Mitchell's Revenge

“Holy crap!” exclaimed Rufus, as the Guardian Angel exited FTL flight at the edge of the Spansion shipping lane.

“This is a mess.”

The wreckage of what looked like several ships was spread across a thousand kilometres of the normally busy transport route. At first glance nothing seemed to be salvageable. Rufus concentrated on manoeuvring the Angel around the debris, all the while scanning for something useful.

“I wonder what did this?” pondered Flex.

“An Eridanian warship, according to the news feed I’ve just picked up,” muttered Bolter.

“So where the hell is it?” asked Flex.

“It could be anywhere,” said Flick cheerfully. “But if you look over here, you’ll see what seems to be an escape pod. Ah yes, there’s the distress beacon now.”

She pointed to a tiny blip on the command board in front of Flex. There was indeed a pulsing beacon showing the pods’ exact location.

“Just what we need,” said Bolter. “More passengers.” Flex chuckled.

“And exactly what they need,” he said. “Just when they think their day couldn’t get any worse, they get rescued by pirates! Let’s see how many are on board. They can no doubt tell us what happened here.”

Flick scanned the escape pod to find three life forms. Two of them appeared to be humanoid.

“Let’s put Natasha on guard duty when we get them aboard,” suggested Flick. “She won’t tolerate any nonsense and she won’t hesitate to hurt them if necessary.”

Flex grinned. “What a good idea! That’ll keep her busy. She’s been more agitated than usual since we arrived here.”

While Rufus took them cautiously towards the pod, Snatch, Grabb and Natasha made preparations in the docking bay to receive the survivors. As they got closer, the distress beacon faded and a message appeared on Flick’s board.

“Please hurry, Eridanian warship only just gone. Afraid it will return if survivors detected.”

She read the message aloud to Rufus and Flex.

“Looks like we’ve got a couple of scaredy cat survivors! Still, it’s not bad advice,” she said to Flex. “Perhaps we should just load them up and get out of here right away.”

“I agree,” he replied. “We hardly have the fire power to defend ourselves, let alone deal with a warship. Rufus, let’s get them aboard and then jump to the Karhu system. I think we’ll head to Tiberion. There’s usually enough misfits on that moon to let us blend in until we know what we’re doing!”

An hour later the Guardian Angel had done exactly that. Rufus set course for Tiberion. The two human survivors from the freighter were exhausted and scared, but glad to be rescued by other humans at least. They were accompanied by a small shaggy dog that immediately ran to Natasha and peed on her boot.

Snatch and Grabb could not believe their eyes when, instead of kicking the animal away, she picked it up and stroked its shaking body until it had snuggled into her ship suit and closed its eyes. It was the first time in the months they had been travelling together that they had seen Natasha smile.

“I’m going to call him PB,” she announced. “He can sleep in my cabin.”

“You’re welcome to him,” said the male survivor. “All he’s done is piss on things and chew stuff he shouldn’t touch. I don’t know what Lou was thinking when she gathered him up before we left.”

The survivor identified as Lou rolled her eyes at them.

“He likes you,” she said to Natasha. “Make sure you take good care of him, he’s a special dog. That’s why I picked him up.”

“I will,” replied Natasha. She smiled at Lou and strode off towards her cabin to accustom PB into his new environment. Once the dog was settled, she quickly returned to the bridge to hear what the survivors had to say.

It turned out that Bot Ramsay was a software technician who had worked on the freighter for the past three years. He transferred to the ship from Universal Starship Enterprises technical development group after an argument with the head of space design testing turned nasty. He had nothing positive to say about his former employer. Now in his mid forties, Bot was an embittered narcissistic loner, and a very average technician.

Lou Pejic was a young cargo handler who had joined the freighter at the last port of call. She was tall and strong, but trembling with nerves after her narrow escape from the Eridanians. She was an empath and had predicted what was going to happen well before it did.

The trouble was, no one on the freighter had believed her and then suddenly it was too late. Bot was the only crewmate she could convince to leave, and it was her anticipation that saved them both.

They were closing the hatch on the escape pod when the Eridanians arrived. They had just enough time to eject the pod. They then watched with horror at the events unfolding before them as they drifted away from the hot zone.

They told the crew of the Guardian Angel how the warship had destroyed both the rescue ship and the freighter after the crew of the Zond annihilated the smaller Eridanian boarding craft. As soon as the Zond was free of its attacker, they said, it jumped away, leaving the others at the mercy of the warship.

Natasha listened to the story with a stony face. Realising that her role as enforcer was not strictly necessary when they discovered what a pair of wimps they had collected, she was now furious that she had literally missed her ride home. She knew the Zond was headed directly back to Tarasov, and she thought she knew why.

“Typical of Maxim to run,” she thought to herself. And now, the funds she had cadged from her father at Topernicus were supporting two worthless crewmen from a nonexistent ship.

“I really need to get off this junk heap of a ship,” she thought as they hurtled towards the Karhu system and Tiberion.