Pirate ships.
“Do you think they’re vacating the station?” Tina asked. Was that what this dock closure was about?
“No, that’s not what I mean. Look,” Evelle said.
The list on one of the screens had changed. These were cargo ships, mostly idling in dock at fifteen to twenty percent readiness.
Except one line said, “SF Manila. Readiness one hundred and five percent.”
“We have to hurry,” Aliz said.
But how? There were too many people in this hall. They needed to cross the hall, and now something was happening: a group of pirate guards came out of the same passage where Evelle and the other crew from the Manila had been led away. They were followed by a group of people.
They were all men. They were dressed in the same grey station suits. Each one had a number painted on their chest pocket.
The men all wore the same blank expression. They were human, but several showed mottled patches on their skin.
They marched in neat formation across the hall over a path cleared by the pirate guards. The lift doors opened and about twenty of them went in.
Loading.
What was the bet that this was the cargo being loaded? Mindless soldiers. Cannon fodder being sent off to war?
And all this was happening while the Manila was getting dangerously overheated, a time bomb ticking inexorably towards a catastrophic ending. Why had no one properly disengaged the engines? Was this done on purpose? Were the pirates unable to stop the process?
Then Margot said, “No.” She stared, horrified, at another group of prisoners being led into the hall.
“Those are Manila crew,” Evelle said.
The men all still had healthy skin, but their eyes held an eerily distant expression.
“They’ve been sedated,” Evelle said.
“That’s disgusting,” Aliz said.
Next to Tina, two women struggled to hold back one of the male crewmembers they had rescued. His face was sweaty and he opened and closed his mouth as if he wanted to call out, but no sound came out.
He yanked himself free from the women and lunged to the path through the crowd. A pirate soldier stood there and noticed the attack from within the crowd too late.
The crewmember grabbed hold of the pirate’s weapon, a Fireseed model. Before the pirate could react, he had pulled the weapon free, turned it on, aimed and—
“No, don’t!” Tina called out.
But it was already too late.
The crackling beam hit the pirate. He froze. A shudder went through his body. He stood there, with a surprised expression on his face, for what seemed like a long time. And then a volley of crackling lightning beams flew from his skin, hitting bystanders. People screamed and tried to run away, but there was nowhere to run.
In the throng of panicked people, Tina was pushed against the people behind her, who themselves were pushed against the wall.
The crackling light also hit other mutant pirates, who spread the lightning further through the hall, to other people and other pirates.
Pandemonium broke out in the hall. People tried to make for the couple of escape routes. The lift, the passage to the right, the passage across from where Tina stood that led into the docks.
The pirate guards formed a wall around the station director.
Tina was left with Evelle, Aliz and Margot, two other women and two rescued men. The man who had fired the gun wasn’t one of them. That man was likely to have been swooped on by pirates.
One of the women had been hit, and she clutched her arm.
“Come on, we have to go,” Aliz said. “We need to get to the ship.”
The dock status screen cycled through the list of docked ships, oblivious to the panic, showing the Manila at one hundred and six percent readiness.
Another load of new soldiers had arrived upon the chaos. They stood bunched together in a group, with the pirate at the front looking visibly bewildered on how he was going to get to the lift.
Onlookers were shouting at the new soldiers. Many of those men only displayed the beginnings of mottled skin, and they retained their human features.
The pirate guard frantically tried to keep the onlookers away, but several people from the crowd were trying to pull the soldiers out of their formation. Tina guessed these men were some of the missing locals.
“We can’t get out!” Aliz called over the yelling and shouting.
Her eyes were wide, her face pale and sheened with sweat. Tina couldn’t imagine what it was like to be paired with a ship and feel its distress.
“This way!” Evelle led them through the crowd.
They dodged fistfights, arguments, jostlings. But at the exit that led to the Manila’s position stood a group of pirates.
Tina stuck her hand in the pocket of her jacket and grabbed a couple of rivets. She put most of them in her breast pocket, but kept one, placing it against the elastic of the door seal catapult. She pulled.
And pulled and pulled as hard as the could.
Then she released the elastic.
The rivet flew over the heads of the crowd. It missed a pirate’s shoulder by a hair’s width and hit the metal wall next to him with a sharp thwack.
The man turned around, presumably saw the projectile, and shouted, pointing across the crowd, roughly in Tina’s direction.
Tina pulled out another rivet. This time, she aimed for the light in the ceiling.
The rivet hit the light cover with a thwack that was audible over the shouting. The light shattered, spraying shards of glass everywhere.
Then she aimed at the lift panel and broke the screen with a shower of sparks.
Next to her, Margot was doing the same, hitting a pirate guard in the face. He searched the crowd for the origin of the projectile.
The crowd surged back and forth.
A man who looked like a private merchant yelled, “Let us go to our ships.”
“Yeah. No reason to keep us here.”
Zia Partlow was wrestling with the wrecked lift screen, trying
