The Hotpot was having communication issues. They were trying to get a message through to the Endeavour, but every attempt had completely and utterly failed and Ali couldn't understand why. She was currently trawling through all the circuitry with her tools to try and find a fault that she wasn't convinced existed.

"Found it?" Wood asked when he thought he heard a slightly happier noise from under the console, moving to see what she was doing.

"Nope," Ali replied. "But I found my sock," she added brightly as she crawled back out. How had that got past her and Spud?

"Sock?" Wood asked in disbelief and Ali held it up by way of proof. "…I don't want to know." He decided against asking the obvious question. By now he was well aware that Ali was highly unorthodox.

"Regardless, the problem isn't at our end, I've been through everything," she explained as she turned to check on the progress of the diagnostic she was running on the system, disappointed to find it only half complete. "Or at least, it's not an internal hardware problem if it is," she concluded.

A silence fell over them as they both thought over more potential faults and therefore fixes. "Maybe -"

"Ssh!" Ali cut in almost immediately, putting a finger to her lips as she did. She was staring at something but not seeing it as she was clearly listening to something from the tilt of her head. "Do you hear that?" She asked after a moment. Wood looked around too, listening for something his ears couldn't detect. Ali started to wander around, following her hearing more than her sight, before pressing her ear and fingertips to the bulkhead and listening intently. "How did you do that?" She whispered to herself then hurried back to hear seat, and furiously navigated through her scanners' controls to take detailed readings of the Hotpot's hull. She sagged back into her chair as her worst fears were confirmed.

"What?" Wood asked, because he knew from her reaction she had the answer.

She indicated to the scans and he inspected the diagram there. "It's a communication interceptor, programmed to decrypt and redirect communications from the ship it's attached to back to it's owner," she explained before hitting the edge of the panel in frustration. "One of the ships must have fired it at us when we made our getaway. Why would we have suspected anything other than standard fire?"

"So they know we've been trying to contact the Endeavour?" Wood checked and Ali nodded, "and they know where we are?"

She shook her head. "Not yet, it's not designed as a tracker, but there is a distress beacon - of sorts - that will activate if we remove it. Then they'll know where we were."

"We're faster than them, though, right? We can reach the Endeavour before they catch up to us."

"It's not us I'm worried about. If Bert knows we've been trying to warn the Endeavour he'll have sent his fastest ships to intercept her and he'll have sent enough to take her down. We can warn them but that… leaves us vulnerable," Ali explained unhappily. Even so she played with the flight controls until they were at their maximum speed, in fact Wood was more than sure that they were over it.

"It's a simple choice, isn't it? We have to warn them, otherwise it's just us against Barker's whole fleet," Wood suggested though he was starting to suspect there was something she wasn't telling him. "Can we take the chance that not warning the Endeavour means he wins?"

When Ali finally turned back to him her eyes almost betrayed all her fear, but after years of living as a disreputable mercenary she had honed her ability to be unreadable. Wood couldn't help but think that she looked incredibly vulnerable in that moment no matter how brave a face she was capable of putting on for the galaxy. "No, we can't," she finally agreed in a voice so quiet it was almost hidden by the gentle beeping and humming of the ship's instrumentation.

Her tone had been devoid of emotion, but her movements were sharp and frustrated as she turned back to the controls to drop them back into sub light speeds. She didn't say anything as she moved over to a control panel near the bulkhead the device was latched onto and tapped out some more commands onto the screen there.

"Okay, blow it up," she commanded in an icy cold tone.

Wood did as she asked, unsure what could make her - the fearless ex-captain Alice Turner as her reputation would have everyone believe - so scared. Whatever it was, she had decided that this was the better way. He briefly mused he didn't want to know what the alternative would look like. She was back in her pilot's chair by the time he had destroyed the contraption and quickly had them back at light speeds. "What is going on?" He almost demanded, but was able to reign his own temper in because he knew that people like her closed up when they felt threatened. Though that was assuming he'd been able to get a good read on her in the short time they'd known each other.

Ali didn't reply to him, instead she opened her comm with one hand while her other quickly searched through the charts in the Hotpot's database. "Endeavour, this is the Hotpot, do you read us?"

Rear Admiral Grey appeared on the screen in front of them. "Hotpot, this is Endeavour," he confirmed, "what news do you have?"

"Short version; Bert is excavating something on Kentar but he discovered me before we were able to get any more information. We were able to escape - just about - but our communications were being intercepted and redirected. My best guess is that he'll have sent ships to intercept you. To get through the jamming we had to destroy the interceptor -"

"You did what?" Grey demanded.

"Big picture," Ali replied evenly. "I'm sending you coordinates for you to collect your head of security from," she added and for the first time since she made the decision to destroy the beacon her cheeky personality broke through. Wood turned sharply at that piece of news with a frown on his face. "I'm going to go and do some damage," she added.

"Ali, what -"

Ali didn't let Grey get any further as she simply cut the connection. She wasn't explaining herself because she knew they had limited time before the Hotpot blew up and she planned on making the most of the explosion.

"What are you doing?" Wood demanded.

"Saving your life," she replied coldly. He didn't know if he was shocked that she had shut down to the point were only logic remained.

"What about yours?" He replied tartly.

Ali shrugged. "Like you said, we do everything we can to make sure he doesn't win," she explained. "The alternative is… too bad to contemplate," she admitted barely glancing at him as he absorbed that information. He was right, they couldn't take chances against Barker, but she couldn't be responsible for anyone else's death. Not another ally. Not when it wasn't necessary. This was how she was choosing to fight back against the inevitable. She closed her eyes as she could still hear the gunshot that killed Ch'o, attempting to push down the memory. She could sense the flicker of doubt run through Wood as he considered reaching for his pistol. "Don't even think about it," Ali warned her own pistol already in her hand, her other disengaging their light speed engines.

He was about to object and try to convince her that she wasn't thinking straight, but she simply activated the beamer and sent him to an escape pod. She returned her pistol to her belt as she hit the launch mechanism, watching her senors long enough to confirm the pod was clear before she turned the Hotpot around and set a course back to Kentar, leaving him on the outskirts of the solar system she'd diverted to.

Ali didn't allow herself time to think about what she was doing, that decision had been made and there was no point in dwelling on something she couldn't change. Hopefully she would bump into Bert Barker's ships on her way - that was her intention anyway. If not, then it was unlikely she'd even make it as far as Kentar.

She had one escape pod left, and - like the one she'd ejected Wood in - it was stocked with enough disgusting nutrient gel to keep two occupants alive for a week. Problem was that they couldn't just have diverted course and hopped into them, because they wouldn't have been able to get out of scanning range in the time available. So they'd have become sitting ducks - or potentially completely stranded if the Endeavour didn't win the fight. This way Ali could provide a major distraction, at a minimum.

Soon the Hotpot informed her that the auto-destruct had been activated. Ali had been expecting that; the interceptor was designed to leave behind some nasty code that it neutralised as long as it was still attached.

Moments later she noticed the ships on her scanners. She grinned and set an intercept course, getting close enough for them to notice her before she dropped back into sub light speeds again in the hope that they'd do the same once they saw her. She wasn't disappointed.

Running on a combination of hope, fear and adrenaline she grinned and sought out the biggest of the ships to set a collision course. Weaving between the ships as they fired on her whilst staying as close to her target as possible, she had timed this so that the Hotpot's self-destruct would trigger when the ships collided. If she was going to lose her ship, she wasn't letting it go out in anything other than a blaze of glory. Once she was confident they wouldn't blow her up prematurely, she ran the short distance to the remaining escape pod and ejected.

She wasn't much safer in her new surroundings, but at least she was no longer inside a ticking bomb. The pod had almost no defences, but it had dexterity. She weaved between the ships and projectiles they were still firing at her little, trusty Hotpot as they tried destroy it before it's impact.

Just as a bittersweet satisfaction overcame Ali from the successful detonation and crash, she felt the familiar pull of a beamer and landed unceremoniously as she rematerialised in a sitting position but no longer in a chair. She was saved the effort of scrambling to her feet by two taurran guards each taking hold of an arm and hauling her to her feet before she had a chance to move. They manhandled her off the beamer and to a third who promptly relieved her of the items on her belt. She was briefly irritated at both their competence and their efficiency - before being frogmarched through the ship to their brig.

She halfheartedly tried to strike up conversation with them, in the vain hope that either would let something useful slip, but she received little by the way of reply so she quickly gave up trying. When they arrived at the brig they all but threw her into a cell and she thumped the door that sealed behind her in frustration as they left. She turned to start pacing, before giving up that thought, and ran her hands through her hair as she dropped to sit on the hard bunk in defeat. For a second she missed having Wood around, before she scolded herself for the thought. He was safer where he was. He might be fun to wind up but she had taken to travelling alone for a reason - she wouldn't risk other lives on her mistakes.

She told herself off again, there had been no good options.