Upon the bridge of the Albright, chaos reigned This was not unusual, nor was it an unusual amount of chaos. There were charts and maps and official courses designated but the standard policy of Gasocorp was to allow the captains of their ships to, essentially, follow their guts. The formal argument went something like this:
“What if they crash?”
“So?”
“What if they don’t come back with fuel?”
“If they don’t have fuel how will they come back?”
“Fair point.”
At the time it was seen as a wonderful example of boardroom strategy, and despite many, many examples of the silliness of the policy, the board of the company had never gotten around to reversing itself. In financial terms the policy didn’t hurt the company that often. Any time a big ship crashed the company cashed in on the insurance their forefathers had been smart enough, once upon a time, to take out on the ship. No one could remember what that time was, but they all enjoyed receiving the massive checks paying for totaled capital ships and decided that asking questions was (literally) asking for trouble, given that any investigator worth his salt would probably come away with the notion that the company was run with criminal negligence…a notion which each and every member of the board would admit was probably true as long as they were outside of a courtroom. There was simply too much to do that wasn’t work, and so they chose to do those things more often than they chose to do the work things. Their fathers had done the work things, and it ended the same way for each and every one of them: rotting in the ground. Or in the case of the old President: rotting in the ionosphere of a star he had personally selected. They assumed. Anyone could have chosen the star, really, as he’d been pretty out of it toward the end. And, come to think of it, they weren’t sure you could rot in the ionosphere of a star. Wouldn’t you combust? Or be preserved in the vacuum of space? Shouldn’t it be one of those options, rather than rotting? The board worried about that, but not directly. Sort of like how they worried that one day they wouldn’t receive any more checks. Digression aside, chaos reigned aboard the bridge of the Albright. Then the captain came aboard, and everything stopped.
The reason for all this sudden stopping of things was that the captain who came aboard was not the captain of the Albright. Galactically speaking, piracy is a problem, and this particular captain was a pirate captain, though she did not look particularly corporate or established. Her pants were very tight and she wore a very large scarf, for instance, and the glasses she wore were ever-so-slightly lined in purple, offsetting her carefully selected eyeshadow. The officers were officially terrified, and rightly so. She was downright entrepreneurial.
“Who runs this place?” she spat- metaphorically, obviously: this was not a person who ever spat in her life. A trembling hand materialized from the pile of bodies wrapped in a ball on the bridge’s New Couch.
“I do…”
“Want to keep running it?”
“…”
“It’s not a trick question.”
“Yes.”
“Good. I don’t want to shoot you but I would have. I’m not taking this heap of shit anywhere and someone has to.”
“What do you want?”
“The fuel coming in on that shuttle.”
“What?”
“The fuel. On that shuttle.”
“What shuttle?”
The pirate cocked her hip and put her hand on it in the most dashing fashion anyone had ever conceived. She stared deathdaggers through her purple-rimmed glasses. The man below the bodies jellied in fear, and several of the bodies which had seemed so comfortable atop him leapt off in alarm. A slim man with a very small chin approached from the other side of the bridge, hands raised.
“He knows nothing, ma’am.”
“Shocking.”
“Yes, I agree. You would like to keep the fuel?”
“No- I’m going to keep the fuel. That’s what I… . He wasn’t supposed to be this big of an idiot. I had this all planned out. It usually works.”
“I understand. Pretend you began this conversation with me. Shall I cower?”
“Ugh. No. Waste of time. Look, I’m taking the fuel and you’re taking the ship.”
“I believe that is a fair compromise.”
“They won’t be happy you got away unharmed with a ship intact.”
“I shall indicate it was his doing.” The chinless man indicated the jellying one. The pirate nodded in agreement. She was mildly impressed, and if she hadn’t believed he was the man really in charge of running the disaster wagon they were currently standing on she’d have offered him a job in her organization. But all of these people had to get home somehow.
“I guess I can’t kill him then.”
“I would prefer it if you didn’t. They shall execute him. Do not worry.”
“Fair enough.”
“What of the men on the planet?”
She had forgotten about them, which disappointed her. She didn’t often forget things. In fact she’d actually remembered just before boarding the Albright but by that point pulling back and waiting for the last shipment like she’d planned would have put cement shoes on her momentum. She had been hoping they’d have forgotten too, so she could pull that out at the last second, but now the surprise option was off the table and she went with Plan B. It probably should have been Plan A to begin with but in her experience Plan A tended to fail far more often and it was nice to have a Plan B that was easily as good as a garden variety Plan A. Anyway this Plan B was for more lucrative, and practical.
“They’re coming with me.” She wheeled on her heeled boot (which made her calves look fantastic, by the way), leaving every bechinned mouth on the bridge agape.
