“Hold it, before we open that thing, I want to establish some kind of communications with the landing party.” Moo was at the main airlock controls, trying to figure out a way to route intership communications to his station.

“That’s going to take a bit, unless we get to the bridge first,” Yili offered. “The closest universal control is in weapons storage.”

“You know something? That’s not a half-bad idea!” The colonel stalked into the egress corridor, looked both directions and then headed aft. “Never served aboard a line cruiser. Where do they keep the muskets and cannon around here?”

“Deck six, if I recall. The Pershing hulls moved all the provisions center-ship along with most of the organic storage,” Yili said as she worked with a portable sensor unit she had found. It was in mediocre condition primarily because Argent’s Chief Engineer had performed repairs on it in the sixty seconds since she had found it.

Colonel Moody stomped and rattled around, climbing ladders, descending deck tunnels and opening and closing airlocks. Finally he strode up one of the central deck six corridors with Yili following close behind as she worked with her sensor device. He reached a hatch marked “Armory” and went inside. The engineer stopped in the open doorway.

“Now we’re talking!” Moo shouted. The room was surrounded by powerarmor suits standing against all four walls. At one end was an open weapons locker stocked with three racks of TK-40s. At the other end was an automated sentry unit in standby mode. In the center was a rack of accessory modules for the powerarmor.

Yili went to the universal console in the corner and pulled up the command computer interface. “I hope this thing isn’t permanently keyed to DeMay’s voice print, or I’m going to need a few minutes to re-route communications control to the universal.”

“We need to get everyone in here and properly equipped,” Moo replied. “We’d have a much better handle on all this if we could get this ship manned and fully operational. At the very least we’d have no trouble running a complete set of scans on the station.”

“Dunkerque to landing party. Come in.” Yili waited the regulation ten seconds and keyed the transmitter again.

“Dunkerque to landing party. Come in.”

"–hostile contacts. Do not approach the station! Repeat! Do not approach Barker’s Asteroid!”