Jax knew the cockpit door wouldn’t open unless the outer hatchway was closed. He’d have to cut off the ModPol officers long enough to secure the ship. He put a foot against the wall, hit the door trigger on the hatchway, and sprang his body across the chamber to the opposite side, grabbing onto the latches on the wall and hiding himself behind the spacesuit closest to the cockpit.

He waited. The seconds passed. He tasted bitterness in his own saliva and he forced his breathing to slow, trying desperately not to vomit. Finally he heard the internal mechanisms of the door sliding around, eventually clinking into place. The door slowly opened.

“Hey, fellas,” a voice said. “Back already? Hello?”

Suddenly, unexpected to both Jax and the pilot, there was a series of clanging sounds coming from the outer hatchway.

“What the hell?” said the pilot to himself. He was still out of view from Jax. The banging of something solid on the metal hatch came again. “Okay, I’m comin’, I’m comin’,” he shouted, then said in a quiet aside, “How did those idiots manage get the inner door to open without coming through the outer door?”

Jax could hear the snapping sound of belts being unclipped. He tensed and poked the little ball at the end of his stun-stick between the sleeve and the midsection of the spacesuit, pushing the sleeve aside just enough for him to watch his aim. A body began to float by and he hit the button, jabbing the stick forward.

“AAAhhhhnnnnNHHHHH!” the pilot screamed, his body contorting with almost mock-athleticism in the absence of gravity. After a few seconds it went limp, and he hung there, arms dangling like a scarecrow-bot.

“Shit, guys,” Jax breathed. “I hope that’s you.” He didn’t know how to fly a ship, so he figured he was dead either way if it wasn’t Stanford Runstom or George Halsey on the other side of that hatch. He punched the close button on the cockpit door and floated over to the hatchway.

He hit the release and Runstom came through. He quickly spun around and slammed on the button to close the hatch. He looked wounded, blood oozing from different parts of his uniform. Jax tried to look into his eyes, but the officer was looking down, eyes squinted in pain.

There was a low boom and the ship seemed to drift slightly, an odd sway that moved around them while they floated weightless in the center of it.

“Stanford,” Jax started.

“Halsey,” Runstom rasped quietly, looking at the closed hatch.

“Shit.” Now Jax read the pain on Runstom’s face differently. He wasn’t good at dealing with grief, but he suddenly thought of his mother and it felt like something was tearing apart his stomach. “Stanford,” he said, putting a hand on the officer’s shoulder. “He was a good man.”

Runstom swallowed a couple of times. “That asshole was the closest thing I’ve had to a friend in years. He didn’t deserve to go like that.” He closed his eyes for a moment and Jax stayed quiet, despite being terrified of the danger they were still in. After a few seconds, Runstom opened his eyes. His lips quivered and pursed and his forehead creased as his eyebrows tensed. Jax could only guess what was going through the other man’s mind. Pushing down the pain, burying it for another time. “We don’t have much time,” the officer said finally. “We have to move.”

Runstom grabbed the floating pilot and briefly checked his pulse. He took a restraint band off his belt and pulled the pilot’s arms together and bound them. “Strap this guy into one of those,” he said to Jax, pointing at the harness-seats. “And then get up to the cabin. I’m going to warm up the engines.”

Jax did his best to strap the unconscious pilot in, and then floated into the cockpit. There were four seats, each facing a long, narrow window that looked into the blackness of space. Runstom was already strapped in, and Jax picked a seat at random and followed suit.

“I’m detaching the boarding-tube now,” Runstom said, and Jax could hear the crack in his voice. He cleared his throat and then turned with a quick jerk. “Do you have the notes I copied for you?”

“Yeah, of course. They were the only thing I grabbed when the alarms started.” Jax had a standard, prison-issue satchel strapped to his body. He pulled the collection of papers out of it and handed them to Runstom.

Runstom took the notes and quickly found the page he was looking for. He set them down on the console. “I’ll need to navigate away from the barge a few thousand meters, then we’ll be hitting Xarp speed.”

“This thing can do Xarp?” Jax asked, trepidation in his voice. Warp was light-speed, and that was terrifying enough, but Xarp was even faster; a speed appropriate for mammoth interstellar vessels, but insanely dangerous in such a small ship. His experience with space travel was about to compound as it went from a day and a half of looking at the stars through a porthole the size of his hand to a faster-than-light escape from a murderous space gang.

“She’s an interplanetary, military personnel transport. Designed to be launched in packs, usually about a hundred or so at a time, delivering squads of elite soldiers to a target without warning. Usually sent from deep, deep orbit on the outermost part of a system, where a warship can sit undetected.” Runstom looked up from the console for a moment, but not at Jax. Not at anything in particular. “She’s not much for luxury. All engine and fuel storage. Designed to bring the fight to your enemy’s doorstep.”

Jax looked around, wondering if he had missed some kind of informational plaque on the way into the cockpit. “How the hell do you know all that?”

Runstom shrugged. “ModPol training, mostly. Plus my grandfather was in the Sirius Interplanetary Navy. And … I guess I probably watch too many documentary vids.” He grabbed the throttle and the ship started to move with a jolt.

“Stanford,” Jax said tentatively. “You do know how to pilot this thing, right?”

Runstom was quiet, concentrating on the stick. “Every ModPol grunt has to fly patrol for a couple of years before they get to start doing real police work.” The ship shuddered and Runstom quickly reached for the panel in front of him, hitting a button and flipping a switch. “Of course, this thing is just a little different than a one-man patroller.”

The view panned to the left as the ship rotated, the side of the barge disappearing to the right. Jax leaned forward to angle his head back and forth and take in the view without unstrapping himself. As the emptiness of space opened up before them, he looked at the rear monitor to see the barge coming into view. There was another small craft next to it on this side, tethered by a boarding tube. Next to that he could see the boarding tube that was once attached to their newly acquired vessel, now just floating idly, a jagged hole in one side of it where it was half-hanging from the barge like a misplaced tentacle. Despite the lack of wind in space, it flapped oddly.

“I think the barge is decompressing,” Jax said, watching the monitor.

“Nothing we can do,” Runstom said quietly. “I don’t know if anyone but Space Waste is left. Our problem is that they probably expected all boarding parties to detach at the same time. So we have to get out of here quick before they figure out something is wrong.”

Jax looked away from the monitor and back to the view from the window. There was a ship in the distance, but with no frame of reference he couldn’t tell if it was a large ship far away or a small ship close by.

“That’s the command ship,” Runstom said before Jax could ask. “She’s pretty far out, but she’s got some fighters close by. That’s the contact computer.” He pointed at a crude holo-screen positioned front and center of the cockpit. It displayed a large red blob surrounded by a handful of green dots. Another green blob sat farther off from the rest. “The red one is the barge. The little green ones are combat vessels. Small fighters and personnel assault ships like this one.”