FSE

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Part 5

As a species, Snythelings have an instinctive spatial awareness that any other species would consider supernatural. They are keenly aware of everything around them and their relation to it. This extends even to a ship they happen to be piloting. They become attuned to the ship so deeply that it becomes an extension of themselves. Even for such creatures getting two objects that are moving at relativistic velocities to intersect in open space with only minimal computer assistance should be just shy of impossible.

That's exactly what Bobbie had done.

The Cimmerian Star appeared to blink out of existence when the cargo container struck it head on, enveloping the warship and carrying it away without even slowing down. The only remaining evidence of the cruiser was the broken off tip of one wing spinning in place. The gravity well of the object passing at point nine-nine-nine-eight light speed scattered the remaining four ships like pinballs.

The Proud Mary somersaulted through space at a dizzying rate, just barely missing colliding with one of the Barracuda fighters. Captain Clair was thrown into Bobbie's tangled tentacles and the two Vask girls clutched to their control panels, desperately trying not to get flung across the cab. Though the main view screen the universe zipped by in a repeating pattern. Stars, nebula, stars, nebula, stars, nebula.

"I think I'm going to get siiiiick!" Manjeet screamed.

Clair clung to Bobbie almost as much as she clung to him. "Bobbie, get the ship under control!" He yelled.

"Working on it!" The Snytheling responded. She was punching buttons as best she could while keeping herself and her captain from getting tossed about. The view screen suddenly blazed a brilliant green and warnings started to scream on the computer.

"The reactor on the _Cimmerian Star _just detonated!" Bobbie said. "Incoming radiation pulse!"

"Get us out of here!" Clair ordered. His ship didn't have near enough shielding to withstand the shock wave from a reactor that large. "Any fucking direction."

Bobbie abandoned trying to stabilize the ship and fired up the trans drive. The Proud Mary careened into FTL accompanied by a horrible groaning in the ship's superstructure. Somewhere inside the ship there was a deafening crack as a framing strut failed, but the ship held together. After a moment the ship's forward momentum forced her to stabilize and Clair could untangle himself from Bobbie.

"Are you alright?" He asked her.

The Snytheling straightened herself up and realized that one of her tits was exposed. She tried to fix her sleep romper only to discover that one of the shoulder straps was broken. She sighed and let it drop.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

The two wasp girls were picking themselves off the floor. Both looked shaken, and Manjeet had a hand clasped over her mouth. She looked especially peaked.

"Are either one of you hurt?" Clair asked.

"I- I'm okay, sir." Lulu replied. Manjeet simply nodded her head, appearing to be concentrating on keeping her stomach where it was. Considering she doesn't even need her mouth to respond she must have been really close to losing it.

"Holy shit!" Bobbie exclaimed as she looked over her sensor readings. She brought up a visual of the carnage they left behind where a massive bloom of green radiation spreads out into the cosmos. "We were insured for that cargo... right?"

Clair didn't reply to her as he drunkenly stumbled over to his command station. Considering the ship he just destroyed had a compliment of at least two-hundred Shan-Toru he wasn't particularly concerned about his cargo anymore. That was clear cut self-defense in his mind but interstellar law was a snarl of legal loopholes and traps. This could all fuck him up the ass if some jurisdiction decided they had standing.

He opened his holo screen. "All hands," he said wearily, "is everyone okay?"

An image of a blue furred, alien popped up. She looked something akin to a rabbit, only with four long ears instead of just two.

"What the hell are you doing to my engines?" She shouted at him. "I have valves popping all over the place!"

Clair grimaced at the engineer's insistence on _her _engine. "Is there any radiation danger?"

"No, that's what the valves are for," the rabbit explained, "but if we blow any more the eng--"

A second face pressed into the image next to her. "If there was any radiation I'd be starting to wilt." The plant girl said helpfully.

"April!" The rabbit shoved at the plant's face. "Get your thorns off me, you oaf!"

Another image appeared. This time it was Zenais.

"We have supplies spilled all over floor in the main passage." She told him. "It's a huge mess."

"Is anybody hurt?"

"I don't think so."

A third image appeared.

"I bit my tongue!" The squirrel girl wailed.

"That's not a real injury, Farren." The lizard female told her.

"It hurts!"

The rabbit banged on the optical camera which made a loud and obnoxious thud with each strike. "Captain! Core override isn't responding, the whip coil is abo--"

Clair muted her just as two more images blinked on. One of them had the gray face of Dez and the other didn't have a face, just a shifting blob of pink goo. Dez started talking as the blob started to make a series of squalling noises.

"Wait, what? Don't talk at the same time." Clair said as he waved his hands at them to stop. "Jewls, you know I don't even understand your language. Where's Torra?"

The pink blob made a motion that might have been a shrug before holding up an empty wrapper in a gooey appendage. Clair frowned at the wrapper that had once held a chocolate bar in it.

"Where the hell did she get that? Why did you let her eat it?" The captain accused. Jewls sprouted tendrils that waved around and made more squeaking to assert her innocence.

Torra was an Argise, a species for which theobromine was both euphoric and highly addictive. Torra had struggled for years with the dependency and chocolate was loaded with the chemical. There must have been some hidden in the food storage that spilled into the hallway and the Argise simply couldn't resist the temptation. There's not supposed to be any chocolate on the ship at all but it seems somehow it got on board. It's a shame because she had been clean for several months.

Clair rubbed his temples. "Alright, just find her and don't let her eat any more." He told her. "I don't want to have to pump her stomachs out again."

"She's likely in the air ducts." Dez chimed in.

"Of course she is, that's where she always goes." Clair said. He hoped she didn't puke in there like the last time. Even after sterilizing the ducts he could still smell a whiff of it on occasion. "Is Melody with you?"

"No." Dez replied. "Faithe is here. I don't know where Melody is. If you're interested, Faithe and I are unharmed."

"Good. Good." He said, but he already swiped aside her com page to hunt down his last unaccounted crew member. In the ship wide band he called out: "Melody? Where are you at?"

There was an uncomfortably long silence. Clair could feel the first sickening edge of anxiety for the cyborg's well-being creeping into his gut.

"Old girl, I really need to know you're all right."

Finally a communication's image opened up. "Don't 'old girl' me, young man!" Melody said to him.

Clair sighed in relief. "Good, you're okay."

"No! I'm not okay!" The cyborg replied irritably. "I'm in the upper holding bay and the securing straps for the cargo boxes snapped. I got pinned under two tons of crap you got stored up here! I had to disconnect myself from the waist down to get out!"

"Are you hurt?"

"Outside of the fact that I'm in two pieces?"

"Alright," Clair said, "I'll send a couple of girls up to dig you out and put you back together."

"Make sure you send Torra." Melody requested. "She has the best head for my cybernetics."

"Uh... I'm afraid Torra is off the wagon again." Clair informed her.

"What?" She shouted. "How did she get chocolate?"

At that moment there was a sudden vibration that shook the entire ship. The lights flickered and he could feel the inertia stabilizers straining as the ship jolted out of FTL.

"Shit!" Clair yelled in frustration. "Noka, what the fuck?" He swiped pages around looking for the com to the engine room buried in multiple open pages. He found it with the rabbit alien fuming angrily. No doubt a string of expletives, but he couldn't hear her since he had muted her mic. He was hesitant to flip it back on.

"--holy horse fucking, cock suck, mother puke!" Noka finished when he switched her on.

Clair grimaced. "What happened to my ship?"

"The fucking starboard whip coil seized up is what happened!"

"I thought you told me that the coil was fine." He admonished.

"It _ was _ fine!" The rabbit shrilled. "Unless we happened to do something fucking stupid like, I don't know, jump into trans at an unstable trajectory? The coil has been screaming bloody murder for the last five minutes!"

"Why didn't you hit the override?"

"It's not working, god-damnit!" The blue alien slammed her fists down on the panel in front of her. "We're lucky not to be a debris field scattered across half a fucking light-year right now!"

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry I saved your furry butt from pirates and broke your engine." Clair said. "How long will it take to fix it?"

"Fix it?" Noka said with aghast. "That coil is over eighteen-hundred degrees and every valve and sensor is blown. I won't be able to pull the shielding off for ten hours, let alone even guess at what repairs need to be made. Not to mention if you think I can repair a burnt out coil you have far more faith in my abilities than I do."

"Can we run on one coil?"

"Can you run on one leg?" The rabbit retorted. "No, we can only putt-putt around on thrusters for now. We're stuck unless we happen to have a spare coil somewhere around here."

Clair seethed quietly to himself. "Bobbie," he ordered, "send out a distress signal."

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" His co-pilot asked.

"Well, I'm not going to get out and walk." He said.

"No, it's just that we don't know what happened to the other three pirate ships." She reasoned. "They might have gotten caught in that radiation pulse, or they might still be around. Do we really want to broadcast that we're helpless?"

"Shit." Clair muttered as he sank down onto the padded bench by the doorway. She was right, of course. Not to mention that they were in what could only technically be called "claimed space". They were in the middle of nowhere with no governing body that could offer any protection within several light years.

"I need to think for a minute." He sighed as he rubbed his temples. "Noka, drop whatever you're doing and hop up to the holding bay. Melody needs your help. Take April and Zenais with you."

"Nothing I can do here right now anyway." The rabbit grumbled before turning off her communication.

Clair found himself staring at the staggered image panels of his crew on the holo-panel. They were all looking at him expectantly.

"Everyone else, just... chill where you're at for the moment." He said before switching them all off. He leaned back and put a hand over his face, remaining in that position for a while. After several minutes the rest of the occupants of the cab were getting visibly strained by his lack of action.

"Do you... do you want me to get us back on our original heading?" Bobbie offered.

"Not much point in that since we have no cargo to deliver." Clair said without moving. "Besides, it would take fifteen years to get there on ion thrusters."

"Actually, it would only take twelve years and four months, sir." Lulu piped up helpfully, to which Clair took his hand off his face to shoot her a dark look.

"I'm sorry, sir." The little Vask apologized as she glanced down.

"Bobbie, what's the closest system?" The captain asked.

The Snytheling glanced at her navigation panel. "Arc 49." She replied. "One point seven light years. It's an uninhabited system though."

"Fuck." Clair muttered. Inhabited or not, being in a star system with a broken engine was far preferable to being outside of one. A star was a point of interest with a much higher chance of happening across another ship that might be able to help. Unfortunately, Arc 49 was over three years away. His ship had, at best, six months worth of supplies before his crew starved to death.

After a few more moments Clair leaned forward. "Okay," he said, "I guess we don't have much choice. Bobbie, drop anchor and lock us into position. Go to silent run, minimal sensor echos. We're going to be stuck here for a while so I don't want to leave much of a cross-section in unfriendly space. Manjeet, I need you to draft a subnet note addressed to Mrs. K'alla."

While it was true that the Proud Mary was his ship, it wasn't one-hundred percent his. K'alla was his financier and owned a forty-nine percent share of his ship as well as his transport business. While the exact terms of their agreement stipulated that her burden was purely financial, he expected that she had enough invested in his ship and business that it would be more cost effective to aid in a rescue than write him off as a loss.

"Let her know of our situation and our precise location." He told the young queen. "Make sure she knows we're dead in the water in hostile space and further communications are likely not possible. Do _ not _ inform her that we lost the cargo."

"Even a short upload is going to cause a sensor ping." Manjeet said. "If someone is looking for it, they'll see it."

"I know that." He said, but it's not like he had a choice. Any type of communication they send could be picked up and traced back to their location by any ships in the vicinity, but he needed to get a message out because nobody knew where they were.

When they fail to arrive at their destination the shipping guild will be tipped off within seven days. That should trigger a mandatory sweep of his charted flight path to search for him. There were several problems with that. For one, he was well off his expected flight path by a factor of light-years. For two, that's assuming the guild actually followed protocols correctly. Beyond that, guild search procedures were merely cursory. Space, to understate it vastly, is fucking huge. If the Proud Mary isn't where they expect it to be the guild understands that attempting to expand the search is an effort in futility. They won't even bother. He would just be added to the growing list of missing and presumed lost.

"Do you want me to link the note to the shipping guild as well?" Manjeet asked.

"It can't hurt." Clair told her. Although he had no real expectation that it would help, likely the note would just sit in someone's inbox until it was cleared out into the trash. The guild is famously difficult to reach due to layers of bureaucracy coupled with incompetence. Typically the easiest way to contact them was to stop paying your dues.

"Should I send it now?" The Vask inquired. "It might be a good idea to wait a while. Maybe they'll leave this sector."

Clair sighed. There was some validity to sitting in the dark for a while. Possibly even for weeks just to make sure, but that assumed nothing else could go wrong in the meantime. If he did nothing and they had another emergency later that would mean there was no possibility that help was on the way. He wasn't fully aware of the extent that his ship was damaged. If the power core should fail he would lose any ability for long range communication. For the time being he can send a message, but there was no guarantee that wouldn't change shortly.

"Send it." He decided. "Let's hope they blink."