Mahou Galaxy: Chapter 8

The BioWarp station wasn't exactly cramped, measuring six feet wide and a bit more than double that from the doorway to the back wall, but it still seemed like it would be a little claustrophobic, and certainly too plain to want to spend any more time in there than was absolutely needed.  In the back corner, Keith had set all of her possessions, totaling a pile of clothes that seemed likely to never fit anymore, a crushed tape player, still cradling a mostly-intact tape stuffed to the brim with low-fidelity Haydn, and the Fairy's wedding gift, tucked neatly away into its velvet pouch.  She'd meant to get back to practicing with it, but it would have to wait until they'd successfully entered BioWarp.  The real thing was better, after all.  As for the cassette player, smashed out of operation at some point during the initial meeting with Heinrich, she figured Sergio would have the ability to repair it, or at least find a way to transfer the music from it.  As the ship's maneuvering thrusters whined up, she pushed her thoughts aside.  All of that was to be dealt with later, she thought.  For now, she has a job to do.

Using the rigged pad Sergio had slapped together was a tough challenge, but now, with the proper equipment, it was much easier.  For one, there was no need to keep a death grip, and though it probably would have been more comfortable to sit, she reasoned that BioWarp Mages probably kept standing during their channeling to ensure that they stayed alert and active, and to help focus their concentration.  
The suit was a tremendous help as well, and were it not for Lyn and Sergio's explanation, she wouldn't have thought it much more than an outfit to make the mage look more futuristic.  Apparently it had been designed to route magical energy from all of her body's extremities, reducing the need for her to concentrate so heavily on directing the energy through her hands.  Without any power meters to gauge the output, however, she couldn't be sure how well she was channeling.

At that thought, a gauge winked into existence, hovering helpfully from the center of the podium.  It displayed itself as a green bar, with a smaller but still significant blue bar nestled atop it.  Keith was able to figure that the larger bar was the ship's own power supply and the blue bar was what she was producing, mostly because that's exactly how she would have visualized it.  Curiously, she tried directing the gauge, seeing if it would track her head movements.  Obediently, it did exactly that.  

"Alright, let's see what else you can do.  Can you show me the rest of the crew?"  With a shimmer of cascading light, the tiny room's walls peeled away, showing through to the cockpit on her right side and the engineering compartment immediately to her left, bypassing the double-sized crew quarters shared by the ship's captain and engineer.  Watching the crew performing their duties without skipping a beat, she figured the effect was one-way, and wondered how well the effect would work if any of the crew went to a different area.  "Nice.  I don't suppose you could pipe some Mozart in here, could you?"  Her words echoed around the chamber as nothing happened in response.  "It was worth a try, I guess."

"So, what do you plan on telling the High Matriarch?"  Lyn asked Heinrich, slowly increasing the throttle to the maneuvering thrusters.  "You know how paranoid she is, she's going to do a life-signs scan and the second she picks up on the fourth life form, she's bound to ask some questions."

"Well, the fact that we're bringing another girl is definitely going to lessen the blow.  Maybe we should just make up some story about how we rescued her from slavery and she made the independent choice to be a BioWarp mage on our ship.  I'm sure the Matriarch would respect something like that."

"Why can't they just tell them the truth?"  Keith wondered aloud, only realizing that her voice had been transmitted through to the cockpit when Lyn and Heinrich both jolted to the side expecting to see her.  Heinrich plodded around to the intersection, looking inside as he growled.

"How'd you hear us all the way over--" he began, stopping as he looked inside, the displays around him clearly not something he was expecting to see.  "Huh.  How'd you do that?"

"I'm not sure.  The ship seems able to obey some of my commands from in here, at least when it comes to what I see and hear."

"Okay, I guess.  Just let us know next time you decide to peek in on us.  That's really freaky."

"I didn't really mean to do it, but I'll be more careful from now on."

"Okay, good.  Uh...Lyn says that the thrusters are running much more smoothly now, and we're just about out of the planet's atmosphere, by the way.  Did you hear that part?"

"Nope.  I'm still figuring out how everything works in here, and I just a minute ago turned on the video thing."

"Alright," Heinrich started as he walked back to the cockpit to explain the situation to his pilot, "Keep up the good work, then.  I guess."

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"We've picked up their engine signature again, Mistress.  This time the ship seems to be firing much less erratically."  Epsilon 33-K mechanically informed Anyaria.  

"It seems as though the grateful citizens of Proxima Z assisted in the repairs of their savior's ship."  The Succubus chuckled, dipping one finger into her drink to test its temperature.  Ice cubes, she reasoned.  That would have been a great idea a few hours ago.  "I suppose they'll regret it soon enough, once they give up the location of the convoy that's delivering the next batch.  All stations, report."  An orderly series of affirmatives confirmed the plan's readiness, and she strained to keep her eagerness from showing through.  Instead, she watched the map carefully, as the smaller freighter broke from the atmosphere.  Moments later, its main engines fired up, thrusters pointing it directly away from the planet for a few thousand miles, then another burn of the maneuvering jets and it was taking a more galactically eastward position.

"They appear to be acquiring their BioWarp vector, Mistress."

"Excellent, watch their energy output."

It was a few tense seconds before the followup.  "Relativity shield is forming!  Closest trail is north B-18"  The display showed the ship shrouding itself in a translucent reddish sphere.  Before the crewman could finish his report, she begun giving her orders.

"Hit the entropic drive now!  Activate the gravity well emulator!  Ready the drones for launch, and prep to fire all of the portside harpoons!"

With a purple-black wink of arcing energy, Anyaria's ship disappeared, instantaneously reappearing a few dozen kilometers in front of the Cassie's Machination.  The small freighter's reddish shield faded away as the center engine began to glow white hot, then suddenly cut off.

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The entire ship shuddered as a warning buzzer flooded the deck.  "What the hell just happened?"  Heinrich barked at the last flickering remnant of the relativity shield.  "We've got the kid on board, what else does it want?"

Lyn frantically replied as she worked the control panels in front of her.  "The BioWarp drive shut off automatically!  It says there's a moon-sized gravity field in front of us, but the only thing there is--" With a key press, a window appeared in the middle of the ship's view, then scrolled it to the upper-right. The speck in the middle magnified, until the other ship was visible.

From the front, the vehicle was hard to discern, but it must have been a minimum of a hundred feet wide.  the bow of the ship was painted black, with streaks of dark yet highly reflective red painted like blood splatters from the front toward the back, as though it had just plowed through a tremendous spaceborne beast.  Flanking the jagged-shaped front viewscreen were a pair of oversized cannons, held to the ship by its plating but surrounded with massive metal chains made to look as it they were just hanging on.  Lyn wasted no time with her reaction, pressing the frontmost portside thrusters and the rearmost starboard ones to snap the ship harshly to the right as she blasted the engine up to its full burn, then pointing all of the maneuvering jets downwards to push the ship up and away from the huge vessel.

"Pirates.  And they've got a device to fake a gravity well!  Damn, how far until we can re-engage the biowarp drive?"  Hein examined the enemy ship and barked his questions with a focused growl.

"We're going to have to get around the ship if we want to get a proper warp vector.  How about we try going anywhere else?  I think I can get us out of the well in about two and a half minutes.  We are faster than them, at least."

"Make it happen!"  Heinrich turned toward the wall, looking as close to directly where Keith should be as possible.  "Anything you've got to help the ship, kid, push it as hard as you can!"

Keith barely managed a "Yes, sir!" as she shook in terror.  As the Machination pulled hard to the side, the display window centered on the enemy's battleship panned around to show the side.  From this angle, the ship looked more like a tremendous scimitar blade, long cannons strapped down with giant chains and protrusions bumping the sides capped with jagged barbs.  Though a chunk cut out of the bottom, dozens of tiny engine exhausts lit up and careened out towards the viewscreen.

"Are those missiles they're launching?"  Heinrich growled at the display, then raising his wrist up, he yelled, "Serge!  Divert everything you can to getting the shields back up!  Lyn, send a distress call to Zed!  Tell them to get every--"

"No good!  They're jamming our transmissions!"

"Then evasive maneuvers, even with shields we can't take many missile hits!"

Pulling back on the throttle, the Demoness pilot pumped all of the power she could into the thrusters, causing the ship to zigzag away from the pirates'.  Shields sputtered to life, shimmering around the Machination for the briefest moment, and Keith cringed as the tiny specks of light pushed toward the ship...

...and flew right past, parking themselves in a sphere around the ship before slowly converging in.

"Hein, they're not missiles!"

"Drones!  Can you shoot them down?"

"I can get enough to bust out, but if they start shooting..."

Heinrich didn't need to answer as Lyn was already firing bolts at the tiny spherical mini-ships that surrounded them.  The ones in front of her flitted back and forth in front of the Machination's puny laser canon, but after a direct hit, one of them fizzled out and fell away from its position.  Almost as if they sensed their comrade's demise and were suddenly out for blood, the remaining drones buzzed closer, ducking out of the small laser cannon's range of motion.  Waiting for her to try and push her way through the hole, as the ship's power systems strained to keep all of its systems going, the maneuvering thrusters faltered for a moment, and the drones all struck the ship from different angles, latching onto it.  Keith felt a sudden unnerving sensation, as though her skin was crawling with spiders.  The tiny engines ignited on the forward half of the drones, pushing back against the force of the ship's engines and retarding its own thrust to a fraction of its potential.

Lyn let loose with a stream of alien profanities.  "They've got us slowed down too much.  I can't shake them off!  If we'd just kept burning the engines..."  She looked at her controls, at the captain, and back down at herself for someone to blame, but resigned to the impossible-to-guess tactics of the opposing ship's captain.  As she pushed harder on the main throttle, a pinging beep signaled the crew.  "I think they're hailing us."

"Bring it up."

Another window appeared, and within it the crew could see the darkly-dressed Succubus, seated powerfully in her intimidating captain's chair.  With a cool, assured voice, the woman on the other side spoke.

"Greetings, prisoners.  I am Listless Malaria--"

The woman's eyes widened and the viewscreen cut off to fuzzy static.

Though Lyn had not let off the throttle and Keith was channeling energy with all of her skill, the cockpit was completely silent for the next fifteen seconds, the crew processing what just happened.  As Heinrich was about to speak up to let everyone know his thoughts, the screen cut back on.  The pirate's face twitched slightly, her hair having fallen slightly over one eye.  Her right sleeve was stained with some sort of reddish liquid, and she held in her hand the top half of a wine glass, the stem half-shattered and bottom completely missing.  Without so much as a second's pause, she spoke again, adopting a tone identical to her previous transmission's.

"Greetings, prisoners. I am Mistress Anyaria of the Undeclared Discount, sole ship of the Galactic ANarchist's Double Omega fleet.  You will lower your shields and allow your ship to be boarded, or risk permanent damage to both you and your vessel.  You have thirty seconds to com--"

The picture closed down as the ship's lights dimmed, the gravity lessened, and the engines in back began to roar and rattle well past their suggested parameters.  Sergio called out down the hallway.  "Everything is in the engines now, I suggest you push as hard as possible."

Keith took the advice as well, straining mentally as she devoted every last thought to escaping the ship's predicament.  For the next few seconds, the Machination began to accelerate, but cutting short any celebration was a massive slam against the port side of the freighter.  Flooded with a sudden sensation of pain that burst from her left side, Keith screamed in agony, the door to the hallway slamming shut as the BioWarp station went dark.  Keith moaned and clutched at her side as she felt the ship's shuddering strain against a new force pulling at it.  With two more consecutive slams, she shrieked, more weakly this time, pinching her eyes shut and breathing sharply through her teeth.  

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"Three of the five harpoons hit dead-on, Mistress.  One slipped back out, but the other two have secured themselves fully and the ship seems to have lost a great deal of its engine thrust."

"Good.  Begin retracting the cables.  If they start squirming again, have the drones around the maneuvering jets and the main engines detonate.  I'd really prefer they leave once we're done with them, however, so try and leave our guests with enough power to limp away once they're back.  Are they in range to scan yet?"

The smaller freighter pushed against the combined force of the harpoons that had punctured and the drones that had latched on like a chained dog trying to free itself.  Whatever power they had in reserve pushing it had been enough to stop a couple of her harpoons from striking, but it seems that it had burned itself out in the process.  The ship's cockpit lights returned to their normal brightness as the engine glow dimmed, still putting up resistance but only enough to stall the inevitable.

"Yes, Mistress.  Bioscans show two in the cockpit and one in the engine, though that one's making its way back to the cockpit."

"Keep an eye on him, make sure he goes no where else.  We don't want any surprises waiting for us."  She relaxed her pose and let out a sigh of relief, mentally preparing for the next phase of her plan.  Turning to the Dark Elf who was ducked under the chair's armrest, clearing away shards of glass and blotting up fruit juice spilled to the floor, the Succubus spoke, an earnest tone to her voice.  "Do you think they were intimidated?  The second time, I mean."

"I'm certain that they completely forgot about the first one, Mistress."

"Yes, I suppose that now they'll be passing my name along to everyone they meet.  Also, once I have delivered the convoy to the other pirates, what do you think my new title should be?  Empress?  Queen?"

"Perhaps you should give time to both, and choose the one that sounds better?"

"Good idea.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some prisoners to interrogate."