Chapter 10: Long Arm of the Law

Eriksen was awoken by movement, opening his eyes to see Nazka sitting up in the bed beside him, the sullied sheets and clawed mattress serving as evidence of their activities the night prior. She was alert, her round ears twitching and tracking, her eyes scanning the room.

“What is it,” he asked sleepily, “everything okay?”

“I hear an alarm,” she replied, rolling out of bed and beginning to pull on her clothes. Eriksen strained his ears, and then he heard it too, faint and coming from outside the door. He hopped to his feet, foregoing clothing, and hit the touchscreen to open the cabin door. He walked into the corridor, stifling a yawn, and tapped at a nearby control panel. It showed several missed hails and now an intercept warning. That jolted him awake, and he hurried back into the bedroom, hopping into a leg of his pants as Nazka watched him.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know exactly,” he replied, “but someone has found us.”

“Fuck,” she snarled, zipping up her leather jacket. “I took too long, someone from the inner system must have come looking for you. I need to move quickly.”

Suddenly the confrontation that he had spent so much time avoiding had been dropped into his lap, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. Was he in danger? Should he try to escape, or try to make contact with the incoming ship? What did Nazka want? What did he want?

“What ... do we do about this?” Eriksen asked hesitantly.

“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” Nazka replied, staring him down with her yellow eyes. “You’re going to open that damned door, and then I’m going to jump us both back to Borealis, where I’m going to scrap this junker and live off the spoils for the rest of my days. You can join me, or you can take the Black Claw. I don’t have time to bring her close enough that she can ride the wake.”

“Or how about you take your shuttle back to the Black Claw and leave me to finish my cargo run?”

She growled like an angry lion and punched the padded wall. It was alarming, but Eriksen stood defiantly and didn’t flinch.

“Don’t do this now,” she said, her tone low and threatening. “I know exactly what’s coming, standard procedure. You missed your delivery and didn’t call in, so they did a long-range scan and detected your freighter. There’s a Warden on an intercept course, full of Marines or maybe PDF weekend warriors if we’re in the sticks. When you don’t respond to their hails they’ll board us, and they’re not going to let me off with a slap on the wrist.” She leaned closer, baring her teeth an inch from his nose. “We have minutes before they’re swarming this ship. I don’t have time to fuck around anymore, give me the code that unlocks the cockpit door or I’ll start breaking your fingers.”

“No,” Eriksen stated simply, crossing his arms over his chest. She bellowed and brought her massive fist down on the bed, the frame collapsing, the sound of buckling plastic echoing in the room. Seeing that he was unimpressed, she turned, flaying the soft padding on the wall with swipes of her curved claws and sending clumps of foam flying through the air. She was throwing a tantrum like a little girl. The display was intended to intimidate him, but he no longer saw her as a dangerous alien monster. There was method to her madness, and he knew that she would never lay a finger on him, not now. She reduced the nightstand to debris with a powerful kick, the bedside lamp falling to the floor and breaking, then spun back to face him.

“Give me the code, or I swear I’ll-!”

“You won’t hurt me, Nazka,” he reached up and gripped her furry forearm tentatively. She bristled as if she was about to swipe his head from his shoulders, then relaxed, her fury waning as she looked down at her tiny companion. She ran her claws through her hair, rolling her head back and muttering some curse in a language that he didn’t recognize.

“Of all the fucking stupid decisions, the first was choosing this freighter as my mark, the second was letting you live long enough to get on my good side. Alright you little bastard, alright. I can’t bring myself to dice someone who gives such good head.”

“Ever the romantic,” he complained, “now let’s get you off this ship.”

“You’re not going to turn me in?”

“Let’s just say that I can’t bring myself to get someone I have chemistry with arrested for piracy.”

“Well shit, you’re just full of surprises, aren’t you? Now what the hell are we-”

There was a clunk that reverberated through the deck. Eriksen felt it in his feet, the vibration of something impacting the hull. The pair exchanged alarmed glances, Nazka making for the door as Eriksen followed, struggling to pull a shirt over his head.

“That was fast,” she muttered, “they must have seen the Black Claw. She’s stealthed, so she won’t show up on long-range scans, but they’d see her if they got close enough. Now they know that I’m here, no choice but to fight my way out.”

Her hand shot to the massive revolver on her hip, but Eriksen gripped her wrist, the alien peering down at him quizzically.

“You can’t kill them, they didn’t do anything wrong.”

“They’re going to try to take me alive. If I resist, which I will, they’ll switch to lethal methods. An XMR railgun slug is going to do a lot more damage to me than a nine-millimeter.”

“You can’t kill them Nazka, they’re just doing their jobs. Please.”

“What the hell do you want me to do then, ask them politely if I can return to my fucking pirate ship?”

“It’s not as if they can fire a railgun in here anyway. This is a civilian ship, it would pop a hole in the hull the size of a basketball, and we’d lose pressure.”

He stopped dead in the hallway, and Nazka turned to look at him, waving her furry tail impatiently.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Hang on, hang on, a plan is forming.”

“What kind of plan? Hurry it up, we don’t have time to fuck around.”

“What if they couldn’t use their guns?” Eriksen mused, scratching his chin pensively. “What if you had a hostage who happened to be outside of his pressure suit and in the line of fire?”

Nazka grinned, releasing her hold on her gun and letting it slide back into its leather holster.

“Now you’re thinking like a pirate.” She seemed to hesitate for a moment, her claws drumming on the revolver’s metal cylinder. “So ... how long do you want to be my hostage?”

“You’re asking if I’m coming with you, but you know that I can’t do that Nazka. I have obligations to my shipping company, to my clients, there are people depending on me to get my job done. I have a life here, I don’t get to just walk away from that.”

“I guess that’s one of the things that I like about you, Eriksen, you stick to your guns no matter what. Fine, tell me exactly what you have in mind...”

The Planetary Defense Force squad marched along the hull, the magnetic boots of their armored pressure suits securing them to the metal. The UNN-black paint was chipped here and there by years of wear and tear to reveal the silver metal and ceramics beneath. Their gear was all surplus, but it was better than anything that civilians could get a hold of, military-grade armor and earlier generation modular rifles. Probably wouldn’t count for much in a Bug invasion, and while that was the PDF’s primary concern and the reason for the creation of the militia organization, they mostly found themselves doing police work and more mundane security operations.

The squad leader raised his fist in the air as they neared the freighter’s hangar bay as a signal to halt, his four squad members stopping behind him, clutching their XMRs nervously as they waited for further instructions. His voice fizzed through on their suit radios, crackling to life as they watched the starfield turn around them, one of them glancing back apprehensively at their shuttle which was clamped to the vessel a short distance behind them.

“Form up, weapons at the ready. We don’t know how many of them are in there.”

This freighter had failed to make its delivery on time, so flight control back on the colony had done a long-range scan of the system and they had detected it cruising near where it must have jumped in. The squad had been dispatched via Warden to check it out, and once they were in short-band range, it had failed to respond to their hails. It was only after they had closed into visual range that they had seen the damage to the aft section, and shortly after, the cruel parody of a Warden that had matched velocity with it. That ship had also failed to respond to hails, and it had made no attempt to evade them, which indicated that the crew were likely responsible for the damage and were presently aboard the drifting freighter. It was a pirate ship, no doubt about it. The Warden’s serial number had been erased and replaced with what looked like a crudely painted, black bear paw. The repairs to the hull were so spotty that it looked more like a scrapheap explosion than anything resembling its original streamlined silhouette.

“Hold your fire,” the squad leader said, “don’t shoot anything until I give the order. I’m looking at you, Murray, finger off that trigger. One more misfire from you and you’re back on kitchen duty.”

“Collective punishment’s against UN conventions, Pete,” another man added. “Murray makes soup about as well as he shoots.”

There was a chorus of stifled laughter over the radio, and the squad leader waved for them to keep quiet.

“Damn it, Harry. You’re supposed to use ranks when we’re on duty, maintain radio silence unless absolutely necessary.”

“Sorry, Sarge.”

“Alright, we’re going in.”

He waved them forward, and they moved towards the curved ramp that led from the hull to the hangar bay, rifles raised as they navigated the odd geometry. Pete went first, the barrel of his rifle passing through the force field that held the atmosphere inside the bay, followed by his armored suit as he set foot on level ground. His stomach lurched as he entered the freighter’s AG field, good, that meant that there was still power to the ship despite the damage to the aft section. His suit HUD blinked a green light to indicate that the atmosphere was breathable and that the pressure was Earth norm, so he flipped up his faceplate as the rest of the squad formed up around him.

“Ain’t that against regulations?” Murray asked.

“I can’t see shit in these helmets,” Pete complained, “no reason to keep the visor down if the ship’s atmosphere is green. These tin can pieces of shit won’t stop a slug anyway.”

“Would be nice if we could get the good stuff,” Harry confirmed, sweeping his rifle around the hangar.

“Yeah and maybe Murray will be promoted to Admiral,” one of the other PDF added.

“Alright wise up people, get your heads in the game. We got potential hostiles in the AO.”

Nobody had been there to receive them in the bay, but there was a shuttle docked inside that looked so old that it might have been drawn by horses. Somebody was here who wasn’t supposed to be. Might have been scavengers thinking they were salvaging a derelict, or it might be a whole crew of heavily armed pirates.

“Murray, Harry, check out that shuttle. I want the rest of you on the aft and fore doors to make sure that nobody surprises us.”

The squad fanned out, two of them taking up positions by the two doors that led to the hangar, and the rest moved towards the shuttle. Just as Harry reached the landing ramp, he cried out in alarm, lurching backwards and shouldering his gun.

“Sarge! Pete!”

“What have you got Harry?”

Before he could answer, a massive, red figure descended the ramp. It was huge, taller than a man and twice as broad with limbs as thick as tree trunks, its heavy boots crashing to the deck. The squad scurried back, weapons pointed at the enormous thing as it peered at them through a narrow visor.

“Is that... ?”

It was a Borealan, a fucking alien, near eight feet tall and clad in an apple-red pressure suit. It was heavily armored and around its waist was fastened a leather belt from which was hanging the largest handgun that Pete had ever seen in his life. His hands trembled as he kept his rifle trained on it. What the hell was a Borealan doing all the way out here? He had never even seen one before, at least not in the flesh, and yet here one was. It stood before them, towering so high that its round ears would have skimmed the shuttle’s wings, standing as still as a statue as if waiting for them to make the first move.

Pete tried to compose himself, he was the squad leader damn it, he needed to take charge of the situation before somebody startled it and it tore through them like a bull in a china shop.

“T-This system is under UNN jurisdiction,” he announced, watching the alien turn its armored head to look at him. “You got no business bein’ here. Under section fifty-six of the UN charter, as a colonial security officer of the PDF, I got the right to subdue you by ... by any means I deem necessary and bring you in for questioning. What are you doing on this ship?” It didn’t answer, it just watched him through that narrow visor, its red armor reflecting the harsh lighting in the hangar. “Speak up,” he shouted, “you a pirate? Piracy is illegal.”

Its voice came through on speakers mounted in its helmet, it was female, its husky voice given a robotic timbre by the electronics.

“Looks like I’ve been caught in the act, I don’t suppose you’ll let me be on my way?”

“Are you alone?” Pete asked, then he gestured frantically to his squad. “Stay on the fuckin’ doors, I don’t want to be surprised by any of her friends.” He turned his attention back to the giant alien, swallowing hard as the creature scrutinized him. Goddamn, it was huge, it looked as if it could snap a man in two like a twig.

“Hey, alien! You got an illegal ship out there with no serial number, and if you’re a pirate, then I gotta take you back to the inner system. We can do this easy, or we can do it hard, there’s five of us and one of you. You reach for that gun on your hip there, or take any actions that might be construed as aggressive, and we’re authorized to light you up like a fuckin’ Christmas tree.”

As they watched, her long tail emerged from behind her, clad in a flexible tube that was painted the same red as her armor. To their surprise she deposited a human on the deck in front of her, she had been holding him with her tail as if it were a limb and he had been obscured from view behind the far larger alien. He was dressed in a sleeveless shirt and a pair of jeans, and he looked like he had run through a damned bramble thicket. There were cuts and scrapes visible all over him.

“Oh, I’m not sure that firing guns in here is a good idea,” she said ominously. “One railgun round goes through the hull and mister freighter pilot over here has his lungs explode.”

“Hostage!” Pete called out, “she has a hostage! Hold your fire!”

“She’s crazy!” the man cried out, struggling in the hold of her serpentine tail. “She’ll kill us all, just let her go!”

“Don’t worry sir,” Pete shouted, “the PDF is here. We’re gonna get you out of this situation.”

“Pete, you ain’t no hostage negotiator,” he heard Harry mutter over the radio. Pete shot him a murderous look as if to say I got this and turned his attention back to the Borealan.

“Now this doesn’t need to get messy,” he said, “you didn’t hurt nobody yet as far as I know. This can go a couple of ways. If you let the pilot go and come peaceful, I promise that no harm will come to you and that you’ll be treated fairly. We got juries and courts and the like, if you didn’t do any real harm, they’ll probably just send you back home. All the time you spend waitin’ is time I’ll spend thinkin’ up a safer way to kill you.”

“I have another proposition,” the alien said, squeezing the human in her tail. “You let me board my shuttle and head back to my ship, and I let this tasty little morsel go. I’ll be out of your hair, and nobody even has to know that I was ever here.”

“I got a job to do, Miss, that ain’t an option for me.”

“Just do what she says,” the struggling pilot demanded, a touch of hysteria in his voice. “She’s a Borealan warrior, you can’t fight her!”

“Let us handle this sir, we’re trained professionals,” Pete said as he slammed his visor shut. Now he could communicate with his squad without her hearing them, try to come up with a plan to get this guy loose.

“Harry,” he said over the radio, “you got any idea what to do about this?”

“I got a couple, Sarge. If we let her board the shuttle, she’s gonna be in her Warden and gone before we make it back to ours. It’s a five-minute walk across the hull. We could try taking a pot shot at her head, she’s got like two feet on that pilot, shouldn’t be much danger of collateral damage. Problem is we don’t know what kind of armor she has on. If it doesn’t penetrate or glances off and makes a hole in the ship, we’re fucked.”