"How close?" demanded Call, knowing their USM registry would be useless.

"Close enough to ask questions, that's for sure," muttered Hillard.

Call nodded, then tossed the data pad aside and scrambled from her chair.

"Get Elgyn!" called Hillard, but Call did not need to be told either.

She thundered down the gangway and stopped only when she reached the railing at the top of the stairs. She could see no one within the cargo bay, but quickly counted ten of the cryotubes. They were beginning to steam in the humidity. Pausing only a second more to catch her breath, she took the steps two at a time, and then wove quickly between the cryotubes until she reached the airlock.

"Elgyn!" she called, but there was no response from beyond.

There was, however, a mechanical whirring from behind, and then Vriess came wheeling out from the shadows. He clutched a scruffy scrap of paper in one hand, and looked altogether pleased to see her. His smile quickly dropped.

"We've got company," she told him urgently. "Where's Elgyn?"

"He's on board," replied Vriess, pointing the way. "Here! Take this!"

She tore the flashlight from his hands with only a smile in thanks and then leapt through the airlock. She was suddenly hit by how cold and dark and silent it was. As a starship not intended for normal human habitation, after all, it had no need to cater for the warm blooded. Twisting the end of the flashlight, she proceeded into the murky ghost ship, following the bright spot projected onto the far wall.

"Elgyn!" she called loudly. "Johner!"

Feeling her way rapidly through the darkness, she quickly located her new crewmates by the sound of their voices. She followed one passage as black as night, until she caught sight of dancing light beams through a door that had been forced open. The three pirates were awaiting her arrival expectantly. Johner was loading one of the hefty cryotubes onto a cradle for transport, whilst Christie was busy disconnecting another from the wall. Elgyn, meanwhile, was supervising the procedure over a long cigarette.

As she entered the bay, they turned their attentions to her.

"What is it?" croaked Elgyn, his form silhouetted by Johner's flashlight.

"We've got a USM fleet coming our way," she told them.

Christie moved in the darkness behind her. "How long?" he asked gruffly.

"About seven minutes," she said over her shoulder.

Elgyn looked beyond her, presumably to Christie, and then nodded. Christie abandoned the twelfth cryotube and joined Johner at the eleventh. Then the pair of them strained behind its cradle until it began to budge. Elgyn took one last drag on his fag and then flicked it to the floor. It bounced between two of the remaining cryotubes, where its embers glowed brightly for a second.

"Call, you with me," he ordered, landing his flashlight heavily atop the twelfth cryotube and then took the weight of the machine on his shoulder. Though Call doubted her own strength, she joined him beside it and began to push. They then followed Christie and Johner through the doorway and back to the Betty.

Elgyn's flashlight rolled back and forth from side to side on top of the cryotube. This meant they often lost sight of the two men ahead of them, and simply had to follow the noise they were making. It also meant Call caught sight of the person within the cryotube through the frosted pane. He was a pale, anaemic man with an oval face and arched eyebrows. He looked calm and he looked peaceful. He also looked dead, though Call tried not to think about that.

"Quickly!" urged Vriess once they reached the airlock.

Christie and Johner had trouble driving their cryotube across the lip between the two ships. Once both wheels were clear of it, however, they left Vriess to stow that cryotube safely with the others, and then returned to help Elgyn and Call. With the four of them behind it, it was quickly pushed aboard, though Call found her contribution was somewhat unneeded.

Elgyn didn't pause for breath. He returned immediately to the cockpit, leaving the others to seal the airlock. This task fell to Christie, who produced a thermal charge from nowhere and secured it to the wall between the transport's inner and outer airlock. He left Johner to work the doors, and as they slid home, he and Call followed Elgyn up to the bridge. The captain and his pilot were already seated and belted.

"Forty seconds and we'll be on every screen in the fleet," groaned Hillard.

Elgyn snapped open the intercom. "Somebody shut that goddamned door!"

Call came up behind his seat and quickly found herself gripping the back of it. Hillard held trembling fingers above those four yellow buttons, watching them intently as if will alone would light them up. Elgyn was slumped back into his chair, making fists with his hands and staring out into space. The warships were becoming ever more visible, though it was only their regular formation that so far betrayed the fact they were not asteroids. Beside Call, Christie sighed away the tension.

And then the buttons began to blink and Hillard hammered each one. Seizing the sticks in her sweaty hands, she took a deep breath and banked suddenly to the port side. The Betty broke away from the other ship with a sharp jolt, but Call just clung to Elgyn's chair all the more tighter. A slight tremor dissipated beneath their feet.

"Away and clear," Hillard sighed. "What's our heading?"

Elgyn fumbled for the words. "Call," he asked. "What's our heading?"

But Call had no heading, for she had not completed the task he had set her. She had tossed the data pad aside when she had gone looking for him and thought nothing more of it. She had left it ruminating on a new decryption algorithm, but she still had no answer to give him. As Johner arrived with Vriess on his back, Call took a step away from Elgyn and turned an apologetic look on them all.

It was Hillard, of all people, who came to her unlikely rescue.

"I'm taking us into the 'roids," she told them. "We can lose them in there."

Call caught Elgyn's glare in his reflection and knew it was a lucky escape.

Hillard brought the ship about, so that the transport vessel came into view one final time. As they left it behind, Christie thumbed the detonator he held in his hand. The ghost ship shook violently yet silently and then the airlock blew clear. The ship sank into a slow spin toward the asteroids and began to crumple like wet paper in the dead of space. It had looked, Call realised, like an asteroid had struck.

Hillard did not deviate from her course. As she took them further into the asteroid field, they were buffeted from all sides by rocks they could not even see. The sounds of these collisions were loud and hollow, and became ever more frequent. It was becoming increasingly more dangerous, though only Call seemed to notice that Hillard was gradually decelerating. There was then a sudden tinny beep from where Elgyn was sitting, and the captain strained in his restraints with alarm.

"What was that?" he groaned. "What was that?"

But Hillard shook her head, not allowing herself to be distracted from the controls. Vriess began clamouring for a diagnostic, but the ship didn't seem to have such a capability. It took a moment for Call to discover the source of the sound.

"The data pad," she said loudly. "It's the data pad."

Elgyn stared at her reflection for a second, then groped under his chair until he found it. He pulled it up by the modulator, so that the data pad itself swung underneath. As he handed it over, the lead connecting it to the ship's computer snagged on his chair. Call just tore it loose. If her suspicions were accurate, it would not matter. And they were.

"I just broke the code," she whispered, surprised even at herself.

Elgyn immediately broke free of his belt and turned around. "You sure?"

Call nodded. "It's all here," she told him. "Instructions, codes, frequencies..."

"Frequencies?" said Elgyn and Christie together.

They were, at that point, struck hard by an asteroid, though Hillard was quick to assure them they were okay. For a moment the others were distracted from Call's discovery as Hillard took evasive action to avoid a far deadlier collision.

"We've got to send a signal," Call continued. "A clearance code. It's also got the reserved military band we have to transmit it on. They want a contact name as well. When we've sent that, they'll relay a rendezvous point. That'll be coded, too."

Johner shook his head and sighed. "This is some deep shit, ain't it?" he said.

Elgyn glanced over at Christie. "What do you think, Christie?" he asked.

"I dunno," said Christie, shaking his head warily. "It just sounds so... simple."

"I've got no problem with that," said Vriess from his box.

Hillard banked steeply once more. Call could tell that she was finding it harder and harder to find a safe route through the asteroids. Hillard, always the implacable pilot, had begun to sweat. The tendons in her arms were taut, and her knuckles trembled with the strength of the grip she had on the sticks. It was when she glanced across at the scanner and screwed up her face that Call knew something was wrong.

"Umm, Elgyn," said Hillard quietly. "Take a look at the scanner."

He took a quick look, then asked, "What am I looking at?"

"That's the USM fleet," she told him as the others took their turn.

"Yeah, and it's moving away from us," he said slowly.

Hillard shook her head, snorting quietly. "It isn't moving at all," she said.

She would get no further. The asteroid that punched through the Betty's hull was probably no larger than a grain of rice. However, with the force of inertia behind it, that left a hole sufficiently large to destroy the entire ship. At first it shook violently beneath their feet, and then trembled with concussion. It only occurred to Call what had happened when she heard the shrill whistling of burgeoning decompression and felt the pressure build up behind her eardrums. Vriess knew of it too.

"Pressure's unstable," he cried. "We've got breech!"

If they had hoped for the Betty's computer to locate the problem for them, they were to be disappointed. Lights began to flash across the board, but this did not help. It was when they began to feel the air blowing cold across their faces that the emergency klaxon began to wail. Vriess was desperately trying to make sense of the read-outs, and Call reckoned it sheer fluke he found the location in time.

"It's the airlock!" he screamed over the wind. "Blow the outer door!"

But Hillard was bent over the deck, clutching at her ears in pain, and Elgyn did not hear. Though Call knew little of this ship, she had seen Hillard at work, and knew where to find the airlock controls. The emergency release, she found, was a handle behind a flap. She reached across Elgyn, and as her eyes began to bulge from her head, she seized the oily handle in her hand and wrenched it downwards.

Though the winds of depressurisation ceased instantly, the ship continued to creak and buckle under the sudden strain until pressure was equalised once more. Then there remained only the ringing of that piercing whistle in their ears. Only then did Call release her grip on the handle and take a step away from Elgyn.

"Fucking hell," croaked Elgyn under his breath.

Hillard shook her head disparagingly. "USM or no USM, I'm taking us out."

Her decision met with no complaint, and Hillard turned the Betty around in retreat. Despite the rocks bouncing off their hull, she was intent on a swift escape. They would have a further close encounter with another wayward asteroid twice their size, but escaped unscathed regardless. As they reached the edge of the asteroid field, however, the first ship that appeared upon the scanner was identified by Call as a CAS warship. Then there was another, and a third, until a dozen appeared.

The fight for the Xarem Straits was about to commence.

"Hey," began Johner. "If these guys start shooting, I wannabe elsewhere."

Call set her jaw and shook her head. "Go where? We're stuck here."

Elgyn glared up at her then raised an eyebrow at Christie. "You got an idea?"

"Yeah," sniffed Christie, blood trickling from his nostril. "Kawlang..."

"Kawlang?" muttered Call, realising she was out of this loop.

Hillard shook her head. "Oh, no," she said. "No more comic book piloting."

As far as Call was concerned, she had seen Elgyn decide as soon as Christie had said it. It then became a matter of persuading Hillard, and Elgyn proved adept at that as well. So as the warships engaged in a vicious yet silent battle all around them, and the Xarem Straits became yet another graveyard of ghost ships, a single wayward asteroid drifted away from the action with the tiny spacecraft in tow.

Once the last of the ships had disappeared from their scanner, through destruction or distance, the crew of the Betty began to relax once more. It quickly became a period for reflection, as Hillard took them away from the asteroid and further into the black heart of space. Even Johner could be found slumped exhausted at the back of the cockpit, alone with his thoughts. It was a time when Call felt less and less part of this crew. Whilst their thoughts were evidently in the past, and what had once been, her thoughts were very much in the future, and what was yet to come.

The question of whether they were to continue eventually arose.

"I dunno, Christie," sighed Elgyn. "I really don't know."

Christie licked his dry lips. "I was thinking," he said. "What would Justy say?"

Elgyn raised an eyebrow. "What do you think he'd say?" he asked.

"Nothing," Christie grinned. "I think he'd just yawn."

There was no further discussion, for there was no more to say. By unanimous, unspoken decision, the crew of the Betty had decided they had been through far too much to simply call a time-out at this late stage. Call repeated the contents of the data pad and then willingly followed the instructions. Once the signal had been sent, a new registry appeared at the furthest range of the scanner. It was a USM registry, and it read Auriga.

Though it meant nothing to the eager crew of the Betty, it meant everything to Call. And although she had only known these criminals, these pirates, these murderers for a few days, the first thing she felt was a hollowing sense of regret.

NOTES:
Two things of note would be the cryotube Call looks into, which I conceived as containing Purvis, and the Kawlang Manoeuvre, which is also in "Alien: Resurrection", but there it refers to the way Johner carries Vriess on his back when they have to ditch his wheelchair to go underwater. Having written about these characters steadily for over a fortnight, I too had grown rather fond of them. The pirates Joss Whedon peopled "Alien: Resurrection" with were cardboard cut-out secondary characters it was hard to feel sympathetic for, but by giving them centre stage and making them my own, I think they grew beyond that. I don't think I'd want to write another story about the Betty crew, though a comic story about Call's previous employment as a robot sex slave has a certain "Hudson's Tale"-esque appeal...