RavensDagger

  Chapter Twe - Easy Meal

  The kindly pirates of the vent were expeg 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 particur 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 t 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 creassengers, the captured ship was scoured .

  That involved a team of expert meid engineers and destru-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 dition to fly around, the 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 vent to decide what to do with it. Some were turned into ons ptforms to protect the station. Others were rendered down for scrap.

  Ivil imagihat the fate of the Held Together was supposed to be something along those lihe 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 meisms, and Ivil found herself walking into a retively rge room. The far wall had tool chests and cubbies for equipment on the floor and ceiling, the tre had a rge window looking into a trol 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 pced just outside of the airlock, giving the waiting team of pirates a pce 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 fshier, better decorated spacesuit, gestured towards Ivil. "Hands in the air!" she barked.

  "No," Ivil said. Without an audiehat she cared about) she didn't mind cutting loose a little.

  A gu off, but its rounds stopped long before strikihen the gun, and the others in the hands of her assaints, were crushed into small bundles of scrap metal. The pirates screamed, some of them because they still had fingers in ter 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 go the far end of the room where the waiting meics were now scrambling to escape.

  She let them. Her i was fixed on the and room above where someone was calling for help over what robably an inter system lihrough the station. That was where she'd o be, then.

  Ivil hopped forwards, allowing the ck of gravity to finally let her float off the floor. She khat there had to be a way around and into the and room. Her way--through the inch-thick gss--was much faster.

  A few more pirates shot at her with small arms. Ivil rehe bullets safe by draining them of kiiergy long before they struck her. When they did, it was with the force of a particurly zy mosquito. Not even enough to crease her blouse.

  The pirates in the and room were soon clutg 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.

  She supposed that even pirates needed ptrollers and atants and people w the kind of system that didn't involve shooting up is.

  Ivil found the unication system off to one side. It was a puter linked into the eation's work. The touch-s had bels across dozens of stations across the ship. At the moment, it was lio a tral location in the main block of the statiht in the tre of it all.

  "Vagrant? Vagrant, e in?"

  Ivil's eyebrows perked. She inteo reply, but not just yet. First she walked over to aation, this ohe navigation-assistaation where one of the now-unscious workers had been sitting. The puter there had the beas and trols desigo 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 trolled from here. She imagihat the same yout could be found elsewhere, then, with eae of the arms of the station having its own small trol tre lio the station's tral hub.

  It was a design philosophy that she'd seen before, and it made a certain amount of sense.

  More even, if she sidered that the various pirate crews using the station might not all agree with each other. If they all had strong indepe streaks, then it only made seo keep them a little apart.

  She tapped on the navigation sole, bag out of the current menu, then frow the software's yout. It was not what she was used to, which was the rather cluttered but intuitive yout 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 lio one of the arms ected directly with the tre 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 tre. That was usually how this kind of pce's hierarchy worked out.

  A pirate started to cough as he regained sciousness, and Ivil idly forced the air out of her lungs as she returo the station-wide unication system.

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

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

  "Don't bother," Ivil replied. "Instead, I would much rather have you lio the captain of the... hmm, I believe it was the Amelia Earhart?"

  "Who is this?"

  "Never you mind," Ivil said. "Lio 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 ging. Someone was venting this entire se 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 Civen 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 hat none of them had any Cores to collect, which was really too bad, but not ued.

  Then the s 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."

  ***

  RavensDagger

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