Thirty seconds. An eternity when raiders were hunting us through a dying ship.
Elena pulled me forward, each step a negotiation with consciousness. I could feel my body shutting down, blood loss and trauma overwhelming even Zandovian resilience. My vision tunneled, sounds growing distant and muffled.
"Stay with me, Commander." Elena's voice cut through the fog. "That's an order."
I almost smiled. She was giving me orders now. My chaotic, brilliant engineer who'd never met a regulation she couldn't creatively reinterpret.
The raiders were close. I could hear them coordinating, closing the net. We'd never make it to the cargo bay. The math was simple and brutal.
"Leave me," I managed to say. "Get to the shuttle."
"Shut up."
"Elena—"
"I said shut up." She dragged me around another corner, and I saw the cargo bay ahead, massive doors blown open to space, the shuttle hovering beyond them like a promise of salvation. "We're both getting out of here, or neither of us is. Those are the only options."
The raiders burst into the corridor behind us.
Elena didn't slow down. Didn't look back. Just pulled me forward with desperate strength, closing the distance to those open cargo doors where vacuum and death waited.
The shuttle maneuvered closer, Er'dox's piloting threading the needle between debris and structural collapse. Ten meters. Five.
Plasma fire scorched past us. One bolt caught Elena's shoulder and she stumbled, gasped in pain but didn't stop moving. Blood bloomed across her sleeve—a wound that would have dropped a smaller woman.
But Elena Vasquez had apparently decided that pain was also negotiable.
We reached the cargo bay's edge. The shuttle hovered just beyond, ramp extended but still three meters away. Too far to jump, especially with my weight.
"This is going to be ugly," Elena said.
Then she jumped, pulling me with her.
For a moment we were suspended in space, the derelict's artificial gravity giving way to void. I felt weightless, disconnected from my failing body. Saw stars beyond the shuttle, infinite and cold.
We slammed into the shuttle's ramp, Elena taking the impact with a grunt that suggested broken ribs. But her hands locked onto the ramp's safety rails, and somehow, impossibly, she held us both as the shuttle's gravity caught us and pulled us inward.
The ramp retracted. Doors sealed. Atmosphere returned in a rush that made my damaged lungs scream.
"Got them!" Er'dox's voice, triumphant and relieved. "Disengaging now."
The shuttle pulled away from the derelict as Elena collapsed beside me, both of us bleeding on the cargo bay floor. Behind us, through the closing ramp, I saw the raiders reach the cargo bay edge. Saw them raise their weapons.
Then the derelict exploded.
The shockwave caught the shuttle, sent us tumbling through space before Er'dox's piloting stabilized us. Through the viewport I watched debris scatter, watched fire bloom and die in the vacuum. The raiders, their ship, any evidence of what had been hidden in that derelict, all of it consumed by destruction.
Elena had done it. She'd completed her mission and saved my life, refusing to sacrifice either objective.
"Don't you dare die on me," she whispered, her hand finding mine. Blood stained both our fingers. "Not after all that."
I managed to squeeze her hand, put every ounce of remaining strength into that single gesture. "Wouldn't dream of it."
Then consciousness finally gave up its fight, and darkness claimed me.
I woketo white light and the distinctive smell of Mothership's medical bay, antiseptic with undertones of the exotic compounds Zorn used for xenobiological treatment. My body felt wrong, disconnected, like someone had taken it apart and reassembled the pieces slightly off.
But I was alive.
