Lithia had never seen anything like it, the figure standing there, a green substance oozing from a dozen little cuts and slashes, and a face that was little more than charred flesh, metal, and two red hate filled eyes dwarfed Jerula.

  Cade was standing across the room from it, his right arm hanging limply at his side. At first Lithia thought he was clutching a sword in his left hand, and wondered where he had hidden it from her, but as she looked, she realized he wasn’t holding it in his hand, somehow the sword was protruding out of his hand.

As Lithia watched, Cade sprang forward, the blade rising to fill the space between him and the monster. He moved so fast that her eyes could barely keep up, but it seemed the monster had no such problems.

Cade’s blade only made a small cut in the monster’s chest, before a large hand, easily the size of Cade’s head batted him aside.

“What the hell is that thing?” Lithia screamed.

“I don’t know what it calls itself, for us it was just death.” Aurelius said beside her.

“Where’s Jerula?” Aurelius asked, a moment later.

Seemingly in answer to his question, Jerula pulled himself out of a pile of smashed furniture and appliances that had once been the kitchen. in his hand was a large canister from the fire suppression system. Lithia knew each of those tanks weighed more than she did, but Jerula held it  over his head with ease.  

At first Lithia was amazed that he had come through the fight unheart when cade had taken so much damage, but as he charged, a warcry that belonged to no language lithia had ever heard on his lips, Lithia saw the truth.

Jerula was far from unhurt, he had a gash across his back deep enough, that lithia could see the two ends flap as he ran, and what looked to be a piece of bone poking out of his upper leg. No, jerula wasn’t free of injuries, right now he just wasn’t feeling them.

Jerula didn’t move as fast as cade had, and the monster was able to bring up his hand to stop Jerula’s strike easily, but that didn’t seem to matter to Jerula, when the large tank hit the hand of the monster, Jerula just kept driving it down. The tank crumpled like a tin can, and white foam sprayed from every crack, covering everything around them, and jerula kept pressing.  for a moment the two behemoths seemed evenly matched, neither able to make the other move, but that stalemate was all too short lived.

Lithia watched as the monster’s other hand came down on on Jerula’s back with a crack. Jerula staggered and probably would have fallen to the monster’s next strike,  but there was a flash of movement, and cade was standing beside him again, and the monster had a new slash. a deep one, that had to have nearly severed the enormous bicep.

There was a moment when all three combatants paused, the two giants, and the cyborg all facing each other,

And then as if by some signal, the three came together again. Jerula and the monster swinging fists, and Cade thrusting with his blade.

 Between thrashing blows, Cade reached into his jacket. He pulled out a small cylinder, and threw it past the monster to Aurelius,.

“Get out of here! Get to the Frontier! Find Captain Pacius!”

The monster slowly rotated to face Aurelius. Every status and computer screen in the galley went black. A second later, a pair of red glowing eyes flickered onto the displays, “And now I know the faces of those who would stand with the betrayer. Before, you were nothing, but now you will be swept up in the fires of my righteous crusade.” The beast glowered, his eyes burning with some inner madness, and Aurelius ran.

Aurelius pushed Lithia back into the hold. He swung the bulkhead shut as fast as he could, shoving a pole in the lock to keep it closed.

“We’ve gotta get out of here!” Aurelius reached into the Storm Chaser and started up the engines.

“Wait! Wait!” Lithia panicked. “What is that thing?”

“Death, if we don’t leave now!”

“Wait! My brother’s still in there! We can’t just leave him!” Her eyes filled with tears.

The deafening impact of the mechanical nightmare’s fists on the door echoed through the room, “Did you see what happened in there!? We can’t do anything for any of them!”

Lithia couldn’t breath, she couldn’t move, her shock rooted her feet to the deck. Behind them that thing was beating against the door. Lithia knew from the sounds the door was making that it wouldn’t hold for very long, but Lithia was frozen.

“Do you hear that? It means the fight in there is over. We don’t have time to talk this out, it is either run or die.”

Lithia wasn’t entirely clear what happened next. She saw Aurelius turn away from the door just before everything seemed to explode around them. Lithia was thrown away from the door in a shower of sparks and shards of metal. She didn’t see what happened to Aurelius and for a moment she feared he had taken the blast in the face, but then felt a pair of thick gloved hands pull her from the deck.

Lithia couldn’t speak, and her thoughts seemed clouded by the ringing in her ears, but she felt the hands almost drop her into the padded seat of the planet hopper and strap something across her chest. In the distance Lithia could hear the sounds of metal being bent and broken, and the clangs of pieces of the door hitting the deck. The monster must have broken a power conduit to make a blast that size. This thought didn’t bother Lithia for some reason, she knew it should, The monster may have already killed two people, and was tearing up her ship but for some reason nothing seemed to bother her right now.    

“This is going to be a little rough,” Lithia heard the words, but they sounded so far away.

“What’s going to be rough? What’s…” Lithia didn’t have time to finish asking the second question before she was jerked back in her seat, the padding and straps across her chest doing their best to keep her in place, but still her head lurched, and it felt like her brain was sloshing around in her head.

The sudden motion seemed to do something to clear Lithia’s mind a bit.  She looked around at the cramped two seat cockpit she was strapped into, in the seat in front of her was a figure with messy dirty-blond hair, who she was now reasonably sure was the pretty one. No, his name was Aurelius. She had to cling to details now that she had them again, she had to cling to them or risk dropping back into that fog.

The person in front of her was Aurelius, the ship they were in was the Jerula, no that wasn’t right. Storm Chaser, the planet hopper was the Storm Chaser.

“I’m going to try and fly us out of this hanger. You’re going to want to hold onto something if you can.”

What did he mean fly out of the hanger? The Amaranth’s hanger wasn’t big enough to fly anywhere in, best he could do is drop out the bottom.

If we can get out of here, I think we have a chance of escape.”

Lithia peered out the slightly cloudy glass of the canopy, trying to make sense of what Aurelius was saying.

There was a sudden rush in her stomach as she felt herself plunge downward and within a blink of an eye she could see the Amaranth above her, through the cockpit, glass as it rapidly began to shrink. She was astonished not to see any stars above them. No, instead there was a massive, sharp, piece of metal that seemed to loom above them and be so large that it filled her entire view and wasn’t shrinking at the same rate as her ship.

“What? Where are we?” Lithia said, proud that her words sounded only slightly slurred, to her anyway.

“The Enigma pulled your ship in. We’re still in the inside. See those doors below us?” Lithia tried to look past Aurelius at what he was talking about, but it was still really hard to focus.

“No not really.” She finally yelped.

“Well take my word for it that they’re there and we’re heading at them as fast as I can make this thing go.”

“Ok with you, I think. Why do I have to hang on?”

“Because the doors are closing and I don’t know if we’re going to make it!” Aurelius yelled back to her.

Lithia tried again to see the distant doors, in her mind they were two massive metal flaps slowly swinging shut, like in a holo adventure, but they were either too far away to be seen with the naked eye, or her head still wasn’t fully recovered. Lithia did see a startlingly large number of other ships around them. They ranged in size from smaller than the little hopper they were now in, to ships that could fit several Amaranths inside them, and still have room for crew.

Lithia felt the Storm Chaser slow a bit as Aurelius banked around a long box like ship, and then was jerked back in her seat again as he kicked his little hopper back up to full speed.

“No G-diffusers in this thing?”

“I’ve got them, well sort of. They’re kind of old, they should still protect us from the worst of it,” Aurelius called back to her.

“How can you be sure?” Lithia asked, the motion, or maybe just time clearing her head rapidly.

“We’re not human pudding… Yet...” Aurelius said.

“The doors are closing!” Lithia yelled.

She stared at the two massive doors, they seemed to be sliding together at an almost glacial pace, though she was sure most of that was just their size.

“Come on hold together.” she heard Aurelius muttering.

Aurelius flew his ship around the cavity in the Enigma, at first Lithia didn’t know why, but then she saw them, long segmented arms, blades spinning, and clamps open. They were part of the Enigma’s retrieval system, the arms were trying to catch and pull them back in.

Aurelius was dodging them, always trying to keep other ships between the arms and the Storm Chacer. Lithia lurched as the small hopper jerked back and forth, it would have been like a rollercoaster, except a rollercoaster had a down.  

Aurelius threw the sticks down hard and flew down past the Amaranth. throwing the Storm Chaser directly at the rapidly closing doors.

“This is getting cliché!” he yelled.

Aurelius slammed the throttle. Down they went, faster and faster.

Lithia could feel the Storm Chaser straining under the pressures Aurelius was putting on it, and she wondered if this piece of junk would be able to hold together long enough to be crushed by the doors or grabbed by the arms.

The Storme Chaser jolted off course with a violent cracking sound, At first Lithia assumed the sprint drive had broken free after all, but a quick look back told her the truth. one of the clamps had finally managed to grab the back of the little hopper, and was pulling it back in.

“Not good, definitely not good!” she heard Aurelius shout.

Lithia watched helplessly as the Storm Chaser began sliding back away from the doors.

“I’m going to try something really stupid. Just giving you the heads up.” Aurelius said.

Aurelius flipped a switch on his console and Lithia tried to ignore his muttering about how he was sure this would kill them both, while at the same time trying to figure out what he could possibly have up his sleeve.

She did not have to wait long. There was a blinding flash, and the Storm Chaser shot forward through the doors. She could hear the sound of metal scraping against metal as they passed.

“What the hell did you just do!?” Lithia called up to him.

“I used the soap.”

 Lithia crained her neck around to get a look at the back of the Storm Chaser. the clamp was still there, but several meters back, the arm ended in a line of jagged scorched metal.

The Enigma began to fire wildly into space. Lithia watched over Aurelius’s shoulder as he piloted the Storm Chaser away from the Enigma as fast as he could. in her first true moment of clarity since the blast on the Amaranth,  she couldn’t believe she was having to leave Bobby behind. She shivered with both terror and an agonizing sense that her brother might not have long to live. Before she could think about it too much, or say anything for that matter, she felt a pressure against her body, forcing her back into her chair. The Stars outside the cockpit glass began to elongate and brighten, as if they were being stretched from tiny points of light in the distance into long bright needles.
“Here we go!” Aurelius yelled, but for Lithia there was nothing but darkness.