on the offensive

Our attack on the Runner ship went nothing as planned.
We swooped in before they could fire and slammed our catchlock into place as if we had done it a hundred times before. After moving swiftly through the Runner’s ship, exchanging fire and fight, we had them overcome, though they put up quite a battle. I hate popping ships. We left them bound and gagged and bleeding on the bridge, after Caban delivered a brief lecture on the virtues of robbing from the innocent and ill-equipped, then made sure they’d be able to get free once we were gone. Ice, meanwhile, disabled their scanners and scrambled their nav so we’d be burning dust before they got a chance to find us.

We didn’t even take all their supplies.

We took their cargo, and Ice found the contact info so we could sell it ourselves, on Agrafena. They had so many supplies it was all I could do not to give them another lecture about the hungry spacelings they’d left behind, the family we had waiting for us an hour back.
As we were bringing back the first load of supplies, I noticed something was wrong. The Catchlock hatch was wide open, though I remembered closing it. Perhaps Em or the Doctor had followed us? Ice simply put down her crate and took her guns from their holsters.

We found the intruder near the door to the medbay. At first I thought the man lying facedown in a pool of blood was the Doctor, but then Mezaro appeared with a cleaning wipe and started removing the bright liquid from the floor. He looked up at us, and I saw a line of spatter marks on his face.
The sight of his torn body did not disgust me as much as the look in his crew member’s eyes when we laid the sheet-covered corpse on the bridge. They were cruel men. Killers, but still men. Caban doesn’t know I heard his fumbling apology.

I wish I could say that the shock of gore had some affect on our appetites. After returning to the civilian ship with water and provisions, the food was more delicious than any packaged protein has a right to be.