Kyle pointed at the monitor. "Zoom in."
"Where?" David asked.
"There," Kyle said. "Just below the engines."
As David zoomed in the camera, we all leaned in for a better look. The camera shifted focus, zooming in and moving along the hull. The light gray-brown hull, metal plating designed to shield the ship from the forces inside a wormhole, seemed undamaged. A large blue stripe ran from top to bottom, just behind the bulge where the experiment equipment was housed. The camera passed over it. The paint was still fresh, lacking the pitting and scrapes that space debris would leave over time. It reminded us how very new this ship was.
"There!" Kyle said, prompting David to stop moving the camera. "There is it."
"Great," Raj muttered. "Squid ship."
A squid ship. The Edra, hundreds if not thousands of years ahead of us technologically, used the small ships to move their commandos. I'm sure they had their own name for the little spacecraft, but we just called the squid ships, for their shape. I had seen a squid ship only in pictures, and it was unmistakable. About eleven meters long, the small troops carriers had a small troop cabin, with a powerful engine attached to it. Extending out from the hull was a set of arms that looked and moved just like tentacles. When the ship was ready to attach itself to a target vessel, the ship flipped over and the tentacles took hold of the hull. Then the troop cabin extended a small docking ring, and cut through the hull. According to our best intelligence, they could cut through the thickest armor and board a ship in under a minute.
"They're already aboard," Kyle grumbled. "That explains why we aren't getting any response from the crew."
"I guess this means we're not going to saunter up and knock, huh?" David commented.
The Saturnus wasn't a warship, but it still had a nice laser point defense system to knock out incoming missiles. Those same lasers could be turned on us, if the Edra controlled them. Our needle-jumper had a reinforced hull, designed to withstand the shock of a forced insertion through armor plating, but those lasers would still slice us up if we gave them half the chance.
"We're going in hot," I declared. "Let's get ready."
I moved to the navigation controls, and entered in the appropriate instructions for the needle-entry. These ships were mostly pre-programmed, usually en route. This ship had been prepared even before we docked with the Nautilus, so it was just a matter of telling the nav computer to make a forced entry. Our entry location had been selected for us, and though we would normally have input into that, here we had none. The needle-jumper was set to insert us near the forward edge of the ship, three decks above the keel. The area was mostly storage and non-essential systems. More importantly, the area was usually free of crew, so we wouldn't have to worry about killing anyone just by inserting.
By the time I had the nav computer ready to go, the guys had set our seats for entry. The chairs rotated in place, facing forward. Chairs not being used were locked down, their seats folded up. Raj checked the gear strapped to the deck. If we struck the Saturnus and the straps snapped, all of that gear would be thrown forward and crushed against against the forward bulkhead of the cabin.
I sat in my seat, and strapped in. My helmet swung up and over my head, sealing in place. I felt the recycled air wash over me.
"Ready?" I asked.
Everyone replied in the affirmative. I reached over from my seat, and flipped up the yellow-black hazard cover to the launch initiator. I turned the key clockwise, and tapped the button below it. Instantly, the air in the cabin was evacuated. If our hull breached and we had atmosphere in the cabin, the sudden rush of air through a small hole would make it bigger or worse yet, it might send us careening out of control.
The automated voice of the nav computer counted down from five, and then kicked in our boosters. I felt it before I heard it, the eight gees of pressure forcing me so far into my seat that I thought I might actually start to feel bones snap. Thankfully, between the gravity plating and the seat design, I was alright, even if I couldn't breathe for the moment.
The monitor to my right was out of sight, but I wasn't sure I'd want to see it anyway. The needle-jumper was hurtling toward the Saturnus faster than the fastest space fighter could manage. Imagine ramming a needle into armor plating, in the hopes of breaching that plating. We were the needle.
This was going to hurt.
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