"Long range comms are gone again, Mei." I said. "Something behind the panel blew up again."
There were no comments from Mei.
"Don't tell me... Is the short range working? Can you hear me?"
And, once again, the reply was silence. I tried to see Mei through the cockpit window, but she was in a blind spot on top of the shuttle. I hit the shuttle's walls rythmically so that Mei could notice that I was trying to communicate, since the sound would be transmitted through the shuttle's structure and Mei's spacesuit which should've been in contact with it.
Yet, I got no answer back. If she had heard me, she would've sent a message back by hitting the shuttle's walls back.
My last idea short of going out myself was to flash the shuttle's external lights, which would normally be lit to avoid spacecraft collisions in high-traffic zones. Unfortunately, that didn't work out either. Now, I was getting worried.
I left the cockpit and floated towards the airlock to get in a spacesuit. Once I was completely sealed off from the environment, the inner hatch of the airlock closed and the outer hatch opened, exposing me to the vacuum of deep space. Using the safety cord of the suit, I attached myself to a grab bar nearby and pulled myself out of the shuttle. Reaching the top side of the hull, I saw Mei just floating there, motionless. Parts of her spacesuit had been painted black, no doubt by the loosely attached antenna assembly in front of her that was practically obliterated by an explosion.
I pulled myself closer to the scene and caught her by her right arm. I then tried to drag her along with me towards the airlock, but I was suddenly stopped by an unexpected force. Of course, Mei also had her safety precautions, which involved being attached to the shuttle's hull by a safety cord of her own. Luckily, the cord could be released from the spacesuit-end as well, which I quickly took advantage of. Within a minute after that, we were both inside the airlock. The outer hatch was automatically closed and the airlock was repressurised.
I quickly removed my spacesuit to start working on removing hers. Her helmet and the environmental control backpack came off easily, but the rest of the suit was a bit more challenging. Parts of the suit seemed to have almost fused into her body. Afraid of harming her any further than she might already have been, I refrained from proceeding on my own.
I reached for the medical kit inside the airlock, before commanding the computer to help me out with basic first-aid procedures.
Mei regained consciousness while I was in the middle of examining her breathing, by caughing in my face and scaring the hell out of me.
"My chest hurts." she said. "My arms too, ouch!"
"You are lucky I was there in time." I said. "It looks like your spacesuit had been punctured."
"I feel like... dying." she moaned with a thin, barely audible voice. "That arcing really startled me."
"That wasn't a simple electric arc." I said. "The antenna assembly seems to have blown up in your face."
"Are there painkillers in there?" she asked, pointing at the medical box next to me.
"I think so, yes."
"Hand over. Please"
"We need to get help." I said, giving her a small dose of painkiller. "There is not much I can do to help, I'm not a doctor. I will ask for help from nearby passenger liners; they all, at least, have infirmaries. We are not too far away from shipping lines."
"Ask for hel- * cough*. Ugh."
"Easy, I'm listening."
"Ask for help with what?"
"Right..." I said. "I think I will have to forcefully intercept one, hopefully they will not get any wrong ideas. Our shuttle's max. acceleration should be more than enough to out-maneuver anything short of a Republic fighter."
"Can you carry me over to the port-side capsule?"
"Oh no, you are still bleeding!"
I patched up the remainder of her wounds exactly how the guide on the shuttle's computer instructed me to. Then, I helped her to settle into the port-side habitation capsule by gently pushing her around in zero-g. After that, I placed a few biological monitoring probes onto her body. That way, in case her situation worsened suddenly, I could get a warning from the computer.
"Stay calm." I said, and left her to get to the cockpit.
I activated the infrared sensor in an attempt to pick up IR waves from any nearby ships. It only took me a couple of minutes before I could detect a passenger ship in the middle of a course adjustment maneuver, which appeared as bright as a star on the display due to the heat it was generating. I locked the sensors onto the ship's heat emission signature to keep it in track, and created a set of high-acceleration maneuvers on the flight computer to bring us closer to it.
The shuttle's engines started up and slowly increased power, pressing me against my seat. I glanced at Mei's biological monitors to see whether the acceleration was having any negative effects on her status. So far, she was fine.
The shuttle's trajectory slowly changed to intersect with that of the passenger ship's. By doing this, we were probably triggering an alarm on their cockpit, indicating a hot, energetic chunk of metal about the size of a shuttlecraft was on a close-encounter course with them. The rest of the story was up to how the pilot-in-command of the vessel would react to that.
It wouldn't be very difficult to identify us as a shuttlecraft, so they would try radioing us first - but that obviously wasn't going to work. Then, would they allow the chunk of metal to get closer or would they try to divert in order to avoid the paperwork of a possible traffic accident?