We sat there and stared at that world in awe for a moment. It looked more like the Earth I remembered from my zero-g training than the slate grey communist orb we'd narrowly escaped. The continents were all wrong, but the general vibe was mostly water, nice green land. Clouds, and ice on the poles.

  Rembrandt headed back up to the ship they'd attached and ran some scans. 200 years more advanced sensors up there.

  "Passive scanning shows a breathable atmosphere, might be a touch more oxygen than we're all used to, but not to a dangerous level. Almost no artificial chemicals in the atmosphere. Looks like an untainted paradise. Possibly Stone age life forms."

  "An untainted paradise planet is where the giga-brain AI that does galactic war with Disney lives?"

  "Or it did two hundred years ago, who knows what's happened since then." Terraphiny said. "This plan lives on a shell and a prayer."

  "Oh whoa! There are some crazy power signs popping off down there. Oh shit, up here too." Rembrandt reported the sensor findings down to us in the RarDrive ship.

  A ship decloaked dead ahead. No... an Orbital platform decloaked...

  "Oh man, I hope our cloak holds." Rembrandt said, ensuring it wouldn't. "Their scanners are doing a sweep. Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck! They're scanning us."

  "Is that ship up there capable of a planetary landing?" Nyany asked.

  "Yeah, of course." Came the reply from Sofonisba.

  "And the cloak on it probably works better when it's not trying to cover this bucket too, yeah?" Nyany followed up, but she already knew the answer and was busy shuffling all of us up into the other vessel. All the people, and the eggs. No one left behind.

  "Certainly damn well better. I paid enough for it." Terraphiny grumbled as she was hauled up the ladder by our children while I lifted from below.

  Just as she got up and aboard the other ship there was a jostle, but this time the gravity grid remained engaged.

  "They've hit us with a tractor beam and are pulling us in." Rembrandt called out.

  "Get on the other ship." Nyany told me, "I have to do something real quick."

  "You're not doing anything crazy are you?"

  "Oh sweetie. I certainly am." She kissed me on the forehead and pointed up. "Go go go, I'll be right behind you!"

  She dashed back to the cockpit and started punching commands into the console. I felt the gravity plates strain, we started to rotate inside the tractor beam.

  I was barely up the hatch into the other ship when she came flying in behind me at full cat-zoomies speed. She slammed the hatch shut and yanked the emergency disengage.

  "Punch it Remmy!" She shouted, and the ship we were now aboard surged away at what was probably a hundred g's of acceleration. That planet started coming at us awful fast. I felt a slight swaying in the ship as the grav grid kept us from being turned into paste.

  I looked out the nearby window up at the RarDrive ship, still being tractored in, and then there was a rainbow streak across the sky in the shape of both the Rardrive ship, AND the orbital platform.

  "What the hell just happened?" I asked.

  "They wanted to tractor the Rardrive, but the way it works, with equal and opposite reactions and..." She looked at me like I was just realizing I was an idiot, "Do you even know how the Rardrive works?"

  "It works pretty well from the look of things." I gestured out the window at the fading rainbow there in space. "But no."

  "Well, it's probably going to be towing that orbital platform with it for two hundred light years, foisted by its own tractor beam forcing them to remain in the same reference frame." Nyany chuckled to herself. "No one scruffs me."

  We flew down toward the planet with our cloak seemingly working. Then we hit the upper atmosphere going way too fast.

  "Funny, I thought a turtle was flying." Nyany said, slipping between everyone and up toward the cockpit of the cramped craft.

  The cloak might hide us in space, but the friction of such a high velocity reentry unhid twice as effectively.

  "Fuck this. I'm using active scanners." My four hundred something year old blushing bride said.

  Jesus. Cat people live a long time. Wait... am I even... legal? for her. Oh god, interspecies dating ethics... I don't think I covered that in mission training.

  "There is a ton of life on this planet. The biodiversity factor is off the chart, literally. This graph it's trying to display is all jacked up because the number is so high."

  "Whoa look at them!" Rembrandt zoomed in the view on a pack of... tribal horse people? Way more people than horse. They had been the other way around on the dating show. Tiffineigh was not my type, what with the horse head. These people were more hoofed humanoids with horse tails, and horsey ears than the horsinoid hominid I met before.

  This was the planet of the umamusame, not the bojacks.

  I glanced up and notice something... not natural. The nearby mountain seemed to be opening.

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  "What is that?" I directed everyone's attention to what I saw. Something the size of a mountain shouldn't be able to open so quickly. That looked like a bigass laser gun to me.

  "Ohhhhh shiiit!" Rembrandt yanked back on the yoke and slammed the throttle full forward, but it was too late.

  We had started to pull away, but the mountain fired a blue orb of some sort at us, and it tracked us down real good.

  Nyany took command.

  "Fucking DIVE! Idiot!" Nyany shouted. "We're gonna crash, that shit will power us down for sure! Choose where!"

  She's the new Captain I think, and I'm just Captain Pantigris' trophy husband now. Damn, I married a badass. Go me.

  "Fine! I will dive, but don't care if you married my dad! You're not my real Mom!" Rembrandt quipped as he flew. "Don't tell me what to do!"

  The kid was actually more than a decent pilot. He dove our ship low and ran us through some forest and canyons attempting to evade the tracking orb.

  When it became apparent the ball wasn't stopped or slowed by trees or bits of canyon walls. Nyany instructed him to get us low and slow, before that blue ball caught up to us.

  Rembrandt flipped us one-eighty and did his best to slow us down near the ground before the ball hit us.

  It hit and powered us down; all the way down. My confidence that everything would be alright shattered when the grav grid gave out. Someone shouted "We're all gonna die!" In my voice. We still had a more than a hundred meters* until the deck. Plenty of fall enough to kill a man.

  *(YEAH meters! I'm an astronaut. Also American, I guess, if there even is an America left that isn't just a part of Disney Corp. Kinda hard to imagine there still being a recognizable United States with capitalism banned on Earth. Anyway it's the future now, I'm ditching the freedom units for reason units. Besides, the ship reported things in meters, and while I'm good at math, I'm not that good in my head.)

  Well, it was a real short zero G ride as we fell toward the planet, because only couple seconds later we were caught by a tractor beam fired from that same mountain, turned techno-marvel, and it started drawing us in.

  "Fuck fuck fuck. Cycle the power systems." Nyany wasn't panicking, she was... in a state of elevated concern. Yeah... lets go with that. Her tail was all puffed up though.

  "I already did that!" Rembrandt replied. "No joy. I think we're boned, fam."

  We got to enjoy a nice slow ride over there... at least it felt slow from inside the ship, up high. When we got lower I realized we were being pulled in at what was probably a little faster than freeway speeds, zipping over the treeline.

  I looked out the window and there was a whole herd of horse people racing along the ground with us. Hot damn they are fast... where are they going? Oh... where we're going, right.

  The mountain had a very, lone volcano feeling to it. Like Fuji or Tohoma, but unlike Earth's great old volcanos this had a bunch of weird blue technology all up in it, glowing and pulsing and such.

  The mountain brought us to a hover about midway up, where a sort of landing platform for our shuttle protruded from the slope. It set us down gently, but there were thousands of those equus sapiens swarming up the mountain's base toward our shuttle as it was coming in.

  From what we had seen, they wore simple woven clothing and carried spears. The stone age assessment seemed correct, for them. The mountain on the other hand, maybe not so much.

  Speaking of, by the time it set us down it had folded its whole top closed and once again looked like a regular volcano mountain. Nice slope up to the top, presumably a caldera full of lava waiting at the up there.

  Emergency power kicked on. Not enough power for engines or anything useful for getting away or fighting, but life support worked, and so did some sensors. Outside readings of the atmosphere showed the earlier assessment seemed accurate down here on the ground too. No weird spores or unexpected pathogens in the air. Just nice clean air.

  It didn't take long for the locals to arrive. Nyany had locked the doors as soon as we landed, and I was glad she had because from the moment we could hear them outside, the horse people were trying to open the door.

  When the buttons outside failed to work, they started resorting to violence. First, they tried to jam spears in the doors seals, and when that failed some threw rocks at us.

  "Does it seem to anyone else like this maybe isn't the first space ship they've tried to crack open?" I asked.

  "We should be fine. This ship has a strong shell." Terraphiny said.

  They started covering the camera ports on the outside with mud.

  "They seem to be blinding us." Leonardo said, from the corner where he'd been hiding out. "Should we sally forth, blasters out?"

  Everyone looked at me. Oh shit, I was still the Captain. "No. If they can't get to us, let's just wait them out a little. Maybe whoever has the technology will come fetch us and no one will have to die."

  Once we were good and blind the banging ceased.

  We sat there, waiting. The silence grew and grew until I could hear my every heartbeat.

  Then all at once the furious stamping of hoofed feet and hooting and hollering of voices began.

  I almost missed it, but Nyany heard it immediately, it was her body language that cued me in. Something had landed on the roof and scraped across the ship. Suddenly the ship jerked.

  "What was that?" Someone said.

  Another thing scraped over the top of the ship, and we jerked again, this time moving further.

  This happened three or four more times before the jerking pulling motion started to fall into a steady rhythm. As we we moved the mud fell from one of our camera eyes to outside.

  "They're pulling us up the mountain." Rembrandt reported.

  "So? Blasters, dad?" Leonardo asked. He had produced a small blaster pistol of some sort.

  "Uhh, I guess so?" As soon as the words left my mouth the horse people outside kicked into another gear and we all got thrown together in a heap in the back of the ship. "If we can even get out of the ship that is."

  Nyany was the first one up to the hatch to try to open up and get us a firing arc, but when she tried to open the door, "Terra, it says I need your permission for a safety override, you're the captain to this ship's computer, right?"

  "Safety Override Approved!" She shouted, and the door slid opened.

  There were nets over the whole ship, and they certainly were dragging us uphill pretty fast. Many horses make light work.

  If I had to guess I'd say we were going thirty-five, maybe forty miles an hour. Okay fine, I'll keep some freedom units.

  Nyany put her retractable claws to use and started slashing at the nets trying to clear some space for us to maybe jump out before we went over the edge of the volcano above.

  A spear thrown from someone in the crowd of running horse people dragging up the mountain stopped Nyany from her work, and the whoops and hollers of the mob let everyone know the door was opened. Nyany closed the door again and we heard a clatter of a dozen or more spears hitting space ship hull.

  "I don't think we can get out that way!"

  The horse people slowed down our ascent, but the angle they had us at left us all standing on the walls. Only Rembrandt remained strapped in the pilot's seat.

  When we reached the lip of the caldera they pushed us up to the edge, and with the one partially clear camera we could see the molten destination waiting for us.

  As we dangled there on the edge of death, a single voice called out. My translator wasn't programmed with her language, but she sounded commanding. The rest were brought to silence by her words... at first. She spoke for a moment, I hoped, imploring her fellow sapient beings to show mercy on us.

  They all let out whoops and hollers, and then cleared the aft camera of its mud covering, so that we could see that they had strapped a horse girl to our ship. She looked proud. She shouted something back toward them, and that was definitely the same voice, defiant to the last!

  We were one big happy clusterfuck, all about to die: me, my cat girl and turtle waifus, the teenage mutant ninja family, and the horse girl strapped to the outside.

  We all screamed together as we went over the ledge.