“That’s not the question you really want to ask. The question you really have is…”
“Who am I?”
“You,” he says, “are trouble. That is all you really need to know about yourself. Now, I want you to stay in this room until we have finished our escort mission. Please. For me.”
I almost do what he asks. I swear I do. But the temptation to see if I can wriggle out of the bonds is too high, and about twenty minutes after he leaves, it turns out that I can.
And then, though I could make absolutely any other decision, I go to the bridge. I have my reasons.
Sligtonians are one of the very few aliens I know not to like. They’re slave traders. They abduct humans. And frankly, right now, I’m looking for a fight.
I sneak onto the bridge and stay quiet at first. They are clearly tracking another ship, which is on screen and very much Sligtonian in appearance. It has green and yellow stripes and a sort of penis and balls appearance to it. The balls in the rear are where they keep their cargo. The thick head is, well, I don’t know. At any rate, it looks ridiculous.
At first, I’m afraid the whole mission is going to go smoothly and nothing very terrible is going to happen to them.
I have a real sense of satisfaction when I see them start to come under attack as three ships with red and gold spiky protrusions zoom out of the dark ether. They surround the Sligtonian ship and start threatening them. I know this because the audio is piped right from the Sligtonian ship into ours.
“Come to a halt and prepare for boarding, Sligs! We’re taking your stuff.”
“It’s our stuff, and you can’t have it,” the Sligtonian captain responds. “We have guards.”
“How many guards?”
“Enough?” The Sligtonian captain really doesn’t seem that confident.
“We’ll take our chances,” the robber captain says, slightly less intensity in his tone. “Pull over, or we’ll start shooting.”
And then they start shooting.
“You have them locked?” Sharp asks Kronos. Sharp is the navigator and captain. I actually think this ship is technically his, if I had to guess. Kronos and Boss are on the weapons systems.
“Mhm.”
“Take them out.”
The ship takes one shot and one of the three vessels explodes like a cylinder of baking powder being crushed by an unseen cosmic hand. Apparently we are very well equipped with intense fire power.
“Want to try that again?” The Sligtonian captain asks the question quite smugly. He’s far too comfortable with this situation. I don’t like it.
It takes a moment for the space pirates to reply. When they do, it’s not a male voice that comes over the speakers. It’s a female. And she seems pissed.
“My boyfriend was on that ship,” she says. “And we were trying for a baby. Now I’m going to have to find someone else to mate with. Do you know how inconvenient that’s going to be? Do you know how hard it is to find a man worthy of breeding with? And you wipe him out like he never mattered at all because we were trying to steal a few trinkets from a few space slugs?”
I’m on her side. I like to support women’s rights, but I really love to support their wrongs.
“Go home,” Sharp says. “Find someone else to ovulate on.”
His lack of apology for the instant and brutal murder only serves to agitate the space pirates.
“You know what? For that? We’re going to kill everybody on that ship. And you’re not going to be able to stop us,” the new pirate captain says.
Her ships zip away from our location, effectively putting the Sligtonian ship between us and them. The audio demonstrates that they are firing repeatedly and viciously on the Sligtonian vessel.
Sharp sends the ship rocketing over and around the Sligtonian vessel, but the pirate ships simply rotate around away from us as quickly as we can move, and continue firing. This is a lose, lose, lose situation. The Sligs really didn’t hire enough security.
I grip a hand bar on the wall and giggle to myself as we spin about in a desperate attempt to shoot the pirates. They are doing far more damage to the Sligtonian ship than we are to them. They’ve seen what this ship can do if we get line of sight, and they’re not going to risk it at any cost.
I wonder if I can bring this to an end. The captain doesn’t really want this, I bet. She’s just pissed that the Sligs got her man killed. I bet there’s still a chance to talk this out, and kill the Sligtonians, if Sharp cannot sound like a huge jerk.
