"All right, ladies and gentlemen, same as usual. Load up the hauler. No one gets hurt."

The voice transmission was picked up by a drone. One of the small ones that was cobbled together with leftover pieces of the two mining drones. The message was then relayed to the Retribution.

"Yeah. Just a heads up. There's a ship somewhere north of us who thinks they're using us as bait for you."

"They ratted us out just like that?" Sam asked with a tone more along the lines of disappointment than surprise.

I shrugged. "They can't be too ruthless. I assume they need to build up trust with their targets. 'You give us the goods, we don't hurt you.' That kind of whole shtick. Makes sense that the miners trust them more than us."

I spent more time trying to figure out how our position had gotten defined as North. It took too damn long to realize it was based on Azore's spin. The cardinal directions then plastered themselves in my mind: north, south, east, west, toward Azore and away from Azore.

There was some not very useful chatter as the miners and pirates discussed our probable location and whether or not there was more than one of us. Five ships came into view, two of them, a large freight hauler of some sort and a smaller fighter, parked themselves next to the mining barges. The other three, two fighters and a gunboat of an extremely similar design to the Retribution, though considerably more whole, angled their way towards us.

I took control of the Retribution and moved us a bit east and away from Azore. There was a specific asteroid I wanted these guys to pass, and the closer I could get them to it, the better this ambush was gonna work.

"Unidentified vessel, what do you think you're doing?"

I looked up towards the console and over at Sam. "What are we doing? It's not privateering. That's just piracy for other nations. Pirate hunting? Pirating the pirates?"

Sam shrugged. "I think technically it would be pirate hunting."

"Hunting pirates. What are you guys doing?" I said over the comm, wondering what his expression to my answer might be. "X-Talia, you can activate the, uh, transponder?"

It came out as more of a question because we weren't actually using a transponder. We weren't running an actual ship ID. We were just gonna squirt out a name connected to a number that was just a bunch of zeros. I wanted all eyes on the damaged, but shielded ship.

"I think you're in the wrong system for that," came the response nearly a minute later. Must have been due to hesitation because he wasn't that far away. He was right, of course. We had literally no support. With the pirates and the mercenary security working together, Rixa indeed was the worst place to be a pirate hunter. It would be less bad if I had a working Rift Drive, but we didn't. We were stuck here. Couldn't go to any stations, and wouldn't be left alone to mine. However, I was done with running. There was literally no place left to run. We were at the edge of human-controlled space, and we were as far as we could go without some type of very self-sufficient fleet.

Random thought: Could we build a self-sufficient fleet?

I thrust the ship into a forward dive, flying straight at the pirates. It must have been an odd sight. The whole front of the ship was unshielded and partially missing. There was a freight container welded to the ventral section. One side of the ship was missing most of its shields. The Retribution only had one working point defense cannon. We were falling at a comfortable four-G acceleration. We looked wounded. We were wounded. The pirates had to be too busy laughing to know what hit them.

Two missiles launched from their gunboat. Two missiles launched from the Retribution. Two more missiles activated just as the ships passed one of the asteroids. One of them targeted the nearest fighter. The other targeted the gunship itself. Without the advantage of seeing them coming from a distance, both ships were unable to turn their point defense cannons on the incoming death tubes. One missile hit the fighter and took it out completely. The other missile smashed into the gunboat's shields, causing a wave of light to play over the ship. It didn't cause the shields to go down, but the ship rolled to put its suddenly weakened side in the other direction. The other fighter moved in front of the gunboat to picket the incoming missiles from the Retribution.

I laughed. Two more missiles came out from the next asteroid. They were more ready for this. The gunboat managed to take out one of them before the other smashed into the other fighter. The fighter wasn't completely out of commission, but the pilot had some serious problems. Plus, there were still the two missiles from the Retribution coming straight at him. That fighter went up in a blaze of vapor and parts. The gunboat started firing its point defense cannon at this last incoming missile, only to find a drone firing Ripper cannon shots into its turret. The Retribution's second missile never made it to the gunboat, but by then, the drone was on the gunboat's turret, hovering only about five or six meters away from the vessel as it poured rounds into the ship's weak point. The gunboat tried to turn, but the little drone with oversized power core and gravity emitters merely rotated along with it, continuing to pour rounds into the ever growing hole. I took my concentration off long enough to vaporize the two incoming missiles with my own point defense cannon. An easy job when nothing else was shooting at you. And then the gunboat stopped moving.

"Ok, guys," I said, directing the message towards the hauler and its single fighter escort. "Let the miners take their cargo back. Vent your atmosphere on the hauler, turn off the gravity, and power down all ship systems. Whoever is on the hauler can get in that little fighter and you can leave. Or you could try to run. I've got plenty of missiles left and we didn't take any damage." I sat back in my chair and waited.

"Can we take the soft suit off now?" Sam asked.

"X-Talia, why do you think that gunboat stopped moving?"

"Extrapolating from the drone's firing angle, I guess the systems cabinet was separated from the rest of the ship, either directly damaged or possibly the wiring."

"So they could still technically get some things fixed, start flying around, and firing at us?"

"Yes."

"The fighter is docking with the hauler," Sam noted, bringing my eyes to another screen.

Were they actually listening to me? "I feel like this went too well. What's the bigger prize?"

"The gunboat," Sam said. "More missiles, shield points, and all that stuff."

"I agree with Sam," X-Talia said.

"Hmmm," I stared at the drifting gunboat on the screen. Sam was right. It was the bigger prize. The shield generator alone was worth it, let alone two power cores, but how to collect? "X-Talia, can you bring our fighter drone up to the front of that thing? See if we can get a good look inside the bridge viewport."

"One moment."

It didn't take long. The drone had been following at zero relative speed right alongside the gunboat. It merely moved up forward and turned itself so its main camera could look directly into the bridge. The people inside still had power. Two guys were frantically working on the systems cabinet. They had gravity, but were probably in vacuum at the moment.

"Well, I guess let's try comm-ing them.”

"Attention, pirate gunboat. If you will look outside your forward viewport, you will see down the barrel of one of my automated guns." I waited to see if anybody in the bridge would turn and try to look out the viewport. They did. Supposedly, they had lost control of the mechanisms in the aft end of the ship. Theoretically, the engineer could manually fly the thing. They still had almost all their shields, so they were like a big floating turtle, a hard shell with a few weak points. All the valuable innards would get damaged if we decided to do the same thing we had done to the Retribution, which I was sorely tempted to do.

"Hello. I know you can hear me. You've got a choice. You either surrender and we'll see if we can get one of the miners to take you back to a station with them, or I start opening your tin can. What's it gonna be?" Both men on the bridge stopped what they were doing and stared back out the viewport. I imagined them arguing whether or not I could make good on my threat. I could. We could stick that drone back in the little hole where the turret had been and rip its way through into the bridge, turning the gunboat into something that resembled the Retribution a little more closely.

"It looks like they might have listened with the hauler," said X-Talia.

"Can we send our little relay drone down there to see if it worked?" Sam suggested.

"Sure."

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"You have two minutes before I start firing again," I said to the guys trying to get their ship fixed enough to keep in the fight. The turrets were certainly a weak point. In open space, it likely didn't matter quite as much, but in the asteroid field that was the ring around the gas giant, the ability to lay ambushes certainly changed the dynamics. The ability to cut the cord from the systems cabinet to the actual systems they reached out to was another weak point. The guys on the screen started working more frantically. One guy disappeared through the hatch, leaving only one on the bridge. They weren't surrendering; they were gonna go down fighting.

"X-Talia, just start chewing away at the front."

She gave me a nod, and then the drone left the front viewport, stuck its gun barrel into the hole in the shields, and started firing towards the fore. It was considerably more precise than I had been when we took the ship we were currently on, and it wasn't long before the drone had opened up the front and could point the barrel of its gun back down the viewport and pick off the squishy targets inside.

"FUCK!" I yelled as the gunboat launched two missiles. Both screamed forward, alternating their trajectory just slightly so that they collided with the drone in front of the ship. That move may have been suicidal with the shields up, but without shields, there was no coming back from it. Twin explosions obliterated the cobbled-together parts of the Res-a-tesseract as well as the bridge of the gunboat. A moment later, a secondary explosion erupted as the drone's oversized power core suffered a catastrophic meltdown. I held my breath, waiting to see if the gunboat would go off, either its cores or its missile batteries taking the rest of the ship with it. The thing gently floated backward, a lifeless husk. If there was anyone still on board, they were far more worried about their levels of O2 than trying to get the ship to move.

I grit my teeth and returned my focus to the other ship that we may or may not still have. " What about the hauler?"

Sam was watching over a screen that showed our little relay drone flying through the empty freight bays of the hauler. "So far so good," said Sam. "The locks aren't open, so I can't tell if they've actually followed orders."

"X-Talia, can you send our mining drone over there and we can cut into it?"

X-Talia gave a nod of her head before reporting that the mining drone had been launched. It would take a few minutes for it to get close. I monitored the telemetry of our now derelict pirate vessel and brought the Retribution closer to the cargo hauler. I didn't want to get too close. There were still about eight mining vessels that didn't trust us, and who knew whether or not the hauler had been rigged to blow.

It was a long and nerve-wracking process to have the mining drone cut its way through the lock and send in the relay drone. As asked, they had turned off the gravity and canned the air. This meant the relay drone could fly through the ship and check for any surprises. We didn't find any. That pirate fighter was out there watching us, likely having called for backup. That would probably be coming around in the next few hours.

"What do you need in order to take control?" I asked X-Talia.

"I need to be plugged into the systems like you did to the Res-a-tesseract."

"Can we have a drone do it?"

X-Talia shook her head. "We don't have anything with the arms needed."

"So I guess I'm going on a spacewalk."

"Be careful," Sam said as I vacated my seat. She slipped into mine, taking control of the Retribution.

"Line us up close to the lock," I said, fiddling with the device I was going to have to plug into the systems closet in the possibly hostile vessel.

The short trip was creepy and nerve-wracking. The desolate ship was dead quiet without atmosphere, and I kept waiting for something to explode or shoot me or something, but nothing actually happened. I drifted into the living and working corridors that reminded me a lot of the flying brick, popping up the systems cabinet and plugging in the device so X-Talia could take some type of control over the vessel. It didn't take long. Oddly enough, she couldn't copy her base code, so we were going to have to fly pretty close in order for her to remote control the hauler. That was fine by me.

We headed back to the chunk of gunboat, and once that was welded to the hull, we'd be trying to skedaddle. With our modified mining drone, I didn't even need to be outside to do the welding. It was a nerve-wracking two days as we gathered our prizes and flew off deeper into the asteroid fields, changing course several times to throw off any would-be pursuers, all while taking stock of our ill-gotten gains.

Losing the little fighter drone hurt. The thing had functioned amazingly. Its overpowered Core and gravity emitters made it quick. Its lack of internal environmental area made it small. The thing had worked almost flawlessly. Having another gunboat would have been great for spare parts as well as everything we could pull out and sell. Unfortunately, the front half of it had been blown away. By some miracle, the shield generator had survived along with both power cores, though the one connected to the shield had suffered some damage. Its gravity drive had come out unscathed as well.

We had a choice. We could cobble together another drone, this one with a shield, or we could sell the shield generator and get other supplies. We needed to figure out a way to capture the smaller fighters. They would be a lot easier to convert to drones. In the end, I decided to set some time aside to talk with Sam and X-Talia about our future plans. We needed a full set of blueprints and a road map to get there. For now, we should probably celebrate our success. Quite honestly, quite probably our first success.

Six more weeks, two more ships. The two ships were fighters, well, I mean fighters in the same way that I mean gunboat or cargo ship, that is to say that they were small and they had guns. The first one was a converted shuttle. It had twin chain ripper cannons, and much like our cute little attack drone, it also had two exterior-mounted missiles. We managed to take that one out by surprise—chain cannon to the face of the guy flying it—which literally meant that we had a shuttle with minimum damage and almost all the working parts.

The second one was a modified freight hauler much like the Flying Brick minus the freight container and with a jumped-up gravity drive and a rail gun. This one also carried four missiles. Unfortunately, because we had to fight them both at the same time, the one with the rail gun ended up taking a missile to the rear, overloading its power core and taking out the aft end of the ship along with the gravity drive. Bad luck for us, but it was another one of those things where we came out unscathed.

Fun fact, the Gravity Drive did not create gravity. The machine was essentially a complicated power distributor. I'm not sure why I never realized this before. Obviously, you can't send gravity through electrical conduit. The actual gravitational effect was produced by the emitters, whether that be the internal dampening systems, the main gravity emitters that pulled the ship in various directions, or the gravity decking, which produced the ability to stand up in the middle of space. Either way, the fact that I have spent my whole life in space and not realized that the Gravity Drive did not produce actual gravity was one of those mind-exploding moments.

We had taken enough shield emitters off the derelict gunship to fully recoat the Retribution. Its face still looked terribly deformed, but it was now behind a set of shields. We also managed to replace the slagged point defense cannon with the good one from the derelict. In the end, we sold the shield generator. It was the thing with the highest price on it. There wasn't a lot we could do about it. What we got in return was almost worth it: a mini foundry.

The mini foundry was one of those things that didn't really make a lot of sense if it wasn't a very long trip to the nearest orbital foundry. It was slow, took a lot of energy, and produced a lot of waste heat. Not the kind of thing that the average person wants on their ship. It basically required its own power core, which we had, and it just didn't function up to par with the orbital foundries. It was one of those machines that was great when you didn’t have support. Like when you're bootstrapping up in a new system or unable to simply fly into port. If only we had a very large ship with a lot of space on board that we could throw in a few additional servers and have a bunch of drones run said foundry and simply just tack on some extra radiators. Oh wait, we did. The hauler was quickly turning into the mobile base of operations, but we weren't exactly mining asteroids. We had all this refined material that could be collected, cut into smaller pieces, and fed into the mini foundry which would spit out metal stock for any number of machines.

Next on the list was an extruder so we could turn that stock into structural supports, then maybe some type of laser cutting machine so we could turn plates into various panels for things. If we could keep up with the way things were going, we'd be six months out from having our own little mini drone factory. The problem with that is it all required specific components that we weren't going to be able to build: computer chips, cameras, lenses, lasers, data arrays, all that stuff.

In time, we could theoretically be self-sufficient, but that was a tall order. What we needed was to be able to form the structural components of most of our drones and stuff, and trade high-end equipment like power cores and shield generators for all the little minutiae like batteries, cabling, and processors. Oddly enough, things were going quite well. I'm sure David Sullivan was still making out like a bandit being my only point of contact. But we were also considering maybe making a small mining drone ship that would release a few drones, do some mining, and then transport that automatically to the Free Light Consortium orbital foundries. We didn't know what it was gonna take to get it registered legally so it wouldn't be tagged as connected to us by the mercenaries or the pirates, but that was a project certainly on the drawing table. Everything was going just fine until we got a message.

"GRANT!" X-Talia seemed to scream over the intercom.

I woke with a start, Samantha pulling her head off my chest and looking around the dimly lit ship.

"What?" I slurred, my mind still hazy. Not certain if X-Talia's voice had come in my head or the real world.

"Incoming message," X-Talia said.

I rolled out of bed and stumbled across the few steps into the rec room, which now housed the ship's control systems.

"How many?" I asked in a panic.

"One," X-Talia replied, her voice sounding slightly confused. She was having a hard time of it these days. The Res-a-tesseract had been wired with a butt load of cameras. In this new ship, she could only see me in a few select places.

I grabbed hold of my hardsuit and started trying to pull on the legs.

"What are you doing?"

I looked down at my leg shoved through one leg of the hardsuit and realized this was stupid. The incoming missile would be here long before I got the damn hardsuit on. I flopped into the chair and pulled up the gun systems. "Where is it?"

"The message?" X-Talia asked, sounding even more confused.

"Message?" Sam stumbled in behind me in a black tank top and panties.

"Yes, I said incoming message."

I slumped into my chair. “I thought you said incoming missiles.”

"Oh." The two-dimensional image of X-Talia popped up on one of my screens, covering her mouth, giggling at me.

"Just play the message."

"Sure."

There was a moment of delay before an oddly accented voice came over the speakers. It was female and sounded considerably less concerned despite the circumstances the person was reporting.

"Mayday, mayday, this is Zoia of the Black Adder. My ship has been disabled by fire from pirates. I have two hours of oxygen and don't think I'm going to be getting life support up and running before I'm out. Is anybody out there listening? Please respond. Be warned, the other pirate is probably disabled, but might get their ship online faster. Mayday, mayday, mayday, is anybody out there?"

I slowly turned my head to Sam, mouth agape. She had a similar expression. "Well, shit."