Laura looked like a grown woman as she climbed the steps to the administration building of her third school of the day. She was touring their respective campuses, trying to find one the one that fit her the best. Ash had been on the road for months, going from one delivery to the next, trying to make his truck payment first, and then repair the wear and tear from the last time that he had done a chain like that. He would drop one trailer in the receiving dock, speak to the shipping manager, and then pick up one of their trailers and head for it''s destination. It was a brutal way to live but he did always come out on top with a large profit.


    "Dad look!" Laura said, posing in front of a large statue of a bear wearing a football jersey. Ash smiled and took a picture of her with his phone camera.


    "That''s one bear, two fish, and whatever that first thing was. A badger or something." He said as he flipped through the pictures.


    "A wolverine." She said as she walked up to the administration desk.


    The woman behind the counter looked as bored as the last two. Barely holding herself upright under the weight of the mundane bureaucracy Ash guessed.


    "Name?" she said, not even looking up from the paperwork in front of her. It sounded like a statement more than a question.


    "Laura Miller." Laura said, looking back and rolling her eyes as Ash grinned.


    "CONNOR!" The woman yelled, startling Ash and Laura with her unexpected enthusiasm.


    "Geez, okay, I''m right here." A young man said from a filing cabinet in the back of the room.


    "She''s here to tour EMERGENCY."


    "EMERGENCY! ASH WAKE UP NOW!!!"


    "Ahh, what. Shit. What is it?" Ash grunted and sat up in his bed. Charlie was actually yelling from every speaker she could find in his quarters.


    "THE SHARLAH ARE HERE! AT DOTTIR!" She yelled with panic that he wasn''t sure was part of her programming gave him a shot of adrenaline that was better than several cups of high grade coffee.


    "FUCK SHIT FUCK DAMNIT" Was all he could get out as he threw on his overalls and boots.


    Kate was on duty and wide eyed as she turned around to look at him.


    "What can we see, how many? What are they doing?"


    "I cannot get an accurate count but their ships number in the hundreds, not tens. They are jamming all sensors system wide but I can boost ours and see through much of the interference. They arrived in large numbers on the opposite end of the solar system. I am sorry but I wasn''t scanning that far. I only just detected them near Dottir. I..I don''t know how long they''ve been there but I don''t detect any debris."


    "Ok ok. Do they know we''re here?" Ash asked.


    "Yes."


    "Yes and?"


    "Yes, they have done a system wide scan, I am busy."


    Ash and Kate looked at each other and then at Jayden who was coming up from the engine room. He shrugged. "She''s busy."


    "ASH THEY''RE FIRING! I am sorry, they''re firing on the militia. They''re using jump missiles."


    Ash looked at the display on the Solent''s instrument panel which changed from a sensor overview to what looked like a very realistic video game of a ship battle.


    "I am generating a virtual view of what is actually happening as the light reaches us. This is approximately five minutes in the pas- stand by."Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    The ships were launching salvos of missiles at one another. Militia ships bearing the flags of the three main countries with space navies were in a wall formation that was impressive to behold but every wave of missiles from the Sharlah took human lives.


    "Whoa what was that? Those missiles just appeared in front of the ships?"


    "Ash I have just communicated with the fleet. Those are the jump missiles that I mentioned. They have mini jump drives like the one that we installed on the Solent. They jump to hyperspace and then jump back out just before they strike their target. There is very little to defend against that. I advised the fleet to target the rear of the Sharlah formation where the missiles are launched from."


    "Ok, what can we do?" Ash said, the situation spiraling away from him as his two young crew looked on in shock. The militia was already devastated in just a few minutes of battle with the Sharlah fleet.


    "We need to run. Soon." Charlie said, emphasizing the last word.


    "Jay, is the drive ready." Ash asked.


    "No Ash, but it''s close. I''ll get back on it."


    <hr>


    The Sharlah formations on the flanks had completely encircled the walls of Dottir and were pouring thousands of missiles out of their pods as the carriers dispatched seemingly endless light fighters to protect their boarding parties.


    “Commander the Xi’an is taking hits, we can’t stop them!” Zhao called out with panic creeping into his voice.


    Ruo was about to respond when the gunner yelped.


    “Jump Missiles!”


    BANG.


    The Bao rocked and the bridge went dark for a few agonizing moments before the emergency reactor powered up. What Ruo saw first was that her vessel was in a spin. What she saw second was a sight that she knew would haunt her dreams if she even survived to sleep again. The Xi’an was also rotating, it’s spine shattered. Jets of oxygen shot out of the numerous holes along it’s hull, many of them catching fire before being immediately extinguished in the cold vacuum of space.


    The Sharlah fighters pounded Admiral Chen’s crippled vessel before several of the landing crafts pitched up and latched on to undamaged areas with the bellies of their ships pressing against the Xi’an’s hull. The fighters, now finished with their part, peeled off and to Ruo’s horror, targeted the Bao next.


    Their red beams ripped into her missile pods and rang off of the armored hull. Icons lit up all across the damage report screen, showing fires and power outages that were spreading like those fires. Ruo’s stomach dropped as the bridge once again went black. Zhao gripped her arm and she could feel warm sticky blood on his fingers. The battery powered emergency floor lights came on, marking the important pathways around the ship. The only sounds that she could hear were her own heart beating against her pristine Navy blouse and her sharp jittery breaths. Nobody spoke into the darkness, there was only fear in the spaces between them.


    A Thump against the hull broke the paralysis, then another. Ruo was up and pumping her legs before she even realized what her terror stricken mind had ordered her to do. She ripped her arm away from Zhao who was now howling in the dark and sprinted into the corridor through the now lifeless and open doorway. The sound of gunfire erupted throughout the upper deck as her troops engaged the Sharlah boarding party. A soldier in the corridor tried to stop her, his eyes as wide as dinner plates behind his visor, but Ruo blew past him.


    “Commander, the bridge is that way!” He called out a moment before screams and the sound of an explosion ripped through the barely illuminated corridor. Kang was out there somewhere with his special operators fighting the monsters and buying her precious seconds by spilling their blood.


    Ruo pictured his smiling face as his men goofed around, simulating their own botched boarding operation during break time. The lights on the floor turned red and branched off to the right as Ruo sprinted over them. There in the dark she could see the red glow of the escape pods. Nobody else was there. Of course not, she hadn’t given the order to abandon ship.


    Her gut twisted and tears threatened to drown her inside her helmet but she climbed into Pod 1 anyway. She could weep for her sailors later if she even survived the ejection into the battle space. Footsteps sounded behind her as she slid into the pod that was large enough for five sailors to cram into, and flashlights danced on the walls around her.


    The frightened sailors screamed at her as the pod bay doors locked in anticipation of a launch. They screamed at her and pounded on the reinforced glass surrounding the escape pods. It was locked and it would remain so until her pod was clear and the danger of the launch had passed. There should have been several armed guards and officers conducting the abandonment in an orderly fashion across five other pod bays but she hadn’t ordered that. Ruo was a coward. All of the bravado before and the leadership skills had evaporated the moment that real cards touched the table. She lowered her head and blinked away the shame as she strapped herself in.


    "I''m sorry. I''m so sorry. I have to live." She whispered through jerky sorrowful breaths. "I have to live for my girls."


    The last thing that she saw before she was was fired into space like a missile was the sight of every flashlight in the room suddenly pointing toward a figure at least seven feet tall wearing jet black armor from head to toe and some kind of alien dog beside it.


    Lieutenant Commander Ruo and the shame of what she had done would be the only survivors of the Tiantang Naval Destroyer