Chapter Text
Corsaire switched on her transmitter and steeled herself as she spoke. “Control?”
“What is it now, Hound Fourteen?” Answered a haughty, arrogant voice Corsaire had learned to loathe.
“Our heading is leading us straight into a fresh asteroid family,” she bit the inside of her cheek but responded curtly, drawing up as much willpower as she could to push past the arrogance crackling into her ears. From the cramped cockpit of her External Frame, she pushed forward on the throttle to bring the rickety bipedal machine up to enough speed to trawl towards the bow of the B. T. Delilah, the elongated, sun bleached box of a cargo hauler that was her squad’s charge.
“An asteroid family? In the asteroid belt?!” Control’s voice gasped back at her sarcastically, “What an incredible observation, Hound Fourteen! Perhaps if you’d used that situational awareness in the past, you wouldn’t have ended up here flying for me!”
“We’re going to have to go around it,” Corsaire knew every word that came out of her mouth would be twisted in whatever way Control wanted to toy with her; the last month of experience had taught her that protests against her CO’s condescensions would only dig her deeper into the hole she was already in.
“I know you’re too stupid to retain concepts like this, but I am the commander here, and you are the brain dead hound that forfeited your agency when you broke the law.” Control placidly replied, the coy arrogance in her voice freezing into an icy venom. “Hound Eight, Hound Eleven. Hound Fourteen thinks you two aren’t doing your jobs and clearing the asteroids in your path. Get to it!”
A pair of voices grumbled their acknowledgement. Corsaire definitely heard a “bitch” come through the static, though she was unsure if the insult was directed at her or at Control. As she watched the two External Frames at the front of the freighter putter forward into the cloud of rocks and space dust ahead, Corsaire slid her left hand under her mask and visor to rub her eyes and the bridge of her nose. The white XFs became barely little blurry dots on her low resolution view screen as they began the futile work of clearing a path for the worn down freighter and her escorts. This had been the day-to-day for Corsaire for the past six months now; mind numbing sorties between the minor outlying stations of the Belt, the silence of space only kept at bay by the rattling hum of her penal wing-issued XF and her handler’s barbs over the radio. The routine had taught her that speaking up or thinking for herself would be met by abuse, physical, verbal, or both, but Corsaire was already tired of putting up with it. Dead tired. “Hound Fourteen, why are you out of formation?” Control’s voice barked into her earpiece as Corsaire pushed her throttle forward once more, her other hand pulling back on the stick to guide her machine above her charge.
“Look, do you want me to sit on my ass while those two kick rocks for hours, or–” An alarm began to buzz an alert into Corsaire’s cockpit. Her XF was being spiked by multiple lock-ons, all of them from the others in her own squadron. Control’s voice came back into her ear, this time without any of the playful pretense she’d deployed earlier; “You listen and listen good, you two-bit ship stealing piece of shit. You turn around and follow my orders to the letter so I can put my hands around your neck as soon as you return. If not, you die here, forgotten in the cold Black–”
The buzzing suddenly stopped. When Corsaire looked back down at the freighter, she saw the two XFs that were behind her shattered, one’s torso blown apart by an explosion, and the other pierced by a tight group of shots from an unseen foe– an ambush? Something in the back of her head told her to move, and as the impulse jets on her frame’s left side shifted her to the right a massive metal blade swung down into the space where her frame had just been.
She turned to face her assailant and found an XF with a long, broad sword recovering from its missed swordstroke. Though its base was painted white like hers, this machine was tall, angular and heavily armed, with colorful splotches of paint peppering its fuselage. It swung at her again, and Corsaire deflected the blow with the body of the polearm her machine held as a weapon. This enemy frame attempted to recover from the miss with a quick flurry of attacks but both machines were too close for it to land a blow with their long, unwieldy weapon. Corsaire brought the butt of her polearm behind the leg of her foe and pulled the pirate’s XF against the body of hers, her other hand jabbing a punch into the frame’s center of mass. Her assailant’s machine froze in place, and Corsaire wondered for half a heartbeat if her blow had killed the pilot before she turned around to check on the other XFs. Two other unfamiliar frames, painted in bright clashing colors, had torn through the rest of her flight’s frames with what must have been no effort. A trail of flotsam from the two forward frames of her squad told her that a fourth XF was hidden somewhere in the asteroids ahead of the convoy, probably a sniper hiding among the space rocks. The escorts of the B. T. Delilah were all dead save for her. A boxy pink and black frame landed on the nose of the cargo ship and pressed the barrel of a rocket launcher against its bridge.
The sudden rush of violence over, Corsaire was overtaken by silence for the first time since sortying. The pirates must have hit Seven’s XF, the one relaying long-range communication back outside the Belt, first, and with the speed and aggression of their strike, it must have looked to Control, likely lounging in a plush chair in a roomy office on a sturdy space stay, like the entire squad and freighter were wiped out in the blink of an eye.
The XF behind her dispelled any illusion that she’d won the fight as its hand suddenly gripped the head of Corsaire’s machine. Over the sounds of metal armor buckling under durress, an unfamiliar voice called over open comms; a placid alto voice. “Making a new friend over there, ‘Spress?” It laughed.
“I’m fine,” the other grunted back, a bit of pain touching this pilot’s voice. “This one’s a tough fuck, though. Was it the only one who fought back?”
“I think so. Slender nailed the two in front before they even saw us,” a third voice answered, this one masculine. “Is that the one you saw first, Slend?”
“Yep,” the first voice proudly chimed back. The source of the leading voice, an XF that seemed to be more limbs than body, closed the distance with the Delilah from the asteroid ahead of it. “Traced that little firefly’s trail all the way back to the loot.” A sudden wave of dread hit Corsaire; had she just doomed everyone else just by drawing these pirates' attention? “Guess we kinda owe it something, don’t we?” Slender chuckled.
“I’m not an 'it,'” Corsaire bit back on the same open channel. Speaking up might have been the exact excuse the assailants around her needed to off her right then and there, but if they didn’t…
“I didn’t ask,” the voice the others called Slender responded flatly after a pause; Corsaire felt the eyes of all four pirates on her at once. “But it sounds like you’ve got some fight in you, kid. I’ll cut you a deal if you don’t wanna die out here.” Suddenly, this was starting to look less like the end of her, and more like the break Corsaire needed. “Beats rotting out here,” she replied to the pirate, “my XF is rigged to blow if I get too far from the mothership, though.”
“Yeah, that’s how the Jovie penal units do it these days,” Slender’s External Frame approached hers, “lucky for you, Firefly, I want you aboard the mothership.”
Firefly. Far from the worst callsign anyone had given her, and certainly better than being called a Hound. Slender’s frame stretched out a long, spindly arm from its upper body and grabbed the shoulder of Corsaire’s machine. Plucking her from the grasp of “‘Spress,” whom she was still mid-grapple with, the two XFs made their way back to the B. T. Delilah. Slender reached out to grab a pair of manually extending airlocks from the Delilah's starboard side with another pair of limbs. Corsaire squinted at her machine’s low-res view screens, but before she could count just how many appendages the XF holding her had, the metal and kevlar shroud came forward to cover the front of her frame’s body. A few red lights in her peripheral vision turned green to confirm an airtight seal, and her hatch stuttered open and Corsaire pushed herself out of her seat and into the airlock. Pulling herself through the small hatch and into the Delilah's main corridor, she felt the ship shudder as a few explosions buffeted the hull-- the crew escaping in the lifeboats, she guessed as she stood up in the tall, narrow hallway.
Slender came to the same conclusion. “Well that makes our job easier!” The alto voice laughed as its owner climbed out of the hatch next to Corsaire's – a tall salamander with golden-yellow eyes, Corsaire pegged them as being around 10 years her senior. With a long slim tail and a flat, athletic figure, she began to see where their callsign came from. The tall amphibian’s gaze met Corsaire's deep green eyes. They seemed to take a few moments to study the flying fox in front of them, her frame shorter and thicker than theirs. As quickly as the pilots' eyes met, the pirate's head snapped up to inspect the tall, narrow corridor the two found themselves in. “The fuck were they going for with this floorplan?” They wondered aloud.
“It's a B. T.,” Corsaire answered, reaching behind her head and yanking. After some effort, her hair tie gave way and rust-red hair fell across her shoulders. “They used to be autonomous, but when their central computers died out, their brains got yanked out and replaced with some dogshit crew accomodation.”
“Yeah?” The salamander raised an eyebrow, the pair kicking off the floor to float to the bow of the ship. “You know how to fly ‘em?”
“There's not much I don't know how to fly,” Corsaire let a flash of pride touch her voice as she followed the slim salamander to a two-seat pilot house gracelessly grafted into the nose of the freighter.
“So you're a ship thief? Got nailed for grand larceny or something?” They asked, their eyes scanning the control cluster in front of the left pilot’s seat.
”Ships, frames, cars, whatever's around. Got nailed trying to lift a freightliner back to Iapetus,” Corsaire vaulted herself over the back of the other seat, an effortless feat in microgravity. As she settled into the seat, she turned to the salamander. "You're from Cronia too, right? I can hear your accent. Didn't think I'd find someone as far away from home as me..." she offered with a chuckle, but Slender didn't turn to meet her gaze. So she turned back to the controls in front of her, grabbing the yoke and throttle to take control of the bulky freighter. “So about you needing my help and all,” she let her voice amble for a moment, the pirate had their back turned to her now, “you hiring?”
Slender was focused on the navigation panel, punching in a new heading for the hijacked vessel. “Follow this vector,” they said, looking back up at Corsaire with a sly grin on their face. “Help us get this piece of junk home, and we’ll talk.” With an encouraging pat on her shoulder, the amphibian began retracing their steps back to the outstretched airlocks, leaving Corsaire alone at the controls of the B. T. Deliliah. Her hands on the yoke and her feet on the pedals, she began to turn to match the heading that the pirate had given her. The Delilah took her inputs more like suggestions than commands, but she eventually began to lurch onto her new vector.
Corsaire could hear Slender’s voice settle back into their XF’s cockpit over the radio, “Okay, Firefly’s gonna help us bring this scrap metal home. Vino and Espresso will bring up the rear. Rudie, you and I will stay up front. Executing!" With that call, Corsaire felt the ship’s hull groan again as their frame kicked itself off from the hull, yanking the XF Corsaire had been flying with it. “She’s coming with us?!” Espresso finally bit out over the radio. Another, younger female voice echoed her sentiment; “You said we weren’t taking in strays, Slend.”
“I know what I said,” Slender responded. Corsaire watched their External Frame thrust forward to take a position in front of the Delilah, tossing the stricken penal machine off into the Black. As the white frame drifted far enough from the freighter to trigger the explosive charges aboard it and render it a fleeting, violent fireball in the vacuum of space, their voice lowered into a deep purr. “...but that was before I knew this one was so cute.”