“And you’ll find out if you’re too bad.”
-Technotronic

It felt to Michael like some sort of fever dream as Rix danced and rolled the Fresno in lunatic arcs among the hunks of death.  The ship was dangerously close to becoming the cue ball in some demented game of dom-jot.  If the break hit just right it would end with pieces of the utility cruiser scattered among the field of rock.  All the while, the Vaadwaur Manasa vessel kept pace and hounded them like a Ferengi Liquidator with a grudge intent on scraping away their aft hull plating as if it were molten latinum.

Michael’s eyes held the thousand-meter stare of one who was watching the universe unravel faster than he could bullshit his way through it.  With every polaron blast that landed and tore through the bulkheads, the ship flinched and shuddered like a wounded animal that was too stubborn to die.

Thalissa sent a concerned glance his way.  His XO saw the crack in him before he felt it himself.  She didn’t say a word.  But her hand slid over to his in a subtle act of rebellion against the bedlam.  Terror does strange things to a man’s wiring.  It short-circuits logic and bypasses pride.  Before he knew it, before he could even process how he felt about it, his fingers curled around hers like a drowning man clutching a shred of driftwood.

Another seismic jolt rocked the deck and then in the split-second silence that followed, the unbidden voice of the computer emerged to sound cool as a cucumber and twice as indifferent to the silently screaming meatbags it addressed.  “Acknowledged.  Playing Pump Up the Jam by Technotronic.”

Pump up the jam, pump it up
While your feet are stomping
And the jam is pumping

They locked eyes with the same damned expression two circus clowns might share the moment they realize the whole tent is on fire.  As if to ask if this was really how their ticket finally gets punched – not with any shred of valor nor vengeance, but instead in some slapstick farce that might as well have been written by a bored Q.

“Computer!  End music!” Michael barked desperately.  They were only met with an error tone as the song indomitably ran its course.

I want a place to stay
Get your booty on the floor tonight
Make my day

Vorak was at least making the best of it.  As bits of the hull plating were shaved off like a Thanksgiving turkey, the Tellarite Chief of Tactical was hurling back phaser-charged insults with all the ferocity of a cornered targ.  While Rix did her best to weave them through the asteroid field with wild abandon, he was giving the Vaadwaur something to chew on in return.  It did not come close to the same sort of devastating affect as what was received.  They were looming on the edge of oblivion, and the only thing that’d save their asses now would be something that embraced this full throttle dive into the absurd.  Something that reeked of desperation.

Emboldened and renewed by his first officer’s unexpected gesture Michael gave her hand a firm, solid squeeze before slipping from her grip.  Embracing said desperation like a wild beast gnawing off its own leg to escape a steel trap, he tapped furiously at the console set into his seat’s armrest.  “Target that asteroid at bearing eighty-nine degrees and on my mark, engage tractor beams!”

“Captain, with all due respect!  Yanking that damned rock at this velocity’ll rip our wee flying tin can in two like a Klingon takin’ to a bonnie lass!” Vorak’s objection tore out of him with all the subtlety of stone running through a meat grinder; equal parts of panic, incredulity, and the raw hysteria of a man being asked to hug a breaching warp core.

Pump it up a little more
Get the party goin’ on the dance floor
See, ‘cause that’s where the party’s at

The Technotronics’ balladry continued on with all the cheer of a child’s nursery rhyme being played over the footage of a collapsing star.

“No questions, do it now!” Michael barked impatiently.  “We’ll hold.”  He wasn’t as confident as he sounded making such a declaration.  But in the crucible of imminent demise, hopelessness was the only metal left with which to forge a plan.  “Miss Rix, you see that larger cluster of rocks there?  I want you to gun it towards them, and the second Vorak engages our tractor you bank hard to starboard!”

With a glint in her eye, the young girl at the helm caught his intent like a dog catches a tossed bone.  Midair.  No hesitation.  All instinct.  “I understand, sir!”

Michael clung to the arms of his seat with a gambler’s twitch, waiting for the odds to taste just wrong enough to feel right.  Then he expelled his order with a hiss.  “Right… fucking… now!”

Vorak stabbed his console with gusto as the Fresno shot past their intended target.  What leapt forth from their aft was less a beam and more a tether of reckless hope hanging by a thread.  The tractor beam fired off like a frantic lasso, wrapping its shimmering grasp around the tumbling space rock with all the grace of a cowboy clutching the horns of a bucking bull at the rodeo.  At the same moment, Rix leaned hard into her controls.

The effect was twofold.  Anchored as they were to the greater mass of the asteroid, the ship lurched to starboard like some wild-eyed bastard gripping a steering wheel at full tilt.  The stress on the hull could be felt more than heard as it shrieked and groaned like the Fresno were some junkie trying to fight it’s way out of withdrawal cold turkey on a sweat-filled night.

Make my day
Make my, make my day

The poor Vaadwaur bastards hot on their tail couldn’t handle it.  They tried to make the turn, but comparatively their trajectory was all wrong.  Without the benefit that the Fresno’s tractor beam had leveraged them, the wall of rock ahead gave them their brutal wake-up call.  The Manasa escort slammed into the cluster of asteroids with an impact that it simply could not handle.  The last of their shields flared an angry amber that lit up the void like a cheap firework on Frontier Day.  Then their hull crumpled and shattered into so many pieces.

Yo! Pump up the jam
Pump it up
Pump it up
Yo! Pump it!

“Cut tractor, all stop.” Michael uttered with a shallow breath.  His body felt like lead, caught between euphoria of survival and the horrid clarity of what they’d just risked.  Their survival was a goddamn accident, nothing more.  His heart still hammered like it wanted out of him, blood still pumping like a fire hose.  His thoughts were still in fight or flight mode, racing furiously past warp 10 as though they were dead set on having salamander offspring.

“We can’t stay here for long, we have to assume more of these Vaadwaur Supremacy will follow up when they realize their friends aren’t reporting in.” Thalissa pointed out gravely.

“I can’t take us very far while the warp core is still out of commission.” The junior grade lieutenant at the helm reminded them with subdued tones.

“Miss Rix is quite correct.” Michael muttered, barely hearing the words that fell from his mouth.  “But your point is just as valid.”  His mind was still buzzing, spiraling in a cocktail of adrenaline and shaky dread as he wondered just how bad all their damage was.  How many lives had just been spent?  They were not quite out of the woods yet.

His eyes locked to the readout built into his armrest.  Its image blurred in front of him.  He raked his fingers past stubble and shook it off.  There.  It was on the other side of the asteroid field, but it was salvation cavernous enough to shield them from the cacophony of rocks that churned around them.

He tapped it up onto the main viewer.  A giant among its stony counterparts beckoned them, a gargantuan monolith with a mouth that yawned deep enough to swallow them whole.  “We’ll need to navigate carefully to get there, but we hide in that.  Power down to the lowest possible signature, and effect our repairs.”

“On it, sir!” came the short reply of Lenara Rix, still shaky but also sounding more sure now that it would seem they had been offered this last lifeboat in the middle of the storm they had all just weathered.

Only now with some sort of half-solution to their problems, did Michael trust his legs enough to stand from the juxtaposed seating arrangement between himself and his XO.  “I want reports from every department routed to my readyroom the second they come in, not a moment later.  I want to know who we lost, and how bad a shape we’re in.  And I want it yesterday.”  He couldn’t exactly explain the sensation that crackled along him now like bottled lightning.  The panic was loosening its grip, to be replaced by something that could only be described as sitting somewhere in the ether between the afterburn of victory, and a hollow loss.  “I’ll be in there, wiping cold coffee of my damn desk.”

The next thing he knew, the doors to his readyroom were hissing softly shut behind him, and he’d no idea how he’d gotten there.  Had he walked?  Stumbled?  Maybe floated.  Who the hell knew?  His feet had simply carried him across the bridge like he’d been in a trance.  The steps he took towards his desk were arrested as he heard his doors sigh open and then closed once more.

Thalissa stood framed in the doorway like a hunter’s trap, blue skin flashing under the clinical lights that had resumed their bright hues now that the angry glow of red alert had been swept away.  Her lithe figure, every curve and muscle outlined in that harsh light made his head spin – but he was too damned tired to think about it properly.  Before he could even register what had occurred, there was a quick, hungry collision of mouths.  It was hard, raw, unexpected.  Something that wasn’t supposed to happen, and yet somehow had to.  Just two people, tired, fucked up, and perhaps doing something stupid.

But damn, did it feel good.  He didn’t fend off the advance, but rather leaned into it.  There was something about the moment that was grounding.  She was the rock he didn’t feel he deserved, but by God did he ever need it.  She seemed to always be there to keep him from spiraling into the void – solid and unshakable.

And then as abruptly as the moment had come, they broke away.  Quick, almost violently, like they’d torn themselves from something neither of them were sure they were ready for.  For a second, Michael thought he might say something clever, or at least insightful.  But all he could do was stand there, feeling as stupid as he ever had as they both held an awkward gaze that asked – ‘What the hell happens next?”

I want a place to stay
Get your booty on the floor tonight
Make my day
I want a place to stay

The faint lyrics, like a half-forgotten dream, were still wafting through the bulkhead.  Its distorted notes finally registered with him and pulled him out of his fog and offered them both an escape from the awkward moment by replacing it with another that felt just as strange.  He bolted by her like a man with way too much on his mind, and bellowed into the bridge past doors that expelled their breath like a reanimated corpse gasping for air.

“Will somebody please, for the love of God, get that damn song to stop playing!?”