Work Text:
The swivel chair in front of the terminal was bolted securely to a panel in the floor. The upholstery was obviously new, and rather nice.
Kre'killik used it to wipe the blood off his claws, then took a moment to stare at the console and shield generator hardware it was connected to. The shield generator was shooting sparks and had seen better days -- it was currently producing one solid layer of energy barrier and was struggling to keep the second one up. On the monitor, the display quivered and blipped into nothing as something hit it, and for a brief, alarming moment, the ship was shieldless. Then it went up again.
Kre'killik had never been much of a tech-head, but you didn't traipse around in space on a skeleton crew without learning a thing or two. Now that he was looking closely, he could see the more vulnerable parts of the system, and he knew where the sparks were coming from. Already, it would be difficult to fix.
He struck and deepened the gouge. Then he struck again. Kre'killik's claws were made of hardened chitin, serrated, and honed to a ruthless edge. He had never been good at fixing things.
But he was very good at breaking them.
He struck anew, this time at a different part of the shield generator's core components, and more sparks flew. On the display, the shields were barely staying at one.
The door burst open and a Rockman lumbered in, barely clearing the door frame with his mass. Kre'killik turned his head, and their eyes locked. His countless, gem-like ommatidia stared into whatever passed for optical organs in those crevices the Rockmen called eyes.
The Rockman roared like a landslide. Kre'killik got one more good hit in at the shields before he had to whip around and raise his claws to defend himself.
Right, the crew generally didn't like it when you started destroying their shields.
The Rockman was tougher than he looked, which was saying something. Kre'killik struck at the junction of his neck and shoulder, and it was exactly like striking pavement planetside. Then the Rockman's punch nearly swept him off his feet.
He tried comms. "Uh, Captain?"
"What is it, Mantis?"
Ugh, humans. Kre'killik rolled his eyes, then scrambled over the swivel chair in his haste to get out of the Rockman's reach. "This guy's pretty tough. I'm not, nghk, too sure about the outcome here, so when's extraction again?"
"Don't worry, I've got my eye on your vitals," the Captain answered in the laissez-faire manner of a human who would probably shed precisely one tear for the demise of his designated Mantis boarder, and that tear would be for the scrap expenses incurred in hiring his replacement. "We're ready to pull you out as soon as they drop too low, in fact--" At that moment, Kre'killik took an unfortunate hit to the sternum that nearly crushed through his chitin shell and left him struggling to draw air, let alone answer, "Oof, that sounded like it hurt. Look, stick it out for a little bit longer, yeah? As long as he's fighting you, he's not trying to fix the generators, so just--"
The rest of that chain of reasoning went unvoiced. Over the Rockman's shoulder, on the flickering monitor, Kre'killik saw with stunning clarity as the shield wavered as it was grazed by a meteorite.
Then the entire ship groaned with impact. The lights flickered. The Rockman stopped to look around with a surprisingly expressive sense of terror in those granite edges. Then he bounded back through the door he'd come from. As it slid open, Kre'killik smelled smoke.
"That's bad, right?" he asked, staring after the Rockman. "Did I do too good a job at destroying those shields? How big was that asteroid? ...Captain?"
The alarming silence that answered him meant, best case scenario, the Captain was very busy being on comms with other people. The ship was probably still there. Should he start looking for a window? Should he start trying to fix the enemy's shields again? He stared at the serrated edges of his claws. That was probably a bad idea.
"Did we get hit?" he asked, with dawning horror.
At that, the Captain did respond. "So, uh!" He sounded nervous. Oh, this was bad. "Getting you out is going to take a little bit longer, Kirillik, but you hang in there! The teleporter's a bit busted right now, but don't worry, Bitty is on it!"
Oh, no. The Captain had called him by his real name. Well, he'd tried. Oh gods, was he about to die? Maybe not if Bitty was on it. Bitty was everything Kre'killik was not. Bitty had once taken two hours to try and fail to open a jar of canned food (which he had obviously mocked them for relentlessly), but they were very, very good at fixing things.
The ship lurched again and his claws sank deep into the swivel seat to keep his footing. There was a sharp hiss, and a sickening sensation of decompression in the room. He stared at the gaping fracture in the corner -- a hull breach, right here? He needed to get out.
He scrambled past it. The door had slid shut again, and was holding shut -- door controls were among the ship's scant few functioning systems, for all the good it would do them.
Kre'killik tried to smash it open. And again, and again. The hiss of decompression had softened after the initial surge; the air was growing thin. His claws hurt. The serrated edge was mostly just edge now, but asphyxiating in a breached room on an enemy ship after he had destroyed their shields in the middle of an asteroid field at his dimwitted human Captain's orders would not be a very glorious way to go. Borderline embarrassing, really. Tragic, in a word.
He swung at the door again and the dent in it gave way, metal splitting under his claw. He dug both claws in and pried it apart, until it was just wide enough to accommodate his body, and squeezed his way through. The metal edges left deep gouges on his chitin shell.
He fell through to the other side, the side that still had air, and even with four legs he barely kept his balance. As he heaved for breath, he noticed two large, rocky feet in front of him. In the dim red emergency lighting, it was harder to spot the hulking Rockman than it should have been. He smelled of smoke.
"YOU!" the Rockman bellowed. Whatever he had been doing was clearly less important, or liable to yield results, than swinging his fists at Kre'killik to squash him like a bug. Frantic with desperation and already knowing he wouldn't be quick enough to avoid the hit, the Mantis scrambled for the gap between the Rockman and the wall.
And oh, he had never quite been so glad to be yanked away by the lurching sensation of their ship teleporter.
For a jarring moment, he was nowhere at all, and keenly aware of it.
"--Mind the air," the Captain was saying, as he dropped down onto blissfully familiar metal flooring.
Kre'killik leveraged himself onto his four feet, shaking. "Mind what about the air--" he was going to say.
He sputtered instead. He couldn't breathe. Hadn't he just left a situation where he was in danger of asphyxiating? His head swivelled frantically, and in a heart-splitting moment, he took in the scene.
Damaged but freshly-repaired teleporter spool, check. New but freshly-repaired hull breach in the floor, double check. Oxygen, no check. The ship's puny ventilation sputtering and working overtime to pump air into the room, checkity-check. Oh, and there was Bitty.
Bitty was at the console, and looking worse than he felt, which was saying something. The Engi's screen-face flickered into a surprisingly expressive jitter of pixels and he raised one tube-like arm to wave weakly at Kre'killik. The other arm ended in a wiry, jagged stub just below the shoulder. It was shooting sparks.
Right. So Bitty had not only repaired a hull breach and the teleporter in record time, apparently after a separate hit to the ship that gave them that injury, but they'd done it one-handed. It was entirely possible they would actually gloat about this one. If they didn't, Kre'killik may actually insist they do so, purely in the interest of sportsmanship.
"Good to see that you have survived your boarding safely, Crewmate Kre'killik!" the Engi said to him. Unlike the Captain, they never mispronounced his name. "I compute our next course of action best be relocation to a room with higher oxygen partial pressure."
Kre'killik was already striding toward them and holding out an arm. It took a moment to figure out how to do it without his claw causing further damage to Bitty's scrap-like frame -- he had just spent a while trying to break machinery, after all, he had to watch those instincts -- but he managed to hook it under the intact arm and drag Bitty to the door. The extent to which Bitty leaned against his chitin shell suggested nothing good.
The air was much better in the next room and Kre'killik paused so both of them could take a breather, then tensed. There was a faint tremor -- not inside the ship, thankfully, but close.
"Good work, crew!" announced the Captain. "Just so you know, the enemy ship did just explode, so that's good news. The bad news is that we are still in the asteroid field, but the shields are holding when we're not being shot at, so we can take a breather before we jump to the next beacon. Still, uh... Engi, if you want to fix the door control system sooner rather than later..."
"Fix it yourself," Kre'killik shot back. "We're headed to the medbay."
He turned to Bitty to see if they would challenge that course of action. After all, they really liked fixing things.
The Engi responded with a giant thumbs-up emoji on their screen-face. Five fleshy, human fingers twisted in a gesture.
It was silly and more than a little anthropocentric, but he wasn't going to complain.