From what we could see on the scanners, the TCS Thaleia just looked like an old-school Tarkan freighter. We know now that that was just smoke and mirrors.

 

Strictly speaking, of course, we weren’t supposed to pillage Tarkan cargo ships: our papers from the Magellan Corporation only gave license for actions against Exoplanet Confederacy vessels. But Drake always reckoned that if nobody witnessed what we did, we could pillage to our hearts’ content, and the Corporation wouldn’t give a cyborg’s chuff.

 

So far, the commander had not steered us wrong.

 

He’d brought the Aurora to a near-synchronous, parallel trajectory so that we were close enough to the Thaleia for two-way electro-spit communication. Wyvern then fry-wired the Thaleia’s navigation and propulsion control systems and hacked across with a couple of her fancy new LX5 scripts.

 

The new scripts worked like a charm, and we all then figured that the symbiont polymorphs – worth 300 U a piece on the Shadow Worlds — were as good as in the bag.

 

Drake dispatched four-man boarding parties on each of two solar-sailed skiffs, with me and Wyvern on the advance craft.

 

When Wyvern disabled the lock on the Thaleia’s aft entry port, the three of us followed her aboard in single file. The second skiff docked at the mid-line port on the starboard side and waited on the all-clear from us.

 

We didn’t expect to meet any resistance. Long-haul ships like the Thaleia had onboard auto-navigation and AI contingency-ware, so there was no risk of us running into Tarkan crew or freight marines. Their primary cargo of organics would just be sealed in PPG wraps inside oxy-pods up in the topside hold, the more frisky ones drip-fed with Somex to keep them quiescent.

 

With Wyvern leading the way topside, we first walked in close formation up an inclined ramp, and then, one-by-one, scaled the ladder work that was braced to the bulkhead, eventually passing through a domed trapdoor and out onto the topside deck. Going was slow, because of the strictures imposed by our virosuits.

 

And when we did eventually get up into the topside hold, it proved distinctly disappointing. There were a couple of coiled cables strewn across the floor, but no sign of any oxy-pods, PPG wraps, or Somex ancillary units.

 

No sign of any organics, symbionts or otherwise.

 

"Something's not right here," Wyvern said, her voice crackling through the virosuit comms. "Thaleia’s logs didn’t mention anything about them transferring cargo. And there's no way they’d ship symbionts without containment."

 

Drake’s voice came in over the ether link from the Aurora. "Stay sharp. I don’t like this. Our scanners are picking up some weird energy spikes aboard. Not sure yet what the source is. Could just be a power surge or a glitch — but maybe not. You guys see anything in there?"

 

"Negative," I replied, looking round the hold. "The whole place seems deserted."

 

Wyvern shook her head, unconvinced. She took out a portable scanner and started running it along the walls. The readouts were normal at first, but then the scanner’s alarm sounded, and I saw red lights flash on the display.

 

"This is weird,” Wyvern said. “There's an active power source here, something big, just beyond this bulkhead."

 

"Could be a hidden cargo bay?" I suggested.

 

"Maybe," she replied. “And then again, maybe not.”

 

We moved to the far end of the hold, where a large bulkhead door loomed. It wasn’t on any of the schematics that Wyvern had pulled from the Thaleia’s systems. She ran an LX2 jump script, trying to hack into the door controls. It took longer than expected, and the tension in the group was palpable.

 

Finally, with a heavy hiss, the door slid open.

 

Beyond the bulkhead lay a cavernous chamber, dimly lit by a bile yellow glow. At its centre there was an enormous, pulsating mass, detaching from the floor and rising up. It clearly wasn’t any form of machinery, it was organic, or at least partly so. Its surface was translucent, and beneath it something shimmered and writhed.

 

"Oh, hell," Wyvern whispered. "That’s not a fucking symbiont. That’s—"

 

But before she could finish, the mass pulsed violently causing the surrounding air to vibrate, and then a host of shifting, spectral forms separated from the walls and seemed half to float and half to slither towards us.

 

One of the figures lashed out with whip-like projections that split into tendrils that wrapped around Arlan’s legs and torso. Another did the same with Kidd. Their screams echoed through the comms and then cut off abruptly as the tendrils lifted them up and dumped them into the central pulsating mass.

 

They were briefly visible through its translucent surface but then seemed just to dissolve leaving no trace.

 

Wyvern pulled a Viper-Q from her belt and fired repeatedly, but the figures seemed to morph around the blasts, forever shifting and reforming, and the shots that struck the main body of the organic simply got absorbed. "We need to get the hell out of here!" she yelled, backing toward the door.

 

I lunged forward to cover her retreat and tried cutting the advancing tendrils with my plasma blade, but all to no avail.

 

"Drake!" Wyvern screamed into the comms. "Abort mission! Abort! We got us a pseudo-metalloid heterotroph in here, and the son-of-a-bitch ain’t playing nice! We need to pull out!"

 

With thickening tendrils surging behind and alongside us, we bolted back the way we’d come, and eventually managed to re-board the skiff.

 

As Wyvern fired the thrusters to life and took us back to the Aurora, it became crystal clear that the Tarkans had got wise to our looting and were using the lure of symbiont polymorphs to bait us.

 

Melding the heterotrophs to the cargo ship metalwork was their means of ensuring they brought an end to our activities.

 

Suffice it to say that we went about our privateering as good little boys and girls after that.