From the safety of the massive Coalition of Worlds goliath class freighter’s repair bay, Captain Josephine Starcross heard  through her earpiece  the scuffle of her strong arm Garvey cracking skulls. If the plan proceeded as it should, Carter would have bypassed the security systems and opened the door to the storage area by now, and Garvey would have disabled the guards before they could trigger any manual alarms. Elle, The Rebell’s mechanic had done a fine job mucking up the ship’s works, buying them half an hour aboard the freighter easy, and that was just for repairs. That didn’t include the paperwork, the fast talking, the schmoozing these Coalition bastards all while she and her crew stole their precious cargo right out from under their oblivious noses. It was moments like these that made life worth living. She sighed a contented little sigh.

“That’s a pretty happy sound for someone whose propulsion drive died out on her a hundred light years from anywhere.”

“It’s just really good hot cocoa,” she said, and she took a sip of warm, rich, creamy, evil complimentary hot cocoa from the no good tyrants’ hospitality room for stranded travellers. And it was really good cocoa. No doubt because it had been made from the best ingredients, seized by these evil overlords while the rest of the population lived on the dregs, the lowest quality cocoa in the ‘verse.

“Psst, up here, Captain,” a voice whispered in her ear.

She did her best to look about casually, checking gangplanks and crannies for Athena, her ship’s grizzled old… something. She wasn’t exactly sure what specifically the disgruntled vet from the Crab Nebula war thirty years ago brought to the table, but she always managed to come in handy in a pinch so she kept her on. Besides, Elle had told her when she hired Athena that every respectable outlaw crew had at least one bitter and disillusioned soldier, and if Josephine wanted The Rebell to be taken seriously, she would need one too. After glancing around for several seconds and enduring several more hissing pssts in her ear, she finally spotted the old woman waving wildly from the bridge window of her ship.

“I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.”

“Why not?” Josephine asked.

“Why not what?” asked the Coalition lackey running this repair bay.

“Why not, umm… why not get a refill on this cocoa?” Josephine said, stumbling over her words. Carter was the smooth talker, the liar, the charmer. Why did she have to be the one talking to this guy? Because’s Carter’s also the lockbreaker, she reminded herself as she awkwardly stepped away from the bay boss and toward the beverage station.

“It’s not cocoa,” he said. “It’s actual hot chocolate.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference is the added mind control cocktail,” Athena said through the com.

“Well, cocoa is just the processed powdered cocoa bean after all the rich cocoa butter has been removed. Hot Chocolate still has all that delicious cocoa butter, plus the sugar and milk.”

“I see,” Josephine said and held off on taking another sip just yet.

When she made her way to the wall with dispensers for hot chocolate and assorted flavor syrups, far enough away that the bay boss wouldn’t hear, she whispered back.

“What do you mean there’s a mind control cocktail in my hot chocolate?”

“Isn’t it obvious? All these smiling faces in a den of evil and exploitation. Either the Coalition is keeping them in the dark or it’s keeping them doped up. Hot chocolate isn’t cheap, and if they’re just giving it away for free, my money says the mind control’s in the drinks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Even money says you’ve got that stuff passing through your system right now. You think I didn’t notice you smiling when you were drinking that stuff?”

“Well, it is really good.”

“Nah,” Athena said. “That’s the psychotropic drugs talking. You keep your wits about you.”

Josephine eyed her steaming cup hungrily. “Do you really think they would do that to strangers? To their own crew?”

“Ma’am, I’ve been through three wars, a dozen campaigns, five enemy hoosegows. There’s nothing I wouldn’t believe an entity as corrupt as the Coalition would do.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said and secreted away another sip.

While Josephine didn’t believe the Coalition had drugged her hot chocolate--the crew of the freighter seemed to drink it without concern--she wasn’t willing to dismiss the possibility outright either. Lacing complimentary beverages with pacifying chemicals seemed like the sort of thing the Coalition would do. Fortunately for her, she didn’t need to be aggressive. That was Garvey’s job.

Josephine eyed the mechanics moving in and out of her ship and sipped her hot chocolate. Delicious, delicious evil hot chocolate.

***

Deep inside the pristine white, softly lit bowels of the Coalition freighter, Carter delicately spliced and re-spliced wires trying to bypass the magnetic locks holding the storage bay closed. In another ship, he could just grab and pull and the broken circuits would cause the door to unlock when it failed. Such was often the case in passenger ships. After all, in the event of of a systems crash, passengers would need to be able to escape their rooms to make it to escape pods. On a cargo freighter, however, he had no such luck. The place was built to lockdown when things went wrong. Almost as if the designers didn’t want people sabotaging the power supply to steal goods hidden behind locked doors. Engineers, Carter thought. So distrusting.

“What’s going on here?”

The sudden voice broke Carter from his work. He glanced up to see a Coalition goon standing over him in the sharp angles of his light gray security uniform. No doubt, his suspicions were roused when he saw the short statured thief with flaming, charmingly scruffy red hair tampering with the wiring. Garvey looming beside a small pile of unconscious individuals did not help.

“What are you doing here?” Carter barked back with a surprising amount of authority for someone who clearly did not belong there. “Can’t you see there’s a gas leak?”

“What?” the goon stammered, not expecting this response.

“What do you mean, what? Why are you still here? Do you want to end up like these guys?” When in doubt, bombard them with questions.

“Wait a second,” the goon said, circuits firing behind his eyes. “If there’s a gas leak, why aren’t you two passed out on the floor?’

“Gills, man” said Carter, tapping at his ears. “And this fellow’s an android.”

“But wouldn’t gills-”

The goon didn’t have time to finish speaking. Garvey’s ham-sized fist had that effect on people. “I’m not an android,” he said as he nudged the man onto the growing pile.

“I know that. I don’t have gills either, but I had to say something.”

“Not if you could punch better.”

“That’s what you’re for. Now step back.”

Carter twisted a final pair of wires together, and after a small shower of sparks died down, the door slid sideways into the wall.

“What did I have to step back for?” Garvey asked. “The door didn’t swing open. It wasn’t going to hit me.”

“You have no flair for the dramatic, you know that?”

Garvey only shrugged and began to drag the unconscious men and women of the Coalition guard into the storage bay. It was easy work for the man. Carter had decided once that Garvey is what a geneticist would get if he took a perfectly respectable specimen of man, traded all charm for looks, brains for brawn, and still coming up short, cashed in all the human decency he could find for more muscle. He had a rugged sort of style. Functional. Trousers that wouldn’t tear too easily in a good scrape, a tight shirt that gave enemies little to grab onto, a solid pair of kicking boots, and suspenders due to some hinted at but never explained aversion to belts. Not the best when it came to planning, but a wonderful weapon to point at one’s foes and let loose.

As the one man brute squad cleared the hallway, Carter set to work rifling through the ship’s inventory for the good stuff. Food. Meh. Tools. Not worth the fence. He had it on good authority that this particular transit ship was moving a hefty load of medical supplies. Painkillers. High value drugs for life threatening diseases. Real seller’s market stuff.

“Bingo, bango! We have a winner!”

“What did you find?” Garvey asked as he moved the last goon in.

“Paydirt, baby. Pure medical grade paydirt.” Carter waved his hands across an enormous stack of crates like a game show host revealing fabulous prizes. “All the finest morphine, spazine, phenyldrine, and everything inbetween. We’ve got pills for all ills, shots for all pox. We’ve got meds, spreads, everything but hospital beds. We’ve got the cure for whatever ails you right here and it’s ours, all ours.”

“So how do we get that out of here?” he asked. “I don’t think I could fit one of those under my shirt, and there’s a lot more than one of them.”

Garvey had a point. They barely slipped off The Rebell unnoticed, and that was unburdened by a sizeable chunk of stolen goods. They were looking at more than a ton of medical supplies easily, and that was after factoring out crate weight. He had a lot of pockets hidden way throughout the folds of his suit, but not that many. Someone moaned from the mound of Coalition guards at their feet, and without so much as batting an eye, Garvey began to punch wildly until the moaning stopped.

“We need to get out of here soon,” he said. “I can’t keep knocking ‘em out forever.”

“Yes, you can,” Carter said. “It’s not like your fist will run out of ammo.”

Garvey considered this, realized it was true, and shrugged. “Well, they’re gonna fix the ship soon. We should probably finish before then.”

“Don’t worry, my jumbo-sized friend. I have a plan.”

He didn’t. Not yet. But he would.

***

“Geez, kid,” the Coalition mechanic said as he sorted his way through the mess of things Ellen had made of the ship’s engine. “What happened? You let a whole pack of Rockies loose in here?”

“I beg your pardon?” Elle snapped. “Rockies?”

“Y-yeah…?” he said. “R-rocket Kingdom people? Erm… citizens?”

Elle shouldn’t have been able to intimidate the mechanic. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, and he a grown man in his prime. He had a solid head over her and had years of lugging about heavy hyperdrive parts built into his arms, but what Elle lacked in size or age, she made up for in ferocity. Her arms and midriff, tattooed with ink and scars, lay exposed beneath the shredded canvas coveralls. Her hair a torture chamber of blue and green spikes, engine grease streaked across her face like warpaint, and a fire kindling in her eyes hot enough to ignite even an old inefficient Nexus class corsair’s thrusters, her aura, her very Elle-ness personified words like fury and tempest. Though he had no way of knowing it, she had earned the branding down her spine, an old quotation from some work long forgotten written in the circuitry language of her people, And though she be but little, she is fierce.

“Just what in the void is that supposed to mean?” she said. Her words dripped with battery acid, and he instinctively covered his chest with his arms for protection.

“I’m just saying that I’m having a hard time telling what’s broken and what’s undergone some, erm… unorthodox modification.”

“I’m sorry, but I thought you were a real wrench jockey,” she said. “But if you can tell what’s what, I’m guess you’re just glorified engine tech support.”

The mechanic looked back and forth between the engine room, a puzzle of homebrew engine upgrades, and the young woman, whose tattoos seemed to suggest she knew a lot more about how starships worked than he did. “You’re not from the Rocket Kingdom are you?” he asked, then quickly added, “Not that there’s anything wrong if you are.”

Screwing her face into a proper furrow, she replied only with a death glare. She had said too much already.

“I don’t mean to presume,” the mechanic said cautiously as he began to gather his tools from deep within the engine, “but something tells me you don’t need our help to fix this thing.”

“You got me,” Elle said, throwing her hands up in the air as though caught planning a surprise birthday party and not helping to orchestrate a major heist.

“In fact, I would hazard a guess that you did this on purpose. Sabotaged your own ship.”

Not knowing what else to do, she put on her poutiest lips and said, “I thought this would be a good way to meet a nice, handsome mechanic. Maybe we could find some remote planet. Raise babies. Fix rockets. What do you think?”

“I’m too old for you, kid,” he said. “Now why don’t you tell me what’s really going on?”

“Fine,” she said, and going on instinct, reached into her toolbox and pulled out the biggest wrench she could find. Moving quickly, she tossed it to the mechanic, hoping to catch him unaware. “Catch!”

The Coalition mechanic flailed wildly with his free hand, caught the wrench, and breathed a sigh of relief. Elle stole that moment and used it to kick his arm with her thick rubber boots, smashing the wrench against a power coupler, closing a circuit on the poor man, who spasmed wildly then collapsed to the ground. “Just as well,” she said to the trembling heap on the floor. “If you said yes, you’d be a pedophile, and then I’d have to really hurt you.”

“I have good news and bad news, ladies and gentleman,” she said into her com. “The bad news is our mechanic friend is on to us. The good news is I’ve temporarily disabled him.”

“How long do we have?” Josephine asked.

“Well, given how timid Mister Fixit was, I’d say forty-five minutes?”

“You said it was a half hour fix when we landed.”

“Yeah,” Elle said. “That was before he got in there and started undoing all my beautiful upgrades.”

“I’m not talking back to best condition. How long before we can get our ship out of this repair bay?”

“Oh that? Five minutes.”

“Do it,” Josephine said. “You hear that, fellas? You need to be loaded and back on board The Rebell in under five. I’ll figure how to get our friend off the ship without drawing notice.”

***

“Athena, you copy that timeline? I need a course plotted.”

“Is everything alright?” asked the bay boss, who had appeared quite without notice behind Josephine.

“Yes, everything’s fine. Just got an urgent word from someone… urgent.”

“Well, the matter is, though we’re happy to help, I…” The bay boss nervously chewed his lip, as though weighing a delicate choice of words. There was something in the way he kept avoiding her eyes, looking at her mouth, the way he stammered and stumbled over his thoughts that made her think perhaps she had better check her teeth for some stray food stuck in there.

“The thing is,” he said after some effort, “and I don’t mean to insinuate and I understand if you are offended and it’s all just a big misunderstanding, but you see, the thing is the dust that’s collected on the side of your ship…”

“No, I’m afraid we don’t have time to give it a wash right now,” Josephine said.

“It’s not that. You see it sort of accumulates on the hull in the shape of… Well, it appears to be the logo for Starcross Charter Flights, and we’ve been given a lengthy training meeting about looking out for that particular ship due to its unpleasant association with… piracy?”

“What?” gasped Josephine, trying her best to muster a sense of outrage. “Why, the Starcross brand would never resort to piracy! And if they did, I hear it’s only because they were forced to after Coalition red tape and taxes and fines drove them out of business! And even then, I know nothing about any of that, because I bought this ship used from someone, so who knows?”

She paused for breath, hoping to wrangle in her senses before she said anything else potentially incriminating. “But yes. Yes I am offended! I demand to speak to your manager this instant! You’ll regret saying something so terrible as to sully the reputation of me and my ship. Why, maybe you should wash my ship and… and fuel it up too!”

The mechanic reached for his com. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll call my manager down and we’ll see what we can do.”

“No!” shouted Josephine, perhaps a little too abruptly, she realized. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll just get on out of here and we’ll call it square.”

The head mechanic probably said something, but Josephine Starcross had no intention of sticking around to find out. Putting on her best huff, she stormed across the repair bay and muttered to her crew under her breath.

“Remember that five minutes I promised?”

“What about it?” ask Eloise.

“What can you get me in thirty seconds?”

“Cap’n,” came Carter’s voice, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but Garvey and I can’t get back with an aspirin in that timeframe.”

“Then we’re all going to need to think fast,” she said as she ducked aboard through the rear hatch and sealed the door behind her. “Athena, you plot that course and you plot it good. I’m heading to the engine room to help Elle get this bird in the air. Carter? Garvey? I’m going to need you guys to do some mighty fast thinking.”

“I’m on it, boss,” Garvey said.

“Carter, I’m going to need you to do some mighty fast thinking.”

***

Carter surveyed the storage bay for something, anything they could use. He found himself more than a little disappointed by the lack in space suits and high speed scooters lying about. Just crates. Stacks upon stacks of temperature controlled, high durability crates.

“Garvey, I’m going to need some high tensile rope.”

“How will I know if it’s not regular rope?”

“Or chains! Get chains! Or… you know what? If you could just drag those bodies back out of the room, that’d be swell.”

Garvey’s shoulders slunk. “But I just pulled them in.”

Carter had already begun to tear through any crate not marked medical looking for something to bind the loot together. “Look, we’re about to blow this place, literally, and I don’t want to litter space with bodies. We’re not killers.”

“I am,” he said.

“Well, I’m not. I’m a thief. I have boundaries.”

Garvey set about undoing all of his hard work, taking only a brief break to add a couple of nosy interlopers to the pile. Carter, meanwhile, had emptied several crates before stumbling across some salvage line, which he fashioned haphazardly through as many medical crates as he could while still leaving enough to tie up a couple of the empties as well.

“Athena, they got you working the bridge right now, old girl?”

“Not too old to kick your ass, little man” she grumbled.

“Glad to let you try, sweetheart, but first I’m going to need you to come find me.”

“I’m not leaving this ship,” she said.

“What happened to never leave a soldier behind?” he asked as he tried to find a crate he could fit easily into.

“You’re not a soldier,” she said, “but you are on my team. What do you need?”

“For you to just keep sitting there comfy and cozy as you please and while you’re there with your feet kicked up, if you could kindly tell me if you’re able to get a location ping on my coms signal?”

There was silence for a moment, during which time Carver motioned for Garvey to try to fit into one of the bigger crates. It was not the most successful part of the plan by any stretch of the imagination.

“Tuck your leg,” Carter said.

“It is tucked! It’s just big!”

“Hold on, I’m going to try something.”

Carter stepped back to the door, cleared a path, and charged. He had hoped the momentum of his body colliding with the big lug in the box to help wedge him in there. Unfortunately, a hundred twenty pounds in a five-foot-four packages simply lacked the mass to have much of an impact. If he wanted to do this, he would need someone at least as massive as Garvey, and the only person that big in the area was Garvey himself.

“I think I’m stuck” Garvey said.

“Good,” Carter said. “You’re not supposed to be going anywhere anyway.”

The thief began to pace, wracking his brain for some way to shut the crate on the monster.

“I’ve got a lock on your signal, Carter,” came Athena’s voice. “What’s the plan for this exfiltration?”

He told her.

“You’re a crazy son of a bitch,” she said.

“Yeah, well, being sane wasn’t working out so well for me. But you’ll get the captain to do it?”

“Yeah, we’ll do it. Just be ready, because when we get close, coms are going to short out, and we’ll have no way of knowing if you’re in position.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about us. We’ll be in position,” he said. I hope.