Alex’s jaw still ached as he pushed to his feet, staring back at the intimidating form of Grant Lido directly in front of him. Just behind Lido, more members of Serrano’s gang had arrived, balancing the scales with the men that came with Alex.

“Did you think we wouldn’t notice when our patrols went missing?” said Lido with a sneer as he looked at Alex. “I knew it was you the second they failed to return.”

“I was hoping you’d figure it out,” said Alex, challenging him. “I wanted to be the one to kill you. And now this is my chance.”

Lido shook his head. “You have nothing. Nothing to back up that tall boast. You have a group of pussies with you, none of which are a match for my men. In fact, my men have stolen their companions already. You really think you can beat us?”

“Yeah, I do,” replied Alex, taking one step closer. “And I’m getting tired of all this talk. Are you going to fight me or not?”

Lido growled. “With pleasure.”

The two men collided at once, their arms pulled back to strike each other as the rest of the men started to engage in the fight as well. Alex almost forgot how quick Lido could be, moving with a speed that most large men couldn’t fathom. He was strong too, as evidenced by the way the pain struck Alex’s body every time he was hit.

“It must devastate you to know that your little blonde bitch is with us now, doesn’t it,” taunted Lido. “What was her name? You see, I don’t even know what it is. To me, she’s just a bitch. A bitch with a tight ass and a sweet mouth.”

The reminder of Jenna struck Alex with a fury he hadn’t felt in a long time. He launched himself at Lido, causing the man to fall back against the wall of the ship, his head making contact with the metal.

Lido looked up at Alex and sneered. “That piss you off, Hawthorne? I heard that you never even had her. Does it make you mad to know that we already passed her around like a peace pipe?”

Alex smashed his fist against Lido’s mouth repeatedly, not stopping until the man’s mouth was filled with blood. Lido spat out a tooth in the process, failing to use his remaining strength to dislodge Alex from his dominant position.

It was while in this position that Alex heard an unmistakable sound. The sound of a pulse pistol firing. Looking up, he saw that several of Lido’s men had started firing at his own group of rebels, taking out a few of them in the process. Even when they were warned not to do so, they kept doing it anyway, setting up the potential for calamity.

It was Alex’s temporary distraction that caused Lido to pull his feet up, using his remaining strength to launch Alex across the corridor and freeing himself in the process. Lido wiped the blood from his mouth.

“Stop firing, you fools! You’re right next to the damn engine room!”

Despite the warnings, Lido’s men kept firing which was only making the matter worse. Lido attacked one of his men that was closest to him to get him to stop firing but now even some of Alex’s men were firing back with weapons that they’d picked up from the dead.

“No firing!” yelled Alex. “You’re going to get us all killed if you puncture the hull!”

Alex barely had the chance to complete the sentence before Lido was on him again, his fist shattering against Alex’s already sore jaw. Alex lost his footing, falling to the ground only to have Lido take his place over him, using his powerful fists to batter at Alex’s head.

“You’re not going to stop us!” roared Lido as he battered Alex. “We’re not going to fucking Vesta! We’re going to Dangallu!”

The blows stopped temporarily only for Lido to grab Alex around the throat and start to squeeze. Alex grabbed the other man’s arms, trying to pull them away from his body but Lido’s strength was starting to overwhelm him.

“Just fucking die,” snarled Lido. “You need to fucking die.”

At that moment when the fight seemed lost, Alex remembered the dirty trick Lido had pulled against him. Pulling his feet back against his body, Alex dug his boot into the other man’s chest.

“You first,” he growled, launching Lido with the thrust of his legs.

The man was tossed across the corridor, directly into the oncoming fire from the rest of his men. Lido took two shots—one in the stomach and one in the shoulder—killing him almost instantly.

That might have been the end of the fight had the rest of the men not resorted to using their pulse pistols. Lido’s death caused the still living members of the gang to start their retreat, using their pistols to cover their asses as they moved. And yet it was because of one missed shot that seemed to set off the calamity that befell them.

Alex wasn’t sure who fired it but he saw that it came from one of Lido’s men. The shot missed all of them, and the extremely concentrated burst of plasma energy passed through the barrier of the corridor directly into the main engine compartment, where it impacted one of the dark matter reactors.

The resulting explosion knocked all of them to their feet. Alex couldn’t even look in the direction of the engine room, as flashes of light and fire continued to burst as the reactor started to shut down.

The worst was yet to come. The explosions continued down the length of the reactor, causing the entire ship to tremble as it then reached the outer exhausts of the Racine. The biggest explosion yet blinded all of them as it ripped off a portion of the ship’s outer wall, exposing the reactor to the harsh environment of deep space.

“We have to get out of here!” yelled Alex to Rick as he pulled his friend to his feet. “We have to seal this section off before it’s too late!”

As it turned out, it was too late for several of the men closest to the engine room. The resulting hole extinguished the fires completely due to the lack of oxygen but the loss of pressure caused several men to be sucked into the room before they were pushed out into deep space.

What was left of the group managed to get to the end of the corridor where there were a set of airlock doors built into the structure—a safeguard for catastrophes on the ship, which were set every fifty meters along the corridors. Alex triggered the doors to shut as the remaining members of the gang did the same thing on the other side of the corridor.

After the doors were closed, almost all of them looked through them to see explosions continue to demolish the reactor, tearing away another portion of the ship.

“Jesus Christ, I told you all to never fire your pistols on the ship!” yelled Garrison. “You may have just killed all of us!”

“Nothing more we can do now,” said Alex. “What’s done is done. Can the Racine continue on with only one reactor though? How bad is this likely to get?”

“The Racine was designed to only need one reactor at a time but what I’m worried about is that giant, gaping hole in the engine room,” snapped Garrison. “That hole is only going to get bigger with time! It might not seem bad right now but the cold harshness of space is going to continue to enlarge that hole until it destroys the entire ship! We might only have a small amount of time left!”

“How will we know?” asked Alex. “Do we have somewhere we can go to evaluate the damage?”

“The bridge will be getting a report, no doubt,” said Garrison, pointing his fingers between his eyes. “But we might be able to hack into the data feed and see for ourselves. Either way, we would need to know how much time we have left.”

As Garrison finished speaking, the alarm for the entire ship went off, the one signaling cataclysmic structural damage. At that point, everything Garrison said seemed to be vindicated and they raced off back to their cylinder, where they found the rest of the colonists waiting.

As Sam and the other men updated all the people, Garrison used his P-com to hack into the ship’s data feeds, rerouting the status report to them for investigation. Just like before, a hologram of the entire ship appeared before them, only this time it was centered on the damage to the ship, showing the hole that had developed from the explosion.

“This is bad,” muttered Garrison before looking at Alex. “This is real bad.”

“How much time do we have left?” pressed Alex. “What’s going to happen to the Racine?”

“Judging by this report, the Racine can maintain structural integrity for another fifty-two hours before she’s completely destroyed,” replied Garrison. “That hole is going to keep getting bigger, doubling in size every eight hours. The ship will be sufficiently weakened by the time we get two days out and then no more Racine.”

“But we can get to Vesta though, right?” asked Rick. “We’re still less than two days out from Vesta, so we can still make it?”

Garrison shook his head. “That fifty-two hour figure is the time it takes for the ship to completely disintegrate. We’re going to lose other portions of it quicker than that, depending on how close they are to the main engine room. A good portion of the ship’s internal systems like the ones that regulate our oxygen, water, and gravity levels are housed nearby the reactors. Once those go, we might as well be in deep space anyway because it’s sure as hell going to feel like it.”

“If that’s the case, how much time do we actually have?” asked Alex. “We need to be long gone before the fifty-two hours lapses but what’s a realistic figure before the ship’s support systems give out?”

Garrison studied the map of the ship and even enlisted another member of the crew who’d been huddling with the colonists. The two men went through the data before coming up with an estimation.

“The most critical thing we need is oxygen,” said Garrison, gesturing to the oxidation machines that were found near the reactors. “When this thing goes, we won’t be able to breathe. Judging by the distance to the reactors, we’ll have six hours at most. Maybe less, maybe more but the majority of the people have to be off the ship by then.”

“We have no choice but to launch all the escape pods right now then,” said Alex. “All the colonists have to get in and prepare to launch but my question is are we close enough to Vesta to make it work? Will we be launching too soon?”

Garrison shrugged. “I don’t know, Alex. The escape pods rely on the reactors to provide the initial thrust to clear the ship. They are designed to work without the reactors if needed, in the case of a total power failure, but I don’t know if they’ll have enough thrust to get to Vesta on their own.”

“So we either launch them now and run the risk of them not having enough juice to get to Vesta or we wait to launch them and potentially wait too late where they can’t benefit from the reactors to get a decent thrust?” asked Alex. “Did I hear that right?”

Garrison spread his hands. “I don’t know what else to tell you. We’re stuck between two bad options without much in the way to go on.”

“Either way, we should launch the escape pods,” said Alex. “We’ll at least have a chance of making it to Vesta. Otherwise, we’re going to die a very horrible death if we wait too long.”

“I’m all for getting the hell off this ship but what about our companions?” asked Rick. “We can’t leave Nikki and the rest of the girls here. Serrano still has them locked up, and if they can still manage to escape, we won’t be able to save them at all. We can’t just leave them to that fate!”

“We’re not going to,” promised Alex. “We’re going to save them if it’s the last thing we do.”