//------------------------------//
// Chapter 10:  Pirates 
// Story: Starbound Flight 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

Flight took a deep breath, and let it out.  “Do we have confirmation of Fleet presence?” she asked.
“Affirmative,” Willow answered immediately.  “According to our recon drone reports, a good hour out of date, there’s a stealthed Gravity Drive cluster signature about an hour and a half away and decelerating, though I can’t tell what the Admiral’s brought.  By the time anything we send reaches them, they’ll be in position and getting bored.”
“Alright then,” she nodded.  “Everypony ready?”  She glanced down at her intercom display.
About a month ago, she had finally recovered from whatever weird sickness had plagued the ship from the Enterprise- and as near as anypony could tell, they had all become immune to it.  She’d been the last, by a month or so.
Now, the First Light was under silent running, drifting towards the pirate base on a path that Willow and Skies had hashed out.  They’d be entirely inside the base by the time anything had time to see them- and they’d identified a few sensor blindspots as well, which they were going to hide the ship in…  Or missiles.
Her intercom was connected to one of her side bays, where the Thestral soldiers were.  Sure, Flight was launching and hiding missiles so they could take out the pirates’ entire sensor network in one fell swoop, and both providing and calling down artillery support, but the entire plan hinged on the thestrals.  They were going to infiltrate the base, locate any surviving captives from Equineothame or other nations, and rescue them, before blowing it all to Kingdom Come.
“Ready, Captain,” the General nodded.
“Ready,” Willow nodded.  “Another minute or so, I want to say, and I’ll have our retirement vector too.”
“Alright then,” Flight muttered.  “Let’s do this.”





River Skip sighed as she paused to look out the window on her way back to the command room from the armory.  Tactical work at this pirate base rarely amounted to much- but she had no choice.  If she didn’t work for them, they would kill her mother…  and had already killed her sister.  Ostensibly, at least- the squadron they’d sent to kill her sister had never reported back, despite having a capital ship at their disposal.
Perhaps her sister had been in a command position aboard the vessel, allowing her to repel their ridiculously stupid attacks with ease?
Once upon a time, she’d been a Tactical Midshipfilly aboard the Royal Equineothame Navy dreadnought Ostentatious…  but that had ended fairly abruptly.  Three years before, in the middle of a fight that she had never found out the cause of, having been off-duty at the time, she’d been thrown from the ship when an explosion peeled open her private quarters…  then she’d had the privilege of watching the ENS Everfree, the flagship of the entire fleet, fire the broadside that completed the dreadnought’s destruction…  and completely demolished two entire previously unharmed battlecruisers.
She’d continued to watch…  and studied the massive superdreadnought’s actions, even as she drifted further and further away from the fight in her pressure suit.  It was concentrating its fire on each enemy in turn- but only ever allocating just enough fire to completely obliterate its targets before moving on to the next.  The massive warship had all its defenses thundering- even the polarization field that had killed three of her crewmates on the eave of the battle- so it had yet to take very many hits at all…  though the rest of the Fleet was mobilizing, slowly, and battling against itself.
Then out of nowhere, a shuttle appeared, and picked her up.  At first, she was relieved…  then she’d realized that it was a pirate shuttle.
That shuttle had taken her to a nearby cruiser…  that had taken her out here, where she’d learned about the true structure of the Equineothame government.
These pirates controlled the King.  To an extent, at least; when they’d tried to manipulate him into giving them new ships, he’d given them cheap junk that they’d had to patch up and upgrade in several places before they were truly usable.
A couple months before, the task force sent to recover an ancient starship called the Enterprise had returned to report that it had been stolen out from under their noses by an unidentified starship that had casually swatted aside all their artillery and hightailed it out of there so quickly they’d been unable to pursue.  They’d headed out just days after word of the Enterprise had finally reached them- apparently, they’d managed to broker a deal with the Equineothame High Engineering Society.  They’d received all the data on the Enterprise…  in exchange for not targeting their private vessels.
Pirates really did have no laws.
She paused in the middle of her habitual counting of all the flags she could see.  She’d spotted an unmarred Equineothame flag, though partially obstructed behind the docking facility.  Had they captured another civilian vessel?
She paused again, picking out the parts of the vessel that she could see.  No…  that was the largest aerodynamically-built ship she’d ever seen.
And there was only one aerodynamic vessel of that size ever built.
So what was the Equineothame Crown Princess doing in the middle of a pirate base?  Had they stolen her ship as well?
She tapped a console next to the window, and checked the database.  According to their database, which she had full read access to, there was nothing there.
So she headed instead for her private quarters.
Once there, she closed and locked the door, then logged into her terminal.  The base was extremely lax; they liked to see her on the command deck, but she was allowed to check in and otherwise keep tabs on things from her quarters or wherever else.
It took her about twelve seconds to secure exclusive access to a laser com module on the main comms array, and point it at the unknown vessel…  before she sent a quick message.
Hi.  Are you here to rescue me?
About fifteen seconds later, the com head received a hit from a different direction- to establish an encrypted connection.  She allowed it, hoping it wasn’t just more pirates.
Yes, we are.  Where are you?
She paused, examining the message…  and decided to answer a slightly different question.
I am the base tactical officer, she answered.  I am being forced to work here so they won’t kill my mother.
The connection was silent for about two minutes…  then one last message showed up, right before the connection cut off.
All base power, command, and comms facilities will be annihilated in 13.7 minutes.  Get to the Armory and secure it.  We will meet you there, and likely vent all air from it, shortly afterward.
She stared at the message for several seconds, then checked the time, logged out, and casually left her quarters to go inspect the armory.  It was one of her assigned duties that she hadn’t discharged too recently- a convenient excuse to secure the armory, which almost never had anypony in it.
Though the word annihilated suggested there was more than just the Princess’s ship involved…  nevermind the odd angle the connection had come from.  She was probably bouncing it off of a recon drone or something.





Thirteen minutes of calm passed the base.  River met a couple soldiers in the armory- then, after telling them it was part of her routine inspection, tested the automatic powered armor deployment system by putting some on herself.
About two seconds later, a deep rumble echoed throughout the base…  and the lights went out.
River flipped up one of the weapons on her freshly stolen armor, and hosed down all three pirates left in the room.  The maintenance tech in the corner was also a captive- and she turned to look at her.  “Get something on,” she ordered her.  “This room’s about to be open to space.”





No sooner had the young tech managed to seal the helmet on her unpowered armor, looking extremely confused- especially since River had sent high explosive grenades out into the passage whenever anypony got close- than the wall exploded in a shower of debris…  and silence.  Dust and smoke shot back out the hole as the debris fell to the ground, and eight ponies in full powered armor thundered into the room, an assault shuttle floating behind them.  One trotted up, and tapped a comms ID card against both of their helmets.  Almost immediately, the mare spoke.  “You okay?” she asked, in an unfamiliar but harsh voice that told her of significant battlefield experience.
“Yeah,” River answered.  “I’m their tac officer, this is a maintenance tech that was also captive.”  She gestured towards the tech.
The mare nodded sharply, and turned to the tech.  “Alright.  How much combat experience do you have?”
The poor filly shivered and shook her head.  “N-None, Ma’am.”
“Then get to the ship,” she commanded, and glanced back for one of her soldiers to help her out.
As she did so, River glanced behind her, at the assault shuttle…  that was floating in the space that used to carry the Loyalist Berthing Area, where the truly loyal pirates had their bedrooms, with the stars visible behind it.  The vertical stabilizer of the Princess’ ship was also visible through the opening.
The filly moved quickly towards the opening, clinging desperately to the ground with her mag boots.
River spotted a set of missiles suddenly blast away from the Princess’s ship.
“Alright,” the commander told her.  “I’m Shadow, you’re Parrot.  Channel five.”
She nodded, and switched to channel five.
“Alright, ponies,” Shadow commanded.  “This is Parrot; she’s got inside knowledge.”





About five minutes later, when River glanced out a window as they proceeded rapidly towards the brig, the amount of destruction visible through it seemed enormous to her.  All three superdreadnoughts at the base had been broken in half, the comms module had been blown to bits and cooked, and the entire power sector, including both the main base reactor and the backup batteries and reactor, was simply gone.  She managed to avoid staring- but the soldiers noticed anyway.
“That’s what artillery does to unsuspecting structures,” Shadow informed her calmly.
“The comms section looked like plasma damage,” Willow observed.
“We used two different kinds of artillery,” Shadow informed her- then raised one hoof and went straight through the sealed door into the brig in a shower of broken steel.  The rest of the squad was through a second later- and hardly two seconds after Shadow had entered, the rear guard had already thrown a plastic seal over the opening, preserving the pressure.
Two seconds later, the sound of gunfire went away, and the pirates’ prisoners were left staring at the heap of bodies against the wall in awe.
Willow wasn’t, but that was only because she’d seen that same brutal efficiency several times already.
She did, though, have to wonder where the Princess had found soldiers that were that good.  It simply wasn’t possible to do in or near Equineothame- the pirates had seen to it that the Equineothame training programs had degraded to the point that their Marines were basically useless.
Then the brig airlock beeped and opened- to reveal the inside of the assault shuttle.  The soldiers ripped bars off of cells and ordered the prisoners to board the shuttle- then a minute later, the shuttle was heading back for the ship again while they recovered their seal and continued through the wall towards their next target, the Shipyard Bay- where some less technically-inclined prisoners were being forced to help refit or construct new ships.  The gargantuan bay could handle anything up to Cruisers.
“They’ve got some battery-operated turrets down there,” she informed them.  “And they might have the ship stuff running too.”
For this one, they exploded out of the ceiling and smashed down right on top of the poor pirate ordering the ponies around.  “Low pressure in here,” Shadow observed, even as her hole in the ceiling was sealed by one of her soldiers.
A row of shipboard bullets smashed into the wall over their heads.  “Freeze, you scoundrels!” somepony cried.  Sounded like the pirates’ second-in-command.
Shadow ignored him.  “Hawk, strike.”
Almost instantly, the massive bay doors at the front exploded inwards in a massive fireball.  The cruiser that had been being worked on, and had fired at them, was smashed through the back wall and crumpled by the force of the blast, sheathed in searing hot plasma and everything.
The destruction was absolute…  and River was thankful that it looked like no prisoners were in the yard at the time- on break- and that they were wearing powered armor, and that the blast had happened so far away from them.  Even with the atmosphere in the bay to attenuate the blast and the starship to deflect it, and the corner right behind them for the pressure to built against, anything else wouldn’t have survived- and she still got overheat warnings from her armor, with the sharp pain of sudden heat flowing through it to her body.
“That,” Shadow told her, “is what took out the comms.”  Then she turned, and smashed through the wall again.  “We’ve got seven minutes, move!”
Before River followed her, she caught a glimpse of the Princess’s ship almost perfectly nose-on to the bay, all the way on the far side of the asteroid cluster that held the pirate base.
A missile would have required two seconds to cross that gap.





Seven minutes later, River and the soldiers grabbed the last few prisoners and kicked off, launching themselves into  space in the middle of the base.
“We’re all gonna die,” the filly River was holding cried.  She was two years River’s senior, but had been one of their sex toys- and was wearing one of the many emergency vac suits the soldiers had brought, little more than airtight bags that were roughly pony shaped with helmets tacked on top.
Then the Princess’s ship came out of nowhere, moving sideways so it swallowed them up with one of its bays.  River landed deftly in the full gee maintained by the ships’ Gravity Drive.
“Brace!” Shadow barked- and River did exactly that, instantly.  She lowered her stance, tightened her grip on the poor filly-
Very suddenly, she knew what she was bracing for, as she felt the gut-wrenching force- and saw the overload warnings on her mag boots- of a warship jumping to maximum capable acceleration.
The pirate base, out the closing bay door, vanished from view in an instant while River and the soldiers fought against a full ten gravities apparent.
Fortunately, it didn’t last long, fading gradually down to nothing…  then they were just standing once again.
At the same time, the big lights in the corners of the bay, indicating bay pressure, turned green- safe to remove helmets.
She reached up, and opened her helmet, breathing in her first breath of Equineothame air.  She instantly smelled the sharp, cool crispness of freshly boiled LOX- the ship’s life support was overloaded.  It also rather handily explained the pressurization speed of the bay.
Shadow followed suit, twitching her head sharply to command her suit to automatically retract her helmet- a feature that River’s didn’t have.  “Thanks, Parrot,” she told her.  “Thanks to you, we were able to hit not just all our known targets, but quite a few that we weren’t aware of.”  She chuckled.  “You’ve saved quite a few lives today.”
“I- I did?” she asked.  The mare was a thestral- yet wearing Equineothame powered armor, and that skilled?  Something odd was afoot.
One of the other soldiers- they were all opening their helmets, and all thestrals- stepped up, a tablet in her Hands.  “You were right, General.  We didn’t have time to use the shuttle again.”
Suddenly, a tone chimed on the intercom…  then a young, female voice spoke out of it.
“Hello everypony, this is your Captain speaking,” it began.  “We’ll be rendezvousing with the Navy in about two days, and until then I’m sorry to say we’re going to have to sleep in shifts or something and the air might get a bit stuffy- we’ve got way more ponies than this ship is made to handle right now.  Buuuuut who wants to see what happened to that pirate base when we left?”
There was a pause.
“Why does she sound so giddy?” River asked.
“I bet this is why,” Shadow said, gesturing down at the tablet.
River looked as well- and the soldier tapped the play key.
It was a slow-motion video- and about a half a second after the ship had escaped the bounds of the pirate base, completely ignoring the several warships that were maneuvering against it, a wave of artillery rounds showed up to erase the entire base.





The PNV- Pirate Naval Vessel- Demolisher was the only one that saw the incoming artillery in time to do anything about them.  The comms had already been shot off every ship, so the crew couldn’t send a transmission to any other bases or vessels- but they could defend themselves.  They even successfully shot down four artillery rounds.
Unfortunately for the Demolisher, nearly thirty were on direct collision courses with the dreadnought, as nearly twenty thousand megaton-range nuclear warheads traveling at eighty percent of lightspeed slammed into the base as a single salvo.
There were no survivors.
About a month later, when the light from the explosion reached Equineothame, anypony that happened to look up that night- and quite a few that didn’t- noticed the sudden, temporary addition of a second, dimmer sun, gently illuminating the dead of night for almost a minute.





“Holy-!?” River began, then took a deep breath and let it out.  “That’s quite a bit of artillery.”  She looked up.  “And, er, do I take it the operation is over?”
“Yup,” Shadow told her, and held out a hoof.  “Shadow Flight.”
She accepted it- and though their powered armor meant that neither of them really felt the hoofshake, they still did one.  “River Skip.”  She sighed.  “Before the pirates grabbed me, I was a Tactical midshipfilly.”
“Filly, huh?  You look plenty old enough to me.”
She nodded.  “Yeah, as of about two years ago.”





“That had to be a pretty big chunk of the Navy,” Princess Short Flight mused.  “Pretty sure artillery doesn’t normally make explosions that big.”
“Pretty big, yeah,” Willowstone nodded, settling down with her in the mess hall for some dinner, only half an hour later.  “That had to be at least five thousand rounds.”
“Five thousand?” Flight asked, tilting her head.  “That’s a quarter of the Fleet.”  She paused.  “Well, I suppose it’s true I didn’t put any limits on it- and I know the Admiral would be happy to have an ‘exercise’ to put her people through.  She could easily have brought an entire task force.”
The door opened.  “Captain?”
“Yes?”  Flight looked.  It was General Shadow Flight, the highest-ranking soldier.  A young mare was walking behind her, looking nervous.
“This is the mare that helped us from the base,” Shadow informed her.  “She said she’d be happy to help us infiltrate further bases.”
“Nice,” Flight observed, and looked at Willow.  “If the Admiral…?”
Willow, however, wasn’t paying attention.  She’d abandoned her salad, and was trotting towards the young mare.  “River,” she greeted.  “You’re alive.”
The mare stared.  “W-Willow,” she greeted, before stepping forward to meet Willow so they could hug each other.  “You’re alive.”
Shadow blinked, looking somewhat confused.
Flight chuckled.  “Looks like we’ve found your sister, then.  Anyways, if the Admiral has brought so much of the Fleet, it might be worth our while to go raid another few pirate bases- especially if we’ve got inside info to work with.”
Shadow chuckled, and moved over to her own seat.  “I know we’ll be all for it.  We’ll want longer deadlines, though.”
“We should be able to park the Fleet presence a lot closer in next time,” Flight told her.  “We’ll be able to order the arty within a minute or two of when it actually hits, so we won’t have to set ourselves a time limit like we did this time- we’ll be able to take the time we need, and still leave them in pieces when we bail.”  She paused.  “I know I’m going to want to talk to the Admiral and our tactical talent here,” she gestured towards Willow and River, “about possibly bringing a ship or two from the Fleet into the base with us, to help lighten the load in the naval battle that took place during your raid through the base.”  She smiled.