The squealing of Squilla went by the door again followed by the heavy footsteps and horselaugh of Polo following behind them. Someone else moved up and down the hallway, but they remained quiet and Illise could not figure out who they were based on their movements alone. Her head remained resting against the door, waiting for the moment it opened up and they were ready to talk to her in person. Tony had stopped replying to her, and she had no way to message those on the outside with the docupad now locked down.
Two sets of footsteps strolled in the hallway, pausing right outside her door, which was doing an excellent job of muffling their speech. The hum of the DME stopped a while ago as the ship slowed down. Her assumption was right that they would visit her shortly after. Her nerves spiked as if she had to jump around due to the floor being hot. She tried to stand up quickly, but her legs were stiff from sitting on the cold, hard metal floor for at least an hour. Age was catching up to her. To loosen her legs she dropped into a squat - right as the door opened.
Alice’s eyelids vertically slowly blinked, Ilise’s emotions calming down completely and returning to their typical steeled state. Charyd, on the other hand, snorted, failing to hide his laughter at seeing Illise deep in the squat. He was different looking and no longer Officer Charyd, but Pirate Captain Charyd with a slimmer build, hair growing out in various directions, his square jaw even had a pathetic stubble of growth going, and his uniform was gone in exchange of slacks. “You preparing to jump us, or do you want us to come back another time?”
“She is not in the mood for that,” Alice stated.
“I’m always looking for an opportunity,” Illise growled at her. No one would answer for her.
Alice stepped forward, her skin color becoming more translucent, but Charyd put a hand in front of her. “Remember, we’re here to end this.”
“Unless you’re here to return the Darkstorm to the Cadoon military and turn yourself in, there is no other way to end this.”
Alice moved her hand to the side as if to say, I told you so. Charyd took a deep breath. “Tony is acting like he used to, an angsty teenager who won’t talk to anyone. If you could give us access, we’ll drop you off somewhere.”
“You’ve wasted our time.” She did not expand further. She walked further into her room. Any assistance to the pirates would be treason, if she did that then she should have remained on PT-0237.
“That’s not what we are really here for. You have clearance-”
“No.” She replied, walking away further into the corner to her bed.
“-and we would like it if you could aid us-”
“Tony, close the door.” The door remained wide open.
“by clearing our names by researching our case.”
“Never!” A good soldier makes their bed every day to make it easier to throw the pillows as if they were grenades at her enemies.
The pillows with their cold underside technology hit Alice and Charyd. Instead of being scared by her threat, they smirked at her fluffy attempt.
Alice raised the pillow to throw it back, but Charyd blocked it. He picked up the four pillows, embarrassingly Illise’s drool stain visible on one of them, and he placed that one by the head of the bed, two by the wall, and the fourth where her feet would go. It stunned her completely to see him casually taking care of her like she was - a weak woman.
She reached out to grab his throat, and he lept back, bumping into her desk, but before she could corner him, Alice sauntered in with a gun pointed at Illise. “This one actually hurts, unlike your ammo.”
Charyd licked his lips and took a deep breath. “Let’s try this again. You want to go home. We want to go home. We can fly this ship without Tony and go wherever in the open space- but we want to be honest folks.”
She laughed, a Shicor does not snort, the sound echoed in her room. “You lost that opportunity the moment you chose the pirate life.”
Charyd crossed his arms, fingers tapping. “I bet you didn’t even look into why they threw my crew into the brig.”
Pondering why bad people were bad was a waste of time.
She reached for her drool-stained pillow up to threaten again but instead stumbled into it face-first as the ship shook suddenly. The hull of the Darkstorm groaned as it was hit.
“Warning! Warning! Warning!” wailed the siren of the ship in a generic robotic voice.
Illise left no question about what was happening but jumped up and tried to charge past Alice and Charyd who both stumbled to the ground. The nearest escape pod was in the back by Tony, but that would only save her. With a well-placed shoulder check, she shoved Alice down and forced the gun out of her hands.
Unfortunately, she was still one versus two. Charyd must have extended an arm to hook it around her neck. She thrashed and smacked the gun’s hand into his arm, and his vice grip loosened. At the same time, the Darkstorm shook around like a maraca and all three of them thumped into the panels like beans. Tangled up in the arms and legs of Charyd, Illiise was too slow to get up and recover before Alice ripped the gun back from her.
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“Squilla, Scooball, what’s going on?” Charyd shouted, his mouth was next to her ear, and it rattled in her eardrum. It would bring her so much joy to stuff it with a sock.
The warning message stopped as Scooball’s voice cut over. “We don’t know! The report only says hit.”
“Fancy, schmancy technologies of the military and they can successfully detect the obvious,” Alice grumbled.
“We’re on our way to the deck.” Charyd’s grip on Illise loosened.
Illise eyed the gun in Alice’s hands, the humming sound making it clear it was set to stun. Illise untangled from Charyd, feeling his muscles ripple underneath as his arms shrunk back down so he was less of a pretzel. He stood up and actually offered a hand to her like she could not take care of herself. She did not touch him, but stood straight, dusting her uniform and making sure her captain pins were aligned. Their brass color stood out against the dark uniform. She wanted to give the sense of air that she did not care that a stun gun was pointed at her, if they wanted her dead they would have sent her out of the airlock already, they must have figured out they can’t pilot Darkstorm or work with Tony without her. She had a leveraging chip.
Annoyingly, Charyd led the way to the deck, with Alice pointing the gun at her. There was too much distance between her and Alice when a third hit rocked the ship for her to take advantage of. Polo came running from the dorsal fin of Darkstorm to the front puffing. “We are being attacked, but can’t pinpoint by what!”
“Usually it's the bad guys.” Illise educated them. “But if you’re the bad ones, they must be my allies.”
A hologram of Tony showed up in the hallway next to them. “I don’t know who it is. There is nothing on my sensors.”
Polo’s hand was over his heart as he stared at the sudden appearance of Tony. Charyd cleared his throat. “Tony, please get us a status report up in the viewport.”
Oddly polite for a pirate, but manners did not guarantee Tony’s obedience…
The door hissed open, allowing them to all enter and right on the viewport was a diagram of the Darkstorm, with three spots highlighted. She glared back at the Tony hologram, her fangs grinding against each other, resisting to snap at him. Alice poked her with the gun, guiding her to sit at an officer station while that man took the captain’s seat. Squilla was sitting in the gunner’s seat, spamming the plasma cannon shots as fast as she could.
The lights in the room suddenly flickered off and on, changing in shades of colors of pink, reds, blues, indigos, oranges, and greens for a few seconds, but the ship itself was stable and silent. Charyd asked the question they all had. “What does that mean?”
Squilla’s antenna waved about. “It's better than getting drenched by the sprinklers. It’s not a threat. Worry about it later.”
“Is there anything irregular being detected around Darkstorm?” Scooball voiced, her fingers twirling around the earring.
The viewport was wide open showing the space and planets slowly moving by them. No asteroids bounced off their hull. Two bright lights out past them on the right, one barely missing, the other making them all feel like beans again as they bounced about. Alice had been smart in buckling herself in allowing both hands to stay tightly on the gun. Illise squinted, her hands grabbing the straps and clicking them in, muscle memory from years of sitting in these ridiculously hard chairs as a medic pilot. They could have splurged a little more to make them all as comfortable as the captain’s cushions.
“Something is clearly shooting at us! How are you missing those cannon shots?”
Tony’s face appeared on the navigation screen, but the hologram version of him was nowhere near the captain’s chair. “Would you care to have the report of all the light that is shooting past us as well as every single pebble in nearby space? The current count is 14,568 pebbles and, limiting it to the visible light spectrum, there are-”
“I get it. How is something unseen and not on your radar shooting at us?”
Alice, without breaking her glare at Illise, tossed a suggestion out. “Is there a way we can triangulate the location of where they are shooting and shoot back?”
Tony's eyes rolled. “Yes, you can pew pew pew in whatever direction you want. They seem to be keeping up with our speed fairly well and changing their position between each shot.”
Charyd was studying Illise’s face, the morphling would not get any guidance from her. Two cannon shots flew past the Darkstorm, they had already taken quite a few hits, and the multiple damage reports filled the screen in the upper corner. Some were written in a warning yellow text, but there was one red and hopefully, the other pirate was over there with a fire extinguisher using it for its rightful purpose of putting out fires.
“Charyd use that horseshoe and shoot!”
Charyd fumbled about, fingers dancing in the air at nothing. “Tony, I need you here.”
“Oh, I bet you do.” The blue hologram appeared in front of him with the flight controls.
“Squilla, see if you can shoot a missile anywhere or look for something. Polo, go help with controlling the damage.” Alice commanded, her skin clear, the veins beneath pulsing due to her raised heart rate.
Charyd adjusted their position and aimed rapidly in the way they saw the previous shots, as he fired with no aiming, they saw a shot barely flying over the ship back in response.
“In the coming short-range message,” Tony said. That meant whoever was shooting had to be within a few thousand clicks of them.
Illise was glad Alice and Charyd had not thought of using the DME to escape. She bit on her lip to keep her mouth shut. Even at the high risk of being blown up, she would look for an opportunity with this next enemy.
“Play it - if it's virus-safe,” Charyd said. The man’s concerns in this situation were ridiculous.
A group of men and women dressed in suits, knee-length skirts, and their hair groomed better than those in the military appeared over the viewport. One with a head the same size as Polo, wearing a tactful deep purple wrap around their head, sat in the middle with hands steepled together in front. “Wise choice to listen to our words. Oh, this is unexpected. Alice is that you? I thought you were dead by now.”
Alice waved a hand at them. “Captain Charyd knows how to do a pick-up on time.”
A scowl pulled at their cheeks, a bit of light shining out of their head, offended by the slight. “Is it safe to make the presumption that the vile Captain Charyd is sitting in the captain's chair?”
Charyd stood up, putting his hands on his hips. “Looks like you are finally getting your chance to shoot me.”