On the Codex writers’ forum, in a discussion about characterization, author Rick Novy said, “I’d love to know what Huck Finn would do if forced into* an airlock by Klingons.”
My response:
WELL, I catched my breath and most fainted. Throwed out of a wreck by such a gang as that! But it warn’t no time to be sentimentering. We’d GOT to find that ‘scape pod now–had to have it for ourselves. So we went a-quaking and shaking down the stabboard side, and slow work it was, too–seemed a week before we got to the stern. No sign of a pod. Jim said he didn’t believe he could go any further–so scared he hadn’t hardly any strength left, he said. But I said, come on, if we get left on this wreck and it warps we are in a fix, sure. So on we prowled again. We struck for the stern of the bird o’ prey, and found it, and then scrabbled along forwards on the deflectors, hanging on from emitter to emitter. When we got pretty close to the cross-hull airlock there was the pod, sure enough! I could just barely see her. I felt ever so thankful. In another second I would a been aboard of her, but just then the airlock opened. One of the Klingons stuck his head out only about a couple of foot from me, and I thought I was gone; but he jerked it in again.
Alas, the above is not an example of my ability to write like Mark Twain. I merely tweaked a passage from Huckleberry Finn.
*I originally misread this as “forced out of.”