by Troy Osgood
That lasted about ten years. I came in on the tail end when I joined the service and well the war officially ended, the fighting did not. I kept busy in the ten years I was in EEF Special Operations. I’d only gotten out a couple years ago. Had enough of the crap. The orders, the missions. It was time I was on my own.
We all make choices in our lives that lead us to certain points in our journeys. It’s not always the big decisions that decide our course. Sometimes it’s the little choices we make. One of those little choices had led me here.
*****
The door to Kinn’s ship slid open and the lead pirate stepped through. I followed and stepped into a hallway. The hall ran left and right, probably around the perimeter of the ship with the functions inside and not along the hull. Left went to the bridge, right to engineering. Directly ahead was a large sliding door, probably going to the hold. This style ship had an elevator that lowered out of the bottom to load and unload cargo. I glanced behind me and saw the outline of a larger sliding door. At the edge of that door’s size, in the corridor in both directions, I could see blast doors that could close when needed to form an airlock.
A ship of this side needed a crew of about twelve and there would be another twelve or so pirates on board.
So say a minimum of twelve and a maximum of twenty-four.
I killed two, there was six on board the Wind including the captain, these two with me. So that left a possible two to fourteen pirates onboard the ship.
Hopefully no more Guykik. Those things are a pain to kill.
The pirate nudged me to the right and I went down the corridor. It wasn’t wide enough for two to walk next to each other but it wasn’t cramped. The Guykik, and even Kinn himself, could have brushed the sides. Too tight to do anything.
Large access was through the doors we had just entered or through the bottom so the engine room would connect to the hold. This corridor, and one on the other side of the ship and on the next level, would give access around the perimeter, ending at the engine room and probably up front at the bridge. That’s where most of the activity would be.
Fine with me, I didn’t need those areas for what I had planned anyways.
We stopped in front of a door on the left side of the corridor. The pirate in front hit a button on the keypad and the door slid open to reveal a dimly lit hall with doors lining both sides. The brig. The room and spacing of the doors indicated small cells, five by five and probably that deep. Nice and cramped. Three to a side. A quick look at the keypads outside each showed that none were in use, none of the pads showed locked.
I paused just inside the door, in range of the sensors so it wouldn’t close. The lead pirate continued, not paying attention, towards one of the doors. The one behind me stopped before bumping into me and nudged me with his weapon.
“Move,” he said.
I didn’t.
Now the one in front started paying attention. He turned and walked the couple steps back towards us.
“Move,” he said.
I still didn’t move and the one behind nudged me again. I stumbled forward, exaggerating the move. I fell towards the ground, tucking into a roll and came back up directly in front of the surprised pirate. He tried to move back but couldn’t. I planted a foot solidly, placed my second foot between his, grabbed his weapon, and twisted.
Surprised and off balance, tripping around my foot, the pirate fell into the motion of my pull. I threw him behind me, ducking down at the same time. I ripped the weapon out of his hand and felt the heat of the other pirate’s blaster bolt over where I had been. The first pirate hit the wall and I turned and dropped, now facing towards the door.
I fired and got lucky, my quick and unaimed blaster bolt striking the pirate in the chest. He fell, flying back against the far wall of the corridor. The bolt had been green, a stun blast, and I switched the weapon to lethal.
Standing up I shot the pirate still on the floor and then the one in the corridor. With one hand, I pulled that pirate into the room and searched them both quickly. Not much of value, no keycards or anything else but one of them did have a small vibroknife that I stuck into my pocket. Luckily both rifles had straps, so I hung one off my shoulder and stepped out into the hallway.
Left to engineering, right to the bridge and access to my ship.
I went left.
*****
Moving as quickly as I could, but keeping quiet, weapon ready, I made my way down the corridor. I encountered no one and it was a short distance to the door that led to engineering. Security was pretty lax, the door wasn’t locked. But then pirates weren’t known for their discipline and they had no cause to think anything was wrong.
The door slid open and I was assaulted by the noise.
All engine rooms are loud. The turbines, generators and other assorted equipment puts off a lot of noise and a lot of heat. The Nomad’s Wind room was quiet compared to this one. The Wind runs smooth, everything purring along. For the most part. But this engine room? There was stuttering to some of the generators, whines where there shouldn’t have been any, leaks from overhead piping.
I was surprised the ship was even running.
A large room taken up by lots of equipment, there was barely an order to the chaos. Enough space to move around and I could see the larger doors that led to the hold, the way that new pieces of machinery and computers got brought into the space. On the Wind, the engine room had its own hatch that opened up in the rear of the ship. This one, the Uinh Geriyu, handled everything through the lift in the middle of the ship.
I walked through the room looking for a specific terminal. The layout was different, not a build I knew, but things were usually kept pretty generic to make it easy to perform maintenance. Ship’s travelled all over the galaxy, you wanted to be able to get it worked on no matter where you were. There were plenty of truly unique ships in the galaxy, but for the most part things tried to be the same.
The terminal I wanted was on the other side and I had to make my way about the generators and drive motors. It consisted of two monitors, lots of dials and readouts and an input station. I started typing, bringing up the maintenance log and hoping it wasn’t codelocked.
It wasn’t but I also got distracted in the menus.
“Who are you,” a voice asked and I turned to see a Yurig standing about ten feet behind me. He was dressed in maintenance coveralls, a magwrench in hand. He didn’t look wary or cautious, just surprised. “What are you doing?”
“The ship is a little wobbly in the connection,” I said, making something up. “The Captain wanted me to come check to make sure we didn’t disconnect from that other ship.”
The Yurig stepped closer, tilting his oblong head in confusion.
“The coupler was checked last week when we made port,” he said and stopped. Now I saw surprise on his face, more confusion. “Who are you.”
I shot him. The blast took him by surprise, sending the Yurig falling against the motor. The wrench clanged against metal as it hit the motor and then the floor. A small trail of smoke drifted up from the wound.
Did I feel bad killing the Yurig? Nope. Not at all. He was a pirate, he chose this life and the consequences that came from that. These were people that were willingly going to sell me into slave labor on some asteroid somewhere. How many other people had they sold into slavery, hard labor or other even worse things? How many lives had they ruined?
With the rifle I rapidly scanned the engine room but didn’t see anyone. There were a lot of places to hide though. Had to make this quick.
I rapidly scrolled through the menu options and found what I wanted. I turned off all the overrides and safeties and cranked up the generators. I could hear the whine beginning. Satisfied I ran to the large doors looking for the keypad.
No time to be fancy, I just shot it. Sparks and pieces of the pad flew through the air, the pad completely useless. They wouldn’t be getting through that any time soon but now I had to move.
Back out in the
hallway I shot the outer keypad as the door slid shut. I could hear running feet now, a variety of sounds against the metal deck. I ran and made it back to the brig door, ducking inside and closing it before the noises ran past.
Leaning against the wall I popped the power pack from the second rifle and dropped the rifle to the ground. It landed where I wanted it to, on the body of one of the pirates. Helped muffle the sound of the metal weapon hitting metal deck. Taking the small vibroknife that I’d taken from the dead guy at my feet, I pried open the power pack. A little rewiring and it was good to go.
Opening the door, I looked both ways and the hallway was clear. Whoever had run by, had sounded like two or three different sets of beings, must be trying to open the door to the engine room. Stepping out, I turned left, back towards the engine room.
When walking that way I had noticed indentations in the wall. Indications of a blast door. Or so I thought. Only one way to find out.
I connected the last two wires together and could feel the power pack heating up in my hand. I tossed it beyond the indentation in the wall and turned, running the opposite direction.
It didn’t take long. The pack overheated and exploded. It was loud, the blast confined by the close walls of the hall. I could feel the shock wave, heat and force, against my back and then it stopped. The echo of a blast door slamming into place echoed down the hall.
It wouldn’t have been a big explosion, but being in the cramped space would help. I didn’t need it to be. Just needed to shut the blast doors and lock some people in the other side. Killing or hurting them was a bonus.
*****
I slowed as I neared where I had entered. The wider door was now open, on both sides, indicating that the pirates had been loading cargo from my ship to theirs. I could hear people talking excitedly, moving from the tube to ship’s hold. They were anxious, curious and worried. Wondering what the noises were. They had heard the sound of an explosion.
An alarm started to blare throughout the ship.
There was shouting now, sounding like Captain Kinn, and the noise of beings disappearing deeper into the hold. Which made sense. The sound of an explosion had come from the corridor, so the safer entry would be through the hold.
Some of the talking became screams and grunts, beings and objects slamming into the walls as the large ship tilted. It canted to the side, artificial gravity keeping people aligned with the floors. Loud noises; bangs, whistles and the grinding of metal; came from the engine room. The whines continued through the hull, the metal plates straining.
I had been expecting it to happen and I still slipped and slammed into the corridor’s side. Because I knew what was happening I was able to recover quickly, bracing myself with one foot on the floor and one on the wall.
New noises came from the transfer tube, metal straining. The Wind, because of its own thrusters and programming would stay where it was. The pirate’s ship, and attached tube, was starting to rotate at a different pace. Soon enough the tube would either pull the Wind with it or break apart.
I didn’t want either.
It was time to get off this ship.
It was an awkward walk, one foot on the floor and one on the wall, as I made my way to the tube. I couldn’t see anyone, all the noise indicating they were inside the hold. I almost fell as the ship righted itself, the pilot adjusting for the tilting. Normally a ship’s antigrav generator compensates for a ship spinning through space and approaching a planet upside down or on it’s side, keeping the occupants in what is considered upright and perpendicular to the floor. But it has a hard time doing that when someone sets it to overload so the generator wouldn’t compensate for the movements of the ship. Setting the thrusters to fire randomly wouldn’t help either.
Ships naturally rotate well in the vacuum of space. The Uinh Geriyu was doing just that. The strain I heard from the transfer tube was the larger Geriyu spinning at a different rotation with the Wind. It’s all pretty complicated and I’m not an Aeronautical Engineer, I just knew the basics, and what I knew was that the pilot wouldn’t be able to compensate for long and the tube would break or the larger ship would pull the Wind and destroy it’s thrusters.
I had to be on the Wind before that happened.
Stopping at the open doors I looked into the hold. I could see Kinn, that weird monkey thing hanging off his shoulder, yelling and screaming. Others moved around the door, some standing and watching. Humans, Yurigs and another Guykik. Kinn didn’t branch out much for his crew. The hold was a mess, crates where everywhere. Most were locked in place but others had not been. A couple had broken against the far wall and some of the crew were nursing obvious injuries. They all had their attention on trying to get into engineering and seemed to have forgotten the possibility of their prisoner having escaped.
Really lax. That should have been the first thing they checked.
I ran into the tube, wanting to get across before the pilot lost control.
The door to the Wind was open and I couldn’t see anyone in my ship’s hold but I kept the gun ready.
I leaned against the cold blue metal of my ship, feeling the familiar vibrations. Turning around the opening I looked in to see an empty hold. The pirates had taken the three crates I had picked up in Touy as well as the others that had been in the hold. Bastards. But that was okay, there hadn’t been anything of real value in them. At least they had been nice enough to take the dead bodies.
There had to be some pirates still on board. They were going to take my beautiful, to me at least, ship to salvage. But they weren’t in the hold. So just enough to pilot the ship? I didn’t like the idea of having to take back control of my own ship.
That would be relatively easy though. The hardest part was coming.
The tube locked onto the Wind from outside the ship. The controls on this side. With the tube disengaging, the Wind’s rear door would shut to keep the hold’s atmosphere intact. There wouldn’t be much time for me to get onboard.
That left one option and it was going to damage my ship. Someone was going to pay for that.
Stepping into the familiar hold of the Wind felt like coming home. The familiar creaks and vibrations.
Quickly I moved to a storage lock along the wall and took out a breathing mask and magline. I attached the magline to a connector plate to the left of the door, next to a grab bar mounted to the hull, and the other end to a plate on my belt. Turning my body to look both ways, towards the access to the Wind’s hold and down the tube, I pulled the power pack off the pirate’s weapon I had. Some quick fiddling and connecting of wires and I could feel it heating up in my palm.
A quick toss and it landed on the tube’s walkway.
I moved out of the way and held onto the grab bar, pulling the breathing mask on.
I hated this.
*****
The explosion wasn’t that loud or that big, not confined like it had been in the pirate’s ship. I could feel heat and wind as the blast wave extended into the Wind’s hold. Immediately I heard the alarms from the ship as a grinding noise came from outside the door. The tube was ripped off, straining and groaning.
It started small but as more of the tube fell away, the atmosphere was ripped out of the Wind. The vacuum of space pulled everything from the hold. The pirates had done me a favor emptying it. The noise was the rush of wind, which was odd that there was noise at all. Space had no sound but all that force rushing past the closing doors made the oddest whooshing noise.
I could feel myself being pulled towards the closing doors, tightening my grip on the bar.
The galley door opened, a pirate stepping out in surprise. It closed behind him, a couple small plates and forks sucking into the vacuum along with the pirate who didn’t have time to catch himself. He hurtled through the hold, screaming and thrashing, watching the void of space approaching.
The Wind’s door closed with a slam, the rush of escaping atmosphere stopping. The pirate dropped to the ground hard, his momentum carrying him furt
her. He slid across the floor and slammed into the hull. Before he could recover, a swift kick from me and he was knocked out.
I grabbed his weapon. Didn’t recognize the manufacturer. Some non-earth brand built for five fingered humanoids. Nowhere near as good as my Sig. I’m leery of those weapons designed for multiple species use, there’s always something wrong with them. But for now, it would do.
It even had a stun setting.
Which I used on the guy laying on the deck next to me.
No one else came running to see what the problem was, so that meant there was a good chance no one else was aboard. With the door closed and the tube ruined, I couldn’t see what was happening on board Kinn’s ship but at least it wasn’t connected to mine anymore.
I ran through the hold, my footsteps loud on the deck. I winced with each bang on the metal. But there was no time for quiet. I was on the clock. Through the door as quick as I could, ducking low, expecting blaster bolts but there was none.
The lounge was empty and a bit of a mess. The pirates had begun tossing it, emptying cabinets and looking for anything of value. Luckily they hadn’t had much time. There would have been plenty when they took the Wind to salvage but my sabotage had ruined those plans.
I could see into the galley, the door open. It was in a little better shape, they had just barely started going through the cabinets there. It was also empty. I moved quickly through the room checking the escape pod to be safe. Still there, no one hiding.
Quietly I went up the spiral stairs, pausing just as my head cleared the floor. I couldn’t see anyone down the short hallway and the door to the bridge was open. Someone there was whistling and tapping away on my keyboard. Probably screwing everything up too. I had the Wind perfectly where I wanted the controls set and now someone was messing with it. Would take me forever to get it right again.
Slowly, keeping an eye on the hall, I stepped up onto the level and made my way down to the intersection. I looked down the bunk corridor, all the doors still closed and showing red lights which mean the locks were still in place. Same with the door at the far end into engineering. Good. The pirates hadn’t gotten there yet. Probably saving it for the trip to where ever the salvage yard was.