We take out the last of the cosplayers and enter the house. The hired guns watch outside while we go in. There are five hostages in here all zip-tied. Meaghan doesn’t know any of them but clearly they were abducted and mistreated by the cosplayers. We cut them free and ask if they have any place to go. They say no, as all of their companions were killed when the cosplayers snatched them.

We find Meaghan’s brother Blake in the other house and there is a tearful reunion. We organize everyone into the vehicles including the hostages and head back to the compound. Meaghan appreciates Simon’s efforts at the house and gives him a more-than-friendly kiss on the cheek.

Scotty has continued to work on the teleporter and he has people getting space suits together for us. He will come along to help with the technology we may find up there. We start training in the suits. They have grip so we will not fly around inside the ship if there is no artificial gravity. Ian tells us not to bring along any firearms as things up there will “not react well to bullets.” Meaghan will not be coming with us but Scotty does.

We teleport and Chet manages to keep his lunch down even though this was his first time. It is dark here and there is only one door. We manage to pry it open and we work our way through the ship. Ian checks to see if others have been walking around up here but there are no tracks.

We see all the way down toward the engine and it’s like a highway, very spacious and long. We work our way through and open several sets of doors. On the last one we see out into space as there’s a huge hole. We use our zero-g boots to walk on the ceiling across.

We come to the area with the pods and we see that there are around a thousand. This is the remainder of five planets’ worth of alien refugees. We should launch them all, because that would cause the ship’s orbit not to decay, or at least buy us time.

Simon and Alex determine where to send all of the 1000 pods and do math calculations on our orbit to make sure things land properly. Simon pushes the button and they start launching. It is a pretty violent process as the thrusters fire, and the whole ship lurches.

We find two space shuttles that seem to be operational, about the size of a fighter or shuttle. We wake up a group of 20 Talolans (and others) to help us.

We spend a few more days here and Alex creates an environmental bubble for us to take a break from our suits. After this we fly the space shuttles back down to the compound.

–end of this book–