Pirate Plots

“Never, under any circumstances, open a door with this symbol on it. Do any of you know what it means? Yes, Yan, thank you. This means that this door is an airlock. It goes to the outside. You shouldn’t be able to open any of these doors, but if you do, you could die. If you ever find a door that’s locked when you think it shouldn’t be, find an adult, and we will tell you if it’s safe to open. Do you all understand? Good.”

-Eman BarCarran, explaining door safety to her nieces and nephews

As it turned out, the captain was going to be extremely ballsy. The captain, whose name was Carver Yossar, or at least that was what everyone called him, could be heard discussing exactly the problem of how to secure the starchart that would lead them to Yan. Paying the man who had it didn't seem to enter into the equation at all.

Several of the plans they floated involved being at the station long ahead of the man who was going to give them the map. They only ever referred to him by a code name, but pirate names were so stupid (in Sylva's eyes) that it hardly mattered what they called him. If they wanted to refer to him as 'Starman', who was she to do anything other than roll her eyes and move on with her life.

They couldn't actually be sure that Starman hadn't been lying when he said he was with the Sundown. He probably was. He was probably even lying about having a starchart to where Yan was being kept, but every lead had to be chased down, no matter how far fetched it may be.

Iri and Sylva took to haunting the microphones, monitoring the rooms live as people walked in and out of them. To be fair, it wasn't as though they had anything better to do while they were aboard the Bellringer. As paying passengers, they had neither jobs nor family obligations to take them out of their little room. And from the way that the crew looked at them, there was no reason that they should want to associate with them anyway. The best of looks could be qualified as 'hungry', the worst as 'hated'. There had never been this cold of a welcome on any other ship, and their fellow passengers seemed to also be on the receiving end of it. Usually, spacers of all stripes were eager to see new faces. The crew of the Bellringer had clearly retreated into themselves during their personal tragedy, and had little use for outsiders.

And so, the plan.

Iri and Sylva waited with baited breath as the Bellringer jumped in to just outside the system where Vanquished station was. They had their bags packed, and they were ready to abandon ship if it became necessary, but they wouldn't even have the chance to. The Bellringer was early for the meeting, but she was not going to jump all the way in. She was going to stay right outside of reach. Instead, two of her shuttles, which had the ‘fortune’ of being discarded mining shuttles, were going to the station, on the pretense of being part of the mining operation on one of the outer planets.

"They had to replace all their destroyed shuttles quickly," Iri muttered as this plan was discussed over the radio. "Mining ships are easy to come by, comparatively. Can get them faster than you can get more specialized things."

"They've had months to replace them," Sylva said.

"If it works, it works."

So the Bellringer might as well use their one odd advantage, so they made a plan that relied on some level of deception.

"Why do pirates even need to mine things?"

"Precious metals are precious metals. If they can be sold, they're worth acquiring. Good way to participate in the wider economy of the Empire," Iri explained. Economics had never been Sylva's strong suit. But there was always a use for rare metals that could be used in computers and such, and there were a limited number of official mining operations sanctioned by the Empire. Pirates could step up to fill the gap.

She asked a question that she didn't particularly want to know the answer to. "And who works the mines?"

Iri looked over at her and didn't say anything. The silence was enough to answer the question to Sylva's satisfaction. They paid attention again to the microphones.

Sylva and Iri listened with mixed emotions as the bridge crew of the Bellringer said a prayer over the group leaving on the shuttles. It was touching, the way that they bid each other farewell, but… They were pirates, going to kidnap someone, but… Iri and Sylva really needed the information that person had, and these pirates were the best way of getting it. Even if they were actually working at cross purposes, and they pirates didn't know they were working at all. Every step of this was a dangerous game for everyone involved.

As soon as the shuttles left, there would be no contact from them until they returned. The Bellringer was hiding out on the edge of the system, disguising its presence and saving its jump for an emergency getaway.

The waiting was intolerable. From the ship's vantage point, they couldn't even see Vanquished Station. It took almost a full day for the shuttles to reach the station, and no one knew how long it would take for them to do their dirty deed. That was operating under the assumption that Starman was even aboard the station. If he wasn't, they would have a whole new set of problems.

So, by the end of the second day, which was the first conceivable time at which the shuttles could return, everyone was very on edge. Sylva and Iri took turns sleeping and the information feeds from the ship. They stayed holed up in their little room, never leaving except for food, and even then, doing it as quickly and quietly as possible. They didn't want to invite the hostile stares of the crew of the Bellringer under the best of circumstances, and this was by far not the best of circumstances for any of them.

It was late on the fourth day when one of the shuttles came screaming back into line of sight with the Bellringer. Radios hissed to life, cameras trained their beady eyes on the action. The old mining shuttle, going faster than it was ever designed for, was pursued by shuttles that, from the way they registered on the Bellringer's sensors, were from Vanquished Station. Were there no ships docked at the station who had cared to send out any of their own forces?

As all this information came flooding in, Sylva turned to the bed behind her and shook Iri awake.

"It's happening!" she hissed through her teeth.

Iri, to her credit, jolted up immediately. All traces of sleep left her face, except for the line of dried drool that crossed her cheek. Gross. Iri leaned toward Sylva and the computer. Sylva handed her one of the headphones so that they could listen in on the bridge and radio chatter.

"Vanquished shuttles, cease your pursuit or we will have no choice but to destroy you," the radio operator of the Bellringer threatened.

"They aren't going to listen! Just shoot them out!" That was the voice of the one remaining Bellringer shuttle pilot. That shuttle must have had some significant head start, several hours worth, because even at its current over-the-top acceleration, it was being gained on by its pursuers. They had gotten closer even in the amount of time that they had been visible to the mothership.

On the bridge, a discussion was playing out.

"How much can we risk making enemies of Vanquished?"

"We already have," the captain said. "It's whoever's paying them that I'm worried about."

"Starman isn't theirs?"

"Don't think so. They'd have a copy of his data. He'd be expendable."

"You don't think they have one?"

"They wouldn't be so desperate to stop us if they did." The captain focused back on the issue at hand. "Can we take those shuttles?"

There was a pause as everyone on the bridge used their own metrics to decide if the Bellringer had the strength. Sylva bit her lip.

"If a full ship can't take out two shuttles…" Iri muttered under her breath. It was a bad sign for them getting Sylva where she needed to be: in position to find Yan.

"Send out Fist and Bright. They should be able to take it," someone finally said. The captain gave the order.

There apparently wasn't time to pray over those two. In less than five minutes, two dogfighters left the holds of the Bellringer and accelerated away towards the rapidly approaching shuttles.

"I thought they only had mining ships?" Sylva questioned.

"Look how damaged those are," Iri said. She zoomed in on a freeze frame of the video feed of the dogfighters leaving their bay. The entire outside of the closer little ship was covered with patchy weld lines. The other had a mismatch in color between its engine section and all the rest of it, as though it had been hacked together from two disparate vessels. "Those must be their two best ones."

Sylva's breath whistled out between her teeth. Every time she was reminded of the damage that Yan and her coworker had done, she was astonished anew. Granted, the destruction of the dogfighters and shuttles could have happened before Yan got to them, but Sylva doubted it. What else could rip a ship apart from stem to stern like that?

They watched and listened, waiting for the two forces to meet each other. All the dogfighters had to do was distract the pursuing shuttles enough to let their own shuttle get away. All the Vanquished's shuttles had to do was destroy the Bellringer's old mining ship.

But really, Sylva was aware that all anyone aboard any of those factions wanted to do was survive. The Bellringer's dogfighters didn't necessarily have to kill anyone, but as Sylva watched, they came close enough to fire off their first salvo of missiles. There were two ways to avoid tracking capable missiles like that: outmaneuver them until they ran out of fuel, or shoot them down.

The Vanquished's shuttles took the second option, firing defensively. They weren't going to be dissuaded from their own hot pursuit of the little mining ship.

"We've got a problem," Iri said.

Sylva turned to look at her, taking her eyes off the screen for a second. "What?"

"Look at the mining ship."

"What about it?"

"It's accelerating towards us."

"So? It has to get away from them." Sylva pointed at the Vanquished's shuttles, who fired off their own rounds directly at the dogfighters.

"What was the last physics class you took?" Iri asked.

"Uh." Sylva thought about it for a second. "Oh. Shit. You're right."

The little mining ship needed to dock with the Bellringer. But it was not slowing down to reach zero relative velocity. In fact, it was accelerating as much as it could, trying to put any distance between it and its chasers and their hot guns.

"You think people on the bridge know that?" Sylva asked. Iri gave her a look.

"Of course they know. They're spacers." As if that meant they had a perfect knowledge of physics, or something. That didn't necessarily mean anything.

"Why aren't they doing anything about it? Shouldn't they start accelerating, to match velocities?"

"Do we have any information on the navigator?" Iri asked. It felt like a non-sequitur.

"The bridge is mic'd, but I don't know if we've heard from her in particular," Sylva answered.

"I think we're going to blow our jump," Iri said.

"What?"

"They're going to spend it, to give us a velocity that matches the shuttle."

"And?"

"And so we won't actually be able to jump out of the system. If there's another ship that wants to contest this, and not just Vanquished shuttles, we're totally screwed." Iri clenched her fists. "Fucking Bellringer. They're doing it again."

"What?"

"The reason they got fucked over so completely before was they jumped in to an engagement without any way to get back out. You'd think that they would have learned their lesson. There's a reason why ships always classically accelerate into fights. Escape strategy."

"So you think we're about to get killed, sitting here?"

"If there's a ship at Vanquished, yes!" Iri was taught like a wire.

"Is there anything I can do?" Sylva asked timidly.

Iri looked at her. "You think you can do something?"

"I don't know! Yan did."

"Ah, fuck." Iri rubbed her eyes. "If you think you can work at this type of distance, and you can do something big. Just break the shuttles, or something. Fuck. But if you do, they'll know something's up, right? The Bellringer? They'll get suspicious."

"Tell me," Sylva said. "Worth it?" She wasn't speaking in complete sentences. She just needed to know if she should try. She probably wouldn't be able to do anything, but wasn't it worth a shot, if she could? Wouldn't it save them a lot of trouble? If they burned their jump, as Iri was predicting they would, and another ship came… They were as good as dead. And Sylva wanted to stay alive.

"Try," Iri said, finally. "But if you can't do it, then maybe that's for the best."

Sylva looked at the screen. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, I guess. I'll try not to kill anybody."

"Yeah." Iri didn't sound confident there, either.

This was probably like the repeat of a bad memory for Iri. Sylva felt pretty bad about bringing it all back up to the front, but she didn't have time to dwell on how much this was going to hurt Iri's feelings, or whatever. If Sylva could somehow stop them all from getting killed by doing something, then she had to. She didn't have a choice except to try, even if she failed.

She stared at the screen and tried to call on the connection to the power deep within herself. She knew, in theory, exactly what she had to do. Just like tearing apart a piece of paper. That was all she had to do. Except instead of a piece of paper resting on the desk in front of her, it was a tiny ship, hundreds of kilometers away, moving unimaginably quickly, made of metal, and she needed to rip the engine off of it. The Bellringer's cameras were doing an admirable job of keeping the action in tight focus, no matter how quickly it was moving, but that didn't give Sylva any sense of scale or context.

"Do we have a, uh, distance display?"

Iri clicked around, fishing through her feeds of the Bellringer's system, and pulled up the chart that Sylva was looking for. It showed the position of the Bellringer, and everything else as though they were in orbit around it. There was the planet they were nearest to, massive, and on the edge of the display. And closer, but moving visibly across the screen, were the two shuttles from Vanquished station, edging closer to the old mining ship owned by the Bellringer. Closer still to the Bellringer, and limited in their acceleration to what a human body could take, were the hacked together dogfighters that had just been sent out. Even as Sylva watched, missiles departed from the dogfighters and accelerated at beyond human speeds towards the other ships.

Oh, she had a different idea. It would be far easier, and look less suspicious, for her to grab the missiles and make sure they hit their targets, rather than just having two ships spontaneously self-destruct. That was what she would do.

The missiles speeding away were already moving too quickly for Sylva to grab hold of them. She found, to her surprise, that she could stretch the power out that far, and she could sense the various entities moving about, but the fast little missiles skittered out of her grasp like the frogs she used to try to catch as a child in the pond in the park near her house. She grunted in frustration, and Iri looked at her, concerned.

"You ok?"

"The missiles are too fast to grab."

"Well, if you can't get them, then maybe they'll hit their targets on their own."

Sylva half laughed, and gritted her teeth and focused. Something about the urgency of the situation brought the power closer to the surface of her brain. Even as her attention kept dancing on the screen between all the different players out in space, when the dogfighters released their next salvo, Sylva reached out for it, knowing what feeling to expect.

There was a moment of success as she held them, but it was short lived as she realized that she was truly holding them; their engines were firing, but they were holding positions relative to the dogfighters, just a little ways out. Alarmed, Sylva released them, and they roared off as though their tethers had suddenly been cut. Sylva blinked and looked around. Using the power had caught her in a weird fugue state.

"Did you see that?" she asked Iri.

"See what?"

"I had the missiles."

"Sure doesn't look like it to me," Iri said, watching as the shuttles defenses shot down the new attack.

On one hand, it was good that no one had noticed the momentary blip in the missiles' trajectories. It would have been cause for panic if they had been firing their engines and not going anywhere (traditional physics dictates that sort of thing shouldn't happen), but Sylva must have only held them for a fraction of a second. Little enough time that alarms didn't go off, and no one looking closely saw it. Still, it was bad that Sylva hadn't succeeded completely.

"If you can't do it, you can't do it," Iri said. "What happened?"

"I grabbed them, but then they were just stopped for a second."

"You need to make sure they hit with force, if that's the route you're going. They need to be faster than what their engines can do on their own."

"I know," Sylva said, a little more forcefully than she had meant to. Iri's calm acceptance of her inability to help was getting on her nerves. Of course Yan had been able to do this easily. Sylva wasn't Yan, but that didn't mean she was stupid, and it certainly didn't mean she wasn't going to succeed.

Granted, Sylva was worried that if she screwed this up more, someone would notice that the power was being used to tamper with this fight. As she watched and waited for the next round, Sylva chewed on her lip nervously.

She had to be prepared. When the missiles came out again, she grabbed them with the power once more. Time seemed like it was stretching out as her focus narrowed to that single point, almost the same way it had when she was stitching Keep back up. She didn't want to think about that. She couldn't think about that. The missiles bucked wildly in her feeling of the power, as they pressed with their engines against the constraint she held them under. Feeling that even her odd experiencing of time wasn't going to save other people from noticing forever, Sylva released them and they zoomed away on their own, though they were no more successful than any of the others had been.

She exhaled heavily. "How many rounds do those dogfighters carry?" Sylva asked.

"Probably no more than ten. They don't have a lot of space." It was true that the dogfighters, designed to create as minimal of a forward profile as possible, didn't have a lot of room to hold cargo. The mass expense of hauling around missiles had to be huge. Plus the monetary expense expense of building the things. Anything with an engine in it that could go that fast couldn't possibly come cheap.

Sylva did the math on how many more tries she had. She couldn't assume that the dogfighters were carrying their maximum capacity, either. This next try had to count. She had to do it. This time, she would take the missile, and jam it forward as fast as she could.

One of the dogfighters launched one. Sylva grabbed it with the power, feeling the weight of it, and she shoved it forward, fighting with its engine to get it to move at the speed that she wanted it to, and not the speed that physics should dictate. Unfortunately for Sylva, her estimation of what speed should feel like when she forced the power through and into the missile was less than its natural speed, and though it cruised along, it fizzled out in what felt like a far shorter distance than Sylva had hoped. She had to drop it so that it wouldn't look odd that a missile was accelerating without an engine to push it along.

She was sweating. It was hard, using the power, especially when she wasn't good at it in the first place.

"You okay?" Iri asked.

Sylva ground her teeth and stared at the screen, waiting for the feeling and visual confirmation that the next projectile had been launched. The dogfighters were moving further and further away, still accelerating at the limits of human endurance for as long as their pilots and engines could hold out for. Finally, one of them released another shot. Sylva would do better this time. She had to.

Accelerate. That was what she had to get it to do. Not jump to a set velocity with the massive jerk that the power tended to provide. Accelerate. Come on, come on, come on! She grasped the slippery thing in her head.

This time, as she pushed the missile forward, it did indeed accelerate. It covered a distance in one mark of time, then doubled it in the next, and again, and again. But Sylva, with her limited perspective and only human abilities, didn't have the pinpoint ability to track and predict the movements of the encroaching shuttles. The missile missed its mark, and at its current speed, it wasn't able to turn around and go back.

"Did you see that?" A voice, coming over the radio, broke into Sylva's awareness.

"There's been something buggy in the programming. Think we got ripped off on this batch," that was a voice from the bridge, over their microphone connection.

Sylva shook her head and her awareness fully returned to her body. Iri nudged her.

"Maybe it's time to stop. They're noticing something's up," Iri said.

Sylva's head was pounding with the effort she had exerted.

"But I didn't help," she said.

"It's okay." Iri put her arm around Sylva's shoulder, leaning on her in the cramped little room. "We'll just have to trust that the Bellringer knows what she's doing."

"Do we trust that?"

"No, but we don't have a choice."

On the bridge, the radio chatter took on a different tenor.

"Dogs, how much more acceleration can you handle?"

"We're at our limit," came back the reply from one of the dogfighters. She sounded beyond strained, from the way her breath caught and hissed over the connection.

"Turn around and come back," the captain ordered. "We're going to jump to pick up the shuttle."

A chorus of dissent rang out from both the dogfighters and the bridge crew. The captain silenced them quickly. He was in charge, after all.

"Enough. We don't have much of a choice and I'm not going to lose anybody else." There was the question of putting the entire ship at risk for one shuttle with information on it, but that was clearly the tradeoff the captain was going to make.

With visible reluctance, the dogfighters abandoned their distant quarry and accelerated back the way they had come, towards the Bellringer. They hadn’t been out long, and so it didn’t take long for them to return. Once they were safely back inside, everyone got ready to jump.

"Do you have the track?" the captain asked. The navigator gave her assent. "Then we're ready. Three, two, one, jump."

Sylva gripped the side of her chair, even though she knew that jumping didn't feel like anything. The positions of the stars outside hardly appeared changed, but the locations and distances of the little mining shuttle and its pursuers on the tracker were totally different. Now, they had almost matched velocities and courses with their own shuttle. They opened the bay doors, and after another tense minute it flew inside.

The battered guns of the Bellringer itself, which were usually only used in very close quarters defense, trained and fired on the approaching shuttles. They had lost their quarry, and there was no way two shuttles could take down an entire starship by themselves, so they peeled off and accelerated back into the star system where Vanquished Station lurked.

"Now what?" Sylva asked.

"Now we wait, and pray that there isn't some ship docked at Vanquished that wants to fight."

"What about the data? And Starman?"

"I'm sure we're about to find out his real name."

It took the usual amount of time for the bay with the shuttle in it to repressurize, and when it did, they listened to the bridge chatter as the crew hauled Starman (unconscious) to the medical wing and debriefed the crew of the shuttle about what exactly had happened on Vanquished station. Apparently, as soon as they had grabbed him, the station went on high alert. There hadn't been any ships there at the time that the shuttles had left, but one could have jumped in in the interim. Once they got far enough away, the little mining shuttle didn't have the kind of sensors that would allow them to see if a ship had come in. The real question on everyone's lips was "what happened to the other shuttle." Apparently, it was still at Vanquished, as its crew had been arrested just as the crew of this shuttle snuck off.

There was an audible sigh of relief on the bridge as everyone realized their crewmates were not dead, only detained. There was a chance of getting them back, then, someday.

Once that information came out, the rest of the debriefing devolved into chaos, and Sylva could just barely make out that this ship had gotten away because its mining disguise had been better. They had taken different routes in to Vanquished, and while aboard the station, crews from both ships had made trips to the one that was impounded, while they very carefully stashed the unconscious Starman and his data in food stores that were meant to be shipped off to one of the mining outposts. Truly, it was a wild and hard to follow story, with many twists and turns. Sylva almost wished she had been there, but she realized that was a dumb thought.

It wasn't like in life a person always got to be where the action and adventure was. And even if a person did get to be in those right places at the right times, it would be a dangerous and probably unpleasant.

The crew of the Bellringer, while they were waiting for their fate to be sealed by some other ship jumping in, turned their attention to waking up Starman and getting his information. They had his data stick where the starcharts were kept, but it was obviously all locked down and encrypted. So Starman needed to be woken to get the password.

They were keeping him out with a drug cocktail, and some of the drugs wore off faster than others, or had counteragents. Sylva and Iri didn't have a video feed of the medical area, but the Imperial agent who had bugged the ship had kindly left them a microphone there. That agent had been thorough, if not completely careful. But it was enough for Sylva and Iri to listen in.

Starman came to sluggishly, long after he had been brought in. Sylva chewed on her fingertips.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," someone, maybe the doctor aboard the Bellringer, said.

"What?" Starman asked. There was the sound of plastic hitting metal. Was he tied down?

"Don't try to get up. You're okay."

"Like fuck I'm okay," Starman said. "My head feels like it's got worms in it."

"I'm sure it'll pass. I'm here to ask you a few questions."

"Where am I?"

"You don't recognize this place?"

"Oh, mother fucker."

"Yes, you're on the Bellringer. Don't worry, we're not going to hurt you. We'll even pay you what we said we'd pay you. We just wanted some insurance that you were giving us good information."

"You think taking me hostage or whatever is going to make me give you what you want?"

"I would hope so."

"Fuck you!" There were the sounds of a slight scuffle.

"Please calm down," the doctor, or whoever, said, slightly out of breath. "If you make this easy, we'll give you a bunk of your own and drop you off at the next station."

"And if I make it hard?"

"I really don't think you want to do that. It wouldn't be pleasant for either of us."

"Yeah." There was a long silence.

"So will you cooperate?"

"You said you're going to pay me?" Starman’s tone was different. The thing about starships was that there typically wasn’t any way to escape from them. If he thought he could still stand to make a profit, then he might as well try for that.

"If your word is worth it."

"Give me the payment first, and then we'll talk."

"One minute." The Bellringer crewmember's voice left the scene, and there was a long minute of silence. He must have been consulting someone out in the hallway. Sylva didn't know why they didn't just give the man his payment. After all, it wasn't like he could get away with it. If his word didn't turn out to be good, they could just steal it back from him. Footsteps, and then the man returned.

"We'll give you half up front, and half when you leave the ship."

"And you'll untie me?"

"This was merely a formality to make sure you weren't going to cause us too much trouble as you woke up."

"Fine. I want the product in a box right here with me, and then I'll talk."

"That… can be arranged. It might take some time to get it together."

So they all waited for the half of the payment to be brought and checked over and handed to Starman. This was stupid. This was all so stupid. Sylva didn't know why she was frustrated, exactly, but Iri clearly picked up on her feeling.

"You okay?"

"I feel like we're so close to getting somewhere, and we just have to watch these Bellringer people, I don't know. They're going nowhere."

"It'll be okay," Iri said. "On the plus side, no ship has jumped in to attack us yet, so maybe the captain's gamble paid off."

"Sure. Yet."

"Don't be such a downer. All we have to do is sit back and wait. We're in the lap of luxury. The Bellringer's going to bring us right where we need to be."

"They're really gonna go off somewhere and keep their paying passengers aboard?"

"Have you noticed how little they communicate with us? If we weren't hooked in, do you think we'd have even known we were at Vanquished?"

Sylva tugged at her braided hair. "I guess you're right. Still seems crazy that they'd put passengers in danger like that."

"No one knows if Yan's being held somewhere dangerous," Iri said reasonably. "It could be perfectly safe."

"And I could be my own grandmother."

"Anyway, if you're on a pirate ship, I don't think you have a reasonable degree of safety regarding your transportation."

"Still, don't they have places to be?"

"We move at the whims of the stars, Sylva."

"Don't get poetic on me."

"I thought you loved language art."

"There's a time and place for everything," Sylva grumbled. "This ain't it."

With the payment, or half of it anyway, tucked into Starman's hands, he gave over the information that the Bellringer's crew was so desperate for.

"All I have is a starchart. I swiped it from their shuttle's memory bank, on the offchance that it'd come in handy."

"Their shuttle woudn't have an interstellar navigation chart on it," the Bellringer crewman said.

"I don't mean that. I mean a navigational chart for in system. Of their home system. You should be able to use that, right?"

There was a long sigh. "And how do you know this isn't an unconnected starchart?"

"It was the only one in the shuttle's main menu," Starman said. "If it's something else, you can have your payment back. But I'm betting a lot that it's the right one."

"So are we, and we're paying you," the Bellringer crewman said. "For your sake, I hope you're right."

"What do you want her so much for, anyway? This a political thing?"

There was a tense moment of silence. Sylva could only imagine the faces the two were making at eachother. Their body language. The way the crewman hovered over Starman, threatening and cold. It was only her imagination, but she could picture it as clearly as if they had a video feed.

"So we'll have to reconstruct this," the crewman finally said. "Should get started on that as soon as possible."

Iri pulled the computer over to herself, which tugged the headphone out of Sylva's ear. She let it go. The conversation wasn't going to give them any more insight. She left the chair and flopped onto the bed.

"Whatcha doing?" Sylva asked.

"We need that data," Iri said.

"Aren't we just going to hitch a ride with the Bellringer?"

Iri gave her a look that communicated exactly how stupid she was being. "You think I want to go to wherever this is without a chance of backup?"

Sylva rolled her eyes. "And I'd like to summon the wrath of God to rescue Yan immediately, but some things just aren't realistic."

"Regardless, if I can, I want to get that data transmitted out."

"How are you going to do that?"

"Up for a little more sneaking?"

"Oh, fuck no," Sylva said.

And yet, a little while later, while the whole ship was still tensely waiting for the timer on the stardrive to tick over and to let them jump, Iri and Sylva snuck out of the spinning ring and into the depths of the ship. Actually, they were headed closer to the surface of the rock, but the mazelike nature of it, and the lack of orienting gravity made Sylva feel like they were descending into the deepest depths. All around, noises echoed strangely as the ship's systems shifted and rumbled in their own natural way. The Bellringer was a quiet ship already, with fewer people than it should have, and down here, were few people ever had reason to go, it was positively tomblike. And every inhuman creak and groan of the air vents or door latches made a shiver run up and down Sylva's spine.

The lights were on low, lighting up the corridors only once every few meters as Iri and Sylva passed underneath them. Though the engine of the ship needen't concern itself with saving energy, it probably helped the life cycle of the bulbs, which were tedious to replace, to keep the lights on as minimally as possible.

They were about to steal something from the Bellringer. Iri had access to all the item logs, from being inside the ship's system, and she had found exactly where all of the maintenance equipment was. Sometimes, the ship needed to send out tiny drones, to inspect damage to the outside of the ship, where it was inconvenient for a person to suit up. Stealing and deploying one of those was their goal.

What they really wanted to do was send a radio message to the imperial agent who they suspected was on Vanquished Station. But even if they had access to a powerful enough transmitter, they were out of line of sight of the station. So they were stealing a drone. They needed one that wouldn't be missed too much, so they were taking one that was currently inside the ship, rather than deployed on the outside in one of the many charging docks. This would also give Iri a chance to fiddle with it, making sure that it carried its message securely, and would be able to find its way to Vanquished Station.

The room housing the unused drones was cold and dark, and the few of them that there were sat in racks, draped like so many lifeless husks. Sylva floated over to them and inspected them. They were simple enough- a tiny thruster, a camera, little claws for doing simple tasks around the outside of the ship, and the body where the control unit was housed. Some of the drones were in different states of disassembly, with pieces missing, or with their guts open and wires spilling out like spaghetti. It was one of the partially disassembled ones that Iri selected, drifting over to one without claws and checking to see if it would turn on. It did, though the only indication of that was a red light flaring to life, and a status monitor on the wall adding another unit to the list of drones being monitored.

"Why'd you pick a broken one?" Sylva asked.

"Don't need the claws. Less mass without them," Iri said. She turned the drone back off, and pried open its back, to access its core functions. There was a port there, and Iri let her computer float in the air beside the drone while she plugged it in.

"How do you even have a program for this stuff?" Sylva asked, looking out the window on the door to the hallway to make sure no one was coming.

"I knew I was going to be on ships, so I came prepared with everything I might need. All of these," she jerked her head around at the disused drones, "are standard make. If they weren't I'd have a problem. Anyway, the Empire keeps documentation and backdoor on all of this type of thing."

"Hm." It wasn't exactly surprising, though it did give Sylva some pause to consider its various implications. "And how come you still had access to all this? Are there no security protocols at all?"

Iri laughed dryly. "Sylva, for some reason that I don't fully understand, I've been trusted with this data package. When I tried to call in some favors, it was handed to me without qualification. Questioning that act of goodwill will probably lead me right to the top, and I don't really want to think that anyone that high up has their eyes on me."

Sylva didn't say anything, and after a moment, Iri continued, her tone somewhat wistful. "I honestly thought I was going to be hauled before a tribunal. I've seen people sent to mining colonies for less than what I did. I certainly didn't expect too be given help in my vigilante quest."

"Maybe they're thinking you'll die out here," Sylva said. Her mind had unexpectedly gone down that dark road, and she couldn't stop herself from thinking it. After all, they were just waiting here to see if another ship would come in and wipe them out. They might all die without ever having accomplished anything.

"Yeah," Iri said. "Maybe."

They floated there in silence for a little while longer, Sylva keeping lookout and Iri manipulating the drone. The starchart was loaded into its internal memory, encrypted with Imperial software, and it was given new programming: to fly away from the safe radius around the Bellringer and to travel far, far away, towards Vanquished station. It would take a while for it to get anywhere near broadcast range. With its tiny little thrusters, it was no match for the shuttles that could cross the distance in less than a day. But it would get the message out, if there was someone there to receive it.

"Now what?" Sylva asked. She was getting a little tired of just waiting around for Iri to do her thing. Iri got to be cool and competent, and Sylva got to, what, fail at using the power over and over? She chewed on her lip as Iri put the finishing touches on the drone.

"Now, I'm going to need your help."

"Great." That meant using the power, probably.

"There's a launch tube down the hallway," Iri said. "I need to cut power to it, so that the ship doesn't get an airlock alert. Then once that's done, I need you to open the doors."

Opening doors again. Well, as long as she had time, and no one came by, it should be fine. Sylva nodded, and the two of them left. Sylva carried Iri's computer, and Iri carried the drone, which was large but not very heavy, apparently. She mostly pushed it, floating, down the hallway.

There was the tube, just as Iri had said. It was a circular hatch cut into the metal wall of the ship, with a status screen to the right side of it. There was no visible handle, unsurprisingly, since the last thing one would want on a ship was unintended access to the outdoors. The status screen indicated that the tube was pressurized and closed.

"Once I shut power, we'll probably only have a minute or so before someone comes to investigate," Iri warned. "So we have to act fast."

"I thought the whole point of doing this was that no one would investigate if you did shut the power down."

"Must you question me at every turn? A power failure in a hallway will be a lot less urgent than an airlock opening. Trust me."

Sylva trusted Iri about as far as she could throw her. To be fair, in their gravity free environment, Sylva could probably throw Iri quite far. Still, she made a face. "You made it sound like you were just going to kill power to the tube."

Iri laughed. "You ready?"

"As I'll ever be."

"Great. When the lights go out, open the hatch. I'll help you get the drone in, then you can close it. And then you'll have to open the outside hatch, and close that again."

"You're putting a whole lot of faith in my ability to open doors I can't even see."

"You can do it." Iri left the drone floating in the air between them, and pushed off down the hallway to find the power panel that controlled this area. Sylva waited unhappily, then abruptly became even less happy when the power cut out, plunging the hallway into absolute darkness, save for the tiny glowing light on the drone. She pulled out her phone and used it as a flashlight, even if that was wasting the precious time they had. The phone floated in the air, illuminating the door.

Sylva put her hand flat on it and reached out with the power. The lack of visual stimulus from the whole hallway being dark didn't stop her mind from wandering. She kept thinking about her earlier failures with the missiles, and it poisoned the well of her mind. The power squirmed out of her grasp, as though she was trying to hold an angry cat.

"Come on," Sylva said through gritted teeth. "Just once, behave."

The locking mechanism on the door was complicated, and it was heavy. For anyone else, that might not have made a difference. She remembered, a long time ago, when she and Yan had been really young at the Academy, Yan told her that she hadn't learned how to unlock doors like everyone else had when they were first using the power. Yan hated the idea of opening a door, and just having there be vacuum behind it. She was too scared to ever force a lock. Funny, now, that Sylva was breaking that key spacer rule intentionally.

Thinking about Yan brought her focus back onto the task at hand, the power slipped quietly into her hand, and the door swung open without further protest. Iri came back from down the hallway.

"Oh, great!" she said. Together, she and Sylva wrestled the drone into the tube. It was a tight fit. Since the tube was intended for use with these drones, there was a good chance that they were doing something very wrong, but they didn't have the time or inclination to try different orientations. It fit without getting stuck, even if it did scrape the sides a little bit. Iri pushed the door shut, and then it was a matter of Sylva re-locking the door. It was easier in this direction, because she already had a feel for the lock.

Now came the real challenge.

"How much time do you think I have?" Sylva asked.

"Don't worry about that," Iri said pragmatically. "If someone starts coming, we'll hide back in the other room. Just do your best."

It was difficult to tell what was door and lock and what was drone and wall, inside the airlock. The first door had been easier, because with it in contact with her skin, Sylva had a good reference of distance for the mechanical innards. They could only be so far away from her, and she could trace out a line between herself and the deadbolts. This time, with the other end of the tube more than a meter away, there was no such shortcut.

Sylva closed her eyes, though it did very little since they were already in the dark, and breathed. The sensations she felt in the power pulled at her. It was like a hundred different people were whispering in her ear, and she had to pick out and identify the voice of a person she had heard once before, on the radio. She knew what air felt like, and this metal that the door was made of, and the static-y feeling of vacuum, but putting those pieces together into 'deadbolt' and the movement in a particular direction to open the door was difficult.

One by one, she forced away the sensations that she was getting, narrowing them down by various criteria (distance, how much they moved with a gentle nudge, the particular taste of different types of materials) until she was sure that all she had was the deadbolts and the door. She forced them open, and the sensation changed as all the air escaped.

"Got it," Sylva said. She shouldn't have said anything, because that broke her concentration. She lost hold of the door in her mind. Great. She would have to find it again in order to close it.

"Push the drone out," Iri said. "Give it a push so it'll clear the ship."

"What am I? A workhorse?"

"That's exactly what you are," Iri said, though there was tension in her voice. Sylva wondered just how long it had taken her to open the door.

She refocused. The anxiety in Iri's voice set Sylva on edge, but it was easy to identify the drone. It was made up of a wider variety of materials than the surrounding ship's walls, so she shoved it out easily enough. Then it was just time to close the door.

"Okay, it's out. I'll close the door now," Sylva mumbled. She stretched out with the power.

"Sylva, hurry up," Iri said.

All Sylva could here were the same creaks and sighs of the ship's air systems. She didn't know if Iri thought someone was coming, or–

Distantly, a door opened.

"Thirty seconds. Give me thirty seconds," Sylva hissed urgently. Her train of thought was scattered. She reached out for the door. She reached out. She scrambled with the power.

"Forget it, Sylva, we've gotta go."

She kept reaching, and she felt the metal of the door as though it was right underneath her fingertips. She pulled it shut. A little too hard, maybe. The thud could be heard through the metal of the walls from where they were floating. One more second. She slid the deadbolts back into place. Iri grabbed her shoulder and pulled her, breaking her concentration.

Sylva barely remembered to grab her phone and the laptop as she was hauled unceremoniously down the hallway. They ducked inside the drone room, and Iri kicked off the wall towards the back of the room. There was a little closet there, full of drawers containing spare parts. Iri gestured for her to come inside, and they squeezed in there together, chest to chest, Iri holding the door shut.

They were just in time. They heard the characteristic sound of hands and feet hitting the walls in the hallway, reverberating through the still air, and a few minutes later, underneath the crack in the door, they saw the light come back on. Sylva leaned on Iri's chest, hearing the thudding of her heart and the breathing that seemed so loud even in this tiny space. After a long time, whoever had come to deal with the outage left, and they both let out a sigh of relief.

"Let's never, ever, ever do that again," Sylva said, and meant it.