Escape Velocity

The trooper held his burn. I could feel him tapping sideways to keep up with the boarding tunnel continuing to flex, all while the delta-vee kept piling up. My inner ear, confused, suggested that we were flying up out of a well, with the ship below and the doors above while we hurtled upwards. To distract myself, I tilted my head to look back down the tunnel.

I had one brief view of the Distant Mountain continuing to fire its engines, then something gave and the end of the tunnel was whipping backwards with releasing tension. Indescribable metallic noise, and then the most dreaded of sounds - outgassing.

No longer sealed against the ship's hull, the tunnel was a cylinder of pressure with an open end. Air rushed out, hitting us with a gale-force wind that drowned out my thoughts.

I looked back up at a new cacophony of tortured metal. More gassing, then the sound of metal much closer. I jerked to a stop in the embrace of my trooper, who himself had been caught by the hulking mass of a mechanised suit.