The Captain sat down and rested his elbows on the table.  “If we took the alien ship,” he said, “could you operate it?”

James and Anderson both stared at him.  The Captain met their gaze evenly.  James wondered, absurdly, if the Captain had drunk far too much ... and then wondered if he should relieve him of command at once.  No one had managed to board and capture a military starship in all of humanity’s exploration of space.  But then, no one had really tried.

“... Maybe,” Anderson said.  “If they had the time to purge and destroy the computer systems, it would probably become impossible.”

James hesitated, then looked at the engineer.  “Could someone operate Ark Royal without the computers?”

Anderson smiled.  “They’d have to run their own control systems through the drives,” he said, “but it might be possible.  Our security protocols purge the local control networks too, sir.  We didn't want to take the risk of the datanet collapsing at an inappropriate moment.”

“I see,” James said.  Unlike more modern carriers, Ark Royal’s datanet was largely decentralised.  Normally, it would prevent battle damage to one section taking down the entire system, but it might also regard a self-destruct command as a network failure and ignore it, particularly if the system was already damaged.  It was why there were backup systems worked into the fusion cores as well as the main computer nodes.  “Captain, do you seriously intend to capture the alien ship?”

The Captain smiled.  “If we get past them, we go back to Alien-Two,” he reminded him, dryly.  “But if we take the alien tramline ...”

James swallowed.  It sounded like a recipe for disaster.  But the more he thought about it, the more he realised the Captain was right.  They were trapped.  Why not place gamble on one last throw of the dice?

“We know nothing about the interior of the alien ship,” Anderson warned.  “The Marines have never gone into an alien ship.”

“No,” the Captain agreed.  “But we have to try.”

“If nothing else,” James said slowly, “we can take out the alien ship and sneak back into Alien-Two.  We might just avoid detection without that bastard chasing us.”

“We’d still have to crawl all the way to New Russia,” the Captain said.  He shrugged.  “But it’s workable as a backup plan.”

James sighed.  “Then the sooner the better,” he said.  “Before more alien ships arrive.”

The Captain nodded.  “Call Major Parnell and the CAG,” he ordered.  “And don’t say a word to the reporters.  They don’t need to know the truth.”

“Understood,” James said.  “I won’t say a word.”