Pirate's Bane; Black Star
Chapter 3; Crew

Finding the docking bay was the easy part, not getting robbed twice was a bit harder. I had to trip up the first one, thankfully he was a would be thief with all the skill of a monkey with boxing gloves, the second I nearly had to kill since he was skilled and smart enough to pull a knife on me, thankfully all I had to do was put a slug in his knee to stop him. Thankfully the law of the station made killing in defense of your property legal, and the definitions of defense and personal property were both pretty lacks.

When I finally got to Omega 23 my thumb print was the key to unlocking the doors since I was now a member of the Black Star’s crew. The door seals gave and left me to look at what I thought at first was a KTS Sea Turtle. It had at least started out life as a KTS Sea Turtle but had been repaired and modified so much over the years that it was missing a few of its more prominent components.

The Sea Turtle had gained its nick name thanks to the armor plants on the top and bottom that looked like the shell of the extinct animal. It had needed the shielding to protect the generation one Tesseract engine, since that sucker was friggin huge, and when it had been developed it was the smallest ship in the Alliance navy with a proper Tesseract engine, anything smaller at the time had to, by design, have a fusion drive. Since back when it was developed the smallest human Tesseract engine was the size of the turtle’s cargo bay. Stubby wings came from the sides capped with twin turbine drives for standard flight as well as atmospheric flight with two more near the back extending back half as long as the ship with twin stabilizing foils and smaller turbines imbedded within the stalks. Built as a surveillance ship it didn’t have all that many weapons just the standard defensive guns, enough to stop incoming missiles from ripping it apart, not that missile could have done much against the Turtle’s armor since in testing, and in practice, it took three direct hits from the main gun of an Enterprise Class destroyer before it started to be compromised. Most are still in service, though not military, but they all still had their upper shells thought their original engines were taken out which made them little more than puddle jumpers and intersystem cargo hullers, though with only one shuttle for escapes if the shit hit the fan it was a good thing that it never really carried much crew, but it had never been meant to be manned by more than four or so marines.

This Turtle had been stripped of its upper shell and left with only its lower shell for protection making it look like it had been sliced in half. I had no idea how it was going to be able to make a Black Space run without the upper shell for cargo to make it profitable enough to attempt since I didn’t think it had a tesseract engine anymore to keep it moving fast and far enough to make a limited cargo run make any sense. Some privet ships had them, but their owners had more money than some small planetary governments GDP and from looking at James and now his ship I figured money was something he didn’t have to spare. Without the tesseract it would have to be a short run since the conventional engines only had a range of a couple of light years, no military secrets from me today, and without the tesseract it would be impossible to break into the corridors. Plus with only a fusion drive flying through black space would be like holding a lit candle in a dark room full of angry men with guns just looking for a target, you wouldn’t be able to miss it.

I must have been standing there for a while looking like an idiot since Arthur, Lerra’s android, noticed me and walked across the wing to her, since she was welding a new patch onto the ships engine housing and tapped on her shoulder. “We have company miss.” He was a steel skinned stripped down older model. Not anatomically correct enough to need clothes and slightly more substantial than a walking skeletal system with pistons. Actually from the outside he looked fine but inside he had a few minor problems.

Lerra stopped welding as soon as Arthur touched her shoulder. She flipped up her welding mask and looked not at him but at me in the door way. She dropped the mask onto the wing and looked at me seriously, standing up and the welder folded into her cybernetic arm, a military spec replacement arm with all the bells and whistles, I could tell by the color and size, just a hair bigger than it needed to be but balanced out nicely since her arm were well muscled from so much manual labor.

“Hey,” she yelled at me and I almost felt like I was back in basic, her voice had the authority of someone who had been in charge of whole platoons and didn’t take kindly at all to being paid no attention to, “who the hell are you? This is a private hanger so tell me what the hell you’re doing here or I’ll put a bullet in your head.” I usually didn’t miss much but given that Lerra was wearing a tool belt at the time I hadn’t noticed that she was also wearing a gun on her hip, next to a socket wrench of all things.

I fell back into my military training and snapped to attention before I remembered that I wasn’t military anymore and relaxed. I fixed my pack’s strap on my shoulder trying to look casual and tried my best to give Lerra a disaffected look. “The name’s Alexis.” I said biting my tongue to keep me from saying any more, like “sir”. “I’m this heaps new navigator, who the hell are you?”

The wing Lerra was standing on was four and a quarter meter up but she jumped off of it with her knees barely bending when she landed on the stone floor of the docking bay. “Lerra, I’m this baby’s engineer.” She said glaring at me, I almost wanted to drop and do pushups to make up for angering her like I had been forced to do in basic every time my smart mouth got started up.

“You’re a Zarinian.” I said groping for anything to keep from doing something stupid, and hoping to hell I wouldn’t give myself away. The Zarinian congress showed the entirety of my trial and the execution of my punishment to all their people, if anyone could figure out who I was it would be a Zarinian and now that I was on this job I couldn’t just walk out on it.

She raised a one side of her brow, with no eyebrows it was the closest she came to giving me a quizzical raising of the eyebrow, but it was hard to look away from her eyes with the sharp red of an apple wrapped in the whitish green of a new grown twig stripped of the upper layer of its bark. “Last time I checked I was, and you’re a human. What did you say your name was again?”

I swallowed hard like a new recruit fresh of the bus and meeting my Drill Sargent for the first time. “Jones,” I said and shock my head, “I mean Alexis, Jones is my last name.”

Lerra extended her cybernetic arm out for me to shake its hand and I looked at it for a second before she spoke up. “It’s safe.” I gave her a lift of my eye brow but took the hand offered and gave it a couple of firm shakes. “Welcome to the Black Star Alexis.”

Nervously I searched for anything to keep her from focusing on me for too long, looking at me too hard and seeing the scars, as thin as they were, and realizing who I was. I let go of her arm as casually as I could, though I’m sure you could have filled a tub with the sweet from my palms, and tilted my head to look at the ship again. “That’s a KTS Sea Turtle isn’t it?”

“It was,” Lerra said slowly, looking at me for what felt like a lifetime before looking at the ship she had been working on only moments before, “now we call it a KTS Frog.”

Before she could tell me anymore, or I could say or do anymore to give myself away, the door opened and James staggered in singing an old Earth drinking song off key even for a song written off key. “Lord bless Charlie Mops, The man who invented BEER.” He saw us and stopped his singing but his speech wasn’t much better than his singing. “What are you all doing out here?” He asked swaying on his feet as he stumbled toward Lerra and me. “We have a Black Hole run to make.”

Lerra rolled her eyes and sighed as if this was a common occurrence, and from the way James was drinking in the bar it probably was. “We’re just waiting for you boss.”

“Well I’m here,” he said stepping forward and falling forward as if he had been trying to go up a stair well and over stepped, “let’s get this show on the road.”

“Of course boss,” Lerra said waving Arthur forward. “Hey Arthur get over here and take this inebriate inside.”

“Of course ma’am.” With as much ease, but a whole hell of a lot stiffer than Lerra, Arthur fell off the wing and landed on legs as stiff as iron supports. He walked over to James and took his arm. “Come with me sir, I’ll take you to your cabin.”

James still rocked even with Arthur holding him up but he made it to the cargo ramp and up into the Black Star, his words slipping from his mouth as he walked. “To my bed room Bolts, to my bedroom, and send up a red head and two blonds and a fresh bottle of the good stuff. I want this party to keep going ’All night long.’”

“Of course sir.” Arthur said in a long suffering way though his tone never changed.

I watched as they went and lost control of my tongue. “He’s going to be at the helm of this thing through a Black Space run?”

“First off, this is going to be a Black Hole run,” Lerra said smoothly, “not a Black Space run, there will definitely be pirates along the way. Second, the captain won’t touch a drop until we reach port at the end of the trip, if you can get us there without getting us hit by a pirate raiding party along the way.”

I couldn’t help it I got snippy. “If he fallows my direction we’ll get there without even seeing a pirate’s radiation trial.”

“Then don’t worry about it and stow you gear cause we are wheels up in ten and if you’re not in your bunk you aint getting paid.”