Slev Torrent- Cormag One—Human Instinct Starfighter

  Slev sighed deeply as his armored boots sloshed through an honest-to-god inch of blood on the cargo hold floor. “Lil fucker couldn’t have just had his murder spree outside the fucking ship, there is no way in hell the one mop we have is going to be enough for this.” Slev stared pointedly at what he thought was part of an alien ear on the ceiling of the cargo hold.

  It took some work, especially with the questionable traction he had in the hold, but Slev was able to get the grav bike to fit nicely and secured to a docking clamp. “Yes, please. This thing is fucking awesome, and I'm tired of walking everywhere.”

  The captive pirate had frozen stock-still halfway through the hold, staring into a conspicuously open vent. Slev couldn’t see her features under the patchwork black helm. But the audible hyperventilating gave him an idea why she had stopped.

  “Chitters, you little shit, come on out we gotta go! There's still a grav tank,thing...out there...ppspspspsp.” Slev shuffled past the traumatized pirate, expecting to see his questionable life choice chewing on a grenade or something equally problematic. “Gah, fuck!!” Slev jumped back a bit at the line of carefully arranged heads peering from just inside the vents.

  “No, bad Chitters, bad! What the hell, man?” Slev didn’t know where the menace was, but he sure wasn’t a fan of the arts and crafts he had done in his absence.

  Reaper's voice chimed in, “Maybe we should get him some more toys?”

  The pirate’s voice broke the silence, sounding almost haunted: “the gods have left this place. Who, who are you that this barely even fazes you!? That is Reth’s squad! They had over forty successful boarding actions!”

  “Huh, neat.” Slev said, sounding unimpressed. He strolled back over to the ramp, trying to slosh some of the blood out with his foot as the ramp began closing. And as an afterthought, rushing back to the vent to gather the heads and toss them out of the bay. The tank was still not visible on the horizon, but it wouldn’t be long now, and that thing had a decent shot at actually taking down the ship if the mystery mechanic was as good as Slev suspected.

  “Come on,” he prodded his guest with his pistol and gestured towards the staircase, which, to his chagrin, was a gentle waterfall of red at the moment.

  The pirate began climbing the ornate stairs, the hyperventilating getting worse with every body she stepped over until they reached the relatively clean cockpit. “ Oh good, no one died on my chair,” Slev smiled, pulling his recliner farther away from a growing puddle in the hallway.

  “Sir, plug me into the ship. I wish to see the security footage,” Reaper gleefully asked.

  “Hold on one damn second.” Slev settled into the pilot’s chair, flicking a switch. The deep, thrumming whine of the engines spooling up sent Red Stone careening around them in his viewport.

  The pirate was sitting against the wall in the fetal position, staring at the remains that began loosely skidding around the commons room as the ship tilted during takeoff. “I’m not a prisoner, am I? This is some kind of awful blood cult. I’ve been taken as a sacrifice for whatever horror you have living on this vile barge of butchery,” she blurted out in a panicked tone.

  Slev reached over and plugged his armor into the ship terminal for Reaper. “Hey now, those are some mighty judgy words coming from a pirate. If anything, stabby and possibly invisible skitters around. Just say “treats” loudly over and over again. You will probably be fine. Oh, and don’t run or pick up anything dangerous-looking or any actual food.”

  Reaper flashed a contact signature across the command holo for Slev. The monstrous form of the Frankenstein tank was just cresting a jagged mesa in the distance. “Yeah, yeah, go ahead, Slev affirmed.

  “Behold the majesty of technology guided by the hand of the divine intelligence,” Reaper cackled, launching a burst from the massive ship cannons. The rounds screamed across the landscape, deflecting brutally off a blue shimmering shield of octagonal hexes. Shredding the stone ten meters around the tank and doing absolutely nothing to it.

  Reaper fired another burst, rattling the entire ship as it rose into the sky. Not even slowing the tank as it accelerated towards them. “That is a very good shield,” Reaper gloomily noted.

  “Yeah, it really fucking is. Stop tickling it; we are bailing. I can feel our dwindling account losing zeros every time you shoot.” Slev slowly pushed the throttle forward, propelling the ship in a soft arc towards the clouds above. After a few seconds of continuous thrust, they were well outside of the tank's range.

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  Slev flicked open a menu on his holo display. And started scrolling to make sure he didn’t have to kill the damned tank to get paid. But the contract details were very specific about pirates in the mine, nothing about their heavy weaponry roaming the area. So with a satisfied smile, he hit the Give me money, please button and confirmed that the mine was cleared out. That would be a nice 25,000 credits that about covered the stuffed animal extortion to resupply the ship, well, not counting the ammo. He had flat-out refused to rearm at Flo-Flo’s insane prices.

  He opened his bank account, not counting the cash advances he had locked away for hiring more people for his big corporate job. He had those funds sorted out into new accounts locked to the contracts he had been given. His funds sat at a decent 108,155 credits, enough for a few months of guild debt payments or some planet hopping. He sighed; it was nice not being at the edge of insolvency for once.

  Reaper interrupted his pleasant musings: “We have a problem, a big one.”

  “Goddammit, of course we do,” Slev grumbled.

  “No, this is not acceptable, that wonderful little angel of death is not on the ship at all. Here, look at the footage.” Reaper forced Slev's screen to open up to multiple camera views.

  “The fuck you mean not on the ship?!” the pirate careened across the hallway, pinging off a wall somewhere near Slev's room as he fully reversed thrust. Slamming the ship to a violent stop in the air.

  Slev fully focused on the security footage Reaper had highlighted for him. It was about what he was expecting: a crew of pirates barged in and got to play hide-and-seek with a homicidal housecat. Yeah, that went about how I figured it would. He was watching the footage of the pirate trying to crawl from the kitchen while Chitters dragged him forcefully back towards his treat box, depositing the corpse on top of the tiny chest before rocketing back into a vent and continuing the killing spree. Things went wrong when, after his strange head diorama,. Chitters, for some ungodly reason, dashed off into the rocky terrain of the mesa.

  “Goddammit, Reaper, is he still on the ground back there with the fucking tank?”

  “No, keep watching, sir, worse than that.”

  Slevs cringed as the camera viewpoint switched to a small pirate shuttle in the distance and the figure desperately running to it. Not long after, followed by Chitters, who seemingly dashed into the cargo hold. “Oh, fuck no.” Slev knew what was coming. the cargo hold closed, and the ship sailed off towards the atmosphere with Chitters somewhere on board. He got up from his captain's chair and walked straight back into the hallways looking for his captive.

  “Hey, where would Reth go to!” he shouted at the half-comatose pirate in a heap where she had slapped into the wall at a decent velocity.

  She stumbled slightly trying to get up, instead sliding back down the hallway wall to take a seat. “The fleet? I don’t know where our fleet is actually moored when they aren’t on jobs. I’m pretty new.”

  Slev fumed internally. He knew he was about to do something really stupid, but they had fucking chitters!

  “Your base where you made the vehicles, does it have anyone important enough to know where Reth would have gone or to get me in contact with your boss’s boss directly?” Slev asked in a deadly serious tone.

  “Yes, I suppose...but…” She stammered out before Slev interrupted.

  “Help me get Chitters back, and I'll pay you a year of your wages and let you go wherever the hell you want in the system.”

  She spoke tentatively, hope creeping into her voice. “The old refinery is near the north river a few hundred miles past Saxum, but it’s a stronghold. I don’t think your ship will be enough to defeat the anti-vehicle defenses.”

  “Does the river run right through it? It’s a refinery, right?” Slev asked

  “Yes, it winds through the edges. We dumped our waste there when I was a worker before ya know shanghaied into a pirate army why?” She seemed confused.

  “River defenses?”

  “Yeah, guard towers and anti-ship missiles, at least a patrol's worth of men.” She answered without hesitation, seemingly having switched sides to team “blood cult.”

  “Anything that would stop one heavily armed man going mach fuck you on a hoverbike?”

  “No, but no one would be that idiotically suicidal. Once you got inside, there are dozens of armed men,” she responded, concern creeping into her voice.

  Slev nodded, then held out a hand. “Let me introduce myself. Slev Torrent, humble bounty hunter and the ninth most lethal sentient in the galaxy, also idiotically suicidal apparently.”

  Reaper chimed in over the ship speakers, “He’s also an asshole, with seriously questionable decision-making skills!”

  Slev stared daggers at the nearest wall-mounted intercom. “What? She’s new to the crew, it’s fair that she know the odds of survival drop to somewhere near that of your average snowball in a desert the moment anyone spends more than five minutes around you,” Reaper defensively responded.

  “Chief engineer Varana, at least that was my job title before the pirates became my new employers.” She pointedly didn’t respond to Reaper’s comment. “Is that a sentient AI?” she asked, an excited tone overtaking the concern again as professional curiosity won out.

  “No, that would be laughably illegal, and I am a very law-abiding man.” Slev said, taking his exit.

  Slev Climbed back into his cockpit and set course for a mountainous region several dozen miles away from the refinery. Sheerly out of habit, he opened the bounty board, seeing if there were any jobs for the refinery. “Might as well make some fucking money if I’m going to do it anyway.” There, in fact, was an offer from the owners of the refinery of a very large reward for whatever private military company was willing to try and clear out the facility. It was obvious that even the corporation offering this job expected it to be a war zone. Slev accepted the contract and waited for them to vet him and send the refinery schematics. He was still too low-ranked in the guild to be able to accept this job without an okay from the employer.

  Much to his surprise, he received an almost immediate acceptance. The maps were sent over along with live satellite footage. That seemed way too easy. Slev furrowed his brows and headed towards the armory; he was loading up for bear this time.