They have finally made a mistake.
I position my ship over their parasitic vessel, matching velocities, and crack my hatch.
Vacuum meets vacuum. Silent.
Descending to their ship like a shadow, I stretch my arms. Long, black blades emerge from the interior of my wrists. I pass over their vessel.
Comms first.
My left blade slices through the receiver relay.
I hook my fingertip beneath the bolt and thump my right blade against the metal hull. Its subtle reverberation paints a picture on my hood, showing what’s inside.
Two males hunch over comms and rub their erect sexual organs. They are so distracted, they do not notice my pulse.
The Eruvisans are never distracted. That is how they’ve escaped me so many times.
I walk forward using the tips of my blades to hook into the metal and pulse a second time. Still hunched. Oh, they’ve noticed the downed communications. One presses the comm button furiously. The other looks up at me—although I am invisible to him through the metal hull—with a frown.
Kill.
My boots magnetize to adhere to the metal with a soft clink which I hear inside my suit via suit-augmented bone conduction. I draw back my left blade and plunge it through three layers of alloy. The curving blade heats as it shears electrons from atoms. I skewer both men through their armored chests; their death shudders reverberate in my blade-bones.
I lift my hand. The blade retracts. Atmosphere puffs into the vacuum and then stops.
One of their bodies has probably plugged the hole.
Silence no longer matters, but the circumstances of their distraction tingle my nerves with a vague foreboding. I pulse my way across the pirate ship, taking more care than usual. But nothing seems amiss.
Why did they not notice my arrival?
Eventually, I slice the hinge cables to breach their airlock, flood and pressurize the small chamber, and then stride into the atmosphere-filled pirate ship.
A dank film molds the surfaces. Bad moisture cleaners. They could not have operated this vessel much longer.
Their stolen cargo is stacked beside the grimy force chute.
I wave my palm over the origin mark. Symbols glow, reacting to my suit, and identify it as Arris cargo lusteal. Aphrodisiac powder. The sweet metal needed to bring on mating lust in Arrisan males and females is all that stands between our race and annihilation.
Anger flashes in my chest. After all the unimportant metal they’ve stole from us, this goes too far.
And yet, they successfully escaped to another system. I barely followed.
Why didn’t they get away with it?
Why were they trapped here, on a lesser cruise ship, after evading a blade fleet?
The lessers on this cruiser could never have overpowered the Eruvisans.
So, how?
Their hull-cracker tube is still attached. I drop into the chute.
Their parasite ship gravity loses me, but momentum carries me until the cruiser picks me up. I land scale-light on the floor. Heat-proof, radiation-absorbing, sound-dampening, light-bending armor conceals my movements so that only the briefest stir of air marks my passage through the cruiser.
But something is odd. Unusual sensations like soft fingers slide up my back, somehow beneath my skin-fitted armor.
Something is different here.
The atmosphere is breathable, so I open the suit.
Strange scents assault my nostrils. The Eruvisan stench chokes me with body malfeasance and waste-cycling problems consistent with their ship. Beneath that, the scent of the cruiser—no, of the lessers who once inhabited this cruiser—causes an odd tautness in my abdomen.
One escape pod door hangs open.
The scent intensifies.
I follow it to the bridge and stop. An incomprehensible sight greets me.
The Eruvisans are not dead as I expected. They are very much alive, and yet they have all ignored the most basic safety protocols. This mistake will end them.
They surround a small, multi-limbed creature lying on the floor making the strangest squeaking noises. One male thrusts his pelvis to its pelvis. Not it, her. Her pelvis. This seems to be a group mating ceremony, but the Eruvisans are not noted for mating outside their race, much less in the middle of a heist, so this whole scenario is senseless.
Strange.
My implant projects ship status and species information in the same impersonal way it attempts to translate the guttural grunts and cries.
“Oh, yes! Yes! More!” Male grunting noise. “Almost there!”
This vessel originates from our colony Humana, and this unfamiliar female is one of the humans. She seems to have five limbs, four of which grapple the cold-blooded Eruvisan, and two sets of ears. The extra nonfunctional limb and one of the sets of ears belong to another species of animal on the Humana home planet, wherever that is. Galacticus? Somewhere outside the eighty-nine asteroids? It is so difficult to keep our conquered worlds straight.
She encourages the Eruvisans to mate with her, and they have clearly been in space too long—or perhaps they have gotten addled by their poor environment—and so they oblige.
I have a duty to announce my intentions. I deglass my suit to become visible and drop my hood. “Eruvisans.”
My words disappear into the noise of their wrestling. The thrusting male slows and stands, his leathery green sex organ erect and dripping.
I clear my throat and try again. “Eruvi—”
“Oh, please, no. Just a little more,” the female begs. “I was so close. I almost remembered. I almost…please.”
Her words are strangely effective. My midsection tingles.
Another Eruvisan unfastens his trousers and kneels between the female’s legs.
Honorable or not, I will not wait. My blades emerge from the bones of my wrists.
The Eruvisan nearest me catches the shimmer out of the corner of his slitted eye. He turns slowly and then hisses. “Blade!”
They all freeze.
Finally.
I give the proper warning. “You have stolen from noble Arris. All who wish to face judgment in the pits of Ranna, remain still. All who wish an immediate death, move.”
The silence stretches.
Will this truly be the day I take prisoners back to Ranna? I flex my wrists, extending the blades in promise.
Everyone moves at once.
I don my hood, not bothering with stealth, and unleash my blades. Scything the room, I paint the bridge in blood. The work of death is effortless and it is my greatest skill. I kill so that the empire of Arris lives.
When it is done and the last disease-ridden thief drops, I cross the spongy blood-soaked floor and pull in my blades to touch the console. This is Arrisan technology. I would understand it even if my implant didn’t automatically translate the colonial scribble into honorable text. Opening a comm channel to our military, I transmit my coordinates to the nearest fleet ship, a new dreadnought christened Spiderwasp.
Now, to wait.
I rest in the captain’s seat. It is covered in strange pink fabric, taut at the top and loosely wavy beneath. The implant whispers that the lesser humans call this design “frills.”
I lean back in the seat and close my eyes. It has been a very long time since I have rested.
A wobbly voice reaches my ears. “Can I move?”
The lesser is the only one who remained still and thus she is the only one who remains alive. I do not care. She is a problem for someone else now. “Yes.”
She rises. A mess of flesh, torn fabric too delicate to withstand wear, and dripping with bodily fluids.