Don’t take a shortcut through Cathcart. (Short Story) The noise nobody wanted to hear crackled, and burst out of the comms. “Pace ‘ack n’ raise ya’ grippers up. T’ beddewan are goolin’” Fucking Spiderlings. You could reason with most pirates, and if you dumped your cargo, they left you alone. Most of the time. That didn’t work with people from Spider. Sure, they wanted your cargo, but they also wanted your engines, your cables, your gravity generator. They weren't pirates, they were scavengers, who didn’t wait until the prey was dead before moving in. The whole situation was compounded by the fact that most of the time, you were speaking two different languages. It could be worse. Most of the time they didn’t go out of their way to kill you. Sometimes they’d even drop you off at the nearest lawless planet, but that wasn’t much better. Warning lights were flashing now. I assumed that the gibberish being spouted through the comms was the pirates informing us that they were boarding. I wasn’t going to stick around, so I slunk to the back, and opened up a vent. I wouldn’t call myself a coward, but I wasn’t going to sit around to maybe get shot. Part of me considered telling the others to hide, but there wasn’t enough room for all of them. No sooner had I placed the grate back on that the airlock opened with a hiss, and inside stood three pirates, all in a variety of painted armour. One seemed to be following the other two, as if he didn’t know exactly what to do with himself. The rest of the crew, save for myself, greeted the pirates. The captain stepped up, and tried to reason with the pirates. “We’re simple traders, please. Take the-” His speech was cut short by the foremost raider backhanding him to the floor, met with a laugh from the spiderling next to him, and seemingly no response from the rearmost one. This clearly rubbed Caleb the wrong way. Caleb was a guard we picked up on Lo, a hot headed man, who seemingly picked a fight with everyone. Honestly, it was surprising that he lasted this long without attacking them. Before I could really see what was going on, Caleb had crossed half the room, and was holding something, a knife? I could hear a gasp of surprise coming from the pirate that just knocked Captain Avery down, and then I was momentarily deafened. I couldn’t see what was going on at first, and I had to reposition myself to see, but Caleb lay dead on the floor, a third eye in the middle of his forehead, currently spouting blood, and one of the pirates held a smoking ballistic handgun. The one that shot him, the rearmost one, pulled off the helmet, and promptly emptied his guts onto the floor, before wiping his mouth, and looking up. He was pale, and seemingly looked right at me, before looking back down at the floor. He looked very malnourished. Another of the pirates whacked him around the head. “Sheeth! Geddit glued up!” Which was met by a singular cough from the shooter, before pulling his helmet back on, and then “Let’s pace.” They all moved out of my line of sight then, and I tried to shimmy further along the vents to see what they were doing. They came into another room, residential. A EZHab. Two of them cursed, and left, checking the other rooms, but one remained. The shooter, I could tell by the blood splattered on his helmet, looked around at the room. It was Caleb’s, not that he had any use for it now. The pirate leant against the door, and cursed loudly. “I din’ fuckin’ want zilch o’ is.” he muttered, and then stood, and walked out of the room, taking with him one of Caleb’s possessions, a painting. Surely the pirate wasn’t stupid enough to think it was an original? I don’t know what happened after that, but the pirates left after half an hour. No more deaths occurred, but they took our engine, and our cargo. We drifted for three days before rescue. Don’t take a shortcut through Cathcart.