by Ethan Bibile
Quinn looked up at the crew, Aboan saying something but Quinn’s ears seemed to have stopped working. Everything seemed to be going in complete slow motion. Quinn could feel every breath coming out of his mouth. He looked up at the purple alien who held his own gun. The alien was standing on the edge of the deck, nearly on the plank, motioning with the gun for Quinn to jump.
What happened next seemed to go by in barely anytime for Quinn. It was as if time itself was making up for the slow-motion he had just experienced, but it was most likely all in his head.
Quinn kicked out, his foot connecting with the purple alien’s stomach. He crouched over, cringing in pain. As he grabbed his stomach to soothe the pain he dropped Quinn’s gun. Quinn pulled it towards him with his foot and bent down, picking it up in his hands. As he bent, lasers shot over his head, firing off into absolutely nothing. Quinn jumped up, and with no time to think about what he was about to do, he jumped off the plank and onto the thin metal bar on the side of the ship.
He only just made the landing, nearly falling off as lasers shot over the place where he had been standing only moments ago. He completely flattened himself against the side of the pirate’s ship. Half of his feet were sticking over the metal and hovering above the abyss.
It was as if his hearing had suddenly returned, he could very clearly hear the enraged shouts of the crew.
A window was next to Quinn. His gun was awkwardly held in one hand as he was still handcuffed. Very quickly, he fumbled his gun around until the nose of it was pointing at one of the metal cuffs. He made sure his entire body was out of the way before awkwardly pulling the trigger, which caused the gun to shoot out a laser that went right through the left cuff. Quinn managed to get his hand free from it and took the gun in his left hand which could now move freely around. He pointed the gun at the circular window before shooting, glass exploding everywhere at this, some flying off and cutting Quinn.
With some initial struggle, Quinn managed to wiggle his way through the glass free hole, getting a few additional cuts from the glass that had refused to part with the window frame. Quinn tumbled into the room, which didn’t seem to be much apart from a few beds.
After he had managed to free himself of the right cuff and threw the handcuffs on the floor, he burst out of the room.
First, he needed to figure out where to go. If he was going to escape he needed to do it quickly as the pirates would immediately follow him. The entire crew was most likely scrambling about above deck. He would need to somehow make sure that the pirates didn’t follow him because they could obviously outfly him.
And then there were all the prisoners, people who had obviously done no wrong yet had ended up being captured. He couldn’t just leave them all to be delivered to Agross. He had to free them, which certainly was going to be a hard task.
Quinn began making his way forward, his gun pointed out in front of him as he made his way to a set of stairs. He could hear the pirates running around up the stairs, their footsteps banging around and their voices crying out to each other.
He needed some sort of map, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to make it through the ship. He would be caught and killed before he could make it anywhere. The only place where there might be a map of the ship would be the bridge. So that was where he needed to go first.
Quinn walked down the hallway, gun at his side, finger on the trigger. Ready to shoot any crew member who appeared on the stairs ahead of him.
Just as he was about to head up the stairs, two of the crew members came barrelling down the stairs towards Quinn. He saw the grins pop up on their faces, but neither of them managed to even raise their guns, both falling to the ground and clutching their injuries in pain.
Quinn ran up the stairs two at a time, sprinting down another hallway, only running into a few crew members who met the same fate as the other two. It seemed that the entire crew had split up looking for Quinn, which was lucky for him. He wouldn’t have been able to take on all of them at once.
Quinn went up a set of stairs which led to a single room. He looked out of the windows of the room, and to his relief, the deck of the ship was right outside. He guessed that he was right underneath the bridge, which caused him to smile.
Quinn looked out the window nervously, and his heart jumped with relief due to seeing no pirates out the window. He grinned to himself as he opened the metal door and emerged onto the deck, which seemed almost wrong without the cheering lot of crew members who usually seemed to occupy it.
Quinn looked upwards at the bridge. On either side of the room he had just come out of were stairs, both leading up to a wooden balcony surrounded by a metal bannister. Off the balcony was an attached room, in which Quinn could see was the bridge.
“Oi! There he is!” Came a sudden voice, causing Quinn to jump in surprise. He whipped around to see crew members swarming out from underneath the deck near the front of the ship.
Quinn tore up the stairs and onto the balcony, turning around just to fire a few shots off into the storming bunch of pirates who were swarming towards him like some sort of infection. Luckily, he hit some, but not a sufficient number.
Quinn barrelled into the bridge, slamming the door behind him. He looked for some sort of lock frantically on the dashboard. After only a second of searching, he found a button with a very rough label above it that said ‘lock’.
Quinn quickly slammed his hand down on the button. Suddenly, from the side of the wall sprouted a metal beam, which went through two holes on the back of the door, making it impossible to be opened. Quinn managed to press the button just in time too, as a group of pirates all slammed against the door, making faces at Quinn through the window as they roughly tried to barge through the locked door.
Now that he had a bit more time to look around, Quinn got his first good look at the bridge.
A large, glass window looked out onto the deck and out into the beauty of the cosmos. In front of it was a large steering wheel, pegs evenly spread out around the edge of it. On either side of the steering wheel were two dashboards, one on the right and one on the left. Each had an array of knobs and levers. A few important ones were on a separate, much smaller dashboard next to the steering wheel. Up above each of the dashboards was a screen and on each of the dashboards sat a keyboard and mouse.
Quinn ran over to the left dashboard and turned the computer on. It booted up quickly. Once it did Quinn began to browse through files, searching for a map of the ship.
It didn’t take him long to find one. He opened the file which displayed the entire ship map. It was littered with dozens upon dozens of rooms on multiple huge floors.
Quinn’s eyes quickly scanned a route to the prison, which was at the very bottom of the ship. Lucky for him, the hangar where the Audion was being kept was also on the bottom floor, literally the next room.
Quinn grinned to himself as his escape plan really began to take shape. He exited the map file and began to browse through others when one titled ‘locks’ popped up. Quinn clicked on it and a program opened which had the name of every single room in the ship and a little switch next to it, indicating if the room was electronically locked or not. Knowing his task would be much easier if every single door on the ship was open, Quinn turned every single lock in the ship off, including the locks for all the prison cells, thus freeing the prisoners.
Quinn ran back over to the wheel of the ship when an idea struck him.
Gantal had said the pirates worked for Agross. And if the pirates did work for Agross, then perhaps they had files stored on him.
Quinn returned to the computer and began to browse through the files at lightning speed. His eyes skimmed over the names of every file. Suddenly, he stopped, his eyes finding exactly what he was looking for.
It wasn’t just a file that was labelled Agross. It was an entire folder, which probably meant they had multiple files on Agross. Quinn couldn’t believe his luck. Being captured by pirates was such a terrible, terrible thing to have happened. But now his luck had compl
etely turned around.
As Quinn went to open the folder on Agross, he was brought back to the fact that there was a mass of pirates standing outside to room. The crowd had gotten even bigger. Some of the crew members had even climbed onto the front window, banging on it and making crude faces and hand signals in Quinn’s direction.
Quinn fumbled around in his pocket, pulling out a piece of digital storage technology he had bought on Nigellia for just this purpose. He plugged it into a slot on the keyboard and began to transfer the files regarding Agross to his storage device.
Quinn looked up at the crew. To his horror, he saw the strange spider alien that had invaded the Audion come into view. It pushed crew members out of its way as it approached the window. In its hands was a huge, incredibly heavy looking weapon. Quinn noticed that it was loaded with a rocket and his stomach dropped. The glass that made up the cockpit window must be incredibly strong if a rocket was needed to break it.
Quinn stepped back away from the window, but only backed up into the steering wheel of the ship.
Suddenly, the front of the ship began to lurch up. As it did so, the crew members who were banging ferociously upon the door began to slide up against the door itself and the glass of the cockpit window. The crew member who held the rocket launcher began slipping forward. He slid into the window, letting go of the deadly weapon, which slid to the ground.
Quinn too began to slip. His back was still firmly pressed against the steering wheel, which caused the front of the ship to continue to rise. The pirate’s ship soon was completely vertical, the front of the ship pointing directly upwards. Quinn had now moved so that he was standing on the wheel instead of the floor. This, however, caused the ship to keep on turning.
As the bridge window was now situated above Quinn’s head, he looked up to see the entire crew in a complete frenzy. They began to desperately knock on the door. Those who had given up on that banged on the glass to no avail. Some tried to pick up the rocket launcher to break the glass but failed as it began rolling around on the glass.
As the ship continued turning, the crew outside grabbed onto the railing of the balcony, while the ship began its descent to turn upside-down.
Quinn was forced to hold onto the pegs to the steering wheel. He hung on for dear life. Pretty soon, the pirate's ship had been completely turned upside down.
The pirates outside all hung onto the railing or anything else they could grab hold of that would save them from falling to their deaths. Inside, Quinn held onto the pegs of the steering wheel to prevent himself from falling onto the roof. He looked around at the computer screen which hung from the roof (Or was it the ground now?) to see if the file transfer was nearly complete. It was just over halfway there.
If Quinn had any hope for an escape, he needed to flip the ship back around.
Quinn’s mind ticked away furiously. Here he was, hanging upside down in the cockpit of a pirates ship he’d completely flipped. And he’d done that by pushing the steering wheel away from the bridge window. So, if he wanted to put this ship right again, he was going to have to keep on doing that.
Quinn began to swing on the steering wheel, trying to pull it away from the bridge window. It took an incredible effort. As his muscles began to ache, the ship began turning.
As the ship reached a vertical position again (Yet this time the back of the ship was pointing upwards), Quinn was gulping air, the muscles in his arms screaming as they supported his entire body. Even though he very well knew it might kill his arms, Quinn pulled his entire body up and over onto the top of the steering wheel so that he was now sitting on it. His body relaxed as he was no longer holding his entire body weight from his arms. The release was short though, as he began to pull the steering wheel towards him and away from the bridge window, causing the ship to continued turning.
Eventually, the pirate’s ship was positioned the right way again. Quinn stood up, shaking his arms as he did so. As he glanced out the window, he noticed that the pirates had collapsed to the ground, shaking in terror. Traumatized by their death-defying experience.
Quinn spun around to his portable storage device, and to his delight, the files on Agross had finished transferring. He ran over to the keyboard where his device was plugged into and pulled it out before running to the door.
Quinn burst out of the bridge, the storage device in his pocket, a gleeful smile on his face at the amount of information he had managed to collect from the pirates.
Quinn jumped straight over the balcony railing, landing on the wooden deck. He was about to descend the set of stairs to the underbelly of the ship when voices sailed up from underneath, the sound of footsteps on wood getting dangerously closer.
Quinn tore off in the other direction, making his way to the other end of the ship where another set of stairs that descended to the bottom of the ship were. He made it to the centre mast when a group of crew members burst out from that set of stairs. Quinn turned on his heels, only to see another set of crew members running towards him from the other side.
And leading those crew members was a furious Captain Aboan.
He strode forward, glaring at Quinn with a look that promised death. He held his black gun in one hand and his rod that crackled with electricity in the other. The electricity spiralled up his metal arm, coming to a stop at the joint between his shoulder and torso. His face flashed with anger, and Quinn knew that he was in for it.
He desperately looked for a way out of the sticky situation. The only way out was up the mast, which had a net surrounding the lower part, and a ladder up to the top.
Quinn scrambled up the net, climbing as fast as humanly possible. He made it to a small platform where the ladder started. He looked down to see Aboan climbing up furiously, pushing his own crew out of the way just to make it up to Quinn.
Quinn scrambled up the ladder until he made it up onto a metal pole that horizontally crossed the mast.
Quinn stood up there like a bird on its perch. From his pocket, Quinn pulled out his gun, the blue tendrils glowing. Quinn pointed it down towards the pirates and began shooting the ones that were scrambling up the net and ladder to get Quinn. The laser connected with most of them and the crew members fell off the mast to the deck of the ship.
However, Aboan wasn’t as an easy target. Quinn tried to shoot him, but it was no use. The Captain of the deadly pirates simply shielded his body with his large, shining metal arm, Quinn’s laser blasts simply rocketing off the arm.
Quinn knew that he had to get below the deck, and the only way for him to do that was if he made it down the staircase to the underbelly of the spaceship. Quinn frantically looked around the mast, at the collection of ropes. He looked down at the ground. It wasn’t as bad as riding a hoverboard down the side of a building.
Aboan made it to the metal pole that Quinn was standing upon. The Pirate Captain’s face was glowing red and full of rage. He pulled out his black gun in one hand, his electric rod in the other hand, the electricity crackling up his metal arm.
“Quinn Fenton,” Aboan growled. “You will pay dearly for what you have done to my ship!” The enraged Captain growled out, and he jumped forward at Quinn.
However, as Aboan lunged towards Quinn he jumped off the pole, gun clenched between his teeth, hands outstretched, trying to grab one of the many ropes that hung around the mast.
Quinn grabbed a rope, yet slid down a bit, pain inflicting his hands from rope burn. He gritted his teeth around his gun and bore the pain.
Aboan cried out in fury, his face like a lunatic, his hair whipping around his face, the robotic half of his face flashing dangerously. He pointed his gun at the rope and shot it. The blast cut right through the rope. Quinn let go of the rope just in time, managing to grab onto another rope. Quinn looked down. The rope he had just been holding onto fell to the savage pirates below on the deck, screaming insults up at Quinn. He shuddered as he thought of what could have been his possible fate.
Aboan kept on attacking the ropes and Q
uinn simply continued to jump from rope to rope, swinging like some sort of monkey. He swung on one rope and landed on the mast where Aboan was standing. The Captain lunged at Quinn, swinging the electric rod as he did. As Aboan swung, Quinn jumped off yet again, managing to grab onto a rope as the electric rod came into contact where he had just stood, the electricity exploding in that part of the mast.
The momentum from Quinn’s jump caused him to continue swinging and he swung right around behind Aboan. Quinn used the momentum to his advantage and swung the rope around Aboan’s large body, entangling him. As Quinn stepped back onto the mast, Aboan cried out in rage, struggling to get out of the rope, which he managed to do easily. However, this sparked an idea in Quinn’s head, an idea that just might save him from impending doom.
Quinn jumped off yet again, grabbing onto another rope. He yet again used the momentum to help him wrap the rope around Aboan’s body. Once he had completed that, he landed back into the mast, only to jump off and grab another rope. He continued this charade, jumping, swinging, wrapping. Jumping, swinging, wrapping. Jumping, swinging, wrapping.
Quinn landing back onto the mast, his hands red with blisters, places on his hands that were covered in rope burn. He pulled his gun out of his mouth, hissing in pain as he did so.
Quinn looked up at Aboan, who snarled at him from the rope entanglement Quinn had put him in. Both of his weapons had been dropped to the deck below, the electric rod having electrocuted multiple crew members.
“Boy!” Aboan snarled out, his face dangerous. Spit flew from his half human half robotic mouth. His entire body tensed as he tried to free himself from the constructed prison, yet he had no triumph. “Free me! I am Captain Aboan, how dare you imprison me! You will be punished for my humiliation! I promise you, Quinn, you will regret this to your dying day!” Aboan screamed. His words had no impact on Quinn, however.
Quinn smiled triumphantly at Aboan. “Looks like I got the upper hand.”
With that, Quinn pointed his gun at Aboan, who stared at him, engulfed in fury. Quinn shot Aboan’s metallic arm, and the force pushed Aboan off the mast and tumbling towards the deck. A loud crash met Quinn’s ears as Aboan hit the ground, crushing a crew member. Despite falling from such a height, Quinn doubted Aboan was dead.
