Lieutenant Darris could see the stars racing past the window in front of her at a mind boggling speed. She carefully flexed her muscles to make sure that she hadn't been injured during the attack.

After a few minutes of careful flexing she moved her right hand up to the screen that was located above the small, but thick, window in front of her face. Due to her trembling fingers it took her three tries to hit the button on it.

A Status Report scrolled through:

Oxygen: 37 minutes left

Comms: Offline

Temperature: -3 C

"Wonderful," she said to herself, noticing the condensation from her warm breath in the cold air. She could see the blue marble, that was a planet called Brackett's World, in the distance. The remainder of her field of view was completely empty, except from the stars in the distance. She could see nothing manmade, like a ship racing to her rescue, or another of the Golden Chariots escape pods. At least another pod would have meant that she wasn't alone.

—

3 hours earlier

Golden Chariot

"Alright everyone. I believe we are done here. Any objections?" Silence answered her. "Great. Then let's get going."

Captain Taryn Wells and her crew had spent the last weeks shuttling their passengers, one of their outfits claimer crews, to their next mission and setting up the usual support network, like gear and weapon caches and a satellite network. They had mapped the planet, dropped off supplies and gear and made sure that everything was in order.

Everyone on the bridge was watching the progress of the team that had just jumped out the starboard hangar bay.

"Navcom downlink going active in 10..9..8..," the officer at the ops station began, when a piercing alarm cut into the concentrated silence. After a moment of surprised silence the officers sprang into action.

"Report," Captain Wells bellowed over the bridge.

"It's the trader, Skipper! I've got three objects coming over the planet's horizon. They are coming right for us and aren't running any transponders."

Before he could continue the Golden Chariot was hit by the impact of a kinetic penetrator that tore through their port engine nacelle and punctured the ships engineering section.

"We've lost three of our four reactors, Captain," the engineering officer jumped in before Wells could ask for an update. Before she could urge him to get someone on getting her more power to fight her ship, a second penetrator ripped clear through the ships nose section and vaporized the bridge and most of the officers in the ships contingent with it.

—

Lieutenant Darris had three minutes left. Three minutes of oxygen. She had spent the last 27 minutes of her life thinking about the three hours before that. Discouraging as it was, she couldn't remember for the life of her how she got into the pod and off the doomed Golden Chariot. She let out an amused snort at that. Thinking about the end wasn't a very good way to go. Unsurprisingly this wasn't exactly the way she would have preferred to go.

"Well, it's beginning to look as if the ancient gods don't give a shit about your wishes after all," she said to herself, noticing how hoarse her voice sounded.

Her eyelids became heavier and heavier as the CO2 content of the air rose, when a shadow fell over the pod's small window.

A dark hull was sliding past the capsule.

She could almost make out what was written on its side, lit up by powerful floodlights. Not sure if she was already slipping off and imagining things or not, she tried deciphering the strange lettering. It took her almost until her eyes slid shut to realize that the writing on the hull wasn't hard to read. It wasn't imperial standard! She'd never seen anything of the sort before.

A frightening thought, considering that she didn't know of any other space-faring nation out here.

The writing on the ships fuselage read:

T.R.S. MARS

D1803

It looked like incomprehensible glyphs to her as she fell asleep.