"...Repeating! We have multiple bogies on a direct course for the Minnow! All crew to battle stations! All pilots to your fighters!"

Rolling out of bed, you rummage around the foot of your bed for your flight suit. You find it and reach inside of the jacket pocket looking for a communicator. You place the communicator to the side and get yourself into your suit. You grab your helmet and communicator, and run out of your room and head for the ready room.

Running down the hall, you put your communicator to your mouth and activate it. "Flight commander!", you yell into the automated comm. routing system. A moment later your communicator beeps.

"Flight commander Baldwin here sir," emerges  from the speaker.

After a split second decision, "Commander," you yell, "this is Alpha 1 of the 13th fighter squadron. I need an Athena with two Avengers, a bank of Interceptors and a bank of 5's." With interceptors and Phoenix Fives, you think you should be able to handle any attack.

"Is that all sir?" Squawks Baldwin.

"No, get a food ration into every cockpit, and make sure the pilots arriving know that they're there.

"Yes sir."

You continue running down past the ops center and onto the catwalk above the fighters. You spot yours in the front of the deck and run to the elevator and take it to the deck. You vault into your cockpit using a ladder that someone considerate had left on your ship. After sitting on a pizza flavored ration bar, you push the ladder away and it crashes to the deck. Moments later, your wing is ready for launch. You look out through the environmental containment field on the end of the flight deck, and past the superstructure of the Orion which is your home. You can already see the thruster trails of Shivan bombers in the distance. You call for launch status, and all four members of Alpha wing report ready. You power up your engines for an easy launch, as do your wingmen. Instead of gently gliding out of the hanger and along the flat exterior deck below you, you punch in your afterburners and tear out through space after the Shivans. When your wing reforms behind you, you bring your shields on-line. Three kicks out from the bombers, your control panel starts flashing that someone has weapons lock on you.

A missile is fired at you, and you simply swerve around it while launching countermeasures. By now, you are only one klick from the bombers and their escort. You arm a Phoenix and target a Nephelmn. As you tighten down on the trigger, a subspace hole opens just beyond the bombers. Out of it a Lilith appears. As soon as it clears the portal, all its turrets fire at the Terran fighters flying in perfect formation...

Part 2

The Phoenix blasts out of your missile bays, and immediately starts homing in on the bomber. It hits the Nephelmn in the rear shield quadrant. The shields buckle from the energy released, and collapses. You take a hit from the Lilith's salvo, and your forward shield drops. Before you can augment any energy to it, a second missile from the escorting Manticore wing impacts your hull.

Your target view goes static, and red warnings flash on your hull meter. "Sensors out!" you scream into the microphone in your helmet.

A frantic call for help comes back through the comm channel, "Mayday! This is Lieutenant Bogdan, the Minnow has been boarded by Shivans! One transport attached to dorsal docking clamp, and two Shivan bombers in the fighter bay, and disgorging dozens of Shivans! The bridge was the first target, and then came engineering. There's nothing our marines can do now! The attack was too quick!"

At that moment, all transmissions from the Minnow, be them targeting data, or communications, ceased. The Minnow turned around and faced the subspace node. The Shivans you had been engaging, were gone.

In a flash of blue light, the Minnow, your home, was gone.