Kasha’s least favourite choice: whether to be boarded, or risk destruction. The pirate clipper chasing them was small, lethal, and already on the bottom of their scopes—much faster than her clunky cargo ship. They couldn’t be outrun. They knew it, she knew it. Which meant outmanoeuvring them—mentally.
Her pilot, Michigan, had his fingers poised over the comm, waiting for her tiniest of nods. She gave it, taking a deep breath as he tapped the console. “Attention, unidentified vessel.” Unidentified like hell. She knew they were pirates, they knew she knew they were pirates, but there was an odd formality to uphold when one was smuggling through the Belt. “This is the cargo ship Clemenestra, out of Olympia City, Mars. Do you require assistance of some kind?” Keeping her voice free of scorn required effort, but gave her a solid sense of pride.
“Attention, Culemnstra,” returned the pirate captain; over the comm he sounded older, male. And none too bright neither, judging from the way he mispronounced their ship’s name. “Prepare to be boarded, or we will fire upon you.”
Kasha and Michigan exchanged glances; again, the tiniest of nods. “We hear you, Captain,” she said, adding a fake quaver into her voice. “We don’t want any trouble. We’re unsealing the airlock to the cargo bay. You take whatever you want. Just let us go in peace.”
A long silence; presumably their new, slow friend was suspicious or confused by such an easy agreement. Michigan flicked the comm to silent, rolling his eyes. “You should have bargained more.”
Kasha shrugged. Thunks and clangs reverberated through the hull as the clipper docked alongside. A long scraping sound caused both to wince. Poor Clemmie.
“Bastards,” Michigan muttered, low, not that he ever spoke much higher. He reached down to a cubby underneath the console, pulled something free, and then set three controls into a blinking mode. He pushed his chair back on its rails, making a screeching sound not unlike the hull, and unbuckled the safety straps, leaving them dangling. “Guess we better go greet ’em.” He stomped out of the cabin, each footstep an effort to detach the magnetic sole of his boot from the plating, his hair waving around his head like loose cables.
Kasha merely grunted in response, her own chair resisting being slid back on its rails. I swear to the Sun I am getting too old for this. But what other choice did she have? Did either of them have? Drifting along the hallway’s hand-ropes, she followed her pilot to the cargo hold.
Both wearing suitably practised and timid faces, Kasha opened the airlock to the cargo hold, activating her boots while Michigan hung back to initialize the grav-plating; as the machinery whirred into life, his hair fell back around his shoulders. Across the cargo hold, the airlock initialized, cycling from red to yellow to green, as four pirates jumbled out, guns drawn. They were all middle-aged and had clearly seen better days: patchwork armour, scars, hungry expressions. Before the door finished opening, Kasha had them pegged as starting in the Oort as genuine pilgrims before running out of fuel and prayers, and knew what the play should be. A quick glance to Michigan confirmed that he’d made the assessment too.
Their hands went up. “We don’t want any trouble,” they said, in unison.
“You take whatever you want and we’ll be on our way,” Kasha added, hoping the quaver in her voice sold their fear.
The less-stupid-looking pilgrim-pirate—a slim distinction; they all seemed a few hammers short of a toolkit—narrowed beady eyes, frankly assessing both the crew and the small, cramped cargo hold. He gestured with his gun towards the stowed cargo boxes behind thick protective webbing. “What are you hauling?”
Kasha loudly cleared her throat, as if it was dry. “Supplies for Callisto Hospice.”
“Medical supplies?” one of the younger grunts asked, excited, his gun swinging around right at her.
“Do we look like the kind of ship that would carry medical supplies?” Playing fearful or not, condescension coloured Michigan’s reply, causing Kasha to inwardly wince.
It wasn’t the only thing that coloured—the grunt flushed an angry red and brought his gun to bear on the pilot instead. “I don’t like your tone!” He began to say something else, but the leader—the less-stupid one—placed his hand on the barrel to lower it.
“We don’t aim to get anyone hurt,” he said, looking Kasha in the eye, captain-to-captain. He sounded like he meant it, too; still the near side of ‘pilgrim’, then. “You two, go open up those crates, see what they’re carrying.”
Kasha and Michigan stood by, hands raised, while the religious-travellers-turned-thugs pried open a few cases near the front, revealing shiny metal homunculi. “Scrubbing bots!” One of the younger pilgrim-pirates spat in disgust, the sputum splatting on the deck-plating. “That’s it, that’s all I got. What you got, Liu?”
The other thug in the back responded by kicking his crate over. Out spilled stuffed animals, of a plasticky and colourful variety. He held one up for review, a wall-eyed teddy in a shade of brown best described—among better company—as ‘unpleasant’. “Toys! Bots and shitty toys! What the fuck kind of cargo is this?”
“It’s for Callisto Hospice,” Kasha repeated quietly, maintaining her rapport with the leader. He was the one to watch, to negotiate with. “Donated by the good citizens of Olympia for the Hospice’s Christmas toy drive.”
“I didn’t know those Outer heathens celebrated our Lord’s birth,” said the remaining thug next to the leader, his voice tinged with doubt.
“The Hospice is run by nuns,” Michigan intoned.
“It’s for sick children,” Kasha added.
The comments caused deep furrowing of brows among the grunts. “We can’t steal from nuns, Reverend,” one whispered. The others nodded.
The Reverend—the pirate captain—whatever he was—crouched to examine one of the open crates, tipping the scrubbers out onto the gravitized floor. He carefully ran his hands along the inside, feeling for a catch, or a snag, or anything out of the ordinary.
Perhaps he wasn’t as stupid as Kasha had presumed.
When his search revealed nothing, he gestured for one of the stuffed animals. A grunt passed him a garish blue unicorn. Unclipping a utility blade hanging from his belt, he gutted the toy, turning it inside out, polyester stuffing drifting to the floor like a heavy cloud.
He clipped the knife back and looked up at Kasha. “This is a piss-poor cargo haul.”
“We take the jobs we can get.” She gave a tiny shrug, arms still raised. “You know as well as we do how bad times are.”
He grunted in response, kicking one of the bots with the toe of his boot. His unmagnetized boot, Kasha noted. Sloppy. Bound for Earth with how long still to go? And already dreaming of the well.
“What about them?” one of the grunts said, with a head nod towards the captives. “We could sell ’em on Mercury.”
“Nah,” one of the others replied. “Now that Praha’s dropped their prices, even slaves aren’t worth nothing on Mercury no more. Cost us more in fuel to haul ’em. Reverend, what do you say we do?”
“We’ll take the haul anyway and blow the ship,” their leader replied, already bored, leaning towards the airlock in his readiness to be finished with his business on the Clemenestra.
Michigan lunged.
It wasn’t a great lunge, as lunges go, merely an opportunistic one. His shoulder collided with the Reverend, and they both tumbled to the ground.
At that moment, Kasha slapped the blinking display on the door panel behind her.
The lights on the panel stopped blinking and the local gravity stopped gravitating.
Her boots held her to the floor, as did Michigan’s; now braced, he gave the Reverend a hard shove, the older man getting tossed into the air. All three thugs drifted, their own flailing pushing them further from the floor while they swore the vengeance of their god.
Glad to note that not even these air-wasters were stupid enough to fire their guns in zero-gee, Kasha straightened up, dusting off her hands. “I hope now, Reverend, that you can see we’re not going to make this as easy for you as you thought. Believe me when I say you have no idea the booby-traps in this hold alone, never mind the rest of the ship. You’re stuck long-haul and turned to piracy—you’re survivors and we respect that. But we don’t want any trouble and you don’t want any trouble. So we’ll give you the bots and shove you into the airlock, and you can go your way and we’ll go ours. Sound good?”
Michigan hauled himself to his feet, scowling at the drifting Reverend near the ceiling. “Deal?” he prompted. The pirate leader, his foot caught in cargo webbing, gun floating uselessly out of reach, growled an affirmative. “Good.”
Kasha unslung the crates holding the scrubber bots, leaving them untethered. “See? All yours.” She mimed walking. “We give these to you, you go, we go. Understand?”
Michigan flashed her a look—stop antagonizing them—and she replied with the tiniest shrug. No.
With a sigh of exasperation, Michigan clunked through the cargo hold door, Kasha on his heels. It ground slowly shut behind them, the thick steel more than a match for the pea shooters the pirates had. Hopefully they’d realize that, stick with the easy deal, and leave.
At the sound of the clunking lock, Michigan reactivated the grav-plating in the cargo hold, noting with smug satisfaction the thuds and curses as he did so. Kasha clicked on a vid and tuned to the hold’s camera. Both held their breaths.
The pirates spent a moment inaudibly deliberating over the scrubbers, only to leave, empty-handed except for their guns, clanking through the airlock.
Michigan exhaled, then ran to the cockpit as fast as he could, with his boots fighting every step.
Kasha remained, watching closely to make sure they didn’t plant or leave anything on their way out. For a split second she was sure that the Reverend looked right at the camera, as though he knew she was there, but then he too disappeared through the airlock. Fucking pilgrims. If I had a gram for every one of ’em that jettisons their morals at the first sign of trouble—
“They’re disengaging.” Michigan’s voice crackled over the comm. “I can’t detect any weapons charging but I say we get out of here.”
“Sounds like a plan.” The airlock indicator flashed green and she opened the cargo door, the Clemmie rattling under her feet as its engines roared into life. “Are they pursuing?”
“Nope,” he replied, tinny from the distance. “They’ve set a slow course towards Earth.”
She snorted. “Of course they have. Fucking pilgrims. Hope the Haudenosaunee blast them from orbit.” She peered around the bay. “Look at my nice clean stock! Scattered all over the place.” She crouched to pick up the shit-coloured, wall-eyed teddy bear. “Oh well. Give me something to do later on, I suppose.”
Back in the cockpit, she wedged the ugly plush bear into a space between two pipes. Its glassy eyes stared vacantly in two different directions.
“I can’t believe they didn’t take the scrubbers.” Michigan tied his black hair back into a ponytail. His “you need some help?” was muffled by the elastic between his teeth.
Kasha was trying to scrape her chair back into position. It squealed and protested, but eventually she was up to the console and comfortable and her safeties clicked tight around her. “Lousy sunburnt chair.”
“Should grease it.”
“Should do a lot of things.” Her fingers played across the console. “They’re still moving away from us. Probably still hoping to land on Earth. Morons.”
He shrugged, his hands now free to make his own console adjustments. “Sending dispatch to the Sentries now. Report and complaint sent; automatic reply received—annnnd… engaging beacon.”
A small red light overhead began to blink.
Kasha smiled, leaning back and lacing her fingers behind her head. “So you did get it on him.”
Michigan grinned in return, his nose wrinkling. “It’s in his jacket pocket.”
“Nice work.” A different light flashed and Kasha checked the read-out. “Ah—a Colonel Jefferies is responding.”
“Oh, fuck no, not him.”
“He’s not that bad.”
“Only because you’re not his type.”
Kasha snorted in sympathy. “Makes up for all the times the Station’s mechanics have tried their luck on me.”
“I suppose. Sending beacon signal and projected co-ordinates… oh, would you look at that: ‘The Sentries are grateful for our assistance in this matter, and thank us for helping to maintain the peace and security of the Belt’.” He thought for a moment. “You know, if there’s a bounty on those grav-fed morons, we might just end up getting paid twice for this job.”
Kasha broke into a wide grin. “I love it when that happens.”
© 2026 Victoria Feistner
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