“Sure thing,” Jessica answered as she turned to exit.

“How long do you think we can hang around out here?” Cameron asked.

“We’re probably okay for a day or so,” he admitted. “But to be honest, the sooner we get a few light years between us and Haven, the happier I’ll be.”

Nathan and Jessica entered the main briefing room located one deck below the command section. Large enough to hold fifty people in five rows, it seemed almost empty compared to how full it had been during his orientation briefing nearly a month ago. Now, it contained only a handful of strangers-aliens, in fact-who were stranded on board his ship with no way to return to their homes.

Josh and Loki sat at the back of the room, their feet dangling over the chair backs in front of them. The two pilots of the now twisted and mangled harvester, still lying in ruins on the Aurora’s flight deck, seemed to be enjoying themselves, despite all they had been through over the last couple of hours. Marcus, the harvesting crew foreman sitting next to them, did not seem as entertained by the situation.

The others, three men and two women, sat apart from the rest. They had all served as indentured workers under contract with the harvesting team that Tobin had hired during their brief stay in the Haven system. It appeared that they had no interest in socializing with the technical crew of their shared employer. They all appeared beaten and disheveled, having gone through more than a full day of labor, not to mention having watched their fellow workers die at the hands of Ta’Akar troops attempting to take over the ship. In fact, many of them still wore the blood of those who died around them during the slaughter.

Nathan stepped onto the platform at the front of the room. He chose to stand beside the podium instead of behind it, not bothering with the public address speaker system built into the room. There were only a half dozen or so of them, and Nathan felt that a more intimate approach would be appropriate. In retrospect, he wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to have the meeting in the command briefing room on the deck above, as it might have been better suited.