This could be really bad.

I know, I know, I’m Security, I should already have a plan in place for a boarding action. But I was used to having a human supervisor come up with the plans and … Okay, right, I just hadn’t bothered because the chances of an attack while en route to and from the mission site were so slight it wasn’t worth taking the time off from viewing media. I’d put all the work into coming up with attack and defense scenarios for the facility while on planet. (None of which I got to use during the one actual attack on the facility, but though it was tempting, “advance planning sucks” seems to be the wrong lesson to take from that whole incident.)

Anyway, SecUnits were shipped as cargo on company transports and I didn’t even have any old procedure documents for ship-based actions in my archive. The only ship-to-ship attack I’d participated in had been viral, and I’d almost destroyed my brain during it.

Speaking of which, my alert monitors on comm and feed weren’t picking up any attempts by the hostile to make contact. That might just mean they already knew there was no bot pilot to attack with killware or malware.

I went up the ramp past the crew lounge toward the control deck. My drone had zipped ahead up into the baseship and through the passage to its bridge. When the bridge hatch opened to let Rajpreet out, it slipped in. Now I had a camera view of the sensor display surfaces floating above the control boards. Mihail sat in a station chair, sweat plastering their light hair to their forehead. Roa was on his feet pacing, dark brow furrowed in thought, one hand pressed to his feed interface. It looked like a clip from an action series, right before something drastic happened.

Then something drastic happened.

The hit wasn’t at all like the way they show ship combat in the media. I felt something more like a power surge than anything else. Gravity fluctuated just enough to thump me against the bulkhead and the ramp lights flickered. A flood of automated warnings came from the facility engineering pod and then the feed and comm cut out. I scrambled to pick up the baseship’s feed, then gravity fluctuated again as the facility’s drive went offline and we switched to reserve power for life support. My drones scattered as the gravity flux interfered with their propulsion, then pulled back into formation.

On the baseship bridge, my drone watched as Roa and Mihail froze, like a scene on pause. Then Roa said, “That was an impact.”

Mihail’s voice was hoarse as they cycled through displays. “On the facility’s drive housing. A locator missile. Attacker must have fired it when they spotted us leaving the wormhole.”

Oh, shit. Seriously: oh, shit.

My organic parts had a reaction that reminded me how lucky I was not to have a digestive system. We didn’t blow up in the next ten seconds so I pushed off from the bulkhead and kept going toward the facility control deck.