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"Come a day there won't be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all. This job goes south, there well may not be another. So here is us, on the raggedy edge. Don't push me, and I won't push you. Dong le ma?"

Serenity - Captain Malcolm Reynolds to Simon Tam

Shrike moved with deliberate grace as it manoeuvred among the various pieces of ships that made up the salvage field they'd come out for. It moved with a certainty and confidence translated through it's controls to it's maneuvering thrusters from it's pilot. Small bits and pieces ricocheted of it's heavily armoured and unlovely hull, damaging what remaining paint there was and adding new scuff marks and dings to the millions already decorating her hull. Her work lights, each about the size of a bowling ball but enormously powerful swept and scanned amongst the floating debris steadily as her crew looked with eyes and far more sensitive artificial senses for those pieces more valuable than the rest.

On the bridge, a space largely dominated by seven console-with-seat modules, a tall black-haired woman's uniquely green eyes scanned the data on the screen as various kinds of information gleaned by the sensors and scanners was cross-referenced and presented by the ship's computer systems.

Objects in the field were categorized by volume, mass, emitted radiation, and what the LIDAR scan as well as other sensors could ascertain about composition.

It was tedious, dull and generally a dictionary-perfect description of 'Boring', but she'd done it often enough to know to let the computer do most of the work, keep an eye on the screen while chatting with whoever happened to be near.

"With a field this size and density, we're bound to find something good." King, the ship's pilot said to her even as he kept his attention on avoiding a rather sizeable and gnarled chunk of unidentifiable wreckage

"Hope so. Been a while since we made any decent coin and last I checked the tanks were getting pretty low." Selina commented as she sifted the displayed information with a practiced eye, tagging one debris chunk's signature in memory as it looked promising.

A baseball-sized chunk of fused ceramic and metal struck and ricocheted off the heavy shields over the bridge windows. The windows themselves were made of four panes of inch-thick steelglass, and proof against just about any incidental hazards but the shields the slid up to cover them had still been installed, each two-inches of armor plate and composite ceramic in four bonded layers.

The sound of the impact through the shields was negligible and the conversation continued.

"I heard that. Sharie's got a list for the Captain, mostly a 'wish-list' but some of it'd be a good idea to get soon's we can." King said, tapping a control lightly, and easing the starboard engine over a piece of wreckage half the size of the massive Shelby-Turmansky engine itself with a carefully done firing of five different thrusters.

The screen Selina watched suddenly started flickering a particular piece of wreckage in flashing-blue overlay to get her attention. The sight of it brought a smile to her face as she checked the sensor information.

"Our fuel problems are over, hopefully. Just picked up a tankage section from one of these old hulks that's way too heavy to be empty." She said to King.

"Always like t'hear we're not gonna die freezing and playing tall card for matches out here." King said, making light of one of the worst fates that could befall a ship out in the deep black.

They were a good week away from even the nearest Cortex relay, and completely on their own in whatever happened.

Which was exactly the way every one of Shrike's crew liked things. None of them had family or anything else outside the small surrogate family of eccentrics aboard the ship and the life that went with crewing her.

Outcasts, loners, wanderers, and those who just simply didn't belong anywhere else all variously described the members of her crew. They had the ship, and they had each other, and all preferred to stay as far away from the dubious benefits and certain complications of centralized civilization as possible.

Selina re-scanned the tankage section, upping the resolution as high as it would go.

"Definitely too heavy to be anything but nearly full. Move us in close enough hook up." She commented and instructed King.

King did as he'd been ordered without qualm. Selina was not only a senior crewmate, she was also the wife of the Captain, had assisted in the construction of Shrike, and as he'd learned over time she was always looking out for the best interests of the crew.

She was also 6'1 in bare feet, and as skilled in combat as she was beautiful.

…and she was very, very beautiful which came in handy as a negotiating ploy more often than not.

King looked around using the ship's sensors and exterior cameras, making sure he had a good idea of where the problematically-large pieces of debris were and sidled the ship closely underneath the tankage section that had caught Selina's attention. It was mostly intact and with a sizeable and jaggedy-ragged part of the vessel it had originally been built into still attached.

Down in Shrike's cavernous main hold equipment of assorted types was being checked and readied. Ronon hefted one of the hull-cutters which resembled nothing else so much as a monstrously oversized chainsaw with an adjustably extendable blade. When in operation a row of plasma cutters fired into the surface the teeth were working at to soften the ceramics composites and alloys with multi-thousand-degree heat and allow actual cutting to occur.

They were based off chainsaws in actual fact, and after numerous refinements had evolved into something simple, ruthlessly practical, durable and surprisingly effective.

Alistair Smythe, ship's Physician-in-residence watched his much taller, swarthy-skinned and dreadlocked crewmate near-effortlessly lift and maneuver the hull-cutter, knowing full well how much they weighed.

"My boy, anyone else I would immediately suspect and accuse of showing off." He commented with a slight smirk under his perfectly-trimmed moustache.

"Huh? Oh." Ronon replied as he looked up from checking the few gauges on the device that measured the cutter's batteries and plasma-gas reservoir. He thumbed the guard back from the test switch and pressed it, getting the displays alive with the cutter otherwise shut down cold. All was good so he set it down and hefted the next one, doing the same check over.

"Anyone else would be." He commented, smirking himself as he knew how such would be received by the older man, knowing the subtle but disapproving look on the Doc's face without looking.

"Okay folks, we found some fuel right off, so I need some volunteers to take the lines over and hook us up." Selina's voice sounded over the intercom system.

A little ways behind Ronon and Smythe the diminutive and somewhat prettily owl-like young woman known as Sharie Valka looked up from the gear she'd been checking over herself.

"Yeah, and I can guess who one of those getting 'volunteered' is." She grumbled as she stood up and rubbed her hands together to dust them off, not that it did a thing to the grease stains on her palms nor would the addition of more dust and grease to the mechanic's coveralls be noticeable..

Sharie Valka was Shrike's mechanic, under-employed and vastly under-appreciated before she'd made the accidental but fortunate acquaintanceship of Captain Sinjihnn Du'Maur. She was the second of the only two women aboard and a near-mirror opposite to Selina.

Sharie was barely 5'1, wore glasses because ocular surgery scared her, and confined her authority to things mechanical. Generally good natured as much as the average mechanic could be called upon to be, she could still throw a serious grump when it came to certain aspects of life in space.

EVA being topmost among the list.

Some time later found Selina and Sharie outside, loaded with every conceivable item they might need and guiding the twin fuel lines to the tankage section from whatever doomed ship that had originally carried them.

Shrike's powerful lights had been adjusted to cover the tankage section, itself comprised of fuel cells and fuel tanks proper, and they had little trouble finding the proper valves to hook the fuel lines up to.

Sharie hated EVA, or so she claimed, but after a short span she always found a way to enjoy it and typically this figured Shrike herself as it afforded a rare opportunity to see the ship she devoted so much care and attention to in-flight without resorting to camera drones.

Seeing Shrike in her element, a massive salvage field filled with possibilities, made her wish she was a painter, but she settled for snapping some shots from her suit's cameras.

Selina took to EVA as though born to it and never turned down the chance to 'walk in the black', as she put it. Sharie privately envied how easily her crewmate handled zero-G.

Selina relied on long-past training and instruction regarding zero-G, and was truly in her element outside the ship. She recalled the time she'd had to hunt a couple of stowaways that had turned out to be rather stubbornly troublesome bounty hunters outside and around the hull to kill them while Ronon stalked their two friends inside the ship.

With the fuel transfer lines connected, they tripped the one-way valves and the built-in gauges showed the pressure of fuel flowing to the tanks of the hungry Shrike. The fuel they'd found wouldn't be enough to fill her tanks completely, but would bring them easily to the half-up mark without a doubt which went a long ways to easing everyone's concerns.

Selina glanced to be sure her crewmate was line-hooked to the tankage array as insurance against getting lost by virtue of drift and checked her own line, then relaxed as fuel was being pumped while keeping an eye on her rearview mirrors for any debris coming along behind her that could be problematic, and watching Sharie's back likewise.

"Selina?" Sharie started with over the comms.

"Yeah?" Selina's answer was casual, relaxed, as if she were reading in the ship's lounge rather than surrounded by millions of bits of sharp bit of wreckage that could turn deadly without warning.

"Whaddya think about Ronon?" Sharie asked after a hesitation.

"Took him a bit to fit in, but he's a good enough sort. He's earned my trust, Sin's and Smythe's too. Haven't thought about it, but I guess I'd say I'm liking him. If nothing else, he knows what he's doing and saved us some real trouble a few times." Selina said, glancing at a brightly reflected bit of sunlight that turned out to be just a tiny speck of shiny metal close by.

"Oh, okay." Came Sharie's simple reply.

"We're on privacy-channel, out with it." Selina said, her voice amused and cajoling.

"I hate it how you do that!" Sharie burst out with, following it with a nervous giggle.

"It's not like I read minds, Sharie. But there's only one reason a woman asks questions like that, so it's kinda like a big holoneon sign…so, how's it between you two?" Selina commented then inquired.

Sharie's nervous gestures transferred even through the equipment-laden and armoured spacesuit as she reached habitually to adjust her glasses and her gloved fingers met faceplate.

"Honestly Selina, just 'twixt us girls…I think I love him." Sharie admitted, busying herself with a portable scanner and recalibrating it pointlessly.

"You could do a gorramn sight worse." Selina commented, eyeballing another piece of shiny-bright wreckage in her suit helmet's rearview mirrors.

"What's he like under the bedcovers?" Selina inquired without hesitation.

Sharie's initial response sounded like she was choking on her own tongue, after the best part of a minute she'd recovered from the shock of the question well enough to answer.

"You know that stupid smile and that weird walk you have the day after Sin rousts you good? Well, been kinda covering, not easy mind you…" Sharie said, the embarrassment and joy evident in her voice.

"So, he knows what he's doing in the bedroom and the battlefield? Good." Selina said, point-of-fact, and pleased for her crewmate and friend. "How about you?" She asked.

"Oh, god…are you gonna stop with the questions or see if I die from embarrassment?!?" Sharie asked in desperation.

"Hey, fair's-fair." Selina commented then continued with a mildly lascivious tone. "With Sin, I know he loves it when I use my tongue…"

"Stop! I don't wanna know…not now, maybe later, advice-wise." Sharie exclaimed, then giggled from embarrassment.

Doverson King, Shrike's pilot, would have been considered too young and unseasoned by most captains…especially in how he'd lost his last job and how it'd blackballed him from flying again for any significant commercial interest. Never mind that in violating protocol and chain-of-command he'd saved hundreds of lives.

Sin had given him a chance, and then hired him on, a decision he'd never regretted as King had fallen in love with his ship almost to the same degree as Sharie had. Young, semi-hyperactive and capable of consuming enough coffee to wire a football team at strengths most people would consider toxic he took his job seriously despite appearances.

Because of this, he noticed the inbound blip on the scope before the alert went off.

"What the…??' He wondered aloud, and brought the ship's other sensors online for a better look, choosing only passive units to minimize signature emissions. Out this far from anything remotely called 'civilization' it paid to be careful.

What the additional sensors and detection instruments showed him was not something he liked.

"Oh no, gods no…" he didn't hesitate in reaching for the comms panel at his station.

"Sin, we've got a problem inbound, looks like Reavers from the radiation emissions and it's a gorramn big signature, too!" King said over the general shipwide address comms, his heart pounding like a hammer inside his ribs.

The reply was quick and simple. "I'm on my way, keep an eye on them." The Captain's voice over the comm said.

King didn't waste breath on a reply, and made sure to keep the suspected Reaver ship under close observation as it began to slow.

This time, they had people outside, were in the midst of refuelling, and in the middle of a dense wreckage field which really limited available options.

He checked the fuel tanks and fuel cells, feeling his mood sink even lower when he saw how little had been transferred so far. Running was out of the question.

The Captain was on the bridge right quick, and quickly eyeballed the blip on the screen and the additional information coming in.

His mouth tightened grimly. It was a Reaver ship, no doubt about it, and from the looks of it's size and it's engine emissions it was one of the bigger ones known by some of those out on the Rim as 'Butcher Ships'. More than big enough to literally swallow a Model-'04 Firefly, unlike smaller Reaver ships they brought their prey aboard and tore them apart inside.

"Sharie, take us dark." Sin ordered over the comms. Sharie didn't waste time replying, and a few seconds later, Shrike went dead in space.

They didn't need the ship's sensors to see the Reaver monstrosity as it came in close enough to be easily seen through the bridge windows. Sin and King recognized the lines of what the ship had been, once a time ago before it'd been taken by the Reavers. It'd once been a good-sized passenger liner for the Wonderlines company, who operated a small fleet of such vessels catering to people seeking cruise-based vacations.

Now, it'd been turned into a space-going dried-blood-brown horrorshow of spiky, asymmetric blade-like hull extensions, three massive magnetic grapplers crackling with electricity, assorted tears and rents in it's outer hull and no small collection of corpses chained all over it's hull. Weapons mounts of assorted sizes were scattered all over the hull as well.

At just over five times Shrike's size, Sin didn't enjoy the prospect of being forced into fighting the Butcher Ship. Usually, when they encountered something like this they had enough advance-warning because of the way he'd enhanced and augmented his ship's sensor capabilities, and they could simply evade trouble without the Reavers even really being aware of them. Other occasions had come down to using the ship's weapons, and Shrike was no pushover. Since her maiden flight, Shrike had accounted for three kills of Reaver craft including one just a bit larger than Shrike herself.

If they'd had the fuel, and there hadn't been crew outside, they could have just popped a 'dazzler' and light out at Maximum-burn. Shrike's engines were immensely powerful as was appropriate to her occasional employment as a tug or tractor-ship and when flying free that same power meant she was fast.

"Sin…??" King asked, hoping for some comforting ideas from his Captain.

"I'm thinking. They haven't noticed us yet, or they'd have come right for us…or they think Shrike's a Reaver. We've scared enough people accidentally to convince me she looks the part." Sin commented. It was true, more than a few times when coming in to a Rim moon or world folks had panicked thinking his ship was Reaver-made. He'd found it annoying, then amusing, over time and now it looked like it might just save their skins…literally.

"What about th'girls? They're still outside n' with Reavers about…" King said, worried.

The Butcher Ship filled the bridge windows now, but still hadn't seemed to have taken notice of them yet.

Sin studied the Reaver ship with a keen eye, looking for weaknesses, something he could exploit quickly and brutally that'd keep them off-balance long enough to get their people back aboard and either run or find a better hiding spot.

The Butcher Ship started firing relatively slow-moving, large-ish oil-drum shaped things from it's sides and bow.

"What the…??" King said, starting to ask what they were when they started exploding, sending out swarms of small shrapnel, some of which sleeted off Shrike's hull and bridge windows harmlessly.

"Da Chow Jing Ser." Sin commented, having what he felt was a good idea about what the Reavers were doing.

"They're trying to flush out any salvagers, like us, who might be hiding from them." He explained to King.

Outside, Selina and Sharie had hidden themselves in a large gap in the tankage array Shrike was hooked up to. The fuel was still flowing, owing to the pressurization of the array's tank modules and there wasn't anything they could do to speed things along with the fuel transfer.

This left them with the sole concern of not being seen by the massive Reaver ship nosing amongst the wreckage field.

"What's going on?" Sharie whispered, getting an unseen eye roll from her companion who'd edged her helmet out just far enough for a glimpse of the overall situation.

"Sharie, we're in hard vacuum and speaking to each other by conduction line. You don't need to whisper." Selina commented.

"I know…just feels right, y'know?" Sharie said, at better than a whisper but still not full-voiced.

Selina gave her a non-committal sound in reply as she continued to watch events. As she watched, large canisters were ejected from the sides and front of the Reaver.

"That's weird…" She said abstractly.

"What?"

"The Reaver just tossed out these big, can-shaped things…" Selina detailed for her friend, just as they started to explode in small bright flashes. Selina noticed the effects on nearby wreckage pieces and got her head down just in time as she ducked back down beside Shrike's mechanic.

"Wang bao dahn…!!" She muttered angrily, her Eastern European accent thick in her voice.

"Some kind of fragmentation devices, like really big grenades." She swore then explained as shrapnel from the canister and incidental wreckage fragments whacked into the metal over her head.

"Why? What's the point of that?" Sharie asked, trying to get a handle on Reaver-rationale and cope with white-lipped fear that was only bearable because of Selina's reassuring presence.

"Dunno. We could always float over to them and ask." Selina commented in dread and dark humor.

"That's not funny." Sharie groused.

"Well, what do you want from me? I don't have any better idea how these freaks think than anyone else. But, it reminds of something…" Selina said, her voice trailed off as she wracked her memory.

"That's it! Those things are like depth charges…used to use them in naval warfare centuries ago to scare or kill submarines." Selina explained.

"How do you know that??" Sharie asked, having no idea that any kind of history was of interest to her.

"Cortex channel four-fifty-six, 'History in War' series." Selina said, edging her helmet out again for a look and stopping when she noticed two booted feet right in front of her face as her eyes came level with the top of where they'd been hiding.

"Tzao Gao." Sharie said quietly in a feathery fear-trembling whisper as she looked up to see why Selina had stopped suddenly.

Not for the first time Ronon was glad that Sharie had made him pay attention to some of how things worked aboard Shrike, and had cultivated in him an interest in learning more about the functionality of their home.

Right now, he was using that bit of knowledge to manually operate the releases and mechanisms of the main airlock's external shield plate. It was pretty straightforward but the manual pressurization pumps for the hydraulics needed a strong arm and lots of endurance.

The shield plate had to be opened for access and use of the main airlock, part of which, when on the ground, also involved a hydraulically-deployable powered lift which when un-needed just folded up and out of the way above the external hatch doors of the airlock. But the shield plate was part of the outer hull armor and hull itself. This meant it was heavy and the mechanisms that normally secured it against the rigors of re-entry, weapons fire on occasion and impacts in wreckage fields were considerable amounts of machinery.

Still, he worked at it, and inch-by-inch got it opened enough for someone Selina's size in salvage armor to get through, which automatically meant that Sharie, being smaller, would be able to negotiate it too.

"Alright, done." He said into a nearby wall comm, having to raise his voice so the voice-powered piezoelectric backup would work.

"Good job, get suited up, just in case something tries following them in." Came Sin's reply, sounding distant over the voice-powered comm.

Ronon was already suited up, wearing full salvage-armor, with one of his swords across his back, and his gun holstered with a lanyard of tripleweave ceramiflex cording to make sure if he lost his grip on it it wouldn't be lost. All he needed to do was put on the helmet, and it's over-armor, depressurize the lock and the main vestibule-staging area, then wait.

He privately hoped some Reaver was thick-witted enough to try boarding. He hated Reavers with a genuine passion beyond what most people felt regarding them.

He didn't fear them, hadn't for a long time, not since spending the better part of two years trapped on a moon that'd formerly been home to him and the rest of his people. He'd fought a small population of shipwrecked Reavers off-and-on during the time, and he just didn't fear them any longer as sheer hatred had burned that fear to less then ash.

Selina only hesitated long enough to be certain she wasn't staring at Ronon, who she wouldn't have been surprised to have found outside the ship looking for them. Even them, as soon as she saw the boots, she'd reached for and started to draw the large pistol-shaped thing on her hip.

Bringing the grappler-gun up, she fired without any delay just as the Reaver started to swing his weapon, a nightmarish axe-head of spikes, flailing chain lengths with blades welded to them and large blades of jagged and crudely-sharpened metal connected to a length of heavy pipe. The Reaver itself wore a suit of stiched-together human skin over it's spacesuit, with crudely-hammered metal coverings and riveted joinings acting as an effort at armor and keeping the macabre oversuit attached to the life-supporting garment beneath. Selina and Sharie got an unwanted glimpse of the slavering, raging face inside the helmet behind the face faceplate…lips cut away, and the remnants held curled back away from the teeth with wires and hooks, teeth filed to stained points, nose cut down the middle and flanged open, the stretched tissue held to the cheeks by metal pins and eyes burning with an insane rage that was nuclear in intensity.

The grappler fired, and the fist-sized grapple hit the Reaver squarely in the upper abdomen just below his ribcage with brutal and bone-splintering force, folding him over the grapple head and knocking him off his magnetic-boot soled perch and away as Selina tripped the line cutter.

"We're not staying here. Grab onto my back, hang on." Selina told Sharie over the conduction-line. She kept watch as Sharie did as instructed. Sharie didn't argue, knowing that whatever her friend and crewmate had in mind was likely better than just trying to hide while Reavers hunted them down in force.

"Ready?" Selina asked.

"No…but go ahead." Sharie said with blunt honesty.

Selina gauged the distance to Shrike by eye, and from experience and training knew how to evaluate her planned trajectory. She glanced at some moving glimmers, noted they were suit lights and the light of same glinting off edged weapons as space was being filled with Reavers on the hunt, pouring out of the Butcher Ship's locks in groups of various sizes.

Selina got herself aligned, fixed her gaze on the distant ship, and drove off the tankage array with her legs, sacrificing some power for more accuracy, then turned in flight so she was between the Reavers and Sharie, keeping an eye on her helmet's rear-view mirrors so she didn't misjudge the distance and collide with Shrike's unyielding hull, which Sharie would get the brunt of.

"So far, so good. They don't to know we're here…or they're saving us for afters." Sin commented to King and Smythe, the latter the ship's Physician and Sin's oldest friend who'd joined them on the bridge.

Outside, the massive and intimidating hideous Reaver ship disgorged Reavers from it's locks as high-powered searchlights began raking the area.

"I don't like the looks of that." Smythe commented in his cultured Londinum accent.

Sin's eyes narrowed as he also watched the goings-on outside.

"They know our girls are out there." Sin said, convinced by the small army of space-walking Reavers and his own gut-instinct.

"And you're going to do…what?" Smythe asked, curious and more than worried about the two women outside playing a very lethal game of hide-and-seek that could end horrifically.

The Captain thought quickly, sorting through tactics, some that would get them all killed in ways he didn't want to think about, and others that were risky, but…

"King, flash our belly marker lights, the ones closest to the main airlock. The angle we're at the Reavers won't see it." He ordered.

"Well, that's singularly underwhelming." Smythe commented.

"It'll give our girls a tip, I hope, of where to go. Ronon's down there right now, suited up and you know how he feels about these men-that-were." Sin said back evenly, ignoring the needling.

Sin then made his way over to the Engineering console on the bridge. Rarely occupied, it nonetheless came in handy now and again, and this wasn't the first occasion to remind him why he kept it on the bridge.

"King, Smythe, listen close as we only get one chance for this to work and if we don't get it right…" Sin began with as he started working controls, continuing as he set things up.

"King, don't do anything yet, I'll say when. Just get ready to hit the disconnect on the fuel ports." He got a silent, affirmative nod from the nervous pilot, then addressed the Doctor.

"Smythe, I need someone on weapons and you're better with Shrike's guns than anyone else."

"Understood." was Smythe's sole reply, and he took the console module normally occupied by Selina, and opened a small, infrequently-used side panel that gave one control over the not-insignificant weaponry the ship bore.

He'd been associated with the Captain for long enough to have a good idea what he had in mind, and selected weapon functions and types accordingly...

Being a Salvage ship, Shrike was equipped to handle any and all aspects of such an occupation. Some aspects of her occupation meant possessing the ability to slice things up at a distance. While Shrike's lasers weren't considered weapons for a variety of reasons, they could still serve extremely well in such a capacity if the situation warranted.
Two of their own people were out there as well, and lasers had no accuracy problems and over distances like this, were instantaneous.

He brought Shrike's entire weapons complement online, but selected the lasers only, leaving the guns of various calibres for as-and-when they might be called upon...and given the proximity of the Reiver, he thought that such would likely occur soon.

On Shrike's hull, battered and scuffed panels slid back and ball-shaped, yoke-mounted lasers deployed along her bow, sides, top, and underside.

With main power down, they were running off battery reserves, which could handle a lot, but didn't feed to the lasers. The genuine weaponry could be fired off battery-power without an issue but Smythe understood why Sin was loathe to start firing the cannons in the wreckage field with two of their small number outside.
There'd be no telling how it would stir up the wreckage and what kind of secondary and tertiary shrapnel would be whipping about after they started firing solid projectiles.
So, lasers.
But, while he could easily use the passive-sensor targetter functions, he had to wait for whatever Sin was going to do before he could do his part.

"Anytime today would be good." He said very quietly under his breath as he set his own plans.

Out in the unforgiving vacuum of open space, two bodies sped across open distance, pursued by others bearing a nightmarish array of weapons to haunt the memory of any who'd seen them.
Selina used short bursts of the suit's maneuvering thrusters to ensure she was as precisely on-target to the comforting sight of Shrike as possible.
Sharie was making an unconscious low-level keening sound because all she could do was ride along and watch the psychotically-murderous Reivers close the distance while her crewmate worked to rendezvous with their home, flying backwards and navigating by mirrors.

Abruptly, a bright amber-colored flashing at the corners marking a square flared on Shrike's underside, repeated several more times and Selina nudged their course a bit to head for that point which marked the ship's main personnel airlock.

"Selinaaaaaa....!" Sharie said, deeply frightened as the swarm of Human monstrosities continued to gain on them.
"I know, I Know...say, you never did answer my question." Selina replied, sounding distracted and busy as she guided them by eye and reflexes.
"You wanna talk about my sex life NOW!? " Sharie yelled in stunned amazement.
"Ow! Little loud there, girl." Selina commented, keeping an eye on the Reivers.
"Aren't ya gonna try, oh I dunno...SHOOTING at them?!" Sharied yelled again, making Selina wince as her helmet became a concert hall and echo chamber again.
"This stunt is tricky enough without adding gunfire into it. This is best-guess-by-eyeball, Sharie and we get ONE chance to do this right. I screw up, we hit the hull at full speed and at the the speed we're going that's fatal, even with the spacearmor we're wearing. If I miss, we're screwed, and so is Shrike because they won't leave without us and that Butcher ship would take full advantage of them trying to get to us."

Sharie went silent for a moment as she sized things up herself.

"Lemme see the settings on your suit thrusters." She said, and started bending Selina's right arm in a way only possible for the double-jointed or a Chimeran Artemis.
Sharie examined the thruster settings, and checked the fuel reserves, then checked her own and started hunting around on her equipment harness over her spacearmor while managing to remain clinging to her shipmate.
"What are you doing??!" Selina asked in annoyance and curiosity.
"Working on an idea, and as soon as find...got it!" Sharie said, then Selina felt Shrike's mechanic working on the service pack on her back.

Selina kept an eye on the Reivers, and adjusted their speed and course as Sharie worked, after almost a minute the mechanic's stressed but cheerful voice came through the induction link.
" 'Kay, here's what we can do now. I used an emergency oxygen transfer line to tie our thruster fuel reserves together, kinda. So, you can run us right up to the max you can with what you've got left and we can avoid smearing ourselves across Shrike's hull by hard-firing my thrusters to brake as I've got more fuel."
"Uh...so how does the transfer line help again??" Selina asked.
"Ties in the controls, your's to mine. You've got got two thruster systems to work with. You're better at this than I am, so i figured..." Sharie explained, trailing off as she sensed the point was understood.

Ronon, heavily armed and armored, waited for the two women speeding across open space as on the bridge a nasty and vicious surprise was being prepared.

"Smythe, you give our girls covering fire with the lasers. King, once they's aboard and just after Smythe fires the missiles, you get us turned so they're staring at our mains and light us up for Maximum-burn." Sin said curtly, laying things out again to be sure everyone knew their part.
"Sin, what about fuel? We pull a Maximum-burn, and we're on the drift." King asked as he finished setting things up.
"I've got it covered." The Captain said tersely, without looking up as he worked with the Engineering console and finished prepping the ship for one of the most dangerous things a ship could do.

One of the reasons Sinjihnn Du'Maur was still alive in a hostile universe was his ability to turn a bad situation for himself into a nightmare for an enemy and his ability to think of and utilize resources no one usually considered.
He wasn't leaving without his wife and mechanic, and that was that. The Butcher ship was a serious problem, but he'd figured out a way to turn it's size into a serious liability, and with a bit of luck would leave it hopelessly crippled or dead.

The thought of leaving the two women behind hadn't even occured to him, it was simply unthinkable.
But, they had to get aboard on their own before he could save them all.

Ronon had fought Reivers more often than most and knew their habits well.
There was always a few sneaky types amongst the usual straight-ahead suicidally-singleminded types. When the human-skin oversuited figure tried slipping aboard through the open lock he was guarding, he didn't hesitate in decapitating it in a single powerful blow from his sword. The hullsteel blade sheared cleanly through skin, suit, flesh and bone to send the helmeted head in one direction as the body dropped to the deck in the residual gravfield.

Shortly afterwards, there was a blast of flickering flare-light from outside, and an impact that he felt ever-so-slightly through his boots and two figures of markedly different heights crawled in through the open lock, neither wearing an oversuit of human skin, but instead very recognizable and familiar spacearmor over the life supporting garments beneath.

"We got' em." was all he said into his suit comm, knowing the bridge had been waiting and hoping for just those words.

The shorter of the two newly-arrived figures stood, the taller one laying on the deck near the headless Reiver.

"Ronon, Selina's hurt really bad." He heard Sharie say in fear and concern painted tones through the suit comm.

On the bridge, different concerns ruled the attention of three men.

Sin brought the ship's engine cores online, crash-starting all four simultaneously, and watched the displays on the engineering console he was at waver, wobble, skew and start to settle as the surge began to smooth out.

Function telltales lit up on the console Smythe manned, indicating the lasers were getting power now and he unhesitatingly began spearing Reivers with coherent beams of alloy-shearing light. Blasts of plasma marking each impact as the majority of each Reiver's torso was obliterated by the extremely high-energy beams punching through them almost as easily as if they were firing into open space. He touched another control while doing this grisly work, and two missiles leapt from Shrike's forward underside mounted launcher like hunting animals let off-leash and hot on the scent of prey.

King knew his task well and wasted not an instant in bringing Shrike around on her maneuvering thrusters so her aft was aimed directly at the much larger ship even as he shoved the throttles to Maximum Conventional, then tripped a mechanical lockout safety, continued moving them into a well-marked range of alternating bands of red and black.

The pivot-in-place maneuver done, Shrike's three large main engines at her stern began glowing with a white glare and venting ghostly, phantasmal vapor with the glow building quickly to an almost eye-searing brightness in the larger bottom engine of the triplet.
The missiles impacted the Butcher Ship in blossoming hot-yellow and actinic-orange explosions, hitting it in it's main engines and taking one out of commission. The damaged engine began spewing molten chunks of itself out it's exhaust.
Shrike's twinned Radion Accelerator Cores were spun-up to their theoretical maximum, as the engine cores thinned their radiation containment fields to the lowest levels that could still be considered 'safe' as energy levels in the reaction chambers soared beyond normal 'Red Line' limits and was channelled to the largest of the three main engines.

The explosion of power was apocalyptic and directed to propel the vessel forward instead of simply detonating it in a fireball of spectacular fury.
To anything behind Shrike within a goodly distance, the effect was like a directed thermonuclear explosion.

The Reiver Butcher Ship was well-within such a distance.

The white-glaring, incandescent blast of raw power unleashed that marked Shrike's extremely rapid departure spelled near-instant catastrophe for the larger ship as the radiation, followed by the blast-wave slammed into it. The blast-wave pitching and rolling it, washing over and burning it's hull whille stripping fixtures that weren't vaporized or melted liquid in the sudden violence of the smaller ship's Max-Burn and incinerating the remnants of Reiver corpses dealt with by the retreating ship's lasers.

"Stop complaining. If you were Human you'd be quite dead and Sharie likely along with you." Smythe groused in reply to his naked patient's irritated grumbling as he finished adjusting the support wrap around Selina's lower ribs.
"Chimeran or not, you were extremely fortunate my dear girl. Hitting the hull at those relative velocities, it's only a quirk of physics that allowed you to live. On the bright side, aside from some painful all-over bruising, your grateful passenger will be just fine." He said as Selina glared at the wall.
"I feel like I've been run through a metal recycler." She groaned as her broken ribs twinged from a slight muscle spasm.
"Mmmm, yes. The ribs you didn't break you cracked severely. Both maxillary fangs broken, while retracted no less. Cracks in the tibia and fibula of both legs, deep tissue bruising to both lungs, liver, and a concussion with hairline skull fractures that would be considerably problematic for anyone else aboard but you...and possibly Ronon as he doesn't use his brain overmuch anyways. Then there's the damage to the bones in your forearms and your shoulder joints..."
"I'll be fine, Alistair." She said, pained as another, nastier twinge caught her and made her breath hitch.
"I know, but I'm a Physician, and we vow to worry and mother-hen right after we swear our Hippocratic Oath. Irrespective of species or race. " He said in perfect grouchily-deadpanned humor.

Selina gave him a sigh of concession, and looked up tiredly at the older man.

"Are we done here yet?" She asked, smirking at his joke.
"Almost." He said, slotting a canister into the back of a hyposonic and pressed it to the side of her neck where a pulse of ultrasound and air drove the medication through a skin capable of resisting bullets.
"What's that?" She asked, gingerly stretching an arm, and testing the range in her left shoulder carefully.
"A neural enhancer that I modified to work alongside the pain control and management systems in Chimeran physiology. Normal pain medications are useless as your metabolism destroys them as toxins, so I thought to work with what's there already. There's also a good cocktail of concentrated vitamins and assorted other ingredients that'll make for an easier time recovering." He said, handing her a robe and helping her slide into it as she moved carefully and stiffly.

Once she had herself appropriately covered, he keyed the door and called the others in, so they could see with their own eyes that the time for grave concerns was done with. The small Infirmary was somewhat crowded with the entire crew in it at once clustered around the woman sitting on the examination and treatment table.

Sin helped his injured and sore-all-over wife down and onto her feet, noting her reaction as the injured bones in her legs sent their protests flashing through her nerves as she half-listened to the general low-level cacaphony of a group of very relieved crewmates, nodding in acknowledgement and letting Smythe handle questions about her status as she was led out and headed to their quarters for what her body was screaming for; Rest.

"I'm never doing that again." Selina groaned, then chuckled painedly as they walked, Sin helping her steer herself along.
"Gutsy move, and a gorramn big risk." He commented, not harshly but in a tone recognizing the facts.
"No choice. Sharie's not a fighter and we were outnumbered. I knew you wouldn't leave without us both being dead or aboard and figured there was nothing to lose by risking getting killed to get aboard." She said, leaning on him in affection and exhaustion as her system channelled more and more resources towards healing.
"There's an ugly turn of logic I can't find fault with." Sin said, taking her weight easily, affectionately.
"Say, what are we burning for fuel right now?" she asked, recalling how short the refuelling time had been.
"Ronon, Sharie and myself ran transfer lines from the shuttles to the main fuel-flow tree connector. So, we've got enough for a leisurely cruise to the nearest station." Sin told her with a definite tone of good-natured humor and satisfaction.
"You mean I risked my rump out there playing hide-and-get-eaten against Reivers for nothing??" Selina asked in bristling manner.
"No, Kitsune`. You got us enough in the fuel cells to trigger a Maximum-Burn to get us out of there. It took some finagling to get the transfers hooked up and the pumps sorted out. Without you and Sharie out there, we'd all be Reiver trophies now." Sin told her, smoothing slightly ruffled perspectives and mood.
"Oh. You're welcome then." She said sarcastically-casual, leaning against him again. "So what's next after we fill-up?" She asked after a moment and a few more steps.
"A nicely dull job involving some mining equipment and related machinery headed out to the Hinterlands. Some wildcatters are prospecting on some half-terraformed rock and dreaming of finding oceans of precious metals and rare earths as the terraformer machines tear things up." He said.
"Oh, joy--excitement and thrilling heroics. Well, so long as nobody drops a D-9 Excavator on me, fine." She joked mildly, liking the sound of a nicely straightforward job and relaxing in the familiar sense of security found in the presence of her husband aboard the only true home she'd ever known.

END

Description
"Come a day there won't be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all. This job goes south, there well may not be another. So here is us, on the raggedy edge. Don't push me, and I won't push you. Dong le ma?"

Serenity - Captain Malcolm Reynolds to Simon Tam

Shrike moved with deliberate grace as it manoeuvred among the various pieces of ships that made up the salvage field they'd come out for. It moved with a certainty and confidence translated through it's controls to it's maneuvering thrusters from it's pilot. Small bits and pieces ricocheted of it's heavily armoured and unlovely hull, damaging what remaining paint there was and adding new scuff marks and dings to the millions already decorating her hull. Her work lights, each about the size of a bowling ball but enormously powerful swept and scanned amongst the floating debris steadily as her crew looked with eyes and far more sensitive artificial senses for those pieces more valuable than the rest.

On the bridge, a space largely dominated by seven console-with-seat modules, a tall black-haired woman's uniquely green eyes scanned the data on the screen as various kinds of information gleaned by the sensors and scanners was cross-referenced and presented by the ship's computer systems.

Objects in the field were categorized by volume, mass, emitted radiation, and what the LIDAR scan as well as other sensors could ascertain about composition.

It was tedious, dull and generally a dictionary-perfect description of 'Boring', but she'd done it often enough to know to let the computer do most of the work, keep an eye on the screen while chatting with whoever happened to be near.

"With a field this size and density, we're bound to find something good." King, the ship's pilot said to her even as he kept his attention on avoiding a rather sizeable and gnarled chunk of unidentifiable wreckage

"Hope so. Been a while since we made any decent coin and last I checked the tanks were getting pretty low." Selina commented as she sifted the displayed information with a practiced eye, tagging one debris chunk's signature in memory as it looked promising.

A baseball-sized chunk of fused ceramic and metal struck and ricocheted off the heavy shields over the bridge windows. The windows themselves were made of four panes of inch-thick steelglass, and proof against just about any incidental hazards but the shields the slid up to cover them had still been installed, each two-inches of armor plate and composite ceramic in four bonded layers.

The sound of the impact through the shields was negligible and the conversation continued.

"I heard that. Sharie's got a list for the Captain, mostly a 'wish-list' but some of it'd be a good idea to get soon's we can." King said, tapping a control lightly, and easing the starboard engine over a piece of wreckage half the size of the massive Shelby-Turmansky engine itself with a carefully done firing of five different thrusters.

The screen Selina watched suddenly started flickering a particular piece of wreckage in flashing-blue overlay to get her attention. The sight of it brought a smile to her face as she checked the sensor information.

"Our fuel problems are over, hopefully. Just picked up a tankage section from one of these old hulks that's way too heavy to be empty." She said to King.

"Always like t'hear we're not gonna die freezing and playing tall card for matches out here." King said, making light of one of the worst fates that could befall a ship out in the deep black.

They were a good week away from even the nearest Cortex relay, and completely on their own in whatever happened.

Which was exactly the way every one of Shrike's crew liked things. None of them had family or anything else outside the small surrogate family of eccentrics aboard the ship and the life that went with crewing her.

Outcasts, loners, wanderers, and those who just simply didn't belong anywhere else all variously described the members of her crew. They had the ship, and they had each other, and all preferred to stay as far away from the dubious benefits and certain complications of centralized civilization as possible.

Selina re-scanned the tankage section, upping the resolution as high as it would go.

"Definitely too heavy to be anything but nearly full. Move us in close enough hook up." She commented and instructed King.

King did as he'd been ordered without qualm. Selina was not only a senior crewmate, she was also the wife of the Captain, had assisted in the construction of Shrike, and as he'd learned over time she was always looking out for the best interests of the crew.

She was also 6'1 in bare feet, and as skilled in combat as she was beautiful.

…and she was very, very beautiful which came in handy as a negotiating ploy more often than not.

King looked around using the ship's sensors and exterior cameras, making sure he had a good idea of where the problematically-large pieces of debris were and sidled the ship closely underneath the tankage section that had caught Selina's attention. It was mostly intact and with a sizeable and jaggedy-ragged part of the vessel it had originally been built into still attached.

Down in Shrike's cavernous main hold equipment of assorted types was being checked and readied. Ronon hefted one of the hull-cutters which resembled nothing else so much as a monstrously oversized chainsaw with an adjustably extendable blade. When in operation a row of plasma cutters fired into the surface the teeth were working at to soften the ceramics composites and alloys with multi-thousand-degree heat and allow actual cutting to occur.

They were based off chainsaws in actual fact, and after numerous refinements had evolved into something simple, ruthlessly practical, durable and surprisingly effective.

Alistair Smythe, ship's Physician-in-residence watched his much taller, swarthy-skinned and dreadlocked crewmate near-effortlessly lift and maneuver the hull-cutter, knowing full well how much they weighed.

"My boy, anyone else I would immediately suspect and accuse of showing off." He commented with a slight smirk under his perfectly-trimmed moustache.

"Huh? Oh." Ronon replied as he looked up from checking the few gauges on the device that measured the cutter's batteries and plasma-gas reservoir. He thumbed the guard back from the test switch and pressed it, getting the displays alive with the cutter otherwise shut down cold. All was good so he set it down and hefted the next one, doing the same check over.

"Anyone else would be." He commented, smirking himself as he knew how such would be received by the older man, knowing the subtle but disapproving look on the Doc's face without looking.

"Okay folks, we found some fuel right off, so I need some volunteers to take the lines over and hook us up." Selina's voice sounded over the intercom system.

A little ways behind Ronon and Smythe the diminutive and somewhat prettily owl-like young woman known as Sharie Valka looked up from the gear she'd been checking over herself.

"Yeah, and I can guess who one of those getting 'volunteered' is." She grumbled as she stood up and rubbed her hands together to dust them off, not that it did a thing to the grease stains on her palms nor would the addition of more dust and grease to the mechanic's coveralls be noticeable..

Sharie Valka was Shrike's mechanic, under-employed and vastly under-appreciated before she'd made the accidental but fortunate acquaintanceship of Captain Sinjihnn Du'Maur. She was the second of the only two women aboard and a near-mirror opposite to Selina.

Sharie was barely 5'1, wore glasses because ocular surgery scared her, and confined her authority to things mechanical. Generally good natured as much as the average mechanic could be called upon to be, she could still throw a serious grump when it came to certain aspects of life in space.

EVA being topmost among the list.

Some time later found Selina and Sharie outside, loaded with every conceivable item they might need and guiding the twin fuel lines to the tankage section from whatever doomed ship that had originally carried them.

Shrike's powerful lights had been adjusted to cover the tankage section, itself comprised of fuel cells and fuel tanks proper, and they had little trouble finding the proper valves to hook the fuel lines up to.

Sharie hated EVA, or so she claimed, but after a short span she always found a way to enjoy it and typically this figured Shrike herself as it afforded a rare opportunity to see the ship she devoted so much care and attention to in-flight without resorting to camera drones.

Seeing Shrike in her element, a massive salvage field filled with possibilities, made her wish she was a painter, but she settled for snapping some shots from her suit's cameras.

Selina took to EVA as though born to it and never turned down the chance to 'walk in the black', as she put it. Sharie privately envied how easily her crewmate handled zero-G.

Selina relied on long-past training and instruction regarding zero-G, and was truly in her element outside the ship. She recalled the time she'd had to hunt a couple of stowaways that had turned out to be rather stubbornly troublesome bounty hunters outside and around the hull to kill them while Ronon stalked their two friends inside the ship.

With the fuel transfer lines connected, they tripped the one-way valves and the built-in gauges showed the pressure of fuel flowing to the tanks of the hungry Shrike. The fuel they'd found wouldn't be enough to fill her tanks completely, but would bring them easily to the half-up mark without a doubt which went a long ways to easing everyone's concerns.

Selina glanced to be sure her crewmate was line-hooked to the tankage array as insurance against getting lost by virtue of drift and checked her own line, then relaxed as fuel was being pumped while keeping an eye on her rearview mirrors for any debris coming along behind her that could be problematic, and watching Sharie's back likewise.

"Selina?" Sharie started with over the comms.

"Yeah?" Selina's answer was casual, relaxed, as if she were reading in the ship's lounge rather than surrounded by millions of bits of sharp bit of wreckage that could turn deadly without warning.

"Whaddya think about Ronon?" Sharie asked after a hesitation.

"Took him a bit to fit in, but he's a good enough sort. He's earned my trust, Sin's and Smythe's too. Haven't thought about it, but I guess I'd say I'm liking him. If nothing else, he knows what he's doing and saved us some real trouble a few times." Selina said, glancing at a brightly reflected bit of sunlight that turned out to be just a tiny speck of shiny metal close by.

"Oh, okay." Came Sharie's simple reply.

"We're on privacy-channel, out with it." Selina said, her voice amused and cajoling.

"I hate it how you do that!" Sharie burst out with, following it with a nervous giggle.

"It's not like I read minds, Sharie. But there's only one reason a woman asks questions like that, so it's kinda like a big holoneon sign…so, how's it between you two?" Selina commented then inquired.

Sharie's nervous gestures transferred even through the equipment-laden and armoured spacesuit as she reached habitually to adjust her glasses and her gloved fingers met faceplate.

"Honestly Selina, just 'twixt us girls…I think I love him." Sharie admitted, busying herself with a portable scanner and recalibrating it pointlessly.

"You could do a gorramn sight worse." Selina commented, eyeballing another piece of shiny-bright wreckage in her suit helmet's rearview mirrors.

"What's he like under the bedcovers?" Selina inquired without hesitation.

Sharie's initial response sounded like she was choking on her own tongue, after the best part of a minute she'd recovered from the shock of the question well enough to answer.

"You know that stupid smile and that weird walk you have the day after Sin rousts you good? Well, been kinda covering, not easy mind you…" Sharie said, the embarrassment and joy evident in her voice.

"So, he knows what he's doing in the bedroom and the battlefield? Good." Selina said, point-of-fact, and pleased for her crewmate and friend. "How about you?" She asked.

"Oh, god…are you gonna stop with the questions or see if I die from embarrassment?!?" Sharie asked in desperation.

"Hey, fair's-fair." Selina commented then continued with a mildly lascivious tone. "With Sin, I know he loves it when I use my tongue…"

"Stop! I don't wanna know…not now, maybe later, advice-wise." Sharie exclaimed, then giggled from embarrassment.

Doverson King, Shrike's pilot, would have been considered too young and unseasoned by most captains…especially in how he'd lost his last job and how it'd blackballed him from flying again for any significant commercial interest. Never mind that in violating protocol and chain-of-command he'd saved hundreds of lives.

Sin had given him a chance, and then hired him on, a decision he'd never regretted as King had fallen in love with his ship almost to the same degree as Sharie had. Young, semi-hyperactive and capable of consuming enough coffee to wire a football team at strengths most people would consider toxic he took his job seriously despite appearances.

Because of this, he noticed the inbound blip on the scope before the alert went off.

"What the…??' He wondered aloud, and brought the ship's other sensors online for a better look, choosing only passive units to minimize signature emissions. Out this far from anything remotely called 'civilization' it paid to be careful.

What the additional sensors and detection instruments showed him was not something he liked.

"Oh no, gods no…" he didn't hesitate in reaching for the comms panel at his station.

"Sin, we've got a problem inbound, looks like Reavers from the radiation emissions and it's a gorramn big signature, too!" King said over the general shipwide address comms, his heart pounding like a hammer inside his ribs.

The reply was quick and simple. "I'm on my way, keep an eye on them." The Captain's voice over the comm said.

King didn't waste breath on a reply, and made sure to keep the suspected Reaver ship under close observation as it began to slow.

This time, they had people outside, were in the midst of refuelling, and in the middle of a dense wreckage field which really limited available options.

He checked the fuel tanks and fuel cells, feeling his mood sink even lower when he saw how little had been transferred so far. Running was out of the question.

The Captain was on the bridge right quick, and quickly eyeballed the blip on the screen and the additional information coming in.

His mouth tightened grimly. It was a Reaver ship, no doubt about it, and from the looks of it's size and it's engine emissions it was one of the bigger ones known by some of those out on the Rim as 'Butcher Ships'. More than big enough to literally swallow a Model-'04 Firefly, unlike smaller Reaver ships they brought their prey aboard and tore them apart inside.

"Sharie, take us dark." Sin ordered over the comms. Sharie didn't waste time replying, and a few seconds later, Shrike went dead in space.

They didn't need the ship's sensors to see the Reaver monstrosity as it came in close enough to be easily seen through the bridge windows. Sin and King recognized the lines of what the ship had been, once a time ago before it'd been taken by the Reavers. It'd once been a good-sized passenger liner for the Wonderlines company, who operated a small fleet of such vessels catering to people seeking cruise-based vacations.

Now, it'd been turned into a space-going dried-blood-brown horrorshow of spiky, asymmetric blade-like hull extensions, three massive magnetic grapplers crackling with electricity, assorted tears and rents in it's outer hull and no small collection of corpses chained all over it's hull. Weapons mounts of assorted sizes were scattered all over the hull as well.

At just over five times Shrike's size, Sin didn't enjoy the prospect of being forced into fighting the Butcher Ship. Usually, when they encountered something like this they had enough advance-warning because of the way he'd enhanced and augmented his ship's sensor capabilities, and they could simply evade trouble without the Reavers even really being aware of them. Other occasions had come down to using the ship's weapons, and Shrike was no pushover. Since her maiden flight, Shrike had accounted for three kills of Reaver craft including one just a bit larger than Shrike herself.

If they'd had the fuel, and there hadn't been crew outside, they could have just popped a 'dazzler' and light out at Maximum-burn. Shrike's engines were immensely powerful as was appropriate to her occasional employment as a tug or tractor-ship and when flying free that same power meant she was fast.

"Sin…??" King asked, hoping for some comforting ideas from his Captain.

"I'm thinking. They haven't noticed us yet, or they'd have come right for us…or they think Shrike's a Reaver. We've scared enough people accidentally to convince me she looks the part." Sin commented. It was true, more than a few times when coming in to a Rim moon or world folks had panicked thinking his ship was Reaver-made. He'd found it annoying, then amusing, over time and now it looked like it might just save their skins…literally.

"What about th'girls? They're still outside n' with Reavers about…" King said, worried.

The Butcher Ship filled the bridge windows now, but still hadn't seemed to have taken notice of them yet.

Sin studied the Reaver ship with a keen eye, looking for weaknesses, something he could exploit quickly and brutally that'd keep them off-balance long enough to get their people back aboard and either run or find a better hiding spot.

The Butcher Ship started firing relatively slow-moving, large-ish oil-drum shaped things from it's sides and bow.

"What the…??" King said, starting to ask what they were when they started exploding, sending out swarms of small shrapnel, some of which sleeted off Shrike's hull and bridge windows harmlessly.

"Da Chow Jing Ser." Sin commented, having what he felt was a good idea about what the Reavers were doing.

"They're trying to flush out any salvagers, like us, who might be hiding from them." He explained to King.

Outside, Selina and Sharie had hidden themselves in a large gap in the tankage array Shrike was hooked up to. The fuel was still flowing, owing to the pressurization of the array's tank modules and there wasn't anything they could do to speed things along with the fuel transfer.

This left them with the sole concern of not being seen by the massive Reaver ship nosing amongst the wreckage field.

"What's going on?" Sharie whispered, getting an unseen eye roll from her companion who'd edged her helmet out just far enough for a glimpse of the overall situation.

"Sharie, we're in hard vacuum and speaking to each other by conduction line. You don't need to whisper." Selina commented.

"I know…just feels right, y'know?" Sharie said, at better than a whisper but still not full-voiced.

Selina gave her a non-committal sound in reply as she continued to watch events. As she watched, large canisters were ejected from the sides and front of the Reaver.

"That's weird…" She said abstractly.

"What?"

"The Reaver just tossed out these big, can-shaped things…" Selina detailed for her friend, just as they started to explode in small bright flashes. Selina noticed the effects on nearby wreckage pieces and got her head down just in time as she ducked back down beside Shrike's mechanic.

"Wang bao dahn…!!" She muttered angrily, her Eastern European accent thick in her voice.

"Some kind of fragmentation devices, like really big grenades." She swore then explained as shrapnel from the canister and incidental wreckage fragments whacked into the metal over her head.

"Why? What's the point of that?" Sharie asked, trying to get a handle on Reaver-rationale and cope with white-lipped fear that was only bearable because of Selina's reassuring presence.

"Dunno. We could always float over to them and ask." Selina commented in dread and dark humor.

"That's not funny." Sharie groused.

"Well, what do you want from me? I don't have any better idea how these freaks think than anyone else. But, it reminds of something…" Selina said, her voice trailed off as she wracked her memory.

"That's it! Those things are like depth charges…used to use them in naval warfare centuries ago to scare or kill submarines." Selina explained.

"How do you know that??" Sharie asked, having no idea that any kind of history was of interest to her.

"Cortex channel four-fifty-six, 'History in War' series." Selina said, edging her helmet out again for a look and stopping when she noticed two booted feet right in front of her face as her eyes came level with the top of where they'd been hiding.

"Tzao Gao." Sharie said quietly in a feathery fear-trembling whisper as she looked up to see why Selina had stopped suddenly.

Not for the first time Ronon was glad that Sharie had made him pay attention to some of how things worked aboard Shrike, and had cultivated in him an interest in learning more about the functionality of their home.

Right now, he was using that bit of knowledge to manually operate the releases and mechanisms of the main airlock's external shield plate. It was pretty straightforward but the manual pressurization pumps for the hydraulics needed a strong arm and lots of endurance.

The shield plate had to be opened for access and use of the main airlock, part of which, when on the ground, also involved a hydraulically-deployable powered lift which when un-needed just folded up and out of the way above the external hatch doors of the airlock. But the shield plate was part of the outer hull armor and hull itself. This meant it was heavy and the mechanisms that normally secured it against the rigors of re-entry, weapons fire on occasion and impacts in wreckage fields were considerable amounts of machinery.

Still, he worked at it, and inch-by-inch got it opened enough for someone Selina's size in salvage armor to get through, which automatically meant that Sharie, being smaller, would be able to negotiate it too.

"Alright, done." He said into a nearby wall comm, having to raise his voice so the voice-powered piezoelectric backup would work.

"Good job, get suited up, just in case something tries following them in." Came Sin's reply, sounding distant over the voice-powered comm.

Ronon was already suited up, wearing full salvage-armor, with one of his swords across his back, and his gun holstered with a lanyard of tripleweave ceramiflex cording to make sure if he lost his grip on it it wouldn't be lost. All he needed to do was put on the helmet, and it's over-armor, depressurize the lock and the main vestibule-staging area, then wait.

He privately hoped some Reaver was thick-witted enough to try boarding. He hated Reavers with a genuine passion beyond what most people felt regarding them.

He didn't fear them, hadn't for a long time, not since spending the better part of two years trapped on a moon that'd formerly been home to him and the rest of his people. He'd fought a small population of shipwrecked Reavers off-and-on during the time, and he just didn't fear them any longer as sheer hatred had burned that fear to less then ash.

Selina only hesitated long enough to be certain she wasn't staring at Ronon, who she wouldn't have been surprised to have found outside the ship looking for them. Even them, as soon as she saw the boots, she'd reached for and started to draw the large pistol-shaped thing on her hip.

Bringing the grappler-gun up, she fired without any delay just as the Reaver started to swing his weapon, a nightmarish axe-head of spikes, flailing chain lengths with blades welded to them and large blades of jagged and crudely-sharpened metal connected to a length of heavy pipe. The Reaver itself wore a suit of stiched-together human skin over it's spacesuit, with crudely-hammered metal coverings and riveted joinings acting as an effort at armor and keeping the macabre oversuit attached to the life-supporting garment beneath. Selina and Sharie got an unwanted glimpse of the slavering, raging face inside the helmet behind the face faceplate…lips cut away, and the remnants held curled back away from the teeth with wires and hooks, teeth filed to stained points, nose cut down the middle and flanged open, the stretched tissue held to the cheeks by metal pins and eyes burning with an insane rage that was nuclear in intensity.

The grappler fired, and the fist-sized grapple hit the Reaver squarely in the upper abdomen just below his ribcage with brutal and bone-splintering force, folding him over the grapple head and knocking him off his magnetic-boot soled perch and away as Selina tripped the line cutter.

"We're not staying here. Grab onto my back, hang on." Selina told Sharie over the conduction-line. She kept watch as Sharie did as instructed. Sharie didn't argue, knowing that whatever her friend and crewmate had in mind was likely better than just trying to hide while Reavers hunted them down in force.

"Ready?" Selina asked.

"No…but go ahead." Sharie said with blunt honesty.

Selina gauged the distance to Shrike by eye, and from experience and training knew how to evaluate her planned trajectory. She glanced at some moving glimmers, noted they were suit lights and the light of same glinting off edged weapons as space was being filled with Reavers on the hunt, pouring out of the Butcher Ship's locks in groups of various sizes.

Selina got herself aligned, fixed her gaze on the distant ship, and drove off the tankage array with her legs, sacrificing some power for more accuracy, then turned in flight so she was between the Reavers and Sharie, keeping an eye on her helmet's rear-view mirrors so she didn't misjudge the distance and collide with Shrike's unyielding hull, which Sharie would get the brunt of.

"So far, so good. They don't to know we're here…or they're saving us for afters." Sin commented to King and Smythe, the latter the ship's Physician and Sin's oldest friend who'd joined them on the bridge.

Outside, the massive and intimidating hideous Reaver ship disgorged Reavers from it's locks as high-powered searchlights began raking the area.

"I don't like the looks of that." Smythe commented in his cultured Londinum accent.

Sin's eyes narrowed as he also watched the goings-on outside.

"They know our girls are out there." Sin said, convinced by the small army of space-walking Reavers and his own gut-instinct.

"And you're going to do…what?" Smythe asked, curious and more than worried about the two women outside playing a very lethal game of hide-and-seek that could end horrifically.

The Captain thought quickly, sorting through tactics, some that would get them all killed in ways he didn't want to think about, and others that were risky, but…

"King, flash our belly marker lights, the ones closest to the main airlock. The angle we're at the Reavers won't see it." He ordered.

"Well, that's singularly underwhelming." Smythe commented.

"It'll give our girls a tip, I hope, of where to go. Ronon's down there right now, suited up and you know how he feels about these men-that-were." Sin said back evenly, ignoring the needling.

Sin then made his way over to the Engineering console on the bridge. Rarely occupied, it nonetheless came in handy now and again, and this wasn't the first occasion to remind him why he kept it on the bridge.

"King, Smythe, listen close as we only get one chance for this to work and if we don't get it right…" Sin began with as he started working controls, continuing as he set things up.

"King, don't do anything yet, I'll say when. Just get ready to hit the disconnect on the fuel ports." He got a silent, affirmative nod from the nervous pilot, then addressed the Doctor.

"Smythe, I need someone on weapons and you're better with Shrike's guns than anyone else."

"Understood." was Smythe's sole reply, and he took the console module normally occupied by Selina, and opened a small, infrequently-used side panel that gave one control over the not-insignificant weaponry the ship bore.

He'd been associated with the Captain for long enough to have a good idea what he had in mind, and selected weapon functions and types accordingly...

Being a Salvage ship, Shrike was equipped to handle any and all aspects of such an occupation. Some aspects of her occupation meant possessing the ability to slice things up at a distance. While Shrike's lasers weren't considered weapons for a variety of reasons, they could still serve extremely well in such a capacity if the situation warranted.
Two of their own people were out there as well, and lasers had no accuracy problems and over distances like this, were instantaneous.

He brought Shrike's entire weapons complement online, but selected the lasers only, leaving the guns of various calibres for as-and-when they might be called upon...and given the proximity of the Reiver, he thought that such would likely occur soon.

On Shrike's hull, battered and scuffed panels slid back and ball-shaped, yoke-mounted lasers deployed along her bow, sides, top, and underside.

With main power down, they were running off battery reserves, which could handle a lot, but didn't feed to the lasers. The genuine weaponry could be fired off battery-power without an issue but Smythe understood why Sin was loathe to start firing the cannons in the wreckage field with two of their small number outside.
There'd be no telling how it would stir up the wreckage and what kind of secondary and tertiary shrapnel would be whipping about after they started firing solid projectiles.
So, lasers.
But, while he could easily use the passive-sensor targetter functions, he had to wait for whatever Sin was going to do before he could do his part.

"Anytime today would be good." He said very quietly under his breath as he set his own plans.

Out in the unforgiving vacuum of open space, two bodies sped across open distance, pursued by others bearing a nightmarish array of weapons to haunt the memory of any who'd seen them.
Selina used short bursts of the suit's maneuvering thrusters to ensure she was as precisely on-target to the comforting sight of Shrike as possible.
Sharie was making an unconscious low-level keening sound because all she could do was ride along and watch the psychotically-murderous Reivers close the distance while her crewmate worked to rendezvous with their home, flying backwards and navigating by mirrors.

Abruptly, a bright amber-colored flashing at the corners marking a square flared on Shrike's underside, repeated several more times and Selina nudged their course a bit to head for that point which marked the ship's main personnel airlock.

"Selinaaaaaa....!" Sharie said, deeply frightened as the swarm of Human monstrosities continued to gain on them.
"I know, I Know...say, you never did answer my question." Selina replied, sounding distracted and busy as she guided them by eye and reflexes.
"You wanna talk about my sex life NOW!? " Sharie yelled in stunned amazement.
"Ow! Little loud there, girl." Selina commented, keeping an eye on the Reivers.
"Aren't ya gonna try, oh I dunno...SHOOTING at them?!" Sharied yelled again, making Selina wince as her helmet became a concert hall and echo chamber again.
"This stunt is tricky enough without adding gunfire into it. This is best-guess-by-eyeball, Sharie and we get ONE chance to do this right. I screw up, we hit the hull at full speed and at the the speed we're going that's fatal, even with the spacearmor we're wearing. If I miss, we're screwed, and so is Shrike because they won't leave without us and that Butcher ship would take full advantage of them trying to get to us."

Sharie went silent for a moment as she sized things up herself.

"Lemme see the settings on your suit thrusters." She said, and started bending Selina's right arm in a way only possible for the double-jointed or a Chimeran Artemis.
Sharie examined the thruster settings, and checked the fuel reserves, then checked her own and started hunting around on her equipment harness over her spacearmor while managing to remain clinging to her shipmate.
"What are you doing??!" Selina asked in annoyance and curiosity.
"Working on an idea, and as soon as find...got it!" Sharie said, then Selina felt Shrike's mechanic working on the service pack on her back.

Selina kept an eye on the Reivers, and adjusted their speed and course as Sharie worked, after almost a minute the mechanic's stressed but cheerful voice came through the induction link.
" 'Kay, here's what we can do now. I used an emergency oxygen transfer line to tie our thruster fuel reserves together, kinda. So, you can run us right up to the max you can with what you've got left and we can avoid smearing ourselves across Shrike's hull by hard-firing my thrusters to brake as I've got more fuel."
"Uh...so how does the transfer line help again??" Selina asked.
"Ties in the controls, your's to mine. You've got got two thruster systems to work with. You're better at this than I am, so i figured..." Sharie explained, trailing off as she sensed the point was understood.

Ronon, heavily armed and armored, waited for the two women speeding across open space as on the bridge a nasty and vicious surprise was being prepared.

"Smythe, you give our girls covering fire with the lasers. King, once they's aboard and just after Smythe fires the missiles, you get us turned so they're staring at our mains and light us up for Maximum-burn." Sin said curtly, laying things out again to be sure everyone knew their part.
"Sin, what about fuel? We pull a Maximum-burn, and we're on the drift." King asked as he finished setting things up.
"I've got it covered." The Captain said tersely, without looking up as he worked with the Engineering console and finished prepping the ship for one of the most dangerous things a ship could do.

One of the reasons Sinjihnn Du'Maur was still alive in a hostile universe was his ability to turn a bad situation for himself into a nightmare for an enemy and his ability to think of and utilize resources no one usually considered.
He wasn't leaving without his wife and mechanic, and that was that. The Butcher ship was a serious problem, but he'd figured out a way to turn it's size into a serious liability, and with a bit of luck would leave it hopelessly crippled or dead.

The thought of leaving the two women behind hadn't even occured to him, it was simply unthinkable.
But, they had to get aboard on their own before he could save them all.

Ronon had fought Reivers more often than most and knew their habits well.
There was always a few sneaky types amongst the usual straight-ahead suicidally-singleminded types. When the human-skin oversuited figure tried slipping aboard through the open lock he was guarding, he didn't hesitate in decapitating it in a single powerful blow from his sword. The hullsteel blade sheared cleanly through skin, suit, flesh and bone to send the helmeted head in one direction as the body dropped to the deck in the residual gravfield.

Shortly afterwards, there was a blast of flickering flare-light from outside, and an impact that he felt ever-so-slightly through his boots and two figures of markedly different heights crawled in through the open lock, neither wearing an oversuit of human skin, but instead very recognizable and familiar spacearmor over the life supporting garments beneath.

"We got' em." was all he said into his suit comm, knowing the bridge had been waiting and hoping for just those words.

The shorter of the two newly-arrived figures stood, the taller one laying on the deck near the headless Reiver.

"Ronon, Selina's hurt really bad." He heard Sharie say in fear and concern painted tones through the suit comm.

On the bridge, different concerns ruled the attention of three men.

Sin brought the ship's engine cores online, crash-starting all four simultaneously, and watched the displays on the engineering console he was at waver, wobble, skew and start to settle as the surge began to smooth out.

Function telltales lit up on the console Smythe manned, indicating the lasers were getting power now and he unhesitatingly began spearing Reivers with coherent beams of alloy-shearing light. Blasts of plasma marking each impact as the majority of each Reiver's torso was obliterated by the extremely high-energy beams punching through them almost as easily as if they were firing into open space. He touched another control while doing this grisly work, and two missiles leapt from Shrike's forward underside mounted launcher like hunting animals let off-leash and hot on the scent of prey.

King knew his task well and wasted not an instant in bringing Shrike around on her maneuvering thrusters so her aft was aimed directly at the much larger ship even as he shoved the throttles to Maximum Conventional, then tripped a mechanical lockout safety, continued moving them into a well-marked range of alternating bands of red and black.

The pivot-in-place maneuver done, Shrike's three large main engines at her stern began glowing with a white glare and venting ghostly, phantasmal vapor with the glow building quickly to an almost eye-searing brightness in the larger bottom engine of the triplet.
The missiles impacted the Butcher Ship in blossoming hot-yellow and actinic-orange explosions, hitting it in it's main engines and taking one out of commission. The damaged engine began spewing molten chunks of itself out it's exhaust.
Shrike's twinned Radion Accelerator Cores were spun-up to their theoretical maximum, as the engine cores thinned their radiation containment fields to the lowest levels that could still be considered 'safe' as energy levels in the reaction chambers soared beyond normal 'Red Line' limits and was channelled to the largest of the three main engines.

The explosion of power was apocalyptic and directed to propel the vessel forward instead of simply detonating it in a fireball of spectacular fury.
To anything behind Shrike within a goodly distance, the effect was like a directed thermonuclear explosion.

The Reiver Butcher Ship was well-within such a distance.

The white-glaring, incandescent blast of raw power unleashed that marked Shrike's extremely rapid departure spelled near-instant catastrophe for the larger ship as the radiation, followed by the blast-wave slammed into it. The blast-wave pitching and rolling it, washing over and burning it's hull whille stripping fixtures that weren't vaporized or melted liquid in the sudden violence of the smaller ship's Max-Burn and incinerating the remnants of Reiver corpses dealt with by the retreating ship's lasers.

"Stop complaining. If you were Human you'd be quite dead and Sharie likely along with you." Smythe groused in reply to his naked patient's irritated grumbling as he finished adjusting the support wrap around Selina's lower ribs.
"Chimeran or not, you were extremely fortunate my dear girl. Hitting the hull at those relative velocities, it's only a quirk of physics that allowed you to live. On the bright side, aside from some painful all-over bruising, your grateful passenger will be just fine." He said as Selina glared at the wall.
"I feel like I've been run through a metal recycler." She groaned as her broken ribs twinged from a slight muscle spasm.
"Mmmm, yes. The ribs you didn't break you cracked severely. Both maxillary fangs broken, while retracted no less. Cracks in the tibia and fibula of both legs, deep tissue bruising to both lungs, liver, and a concussion with hairline skull fractures that would be considerably problematic for anyone else aboard but you...and possibly Ronon as he doesn't use his brain overmuch anyways. Then there's the damage to the bones in your forearms and your shoulder joints..."
"I'll be fine, Alistair." She said, pained as another, nastier twinge caught her and made her breath hitch.
"I know, but I'm a Physician, and we vow to worry and mother-hen right after we swear our Hippocratic Oath. Irrespective of species or race. " He said in perfect grouchily-deadpanned humor.

Selina gave him a sigh of concession, and looked up tiredly at the older man.

"Are we done here yet?" She asked, smirking at his joke.
"Almost." He said, slotting a canister into the back of a hyposonic and pressed it to the side of her neck where a pulse of ultrasound and air drove the medication through a skin capable of resisting bullets.
"What's that?" She asked, gingerly stretching an arm, and testing the range in her left shoulder carefully.
"A neural enhancer that I modified to work alongside the pain control and management systems in Chimeran physiology. Normal pain medications are useless as your metabolism destroys them as toxins, so I thought to work with what's there already. There's also a good cocktail of concentrated vitamins and assorted other ingredients that'll make for an easier time recovering." He said, handing her a robe and helping her slide into it as she moved carefully and stiffly.

Once she had herself appropriately covered, he keyed the door and called the others in, so they could see with their own eyes that the time for grave concerns was done with. The small Infirmary was somewhat crowded with the entire crew in it at once clustered around the woman sitting on the examination and treatment table.

Sin helped his injured and sore-all-over wife down and onto her feet, noting her reaction as the injured bones in her legs sent their protests flashing through her nerves as she half-listened to the general low-level cacaphony of a group of very relieved crewmates, nodding in acknowledgement and letting Smythe handle questions about her status as she was led out and headed to their quarters for what her body was screaming for; Rest.

"I'm never doing that again." Selina groaned, then chuckled painedly as they walked, Sin helping her steer herself along.
"Gutsy move, and a gorramn big risk." He commented, not harshly but in a tone recognizing the facts.
"No choice. Sharie's not a fighter and we were outnumbered. I knew you wouldn't leave without us both being dead or aboard and figured there was nothing to lose by risking getting killed to get aboard." She said, leaning on him in affection and exhaustion as her system channelled more and more resources towards healing.
"There's an ugly turn of logic I can't find fault with." Sin said, taking her weight easily, affectionately.
"Say, what are we burning for fuel right now?" she asked, recalling how short the refuelling time had been.
"Ronon, Sharie and myself ran transfer lines from the shuttles to the main fuel-flow tree connector. So, we've got enough for a leisurely cruise to the nearest station." Sin told her with a definite tone of good-natured humor and satisfaction.
"You mean I risked my rump out there playing hide-and-get-eaten against Reivers for nothing??" Selina asked in bristling manner.
"No, Kitsune`. You got us enough in the fuel cells to trigger a Maximum-Burn to get us out of there. It took some finagling to get the transfers hooked up and the pumps sorted out. Without you and Sharie out there, we'd all be Reiver trophies now." Sin told her, smoothing slightly ruffled perspectives and mood.
"Oh. You're welcome then." She said sarcastically-casual, leaning against him again. "So what's next after we fill-up?" She asked after a moment and a few more steps.
"A nicely dull job involving some mining equipment and related machinery headed out to the Hinterlands. Some wildcatters are prospecting on some half-terraformed rock and dreaming of finding oceans of precious metals and rare earths as the terraformer machines tear things up." He said.
"Oh, joy--excitement and thrilling heroics. Well, so long as nobody drops a D-9 Excavator on me, fine." She joked mildly, liking the sound of a nicely straightforward job and relaxing in the familiar sense of security found in the presence of her husband aboard the only true home she'd ever known.

END