"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Damien's breath was slow and almost laboured within the chamber of the drop canon. It didn't quite accommodate the width of his shoulders, and so he had to squash himself in to fit. Strange that they should still have this problem. Onboard the UNSC Daedalus, Damien was the only one of the crew able to use the drop cannon, and he thought ONI would have at least got a fitting launch canister when they fitted the drop canon itself to the ship.
He gripped two handles, vice-like, though he felt no strain. His locked gauntlets held onto exit frame, a bulbous and angular chunk of technology with a ring of holes around it. Aside from the lights of his HUD, he was unable to see anything. Of course not, there's nothing in the visible spectrum in open slipstream space. The only indication that he had even left the Daedalus came in the form of a dull bump as his suit absorbed the sudden departure from the ship. Without engines acting in slipspace, Damien rapidly shed velocity, and he felt an increasing gravity to his side as a result of the acceleration. How far had he fallen since launch, a second ago? Forty thousand kilometres? More?
Suddenly, Jupiter.
Damien fell out of slipstream space with a four-dimensional speed of four thousand kilometres a second. He bathed in the majesty of the gas giant and all its surface turbulence for half a second, much longer than was needed for a brain that worked at the speed of a Spartan-II. With pre-programmed motions of his suit, he executed half a flip, and brought his legs down to face the planet, as a white glare exploded above his head, triggered by the firing of command nodes in Damien's neural implant. He was down to a thousand kilometres per second by the time he saw his target, previously lost against the massive and awe-inspiring background of Jupiter.
UNSC Hades' River. Silent, for the last three days, steadily drifting in a decreasing orbit around Jupiter. All remote efforts to commandeer the ship had failed, reason: unknown. The Daedalus had intercepted inbound insurrectionist warheads - old FENRIS style ones, nine of them - and the crew that carried them. Actually, that wasn't quite right. Damien had taken care of them. The Daedalus had just flown close enough through slipspace to silently drop Daedalus onboard.
The same day, news of the Hades' River's inactivity had come to them. A quick sleep, an even faster feed, and Damien was stuffed back into the drop canon with another launch canister and exit frame. Currently, that exit frame brought him alongside Hades' River, nearest to where he estimated the fighter bay to be. He touched his feet to the chunky, closed doors of the bay, and a series of static magnets came online, powered by the piezoelectric effect and Damien's own impact with the side of the ship. He took a general survey around him, with no sign of battle or damage. Damien removed from the small of his back a flat disc four inches wide, and unspooled from it a fine cord. Taking two metres of it, he spun the disc above his head in an ellipse, then smacked it down to the hull, where it settled, flush to the surface.
Through the elliptical spin, the change in tension magnitude and direction - via the piezoelectric effect - set up a current in the cord, which was fed to the disc, now acting as an electromagnet. Damien then let the cord come out to its full length of one hundred metres, and kicked off from the ship. Using the cord and disc like a grappling hook and rope, Damien flung his way around the exterior of the ship, inspecting for any damage whatsoever. Nothing of the sort, and the only thing out of the ordinary was all but one of the escape pods had been ejected. Damien pried open the shutter over one of the fired ports, flashed a set of ONI credentials through flashes of light from a torch on his helmet, and entered the airlock. Seconds later, he felt ship gravity take effect, and sound return. Switching from contained to external air, Damien stepped on board the Hades' River.