Frozen Soul, and other works: Chapter 143

(BSN Shinokage, Captain’s Quarters, Interstellar Space)

“Captain, the Artemis has reported in. They have confirmed pirates setting up a tarpit trap in the lane between Cadaran and Tietera. Six ships in total, a frigate and five corvettes. Looks like they’re setting up for a strike on the relief convoy for the Bobobo Plague that has been reported there.”

“I’ll – AH! – be right theeeere!”

There was a repressed giggle at the other end. “Understood, Ma’am. Will you take care of informing the Admiral?”

Slave-Captain Inatumal tried to glare, but it was ruined by the fact that the intercom was audio only, and the way she was trying not to moan as I thrust up into her as she straddled my waist, her hips bouncing as lewdly as they could as they met my thighs. “Y-yes. I will take care of it. Inatumal out.” When the comm line was closed, the captain tried to glare down at me, and said, “Master! You could at least let me talk to my subordinates without – EEK!” Unfortunately, her words were cut off by her sister grabbing her breasts from behind and nibbling on one of her ears.

“Now, sister. Why don’t you just forget all about that, and just enjoy the master’s cock? Weren’t you the one who was so happy that he decided to ride on the Shinokage for this run, instead of taking the Raven? I do believe that you were debating on what kind of panties to wear when you welcomed him aboard, weren’t you?”

“W-well I wanted to make the proper impression!”

“You should have just done like I did. No panties, no problem.”

“I’m not a – ahh! – slut like you are!”

“Says the woman bouncing so erotically on her master’s rod. Admit it, you were hoping he would just bend you over and take you in the middle of the shuttle bay!”

I had taken the Perfect Shapeshifting route when advancing my shapeshifting abilities, but that didn’t mean the other options were forbidden to me. The sisterly banter between Aurae and Nimue came to a halt as Nimue gasped as the second phallus I’d just grown stabbed up into her, causing her to pinch hard on Aurae’s poor nipples in surprise. Both Knelfi women moaned in pleasure as I made a two-pronged assault on their luscious bodies, enjoying every bit of the twins’ undivided attention as I ravished them. I would love to say that I kept them there all day, but, well, they DID have work to get to, and the thing about twin penises is that you have double the stimulation. The next time Aurae came, it was too much for me, and I exploded within the twins, which set off Nimue as well. Both knelfi women collapsed onto me as I went back to my ‘base’ form, pleasantly relaxed from their exertions.

When she had recovered enough to speak clearly, Aurae said, “Master, reporting that we have confirmed pirate activity in the transit lanes between Cadaran and Tietra.” She giggled as Nimue smacked her backside for her cheeky tone, and then said, “Shall we reform the group?”

I gave each of the knelfi women a kiss upon the lips, and then said, “Only six ships, and none larger than a frigate? Have Shinokage, Shadowdancer, and Luvon Gilrie converge on the location to work with Artemis. The rest of the group is to converge on the convoy containing the relief supplies, and shadow them in. They are not to reveal themselves unless the convoy comes under assault.”

“As you wish, Master.”

I smiled, and said, “Now, I believe we need a shower before you report to the bridge, don’t you, girls?”

They were all too eager to agree.

(BSN Shinokage, Secondary Command Room)

Six hours after Artemis signaled her sighting pirates, Shinokage and the Assassins were finally into position, and ready to join in the assault. I watched as the countdown dropped to zero, and all four ships hit the tarpit, moving in perfect formation. We dropped our own tarpit so we could keep the rats from running away.

At my command, Captain Inatumal sent her surrender demand to the pirates. While there were female pirates, and even some female pirates who had become leaders, the vast majority of the breed were, shall we say, less than supporters of the idea of gender equality. To put it bluntly, they were rampant misogynists who enjoyed the power and control they got over the females of any ships they took, and were unwilling to put up with anything from a woman who hadn’t shown that she was willing to kill anyone who crossed her in horrible ways. Even then, they only put up with it so long as the fear remained.

Such sentiments would probably have been met with laughs and angry comments by anyone who took a superficial look at my lifestyle in the game, but I liked to think that I had established a clear stance on things. While I owned slaves, and delighted in using them, my organization had quite a fair balance of genders and races in power (OK, so mostly humans and knelfi, since we hadn’t moved into the Alliance or Imperium yet, but still). And they weren’t there because of favoritism. They were there because they had the skills for the position, and they were trustworthy.

The pirates, after being taunted with a surrender demand from a pretty knelfi woman who only had three ships to their six, lost their heads. Raven was able to pick up their ship registrations, and identified them as members of the Fenrora Clan, one of the two pirate clans that had fled the central systems of the Confederacy after our assault on Booty Bay wiped out the primary pirate haven in the region. They should have known better. They HAD to know better.

But bigots allow their hate and need for superiority to override their common sense. ESPECIALLY when the object of their prejudice is calling them out and telling them to submit. THAT pisses them off to no end, and they get a severe case of stupid that makes them go into situations that they know are all kinds of bad for them, but they do it anyway, even if it destroys them, to try and ‘own’ the people they hate. It actually made me feel slightly bad for doing this, since it was like challenging the handicapped to a race… up a flight of stairs.

But war is not fair. Sucks to be them, but that’s how it goes. The pirates turned straight at us, in what might pass as a ‘formation’ only if you applied some chaos math to it. Our only hint at the central location for any pirates in the area was what the Sarkas clan had given us. But going straight to Madrigal without confirming the location and numbers was a great way to get ourselves ambushed and destroyed. And I didn’t like getting destroyed.

So we were going with the slightly more difficult method of trying to ensure that someone with authority survived to tell us what we wanted to know. If we could capture any of the ships intact enough that they could fly on their own power, well, I could think of quite a few uses for an eminently expendable warship. And the slaves would be good additions to the rising work force of the Black Star Company.

Still, I wasn’t going to give pirates a fair fight in open space. There was simply no need for it. Especially when they were stupid enough to try and close with us on straight-line trajectories. Clearly, whoever was on that frigate wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb in the box. We weren’t dealing with the cream of Fenrora’s ships. Three of the corvettes were reduced to so much floating debris as the main weapons of the Assassins obliterated them. It was like these pirates hadn’t learned a damn thing from our campaigns over the time we’d been openly kicking ass in this game.

The remaining three ships were… less than coordinated in their response. One corvette veered wildly to port, trying to avoid any projectiles that might possibly be on their path. The other began turning hard, shedding velocity as quickly as they could to try and run from our little group. That captain was probably the only one with any sense in the pirate flotilla. The captain of the frigate certainly didn’t have a clue, as I saw that they had increased speed, and sensors indicated magnetic grapplers were coming online.

Normally, I would have laughed at the idea of a frigate trying to board and take a cruiser like the Shinokage, because it was clearly a move fueled either by anger or desperation. About the only way the frigate wouldn’t get blown out of the sky was if they managed to somehow get close enough to grapple the Shinokage and could at least board her, if not take her. However, the magnetic grapplers had zero chance of catching the nonmetallic hull of my ships, so I wasn’t worried about that in the slightest.

Looking at the plot, I quickly gave out commands to my ships. “Artemis and Luvon Gilrie to pursue the runner. If he doesn’t surrender, disable him and capture. Shadowdancer, you take out the one that doesn’t know what in the hell he’s doing. Shinokage will take the frigate. First group to take their target, either by securing their surrender or boarding and capturing the ship, will earn a prize next time we hit a port where we can be sure the locals won’t try to poison us and take our ships.”

I chuckled as I killed the line. It was a fairly decent match, I thought. All three of the groups clearly out-gunned their targets, but the question was how much fight the groups would have. The frigate was clearly going to have to be disabled and taken, so I doubted Shinokage would win this. The question was which of the other pirate captains would lose their nerve first. The one doing evasive maneuvers might scare fast and fold, or they might make a fight of it, at least long enough for the runner to drag their conflict out enough before they realized they weren’t going to escape the Assassins. That one was probably going to surrender in hopes of not getting killed. Looking back at the plot before the fight started, it looked like he was deliberately using one of the destroyed ships as a screen. He, at least, knew that there wasn’t any winning this fight.

As the different groups closed, the difference in firepower, shield strength, and general toughness (not to mention regular maintenance) soon proved its worth as the pirates began trying to kill us, while we tried to take the pirates. Unfortunately for them, they were wholly insufficient for the task. A missile from Shadowdancer broke through her target’s shields, impacting the stern. Something important must have been hit, because secondary explosions rocked the ship, blowing out compartments on one deck all the way down the port side of the ship, opening them to vacuum. The runner must have been watching that, because they cut power and surrendered just half a second after Shadowdancer’s target did.

The frigate, of course, was too intent on trying to make the insolent woman who taunted him pay to realize what was going on. When the frigate’s shields fell, and the ion cannons began hitting his hull and disabling his systems, and there was still no surrender, I knew I was right, and this guy was going to need to be taken down in person, rather than just assuming he would surrender. Seeing a chance for some fun, I ordered my team to suit up and join the Shinokage’s tactical team. I hadn’t gotten to go shooting pirates in too long!

By the time the frigate was finally under control, and the last of the pirates captured or killed, we had already confirmed Sarkas’s information that the major pirate base in the sector was in Madrigal. But that just let us know that we were on the right track. Hitting the base and rooting out the pirate network here would take a little more work. However, the captain that tried to run was apparently being very helpful in an attempt to save his worthless life, and we had a location where a money-man would be meeting with a local pirate leader, one of the ones that had been in the area for a while.

We had the beginnings of a plan that was more than just ‘shoot everyone’. Not that ‘shoot everyone’ was a bad plan, but it did tend to get people all kinds of cranky when terms like ‘collateral damage’ or ‘gross negligence’ or ‘slaughter of innocents’ were thrown around. If we could just shoot the pirates without shooting bystanders, that would be much better for our image.