Free Star Force: Starchaser (SF69) by Aer-ki Jyr Page A

would ensue but she wouldn’t remember them when she woke, for she rarely
did…not to mention the circumstances of her waking would wash away any lingering
memory as sheer panic set in.

 
 
    7

 
 
    Mina woke to a loud bang on her door so intense and
quick she wasn’t sure why she sat bolt upright in bed, thinking for a moment it
was all in her groggy mind’s imagination until the second thud sounded. Then a
third and fourth came in quick succession and she scurried out of bed and over
to the door, pressing the button on the wall that slid the panel open into the
midst of a scuffle between one of her security guards and a non-human…someone
that was definitely not supposed to be on her ship.
    She took a step back as they tussled, then the
green-skinned biped that stood a good six and a half feet tall got her guard in
a headlock and began choking him out with a knee into his back to keep him from
wriggling away. Seeing that he was losing, Mina ran out the door and jumped on
the pair of them, wrapping her own thin arms around the Fahmren’s neck and
feeling its skin plates slice into her skin as she pried it back using her
weight and her own knee in its back.
    She succeeded in pulling it off her guard, but was
pancaked as it fell backwacks and something in her
left knee popped under the weight. Unable to move with the Fahmren’s mass on
top of her she was pinned and could do nothing, hoping she’d done enough to
help the guard get free as she still clung to the attacker’s neck.
    The next thing she knew her head slammed into the
ground again, knocking her half unconscious. The weight on her chest
disappeared and she heard a plasma blast, feeling a trickle of heat wash over
her before two more sounded and the Fahmren fell to the floor a meter past her
feet...then the guard was standing over her and pulling her to her feet.
    “Get back inside,” he ordered, standing over her
protectively as she tried to step on her injured leg and yelped from the pain.
He grabbed her by the arm and yanked her inside, tossing her on the floor as a
red plasma bolt shot down the hallway and they both ducked inside her quarters.
He shut and locked them in, then pulled her out of the way so he could have a
clear line of fire.
    “What’s going on?” she shouted, with the guard’s
answer cut off by two huge bangs on the door. Instead he pulled out his stun
pistol and pushed it into her hands.
    “I hope you remember how to use this. That door isn’t
going to last long,” he said, with his prophetic words being followed up with a
glow mark popping up about a meter off the ground as it was hit from the
outside with a plasma blast, quickly followed by many more as they began to
burn their way through into her quarters.
    Mina saw that he held some type of rifle she wasn’t
familiar with, ostensibly the same one the Fahmren shot in the hall had been
carrying. “How many are there?”
    “At least three…probably more,” he answered as a small
hole was torn in the door and a bit of red leapt across the room and into the
far wall, thankfully below the skylight that led directly into space. Melt that
and the whole room would depressurize and they’d be dead, though in theory it
should be made of material more sturdy than the door. “We’ve been boarded. I
don’t know how or why, but we should have jumped out and didn’t. I can’t reach
the bridge and barely got to you before that bastard did. The rest of security
is down or missing.”
    “What do you want me to do?” she asked, wincing
against the pain as she held the stinger pistol at the ready. All Humans had a
decent amount of combat training in the maturia and she had always been a good
shot, but she’d never expected having to put those skills to use onboard her
own ship.
    “Unless there’s somewhere to hide in here that I don’t
know about, we just shoot as many as we can. They’re here for you.”
    Mina swallowed hard as a fist-sized chunk of her door
blew out.