When in doubt improvise

They found Ghorrax exactly where the Krothian’s dying eye had promised—in the station’s core, surrounded by a semicircle of cybernetically enhanced Brintax enforcers. The warlord himself was a mountain of scar tissue and outdated augments, his cybernetic tusks crackling with unstable energy. He was laughing at a holoscreen showing Vorax’s pack "ambushing" a shuttle full of human-shaped target dummies. "Predictable," Ghorrax rumbled, flexing a clawed hand over the detonator in his palm. "Now we wait for the real—"

Susan shot the detonator out of his grip. The needler’s round hit with a sound like a champagne cork popping, freezing Ghorrax mid-sentence. Every Brintax enforcer whirled toward the shadows where she’d fired from—just as Adam’s plasma cannon melted through the ceiling directly above them.

Susan's vision swam in and out of focus as she spat a mouthful of blood onto the deck plating. Something was wrong with her left arm—the way it hung limp at her side suggested either a dislocation or a fracture, maybe both. Across the smoldering wreckage of Ghorrax's command console, Adam dragged himself upright using the jagged remains of a Brintax spine as a crutch. His right leg was a mess of charred flesh and shredded uniform where a plasma burst had grazed him, the smell of burnt meat clinging to him like a second skin.