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Hey everybody, lots of exciting stuff in this chapter!

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Chapter V

Derry climbed out of the Rattler and stared in shock for a second, as the other Marines dove for cover. Someone body-slammed him back into the Rattler, and he landed with a thud, his armor's nanites hardening in such a way he didn't lose his breath as Corporal Kerr hit him like a football linebacker.

Behind the Corporal, a large section of the space port terminal lit up like Christmas, then disintegrated, flying apart in a fountain of dust and steel and glass.

"ARTILLERY INCOMING, GET DOWN!"

The wolf instinctively covered his head, helmet and all, as thunder and flash turned the cloudy day to a calamitous symphony of sound and shockwaves. Shell after shell crashed down into the starport, blasting the terminal to bits and hurling columns of pavement and dust skyward with report after report of gut-punching physical sound.

From her rooftop perch on the parking structure, Nivea was yelling into the communicator mounted in her collar.

"Command, this is south gate, come in! Respond! Over!"

The whistling of artillery shells just kept coming, landing here and there as if they were drops of water flicked from a careless child's paw. Two hit the terminals, blasting them further into rubble, then another hit somewhere near the north gate, then three more at the western.

"Shit shit shit! GET AWAY FROM THE GATEWAY!"

Cacophonous radio calls, confirmations, yells, static, and Marines were running fast to get away from the checkpoints. Not a hundred feet from one, Nivea stood and began to run, only to be grabbed off her feet by Clicks, who leapt off the multi-story parking structure with inhuman strength and speed. Ix'kat queens didn't have strong wings, like the male drones, but she flapped hers until the diaphanous things snapped to cushion their fall.

Nivea grunted, breath blown out of her as they hit the concrete, then yelled and covered her face with her arm as the parking structure's north-facing side collapsed from a near hit that sent both of them rolling, spattered with chunks of rock.

Then there was a profound sort of silence, as if the whole world were holding its collective breath. The silence was broken only by odd chittering noises low in Clicks' throat.

"You okay?"

"No...Wings broken...Ow."

Nivea winced. Though she'd read that Ix'kat drones had no real emotional reaction to pain, feeling it only as a sense that damage had occurred, she knew the queens like Clicks were quite capable of pain as humans and their furry sub-species experienced it. Sitting up, she slid around Click's back to get a look.

Both wings, beautiful multi-colored things like webs of transparent gems, were broken near the base, hanging on by transparent tendrils and oozing green-red 'blood'.

Having no real training on what to do, Niece got up and offered a paw to the prone queen. Awkwardly, the four-taloned hand gripped hers and pulled, helping the surprisingly light creature stand.

Then there was no further time for checking.

"All Marines, check in!" called SSgt Herrin's gravelly voice.

"South One is fine, South Two has minor injuries," Nivea called, and let go of Clicks' hand to start jogging toward the Staff Sergeant's position past the barricades. As other Marines checked in, she came around the corner of the groaning, collapsing parking structure, and saw the sprawl of injured Marines. They'd heard her warning in time to leap the concrete barricade, just before a bomb had blown a crater near their position.

Not missing a beat, she vaulted the concrete barrier and started checking for anyone with injuries more treatable than bleeding ears and nostrils.

"South gate, this is Sar'nt Boxer at east gate! What's your condition over!"

"East gate, this is Staff Sar'nt Herrin at south! Some injuries, but we're still combat functional. What's your condition, over?"

Derry! Ohmygod that's Derry, he's okay!

She could have cried for relief. Instead she just balled a fist, grinned, and then un-balled it to get back to work until the Corpsman could arrive.

"South gate, we saw artillery con-trails from south by southwest. No contact from command or the Fist. What're your orders?"

There was no response from SSgt Herrin for a few seconds. Niece popped up from her crouch to look, and saw him helping the Corpsman go through wounded civilians with the comm. set in one paw.

"Sar'nt Boxer, that artillery's just reloading and probably scouting our positions. The space port is rubble and they have heavy guns. I want half your unit to consolidate with mine, and the other half to search the rubble for survivors. My unit will go try to knock out those guns."

"I copy, Staff Sar'nt. Staff Sar, do you have any officers over there?"

She saw Herrin straighten up and glower at the receiver, before responding.

"No. The Corps decided not to give the Fist a full officer compliment, so we're operating with non-commissioned only. Now get moving, we've got maybe three minutes before they hit us again."

Motherfuckers...

The lion continued barking calls into the comm., as he scrambled over a heap of broken concrete and began climbing into the Rattler's copilot seat.

"All Marines on Atria, this is Staff Sergeant Herrin. As of this moment, I'm assuming command until officers can be located. Any survivors, keep watch on your positions and hunker down until we can evaluate the situation. An attack is expected at any time, that was likely a preliminary bombing!"

She wasn't sure what they were dealing with at that moment. Insurgents? A revolt the Atria system hadn't reported? Some kind of coup?

"ARMOR SOUTH, INCOMING!" roared a voice from somewhere further down, and Niece popped her head up to look.

Rolling down the six lane freeway, the ominous barrels of heavy battle tanks three abreast emerged from the smog and gloom. Moving at less than 40 kph, their repulsor engines made so little sound that they had come upon the Marines unnoticed. Likewise, however, they'd obviously not spotted Derry's Rattler or the Marines just in front of them.

Without missing a moment, Herrin made paw-signs, and Marines were running towards the armored monsters, digging grenades and breaching charges from their bags. She could only watch in stranded anger as a second row of the beasts began emerging from the smog.

"Fuck fuck FUCK, where's our goddamn air support?!"

With a heave and a grunt, a young, bright red fox managed to push the hatch open. Commander Galen Forza looked up, pinned underneath the computer bank as the dazed, disoriented vulpine staggered in and blinked, going pale at the carnage.

"Hey there," the wolf coughed out, putting on his best smile. The fox cringed away from him, against the blood-splattered wall, tail flagged low between his legs.

"Just stay where...Where you are, okay? Help is on the way...Um...Robert, right?"

The fox nodded, startled that the Commander remembered him, being so briefly introduced hours ago. From somewhere off in the direction of Galen's feet, he heard a grinding, clanging sound, as a damaged hatch was being levered open by the wiry chief engineer.

Shit shit shit, the fox named Robert thought. He was fairly sure he could open the throat of one fur, but two was pushing things. If the pinned one called for help while he struggled with the dirty, tough-looking chief engineer, help might arrive before he could finish the job. He just prayed that help was as far away as he thought.

The equine knelt down next to Commander Forza, then stood again as the wolf feebly waved him off.

"Fix the ship...Chief...Bombing might be a p...predecessor to an attack..."

The horse turned and, shaking his head, strode over to the damaged consoles. A few quick moves of his tools and the plating on its side was melted open, allowing him access to the array of sparking, twisting wires within.

"Fuckin' shit...Bomb blew right through the controls, musta shorted something in the transmission system. Give me ten minutes, commander. Already got corpsmen on the way."

The fox's mouth went dry. He had to move, and move now.

"Okay, there we go, that should give us power for the second!"

Lights began turning back on, as the panicking intern-turned-terrorist slid his ceramic blade from sleeve to paw and began advancing towards the engineer's turned back, as the lupine Commander hovered on the verge of unconsciousness.

Captain Leith's security escort stood in a protective phalanx around her, a sea of muscular furs armed and bristling and ready to die in service to their Captain and fleet. The two at the front were bypassing the security door, hooking a mobile battery to it, and had it sliding open just as running lights began to turn back on.

Thank the gods but stay alert, this isn't over yet, girl...

As she strode onto the bridge, Lieutenant Commander Torvals shot to his feet and saluted, calling out the traditional "Captain on the Bridge". Everyone had stayed at their stations, even in total darkness, waiting for the moment power came back on.

As she saluted back and strode quickly to the command chair, the view screen that occupied an entire wall darkened up and fuzzily began to develop shapes to show space around them.

"All stations, I need damage reports and combat effectiveness evaluations. Lieutenant Cross, get in touch with our Marines on the ground and learn their status. Mr. Torvals, I n-"

Her commands stopped a moment, as the screen came fully into focus. What looked like stars were popping into existence far in the distance, first five, then ten, then another dozen, tiny black shapes firing off in front of each as it came out of RT drive, distorting space as the miniature black holes hurtled through the void.

"Mr. Adeling, get me scans. Helm, how operational are we?"

The normally-quiet young tiger swallowed hard, looking over his instruments. His seat was the front-most in their large, armored bridge, and it quite obviously made him nervous to be right by the screen despite the fact they were hundreds of feet from the ship's outer hull, and in fact safer from weapons fire than any chamber other than the reactor cores in Engineering.

A few quick button-taps got him the information.

Good, follows orders despite dripping sweat. It's a start.

"Captain, all three grav-rings are fully operational and our drives are at 80% function."

Adeling spoke up without preamble, as the screen to their front began to light up with yellow lines and circles radiating out from each of two dozen stars.

"Captain, those ships are mostly heavy in-system freighters and light naval frigates. I'm detecting weapons systems and fusion cores."

"In-system freighters don't have RTD's, Mr. Adeling, are you sure?"

"Yes, Captain," he responded in a tense tone.

Modified freighters...Probably up-armored and armed. Jumped out of system just before we got here to lay in wait, most likely.

She could see the readiness rippling through her command staff in the straightening of backs, the clenching and unclenching of muscles. Adriana Leith felt the drop in the pit of her stomach that meant she was expecting a fight.

"Mr. Torvals, get our guns online. Ms. Cross, hail the oncoming ships and see if they have anything to say about why they're coming at us in formation with weapons-bearing vessels. Helm, prepare for evasive maneuvering. Major Thaurun, order your fighters launched in defensive formations. Orders are not to engage unless fired upon, understood?"

Her quick, terse commands were answered with confirmations, and the bridge flew into activity. The incoming ships weren't yet confirmed hostiles, she had to remind herself - but the chance of their being friendly was virtually nil. The bombing, their appearance, the timing was too good. The only reason they hadn't been Torpedo Run'd, she was sure, was that smaller ships had trouble holding enough computer equipment to calculate planet-close jumps.

"Chief Karnen, this is the Bridge, copy if you hear me. I need to know if our RT drives are online."

For long seconds, no answer came. Someone had to be alive down there, for the power to be back on, but she knew there was every possibility a blast had knocked out the comm. system, or worse yet, damaged reactor containment. Radiation would likely shut down all communication if it were intense enough.

Then the horse's rough voice answered, and she felt a sharp flash of relief.

"Captain, this is Karnen in Engineering, I copy. Whoever blew up the Senators must not have known what they were doing with the explosives. Damage to our electrical system looks minor, but by the structural damage in here I'd say the bomb itself was damn potent. Only reason we lost power is some kinda error in the backup power systems."

Captain Leith sat back in the captain's seat, refusing to let the crew see how badly fuming she was that someone had blown up an entire planetary senate aboard her ship. She glared balefully at the yellow dots that were growing slowly larger on-screen, and caught herself hoping they were hostile.

Then she could exact some revenge before her career was brought to a screeching halt.

"Understood, Chief." Her voice was level, strong and carrying but calm despite her furious desire to unleash hell with her bare hands. "Casualties?"

"Corpsmen are already on the way. I'm guessing maybe...Ten survivors from the blast. Commander Forza's-GRK!"

A clatter cut through the comm., and Adriana blinked at the speaker that sat under her left hand.

"Chief? What's going on?"

The link had cut.

"Security! Get down to Engineering NOW!"

Chief Will Karnen, at 40 years of age, was a lanky unkempt horse. A dozen times he'd been the chief engineering petty officer for big ships in the USF's fleets, and a dozen times he'd either pissed off the commanding officer by being blunt to the point of disrespectfulness, or been 'laterally promoted' to make space for some up-and-coming hotshot fresh out of training.

Nonetheless, he loved the Navy, and loved the Fleet, and most of all loved the Fist of the Nascent Dawn. He'd been there the day her first girders had been laid, overseeing the work to gain a better understanding of the battleship's every minute chamber cell and system. Every error she had, he had sworn to fix, every mistake in construction, he'd sworn to be his own project.

Neck-deep in machine grease with a wrench in one hand and a lifeline in another, he'd been happy as a clam to go 'engine-diving' into the massive mechanical systems a less-experienced fur would call a death trap. The other engineers beneath him looked up to the horse as something of a machinery god. Or as a crazy fool with no sense of self-preservation when it came to the ship's deep internals.

So, when the bomb had gone off in the floor above them, Chief Karnen had ordered his various personnel to start repairing systems nearest to them that were damaged by the blast-quake. Then, he'd gone up himself, if for no other reason than he was the only person in the crew who knew the entire Engineering deck by touch.

Finding his friend Galen pinned under three tons of computer equipment amidst a heaping mess of gore had nearly put him off his game. Nearly. But quick orders from one of the few officers he really truly expected had him ripping into the Fist's electrical control system, re-connecting wires with all the expertise and loving care of a heart surgeon performing the most delicate of procedures, albeit on a robust beast like the Fist.

He'd been in contact with the Bridge, which was proper - They needed to know what was happening, and from what he'd heard out of Captain Leith, she was expecting trouble and to need all possible systems running. Karnen had thrown himself into the task, talking with her as he worked.

When a quivering paw landed on his shoulder, he thought it to be one of his pestering assistants, and raised a paw to wave him off. Then, blinding pain shot through his shoulder as something hard and cold jammed into the oil-soaked skin just over his clavicle.

With a roar of indignation, he yanked himself free of the computer he'd been half-buried in, lashing out with his wrench awkwardly only to have it caught by a grunting, crazy-eyed fox. Struggling briefly over control of the thing, Karnen didn't see the knife coming again until it jammed into his side, making him lurch the other way in a reflexive attempt to get away from the biting thing.

The fox screamed, and jumped at him, slashing wildly with the thing. Chief Karnen stumbled backwards, trying to stay away from the blade, only to trip over his own tool box. With death rushing towards him in the paws of a shrieking, knife-swinging fox, Karnen thought fast and booted the tool box with waning strength, suddenly dizzy as blood gushed from his side.

Knife still slashing, the vulpine tripped, sprawling on top of Karnen's chest. A fist jammed into the horse's jaw, and he ignored it, going for the knife-wielding paw with both of his own. A paw jammed down into the wound on his shoulder, and Karnen blew a high-pitched yell of burning agony.

The fox reared up, and shoved down with all his weight against the horse's arms. Karnen knew he couldn't hold long - Though the fox wasn't terribly heavy, his vision was already getting blurry from blood loss and pain, and a sideways glance told him Galen had passed out sometime before this started.

Then, abruptly, the fox's head snapped back and he went limp. As his face lolled back forward, Karnen saw a hole blown clean through it right between the eyes. Shoving the corpse aside with the last of his strength, Will looked toward the side on which he felt momentarily deaf.

A very old tiger, so white-furred his stripes were nearly gone, had managed to crawl for a security sailor, and laid against the corpse for use as stabilization. Smoke wisped from the muzzle of the late warrior's pistol, where it rested in a withered pair of old paws.

For a moment, they met eyes, and Will felt himself fading into them, losing consciousness. A sharp bark snapped him back.

"Get up, Chief! You've got a boat to run!"

Chief Karnen groaned, more in aggravation than pain. He was angry, to be hurt when his ship needed fixing. The horse rolled, tail flopping to one side, and grabbed the wound in his side with a hiss of pain.

"Thanks, old man...Nngh..."

Then the hatch from the elevators banged open, breaking the makeshift barrier his assailant had made with a fallen bit of debris jammed into the wheel lock. Corpsmen came streaming through, along with Marines and Naval security forces.

"Where'd you learn to shoot like that, old man?"

The old senator gave a white-fanged grin as he set the firearm down and slid it towards the incoming Marines.

"Semper Fi, friend. Forty years a senator doesn't erase thirty in the Corps."

"Captain, they're refusing our hails." The caracal's tail was lashing through the hole in back of her seat in agitation, as she punched frequency after frequency. Captain Leith shook her head at the stupidity of the incoming enemy. Their numbers were overwhelming, at some twenty to one against her, but the Fist was a battleship, and could kill any one of those ships with a minimum of difficulty.

Nonetheless, she expected tricks, and wasn't about to play nice.

"Lieutenant Cross, signal all crew to battlestations, we are under attack."

A few heads turned away from stations to look at her with surprise. The more experienced didn't even bother, and began calling out preparations to their various crews, stationed across the battleship's decks.

"Mr. Adeling, I want scans of those ships. They can't think to take us on with a bunch of welded-on mining lasers. They've got a trick, and we need to know what it is."

"Aye, Captain."

"Mr. Torvals, maybe they aren't hearing is properly. Fire a warning shot, main railguns, and load all torpedo bays. Time until we're in range to fire?"

"Time until firing range is one-twenty seconds at current speed, Captain. Time until ready to fire all torpedoes...Seventy seconds."

The Fist of the Nascent Dawn didn't so much as shiver when the twin rail guns mounted alongside her prow let loose. Silver streaks flashed through the void, cutting the darkness with their spinning mass until they bulls-eyed a chunk of space wreckage at the edge of their targeting computer's effective range. Where once there had been a rogue asteroid, now there was little more than twirling space dust, hurtling through space towards oblivion.

Undeterred, the approaching flotilla came on, gathering speed in the frictionless void.

"Helm, give us one-half forward speed, 45-degree angle to their line of approach, and bring is up at a 45 degree. Make ready to engage full-speed and evasive maneuvering. Engineering, give me one grav-ring for maneuvering and one for deflection."

From the communicator in her chair, Chief Karnen's voice came through, sounding pinched and angry. She couldn't help the rush of relief that he was all right, but pushed it aside, keeping her eyes to the spreading formation of enemy ships.

"Bridge, this is Engineering. Sorry for the glitch there. Minor...Ngh! Minor problem. It's fixed now. One ring to maneuvering, one to deflection, aye."

Captain Leith's eyes went a little wide, as the foremost ship in the enemy fleet, a fat, ugly cargo vessel that looked more like a trash barge than a war-ship opened its cargo bay and dumped out what she could swear was a misshapen missile.

"Captain, detecting fusion readings! She's firing a ship core at us!"

"Helm, evade! Major Thaurun, have your fighters swat that thing down! Mr. Thieren, send them a message, courtesy of the USF Navy!"

"Aye Captain!"

On the exterior of the hull, Petty Officer 2nd Class Sati Anwar prayed to the gods of space that the magnets on her EVO suit would keep her firmly anchored to the hull as she clung with all her strength, and that none of the incoming combat would rake her poor fragile otter body with flesh-disintegrating fire.

When Chief Karnen had asked her to fix one of the electrical relays, a quick consultation of the ship's design schematics told her something mind-boggling and heart-racing; she would have to get out on the hull itself and dig into one of the incomplete areas to get the job done.

Quite simply, their backup power systems had failed because of a critical short circuit in a conduction line that wasn't even insulated yet. Nor armored over. She couldn't believe the stupidity of putting such an important system so close to an incomplete surface.

So, without bothering to ask the harried Chief for permission, she'd thrown on the custom-fit EVO suit her parents had built her as a shoving-off gift, and climbed outside into the comforting vastness of space. With a laugh of sheer joy at the silliness of her situation, she had swum along the hull until reaching her destination, and in moments had located the arcing wires and separated them.

The otter was wrapping them in electrical insulation, relying on her suit's nano-wiring to keep her from being fried by the truly insane current, when two entire wings of fighters blasted by her position. Her inner-ear implants, designed to help give her better balance, orientation, and spatial awareness through sound, made the noise of rushing jet engines as she looked up, close enough to see one pilot's grim vulpine face beneath his transparent flight helmet.

Following their trajectory, her eyes went wide seeing the incoming fleet. She would have chided herself for not paying attention, had she not been suddenly seized by the urge to pray and hope she didn't go home in a drink tube after this.

Then the Fist was moving, the great gravity rings arresting their constant motion and swiftly spinning into an entirely different pattern and cadence. The resulting flux in gravity sent a shudder through the hull beneath sati's crouched body, and her aural implant resolved the vibration as a low tolling of bells. A sensation of motion flowed through her, like being underwater in a shifting tide, as it pulled her towards the endless sea.

One of the fighter wings accelerated at a break-neck pace, the silver-blue light of their afterburner thrusters hurling them through the black. Someplace distant, when they seemed only to be fast-moving, dancing stars, a sudden flash heralded change in the great black starlit sea. A few seconds later, as the fighters scattered to evade, alarms began to go off in her EVO suit's headset.

"Warning, a fusion detonation has been detected. Shockwave incoming. ETA 20 seconds. Please anchor yourself for impact."

Sati threw herself flat against a protruding vertical section of armor and stared in morbid terror as the shockwave approached. Too far from any more meaningful cover, all she could do was hope the blast didn't fry her or bounce her off the hull like a basketball and away into the endless depths. The shockwave was a bright cerulean blue and looked like a gigantic expanding cornea, forcing her helmet to polarize, reducing the glare so it wouldn't render her retinas into useless charred cinders.

The world above her changed suddenly, not unlike a spinning kaleidoscope, as the Fist spun through space, shifting angles to force the incoming enemies into breaking formation for the pursuit. Like a cloud of lights, they came on until they were close enough for her to make out the dark shapes of their hulls. Finally, the shockwave passed over her, setting off alarms in her suit about a surge in radiation. A quick glance at the readings displayed on the lower left of her facemask, told Sati what she needed to know. The otter was relieved to find the radiation levels were easily less than the EVO suit's limits.

Then the shock itself hit her, and she was pulled away from the armor plate only to be bashed back into it as her body's own muscular tension combined with the magnets in her suit to pull her back to it as if she'd been shock-waved in planetary gravity. Her vision jarred and tearing, she felt the pulsating shivers run through and over her as the wave buffeted her beloved ship and then was gone, leaving her in a stunned and dizzy state as her inner ears struggled to keep her from getting motion sick.

Fighters were blazing past her then, spewing from the bays in staccato streams. She raised her fist to give a cheer, effervescent with the adrenaline of still being alive and the devout wish that they come back safe and victorious.

Then, the fastest freighters began to make flank speed. Sati heard the metallic sliding sound of well-loved hatches opening, and looked down toward where the nearest of the Fist's mighty torpedo bays had just come online. A wrenching, squealing noise that echoed up through the hull told her something out of a horrified nightmare; someone had forgotten to remove the shipyard's torpedo tube cap, something that could only be done from the outside, ideally in spacedock.

As the clearly-modified freighters began to disgorge fighters to engage the Fist's defensive screen, Sati Anwar disengaged her magnetic locks and threw herself toward the torpedo bay, twisting in mid-nothing and jerking her body about so that she flew over the ship's hull in a graceful arc. At its apex, she re-engaged magnets, and the hull flew towards her as if she had sudden remembered gravity, and she hit with bone-jarring force.

Grunting in pain, she spat out blood from a bit tongue into the chin reservoir of her helmet, where its internal systems sucked the fluid away before it could ruin her vision. Then she raced across the hull, boots giving her a clang-clang-clang sound effect through the aural until reaching the torpedo tube's exposed outer section.

Though the tube overall was nearly sixty meters long, the protrusion was barely five. Just enough to prevent the torpedo's energy fuel rocket from scorching the Fist's hull. Over her head and two body-lengths away, the tube cap squatted atop its aperture like a giant black slug, rubbery and stubborn, holding a titanium plug inside the mechanism.

If, as she suspected, the torpedo tube crew had tried to fire, a failsafe system should have prevented launch. But as she climbed the side of the tube, magnetic boots holding her perpendicular to its structure with the Fist's hull at an angle that would dizzy any less well-trained fur, she could feel the vibration of a torpedo's engine as its onboard computer tried to maneuver it around an obstacle.

Something's wrong with the tube...Didn't prevent launch. Maybe a software issue?

"Warning, extreme temperature change detected."

Her helmet was top of the line triple-plated ferro-plastic, and the nanomachine gel inside it shifted, colorizing to show her the heat gradients within the torpedo tube at a depth of .3 meters. Though her boots were unaffected by the white-hot core, where the torpedo was no doubt idling and spewing energy back down into the launching bay, she felt no heat and detected no suit damage.

As she reached the rubberized torpedo tube cap, she knew that would soon change. The second she removed it, the torpedo would come rocketing out, and if her timing in escape was even half a second off, she'd be so crisped they would likely never find what passed for her corpse.

At least, she mused, she had remembered to log her exit through the airlock. The crew would be able to surmise what had happened. It wasn't much comfort.

Grabbing at her magnetized tool-belt, Sati brought out her crowbar. A shortish piece of metal, maybe half a meter long, it looked something more akin to a flattened stapler than a prying tool. She jammed its end under a rubberized edge and pressed a silver button to engage the tool. Two magnets activated, and the ends of her tool jackknifed apart, loosening the cap by several tenths of a meter.

As her suit began to show more and more heat beneath, Sati hurried, loosening another section, then a third.

Come on, tell me the shipyard did ONE thing right...

The fourth section of tube cap popped loose and she immediately leapt, leaving her crowbar behind in the process and twisting to keep her face away from the coming blast.

Abruptly she was accelerated, as the torpedo spewed free of its cage, and Sati was momentarily blinded as a reflective bit of hull plate shined its drive-flare into her eyes. Then her blindness was rendered far less of an issue as her suit's alarms went insane, blaring of incoming heat, as the cast-offs of the torpedo's fission engine clipped her back.

True to its construction and programming, the suit's nanos prevented the thing from being burned open and venting her viscera into space. Instead, it ablated the heat all over the suit, spreading its surface area to steal energy and prevent a burn-through.

Seconds later, as she crashed into the hull hard enough that blood splattered across her faceplate, the suit's inside began rapidly heating.

Shit shit shit!

She bit the microphone enabler that rested next to her cheek inside the helmet, and connected instantly with Engineering, just as the suit's alarms reached a crescendo of informing her she was about to be burned.

"Engineering, the tube caps are still on! Send EVO's to get them OFFAAAUGH!"

The smell of burning fur filled her nostrils as she reached an airlock, and her mind failed to remember the boarding code as her paw slammed into it over and over, trying to convince the damn thing to open. Her flesh was cooking, and it smelled of overheated steaks.

Around her, a spray of impacting weapons fire spattered off the hull, as a nearby enemy ship got close enough to open fire for a moment, only to be swatted from space by one of the Fist's many particle acceleration turrets.

Then the airlock slid open, and she fell inside, the ship's internal gravity bubble catching her like a flame caught moths. Screaming, squealing, thrashing, she didn't notice as three other Engineering otters leapt outside past her falling form, and as the outer door cycled shut and inner began to re-open.

At least I got the job done.

Her last thoughts, at least for a while, gave her a grim grin of victory.