jeriendhal | Fic: I Fought the Claw, and the Claw Won

Slightly late but it's here.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven

So I followed her out via the service entrance, into the back corridors of the station, away from the public area. The station had been built originally to provide rotational gravity, until artificial gravity had become cheap enough to retrofit onto it. A station built to handle rotational stresses was usually good for several centuries of operation once it stopped spinning, and from the looks of the half-arsed repairs along the wiring trunks and life-support shafts, it already had.

"Where are we going?" I asked, as I followed along Snarli's black cloaked shadow. At least I could see easily enough. The same holographic unit that masked our faces provided an unobstructed 360 degree view, even with the hood snugged up.

"You'll find out when we get there," she replied curtly.

"Are you going to give me a weapon, at least? If you want to use me as backup, I'm not going to be much good in a firefight with just my fangs and claws."

"If you think I'm stupid enough to give you a chance to stun me and grab Milady's ring, you've got another thing coming."

Ah, well. It had been worth a shot, so to speak. To keep her from dwelling too much on that line of thought, I continued, "Anyway, why are we going through with all of this? Loyalty to one's comrades is all fine and well, but you're pirates. Why not just elect a new captain and move on?"

Snarli stopped and turned around abruptly, the hem of her robe twirling angrily. Even underneath the blank, black hologram I could imagine her eyes burning. "Listen you merc, I know you only fight for the money, so let me explain it in terms you understand. I owe Milady, got it?"

"What, worked up a debt to her and got yourself indentured?"

"No! I owe everything! She saved my life. Pulled me up up when I was bleeding to death in the mud and made me hers. I was nothing when she found me. Everything I am now I owe to her!"

"Oh, Mother Goddess bless me, you're not doing this for honor's sake, are you?" I exclaimed.

"Not... Yes," she corrected herself. "For honor. For her. Now come on, we don't have time to argue."

I followed the Red Vixen's bodyguard/lunatic down the maintenance corridors, until we reached an alcove containing a safety pressure door and a sign that read, "COMMUNICATIONS NODE FOUR. AUTHORIZED PERSONELL ONLY!" It looked like it hadn't been cracked open for years.

"Well, obviously we can't be breaking station regs and tamper with this," I said. True to form, she ignored or didn't understand the sarcasm, and pulled out what I recognized as a multi-tool styled lock picking device, good for both physical and electronic deterrents. In a couple of moments she'd popped the lock. Then she opened the manual door release and pumped it several times to slide it back enough to slip inside. The noise it made as it screeched back into its alcove could have woken the dead.

"Your friend Compton probably heard that ten frames back," I noted. She lowered her hood to glare at me and pulled me into the com node.

"I'm going to tap into the communications and security network," Snarli Ali said, lowering herself into a dusty station chair. She pulled out a compad and interfaced it with the console, checking against the readouts she was pulling up on the node's flatscreens. "I need to find which dock their ship is at and whether we can sneak on board."

"Sneak on board? Are you mad?" I said. "Sorry, that was a rhetorical question. You can't sneak on board a ship. The only way in would be through the docking hatch, and that's going to guarded for certain. And even if you blasted your way through you'll intercepted by whomever is left before you could get clear of the suit lockers."

"There's at least one other way, though if either of us were much bigger it would work." She smiled in grim satisfaction. "Found what dock they're at. Looks like Able Niner."

"Oh, hurrah."

"Shut up, I'm tapping into the station's com network."

I kept quiet, watching as she brought up the station's communications network on the display. The rat's nest of links looked as patchy as the rest of the place, obviously upgraded several times and inefficiently integrated with what was there before.

Snarli let out a snort of satisfaction, as she pulled up a set of three links running from the ship at Able Niner to crew coms at various points in the station. "One those may be Compton's," she said. "If so, we might be very lucky and they won't have taken Milady onboard their ship yet."

I couldn't argue with the logic of that. "Even here, dragging an unconscious and half-naked vixen on board your ship would attract all sorts of unwanted attention from station security," I said grudgingly.

"Right. Now shut up. I need to check the signal traffic." I kept quiet, watching as she plugged in a pair of earbuds to the console, narrowed her eyes, and began scrolling through the traffic logs. After a couple of minutes she let out one of those short, useful human cuss words, yanking the buds out. "I found what has to be Compton's com, it has to most traffic back and forth between their ship, but it's all encoded."

"No surprise there," I said. "Guess it doesn't actually do you any good."

"Yes, it does. I've got his position narrowed to a mid-rent hostel on the Accommodation Deck. From there I can sniff Milady down if I have to."

"Given how nasty her perfume it, that should be easy enough." I gave her a cheery wave. "Well have fun with that."

“And what makes you think you’re not coming along?” she asked.

“A complete lack of desire to get killed rescuing someone I don’t like very much?”

She glared at me, then pulled her hood back over her head and grabbed hold of my leash. “Come on.”