Art:Space Pirates/Delinvir's Story

= Delinvir's Story = by Trevorius

That was the Cusp. That was the day the balance of power in the galaxy finally swung away from the human plague spreading across it. On that day, I became Delinvir. The Fulcrum. My people were ancient by galactic standards, and had retired to a peaceful existence of contemplation. After all the physical mysteries of the universe had been discovered, we set our minds towards Nir’kin, the afterlife. But we grew complacent during our long meditation. The plague came to our world. Great flaming slabs of metal descended from the skies, scorching everything with their exhaust. Hatches opened, and humanity spilled forth. They were disturbing and unnatural in the extreme, but we greeted them cautiously, for there are many wonderful things in the universe that seem strange at first. But they only came to harvest the resources of Nir'thul, and had no interest in trade or brotherhood. Only food for their massive machines. They reaped, but did not sow. They mined, and gouged deep wounds into our home. We fought but were crushed by their machines. Millions were imprisoned and tortured by Inquisitors, for the humans hungered for our knowledge also. Eventually, sated, they departed. They left terrible scars on our world, and our souls. Many of us left Nir’thul to explore the galaxy again. The galaxy had once been pure, but became infected by the human plague while we were dormant. A cure must be found. Shortly before the Cusp, I had been skulking around Calliope station, hiring myself out as a killer and thief. It wasn’t too difficult; Calliope was crawling with the human plague, and security was utterly corrupt. My contact was Ratri Iolana, a Saffir that ran the local watering hole. The moment anyone stepped aboard Calliope, she already seemed to know the number of speckles on the egg they had hatched from. “Any news?” I asked her that day, ignoring the drink she set in front of me. I never drank, but her services were not free; she always served me a glass of something. And I always tipped well. “Something different,” she purred. Her yellow eyes gleamed and her fur rippled. I knew to be cautious; she loved trouble even more than untraceable credit.

“There’s a pirate ship in port, Oliver’s Folly. She’s here hunting some gun-runners aboard the Apathy.”

“Hiring a scurvy crew to pillage the stars,” I said dryly.

“They’re thieves and killers, just like yourself. What could go wrong?”

Not my usual forte, but she wouldn’t have mentioned it if it wasn’t going to be profitable, somehow. She may love trouble, but bad information would put her out of business faster than losing her weekly shipments of Venusian ale.

She smiled, and her fur rippled again. Her species’ version of a laugh, I figured. “Docking ring twenty-three.”

I nodded, paid for the drink I hadn’t touched, then left.

Life aboard Oliver’s Folly with the pirate crew was as filthy and disgusting as I had expected. All of them were human, except for the navigator who was some sort of hybrid. The captain went by the name “Two-Eye Jax,” which was apparently humor of some sort, since the man only had one eye, and wore patch over the other. Fortunately, after one glance at my claws, tail-blade and powerfully un-human physique, the filth generally kept their distance.

Ratri had sent me here for a reason, likely a very good one. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to miss it, and had taken to loitering in the command center, despite the stink of plague that clung to everything. We had been following the Apathy through null-space since Vega and were scheduled to drop into the Sol System in a few minutes.

“Ah, home sweet home,” Mull, the navigator, giggled in his high-pitched voice as the ship reappeared in real-space. I’d overheard that the half-human was from Jupiter, the largest planet in the plague’s home system. He examined the sensor display and said, “Just about 35 AU out from those beautiful reds and oranges and whites I miss so much.”

“Any sign of the Apathy?” Captain Jax asked, stepping forward to look over Mull’s shoulder.

Mull nodded and pointed. “Oh, aye cap’n, she’s right ‘ere, droppin’ in towards Neptune, gettin’ a boost from th’ gravity well.”

Jax frowned and squinted at the display. “Can you figure an intercept?”

“O’ course, cap’n!” Mull glanced down at his navigation computer. “Easy as Pluto pie. Y’see, we’re o’er ‘ere, and traveling at thirty-one point five-three KPS, and then they’re…”

“Right in front of us!” Jax realized. He lunged for controls and banked hard to port. “Battlestations!” he roared.

The humans did what they did best: they scurried. Hatches opened and closed, boots stomped the deck, local gravity increased as Jax threw the ship’s throttle wide open.

“Gunners, target maneuvering thrusters!” he ordered. “Drone pilots, defensive perimeter!”

The Apathy turned out to be anything but. As the Folly’s guns began firing, the Apathy swerved broadside, exposing open missile tubes. But the Folly was prepared; drone pods were already launching.

The drone pilots pulled down control hoods over their heads, blotting out the world and replacing their eyes and ears with their drone’s sensor array. There were twenty stations on each side of the command center, and at that moment forty free-floating laser platforms were forming a perimeter around the Folly.

“Missiles incoming!” Mull reported.

The gunners and drone pilots locked onto the targets in their defensive zones and fired. The space between the two ships blossomed in brief flashes as missiles were picked off. Neptune loomed in the distance, and the two ships accelerated into its gravitational maw.

“Sector six drones form up ahead -- sector one, flank the prize,” Jax ordered. The Apathy continued to launch missiles, but surprise was lost; they were hoping for a lucky hit as they fled. The Folly’s gun crew turned their attention to the Apathy’s engines. Several of the drones guarding the rear dropped down to a lower orbit, gaining speed and raking their fire across the Apathy’s exposed sensors as they passed.

Captain Jax flipped a few switches on the comm panel and spoke: “Apathy, this is the captain of Oliver’s Folly. Cut your engines and prepare to be boarded.”

The response was static, the hiss and whine of solar radiation caught in Neptune’s magnetic fields. Then, a woman’s voice, slightly distorted but obviously cheerful, came though.

“Two-Eye! So good to see you again! I thought we’d lost you after Calliope!”

The signal was interrupted as one of the Apathy’s engines suddenly exploded, taking out several of the drones that had gotten too close. In unison, the pilots of the two destroyed drones slammed their fists down on blinking “launch” buttons, and replacements were shot into the void.

Globs of melted-and-refrozen metal pattered off the Folly’s hull as it hurtled through the debris field. The radio static cleared, the woman’s voice came through again, “Ah well. It was a good chase.” The laugh was gone, for the most part.

“She’s powering down ‘er engines, cap’n,” Mull reported.

Jax nodded, grinning. “Drones, keep a perimeter around the prize. Gunners, ready the mag-grapples. Boarding crews to your airlocks.” He rubbed his hands and laughed.

I left the command center and went down to the port cargo airlock. Beyond the airlock were drone launch tubes, ammo feeds for the cannons, coiled mag-grapple tow cables. The cargo bay throbbed with the rumbling mechanical heartbeat of the ship’s engines.

The guns’ hydraulics whirred and hissed, and the tow cables unwound as grapples hurtled through space towards the Apathy. There was a dull thud-thud-thud as impact vibrations were carried back along the cables, and then the wenches whirred to life, pulling the ships together.

A minute later, the universal airlock extended and latched onto the Apathy’s hull around their cargo hatch. Atmosphere poured into the tube, inflating and pressurizing it. “Charge weapons,” I said, and cracked my knuckles. This was the fun part. The airlock doors opened, and there I came face-to-face with the double-edged blade of legend, futility and hope, destroyer and savior. ''For the wanderer will find the weapon of weapons, and gaze into the abyss. In the darkness will he find Hope, and Salvation.'' She was a young human, nearing adulthood, but not yet ripe. She somehow stood in the middle of the tube that bridged the void between the two ships, even though it was a zero-gee environment. How she came to be there I had no idea; the Apathy's airlock remained sealed. She smiled brightly. “Hi!” she said, “Are you a pirate?” She showed no fear at all. “I’m Lucy; Lucy Swift!” I noticed she was vaguely opaque. Something was very wrong. While I considered my options, the Apathy's airlock hissed open, and an aged human drifted out into the tube. He wore simple work clothes, and didn't appear to be an officer. "Lucy!" he hissed, “Get back in here!” "No, Mister Flint," she replied. "I want to become a pirate, like my parents before me." "That's Professor Flint," he said, and pulled a laser pistol from inside his coveralls. My boarding party immediately sealed their suits and moved back into the airlock; they knew better than to start shooting in a place like this. "You can't hurt me," Lucy said. "No," he replied, pointing the pistol at me. "But I can make life very difficult for your pirate friend." Lucy sighed dramatically, then made a grab for the pistol. There have been times since my torture at the hands of Inquisitors that I have questioned my sanity. But I saw what I saw. Professor Flint turned away, trying to hold the pistol out of the girl's reach, but Lucy lunged through him to pluck the pistol from his hand. “He’s a pirate, and I’m gonna join him!” Lucy shouted, and leveled the pistol at Flint. “My parents were pirates, great ones! And it was pirates that found the golden chest that exploded and killed me… or… whatever! And I’m gonna find out where they got it from!” She turned to me and smiled. "I blew up the engines for you. It was easy. I'm gonna help you guys lots!" This is what Ratri sent me to find. The extinction of not only my people, but the entire galaxy stood before me. I had a vision of the human plague, immortal and omnipotent. The vile humans had, unbelievably, stumbled across the great mystery of life-after-death.

The girl somehow straddled the barrier between worlds. I must discover how she came to be this way, and bring this knowledge to my people. At that moment, my communicator buzzed, and Jax’s voice crackled through the static: “Boarding crew, abort, abort, return to the Folly immediately! It’s a trap!” The tube shuddered as the mag-grapples disengaged, and behind me I heard the whirr of the gauss cannons powering up again. Lucy frowned a little and said, "Oh yeah. I was gonna tell you; there’s a big navy ship waiting on the other side of Neptune." The tube swayed as the Folly shuddered from impacts. “Um… I guess they’re here.” "You -- old man," I said quickly, "What do you know about the girl?" He straightened up and tugged the wrinkles out of his overalls, salvaging his dignity. "I am Professor Tamar Flint, of course," he replied. "And she is my greatest discovery." "I am not a discovery!" Lucy shouted, then turned and ran down the tube in my direction. "I'm a pirate! Arr!" She ran through me, and into the Folly. "You're coming with us," I said to Flint, and ducked back into the airlock. "If you're fast enough." He quickly pushed off and flew through the tube; he was old, but he could move. I hit the emergency seal for the airlock as I pulled him aboard. From the cacophony of the machinery, I knew battle was raging. We hurried to the command center. When we arrived the drone pilots were madly hammering away at their launch buttons, replacing drone pods as fast as they were destroyed. “Ammo bay four out!” shouted a gunner, and behind the chatter and warnings I noticed a high-pitched whine go silent as a bank of cannons stopped firing. “Blast!” Captain Jax shouted and slammed a fist down on the tactical display. “The President Bartlet of all ships, captained by Worthington, the best pirate hunter in the galaxy!” “Aye, Cap’n!” Mull replied, “What better way ta catch a pirate, than with an ex-pirate, eh?” He laughed bitterly. At that moment, Lucy stepped into the command center, through a nearby bulkhead. “Did you know you guys are almost out of ammo?” she asked me. “Yeah, we know,” I replied, then turned to Lucy and grinned my best bloodthirsty grin. “Hey, kid. Why don’t you show the captain here what you can do, and take care of that navy ship for us?” Lucy’s eyes grew wide, and she bounced a little. “Aye-aye!” She turned and scampered off through the wall. Lights sprinkled across Mull’s display. “Port maneuvering thrusters at ten percent, cap’n!” he reported. Jax gritted his teeth and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll keep the Apathy between us and the Bartlet; you just figure out how the hell to get out of here.” “Aye, Cap’n! I have an escape window, if we slingshot and go real low over Triton. We gotta hold tight for fifteen more minutes.” Jax wrestled with the controls as the Folly was rocked by another missile impact. “Gunners!” “Sorry cap!” came the reply, “Ammo’s dry!” Jax shot a glance at Mull. “Nothing sooner?” “Main drive’s too damaged, Cap’n; we don’t have th’ delta-vee. Best I got.” Jax shook his head, and I could see defeat in his eyes. Suddenly there was a blinding flash and the screens went blank. “Nuke!” Mull squealed. “No, wait,” Jax replied. “They missed, or we wouldn’t be here.” The sensors came back online and the monitors flickered to life again. Where the Bartlet had been was now an expanding cloud of glowing metal, dimming from white to orange to red as it cooled. “By the flaming barnacles of Betelgeuse!” Jax gasped. “That was a hell of a malfunction!” “Er… sorry,” Lucy said quietly as she stepped through the wall again. “I just meant to turn their reactor off, not… that.” “Don’t worry kid,” I said and grinned at her. “The navy is a pirate’s greatest enemy, after all. You did great.” “Arr!” Lucy said, giggling. I smiled the first true smile I’d had in a long, long time. It was going to be a long road home, but with Flint’s help, I would bring the secret to omnipotence to my people. The balance of power had shifted, even humanity’s powerful machines were no match for this girl, and after long years of darkness, a new dawn was coming. “Arr!” I agreed, and laughed.

= Cast of Characters =

Delinvir

Ratri Iolana

Jackson Devonjer

Mulligan McInvernesshireling

Afya

Lucy Swift

Tamar Flint

Nicholas Worthington