Beep.
“Some people say that the void of space is a cruel and unforgiving mistress that will take the lives of your entire ship's crew if even one mistake is made. You know what I, Liam E. Zekker, say to narrow minded, landborne cowards that think that way? I say “Fuck you, get off this ship”, the only proper response to the bitching of station babies that never left orbit. Hell can have them, I'll take the Rats over any wannabes that come crawling out of a cloning vat.”
“Right, suppose this is supposed to be a log of some kind, better get on with it before the captain arrives. You already got my name, rank's something of an armory maintainer but rank means all of a jar of piss to the Rats, and I'm currently about three knuckles deep in a pulse bomb's innards. Stuck I should say, as I can't get my hand free of the magnet coil on account of that hand being a mechanical prosthetic. Damn arm's been a pain to deal with since the unexpected and unwanted upgrade, it being steel core to skim on costs really fucked me over more than once now.”
“I've been flat on my back here for three hours now working on the bomb, got stuck about half an hour ago, only called the captain ten minutes ago, and I'm about five minutes from drenching my jumpsuit with piss. Kiri was supposed to be the one fixing this damn timer, but I just had to be a good brother and save her ass from the wrath of the bomber team. Those pricks can drink the void for all I care, but letting them space my sister would go against my code of honor. Psh, and what a lot of honor I have being one of the Rats of all things. What’s that…fuck, I can hear the captain down the hall now.”
“Alright, if I die today I want all my stuff to go to Jan from the gunners, and I want my personal data pad dropped into the nearest star. Don't you shits dare think that I didn't rig my locker with viper mines, so my haz suit is going with me to the grave. Keep my sister safe and don't let her get keelhauled for this. Oh, and if Danno hears this: eat a dick. You're the worst best friend I've ever had, and you deserve the best of the worst things in life, asshole!"
Beep.
Liam’s eyes looked over his recorder as he sighed, the blinking red light indicating that it was on and not recording shone dimly through the time worn casing, the weathered shell of a machine older than he was sitting in his hand with a dense weight. He looked around the dull gray metal room at the shelves of ammunition, the illuminated racks of dangerous firearms and energy weapons, the suspicious red stains on the walls and floor, and the smears of rust coming down from the rattling ventilation ducts. His eyes fell again on the sleek white metal casing of the pulse bomb held over him on supports and his black polymer cased arm stuck inside of the open underside panel. He hated this ship sometimes for being both the oldest hunk of junk and the owner of some of the best tach available.
Pirate vessels were always either husks of ships that had been resurrected from their graves to serve again, or a hodgepodge of stolen and disemboweled ships making a bigger vessel than the original. This old tub was a bit of both: a Dublin class heavy freighter from forty years ago that had gone reactor critical, refitted and repaired by the Rats to be on par with most Moscow class cruisers in both size and weaponry. She had all the bells and whistles to be a good bruiser, and enough tricks to keep even the enforcers stay on their toes. Liam twirled his recorder in the palm of his hand as he remembered the name of the ugly boat: Korraine’s Call.
It was right as Liam clicked the generations old analog recorder off that the inner bulkhead let out a tired groan as the double locked hatch swung open. Stepping through the rectangular passage was the formidable captain of the ship, adorned in an armored undersuit and a flowing red overcoat that dragged on the floor. She was a Phalanx-Human hybrid, which to the uninformed masses of a majority of the tamed regions of space meant that she looked much like a human aside from the skull-plate covering the front of her face and the numerous spines and blades that jutted from her body. Liam found himself looking up at the captain, which was rare due to him being a full foot taller than her, and was actually struck with a tinge of fear as those electric blue eyes were contrasted by the stark white bone of her face and the braided black mane of hair around it parted by numerous quil-like spines. The ice-cold fury in her eyes, the impassive expression on her face, and his helpless situation made him almost lose control of his facilities.
He spoke with a slight stutter as she stepped within inches of his goggled head. “C-captain, thank you for coming down here. I would salute you but my arm is a little stuck, i-in the bomb.”
He swallowed hard as the captain loomed over him wordlessly, the words spoken to her seemingly ignored as she studied the situation laid bare. She circled him and the explosive slowly like a cat on the prowl, her sharpened index finger scraping across the surface of the bomb with a quiet scream. She stopped before the control station sat next to the ordinance and began tapping away with loud clicks as her fingers entered a series of commands. Liam could only see the black metal boots she was always found in and hear her hardened claws clacking against the touchscreen controls. His heart nearly leapt out of his throat as something inside of the casing slid forward, a sure sign that the explosive was running the test cycle.
Liam shifted nervously as he tried to get himself out once again, his voice wavering much more than before. “Boss, um, I'm still in the thing's guts over here. Could you depower it and let me out of here?”
The captain refrained from speaking until she had finished inputting the last command, her lips curling into a satisfied smile as she replied. “Relax.”
From within the metal cylinder that was the device came a series of whirring motor startups and rapid chains of beeps. Liam could scarcely believe it, but she had just activated the arming sequence on it while he was still trapped. He began to writhe and squirm desperately as his life now depended on it, his only focus now being to escape the deadly trap. The Initiator of this lethal event stepped over to the intercoms panel in order to enter a series of numbers that correlated to a certain crew member's personal frequency.
From the speaker came a cheery voice distorted by the crackle of static and rumble of some large machine. “This is gunner Jan, what can you do for me?”
The captain glanced back to Liam, who was shaking his head furiously, begging her not to involve his crush in this attempted murder. “Captain Blainen speaking. Begin raid preparation. Armory munitions primed for loading. That is all.”
The speaker barked back attentively before clicking back into a dormant state. “Aye captain! Sequence will only take a minute or two.”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
The deck beneath the unfortunate repairman began to shift and clank as the hidden mechanism that would carry the pulse bomb forward along a conveyor to the weapons array awoke from their cold slumber. Liam locked eyes with the captain again, and for a moment he recognized the look in her eyes as malicious delight. He realized all too late that this was revenge for something he had done, but with how many pranks he tried on her and the rest of the crew it was impossible to know what exactly he should be apologizing for. The curt way she spun on her heel to leave meant that she was done “talking”, and was leaving Liam to his fate.
He had been wanting to avoid ditching his prosthetic limb again, but if this is how she's getting her justice then there was no saving the pricey appendage. He reached around on his tool belt for something to cut the hand off with, but each available option carried too much of a risk of causing a premature detonation. His last resort was, as with all of his greatest creations, the simplest option: a hack saw. Each stroke of the jagged blade across his metal limb sent phantom pain through the tactile sensors connected to his robotic hand. Ignoring the pain he pressed on, his saw being the only thing that could save him from being flattened under the bomb or blown up by it, whichever killed him first.
The grinding of heavy gears joined the hissing pistons in song as the conveyor doors opened next to him. He could see out of the corner of his eye the cradle awaiting the bomb below him opening its jaws wide in anticipation of the promised payload. If the bomb dropped now, Liam would be dragged down with it, and this was not on his to-do list today. Doubling his effort on the saw subsequently doubled the pain he felt from the electronic nerves, but the extra effort was just enough to cut through so that he could snap the last polymer and steel sliver holding him hostage.
The pulse bomb rattled as the platform holding it abruptly dropped to ground level, where it would have crushed Liam if he were still under it. He muttered and cursed as the bomb slid Into the breach, swearing loudly as the panels closed around it while the conveyor started up. The stump of his prosthetic still ached with synthetic nerve pain, but a button press on the mounting cuff told the system to cease its function. Liam hated being on the receiving end of space pirate humor, it always left his terrified and drenched in something. He collected his belongings and approached the hatch that left the armory, noticing that it was left ajar by a black metal boot.
Liam pushed open the door and looked down at the menacing Visage of the captain, then spoke to her in a tone that barely suppressed his fear and rage. “Sheila, you're the devil.”
The skull-faced captain pried the hatch open with the foe of her boot, allowing her malicious side eye to settle on the crafty prankster. Her voice remained the same neutral calm as it always was, almost a deadpan drone. “Insubordination. You'll be keelhauled for vandalism.”
Liam knew she wasn't serious, but a threat from her meant that she was angry. A defeated sigh was all he could muster as he offered her an inquiry. “What was it that pissed you off?”
A bone covered hand dug into her coat pocket to drag out a mangled circuit board with an attached microphone and speaker module, as well as the fragmented remains of a chip Liam recognized as a smart card. She jostled the scrap in her palm as she spoke calmly. “An obnoxious device found in my plants. It spoke to me in mockery. I destroyed it.”
He vaguely remembered making that one as part of a dare, and exactly which bonsai cherry tree he stuck it to the pot of. All it did was listen to her and repeat what she said in different pitches and tones, but perhaps making it mix and match her words had been a bit too much. Messing with her plants was akin to violating a deeply sacred thing of hers, which is exactly why he had gone for an approach that wouldn't harm her beloved botanical beauties. This wasn't worth the thousand digits he'd earned, but perhaps he could still reason with her. “I'm sorry captain, I forgot I made that one. I made it as part of a bet with Hawkler. The wager was one thousand.”
A crunch came from the device made Liam wince, the already damaged components grinding to splinters in the gravity well of her terrifying grip. Her eyes never left him, as she half expected him to run the moment she blinked. “Prepare for combat. Twenty minutes. Do not change your attire.”
With that she turned away to walk the length of the corridor beyond the hatch. Liam let out a sigh of relief, then upon looking down the wet jumpsuit he wore he changed to a frustrated roar. A urine and sweat soak jumpsuit was an awful thing to wear under a combat rig, and only having one arm to gear up with was even worse. Liam wondered if he deserved this level of punishment, but upon remembering what had happened to the late Samantha upon uprooting a rose plant he changed his mind. Accepting this somewhat minor loss was a better alternative to being tossed into the reactor, or so he thought.
With no other option than to obey his captain, Liam trudged to the secure armor cabinet where he kept the combat armor he had custom fitted to account for his asymmetrical profile with a pressure cuff just below the shoulder on the right side. He preferred using tech from a few generations back for his personal usage, as most advanced hacking devices were useless when something as archaic as a binary switch was used in place of an advanced atmosphere calibrator. Many other modifications made his bulky old suit stand out amid the other stolen or illegally purchased suits of the same model and dusty brown color, such as the flames painted on the glove, the additional manual activated lights, an extra layer of plating around the collar, and the complete integration of a hack-proof pre-interstellar computer. It was an ugly thing, but aside from his right arm it had kept him intact in many firefights.
Just as he had known it to be true, gearing up was a great deal more complicated when only one hand was attached. Stepping into the pants of the suit earned him a disgusting squelch as the damp jumpsuit pressed into the inner lining, and more awful sounds followed as the torso of the suit slid into place. Finally it was time to seal the neck and arm pressure cuffs, and to don the hardened tactical helmet that bore painted on googly eyes above the actual viewport and cameras. A hidden switch on the bottom of the main control board was flipped, and the internal computer awoke with an ancient jingle that none alive would remember. The heads up display flickered to life with a blue hue, a miniscule number 98 appearing in the corner of his peripheral.
He raised his stump of a mechanical limb and groaned in dissatisfaction. He had spend much of his time and savings fine tuning that hand to be as close to having human senses. By depressing the right points on the elbow joint he was able to swiftly detach the useless arm, and in its place he inserted a motorized frame that could operate a weapon of his choice. Today was a shotgun kind of day, he thought to himself as he grabbed the 10 gauge breaching gun from its place on the rack compatible weapons.
His sidearm of choice was a bastardized revolver he had machined to operate as an over-under double barreled version of an Earth model 44. One barrel was designed to fire magnetized anti-shield rounds, the other a ballistic projectile jacketed for armor piercing. Crude and deadly, efficient in close quarters combat, just as he had designed it to be. Not wanting to feel short on melee weapons, a bayonet was affixed to the end of his weaponized prosthesis and a combat knife slipped into each boot and on his hip. He once thought having this many weapons was overkill, but a run-in with galactic peacekeepers taught him that too much gun was just the right amount of gun.
All of his gear was prepared for combat, though in his mind he was half dreading going into battle with whoever the captain had chosen as their mark. Firing the pulse missile meant that they had shields, and shields meant money, money meant power and having that ensured security. Liam hated fighting security forces, as they always liked to set up barricades at intersections and spray an unending tide of lasers and bullets down the corridor you occupied until they either pierced the bulkhead through sheer bulk of ordinance or erased you and the cover you had altogether. Such a waste of ammo was a clear sign that they had no respect for the logistics network that was straining to keep them operating. Liam knew what it was like to be one of those logistics drones, since making replacement ammo on the fabricator and reloading bench was a third of his job.
Rolling his shoulders, Liam left the armory and proceeded down the rusty and uneven halls of the pirate ship. He had mixed feeling about everything he walked past: the outdated cargo rails hanging from the ceiling, the mil-spec auto turret hidden under a manhole cover at the intersection, the massive food replicator taking up the entire mess hall side wall, and the loose floor panels hiding deadly traps he had helped design and install. He thought to himself about how awful this place was for everyone but the crew, as even a single misstep could have you killed by any number of things.
Ahead of him he saw another figure clad in newer model combat armor waving for him to approach, so he hastened his steps to catch up with them. The name tag read “Louie DeRay”, which meant that the person in the suit was none other than former security forces member Louie DeRay, the same Louie DeRay that had shot Liam with his own gun when they first met. Liam hated Louie, but at least he knew the way down to the hangar bay. The two stepped into an elevator and waited for the doors to grind shut, then upon the pneumatically assisted punch of Louie the whole car started its slow crawl down. Liam tried to avoid looking at his disliked companion, but it seemed that this man had something to say to Liam. Oh great, he thought to himself, here comes the second worst part of my day.