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.

In the aftermath of the battle, Skippy opened the portside docking bay door so we could take the damaged Dodo aboard, and a shaken Desai when immediately to the ship's control center to get a crash course in flying a Kristang frigate. My first instinct was to call a halt, let everyone recover, and most importantly, tend to the wounded. Simms and Skippy urged me to continue with the plan, right away, we had not a moment to lose. Simms assured me she was seeing to the wounded, they had been brought to the frigate's limited sickbay, and there wasn't anything I could do to help them. With the paltry medical supplies we'd brought with us, there wasn't much anyone could do for them. The best thing I could do, Skippy said, was continue with the plan, and capture a Thuranin star carrier, where the wounded could be tended to with the Thuranin's amazingly advanced medical technology. Wounds could be healed, limbs even regrown, Skippy assured me, once we could put our injured soldiers in Thuranin healing tanks. It felt wrong, I swallowed my pride and let my people do their jobs.

While Desai pressed buttons under Skippy's direction, programming a jump, I looked around the control center in amazement. We had a ship. A starship. Us. Grubby, low-tech, ignorant monkeys from Earth. A starship.

Damn.

CHAPTER TWELVE    MERRY BAND OF PIRATES

"Did it work?" I asked Desai.

"Sir?"