A jolt vibrated through the deck and a sudden uncompensated surge of acceleration knocked Rajpreet flat. I hit the bulkhead and slid down as my drones scattered. The lights fluctuated again and the life support cut out, then back in.

Oh, this is not good. My plan (make that “plan”) depended on holding the intruders back until the armed station responder or the angry raider-hating merchants got close enough to scare them off. But my bridge drone was reading displays that indicated the hostile had grabbed the facility with the tractors transports use to attach and detach modules. It was pulling us close, intending to clamp us onto its hull and drag us into the wormhole with it. From their frantic cursing, Roa and Mihail agreed.

I got upright and caught Rajpreet’s flailing arm to help her stand. The facility’s comm came back online with a static-obscured warning alarm. Yes, great, that’s really helpful right now.

A survey member, Adjat, staggered into the foyer from the corridor that led to the facility’s lowest storage and lab space. Rajpreet told them, “Get up to crew level, hurry!”

Adjat nodded, heading for the corridor. “Hatches are jammed to labs 3 and 4, I don’t know if anyone’s trapped—”

“They’re doing a headcount up there,” Rajpreet said, pushing them on toward the access.

I had an idea, though it had its downside. On the feed, I said, Roa, can the baseship jettison the facility?

The baseship itself was just a small carrier, with bridge, drives, and living space for the five-person crew. Most of its bulk was designed to be able to grab or deploy the facility module.

Mihail replied, calm but breathless, He’s working on it, checking sensor view to see if our clamps are clear—

So they had already thought of it. It was nice working with smart humans. Now if I could just keep them all alive.

A lot of my attention was on the hatch two meters away from me. I was scanning for any attempt to breach it, either physically or via the hostile’s feed. I tried a breach of my own through the feed, but the hostile’s wall was so solid I couldn’t get any kind of read off it.

On my feed relay, Arada said, We can remote-jettison from here—the facility command center—if you transfer control. But we need to get the rest of the team up to the baseship.

Ratthi added, I’m doing a headcount now, but with the feed and comm not responding—

Roa broke in: Our clamps are clear, we can jettison.

Arada said, Roa, will they be able to scan us? If they can tell we’ve abandoned the facility—

Roa replied, They may be able to.

They would definitely be able to. Before anybody else could butt in, I said, They may fire on the baseship once the facility is jettisoned.

That was the downside I mentioned. It just depended on how anxious the hostile was to get to the wormhole with the facility before the responder and merchants arrived, whether they were ordinary assholes or huge assholes, if they wanted the facility or the humans in the facility, if they were afraid of retaliation by Preservation or just didn’t care.