Lord Admiral S’Cipio sat silently at his command chair aboard the CDD Little Bruce and willed his crew to be quiet. They obeyed. Even Captain Selot, nominal commander of this vessel, standing behind the command chair and shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to the other, kept silence. Captain Selot was not happy about giving up command to the Lord Admiral. No captain ever was, but S’Cipio did not care. He wanted this ship and so he took it. Being a member of the Tri-Bruce commission and thus one-third of the Gorn government was usually more work than it was worth, but it did sometimes come with its advantages.
The only sound on the bridge was the rhythmic tapping of S’Cipio’s finger claws on the sword he rested across his lap. The sound made the bridge crew nervous, but then everything about this mission made them nervous. They were not used to Gorn officers carrying swords on the bridge. They were not used to Lord Admirals taking over their command destroyer for anti-piracy duty. And most especially, they were not used to the orders that S’Cipio had been giving them for the last few days. Again, S’Cipio did not care.
After the war, piracy had gotten out of hand. Let the other Great Powers worry over their neighbors, thought S’Cipio. What was the point? Their neighbors were as shattered as they were and would cause no trouble for quite some time. Worrying over your neighbors was nothing but paranoid plotting for the next war; and as every Gorn knew, starting a war was insane. What mattered was *home*. The word barely translated to other launguages. Every Gorn was territorial to a fault and had a strong sense of this word. Each would sacrifice his life to prevent the loss of one inch of *home*. Piracy would not be tolerated. Piracy was the worst sort of invasion. It came not from the outside, not from someone who thought to match brawn with you to decide who could live where. No, piracy came from the inside. Piracy came from vermin who set up their sunlamps in your home and then sought to charge you rent for letting you stay.
Let the other empires worry over the next war. The Gorn always hoped to sit out war anyway. S’Cipio felt no guilt over pulling front line units, like the Little Bruce, away from the border and bringing them back home for anti-pirate duty.
“Communicationssss,” hissed S’Cipio, finally ceasing the sword tapping that had been driving his crew up the wall. “Statusss?”
“The freighter iss still calling for help, ssir” answered the young officer. “They are down to two hoursss life support left and are beginning to sssound frantic. They have alssso ssswitched their distress call to a broadband channel.”
“Ahh!” S’Cipio’s mouth dropped open in the Gorn version of a laugh, which let the world know that he was a very happy lizard. He began tapping the sword with his fingerclaws again. The entire bridge crew winced at the noise. “It won’t be long now. Put the message onssscreen”
A disheveled Rigellian appeared on the main viewscreen, leaning into the camera. Fire raged behind him. “This is captain Jarret, of the independent Freighter Molly’s Choice, three days out of Cestus. We were attacked by an unknown ship and our engines and life support are out. I repeat, our engines and life support are out. We got off a good volley and seem to have driven off the attacker, but we are dying here. Any vessel, please respond. I repeat: any vessel, please respond!”
The message then repeated. S’Cipio nodded. Captain Jarret must indeed be getting desperate to have switched to a broadband channel. He certainly knew the most likely vessel to hear this transmission was the very vessel that had attacked him. Still, when you couldn’t breath, any ship was a welcome sight.
S’Treleg, the Lord Admiral’s adjutant, began twitching just as restlessly as was Captain Selot. “Ssshouldn’t we help them, Lord Admiral?”
“Not just yet.”
“But the Rigelliansss are alliesss!” worried S’Treleg, always a stickler for protocol.
“Allies help one another,” agreed S’Cipio, “and the Rigelliansss are helping us now.”
Captain Selot could remain silent no longer. “Let usss hope they are not forced to help usss for more than another two hoursss." S’Treleg clearly agreed and began to nervously dry wash his hands.
“We will wait a bit longer,” stated S’Cipio calmly, tapping the sword blade with his finger claws again for emphasis. Had he not brought a complement of his own marines aboard then S’Cipio was certain that the crew would be muttering about mutiny, regardless of whether or not their unexpected commander was a member of the Tri-Bruce commission. But the marines are here, thought S’Cipio, and the crew stays in line. Gorn did not suffer betrayal easily, which, ironically, made the crew consider betraying him now. S’Cipio had known he would need the marines for internal security as well their normal job.
Little Bruce did not have to wait long.
The sleek, sharklike form of the Heavy Battle Raider Gaijin’s Folly dropped out of warp and simultaneously performed an emergency deceleration bare inches from Molly’s Choice. Her transporters were energized and her grapples were deploying before her image even resolved in the scanners of the Little Bruce. It was a maneuver only a master could perform, and had made the Gaijin’s Folly feared and famous throughout all Gorn space.
“Enemy ssship!” squawked the helm officer, belatedly stating the obvious.
“Yessssss!” hissed S’Cipio in triumph. For month’s this ship had frustrated the Gorn police and navy both, but now her name would carry a new irony.
“Ssshields up, sir?” asked Captain Selot, still nervous. The Little Bruce sat motionless a bare 350,000 km away from the Molly’s Choice, powered down and with engines idled. Space was big. She had sat like that for many hours. She would be virtually impossible to find without a painstaking and careful search. She would need time to come up to speed, however, and she would not have been able to catch Gaijin’s Folly even on her best day. The pirate ship had proven this during many escapes.
“Not yet, captain. We must sssit quietly until they are fully engaged. We must be able to close and cripple them before they can disssentangle themselves from their prey, elssse they will slip away again.”
And sit they did. The pirate’s marines stormed aboard the hapless freighter, and it was not until they returned the message that the ship was theirs that the Little Bruce began inching forward. Flush with their victory, the pirates never saw her coming. Since she fired her torpedoes while still on passive sensors, the pirates didn’t even know they had been shot at until the full salvo of plasma smashed into their unshielded hull. Gorn marines stormed aboard as active sensors came online to guide non-lethal phasers. After that, it was a quick fight.
With the pirate ship out of the way, S’Cipio then ordered the science officer to begin deep scans. He had no intention of repeating the pirate’s mistake. Only then did he turn his attention to the freighter. Rigellian life signs were quite different from human, and thus it was an easy matter to pick out the Syndicate pirates and beam them straight into the brig. They may not have even known that their ship was already captured. Unless the Rigellian crew had put up a struggle during the pirate boarding action, and men two hours from suffocation rarely did, the freighter crew had never been in any real danger. Not that they had known that.
They were not relieved when S’Cipio put through a call offering assistance. “Captain Jarret,” he began, in his most friendly tones. “I underssstand you are low on air. I shall have my engineersss beamed aboard to effect repairsss of your life support. You and your crew may spend the intervening time in our mossst comfortable quarters, where you may breathe more easssily. Then we ssshall be glad to offer you a tow home.”
“You bastard!” answered the Rigellian. “You are the one that attacked us! The only reason I didn’t recognize you is that we never thought to compare our scans to those of a bloody Gorn warship!”
S’Cipio nodded his admission. “Yessss, captain, it wasss I who crippled you. You ssshall be compensated.”
“Compensate this!” screamed Captain Jarret, making a rude gesture. “What the hell do you mean using me for bait like that? I thought we were supposed to be friends!”
“And friendsss we are, captain. You have helped me rid the Gorn Confederation of an infamousss pirate threat, and now I am going to help you make your profit. What more could any friend do?”
Captain Jarret screamed and cursed for a while longer, but in the end he accepted the Gorn offer of help. Men two hours from suffocation could do little else. Warlock would simply have blasted the freighter to prevent witnesses, thought S’Cipio. But I am not that far gone. Only later did he begrudgingly add the last word, yet. Was it the brutal Syndicate pirates doing this to him, or his wife? This question filled the court back home in the ancient Gorn capital. S’Cipio feared either answer.
Time to finish it. S’Cipio hefted his sword, rose from the command chair, and ordered S’Treleg and Selot to follow him to the brig. This was the part he both hated and relished.
The surviving Syndicate prisoners consisted of six officers and 56 crew. Most of these had been beamed from the Molly’s Choice. Like the Romulans, the Syndicate were notorious for dying before surrendering.
Piracy was a capital offense in Gorn space and required only three reliable witnesses for a conviction. S’Cipio, S’Treleg, and Selot filled this requirement nicely, and thus within five minutes of their arrival at the brig all the Syndicate crew were bundled into an airlock and flushed into space. All the Gorn watched impassively from a viewport as the bodies exploded from decompression.
“You’re a cold-blooded bastard!” screamed the only non-Asian Syndicate officer.
S’Cipio merely wrinkled a brow ridge. “I am reptilian,” he answered. “Of courssse I am cold-blooded!” Only within the confines of his own skull did he add, Gods preserve my eggs, what have I become?
Then he hefted the marred sword above his head and bellowed out his titles in his loudest hiss, “I am the Lord Admiral S’Cipio, Member of the Tri-Bruce Commission, Gorn Dragon Templar, Knight of the Order of Wyvern, Hero of the Day of Despair, Architect of the Circle of Iron, and Protector of the Inner Marches. You see the marks of my victories over your filth!”
The pirates went berserk, as they always did when he showed them the sword. He had taken it from the captain’s quarters of the first pirate ship he’d destroyed when he began his crusade last year. The captain had kept screaming something unintelligible in the sing-song, high-pitched chirping they called Japanese and trying to take it back, until S’Cipio had been forced to snap his neck. One of the words he’d used most often had sounded like “Tanaka”, and S’Cipio had then begun noticing a lot of Tanaka banners among Syndicate ships. Since that time he had carved a deep gouge in the blade for every Syndicate ship he had taken. Twenty ugly scars now ruined the blade, and this number became twenty one as S’Cipio used a finger claw to carve out the symbol of Gaijin’s Folly’s defeat. The Syndicate officers, all but the non-Asian one, went even more berserk. At least two of them broke their arms struggling against their immovable 7’ 8” Gorn “handlers”.
S’Cipio nodded with satisfaction. The Syndicate prisoners did not all understand his language, and he certainly did not understand the sing-song, high-pitched chirping they called Japanese, but it was clear they understood the meaning of the gouges. Their kind was dying in droves here in Confederation Space. Soon their masters would realize that it would be best to take their thieving some place else
“Load them into a life a life pod each,” ordered S’Cipio. “Sssome of them ssshould sssurvive to carry their ssstory back to their massstersss.
Only S’Treleg noticed that, as always, the pirates had gone berserk as soon as they saw the sword. They had gone berserk long before they had a chance to realize it had been damaged, let alone what the number of gouges meant. But he had given up trying to explain things like this to S’Cipio. Bosses never listened.
-S’Cipio
Topic: The Return of Grazz'Tzz: Full Scale War! (Read 8722 times)