Moses scowled as he stared at his shield station’s monitor, and I watched enemy vessels flow from the portal and gather into tight battle positions. I counted about sixty ships, and my heart raced as they began to drift toward us.

This was a shitload of pirates. Even the RTF Valor would have a bit of a problem battling this many enemy ships. I thought we were as good as dead, but I would take as many of these bastards with us as I could.

“Our senior jump mage is probably working his cybernetic ass off to seal that portal,” the shield knight said. “Let’s pray he’ll get it done before any more waves come through.”

The artilleryman scratched his neck. “It gets worse, sir. The pirates have taken down our detection systems.”

Moses peered down at his prot-belt and pressed a few keys on his holographic interface. “You’re right. Every one of them is offline. It is probably a system-wide virus by the looks of it.”

How had pirates obtained a virus smart enough to infect an RTF ship? The Stalwart wasn’t the best vessel, but it would still require a remarkably intelligent bit of malware to bring down her systems.

“How the fuck did they deliver it?” the artilleryman asked.

“The first wave of enemy ships must have flown close enough to the Stalwart to transfer the bug remotely.”

I cursed under my breath. These pirates were obviously wielding some serious tech.

We’d fought off the first wave, but the second wave was almost twice as large. And now they’d delivered a virus to cripple the crew’s ability to hunt down any of the hostiles who might board us.

“Those arrow-ships have some incredible modifications,” Moses grunted. “I’ve never seen a vessel that size move so fast.”

“What do we do now, sir?” The artilleryman was standing beside a gunnery station, and he seemed eager to jump into it and start firing at the enemy ships as soon as they got within range.

I shared his desire, but I held back to await Moses’ orders.

“Someone needs to clear the detection systems, otherwise we’ll be in the dark when the enemies board. Tell the commander we’ll send someone as soon as we can.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Time to get serious, crew,” the captain’s voice crackled from the overhead. “Take as many out before they get their claws onto the hull. Then we start killing every last one of these bastards.”

“Gunners! Back to your stations,” Moses ordered. “You heard the captain. The more we blow up now, the less we’ll have to deal with when they breach the hull. Shielders, protect the Stalwart’s vitals. As soon as the hull is breached, you need to maintain the airlocks. If we all pitch in, we got this.”

The portal on the monitors behind the pirate ships shimmered and vibrated. I heard Moses yip with glee when the purple fissure sealed shut.

“Matthias has done it!” the knight said. “Only sixty ships filled with these space scum to take out! Let’s do it, boys!”

I turned back to the terminal and resumed the defense. The shield knight’s confidence calmed my mind as I magnified a section of my monitor to get a better look at a line of enemy ships.

The sixty new vessels were almost identical to the other pirate ships in construction, except their engines were much larger. These vessels cut through space much faster than the first group, so I guessed that the first group was meant to soften us up for the actual raiding party.

We battled the enemy ships, taking out as many as we could. Blue beams arched out from the Stalwart’s hull--rune lances. The magically enhanced weapons were used to scramble the systems on the enemy ships, and it must have been a last-ditch effort by the crew before the inevitable.

After our rune lance attack, the Stalwart’s gunners performed better than I could have imagined. By the time the remaining pirate vessels closed the distance, there were less than twenty left. Each enemy arrow-ship launched a smaller boarding vessel and the Stalwart rocked when these pirate-bearing craft fastened themselves to her hull.

Sirens screamed, red lights flashed, and smoke burst from pipes all along the overhead. The pirate ships must have hit something vital when they clamped onto the Stalwart. Her atmospheric systems seemed to be struggling. The air thickened, and I wondered how long it would be until we couldn’t breathe anymore.

“Shit!” Moses punched the screen on his shield station.

I eyed the bulkheads and imagined a horde of cutlass-wielding men bursting through a breach. The pirate vessels were large enough to carry crews of at least twenty. If twenty ships had survived the initial firefight, then as many as four hundred pirates would be boarding our ship. There was no way the Stalwart’s crew of eighty could take on so many enemies.

I heard something slam into the bulkhead behind me, and then a dozen more banging noises sounded in a small radius.

“They’ve breached the hull,” Moses said to us all after he’d stepped out from his terminal. “Whatever tech they’re packing aboard their ships has disabled parts of our shields.”

The hull screeched as a drill pierced the crystalanium hull. In just a few seconds, a metal rod poked through the bulkhead and then unfolded like an umbrella. I drew my sword to attempt to cut down the foreign objects.

“No!” Moses yelled as he grabbed my arm. “We can’t cut the grappling hooks off. Do that, and you’ll depressurize the ship.”

“What do we do then?” I asked, still holding my sword. I doubted the blade would cut through metal, but I would have tried had the shield knight not stopped me.

“We wait,” Moses said.

We didn’t have to wait long.

A screeching sound filled the artillery room. I thought it was an alarm, but then massive sparks started flying from between the grappling hooks. The door leading to the passageway behind us clanged shut.

“We’re sealed in now,” Moses said. He touched his helmet, and the visor slid over his face. I heard some feedback chirp from his earpiece. “Captain’s given orders. No one is to leave until the last pirate is dead. Do not let them escape back to their ships. Generators are already at their maximum, and we don’t have enough juice to plug twenty holes.”

I’d already fought a battle of life and death today, and I forced the exhaustion back. My pulse throbbed in my ears and adrenaline surged through my veins as the artillerymen stepped out from the terminals while the shielders remained to seal the breaches if any pirate ship unclamped itself from our hull.

“Get ready to fight!” Moses commanded us all.

The artillerymen pulled out their rifles, and I gripped my longsword in both hands. I activated my shield from my belt. The air around me crackled for a moment as the prot-field generated. When I enabled the longsword’s Forcewave rune, the blade started to glow a bright blue. My first real battle was about to unfold, and my stomach churned with excitement mixed with a touch of fear.

I turned to the hole carved into the bulkhead. The lines met each other, and the section of wall fell inward with a crash.

“Wait!” Moses said as he raised his hand in the air. The smoke settled, and four pirates ran into the room. “Artillerymen, fire!” The knight clenched his fist, and the soldiers’ rifles roared to life.

Bullets punched holes in the first wave of enemies. The second wave came immediately after. Unlike their fallen comrades, these pirates had activated their forcefields, and the bullets were unable to penetrate them.

“Draw your swords!” Moses screamed as he took his short spear in hand. With a flick of his wrist, the handle extended two meters. “Time to spill some blood, boys.”

Moses leaped into the group of pirates, and his spear whistled as its long sword-like blade carved two men in half. They screamed as the top parts of their bodies slid from their hips in a cascade of blood and entrails.

“Shields!” the big knight roared as more enemies surged into the gunnery.

At Moses’ signal, the artillerymen removed their bucklers from the magnetons on their backs and pushed against the wave of pirates. I came in behind them, searching for an opening in the mass of bodies, blades, and shields. In such close quarters, I couldn’t use the longsword’s rune effect, but I shoved my sword into a gap between the shields. A shrill cry and the feeling of driving my sword into flesh told me I’d struck an enemy.

“Shields up!” Moses screamed.

The artillerymen raised their shields instantly, and I activated the speed sequence from my belt before I leaped over a pair of soldiers. A two-handed swing cleaved the bearded head off one pirate with a spray of blood, and a low thrust took another in the stomach, splitting armor and spilling his guts across the floor.

I turned to another group of pirates as they aimed their pistols at a pair of artillerymen. The soldiers’ low-grade prot-fields could absorb a few gunshots, but at close range the men’s heads exploded with red blood and grey brain matter.

I hadn’t had the chance to get to know any of them, but right now they were my brothers in arms. Each one who died caused my heart to ache and my rage to increase the frenzy of my sword swings as I carved pirates to pieces.

“Get back!” Moses reached over his shoulder and grabbed his tower shield. The artillerymen jumped aside as the knight charged through the pirate ranks. Bullets pinged off the knight’s shield as the huge sheet of metal crushed enemies like a bulldozer.

I retreated behind Moses, and the remaining artillerymen regrouped alongside me. The shield knight tapped his belt, and a shimmering domed wall appeared in front of him. The forcefield expanded three meters wide, reaching from the floor to the overhead and back around the pirates. Now they couldn’t escape back into their ship, nor could they pierce the field with their gunfire.

“Everyone alright?” Moses said as he scanned the crew. I did the same and realized only five of the original nine artillerymen were still alive. “Time for round 2. I’ll keep the rear barrier up so they can’t retreat. Releasing the shield in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1!”

The forcefield vanished, and the pirates surged toward us. Cutlasses clanged against bayonets, and my shield absorbed gunfire as I charged into the fray.

A pirate with his teeth sharpened to points grinned at me as he brought his cleaver down. I caught his forearm with the guard of my blade before he could complete the attack, and then I drove my fist into his stomach. The blow caused the man to bend over, and an artilleryman slammed his bayonet into the back of the pirate’s skull. The end of the blade sprouted between the enemy’s eyes, and crimson sprayed over my face.

I had barely wiped the blood away when a flash of metal spun toward me. I ducked, and a sickle at the end of a chain whipped where my head had been a half moment ago. A lanky pirate retrieved the chained sickle with a sharp tug, and he grinned with a golden-toothed mouth.

“You’re a fresh one,” the pirate said as he threw his right hand forward.

“And you’re an ugly one,” I said as the sickle sliced through the air, and I angled my longsword in front of me. The chains wrapped around the sword’s blade like a coiled serpent, and I knew it was only a second before the guy pulled on the other end. I released my left hand from my weapon’s hilt, and my fingers tapped a sequence on my belt like a pianist playing a sonata.

The gravity runes on my equipment burst with light as the arcane energy made them almost weightless. The rune on my right hand prevented the pirate from disarming me, so when he tugged on the chain, I jumped toward him. His eyes widened as I twisted my body so I was horizontal. I delivered a powerful kick to the pirate’s head, and his jaw shattered beneath the steel of my boot.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

I landed on my feet beside the dead pirate, and I returned my equipment to its regular weight with the press of a button. The gravity runes had lost some of their power from my attack, so my equipment was a little heavier than I was accustomed to.

I glanced at Moses to see if he’d noticed my maneuver, but he was too busy disemboweling a pirate with his retractable spear.

My attention was drawn to another pirate as he bellowed and charged me. I twisted my body, and his cutlass glanced off my shoulder armor. I put all my strength into a backhanded swing, but the man danced away, and my longsword’s point merely nicked his stomach. I spun back around and lowered my shoulders to angle my blade at his lower body. He couldn’t dodge my attack so my sword took his legs off below the knees. The pirate toppled to the bloody metal floor with a horrified scream, but then I drove the point of my sword into his skull, sending him to the underworld along with his dead comrades.

The bulkhead behind the shield stations screeched an ear-splitting sound that rattled my bones. Sparks flew as a dozen harpoons breached the gunnery’s hull. The harpoons deployed unfolding umbrella devices, and the gunnery trembled as the enemy ship secured itself to the Stalwart. Lasers pierced the bulkhead and carved a hole two meters in circumference.

“We need to protect the shielders!” Moses roared from a meter away from me. The knight folded his spear and attached it to his belt. His armor blazed with golden light as a barrier extended from his outstretched hands to cover the shield stations. “I’ll keep a forcefield around them. Nick, it’s your time to shine.”

My chest swelled with pride as I held my longsword. I was standing five meters in front of the rapidly opening breach, sufficient distance to perform a forcewave.

“Stay back,” I said to the five artillerymen behind me. “I’ll deal with them.”

A chunk of the bulkhead slammed onto the floor in a cloud of dust and smoke. I swung my longsword in an arc and tilted the blade as a wave of pirates flushed out from the hole. The air rippled as my prot-shield swept toward them. The barrier slammed into the unsuspecting pirates, and necks snapped and legs twisted.

Gunfire roared from the breach, and I jumped behind a counter in response. The artillerymen crouched next to me and peered over the metal benchtop to fire their rifles through the hole in the wall. A few screams confirmed the accuracy of their shots.

Enemy bullets peppered the forcefield Moses had surrounded the shield stations with. I glanced at the knight, seeing him give me a proud nod. His plate armor was almost too bright to look at now, but his forcefield seemed to be holding. He wouldn’t be able to join us in this fight, so it was up to the artillerymen and me to defend the shielders.

A battle cry sounded from the hole as the second wave of pirates crossed into the gunnery and leapt over their fallen comrades. The artillerymen opened fire, and the first line of pirates cried out as their fields failed. I was thankful these enemies didn’t have prot-fields capable of absorbing more than a few bullets.

It was time for some close combat.

“Attack!” I bellowed at the artillerymen as I thrust my longsword into the air like I was waving a standard. Then I charged into the thick of the enemy with the band of screaming artillerymen.

I hit the front lines of the pirates and cleaved through two of the men with one swing. One pirate thrust his sword toward my stomach, but I knocked it aside with my own blade, stepped into his arm to check his backswing, continuing my maneuver as I removed his hands with a vertical cut. Another pirate jumped at me as he brought his blade down at my skull, but I ducked under the blow and removed the top half of his body from the lower half with a twist of my hips and a cleave from my sword.

I was lost in the battle. Sweat stung my eyes, blood roared in my ears, and my lungs screamed, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t allow my new crew to die. None of the artillerymen’s names were known to me, but in the heat of battle, they were my brothers.

More enemies filtered out from the hole, and we met them with superior ferocity. In minutes, there were none left. My chest heaved, and my helmet’s fluid extraction systems couldn’t keep up with all the sweat drenching my body. My bio-readout on my prot-belt said I was suffering from a minor concussion and a laceration to the back of my head. I couldn’t remember taking a hit, but I couldn’t feel anything with all the adrenaline racing through my veins.

Moses’ armor stopped shining, and he was encircled by pirate corpses. He must have killed them while maintaining his shield. Sweat glistened along his chin below his helmet, and blood caked his armor.

The sirens still blared in the overhead, but it didn’t seem like any more pirates would enter the gunnery from either of the two ships that had breached the room.

Smoke shrouded one of the shield stations, and I went over to it to assess the damage. A soldier laid over the terminal and blood leaked from a hole in his head. A bullet must have pierced Moses’ prot-field and tagged this man.

I turned only to see Moses frowning at the fallen soldier and smoking shield station. I knew I should say something, but I couldn’t think of anything to make the situation better. We’d lost five men in this room, and there were probably far more casualties outside of this gunnery.

The shield knight pressed the comms link on his helmet. “We’ve cleared two of the enemy ships,” Moses said to someone over his comms. “But we’ve lost a shield station and five men.” He paused for a few moments and grimaced. “Yes, Commander.”

The shield knight tapped his helmet to close the link before turning to the survivors. “Artillery, I need two men to sweep the enemy vessels and make sure there aren’t any pirates remaining. The rest of you are coming with me. I’ll seal the door behind us to protect the shielders.” He grabbed a soldier wearing a full-faced helmet. “Zac, go to the surveillance room and see if you can patch up the detection systems. We need to kill every last one of these bastards.”

“Yes, sir,” he said as he pulled a sword out from a dead pirate’s abdomen and attached it to his belt.

“Nick, you escort Zac to Deck 5 and make sure he doesn’t get himself killed.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Moses went to the sealed doorway and entered a code into its terminal. The door opened to the muffled sounds of battle from the other gunnery on Deck 3. The artillerymen followed him as he leaped into the other room with his gladius in one hand and his tower shield in the other.

“Let’s go,” Zac said as I followed him to the end of the passageway. The artilleryman pushed open a hatch and stepped inside a cylindrical shaft.

I climbed the ladder behind Zac, and my metal-covered hands and feet clanged as they hit the rungs. I smelled oil and ozone. The atmospheric systems were really taking a beating.

The clangor of fighting resounded through the chamber, and I fought back the desire to take one of the exits and help the crew. Moses, the artillerymen, and I had killed close to fifty pirates, but we’d lost five men in the process. Winning at those odds was almost unbelievable.

Moses was an excellent fighter, but I wondered whether the other knights among the crew were as good as him. Even if the others managed to fight off the attackers, there might not be much of a ship left.

I pulled myself over the lip of the shaft, and Zac opened the hatch to Deck 5. The atmospheric systems in this area of the starship didn’t seem to be working as hard because breathing was a lot easier. My boots echoed as they hit the floor, and Zac’s labored breathing through his helmet sounded like a roaring engine.

“Where’s the surveillance room?” I asked the artilleryman as I gestured at him to follow me.

“At the end of the hallway, past the entrance to the arcane chamber.”

My longsword thrummed as I crept forward, and the dull atmospheric vents hummed, but I couldn’t hear anything else. The rooms were likely soundproofed so there could be pirates behind any one of them.

The door to my left slid open with a hiss. I jumped back and brought my sword up as a pirate stepped through the doorway. I plunged my weapon into his heart before he could open fire and then yanked my blade free. The pirates still inside the room started to open fire, but I’d already spun away from the entryway, and the blasts just heated the far bulkhead wall.

“I got this,” Zac said from behind me.

I turned as he sprinted past the doorway and tossed a grenade into the room. I spun to cover myself with the bulkhead, and the explosive detonated with an angry bark.

When the smoke cleared, I peered through the doorway and saw a chaotic array of body parts. The room itself was mostly intact. Storage seemed its primary purpose, and the metal boxes were only a little charred from the blast and caked in human guts.

“Not bad,” I said to the artilleryman. “Next time you might want to--” I stopped when I saw Zac kneeling and clutching his side.

“One of them fuckers nicked me.” He pulled off his helmet and grinned.

My stomach dropped as I crouched beside the artilleryman and inspected the wound. A bullet had lodged itself between his ribs, probably centimeters from his vital organs.

I removed a medkit from my belt and applied it to the wound. The runes would slow the bullet’s descent for a bit. Zac tried to speak, but I could barely hear him. “The code . . . is seven-zero-golf-nine-delta-whiskey,” he struggled to say.

“You don’t need to tell me the code. You’re not gonna die,” I said, although I didn’t believe it because Zac’s face was now a ghostly white and the blood had completely soaked through his light armor.

I couldn’t leave him in the passageway while pirates could still be around, so I carefully grabbed beneath his arms and pulled him into a nook between two bulkheads. He would be safe here.

I flipped open my belt pouch and took out my last medkit. Normally applying a second kit wouldn’t do much more than help with the pain, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. As I pressed the gauze marked with healing runes to Zac’s ribs, he pushed my hand away.

“I’ll handle it,” he said. “You need to get the systems back online. You remember the code?”

I repeated the passcode. Although I didn’t want to leave the artilleryman to apply the kit himself, he was right. Without the detection systems, there could be pirates hiding throughout the starship and we wouldn’t know.

“Do I need anything organic?” I asked Zac. All the systems I’d learned about required biological authorization.

Zac smiled as he licked bloodied lips. “The Stalwart’s old-school. Just . . . the . . . code.”

I ran through the alphanumeric passcode in my head again, repeating it a dozen times so I wouldn’t forget. I left Zac and made my way toward the end of the metal passageway. There were a few other doors on either side of the corridor so I crossed them slowly in case any more pirates were lurking in the rooms.

The clanking sound of a door’s mechanisms came from a few meters ahead of me, so I prepared to kill some asshole. The door opened, and the sound of men screaming filled the metal hall. A pirate corpse toppled out from the doorway like a thrown ragdoll, and three pirates trampled it as they tried to exit the room.

Fear filled their eyes, and they didn’t seem to see me as they sprinted straight into my forcewave. I must have been edgy from seeing Zac get shot because I’d swung with much more power than I’d intended. Armor crinkled and flesh pulverized as the prot-field projectile crushed the trio of pirates.

My belt read Prot-field: 7%

More screams invaded the passageway from inside the room, so I rushed over the destroyed bodies of the invaders to peer inside.

A knight clad in power armor was hacking pirates to pieces. The room was ten meters long and five meters wide, and it looked like three enemy ships had drilled into the walls. From the refrigerators lining the bulkheads, I figured it was a food storage room.

Terrified screaming came through one of the breaches as a dozen pirates leaped out of the clamped ship and into the room. In a swirl of motion, the armored knight hacked pirates with twin one-handed axes. Limbs flew through the air, blood sprayed across the knight’s armor, and the sound of insane laughter filled the room.

The laughter was coming from Olav’s mouth.

“Can’t let them escape,” the knight with the red-mohawk said, seeming to speak to himself as there was no one else in the room to hear him. “Gotta kill them all!”

Two fleeing pirates screamed as they fled in my direction, but the knight threw both his axes and the two weapons plunged into the fleeing men’s backs. They tumbled to the ground with shrieks, but Olav didn’t even walk over to finish them off. Instead, the berserker removed a water drum from his belt with his free hand and took a long swig.

A stray pirate jumped out from the ship, and Olav burst into laughter as he tackled the man. The knight drove his gauntleted fists into the enemy’s skull, and it exploded like a watermelon hit with a twenty-kilo mallet. The berserker wasn’t wearing a helmet, so blood splashed his face, and I swore he licked his lips as he stood there laughing.

Another knight poked his head out from the hole the pirates had just come from and brushed aside his long blonde hair. He wore a lazy smile as though he’d aced a training exercise with little effort. I recognized him from the galley. He was the knight who’d been wrestling Olav.

“You done in there, Flanagan?” the berserker asked the long-haired knight.

“It’s cleared.” The knight stepped out from the enemy arrow-ship. “I think I’m winning.”

The herald knight’s harp glowed on the front of his blood-stained tabard and the gleaming silver pauldrons on his broad shoulders. His armor was sleek and fit his form like a bodysuit, designed more for speed than defense. He carried an axe-shaped stringed instrument in one hand and a falchion in the other as he strolled passed the pirate corpses and entered the other pirate ship.

Mounds of flesh and guts covered the ground outside the ships. Did these two knights kill them all? There were three ships in total, and two of them seemed to have been cleared.

I was about to leave the knights to continue the slaughter when the room trembled.

“Fuck!” Olav yelled as one of the pirate ship’s engines roared to life. “Flanagan! You said you’d cleared the bloody ship!”

“I’m kinda busy in here. You deal with it!” the herald screamed from inside the other arrow-ship, barely loud enough to be heard above the sirens and arrow-ship’s engines.

“Why the fuck do I have to clean up after--”

The berserker was cut off as the harpoon umbrellas snapped free of the bulkhead in a thunder of tearing crystalanium. The enemy vessel liberated itself from our ship as its engines burst with blue fire.

My eyes widened as I thought about getting sucked out into space, and I stepped back from the doorway. I was about to yell out to Olav to flee into the passageway so I could seal the door when the Stalwart’s shields molded over the breach, keeping the room stable and preventing depressurization.

I exhaled in relief, and Olav glanced over his shoulder.

“Are you lost, Squire?”

I stumbled over my words as the berserker’s golden eyes bore into mine. “Moses ordered me to get the detection system up and running again,” I said after I’d swallowed a few times.

“Then what the fuck are you waiting for? It’s in the next room.” He turned away from me and strolled over to the hole in the bulkhead the herald knight had entered moments ago. “Flanagan! Are you almost done in there? You think you can cheat me out of kills? I’m coming in!” The berserker cackled as he jumped through the bulkhead and into the enemy vessel.

I was a little concerned the pirate ship might take off while the knights were aboard, but I figured Flanagan would be using his melodies to stop the pirates from fleeing. I’d never seen a herald play runesongs in battle before, but I couldn’t stick around. I’d already wasted too much time, so I left the knights and entered the next room.

The wall adjacent to the doorway was covered with displays and computers systems used to survey the ship. Terminals squealed like an electronic choir, and half the monitors showed readouts while the other half were off.

I heard a woman cry out, and I turned my attention to the far wall.

The area was mostly shrouded in darkness, but I could make out two pirates cornering a raven-haired woman about six meters to my left, and my heartbeat kicked up a notch as they stepped toward her.