"Engage." I ordered. I needed to think of something original to say. Warp factor five was not an option, unfortunately. The ship swung around about forty five degrees which made me dizzy, and the engines fired. Fired hard. It was good that everyone was strapped in. Damn, it felt like someone was sitting on my chest. It must be worse for our wounded. "Skippy," I grunted, "is this necessary?"

"I'm not showing off, if that's what you're asking. The Thuranin wish to jump away quickly, their message ordered us to rendezvous at maximum speed. We're going to flip around and decelerate soon, so hang on. Also, when we get within half a lightsecond, the Thuranin will take control of our navigation system, to bring us safely onto an attachment point. That is standard practice. I am running this ship's navigation system within one of my subroutines so the Thuranin will think they have full access. But they won't."

"How will we know if the Thuranin accept our IFF codes?" Chang asked.

"They already have. I'm chatting with them, and the local Kristang commander right now. It's a slow conversation, because the signal travels at lightspeed. They accept our story about being thrown off course by a Ruhar stealth mine, they can see the damage to this ship. Don't be alarmed, we're going to cut thrust in three, two, one, now. We'll coast for twelve minutes before we flip over. This, uh, would be a good time to use the bathroom, hint, hint."

"Oh, good point." I opened the intercom and advised the crew what was happening.

It was a long twelve minutes, drifting through space toward a technologically superior enemy ship that could squash our ship like a bug. Skippy had better know what he was doing, or it was going to be game over real soon.

Unlike our assault on the Kristang frigate, our plan to capture a Thuranin star carrier depended entirely, one hundred percent, on Skippy. We humans were simply along for the ride, until Skippy firmly seized control of the ship and all systems aboard. The difference between the two plans, was, ironically, the Thuranins' advanced technology compared to the Kristang. According to Skippy, the Thuranin's cyborg nature made them highly reliant on networked computers; computers which the Thuranin obsessively protected from any possibility of being hacked. Any possibility, that is, except for the utter magnificence of Skippy. Even the Maxohlx overlords of the Thuranin had a very difficult time breaching Thuranin data system security, but Elder technology was beyond the most fevered imaginations of the Maxolhx.

According to Skippy.

Skippy, an ancient, alien AI I didn't entirely trust. Not that I didn't trust him to do what he said he was going to do, since he needed us as much, or more, than we needed him. What I didn't trust was not his ability, but his judgment. He was an amazingly arrogant and absentminded little punk-ass beer can. So, we had cooked up a backup plan, a plan Skippy huffed was not necessary.