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"What's wrong?" Roger placed his hand on Kamala's upper-left shoulder and leaned closer. "You look hurt."

"Think I pulled a muscle when I did that boa-constrictor thing a while ago." She pointed at a spot on her right side, roughly halfway down the length of her body.

"I hope that's all it is." He glanced at his arm, which the alien animal had clenched in its jaws a few seconds before Kamala crushed the life out of it. "I'm gonna have one hell of a bruise here, so I can sympathize."

She chuckled. "If that's the worst thing that happens to us, it'll be one in the 'win' column."

"Yeah, I'm keeping my fingers crossed." He stopped at the next doorway and pointed his ultratool into the dark room beyond, trying not to notice the O2 meter on the lower-left of his heads-up display.

Kamala turned and scanned the room across the corridor. "I've got another empty one here. How about you?"

"Same." He looked over his shoulder. "Well, at least yours is brightly lit. Let's check it out."

She waved her 'tool over the doorway again. "I'm not picking up any life forms or movement or heat sources." She slithered up to the opening, peeked inside, and entered the room. "There's nothing but bare, white walls. Well, there's something that looks like a big, blue button on the far wall, but that's the only feature."

"Huh." He joined her in the middle of the room and glanced upward. No lights in the ceiling or walls. Maybe the walls themselves are providing the illumination. Though they don't actually appear to be glowing.

"No other doors." Kamala sighed. "Guess we'll have to try another one." She turned around and froze with her mouth hanging open. "Oh, for fuck's sake!"

Roger groaned and slumped forward slightly. "The door's gone, isn't it?"

"Bingo. I should've seen that coming."

"Me, too." He shook his head and stepped forward. "Well, maybe that button on the wall opens another door."

"I'd rather not start pushing buttons unless we're sure what they do."

"Me, too. Doesn't look like we have a choice, though."

The floor in front of him melted and drained away. He leaped backward. "Shit!"

"What's wrong--oh, bloody hell!" Kamala slid up beside him and stared into the seemingly bottomless pit where a solid metal floor had been seconds ago.

"I'm not even gonna look behind us. I have a pretty good idea of what I'll see."

She looked over her shoulder and gasped. "Yeah--the floor's gone. There's just this section we're standing on. Everything else is just a long drop."

"And we have no way to know how long it'll be before the rest of the floor disappears, too."

She coiled her body up under herself and "sat," clasped his hand, and leaned her head on his shoulder.

He reached over with his other hand, stroked her cheek, and wished that he could take off his helmet and kiss her. But unless the atmosphere changed spontaneously into something they could breathe...

She stared at the pit between them and the button, and frowned. "I wonder...I think my body might be just the right length."

"For what?"

"I have an idea." She turned and met his gaze. "I might be able to push that button--or I could end up hitting the bottom of this pit with big, wet splat."

"Uh, I don't like that idea."

"It's all we've got. It's either that, or wait for the environment to be altered again--and we don't have enough oxygen left to wait around for something that might never happen."

He sighed. "Okay, you've got a point."

She wrung her lower hands. "And if this goes wrong, we could both fall."

Well, dying with her would actually be a plus. Better than watching her die and having to go on without her. He took a deep breath and nodded. "Okay, I'm up for it. What've you got in mind?"

#

"Am I getting any closer?" Morrison crept forward, pointing his gun straight ahead. The thick fog had vanished, but now there was only darkness. Luckily, his sidearm had a tiny but bright flashlight under the barrel, which lit the way ahead quite nicely--but the power cell would only last so long.

"My 'tool is able to detect you," Luana said, "but there's still no way to us to get back together. The hallways seem to shift every time I scan them."

"And the only thing that doesn't change is the wall between us?"

"Exactly. There's only two corridors between us, but I can't find any doors linking them. Everything else, though, keeps changing. Like, a few minutes ago, there was a passageway up ahead that turned to the left; now it turns to the right."

Morrison shivered. "Yeah, somebody is definitely fucking with us. Why, though? Are we someone's lab rats? Are they putting us through this just to see what we'll do?"

"That's what I was thinking. Little white lab mice running through a maze."

"A maze that keeps changing. How would we know if we reach the end of it? I mean, what if we already have, and they moved things around to keep us trapped?"

"Shit. Don't put ideas like that in my head."

"Sorry. Guess this place has affected my brain-mouth filter." His light passed over a shape and he stopped. "Hold on. I think I've found something." He adjusted his aim, moving the light until he found the shape again. "Oh, hell. It's a body."

"What kind?"

"The no-longer-living kind, from the looks of him. His throat's been slit."

Luana chuckled nervously. "I meant, is he human or anthro? Or alien?"

"At first glance, he looks human. And his clothing...well, it's not quite like the ones I've seen in movies, but he's kind of dressed like a samurai."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. Either he got yanked off a movie set or out of a convention or cosplay thing, or... you remember one of the things we found before we docked with the Challenger? The thing that looked like half of a Spanish galleon?"

"Yeah. Couldn't forget that if I tried."

"Well, I think this guy really was taken from Earth centuries ago."

"Huh. If one of those rift things opened up near Earth's surface hundreds of years ago, sucked this guy in, and popped him out here--he would've emerged into open space."

"I don't see any signs of prolonged exposure to vacuum. So if he did get dumped into space the same way we ended up here, this ship must've been right there to pick him up before he died." Morrison took his security omnitool out of his pocket, scanned the body, and sighed. "Well, I was hoping he was merely unconscious, but he's definitely flatline. We're not getting any answers out of this guy unless you happen have a Ouija board on you."

"Marvelous." She sighed. "Well, how long do you figure he's been there?"

Morrison frowned and studied the data in the holofield above his omnitool. "Not long. He's still bleeding, and the body hasn't cooled off yet." A chill surged through Morrison's chest and he whipped his gun up to cover the corridor ahead before turning to check behind him. "Which means whoever killed him could still be nearby."

#

"How much air do we have left?" Seth muttered--then he shook his head. "No, never mind. I'd rather not know."

Marissa rubbed his back slowly and rested her other hand on his.

"Actually," one of the other techs said from the pilot's seat, "we should be okay for a while. From what I've seen of the specs, the Challenger and its shuttles have a really efficient air recycling system. We should be good for at least a couple days."

"That's a relief." Marissa patted Seth's hand.

"Food and water could be a problem," Tank said, staring at a random spot on the wall. She rubbed her hands over her face and wiped more tears away.

Hitomi reached over to pat Tank's hand. "I'm sorry about Marcus. Was he a friend of yours?"

"Not a close one; we'd only just met a few weeks ago, but we were getting along pretty well. Just starting to get to know each other." Tank pressed her lips together for a few seconds before drawing in a quick breath. "Nice guy. Wish we could've saved him."

"Yeah," the pilot said, frowning at his control panel. "Maybe we could've, if that girl hadn't shot him."

Tank shook her head. "You didn't see what happened. I did. That spider-centipede thing bit him--injected something into him. No idea what it was, but it affected him instantly. He changed right in front of me. Glowing lines appearing under his skin--dunno what the fuck it was, maybe some kind of alien circuitry. It was already too late for him, and he knew it." She squeezed her eyes shut and sobbed. "He wanted Asuka to kill him. So she did. It was the only thing she could do for him."

"Sorry," the pilot said. "Maybe those critters turned him into a zombie like the Challenger's crew, but at least he didn't have to suffer through it."

"Yeah." Tank crossed her arms tightly over her chest. "Not much comfort, but I guess it's all we've got."

A brief silence followed. Marissa gave Seth's knee a pat and unbuckled her seatbelt.

"Think I'll take a look at whatever navigational data the shuttle might have, see if I can figure out where we are."

The pilot waved at the console to his left. "There's a ton of star charts and whatnot, but I've only skimmed over a few."

She floated over to the empty seat and strapped herself in. "I'll let you know if I find anything useful."

A few more silent moments drifted by. Finally, Seth raised an eyebrow at Tank.

"I've been wondering...I never got around to asking how you got your nickname. Don't know when I might have another chance to ask, so--"

Tank managed a very brief, very slight smile. "Got it in high school. I was on the football team in my senior year. I had a tendency to mow down anyone in my path, so they started calling me Tank. My real name is Gertrude Kozinski." She shrugged. "I was a lot heavier back then. As you may have noticed, I got into bodybuilding in the years since, dropped quite a lot of weight and added quite a lot of muscle."

"Yeah, I did notice." Seth aimed a quick, lopsided grin at her. "It was kinda hard not to."

Tank chuckled.

He nodded at Marissa. "Our girlfriend is like that, too. It's a good look."

"I've seen her around--well, before all of us ended up here. Boiler, right?"

"Yep."

"Her muscles are at least three times the size of mine." Tank let another quick smile show. "You're lucky you landed her first; I don't swing that way, but she made me consider trying it."

"Same here. Before we hooked up with Boiler, I never even knew I was bi." Marissa cocked her head. "I'm still not sure, to be honest. Ever since we got together, I haven't been attracted to any other women. So, I dunno, maybe it's just her." She shrugged and resumed her intense scrutiny of the starmaps on her monitor.

Seth let a few more seconds pass and said, "So, find anything yet?"

"Well, there's a detailed map of the jumpgate system--at least, as it was in 2147--and lots of files on solar systems that have been explored, and various Earth colonies." Marissa sighed. "Our current location doesn't match any of the maps. At least, not the ones I've looked up so far."

"If I had to guess," the pilot said, "I'd say we're nowhere near even the most distant gate. Well, either that, or a few thousand years of stellar drift has made the maps useless."

Tank groaned. "Gee, Chuck, thanks for putting that in our heads."

"Uh, sorry." Chuck tugged on his shirt collar and tapped a button on his console. "Hey, guys, just an idle thought, here--shouldn't the Challenger's reactors have blown by now? I haven't detected any huge explosions. Or small ones, for that matter."

"Asuka here. I didn't want to alarm everyone, but yeah, it should've happened by now. Which means those spider-centipedes and zombies--or whatever else might be onboard--managed to counteract my hacking attempt and cancel the overload."

"Well, shit." Tank thumped the back of her head against the wall. "That's just fuckin' great."

Marissa turned slowly to look over her shoulder and meet Seth's gaze. "So the ship and all those things on it are still out there."

"Yeah," Asuka said. "And just a few seconds ago, a large ship entered ladar range."

Tank stared at the console. "Oh, hell."

"And it's heading our way." Asuka paused. "And now I'm picking up a half-dozen smaller ships. Looks like they've taken out some of the shuttles or fighters."

Seth met Marissa's wide-eyed gaze again. "Jesus. They're looking for us."

#

"Okay." Roger secured his grip around Kamala and released a slow breath. "Ready?"

"No." She chuckled nervously and locked her arms around him. "But what the hell." She looked over her shoulder, trying her best to aim at the button on the wall, and coiled her lower body up. "Well, here we go."

She wrenched her tail around, flicking it out toward the button--and the tip missed it by an inch.

Her eyes widened and she gasped. "Oh, this is gonna--"

Gravity took over and her tail fell toward the pillar on which Roger sat. His heart lurched and he tried to tighten his grip even more. Kamala's body slapped against the side of the pillar with a sharp, echoing whack. The fall tugged Roger forward, and he lunged back to prevent both of them from plunging into the bottomless pit the floor had become.

She held her breath for a long moment, squeezing her eyes shut and biting her lower lip. Finally, she gasped again, opened her eyes, and grunted, "Hurt."

"Shit." Roger glanced at the surface behind him to make sure it hadn't melted away while he wasn't watching it, leaned back slowly, letting her rest on his chest, and held her for a long moment. "Guess it's time for Plan B."

She coughed a few times, drew in another ragged breath, and said, "There's nothing else in this room except that button and empty space. There is no Plan B." She moved her upper-left hand over to caress the side of his helmet. "Gimme a minute to recover and I'll try again."

"Maybe we should at least try to figure something else out. I mean, you hit hard enough to damn near snap your spine."

"It sounded worse than it felt."

"Sure, it did." He rubbed her back, wishing he could feel her skin under his palms, but unless the atmosphere on this ship could change as abruptly as the walls and floors, he was stuck in his spacesuit. And even if it did change, the way things were going, it would likely end up turning into something even worse.

The O2 gauge in his HUD turned red. Oh, hell.

"What's wrong?" Kamala pushed herself up a few inches and stared at his face.

"Uh, nothing."

"First you winced, then your face turned white. That's not 'nothing.'" She arched a brow ridge. "It's your oxygen supply, isn't it?"

He stifled a sigh. "Yeah. The meter's gone into the red."

She lowered herself back onto his chest. "Mine's been red for a while. I've got about ten minutes left. Luckily, I've got the spare breather pack, but..."

But I don't have a backup. He stroked the side of her breather mask. She placed her hand over his and held it there for a moment.

"Which means we need to get back to work." She pulled her tail up onto the floor and scrunched her face up again. "Ugh. My entire frontside is gonna be bruised. When that sets in, I'll be lucky if I can still slither."

"You sure you don't want to find another way? We don't know how many times you'll have to go through this until you hit it."

"Hey, have a little faith in my aim." She grinned, but it didn't last long. "Okay, better not wait any longer. Get ready, I wanna give it another shot."

"Well...okay." He sat up and waited for her to slide onto his lap. They locked their arms around each other and she coiled herself into her launch position. "Okay, any time you're ready."

"Here we go again." She looked over her shoulder and stared at the button. "Three...two...one." She flicked her tail out toward her target, pushing against Roger, trying to extend herself another inch or two.

The tip swatted the edge of the button and Kamala grinned. In the fraction of a second before she lost contact, she managed to flex her spine enough to push it. A faint click followed, barely audible through Roger's helmet, before the lower half of Kamala's body began its downward swing. He threw himself backward, pulling her toward him, and shoved his left leg under her body and lifted, doing everything he could think of to lessen her inevitable impact with the side of the pillar.

Whack. Not as loud this time, so maybe he'd succeeded.

She grunted. He gazed through her mask's faceplate and saw tears streaming down her cheeks. He held her and rubbed her back again until she was able to resume breathing.

"Ow." She grumbled something under her breath. "At least it wasn't quite as bad, this time. Gonna feel it in the morning, though."

"At least we might have a chance at seeing tomorrow, now."

"Yeah, there's that." She heaved herself up and looked around. "I hope that goddamned button actually does something, after we went through all that."

Roger sat up and stared at the open space where the floor had been when they entered the room. After a few seconds, it remained open. Frowning, he shifted his gaze to the wall at the far end of the room, then the other three.

Nothing appeared to be happening.

Kamala let out a frustrated growl. "Son of a bitch!"

Roger groaned and flopped onto his back. "Someone is having too much fun at our expense."

"I'm not normally a violent person, but if we ever meet whoever is screwing with us, I swear I'm gonna give 'em four knuckle sandwiches. At once." She sighed and ran a hand through her head-tentacles. "I dunno, maybe something malfunctioned. Who knows how long this ship was where we found it. Maybe its crew is gone, like the people on the Challenger, and now everything's running on automatic."

"And if enough time has passed, parts are starting to break down." Roger shook his head. "That might even be worse than having a living being doing this to us."

"Yeah. Not only that, but it'd deprive me of someone to punch right in the fucking grille." She growled again, then she glanced off to the side, frowning, as if something had distracted her.

Roger chuckled and clasped her nearest hand. "At least it only took you two tries to nail that button."

"Yeah," she muttered absently. "Most chimeras can boost their reflexes for a few seconds. Kinda like an adrenaline burst, I guess. Everything appears to go into slow motion, so you're able to see more of what's happening around you. The ones who were designed for combat can push it a lot farther--some of 'em can keep it up for ten to fifteen seconds, after plenty of training and practice--but I'm lucky to get two or three seconds. Still, it was enough for me to put one last twitch into my tail and push that button." She snapped her head around to look at him, frowned, and pointed at the floor. "You feel that?"

"Feel what?"

"There's a vibration in the floor. Very faint, but growing stronger."

"It must not be getting through my spacesuit."

"I'm guessing it started when I pushed the button. Feels like some sort of machinery's running nearby."

"The way our luck's going, it's probably a fucking airlock opening." Roger held his breath for a moment, concentrating--and there it was, under his back, the floor vibrating like a massage cushion. "Okay, yeah, now I'm feeling it."

The ceiling began inching down toward them.

"What?" Roger shook his head. "What?"

Kamala stared at him for a second and looked up. "Oh, you've got to be kidding!"

"This? This is what the button does?" Roger glanced around and tried not to panic. "Jesus Christ!"

"Okay, uh...stay calm, baby." Kamala looked around and wrung her hands. Then she pulled her ultratool out of her belt pouch and pointed it into the abyss surrounding them. "Whoa. That thing's over a mile deep. That's wider than the ship. The gravity must run from one end to the other."

Roger clamped his mouth shut and stared at the approaching ceiling. It had already lowered halfway to them.

"There's a smooth surface at the bottom," Kamala continued. She swept her 'tool around and smiled ever so slightly. "I'm also picking up a number of openings in the walls. If we can make it to one of 'em, we'll have a way out."

"Assuming they don't lead to a furnace or rendering plant or the inside of a fusion reactor."

"Well, wherever they lead, we'll figure out what to do when we get there. It's better than staying here." She stretched out on the floor. "Here, climb onto my back."

He put his arms and legs around her, and she shook her head.

"No--the other way. I can't move backward very well, so I'll be upside-down on the way down. You'll have an easier time hanging on if you're upright."

He flipped around and clamped his arms and legs around her again. She held onto his ankles with her lower hands.

"Okay, hang on, honey." She wrapped herself around the pillar and started their descent.

Well, we might actually live through this if the pillar doesn't get any wider toward the bottom. He looked up and almost gasped at the speed with which the lighted room receded into the distance.

"Geronimo," he muttered, closed his eyes and concentrated on simply holding on as he and Kamala plunged into utter darkness.

#

"Anything yet?"

"No, Luana. Just more of the same empty corridors." Morrison turned to cover the hallway behind him; still empty. He faced forward again and kept walking. "How about you?"

"I'm getting pissed. Every time I come up on a corridor that intersects with yours, it changes before I get to it."

"Yeah, same here." He swept his omnitool over the hallway ahead and glanced at its holo-display. Luana's position was marked by a green blip two corridors to his right, and there wasn't another intersecting one in the device's range.

"When we find whoever is screwing with us, I'm gonna have some fun at their expense. Starting with my foot ramming up their asses."

He grinned. "That's the spirit."

The corridor in his holofield changed abruptly, accompanied by a faint squishing, slurping sound directly behind him. He whipped around and snapped his gun up, and found a solid wall in front of him.

"Damn it. They've sealed the passageway behind me." A faint odor brushed his nose; he sniffed and wrinkled his snout. "And now I'm smelling blood. And other stuff--scents I don't even recognize. But yeah, one of 'em is definitely blood."

"Henry, be careful."

"As much as possible. Not sure how much wiggle room I'll have in that department, though." He glanced at his holofield and found a new corridor had opened a few feet ahead, leading to the right. He holstered his gun and flexed his two big fingers and thumb, working out a cramp that had started a few minutes ago, and pulled it out again. "Okay, let's see what kind of fucked-up stuff I'm about to run into now."

He crept up to the corner, wincing at the echoing thumps each step made on the metal beneath his hooves. He stopped, took a slow breath, and peeked around the corner.

"Oh, shit."

On the floor, strewn from one end of the corridor to the other--bodies. At a glance, Morrison estimated there were over a dozen, some human and some...not. None of them looked like chimeras, unless the bioengineering corporations had started producing even stranger ones than Kamala over the centuries.

And if they weren't chimeras, then they were likely aliens.

Just our luck--we can't actually meet any living aliens, but we keep finding dead ones.

"Henry? What's going on?"

"Just found a bunch of bodies." He scanned them and glanced at the data appearing in his holofield. "Eighteen of 'em, all dead."

"What do you think killed them?"

He took a few steps toward the nearest corpse, a human in furs and a loincloth, with his head turned at an unnatural angle; the poor bastard's neck had been snapped.

Morrison moved on to the next pair, another human in what appeared to be a futuristic spacesuit and a stocky, hairless creature with eight eyes and a vertical mouth filled with needle-like teeth. It had buried those teeth in the human's neck and ripped a chunk of her throat out; she had blasted a fist-size hole clean through its body with a big gun in her right hand.

He wrenched the gun out of the woman's hand and whispered, "Sorry, whoever you were." If the weapon still functioned, he'd give it to Luana when--if--they could find each other. It was too small for his hand; his big finger wouldn't even fit through the trigger guard. Luana would be able to handle it, though, and he would feel a whole lot better if she had something to protect herself from whatever was going on here.

"Henry? You okay?"

"Uh, yeah. Sorry. Hold on a sec."

The next pair were aliens--or whatever--and had died with their claws gouged deep into one another's throats.

He took a quick look at three more bodies. Tall, slender alien with pale skin and no hair, apparently female; two beings of indeterminate gender, bipedal, with four arms and humps on their backs. One of them had plunged a horrific weapon through the female's chest--a thing that looked like a cross between a rifle and a power drill--and she had apparently killed them both by placing her palms on their heads. Their faces were frozen in grimaces of agony, and the skin where her hands touched them appeared charred.

Maybe she had delivered some sort of energy burst into them. Or it could've been a telepathic attack.

"Come on, talk to me, Henry! What's going on?"

"I just took a quick look at some of the bodies." He shivered. "It looks like they all killed each other."

#

"Here they come." Asuka kept her eyes on the ladar screen, watching the half-dozen blips approaching her position. "Everyone, keep your thrusters on maximum. I'll delay them as long as I can."

"We're with you," T-bone said, and in the corner of her right eye, his fighter eased up beside her.

On her left, Tits's fighter joined them.

Asuka shook her head. "Everybody else needs you to cover them in case they run into any more hostiles out here."

"This is Lieutenant Rebecca Orr. Identify yourselves."

Asuka raised an eyebrow. She'd never heard that voice before.

"Should we respond?" T-bone said.

"Not much choice, really. They can probably hear our transmissions, and see us on their ladar. If they're hostile, they'll shoot us down whether we reply or not." Asuka powered down her weapons and nudged the controls, halting her forward motion and turning to face the approaching ships. "Lt. Orr, my name is Asuka Hudson. Don't take this the wrong way, but you're not some kind of alien cyber-zombie, are you?"

"Sounds like you've run into our former crew. No, we're not...whatever the hell those things turned our crew into. Here, I'll show you."

A new window opened beside the ladar screen. On it appeared a face in a helmet. Feline--another chimera, apparently--with black fur; a panther type, from the few details visible inside the helmet. There appeared to be no circuitry or rotting flesh.

"I showed you mine, Ms. Hudson. Wanna show me yours?"

"Sure, as soon as I can find the camera." She flicked her gaze over the console.

"On your left, around the middle of the panel. The controls are beside it."

"Ah, thanks." Asuka activated the camera and turned her head to look directly into it. "Can you see me now?"

"Yeah. Christ, you're just a kid!"

"It's a prosthetic body. I'm actually quite a bit older than I look." She glanced at the ladar and back to the camera. "We're not sure how we got here. We were on a space station orbiting Io, where we had construction teams building our first jumpgate. Then, suddenly, the entire maintenance bay we were in got sliced off from the station and ended up here. We evacuated the bay minutes before a huge piece of debris smashed it. We boarded the first intact ship we found, but that...ended poorly."

"The Challenger_, right?"_

"Yep. Your ship?"

"Yeah. Nine of us got out once the crew became infected. Another rift appeared shortly after that, and we went through it, hoping it'd take us back home." A haunted look crossed Orr's face. "It didn't. There was nothing but blackness all around, and the rift behind us. We scanned for life signs, ships, anything_, but there was nothing. Not even stars."_ She shook her head slowly and her expression turned numb. "The temperature readings were impossible_. Cold--far colder than space should be."_

Asuka would've felt a chill rising up through her body if it were capable of such a thing. "Damn. That sounds like the Big Freeze--the end of the universe."

"That's what I was afraid of. In which case, there would've been nowhere for us to go. So we did a one-eighty and pushed our engines to full burn, and entered the rift again." Orr closed her eyes and sighed. "Six of us made it through before it vanished."

"I'm sorry."

Orr nodded and made a visible effort to shift her mental gears. "Anyway, uh, you're all civilians?"

"Most of us are part of a maintenance crew; a few others, myself included, are--were--on the security team."

Orr nodded again and glanced at something on her control panel. "I assume those zombie things--or the bugs--have taken control of the ship?"

"Looks like it. I hacked into the primary systems and tried to overload the reactors, but if they haven't blown by now, then they won't."

"Shit. I should've known they could do that. Look, our shuttles and fighters are faster than the Challenger_, but we'll run out of fuel long before they do. Our only chance is to disable the ship, if not destroy it."_

"Okay. I'm powering my weapons back up. Just tell me what to shoot at."

"You three should stay to protect your little fleet, just in case."

"You said it yourself, we'll run out of fuel before they do. You guys might need the extra firepower, and I'd rather not run out of gas and be a sitting duck when they find us."

Orr sighed, but nodded. "Okay. Aim for the weapons systems, since they're the most volatile things on the ship. The engines are too well shielded to prevent radiation from harming the crew. But if we cook off enough of their ammo, the secondary explosions should do the rest."

"Got it. Tits, T-bone, are you with us or would you rather stick with--"

"We're with you," T-bone said.

"Yeah. Let's do this."

"Okay, then. Lt. Orr, take the lead."

Orr nodded and tapped something outside the camera's range. Another new window appeared on Asuka's console, showing her a schematic of the Challenger with pulsating blips on key weapons systems.

"You've got your targets." Orr took a breath and let it out slowly. "Okay, here we go."