One of the pirates was so startled by the site of the strange contraptions that he inadvertently squeezed off a burst of fire. Two of his six rounds hit the top of Poison’s Kevlar cover, the part the pirates would describe as the top of the flying saucer. Those two 7.62 rounds harmlessly skidding off of Poison’s domed surface and bounced off the side of the Nucleus, making movie ricochet sounds. Two more rounds hit the mini-gun mounted under Poison and went pinging off into the ocean. The last two rounds missed everything entirely and harmlessly disappeared into the distance.
The blast of gunfire drew the attention of the rest of the pirates and they raised their guns up to their shoulders and took aim at the closest alien.
Each of the cameras mounted to each of the flying weapons streamed the video back to the security center on the Nucleus. The video that arrived showed five pirates that looked both scared and angry.
“What do you want to do, Marshall?” Dallas asked. “We have them at gunpoint.”
Hail looked at the pirates. They stared back at him through the eyes of his avionic soldiers.
God, what would it be like to be one of these guys, Hail thought. Born into abject poverty; having to scrape for the very basics of life. And the kicker was that their lives would never change. No retirement. No relief. Day after day, doing whatever they had to do to eat and keep a cardboard roof over their heads. Death might even be welcomed after a lifetime of that. Hell, maybe even after a decade of that type of existence. Today, however, the Hail crew would not be the answer to those prayers or any of their problems.
“Alba, do you know Indonesian?” Hail asked.
Alba put down the bowl of popcorn that had just arrived and said, “I know a little of the Bahasa Indonesia form of the language. It is the official modified form of Malay.”
Hail responded, “I don’t know what any of that means, but it has to be better than nothing. Open a microphone and speaker channel on Ratt.”
“Give me a minute,” Alba said.
Down on the water, the pirates appeared both confused and paralyzed. They stared at their flying captors, apparently trying to make up their minds as to what to do next. Their choice was to either continue on with what had become a very odd abduction scenario, or cut their losses and return to their mother-boat.
Hail looked over the Indonesians closely, trying to determine which one was the leader. Their body language was being continually interrupted by the bumps and dips in the ocean. The man sitting down at the back of the boat and operating the outboard engine had it easy. The others were doing their best to remain standing, while keeping their guns trained on the targets surrounding them.
Hail decided that it really didn’t matter who was in charge. There were no decisions to be made by the pirates. Hail was making all the decisions on their behalf. Live or die. It was all a matter of one command that exited his mouth and entered the ears of his pilots.
“I have the comms open, Marshall,” Alba reported.
Tell them this, Hail said. “This is the captain of Hail Nucleus. Turn your boat around and go home. Turn your boat around and go home. If you do this, then no harm will come to you or your men.”
Alba made an adjustment to the TC Helicon Voice Modulator and set the dial for BARITONE MALE. She slipped on a headset and adjusted the microphone in front of her mouth.
She then translated Hail’s words into the microphone.
Hail and the crew waited for a reaction.
The pirate that was closest to Ratt was so startled when the weird thing started talking, that he fell back into the boat and opened fire. His volley of led was not aimed well and the rounds uselessly shot skyward.
Hail shook his head and said to Alba, tell them, “Turn your boat around right now and go home or we will open fire.”
Alba repeated the phrase in her best Indonesian.
The mechanical Indonesia voice that came out of Ratt was low, loud and clear. Hail could tell that all the men in the boat had understood Alba’s instructions. They just didn’t like the message. They began arguing with one another. There was a rapid fire of curt exchanges that didn’t appear to resolve the situation. The pirate who had fallen down in the boat, got back to his feet and purposely pointed his weapon at Ratt and appeared to be ready to fire.
“Screw this,” Hail said. “Vaughn, what kind of angle do you have on their bow gunwale?”
“I’m good,” Vaughn said, “But Dallas needs to move Ratt out of the way.”
“I’m on it,” Dallas said, tilting his joystick to the right. “I should be clear now.”
The pirates looked happy when the flying gun-alien-thing that had been hovering over their bow began to move away from the front of their boat. To Hail, he sensed they thought that their recent gunfire had scared the thing away.
“Fire,” Hail ordered.
Vaughn lifted the safety latch and slid in his finger onto the trigger of his left joystick. On his screen, he centered a red laser on the top rail of the pirate boat. Confident with the fix on his target, Vaughn fired the machine gun. The speakers in the security center crackled with loud static as the barrage of brass and lead peeked and distorted the drone’s microphones.
The pirates jumped and launched themselves toward the back of their boat as Poison spit out bullets. Chunks of wood and flying splitters chattered off the bow of their vessel. The pirate driving their boat cranked the motor hard to the right. As the roar of gun fire subsided, the vessel veered away from the Nucleus. The barrel on Poison smoked, leaving a dull grey cloud behind it as the flying weapons maintained their original speed and position next to the Nucleus.
“Should we pursue them?” Dallas asked.
Before Hail could respond, Tayler, who was still flying the attack drone Queen high above, said, “The mother-boat is on the move and closing rapidly on our position. There is one guy manning the fifty cal and they are vectored to reach us in about forty-seven seconds.”
“Get one of the port cameras on them,” Hail requested.
Being one of the few crew members with free hands, Mercier pulled up the console and took control of the camera that had been tracking the pirates below. He pointed it up and out toward the sea. It took him a few minutes of scanning, but he finally acquired the inbound boat, drew a crude box around the vessel with his finger and set the camera to auto-track.
Hail studied the fiberglass boat that was approaching the Nucleus. From the front, it looked like a twenty-six foot Boston Whaler; year unknown. The only modification from the stock craft was the addition of a large 50 caliber Browning machine gun that pivoted on a stand mounted on the front deck. As Hail scanned the pirate boat for other weapons, puffs of smoke began appearing from the barrel of the machine gun. A second later, the sound of the gunfire arrived at the drone’s microphones and was piped up to the security center.