Our losses were four dead and three seriously injured in taking the ship. Four dead and three injured out of twenty one in the assault teams. A third of our force was now gone or combat ineffective. In one battle. In taking one ship.

Take the ship we did, it was ours. Giraud had only one casualty in taking the ship's control center, Private Arun Kurien of the Indian Army died from being shot by one of the two Kristang who were blocking access to the control center. All the other casualties were in Chang's team that seized the engineering compartment. Chang's team had the toughest job, they had to kill five Kristang who were motivated and desperate to prevent their ship from being captured. Three of those Kristang were killed in the initial firefight when we had some advantage of surprise, the remaining two were much more difficult. One of them managed to get to a suit of powered armor, despite Skippy jamming the door of the locker where the suits were kept, this Kristang had the armor almost on and partly powered up, when three people fired blindly into the compartment, giving cover for Chang to throw in a grenade. The Kristang was tough, he was still trying to get the suit buttoned up after the grenade hit, it took concentrated fire to take him out.

The worst problem was the last Kristang. This one must have realized he was the only one left, despite Skippy shutting down their comm system, and he decided to blow up the ship rather than surrender. Skippy warned Chang that he needed to stop that Kristang now, now now now, before the Kristang was able to breach the reactor containment. Despite Skippy doing everything he could, the controls to dump the reactor plasma were manual, not anything Skippy could interfere with.

Chang told me what happened; when the assault team had already lost two people killed trying to get at the Kristang in the narrow space he was hiding, Sergeant Yu Qishan pulled the pins on two grenades and launched himself around the corner, dying when the Kristang shot him in the head. That last Kristang also died when the grenades exploded and blew a hole in the ship's hull, sucking both the Kristang and Sergeant Yu into space. Almost sucked most of Chang's assault team into space, except a bulkhead automatically slammed down to prevent further loss of air in the engineering section.

Chang actually tried to console me, though Sergeant Yu was one of his own men. "He knew the survival of humanity depended on stopping that Kristang from destroying the reactor. He did his duty. We will honor him when we get home."

He was right. I still felt like shit about it.