Thea

“Alrighty princess, you ready?” I asked. We were standing in the bad guy’s airlock after we finished changing and our EVA suits were safely stored away in my ring. We were getting ready to storm the ship. Well, maybe ‘storm’ wasn’t exactly the right word.

“Remember, we need to get to the navigator’s core before we’re discovered,” Bryce reminded me again. “The crew should be large enough, and the ship big enough, that they won’t know we’re here if we just walk around. But that’s out the window the moment we start killing people, and we really don’t want to be on board a ship whose navigator wants us dead.”

“Yeah, I get it. We need to be sneaky. But are you ready to go?”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Bryce asked.

“I don’t think--oh right.” I made the two of us invisible. “Except now we can’t see each other.”

“Give me a second and I can cast a spell that should help.”

“Or we could make this a proper date and hold hands.” I bounced my eyebrows a few times, but they were invisible, so Bryce probably didn’t notice.

“Scandalous.” Bryce sounded like she was smiling, but again, invisible. “We can try it, but make sure you stay close and watch your step. We’re invisible, not silent.”

“Just who do you think you’re talking to? This isn’t my first time making myself invisible and sneaking through a place where I’m not wanted so that I could trick a cute girl into holding hands with me.” I strutted across the room and grabbed Bryce. “I’m basically an expert at this point.”

“Thea, that’s not my hand.”

“Like I said, I’m an expert.”

Bryce brushed my hand off her ass before casting some sort of spell that made her visible. “There, that should make it so that only we can see each other.”

“Well that's way less fun." I shrugged. "But I guess it's still pretty neat.”

“Come on, you dork.” Bryce turned to leave, and I chased after her.

The ship was, well, not great. Admittedly, it was only the second one I had ever been on, but the whole place needed a major wipe down. And I think somebody was boiling fish-heads in a pot of gym socks, because that was the only way I could describe how everything smelled.

Sami had given us a map to follow that would bypass the places people were most likely to hang out, but Bryce was here, so I left reading it to her. Which was probably for the best, because I was completely lost by the time we ran into our first real complication.

“Should we wake him?” Bryce asked.

“We should probably just kill him. I mean, that’s why we’re here, right?”

"I'm not sure if I want to kill somebody in their sleep." Bryce shook her head.

There was a man cradling a bottle of rum while passed out on top of the panel that hid the navigator’s core. We were there to clear the entire ship, but Bryce was being squeamish about killing somebody who wasn't actively trying to murder us. She had the weirdest hangups.

“Wait, I have an idea.” I took the man’s bottle, which caused him to stir. Then I hit him hard on the head with it, which stopped his stirring. Finally, I checked to make sure he was still breathing, before kicking him off the panel and pulling it open. “See? Easy.”

“I guess that works.” Bryce knelt down by the newly open panel and started to cast something. We couldn’t just remove the core. There was a ton of power flowing through it and even touching it would be dangerous. But we still needed to deal with it, and that’s what her spell was supposed to do.

Bryce finished casting a few minutes later and wiped herself up as she stood. “That’ll do it, but we should probably get out of the area before the spell activates. There’s no way their navigator won't notice losing connection, and I’d prefer not being here when they decide to investigate.”

“Sure, let me just put the panel back on.” I tried my best to cover up what we’d done, but the panel was a little wonky after I tore it off. At least, Mr. Sleepy covered most of the damage.

We left the area to search for the cargo-bay, which, according to Sami, was the most likely place for them to keep their prisoners. It didn’t take long for us to find it, but the door was locked and we didn't exactly have a key.

“What now?” I asked.

“Well, my spell should activate soon and after that, we won’t have to worry nearly as much about stealth,” Bryce explained. “We just need to wait--”

A massive explosion rocked the ship, and the lights blinked off, followed by a moment a silence. Then the lights came back on red and a loud siren started to blare.

“Holy shit, princess.” I laughed. “Don’t you think that was a bit much? I mean, Mr. Sleepy is definitely dead now. I sat the poor guy right on top of your spell.”

“Nothing was supposed to explode! The spell was designed to disrupt the signals between the core and the ship!” Bryce was staring back, wide-eyed.

“Babe, don’t you have a fancy degree in this sort of thing? I’m pretty sure there’s a difference between disrupting something and blowing it up." I paused to think about it for half a moment. "Actually, on second thought, it’s probably about the same.”

“My doctorate is in arcane magic, and nav-cores are magi-tech, which is different. Even then, there’s no way the core should’ve exploded.” Bryce suddenly realized something and let out a pained groan. “Unless they’ve been completely ignoring standard maintenance procedures, and the core was barely being held together without my interfering. Just how incompetent are these assholes?”

I was about to respond when the door opened to reveal an annoyed looking blonde woman. She was wearing a blood covered apron with matching rubber gloves that ran up past her elbows.

“Those fucking assholes are completely incompetent,” she complained, as she stomped into the hallway. “Leave them alone for five seconds and they blow up half the gods damned ship.”

Bryce and I pushed our invisible selves up against the wall as the woman walked by, then I pulled both of us through the open door before it could close.

The cargo-bay was much larger than what we had on our ship, even with half of the space being taken up by a couple of massive shipping containers.

“I don’t see anything that looks like a prison,” I said. “Are we in the wrong place?”

“That woman was doing something in here, and that blood didn’t look like her own.” Bryce thought for a moment. “Let’s check these containers. They could be using them as makeshift cells.”

There was a padlock on the first container, but Bryce made quick work of it with her fancy sword. We found seven pairs of frightened eyes staring right past us when we opened the door. I canceled the invisibility spell, which caused them to flinch away.

“Hello! We’re here to rescue you!” I waved at them, and they all just kind of blinked in response. It looked like it had been a rough week. There were both men and women in a mixture of different races. There was even a dwarf.

All of their outfits were super wrinkled, and it smelled like they weren’t being allowed to leave the container to use the bathroom.

“Who are you?” The dwarf asked. Her beard stubble was growing in, which gave her a rugged look that she was totally rocking.

“I’m captain Virra, and this is my partner Thea,” Bryce introduced us. “And it’s exactly as she said. We’re here to rescue you.”

“Pardon my mistrust, captain.” the dwarf frowned. “But we were stationed on a secret research facility. How do we know you’re not just here to steal the union’s bounty?”

“You don’t, which means you're going to have to trust us,” Bryce answered. “But it doesn’t seem like your situation could get much worse from here.”

Everybody kind of just looked at each other, and the dwarf lady didn’t seem at all convinced. So, I added one other piece of information to push them into agreeing. “We also have food and showers back on our ship.”

“Well, that’s all the convincing I needed.” An elven woman stood and addressed the dwarf. “Firra, she's right, our situation really can’t get much worse. We can figure out who they are and how they found us after we’ve taken a hot shower and eaten some actual food.”

“Fine. But I want my objection officially noted.” the dwarf, Firra, stood and walked over to Bryce. “I’m Firra, head of security. The prissy elf is Lorelei, our head of operations. If you really are here to rescue us, then it’s a pleasure to meet you, Captain Virra. And if you’re not, then you can expect a swift death the moment you turn on us.”

“I guess I can appreciate that you’d kill us quickly. There's really no need to draw that sort of thing out.” Bryce smiled as she shook the shorter woman’s hand. “But I promise we really are here to help. I don’t suppose one of you is Doctor Phaylex?”

“The doctor attempted to escape,” Lorelei explained. “Their captain had him separated in order to prevent it from happening again.”

“Do you know where he's being kept?” Bryce asked.

“We don’t, but it’s probably not far,” Firra said. “It sounded like they were still in the cargo-bay.”

“There’s another shipping container we haven’t checked,” I said. “If they’re still in the cargo-bay, then he’d need to be in there, right?”

“Makes sense to me,” Bryce responded. “Let’s find out.”

We walked over to the other container, and Bryce cut the lock, but what we found inside wasn’t exactly promising.

They had converted the space into a surgical suite that had tools, bottles, and jars arranged around the room. In the center of it all, there was a human man lying on the table. He was clearly not alive and had been completely dismantled. His arms, legs, and head had all been removed, and his chest was splayed open. It looked like the whole thing had been done surgically, and there wasn’t any sign of a struggle. Hells, there wasn’t even much of a mess beyond a single blood-covered freezer that was labeled as a biohazard.

“Oh, thank the gods,” Lorelei said as she saw the terrifying display. “It looks like the doctor is unharmed.”