Center Worlds - Spark

by Tim Morrison

  Chapter 7.2

  The Drosini - Pirate Ship Alkadia -11 BA

  They all heard about the Drosini when it happened. The Captain wouldn't stop talking about the base stupidity of the other Captain and his now dead crew for months, berating his own people to ensure they did not make the same mistakes.

  Captain S'Lar was a half-Confederacy outcast who's family had been banished generations past for some crime they had committed. He hated the Confederacy and everything it represented. His crew, on a ship similar to the Alkadia, and run a raid against a passenger liner, the Drosini, deep within the Confederacy Clan Borders for Guylian. They had hit the liner hard, blowing out it's engines and core reactor in the first wave, then they boarded it and went on a rampage. The liner's crew were killed, and some of the female passengers raped before the pirates departed. As a passing shot, S'Lar shot the women who had been repeatedly raped and brutalized, feeling that this way, they would tell no tales of what had happened.

  Sadly for the Captain, one of the women he himself had raped and then killed was the daughter of Clansman Guylian himself, on a trip around the realm before her wedding to a son of Clan Faniruf.

  Once the word began to spread of a pirate attack this deep into the Confederacy, two TGX cruisers were at the scene within a few hours. The Guylian flagship TGX-3 and Commander Desinlo's TGX-4. The stricken liner was pulled aboard the TGX-4, it's living survivors offloaded onto other ships, and he vessel was deconstructed within a day. Teams of engineers diagnosing and determining exactly what happened.

  Once they had the Neospace signature of the Pirate ship, the TGX-3 leapt into Vortex to jump to the buffer edge then crossed into United Suns space at maximum velocity in pursuit of the fading but still detectable energy signature left by the pirate vessel.

  Even as the United Suns raised issue with the Emperor and he explained the situation, the TGX was directly on the trail of the smaller ship, and within two days, had caught up with it. A firefight that was so one-sided as to be a non-event left the pirate ship adrift without engines and mains power, then while two United Suns corsairs were coming alongside to board it, the TGX-3 threw a tractor bubble around the ship, pulled it into a docking bay, and Vortex jumped back to Guylian space.

  Clan War was nothing, Michelab and Camelin put aside their differences temporarily to mass on the Border along with the other TGX battlecruisers to meet a United Suns fleet of 34 cruisers. The standoff continued as Clan Guylian declared sentence on the surviving pirates. They would be flayed. Each pirate was kept injected with nanos to keep their bodies alive as the skin was slowly stripped off of the underlying muscle and sinew. It took almost a month until all the Pirates were dead. The bodies were incinerated and the ship was returned to the United Suns with a simple caution that brooked no disagreement.