"GM May GY 2014: discovered a rather barren little planet. It appears to be uninhabited and without any signs of life. There's considerable heat though, built up in the atmosphere. Going down to check it out."

Unnamed Hadad personell, just before dying of asphyxiation

The small ship sailed between two intersecting laser beams, and narrowly avoided a railgun projectile. The Great Justice was being totally hammered by concentrated waves of railgun and laserfire with a little artillery thrown in for good measure. The noise was tumultuous, and inside the turret Jack could hear every bit of it. In fact, he'd abandoned his resolve not to begin hyperventilating only minutes before, and now was trying not to fog up the glass of his turret capsule as he counter-fired against a nearby mini-pyramid.

"I'm making a hard left! Break off from the pyramid!" Helen shouted, and the ship banked to port with a roar and an extra kick of speed. As it did so, a cubby jarred open on the starboard side, and a figure fell out and smacked his head quite badly. Jack looked back over his shoulder. The supine man was wearing a tight-fitting baseball cap, and the object that had fallen out with him would have been banned in most small countries.

"Oi, you!" Jack shouted, turning his head, screaming over the cacophony of destruction raging outside the ship.

The figure sat up, and patted the area of floor beside him looking for his completely outrageous shotgun. Helen looked back over her shoulder.

"Uuom, what the- what are you doing here?"

Uuom groaned, rubbing his head.

"Whassup?" he slurred.

From the same cubby, Tahlia emerged, tousle-haired. She was quicker on the uptake.

"We're flying?"

"Turns out we are," Jack said. "And we're right in the middle of railgun fire right now, so... just... don't screw anything up. And don't touch that shotgun!" he added, as Uuom clasped a hand around the grip of his weapon.

Outside, a long, superheated rail of metal seared past on its way to its intended target. The Great Justice was beginning to take even more massive barrages of fire, and its iron armor was stuck full of huge metal barbs. Jack looked at it, and wondered how much longer it was going to last. Not much, he surmised, at least for the outer armor.

Suddenly, on his side, there came a smaller pyramid. Jack, following the pyramid's path, saw that a nearby Hadad Pyramid Craft, was sprouting tiny pyramids from its sides. Bits of the exterior facade flaked away, releasing them like... well, to put it in a strange way, like a swarm of hungry Illuminati bees, sans the giant eyeball. They began to fire at the fleeing ship, pausing only to score great marks on the Great Justice's side before hurriedly continuing with their assault.

"Fire on the ships!" Helen ordered.

Jack followed the pursuing ship with his turret's sights, and squeezed out a few rounds into the ship's side paneling. However zippy and numerous the smaller pyramids were, they were near-tissue paper against conventional weapons, for as the rounds made contact on the ship's paneling it burst asunder and plummeted downwards, spilling its pilot into open space. He then swiveled to meet another one coming down sharply from his upper right, and fired on it as well. This time, the pyramid didn't simply split, but actually exploded in a ball of fire! From behind him, he heard the ticking rhythm of John's turret rotating, and the loud report of exchanged fire. Suddenly the ship lurched, as a pyramid finally hit its mark. Jack steadied himself at his station, watching as the ship that had made the successful shot arced over the roof of their ship and began to peel off back into the cloud of its fellows. He swiveled, aimed, and shot the pyramid. In midflight it split into two pieces, and the pilot suddenly found himself tumbling to his death.

But the cloud of pyramids slowly drove the ship into retreat. Laser fire slammed into the hull of the ship. Jack was trying to return fire when a bolt was cast right into the barrel of his turret- and the barrel split. Sparks flew back into Jack's face, and he howled in pain, falling backwards onto the heaving floor...

OOO

Fadiris watched from his chamber as the battle raged above Oxiaris in the sullen red sky flecked with green and brown from a day's sandstorm. Flashes from above glanced off the soaring cliff faces near the Hadad outpost, and arced off the distant, jagged black mountains.

He was nervous.

He knew that they were winning, but there was always the matter of, once you started a space battle, tracking where everything was going. Something always got through and screwed as many things up on your end as it could until it was either shot or captured. Fadiris' veined hand flicked over the arm panel of his chair, as mad thoughts zapped through his cortexes. He was remotely ordering the larger Hadad pyramids into their battle positions, and via a screen mounted on the ceiling facing downwards, monitoring the enemy. It was a broad view of a lot of small things going to bits, and a lot of large things sitting there and taking heavy fire.

"Chaotic."

Fadiris hadn't noticed the Duke sitting in the upper right hand corner of the room, watching him.

"Is it not in order, Fadiris?" the Duke inquired, slowly corkscrewing downwards towards him. "Are you not in control?"

"I-I am in control, my Duke," Fadiris said rather quickly.

The Duke came to rest, and turned around to stare right through him.

"Yes? Then... why has your gravitational mass shifted in such a way? You are nervous. Summarize," he added, "the fight."

"There are two sides, my duke," Fadiris said. "One is our side, and we outnumber and almost outgun the Robloxian warship-"

"You are worried." The Duke slowly inched a little closer. "Tell me why it is so with you."

"Well, sir, I feel almost as if there's a ship heading away from the fight, sir..."

OOO

They were boned and they knew it. One engine had been blasted out by a railgun attack. The other was whining disconcertingly. At the controls, Helen tried to keep their ship afloat, dodging fire but taking heat nonetheless. Meanwhile, at the back, Tahlia and Uuom (the latter of whom was so badly hung-over that he needed cotton earmuffs jammed over his ears) were wrapped in a towel, shivering. The reason they were shivering was that one of the gunner's pods jutting out of the starboard wall had been completely obliterated. The former occupant of the capsule was in an alert kind of crouch in a corner, checking that all his ribs were there, for they hurt like hell.

This was not, however, Jack Steel's most stressful day, not by a long way. When you saw an entire town shelled into smoking rubble in the space of about an hour, you pretty much developed the best shock dampeners on anything, bar heavy assault tanks. Besides, Jack had been in New Robloxia's lag-stricken Southeast Corner during some of the worst ethnic fighting therein: Noobs versus Guests versus Robloxians versus military police, versus most everyone else who lived there. The lag had made it nearly impossible to get any real work done, with the framerate at some horrible moments being less than one half a frame every second.

Still, he'd never been in a disintegrating spaceship, being shot at by evil pyramids before.

"Jack, your right!" John called over the deafening roar of artillery. Glancing to his right, he saw a slow-moving dart tracing its way towards him. Picking up a sheet of bent metal lying pressed up against the back wall of the ship, he held it up in front of him. The dart, however, had not been moving so slowly, and it slammed into the metal sheet, almost screaming straight through, but stuck because of the inconveniently arranged steering fins at its rear. Jack crushed the tip of the dart under his boot, and the missile stopped wiggling frantically around. He then tossed the piece of metal out of the ship, where it fortuitously struck a pyramid craft.

"What on Robloxia's goin' on?" Uuom slurred from the back.

"Nothing," Jack lied blatantly, "just enjoy the rest of the trip."

"Are we heading back to the ship? Tahlia groaned.

"I... don't think we are," Jack said.

"Oh."

"In fact," Jack added, peering for one heart stopping moment around the hole in the side of the ship into the blitz outside, "everyone seems to be leaving..."

They were. Blue streaks were slowly making their way out of the Great Justice, except this time going the other way, into the appalling void that separated the Great Justice from Robloxia. With any luck, it would be a hundred years before they reached the planet, and by then their mission would have been forgotten.

"'s a good thing I brought me shotgun, eh?" Uuom said blearily, reaching again for the shotgun which was propped against a wall. Jack snatched it away.

"Honestly, you're hung-over like a convicted murderer," he reprimanded.

"Dun't see why 't matters," Uuom muttered.

At that moment, the other engine petered out, flickered back on, then exploded with a BANG!

"We've still got steering!" Helen yelled. "We'll have to take her in to land!"

"Land?"

"There's no bloody landing gear," John said, "I checked!"

"Whussat?"

"I said there's no bloody landing gear, Uuom!"

"Oh. Dun't see why 't matters, we can just crash-land..."

"We could," Helen said, "but the enemy ships would still follow us. Hold on, we're entering!"

"Shit!"

They fell through the atmosphere in a barely controlled plummet. The pyramids pursued them.

"We should jettison some parts!" Jack said suddenly.

"Why?"

"It'll get them off our tail!"

"Good plan!"

Helen pressed a button, and the back of the ship fell off. Jack planted his feet firmly and, as Tahlia and Uuom began to fly outside into the searing wind, caught them each by one hand. Flashing light danced on his surroundings. His feet began slipping. Jack, in a desperate attempt to save all three of them, reached out for a pack which he was sure was a parachute, and while holding two people in one hand let himself slide out of the ship's backside. His feet were whipped from under him.

He, and his two companions, tumbled through the sky.

There was little enough oxygen up here, it was very cold, and Jack was struggling with the ripcord on his parachute. It was stuck on the zipper.

There! He got it, and made sure he was still holding on to Uuom and Tahlia before clasping the pack between his knees, and giving the cord a good tug between clenched teeth. The parachute ballooned out of the top of the pack like a huge mushroom, and gradually their descent slowed, although they were still not out of the danger zone yet. One of the three pursuing pyramid craft had split from its fellows and was making a beeline towards them.

Jack slung Tahlia over one shoulder securely, and Uuom on the other. Pulling his shiny gun out, he took as careful an aim as he could, and fired a large shotgun slug into the pyramid craft's shiny exterior plating. It made a crashing noise as it smashed through the surface like a pane of sugar glass, and a sudden loss of control meant that it had, somehow, hit the pilot as well. The pyramid craft spun away from them, flaming, and as they gently bumped onto the dark sands below, just a few yards from where the wreckage of the ship sat and smoldered, the pyramid craft disappeared down a canyon, and exploded at the bottom, sending a tiny lick of orange fire over the lip of the crevasse.