Wild Thargoid Chase: Hook, Line, and Sinker
26 Feb 2021Lilly Terranova
Alyse wasn't sure how much more of this she could take. Lilly appeared to have near inexhaustible patience for the tedium of transporting tourists around the galaxy, but she was well past her limit. Weeks of ferrying rich, snotty jackasses around had pushed her beyond the limits of her patience, particularly as many of them insisted on speaking to the flight crew, a task Lilly generally delegated to Alyse on those rare occasions their new flight attendant Jackson could not pacify or otherwise deter particularly demanding passengers. What Lilly did during these largely automated flights, Alyse was not sure. She seemed to be quite absorbed in her monitors while leaving the minor course corrections and jump plotting to Alyse, and the handling of their fares' comfort to Jackson as he floated up and down the ship's access corridors, checking the passenger cabins whenever was necessary.The sheer monotony of these flights left Alyse with plenty of time to catch up on what was happening around the galaxy. Of particular interest was the evident takeover of Lakon Spaceways by Core Dynamics. Much as Alyse had no real use for the Alliance or their favored starship manufacturer, she did not particularly care for the notion of Core Dynamics, and by extension the Federation, getting its tendrils so far abroad. The last thing a company as massive as Core Dynamics needed was to straddle both sides of a conflict and make their money as the primary supplier of both militaries. While she had to admit to herself that this sort of thing was probably happening all the time, she at least hoped that it wasn't occurring at the scale this deal would represent. But it seemed to be more or less concluded, which was...troubling to say the least. If there was one thing she liked less than the Federation, it was the corporations that effectively ran it.
Taking a moment away from her perusing GalNet feeds, Alyse rather absently plotted the next jump, keeping only half an eye on the monitors. By now, she had plotted the same few jumps so many times that the whole process was practically automatic. The Nepenthe lurched forward and Alyse spared a moment to stare out into witchspace, watching the swirl of color and flickering stars. Maybe it was time to find another job. Working for Lilly was getting as bad as hauling cargo, and at least when she was hauling, she occasionally had someone interesting to talk to. Lilly, it seemed, could happily go days without uttering a word. Of course, if Alyse had her toneless digital voice, she might not have been particularly chatty either.
Next came the only bit of flying Alyse ever had to do. As the ship exited witchspace, Alyse pulled back on the yoke, veering away from the system's star and toward their destination. Sometimes she skimmed around the star, just for something to do. Unfortunately, once she'd gotten careless in her boredom, trying to thread through a coronal mass ejection, and the ship had gotten a bit hotter than the passengers would have liked. This had led to Lilly ordering her not to do so again, so she merely completed the turn and allowed the supercruise computer to take control. A few minutes later, she would align out to their exit vector, and prepare to do it all over again.
Except, at that moment, a knock rang out against the bulkhead leading into the ship proper. Lilly turned, glancing toward the hatch. The knock sounded again. Knowing that she would have to be the one to deal with it, Alyse unbuckled herself from her seat and floated clear of it, pulling herself around and kicking off the back of the chair toward the hatch. "I got it," she muttered. Just what she needed. Some angry snob who was mad they didn't stock Kamitra cigars or something. Reaching the hatch, Alyse grabbed hold of the rails along its edges, pulling herself into a more or less "standing" position facing the door. This would at least block the angry passenger from trying to enter the flight deck.
But when she pulled the door open, things happened far too quickly for her to process. On the other side of the hatch, a man in a business suit aimed a pistol at her, both feet braced against the rails under the hatch, one hand gripping the hatchway once it opened. Before Alyse could react, a shockingly powerful tug sent her spinning backward into a nearby console, knocking the breath from her when her back slammed into the hard metal. As she floated away from the console rather helplessly, she had just enough time to see Lilly, having magnetized her flight suit's boots, kick the man's feet from their anchor points and dodge sideways as he fired. No longer braced against the hatch, the gunshot sent the man floating down the hallway and the round pinged harmlessly off the canopy's interior over Lilly's shoulder.
Heads began poking out of passenger cabins, some of the rich idiots not knowing gunfire by its sound. Jackson came racing around a corner, pulling himself along a crew line, nearly venturing into the gunman's line of fire.
"JACKSON. GET. BACK." Lilly's digitized voice exploded among the confused muttering from the passengers, louder it seemed than the gunshot that preceded it. Shocked, Jackson pulled himself into a nearby crew station, waving the passengers back into their cabins. Some complied.
Perhaps sensing that he had missed his opportunity, the gunman opened fire again, sending several rounds down the corridor and only accelerating his trip down it. Lilly swung the hatch back into place, pressing her shoulder to it rather than latching it, so that the rounds did not damage any controls or instrumentation in the cockpit. In the seconds she held the hatch closed, Lilly produced a pistol from a nearby compartment. Her right eye was flickering slightly, and Alyse could only assume that her rapid, seemingly incautious flinging of the hatch open must be explained by her cybernetics being connected to the ship's internal cameras, so she could be certain she wasn't exposing herself to fire.
Whether Alyse was correct in her belief or not, Lilly flung herself down the passage, disengaging her magnetic clamps as Alyse finally floated into reach of a handhold. Pulling herself upright, she heard a single gunshot followed by a cry of pain. There at the end of the corridor, Lilly stood, now magnetically attached to the ceiling, her weapon pointed at the gunman, whose blood floated around him, slowly congealing into writhing, oblong spheres as it leaked from a wound in his shoulder. As his gun floated out of his limp hand, Lilly plucked it from the air and, without turning, spoke to Alyse.
"Return us to the nearest dock immediately. Do not inform station security of the incident," she said, her voice at a more normal volume now. "I will speak with our intruder."
After a moment of examining the man's weapon, Lilly dropped it into a nearby trash chute before attaching her weapon to one of the magnetic anchor points on her flight suit. This done, she grabbed the intruder about the collar and hauled him down the accessway, toward the small, empty passenger cabin in the ship's rear compartment. Alyse, unsure of what else to do, sealed the hatch to the flight deck and made her way back to her seat, settling in and plotting a course to a nearby orbis station, not without a certain degree of excitement, now that the momentary fear at the prospect of imminent murder had passed. Lilly was going to have a few words with the hitman about who hired him, and she, Alyse, was going to get to kick all these rich jerks off the ship and hopefully never fly passengers anywhere again.