Please note that none of the characters is necessarily my ingame CMDR. I reserve the right to decide on that question at a later point, so for now let's imagine that they are not. I am not sure whether there will be more installments than just this one short story, but in any case it won't be something continuguous, but merely seperate stories and events that happened to the same character.
I noticed the forum sadly censored half of one swear word I used, I marked the place asterisks, you will know what it was when you see it.
Shipwrecked
"Can I at least know your name?"
Miharu kept fiddling inside the innards of the smashed laser turret just above her head, halfway sticking out through hole where the hardpoint cover had been ripped off its mechanism in the crash. Quite deliberately taking her time, she only answered the question, barely even looking at the man at the edge of her field of view, just as he seemed to have stopped expecting a response.
"No", was the only thing she said. A second later she pulled free one of the capacitators, a heavy cylinder as big as a human head. Most people would have struggled to lift the thing with both of their hands, but her cybernetic arm coped easily. Nonetheless, she had to brace herself for the weight, shifting the position of her feet so that she would not fall forward. It helped that the right leg, opposing the mechanical arm, was also synthetic and took most of the stress.
She eyed the cylinder in her left hand up and down, then went back to the makeshift workbench she had made out of a steel plate cut out from one of the ship's interior bulkheads. Her cybernetic arm and leg made no sound as she moved, they were as silent as a natural limb - powered not by servos like most cheap synthetic limbs, but by artificial muscles, the finest in Imperial cybernetics, black bundles that each consisted of millions of strands of flexible microscopic piezo-filaments that contract when put under electric current.
She put the capacitator down on the workbench with a satisfying clunk and pulled out a roll of duct tape from the toolbox, then commenced to strap the cylinder to the rest of the device she had been constructing.
"And I guess I am not to know what contraption you are making there, either?" the man asked audibly annoyed and no longer curious at all.
"No", she snapped back, briefly throwing an annoyed glance at him. He avoided the gaze immediately and grumbled something she couldn't quite understand, and did not care about anyway.
The capacitator firmly in place, she connected the two cables she had already prepared, soldering them on each end using a piece of spare copper wire and her wrist laser, unable to smell the irritating stench resulting from the procedure through the remlok mask.
When she was done and finally looked up from her work, the man was staring at here in a way that she guessed must have been a strange mixture of admiration and horror, as if he were at the same time impressed and terrified by how she used the deadly device so easily, almost casually. She decided not to comment. When she walked to the solar cell she had placed a few meters away from the wreck, she was vaguely aware of the man still staring after her while the wrist laser neatly - and without even a hint of sound - folded back into its compartment again.
The solar cell from the emergency toolkit was little more than four square sheets of thin plastic, dark blue on one and black on the other side, connected to each other with long, thin aluminium hinges and a short piece of insulated wire. The four squares could be folded on top of each other to become a single, thicker square, more compact for storage, but now they lay folded out on the sand, the cable leading all the way to the device on the workbench.
Miharu checked the position of the solar cell, once again shoving a bit more sand under one side in order to improve its angle towards the sun, then came back past the workbench and into the shipwreck, emerging shortly after with two plastic bottles of clear, blueish isotonic liquid. She crouched right before where the man was sitting on the sand, in the shadow below the Cobra's rear half. Its nose had slightly buried into the sand during the crash, so that the rear jutted upward, leaving just enough space below it for sitting and crouching underneath. It was the coolest place they had - the interior of the dead ship was already baking hot from the sun - but the man was still sweating a lot, even though had been sitting here all day long.
She put one bottle down onto the ground right in front of the man, who immediately looked back at her angrily, he grunted but then decided it might be better for him not to complain yet. She took her time drinking from the first bottle, alternating between breathing from the remlok mask and taking a gulp from the bottle, making him watch her, unable to drink himself as his hands were tied behind his back. The liquid was warm and sweet, with an exotic taste as if someone had mixed the flavour of all known types of edible fruit in the galaxy. After she had finished, she took the other bottle, opened it and held it before him so that he could drink by akwardly leaning forward while she pulled away his mask. He consumed the liquid at a worrying speed. Either he was more dehydrated than she had estimated, or he was afraid to asphyxate while drinking, or maybe he feared that she may pull back at any moment, leaving him still thirsty. But none of that happened, and when he was done, the bottle almost empty, he sighed a bit and thanked her genuinely. Instead of responding she simply drank the small rest of it, then put the empty bottle next to the first one, and leant back, supporting her back with the synthetic arm behind her, legs outstretched towards the bound man. She stared to the side, into the distance, across the ocre sand dunes and to a ragged dark grey mountain range that seemed impossibly far away.
"And now?" he asked after a few minutes of awkward silence.
"We wait", she said, without looking at him, "it's got to charge up first."
"It's a hyperspace transmitter, isn't it?"
She did not answer.
"Thought so. How long until the cavalry arrives then? I mean, after it has charged up and you have sent our SOS."
"My SOS", she snapped while spending a single second on a brief, condescending glance at him.
"Ah yes, that whole captive thing. I suppose when this is over, I'll end up as a slave in some faraway asteroid mine, for the rest of my life?"
"Not my decision", she said coldly, again staring at the distant mountains, "in any case, you brought this onto yourself."
"Look, I told you, where I picked up the crates, the stuff is absolutely legal..."
"... you know damn well that in Quince it is not", she interrupted him, "besides, it is not the drugs why I interdicted you."
"It's... not?" She could hear the incredulity in his voice, but stilll did not look at him. She sighed.
"Oh my, are you that naive? Do you really think they sent an operative all the way out here between the bubble and Quince, in order to stop some petty smuggler? Have you ever seen more than the just starship hangars of Jeffries High? Do you really think they have no idea what the lot of you are doing, day after day?"
"Well, not really, but..."
She interrupted him again. "The officials know all about your little business, about all of the smuggling that goes in and out. They let it slip through because the stuff is highly sought after among the most wealthy tourists. It builds customer loyalty." Now she looked at him and grinned widely, an expression of emotion he had not at all expected from her.
"Then what have you been you after?"
"That", she said, reverting her face back to the cold mask she could put on at will, "is none of your business. In fact, not having a clue may even work in your favour. If you can convince the judge that you only only ever knew about the drugs, and not the... other stuff, you may get away with a few years. That is, if I put in a good word for you. So if you would just cooperate and try not to annoy me, we're off this hellhole before our oxygen runs out from too much talking."
"I see."
Then he gulped as he realized that she could have easily let him just die here, to have double the amount of oxygen for herself. All along, she had been risking her own life saving his! Was it possible, could there really be some kind of noble cause behind it all, the chase across several systems, the interdiction, the fleeing, hiding and fighting? Had she shot out his engines, after all, deliberately in order not to destroy his ship and kill him?
"I feel so stupid now."
"Go on, tell me", she said, a hint of delight in her voice.
"When you boarded my ship, and I tried to kill you. I mean, you could easily have destroyed my ship, but you didn't, and after the crash you gave me the remlok."
"You mean when you tried to kill me and instead caused an explosive decompression, while your ship was already in an orbit so low that it was at the brink of entering the atmosphere?"
"Yeah, I am... sorry about that."
She looked at him thoughtfully, tilted her head slightly to one side, and then shrugged. "I've had it worse. And don't even think about asking."
It turned out the planet they had crashed upon had rather long days. Where and when they had gone down the sun already had been a considerable distance above the horizon, it only peaked 10 hours later and, when it finally started setting, Miharu estimated the days on this planet to last at least 40 hours. The makeshift transmitter had finished charging up by whatever passes at noon here, she had sent a standard Imperial SOS together with their coordinates and her real digital signature. Officially she was not supposed to ever use it on an open channel, but she expected that had she sent the signal anonymously or under one of her many false identities, whereever the signal would be received, they'd treat her with too low a priority for her taste.
In the end, she preferred a lecture over asphyxiation.
Her captive, a man who goes by the false name of Rick Jameson, fell asleep soon after the sun had set and the air had started to cool a bit. His identity was more likely than not fake; even if the bureau had not briefed her about his backstory, which included his real identity and precisely when and where and from whom he got the false ID - the surname Jameson had long since become the standard go-to that the unimaginative minds would fall back to when pressed to quickly think up a new name. When presented with the name, no one ever expected a genuine descendant of the famous commander any more.
She did not sleep. Even though she was confident he would be unable to remove the shackles around his wrists and ankles, she preferred not to risk being wrong. As long as she could make up for it later, her augmentations allowed her to stay awake for up to three standard days straight, with no loss of mental focus or physical prowess, and even longer if she was willing to let her performance degrade eventually.
Several hours into the night, something peculiar caught her sight. She stood up swiftly and silently, not to wake up Rick, and walk out from under the wreck that obstructed part of the view overhead. A long streak, fiery red, like a shooting star, except brighter and bigger. A rock large enough to hit the ground? No, it turned out soon enough, the fire trail faded and the crash and boom she was already prepared for refused to happen. Burnt up in the air.
She had turned around and was about to crawl back under the dead Cobra, but then she paused. Something had been off with that shooting star. She turned around again and squinted, but couldn't see anything unusual. Still not satisfied, she reached for he left thigh and detached a small round device from the suit, which quickly unfolded into a pair of compact binoculars. She turned it to infrared mode and gazed through it, into the distance. There it was, hanging in the air a red spot in the false color view that showed the sky in dark violet and the mountains in blue.
", " she mumbled, then turned around to Rick, shook his shoulders and yelled at him.
"Hey, wake up!"
"What, where... still dark, let me just..., " he said while he did not even open his eyes.
She slapped him across the cheek with her open palm.
"Ow! You can't just..."
"I said wake up!"
He opened his eyes slowly and frowned at her.
"We are being visited", she said and quickly removed the shackles from Rick's wrists and ankles.
"Thanks, but why are you doing this?"
"Because I don't expect these to be friends."
"Someone intercepted your signal?"
"Possibly."
He crawled out from under the Cobra and stood up clumsily, then had to stretch his limbs and back several times, sighing with some satisfaction. Being restrained for so long isn't very comfortable.
"Here, take this. I hope you know how to use a gun?" she said as she shoved a laser pistol into his hand. He had no idea where she even got that one from, but he knew the rifle she was readying had been firmly attached to the back of her suit when she had boarded his ship, and had resting next to the workbench most of the time after the crash.
The rifle began as a compact, elongated device that looked like a fancy Imperial interpretation of a small carbine, but it unfolded into something much bigger and more sophisticated. A long telescopic barrel extended from the muzzle, a scope emerged from the top, and the butt grew longer, too. He spotted something that looked like a magazine, already attached in the compact configuration, so this was not a laser rifle.
For a moment he looked at the elegant weapon of clearly Imperial design, until he briefly nodded and confirmed. Yes, he knew how to shoot a laser pistol. He preferred not to mention that he had no experience at all with ballistic weapons and would not know how to properly handle the recoil. When the rifle had finished unfolding, she lifted it up and aimed into the distance.
"What is going on?"
"A ship has entered the atmosphere over the mountains, probably heading for us."
"Not the cavalry?"
"No, these are probably the bad guys. I don't suppose these could be your friends?"
"I wouldn't know anyone who would come and rescue me out here."
"Thought so. Be prepared to shoot at my command at whoever leaves that ship. Understood?"
"Understood." He gulped, then frowned. "Why are you suddenly trusting me?"
"I've got no other choice", she confessed, "they will probably outnumber us and you are more useful as a backup than a dead weight. Besides, overpowering you afterwards, if necessary, would be easier than overpowering a gang of pirates."
He grumbled. "Thanks for nothing, I suppose."
"Look, I want to get out of here alive as much as you, and our chances are better if we work together now. So please be ready, but only shoot on my order."
"Okay", he sighed, and lifted the pistol into the same direction as she pointed the rifle, even though he saw nothing.
He relaxed and lowered his gun after a minute of nothing happening, but she ignored it and still gazed through the scope.
"Seeing anything?"
"Single ship, can't say what type, but definitely not Imperial design. Maybe Faulcon. They are flying straight to us."
"Your friends are still coming, aren't they?"
"I don't know. The signal won't reach very far, in order to reach some Imperial official who knows what to do with, it would have to be relayed forward. If a bunch of pirates were the only ones in range, they might have had other plans. Hold on."
For a minute, they both stood in absolute silence, until she broke it.
"I tried to contact them implant-to-radio, no response. Expect the worst, and shoot at anything that comes out of that ship."
"Roger." He nodded, the aimed his gun again, not without feeling quite futile pointing a pistol at a ship still too far away to be more than a distant dot.
"Okay, I can see it now more clearly. It's a Python, heat signature suggests they don't have their guns out. If we are lucky, they expect no resistance. We shall surprise them."
He looked at her and saw her wide grin, then turned back to the ship. He could soon recognize a rough shape, something flattened and wide, surrounded by the glow of its thrusters.
As the ship came closer, its apparent size grew rapidly, then, all of a sudden, it zoomed right over their heads, maybe 100 meters above the ground, and only then were they hit by the deafening impact of the sonic boom. It lasted a second and then everything was silent, and as he yelled at her he could not even hear his own voice. He was deaf.
Meanwhile, her suit had automatically deployed some form of ear-protection, white circular discs framed by the telltale faint blue glow of typical Imperial tech. She swung around in a dizzyingly swift motion, and aimed again at the Python as it rapidly gained distance. He alternated between staring at her and the ship, still baffled by what had happened. He was really deaf. He could see her lips moving ghostly as she said something that produced nothing audible.
Eyes closed and a deep breath later, he had regained his balance. The Python was making a wide arc now, he could see the retro-thrusters burning brightly as it lost speed, and then it came back, at a much gentler pace.
Weapons still not deployed. The Python came to a halt a couple of dozen meters away from the Cobra, then settled down on its massive landing gear, three pieces each the size of a truck. Miharu told Rick to wait, be ready, and kept her aim on the forward landing gear, which also contained the lift and ramp leading in and out of the ship. Fools, they used the lift. Three figures standing on it, projectile rifles clearly visible in the magnified view of the scope. Three targets, three times pulling the trigger, three blazing blue flashes of superheated air, three heads literally exploding from the impact of three railgun projectiles. An alarm sounded in her ear cover, overheat warning. That would take a while to cool down, too long, and she drew the other laser pistol from its holster attached to the upper leg of her suit, and threw the rifle to the ground.
She charged forward. Rick hesitated and she yelled at him, but did not slow down the pace of her sprint. When she reached the landing gear, she hid on its rear-facing side, away from the ramp, her back to the bare steel, the pistol loaded and ready. She glanced towards Rick, who had instead went to hide inside the pitch black void under the Cobra. Clever.
She heard screams from inside, then footsteps, no more than two people, they immediately opened fire at the wreck of the Cobra. They might not have realized her dash forward. Very good.
The bullets hit the wreck with a series of rapid metallic clanking, leaving little more than dents in the paint. Even the lightest default armour on Faulcon DeLacy craft was impenetrable to regular anti-person ammunition. While walking down the ramp, the pirates kept firing short bursts at the wreck. Miharu wondered whether Rick did not return the fire out of fear, or whether he was waiting for the right moment, when they would have to reload. She decided that she couldn't rely on her captive, and when the two men on the ramp paused their fire and cursed, she sprang out of her hiding place and fired at one man, hit him twice, he clutched the smoking, soldering chest wound and collapsed. The other man reacted immediately, drew a pistol, but was slain but a flash of laser fire coming from the Cobra. For good measure, she also delivered two shots of her own, and the man fell down the rest of the ramp.
For a moment, all was silent, until a she could hear a worrying low rumble, coming from deep within the Python's massive bulk above her. As she realized what the pirates were doing, she yelled towards Rick, but there was no sign of him leaving from is position. She screamed and waved, but no sign of him. He'd be dead if he stayed there.
Then, as she had expected, the cover of the weapon hardpoint under the Python began to slide open with a low and deep humming sound. When the large burst laser turret started deploying, Rick finally react, came out of his cover, but instead of running to the only save place, the blind spot behind the Python's deployed landing gear, he ran in parallel to the massive ship, towars its rear, but well within the tracking arc of the turret. Miharu screamed but Rick did not react, and in desperation she fired her pistol at a spot on the ground, right in front of his path, and the sudden explosion of superheated sand and dusted made him startle, stop and almost fall over. But it worked, it made him look at her and see her wave, and he sprinted to her, under the menacingly looming mass of the Python, and to where she was hiding. She half expected him to suddenly turn into a fiery cloud halfway to her, but the turret's mechanism was luckily ready only a moment after he had already reached her.
"Fool, you can't outrun a turret's targetting on foot, their tracking is designed for objects going at two-digit speeds!"
He just gave her a blank stare, then yelled, much louder than would have been necessary, that he cannot hear a thing. Her eyes betrayed her surprise to him, how could she not have though of that! One does not simply witness a sonic boom right above one's head and come out unharmed without ear protection. This would make things much more difficult. He had probably never been trained to use military hand signs, so she did the best she could, activated a small screen on the wrist of her suit, where the natural arm was, and hastily typed a single sentence on the touchscreen: "need a hostge wait dont shoot". He nodded, although with a puzzled look on his face.
They waited. 5 of the gangsters dead, they had no idea how many were still inside. There couldn't be too many, otherwise they would have already just been overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Using the big turret was clearly an act of desperation, as they would have risked destroying any potential loot by firing at the Cobra.
Eventually, she heard footsteps on the ramp above them. A single person, and they did not walk down the ramp.
"The turret is programmed to shoot at anything that moves and is not part of my crew." It was a man, and there was anger in the voice. "If you kill me, you will only have the choice between starving to death in your little hideout and being vaporized quickly."
"Understood."
Rick looked confused until he probably realized she was talking to someone on the ramp, someone they could not yet see.
"You will throw your guns into the sand, where I can see them."
She hesitated, but then she indeed threw her pistol far away from her so that it could be seen from above the ramp. She wanted to grab Rick's gun and do the same, but before she could do that he followed her example and threw his gun in the same direction. She nodded at him in approval, and made a gesture for him to remain silent.
"Good", the man on the ramp said. Footstops announced that he was now walking down. She peeked around the corner, and when he came into view, pointed her mechanical arm towards him, and shot the cable with the grappler at his leg. It hit, swung around his thigh once and clamped tightly, the man screamed and fired his rifle wildly into their direction, but she had already withdrawn, the cable running around the edge of the Python's landing gear. She pulled hard, with all the might of her body, as the cable started to reel back in, and she almost lost her balance if not for Rick to put both arms around her chest and put his weight behind the effort, too. With twice the force and friction, they had enough footing to pull the pirate off the ramp and through the sand.
Miharu was worried about the next part. She or Rick would have to wrestle the rifle out of his hands quickly. His leg appeared first around the corner, following by the struggling and loudly cursing rest of the man. But the rifle was gone, he must have lost hit when they pulled him off the ramp.
Rick grabbed the man's arms and twisted them behind his back, while she detached the grappler from his leg and let it fold back into its place, then she pulled out a large army knife and held it to his throat.
"How many are still in there."
"50."
"Bull****." She pressed the edge strongly against the skin, a single drop of blood emerged.
"Okay fine, I am the only one left. Why'd you think I'd come out if I had more useless cannon fodder to send?" He was still more angry than terrified, but he understood the meaning of a knife to the throat well enough.
"You're coming with us."
She got behind the pirate, knife still in place, and gently pushed him forward. Rick adjusted and followed the motion, and so they emerged from behind the landing gear, into the view of the still active turret, their hostage a living shield. The turret pointed directly at the three, but did not fire. Slowly and clumsily, they scrambled towards the lower end of the ramp, then backwards into the ship, and out of sight of the turret.
In that moment, the pirate broke free, roaring menacingly, but Rick could not hear it and was not much impressed by the effort. He punched the pirate in the face, right on the chin, he stumbled dizzily and Rick struck again, then Miharu took the restrainers she had previously used on Rick, and wrestled them onto the wrists and ankles of the pirate captain.
The gangster properly restrained, Miharu sat down for a moment on one of the benches in the airlock, and took a deep breath. She looked at Rick and nodded approvingly, full well knowing that talking would have been futile. The pirate grumbled a bit more, pulled in vain against the shackles, then gave up and merely stared at them in contempt.
She decided that the airlock would do fine as a makeshift prison. On the control pad, she pressed the button to close the outer door, then open the inner door, Rick and she went inside and closed the inner airlock door again. On the control screen next to it, she navigated a couple of menus and activated the emergency biohazard quarantine procedure, meant for cases when some dangerous pathogen was somehow brought into the airlock and must not enter the ship at all cost. Both airlock doors went into secure mode, and could no longer be opened from inside the airlock or outside the ship.
When she turned back from the screen, she saw Rick sitting on the floor, back against the wall, his head in his hands. A tiny spot on the ground before him was wet. He was crying silently. She frowned, then typed on her wrist-screen "is it about your ears?" and tapped him gently on the shoulder. He looked up, read the text and nodded. She replied "in the empire, we can fix that". He look at her incredulously. He surely must have known that regrowing all kinds of body part in-vivo was a standard procedure in Imperial medicine, it was common knowledge. But he wouldn't have expected her to offer this treatment to him. It was expensive and he would have no way to pay for it, especially not with most of his savings bound up in the wrecked Cobra and its cargo. He gulped, nodded and eventually managed to produce a smile. She typed again on the screen, "i can fly a python. lets get out of here". She smiled back.
I noticed the forum sadly censored half of one swear word I used, I marked the place asterisks, you will know what it was when you see it.
Shipwrecked
"Can I at least know your name?"
Miharu kept fiddling inside the innards of the smashed laser turret just above her head, halfway sticking out through hole where the hardpoint cover had been ripped off its mechanism in the crash. Quite deliberately taking her time, she only answered the question, barely even looking at the man at the edge of her field of view, just as he seemed to have stopped expecting a response.
"No", was the only thing she said. A second later she pulled free one of the capacitators, a heavy cylinder as big as a human head. Most people would have struggled to lift the thing with both of their hands, but her cybernetic arm coped easily. Nonetheless, she had to brace herself for the weight, shifting the position of her feet so that she would not fall forward. It helped that the right leg, opposing the mechanical arm, was also synthetic and took most of the stress.
She eyed the cylinder in her left hand up and down, then went back to the makeshift workbench she had made out of a steel plate cut out from one of the ship's interior bulkheads. Her cybernetic arm and leg made no sound as she moved, they were as silent as a natural limb - powered not by servos like most cheap synthetic limbs, but by artificial muscles, the finest in Imperial cybernetics, black bundles that each consisted of millions of strands of flexible microscopic piezo-filaments that contract when put under electric current.
She put the capacitator down on the workbench with a satisfying clunk and pulled out a roll of duct tape from the toolbox, then commenced to strap the cylinder to the rest of the device she had been constructing.
"And I guess I am not to know what contraption you are making there, either?" the man asked audibly annoyed and no longer curious at all.
"No", she snapped back, briefly throwing an annoyed glance at him. He avoided the gaze immediately and grumbled something she couldn't quite understand, and did not care about anyway.
The capacitator firmly in place, she connected the two cables she had already prepared, soldering them on each end using a piece of spare copper wire and her wrist laser, unable to smell the irritating stench resulting from the procedure through the remlok mask.
When she was done and finally looked up from her work, the man was staring at here in a way that she guessed must have been a strange mixture of admiration and horror, as if he were at the same time impressed and terrified by how she used the deadly device so easily, almost casually. She decided not to comment. When she walked to the solar cell she had placed a few meters away from the wreck, she was vaguely aware of the man still staring after her while the wrist laser neatly - and without even a hint of sound - folded back into its compartment again.
The solar cell from the emergency toolkit was little more than four square sheets of thin plastic, dark blue on one and black on the other side, connected to each other with long, thin aluminium hinges and a short piece of insulated wire. The four squares could be folded on top of each other to become a single, thicker square, more compact for storage, but now they lay folded out on the sand, the cable leading all the way to the device on the workbench.
Miharu checked the position of the solar cell, once again shoving a bit more sand under one side in order to improve its angle towards the sun, then came back past the workbench and into the shipwreck, emerging shortly after with two plastic bottles of clear, blueish isotonic liquid. She crouched right before where the man was sitting on the sand, in the shadow below the Cobra's rear half. Its nose had slightly buried into the sand during the crash, so that the rear jutted upward, leaving just enough space below it for sitting and crouching underneath. It was the coolest place they had - the interior of the dead ship was already baking hot from the sun - but the man was still sweating a lot, even though had been sitting here all day long.
She put one bottle down onto the ground right in front of the man, who immediately looked back at her angrily, he grunted but then decided it might be better for him not to complain yet. She took her time drinking from the first bottle, alternating between breathing from the remlok mask and taking a gulp from the bottle, making him watch her, unable to drink himself as his hands were tied behind his back. The liquid was warm and sweet, with an exotic taste as if someone had mixed the flavour of all known types of edible fruit in the galaxy. After she had finished, she took the other bottle, opened it and held it before him so that he could drink by akwardly leaning forward while she pulled away his mask. He consumed the liquid at a worrying speed. Either he was more dehydrated than she had estimated, or he was afraid to asphyxate while drinking, or maybe he feared that she may pull back at any moment, leaving him still thirsty. But none of that happened, and when he was done, the bottle almost empty, he sighed a bit and thanked her genuinely. Instead of responding she simply drank the small rest of it, then put the empty bottle next to the first one, and leant back, supporting her back with the synthetic arm behind her, legs outstretched towards the bound man. She stared to the side, into the distance, across the ocre sand dunes and to a ragged dark grey mountain range that seemed impossibly far away.
"And now?" he asked after a few minutes of awkward silence.
"We wait", she said, without looking at him, "it's got to charge up first."
"It's a hyperspace transmitter, isn't it?"
She did not answer.
"Thought so. How long until the cavalry arrives then? I mean, after it has charged up and you have sent our SOS."
"My SOS", she snapped while spending a single second on a brief, condescending glance at him.
"Ah yes, that whole captive thing. I suppose when this is over, I'll end up as a slave in some faraway asteroid mine, for the rest of my life?"
"Not my decision", she said coldly, again staring at the distant mountains, "in any case, you brought this onto yourself."
"Look, I told you, where I picked up the crates, the stuff is absolutely legal..."
"... you know damn well that in Quince it is not", she interrupted him, "besides, it is not the drugs why I interdicted you."
"It's... not?" She could hear the incredulity in his voice, but stilll did not look at him. She sighed.
"Oh my, are you that naive? Do you really think they sent an operative all the way out here between the bubble and Quince, in order to stop some petty smuggler? Have you ever seen more than the just starship hangars of Jeffries High? Do you really think they have no idea what the lot of you are doing, day after day?"
"Well, not really, but..."
She interrupted him again. "The officials know all about your little business, about all of the smuggling that goes in and out. They let it slip through because the stuff is highly sought after among the most wealthy tourists. It builds customer loyalty." Now she looked at him and grinned widely, an expression of emotion he had not at all expected from her.
"Then what have you been you after?"
"That", she said, reverting her face back to the cold mask she could put on at will, "is none of your business. In fact, not having a clue may even work in your favour. If you can convince the judge that you only only ever knew about the drugs, and not the... other stuff, you may get away with a few years. That is, if I put in a good word for you. So if you would just cooperate and try not to annoy me, we're off this hellhole before our oxygen runs out from too much talking."
"I see."
Then he gulped as he realized that she could have easily let him just die here, to have double the amount of oxygen for herself. All along, she had been risking her own life saving his! Was it possible, could there really be some kind of noble cause behind it all, the chase across several systems, the interdiction, the fleeing, hiding and fighting? Had she shot out his engines, after all, deliberately in order not to destroy his ship and kill him?
"I feel so stupid now."
"Go on, tell me", she said, a hint of delight in her voice.
"When you boarded my ship, and I tried to kill you. I mean, you could easily have destroyed my ship, but you didn't, and after the crash you gave me the remlok."
"You mean when you tried to kill me and instead caused an explosive decompression, while your ship was already in an orbit so low that it was at the brink of entering the atmosphere?"
"Yeah, I am... sorry about that."
She looked at him thoughtfully, tilted her head slightly to one side, and then shrugged. "I've had it worse. And don't even think about asking."
It turned out the planet they had crashed upon had rather long days. Where and when they had gone down the sun already had been a considerable distance above the horizon, it only peaked 10 hours later and, when it finally started setting, Miharu estimated the days on this planet to last at least 40 hours. The makeshift transmitter had finished charging up by whatever passes at noon here, she had sent a standard Imperial SOS together with their coordinates and her real digital signature. Officially she was not supposed to ever use it on an open channel, but she expected that had she sent the signal anonymously or under one of her many false identities, whereever the signal would be received, they'd treat her with too low a priority for her taste.
In the end, she preferred a lecture over asphyxiation.
Her captive, a man who goes by the false name of Rick Jameson, fell asleep soon after the sun had set and the air had started to cool a bit. His identity was more likely than not fake; even if the bureau had not briefed her about his backstory, which included his real identity and precisely when and where and from whom he got the false ID - the surname Jameson had long since become the standard go-to that the unimaginative minds would fall back to when pressed to quickly think up a new name. When presented with the name, no one ever expected a genuine descendant of the famous commander any more.
She did not sleep. Even though she was confident he would be unable to remove the shackles around his wrists and ankles, she preferred not to risk being wrong. As long as she could make up for it later, her augmentations allowed her to stay awake for up to three standard days straight, with no loss of mental focus or physical prowess, and even longer if she was willing to let her performance degrade eventually.
Several hours into the night, something peculiar caught her sight. She stood up swiftly and silently, not to wake up Rick, and walk out from under the wreck that obstructed part of the view overhead. A long streak, fiery red, like a shooting star, except brighter and bigger. A rock large enough to hit the ground? No, it turned out soon enough, the fire trail faded and the crash and boom she was already prepared for refused to happen. Burnt up in the air.
She had turned around and was about to crawl back under the dead Cobra, but then she paused. Something had been off with that shooting star. She turned around again and squinted, but couldn't see anything unusual. Still not satisfied, she reached for he left thigh and detached a small round device from the suit, which quickly unfolded into a pair of compact binoculars. She turned it to infrared mode and gazed through it, into the distance. There it was, hanging in the air a red spot in the false color view that showed the sky in dark violet and the mountains in blue.
", " she mumbled, then turned around to Rick, shook his shoulders and yelled at him.
"Hey, wake up!"
"What, where... still dark, let me just..., " he said while he did not even open his eyes.
She slapped him across the cheek with her open palm.
"Ow! You can't just..."
"I said wake up!"
He opened his eyes slowly and frowned at her.
"We are being visited", she said and quickly removed the shackles from Rick's wrists and ankles.
"Thanks, but why are you doing this?"
"Because I don't expect these to be friends."
"Someone intercepted your signal?"
"Possibly."
He crawled out from under the Cobra and stood up clumsily, then had to stretch his limbs and back several times, sighing with some satisfaction. Being restrained for so long isn't very comfortable.
"Here, take this. I hope you know how to use a gun?" she said as she shoved a laser pistol into his hand. He had no idea where she even got that one from, but he knew the rifle she was readying had been firmly attached to the back of her suit when she had boarded his ship, and had resting next to the workbench most of the time after the crash.
The rifle began as a compact, elongated device that looked like a fancy Imperial interpretation of a small carbine, but it unfolded into something much bigger and more sophisticated. A long telescopic barrel extended from the muzzle, a scope emerged from the top, and the butt grew longer, too. He spotted something that looked like a magazine, already attached in the compact configuration, so this was not a laser rifle.
For a moment he looked at the elegant weapon of clearly Imperial design, until he briefly nodded and confirmed. Yes, he knew how to shoot a laser pistol. He preferred not to mention that he had no experience at all with ballistic weapons and would not know how to properly handle the recoil. When the rifle had finished unfolding, she lifted it up and aimed into the distance.
"What is going on?"
"A ship has entered the atmosphere over the mountains, probably heading for us."
"Not the cavalry?"
"No, these are probably the bad guys. I don't suppose these could be your friends?"
"I wouldn't know anyone who would come and rescue me out here."
"Thought so. Be prepared to shoot at my command at whoever leaves that ship. Understood?"
"Understood." He gulped, then frowned. "Why are you suddenly trusting me?"
"I've got no other choice", she confessed, "they will probably outnumber us and you are more useful as a backup than a dead weight. Besides, overpowering you afterwards, if necessary, would be easier than overpowering a gang of pirates."
He grumbled. "Thanks for nothing, I suppose."
"Look, I want to get out of here alive as much as you, and our chances are better if we work together now. So please be ready, but only shoot on my order."
"Okay", he sighed, and lifted the pistol into the same direction as she pointed the rifle, even though he saw nothing.
He relaxed and lowered his gun after a minute of nothing happening, but she ignored it and still gazed through the scope.
"Seeing anything?"
"Single ship, can't say what type, but definitely not Imperial design. Maybe Faulcon. They are flying straight to us."
"Your friends are still coming, aren't they?"
"I don't know. The signal won't reach very far, in order to reach some Imperial official who knows what to do with, it would have to be relayed forward. If a bunch of pirates were the only ones in range, they might have had other plans. Hold on."
For a minute, they both stood in absolute silence, until she broke it.
"I tried to contact them implant-to-radio, no response. Expect the worst, and shoot at anything that comes out of that ship."
"Roger." He nodded, the aimed his gun again, not without feeling quite futile pointing a pistol at a ship still too far away to be more than a distant dot.
"Okay, I can see it now more clearly. It's a Python, heat signature suggests they don't have their guns out. If we are lucky, they expect no resistance. We shall surprise them."
He looked at her and saw her wide grin, then turned back to the ship. He could soon recognize a rough shape, something flattened and wide, surrounded by the glow of its thrusters.
As the ship came closer, its apparent size grew rapidly, then, all of a sudden, it zoomed right over their heads, maybe 100 meters above the ground, and only then were they hit by the deafening impact of the sonic boom. It lasted a second and then everything was silent, and as he yelled at her he could not even hear his own voice. He was deaf.
Meanwhile, her suit had automatically deployed some form of ear-protection, white circular discs framed by the telltale faint blue glow of typical Imperial tech. She swung around in a dizzyingly swift motion, and aimed again at the Python as it rapidly gained distance. He alternated between staring at her and the ship, still baffled by what had happened. He was really deaf. He could see her lips moving ghostly as she said something that produced nothing audible.
Eyes closed and a deep breath later, he had regained his balance. The Python was making a wide arc now, he could see the retro-thrusters burning brightly as it lost speed, and then it came back, at a much gentler pace.
Weapons still not deployed. The Python came to a halt a couple of dozen meters away from the Cobra, then settled down on its massive landing gear, three pieces each the size of a truck. Miharu told Rick to wait, be ready, and kept her aim on the forward landing gear, which also contained the lift and ramp leading in and out of the ship. Fools, they used the lift. Three figures standing on it, projectile rifles clearly visible in the magnified view of the scope. Three targets, three times pulling the trigger, three blazing blue flashes of superheated air, three heads literally exploding from the impact of three railgun projectiles. An alarm sounded in her ear cover, overheat warning. That would take a while to cool down, too long, and she drew the other laser pistol from its holster attached to the upper leg of her suit, and threw the rifle to the ground.
She charged forward. Rick hesitated and she yelled at him, but did not slow down the pace of her sprint. When she reached the landing gear, she hid on its rear-facing side, away from the ramp, her back to the bare steel, the pistol loaded and ready. She glanced towards Rick, who had instead went to hide inside the pitch black void under the Cobra. Clever.
She heard screams from inside, then footsteps, no more than two people, they immediately opened fire at the wreck of the Cobra. They might not have realized her dash forward. Very good.
The bullets hit the wreck with a series of rapid metallic clanking, leaving little more than dents in the paint. Even the lightest default armour on Faulcon DeLacy craft was impenetrable to regular anti-person ammunition. While walking down the ramp, the pirates kept firing short bursts at the wreck. Miharu wondered whether Rick did not return the fire out of fear, or whether he was waiting for the right moment, when they would have to reload. She decided that she couldn't rely on her captive, and when the two men on the ramp paused their fire and cursed, she sprang out of her hiding place and fired at one man, hit him twice, he clutched the smoking, soldering chest wound and collapsed. The other man reacted immediately, drew a pistol, but was slain but a flash of laser fire coming from the Cobra. For good measure, she also delivered two shots of her own, and the man fell down the rest of the ramp.
For a moment, all was silent, until a she could hear a worrying low rumble, coming from deep within the Python's massive bulk above her. As she realized what the pirates were doing, she yelled towards Rick, but there was no sign of him leaving from is position. She screamed and waved, but no sign of him. He'd be dead if he stayed there.
Then, as she had expected, the cover of the weapon hardpoint under the Python began to slide open with a low and deep humming sound. When the large burst laser turret started deploying, Rick finally react, came out of his cover, but instead of running to the only save place, the blind spot behind the Python's deployed landing gear, he ran in parallel to the massive ship, towars its rear, but well within the tracking arc of the turret. Miharu screamed but Rick did not react, and in desperation she fired her pistol at a spot on the ground, right in front of his path, and the sudden explosion of superheated sand and dusted made him startle, stop and almost fall over. But it worked, it made him look at her and see her wave, and he sprinted to her, under the menacingly looming mass of the Python, and to where she was hiding. She half expected him to suddenly turn into a fiery cloud halfway to her, but the turret's mechanism was luckily ready only a moment after he had already reached her.
"Fool, you can't outrun a turret's targetting on foot, their tracking is designed for objects going at two-digit speeds!"
He just gave her a blank stare, then yelled, much louder than would have been necessary, that he cannot hear a thing. Her eyes betrayed her surprise to him, how could she not have though of that! One does not simply witness a sonic boom right above one's head and come out unharmed without ear protection. This would make things much more difficult. He had probably never been trained to use military hand signs, so she did the best she could, activated a small screen on the wrist of her suit, where the natural arm was, and hastily typed a single sentence on the touchscreen: "need a hostge wait dont shoot". He nodded, although with a puzzled look on his face.
They waited. 5 of the gangsters dead, they had no idea how many were still inside. There couldn't be too many, otherwise they would have already just been overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Using the big turret was clearly an act of desperation, as they would have risked destroying any potential loot by firing at the Cobra.
Eventually, she heard footsteps on the ramp above them. A single person, and they did not walk down the ramp.
"The turret is programmed to shoot at anything that moves and is not part of my crew." It was a man, and there was anger in the voice. "If you kill me, you will only have the choice between starving to death in your little hideout and being vaporized quickly."
"Understood."
Rick looked confused until he probably realized she was talking to someone on the ramp, someone they could not yet see.
"You will throw your guns into the sand, where I can see them."
She hesitated, but then she indeed threw her pistol far away from her so that it could be seen from above the ramp. She wanted to grab Rick's gun and do the same, but before she could do that he followed her example and threw his gun in the same direction. She nodded at him in approval, and made a gesture for him to remain silent.
"Good", the man on the ramp said. Footstops announced that he was now walking down. She peeked around the corner, and when he came into view, pointed her mechanical arm towards him, and shot the cable with the grappler at his leg. It hit, swung around his thigh once and clamped tightly, the man screamed and fired his rifle wildly into their direction, but she had already withdrawn, the cable running around the edge of the Python's landing gear. She pulled hard, with all the might of her body, as the cable started to reel back in, and she almost lost her balance if not for Rick to put both arms around her chest and put his weight behind the effort, too. With twice the force and friction, they had enough footing to pull the pirate off the ramp and through the sand.
Miharu was worried about the next part. She or Rick would have to wrestle the rifle out of his hands quickly. His leg appeared first around the corner, following by the struggling and loudly cursing rest of the man. But the rifle was gone, he must have lost hit when they pulled him off the ramp.
Rick grabbed the man's arms and twisted them behind his back, while she detached the grappler from his leg and let it fold back into its place, then she pulled out a large army knife and held it to his throat.
"How many are still in there."
"50."
"Bull****." She pressed the edge strongly against the skin, a single drop of blood emerged.
"Okay fine, I am the only one left. Why'd you think I'd come out if I had more useless cannon fodder to send?" He was still more angry than terrified, but he understood the meaning of a knife to the throat well enough.
"You're coming with us."
She got behind the pirate, knife still in place, and gently pushed him forward. Rick adjusted and followed the motion, and so they emerged from behind the landing gear, into the view of the still active turret, their hostage a living shield. The turret pointed directly at the three, but did not fire. Slowly and clumsily, they scrambled towards the lower end of the ramp, then backwards into the ship, and out of sight of the turret.
In that moment, the pirate broke free, roaring menacingly, but Rick could not hear it and was not much impressed by the effort. He punched the pirate in the face, right on the chin, he stumbled dizzily and Rick struck again, then Miharu took the restrainers she had previously used on Rick, and wrestled them onto the wrists and ankles of the pirate captain.
The gangster properly restrained, Miharu sat down for a moment on one of the benches in the airlock, and took a deep breath. She looked at Rick and nodded approvingly, full well knowing that talking would have been futile. The pirate grumbled a bit more, pulled in vain against the shackles, then gave up and merely stared at them in contempt.
She decided that the airlock would do fine as a makeshift prison. On the control pad, she pressed the button to close the outer door, then open the inner door, Rick and she went inside and closed the inner airlock door again. On the control screen next to it, she navigated a couple of menus and activated the emergency biohazard quarantine procedure, meant for cases when some dangerous pathogen was somehow brought into the airlock and must not enter the ship at all cost. Both airlock doors went into secure mode, and could no longer be opened from inside the airlock or outside the ship.
When she turned back from the screen, she saw Rick sitting on the floor, back against the wall, his head in his hands. A tiny spot on the ground before him was wet. He was crying silently. She frowned, then typed on her wrist-screen "is it about your ears?" and tapped him gently on the shoulder. He looked up, read the text and nodded. She replied "in the empire, we can fix that". He look at her incredulously. He surely must have known that regrowing all kinds of body part in-vivo was a standard procedure in Imperial medicine, it was common knowledge. But he wouldn't have expected her to offer this treatment to him. It was expensive and he would have no way to pay for it, especially not with most of his savings bound up in the wrecked Cobra and its cargo. He gulped, nodded and eventually managed to produce a smile. She typed again on the screen, "i can fly a python. lets get out of here". She smiled back.
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