Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, etc. belong not to me, but to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and Fox, and no money is being made here. The story, however, is mine.

“This was supposed to be easy, Eddie,” Libby said as we approached atmo almost an hour later.

“Well,” I started, trying to shed some positive light on this, “at least it was fun.”

“You call having the wrath of an Alliance cruiser on you fun?” Libby reached up and tied a bandage around my left shoulder. It bled more than a wound that size should, but it had stopped.

I was about to answer when I heard a beep from my console. “We’re entering atmo.” This slowed us down immensely, enough for the gunships to catch up to us. I turned on the comm. “Tobias, get ready to leave.”

I turned my attention now completely to flying my boat. “Libby, get rear weapons ready.

Another thing I never told you about Libby, she is connected to the ship via a wireless connection. She can control anything electronic on this ship, and that includes the servos operating the exterior machine guns. In fact, the name Libby is short for Liberty, as she essentially is the ship. That’s another reason I built her. I needed someone else to help me run Liberty . Also, the AI brain comes in handy targeting and shooting at multiple bandits like we had here.

Anyhow, she stared into space. A few seconds later, something lit up on my console. It was telling me that weapons were ready to come out of their hiding places at a moment’s notice. “Eddie, should we deploy the cannon?”

I pondered that for a second. “No, we’d lose the element of surprise. It deploys facing forward, then I’d have to turn it around to face the rear. Plus, cannon shells are almost useless at this speed in atmo.” I pulled hard on my flight stick as we approached the upper layer of breathable air. This is where clouds start to form. “Tobias, get out of here!”

I looked through my rear view. On the starboard side was the shuttle quickly letting the friction of atmo flip it to an