P Is for Pirate

Korsa; Greetings gentle beings. You are my captives. You can expect humane treatment, rapidly giving way to homicidal fury in the face of any resistance. 

Passenger: The Fleet is going to chase you all the way back to your rat hole, you pirate scum.

Korsa: Let ‘em chase me. They’ve chased me half a dozen times. It keeps me on my toe analogs. My rat hole is a planet with no extradition treaties and a lot of financial incentive to give me alibis and whatever protection I need.

Cruise Ship Captain: I will vouch for my crew captain. We will not make any trouble as long as our passengers are unharmed.

Passenger: What if we are harmed?!

Korsa: I can expect a sternly worded letter. How much do you think passenger liner crew make?

Passenger: The Fleet will hear of this.

Korsa: The Fleet ... Let me tell you something about your Fleet. Piracy was completely uneconomical until the Fleet came along.

The Fleet gave us the deflectors that masked our IR and EM signals letting us sneak up on you. 

The Fleet created the defensive shields that let us disable your ship without blowing it to atoms.

The Fleet gave us tractor beams that let us grapple your ship instead of chasing you pointlessly.

The Fleet gave us the teleporter that let us ‘port a commando team over to secure your bridge and security station. No jumping across space. No boarding shuttles. No cutting apart hulls.

I thank the Fleet for all it has done for space piracy. You should thank it too, for picking up your ship after we set the distress signal to buy us time to slip away. But first you moneybags are going to have a short unpleasant session with our resident telepath. After we pick your brains for your pin numbers, secret accounts, and off world holding companies we will give you a good shot of liquid amnesia, a bit of psionic tweaking and you’ll wake up hungover with no memory of this conversation or the last week.


Gods save the Fleet!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Proxy? You Misspelled Patsy! Part 1

Trade Relations

Traveller: Society in Decline or Post Apocalyptic?