"Please don't die. That really wouldn't make my day."
Jacob closed the message, shut the PDA down, and coughed. He looked around the engine compartment, found his last water canister, and emptied it.
I'll try, he thought. Then he turned around, crouched down before the opened panel to the Griffin's main core, and sighed. For the past few hours he had been trying to fix it with the few - very few - spare parts that were on board, but it had turned out to be about as easy to fix the damage to the engines as cleaning an elephant with a toothbrush. Impossible.
Coughing again, Jacob glanced at the display to his right. The needle on the counter was perilously edging towards zero percent. Soon there wouldn't be any oxygen left on the ship to breath.
Slowly, he crept back toward the cockpit. Outside he could see the dark shape of the wreck that he had moored to loom over his vessel. Junction Wreck. He had never heard of it before. Few had, it seemed. And those who had didn't seem to care about it. After all, it was as dead as a station could be. No oxygen. No life support. No power. It was a hunk of useless metal. Not the sort of station Jacob wanted to be moored to at the moment.
Speed. Speed lost all meaning to Sarah McFarlen as the stars winked by. Logically she knew that the Bactrian was moving at a little under half a kilometre every second, but to her it felt as though the freighter were flying through a sea of tar, always moving and yet never actually going anywhere. It was all like some sort of bad dream. The second time in as many days that someone had needed her help. Odd, really, since it was usually the other way around, loath as she was to admit it. She'd been too late the first time, and had promised herself that Junction Station would not be repeat of that. Lights flashed on the ugly freighter's dashboard, signals that would no doubt have meant something to whatever Rogue owned the ship, but to Sarah were nothing more than yet another distraction. She hadn't even bothered to check the freighter's name before she took off. It could have had 'Shoot me' emblazoned on the side for all she cared, as long as it flew. Because right now, what she needed was to fly.
Blue eyes scanned the field, looking for that station that scanners informed her was a mere two kilometres away. Old information, old scans. There was next to nothing useful in any database she knew of that had more than a few lines on the Junction Wreck, and only a few that had much more to say about Kansas itself. Not that it mattered. When your ship ran out of oxygen, it was amazingly easy to stop caring about what end of space you were on. Another asteroid drifted across the viewport, large enough to hold a mid-sized cruiser. Sarah watched it for a moment, half-expecting the familiar site of a docking port. No such luck. No, out here it was just her, the Bactrian, a whole lot of rocks, and, if she was lucky, a certain Jacob Blunt.
If it wasn't for the silhouette she would have missed it. A Griffin Civilian Light Fighter, manoeuvrable, light spaceframe, and with a power grid to match. Back in her last year of school she'd been intent on buying one when she graduated. How things changed. The woman flicked a switch on the dashboard, one of the three she'd bothered to memorize the location of, opening a communications channel with the crippled fighter.
"James? Umm... Are you still breathing in there?" Not exactly movie-grade rescue heroics, but it was the best she could think of. A moment later, she touched another switch, bathing the Griffon in strong-white light.
Jacob had slumped into the pilot's seat, breathing hard. The digital readout on the dashboard displayed an inconveniently small amount of oxygen still being in the ship. Enough for just about another thirty minutes, to be exact.
Well. That's that then, he thought. Survived the war just to suffocate in the middle of nowhere.
Slowly, he turned towards the scanner display. It was still blank, except for hundreds of asteroids and the station that shadowed the Griffin. Jacob sighed. He ran his tongue over his lips. His mouth was parched. He glanced over to the empty canister he had thrown into a corner of the cockpit. Screw you, he thought.
Suddenly, something caught his attention. A little light had flashed on the scanner screen. He leaned toward it, hoping to make out what it was the next time it appeared. A moment later, it blinked again. Something was incoming. And it wasn't an asteroid. From behind a particularly large rock, a ship shot towards Junction Wreck.
What the hell, Jacob thought as he recognized the rough shape of a Bactrian freighter. So before I die, I get pirated?
Suddenly, a burst of static erupted from the communication system, followed by a short message.
"James? Umm... Are you still breathing in there?"
James? Oh.
Jacob chuckled, then coughed violently. He flicked a switch on the dashboard, opening a frequency to the newly arrived craft just as it bathed him and his ship in dazzling light.
"No, James' not breathing," he whispered, squinting. "But Jacob is."
Jacob. Of course it was. She mentally chided herself for forgetting his name. Static surged through the speakers as she opened the channel again. "Sorry! Little busy here. Give me..." She paused for a moment, mentally running calculations. "Twelve seconds." Her hands danced across the controls, maneuvering the bulky freighter with something that almost resembled grace. The craft's lights hovered on Jacob's face for a moment before a burst from the thrusters kicked the Bactrian spiraling into space. Seemingly out of nowhere it reappeared, sliding into position next to the wounded Griffin, blood red docking lights illuminating the field.
Gas hissed from the freighter, life-support systems offsetting the sudden decrease in pressure as the ship's airlock inflated, filling the space between the mismatched craft. Seconds later, a switch in the Griffon's cockpit glowed green, mirrored by it's counterpart on the Bactrian. Before the craft's all-too-smug systems had finished congratulating her on another successful docking Sarah was half-way down the airlock, lugging an oxygen cylinder with her. If the repeated blows the cylinder delivered to the metallic floor of the freighter had not alerted the Navy Captain to Sarah's presence then the irritated voice, only mildly distorted by the airlock's seal was a dead giveaway.
"So... Are you planning to let me in, or would you rather I actually pirate you?"
More or less gracefully, the exhausted Captain tottered to the back of his ship. He knelt down beside the access hatch to the airlock, grabbed at the manual control, twisted it, and stood back as the hatch opened with a pneumatic hiss.
"Good... morning, Miss McFarlen," Jacob croaked down into the airlock where his rescuer had been waiting. "Good to see you."
And with that, he ungracefully slumped down onto the deck into unconsciousness.
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