(Shadowdancer, Valkyrie Assault shuttle: Hildr)
“These are Master’s orders. Take the frigate and prevent the pirates from blowing the ship. There are no other restrictions. Kill everyone, take them prisoner, hack their computers, whatever you like. Master expended considerable capital to obtain your team, and he wishes to see what you can do. Impress him, and he says that you will have more opportunities in the future.”
Jackie Day, former mercenary and now slave after an ‘altercation’ with a corrupt cop, grimaced at the screen as Captain Nyna mentioned her new Master. She still wasn’t keen on the whole ‘being a slave’ thing, but she was stuck with it. She and the rest of the Valkyries were all fitted with Stepford-style slave chips. That meant any attempt at rebellion could be quickly put down. Worse, they could easily have been turned into bimbofied sex pets for some creepy merchant who wanted a bedwarmer that could also act as a meat shield. They might be slaves, but they were still themselves, and their Master wasn’t forcing them to sleep with him, or any of the rest of the crew of the Shadowdancer, so there was that.
“Understood. Hildr launching now.”
Jackie looked to the rest of the Valkyries. Two humans, two knelfi, and a gauz, all females, and all with a complimentary set of skills that would allow them to take on a wide array of jobs. They’d taken a quick vote, and decided that Jackie would be the leader of this group, since she had the most small squad combat experience. She spared a glance to Ashera, their knelfi sweet-talker, who was at the controls of the shuttle as they launched, before turning to the others.
“All right, this is our first op outside the sims. Our ‘Master’ picked us an easy one to test us with. And don’t think that this isn’t a test. Viessa, you say that Master’s AI has some super hacking mods installed, right? Think they could just hack this frigate and be done with it?”
The Knelfi hacker considered that for a moment, and then nodded. “Possible, but it would take time, and they would be under fire. Most wouldn’t risk it, but their AI is pretty advanced, from what I’ve seen.”
Jackie nodded. “So this is a test. He’s trying to see what kind of jobs we can be trusted with. That’s why he took all the restrictions off. We could go like crazy people and blow the ship half to hell, and damn right it would be fun, so stop looking at me like that, Nerila.” The gauz with the penchant for fire and explosions had the decency to look sheepish for a moment, even though the grin on her lips never faded. Jackie continued, “But that would just tell him that we’re good for nothing more than mayhem. And while mayhem is fun, it tends to involve a very low life expectancy.”
Abby, the human medic, snorted at that. “What good is a long life expectancy to us? We’re slaves. Our lives aren’t exactly our own, any more. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you all should go get yourselves shot up, but c’mon!”
The hell of it, Jackie knew, was that she was right. Sighing, she said, “Maybe, maybe not. I was talking with some of the girls from the Starlight Raven, you know, his actual harem? Anyways, they say he’s pretty fair with rewards when someone does good. That Captain Nyna? She is one of his slaves, and now he’s trusting her with the command of Shadowdancer. She’s still a slave, but she’s got it pretty damn good, from where I’m sitting.”
“Look, we’re each here for different reasons. Some of us deserve it, or worse. Some of us got a raw deal. But we’ve got the makings of a really solid mercenary team here. I’ve got tactical experience. Viessa is a crackerjack hacker. Abby, you’ve got that Confed Army training as a combat medic, right? Nerila, you’re a demolitions and heavy weapons goddess, from what we’ve been told. And Ashera is a born negotiator and manipulator, in every sense a woman can do such things.”
She paused, getting a read on the others. They seemed to be coming around to her way of thinking. “We are slaves. That ship sailed the moment we got those chips in our heads. But you all know that valuable slaves get treated better, and get better toys, right? We were bought to serve as a merc team. We do good, then we’re more valuable. We’re more valuable, we get to play with the best computers, the best things that go boom, the best medical tech, and so on. On the other hand, if we fuck this up, we’ll be lucky if we just get sent on suicide missions, or if he doesn’t decide to trade us in for something better. Would you rather be a merc doing jobs out in the black, or a whore at a spaceport brothel, getting dick from every spacer that comes through port?”
“And if we do REALLY good, we might even be allowed to save up enough to buy our freedom, and maybe a ship of our own. That sound like something worth working on to you?” Jackie looked at the others, and saw that they were hooked. “All right, then here’s the play. Two teams: Nerila, Abby, and myself on one, and Ashera and Viessa on two. Team One will go in hard and fast, going for the bridge. Team Two, hack the fuck out of their systems. If you can do that from the shuttle, that’s perfect. Stay here and hold the fort. Otherwise, make your way towards engineering and get control of the computers ASAP. Keep it tight when you can, but once we’re in a fight, end it as quickly as you can. Just be careful of friendly fire when using the grenades!”
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(Pirate Ship Savage Rose)
Boarding an unfriendly disabled vessel was a fairly simple affair. You latched on to their hold, overrode their airlock controls, and then stormed the ship. The fact that it was a pirate ship made things far more difficult. For one, the entire crew was armed, though they clearly didn’t have much in the way of skill levels. The big problem was that everything was a hair’s breadth from falling apart. Pirates, it seemed, didn’t know about ‘preventative maintenance’. This was both good and bad for the Valkyries.
Bad, because they never knew when something was just going to explode in their face because they looked at it wrong. The environmental controls (otherwise known as ‘how people didn’t suffocate’) were clearly in bad shape, if the smell was anything to go by. And from Viessa’s cursing, it was clear that the Shadowdancer’s ion cannons had literally fried the ship’s datanet. They’d have to get to the computer core off the engineering spaces to control ship’s systems if the bridge was locked down.
On the other hand, there was some good news. The ion cannons had done a good enough job disabling the Savage Rose that it wasn’t going ANYWHERE without a couple hours of dedicated repair time, or a tow. And the weapons weren’t coming online without yard time, it looked like. Internal communications were down along with the datanet, and it looked like the ship had entered some kind of lockdown.
Viessa looked away from the terminal next to the airlock which she had been busy with, and sighed. “According to this unit, the entire ship was opened to vacuum. No obvious sign of breaches, so the system failure probably crossed a wire and signaled hull breaches in all sections. Good news is that we’ll be able to keep the pirates contained until we clear the ship, but splitting up is out of the question now. We don’t have enough explosives to blow every compartment hatch on the ship.”
Jackie nodded “And I wouldn’t bet against there being small hull breaches or toxic chemical leaks that we wouldn’t want to get into the rest of the ship, given the state of this tub. What about a self-destruct?”
Viessa shook her head. “Not seeing one. But I didn’t think there would be one. Who in their right mind serves on a ship that could blow up at any time?”
Abby coughed, and said, “Navy ships have self-destructs, to keep them from falling into the hands of the enemy. Drop the magnetic shielding around the antimatter supply and boom. Not something you can do remotely, and requires an officer’s command codes. There ARE nonmilitary ships that have self-destructs, but those are usually in the hands of religious fanatics, groups with a military-style warrior ethos, and spy vessels, or ships being used for other nefarious ends that would be problematic if news got out.”
When they all looked at her, the medic shrugged. “What? I may have been Army, but the Navy gets us from place to place, you know? And there’s not a lot to do in hyperspace. So I enjoyed my share of bubbleheads, and some things came up in pillow talk.”
Jackie sighed. “All right. If they can’t blow the ship remotely, then we’ll start by taking the bridge and seeing if we can regain communications. We’ll let the Captain and Master figure out what to do with the pirates once we’ve cleared our objectives. Agreed?” The others nodded, so Jackie grinned. “So let’s go meet a ‘pirate lord’!”
(Bridge, Savage Rose)
On the bridge of the Savage Rose, the scene was far different from when ‘Slayer’ Valkiam had made his first threat against the oddly configured freighter that had stumbled into the tarpit his crews had set up between Jagloth and Dimiya once they figured out that there was going to be a mass exodus from the system whenever the Navy got around to dealing with whatever had happened on the planet. The evacuation ships themselves would be almost enough to warrant the cost of a tarpit that covered the entire width of the ‘corridor’ between the two systems, but adding on the multitude of slaves and whatever valuables they carried just throwing themselves into his waiting arms? The potential score was more than he could fathom. And he could fathom quite a bit.
So he’d gotten the seven crews under his command, and split them into three groups, so they could cover the entire area easily. Tarpits were a well-known trap, after all. You had to jump the ship quick after they dropped into sublight or they would find the buoy, destroy it, and escape before you could claim your prize. While his crews had the advantage since the buoys had registered them as friends and wouldn’t affect their warp drives, it was still a lot of ground to cover.
“I don’t care what it takes! Get the Maker-damned communications back online! These bastards will pay for this! Avery, wasn’t your brother on the Demon? You going to let these treacherous no-name cockspits kill your brother and get away with it? And Wynnter, get those doors open so we can see what is taking that damn mechanic so long getting power back on!”
Triz, his Ihm first mate, slapped the deck with his tail, a sign that he was annoyed with something. “Cap’n, I’ve been going over the sensor logs. That second ship is definitely the stealthiest thing I’ve seen, but I think I know what happened to the Blackfish.”
“That’s something, at least, what was it?”
“A railgun.” Valkian just gave him a look, so the Ihm continued, “What sensor scans we could get of the second ship after it left stealth mode makes me think it is some kind of new stealth ship built around one massive rail gun. We detected a localized EM spike shortly before Blackfish went offline. Probably shot a hole clean through her. How it missed the reactor is anyone’s guess.”
Valkian bit back a curse at that. “There was no way for them to know we were coming. They clearly aren’t from any of the syndicates or bounty hunter organizations, and if that Captain was Navy I’ll eat my boot. So, what? We caught ourselves a couple merc ships? What would they be doing in a shithole like Jagloth?”
The doors to the bridge opened, and he was about to congratulate Wynnter, when he heard the knelifi wench yell in surprise. He barely had time to turn around before he joined the rest of the bridge crew on the ground, taken down under a hail of bolts from stunners.
The last thing he heard was a woman’s voice. “Secure these rats. We’ve still got to clean out Engineering before Master inspects his new prize.” So, he was done in, not by mercs, but slaves? Oh, he’d never live this indignity down!
And then darkness took him.