Alexander Outland: Space Pirate (2 page)

“Okay, Slink. You’re the only one I’ll call a chick from now on.” I looked at her over my shoulder and gave her my patented killer smile. “Promise.”

She took a deep breath. It was a risk to continue to look at her chest, but always worth it. She had the best rack in at least twelve star systems. She opened her mouth.

“Screaming or hitting will cause an immediate crash. We have not yet reached escape velocity.”

She closed her mouth and I got the eagle-glare again. “Why do I fly with you?”

“Because you’re secretly in love with me, but you don’t want to admit it, because you fear that you, somehow, are not woman enough to keep me from straying. You’re wrong, of course. I stray because I can’t have you. Vicious cycle.”

Slinkie snorted. “Please. You were a dog before I met you and you’ll be a dog well after I’m gone.”

“You know, this is you being planetist. Just because Zyzzx is a canial planet does not make me a dog. Any more than Randolph coming from Weshria makes him a cat.”

“True. Randolph looks like a basset hound and you’re more cat-like. I’ll give you that. But, you’re still a dog, Nap. Or, to make you happy, you’re a tomcat. And you know what they say about tomcats.”

“It’s better to neuter them young.” Randolph sounded like he was displeased with the basset hound comparison, which was always
a shock since you’d think he’d be used to it by now. Of course, he was taking it out on me, not Slinkie, but then again, he was male and shared my appreciation of Slinkie’s assets.

“Et tu, Randy? Et tu?”

“Stop with the pseudo-intellect, Nap. It hurts us all. You gonna jump our favorite pile of junk out of Thurge airspace or just wait for the next eruption to do it for us?”

“Everyone’s touchy. Besides, there’s nothing pseudo about my intellect.” I finished logging in the coordinates, hit the thrusters, grabbed Slinkie, and hit the hyper-drive button.

Due to the way I’d grabbed her and the force hyper-drive exerted when you made the jump, Slinkie was on my lap, arms around my neck, my face buried in her chest. I was forced to wrap my arms around her, to keep her from flying back and getting hurt. One hand needed to be on her behind and one on the back of her head, keeping it snuggled against the back of my neck—for her safety, of course.

When jumping, standard procedures were to remain strapped in until you were cleared through, which was normally three to five long minutes, depending. I’d jumped us to the Gamma Quadrant, a seven minute hold from Thurge.

Argue if you want, but that’s what I call intellect.

O
ur jump cleared and the pressure against our bodies let up.

“You can let go of me any time,” Slinkie snarled. Her mouth was against my skin.

“Mmmmm.” I wondered if I could hit the reverse coordinates with my foot. Another seven minutes like this and I could die a happy man.

“Nap. No joke. Let me go or I’ll bite you.”

“I knew you’d finally come around.”

“I’ll bite you at the point where it’ll kill you.”

“Your words say ‘let me go’ but your body says ‘Nap, you da tomcat’. My Great-Aunt Clara always said that the words themselves were only about seven percent of the communication. So, I’m going to listen to your body. It wants me, and it has the other ninety-three percent going for it.”

Slinkie put her teeth against a spot I knew actually could kill if she bit hard enough. “I mean it.” It’s hard to say that sentence with your mouth open and your teeth against someone’s neck. I certainly was after feeling her do it.

“Just bounce a little bit while you bite me. I think I’ll die happy that way.”

Sadly, before Slinkie could either bounce or bite, the alarms went
off, big time. You don’t survive in space by being slow to react to an alarm. Slinkie was out of my arms and off my lap in a second, I was monitoring shields and navigation, Randolph was checking hull, engine and drive integrity.

“Sensors show nothing, Nap,” Randolph said.

“I have nothing, too. Everything looks right, we’re where we’re supposed to be according to computers.”

We all looked out the windshield. Three hundred years of space travel, and somehow, we still called them windshields. Or maybe it was only me. Anyway, nothing. Of course, I’d made sure we weren’t landing in any planet’s airspace, so we should’ve been seeing nothing. But we were seeing nothing that would cause alarms to go off. Which was a lot more unsettling than seeing something.

“I’m going to Weapons,” Slinkie said. She dashed out. Her voice was on the com in less than a minute. “Scanning for hostiles.”

I waited, counting down. Sure enough, in less than twenty seconds, a different voice came on the com. “Alexander, what in the galaxy is going on?” A quavering, peevish, authoritative voice. The Governor never missed his cues, even if I wanted him to. “And why aren’t we on Thurge? I was looking forward to the baths. You know how I love the mineral baths there.”

“Yes, sorry, Governor. Had a little problem, had to leave. We’ll find you a mineral bath somewhere else.”

“Why do you let him stay?” Randolph muttered.

“Because it was my fault he got deposed.” It wasn’t wholly my fault, but it had been enough of my fault that I’d felt guilty. And the old guy wasn’t so bad.

“Alexander Napoleon Outland, why are you lying to me?” Most of the time he wasn’t so bad. Some of the time he reminded me of my Great-Aunt Clara. This was one of those times.

“Governor, later, okay? Alarms, potential hostiles, all alone in the big bad ether, you know the drill.”

The Governor sighed dramatically. “Oh yes, I know the drill. I learned it all too well, back when I ruled Knaboor—”

“Speaking of boors, we have a problem,” Slinkie snapped. “I can’t see anything on the system.”

“So? Maybe that means it’s just a glitch.”

“Nap, where are we, exactly?” Slinkie sounded nervous. Not good. She didn’t really do nervous as a rule.

“Gamma Quadrant. In the vicinity of Herion.”

“Oh, Dear Feathered Lord.” Now she sounded well beyond nervous.

“What? What is it? We’ve been to Herion before, no issues.”

“Nap, you remember that spacer I was talking to at our last pit stop?”

I remembered him. Herion Military, if his uniform had been any clue. Tall, rippling muscles, built like a battle cruiser and, if Slinkie’s reactions to him were any indication, extremely handsome. I wasn’t short, puny or ugly, but that guy had outbid my ante before I could get close to the game. “Yeah. I think he was hot for Randolph.”

“Hardly. He was from Herion.”

“Time to go.”

“Yes, but not for that reason. There’ve been some weird accidents around here. He told me that the last things anyone got from the ships was that their alarms went off, but they couldn’t find anything wrong. Usually they were talking to Herion Mission Control and then… nothing. The rescue ships only found traces of ships. Like… like they’d been vaporized.”

“Or hijacked by someone who knows what he’s doing,” the Governor said, and he didn’t sound peevish. “Alexander, this sounds familiar, from many years ago, before you were born.”

“Great. Plotting coordinates now.”

“Nap, don’t plot, just fly.” Slinkie’s voice was tense.

“Why?”

“I have something on my scanners now. A lot of somethings. It’s time to remind us all why we fly with you.”

I flipped to full manual. “Because I’m the best pilot alive.”

“Please do your best to be able to still say that tomorrow.”

“Will you sit in my lap again if I get us out of this?”

“I might even have sex with you.”

“Wow. It’s that bad, huh?”

“Yeah, Nap. I think it’s worse.”

S
linkie wasn’t kidding, I could hear it in her voice. “Slink? Can’t see what I’m supposed to be flying away from.”

“Attack shields engaged!” She seemed focused.

Randolph hit the auto-helper. “Captain, would you like Ultrasight assistance?” The auto-helper had a pleasant, soothing female voice. It drove me crazy.

“Ya think?”

“That’s a yes!” Randolph didn’t mind the auto-helper. Sometimes I got the impression they were dating. I mean, he’d even named it. “Audrey, we have invisible attackers.”

“Going to Ultrasight now, Chief.” The auto-helper called Randolph Chief because he was our head mechanic. He was our only mechanic, but there were times not to argue semantics.

A film went over the windshield and suddenly space was crawling with scaries. Because of how it worked with and against the hyper-drives, Ultrasight—which allowed you to see literally everything, including sound and anything cloaked—used up a lot of power, which was why we normally didn’t have it on when we were flying. Most spaceships didn’t even have it installed. Only huge battle cruisers and their ilk could manage hyper-drives and Ultrasight at the same time.

There were a dozen ships out there. Most of them were larger, but none of them actually looked like military ships. However, they still resembled an armada. They weren’t shooting at us, which was good. They were maneuvering to net us, which wasn’t.

“We’re in trouble.” I hit the thrusters and started Evasive Maneuver #206. I had a lot of evasive maneuvers. Normally I saved #206 for when I needed to impress someone. Right now, I used it because I didn’t want to be captured.

“Radio communications are jammed,” Slinkie said. “I can’t raise Herion Mission Control, and I can’t communicate with any of the ships out there.”

“Military?” Randolph asked as I spun the
Sixty-Nine
like she was a prima ballerina while also weaving through the air erratically.

“Nope. Well, not official military.”

“Pirate armada.” I knew the Governor wasn’t looking at any of this. He sounded very sure.

“Right. At least, pretty sure you’re right.” I spun us past three different attach cables. If they hooked onto us, the magnetism would hold us in place—only a few pilots had ever gotten free from an attach cable and had a ship left to talk about. I was one of them.

However, it wasn’t good for the ship or the nerves to let an attach cable hook you, so I was focused on avoiding them. The capture nets held between several of the ships made this a little more difficult, but not impossible.

The laser cannons, now, they were starting to head things into the realm of impossibility.

“L
aser cannon warming up,” Slinkie shouted. “It’s going to take longer because of the Ultrasight.”

“Have to make the tradeoffs. Take your time, I’m fine here.” I flipped the
Sixty-Nine
end-over-end, which meant most of the laser shots missed us. The couple that hit glanced off. “Structural?”

“Looks fine so far. Think we can make Herion?” Randolph asked.

“Doubt it. Can’t jump, either.” The
Sixty-Nine
was outdoing herself—a couple of times I wondered if she was going to split apart, but she held on and we did the dance together no one did as well as the two of us. Of course, I was glad we all had anti-motion sickness meds pumped into our systems on a daily basis, because flying while puking is harder than it sounds.

“So, pretty much, we’re screwed.”

“C’mon. It’s us.”

“Oh, right. We’re completed and utterly screwed.”

I managed to dodge another set of laser shots. They had us surrounded, like we were inside a big spaceship ball. The only positive was that they had to be a lot more careful about where their shots went than we did. They were closing the gaps though, and soon we wouldn’t have any maneuverability at all.

“Any time, Slink. Really. Any damn time.”

“Firing laser cannon in five… four… three….” Slinkie’s voice was back to calm. Shooting things always made her feel better. “Two…one.”

The blast shook the ship, but I was ready for it and allowed the shock to spiral the
Sixty-Nine
even more erratically. Another attach cable just missed us. Unfortunately, the laser shot didn’t hit any of the ships. Which was odd, since Slinkie was a damned good shot.

“So very screwed,” Randolph muttered under his breath.

“Maybe.” I could see where the laser shot had hit. “Slink, really, when are you going to marry me?”

“Never. Do I need to spell it out for you?”

“No, I got it.” I hit the thrusters and raced for the two biggest ships. The ones holding the biggest net. “Let’s just cohabitate. Who needs legality? Not me. I’m the poster boy for anti-legality.”

“Nap? Why are you heading for the net? Are we trying to make it easy for them?” Randolph shoved back in his seat, braced for impact.

“I’m not heading for the net.” Flip, dodge, reverse flip, triple axel, end-over-end, and through the hole in the big net Slinkie’s blast had created we went. “I’m heading for freedom.” We spun past the ships, righted, and then I hit the boosters and the thrusters at the same time.

We shot away like a Libsuno after, well, another Libsuno. They were an active race, and they liked to play chase almost as much as they liked to get caught.

I, however, did not like getting caught. I was determined to put significant space between us and the armada.

“Ships are following, Captain,” the auto-helper said.

“No kidding. You want to offer anything helpful or you just chatting?”

“Don’t talk to Audrey that way.”

“Randolph, it’s a computer program.”

“Audrey has feelings.”

“We need to get you planetside, and fast.”

“I programmed her to have feelings.” Randolph sounded hurt. “And she does.”

“How about her voice? Did you program that to be consistently calm and cheerful, just so it would drive me crazy?”

“No. I think it helps keep everyone relaxed if Audrey sounds like she’s relaxed.”

“She’s a computer program!”