Onboard The Providence, Janus System, Northwest Fringe

The transmission to Domitia ends, and Dell flicks his comb out of his pocket and runs it through his hair. He makes sure to close the comms array, locking it before a blue screen of death takes over the console's screen. He thinks deeply as he floats in the Providence, as he plans out how he's going to deal with the drone set loose on his ship. Saboteur drones aren't complicated things, yet they’re probably more deadly than a direct hit from another ship. He knows that by now it's more than likely penetrated through the ship's outer hull and scurrying around somewhere in the internals of the ship.

He needs to flush it out. Unfortunately, that’ll be a tall order, considering those bots tended to be armed well enough to deal with any crew members it happened to be confronted by. He does have some options, some more extreme than others, but this isn't exactly a time for subtly. The first thing to come to mind is simply to put on his void suit, shut the Providence's oxygen pump off, secure a room, and then open every other bulkhead to the void. It’s a simple enough ploy but invites too much risk. If the drone survives the explosive decompression it can still roam the ship, and then he’s even more vulnerable. The other plan involves trying to lure it out of hiding by overcharging another system. Bots like this arere drawn to things with high power readings, recognizing them as critical systems needing to be disabled. Yet that would potentially reveal the Providence's position to the Fallen Stars. A prospect that he doesn’t want to tangle with.

"Dell," Murci's voice causes the grumlian to stop combing his hair in thought, "What's the plan?"

Dell sighs, recognizing yet another x factor he had not considered, the hacker. Murci is still a liability in his mind; after all, they had met maybe a day ago. Now he’ss on a ship with her, his ship, being hunted by a saboteur drone, which could be anywhere by now. Any plan he makes will have to involve her in some way, and the grumlian doesn’t trust her in the slightest. A dark thought passes over him about using the hacker as bait, but he dismisses it. He’s not that desperate.

Yet.

"Thinkin'." Dell says.

"Well think faster." Murci whispers, pressing herself against a wall, hand holding onto a railing to keep herself from floating away, "I think I can hear it in the walls."

Dell put his comb away and pulled out his PDW, taking the safety off, "First things first, we gotta check life support, make sure it's secure."

"Right." Murci agrees, "Lead the way."

Dell narrows his eyes at the hacker, "Fine. But I got my eye on you."

Murcia grab Dell's arm as he passes, "Listen. We have to trust each other. Now more than ever. No games, no sarcasm, we gotta get this done."

Dell looks Murci in the eyes, searching for any falsehood with them. He sees fear, that was certain and understandable. Being stuck in an iron tube in the void with something hunting for you in the void and inside that very same tube is terrifying. Yet Dell's had it worse; her remembers his days spent as a runner andgoing up against threats bigger and worse than this. Yet his empathy for the hacker extends about as far as understanding. He doesn’t like her or trust her. Yet she makes a good point; they have a common enemy that, if they don’t band together to face it, they’re good as dead.

Not to mention Domitia is depending on Dell to get off the station. That alone motivates Dell to seek out the saboteur and blast it. So, swallowing his pride and setting aside his animosity towards Murci, he tugs his arm free of her grip.

"Oh I ain't trusting you, but right now we got bigger fish to fry." Dell says sternly, "Stay out of the way and stay quiet. The thing can hear damn well."

He begins the journey towards life support. What would normally take maybe a minute's walk or a half a minute's jog feels like an entirety as the pair float through the void. Dell follows the handholds laid out across the hall, made to allow people to move about the ship in zero-g. The eerie nature of the Providence in low, emergency lighting makes all of this all the more frightening.

Every shift of the ship, big or small, sets the grumlian on edge. Saboteur drones come in a variety of terrifying shapes and sizes. He cannot help but think of a beast of iron or a clustern of nanomachines, slivering its way through every crack and crevice it can find. Whatever it is, it's already messing with the power, meaning it has to already be in the interior of the ship.

Finally. Dell and Murci make it to life support. Dell looks over his shoulder, finding the hacker awkwardly hanging from a handhold, clearly unused to the strange sensation of zero-g. He motions for her to get on the other side of the door, which the hacker complies with. He signals her to open the door, which slowly reveals the low, yellow light of life support. Dell rockets himself in, using the handhold to fling himself into the room, PDW held at the ready. He lands with a thud on the opposite wall, clearing the room. Murcia swings in, less gracefully, but manages to keep herself from simply floating awkwardly away. She closes the door right afterward.

"Right." Dell looks around the room, "What did you do..."

The room itself seems virtually untouched. The central carbon scrubber hums along pleasantly while the oxygen generator purrs like a happy felious. Dell looks over the mechanical pieces of the vessel before realizing that none of the hardware has been tampered with. This confuses Dell; the damn thing should've turned the ship's internals to scrap, yet the more he looked over things, the more it seems the problem is internal, not external.

Murci slides in next to Dell, looking at the screen, "The power’s just off?"

"I guess." Dell watches as the screen turns blue with a similar error message, "Fuck!"

"Wait." Murci pulls out the data jack on the back of her head, bringing the cable toward the console.

Dell catches her hand before she can jack in, "The fuck are you doing?"

"Saving our lives, jackass!" Murci says, jerking her hand out of Dell's grasp.

"No. How. Tell me." Dell demands.

Murci scoffs, "Thing isn't messing with the hardware, it's infected the software."

A loud clang somewhere in the ship catches both Murci and Dell off guard, the two of them looking towards the entrance of Life Support. Dell sighs, he then looks her in the eye, searching for bullshit.

"How do you know?"

Murci puts her jack back, and instead brings herself to the console; after hitting a few keys she reveals the blue error screen that had taken over the display was, in fact, fake. "Old hacker trick. Makes people think it's over before it actually is."

The screen comes back anyway, only for Murci to force it to close again, just long enough for her to pull up a system overview. Dell recognizes the forced lock on the comms array; clearly, the damn thing’s been trying to turn on the Providence's beacon or try and transmit anything to alert its masters to the ship’s location. It’s clever, far more subtle than unleashing a killer onto the ship to hunt them down, but it also means they have to act quickly and get this thing off them. A simple password lock wasn't going to last forever, and it could still do more nefarious things, like open the ship to the void.

"Okay," Dell swallows his pride, and nods, "Jack in. See where the bastard is."

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"Don't have to tell me twice," Murci says, but before she jacks in, she looks over to Dell, "Listen, I never got to say it, but my condolences. For what it's worth, Os did respect you. That's a lot coming from him."

Dell chuckles, "Just get the damn data tick off my boat. Then we can talk all about how much of a dick Os could be."

Murci laughs at that before jacking into the Providence. The hacker falls into a trance-like state as she begins to delve into the internals of the Providence. With his tail firmly grasping a handhold, Dell takes position, allowing him a full view of the space around him and the now floating, entranced hacker. It's at that moment that the dark thought returns to Dell. He doesn't need Murci, and how could he trust her? After all, she has every reason to betray him now. She could be trying to reach out to the Fallen Stars as they float there. Yet something stops him, and a new feeling begins to spring up in his mind. While they may be different, and while she is getting in the way of his money, a faded memory of his time before all this rises in his mind. He recalls a similarly ambitious grumlian, trying to climb up the social ladder, only to be stabbed in the back during a gig.

A loud creaking sounds throughout the Providence indicating it may have collided with something. Without anything or anyone to correct the Providence's orbit, they will crash. The amount of debris makes it inevitable. Yet as it currently stands, he can’tt leave the cockpit, even if he was able to seize control of the drone, it would leave the hacker vulnerable. As agonizing as it was, he would have to wait for the hacker to finish the job.

"Come on kid," Dell says with a bit of worry in his words, "Finish the job."

Something shifts again, and then he hears the unmistakable sound of a port door being accessed. The snap and hiss of an airlock activating and opening echoes through the Providence and tells Dell that someone or something had boarded on the ship. It can’t be Domitia, and he realizes that the scraping he’d heard before might've been more than stray debris scratching the haul. As quietly as he can manage, Dell floats back down to the console, pushing Murci down and under the console desk, securing her the best he can as he hears the unmistakable sound of air jets from a void suit.

"O2 is still stable." A garbled voice announces.

"Go for the cockpit." Another static-filled voice voice commands, "Two with me, stack up. Life forms detected in this room."

This is worse than a saboteur drone, Dell thinks; the bastards had found them. In hindsight, it was dumb to think that the drone wasn't broadcasting their location; Dell's presumption had been based on the fact that they were pirates, a profession famous for stolen equipment that didn't work as intended half the time. But these are Fallen Stars, perhaps the most professional and well-armed of the pirate clans he knew off.

Thinking quickly, Dell grabs a fire extinguisher and leaps back up towards the door, perching himself right above the door. He holds a PDW in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other. On the other side of the bulkhead, Dell can hear the fiddling of tools on the door; he turns the safety off and readies himself for a fight. The door clicks, and someone from the other side grabs it and slowly moves it open, Dell watches from above as three red and black void armored soldiers come in, sweeping through the room. He waits for the third to be solidly in the room before spraying the extinguisher wildly, filling it with blinding smoke.

"Hostile!"

"Where?!"

"Can't see--"

Dell interrupts the third voice by leaping from the ceiling and latching onto his helmet. He shoves his PDW in between the neck plate and helmet and blasts several shots through it. There is no struggle after the second shot, the body going limp and beginning to float through the void. Launching himself toward the second one he crashes onto the chest plate, his tail latching onto his rapid-fire energy weapon and pointing it down at the floor. Again, Dell finds a weak spot in the armor and fires his PDW at full charge, the bolt of energy slicing through the pirate cleanly.

"Don't move!" The third pirate announces. Dell turns, seeing he has Murci holding a gun to her head, "I'll take her head off if you don't drop your piece."

Dell's about to retort when Murci's eyes shoot open and a free hand reaches up and grips the side of the pirate's helmet. An electric flashpulses from her hand and causes the pirate to scream in pain. Now released from his grip, Murci pulls her own PDW, and lands several shots into his chest, sending the pirate floating away.

"I see the party has started," Murci says gravely.

"You get the bastard?" Dell asks.

"Fried and gone." Murci say with a ghost of a smile as she readies her PDW, "One small problem, though."

"That being?"

"The damn thing had a tracker, explains the boarders. We need to get moving!"

"Hostiles in life support, move to engage!"

The sounds of more pirates moving towards the door caught their attention. The pair duck for cover as one rounds the corner, a shotgun in hand, ready to blast the two. The pirate doesn't get a chance; the door suddenly reactivates and slams shut, the man's arm left floating in life support, his static-ridden howls audible through the door.

"Fuck!" Dell exclaimss as he looks over to Murci, who has a smug look about her, "Your 'handy' work?"

"What? He was armed and dangerous." The hacker says with a cackle.

From the other side, multiple voices can be heard screaming and shouting; clearly, they’re angry and ready to cut Dell and Murcia down. Fond feelings well up in Dell, reminding him of younger years - the smokey bars and shady warehouses and shoot outs he'd get in with them.

"Startin' to warm up to ya, Hacker. Don't get any ideas though." Dell says as he uses the fire extinguishers to propel himself to the floor. "You got the door, right?"

"Tight as a safe." Murci says, "And don't worry, I wasn't getting any."

"Just like I thought," Dell says as he opens a hatch, it snapping and hissing as he does, "Going under. Keep it closed, I might be a minute."

Dell dives underneath the floor, the maintenance hatch shutting behind him as he crawls through the tangle of wires and cobwebs. Maintenance hatches like these were often called 'Gremlin Holes,' a primarily racist term as Dell's kin could fit just well enough in them, and they had a stereotype of being shipbuilders. A stereotype Dell didn't really buck as he was a mechanic, but not because he was a Grumlian. The trek is made more accessible by the fact that there is no gravity, making the task of navigating the cramp tunnels more like swimming. Above, he can still hear the movement of the pirates but their garbled voices are gone. Clearly, they’ve learned their lesson about broadcasting themselves while O2 is still active. He makes his way through the tunnels, eventually arriving where he wants to be; his quarters.

Leaping over and catching himself on the nearby console he accesses the ship's internal systems. Just as Murci promised, the ship was back under their control, which means he cand send these boarders packing. He opens the Providence's airlock control and prepars the eject the boarder's ship. Yet right before he can finish the job the door to his quarters opens. A gruff armored figure stepps in, his helm a bone white with a black skull painted on its forehead, weapon pointed directly at Dell. Clearly, he was the boarding party lead, hence why he was the only one with an LMAR. He can hear the magnetic coils spool up as he charges a shot.

"Step away from the console! Now!"

Dell sighs, "Alright," He pushes away, internally psyching himself up, "You got me." He takes a deep breath and hits the emergency eject command.

Suddenly, the airlock pushes the boarders ship off the Providence, and the violent sensation of explosive decompression grippes Dell. He’s ripped towards the door, but manages to grab ahold of the frame as he passes by it. He watches the other boarders get ripped off into the void, save for the bone-helmed leader. He had activated his magnetic boots, his auged body allowing him to withstand the decomp. Even though his weapon had been ripped from his hands, he marches forward towards Dell like he’s wading through melted iron. Dell realizes the boarder's armor would shrug off the bolts of his PDW, so he takes a gamble and lets go. The Grumlian flies through his own ship and slams into the leader. He quickly jams his PDW into a weak spot but the man retaliates just as quickly, slamming an armored fist into Dell’s arm. He feels a bone crack in his forearm, the pain near instantly unbearable. Yet Dell can still wrap his tail around the Raider’s belt, keeping him from sailing into the black void. With one last shot, he hits one of his foes' boots, compromising the magnetic sole and causing him to lose his balance. Just as he begins to fly, Dell grips the walls of his ship with his one remaining good arm and the boarder flies out of the ship. The moment he’s ejected, Dell feels his grip fail. Hurtling towards the void he tries to scream but all the oxygen has left his lungs. Right before the void can take him the doors slam shut, which does little to stop Dell from slamming into the door, more pain shooting up his bad arm. As he nurses his broken arm, he hears new oxygen being pumped through the Providence.

He takes a deep breath and lets out a sigh of relief, "Fuck. That was too close."

"Dell!" Murci comes sailing down the hall, "You good?"

"Broken bone or two," Dell admits, "But I'm alive."

"Good," Murci says, genuinely relieved. "Can we leave now?"

"Not until we get Dom off that station," Dell says.

"We're gonna be swarmed with pirates, you really think we can hold out that long?" Murci asks.

"We have to, I ain't leaving Domitia behind."