The pounding in her head matched with the downbeat of her frantic footsteps.

Passing the fried monitors and the bodies sprawled across the floor, she silently acknowledged how the lack of lighting was probably a good thing.  With the main generators down, the corridors of the prison were cast in the faint, glowy, red light of the emergency power.  The excessive shadows cloaked the faces of the bodies, hiding the identities of her fallen crewmen. Which were numerous. 
Crewmen.  Dead.  Her crewmen dead.  Her crewmen dead because of her lack in judgment.  This had happened before, but never this bad.  There’d be hell to pay back at Earth Capital, where she’d at least face a trial, or, at worst, termination.  This mission was a failure.
But none of that mattered right now.
Right now, there was only one crewman she cared about, and she had to save her.
A sharp pain tore through Tesla’s abdomen, making her hiss and her eyes tear.  She increased her speed.  The pain doesn’t matter, she thought. I can collapse and die once this is all over, but not a second before then.  She didn’t have a choice.
Because if she gave into it, if she caved and stopped, it’d bring pain worse than any physical injury.
If she couldn’t do this-
No.  She wouldn’t even think about that, because that wasn’t an option.
A crackle came from her waist as she received an incoming message on her droid phone.
“Captain!”, a deep voice shouted through the device.  But instead of being intimidating or menacing like it should have been, the voice was higher pitched due to fear and desperation. “We have to get you out of there!”, the voice continued.
“No.”  Tesla growled, as she came to a stop.  Here.
“Starcorps set our departure at 2100 hours-”
“There’s still time.”  she interjected, tapping madly at the the display screen of one of the few computers left intact.
“Ten minutes, captain!  What’re you going to do with ten minutes?!”  the head engineer yelled, but by this time Tesla just tuned him out and focused.
“You do not teleport me out of here until you have both mine and Kiara’s signatures to latch onto.”
“Captain-”
“That’s an order.”. She turned off the phone.
The planet’s natives were advanced enough to temporarily immobilize her spaceship.  They had all communications cut off until two hours ago, when Tesla and Kiara shot up the tower that was transmitting the interference. But shutting down the transmission alerted the nearby guards. After the fight that in sued, Tesla woke up in a dark, damp cell, her First Officer gone.  These aliens were intelligent and cruel, but their computer systems weren’t much more than that of Earth.  Tesla was confident her hacking skills would be enough to shut down the energetic barrier that blocked Kiara’s signature from the transporter.
They had to be.
The first few firewalls were easy to bypass.  Subsequent walls and encryption codes were a little more difficult, but after translating into the native language (she had been taught the basic linguistics after she was assigned the mission), she was in the system.
Yes!, she thought, Now to locate the power line that connects to the jail cell. After successfully finding it, she traced it, punched in the last codes and-
nothing.
The screen went black, shutting itself off.
Crap, crap, crap, she hadn’t expected the software to be so sensitive!  What now?  She thought for a moment, scrambling, and fear started to rise again, stealing her breath.
No, no, no, this can’t be it-
And then she got it.
Of Course!  Every computer system in the universe had a reboot.  After initiation, Tesla estimated she had about a minute when the entire place would have no power.
She turned her phone back on.
“Alex, how much time?”
“Three minutes, twenty-eight seconds.”
“Be on standby for dematerialization.”
“Aye.”
Tesla spent fifteen seconds moving to another computer.  Starting the reboot was more difficult than she had anticipated, but she wasn’t considered a hacking legend for nothing.  After the last few codes, she hit the Enter button, and could feel the time slipping by, each second increasing the chance that this wouldn’t work, that it’d be too late...
And then: BOOM.  Or, lack thereof. 
With all systems shut down, Tesla was sheathed in darkness.  She found herself running, again, not stopping until she reached the prison door, now open.  She ran inside, and wrapped her arms around her First Officer.
“Now, Alex!” she yelled into her phone.  She had closed her eyes, but she could still feel the telltale sensation of being dematerialized.
When she heard the hustling of her crew and the humming of her ship’s engines, she knew that she was safe on the transportation decks. Still, she didn’t open her eyes.  Instead, she tensed her arms around her First Officer, the fear that she’d buried inside herself during the rush clawing its way back out.
Too close, she thought.
Way too close this time.
“Tesla,” a weak voice said, making her open her eyes.
Her fear disappeared again when it was quickly replaced by anger, brought on by the sight of her First Officer’s, her friend’s, condition.  Seeing Kiara cut, bruised, and bloodied made her want to go back down to the planet below and presume to beat the daylights out of any living creature she could get her hands on.
Kiara seemed to have noticed this, and replied with a look that said ‘that is ridiculous and I will not permit you to commit such an illogical act-”
Suddenly the doors to the transport deck opened, and behind them shot out a white blur, followed by two gurneys and what might as well have been a medical swat team.  What would you even call that, a medical swat team.  A Swedical?
As Tesla and Kiara gingerly stood up, a man in a white lab coat started to lecture at them over how irresponsible and unbelievable all the was; “God, Tesla, what happened to the Prime Order?! You know, that thing that says not to interfere with other civilizations? The thing that is only mentioned whenever you break it?”.  The entire thing would have been more threatening had the man’s eyes not been glistening with the tears that threatened to over spill.
“Crisp, we’re fine, really-” was as far as Tesla got, but then the floor decided to move sideways, and she couldn’t catch it with her feet in time.  She did not know how, but somehow she ended up on the floor, with medical personnel surrounding her in an instant.
Weird, how without the adrenaline pushing her on, Tesla realized how tired her body really was.  And the pain, oh god, so much pain-
Kiara was hovering above her, her face blatantly expressing worry on her sharp features. 
This for some reason made Tesla felt relieved, because as long as Kiara was okay, that was all that mattered.  She let her vision blur, and welcomed the darkness losing consciousness brought.