In A Starship's Wake

Chapter 29: Rounding Up Pirates

Tension flowed gradually out of their situation as time wore on. Joseph returned to the cockpit after he'd helped the soldiers the shuttle had brought get set up in their cargo bay. Once the Devastator gave the all clear they set out after the drifting pirates. Everyone was a little edgy during the first half dozen retrievals, but no further attacks were forthcoming.

Once they had their pattern down they started to relax, even joking back and forth with the soldiers via radio. The tension returned whenever they found a pirate who was still alive, since they were more risky to bring on board. As soon as the man was safely under guard in the cargo bay, it seeped away again.

"How many to go?" the sergeant in command of the squad asked after thirty and some odd pirates had been collected.

Tyrone glanced back at Joseph for an answer. "Sixty-two," he supplied for the sergeant. For Tyrone he pointed out the count he'd added to the HUD while he was picking out the pirates' positions.

"Nuts. We're barely a third of the way there, I thought we'd done more than that by now."

"Well, we're getting faster at it, so that's something." Joseph had located almost a hundred drifting spacesuits once they'd gotten the Bolinscar Red Comet out of their line of sight.

"Good. I'm already tired of spacewalking and tense examination of every drifting object we see in case it's pointing a weapon at us."

Joseph laughed. "Well, next time we see pirates you're welcome to come square off with them in a transport for four hours waiting for help."

"Okay, that's fair. You two have definitely been under more stress today. You did pretty well, I've never seen a light freighter attack a corvette before, even one with a weak hull like that. Live one here."

Around one in four pirates they picked up were still alive. When they spotted one who was alive and able to move, several soldiers would keep weapons pointed at them as they touched down on the freighter. Once on the hull, another soldier secured the pirate's arms behind his back and searched for weapons. He was then taken aboard and placed under guard in the cargo bay.

"Have any been aggressive so far?" Joseph watched on a monitor as the pirate closed with the freighter. "Tyrone can hit them a little harder if it'll help."

"Not particularly. Most have lost their weapons from bouncing off the Comet or a chunk of corvette hull. The ones that still have theirs push them over to us well ahead of hitting the hull themselves. Most of them are running low on air, if they aren't already unconscious from oxygen deprivation."

"I wouldn't be interested in doing anything that kept me out there longer either, in that case." Many of the dead pirates had probably met their fate by suffocation rather than injuries from the fighting. Once they drifted too far to reach the ships they had no way to resupply, and the cheap pressure suits most were wearing only stored enough oxygen for a couple hours in space.

Since he had nothing else to do, the task of keeping track of all the drifting pirates had fallen to Joseph. It wasn't a terribly absorbing task, just continual monitoring of sensor data. He'd long since laid out an order of retrieval to get the job done efficiently. Anytime he noticed a pirate who was still alive, he updated the order. No reason to deny them a second chance at life.

Other things were still going on in space around them, and Joseph periodically cycled through the rest of the camera angles to know what was happening. During one such scan he noticed two familiar fighters skulking up to White Onyx Devastator. They looked for all the galaxy like a pair of misbehaving schoolboys expecting a scolding. He put the feed up on the windshield where Tyrone could see it. "The other two fighters are back."