Chương 29: Chapter Twenty-Eight - Easy Meal

The kindly pirates of the Convent were expecting an easy meal. The Held Together wasn't a great catch. It was like bagging a rabbit when you wanted a deer. To the pirates, this rabbit in particular looked like it had a limp, a missing ear, and was maybe sickly before they even caught it. The usual process was simple. Get in the ship, clear out the crew, toss those that survived in cages. The VIPs got their own little boxes, or the airlock, depending.

Sometimes a client wanted a VIP dead, and there was no dead quite like 'ejected from an airlock then fired at with an anti-ship gun.' Once cleared of crew and passengers, the captured ship was scoured clean. That involved a team of expert mechanics and engineers and deconstruction-specialists. They even had an explosive ordnance specialist, in case the ship was booby trapped. They could strip a ship of cargo and anything worth removing in a matter of hours.

Then, if the ship was still in a condition to fly around, the next step was moving it to a berth in orbit around the station. There was a market for ships obtained via less-than-legal means. If the ship wasn't flight-capable, or not worth the trouble to repair, it would be up to the crew of the Convent to decide what to do with it. Some were turned into weapons platforms to protect the station. Others were rendered down for scrap.

Ivil imagined that the fate of the Held Together was supposed to be something along those lines. The vessel was far too old to be worth repairing. The choice wouldn't matter, in the end, because the people who were supposed to make that choice would soon be... otherwise occupied. The outer airlock slid open on well-oiled mechanisms, and Ivil found herself walking into a relatively large room.

The far wall had tool chests and cubbies for equipment on the floor and ceiling, the centre had a large window looking into a control room. There were a few doors leading deeper into the station, and a few bays where some smaller industrial craft were parked. A set of barricades were placed just outside of the airlock, giving the waiting team of pirates a place to find cover if things went sideways for them. The crews deeper in the room, hanging out with coffees in hand, didn't look like the usual piratical sort.

Just normal shift-workers that could have been on any old dock.

"Oh, shit!" one of the pirates behind the barricade said as she brought her gun up. Another, with a flashier, better decorated spacesuit, gestured towards Ivil.

"Hands in the air!" she barked.

"No," Ivil said. Without an audience (that she cared about) she didn't mind cutting loose a little. A gun went off, but its rounds stopped long before striking her. Then the gun, and the others in the hands of her assailants, were crushed into small bundles of scrap metal. The pirates screamed, some of them because they still had fingers in to trigger guards of those guns when they were crushed. She didn't have much sympathy for them. Still... just in case that the pirate woman she'd overheard earlier was...

important, she decided to spare their lives and merely cut off their ability to pump blood into their brains for a few moments. Minor brain damage and some broken fingers was hardly worth making a fuss over. Ivil stepped past the barricades, then glanced to the far end of the room where the waiting mechanics were now scrambling to escape. She let them. Her interest was fixed on the command room above where someone was calling for help over what was probably an intercom system linked through the station.

That was where she'd need to be, then. Ivil hopped forwards, allowing the lack of gravity to finally let her float off the floor. She knew that there had to be a way around and into the command room. Her way--through the inch-thick glass--was much faster. A few more pirates shot at her with small arms. Ivil rendered the bullets safe by draining them of kinetic energy long before they struck her. When they did, it was with the force of a particularly lazy mosquito. Not even enough to crease her blouse.

The pirates in the command room were soon clutching at their throats and floating out of their seats as she bid them good night. Most of them were in jumpsuits, but a couple had button-up shirts and were dressed well enough that they could have fit in the average office. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it She supposed that even pirates needed comptrollers and accountants and people working the kind of system that didn't involve shooting up innocents.

Ivil found the communication system off to one side. It was a computer linked into the entire station's network. The touch-screen had labels across dozens of stations across the ship. At the moment, it was linked to a central location in the main block of the station, right in the centre of it all.

"Vagrant? Vagrant, come in?" Ivil's eyebrows perked. She intended to reply, but not just yet. First she walked over to another station, this one the navigation-assistance station where one of the now-unconscious workers had been sitting. The computer there had the beacons and controls designed to guide ships into the berth the Held Together was not occupying. It also had systems for two more berths further out. It seems as if the entire arm of the station was controlled from here.

She imagined that the same layout could be found elsewhere, then, with each one of the arms of the station having its own small control centre linked to the station's central hub. It was a design philosophy that she'd seen before, and it made a certain amount of sense. More even, if she considered that the various pirate crews using the station might not all agree with each other. If they all had strong independent streaks, then it only made sense to keep them a little apart.

She tapped on the navigation console, backing out of the current menu, then frowned at the software's layout. It was not what she was used to, which was the rather cluttered but intuitive layout used on Martian ships. This was some bespoke software, and it took her a moment to find a local map with IFF locators and a list of nearby ships. The two vessels that had followed the Held Together to the station were docked already, both of them linked to one of the arms connected directly with the centre of the station.

The one she was at now was on the fringes. She'd have to walk some ways to get to the main part of the station. Still, it made it far more likely that the attractive pirate captain she'd spoken to earlier was important, if she was able to dock her ship right to the centre. That was usually how this kind of place's hierarchy worked out. A pirate started to cough as he regained consciousness, and Ivil idly forced the air out of her lungs as she returned to the station-wide communication system.

She picked up a headset from one of the pirates and placed it on her head distastefully. She didn't like having a microphone that had been so close to someone else's mouth near hers, but needs must.

"Hang on, Vagrant, we have a team coming in from Angel squadron," someone said over the line.

"Don't bother," Ivil replied.

"Instead, I would much rather have you link me to the captain of the... hmm, I believe it was the Amelia Earhart?"

"Who is this?"

"Never you mind," Ivil said.

"Link me to the nice captain, if you would please. I think her name was Rouge Herring? I think. I'm operating in the dark here, so to speak." Ivil paused, then sighed as she felt the pressure in the room changing. Someone was venting this entire section of the station. It was actually a valid tactic. There was a reason that most people couldn't use traditional guns on a station or ship in the vacuum of space, or use Core-given powers that were too destructive.

"That won't work on me," Ivil said into the microphone. She didn't care that the quickly dissipating air meant that her voice couldn't carry. It did so anyway because she told it to. The pirates and support crew left in the room slowly started to die out. She noted that none of them had any Cores to collect, which was really too bad, but not unexpected.

Then the screen lit up before her, and Ivil found herself staring into the burning, angry eyes of that rather attractive pirate captain she was intending to meet very soon.

"Why hello," Ivil said with as kind a smile as she could manage.

"I've been looking forward to talking to you."