Aiyela the Space Gypsy Meets Retinbour the Space Pirate Read online



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  Aiyela the Space Gypsy Meets Retinbour the Space Pirate

  By J.S. Clark

  Copyright 2012 Jesse Clark

  Table of Contents

  The Story

  About J.S. Clark

  Aiyela the Space Gypsy Meets Retinbour the Space Pirate

  The deflector screen sizzled with space dust as the ship plunged through the Belzine nebula at ninety-thousand miles an hour. Static crackled from the radio of Aiyela’s ’72 Mi-Kalat. A cup of chai tea was getting cold wedged between a well-worn copy of the latest Charlotte Emil novel, The Fraulein Gambit, and a hastily bundled ratty plum blanket. It was plum once anyway, now it was over-ripe plum with age spots that looked suspiciously like greasy finger prints.

  Shave half a light-year off your trip, he says. Get your delivery to M13 in half the time. Blah, b-blah, b-blahidy, blah. Aiyela banked hard around a huge asteroid that appeared suddenly from the rosy cloud of the nebula. Once clear, she shoved the throttle and darted between a pair of smaller asteroids. On the far side, she shot a landing cable back at the larger of the two rocks and reeled her ship to the surface. Her fingers sprinted over the control panel killing power to everything but life-support and passive sensors. A heavy throb of electromagnetic noise was coming from a cloudbank behind the huge asteroid. Aiyela directed the rear camera toward it.

  "You know, Bird," she imagined his smiling face with its small forehead as his men in the background loaded the cargo crates into her hold. "I think I should have liked to know that your shortcut ran straight through pirate space!"

  The cloud tore like fiberglass insulation, and a dark, mean-looking custom ship came through. It was like a rusty axe-head stitched together from the hulls of six or seven other ships. Judging by the ship’s radiation signature, its current engineer wasn’t worth his volume in H73-01, and—if possible—the ship was uglier than her own while still functioning.

  If she had any weapons—and a mind to fight—the pirate ship would turn her into a very short-lived, very bright light in the heavens. If she wanted to run, well, she’d be the faster, but even at a full tank she’d have to stop long before he did.

  If I can just get out of the Belzine while he’s still searching, I might be gone long enough that he can’t track me by the time he gets out. Only science frigates have sensors that can see much through this type of nebula.

  She waited till the axe-head buried itself in another cloudbank. It was her crazy luck that her ship looked enough like a dirt clod to blend with the asteroid. She re-lit the control panel's other systems and headed out. The murk was just fading into familiar black when the ship jolted, and a cable net closed over her cockpit window.

  Aiyela turned to rear view. The pirate ship was coming after her, drawing on a cable attached to the net. An electrical surge streaked down the line. Aiyela covered her head as sparks spit from every panel seam in the cockpit.

  "Multiple secondary system and primary system failures," the computer began an automatic diagnostic. At least the core was intact. "Seventeen, multi-phase fuse crystals rendered non-conductive."

  "Hey!" Aiyela sprang from her seat, "I just replaced those!" She ran the short distance from the cockpit to the engine bay and threw the master switch. Her engine couldn’t break free without tearing itself apart, but she could at least protect the remaining systems from further damage.

  Artificial gravity faded, and her feet came off the deck as the ship went quiet. Aiyela kicked over to her workbench. She wasn’t going to give up. There was no telling what her fate would be, let alone her ship's. "I’ll keep it together, Mama," she patted the Ealsurd as she floated under. She reached a clean yellow and red box—that’s right, clean—magnetically attached to the wall and separate from all the other toolboxes. She opened the latches for a moment forgetting that she was being captured by blood-lusting pirates. Before her was what looked like a screwdriver with a thick shaft and a blunt end like a magnetic pick-up. Its handle was thick, yellow and black, with a contextually sensitive control panel on the side.

  The All-Tool.

  That wasn’t its proper name. It had a much more scientific one that gineers liked to call it, but among the clan of veteran engine surgeons like herself who actually used it, this was the All-Tool. The Omni Nuanced Nano-Restructuring Interfacer, O.N.N.R.I. It was pronounced orn’ry. Yeah, gineers are the smart ones.

  If there was one tool in the bay that would catch a smart pirate’s eye it was this one. It should anyway. It was where half of lord Yasha’s pay went and a bargain at twice the price. It was also the one tool that might get her out of this mess.

  Aiyela glided down the side of the cargo bay toward the doors. Gravity was returning, or rather Aiyela was now inside the pirate ship’s gravity. The cargo hold was just aft from the engine bay forming the rump of her barely fifty-foot ship. It had the largest doors and therefore it was the safest place for an intruder to force an entrance without damaging the ship.

  Loud thunking echoed through the door, Aiyela grit her teeth, my poor hull. She’d manually released them so at least the pirates wouldn’t need to cut anything, but they wouldn’t have so easy a time on the inside.

  The thick doors began to slide apart. Red light cut a growing swath down the length of her unlit bay. Oh boy, it was really happening. Pirates! Aiyela was trying desperately not to imagine being made to walk the plank through an airlock, or being stranded on a deserted outpost, or any of the unimaginably worse fates that might befall her.

  A heavy foot rattled the deck grates as the first boarder appeared. She couldn’t make out more than a tall black figure with a short black rifle held in front, but what else did she need to see?

  Two more steps! Come on, two more steps!

  The pirate took one more step and was joined by a second.

  One more, one more!

  A grate in front of the pirates jumped from the floor. Bang, snap, pow! A pipe shifted up from its normal position beneath the floor grating, and exposed an open end to the intruders. Before they knew what hit them, they were a pair of menacing ice sculptures cool enough to decorate a fusion reactor.

  Four, three . . . Aiyela jumped from behind the barrels and ran for the door. The stream stopped right as she reached the opening, but now there was ice on the door’s rail and instead of pivoting outward to safety she skated into the edge of the door. "Ahh!" she threw up her hands to protect her face.

  Fast as she could, she dove out of the way as the stream erupted again making her rear end feel as if she’d spent an hour sitting in the snow.

  Their bay was humid and the intense cold from her coolant system filled the air with fog and dusted frost. In the red bathed fog were more pirates clad in matte black armor.

  She had to get to their engineering, or at least somewhere to hide. Aiyela got up to run, but her heel had frozen. As soon as she put it down it cracked like a vacuum-sealed rice cake. Her front foot slid forward while the other stayed put, that's when she decided then that she should have been a ballerina. "Ahh-hh-hha," she put a hand over her mouth and crawled for an open door with stairs and the only white light to be seen at the top of them.

  Aiyela was on her feet again doing a kind of penguin sprint on account of her recent splits when a pirate stepped between her and the stairs. She screamed and tried to back pedal. The pirate grabbed her by the jumpsuit, but she yanked her boot off and smashed him across the face. The pirate spun away, letting go.

  Run, run, run, run! Up the stairs! She put her head down and climbed them two and three at a time. She was almost to the door, when she bumped head first
into someone’s chest. Oh darn.

  And this time she knew it wasn’t lord Yasha. Double darn.

  Aiyela pulled back and would have fallen, but the new pirate grabbed her arm. She swung again with her boot, but he twisted her wrist until she dropped it. "Ow!"

  "That’ll be enough of that," his voice sounded like rusted bits in a sandblaster.

  When in doubt—bite.

  The pirate let go and she ran back down the stairs. There had to be maintenance access down there somewhere. Aiyela ducked into the thick reddened clouds. Along the wall, she found a panel leading to a crawlspace. She wished she had something to cover the noise of her escape, but the loudest thing in the bay was the sound of feet stepping on the iced deck plates. She thought pirates were supposed to always be yelling "Avast!" And what