At that moment, the crewmember who had been monitoring the communication channels rushed in. Red-faced and flustered, he panted, “Captain! Captain! Someone’s… calling us… and they said… they want to battle!”

“Battle?” The Captain asked. “You mean they told us they wanted to battle, as opposed to doing the rational thing and just firing the weapons?”

“Mm-hm,” he replied. “They said they wanted to fight us in twelve Earth hours from now. Well, that’s with all the expletives removed.”

The Captain paused, sifting through her options. Selena waited for the inevitable, sure that the Captain was about to declare that they attack.

“Gah!” She cried, banging her fist on the table. “We’ll have to wait twelve hours. Those scoundrels! Obviously, the best course of action would be to attack now.”

Selena nodded. That was the most logical option.

“But we can’t! It would be completely dishonourable.” The Captain tried to regain her composure. It was obviously an effort. “We wait.”

* * *

BOOM!

The tense silence which had gripped the crew was broken by an explosion of laser fire.

BOOM!

“Why did I agree to this stupid plan?” The Captain murmured to herself.

BOOM!

Realising she had spoken these words out loud, she covered up her lapse by barking, “don’t just sit there gaping! You look like fish! Fire back!”

They had manoeuvred the ship into an asteroid belt, and most of the enemy laser fire was hitting the asteroids, creating a frenetic BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! which made it difficult for the Captain to think.

Noting with relief that their weapons were charged up, the Captain altered the firing trajectory to hit the enemy’s engines. As much as she hated Asani, she would rather have him court-martialled than kill him.

BZZT! Their station released a pulse of energy, which… bounced off the fishbowl.

“That’s impossible,” Selena muttered. She looked calm, fortunately, though slightly pale. Elio, on the other hand…

“No, no, no. I’m not fighting that. No.”

“Well, you have to. These people are mutineers and a threat to our organisation! And they want to kill us!”

“BUT THEY HAVE A FORCE FIELD!”

The Captain sighed. This was going to be a looong battle.

At that moment, there was a communications alert. The Captain sighed again. It was on the channel that the rebels had been using. Trying not to make it too obvious (she couldn’t look weak in front of her crew), she deliberated for a moment before she answered.

“We’re going to @#$& destroy you $%&?! people! Surrender now or else! #$%@ ?@# $%&!”

Delightful. This was going to be a really, really looong battle.

* * *

His crew were screwed. In Elio’s opinion, at least.

The enemy had enormous firepower. He had counted thirteen lasers before he lost his nerve, but there were obviously more than twice that. Each one fired a beam of superheated light which shattered every asteroid they touched into a shower of orange sparks. Splinters of rock floated around them, flung in every direction by the impacts. That shrapnel was harmless enough to the well-armoured space station, but would be dangerous to anyone doing an EVA or piloting one of the smaller vehicles.

Every few minutes, a cannonball would come hurtling towards them. Their guns were accurate enough to deflect most of them, but the ship could only take a few impacts before they started running into trouble. And it wasn’t the ‘Oops, I just bought an extra bar of chocolate’ kind of trouble. It was the ‘Seal off hatches to the breach and hope they don’t hit us again or we’re toast’ kind of trouble.

On the other hand, the enemy force field seemed to be completely fine. Undamaged. Unblemished. A casual observer wouldn’t have known it had been taking steady fire for the past several minutes until they actually saw the laser beams heading towards it.

So, yeah. His crew were screwed.

Maybe it was time for a mutiny.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is not finished. This is not even close to finished. But my New Year's resolution was to actually do more than four submissions in a year, so that's what I've done. I'll get some more in when I have the time, but I don't have any time right now.