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Pirates: I Work for Prophet by Ross Becalick
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Pirates: I Only Work for Prophet - A Parcel of Rogues
Date: 9 April 2004, 2:27 PM
0430 Hours, August 17, 2517, (Military Calendar)
Eight Light-years From Military Outpost Alpha- Kehmri System
"Bloody hell," Ford exhaled breathlessly, "I thought they had us there." He leaned back into the ragged fabric of the navigator's chair.
Kirsten gave a short, bitter laugh.
"Most of the ship is still back there, floating scrap for them to turn into more cruisers."
I checked my monitor again. Kirsten wasn't exaggerating; the UNSC planetary forces had blown holes right through our wretched little prowler. Only the bridge and a few of the cargo holds were still pressurised, but then that was all that mattered for now.
Baxter, (the skipper), played a small rubber ball in-between his fingers.
"They're going to find us," He said, still regarding the ball as it ducked under his index finger,
"That little shit at the dock planted a narrow-beam tracker on the ship for them."
"I wonder how much they paid him to do that." Ford thought.
Baxter's face creased into a wry smile.
"Nowhere near as much as we're going to get for the hardware we just pulled."
Baxter threw the rubber ball across the bridge at Ford.
Ford ducked and the ball struck a panel next to him, which abruptly clattered noisily to the deck, the wires and fuses within sparked and crackled dangerously.
Kirsten shook her head.
"First thing we do when we get that money is buy a new ship." She said, watching Ford try to roughly bash the panel back on.
Baxter nodded, although I didn't think he was happy with the notion. Buying black market ships was a difficult business.
"Maybe, but we need to get this ship fixed up first, and also find that tracker before they find us."
Baxter got up from his chair,
"Come on, there's a lot of work to do."
I stood with my magnetic boots on the hull of the Wren, a comforting cable anchoring my leg to it. I pulled Kirsten in from the twinkling vertigo of space she was set against, collecting in more and more of the chord attached to her utility belt as she was drawn in.
Kirsten was a difficult person to describe, young, freckled and with a shock of red hair. She'd never had any trouble getting what she wanted; she was very practised at kissing, kicking and crying.
She'd helped Ford out of some trouble on a mining colony a few years ago, she had only been sixteen. Ford was supposed to be trying to sell some black-market weapons they'd stolen from a UNSC weapons depot there. However during this he'd managed to get on the wrong side of a notorious weapons dealer.
It was apparent that during his brief stay on the mining colony he'd met and gotten romantically entangled with Kirsten, inappropriate considering he was more than ten years older than her. He'd planned on a one-night stand, however it was lucky for him that Kirsten took the relationship more seriously, as she felt strongly enough about him to get him off the colony and away from the weapons dealer with all his limbs intact.
She had lived there her whole life, right until that day. It had been three years since and for some reason she could not go back.
Neither Kirsten nor Ford spoke about it, but I'd heard from Baxter that she'd had to shoot her own brother during the escape. Ugly business.
She'd stayed and worked on the Wren as a member of the Martin Pirate Guild, but since then she and Ford had become awkward co-workers, strictly nothing more.
Ford was a man who'd never been able to stick at anything other than conning people and running. Recently he'd come to accept himself for the cheat he was, but he still often spoke about what life might have been like. He was a man to whom making a living came second in line to thinking about how to go about making a living. Still he had no problems getting by, he was a cheating amoral bastard, albeit a musing one.
Apparently he'd done service for the UNSC for a while, he had Baxter to thank for his new life of ill deeds and crime. I couldn't imagine him as a part of the system.
I'd known him for about six years, and still often wouldn't trust him further than I could throw him. However despite this, I liked him. It was funny how a business like this makes you feel about people.
Baxter was the most stubbornly aging individual I'd ever met. He'd done more things by the time he was twenty then I'd do in my whole life. But he was eighty now, and although he showed no signs of stopping, he seemed to be becoming more aware that no matter how many times he dodged UNSC enforcers and bounty hunters, Father Time would eventually get him.
I'd known him since I was a child, he'd been a friend of my father and when my parents died when I was twelve he'd taken me on his ship and I'd never looked back.
To call him a second Father would be getting too intimate, Baxter had always been adamant that he did not want to curse humanity by spreading his genes, and had never been interested in kids. Yet in a way the freedom he gave me made a bond between us that had kept us together all these years.
Then there was me, both of my parents had been pirates, I'd been born in the very heart of the Martin Pirate Guild, so my future had never seemed in any doubt.
I'm like my father was, Baxter tells me; profit and survival were all that really mattered. I've survived so far, and piracy has been good to me. I realised very early in life that love, religion and philosophy were all delusions made by people who couldn't handle the fact that whether they lived or died really mattered shit.
You only get one go around, so grab what you can.
Kirsten flailed angrily in her vac-suit, and jabbed her thumb on her comm.
"I've had it with that fucking valve Doug, you sort it out!"
It was the third time she had tried to externally repressurise the engine room, and it was the third time she had been blasted into the vacuum of space by a jet of compressed oxygen.
I laughed and replied.
"If I get blasted out into space you'll just let me float away."
"Of course, more cut for me."
Kirsten gently hit the hull of the Wren, and engaged the magnets on the soles of her boots.
She handed me the wrench she had been using.
I accepted it, disconnected the cable on my leg and attached the safety chord to my belt.
Clomping awkwardly across the Wren I made my way to the exposed system Kirsten had been working on.
I placed a thickly gloved hand on one of the joins of the many glittering pipes and began to turn one of the nuts on it.
Easy...
Easy...
Easy...
The squeal of escaping air. A blinding layer of frozen oxygen across my visor. The sickening sensation of tumbling. I wiped the frost off my faceplate, revealing a wildly spinning backdrop of stars. Ughhh... I swallowed down on the nausea sliding up my gullet.
I felt the tug of the chord on my belt.
"You get two more tries Doug!" Kirsten crackled across my comm.
*******************************
"Hah!" Ford laughed triumphantly, "Hey Baxter, I found that tracking device."
Baxter got up from searching under a crate, pain shot up his aching old back and made him wince.
The tracking device was stuck under a conduit. Ford plucked it out and placed it warily on a work surface next to him.
Baxter and Ford looked at it. It wasn't a small device, about the size of a shoe. It didn't beep, give off blinking lights, or any other sign of life, but they both knew somewhere inside it was a short range IBS (Insurgency Broadcast System) that was quietly using their own communications array to let the UNSC know where they were. The UNSC wouldn't have time to work out where they were unless they docked somewhere for a few days. However once they did confirm their location they would send the ODSTs in and that would be the end of them. Luckily they'd known about it and now they had found it.
Ford picked up a loose piece of hydraulics and smashed the little device with apparent satisfaction.
"Eject it out the garbage chute just in case." Said Baxter.
"Sure." Ford replied scooping up the smashed device.
Baxter's personal comm crackled to life.
"Baxter?" Came Douglas' voice.
"What is it Douglas?"
"Cargo holds are all repressurised, you might want to check on our cargo."
"Good work. Ford and I have found the tracking device."
"Great, we're ready to go then?"
"Yeah. Get back inside, meeting in the mess in half an hour."
"Aye Skipper."
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