A Pirate train slid up to a floundering prison transport, guns hot, and deployed cables. Hauled itself sheer with the liner, as it drifted through the asteroids. Clamps engaged, lights flared. Klaxons blared throughout the ship, and briefly, the ship wailed a distress call, cut off from static broadcast from the train.
The airlocks on assault ships often contained nooks down the halls. Places for borders to settle in when the doors opened, when the firefights cross the ship halls started. Most ships filled them with cargo, but on the Whipping Girl, an assault rifle and a suit of armor hung in each cubby, Rhienland Military standard. Bangs and scrapes echoed along their hull. The vibrations flowed up from the floor, from the walls he was leaning on. He checked his armour, glanced across the corridor at his mate. Would be mate. Ahead, two nooks away, Sophie stood ready, calmly loading a flechette gun, wearing a custom designed battlesuit, pleated durralloy plates on ablative weave over ablative leggings from the waist down to a pair of mechanized assault boots, body sculpted durralloy up to her old RM combat helm. He flicked the safety off his own glass-rifle, and settled in to wait for the locks to cycle...
Blasters and high velocity weaponry simply wont do for capturing a ship. Most ships carry rubber bullets and other riot gear as weaponry meant for defense. Raiders often use tazers or more elaborate lighting charges, sometimes even blades, or low powered metal Flechette repeaters, rather than explosive or high energy rounds. Always, the consideration is against piercing hull. Exceedingly rare are the glass rifles, the flechette and mortar rounds which shatter on walls(or bones) and bounce across corridors(or bodies) and leave their victims suffering from dozens of punctures every shot. Calibrated to move as quickly as possible before they lose solid cohesion or start to pierce hull plating, rounds from these guns often turn in to clouds of lacerating dust that speed down entire corridors, gathering pinkish tints wherever they intersect flesh.
First, came the sounds of air hissing as the pressure equalized. Then the slight creak of armoured gloves moving, the pneumatic hiss, and the tinkle of exploding glass shards. Screams followed, as the doors opened to full.
When Sophie stepped aboard the transport, the defenders lay around the halls in riot gear, sporting myriad holes and cuts, gurgling blood, dying or dead already.
"Right. Move in. Cut down anyone who resists, chloroform anyone who surrenders. Bounce shots around corners." She called to her two raiders, before stalking off toward the bridge, popping clouds of high velocity glass in front of her.
Disfigured and mutilated bodies were downed in the halls, splatters of blood leading far down the corridors from the corpses. On the command deck, two men lounged with helmets at their feet. Safeties were on, the guns leaning against the hall. Sophie watched as the screens flickered, her computing spike rewriting the controls and systems. Soon this ship would be transferred to her mate's neural net, and he would be a Captain. Sophie would march back to her ship, and two vessels would land at Malta, trading refits and repairs for the multitude of warm bodies teeming in their bellies.
Trade between the stars was profitable. Every station needed air, needed food, water. Many were sites of construction, demanding raw materials or intermediate goods, and wherever people were, consumables and luxuries were well paid for. Many stations were robotic, drawing in the cheap mechanics and systems to build and maintain, and needed no people at all. Others attracted people, with luxury suites, advanced education, profit sharing, promises at a better life. Still others demanded people, sucked at warm bodies and living populations, paying premiums for wives or concubines, pretties and skills. Souls to feed the maws of mines, to farm the fields, to maintain the air...doctors, mechanics, pilots, whores...Brute labor, orbiting the darkest, cruelest stars, sucked in the life of the Houses and consumed it, demanding more. And more the Union fed it.
Before Sophie left, of course, she'd have to tour her new acquisition. Down through the lower decks, where a crewmember might be hiding, perhaps someone's live-aboard family hiding in a bunk-room. Sophie was hoping for that, wishing for another little girl, something to put in the room above the Borse, the old one had gone stale. Rather dull, shivering in a corner, barely ate. She'd have to change her tactics, bring her out more often. There was a wedding to plan. Couldn't have them losing their wits.
Spikes and chains and howling Borse...What was a girl to do? Or anyone, for that matter? She needed pages too... These liners, these big ships....So many people.
Below, there were more. Debtor families, murderers, thieves, packed into cells, block after block. Hungry. She couldn't decide on whom she wanted, couldn't decide on what to take. Too many choices. Back to cell block D, then, with that little girl with the wide blue eyes. Tears on the cheeks, the shortshaved hair...her mother clutching her with bony fingers. That little blondehaired girl, with the bright blue eyes and the runny nose, the smudged, tear-stained cheeks, too fat face on a rather thin frame. She'd probably fill out rather well. Sophie opened the cage.
Looking in, Sophie bent down, squatting, dug into her pocket. The girl looked out, the mother cowered. Sophie pulled out a chocolate, offered it on an open palm into the cage. Mother loosened up, child reached out, snatched the delight. "I'm Sophie" She whispered, as the girl chewed, hand pressed to her lips. "Kendyl." the girl mumbled between bites. Then she collapsed. Sophie moved, brought her flechette pistol to bear, cut down Mother. She hauled the girl out, and headed back to her ship.
Little Kendyl was asleep in the back, on a pad. A pillow was tucked under her head, and the trian was underway. Sophie's chair was huge, and her deck was larger. An expansive bridge, for just a captian-pilot. She was aone, the engines clanking in the silence. The bunks in the back were empty, and she drifted silently through space, alone. The Union provied crews, crews, crews. She took them out into the depths, led them down the halls, across the breaches.
Men's heads exploded, thier limbs were torn off, a little storm flying by after a dull thump, rending flesh from bone and dropping people like paper sculptures. Little paper sculptures, cut down. Dropped, destructive, meaninless combatants. Their shots wizz past, and they drift, as the glass bounces around hallways. Always, she finds women, children. She looks for them. Looks for the ships chartered by families, or the families not quite commercial enough to hire out and leave their children behind. Take out an entire family in the deep, and noone's missed. And of course, there's company for the ride back.
All the bunks in the back were empty, the lockers, the messroom and the gym...Their chatter, their laughter, the boistrous noise of a pack of wolves, hard, loud, rough men...come along to take a ship, come along as passengers and partners. How she hated them, envied them, as they yelled in the halls. She'd cut them down, soon enough. But first, she needed someone to talk to. Someone to let it out, someone she didn't need to account for as they passed over her threshold. Someone hers.
Maybe this one will be soothing, she thought. Perhaps, little Kendyl, will understand. She doubted it. She'd gone through a lot of little Kendyls recently, peeling off the lies of the world, quicker than she should, till they were nothing but wrecks, broken little dolls. She'd feed Kendyl to the Borse soon enough.
Poor Borse. It needed something live to run down, eventually.
The ship slid into its moorings on Rochester, clanging echoing across the empty holds. There might be a crew here, if Sophie were in the mind to check, under normal circumstances. Today, and for the next few, there were Phantoms sauntering about station, and everyone who could get off had. There were a few security people, owners of bars and houses, and those wretches who so desperately needed the money (on Rochester, there were more than enough slaves or wretches to fill out most posts). Finally, there was a new group arriving on Rochester, men and women desparate or deranged enough to be attracted to the lure, and then those willing to predate amoung the madmen.
Sophie sauntered off the Whipping.Girl dressed in a cross between gala gowns and combat gear: a thirteen wrap cherry-blossom kimono, a duralloy obi and combat boots. Her hair was made up in a bun, and her only weapons were the chopsticks in her hair, ground at their tips down to molecule wide points.
There was, specifically, a doctor, who rented rooms down from the main councourse, on Deck 5, Sector G. A poisoner, on ocassion, who had been producing the drugs. Morphine and cardamine, Flash, Euphoria, packed in with acellerants and anti-coagulants. Then the downers, the tranks. A wake-me-up for the mourning, tied to an IV drip and set to wake her after eight hours, and keep her running for weeks, unless she hit the tranks. Something fast, and something strong.
She needed a doctor, too. She'd caught a bullet, or a knife, or some shrapnel, and had to have things dug out.
She'd walked right through the outer bar. Banged on the door, it had swung open. Over to the domicile of one Oliver Keller, where she'd banged on the door again. Harder and longer this time, till he called out.
"I'm Coming, damn you. Settle."
She slammed on the door again, harder.
"Keller, I need bonework, and I know you've nowhere to go outside this station. Get the damn door open while I'm calm."
Keller was an oldish man, aging poorly, wearing crooked glasses over a white beard. He usshered Sophie in, whispering
"There's at least one Phantom on this station, could be more. I'm keeping my damn door locked, thank you."