To The Escape Pods

"A Raid?" Jax muttered in shock.

He quickly turned to his supervisor, to see that all the color had drained out of his face and that he was frozen in fear. Neither had experienced a raid before and had only sat through the mandatory company training.

Jax had worked as a cargo bay technician for almost 6 months now and had always considered raids to be something that only happens to military contractors. The company he worked for was called Dong Exports, a medium-sized shipping organization, owned by Dong Wei, the heir to an old Chinese family. This shipping company only traveled on two extremely safe space routes, the Palia Route, and the Corriden Route. Corriden specifically has never had a report or incident of a raid, making it the preferred choice for many companies and travelers. The only notable feature of the Corriden Route was a large planet midway, named Mitte by a German who originally discovered it in the middle of his travels.

Mitte was considered worthless, as planetary scans showed that it had extremely low mineral and natural gas resources, and highly dangerous natural fauna as well. Not to mention that despite being the size of Jupiter, the gravity was closer to Earth's due to the low density of the planet. Overall the planet was considered useless, especially when others nearby were so bountiful.

However, it seemed to come back to bite them. No defense forces could reach the cargo frigate in time. They were on their own.

Shaking his supervisor out of shock, Jax urgently asked "Sir what do we do?".

The fat man came to his senses and pushed Jax off, shouting "What do you mean 'what do we do?', I'M getting out of here!"

Jax's supervisor then began sprinting at a pace that made all of the fat on his body slosh and jiggle. Had this not been such a dire situation, Jax would not have been able to hold back his laughter.

However, now he only had one thought on his mind.

"Run!"

At this moment the intercom came on again. The same mechanical female voice sounded off.

"ATTENTION ALL CREW! ATTENTION ALL CREW! BOARDING PARTIES APPROACHING!"

He needed to get to the escape pods as fast as possible. Familiar faces were running past him, making for their escapes just like him.

Jax was quickly knocked down by all his coworkers passing him, rushing to escape. The hallway towards the escape pods turned sharply to the right, showing the boarding area for the pods. However, Jax was far behind, and by the time he made the turn all he could see was the last pod launching out.

"They left without me..."

"How could they leave without me?"

These weren't the only escape pods on the ship, but the next closest would take him over 15 minutes to reach, and who's to say he could make it in time with the ship being raided.

The best thing that Jax could come up with at this moment was to return to the cargo bay and hide until rescue came.

Before turning back towards the cargo bay, Jax took one last look at the escape pods, only for his face to pale seeing that they were shot down and nothing but corpses floated in the emptiness of space.

"Cargo bay it is then" Jax said while attempting to hold down vomit.

The only consoling fact was that his only friend Alec wasn't among those floating lifelessly in space. It was possible that Alec was hiding somewhere on board, or made it out safely.

Running back, Jax was relieved that the hallway was still empty and that no pirates had boarded this section yet. He raced as fast as he could back to the cargo bay, all the while keeping an eye out for any pirates on his way. His luck must be in full swing today, as this bay where he worked was still empty for now.

He began searching the containers for a pressurized container where he could properly hide. The first had strange rabbit-like creatures in cages, which wouldn't hide him very well. The next was pressurized, but only had a small folding table with cards on it.

"I knew they were sneaking off somewhere" Jax muttered as he continued his search.

Right as Jax came up to another container, he heard the sound of a door sliding open and feet stomping into the cargo bay.

"Search the bay. There must be some good stuff in all this junk!"

Out of time.