LotS/The Story/The Right Tools/The Pirate
The Pirate
OFFICER YUN: You're the owner and proprietor of Jacob's Guns and Explosives?
SYLLUS JACOB: That's right.
OFFICER YUN: You were found unconscious behind your counter, having suffered multiple laser burns and blunt force trauma injuries. Numerous high-powered weapons were missing from the store's shelves and cases.
SYLLUS JACOB: Yes.
OFFICER YUN: Do you know who robbed you?
SYLLUS JACOB: No One.
OFFICER YUN: Excuse me?
SYLLUS JACOB: No One robbed me.
OFFICER YUN: But you were beaten, and items were taken from your shop.
SYLLUS JACOB: You don't understand... The man who did it... Before he opened fire he pointed his gun at me and said I should tell people that No One robbed me.
-- Transcript from a victim interview at the Tolsten Hill Police Station on Ricop Prime
This task should be impossible. To find a single ship, one bearing such powerful cloaking technologies, in the vastness of space is a job that makes locating needles in haystacks seem a laughable sinecure in comparison. In fact, you struggle to find a simile which adequately conveys its utter absurdity.
Yet Sun Xi's abilities are themselves impossible, an utter violation of science as it's known and written. So when impossibilities collide, surely anything becomes possible.
The psychic stands at the navigation terminal, next to the Princess. There's a faint smile on her face as the two of them talk, but you understand the great strain simply being here puts her under.
Talia sits beside you in the co-pilot's seat, swiveling her chair in endless circles -- her legs making occasional kicks at the air as she spins. Sighs and eye-rolls express the current state of her existence. Being idle, forced to simply wait, goes against every fiber of her being. But she keeps quiet, lest she distract Mistress Sun.
For that same reason, your other companions are in a different cabin. Though the psychic appeared amused by Telemachus, enchanted by Lu Bu, and somehow even charmed by Ragnar's almost aggressive courtesy, you know that she finds it easier when fewer people are close to her. You couldn't have left them behind, however. From the reports you've read, and what you heard from the Niflung, it's unclear whether Nemo works alone or with similarly attired and anonymous cohorts. If you have to fight a gang of space pirates, you want the others with you.
You cast another glance at the monitors, knowing that it's pointless. Your ship is adrift. It would be useless to fly off in any particular direction until you know where you're going. And the chances of a single ship encountering anything as it floats through the void is so remote it would make statisticians salivate to calculate it. Sure enough, there's nothing there. The universe continues on its way, and countless trillions of intelligent beings go about their business. But they do it elsewhere.
Wu Tenchu gathered all the information he could on Nemo and his exploits before you set out. After studying it all, analyzing it with his wise and cunning brain, he spotted certain patterns. Based on the distribution of the pirate's previous crimes, Master Wu isolated a number of adjacent systems as being likely places for him to be lurking in preparation for his next strike. It's still a colossal area, daunting in its magnitude. But at least it's given you a place to start.
As for Mistress Sun, she's learning all she can of the pirate and the Silver Shadow in which he sails the void -- in the hope that such knowledge will help direct her mind.
And so you drift here, while you wait for the psychic to play her part.
Shooting at Shadows
"I sense something."
The voice breaks your reverie, ending such a long stretch of silence that it catches you by surprise and requires a moment before you can process what you've heard.
Talia drives her boots down, ending her current rotation. Your gazes lock. Then you both spin round to face your respective controls.
"Yes... The ship you seek is in a nearby system. It's in flight."
A marker appears on your navigation display, created there in response to input made on the linked console in front of Sun Xi and the Princess. It denotes the star system in question.
"That's a worldless system," you say. "Are you certain?"
"I can feel its presence."
"Then prepare for a hyperspace jump..."
"It's close!"
The words leave the psychic's lips the moment your ship lurches from hyperspace and arrives in the Melubar System.
A chart appears on your display, showing the emptiness which orbits the system's star. There are no planets here, only asteroids. According to the data blurbs before you, a few of the larger ones are the sites of automated mining operations. Other than that, Melubar is an immense wasteland -- a stretch of void unsought and unwanted by the galaxy's teeming inhabitants. But apparently Nemo has business here...
"In this area."
A line is born on the chart. It lengthens and curves until it forms a circle in response to the movement of Sun Xi's finger on her own display.
You aim your ship towards that part of the system, setting its powerful engines to work. Wilex made sure you had the best ship of its size -- one he hoped would be capable of mastering the Silver Shadow.
The blip representing your position is almost at the edge of the circle when it vanishes. A single dot -- one lone, exact point in three-dimensional space -- replaces it.
"The ship's there! I can see it."
"That's right in front of us!" you say. "We-"
Energy blasts flash at you, crashing against your ship in a series of thuds that hammer you in quick succession -- each one making your shields ripple.
You open up with your own weapons, letting them loose on the place where the attacks came from. The shots meet nothing but empty space.
"This way!" Mistress Sun cries.
A line flicks across the display, marking the invisible ship's movement. You direct the controls, turning your vessel towards the path she's marked, firing your weapons into the void.
Defanging the Snake
"Shoot there!"
There's a dot on your targeting monitor. And on the front window... No... It's not on them. It's in your mind.
"Shoot it!" Pain racks the psychic's voice.
The dot darts across space, across the monitor's display. Nemo is a crafty pilot, using all his skill to take advantage of his ship's invisibility -- to place it where you won't, or at least shouldn’t, expect it. But you match its movements, guided by the knowledge implanted in your mind.
"I see it too, captain!" Talia says.
A stream of fire comes from the weapons she controls. You fire as well, laser beams and blaster volleys zapping in pursuit of the elusive craft.
"We got it!" The gunslinger points towards the window, but you've already seen the source of her delight.
There's a glimmer of light blue energy, zipping through space near to the soaring, diving, swerving dot -- matching its erratic movements exactly. The field is failing where the ship has been hit.
Like sharks scenting blood from wounded prey, you and Talia keep pouring out your weapons.
"Remember, not too heavy," you say. "We need it to survive."
"I know. I'm just going to cut it up a little..."
There are cyan flashes around the dot as more shots strike home. Then a larger one -- this time encompassing the entire outline of a ship. The cyan outline disappears, returns, disappears, then returns once more. This time it brings the rest of the ship with it.
The Silver Shadow appears in all its glory, yanked from the nothingness in which it lurked.
"There's only one man onboard," Sun Xi says. "His mind is shielded somehow. But he's alone."
As though enraged by its sudden exposure, the tearing away of its cloak of invisibility to reveal its now naked metal body, the Silver Shadow's engines burn a bright, furious red. The ship soars and spins, the burst of motion bringing it around to face you.
Weapons fire rakes at you, half a dozen weapons spitting death.
"Disable its guns!" you yell.
Hyperspace Chase
You weave through the void, slipping between the beams and blasts, evading hunting, predatory missiles until Talia can pick them off. All the while you're keeping the Silver Shadow in sight, making sure it doesn't get away whilst attempting to evade its murderous attacks.
The weapons under the gunslinger's control are firing with the calm precision of a surgeon's scalpel. She knows she can't afford to unleash all she has, and exterminate the vessel. So her shots are slow, ponderous -- each one waiting until Nemo's acrobatic movements and your own create the necessary opening.
But when she fires, she doesn't miss.
One by one the Silver Shadow's weapons fall silent, its flight more unorthodox and erratic as it shifts into new, desperate lines of attack and defense. At last it's left mute.
"Take the engines," you say. "And... No!"
Talia, the Princess, and Sun Xi echo you -- all three of their voices crying out in a chorus of frustration.
The Silver Shadow has vanished, a line of radiant light marking its path before coming to an abrupt end some distance ahead.
"There was no sign from its engines!" Talia says. "They weren't powering up! How could it have made a hyperspace jump?"
You have no answer to give her. Nemo's ship must have been preparing its jump as he fought, without betraying its intentions through the electronic signs which would usually have shrieked them to all and sundry.
"He could have gone... anywhere," the Princess says. He voice is soft, almost a whisper.
"Jump into hyperspace," Sun Xi says.
"We don't know where to go," you reply.
"Just jump. I'll... I'll try to guide you."
You hit the controls.
"Captain!" Talia hisses. "This is crazy! You can't change course in the middle of a hyperspace jump! We could end up ploughing through anything! It's suicide!"
But when the void distorts around you, the starry blackness through the window shimmering with the beginnings of your jump, the gunslinger gives a soft laugh.
"Good luck," she says.
One Giant Leap
A thought plunges into your brain like a dagger's blade -- a sharp, incomprehensibly agonizing pain. The brain may have no sensory nerves, no way of feeling what goes on within and converting it into pain. But it seems that the mind does.
You turn the ship's flight, angling and directing it into the new path Sun Xi has thrown into your head.
Warning lights flash. Incessant, frantic, berating sounds blare and bleep and warble all around you in a chorus of chastisement or the beginnings of your dirge.
Another sliver of knowledge slides into your mind. You adjust once more.
"Mistress Sun..."
The fear in the Princess' voice eclipses the ship's electronic screams. You look to her, tearing your eyes away from the screens and displays that will determine destruction or survival.
Illaria's hand is on Sun Xi's shoulder, her anxious, terrified face turned towards her. Blood pours from each of the psychic's nostrils, reddening her mouth and chin so that she seems like a vampire risen from her victim. But Mistress Sun's eyes, filled with an almost searing green light, are focused on her terminal's screen with an intentness that chills you.
Your mind reels as though a great weight has slammed into the side of your head and knocked the brain right out of your skull -- flinging it into the churning hyperspace void outside.
You fight off the pain, the disorientation, and correct your course once more.
Anguish surges through your entire body, tidal waves of agony and despair washing over you and into you, scouring away everything else. Every thought planted into your mind is like a mountain crashing down upon you, like an atomic weapon detonated in the center of your dying brain. You can barely understand each image, each command thrust into your consciousness. But you feel your hands move, your body responding -- directing the ship on its lunatic flight.
And through all this, one single sane inkling forces itself to the bubbling, turbulent surface of your mind: This is just a minute fraction of the pain Sun Xi is feeling, the merest mote drifting from her spirit into yours.
There's a scream. It's hers. And yours. Two shrieks blending together in unearthly harmonies.
"Captain!" Talia yells. The word just becomes part of the song of suffering, a bit part in the infernal performance.
Then the pain is gone. The feeling is so strange, so unexpected, so inconceivable that it leaves a vacuum behind -- and you wait for your body and soul to collapse in on themselves and implode.
But your senses return. Your mind rights itself. And you realize what's happened. Your connection with Sun Xi...
"We're leaving hyperspace," Talia says. Her words barely register.
You turn away from the controls, away from the gunslinger.
Sun Xi's expression is vacant, her face blank like that of a frozen statue or a preserved corpse. Her eyes are wide, and black -- their entire surfaces consumed by darkness as though her pupils have exploded and swallowed irises and whites.
Princess Illaria's hand hovers near her, suspended and shaking in the air -- as if she wishes to grab her, to shake her out of the trance, to comfort her, yet fears that the woman might shatter like a fragile piece of china the moment she touches her.
Mistress Sun turns, her entire body whirling to face the Princess. Illaria leans back, startled. The psychic's hands grab her shoulders, fingers digging into the material of her suit like talons.
"No!" Sun Xi screams. "Stay away from him! Stay away-"
The rest of the psychic's words die in a splutter. Her body trembles. Blood froths from her mouth -- droplets splattering the Princess' pale, distraught face.
She collapses, crumples like a boxer hit by the final punch. Illaria grabs at her, holds her powerless body in her arms, lowers her to the floor.
"Captain!" Talia yells. "The ship! It's there!"
You spin back to the monitors, to where the traces of hyperspace travel are disappearing from around the front window. The Silver Shadow is right there in front of you, so close it seems as if you could reach out and brush your fingers across its hull.
Talia is firing, aiming for its engines. You do the same.
"Lu Bu!" the Princess shouts from behind. "Help her!"
You hear the commotion, as the robot administers to Mistress Sun.
"We did it," Talia says. Her eyes are darting from the monitors' displays to the window. "Its engines are out."
The Silver Shadow's thrusters are glowing with the aftermath of their exertions. But they're the embers of a dying fire. Only its former momentum, unblemished and unslowed by the frictionless void around it, keep it going.
You stand up, and grab your helmet. It slots into place with a click and a hiss, locking into the rest of the suit.
"I'll move alongside it," Talia says, "and match its speed."
Lu Bu is working on Sun Xi as you move to the door, attaching medical devices with lights like solemn eyes and cables like sprawling tentacles. The Princess kneels at her side, clutching her hand.
Illaria turns, looks to you with desperate, watering eyes. Then she blinks, and when her eyes open again there are sparks of strength in them.
"Go," she says.
You nod, and step through the doorway.
"You need us?" Ragnar asks, as you reach the airlock chamber.
The Niflung is dressed in a suit like yours, though his is so huge it makes him seem like a mech. Telemachus stands beside him in his battlesuit, his face enclosed by a helmet that makes him too seem robotic.
"I'll handle it," you say.
The airlock door closes behind you. There's a whoosh as the chamber's systems kick into effect, and a subtle tremor in the soles of your feet as the boots' magnetic grips are activated.
The outer door slides open, exposing the ship to the void. But it isn't blackness which dominates the view. It's the elegant form of the Silver Shadow. Talia's brought you as close as she can without risking both ships. Now it's up to you.
You brace yourself, and leap.
Nemo
You thud against the side of the Silver Shadow, feel the force of your suit's magnetic grips taking hold -- anchoring you to its great bulk like a parasite.
Like a spider or a phantom you creep across its hull, moving towards one of the hatches you glimpse across its argentine expanse. Once you reach it, the actuators in the armor and the cutting tools built into its forearms do their work with ease.
Pressure bursts from within the ship, rushing through its new wound and shoving you away. But your magnetic anchors keep you in place, and your reflexes and anticipations have already moved you away from the brunt of the blast.
You drop inside the little room, a chamber not unlike that you leapt from. The hatch seals above you.
Another flexing of actuators and sparking of cutting devices forces open the locked portal leading to the rest of the ship.
You detach your gun from its docking clamp on the suit. When you lean through the doorway it's braced, ready to fire at whatever target might present itself. But there's nothing there. The small corridor is empty.
Both ends of the passage terminate in closed doors. It's the one on your left which lures you. The hatch you entered from is close to the front of the ship. That door should lead to its bridge...
It slides open the moment you draw near to it, as though resigned to the inevitability of your entrance.
The bridge is spacious, barren but for a few terminals and displays that do little to alleviate its sense of emptiness. Its dimensions and lofty ceiling give it a pervading sense of bleakness, when you dwell on the fact that the ship was being flown and tenanted by a single man.
"So, who are you?"
The voice comes from behind one of the distant consoles. A male voice, tinged with the smoothness of education and the roughness of the underworld in equal measure.
"Law enforcement? Pirate hunter? Maybe another pirate? A lot of people have tried to track us down over the years. I want to know who finally pulled it off before we have to start shooting."
"Just someone who needs your ship."
The pirate laughs.
"Good enough for me. When you get to heaven, tell them that No One killed you."
You train your weapon on the space above that console, ready to open fire the moment he shows himself. But when he leaps out, it's from behind the one to your right instead.
You dive aside from the blaze of his twin pistols.
"Heh. Got me."
The pirate slumps. The dark helmet encasing his head thuds against the metal floor. He rolls onto his back, and you sense the eyes behind the featureless black visage meeting yours.
"The others will hunt for you," he rasps.
"That's fine. I'll be invisible."
The pirate begins to laugh. It becomes a splutter.
"Do one thing for me," he says. "Leave my helmet on."
"Okay."
"Thanks..."
There's the sound of escaping air, the final note of life that you've heard so many times before.
You walk over to the communications terminal and press a few buttons.
"It's done, Talia. The ship's ours."
"Good work, captain," she says. There's little joy in her voice.
"How's Sun Xi?" But even as the words leave your mouth, flung into the electronic ether between you and the gunslinger, you know.
"She didn't make it."
The Princess bends down. Her lips brush Mistress Sun's forehead.
"I'm sorry," she whispers.
Watching her feels like an intrusion, a violation. So you allow your gaze to roam around the small chamber. Images of cogs and gears spin in silence on its walls, picked out in a soft and gentle light. Perhaps to TALOS' mourners they're a source of strength and comfort -- a reminder of what they and the departed held dear in life. But they fill your head with images of a meat grinder, an engine of war and sacrifice that has churned up so many good men and women -- and will continue to do so until the death of the universe.
You pull your stare away from the wall, trying to banish the disturbing vision, and look back at the Princess once more. She's slipping a cylinder, a rolled-up piece of canvas, into the side of the coffin. This done, she reaches up and grasps the casket's raised lid.
It descends noiselessly, sealing the psychic beneath a surface decorated with the imperial seal.
The two of you leave the room in silence, passing into the small antechamber beyond. A large window consumes the entirety of one wall. Through it you can see the distant burning mass of the sun.
Princess Illaria looks to the adjacent wall, that one dominated by a screen of almost the same dimensions. The sun blazes more brightly there, larger and fiercer.
After a moment she turns around and presses the red button on the wall beside the door you entered from. Then she stares out of the immense window.
The casket is launched in silence, not even your aural implant violating the quietness with a relay of fabricated sound. You watch as it flies towards the distant star that will consume it, and the woman within.
Illaria leans against you, and you reach your arm around her shoulders.
You search for words, but none seem adequate. So you simply hold her.