by F. E. Hubert
been lucky just to get his emergency mask onto Lora’s face unseen.
Gods, Lora.
He hoped that she’d wake up before the air in the emergency mask ran out.
In his now discarded plan, he’d knock everyone out, put them in the hold wearing their emergency masks and unload the cargo as fast as he could. Then, he’d stay on the Silver, and when Oon’s men were gone, pluck everybody back out of the hold. All they would have lost was the cargo, which was insured. He’d even theorized about the best way to give himself a believable bruise.
Not that it mattered now.
Almost all his shipmates— His friends—were dead. And Lora only had the air that was left in his oxy-mask when he slipped it on her face.
He hurried. It was all he could do now. The sooner they got off the ship, the sooner she’d be safe. If she woke up in time.
Three: Lora
Floating in the narrow cubical of the airlock, Lora took inventory. She was alive, which was good, and hidden in the second hold airlock, also good. The captain, Malik and Destiny were all dead, definitively bad.
What she knew about pirate tactics didn’t amount to much more than gossip and scaremongering rumour, but it made sense that they preferred to hijack ships without a fight. She didn’t know how they got in, but the pounding of her head suggested that someone hit her, so she guessed at a single intruder. Some hacking skills and a heavy object would do the trick. Then just toss everyone in a hold, go to nul-grav for easy lifting and empty the place at your leisure.
It didn’t explain why she was wearing an emergency mask when she woke up. She swallowed down something sour, thinking what would have happened if she hadn’t been wearing it. Would suffocation hurt when you were unconscious? She hoped not for the sake of her crew, but their pained expressions told a different story.
Feeling the satchel at her hip, she found her own oxy-mask. An ugly thing, no more than a tank of compressed oxygen and a face cover.
Stuffing it back in her bag, she focussed her attention on the door leading out to the hall outside. She could just sit in the lock and wait for the pirates to finish and leave. Every lock held an emergency vac-suit, so even if they purged the ship and thought to manually open the auxiliary locks when they did, she’d be fine. Then all she had to do was go up to engineering and repressurize the ship. Easy peasy.
A bit too easy. What if Steven and Zang Ju were still alive somewhere? They'd be blown out into space, alive or not.
Pushing herself up to panel on the door leading into the ship, she read the outside status. The hall outside was still pressurized, so she wouldn’t even need her oxy mask to go out, but she would need it to execute the plan that started to form in the back of her mind.
If she could get to a panel into the crawlspaces, she could get all the way to engineering, or even the bridge. She looked back to the panel in the lock’s side. The suit would be too bulky to wear inside the ducts, but if they decided to vent the ship when she was out there—
The shrill sound of the venting alarm answered the question for her, in about half a minute the ship would be in full vacuum.
Lora cursed, pulling at the panel in front of the storage locker to get the suit out. Small chance the lock would purge, but like most people working space, getting caught out in a vacuum featured high on her list of worst things that could happen. Spraining the pinkie finger on her right hand in her haste to put on her suit, she heard the final beeps of the warning signal as she pulled the helmet over her head. After that, only the heavy sound of her own breathing echoed in her ears.
Muttering, she jabbed her code into the panel, waiting to enter the last symbol as she craned to see as much out of the window in the lock’s door as the curve of her helmet allowed. Just the flashing of yellow warning lights, alerting her to the vacuum in the corridor outside. Pressing down on the last button, she held her breath as the door slid open.
Empty.
Hopping over the ankle-high threshold, she floated down to the junction on her left. Holding against the wall, she used the suit's hand camera to check around the corner.
All clear.
To her left, the sealed main lock into the lower hold. She frowned, moving away from it down the main passage. Not venting the holds seemed odd. Unpleasant as it were, spacing was about the easiest way to kill someone you could think of. Push the button and Swoosh: Dead. So why didn’t they? Were they that sure that everyone was dead already?
She swallowed against a sudden lump in her throat. Maybe Steven and Zang were still safe somewhere.
Her route up to engineering took her past the loading docks. She could just grab the last handhold on the wall with a frantic swing before drifting into full view.
They were still on the ship.
Cursing herself, she clutched on to the wall grip with trembling hands, waiting for the crazy thud of her heart to slow.
At least they hadn’t seen her or they would have grabbed her by now. She made mental note that next time she should run away, instead of clinging to the wall like a frightened animal.
Clenching her fist to control the tremble, she eased her index finger around the corner. The image shook a little more than usual, but the image projected on the inside of her helmet was clear enough.
Two figures in vac-suits—one large, one small—walked in and out of the lock, carrying what looked like the crates of Silver's cargo. The blue warning symbols announcing its active content.
After two passes, she was sure that they were the same two people every time. Selling, or using, a stolen ship was too much of a hassle, especially an old and patched up number like the Silver. So, however many pirates there were, they were probably already back on their own ship, waiting for the last bits to be loaded.
Pulling back her finger, she halted. The two suits stood together in front of the hatch. One of them faced squarely in her direction. She felt a hot fire start as she checked the image again, a heavy weight in her stomach replaced the happy jump of elation when she first recognized his face, but she already knew she’d seen right the first time.
Steven.
Could the other figure be Zang?
It didn’t matter. Steven sold them out. Put her friends in the hold to suffocate for some easy credit.
She pushed off from the wall quickly, heading back to one of the side corridors.
Now that she thought about it, the strange oxy mask she woke up with could only have belonged to Steve. Rubber tape held the bands together, and everyone else would have tossed it and gotten a new one. For some reason he saved her, while leaving the rest of their crew to die.
A grimace made of grit clung to her face as she hurried to engineering. She would show those bastards what a hijack looked like.
The familiar edges of the processor felt good through the thick fabric of her glove. A single plug-in linked all the computer’s power to her suit, another opened up Silver’s systems to the touch of her fingers.
The pirate’s ship identifier blinked its identity in cheerful green. They docked the mother ship, not just one of the hoppers. Her grin widened into something that would have stopped any hardened thug in their tracks, but they weren’t there to catch a warning glance.
The idiots hadn’t secured the physical link they made by docking at Silver’s port. Shaking her head at their sloppiness, she started to enter commands in quick succession.
Four: Steven
The voice from the speakers sounded tinny, but Steve would have recognized Lora’s voice anywhere. He stared at the roster that produced the beautiful sound that meant he hadn’t killed her.
“She has to be on the ship somewhere, get her!” The fat man in the pilot’s seat snapped from the front of the bridge. “Bitch locked me out.”
“Catch me if you ca-an.” Came the musical challenge from one of the speakers in the hall, just outside the bridge.
One of the pirates, a pale and unhealthy looking man in his late thirties covered with home-made tattoo’s,
prodded Steven’s shoulder. He kept one step behind Steven, one hand on his taser and waving a ridiculously large knife with the other.
They walked down the corridor, each step rang as the metal rosters of the floor moved against each other. This ship was even more ancient than the Silver.
“Not here,” A speaker crackled as they peeked into the small kitchen. “Maybe here?” The sound echoed in from what sounded like one of the holds further down.
“That cunt’s gonna die.” The pale thug shouldered his way past Steven in his hurry to catch her, feet booming on the rosters with loud echoes.
Steven turned into the kitchen and sat down on a fold-down bench, prodding the coffee machine near his head. It came to life with a reluctant gurgle. He sat and listened to the sounds of the search. He doubted there was anything to find, Lora had a way with computers that made most engineers look like toddlers.
In the distance, he could hear the pale thug’s howled threats. The closing of a hatch cut off the sound to relative silence. The others were more restrained, all he could hear from them were their footsteps and the occasional grunt.
“Rang? Nick?” The pilot got the speakers to function again. “Where are you guys? Talk to me!”
Steve took the pot out to pour himself a cup before it was done with its cycle, the machine hissed angrily at the mistreatment.
“Sorry little one.” He sat back in his spot against the wall, holding the sippy-cup in one hand while he listened to the sound of the crew’s
