from “merely terrifying” to “downright psychopathic” in a heartbeat, the (filtered) immaterium of superspace visible through the viewport.

UMLAUT’s external ship cameras watched as the white escape pod dwindled into the distance, the machine verifying that it had taken the correct, human-harm-preventing course of action. Then, a power alarm went off, and UMLAUT’s attention was torn from the pod. He had more human harm to prevent.

The pod, unwatched, hit the boundary of the ship’s superspace stabilizer field, and vanished back into regular space with a flash of energy and light, it’s destination, if it even had one, unknown.

Next Chapter: One Last Quest Estimated time remaining: 29 Minutes