It was said that Harpath class starships were not designed with comfort in mind. They were the workhorse ships of a hundred starsectors, easily modified to serve as light cargo haulers, surveyships, mining rigs, anything people on the frontier needed, but lacked a more specialized ship for. Sure, the spacers serving aboard them might not appreciate the cramped living spaces, barebones industrial decor and lack of creature comforts, but they got the job done, perhaps not prettily, but definitely efficiently. Of course, it could be worse, as Zarai found to her distress, Harpath’s could be even less comfortable, when they had been converted by their pirate owners to serve as an interstellar slave ship.
Up till that point, the short, slender Altheid, with her humanoid figure, blue skin and pale, almost white hair, had been working on a Katar class ore-hauler, another working vessel, though a little more comfortable in its accommodations than the maligned Harpaths. Hauling ore was, she thought, boring, but steady work and, even on the frontier, not the sort of cargo that would attract the attention of pirates. At least she had until the ship’s alarms started going off and what had, up till that point, been an uneventful run turned into a nightmare for her and the rest of the crew.
It was, as pirate attacks went, a slick and professional job. A half dozen Colrath strike fighters had been lying in an empty transit system. Though small and too short range to be much good without a mothership to dock with nearby, with their engines off the fighters were practically invisible, at least to the basic civilian sensors an ore hauler possessed.
The first anyone aboard knew they were under attack was when the fighters, their sharp, aggressive lines painted in intimidating patterns of flames, skulls and fangs, swooped across the ship’s bridge, letting off a flurry of plasma bolts as a warning, before opening a communications channel and order their hapless victim to come to a halt, relative to the empty system’s binary stars. Glumly, the captain ordered them to comply. It wasn’t as if she had much choice. They were unarmed and too slow to run. All they could do was obey and be glad the pirates had given them the chance to surrender, instead of popping a few holes in the ship and waiting for the atmosphere to leak out.
With their prey immobilized and helpless, the small, short craft circled while their mothership, a battered old Harpath class ship, pulled out of the nebula it had been hiding in and slowly cruised over to the ore hauler. It extended a boarding tube, connecting to the captured ship. Its crew, meanwhile, were ordered to assemble at the airlock, to await the arrival of their captors. The spacers looked nervously to each other, praying their captors would be reasonable and let them go, once they had taken what they wanted.
In this, they were cruelly disappointed. What the pirates wanted was the crew and nothing would stop them from seizing their prizes. As soon as the airlock opened, a dozen armored figures rushed in, stun prods drawn. Though the ore barge’s crew put up no resistance, the pirates rushed at them, swinging their prods until Zarai and the rest of the spacers lay sprawled on the decks, unable to move.
Through the haze of pain, Zarai felt one of the pirates grab her, rolling the young woman onto her belly. Small metal rings were clamped onto her wrists and ankles, a large one went around her neck. Seizing a handful of her hair, the pirate lifted Zarai’s head from the deck and slid a bulky muzzle across her mouth. As soon as it was locked on, a small rubber bladder inside inflated, filling her mouth completely and muffling her moans as the stun effect began to wear off.
Before it did however, her hands were drawn behind her back, the rings on her wrists clanking together. To her shock, once they met, the rings wouldn’t come apart again. As her movement returned, she tested this, finding the rings would slide against each other, smoothly enough, giving her some range of movement with the shackles on, but the young woman lacked the strength to pull them apart against whatever force was holding them joined together.
Before she could test it further, the pirate picked her up, roughly, hauling Zarai to her feet. A distorted electronic voice from the pirate’s helmet growled “Get moving!” and the pirate shoved the captive woman towards the airlock. As she stumbled, her legs still weak and shaky from the stun prod, Zarai discovered the cuffs around her ankles had a similar effect.
When close together, the attraction was weak, allowing Zarai to keep her feet apart easily enough, even in her weakened state, but like an inverse magnet, the attraction somehow intensified the further away the two cuffs got. The end result was Zarai could not get her feet more than half a meter or so apart and even that was a strain. But with the pirate still barking at her to move, the captive was forced to awkwardly hobble towards the airlock, falling in line with the rest of the captured merchant crew, who likewise had their hands and feet shackled with the strange cuffs, collars around their necks and muzzles over their mouths.
Over on the pirate vessel, Zarai and the other female spacers were separated from their male crewmates. What happened to them, she never found out, but she and the baker's dozen of women were herded into a cramped, uncomfortable lift by several pirates and taken down a few decks. They emerged into what, on most ships of this class, would have been the cargo hold. That was, she supposed, still the case here, but the pirates had modified it for a certain sort of cargo.
Near the whole space was crammed with large metal boxes, stacked three or four high. Zarai might have taken them for ordinary cargo containers, until she saw how the fronts had been replaced with barred cell walls and doors that gave no privacy at all to the cells’ occupants. Nearly all she could see held at least a couple female figures. They were a mixed bunch, representing nearly every space-faring species in this part of the galaxy, and a few primitives to boot. Some still wore the tattered rags of what had once been spacer uniforms or jumpsuits, or, in the case of passengers, civilian clothes, while others were practically naked. All of the captives she could see had been fitted with the same cuffs, collars and muzzles, modified here or there for the less humanoid individuals.
Zarai and the other women from her ship were marched up a rickety staircase and onto a gantry giving access to the upper cells. They passed several cells packed with captives, miserable faces peering out at them with looks of sympathy, until they came to one that only had a few prisoners in it at the moment. After waving his stun prod at them to get those women to back away, the pirate leading Zara’s party pressed a hand to the lock on the cell door, which clicked and opened.
“In you go, ladies! You’re quarters aboard!” He said, shoving Zarai in. “All the comforts of home!” He laughed while Zarai groaned through her muzzle, regarding the handful of bare cots, far too few for the number of occupants, the spartan toilet facilities and imagined being stuck here for hours, much less days or months as some of the pirates previous victims appeared to have.
“You lot are lucky!” The pirate taunted, slamming the door shut after the last weeping girl shuffled inside. “We’ve nearly a full cargo now. Just need one or two more good prizes, then it will be time to steer for home and send you slaves to market!” Laughing, he and the other pirates turned and strode away.