“Well then, I hope you’re quite done with all that nonsense. I vote we let someone else try flying this stupid thing.” Rocco emerged from the smoke of the damaged research vessel and made his way over to the others who were now gathered a safe distance away. “And I know you’re going to say something about being the only one that knows how to fly but after that…? I’d give ‘er a go.”
“Rocco, stop.” Ricky interjected, hoping to cut down on the possibility of a fight breaking out between his younger brothers after what they had just survived. “His flying most likely saved us from being blown to bits.”
“Is everyone OK?” Reegan asked while helping to guide her elderly father to a large rock in the middle of the field.
Ricky quickly appraised their new situation. He had been slightly battered around the tight cabin during their landing but was largely unhurt. Rocky had exited the cockpit along with him and also appeared unhurt. Bingo, the cyborg repossession agent stood by with arms crossed in a scowl. Ricky still hadn’t got a chance to learn much about the mean little Titan Rocky had decided to bring along, but quite honestly it would have surprised him if the cyborg could be hurt by anything less than a bomb. The same thing crossed his mind when he looked up and watched Amiga land in front of them before shutting off the flight pack strapped to her back.
“Seems more like she saved us, you just tried to kill us…again.” Rocco couldn’t contain his barbs towards Rocky and let one more go before seeing the disapproval cross the face of his much smaller oldest brother and falling silent.
“We all look to be fine.” Rocky replied directly to the pretty young prairie dog female “What about your father?”
The old prairie dog waved aside his daughter’s hands and he let loose a mighty harrumph.
“I assure you all that I am quite all right.” Eligah frowned heavily while working to straighten the smart yet cheap tweed suit that he wore. Overall, he was dressed much like a retired college professor, complete with off-color elbow patches. “I might be old to you today, but I was once young and as filled with adventures as any of the rest of you. Enough of that for now, we must hurry and engage the repair drone. This small craft has but one and it will likely take quite some time for it to enact any meaningful repairs.”
Rocky nodded to his brothers, who predictably looked to him at that moment. He sighed and began moving back towards the fallen vessel. Operating a repair drone was not a difficult thing, it was no feat of advanced programming. Most ships had automated systems that went to work with a simple push of the button. His dim-witted brothers were not motivated enough to even figure out such a simple feat of technology as this. He stopped himself before he allowed himself to get worked up about it though, better they thought operating simple tech was a complicated thing, it gave his standing among the group more prestige.
“We may have another problem headed this way.” Amiga announced to no one in particular as she looked out towards the tree line towards the edge of the field.
Ricky followed her gaze and realized that even her eyesight must have been enhanced to a degree, for he was not able to immediately notice whatever seemed to have grabbed her attention. He reached up and flipped the button along the side of his equalizer, his Net-comm monocle.
“Zoom.”
The monocle magnified the sight picture, enhancing the distant tree line until he could see it just as well as if he’d been merely yards away. That’s when Ricky saw what Amiga did. Pouring forth from the dense jungle wilds just beyond the tall grass of the field they’d landed in were a great horde of superstitious primitives, armed with spears and shields and looking none too happy that something had disturbed the peace of their quaint little island paradise.
* * * *
The Skullia-One had quickly become the most notorious space vessel in all of Titan space. No one was quite sure of its origin, nor from which port the bloodthirsty crew of craven murderers and bandits came out from. Some whispered that it was first seen around Vor Prime, others that it simply came forth out of the Strawberry Cloud Nebula to plunder and wreak havoc across the galaxy. Those more attuned to the knowledges typically hidden by the Zenith Corporation had their bets that only amidst the lawless frontier of Geon and the multitude of undocumented space ports that planet held could have fostered such a bold and untamed group.
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While not much was known of the wild Titan gang that crewed the ship, the Skullia-One itself held even more mysteries within its haunted holds. Some claimed it was some type of vessel that some entrepreneurial individuals living on the outskirts of the law built themselves, others said that it had once been a state-of-the-art Zenith attack cruiser. Still others whispered in the back of lively bar pubs across Titan that the ship was much more sinister than all of that, and might have actually been a hellspawn crewed by the damn, looking to enact retribution upon all of Titan spaceways across the system.
The fact that the craft had been operating for over a year now brazenly attacking unprepared cargo freighters seemingly at will spoke volumes that it had not yet been hunted and destroyed by the fleets of Zenith craft patrolling the galaxy. It could seemingly appear out of nowhere and after a successful raid, meld right back into the nothing from whence it had come. Some within the lawless frontier, on unregulated space stations and towns across Geon and Io even claimed that the Skullia-One had been seen not only not running from Zenith interceptors, but even attacking them head on.
Of course, there was one person who knew the truth of the mysterious pirate vessel that had recently been dubbed by the Zenith Corporate Empire as public enemy number one, and that was its captain, who went by the dubious name of Sabre Khan. It was undoubtedly a fake name, but one that had been extremely successful at spreading via word of mouth through the stations and ports across the Titan star system, every new story attributing more terror and ruthlessness behind the name.
The merciless Titan sat in the generous captain’s quarters aboard the Skullia-One, which was decorated with the many spoils of war that had been accumulated by his crew underneath his leadership. As it so happened, he had belonged to one of the rarest and near extinct species of Canids amidst the Titan population.
Sabre Khan was a red wolf and while not quite so large as the largest species of Canids such as the Wolfen, he was lean and built from a powerfully compact frame. Among the criminal population, gangs and pirate crews, usually the physically largest and most dominant members of the lawless crews came about to dominate those smaller and weaker. Such was the way of Titan. The fact that the captain of the Skullia-One was a relatively average sized Canid, one that might even be considered lean as opposed to hulking, might have brought up questions among some as to what other qualities the Canid possessed that kept such a murderous and unruly crew in line. Those that may have guessed that he probably made up his lack of dominating size with an astounding degree of savagery and ruthlessness would have been proven correct.
The ship’s intercom system let out a small neutral beep from a speaker on the console embedded in the desk along the wall next to the entrance to the quarters. The sudden noise drew the captain’s attention away from the holoscreen embedded in the wall at the foot of the spartan bunk that he had been resting upon.
“Pause”. The captain spoke, his voice was a damaged rasp, as though it had come from a Titan that had engaged in glass and nail eating habits for much of his life. The video that had barely been keeping his attention immediately froze in mid-air, and the Canid quickly shot forth from the bunk to reach across and answer the intercom.
“Yeah.” Sabre Khan looked like a violent Titan to the core, with half a dozen rings clasped through his longer-than usual slightly pointed ears and a simple black, worn leathery patch covering his right eye. Even as his reddish furred frame seemed to barely contain a roiling violence within, so too did his whispery and short tone seem to threaten to unleash this at any moment as well.
“Captain, Wozzel just wrapped up his system check. The replicator drones are around forty percent done with repairs, but he says there’s bad news.”
Captain Sabre snorted. There were many parts of being the leader of a crew of pirates that he enjoyed, even relished, but interacting with the others was not among them.
“Go on.” He commanded simply.
“Woz says he’ll need to melt most of our steel ammo supplies to feed the replicators. Do we use ‘em or look for a port to land for supplies?”
Wozzel was the essential systems operator and the one in charge of keeping the Skullia-One in flight and battle ready. The ship was equipped with the newer model replicator drones, which were able to tear down material at a molecular level and then use the raw material to recreate nearly anything from a standardized recipe. Typically this made repairs, especially ones made in open space, easy and largely automated, but in this case, if he used the ammo block reserves stored in the labyrinth hold to repair the damaged hull, it would leave his crew woefully unprepared for any dangers they might run across. And there was never an end to the dangers a Titan might run across while traveling the space lanes.
Sabre clicked a button to activate the desk within the captain’s quarters. Panels moved and the desk shifted to reveal a secondary captain’s console which was nearly identical to the one on the deck of the bridge. He brought up the galaxy map on the screen and quickly pushed the button to transfer the image to a floating holo-image that floated above the desk and allowed him to see the full picture in 3D.
Quick examination of the floating map showed Sabre that the Skullia-One was just outside Tuscan, a largely mafia-controlled planet a few days away from the homeplanet Titan herself.
“Plot course: Tuscan.” Sabre rasped with his gravelly voice.
An overlay suddenly popped up as the ship’s AI calculated thousands of variables and displayed the data instantly. According to the ship, it would only take about six hours to reach the nearest port on Tuscan.
“Tell Woz to use what he needs to plug essential gaps. Anything non-essential we’ll fix on Tuscan. Tell the boys we’re going to port.”
“Aye sir.”