Prologue: In Which Shit Gets Real, Yo.

The burning wreckage of the once-mighty laboratory laid stricken in piles around the battered room, chemicals melting holes in the floor while rogue Tesla coils arced into the lightbulbs in the ceiling, accenting the scene below quite well.

Chris Ennings, captain of the ship Perse, stood with what remained of his men, surrounded by the heavily-armed Doombot army of Doctor Clockwerx.

“Hah!” The Doctor spat, clutching his heavily-wounded arm with his good hand as hard as he could, failing to staunch the blood as the stain grew larger on his coat. “You came damn close, I'll give you that.” He turned his back upon the surrounded interlopers and limped to the yet undamaged throne of space-alabaster recessed into the far wall. “Captain Ennings, you and your men have proven to be entirely too skilled as far as opponents go-” A distance explosion sent the ship suddenly lurching to its side, causing the Doctor to stumble. “- Which is why I am, at this moment, unable to extend an offer of employment.” He sat down heavily upon his throne, lab coat draped ever-so-awesomely. “You see, I shall soon find myself sans-headquarters, thanks to the efforts of you and your band of intrepid idiots.”

“Gizmo, I do believe we're being complemented.” Malcolm, the ship's chef, remarked. Gizmo tightened the grip on his large wrench and grit his teeth.

“How wonderful. At this point I think I'd rather have him just up and kill us.” Gizmo remarked blithely.

“Well I don't know about you fellows, but I think I'm going to put off that whole dying business as long as I can.” Ennings remarked, wiping a bead of sweat from his tawny forehead.

“Hey!” Doctor Clockwerx snapped his fingers. “I was monologuing, here. I mean, good lord, you people!” He massaged his temples with his one good hand. “First, you rain down steamrollers on my secret island base, you hijack my satellites and drive them around like go-karts, and then you shoot my wonderful Doomship full of holes! You wreck up the place and don't even have the good sense to grovel before I kill you! I don't think I've fought a ruder group of heroes since Flatulon showed up.” Everyone assembled, even the Doombots, winced at hearing that name.

“Wow, I. . .” John Parson, second-in-command, itched the back of his head with the butt of his pistol. “If we had known you had dealt with Flatulon recently. . .”
“Yeah, we probably would have waited a week or so.” Philo, the ship's inexplicably polite robot, said. “I mean, I don't even have a sense of smell, but that dude is just crass."

“I appreciate it.” Doctor Clockwerx said, as another chain of explosions tore through the ship, shaking the room enough to dislodge one of the bulbs in the ceiling. “However, time has run short. I'm running out of things to complain about, so I think I'm just going to up and kill you now.” He solmenly nodded his head. “Terribly sorry, but Doombots, do kill them.”

It's worth noting that Doctor Clockwerx and his Doombot army had entirely subjugated the Hauser system without retreating once. To say that humans and Doombots have been joined on the bloody field of war is a wee bit of an understatement.
However, there are a certain number of maneuvers so simple and fluid in execution that space jockeys slap their foreheads in exasperation for not thinking of them first. The following is one of those moves.
They ducked.
Well, that's not entirely accurate. Captain Ennings and his men ducked, and fired like mad. The Doombots panicked (as much as robots can), given that they hadn't exactly been programmed to deal with friendly-fire. Those furthest from the violence began firing upon those Doombots who had the misfortune of unloading upon friendly units, who were then fired upon by friendly units, until the once-formidable force had been reduced to a pile of smoking parts and a few lone survivors.

“I'd say that worked well.” Parson quipped. “Quick thinking, everybody. We ought to celebrate with drinks later.”

Ennings punched the head off of a Doombot, nodded his agreement, adjusted his lightning-powered brass knuckles, spun, and punched another Doombot square in the chest. It exploded, sending an unfortunately large chunk of metal straight into Malcolm's prefrontal cortex.

“Oh, damn.” Parsons said. “Okay, so, a quick bit of mourning, followed by celebratory drinks. Right.”

Ennings ran straight at Doctor Clockwerx, still slumped over in his chair, while the rest of his men mopped up the surviving robots. He jumped, driving his fist straight into the good side of Doctor Clockwerx's skull.

“Now, I'll be taking what I came for.” He wiped the sweat from his eyes. “The reagent, if you would be so kind, Doctor.” The Doctor spun, and spat a phlegmy mix of bloody mucus and tooth-shards straight at Ennings. He missed, scowled, and reached into his coat.

“Wait.” He said, eyes narrowing. “First, you have to tell me what you aim to do with it. I think I deserve that much, before you kill me.” Ennings rolled his eyes.
“First, no, I don't. Secondly, no, you don't. Give me the damn serum or I swear to God I will punch you to bits and then I will punch those bits into smaller bits, you have no clue how serious I am right now.” Ennings scowled so hard part of his left eyebrow exploded into a fine bloody mist.

“Damn, okay.” He took a small capsule from a secret pocket and placed it gingerly in Ennings' outstretched hand. Ennings turned and swiftly strode out of the room, minions in tow. As soon as the door was out of sight, they broke into a flat-out run for the hangar, where their warship had undergone “improvisational docking procedures”, which is future-speak for “crashed the damn thing as hard as possible.”
A sinister laugh tore through the ship's PA system.

“You think you can escape alive, Captain?” The Doctor cackled. “You shall find that my ship has a few tricks yet hidden up it's- URK.” The signal was suddenly cut off by the sound of a piece of steel punching a large and bloody hole through Doctor Clockwerx's torso. It's a rather distinctive sound, in case you were confused.
“There's a hyperlift at the end of this hallway, should take us down to the janitorial access for the hangar.” Gizmo shouted over the din of the ship collapsing.
“Why can't we go through the main doors?” Parson asked.

“Clogged with bodies.” Ennings said coldly.

“Ooooh, right. Forgot about that.” Parson replied.

The party assembled in the elevator and quickly pushed the lowest button indicated, which would lead them through a serpentine series of pipes and access vents, before depositing them next to their glorious space-chariot.

However, that proved to be entirely unnecessary, as an explosion shot the hermetically-sealed Deathpod through the hangar ceiling, solidly embedding it in the wall next to the Supra-Aether Drive fueling station. The door burst open, and the four slowly oozed out into the hold.

“Damn.” Parson whistled, wiping his forehead with a spare handkerchief. “A few feet to the side, and we'd have caused quite a calamity.” He said, admiring the explosive nature of Supra-Aether Drive fuel.

Captain Ennings screamed. Everyone turned to see what the issue is, and began screaming in tandem. They experimented with a few harmonies, but nothing really struck.

You see, the ship Perse was a terror to behold. Ennings himself stole it from under the nose of the now-defunct Atom Pirates clan. A destroyer class, she was only a few hundred meters long, but she made up for her relatively small size with an array of weaponry that could give rugged survivalists spontaneous orgasms.

She was the sort of ship that could jump out of the Supra-Aether in the blink of an eye and tear any witnesses to shreds before their radars even picked her up. She was the sort of ship you could drive nose-first into a battle station and not even register a dent. She could drive circles around bigger ships and cut smaller ships to ribbons using weapons the likes of which the Military didn't even have their hands on yet. Sleek and fearsome, she commanded a force of bloodthirsty mercenaries some two-hundred strong, all of whom laid decimated or dismembered in the Doomship.
Save four.

Well, five. The chief mechanic, a fat bearded man named Greg was busy hauling large crates from Perse's ruptured cargo hold, over to a much smaller ship the approximate size and shape of four city buses taped together. He saw his commanding officers and waved them over. They began screaming in tandem again, before reluctantly jogging over to the new ship.

Normally, Perse has all the smooth lines and graceful curves of her namesake. She had a decided lack of, say, multi-ton blocks of ceramic and steel crushing the part of the ship where the cockpit used to be, or large titanium beams puncturing the engine, or a number of rogue repair-droids going to town on the hull, exo-brushes worn down to nubs.

Today, on the other hand-

“Good to see you guys made it!” Greg shouted. “I have some bad news about-”

“Everything, yes.” Ennings interrupted. “I figured, what with the rampant
destruction wrought upon my ship by terribly unkind forces.”

“Yeah.” Greg absentmindedly plucked the side of his beard. “Things kind of went downhill once the sewer line ruptured.”

“Oh god.” Parson interjected, close to vomiting. “I have a resolute and unyeilding need for you to stop talking. Let's go.” Ennings nodded and quickly ducked inside the ship.

“I just have more box of junk to load on the ship, I'll be right there.” Greg turned and dashed back towards the ship, but a sudden violent explosion tossed him soundly on his ass. A pile of crates neatly stacked next to the cargo bay door fell, landing heavily on Greg's prone form.

One wayward crate landed solidly on his neck, sending his head flying across the room. It arced gracefully, like some sort of sanguine comet, before being deftly caught in Philo's robotic embrace.

There was a sudden lull in movement, as the assembled tried to make sense of what happened.

Nothing was spoken. There are simply no words to describe what happened, so no attempt was made.

The remainder of the crew climbed into their lifeboat and worked their way towards the cockpit, save Philo, who headed for the cargo bay, to put Greg's head in the freezer.

“We ready to go?” Ennings asked, impatient.
“All accounted for, sir.” Parson replied without skipping a beat.
“Wait, where's Greg?” Ennings asked, checking around the cramped pit.
“He's, ah-” Parsons stammered

“Chilling out, sir.” Gizmo said. Ennings glanced askance at him, trying to understand the joke, before shrugging and realizing that more important tasks lay ahead.

For instance, not dying. Ennings threw the ship into manual and kicked up the engines like they had never been kicked before. Lifting up off of the bay floor, Ennings spun the ship around, pointed it towards the black, and floored it.

The ship handled exactly as well as you'd expect, and wheezingly sputtered towards the force-field currently preventing everything in the bay from being sucked out into the infinite oblivion of space.

“Gizmo, get down to the engine room and see what you can do. I have a hankering to be going faster than I am right now.” Ennings said through clenched teeth. Gizmo grunted his affirmation and ran towards the back of the ship.

The ship began humming along at a respectable pace after breaking free of the patchwork fields and shields and various other electromagnetic pollution produced by a ship marked for immediate destruction, and just as the Doomship began to explode, VOOM. The engines kicked up to a mighty-fine speed, sending the ship careening away from the wreckage just fast enough to avoid the more lethal bits of shrapnel.

“That was fun!” Ennings remarked, smiling much too wide for someone who just escaped death by the skin of his teeth. He reached for the intercom and held the receiver up to his mouth. “Hey, Gizmo, how are we holding together?” He was greeted with a burst of static and the sort of fevered hammering that you hope to never hear from the engine room of a well-maintained spaceship.

“It's good for now, but I'd like to set down for repairs soon. From the looks of things, this hasn't been used recently, and the stress of that last stunt pushed a few components into the red.”

“How soon do you need?” Ennings asked. A pause, and then
“How soon can you get me?”

“Parson!” Ennings called smartly. “Where's the nearest place we can drop anchor?” Parson's fingers began dancing across the screen of his console, skimming through maps of the area.

“Looks like there's a planet near the edge of the system, Bochco. Moderate population, several large cities, definitely looks like the sort of place we could lie low in for a few days, wait for things to calm down, you know?”

“That's a stupid idea.” Ennings suggested. “We just killed a notorious warlord, we'll be heroes! People will be lining up to give us money!”

“Or kill us.” Parson suggested. “I'm certain the Doctor has a few roving kill-squads patrolling the system, looking to avenge his death and reclaim his throne, you know how villains are.”

“Damn, yeah.” Ennings scratched his chin in contemplation. “Forgot about that part, Christ. From now on, we need to start killing less paranoid people, you know?”
“Mmmm.” Parson hummed, rhythmically tapping his fingers upon the screen. “Oh, sweet. Quick, tell Gizmo it's got a Brain-Trust.”

Ennings raised an eyebrow. “Really? Why would he care?”

Parson leaned back in his char and folded his hands over his eyes. “Ah, nevermind then. I'll tell you when we get there.