Pirate's Bane; Black Star
Chapter 4; The Black Star

As Alex finishes talking Agent Coreance clicks him mandibles in thoughtful contemplation, but all Alex thinks about is how much he looks like the monsters from the old movies from Earth back in the early twentieth. After a minute and a half she is forced to make him talk to stop the clicking of those damn mandibles, their clicking is just creeping her out too damn much. “What the hell are you thinking about?” She snaps.

“The KTS Sea Turtle,” he answers her absently, “I am trying to recall its specifications.”

“I thought all you Thrax had perfect recall.” She says smugly.

“We do,” Coreance says letting his eyes trail down from the ceiling and back down to Alex, who is leaning as far back in her chair as she can with her arms crossing as much as they can with her wrists still bound, “but I have never seen the layout of a KTS Sea Turtle.”

“Why not look it up on the info net?” She asks with a twisted smile.

“I am assuming that since the exterior was modified that the interior was also modified so looking up the layout of a standard KTS would be useless, correct?”

That takes the smug look right off of Alex’s face, since he is right. “I’m really starting to hate it when you start to make sense.”

“Well when you continue your tale elaborate on the interior as you did with Lerra.” He says making Alex blush a little at the fact that he thought she had elaborated on Lerra.

Lerra lead me up the ramp that was the cargo bay door and as we crossed over the hinge point, the motors started and it rose up behind us. It only got up about two thirds of the way and its motor ground like an overworked torque wrench on a welded bolt. Lerra groaned along with the motor as she slammed her hand against the intercom. “Arthur, send more power to the cargo bay doors, it’s sticking again.”

“Yes ma’am.” He replied through the slightly gravely sounding intercom.

I looked at Lerra with a raised eyebrow and cocked my head at the door while I asked. “Is that going to be a problem?” If I had known what was going to happen next I still couldn’t have planned it any better cause the door slammed right as I finished asking my question.

Lerra gave me a murderous look but answered none the less. “The damn door’s fine it’s the motor that’s damaged, it came with the ship and I’ve had to rebuild and rewire it more times than I can remember but it’s solid, a destroyer could blast it with its main cannon and it would hold, I would bet my life and your life on that. Now if you’re done insulting my ship come with me and I’ll show you your quarters.” Lerra lead me through the nearly empty cargo hold, all that took up the space was a food storage bay near the back, a couple of quad runners hanging from the starboard wall and in the open area were a few medical storage crate locked up tight and locked into place with heavy bolts that took me all of five seconds to realize was our cargo though I had no idea what it was at the time and I’m still not sure it ever was anything more than a ruse. We took the spiral steps up to the living level. “You’re getting Jenkins old room.” She told me half way up.

“I assume he was your last navigator.”

We got to the top of the step before she answered me. “He was when he wasn’t chasing everything with a skirt like a comet’s tail.”

I stepped up on deck and looked around checking its layout against the ones I remembered from basic, during ship training. Since the KTS’s have such thick armor they make great training ships, since there isn’t much we can do to destroy them. It looked pretty much standard more or less, the cockpit was in the center of the bow, the captain’s cabin was to the forward starboard, common area was forward port. The crew cabins were lined up against the starboard wall and the port wall for, three on the starboard side and two on the port side. The engine room was in the center of the ship where its access would be on a standard KTS. The med bay was on the bottom of the port wall with the shuttle docked to the in the center of the stern. And the weapons locker was next to the captain’s quarter door. More or less the same as a standard training ship just the furniture was less utilitarian.

Lerra lead me to the door of my quarters and instead of pushing the door release button she slammed her fist into the wall and the door slid open. “The door sticks a bit.”

“I noticed.” I walked past her and into the room and found about what I had expected for a civilian ship and a whole hell of a lot nicer than what I remembered from basic except the bed frame was a queen not a pair of bunks one atop the other. In the front lower corner was a small metal table and matching pair of night stands framing the bed’s head board, it was a whole hell of a lot more comfortable than what I remembered from basic. That one had four bunks in the room and two tables and barely enough room for your foot locker with the lockers between the bunks.

“Hey,” she said snapping me out of my mental comparison, “here’s the run down. Dinner’s at twenty, breakfast’s at eight, lunch you have to make for yourself and if you’re not there for either meal then you fend for yourself. Got it?”

I dropped my bag on the floor and turned around to look at her. “You said this is Jenkin’s old room, what happened to him?”

“He’s not dead,” she told me flatly, “if that was what you were afraid of, close though. He went and got married to a Valarian of all things.”

“Aren’t Valarian’s animalistic?” I asked stupidly.

She raised one side of her bow again in that quizzical look of hers and rolled her eyes. “Humans,” she said in a long suffering way, “you have such a one sided view of the galaxy. If you asked a Valarian what they would call a human they would say you are no more than a slightly evolved monkey, and maybe that the monkey looked better.”

I rolled my eyes back at her. “And Valarians are either gill necks or whisker faces.”

This time she raised both of her brows and asked. “If that’s true then what am I?”

I don’t know why but I said the most stupid thing I could think of, thankfully I was bent over my pack so I couldn’t see her face, or if she was looking at me ass but since it felt like she was I figure she was staring pretty hard. “You’re a flower child.”

“Flower child,” she repeated testing the sounds as she said them, “I like that. Put your stuff away later monkey girl, I need you on the bridge to guide me to the nearest corridor.”

I stood up and looked at her in complete confusion, just catching the end of the smirk she had been giving me and not quite knowing what it was for. “What would be the point?” I had always swallowed the military propaganda about humans being the only ones who could pilot ships through the corridors. “Only humans can navigate the corridors. Everyone with a brain knows that.”

Lerra just gave me a sigh and another roll of her eyes, her beautiful red and green eyes. “That’s just pro human propaganda. Any sentient life form with a fairly decent level of intelligence and reflexes can navigate a corridor, the locations are just your military’s biggest secrets since you humans were the ones who found them. Since they don’t want people like you to tell every other race in the galaxy where they are and lose your military’s biggest advantage in a galactic war; a war which your people will probably start. And as long as I’ve been James’ engineer he hasn’t shown me where any more than three entrances are, military training is a nasty thing to forget, trust me.”

I didn’t have to trust her about that I knew it all too well, but I still had my doubts about her being able to pilot a ship through a corridor let alone into one, and I had my doubts about humanity starting a galactic war, though now I have to admit that my views on the subject have changed slightly. “If there is a galactic war I doubt humanity would be the ones to cause it.”

“Really? Your own history might paint a different picture.” She said turning away from the door and heading toward the cockpit.

“Never mind, I don’t have the time to argue this crap with you right now.” I said stopping her. “Not now and not ever. I’m assuming that this thing has a tesseract in it since were going to use the corridors but just tell me this, does this tub have a H.N.I.?”

“A holographic navigational interface?” Lerra laughed. “Are you crazy those things cost an arm and a leg, literally in some cases I’ve heard of, and the Black Star is not a tub, she’s a beautiful lady.”

“Sorry,” I know I said it with a bit too much sarcasm but at the time I was still angry with her, “for someone with such a sharp tongue I would have thought you had stronger skin.” I said rummaging through my pack until I found my personal H.N.I.

Lerra looked straight at it and then at me. “Where in the seven hells did you get ones of those?”

“I have my sources,” I said heading to the door, “let’s just leave it at that.”

Lerra didn’t let me pass though, using her foot and cybernetic arm to block my way by barring the door not that there was much to bar with her still leaning in the door frame. “I’m not letting you out of this room until you tell me how you could either afford a piece of tech that cost almost as much as two shipments of our cargo on the black market, or where and how you stole it, since I can tell from here it’s a military spec, or where you took from since I know for a fact that even a derelict Sol Alliance ship has self-destruct fail safes on their proprietary equipment. So tell me how the hell you got it without having major parts of your anatomy blown away.”

I looked her in the eyes and told her flatly. “I didn’t steel it.”

For a second Lerra looked at me as if I had grown two heads or something like that then her features returned to their normal perfection. “I figured as much since you still have a pulse, any one with ones of those usually has a lot of guns to protect them and a lot of idiots to fire them.” She looked at me, weighting me up and then a twisted smile curled one corner of her mouth and I felt something break in me, until she asked. “Did you salvage it?”

That question caught me like a sucker punch to the face and I knew I had a stupid expression when I answered her. “No,” I snapped like a child. She smiled at me again and something made me say the stupidest thing I could think of, again. “Maybe when I get to know you better I’ll tell you how I got it.”

“Why don’t you tell me now?” She said almost pouting.

It was that damn pout and the soft way she teased me, as if she knew I was looking at her with something that even I didn’t know I was thinking about yet. Sighing I told her the truth. “It was a gift from my old CO when I left the military, but that is a secret alright.”

“I’ll buy that,” she said losing almost all of the seduction she had put into her voice only a moment before though not from her eyes, “for now, but we will talk later cause I can’t tell if you’re lying and that’s annoying.”

“Like I said before once I get to know you some more then maybe I’ll tell you the whole truth not just part of it.”

Lerra let me walk by her then but she didn’t let me get the last word in. “I’ll hold you to that.”

“Hold me?” I asked quizzically.

“Just a figure of speech.” She assured me with a not so assuring smile.