Yvian tumbled through the void. She activated her jetpack, but it took a few precious seconds to stabilize herself. In that time, she saw that Mims and Lissa had exited the Random Encounter. The ship was heavily damaged. Its wings were bent. Its hull was dented and riddled with holes. Yvian stared for a moment, heart aching, but reality reasserted itself.

"Keep moving," Mims ordered. His voice carried the cold professional calm that meant they were all in deep shit. He typed furiously into his wrist console as he spoke. "Activate Stealth and get to the Gate." His jetpack activated, strafing him sideways. "Don't let them anticipate your flight path."

Yvian fired her jetpack, sending her away from the Encounter as the Captain's words sank in. The Random Encounter accelerated much faster than the Symphony of Destruction could. They'd been moving away from the pirate fleet at over forty kilometers a second by the time they abandoned ship. Too fast for MAC drivers to reach them, but not too fast for the more powerful MAC cannons the YEETs and battlecruisers used. A lucky or well aimed shot would turn Yvian into a cloud of blood. She'd be dead before she knew it was happening.

"We need shields," Lissa protested. "The Gate effect-"

"The armor can take it," Mims cut her off. "Activate you're god-damned-." He let out a strangled cry. Yvian turned to see. The human was twenty meters away now, but the cloud where his leg used to be was visible in the blue light of the approaching Gate.

"Mims!"

"Shut up!" the Captain snapped. "Radio silence! Use your fucking Stealth!"

Yvian obeyed orders, activating her Stealth function and shifting her jetpack to change directions. She was breathing too fast. Cold terror seized her legs. She hurtled towards the Gate at speeds that would liquify her if she bumped into anything. The Gate towered around her, two thousand kilometers of blue light surrounded by a thick ring of alien metal. No one knew who had made them, or how. No one knew what exactly happened when you went through one. It was known that entering a Gate without a ship was a bad idea. Yvian knew she had no choice, but the prospect added an extra dimension to the fear ravaging her insides.

The Gate loomed. Yvian's instincts told her she would splatter against its surface. Yvian couldn't help herself. She screamed, raising her arms to cover her face in a futile gesture of protection. She struck the blue expanse of light and... nothing.

Yvian felt nothing. No impact. She opened her eyes to the Gate Effect. Light swirled around her, giving the impression of motion. Her HUD activated, showing a series of alarms. Radiation. Excessive heat. She didn't feel it, at first. She floated in the light for twenty seconds before she felt her body heating up. Would she burn? Be cooked alive in her voidarmor?

No. The armor was hot, and she was sweating, but the next ten seconds found her only mildly uncomfortable. The Gate Effect resolved, ejecting Yvian into a different sector at a much more reasonable speed than she had entered with. The cancelling of inertia was one of the other mysteries of the Gates. No matter how fast or slow you entered, you would come out the other side moving at ten meters per second. Yvian had felt no change in inertia, no motion at all. She listened to herself hyperventilating for a moment, then forced her breathing to slow. She'd made it.

Yvian spun in a circle, trying to take stock of the situation. Lissa was two hundred meters away. Mims was fifty meters behind her. The Random Encounter exited the Gate as she watched. It looked like a derelict drifting away from a war that had been lost. A sadness tinged the fear that was slowly receding. Yvian concentrated on her breathing again. It would be alright. The ship could be repaired.

Yvian didn't see anything else. Just them, their damaged home, and the void. Relief washed through her. She'd been half expecting a fleet of pirates to be waiting on the other side of the Gate. She debated comming Mims to see how they were going to get out of here, but rejected the idea. He'd said to maintain radio silence. She didn't need comms to talk anyway, if she could get close enough to the man.

Yvian was about to jet over when the twinkle of lights caught her eye. Her head snapped up. A dozen streaks of white and yellow light closed in, moving so fast she could barely track them. Missiles. They struck the Random Encounter. Explosive plasma detonated, sending pieces of the ship in all directions. The space where the Encounter had been was now a rapidly expanding sphere of plasma and molten debris.

"No," whispered Yvian. She didn't have time to process the loss of the human's beloved ship. The Encounter had only been half a kilometer away when it exploded. Yvian barely had time to bring her arms up over her visor before the wave of debris struck.

More impacts than she could keep track of thudded into Yvian's body. It was over in seconds, but Yvian found herself dazed, numb, and spinning uncontrollably from the impacts.

WARNING! CRITICAL DAMAGE! PUNCTURED LUNGS. INTERNAL BLEEDING. MULTIPLE BROKEN BONES. PAIN REMOVAL ACTIVE. INJURY STABILIZATION PROTOCOLS ACTIVE. EMERGENCY MOBILITY PROTOCOLS ACTIVE. Yvian's HUD listed her injuries. She'd gotten lucky. The armor had held. If she'd been hit by one of the larger pieces, it would have pulped her. She thanked the Bright Lady for the Terran made voidarmor again. The suit would keep her alive, as least until they got out of here and into a med pod. For now, she had bigger problems.

The Freedom Republic were out here somewhere. Who else would have destroyed the Encounter? They were here, and they were looking for Yvian. She stared out into the void, but there was nothing to be seen. It made sense. A few hundred kilometers would make a ship too small to see with the naked eye. With no ship and no sensors, she had no way to know how many of them were out there.

For a pants-wetting moment, Yvian wondered if the Encounter's debris storm had knocked out her Stealth. A quick glance at her HUD confirmed it was still active. Not that she knew how much good it would do. The pirates had found the Symphony. If they could see through Terran Stealth tech, Yvian was as good as dead.

If the pirates could see her there was nothing she could do. Whether they used their stupid human weapons or just chucked a missile at her, there was no way she could escape. The thought was supposed to make her feel better. It didn't. At least it would be quick.

Unless they decided to take her alive.

That scenario lit a fire under Yvian. She activated her jetpack to stop the spinning. She had to get moving. She had to get to the Captain. She had to find a way to get the fuck out of here.

The Captain. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. She didn't see him. He'd been closer to the Encounter than Yvian was. A frantic search found him three hundred meters away. The human tumbled and spun, one leg missing, his other limbs limp. He made no attempt to stabilize himself. Was he...? Her heart dropped. "Captain!" she yelled uselessly into the void, propelling herself towards the man. A few seconds later Lissa came into view. She was burning towards the human as well.

As Yvian and Lissa tried to get a hold of Mims, a ship exited the Gate. No, not a ship. Ships. Human ships. The sisters stared in horror as over a hundred human vessels bore down on them. Gladiator class fighters, Tempest class frigates, Yvian even saw a few Killjoy battlecruisers. The pirates had called in reinforcements, and they were not fucking around.

"Crunch take it!" Yvian shouted at the ships. "Damn you to The Crunch, you motherless sons!" The ships couldn't hear her. She wasn't using the comms. Yvian didn't care. She screamed defiance as death accelerated towards her. "You'll never take us, you fucks! You hear me? Fuck every one of you! I'll kill you all, you motherless shits!"

The fleet continued to accelerate. The ships shot past the sisters and their inert Captain, maneuvering in the same direction the missiles had come from earlier. Yvian stopped screaming. Defiance changed to confusion, then gave way to embarrassment. A glimmer of hope blossomed within her.

Those weren't pirate ships. Those were her ships.

While Yvian had been busy being stupid, Lissa had plugged a cord from her voidarmor into the Captain's. She grabbed Yvian and pressed their helmets together. "Mark's barely alive," Lissa told her. "We've got to get him to a medpod."

"How?" Yvian asked. "All our ships just-"

A Ronin stealth cruiser exited the Gate. It was the Recompense.

"Never mind," Yvian grabbed the Captain. "Let's go."

The Recompense was eight kilometers away. It did not accelerate or change course. The sisters made for it as fast as they could, their unconscious Captain in tow. Yvian glanced behind her occasionally, hoping to see some sign of their fleet or the pirates. She thought she caught some glimmers of light a few times, but they were so small and brief she couldn't be sure she hadn't imagined them.

They made it to the cruiser without incident. Then they ran into a problem. The Recompense's shields were up. Lissa and Yvian could bypass them with SHIELDBREACH, but Mims wasn't conscious and they couldn't activate his suit functions for him.

Yvian touched her helmet to Lissa's. "I'm gonna have to break radio silence. I'll get some distance before I have the Recompense drop its shields."

Lissa gave a slight nod. "Be careful. I'll get him on board."

Yvian jetted away from her sister, looping around to the other side of the Recompense. Only then did she activate her wrist console. She connected to the cruiser and had it drop its shields. She headed for the airlock on her side of the ship and had the shields reactivate once she got there.

Once on board, Yvian sprinted for the bridge. She slid into a chair and turned on a sensor console. She breathed a sigh of relief. There were a dozen Freedom Republic fighters and pair of frigates, but they'd been blown out of the sky. The Captain's backup fleet had lost two Gladiators, but they were still patrolling the area around the Gate, programmed to engage any new ships that appeared.

Yvian ordered one of the Battlecruisers to pick up the disabled Gladiators, then activated the jumpdrive. The Recompense hummed as the drive charged. Yvian slumped in her chair. "Lissa," she commed, "the pirates are gone. We're heading back to the hideout."

"Thank the Bright Lady." Her sister sounded exhausted. "Mark's in the pod. Do you think there's any beer on this thing?"

Yvian watched the Gate Effect swirl outside the viewports. "Crunch," she answered. "I fucking hope so."