The entirety of the ship shook as the swarm engulfed it. As the five of them hurried out of the craft and into the landing bay, lights dimmed and the way to the door now a minefield wasteland of black silhouettes of boxes, machinery and flying cables, Crysis could feel the thing lurch forward.

'Come on guys!' he yelled behind him, hurrying to the hatchway, 'or you're going to go flying to the rear of the ship if she pulls up too hard.'

Heratrix and Skreem were hurrying behind him, with Rokoara clambering out of the ship they had stolen not far away. 'Doone! Come on!'

'The thing isn't shutting down properly,' he called, still in the cockpit flicking switches and dials. He was the tech guy; he should be good at this. This is why he was here with them. He did stuff with the machines. 'Give me a minute.'

Crysis reached the hatch and waved his hand over the Halo-Core on the side. A number pad projected from it and he hit in the code. With a flicker the screen disappeared, and the hatchway to the rest of the ship opened up with a hiss, the two doors parting vertically like lips.

He looked back. Heratrix and Skreem hurried to meet him, but Rokoara was still by the small craft and Doone hadn't emerged yet. 'What's going on?'

'I don't know,' Doone called back from inside the stolen vessel. The screens were still up, and everything was still functioning, though he had powered the thing down completely. Something was going on inside it, and he had to find out what. He had a bad feeling about it. A very bad feeling.

'I'll stay with him,' Rokoara said, waving for the three at the hatchway to be gone. 'Get up the top and help.'

Crysis didn't want them to split up if he could help it. There wasn't much chance that they would get boarded if his knowledge that only one or two of the ships surrounding them like flies actually had guns attached, but he didn't like the possibility. He didn't want to find his forces cut off from one another should a ship-wide inside attack take place. But then what could he do? If there was something up with the ship they'd stolen, the little guys in hoodies down there had probably wired something up in it like a jamming device of some sort, then they were in big trouble. And like it or not, Doone was the best guy they had to try and stop it.

'Ok,' he yelled back to Rokoara. She gave him a beefy salute with her great biceps, and turned back to the craft, sticking her head in to ask Doone what was going on.

'Let's go,' he said to Skreem and Heratrix. The three of them went through the door that shut behind them with a steam-venting hiss.

*

'Skreem, get to the guns,' he said as they ran down the grimy corridor of the ships underbelly. 'Remember to hold back on that twitchy trigger-finger of yours until it's necessary.'

'You have so little faith in me,' the little Aldesarian said, a grumpy scowl crossing her face. Her pigtails rose and their mouths turned down in turn, nodding as if to say 'yeah, she's right you know; you do have so little faith in her.'

'On the contrary,' Crysis said, halting at the ladder to the upper levels. 'I have lots of faith in your shooting ability. I don't have faith in you and Gurgaston not wasting all of our canisters, because although you've got the best skills in the galaxy, he needs to work up to it and you can't stop.'

'But...'

'Get on it,' Crysis said, before mounting the ladder so as to prevent Skreem from replying in any way. Heratrix nodded to her coldly, before following on after Crysis.

'So mean of them,' Skreem pouted, hurrying down the corridor towards the rear gun pod.

*

'Gurgaston,' Crysis called once Heratrix and he reached the bridge. The room smelled of old leather and blast smoke from hundreds of years of wartime usage, and the chairs were tattered and worn. The consoles glittered away, and as Crysis passed to the front of the ship, he passed one such panel where one of the warning lights for the rear shields had died.

I really must get that one fixed, he thought to himself. That's going to spell disaster for us one day.

Up ahead, buckled into one of the main pilot chairs at the front of the ship, a large man of roughly 35 years, biceps to rival Rokoara's, with a faded and stained T-shirt like a ravaged flag across his torso, turned and got up from the chair.

'You made it in one piece then,' he said, his voice deep enough to always give Crysis the chills when he hadn't heard it in a long time. He always thought he could make a fairly convincing villain in a movie in physical presence alone.

'Just about,' Crysis said.

'He threatened to use Rokoara's foot pedal as a bomb,' Heratrix mentioned.

'You what?'

'They obviously didn't know the power of the electric guitar,' Crysis said, shrugging his shoulders.

'They're preparing to fire,' called the voice of Rhama from the other pilot's chair at the front of the bridge.

'Full thrust, Rhama. Get us the hells out of here,' Crysis replied.

'Roger that.'

'He wants you down on the guns with Skreem, Gurgaston,' Heratrix said.

Gurgaston nodded, not saying anything in reply. He moved past the pair of them and headed to the door, which parted ways with a less-audible hiss than the one to the maintenance bay where Doone and Rokoara were discovering the root cause of their problems and immediate danger.

*

'Oh shit,' Doone whispered as he looked at one of the monitors.

'What is it?' Rokoara asked. 'Why isn't it shutting down?'

Doone didn't reply, his five eyes looking at two screens and another three dials, his hands a flurry of clacking fingers on keys and the swiping of menus. 'Oh, this isn't good.'

'They've rigged it,' Rokoara said almost with a reluctant sigh. 'Haven't they?'

'Yeah,' Doone said, sitting back in his chair momentarily as the weight of the situation crashed down on him. 'One of those things outside...'

The ship rocked to the side as a blast hit the underbelly of the ship. Doone didn't know it, but up in the bridge Heratrix was looking at a screen that told them the first hit to their shields had been taken, the numbers dropping.

'...one of them has gotten into close enough range to prime this thing to go off. If we don't disable it, or get away from them quick enough...'

'...then boom,' Rokoara finished.

'Nothing's ever simple, is it?'