The light was blinding as the fighter went completely dark, emergency life support kicked in. Tyler groaned and rubbed her eyes as she looked around, wondering why everything else died but life support was still working, that was lucky. She turned around in her seat to see that Cabbage looked unresponsive.

“Cabbage!” Tyler yelled.

There was no way that she was going to be able to help him from her position in the pilot’s seat. She could have checked his vital signs if anything was working besides the strange glow of the backup life-support indicator coming from below her controls around her knees someplace. It was dark except for the dull lights coming from that location in both seats.

“I hate science,” she muttered, wishing she had more of an engineering and technical understanding of why the life support would survive but nothing else. She looked around through the windows but she couldn’t see her wingman from the angle she was at.

Meanwhile the other fighters had altered course to come in from what was perceived as the safe direction to assist their wing leader.

“I’m taking command of the wing,” Sunshine announced. “We are still too far out to get a scan of the two fighters but there are no transponder signals at all.” Of course that was likely obvious to the others but sometimes announcing the obvious needed to be done.

“Fifteen more minutes,” Sunshine’s WSO announced. “The Outpost has also acknowledged and has  runabouts en route to effect a rescue.”

Tyler scrambled to find her helmet and got ready in case the onboard backup life support systems failed. She had it in her lap as she thought of her backup communications device in her pocket and pulled it out. She hit the button to activate it but nothing happened it was dead. She checked the battery and the indicator didn’t even light. She knew for a fact that it was full when she got into her fighter before departing the outpost one of the preflight checks was to insure their survival gear was good to go.

“Boss!” Cabbage called, frantically from behind.

“Get your helmet, get ready in case we need it,” Tyler ordered, “everything is dead.”

“What happened?” he demanded, rubbing his head, it ached dully.

“Helmet!” Tyler persisted.

“Right, yeah,” Cabbage said, as he began to fumble around for his gear.

“Teach and Cabbage are alive, good life signs on both,” Sunshine’s WSO announced as they were getting closer.

“Dropping from Warp,” Sunshine added as the fighter dropped in to begin to circle the two damaged.

“No life signs in the other fighter, no life support is working, not sure what happened with Teach’s fighter that it’s working,” the SWO added. “But thank God,” he muttered. “No communications signals.”

“I’ll maneuver so we can get eyes on them,” he said, maneuvering the fighter around and using thrusters only to try and make eye contact with his boss.

Tyler watched the entire maneuver, impressed, and a bit worried. She and Cabbage donned their helmets worried about a collision especially when they were incapable of doing anything at this point at all.  She waved at Sunshine who waved back and then held up his emergency communicator. She made a gesture across her throat and then shrugged.

Sunshine then maneuvered his fighter around and tractor beamed the fighter holding his wing leader and began heading back in the direction of the outpost or so Tyler assumed without instruments. The other fighters arriving tractor beamed the second fighter and the rest took up defensive and screening positions as they headed toward the outpost… waiting to meet up with runabouts that could beam the four crew members of the dead fighters aboard.