PrincessColumbia

  Diane checked the dispy on her gauntlet, noting the atmospheric readings to make sure the oxygen levels and pressure had normalized. Not quite yet, that works in this case, though, she thought as she extracted her connection cable from the gauntlet and plugged it into a nearby comms panel. She waited as the security cracking suite did its job and was pleased to see it complete without any sort of hiccup. The status dispy on her helmet’s HUD flicked from red to green and she removed the cable and tapped through the administrator menus. Finding the selection she wanted, she tripped the ‘all hands’ selection. She double-checked the atmosphere levels and decided it was good enough at 93% and retracted her helmet.

  She pressed the ‘call’ button on the comms panel and said, “Attention pirate crew. This is Commander Diane Somni’els, Matron’s Daughter, First Found of Mortan, and mate to the woman your captain is torturing!” She allowed a growl to underscore her words as she felt her fangs dropping, “You have precisely one chance to survive. Drop to the floor and put whatever you have that passes for hands behind your head. If I see a weapon on you, I will kill you. If I see anything besides your sorry self prostrate on the floor, I will kill you. If you are standing, whether you’re facing me or not, I will kill you. If you believe you can survive me face to face, you are wrong. Your one chance to kill me passed when your captain failed to blow me out of the sky.”

  She took a deep breath and continued, “Hardy Coxand, you are dead. I will find you if I have to tear this ship apart down to the st substandard weld. You will never be ‘lord’ of any sort, your life is forfeit.” She snorted, her anger burning hot enough she almost imagined she could breathe smoke out in twin jets of fury, “And you’re an ugly motherfucker. I’ll see you soon to escort you to Hell.” With that she released the button and smashed the terminal.

  Leki drew up next to her, lifting her pulse carbine and flicking the switch to arm it. “You don’t normally use Earth curse words...or any. I think this is the first time I’ve heard one come from your mouth.”

  Diane lifted her tactical shotgun into position and slid a round into the chamber, “The cause is just.”

  They both brought their weapons to their shoulders and began moving in the direction of the bridge.

  The response didn’t take long, a small squad pirates started stepping through doors with weapons already being raised. Diane shot the first three in rapid succession, only failing to eliminate the two behind them because Leki ventited their torsos with her psma rifle.

  “That thing is loud,” compined the retired lieutenant about Diane’s shotgun.

  “That’s a feature, not a bug,” replied Diane as they kept moving.

  Twenty feet further they were passing a comms panel when a voice that Diane was going to take pleasure in permanently shutting up. “So, the bitch’s little girlfriend decided to py knight in shining armor,” Hardy Coxand mocked, “Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get rid of her permanently. Maybe I’ll teach you both a lesson in how women should properly behave around their betters, then I’ll have your station as a home base and the start of a harem. I hear your station even has a whole stock of sve women to pick fro-”

  Diane silenced the insipid voice by driving her fist into the comms panel, burying it up to the elbow. As she pulled her arm out she growled, “I swear he’s the worst example of human males ever.”

  Leki nodded, “Definitely shows how good people like Russe are, by contrast if nothing else.”

  Diane nodded, “I’ve known plenty of men, and an unfortunately rge number of them are more like Coxand than Russe.”

  Before they could start moving again, alert lighting over the next access hatch they were about to pass through began blinking, an atonal arm beeping in time as a massive firewall panel started dropping to seal them in. Diane growled and released her shotgun, letting it dangle from the carry strap, as she darted forward and grabbed it before it could fully drop. She caught the three-inch-thick panel with her hands and her knees buckled. Snarling in fury, she shifted her posture into an adaptation of the same positioning as she used for deadlifts and heaved. The hydraulics buried in the ship’s walls screamed momentarily and then gave, the metal welding shattering away as she heaved the door back up hard enough to sm back into the ceiling.

  She turned to see Leki giving her a telling look. “You know,” said the other Morvuck, “We could have just blown the hydraulics.”

  Diane just shrugged and turned back to continue in the direction of the bridge.

  It turned out that it wasn’t just the one emergency hatch that was sealed against them, it appeared all of them were. Diane found a comms panel and jacked in again, looking for a way to release the lockdowns. “Damn, the ship has been fooled into thinking there’s a hull breach. We’d have to put the computer into maintenance mode in order to find and clear all the false sensor data to open the doors.”

  Leki chuckled, “Time to make our own?”

  Diane nodded with a grim smile.

  After a moment of discussion, they headed to a nearby lift. The call panel was blinking a red, ‘Hull breach, lift not avaible’ warning indicator. They ignored it and repeated their earlier move where Diane dug her cws into one sliding pocket door and Leki grabbed the other and they pulled the doors aside to reveal the lift shaft. They looked up and down, Diane spotting red emergency lights ending about three decks up. She pointed, “We’ll probably be able to make it quite a ways if we get all the way up there. It’ll be a bit of a climb, you up for it?”

  Leki smirked and slung her rifle on her back, tightening the carry strap, “Last one through the lift door buys the next round at that new bar on the promenade.”

  Diane grinned and mirrored the motion with her shotgun and said, “Onetwothreego!” and leapt across the shaft, digging her cws into the metal before unching herself off to repeat the action and tch onto the wall above the opened lift doors.

  “Oh, you bitch!” ughed Leki as she slung herself around to the service dder and began climbing as Diane wall-jumped her way up.

  Diane was first to the deck, but Leki made it to the shaft’s control panel for the doors just moments ter. Rather than try and hack the system, she ripped off the panel and yanked out the hydraulic tubing as she had for the airlock doors. Twinned tugs in either direction from the two Morvuck women and they were both in the hall outside the lift shaft with weapons up and ready.

  “We never decided what happened in the event of a tie,” said Leki without looking at Diane, eyes locked on the hallway for possible hostiles.

  “You buy round one, I buy round two?”

  “Only if you don’t order Jiantin Bitters again. You’re a total lightweight and would be passed out before you could buy.”

  Diane snorted, “Oh, darn, you saw through my cunning strategy.”

  They moved in the direction the bridge should have been, but given they didn’t have an active map and they were at this point guessing which direction they needed to go given the fairly cracked yout of the ship, it was pretty much an even chance they were going in the right direction.

  Three minutes ter, they found out they were not, in fact, headed for the bridge when they opened a door and found themselves facing an engine room of such proportions that the Dragon’s Daughter could have fit inside with room for maneuvers. Chasms yawned deep enough for a dropped object to reach a significant percentage of terminal velocity. Massive, sinuous ducts snaked across sections of deck, each one rge enough Diane could stand behind one and remain fully hidden. Cheap tack-welds pinned machinery to the walls and not a few spots had duct tape holding in a leak of some variety. The center held a huge antimatter engine that provided power to the FTL colr built into the ship’s superstructure.

  And standing there in shock was what looked to be the ship’s engineering crew and a healthy amount of security and freence fighters.

  Diane released her shotgun, pulled her twinned P390s from their holsters in a single smooth motion, and fired on the nearest heavily armored goon. His armor cracked under the onsught of chemically propelled rounds before the bullets began shredding into the flesh beneath the polymer armor and spshing body fluids out as the man dropped to the floor. The magazines expended, she re-sheathed the weapons and brought her shotgun to the ready. “I WARNED YOU!” she bellowed to the compartment as she started moving in a fast combat glide, heading straight for the highest density of possible combatants.

  “Damnit, Diane!” barked Leki as psma rounds arced around her, forcing the pirates still in the open to dart for the nearest cover.

  Diane managed to drop seven hostiles before her targets put cover between her and them. One crewman, an engineer from the look of him, ducked behind a console and pulled a pistol. He had started to take aim at her as she darted in the direction of the console, leapt up and caught the top edge with her boot heel, then brought herself crashing down on the crewman, some variety of alien with gray skin and no hair, and she peppered his chest at point-bnk range with three shotgun bsts. Whatever he used for blood had a very low boiling point as the milky white fluid began bubbling and vaporizing as it leaked from his dead body.

  A loud CRACK and a sudden smming pain radiated from her side as her torso was smmed against the console. She looked up through the red haze of pain and fury and saw she had left herself vulnerable to three pirates, these looking like soldier types that were carrying far more powerful weapons than handguns. As soon as she mentally identified them as targets, the pain almost disappeared into the white-hot fury as she whipped her 50-cal off her back and executed three range-perfect shots to the center mass of each of the pirates. Her HUD’s count of the rounds in the magazine told her she had 31 more shots before she’d have to reload, and she only had a finite number of magazines in her carry pouches, so using the handgun too much wouldn’t be a good idea. As the three pirates dropped to the floor, dead from the small railgun round that penetrated their torsos, Diane slotted the 50-cal back in the mount on her back and brought up a system integrity dispy on her helmet HUD. She saw a wireframe model of herself that had a radiating rainbow ring starting with a bright red dot of red where she’d taken a hit in her side, surrounded by softening shades of yellow. Most of her armor read as green and the suit had already started repairing itself.

  Nodding in satisfaction, she kept the wireframe up and pulled the energy pistols from their nested wells on her abdomen. She leapt out of the area behind the console and began shooting at anything that moved with rapid squeezes of the trigger, hastening to rejoin Leki.

  “Thanks for joining us, you have any other unfinished business over there?” barked Leki between bsts of her rifle.

  Diane flushed and muttered, “Sorry...” as she positioned herself back-to-back with the other Morvuck.

  “Listen, I know we kinda walked in on this, but we’ve got to find the bridge. We’re just wasting our time with this right now.”

  Diane grunted in acknowledgement and shot two more psma rounds at a console at least one pirate was hiding behind before turning to look around the compartment. “I think I see the mains rey, it’s the box they’ve jammed all the connections into.”

  Leki turned to look over her shoulder to see the spot Diane was referring to and went back to taking shots at hiding pirates, “The cargo container-sized safety hazard?”

  If Diane hadn’t already been disgusted at the kitbashed nature of Coxand’s ship, she’d have been absolutely revolted at the slipshod nature of the clearly poorly jerry-rigged interchange unit. It did, indeed, look like a cargo container, the kind that are designed to interlock with other containers so it could be stacked and secured for long-haul freight across interstelr distances. Cut into it were holes, some square with the corner openings sticking out from where the duct-work had been hastily taped or tacked in pce, others were at least something resembling round enough the ducts feeding into it didn’t show the hole. The ducts themselves ranged in size from a few inches in diameter to the massive tubes that Diane could have stood upright inside of.

  “That’s the one,” said Diane as she shot at more hiding targets.

  “The one across the gap that has no safety rails and only has some metal sheets tack-welded to the floor as a means of access?”

  “Yup.”

  “The one that has the four mercenaries armed with carbines?”

  “Five, there’s one who hasn’t ducked back out of cover to take a shot at us.”

  “Yeah, I saw it,” ughed Leki as she managed to ventite a pirate’s head when he stuck it out from behind cover too long.

  “You got any grenades? I didn’t put any in my loadout.”

  Leki chuckled and released the forward pistol grip of her rifle to tap a release on the armor over her thigh. Instead of untching the armor, it popped open a door on the armor panel and two objects that looked a bit like fat, square-ish markers popped out by about a quarter of an inch. Leki extracted the rods and closed the armor pocket, passing them back to Diane.

  Diane clipped the pistol in her right hand back into its recess and took the items from Leki and examined them. “How do you set the charge on these?”

  “See the button on the end?” Diane gnced down and saw the silver button sticking out. Leki continued, “Press and hold that for a three-count, that arms the charge. Once you release the button you have five seconds to evacuate a 20-foot radius.”

  “Concussion, fshbang, or shrapnel?”

  “Concussion and shrapnel,” answered the other woman.

  “Perfect!” Diane shoved the grenades into her hip carry pouches, one per pouch, and took the opportunity to pull a pair of magazines for the P390s out. “Reloading!” she called to Leki and dropped to a knee so the other Morvuck would have full range of fire. As Diane pulled first one, then the other carbine rifle out of their holsters and popped the expended magazines off, she heard Leki’s psma rifle switch to automatic fire in 1-2 second long bursts. Having put some time in at the range, it was fairly easy for Diane to drop the magazines in pce, lock them in, and chamber around. “Reloaded, moving in five!”

  Leki stepped away from Diane, giving her enough space to go from crouched to vertical with weapons held ready. After her mental countdown hit ‘one,’ she charged the huge, unsightly power rey. Only slowing enough to y down a spray of covering fire, she poured on the speed and, ignoring the patently unsafe ‘bridge’ the pirates had built, leapt over the chasm.

  One of the mercenaries tried to get cocky and knelt into an aiming position as she was jumping. Diane fired a three round burst, missing by several feet but having the intended effect of causing the man to flinch as she hit the deck in a roll and came up to her knees in a kneeling aim position mirroring the merc’s and ventiting his helmet’s face guard with three 3-round bursts. Not even waiting for him to drop, she rolled back onto her back and fired from prone through a gap in two of the ducts at a mercenary who tried to shoot her in the back as he rounded the corner. As he dropped, she pivoted her arms at the shoulder and shot at the third merc, missing as he ducked behind the cover of the boxy mains interchange container.

  Her armor registered a hit, fortunately just a gncing blow off one of her shin guards in the direction she’d left Leki. She gnced to see that the Morvuck warrior was almost effortlessly holding her own, but there was a handful of crew and mercenaries she could see from her side of the chasm that would have been behind cover from where Leki was...and they all had a clear shot at Diane.

  She aimed artlessly in their direction and flipped the fire switch on her weapons to full auto and sprayed lead at them. Only two rounds hit, but again it was to get them to flinch. Using her now borrowed time she rolled to her feet and shoved her P390s into their holsters before weaving through the gap between two of the huge power ducts feeding into the coupling, stepping over the downed merc so she could use the gutted shipping container as cover.

  She made it around the corner when she came face-to-face with two of the mercs. With no time to draw her own weapons, she grabbed the nearer of them by the colr of his body armor with one hand and the rifle in his hand with the other, grabbing around the pistol grip over the man’s hand and squeezing with crushing strength to keep him from pulling the trigger. She yanked him between her and the second merc, who had wasted no time in bringing his own weapon up and firing. Diane lifted her boot to the middle of the dead man’s torso and kicked the limp body at the other merc, who took the full weight of the body to his torso, knocking him back into the chasm.

  It was a combination of her tactical awareness that there was a fifth mercenary and what she could only attribute to Morvuck’s enhanced senses and reflexes that kept her from getting killed. She jumped backward blindly, a 3-shot burst fragmenting against the deck pting where she had just been standing. She got her feet under her properly and looked up to see the fifth merc had climbed on top of the converted storage container and was drawing a bead on her again.

  Snarling, she unched herself up the side of the container, her cws biting into the metal with a shrieking sound, and ripped the rifle out of his hands, yeeting it as far as she could. The carry strap had snapped in the process, yanking the man off bance. Diane smmed her hand against his chest pte, her cws digging in to hold him firmly as her other hand formed a knife-like shape and she stabbed him in the throat. Almost casually, she tossed him off the container in the general direction she’d thrown his weapon before jumping back off behind the cover of the container.

  Pulling the grenades from her packs, she pressed and held the buttons on the ends with her thumbs. As she counted up to three, her eyes scanned the side of the container functioning as a power rey and spotted one of the holes that revealed the construction of the ship they were in was sub-standard at best and shoved the grenades in.

  Wasting no time, she unched herself back up and over the container, taking another running leap over the chasm. Two small ‘whump’ sounds came one after the other behind her as the grenades detonated. Since the engine room was essentially a power pnt attached to a ship and she had shoved frag grenades into what was the equivalent of a circuit breaker box, there were no knock-on explosions. However, the damage done by the combination of metal fragments and compressed air travelling at supersonic speeds in an enclosed area had the intended effect; half the systems around them suddenly shut down and the lights for the room shut off, suddenly repced with red emergency lighting that probably had its own battery backup.

  Diane was not idly observing the aftermath of her action, she had kept moving. She tore into the crew and mercenaries with an almost detached viciousness. Her armor’s poly-ceramic coating was hydrophobic, which meant the blood and gore that sprayed on her from the close quarters combat didn’t stay on her for long, but she was moving so fast that it simply didn’t have time to drip off her before she was lunging at the next target. She was dimly aware that she was taking hits, one or two were directly against her armor as she was pouncing on one of them. It was simply something that factored into her awareness of the whole situation and ultimately minor as her armor tanked the hit.

  By the time Leki stepped around the corner, rifle up and sweeping for targets, approximately twenty pirates were dead at Diane’s feet.

  Leki lowered her rifle, “...did you have your helmet down this whole time?”

  Diane blinked in momentary confusion as she shook her hand in an attempt to get rid of the viscera dripping off it. “...uh, probably. I haven’t put it up since before the elevator shaft.”

  Leki sighed in exasperation and rapped on Diane’s head with her knuckles. “You just dropped a pair of grenades, idiot! Those can cause hearing loss!”

  Diane gnced at a hand to ensure her glove wasn’t covered in dead pirate before using it to rub at the spot her friend had just knocked on, “Ow! Okay, I’ll put the helmet back up! Sheesh!”

  Their little side jaunt to the engine room turned out to be a net win. The entire ship was now in emergency low-power mode, which meant the doors were all defaulting to local control. Any bst doors or vacuum seals that had already been dropped would remain that way until significant repairs could be made, but the control computers that were built into the doors were cut off from the central environmental controls and couldn’t be closed off.

  This unfortunately also meant the lifts weren’t working, operating only in response to whatever emergency crew the ship had...which didn’t seem to have been established as part of the ship’s operations.

  “What, did Coxand get all his knowledge of ship operations form b-grade holo-series or something?” compined Diane as they stalked past a handful of crew that were lying prone on the floor with their hands on the back of their heads.

  Leki turned slightly to keep an eye on the prone crew, just in case they tried anything with their backs turned, “How do you mean?”

  Diane reached out to the control panel for the next hatch and pressed it with her thumb. The indicator light flipped from yellow to green and the door slid open, allowing them through. “You see it all the time with idiots who think being a ship captain is all about being some sort of...space swashbuckler or something,” once the pair of them were through and confirmed there were no crew about to attack them, Diane tapped the control to close the door, then plugged her suit’s interface jack in to seal the door behind them. The yellow indicator flipped from yellow to red and there was a secondary hiss as the door locked itself down. Diane was going to have to thank Russe for ‘conveniently forgetting’ the suite of tools was still on her armor’s computer; it gave her the opportunity to build a script that would give her owner-level permissions on the doors and automatically seal them. “They watch some streaming shows with the handsome captain with the devil-may-care attitude who gets id by the alien girl of the week every other episode and want the looks and the girl but could give a damn about the actual job of running a ship.”

  They rounded a corner and spotted a trio of mercs, both of them bringing up their weapons and rapidly perforating all three hostiles before continuing. “They think there’s no such things as crew rotations, ignore basic safety protocols, let people who have to work for them handle interpersonal issues, and basically become legends in their own minds and cry ‘hax’ or ‘cheater’ when they never seem to get very far before losing their ship or being demoted.”

  Leki’s eyebrow winged up, “Had a lot of washed up ship captains on Earth?”

  Diane blushed, “...um, sort of. There were a lot of space sims in gamer spaces, and the more true-to-life the game, the more people would rage-quit because they couldn’t press ‘A’ to win.”

  Leki chuckled, having heard simir rants during their time in holo-simutions for workouts. “You’re not wrong, it’s one of the most difficult things to train in aspiring officers is an understanding that being captain is more than just giving orders, you have to have an understanding of people and actually care about them.”

  They paused as what looked like a security team stormed out of an adjoining hallway. Before any of the pirates could even bring their weapons to bear, Diane and Leki shouldered their weapons and opened fire, dropping the entire team within a span of about ten seconds before they continued moving, Diane almost casually fishing more shotgun shells out of her pouch to reload as they walked.

  “Yeah, that’s one thing I’ve never been good at,” Diane said with a frown, “I don’t think I’d do half as well running the station without Norma and Russe helping me.”

  They turned a corner and came upon a set of doors and paused, lifting their guns to the ready position before approaching with more caution. “That’s the thing,” said Leki, “By recognizing your weaknesses and delegating to people who have those strengths, you’re demonstrating a level of leadership that most people never attain.”

  As they drew up to the door, Diane released the forward pistol grip of her shotgun and slowly reached over to the control panel. “Good to know, note to self; hire someone to people for me.”

  Leki snorted in amusement as Diane tapped the button to open the door, which hissed open to reveal the bridge of the pirate ship.

  PrincessColumbia