Date: September 20, 2026
Attendance: Jon, Benny Letcher, Dax, Bernard, Arnold Wilkerson, Jackal, Marge, Etna Sola, Gaal
The pirates were beaten and the ship was still trying to kill them. What was left of the Iron Cross boarding party died over the next hour — in vacuum, in the med bay, and out an open airlock — but the fighting had opened the crew’s own air up like a vein. By the end of it, thirty-two people were breathing through a filtration system built for twelve, and the only port left in reach was the one broadcasting an invitation nobody wanted.
It started on the hull. Dax clipped himself to a safety rail at the stern and put a round from the anti-materiel rifle through the dropship’s engine housing; the containment field ruptured, the main engine went dark, and the pilots were left scrabbling at maneuvering thrusters while the salvage arm groaned and sparked. Jon took a salvage pod out and burned into the dropship’s viewport with a cutting torch until the transparent aluminum bubbled. Then the jury-rigged device clamped to the dropship’s flank lit blue and let go. The pulse killed the pod outright, locked the arm’s servos with its claws clamped shut, and froze Bennett II mid-stride out on the arm — drifting at the end of his tether, rifle floating loose on its strap. Two pirates came out of the dropship’s side hatch with torches to cut the claw fingers off. Dax put a round through the first one’s helmet and watched him spin away trailing air and blood. Jon hot-wired a shielded battery into his dead pod, got thrusters and claws back, caught the second man’s torch arm in a grabber and drove him into the hull hard enough to open his suit. Dax spent his last round on the cockpit window; it went in one side and out the other, and both pilots were pulled out through the hole into the dark. The dropship went dead and still.
Inside, the ship was quietly filling with carbon dioxide. Benny Letcher went looking for Weaver on the captain’s orders and found him unconscious at the bottom of the reactor pit, then dropped beside him before he understood why. Arnold came down after them in a rebreather, read the blackening badge on his own collar, and he and Jackal rigged a hoist out of paracord to haul both men up. Benny came around at once; Weaver did not. By then the alarms were going off across every deck.
The last pirate aboard had barricaded himself in the med bay. Zeid — cybernetic arm, cigarette, gun trained on a door that kept sliding open and shut — offered terms: cryo, passage, delivery to any station, and he would put the weapon down. Etna and Gaal held the doorway and refused to speak for the crew. Marge arrived hauling Carl and Bernard over her shoulders, listened to about half of it, and fired through the gap; monitors exploded, Zeid took the hits, flipped a bed for cover and rolled a flashbang out into the corridor. Jackal arrived to find three people on the floor with their ears ringing, painted a tennis ball to look like a thermal detonator, bounced it into the room, and came through the door behind it with an empty shotgun pressed to Zeid’s head before the man realized there was no kaboom coming. He surrendered. Marge walked him to the brig, where he promised to make them all pay and then lay down and started whistling.
Dixie Doss was gone. Her goggles were on the deck by her station, there was blood on the floor, and a vent cover had been pulled off the wall. Arnold went into the ducting after the trail, found claw scratches in the smears where the shaft turned upward, and backed out badly shaken with a blood sample for Bernard. The trail pointed at Arnold’s own workshop, and the workshop was sealed: the keypad had been rigged to overload, and bars had been welded across the frame from the inside. Gaal came back from the armory with an acetylene torch, worked out where the bars were, and cut. Marge went the other way, through the med bay vents, and stopped an arm’s length short of a tripwire strung to a grenade taped under a bunk — she taped the pin down and kept the grenade. Through the grate she finally saw what had been hunting them: a woman with almost no flesh left on her, stealth field down, one hand clamped on the back of Dixie’s neck while Dixie repaired her arm. Tanya heard the grate come loose. Jackal popped the door and took a burst across the chest, Marge traded fire and had her arm broken by it, and Gaal emptied a fire extinguisher into the room to give them something to see by.
Dax ended it from the other side. He crossed to the far airlock, overrode the safety, and let the depressurized cargo bay take the workshop — Tanya and Dixie both went out with the air, still locked together. Jon matched their tumble in the salvage pod, got a claw around Dixie’s leg and tore her free; Tanya fired a grapple at him as she went past, missed, and cartwheeled off into the dark with a look on her face that suggested she had run out of ideas. Dixie was in vacuum, unsuited, for the length of time it took the bay doors to close. She lived. Arnold, out on the arm in mag boots, replaced the blown servos, and the arm dragged the captured dropship into the cargo bay — with him floating off the end of his own tether when it lurched.
What was left was arithmetic. Three of the ship’s four scrubber filters had been cut apart, the monitoring system with them, and there were thirty-two people aboard a ship rated for twelve. Bernard sealed and drained every compartment nobody needed — announcing all of them over the comms except the brig, where he pulled the air out with the prisoner still in it. Zeid, who had surrendered an hour earlier, suffocated on the bench he had been whistling on. Etna plumbed her hydroponic container into the scrubber loop as a living filter, good for about a day before the plants died of it. Arnold pulled the environmental filters out of the captured dropship, found they were the wrong standard, and cobbled them into a single working unit with patching material and stubbornness; Bernard checked it and installed it, and the system came back to about three-quarters. Gaal stabilized Weaver and Carl, then tried to teach the colonists in the shuttle bay a slow monastic breathing pattern to stretch what air there was. The colonists, freshly shot at by pirates, told her what they thought of that and breathed harder.
There was still no jump fuel — none aboard the captured dropship either — and no pilot; Carl was still under. So Jon flew The Second Chance himself, on the grounds that he had watched Carl do it often enough, and took her to the only thing in orbit: the station at the top of the space elevator. As they came in, every screen on the bridge lit with the burning sword, and the voice returned to tell them that the adherents of this mountain would give up independent thought to the will of Bishamonten and be carried to the next stage of human evolution. You have chosen wisely. Please dock and report for purification. The docking clamps closed around the hull — nobody on board can release them from this side — and the airlock opened on a station that looks entirely abandoned. Somewhere in all of it, Jon decided that whatever else happens, this is his last voyage.