Computers took over as soon as there was impact. The silver minnow, after assessing the damage, sensed its inevitable end, and activated a highly sophisticated set of computers that ran algorithms so advanced that they would make an android's head turn in lust or madness, possibly both. It acknowledged the chances of the ship's complete disintegration, decided they were near enough 100% to make no difference, and set about scanning its surroundings for the possibility of saving one, if not both, of its passengers. It mapped the surrounding terrain, calculated trajectories, ran sophisticated geological computations, and examined its own parameters and variables like fuel loads. Then it got to work. The cockpit closed over Skreem and Rhama like a clam, slamming shut and bolting into place. The floor peeled away as a similar set of bulkheads locked under them. After encasing its passengers in a tomb-like capsule, it initiated a set of carefully controlled, minute explosions all along its bodywork. Metal ruptured and peeled away like the outer layer of an egg, revealing a spherical bunker that one could comfortably drop into the heart of a supernova and only need to turn the air conditioning if one had particularly warm blood. The ship then ran some final diagnostics, uncoupled some joints and connections, initiated a final set of explosions, and the egg was tossed out of the ship's husk along its pre-designated course. It dropped through the air, the two inhabitants somersaulting end over end, subjected to intense bodily stresses through the g-forces. As it was, the computers on the ship had checked the vital signs and medical data of both Skreem and Rhama, and calculated that they could survive the extreme stress with only a ringing in the ears and a case of ugly projective vomiting. This would indeed come to pass, but only after the egg slammed into the little round platform that the pilots had noted upon first entering the chamber. The impact slammed them forward, and then their seatbelts snapped them back against the seats, which were specifically designed to absorb hard impacts in just such an emergency. The egg capsule, having cratered into the rocky platform, came to a stop. Four seconds later, Skreem vomited, and as a result of landing facing directly to the sky, gravity pulled the puke back down onto her front. It thankfully, very narrowly, missed her face. Rhama followed Skreem's example with a dry heaving three seconds after.

From the initial impact of the hooded one's ship into the minnow, to Rhama dry heaving, the entire sequence of events took twelve seconds and three milliseconds.

The survivors listened to the sound of the other ships falling into the dark outside their protective bubble of metal. Rhama, through her dry heaving, sensed their silver saviour also take its final flight down into the black, to crumple and burn in an unseen grave.

'We're alive,' said Skreem as she wiped away soap from her mouth. 'I think.'

'The ship saved us,' Rhama said. 'Like an ejector seat.'

Having been part of the ship's cockpit, the screens and monitors were still active. They lit up and showed the pair of them camera footage from outside. The light from the burning ships was fading, swiftly plunging the cavern into a comfortable darkness.

'You ok, Skreem?'

Skreem looked over at Rhama and managed a laugh. 'I'm covered in my own juices and every bone in my body wants a robotic replacement, but I'm in one piece.' Her pigtails slowly raised themselves, shook themselves down, then flopped back again.

'There doesn't look to be any more of them coming after us,' Rhama said, quickly regaining her composure. 'And I don't think they could get in even if they wanted to.'

'We probably couldn't get out either. And I'd rather die by gunfire than drowning in my puke.' As if to prove her point, she suddenly unbuckled herself, leaned over the side of her seat, and vomited ninety-degrees down into the back of the capsule.

Rhama flexed her fingers to check they were all working. Then she tapped the screen and the bulkheads above their heads unbolted and opened up. Light from two torches lit the cavern. She reached around to the back of her chair (a considerably difficult task when pivoted ninety-degrees), and removed the Alpha from its protective holster.

'You're going out already?' Skreem asked. Her face was the colour of diseased grass.

'I'm still here,' Rhama said. 'I'm going to go taste some real air and celebrate not dying.'

'How can you recover from that so quickly?'

Rhama's smile faltered for a brief moment. 'I'll tell you one day. If you get a move on and come with me.'

Skreem gave her a look which said she was seriously considering turning her offer down. Then she forced herself to exhale heavily. 'Why the hell not?' Skreem reached behind her, armed herself with a Beta, and the pair of them extracted themselves from the smoking ruins of the minnow's egg.

They clambered down the side of the capsule, and then up the slope of the impact crater. The lights on the capsule shone directly up, and whilst they did just about reach the cavern walls, they weren't strong enough to light up much besides. Rhama took her Halo-Core and turned on the torch.

'There's a path over to the sculpture,' she said. 'Like a bridge.'

'Any railings?' Skreem asked.

Rhama decided it was best not to tell her and pressed on. When Skreem took out her own Halo-Core and followed behind, the air turned blue. She kept going, though. No way Rhama was going to show her up.

Once across the rocky bridge, they reached the bottom of the sculpture. A foul face peered down at them, and the scythes, though carved from the rock and worn down over the millennia, still looked sharp enough to lop off an unrepentant sinner's head with a single swing.

'Miserable bugger,' Skreem said. She'd hoped it would get a laugh from Rhama, but her friend had spied something much more interesting.

'What's that?' Rhama asked.

'What's what?'

'That there.'

The two of them jogged over to a large metal plate bolted into the floor. Runes circled around it, intertwined with a series of lines and dots which looked too much like a circuit board to be coincidence. Rhama walked around the edge and studied it.

'Looks like a teleport pad to me' Rhama said. She inspected a large rocky pedestal nearby. 'And therefore this must be...' In a few seconds she found a catch to remove the top portion. Inside was a dusty screen. 'Voila.'

'Seen that kind of thing before much in your travels? Old-fashioned teleport controls disguised as a rock podium?'

Rhama laughed. 'No. I'm just good and scared. Aha! Here we go.'

The screen dragged itself lethargically out of a long technological slumber. Rhama's face lit up as she surfed through various menus and options. 'I can't read it,' she said, 'but the principles will be the same.'

'Any way to activate it?' Skreem asked, toeing the edge of the square nervously. 'And making sure it's not to the depths of deep space?'

'Possibly. Maybe. I should think. Let me look.'

'Well hurry up. It's freezing and my fingers can't shoot when they're stiff.'

Rhama doubled her speed. The screens were all in gibberish, and it took her a while to understand exactly what they might mean. But then she clicked one menu, and some moving dots on what looked like a map appeared.

'This one. Should be good.'

'Should be?

'You want better than that?'

'Yes, in all honesty.'

'Well tough.'

Rhama's eyes struggled to keep up with her fingers, entering coordinates and telling the ancient software what she thought it must need to know. A pair of boxes appeared on the screen. She held her breath and tapped one that looked good.

The metal pad behind them started to hum. The runes around the edge lit up in gold, then began to shift on their own separate ring of metal track around the square. It all looked so promising.

Rhama leapt onto the pad and pulled Skreem in tight with an arm around her waist.

'You sure you know what you're doing?'

'Yes.'

'And what are you doing?'

'Not a clue.'

Skreem shrugged. 'Better than nothing.

The pad lit up and light seared their vision. The machine's hum became a high-pitched whine as archaic computer banks activated deep in the hidden bowels of the planet. Rhama felt her skin begin to tingle, and then it was more than her skin as the sensation of being dissolved reached her teeth, her tongue, her tonsils, down into her internal workings. She wanted to scream as the tingling turned to whole-body pins-and-needles. She felt as though millions of insects were gnawing her flesh, her bones, her brain.

She realised that she must have hit the wrong button and triggered some kind of disintegration mechanism. She hadn't saved them, but killed them. It was all her fault. They'd never get to the others. They'd all die in this cold, dark space underground, and it was all her fault.

The light faded but the gnawing sensation remained. Her ears rang, drowning out almost all other noise. She clamped her hands over them, trying to block it out, but it was in her head, not outside, and there was nothing she could do to stop it driving her mad. She felt her internal workings begin to vibrate in sync, trying to shake her to pieces.

'Make it stop! Please, make it stop!'

Then she felt Skreem turn beside her and lift something up in her arms. Heard Skreem shout over the ringing, through her clamped ears. 'Duck.'

No time to think, she dropped to the floor. Rhama felt a small pfft of air as Skreem let off a shot from her gun.

Rhama opened her eyes and looked around. They were alive. Another room. Despite the sensation of being ripped apart atom by atom, and then pieced back together again, she was alive.

She looked up at Skreem, but she had already disappeared. Rhama turned and saw the Aldesarian lurching down stone steps towards a crowd of figures who had turned to see two women appearing out of thin air.

Gun shots rained down on her. Rhama threw herself after Skreem, sliding down behind the crumbling remnants of a stone church's pews.

A hand laid itself on her shoulder with reassuring strength.

'Just in time,' Crysis said. 'We were almost dead.'