Chapter 38: Chapter 37 Choices

Samantha stood on the bridge behind the pirate king. She had done what she needed to in order to survive. The thing that almost broke her was watching the video of her crew trying to escape in an escape without her. After Acton had raped her a few times she made a choice. She slowly started to respond positively to his abuses. He was never rough or violent with her, he just took what he wanted.

She looked for a way to escape but it seemed hopeless. Then she began to admire him overwhelming her disgust of the basic nature of pirates. He had charisma and was very intelligent. She was self aware enough to realize she was experiencing Stockholm syndrome but just gave in.

News had come to the pirate fleet that the Union had fallen and was being divided up amongst the Sapphire Empire and its allies. That was the final straw for her. It was revealed the corporations would remain intact and all civilian debt would remain to them in order to preserve the economy. The only thing that made her grin for a brief moment was the corporate tax rate in the Sapphire Empire was 50% compared to the Union’s 12%. She was sure the corporations already had an army of lobbyists headed to the Sapphire capital to change that.

Samantha had finally decided to play the only card she had. The knowledge of the alien cache on the planetoid. She was fairly certain the engineer had died and she was the only one alive who know of its existence. If she thought she could eventually escape she would have held the knowledge to herself. But she saw the pirate king eyeing other women…soon she might be discarded. So she told him of how her greedy ship engineer had sabotaged her ship and tried to keep the planetoid and it’s riches for himself.

At first he didn’t believe her. It was just too fantastical. Something like that would have long ago been discovered. Samantha whispered to him for days. Without her knowledge he tore apart her ship looking for evidence and found some jewelry that had fallen to a lower deck from the bridge cache. That was all it took for him to mobilize his pirate fleet and he even brought in two other pirate kings. Three pirate fleets soon set out. First they raided two remote space stations for supplies then they set out.

It wasn’t difficult to find the planetoid’s path in astronavigation computers. When they arrived at the coordinates and nothing was there she thought she was dead. Instead Acton sat there for ten minutes ignoring comm requests from other ships then he broadcast to all ships. He said a small planet couldn’t get far. He would coordinate a search grid from his ship.

There was a lot of grumblings from other ships over the next five days and Acton’s position was hanging on by a thread in her opinion. He never once doubted her claim though and even made love to her every day. It finally happened. A fighter with long range scans found a gravitational mass. Acton immediately had the entire fleet converge on the point. She stood behind him on the bridge as they got the planetoid on the scanners and the sensor operator yelled in excitement that the object matched expected dimensions. Acton muttered something about how his golden goose had flown so far off course.

A ship’s power signature lit up on the planetoid and the fleet went on alert. Acton calmly asked for the communications officer to open a channel. Samantha was frozen. It was the engineer on the bridge of ship. The bridge looked new and would have been impressive except for the black and red chair he was sitting in clashed with the rest of the bridge. Samantha wasn’t sure what her fate would be now…she leaned forward and whispered into Acton’s ear and said “That is my engineer.”

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