Void Traveler, Argetha System, Interplanetary Space

“Cap’n, the shields aren’t going to take much more of this!” Destiny Mollen, sometimes called Technica, mainly known as my chief engineer and cousin, knew everything about the Void Traveler, since she was a Technopath, and talking to machines is what she did.

“Keep her together, Destiny! We’re almost through!” Like I said, I’m Melinda Mollen, Captain of the Traveler, and sometimes they call me Frosty. Why the nicknames? Well, when you come from a family of supers, that’s the kind of thing that happens. I inherited dad’s ice powers, and Destiny inherited Aunt Crystal’s ability to talk with machines.

Of course, we’re not alone on the Traveler. She’s a small ship, but not that small. Still, out of a crew of twenty, eight of us are related. There’s me, Destiny, and six of my half-siblings. Yeah, seven of us, all from one dad, and four different women. That isn’t even all of us. I literally have twenty siblings or half-siblings, though twelve of them are from Aunt Talis and Aunt Triel, because Brakthals have litters of 3-6 at a time. Yeah, cat-people are like that.

A jolt of blaster fire coming too close to the hull reminds me not to space out in the middle of running for our lives. Still, Nariko is behind the controls, and he knows his job. After the war, Aunt Talis found she was a damn good pilot, and taught him all she knows. His litter-mate, Eri, is sitting at weapons, shooting back at the bastards trying to blow us out of the sky. You’ll not find a better gunner anywhere in free space, in my opinion.

“Eri, how long on pulse torpedoes?”

“Twenty seconds!”

“Damage Control, what about those rear tubes?”

Isami’s voice came through the speakers. Aunt Hitomi’s daughter had powers, like the rest of us, but oddly enough she didn’t get Ice, like her mother, but metalbending powers. Makes sealing hull breaches a lot easier, I’ll tell you that much. “Sorry, Captain, I unblocked the tubes, but the magnetic controls are fried. You power up the rear tubes, and we’re all dead.”

“Damn. All right, get on the rest of our damage then. We’ll fix the rear tubes when we get to port.” I turned, and looked to the sensor console, where my brother (actual brother, not half) was sitting. He had freaky blood powers, which was a laugh, since neither of our parents had blood powers. “Stephen! Tell me we’re out of range of their warp jammers!”

“Sorry, Sis. The jammers look to be lower-powered models, but they’re small enough that they were able to load them up on that frigate and make it mobile, instead of a static drop. The corvettes are trying to keep us in range of her.”

“Well, that’s fucking wonderful. Range to the frigate?”

“Two hundred thousand kilometers, and opening. Slowly.”

“What is the range of that jammer?”

“One light-second, so just about 300K kilos. We’ll be space dust before we get that far out.”

I looked over to Lilyana over at the Navigation console. “Lily, can you magic us up a nebula or something to hide us?”

“THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!” That got me a scowl from Lily. She hates the generalizations about magic almost as much as she does the name Lily. She’s a mage, like her mother Aunt Mary. And she likes to be called by her ‘mage name’, Shadowsoul. Still, after a moment, she said, in a softer voice, “And no. Nothing to hide in out here.”

“Fine. Here’s the play. Eri, heat up those forward tubes, I want them ready to fire. Destiny, I need you to get ready to throw all the available power to the forward shields when I give the command. Nariko, flapjack on three. Eri, the target’s the frigate. Fire a full spread as soon as she comes to bear.”

“As soon as the torpedoes are clear, flapjack again, and stabilize the rear shields, and go to flank speed. Get ready on the hyperdrive, just in case. That jamming goes down, even for an instant, I want to be a light-hour away before anyone realizes we’re gone. Questions? No? Good. Let’s do this. Three… Two… ONE!”

The stars spun on the display as Nariko pulled a Flapjack. Basically, we flipped the ship end over end, so the bow was facing the bad guys, though we were upside down compared to the ecliptic. Not that it mattered that much in space. Shields became double front, and four pulse torpedoes fired from the forward launch bays, even as the guys on the blasters did their best to give the corvettes something else to think about. Another flapjack, and we were back how we were.

With less than a light-second, the frigate had no chance to evade the torpedoes so long as Eri’s shooting from the hip was on target. The fact that the torpedoes tried to push eachother away due to their magnetic bottles was both blessing and curse when trying to fire without proper calculations. But Eri was the best for a reason. Two torpedoes hadn’t had a chance to spread too far, and antimatter explosions took out the frigate. The other two? That was luck, really, but they had spread just far enough that they got caught by the pull of the corvettes’ mass, and hit one each on the little ships. One exploded (probably because it hit the reactor), but the other was left dead in space. I knew it was dead in space, because it no longer had an engine (antimatter is nasty like that).

I could have said nothing. They were trying to kill us, after all. But daddy may have been a supervillain, but one thing he told me was that, before the war, he never killed anyone he didn’t have to, unless he was sending a message. “Belay jump.” I looked to Kyle, Aunt Jennifer’s son, and fire-wielder, at the communications console. “Kyle, see if those bastards want to surrender. Might as well find out who is trying to kill us this time.”

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While Kyle got on that, Stephen (or Sanguine, as he’s called when we need our ‘other’ names) looked up from his console. “Scanners say they are Vulfun ships. I’m getting an Aprico Corp. transponder from the survivor.”

“Well that explains why they didn’t know better. The Vulfuns are from closer to the Core. Anyone from the Orion Arm knows that human ships have pulse torpedoes.” Seriously, after the war, and a bit of help we gave the Asguard with their machine problems, the whole arm knew that if you faced a human ship, you needed good shields, and you wanted to group together in as tight a formation as possible, so you only lost the one ship, rather than all of them, like what happened here.

Kyle looked up, “They’re accepting the surrender, Captain. And they’re asking us to hurry. Seems they’re leaking atmosphere.”

“Well, that would tend to put most people in a more talkative mood, yes. All right, Nariko, dock us with them. Eri, have the gunners stay on weaps, just in case someone decides to be an idiot. Kyle, let them know why they shouldn’t be idiots before we dock, and then get your team geared up and ready to receive guests.” Yeah, mostly he ran the comms, but he was really our chief of security, for when we needed to kick ass face to face.

With a grin, the battle junky got up, and headed for the door. I hoped for their sake no one tried to resist. That would be a fatal move on their part. Hopefully, we’d get some answers. While pirates were definitely a thing, having a corporation use a warp jammer on you straight out a jump point and opening fire without warning is rather unexpected. Following that up with demands for our surrender was just annoying. Especially since we hadn’t hit the Aprico Corporation’s ships before. Of course, I had an idea about what this might be about. Aprico was the largest weapons company in the Core. Aliens still hadn’t figured out how super-scientists from Earth did half the things they did during the war.

(Later)

It took us ten minutes to dock with the ship, which I found was named the Trakmer Duyd, and another minute to subdue the three idiots who thought they could try and rush aboard and get hostages, or some other craziness. Two died easy, blaster bolts to the face. The third (and biggest of the trio) got burned to a crisp where all the other Vulfuns could see. The fox-like aliens were not big on the smell of burnt Vulfun. Five minutes after that, five of the six remaining Vulfuns sat in the secure room we used as a brig for the few times we had prisoners.

Not their captain, though. No, he was in a different room, an empty storage room, actually, with me, so we could have a ‘chat’. I had taken the time to apply a bit of the special ‘perfume’ Doc Krex came up with using Eri’s pheromones. Drove men wild, and seemed to work across species boundaries. Cheating? Of course, Daddy always said, “If you’re not Cheating, you’re not Trying.”

So I sat across the table from the fox-man who was looking quite ‘distressed’ and getting moreso the longer I was near him. “Now, Captain Auwrits, perhaps you can tell me why you were attacking my ship without provocation?”

The man looked distinctly uncomfortable now. Good. Bastards shot up my ship! “Orders. We were to fly to the Argetha system, and capture a Human vessel to bring back for the lab boys to study.”

“And what in particular were you hoping to gain?”

“Those torpedoes of yours. People have been offering billions of Galactic Credits for one ever since they were used in that war of yours. But only Human ships have them, and no one is willing to sell human ships to nonhumans.”

That wasn’t quite true. I know we had sold the technology to the Asguard to help with their war against the machines, but otherwise yeah, it was true. Pulse torpedoes were one of humanity’s biggest trump cards in this new galactic landscape we found ourselves in. Oh sure, there were a couple greedy bastards that tried to sell the tech to other empires, but Daddy visited them personally, with the Solari Federation’s blessing, and made sure they never tried that (or anything else) again. It only took three black market arms dealers and one corrupt CEO for the message to go around that selling them would be met with extreme prejudice.

“Well, Captain, I hope you enjoyed your demonstration of our pulse torpedoes. Now, because I’m not a corp drone, I’m going to be nice, and deliver your ship to the scrapyard at Argetha IV. That will more than cover the cost of my repairs from your little sneak attack. How is that nice, you’re asking? Because you will not be on it when the ship is torn to scrap. Instead, I’m going to sell you and your men as slaves to a guy I know who needs expendable workers. You’re going to get to clean up radioactive waste from the old space stations down on the surface for the rest of your life. Aren’t you happy?”

The captain was no longer listening by this point. He was thinking entirely with his other head. There’s a reason why we had to make an antidote for Eri’s pheromones. Otherwise the boys would be bending her over a table every time she got the least bit excited. One shipwide orgy was enough for a while, thanks. I did mention I’m related to half the crew, right? That got really awkward for a few days.

“H-happy. Yesss. Happy!”

“Good boy.”