The Pirate Jack
June 14, 5106, Earth Central Time
I finally had her, the woman I’d spent half my career hunting down. She sat across from me at the table in the interrogation room of the ship, chair tilted back, feet propped up on the table, smirking as if I was the one who’d been caught. “Do you understand what you’re being charged with?”
She laughed. “Please, enlighten me. Or, if it’ll be easier on you, tell me what I’m not being charged with: I don’t wanna be in here forever.”
I sighed and gritted my teeth, trying to resist the urge to strangle her. “You are permitted one call, which will be monitored. I suggest you use it to get a lawyer.”
“Oh, captain, you know as well as I that a lawyer could only delay the inevitable.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “You’re too right, Jack. It’ll be the death penalty for you, though even that’s too good an end.”
“Oh, don’t be like that, darling. I’ve done wonders for your career. Whatever will you do without me?”
I frowned. Though I would never admit it to anyone, she always did seem to be throwing outlaws in my path for me to catch. I couldn’t help but think that it was because she wanted me chasing her, like she knew I could never catch her. No, but I had caught her, hadn’t I? There she was, handcuffed to the table right across from me—and smirking like she’d won.
The com-link on the wall behind me buzzed and I got up to answer it. “Yes, what is it?”
“Sir, we’ll be docking at Station 9 in just under three minutes. The admiral is waiting to come aboard when we arrive.”
“The admiral, eh?” said Jack with feigned interest. “Well, well. Maybe there’ll be a promotion in this for you!” I left the room, heading for the bridge, leaving her chuckling malevolently behind me."
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Station 9. The situation was worse than I had thought: it was one of the most densely populated stations this side of the quadrant.
There’d be a ten second interval of time with no power when control of the ship would be transferred to the station’s automated controls. That was when I’d make my escape. First though, I’d have to get out of these handcuffs without anyone seeing. I was sure they’d be watching me on the security cameras. Luckily for me, the cuffs weren’t the type that had to be picked: they could be turned off. Pretending to be examining my nails, I positioned my left palm over the cuff’s power supply. When Drea had implanted it, I hadn’t seen the point of having a chip in my hand which could emit a low level EM pulse, but I was glad that she had talked me into it. The chip was activated by thought, so when the time came, I shouldn’t have too much trouble.
But these creatures were smart. It wouldn’t take them long to find their way to the power core of the ship, and then onto the station itself.
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I reached the bridge just as we began docking procedures. There almost certainly would be a promotion in this for me; after all, the United Earth Bureau of Investigation had been after the pirate Jack for ten years. The UEBI had assigned the war-class ship Phoenix to track her down. At the time, I was only first officer under the command of Captain Strebbins, but when he was killed, command of the ship fell to me. That was before Jack became the most wanted criminal in the galaxy. Needless to say, it had been a long ten years, and I for one was glad that her reign of terror was at an end.
The ship lurched as it was caught by the station’s mag-locks. “Phoenix, this is S-9. Shut down your engines and transfer control to the automated systems.” I gave the order, looking once more at the screen showing the pirate cuffed securely to the table and looking bored.
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10.
I was out of the handcuffs in a flash. Under the table was a grate, maybe ventilation, maybe maintenance access—either way it was my best bet.
9.
It popped off with ease and I lowered myself down, glad of the ladder, and replaced the grate after me.
8.
I had to get to the power core. Now that we had docked they would have no more reason not to go after it. I started down, hoping the shaft could take me to the heart of the ship.
7.
The core would be somewhere in the very center of the ship so it couldn’t be damaged by enemy fire. Brig and interrogation rooms are in the back of the ship near the tail by waste processing.
6, 5, 4, 3.
I had already gone down 5 levels of a ten level ship: it was time to start moving forward.
2.
I wasn’t going to make it before the ship regained power, but I had never expected that I would.
1.
It wouldn’t take them long to realize that I had escaped, and then the ship’s internal sensors would pick me up in these shafts and I would get caught again before I could have a chance to stop the Dlarg. I should’ve thought my plan through a bit more. As if I had even bothered to have a plan!
0.
New plan. By sheer luck directly below me was a security station, one man on com. From there I should be able to hack into the main computer and disable internal sensors. It may help the Dlarg a bit, but it would help me more. I was the only one who knew they were here, so I couldn’t risk being caught again. I slammed down through the grate, catching the guard ironically off guard. Alarms throughout the ship started blaring just then. Looks like my escape has been discovered, I thought.
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Damn! Ten seconds and she’s gone! The admiral is not going to be pleased, I thought, fuming.
“Sir, the admiral has arrived in T-Port Room 1. And it appears as though someone is trying to hack into the main computer control systems from Stat 3.”
“Send security to Stat 3 and block her for as long as you can,” I ordered. “What is she trying to do?”
“She’s reaching for internal sensors, probably to shut them down so we can’t track her movements. Mavin’s on com, sir, wanting to know what her orders are.”
Mavin, chief of security on the Phoenix, though I’m sure she was dying to be hunting down the escaped pirate, was a strictly-by-the-books sort of character. “Send her to T-Port 1; she’s to stay with the admiral. There’s no telling what that crazy pirate will do. And someone find Commander Gard and get him up here! I’m going to Stat 3.”
Tommy Gard, my first officer, was the exact opposite of Mavin. Built like a brick wall, he looked like he would snap you like a twig if you so much as looked at him wrong, but in fact he was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy, seldom seen without a smile on his face. Both of them, however, were the best and most loyal officers I had ever had the pleasure of serving with, and they were exactly the people I wanted watching my back at a time like this.
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Fortunately, I had the element of surprise on my side. The guard was easy enough to take out, and from there, although there was some resistance from the bridge trying to block me from getting into the main comps, I was able to get the internal sensors offline. Unfortunately, I lost some time when I had to rig the computers to kill the power core if anyone without the correct password tried to mess around with the internal sensors. I could only hope that they were smart enough to realize that it had been rigged before they tried anything, or else all life support on the ship would go down, leaving all of us humans dead while the Dlarg would be free to move onto the station.
I left the security station at an all-out sprint, but I didn’t get too far before I turned the corner and almost tripped over half a dozen corpses. They wore the uniforms of security officers. I crouched down by one of the bodies to see if I could determine cause of death. It didn’t take long. I already knew what I was looking for: a small hole in the back of the neck. This was the way the Dlarg killed: a needle in the back of the neck, jabbed into the spine, and loaded with enough electricity to kill their victim and a chemical which would preserve the body until they could go back for it. There was no doubt about it now. The Dlarg weren’t here to just grab a quick bite to eat from the power core—this was an all-out attack.
Just then I heard footsteps from behind me, so I ducked into the nearest room and found myself in an armory, one of many scattered throughout the ship. Luck really was on my side that day, though, because this was the room where they had stashed my stuff—my boots that went up to my knees, the jacket that went down to my ankles (both a worn brown leather and a bit cliché for a pirate, but I had to look the part, and anyways I made it look good), all of the various odds and ends that I always carried with me, and my handy-dandy thingamajig. Its actual name was too long for me to ever bother trying to pronounce. The Drehlean name for it translates roughly to “interactive hologram projector.” Of course, that’s not even close to what it actually was. In truth, the thing had nothing to do with holograms. Basically, it’s a rod of densely-packed nano-bots, similar to the ones the Dlarg use, which can rearrange themselves into different shapes with different purposes. The thing looks harmless enough, just like a small cylindrical metal rod, but it was without a doubt my favorite weapon. It can take the shape of any weapon you can think of—being literally activated by thought—and, though it can dish out a good deal of pain, it can’t actually kill: it shuts off as soon as its sensors indicate that it’s nearing lethal capacity. The Drehleans use it to train their warriors: I use it in place of an actual weapon. It’s nice for bluffing or beating people senseless.
After changing into my usual outfit from the itchy suit I had been given as a prisoner, I listened at the door and, hearing no one outside, went back into the corridor. I started once more towards the power core, but before I could go more than two steps: “Stop right there, Jack! Put your hands where I can see them and turn around slowly.”
“Hello captain,” I said, silently cursing him for picking now of all times to show up. “I was wondering when you were going to come for me. Were you missing me already? I didn’t think I’d been gone that long.” I made my voice purr with a slow and taunting menace as I spoke.
“Turn around, Jack,” he said, enunciating every syllable. I knew he was just itching to pull the trigger. Before he could say it again, I did turn around, quickly and with a gun. Of course, it wasn’t a real gun and it couldn’t kill him, but he didn’t know that. Bluffing and beating, bluffing and beating. I smirked smugly as he said, “The only way you’re getting off this ship alive is in chains.”
“Oh, is that what you think?” I laughed. “I hate to disappoint you, dearest, but I’m not that kind of girl.” I knew I shouldn’t make him angrier than he already was and he did hate it when I said things like that—he was married with two children after all—but I couldn’t help it. I do have a mischievous side, though I’ve tried hard as hell to kill it.
“Just you wait, Jack: I’m going to be there when they strap you down to that chair, and I’ll be laughing when they haul away your cold, lifeless corpse.”
I was about to make a witty remark about the redundancy of using lifeless to describe a corpse, when my ears caught the sound of a faint, mechanical whirring coming from behind the captain. From around the corner a figure emerged—the guard from the security station. He should’ve been unconscious for a while after the blow I had given him—if he were human and if he were alive, but I wasn’t so sure of either. The captain hadn’t noticed him yet, so I re-aimed and shot the guard in the leg. He stumbled, but his face registered no pain.
The captain, seeing my attention divided, risked a quick glance behind him. “Are you okay?” The Dlarg didn’t respond.
So this is how they got on board without being noticed, I thought. My gun would be useless to try and kill it. Though technically it wasn’t alive, the sensors in the rod would translate the electrical signals as signs of life and any bullet fired at a lethal spot would, to put it very simply, dissolve. The Dlarg extended its arm and a thin metal needle erupted from the skin of its wrist. I shot it off. Without that needle, the Dlarg have to resort to the more conventional methods of killing, and, as an added bonus, they don’t get to keep the bodies. It let out a shriek, like nails on a chalkboard, calling its friends. The captain, who was closest, was the most effected, especially since he wasn’t expecting it. He fell to his knees and, dropping his gun, covered his ears against the barraged of shrill sound. I gritted my teeth in pain and changed my gun into a quarterstaff, my preferred weapon as it could do an obscene amount of damage before it became lethal. While the Dlarg was shrieking, it wasn’t difficult, except for the pain in my ears and head, to get close enough to give the metal pad at the base of its neck a good whack with the staff. The pad was destroyed, all electrical currents throughout its body ceased, and it crumpled to the floor, completely dead. I blinked my eyes a few times and rubbed my ears, trying to dispel the lingering ringing. Then I hauled the captain to his feet and propped him up against the wall of the corridor. So that he wouldn’t be suspicious of my thingamajig, I changed the quarterstaff back to a gun. Having done that, I put his arm around my shoulders and half dragged, half carried him down the corridor. The other Dlarg would have heard that call and would be coming to the aid of their comrade.
After a few steps, the captain had recovered well enough to push me away and ask, “What the hell just happened?”
“Let’s keep moving,” I suggested. “We’ll walk and talk. We can’t let the others catch up with us.”
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She continued walking, not waiting to see if I was following her. I did follow, of course; I couldn’t afford to let her out of my sight. What had even happened? She had shot at someone behind me and then—that noise! The next thing I knew, she was dragging me down the corridor. Now the dizziness was starting to fade, so I walked a bit faster to catch up with her. “Fine. We’ll walk and talk. Now, what’s going on?”
She looked at me like I had just grown a second head. “You’re actually going along with this? I thought you’d be calling security to get me back in cuffs.”
“And I thought you were going to kill me. Anyways, I’m not going to go along with anything until I know what exactly it is that you think I’m going to go along with!”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist, cap. I’ll tell you. Your crew has been infiltrated by aliens: you’re at war.”
To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether I should laugh at her, lock her in an insane asylum, or take her seriously. She had lost that smug, faintly amused look that she always wore. And that inhuman shriek…. “Is that why you killed that guard? Because you thought he was some sort of alien soldier?”
“I didn’t kill him,” she said. “I—deactivated him. He was already dead.”
“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?!” Before she could get a chance to answer, three guards stepped out in front of us. Damn! She was just about to talk, too, but I doubted she would with three more people around. So I told them, “I’m bringing her to the bridge so we can keep a closer eye on her. Go to T-Port 1 and see that the admiral gets to the bridge as well.” They gave no indication of having heard me.
Jack drew her gun. “Those aren’t your men, cap. They’re Dlarg. If you wanted proof I wasn’t lying, here it is.” In unison, they raised their arms and long needles slid out from their wrists. “Whatever you do, don’t let them get you with that needle.”
“I had no intention of that.” These things were no longer my men, that was obvious. I didn’t have a clue as to what they were, but Jack seemed to know something. But then again, she was a pirate, a murderer, a cold-blooded killer; could I really take that chance and trust her? For all I knew, this whole thing could’ve been some elaborate plan of hers. The three advanced slowly. She shot one in the knee, but it didn’t even slow down. I shot it in the heart, but they still kept coming.
“Shoot them through the neck! If you can hit the pad you’ll disable their functions!”
“What?!”
“Their hearts aren’t beating! They can’t get any more dead than they already are.”
She confused the holy hell out of me, but I did shoot them in the neck and sure enough they died, or disabled functions, or however the hell she had put it. “Why couldn’t you do that?”
“Outta bullets. Besides, I had to show you they weren’t human.”
I ground my teeth. I had almost forgotten how exasperating she could be. “Start talking, Jack. I want answers. What are they?”
“Come on!” She ran down the hall a ways, then into an open room where she started playing around with a computer interface. “It’s times like these I wish I had a sonic screwdriver.”
“A what?” I asked, perplexed.
“Doctor Who? No? Okay, moving on. Basically, your ship’s being overrun by Dlarg. They’ll drain power from the ship’s core after they’ve killed your crew and made sure the bodies are properly preserved, and then they’ll move onto the station and do the same.”
“What? What are the Dlarg? And what the hell are you doing with that interface?!”
“A long time ago, the Dlarg were an advanced race constantly at war with a species on another planet of their solar system, Raxa. They were at war for quite a while with neither one ever gaining the upper hand. Eventually, the Dlarg created a sort of super-soldier using nano-technology. Basically, the Dlarg installed in their subjects a new spine, or rather a sort of casing wrapped around the original spine. The new spine could manufacture nano-bots, microscopic robots, from the metallic elements in the subject’s bloodstream. These nano-bots, as well as fixing injuries, were programmed to start taking over the subject’s nervous system. Essentially, this made the subjects almost unkillable—they felt little pain and any injuries sustained would be healed near-instantaneously. But if the subjects were killed, the nano-bots would keep functioning. A living body is basically an organic machine; the brain sends low-level electrical signals throughout the body using the nervous system and this tells the muscles to move. That metal pad at the back of the neck takes over this function after the subject’s body has died. When the Dlarg deployed their new super-soldiers, they worked exactly as the scientists had planned. The Raxal were practically defenseless against them, and so the Dlarg converted their entire army. Now here’s where it gets interesting. Whereas the Dlarg specialized in combat technology, the Raxal’s strength was in defense, particularly force shields. They covered entire cities on Raxa, but the things they used to power them, as well as being immensely powerful, were also incredibly unstable. When the Dlarg mounted their final attack on the planet Raxa, they targeted the power plants, intending to take out the shields and leave the cities vulnerable to attack from orbit. Unfortunately, the plan backfired. The resulting explosions destroyed Raxa, and waves of radiation neutralized all life on Dlarg. But as I’ve already said, the nano-bots continue functioning after the subject body dies, and the primary function programmed into all of them is to seek out and destroy all enemies, which they then took to mean all life that did not originate on the planet Dlarg. From there the Dlarg, with no other purpose than that, started to spread out through the galaxy. Actually, now that I think about it, they’re sort of like a terrible combination of the Borg and the Replicators.” I gave her a blank stare. “Star Trek? Stargate SG-1? Really? Well anyways, they use that needle to simultaneously electrocute their victims and inject them with a chemical which preserves the body until the Dlarg have time to—uh—modify them. And that brings us here.”
I took a deep breath, trying to process it all. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
She smiled sympathetically—the first time I had ever seen her make a face like that. “It is a lot to take in at once, isn’t it?”
“No kidding.” I sighed and cleared my throat. “So you destroy the pad and they die.”
“Basically yes, in a manner of speaking.”
She continued fiddling around with the computer interface, but now she had some sort of metal rod next to it. “For the last time, what are you doing with that?”
Before she could answer my com buzzed. “Yes, what is it?”
“Sir, we’ve lost her. She’s shut off internal sensors and we can’t get them back online without her password, or else we’ll lose all life support. Also, we’ve lost contact with the security team we sent to Stat 3. Actually, we’ve lost contact with a lot of our security personnel. And there have been quite a few malfunctions: the ship seems to have put itself in lockdown, so mobility is very limited. We haven’t been able to find the source of the problem. The admiral is here, too, with Chief Mavin and Commander Gard, and he’s not at all pleased with the situation.”
“I want you to focus on getting the internal sensors back online without killing us all. That’s your top priority.” I looked pointedly at Jack. “I’ve got a good idea as to where the pirate is and I think I’m getting close, so radio silence until I signal otherwise.” I turned off my com. “Life support?! Lockdown?!”
“The life support bit was to buy me some time, but I’ve got no idea what’s going on with the lockdown. That was probably the Dlarg. You keep everyone penned in, and it’s easier to move around and kill everyone. And speaking of life support, I think I’ve finally got it!” She had pulled the metal rod apart so that now, between two half-cylinders, was what appeared to be a holographic lay-out of the ship, specifically the level we were on, with two red blips showing fairly close to our position. “You see, the internal sensors of this ship can pick up the life-signs of warm-blooded animals, such as humans, by detecting the specific range of frequencies of the energy waves given off from the bodies as heat. The Dlarg don’t show as life-signs because their bodies are dead—they don’t give off any heat! However, the internal sensors of a war-class ship such as the Phoenix are hyper-sensitive, so much so that they are able to detect—if they were so programmed—the electrical impulses sent through a Dlarg body!”
She seemed very pleased, and it was hard not to get caught up in her excitement, despite the fact that I honestly had no idea what the heck she was talking about. I took a tentative guess: “I take if you have so programmed the sensors?”
“Yep! And I used the interface here to link them into my own screen. Unfortunately, the range of this thing isn’t very far, maybe ten meters, so while it shows the whole layout of the level, we’ll only be able to see Dlarg within that ten meter radius. But they shouldn’t be at the core yet until they’ve finished with the crew, so that’s where we need to go.”
But then something occurred to me. “If what you say is true, then why have I never heard anything about the Dlarg?”
“The Dlarg don’t leave people alive,” she said. “And they’re crafty buggers, too. Up until now, they’ve been going after ships, manufacturing accidents. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of them actually mounting an assault against a station.”
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The next question out of his mouth was, of course, “If they don’t leave anyone alive, then where did you get your information?”
I chuckled. “I have my sources.” There was no way I was going to tell him about the Drehleans. “There are two Dlarg pretty close, but we shouldn’t run into them.”
He seemed a bit annoyed, which wasn’t entirely unusual for him, but willing to go along with it. “Alright, so what’s the plan?”
I grinned. “Reckless and preposterous with about a 50% chance of actually succeeding. Sound good?”
He couldn’t help but grin back at me. “Perfect. What are we waiting for?”
But then I got serious. My grin faded. “Captain, are you with me, really and truly? Don’t—answer yet. I need you to trust me. Can you do it, captain? Can you trust me to save this ship and the station?”
He didn’t answer right away, just regarded me with a look on his face of curiosity and confusion. “Why?” He seemed to be asking himself more than me. “I have no reason to trust you, and every reason not to. And yet…” He sighed and looked down. For a moment I was sure he was going to back out, but then he seemed to come to a decision because he nodded, looked up, and extended his hand with a solemn smile. I took it and an understanding seemed to pass between us. For now, we were on the same side. “So, what’s the plan?”
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I regretted asking about the plan. “You realize you’re going to get us all killed?” She just grinned. “Great.”
“In all fairness, I did tell you it was reckless and preposterous.”
“That you did.” It was too late to turn back now; I was already committed to the plan, no matter how suicidal it may have seemed.
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It wasn’t difficult to get to the core room. Most of the personnel were shut in, and those that weren’t were too busy trying to get everybody else out to really pay attention to what was actually going on with the ship. So getting to the core wasn’t the hard part: that came afterwards.
We stood outside staring at the screen. The sensors were showing a little over a dozen Dlarg in the core room. “Wonderful,” the captain said. “Now what do we do?”
“Good question. Or better yet, what are they doing in there? They always go for people first and then the power.”
“And was this back when they never went after stations? Maybe their strategy has changed because there’s bigger fish to be caught.”
I continued staring at the screen, mulling it over in my mind. He was probably right. The station would be getting suspicious by now, so the Dlarg would have to work faster than usual, which meant going straight to the core to replenish their own power supplies and then going right to the station before it could call for help. That was all well and good, but it only made what we had to do harder.
“So what now?” the captain asked.
“How many bullets do you have left?”
“Enough to take them out,” he answered. He was about to go charging in, but I put out my hand to stop him. “What?”
“The others we saw were probably the ones assigned to get the crew. I think they broke off into two teams: one to stay here to make sure the core is compatible and then prep it for consumption, and the other to see that the crew isn’t a threat to their plans. If I’m right, these ones won’t be functioning as subject converters like the others were—they won’t be trying to kill us with that needle, they’ll just shoot us.”
“So what are we going to do?”
I groaned inwardly. “I’m getting another really bad idea. You should know now, if I die, I want to be cremated.”
He looked at me in shocked concern. “What are you going to do?”
I snapped the thingamajig shut. We didn’t need the ship’s sensors anymore; we already knew where all the Dlarg were. “This ol’ thing here,” I said, waving the thingamajig around, “is made of a bunch of little nano-bots almost exactly like the ones in the Dlarg, except that these ones are a bit more advanced and much better programmed.” I held it out in my hand and it flattened into a square pad like the ones on the back of the Dlarg’s neck. With a shudder and a wince, I put it on the back of my neck and felt as the thin tendrils of the nano-bots snaked their way down to tie with my spinal column. “Oh, that’s uncomfortable.”
“What the hell are you doing?” the captain exclaimed.
“I told you, it’s a really bad idea: I’m becoming a Dlarg, or at least disguising myself as one. This thing,” I patted my new pad, “will make them register me as one of them.”
“Great. Now you’re a Dlarg. Congratulations. So tell me, what exactly is the purpose of this?”
It wasn’t hard to tell that he was confused and exasperated. “I’m going to go in there, walk around, see what they’re doing, and then stop them from doing it.”
“Just like that?” He was looking at me like I had just told him I was going to sprout wings and fly.
“It’s a work in progress. I’ll know more about how to stop them once I get inside and see what’s what.”
“You’re insane. When this is over, you need to get professional help.”
I grinned. Now that he wasn’t sitting across from me in the interrogation room, I found I rather liked the captain. “Stay here, and stay out of sight.” Then I fixed my face into the stonily apathetic visage of the Dlarg.
The door slid open and I stepped inside. On the floor to the right were the bodies of two dead engineers. The Dlarg paid no attention to me. I let out a breath of relief. Maybe this was going to work after all. Walking slowly, I kept close to the wall, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. It was a large round room rimmed with computers. In the center were four steps that led down to the base of the tall cylindrical shield that held the core of the ship. It bathed the room in an eerie flickering blue light, like looking up at the sun from deep underwater. The core of the ship. It had a mesmerizing, almost hypnotic effect. The Dlarg were bent over the computers nearest to the core, wiring in some sort of machine.
Just then one of then looked up from the work, looked at me. “You are not authorized to be here. What is your purpose?”
For a moment I froze, but I recovered quickly and said, “I have not yet been programmed with a purpose.”
The Dlarg regarded me impassively and I could just imagine it calculating the probabilities. “You are malfunctioning. This is a threat. You will be eliminated.” It raised its gun.
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I was left listening at the door. At first I didn’t hear anything and I began to think that maybe her insanity would pay off. Then I heard a voice, “You are not authorized to be here. What is your purpose?” Damn. And we had been so close. But I kept listening; Jack was a quick thinker and if anyone could talk their way out of a situation like that one, it would be her.
“I have not yet been programmed with a purpose.” I crossed my fingers. It sounded like a good excuse to me, but then again I wasn’t a Dlarg. I held my breath, waiting to hear what the response would be.
“You are malfunctioning. This is a threat. You will be eliminated.”
In frustration, I punched the pad on the wall and the door to the core room slid open, and I was presented with a room full of Dlarg working diligently at the computers, and one with a gun raised to Jack. Whoops. “Hello! I’m the captain. You’re not welcome on my ship, so leave now or be destroyed.” What the heck, it was the first thing that popped into my head. From the corner of my eye I saw one of the Dlarg reaching for a gun. I shot it through the neck before it could do the same to me. Unfortunately that only seemed to make them all angry. With a disturbing unity they stopped their work and turned to face me, raising their guns.
“This human is of value,” said Jack. If I hadn’t known better, I might’ve thought she really was a Dlarg. Her voice, like theirs, was flat and lifeless. “The humans have learned of our presence. They are planning an attack. This human is their leader. He will know of their plans.”
For a moment I was confused. What the hell was she thinking? We were the only ones who knew about the Dlarg. But she was bluffing and luckily I caught on quick. “That’s right,” I said. “You’ll all be dead soon enough. There’s no point in trying to fight: you won’t win.”
The Dlarg that seemed to be the leader cocked its head as if considering the options. “You will be converted. Your plans will be discovered. You will be defeated. We will destroy all enemies of the Dlarg.” The needle slid from its wrist.
I shot it in the neck and looked around at the others. “If you want me, you’ve got to catch me first.” Two more advanced, but I shot them down quickly. I smiled. This wasn’t going to be nearly as hard as I thought it would be.
But apparently I had thought that too soon. There were still ten Dlarg left and one of them said, “It is not necessary that the human’s body be intact. We require only his mind and his knowledge.”
When they all pulled their guns on me, I decided it was time to retreat. I shot one more of them just for the hell of it before taking off down the corridor.
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When the captain ran off, six of the Dlarg went after him, leaving only three there for me to deal with. They turned back around to decommission me, or however they wanted to put it, like that other Dlarg had been about to do before the captain had come barging in. I had to hand it to the guy, his timing was impeccable. But right then I had bigger things to think about than the cap’s timing, like those Dlarg about to kill me.
With a pained groan I yanked the thingamajig out of my neck and changed it to a gun. My unexpected shift from Dlarg to human was evidently enough of a surprise to give me a moment’s advantage, so I rushed on the nearest Dlarg and shoved the butt of my gun into its pad. By then the other two had gotten the message and didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger on me. One of the bullets got me in my left shoulder and I dove behind the core, the blue of the light turning my blood a gruesome purple. They wouldn’t risk shooting the core, but with two of them they could easily come one around each side.
Why do you get yourself in these situations, girl? You should have left while you still could and let them all DIE! I clamped my eyes shut and dug my fingers into the hole in my shoulder in a desperate attempt to shut him out. “Shut up!” I roared. Then they came, one on the left, one on the right.
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I charged through the corridors with six Dlarg right on my heels, hoping Jack would be able to take the remaining three out. Every now and then I risked a shot behind me in the hopes of hitting one in just the right spot, but there was really no point. Running like I was, it would take a miracle to hit even one of them lethally. All I could do was pray she got a chance to carry out her plan, and pray that it worked.
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I changed the gun to a quarterstaff and lunged at the one on the right, swiping low. It toppled to the ground. I landed heavily on top of it and, pain searing up my shoulder, pressed my left palm against the pad and sent an EM pulse through it. The other one took a shot at me and I threw myself around the other side of the core. I was crouched down leaning against the console at the base of the core, cradling the staff in my arms while trying to staunch the flow of blood from my shoulder. The beep of computers, the steps of the advancing Dlarg, the patter of light on the floor, the trickle of blood. I shut my eyes against the barrage of noise and took a few deep breaths to calm my heartbeat. The Dlarg was getting slowly closer and a lump was rising up in my throat, but I swallowed it down. Just two more steps…one…now! Putting all my weight behind the staff, I lunged at the last Dlarg and got it square in the chest, knocking it backwards onto the steps. It landed on its back with a satisfying thud and I brought the heel of my boot down on the hand that held its gun with all the force I could muster and was rewarded with the crunch of bones. I could feel his excitement and rage rising up in me, but I shoved him back. The needle slid from the wrist of the Dlarg’s other arm, but before it could move it I let myself fall, coming down on his arm with my right knee. With my right hand still gripping the staff, I brought my left around the back of the Dlarg’s neck to the pad and sent an EM pulse through it. A shudder ran through its spine before it finally went limp and died.
I sighed and dragged myself back over to the console at the core’s base. It was finally time to put our plan into motion.
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I barreled down the corridors, Dlarg shooting at my back. None of them hit, thank God, but it was only a matter of time. I turned a corner and stopped dead in my tracks. There were three more ahead of me, blocking my way. I turned back around but the others had already closed in. I was trapped. It looked like it was a dead end, literally. S***! There was nothing I could do. I had run out of bullets two corners ago.
I closed my eyes and waited for—what? A bullet? A needle? All I felt was a slight shudder ripple through the floor before I was plunged into darkness. I heard the Dlarg around me fall almost simultaneously and I laughed giddily, the laugh of one who has narrowly escaped death. The plan had worked!
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I closed my eyes and sat down on the steps next to the dead man who used to be a Dlarg. Every part of my body ached. It had been a long day. For a while everything was dark, but eventually everything came back on: lights, internal sensors, everything. I heard the steps of someone entering the core room behind me, but I just laid my head against the rail. Now that everything was over, the adrenaline had stopped pumping and I was too tired to bother looking to see who it was.
“It looks like your plan worked.” It was the captain. I only grunted in response. “Hooking a tiny little EM pulse generator like yours up to a power core like that is risky business. I thought for sure you were going to blow a hole in my ship.”
Pushing myself to my feet, I regarded the bleeding hole in my hand where I had pushed in the wire to connect it with the chip. I felt dizzy and wavered on my feet. “It was a bit of a long shot, wasn’t it?” I turned and climbed shakily up the steps. “I led the Dlarg here. When you learned how I had gotten out of the cuffs, you brought me here to send an EM pulse through the ship to knock them out. I tried to run so you shot me.”
The captain frowned at me in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“When they ask what happened, that’s what you’ll say.”
“Absolutely not!" The only thing I’m going to tell anyone is the truth. You saved all of our asses: I’m not going to turn around and blame this whole thing on you!”
“Damn it, captain!” I clenched my fists and tried to resist the urge to punch him. “What kind of an idiot are you? Do you honestly think that anyone in their right mind would believe that?”
“I’ll make them believe!”
“Don’t be naïve! Have you completely forgotten who I am? I’m Jack! I’m a pirate. In the 28 years that I’ve been alive, I’ve killed more people than you would care to count. I’ve decimated entire cities. People have become so disgusted with me that in the past five years there hasn’t in the entire galaxy been a single baby born named Jack. If you go feeding your superiors a story like that, the only thing they’ll hear is that you were actually so stupid that you trusted me alone with the core of a war-class ship. And what do you think will happen to your career then? What do you think will happen to your family?”
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I wished I could think of something, anything, but she was right. No one would ever believe that story, and she had taken out all internal sensors so there was no evidence to back it up. “This isn’t right.”
I guess she sensed my resignation, because her next words had lost their edge. “No, but it’s the only thing that can be done.”
I looked her full in the eyes then, searched them for any indication as to who she really was. But if they had any secrets they weren’t giving them up. I shook my head. “I don’t get it. Who are you, really? You can’t be the pirate everyone thinks you are: you just saved thousands of people.”
She smiled. “Maybe one of these days I’ll tell you, but not today.”
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Two hours later I was back in the interrogation room, feet propped up on the table, cocky smirk plastered on my face. Except for the captain, everything had gone according to plan—despite the fact that the only plan I’d ever had was just to stop the Dlarg. But it wasn’t so bad; in fact I believed I had actually gained an ally. And soon enough I’d be back on my ship and flying away from there as fast as I could.
Just before a couple dozen security officers had come pounding into the core room, the captain had told me where my ship was, and it wasn’t too far from where I was being held. And as an added bonus, having to disguise myself as a Dlarg had made me realize that I had a foolproof way of hiding my thingamajig on—or rather in—my person. Yep, things were beginning to look up for me.
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The admiral, Chief Mavin, Commander Gard, and I stood watching Jack through the large one-way window. She looked exactly the same as she had before, and if I hadn’t known better I might almost have thought that nothing had happened. The admiral was congratulating me on my outstanding work in recapturing the pirate, but I wasn’t really listening. 53 people had died, and the only reason we hadn’t all died was because of the murderous pirate sitting on the other side of the glass. In just under twenty-four hours she was to be executed. I felt sick.
“I want to know everything she knows about these Dlarg,” the admiral was saying. “They’re a threat to the entire galaxy. And I want to know what her connection to them is, too, and why they followed her.”
“I’ve been questioning her for the past hour,” Mavin said, “but she hasn’t said anything yet. Honestly, I doubt if she’ll ever talk.”
The admiral glowered. “You’re not understanding me. I don’t care what it takes: I want answers.”
The Commander was glaring stonily at Jack. I knew her reputation better than anyone, so I could understand if not agree with his feelings, but even so, I had never seen Tommy looking like that. “Turn off all the recording devices in the room. I’ll get you the answers you want.”
The admiral nodded his assent and Mavin turned them all off. There was nothing I could do.
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I had my eyes closed leaning back in the chair when the door opened and someone walked in. Without opening my eyes I said, “Back again, Mavin? I would’ve thought you’d have given up by now.”
But it wasn’t Mavin at all who answered, “Not quite.” I took my feet off the table, set the chair back on all four legs, leaned forward, and folded my hands in front of me on the table. Then I opened my eyes. “Hello, Margaret,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Yeah, twelve years is a long time. How’s the family?” It killed me to say it, but I had to play my part well.
He was barely containing his anger. “Why?”
I forced my face into a cruel smirk. “Oh, is that all you have to say to me? ‘Why?’ Ha! You’re wasting your breath.” I wanted to die. Any minute, I was sure I was going to lose it. All I was doing was twisting the knife deeper into my own heart.
But I didn’t die, though I think that day a part of me did. Twelve hours later I escaped, that time for real.