1: Breaking the Surface

Olivera turns to the comms and begins keying in commands.The comms officer is starting to look a little nervous, but he keeps his voice low, "Sir… I’m not getting much. The ship is showing no significant damage, external or internal. If their transponder’s broken, I’m not seeing any reason why…"

Zaki’s tense in his chair, but like a predator preparing to spring. He, too, keeps his voice low, practically spitting through gritted teeth, "Imalowda ere wa direct intercept course. Even if da Bounty burn hot, maye wang, tu ora."

"Should I attempt to hail them, sir?" Olivera asks. He wipes his brow.

"I… I…" Olivera runs an automatic comms scramble, but anything more advanced than a repair skiff OS could fend off corporate cyber warfare software that’s hasn’t been updated in three decades.

"Aye! Let mi, dzhemang!" Zaki opens a blank command line interface to comms and begins keying in commands."Transponder mask, bosmang. Ah na," Zaki tsks cheekily, continuing to type away, "pirata tenye na update imalowda remote engine override systems ere wa teng anyiye."

Meanwhile, Saveen’s response comes back from engineering, surprised at being contacted, glancing around nervously at the blue light.

"Ke?!" Saveen rubs his forehead. "Hoo boyo… we could burn hard, go up to 3-G level speeds for a bit, bosmang. She’ll rattle, but da Bounty will hold."

That might be hard on some of the Belters, and very uncomfortable for everyone else. Anyone with a brain would be on their crash couches in blue alert.

Zaki nods at what Saveen says from the helm, continuing to type away on the command line. "Imalowda fire ere da Bounty, mi ta kang use speed fo evade. But Pampa," he says, scowling in resignation, "that na race milowda kang sémpere win. Na da Bounty."

Olivera’s voice has a panicked tone, and the nav officer is muttering a prayer. "Are you crazy?! We’re an ice hauler! We let them board and hope they just ask for protection, maybe top up their water and air! They have fucking torpedos, sir!"

"Aha!" Zaki calls out. The pirate ship starts to fall back. "Pirata engine off. Deting bera xalte imalowda fo wa wamali tim, Pampa. Wamang bera mowteng fo manually restart engine."

The Bounty’s comms array begins emitting rapid radio bursts directed at the transponderless ship, overwhelming their ship sensors, hopefully even causing an electrical fire if the system runs too hot. They’ll need to contain any damage, reroute and reboot the systems. It’ll give a few minutes of confusion as the radio bursts communicate that the Bounty is going in multiple directions simultaneously.

Zaki is confirming a cut to the engines to play dead, when Captain Reyes steps onto the deck, the XO right behind her. Reyes looks tense, and Mitchell is scowling. Lobos can easily spot the holster the XO put on earlier.

"Belay that order, Mr. Saveen," the captain snaps at the bridge crew. "Matar, give crew the warning that we’re cutting engines."

"Oh thank fuck," Olivera mutters to himself, sagging in his chair. Zaki looks furious, but he goes still and quiet the second Mitchell steps on the deck, like a cornered animal.

Reyes turns to the Lobos, the XO standing over her shoulder. She sounds both impressed and exhausted, "Thank you, Mr. Lobos, but I saw your report. This isn’t a fight we can win."

As Zaki begins the process of spooling down the engine in a cold fury, Captain Reyes strides past Lobos, shaking her head. She walks over to Olivera, looking at the information he has on his terminal, and has him open a channel to the vessel.

"Unidentified vessel, this is Captain Reyes of the ice hauler Abzu’s Bounty. It appears your transponder is inactive, please provide an explanation and transmit your flight plan immediately."

She waits about ten seconds, the bridge holding their breaths in anticipation. She looks at Olivera, but he shakes his head.

Reyes turns on Lobos, "What the hell were you thinking?! A cyber attack on an unidentified vessel? What if they’re Martian?! We just attacked them!"

Zaki shoots Lobos a scowl. He clearly thinks they were in the right.

Reyes opens her mouth, shuts it, opens it again and then turns in frustration back to Olivera.

"Open the channel again. Unidentified vessel, this is-–"

"Captain…" Olivera checks his screen and then leans back, wiping at his brow. "They must be jamming our transmissions, we-–"

As if in response, a transmission comes through from the unidentified vessel, a Belter woman’s voice modulated by interference. She does not sound happy. "Abzu’s Bounty, cut engines and prepare to be boarded. This is your only warning."

Olivera’s voice quavers as he says, "They have a target lock on us, Captain…"

She snaps her fingers at Zaki, who cuts the engine, and the crew suddenly feel the effects of weightlessness, the beep and clunk of a dozen pairs of mag boots connecting with the deck. The captain is bracing herself against the comms terminal, her knuckles white where she’s gripping the display. She waves her hand and a holo of the local system comes up. The transponderless vessel is on a direct intercept course.

"Fine, you want to get shot so badly?" she snaps, heading over to the command terminal where she starts keying in commands. "Lobos, Mitchell, take a couple of people authorized to use small arms to the main airlock. Defensive measures only, we just need to get this over with. Find out what they want and give it to them. No heroics."

The main airlock is on level 03, two levels down. She pulls up the personnel file and assigns Hinkley, the blond, broad-shouldered Earther and a Belter laborer named Cas to report to retrieve their weapons from the equipment room and report to the airlock immediately.

Reyes nods, watching the holo on the command terminal as the unidentified ship inches closer. "Any luck, we all get out of this alive."

Lobos soars through the ladder tube, occasionally reaching out and slapping a rung to give himself a boost of momentum or course correction. He could do this in his PHEG, he has, many times.

He pulls the door open and sees Hinkley and Cas, his backup, checking their pistols in the equipment room. They look up as he soars over.

"What’s going on, sir?" Hinkley asks, his face set. He’s prepared to accept orders.

Cas, the Belter, shakes his head and mutters to himself as he slides his pistol into his holster. "Hazard pay na worth this kaka falota."

Hinkley takes a deep breath, exhales and then nods at Lobos. "What have you got in mind?"

The hangar bay doors open to the void of space, distant Saturn the nearest point of reference in the star-dotted black.

The Lahmu’s thrusters nudge it out of the hangar, and Zaki maneuvers the skiff to the airlock, quickly connecting and allowing the three men to board. He uncouples the skiff and pushes off before Hinkley and Cas have found their crash seats. Lobos, in his PHEG, merely needs to magnetically brace himself between the ceiling and floor.

"Buckle up, beratnas. Lahmu thrustas only, gonya ge bumpy if imalowda spot us, but mi bring milowda in hush hush."

The pilot keeps the Bounty between the skiff and the pirate ship, speeding along the hull. He waits until the Lahmu is equidistant around the Bounty before he begins to take it around to connect with the pirate ship.The distance closes as the repair skiff skirts around the Bounty. As the skiff comes out of the shadow of the Bounty, the pirate’s modified freighter looms on the monitors ahead. The words "ANNE BONNY" are visible under display lights in large yellow letters against the black paint job.

The Anne Bonny, the ship Lobos heard was flying a pirate flag under the command of Captain Claire O’Rourke, a longtime associate and brief flame of Pampa Coyo.

Claire O’Rourke is a Belter woman from a large Ceres family who’s always been proud of their mixed Irish heritage. Claire had an Old World saying from her father, "luck fo da Irish", which defined her life. Claire’s always been the kind of person who things just seem to work out for. She got a job as a dockside inspector for the Earth-Mars Coalition Navy’s logistics division on Ceres through an uncle, a position easily exploited for someone with ties to the OPA. By the time the coalition caught on to repeated logistical diversions O’Rourke was long gone, signing on as a hired gun with a security firm escorting merchant vessels in high-piracy areas of the Outer Planets. This led to further opportunities to shake down vessels who made the mistake of not hiring their services.

She met Lobos during this period–she affectionately nicknamed him "Blue" after his military background–since her outfit increasingly turned to piracy–the lean years of Earth-Mars cooperation drove the system's fringers further outward looking for the next score. Despite… maybe because of her line of work, Lobos saw something of a kindred soul in her. She had a loose but honorable moral code, and it meant watching the backs of her crew members, and solidarity with her fellow Belters against the tyranny of the Inners. If O’Rourke lined her own pockets in the process, all the better.

They had a night on Europa where a great deal of Belter moonshine was had, a room with a view of the domed greenhouses was rented, which ended in the old "what life could be like" talk. Claire admitted she was attracted to Lobos, but that she wasn’t a settle-down type, and that settled that. He later heard rumors that she had lucked into command of her own ship and was privateering in the Outer Planets, which sounded like just the sort of thing Claire would do.

Clearly those rumors are true.

The Anne Bonny is clearly a fairly new but standard civilian-designed freighter ship. She’s boxy, the segmented engineering levels almost squat over the quad rockets, which would make her a speedy, highly maneuverable little lady. Above the two main airlocks on the ship’s midsection the Bonny tapers up to the arrays on the tip. While her original specs were for a Grendel-class freighter, about the size of a Martian or UN light frigate, she’s clearly had some work done. A standard network of PDC mounts have been installed, along with a dual torpedo tube affixed to the upper section. The black highlighted with deep, rich goldenrod paint job gives her a hornet look, aggressive, packing a sting.

Zaki hisses as the meters close to feet. "Imalowda see da Lahmu, target lock! Na, keting da--"

Lobos watches on his HUD along with Zaki on the shipboard system as the Anne Bonny finishes retracting their docking bridge and begins to push off with thrusters. The target lock holds the Lahmu for a moment, clearly scanning the repair skiff, before switching… to the Bounty. Zaki swears from above.

"What?! What’s happening?!" Hinkley calls out, terror gripping his voice.

"Zaki! Wagwan?!" Cas calls out. Zaki and Lobos already know exactly what’s about to happen.

The Bonny’s rockets light up and the ship begins to blaze away from the ice hauler. Zaki has just enough momentum to keep up for a few seconds.

"Imalowda target da Bounty! Xalte ere! Hold on!"

"Na! NA! NABI!" Cas screams as the skiff pitches to the side, throwing the men in their EVA suits hard against their restraints.The Lahmu slams into the side of the pirate ship, and there’s a horrible screeching sound as the claws and welding tools dig into the hull of the moving ship; an improvised graft, and the repair skiff holds on for dear life, rattling hard against the Bonny’s hull.

Even Lobos, in his advanced armor, can feel the discomfort of a very rough acceleration to maybe two or three Gs of force, not helped at all by the Lahmu’s precarious clinging to an accelerating ship. Gideon and Cas are both gasping for breath, and Zaki cries out in pain from above in the cockpit.

Even as the G-force eases up somewhat another force rocks the ship… That wasn’t acceleration or a course adjustment, but an explosion… and an impact! That’s when Lobos hears a high-pitched roaring noise that makes his blood run cold even as a powerful wind pulls at the few loose materials in the hold. His eyes follow the paths of swirling dust and small debris visible through the suit’s HUD, towards the fist-sized hole in the bulkhead in the corner near the airlock, the atmosphere rushing out. If the Lahmu bleeds out all the atmosphere all they’ll have is the oxygen on their backs, and Zaki’s only in a light VAC suit, it's unclear exactly how much oxygen he has.