Memoirs of Itty Siam

The Pioneer Spirit.

I was escorted through the ship and along the way I was informed that I was to meet their leader. They called him "Captain" and suggested that I do so as well if I knew what was good for me. When I looked him over there was nothing about the man that indicated that he had authority over anyone. I could see why he was not a member of the raiding party that had captured us. He was not in good physical condition and was probably about a hundred pounds over weight. The way that he waddled about his cabin I concluded that if he and Jobu were to race up the steps of the shrine, Jobu would win.

They knew little about me other than one of the crew that stunned and captured me told the Captain that I was wearing the robes of a monk. From their raids on other villages on Angkor they knew that the monks were healers and community leaders. As the Captain spoke I knew what he was after even though he did not come out and say it right away. He knew his crew was sick and given the look of some of the corpses that we passed on the way to the Captain's quarters, there were not many of them left alive and those that were still alive did not have long to live. The plague was in its final stages and I think he knew it.

I listened to him ramble as he brought up the subject of his dead crewmembers and the black festering sores on those still alive. His voice started to tremble and it was obvious that even though he did not leave the ship during the raid the virus was brought onboard and it had spread through out the crew. I did not have to wait long to find out what he was after and what the price would be for non-compliance. I had the choice of curing the crew or being tossed out the nearest airlock.

I knew that I could physically take the Captain out easy enough if I wished to make a move on him but my worry was the man behind me with the stun rifle. I looked over my shoulder to see how far away he was and as I looked at his face I could see that he was perspiring terribly and that his eyes were half shut. He was wavering slightly and I could see that just like the Captain he did not have much time left. I had a feeling that they could toss me out an airlock a bit faster than the plague could take their lives so I knew I had to do something.

Without the healing beam of the shrine there was nothing that I could do to save the lives of my captors. Refusing to help them would leave me just as dead as if I explained that I could not or would not help them. I allowed the Captain to think that I was paying attention to him even though I did not answer. As he spoke I looked over my left and then my right shoulder to get a count of the number of people in the room with me. I could see only two and as I started to formulate a plan the man behind me with the rifle poked me in the back and demanded that I answer the Captain.

I honestly did not hear the question so I stammered for a few seconds to get them both focused on me as they waited for my reply. Once I knew that they were focused on my face and lips I used the wardrobe device to digitize and remove my magnetic restraints. Faster than they could see what had happened I was standing naked before them with my wrists and ankles free from their shackles.

The man with the rifle was the closest to me so before either of my captors realized that I was free I took a step to my left and twisted to my right. My hands closed the barrel of the stun rifle and as I secured my grip on the weapon I pulled hard. One thing that they stressed in weapons training at the academy was not to keep your finger on the trigger until you were ready to fire. The fool behind me must have forgot about that or was absent that day. As I pulled the weapon forward his finger pulled the trigger. The rifle discharged and struck the Captain in the chest as planned.

The discharge of the weapon startled him, and probably the sight of his Captain crashing to the deck unconscious did not help either, but since his concentration was broken I once again pulled on the weapon and twisted. I suppose I moved faster than he thought was possible and it was quite easy to twist the weapon from his grip before he realized what had happened. With the weapon free I took a hold of it with both hands then lunged forward, striking him in the throat with the rifle butt. On impact he clutched his throat as he sunk to his knees, and once he was no longer a threat I turned the business end of the rifle on him and fired.

I was armed but the altercation in the Captain's cabin was bound to draw some unwanted attention. In the few seconds that I had to think about the possibilities I used my wardrobe device to don my battle suit. To accessorize my outfit I added my bow, quiver, and katana. I knew that the suit would easily absorb the blasts from their stun rifles so I would be safe from their weapons while I made my way to the flight deck.

The flight deck was just down the hall from the Captain's cabin, and as I entered the flight deck I found two crewmen on duty. They looked about as ill as the Captain and even though they were close to death, I helped death along. When they heard the door open they both stood and turned towards me. They were not fast enough to avoid the arrows that I had launched in their direction. Both were struck in the chest as they turned to face me and as they dropped to the floor they had a few seconds to try and pull the arrows free. Even though one managed to pull the shaft from between his ribs, he expired a minute or so later in a pool of his own blood.

I was in control of the flight deck, so my next trick was to locate the controls for the hyper drive and shut it down. It took me a few minutes to study the controls and as I looked around the flight deck I could not help noticing that this ship was a flying disaster. Most of the critical systems were running close to red line and there were grease pencil marks on the instrument panels that indicated that readings in or close to the danger zone was the accepted norm for this crew and it's Captain.

I found what I was looking for, and since Ragalian was a language in my UT I could quickly read the labels over the controls. I brought the ship out of hyperspace then used the docking thrusters to bring the ship to a dead stop in normal space just outside the gravity well of a blue gas giant. I knew that if there were any more of the crew still alive on the ship they would be coming to the flight deck or going to the engine compartment to find out what had happened. It was now time for me to go hunting slavers.

The First Officer was the last one to log on to the command console so it was easy for me to scramble the ship's command codes and over write them with codes of my own. This would deny any other crewmembers access to the ship's command or navigation functions. Once that was done I shut down the engines, and the reactor that powered the engines and the ships electrical grid. The ship's emergency batteries kicked in as designed, but the power that they supplied did not last long. Just like the rest of the ship, the batteries were about a century over due for their scheduled maintenance. When the last of the emergency power was expended I activated my feline night vision and began my hunt.

The ship was not very large and contained a single level so there were no ladders or stairs to climb, or a chance that someone could descend a ladder and come up behind me from an area that I had already searched. It took me a little over four hours to clear each compartment and hallway and in my tour of the ship I only came across three living souls that were once our captors. As they stumbled around in the dark it was quite easy for me to either dispatch them with an arrow or a quick slash of the katana. Once I was sure that the ship was mine and that my ownership would not be contested, I went to the flight deck and restarted the reactor. Once the lights were back on I made my way to the cargo compartment where the captives were being held.

I remained in my battle suit, as the cargo bay was one area of the ship that I did not check previously. I knew that when I left the bay under escort that none of our captors were left behind to guard the cages. I did not want to go through there and panic the captives any more than the loss of the lights had already. When I entered the bay I could still hear the sobbing and crying of the confused captives. Sala recognized me immediately and gave me a look that told me that she was trying to figure out what I was wearing and why. Raku and Attu also did not know what to make of me, but they held their questions for the moment as I went through the corridors opening the locked cages.

I pulled the two Alphas aside and told them what had happened. I informed them that they were on a ship and that I was in control. They did not understand the part about the ship as they did not know of any ships this big, and as Attu began to ask a question I cut him off and told him that I would explain later. The look he gave me told me that he was not used to a woman talking to him in this manner. I did not mean to be disrespectful of his position as Alpha, but there were things that needed to be done and I did not have time to stroke his ego.

I asked Raku and Attu to round up any other Alphas, elders, or monks among the captives and have them meet me at the end of the hallway that led out of the cargo bay. The captives were growing restless and I needed them to calm them down so that I could explain better what had happened to them so that they could come back and calmly explain it to their people.

It was about ten minutes before the leaders of the group had joined me, and I noticed that Sala being of royal personage had joined the all male troop of leaders. I chose a room just off the main hallway that was a dining room for the officers, or at least it was back when this ship was in control of the military instead of a band of cutthroats. The dining room had a large window that looked out into the black void of space. It seemed that the Alphas picked a room on the side of the ship opposite the gas giant so all that could be seen was the blackness of space. On a positive note, this saved me from having to explain to them what a planet was. Once the group quieted down I took control of the meeting and I asked them to have a look out the window and tell me what they see.

The consensus was that they were looking at the night sky which was close to being true but I explained that we were above the night sky looking down, but since they could not see anything but darkness and the twinkle of stars in the distance they were confused. I tried to explain again in words that someone from the iron age of Earth might understand but with their ability to comprehend complex concepts, it was as if I was trying to explain celestial navigation to a houseplant. Once again I tried to dumb down my explanation but they still did not understand, so I promised that I would try again later but first there were some things that I needed to do to get the ship moving toward home again. I asked the leaders for their cooperation in keeping their villagers calm and orderly. I also asked them to pass the word not to touch anything that they do not understand, which was pretty much 99% of the items on this ship.

The last thing I asked them to do was busy work, but we did need to round up the bodies and dispose of them properly before they began to decompose and stink up the ship. The ship smelled really bad as it was, but the stench of rotting corpses was more than I wanted to imagine or live with and we made our way back to Angkor. With the leaders following behind, I found the nearest airlock and asked that the dead be piled neatly in this room. I showed each of the leaders individually how to open and close the inner door. After I did that I made sure to remove the manual key that unlocks the outside door. I did not want to see any of the passengers accidentally launched into space by pressing the wrong button.

Next we addressed the issue of food. I noticed that the ship had a mess hall with a crude replication facility, so I knew that as long as we had power and a large quantity of stored biomass that we would be ok as far as food was concerned. I knew that I would also have to give someone a crash course on ordering food from the replication alcove. I decided that Sala would be a good person for that job and she was designated the cook for lack of a better term that my fellow captives would understand.

When our little meeting broke up Sala took it upon herself to stay close to me. I did not see any harm in her following me about the ship as I figured out our next move. Before the group of leaders was out of sight I asked if they would send eight strong men with me as I would show them were some of the dead could be found.

The dead and dying were rounded up along with the stunned Captain and loaded into the airlock. Using docking thrusters I angled the ship toward the nearest star then engaged the sub light engines. I got us as close to the star as I could without melting the external hull plating. These brigands were not the religious sort and neither was I but being the Priestess that I was I said a short Pa'u prayer for their sins, and I was surprised when several of my traveling companions joined in. After the prayer was concluded and in full view of the elders I pressed the red button that opened the external hatch of the airlock to the vacuum of space. As the bodies of our captors were sucked out into space and eventually burst into flames I turned to the leaders and said, "Safety lesson number one, never touch anything that you do not understand!"

They all nodded as I advised them to relay what they had seen here today to their people. I did not expect any trouble from the people of Angkor, but I had to do something to express the dangers of traveling in space and what could happen if they touched the wrong control intentionally or by accident. Once my little safety demonstration was complete I made my way to the flight deck to get us away from the star we were orbiting, and then figure out where we were headed, where we came from, and what we should set as our new course.

I took the Captain's chair and started going through the specs and such of the ship to see what sort of mess that I had inherited. The word mess was an understatement. If I was reading the date right and my math was correct, which it usually was, this ship was launched on its maiden voyage about three days before Jesus was nailed to the cross by the Romans.

As I learned more about the ship's systems I understood why they were doing their hyperspace jumps in short bursts instead of long carefully calculated segments. Their navigational computer had a little more memory than something called a "Game Boy" that children played with in the late twentieth century. Just out of curiosity I plugged in the coordinates for Earth being that I knew these coordinates intimately. The response I got back from the navigation computer was that the jump computations would take 1,172 days to complete. Of course that was totally unacceptable.

I did not know the special coordinates for Angkor but I figured that the navigation system kept a record of where they had been, so I started looking at the logs to see if I could back track the course that the slavers had taken. What I found was par for the course on this ship. The navigation system was running a subroutine that purged the logs as they were created. It seems that these pirates did not want any evidence to be left in the system should they be captured by the authorities. Deleting the logs eliminated one form of evidence that would point to when and where they had raided which could be used against them in a piracy trial.

I still had no idea where I had been and were I was going and there were a few more sets of coordinates that I could remember and all of them would have taken a similar amount of time to calculate. As I was going through the coordinates that I knew the numbers 114.7.413.67.101.5.771 popped into my head. When I entered these coordinates into the system I was informed that it would only take 17 hours to process those route calculations. The short length of the plot time told me that this planet was much closer to our current location than Earth was. I was not exactly sure what we would find there, but the numbers seemed very familiar so it was a shot in the dark worth taking.

While I was waiting for the calculation to complete I poked about in the system found that this ship also had a crude wireless access system built into it but it had not been used in many centuries. I was able to set myself up a network access account and granted myself Captain and owner level access. Once that was done I made myself the Captain of the ship and removed the access that the previous Captain and crew had. I now had wireless access to everything aboard this ship from the food replicators to the hyper drive.

Since I could control the ship with my internal data port I could do a detailed inspection of the ship and access the ships schematics and performance readouts while I toured the engineering compartment. The more I looked at the engines and reactor, the more I wished that I had stayed on the flight deck and assumed that everything was in good working order. My first impression was that this ship's only function should be hauling garbage, but I rethought that statement and now I believe that this ship should be hauled away AS garbage.

Since there was no longer an internal threat from the previous crew I switched into something more comfortable and more fitting my station aboard this ship. It felt so good to be back in my white Drax Corporation flight suit, though this time when I dressed myself with the wardrobe device I left off the logo and text of the afore mentioned corporation. I snickered to myself as I thought about replacing the Drax logo with the Annunaki flag or some similar standard of that long dead race of space colonizers.

I made my way to the cargo bay where we were held earlier to see what my passengers were doing. The first thing I noticed was the looks that I was getting from my fellow travelers as I entered the bay. I could swear that some of the men were drooling or leering, as they looked me over in my tight formfitting white flight suit. The looks from some of the women was more of a jealous nature, and the looks from the elders told me that they did not believe that a Priestess should be dressing this way. One of the elders was bold enough to express his opinion to me and I did my best to explain that my job now was to fly this ship to some place safe, and that this was the proper attire for a pilot to be wearing for such a task. I think he understood the part about what my job was here but I do not think that he understood the word "pilot" or its meaning.

Another surprise as moved through the bay was that the leaders had organized the people into work teams and they were in the process of ripping down the metal fencing that formed the cage corridors. I spoke to Raku who had assumed the role as leader of the entire group and he informed me that there was a shortage of quarters for his people and that they would use the metal fencing to create little huts that a few people could share for privacy. They had found some tools, canvas and other items to assist in their efforts to build a small village in the cargo bay.

I gave Raku the directions to the crew quarters and told him that they could have anything that they found in there to use also, and that they could make use of that space as well for living quarters. He nodded in agreement but as I left the cargo bay I thought I had better go through those quarters myself to make sure that there were no weapons or anything harmful there that could cause an injury, or death. Raku decided to accompany me on my safety check of the crew quarters, and on several occasions I caught him checking out my backside as we walked the hallways.