Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who HATES this part
Goatfish Eats the Sun shallows from its deepnavigation at the nearest planet with orbital repair facilities, battered and furious; hull scorched, a score of crew deepsickened or injured, a wing of pilots missing.
Hren Zo-Seven wakes slowly in the soft cradle of a ship's hospital bed, arms crowded with gel leaves, each monitoring her condition or slowly, electromolecularly, infiltrating medications through the barrier of her skin to diffuse within her. Tall Kettle's staff stop by to check on the leaves, their ultimate dissolution and absorption to her skin, and slap fat new medicine-swollen ones on in their place; painkillers, anti-inflammatories, and trace exotic molecules. She is in interface shock, her neurological tissues angry and swollen around her insystemics, the slightest diagnostic chirp a migraine-auraed shock.
Shipself sends a newly autofactured servo, something midway between the shapes of a chameleon and parrot, to sit by her on the pillow and narrate to her in a synthesised whisper all the chirps it cannot currently send to her directly; and at her bedside, at all hours, is her wife.
"I know what you'll say," Two Marks murmurs, when she first wakes lucid, for long enough to talk. "You'll say oh no, I left her, I left our girl; and I'll tell you that she said to you to do it. That you did what you must, what any deepnavigator must; for your ship, for its crew, for yourself, and for me."
"But what if she's hurt," Hren says, cracking; "what if—" and she can't say any more.
"I can't think that," Two Marks says steadily. "You're hurt, and that's as much as I can think, just now; so Nene is fine, and she'll only be a little while. And she'll be proud of you, for keeping us safe."
Hren sobs for a while into her wife's shoulder, feeling neither proud nor brave nor good at all.
The pirates, when they come to check on the remains of their ambush, are perhaps expecting wreckage. One of the wing of mechs, piloted by Shaking Leaf, was too near the detonation, and nothing remains of him; the other five are waiting, hearts and weapons hot.
The pirate vessel is of Peninsular make, a long spindle; the wing have spent long hours, drifting to conserve fuel and calculating the most likely deepnavigational approaches, waiting for traffic in and out to become viable to an experienced crew who know the area, and the ship shallows perfectly within their noose. Swarm-deployment missiles burst before the wing are even detected, spraying clouds of short-lived propulsionless servos: chirp-jammers, drivefield deformation generators, sensor countermeasure beacons. Dazzled and muted, unable to hastily deepnavigate away with its drive effects pulled out of shape, the ship wallows, pointlessly warming its weapons as the unseen mechs are already latching to its hull.
Precision fire with breacher splinters cuts apart the ship's systems infrastructure, cable-connected mechanisms severed. Very Roll starts cutting into the drive pod for physical access, to annex its systemics; holding the interior of the ship is moot, if its attackers control its deepnavigation.
Nene crouches her mech on the exterior of the bridge pod, and chirps to its pirate inhabitants through the already-clearing communications haze: I have breachers aimed at your air systems. Stand down.
Her mech filters some internal shouting from the hull vibrations picked up through its feet. The pirates seem angry, panicky, planless; their ship's remaining capabilities shrivelling and turning against them under their hands, as the mechs' countersystemics rip apart and suborn its software.
Nene swallows against the constant sick feeling and burning-metal taste of the antiradiation medicines her mech is continuously pumping her with, and finishes locking the pirates out of sensors and manoeuvring; casts the system interfaces across the mech-wing's tactical links to Very Roll, as his mech's claws burrow system-breaching taps into cable bundles and optical lines. Even as the last of the deformation generators exhausts its power and allows the billowing drivefield to snap back into useful shape, the deepnavigation drive itself yields to them.
Without a mechself or a deepnavigator, any trip is going to be slow and harrowing, but the ship has waypoints set for nearby ports, and will be able to sense the nearby gradients of deep enough to autonomously fumble some halting, cautious route.
Take us out of here, in case any more come, Nene chirps Very Roll; and shudders as the mechs, in preparation, sluice sedatives into their veins and sensory-baffle their pilots as best they can. The punctured, parasitised, and hijacked vessel shivers as its drive surges under new direction, then begins a slow, juddering, robotic descent into deepnavigation.