“Why is it everytime someone in Ops thinks they see a blip on their screen we have to waste hours freezing our butts off checking it out?” Kessia grumbled from the copilot’s seat. She was a tall, stocky woman in her 20’s, her dirty blonde hair cut short, spacer style. She wore a baggy green-grey jumpsuit, stitched on the front, just above the swell of the young woman’s breasts with a patch showing the logo of the Transstellar Mining Conglomerate.
“Because TMC are too cheap to spring for a proper network of monitoring satellites.” The woman in the pilot’s seat beside her replied. Shaan was of similar height, but with a more slender build. She wore her dark hair long, but as usual when one might need to don a helmet in a hurry it was tied back out of the way in a tight bun. Thumbing the shuttle’s communicator on, she reported in: “This is Shuttle 6, we’ve reached the specified coordinates. No sign of the anomaly reported. Beginning our sensor sweep…” Beside her, Kessia hit a few switches starting up the shuttle’s active scanners.
On screen, the two could see a display of the system they were currently in. Orrontes IV was a young stellar system, the cloud of dust and orbiting rocks not yet coalesced into protoplanets. One large icon glowed in the center of the largest cluster, representing TMC’s Outpost 832. Buzzing around it, like flies around a waste receptacle were a cloud of smaller icons representing the other shuttles, mining rigs, ore haulers and other support craft.
Filling the rest of the screen were blank blocky shapes, representing the asteroids and clouds of static representing smaller space dust and debris. The system had a fortune in ores bound up in those asteroids. Many of blocks were tagged with sensor buoys, designating them for eventual processing.
Unfortunately, all of that rock and metal played havoc with sensors and the erratic orbits of the smaller debris meant stationary satellites had to be repaired or replaced frequently, the reason why corporate had yet to shell out of the sort of sensor nets that were usually standard out in frontier systems like this, keeping an eye out for pirates, smugglers, slavers or worse. Which of course meant anytime the station’s sensors thought they saw something out amongst the asteroids, they had to send out one of the mining shuttles to take a closer look.
No one liked the duty. The ever changing fields of rocks made autopilot too risky so they had to fly by manual the whole way. And the shuttles were ancient, long due for a replacement the penny pinchers back on Earth wouldn’t authorize. They were slow, the scanners took forever to do a proper sweep and the life support systems couldn’t keep the cockpit tolerably warm, nor do anything the peculiar odor left by generations of miners cooped up in them for long shifts after grabbing a meal from the station’s galley. The fact no one ever found anything just added an additional layer of pointlessness to the whole thing.
For over an hour, the shuttle hung in space, occasionally adjusting its position whenever one of the closer space rocks drifted a little too close. Meanwhile, the sensors steadily, tedious, scanned space, moving section by section. On screen, the shapes flickered and shifted as the computer updated the new orbits of certain asteroids that had drifted or been knocked about since the last sensor sweep.
“Hey! We’ve got something…” Kessia said, astonished. She pointed to the screen. A small, flashing icon marked the anomaly, hanging in space not too far away, at least by interplanetary distances. It was partly obscured by a cluster of particularly iron rich asteroids, whose combined magnetic field were interfering with the sensors. At Kessia’s instructions, Shaan maneuvered the shuttle to get a better angle while the young woman angled the active sensors.
“It’s dense, whatever it is. Unusually pure too…” Kessia said, watching as the data was slowly refined. On screen, the object resolved itself from a vague, indistinct blob into the regular, curved lines of another ship. Warning icons flashed as the sensors picked up energy readings from reactions, engines, and weapons…
“Let’s get out of here!” Shaan said, pulling hard on the stick and gunning the shuttles anemic engines. At the same time, Kessia reached for the radio, hoping to get off a distress signal to the station. They were both too late. A bolt of crackling energy erupted from a gunport on the mysterious ship. It enveloped the tiny shuttle, instantly overloading all of its system…
***
Captain Jar’Takan of the Raider-class War Saucer Hunter’s Claw watched from his position at the back of the Number 3 Hanger as the ship’s gravitic grappler pulled the small shuttle in. The tiny craft was dark, all of its system hopelessly friend by a blast from icon cannons designed for much bigger prey.
The captain, like all his crew, stood roughly a meter in height. His skin, what was visible outside the silver jumpsuit he wore, mainly his hands and large, round head, was green and completely smooth. He had two large, black eyes and a wide, narrow mouth. Between them as only the faintest ridge above the twin slits of a nose. At his temples, a pair of short, slender antenna twitched impatiently. The four long fingers of his right hand drummed on one leg as the shuttle was set on the deck. It seemed a paltry prize for three weeks lurking through asteroids trying to get close to the mining station, but if it had managed to get off a distress beacon before they disabled it, it would be the pirate’s only consolation for all their efforts.
As the shuttle settled down on the metal deck with a dull thud, a mob of pirate techs descended, looking to strip the captured craft of anything vaguely useful. Not that Jar’Takan expected there to be much from so old and battered a craft. When they had finished, he’d order it tossed back out into space to give his gunnery crews a second round of target practice.
Then, as the techs cracked open the cockpit with a slight hiss of equalizing atmospheres, he saw he’d been wrong. There definitely was something to be had from the unprepossessing craft…
The blast which had disabled the shuttle’s other systems had also taken out its life support and inertial dampeners. The former was not so much of a problem. The cockpit held enough air and heat to last its two occupants several hours, though far from comfortably. The lack of dampeners had been a more serious matter. When the pirate’s grappler had seized hold of their stricken ship and pulled it closer, the sudden g-forces of the uncompensated acceleration had instantly knocked out both women.
Excited chatter rose up from the pirates as they carefully extracted the two unconscious women from the cockpit and saw they were still alive. Coming over to see what the fuss was, Jar’Takan found his mouth opening in a wide, toothy grin. Like many of his race, he found humans, their females anyway, exotically beautiful; tall, long-legged, curvy and possessed of wondrous breasts the females of his own races sadly couldn’t compare to. And these two were certainly fine specimens of the female form…
Excitedly, the pirates began to paw at the limp figures lying on the decks. Hands unzipped jumpsuits and began to remove their clothes. They would have gone further, but the Captain barked an order. “Enough! Fetch binders and muzzles!” A few of the lower ratings slunk off to fetch the requested items. Meanwhile, refreshed by the rich atmosphere of their captors’ ship, the two females started coming too.
“Wha-what’s going on? What did you do with my clothes? Let go of me!” The one with the short, golden hair exclaimed, or so Jar’Takan’s translator informed him. She had sat up, arms immediately going to cover her naked chest as she found herself suddenly naked. A couple of the techs had stepped forward and seized her arms, pulling them away so they could continue to ogle her perky tits.
She struggled, ripping one arm free and knocking the pirate aside with a slug the Captain had to give a grudging respect for, even though it wouldn’t do to give a prisoner the idea she could hit her captors at will. He waved forward the ratings who had returned with the restraints. The blonde female continued to fight and struggle, but soon her hands were locked safely behind her back in the metal binders, her protests muffled by the muzzle which was locked over her mouth.
In response to her frantic grunts and moans, the second female started to stir. Her response was much the same, initial disbelief, followed by embarrassment at finding herself naked, surrounded by ogling aliens, and anger and frustrations as she was restrained the same as her copilot.
As the captain’s orders, the two humans were hauled to their feet. A couple pirates fetched electro-prods, commonly used to keep captives in line. “Take them to the holding cells.” He ordered, “Soon they’ll learn respect for their new masters!” The females yelped as prods were applied to their naked backsides. Soon, though, they got the idea and trudged off to captivity.
Watching them go with every sign of pleasure, the captain ordered one of the techs, “Go over the shuttle’s computer and do a complete data dump. Find out if these two got off a message before they were disabled. If not, the station, and all those aboard, will soon be ours!”