Pirate's Bane; Black Star
Chapter 9; Rescue

Alex downs another cup of water and runs her hand over her stomach, it had felt odd since she had been taken into custody thought she couldn’t say why and it had become almost like a nervous twitch to rub or caress it. Agent Coreance notices this time as he has noticed all the others times before. “Since you entered this room you have rubbed your stomach at least four times each hour.”

Alex stops her hand right where it is and looks down at her hand pressing ever so lightly on the cloth over her skin. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“How do you feel?”

“Fine.” Alex blatantly lies, without missing a beat Agent Coreance’s antennae sides up in his quizzically expression.

“You are lying.”

“So what,” Alex gives a grumble mixed in with her words, “I was without oxygen for two minutes, that’s not good for humans?”

“Given your genetic modifications one would think that going without oxygen for that long would leave no lasting bodily effects. Therefore I am going to order a medical check for you, a full medical check.”

“Why don’t you just use the damn scanners in this suit?” Alex grumbles angrily.

“I could but your physiology was not what this suit was designed for, quite frankly your organs are in the wrong place.”

“Look I don’t want an exam and you need to hear my story and we can only do one right now so make your choice. Give me a medical check or continue this interrogation?”

“We’ll continue but only after one check.” Alex doesn’t see how he does it but he called in some of the guards who had brought her into this tiny cell of a room. “Take her to the restroom.” The guards are well trained and go about their tasks efficiently and silently.

The guards don’t say anything until they all got to the door outside of the small room, it is completely isolated surrounded on all sides by a hall of at least ten feet in width on all sides and guarded not only by the two guards who had escorted Alex but four automated turrets mounted in the ceiling and all aiming at her and waiting to kill her with enough bullets to turn her into a human sized statue made of Swiss cheese, all locking on her by the signal being emitted by the collar around her neck and waiting for the guards to release them with the push of a button or a loose of their consciousness, a dead man switch being part of their uniforms, scanning their physical state hundreds of times a second. It isn’t like Alex is going to try anything, she knows that Lerra is still alive and that is enough for her to keep going and keep her talking to Coreance in the hopes that she might get to see Lerra again. She just needs to go to the restroom to allow the chemical sensors to tell if anything is physically wrong with her other than too much stress, and of course the fact that she actually needs to go didn’t do much to make her want to argue the point all that hard, so these guards are sent to escort her to the interrogation room’s restroom. Unlike the toilet in her cell there is some semblance of privacy with this one since it is enclosed, the toilet in her cell is just in her cell and with an entire wall made of nothing but an energy field it has all the privacy of something seen on a news vid. The same guards who had locked the cuffs on her in her cell and then removed them only to fit them through the interrogation table and back onto her wrist once again free her hands and then her ankles one more time.

She could knee it in the face and run but it is wearing armor and it would probably do more damage to her own knee than to the guard and probably keep her from ever being able to see Lerra again locked up for assault on an officer until who knows when. So she just stands still and allows the other guard to push her forward with a tap of the rifle on her shoulder. She takes the hint and walks toward the door with her hands up and palms out to show she is harmless and complying to the guard’s orders and the prisons regulations.

Like all the other doors it unlocks with a signal from the guards and slides open when she gets within a meter from its threshold. She takes her hands down once in the privacy of the restroom and looks around, like Lerra had said back on the Black Star military training is a hard thing to forget about. It is so utilitarian it would have made the military proud actually. It is simply a toilet and a sink, even though she couldn’t see them all she figures the whole place has to have at least a hundred, more likely hundreds of, sensors and at least four cameras. She quite easily should and could quite easily feel disgust by the fact that hundreds, possibly thousands of electric eyes were looking at her doing something very privet, but she could not bring herself to feel anything, she is in an Alliance Prison ship it only makes sense that they would want to keep an eye on the criminals at all times and for now she is one of their “criminals”, that means she is going to be watched. So without any anger or fear she pulls down her pants and takes a seat on the toilet and takes the time to think.

Taking that time to think is a mistake. Time to think means that she has time to wonder about Lerra and whether or not she would survive this trial, she must make it or everything that they had thought about and planed lying next to one another under the covers with their naked flesh pressing against each other and their limbs entangled would all come to naught like a beautiful but still bad dream. She feels it, another rumble in her stomach, another movement under the skin, something is changing in her and it has nothing to do with being called a criminal again, it isn’t spiritual or mental it is purely physical. How long had she and Lerra been floating through the black in that shuttle, how long had they been on the ship together before that? Three weeks, a month, more. It took them a few weeks to travel as far as they had in gray mode going only one or two light seconds a day, hopping from asteroid to asteroid. By the time the shit hit the fan how many days had it been, eight, nine, they were all just a blur of pretending to be little more than friends during the day, sneaking between each other’s rooms at night and then folding their bodies into one throughout the night only to have to sneak back to their own rooms before the others woke up. Then there was those days on the shuttle, it took so much power to keep the pressure chamber working to keep Lerra from bleeding out, the whole in her stomach was big enough put her fist through and her blood had soaked through the gauze in less than a minute, if she hadn’t got her in the chamber and kept it working she would have died in a few hours but as it was the chamber had kept her alive until the air in the ship began to run out, she had breathed the majority of it into carbon dioxide, even too much for Lerra to breath, besides she had turned off the lights to conserve power so she couldn’t use photosynthesis to break down the carbon to oxygen and like all living things she needs to breath so she gave up her oxygen mask to save the one person who meant anything to her, the only person who had meant anything to her in such a long time it hurt her to think about it.

Somewhere in a logical and detached part of her mind she remembered her old exobiology classes from the academy. The teachers there had been as dry as stones in the dessert and about as entertaining but that part of her mind latched on to something from one of her classes when she had though she hadn’t paid attention to anything in that class at all. Being plant bases, and more importantly carbon based instead of any of the five other mineral basses that the Alliance had meet over the human expansion through space, Zarinian’s biology was capable of being introduced to human biology without harsh side effects, it was sort of like O type human blood being called the universal donor. Zarinian DNA could mix with the DNA of any other carbon based life form to create a hybrid creature, but they had never told them how or why that happened only that it could. She might be learning how and why that happens. The why being love and the how as simple as sex.

Finished she gets up and wipes herself clean before she pulls up her pants. She gazes at herself in the highly polished slab of metal behind the sink which acts as a mirror since glass could be broken and made into a weapon thought with all the cameras the guards would know as soon as it broke and would have the guns primed and ready before anyone steps out of the room. She looks at herself and sees how much she has changed and for once she doesn’t hate it, Lerra loved her when she had been Alex and she loves her even now as Alexis but still she rubs her stomach before she gets a hold of herself and claps her face between her hands and goes back to washing her hands. This is not the time to think about having a child, not now, later maybe, she needs to save Lerra first or she would never replace anyone to have a child with.

She walks to the door with her hands up and palms out as she had walked into the room and leaves. The guards meet her outside the door, she doesn’t even have to walk the meter from where they had left her. Without saying a word they go to work locking up her limbs with the same heavy chains as before, well one spoke to her, the one who might be female says something once they finish locking her up.

“You took your sweet time in there.” It speaks snidely and its voice makes it even harder to tell if it is male or female, since when it speaks its voice is as ambiguous as its body hidden under all that armor like a woman who had been smoking since they were born.

Alex looks at it through the corner of her eye and asks. “You’ve timed a lot a human females when they go to the bathroom have you?”

“She’s got you there.” The other guard says with a snicker as it gets up from locking the chains over Alex’s ankles.

“Shut the hell up.” It snaps at the other guard. “We need to get her back to the interrogation room before Agent Coreance decides to have our hides as decorations on his walls.”

From there on they led Alex back to the interrogation room in silence; all but their footsteps echoing in the hall as they march their way back through them. As they had the first time they fallow Alex into the interrogation room and unlock her wrist cuffs and let her sit down before they move to lock her back to the table.

“That won’t be necessary.” Agent Coreance says from his chair across the table from Alex.

“But sir there is procedure…” The second guard starts.

Agent Coreance doesn’t let it finish though. “I said it won’t be necessary, activate the hall defenses and put them on active tracking of Alex’s ID collar but you will not lock her back up. Do I make myself clear?”

It is in no way a question and both guards know it, they leave and Alex has free range of her arms though her legs were still bound by chains. “Won’t you get in trouble for this?” She asks as the door slides shut,

“No.” He says flatly. “And I would like you to be more comfortable, we are discussing rather sensitive things.”

“Thanks.” She says rubbing her wrists.

“Do not thank me just yet I still want you to answer more questions.” He says somberly.

“Alright ask me whatever you want.” She says relaxing, at least a little bit.

“While you were gone I looked though your file and I noticed something strange, you have not been a member of an actual crew of any type on any ship since the Iowa incident, nearly five years ago.”

“I haven’t.” She admits somberly.

“Lerra got to you that much?” He asks with the twitch of his antenna that indicates for him a rise of his eyebrow.

“I don’t know?” Alex lies not only to Agent Coreance but herself.

“You don’t, then why did you give your oxygen to save her so readily?”

Alex raises her own eyebrow and looks at Agent Coreance. “That’s the first time that you didn’t say that I shot her.”

“I am not a fool,” he says flatly, “as such I am starting to believe that you did not shot her in anger or even on purpose, in fact I don’t think you could have hurt her on purpose so something must have happened to cause you to put a bullet in her even on accident.”

“Thank you.”

“Well,” he says with a near human cough, “I also believe that you do love Lerra.”

“Maybe I do.” Alex says leaning forward to look at her feet. “No that’s not true I do love her.”

“Then please, tell me what caused her to get shot back on the Black Star?”

“A lot of shit.”

“Start from where it hit the fan as you humans say.”

I was sitting in the cockpit alone trying to get a feel for the next leg of our trip but the space was just so warped, not physically, that’s impossible as far as I know, it was just filled with so many gravitational anomalies, rouge asteroids, and worse known pirate taps and ambush sights it was like trying to pick a clear path through mine field when the mines can move. That was when I saw it, there was a ship dangerously close to the edge of a gravitational eddy, not even a quarter of a light second to either side and it would be crushed in a gravitational tidal wave. My H.N.I. recognized it as a Sol Systems Alliance escape shuttle with two life forms aboard, each of them human and one dying quickly, very quickly. I didn’t want to get involved with the Alliance but like I said training is a hard thing to kill and besides I got within twenty light seconds of those men my H.N.I. would have linked with their ship and we would both know the other was out there.

I originally barely registered them on the H.N.I. when I picked up their distress call over the weakest radio signal I have ever heard but once I found them I tried to get them on the com channels just to get them off the open channels. “Unknown ship off of our starboard bow. This is the escape shuttle of the Alliance Frigate Nina.”

“Please pardon my interruption,” Agent Coreance hasn’t broken into Alex’s story for a long while but he had to now, “they said they were on an escape shuttle from the Nina, that is not an Alliance ship.”

“Weren’t you listening, not your Alliance,” Alex says without any anger for the interruption, “the Nina is a Sol Alliance Frigate. Its mission is to patrol the Rim human colonies, their mission is to stop another Iowa Incident from ever happening again and yeah they use my nav system.”

“That is a noble mission and I am sorry for interrupting you so please continue.”

I responded without though, switching back to my training as easily as I would put on a pair of shoes, I even forgot to take them off the open channel like I had planned. “Alliance escape shuttle what is your situation?”

Just like all Alliance troops had been taught they answered with as few words as possible and as much precision as the pain and panic would allow. “I have a wounded man and I’m leaking atmo, I need help and medical attention for my friend.” He was so right but he kept saying I and not we, the alliance taught us to put ourselves last when in danger, unless he was an officer but an officer would have told me his station to begin with.

“I have your position,” I told them as I powered up the cockpit and began the sequence to bring the engines back out of gray mode but I would need help to pilot us out of the sector and not get killed by all the pirates that pick us up with the engines lighting us up like a neutron star in a dark room, “return to radio silence you are in hostile territory “

“Understood sir. Going dark.”

I could power the ship back out of gray mode but I couldn’t pilot the ship any better than I could control a rock skipping across water, i.e. none, I needed the others. I switched from ship to ship to inter-ship communications and called for the help I needed. “Lerra, hey get your tight green ass to the engine room right now, I need you to get this damn tub moving like a comet. James you get up here and take the helm, I’m good but I need you at the helm to get these soldiers. Doc get to med bay and prepare for casualties.”

Even over the intercom I could hear the anger raging through James in his angry and heavy footsteps and worse his controlled breathing and steady tone, he had to have been an alliance captain if not higher. “What the hell do you think you’re doing with my ship?”

“You were a Sol alliance soldier,” I reminded him, “you know the cod as well as I do, there are a pair of Sol Alliance soldiers out there that need our help or they are going to die. ‘Never leave a man behind’.”

“That was a long time ago,” he snapped but he was already on his way toward me, “I and my ship stay out of the way of the Sol Alliance!” He finished his sentence yelling directly at me as he stood in the back of the cockpit staring at me like he could burn a hole in my head with his gaze.

I just looked back at his over my shoulder and meet his stare with one of my own, not as powerful but just a defiant, the same glare I had used when I glared at the cyborg who whipped me those years before. “Either you will save them or I will, I’m not giving you a third choice.”

“‘Death before dishonor’.” He grumbled while he continued to glare at me for a moment and then sat down hard in the pilot’s seat and looked at me through the corner of his eyes so that he could keep giving me an evil look. “Damn you’re a hard headed bitch.” I wanted to say something but he activated the intercom before I could get a sound out of my throat. “Lerra give this old girl all she’s got, were going to save your damn girlfriend’s soldier friends.”

I could almost hear Lerra laughing at him through the intercom and I bet if I saw her face she would have been fighting back a mouthful of giggles. “I understand captain. You’ll have full engines in ten seconds.”

Taking the controls he finally asked me the logical question, if not very politely, “So where the hell are your soldier friends?”

“Their ship is stalled at one hundred and forty-nine degrees seven minutes and eleven seconds by ninety-six degrees forty-six minutes and twenty-three seconds.” I told him flatly.

“Distance?” He growled.

I looked again at the H.N.I. and brought up the ship and from there my implant took over and calculated the distance. “Fifty-nine kilometers away.”

James changed the ships orientation until it matched the degrees I had given him and checked the scanners until he found the ship along our horizon. “I see them,” They were just a dot in the window mixed in with the stars but as the engines roared to life that dot grew larger in a hurry. He growled and then opened the intercom, “Lerra how are those engines coming cause we’re sitting out here like a damn fish in a barrel with a target on our asses.”

Lerrra wasted no time in answering him. “You have full power at your fingertips right now boss.”

He snorted and flicked off the intercom and glared at me though he kept the majority of his focus on flying the ship. “How good are you with grappling arms?”

I was already getting them ready when he asked me. In fact I already had the visual interface on top of my head and was getting the gauntlets ready. I put my arm into the interface and felt them wrap around my arms the straps tightening until they felt like they were part of my skin and not on them, once done I pulled the virtual interface down and gave the arm a flex, I saw not the cockpit but the outside of the ship and the mechanical arms unfolding themselves and moving into my vision. “Good enough.” I snapped with a snap of the arms.

“Good cause you’ve got to catch them and hold on tight, cause when we go to full all the shielding in the world won’t hide all our radiation and heat emissions.”

I gave the arms one last movement test and then I was ready. “Do it.” I commanded.

At my word James pulled back on the throttle control and the engine roared like a tiger. I had to admit the speed kind of scared me since I had never felt the ship go to full speed yet, going through a corridor is more like cursing rather than speeding and it was worse with me looking out of the ship through the visual scanners on the ship’s hull. Even with the ships inertial dampeners working fine I still felt like I left my stomach back where we started. I didn’t even remember about my actual body inside the ship’s cockpit until James spoke. “Interception with target in ten seconds.”

“I’m ready with the arms.” I said shacking my head to clear it.

“Five seconds, four, three, two.”

I watched the ship growing larger in the interface and let its targeting computers help with grabbing the ship with the arms before he got to one, I had to show him up some way. “Got’em.” I said and pulled the interface off my head before he rocketed up at FTL and I died of sensory overload, or at least went mad from it.

“Saving our collective asses!” James yelled as he pulled the throttle past full and took us on a bout of FTL jumps that would have hurt like hell if I had been looking out of the ship’s skin instead of its windows.