“Kik, hide. We believe in you.” Those were the last words his father told him that day.

As he hid in his bed in the ventilation system, not daring to move, his father, Garet, bled out on the deck beneath him.

Garet had been shot several times with a small-calibre high-velocity slug thrower, blasting out holes in his suit and allowing blood to leak onto the ship’s grating. The pistol he had been holding for self-defence had been taken by the invaders with his other personal effects, and along with it any chance of Kik getting revenge on the armed attackers.

The pirates that had shot his father had already moved past the body blocking the intersection. They were now either crowding into the small one-person bridge where his mother, Hala, had been piloting just a few minutes ago, or were out in the void, ferrying crates full of cargo back to their ship. Kik blotted out the muffled cries from outside his suit’s helmet and tried to think about how the pirates could have found them, simply to distract himself from the horror before his eyes and ears.

Their ship, a refitted nebula traveller, had been refuelling from ambient gases for their next system jump when the pirates had jumped on them. Kik had been asleep until weapon impacts had jolted him awake and his parents had yelled at him to stay there, so he didn’t know what kind of ship they had or where they had come from. However, to have been found in a deserted system in a nebula was less than a billion to one, especially since they had already been refuelling for a few hours without incident. No, the pirates had known where they were going to be.

Their middleman was trustworthy, an old friend of his mother’s. In that case, the information leak had to have been on their client’s side. Kik knew his name was Erstine, but he had never met him before as his parents always left Kik behind for dealings with him.

The deal this time was simple. They were to cross six star systems, then ‘accidentally’ leave their cargo, twelve mysterious crates, in a specific berth in the spaceport, which was to have been kept clear for them.

More importantly, their route had been pre-planned. Nebula travellers were unlike other ships since they were designed to be able to travel without stopping, able to refuel by taking in hydrogen and dark matter from nebulae and cosmic radiation from stars. This made them perfect for long-distance, off-the-books deliveries. However, it also meant that they could easily go missing along the way and they would be very hard to recover, as if they were sent adrift in an unknown system they could be lost nearly forever.

This meant that somebody who had access to their route had betrayed them. Obviously their travel records at ports were falsified. The betrayal had to have come from Erstine, or someone close to him.

Kik was thrust from his reverie by three pirates walking past him towards the back of the ship. They were all wearing black void suits, painted with markings of red and white, images of bestial skulls marking their suits and helmets. More sinister were the faint splatters of blood staining the black, some old and some new. One of them directed a kick at Garet as they walked by, eliciting another small spill of blood on the floor.

Unfortunately, Kik couldn’t hear their conversation as their suits were sealed on the off chance of decompression. However, they were obviously communicating with each other, as he could see them gesturing. The three pirates split up here. One made his way along the branch to the port of the ship, while the two others went to starboard.

Kik could hear clanging and gunshots from the aft, when suddenly the lights flickered momentarily. It seemed that the pirates were enjoying destroying the ship’s delicate machinery. However, he didn’t dare move from his sleeping space until all of the pirates had left the ship. He didn’t make a sound in case there were still more pirates in the bridge.

A few minutes later and a fourth black-suited pirate walked back from the direction of the bridge, proving his fears correct. She seemed to glance at Kik’s hiding place as he passed, but didn’t break stride as she walked down the starboard-heading corridor back to the airlock. A few minutes later, the gunshots and clanging from aft came to a halt and the ship shook as the pirates disengaged their ship, having finished what they came for.

Kik pulled aside the grating and jumped down to the deck. He barely felt the impact due to the low gravity he was acting in. He rushed over to his father and quickly checked his condition.

The four shots in his body were scattered. One was in his left arm, another in his right shoulder, and the final two were in the centre of his belly. Some dark fluid other than blood was leaking out of the holes in his suit, so it must have hit something vital. Kik tried to pinch the holes shut, but they were too wide and he achieved nothing but covering his gloves in blood.

His father was unconscious, probably from combined shock and blood loss. Kik couldn’t do anything more to stop the bleeding without some sort of tool. He couldn’t even take the suit off properly right now without making it worse. He lay Garet in a resting position and dashed off to check on his mother.

Hala was lying across the pilot chair and controls on the bridge. There was some blood splashed on the viewscreen, which showed the red gas of the nebula scattered with a few stars. The pirate ship wasn’t visible against the backdrop. Kik pulled her off the chair and lay her on her back in the corridor outside the bridge.

She had taken two stab wounds, one each to the chest and midriff. The bleeding was pooling inside her suit, so the severity was hard to tell. She also had a bleeding mark on her head. She seemed to be unconscious, perhaps from the head trauma.

Her spacesuit had been slashed along with the bodysuit beneath it. The holes revealed patches of paler than usual skin traced with faint trails of blood. It seemed the pirates had enjoyed cutting her suit apart. She would survive barely a minute in decompression.

Kik pulled apart the remaining scraps of suit to reveal her wounds. The first stab was above her right breast and had probably punctured her lungs, as there was traces of bloody froth on her lips beneath her helmet. The other stab was just beneath the bottom of her ribcage. It was bleeding but the flow wasn’t pulsing, so it must have missed her heart.

Kik’s head swam from shock and adrenaline. He stumbled away from his mother and opened his own helmet before throwing up on the floor. However, he couldn’t allow himself any more time to rest. He needed to find a medical kit and seal their wounds, as quickly as possible.

Wracking his brains, he realised there must be one in the storage room. Running back to the intersection beneath his sleeping spot, he skirted his father’s body. He went down the corridor to starboard, where the storage room was located.

He was not in luck.

Inside the room, the originally untidy junk was in shambles. The piles of batteries, equipment and spare parts were scattered across the floor. Some had been crushed beneath boots, others had been shot, while others seemed to have been set alight. It would take far too long to find anything in this mess, but he tried anyway.

Half a minute later he looked near the door and froze. Laying against the doorframe were three things. First was a set of ration packs that he could feed to spacesuits. Second was some kind of pistol. Third was a black box with a red cross on the top.

He didn’t believe that this was coincidence. These had been specifically placed there for him to find. In fact, they seemed so obvious that the pirates must have seen them. However, Kik didn’t have the luxury of choice. He grabbed all three items and ran back along the corridor, hugging them to his chest.

He went to his father first. His injuries were the most severe. Dropping everything on the ground, he snapped open the clasps of the black box and looked inside. On the top was a small instruction set which he ignored for the moment.

Inside was a roll of bandages, some fine surgical tools such as a scalpel and tweezers, and several needles containing fluid marked with different symbols.

He compared the symbols with the lid to find out the contents.

Adrenaline: 4 syringes

Antibiotics: 2 syringes

General Antivenom: 1 syringe

Painkiller: 3 syringes

Medical Nanomachines: 3 syringes

The nanomachines gave him a shock. This box definitely wasn’t from their ship. There was no way their medical kits contained nanomachines. This made him more suspicious, but he treated Garet anyway. Worrying about faulty equipment wouldn’t help him. He opened a patch of his suit and gave him an injection of adrenaline in his leg to prevent cardiac arrest. He followed this up with the nanobots. He rolled his father onto his belly then placed the needle in his back, near the damaged area, to try and heal it as fast as possible. Garet’s muscles seemed to flex slightly after the adrenaline shot, but he didn’t wake up.

Kik then pulled out the bandages, but going by the blood flow they wouldn’t help enough. Instead he picked up the pistol, which seemed to be a laser. On the side there was a power setting. He set it to minimal and tested it by firing it at the floor. He couldn’t see anything coming from the barrel, but after about five seconds the metal floor started to glow red.

Satisfied, he aimed it carefully at the surface of the wounds and fired. They quickly turned black and the smell of burnt flesh filled the air, but the bleeding slowed to a trickle. Repeating this on each of the entry and exit wounds, he was satisfied that he he had done what he could with his father.

Moving on to his mother, Kik tried the same thing. He injected adrenaline first, moving onto nanomachines, then cauterizing the wounds with the laser pistol. She seemed to breathe a little easier, although the froth hadn’t disappeared from her mouth. Kik sunk to the floor, relieved that his parents seemed to be out of imminent danger, and felt the first taste of tears in his mouth. They could get out of this safely.

Now that he had a moment to himself, Kip finally tried to comprehend the situation. His parents were alive, but he knew that they needed more intense medical attention. He didn’t have the supplies or the medical knowledge to heal them properly.

Their current position would take them one jump to reach a planet. However, they would likely be denied landing permission unless they had a travel itinerary. He didn’t know how to fake one either. Planetary law was strict to unplanned approaching ships due to the potential of infections. The planet they were travelling to, Lanos, was instead two jumps away. They should have obtained enough fuel for one jump in an hour or so, maybe the second jump after a day of collecting. That was, of course, as long as nothing had happened to the collecting array or its associated equipment.

The engine room where the fuel converter was held was in the back of the ship. Earlier, it had sounded as if the pirates were breaking things inside it. He would need to check whether faster than light travel was viable. Leaving the medkit behind alongside his mother, he took the laser pistol and rations, sliding them into pockets on his suit.

Walking down the ship’s central, bow-to-aft corridor was slightly less cramped than the port and starboard corridors. Two people could fit abreast in this one, if they were willing to squeeze. Ignoring the side corridor leading off the the airlocks and other parts of the ship, Kik pulled apart the doors to the engine room. After pulling for a second, they took over under their own power.

Inside the room was a mass of technology. Wires, entangled like mating snakes, covered the walls and some of the floor. The twin lights in the roof still lit the room, but shadows were cast across it like an unsolvable maze on the floor. The air softly hummed from moving parts and electricity. Looking around, Kik could see the dark shape of the murky hydroponics tank in the corner, as well as various boxy silhouettes containing masses of wiring and piping that made up the ship’s computers, engine status display and what he was looking for, the gas-fuel converter.

Running up, he opened a panel on the side, revealing a small trickle of liquid flowing through a clear tube. The amount was slow, maybe ten drops a second or so. However, this indicated that the collector array and converter were both working properly. Due to the sparsity of gas, even in a nebula, these few drops indicated a great collecting power. It seemed neither of the two were even damaged.

After being turned to liquid, the gas, mostly hydrogen, would be held in tanks on the ship’s exterior and bombarded with cosmic radiation. It would be kept there until the hydrogen turned into the isotope septeurium, which was the fuel for most FTL drives. This was mixed with small quantities of dark matter if present, as it often was in nebulae in the arms of spiral galaxies.

This part of collection, however, was safe from the pirates, as it took place outside the ship in various sections. Rupturing a small external tank or two wouldn’t be enough to prevent the conversion of hydrogen. The dark matter was also stored in a series of tanks in the belly of the ship.

This left the engines themselves. Stepping over the wires to the status display, Kik tapped it. It lit up with a soft blue light, each of the indicators on it blinking green. Fuel supply, cooling, thrusters, all had no problems. This seemed almost too suspicious. Had they wanted to, the pirates could have crippled the ship more than this.

Looking around, Kik noticed something out of place. Among the boxes bolted to the floor, nested in the wires sat one which wasn’t fastened down. It was hidden deep in a corner behind some overhanging piping. Looking at it, it seemed to be a supply crate.

What could a supply crate be doing here? As far as Kik knew, everything in the hold had been removed by the pirates. Unless this was another mysterious “gift”? This eased his mind somewhat, thinking that somebody was helping him. He went over to the crate and opened it.

Inside was stacked to the brim with brown packages which Kik didn’t recognise. He picked one up and unwrapped it, revealing a clear, airtight tube full of cloudy liquid. “Fuel?” he asked himself, reminded of the blue-tinted condensed gas in the fuel converter. This theory was supported when he noted the “flammable” tag on the side. However, from reading the tag his suspicions were confirmed.

LE-14 (AC). The first part that meant something to him was the LE, which stood for Liquid Explosive. The second was AC, which meant Air Combustible. These types of weapons were otherwise known as LEACh bombs or Leak Canisters. He very gently rewrapped the canister in its padding and replaced it in the crate.

Suddenly he had a horrible thought. He leaned as far over the crate as he could. Looking between the rows of stacked explosive, he spotted a red light blinking at the far bottom. Working quickly but deliberately, Kik started pulling out capsules of explosive and resting them on the ground. He placed them in spaces between wires, where they wouldn’t be knocked.

Finally Kik pulled out the last explosive and placed it down next to the crate. He took a look at the bottom. Sitting in the middle of the bottom was another explosive, of different make to the others. It was a circular black device with four arms stretching off of it. Each one was bolted to the bottom of the crate. There was also a green display on this explosive, unlike the others which were just canisters of liquid. This one was timed and the counter was ticking down, currently at two minutes and ten seconds.

“Shit!” Kik yelled, and grabbed the crate and carried it out of the room away from the LEAChes. If he had missed spotting the crate, or hadn’t opened the package, the entire ship would have soon been in pieces. The situation now wasn’t much better now though, even though he was probably safe from setting off the bombs.

Kik had no idea how powerful the explosive might be and no intention of finding out. Dragging the crate out of the tech room and down the corridor, he considered how he could dispose of it. Thinking about the facilities on the ship. Bridge. Supply room. Nothing in there that could help with his skills. Living quarters. Weapons bays. Airlocks.

Having found the answer, he strained and heaved the large metal crate along the corridor. When he reached the turn-off for the airlock, he looked inside and saw that there was only a minute and twenty three seconds left. A quick decision was required. Port or starboard? He chose starboard as the pirates had left from there. They probably would have left it functioning so they could leave.

Tipping the crate onto a corner, he reached underneath, strained and managed to lift it in front of him. He ran for a few seconds down the corridor before striking the wall at the end. He dropped the crate and shoved it to the right, the airlock coming into sight above the rim of the crate.

He reached the airlock with just over a minute to spare. Currently both doors were closed, but the inside door opened automatically at his approach. He shoved the crate inside and collapsed by the door, gasping, beads of sweat forming which were sucked up by his suit. As quickly as he could he closed the doors. He then pressed the button to drain the air out.

A few long seconds let the pumps empty the room. Kik double pressed the last button, to open the outer doors, and let the crate slip out.

It didn’t. The edges of the artificial gravity still held it to the ship, and there was no force to overcome its inertia. Kik cursed again and refilled the airlock, but this time he stepped inside once the inner doors were open. Closing the door behind himself with unknown seconds remaining, he overrode the pumps and opened the door. He let the oxygen flood out this time, holding onto the handrail to remain still.

Once again the crate was unmoved. But this time Kik was in the airlock with it. He shoved the crate out and free of the low gravity, and it drifted into space. It tumbled end over end and faded into the distance, another spark of reflected light among the red of the nebula. He swiftly reclosed the door and waited for the air to refill. The filtered air burned his lungs as he panted from exertion and released tension.

As the inner door back to the ship opened, a light shone in from the window. It lasted a second before fading. Glancing out the single palm-sized window in the airlock, he saw nothing. Nothing where there had previously been a thick metal box. Either it had been knocked far off trajectory or it had been torn to pieces. Perhaps both.

The ship may be safe for the time being but Kik still couldn’t afford to rest. He had placed all the explosives across the engine room and they could still be triggered. He went looking for a box or boxes to keep them in. In his search, he entered his parent’s quarters which he hadn’t entered since the pirate attack.

Clothes were strewn across the floor. Vacuum-sealed while in space, their holding crates had been torn open and scattered around. The chests beneath the single bed they took turns sleeping in had been overturned and scattered across the sheets.

Kik spotted a few of what must have been their personal effects, all mixed together. He saw a carved bone trinket which looked like the one his father had used to wear. He also spotted some pieces of metal which might have been the latest toys his mother had been making for him. She would always make little mechanical animals, teaching him the name of the creatures he never got to see.

Suppressing the tears that threatened to form, Kik grabbed a handful of clothes from the bed and placed them inside one of the emptied crates. He carried the whole lot to the engine room. Once there, he padded the outside of the box with the clothes and loaded the explosives in one at a time. Once he had done this twice with both boxes, he had managed to pack away all the packages with a little space to spare. He made sure to fill this with more soft clothing. He left both of these crates in the corner of the engine room, as he didn’t feel like dragging them anywhere else.

Now that the potential of imminent death had been taken care of, Kik considered his next move. First, he moved his parents into their quarters. He kept their movement to a minimum by dragging them along the corridors on the sections of grating they were each lying on. After around six minutes of screeching and grating of metal on metal, they were laying on the floor of their room.

Both seemed to be doing better, although the smell of blood still hung around them. His father seemed a little pale and was breathing a little rapidly, but he was no longer the deathly pale that he had been a half hour ago. It seemed the nanobots were doing their job. His mother was breathing slowly and evenly. She could almost pass for asleep rather than stabbed if it wasn’t for her bloody clothes. Kik checked the places he had shot to close her wounds. The spots weren’t bleeding anymore. Perhaps the nanobots were even replacing the damaged skin, as the burns seemed to have gotten much better than they should have in the short time that passed. It was a shame he had no access to cold water for the burns, but he was on a spaceship.

At last, Kik smiled slightly. For the last forty minutes, since the pirates had boarded, he had been in a heightened state of tension and alertness. Now he allowed himself to calm down for a short time and rejoice that his parents could quite well live.

Feeling like he’d treat himself, he went and picked up two things from his parents’ bed. First was the bone amulet which he had noted was similar to his father’s. Second was one of his mother’s toys. He chose a creature with eight curly legs and no discernible eyes or other features. He slipped them into his suit along with the pistol and the rations.

Then he pulled off his parents’ ruined suits. He started with his mother. He pulled off her helmet, and her shoulder-length black hair fell out of it. Her green eyes were closed in rest and her mouth was slightly open. Kik picked up the first piece of cloth he came across, part of a trodden-on dress shirt, and used it to wipe the residue of blood off of her mouth before discarding it.

Next came the suit. Leaving on scraps of her undersuit to preserve her decency somewhat, Kik used the scalpel from the medical kit to cut the suit into strips which he pulled out one by one. The gloves and boots he kept, as they could be separated from the main suit and reused. Beneath the suit, her pale body was heavily bruised. Besides her head, it seemed she had been beaten all over.

Kik didn’t even notice his fists clenched on the scraps of suit. He ground his teeth and wished the pirates would warp into a black hole. But if some cosmic entity heard him, they didn’t deign to reply. After checking for broken bones, which he didn’t find, Kik replaced her torn undersuit with a spare one from her clothes on the ground. Both she and her father carried around three such. Once he put it on, the absorbent material started to clean the blood from her body.

Satisfied that his mother was healthy and clean, Kik moved to his father. His blue eyes were also closed, and his brown hair tousled. His condition had been significantly worse, but the problem had mainly been the wounds. Once the nanobots fix that, he should recover quickly. He followed the same procedure, but as he was cutting the suit off he noticed that his father wasn’t fully as healthy as he had first believed.

His wounds were closed, certainly, but his skin was particularly pale, and his breathing was rapid. In addition, sweat was gathering on his skin. When Kik touched his forehead beneath his hairline, it felt hot the touch.

Looking him over, Kik couldn’t see any obvious problems besides the fever symptoms. The only thought he had was poison on the pirates’ bullets, although why they would poison their bullets and not blades was beyond him. He pulled out an anti venom shot from the medical kit and injected it into his father’s arm.

He covered his father in clothes and the blanket from the bed, nestling his mother in as well. That way they should stay warm and maybe help his fever to break. He stayed by his parents for nearly two hours, resting his own body alongside theirs.

His head span with conflicting thoughts and reassurances. Were they going to be alright? Of course they were, he had done everything he could. He had done everything that he could but what if it wasn’t enough? If something happened to them, what would he do?

He spiralled further and further into concern and worry before wrenching his mind forcefully away. If there was one thing that he learnt growing up, doing nothing but worry will only give you more things to worry about. He needed to take action before he lost the chance to.

Watching over his parents wasn’t going to improve their condition. He had to move. If he stopped for any longer he wouldn’t be able to keep going.

From there, he dropped the bloody spacesuits in a recycler to suck out the moisture and chemicals for reuse. He then moved to the bridge to try and fix the controls, which he would need to get out of here.

The bridge controls, now that he looked at them again, were awful. The panels were cracked and smashed. The manual thruster and steering controls had been torn free, leaving torn wires in their place. The blood across the viewport had mostly evaporated in the dry, filtered air, leaving behind a crimson residue that tinted patches of the glass.

For the good news, though, the navigation controls in the slide-out drawer beneath the main controls was still working. The pirates had probably missed it completely.

The navigation system was a computer-assisted piloting method intended for lining up for long-distance jumps. It was mostly ignored in regular piloting, especially during hazardous areas, as it was rather inflexible to turning. However, in the middle of a nebula, on the edge of a new sun’s orbit, there were few large particles that could pose a threat to the ship. They would be detected far ahead of time and displayed on the bank of warning lights on the navigational array. Once the targeting computers achieved a lock they could be easily broken up by the shipboard defence weapons, or simply avoided.

Seeing that the navigational computer was working without problems, Kik connected the other sections of the controls to it. His parents, mostly his mother, had set up numerous bypasses in case something like this happened. All he needed to do was select a command in the interface and it would finish the job by itself.

When the program had finished running, the display was considerably more packed with prompts. The bypass would connect all of the controls to the navigational computer, not copy the functions of the others. Because of this only certain notifications were displayed, and the screen wasn’t filled completely. But there were still many system complaints that required his attention.

He flicked through them, ticking them off one by one. Weapon systems damage. Minor fuel leakage, already plugged. Temporary sensor overload from nearby energy discharge. They were ordered by the most long-standing first, caused by the pirates’ initial attacks against the ship. Then he reached the last one, the one which had been most recently updated. Hydroponics tank leakage, life support unstable. Air contains high carbon dioxide concentration - approximately thirty minutes before dangerous, at current rate of consumption.

It was good that he had replaced the grating in the corridors, or else he may well have fallen on his hurried way to the engine room.

Back in the engine room, he looked at the small hole smashed in the bottom of the tank. The majority of the tank was standing, but it was empty. The shadows cast by the wires surrounding it and the stubborn plant life still clinging to and staining the sides of the tank were the only reasons why he had thought it was full. The plant life and water had already all leaked through the floor grating into the space beneath the floor, where the heat from the engines and machinery had dried them out and killed the damp-loving mould.

If he couldn’t fix the hydroponics tanks, he’d have to get the air from somewhere. The ship had enough tanks of pressurized breathable air, but he couldn’t just open them and hope. That would just increase the pressure, not get rid of the carbon dioxide. He needed to find spacesuits, and both of his parents’ had been cut up.

He went into the storage room and sorted through the piles. After two minutes of digging for the white of the suits, all that he found there had been completely slashed. The pirates had specifically targeted the chest pieces on each. All he could find was one which had been punctured in the back, which he combined with one of the others for a complete suit. That took him a full ten minutes. He was swiftly running out of time.

If he had a breathing mask, and his parents were conscious, he might try getting them to share it. However, they didn’t even have one, let alone two, as usually vacuum was the worry rather than running out of oxygen. A breathing mask wouldn’t help with depressurization and the cold of space. A suit was his only option here.

He found one other suit on the ship, but it was his own backup in his sleeping area. Not only that, it was his old suit from two years ago that he had already nearly outgrown. There was no way that it or the suit he was wearing now would fit his parents. As if recognising his rising panic, his own suit switched from filtered air to tank, recognising a lack of breathable air for it to filter.

Eventually, with only three minutes of air left after dashing back and forth around the ship repeatedly, he had to face reality. He only had one suit for the two other people on the ship.