07: While the Getting's Good

Getting caught in a pirate's trap was just about the most embarrassing thing I could imagine doing. Here I was, the chief of cipher analysis at the Codex, an experience field operative and expedition leader, combat trained, and renowned for my intimidating intelligence, caught in a bloody, stupid pirates net. I couldn't believe what was happening.

The funny thing about pirates is that they are notoriously lazy. Violent, sneaky, and dangerous, but lazy. These one were nothing like that; they were efficient, punctual, and organized – three very odd qualities for men of their sort. Beyond that, all of them that I had encountered were well-spoken and almost refined, aside from Cinder, though his behaviour came across as almost disingenuous at times as well. It was all very surreal, and for all their seeming skill and attention to detail in knowing exactly who they were after and how to get us, they seemed to have completely overlooked some very basic information.

At the time I was too deep into fight or flight mode to really thing about the immense oddity of the situation; like, honestly, who secures a girl with super-strong mechanical arms with simple handcuffs and a steel door?

* * *

“Somebody help me out here?” shouted Sal from inside the cell. “Hey! Anybody! There's been an escape!”

A lone pirate guard appeared in the cell door's small, round window, looking around inside and seeing only one prisoner, instead of three. “Where are your friends? If you're trying to trick me, I'll see you pay for it!”

“They aren't my bloody friends, I was just along for the ride. We had a little fight over whose fault it was we were in here, and then the bastards escaped and left me here to rot!”

“What! Escaped? How?” The guard pressed his face up against the window to get a better look at the cell.

Crouched flat against the door, Naomy stretched back her arm, trying to estimate the location of the guard's keys on his belt. Up above, suspended by his mechanical legs from the ceiling, Noal signaled her to move a little higher, and a little to the left.

“I don't see anything back there,” the guard shouted through the door, “I'd better get backup.”

“Keep looking, man!” Sal argued, “I want those arseholes caught, and I'm sure you'd like to be the one to catch them. Look a little harder. Yeah, that's right.”

Noal gave Naomy a thumbs up, and suddenly the guard went careening onto the floor, with a grunt, as a steel fist punched through the door and into his abdomen.

“Got it!” she yelled, feeling around outside the cell for the keyhole, then trying the various keys in the lock. After the third or fourth try, they heard a loud click and Naomy pulled her hand back inside to open the cell door. “Apparently Cinder didn't do his homework on us,” she commented.

“Good job, Nae. Now get Sal out of those cuffs and let's get the hell out of here!”

Noal ran over to the groaning guard and took his weapon, stepping hard on his chest with a metallic foot. “Tell me where you're keeping our gear, or you're dead!”

“What gear?” asked the frightened guard.

“Weapons, documents, artifacts, and anything else we had on us or in our toyo! Hurry up!”

“It's all in the armoury! Three passages down and two left – big double steel door! Everything else is in your toyo, and your keys are in the garage!” gasped the guard, “ Please don't hurt me!”

“Thanks for everything,” said Noal, coldly, rendering the pirate unconscious with a quick rifle-butt to the temple. “Help me get him into the cell, Sal.” The two men dragged the unconscious guard into the cell and secured him with his own handcuffs, before closing and locking the door behind them.

“I figure we've got maybe ten minutes before someone comes to check up on our guard,” said Sal, “That doesn't give us a lot of time, so let's get our stuff and get outta here.”

Noal handed Sal the guard's assault rifle and a pistol he had also found on the pirate to Naomy. “I do better with my hands,” he said, and led them down the first passage.

The first group of pirates they encountered never saw them coming. Noal went first, approaching slowly and taking one down with a quickly-executed chop to the back of the neck. Sal and Naomy took the other two with the butts of their weapons, and all three were dragged into a dark corner and locked together with their handcuffs. Noal slung an assault rifle around his shoulders and stuck a pistol in his boot and the downed pirates other weapons were given to Sal and Naomy. “We got lucky, but there'll be more,” said Noal.

They moved further into Anflux, sneaking around as many pirates as possible, especially those in larger groups. Finally, they found the big steel doors that their cell guard had told them about. Four pirates stood guard duty outside. “We can't afford to take any more chances,” whispered Noal, “we put them down by the numbers, no looking back. These weapons have silencers, so we can fire with impunity.”

“You're sure you want to just kill them?” Naomy asked.

“It's about damn time we started acting like we're fighting for our lives here,” Sal cut in, “Let's keep in mind here, they lured us in, took us down and brought us here. They are very likely planning on killing us sooner or later. Knowing the kind of person who becomes a damned pirate, probably later.”

“You and me are from Core, Sal, we don't render judgment like that, even on a pirate,” Naomy responded.

“It's not a judgment, it's the simple fact that it is them or us; they have brought this decision upon them, and I, for one, am not going to die for that.”

Naomy nodded, “Okay, you're right, I'm sorry. Let's just get this over with.”

“Did you hear about the Codexers Cinder brought in from out there?” one pirate was saying to the others.

“I heard the boss personally had Cinder bring 'em in. Poor bastards.”

“Yeah, when the boss asks to see someone, they don't come b—“

“Hey guys!” came a voice from down the passage. The pirates looked up in surprise and found themselves suddenly gunned down with a flurry of silent slugs. Sal poked them, one-by-one, with the barrel of his rifle, finding them satisfactorily dead.

Noal stepped past them to the armour and tried the the door-handle; it was locked tight. “Ideas?” he asked.

“This one has a key,” said Naomy, in the midst of searching the dead men. She tossed it to Noal.

“Fits perfectly,” he said, smoothly turning the key and opening the door to a cornucopia of effective-looking weapons, including their own. “How do you suppose these pirates got ahold of so many hand grenades?” asked Noal, opening a steel crate full of slightly elliptical objects with round pins on top. He took a torso-strap out of the crate and slipped it over his shoulders, clipping on as many grenades as it could carry. “Just in case,” he said, “better take the rest of them too, and let's grab as many other guns as you can too.” After a little digging, he found the zweihander, along with Sal's auto-recoilers and Naomy's shotgun, and retrieved them, as well as several other particularly well-made weapons.

“Hey Noal, that's not all these pirates have in the way of explosives; take a look at this!” Sal exclaimed, pulling out a case of rectangular blocks resembling gray putty. The label on the case read 'C-4: Warning, High Explosive!'

“Okay, slight change in plans,” said Noal, “We take as many guns and grenades as we can carry, and blow the rest of it. Anything we can do to cripple these bastards is a worthy cause, as far as I'm concerned.” Sal went to work on the C-4 as Noal and Naomy went through the armoury's inventory, sorting out the best of the high-powered rifles, auto-recoilers, machine guns, grenades, pistols and ammunition crates and piling the rest for easy demolition. A sudden klaxon wailed through Anflux, no doubt alerting every pirate in the vicinity.

“Sal, how's that C-4 coming?” Noal shouted over the din.

“Ready, boss! It'll blow in thirty seconds, let's get the hell outta here!”

The clatter of boots sounded over the alarms in close pursuit as the trio ran from the armoury, gaining on the fleeing Codexers, slow from the ordinance they were loaded up with. Noal counted in his head: twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—

KAAAABBBOOOOOMMMMM!!!!

A resounding explosion rocked the walls the pirate base, the shock-wave demolishing the pursuing pirates and knocking Noal and company off of their feet. “I thought you said thirty seconds” shouted Noal, picking himself back up off the ground and helping Naomy to her feet. “That was twenty-four.”

Sal shrugged, “Eh, it's never an exact science.” More boot-steps followed from the direction of the demolished armoury and Noal's group took off in the direction Noal remembered the garage being. Shots rang out from behind them, and bullets began ringing off the walls and floor all around the group; one ricocheted off of a passage doorway and hit Noal in the back of one of his legs. He didn't feel a thing, but responded by grabbing a grenade from around his chest, pulling the pin, and tossing it behind him. A concussive blast echoed from the same direction, a few second later, accompanied by yells of pain and alarm. Fewer boot-steps followed after that.

More projectiles ricocheted around them from another connecting passage, as a second group of pirates took up the chase. Noal tossed another grenade their way and shoved Naomy and Sal to the ground as the resulting explosion sent shards of hot shrapnel flying overhead, then pulled them up and continued running. The bullets stopped zinging in their direction for a few moments, but started again, though with significantly less furor, once the smoked had cleared. Sal and Naomy returned fire, haphazardly trailing their gun barrels behind them and firing more for distraction than any real attempt to hit a target.

Turning the last sharply blind corner before the garage, they ran head-on into a heavily armed squad, with heavy body-armour and lot of bad tempers, standing ready, behind a makeshift barricade of metal filing cabinets standing at chest height. Sal and Naomy opened fire, but only managed to pin the pirates down, as the barricade deflected most of the bullets, and those behind were careful to shoot and duck at strategically advantageous moments. Almost without thinking, Noal leaped into action, jumping up and over the barricade with ease, thanks to his mechanical legs, and taking the enemy by surprise with his zweihander. None could get a bead on him as fast as he could cut them down, and before long he and his crew were inside the garage, with a nice, conveniently placed barricade already set up for the other pirates to contend with.

Sal shut and locked the garage's heavy doors and found the Gravedigger's keys on an abandoned toyo-tech's desk, and walked over to open up the prized vehicle, stuffing all of the pinched ordinance into the storage area, after which Noal and Naomy did likewise. Looking around, they could see that the place was empty, aside from an impressive number of decked out toyo cars; the pirates' entire fleet.

“Sal, we need to find a way to disable every toyocar in this place, before we leave, or they'll be on top of us before we get a kilometer away.” A banging sound started coming from the locked door; the pirates were right outside, and it wouldn't take them long to break through.

“One minute, boss,” said Sal, jumping into a large and heavily armoured tank of a toyocar, “I've gotta buy us some time first, then we can worry about disabling things.” Tires screeched as he drove the toyo right into the entrance, crushing off the door and wedging the plate-steel vehicle firmly into the opening; it made a more effective barrier than the door had, anyway. “That should hold ‘em for a couple of minutes, anyway,” said Sal, emerging from the vehicle’s rear door, “But whatever we’re gonna do, we’d better do quickly.”

“Sal, you’re the mechanic here, what do you think we should do?” asked Naomy.

“In my professional opinion,” said the mechanic, “the best and quickest way to disable all their vehicles is to take out the whole works – like blow up the whole garage.”

“No can do,” said Noal, “All the high-explosive went up with the rest of the armoury.”

“We don’t need high-explosive,” said Sal, gesturing toward the steel-grate floor. The tell-tale blue-green glow of hydro-fuel lines could barely be seen shining through the grate, and upon closer inspection one could see a network of fuel tubes leading up from a large reservoir and into the garage’s fuel pumps. “There’s a fueling station here, which means fuel reserves, and as you can see they keep it all underneath the floor here. Forget about C-4, one of those hand grenades could set the whole thing off just as easily.”

“So what are you suggesting?” asked Noal, “We just pull the pin and drop it in? Doesn’t give us much time to get out of here.”

An explosion rocked the barricade-toyo, as the pirates attempted to clear a path into the garage. “You two grab as many fuel canisters as you can and get ‘em loaded into the Gravedigger while I rig up a little surprise,” Sal directed, “Noal, I’ll need one of those grenades.”

Noal handed Sal a grenade and ran to help Naomy gather up fuel canisters. A sharp sizzle and a bright flash caught their attention as Sal popped open the fueling station manifold. Warmth radiated into the room from the un-capped fuel line. Sal looked through various pieces of equipment until he found a switch-operated and a chain-fed pulley system, and set up both devices in a line with each other, near the opened fuel-manifold. The sound of ratcheting and chain-rattle followed as he continued doing only-God-knew-what, but by the time Noal and Naomy had packed up every fuel canister they could find, Sal was standing happily by his make-shift grenade timer.

“So here’s the deal: this clamp holds onto the grenade’s fuse release, so even when I pull the pin, the timer doesn’t start until the clamp releases it, at which time it will drop into the fuel line here,” he pointed at the manifold. “In order for that to happen, this clamp release switch needs to be pressed down, for which purpose I have rigged up this pulley with these weights here. Once I release the weights, about a hundred feet of chain will be pulled through the pulley, at the end of which this old gear-box, with tire-iron attachment, will flip over and press the button. Then of course, the clamp releases, the grenade falls into the fuel line and approximately seven second later all hell breaks loose. With any luck we’ll be out the door at that point,” Sal looked more pleased with himself than Noal could remember for a long, long time. “Any questions?”

“Yeah,” said a perplexed-faced Naomy, “How the hell do you come up with this stuff? And, do you actually it to work?” More explosions erupted from the direction of the barricade, and it slowly started to roll backwards, out of the doorway, accompanied by shouts from behind it.

“Any good mechanic knows how to use what he has at hand, don’t you know? It’ll work.”

“Whatever,” shouted Noal from the driver’s pit of the Gravedigger, “We’re out of time!” The toyo’s hydro-cell engines started with a healthy roar, and Noal pulled the hulking vehicle around to the soon-to-be-violated fuel manifold. Naomy opened the back door for Sal and jumped into the front passenger seat, beside Noal.

“Let it go, and let’s get out of here!” Naomy shouted.

Sal released the weights and leaped into the back of the toyo. Noal jammed on the accelerator and squealed up the garage ramp as the barricade toyo was blown backwards by a C-4 sized blast, and pirates stormed into the garage, shooting futilely at the escaping Gravedigger on its way out.

“Hold your fire! Hold your bloody fire!” shouted the squad leader, “We’ll chase ‘em down!” Then he heard the funny clinking sound coming from over near the fuel station and wandered over to watch, curiously as a chain cycled through a pulley. “What in the hell is this supposed to be?” he asked, to no one in particular. Thoroughly confused, the pirate followed the line of the chain down the line to the old gear-box and saw that a tire-iron was in place to hit the release switch on a portable clamp. Following the logical path, he looked over at the clamp itself and saw a funny, elliptical object in its grasp, minus pin, directly over an open fuel manifold. It took him a few more seconds to put two and two together.

“Oh shit! Everbody get ou—“

The three Codexers in the Gravedigger flinched as Anflux’s garage was leveled by a mighty explosion of blue fireballs, somewhere behind them, blasting hard enough to rock the ground beneath the toyo’s wheels.

“Déjà vu,” said Sal.

“At least we all made it out alive, this time,” replied Naomy.

“I just realized something,” Noal interjected, “I have no bloody idea where we are.”

“Not a problem,” Naomy said, pulling folded up maps out of her pocket, “I found these in the armoury. Your bar-keep’s info was so much bullshit, I almost have to laugh. But I won’t.”

“Remind me to pay him a visit on my way back through Johnstown,” said Noal, coldly, then pointed ahead and exclaimed, “Second star to the right, Naomy, and straight on till morning!”

“Uh, what?”

“Nevermind. Which way to New Babylon?”

* * *

Cinder knelt down before the one he called ‘boss’. He hated being in the man’s presence, always afraid that the next meeting might be his last. Today was no exception.

“They have escaped your men, Cinder?” said a metallic voice.

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid they have,” came the reply.

“And caused extensive damage to the garage, as well as depleting most of our fuel supply, I see.”

“They were… more resourceful than expected,” Cinder cringed at the thought of his punishment for this.

“More than you expected, perhaps. And what of the tracking device?”

“Installed in their toyo, as you ordered, sir.” Perhaps it hadn’t been a total loss, after all, Cinder thought.

“Good, Cinder. That is all that matters; they cannot run far enough that I cannot see them, now. You may go now.”

“Thank you, sir, I appreciate your understanding on the matter.”

“Indeed.”

Cinder walked, calmly out the door, closed it behind him, then ran as fast as his legs could carry him. Whew! Dodged a bullet, that time!