Sol

2186 AD

The Marinated Chihuahua's Duckfoot

It was during times like these that she found herself thankful for the unknown engineer that made possible these windows into the void; allowing for the whole of the Sun to fill it yet to keep herself and her crew from being blinded.

Astonishing, really, how far progress had driven the human race. Two centuries earlier, they were pointing the most destructive weapons they had ever wrought at each other's throats.

One century ago, they had just barely avoided a climate catastrophe.

Now?

Human personalities and their expressions were unbounded by the Earth, billions of souls free to wander among the stars.

Free to venture into the blackest parts of the night sky.

And for her personally?

Free to steal until her entire ship was bursting with the spoils of raiding, and free to hunt until her heart was satisfied.

She hadn't really bothered to find a crew as of late, what with all of her previous seventeen sets of crewmates having managed to get killed.

While she wouldn't ever admit it, the burden of constantly being the only one to survive raiding a vast lucrative merchant hauler had been pressing down on her.

Not only the survivors guilt, but simply being alone in a metal can; armed to the teeth, stress levels always the highest in the galaxy for the near-constant threat of one of the myriad of navies in Sol popping in to preemptively wave her off to heaven.

But that was preferable to having to mourn yet another crew of young, energetic, and able-bodied recruits getting slaughtered before her very eyes.

Leviathan-Class Merchant Vessel arriving, T-Minus 60 seconds.

Her previous few years of raiding had already set her up for life, why did she continue to live this dangerous pirate's life?

It provided her the greatest gift one could get in this supposedly free galaxy.

True freedom.

Self-determination, a constant source of revenue she could turn to instead of becoming a terrestrial government welfare-slave.

The thrill, of course, couldn't be understated, this life was certainly blood-pumping; but that was simply an unintended but nevertheless welcome benefit of being a pirate.

Leviathan-Class Merchant Vessel arriving, T-Minus 15 seconds.

It couldn't hurt to get a few more million dollars to top off her retirement fund, right?

She resolved that this would be her final raid.

But the splendid part of having no crew to consult, and having only yourself to answer to, was the spontaneity.

She might well raid for several more decades- centuries, if she could get her hands on those famed 'immortal-cell' components -and have nothing but an empty thought to remember this moment by.

Spontaneity, true freedom, being able to do whatever she wanted; this was the stellar dream that drove people to get off Earth.

It was a silly dream.

Expecting the hand of government to remain on Earth and Earth alone was a misconception she was fortunate enough to have avoided during the first migrations; much to the confusion of other starry-eyed individuals who would end up as lazy and complacent bureaucrats.

Leviathan-Class Merchant Vessel arriving.

Without thinking, she grabbed the control stick and drove to make sure the roof of her ship was facing the rapidly materialising bulky cargo ship. The belly of her ship was weak, a paper-thin shield compared to the turtle shell above her, bristling with missiles.

Her favourite tool was a design she'd fashioned herself, a worm-like retractable appendage which could shoot out to about twenty or thirty metres above the ship to lock onto one of its hatches.

She was typically confident enough to handle herself in any duel these underpaid sailors offered, but it didn't stop the allure of blowing up the ship and snatching the safely containerized goods before jumping away to Barnard's Star.

The only problem would've been that the wreckage would be a smoking-gun of her ship's offensive capability.

That would more likely than not alert this entire sector of the galaxy that she was a force to be reckoned with- though, considering how much she'd already raided; and the minimal response (excluding all of her crews being killed, of course) they took to apprehend her, it was only a chance. A decently high chance. She wasn't about to gamble everything away like that.

Clicking the small brilliant cyan button on the dashboard, she let the auto-pilot take over as she prepared to board the ship.

Handheld firearms were far too messy to use in outer space, so it was perhaps her greatest investment to purchase the heaviest machine gun to ever have eyes laid upon it by man.

What?

She wasn't averse to using the messiest mutated mole-rats to sow chaos on the formidable military arsenal of Lincoln's Regolith, why should she bother to throw away this most powerful, grand, awe-inspiring weapon of ter-

Leviathan-Class Merchant Vessel Departed

Strange…

Usually they stopped by these navigation checkpoints close to the system's main star for at least an hour, and such a bulky ship would require more than a few minutes' time to cool off its hyperdrive.

Something was afoot.

And it irked her extremely to not know what was going on.

Clambering back to the cockpit, trying to make sure she re-strapped the machine gun to a wall or floor to keep it from smashing into something; she decided it was about time she just went home.

There was too much noise in her head to think straight, and a small part of her mind seemed to be thoroughly spent in this tomfoolery she so enjoyed calling piracy.

She was just barely on the cusp of turning fifty; yet she looked as if she was still spiffy in her twenties.

She had amassed so much wealth in her time out here that she could afford to live another seventy years without moving another muscle.

A well-deserved rest.

Though… again, she still reserved the right to be spontaneous.

It'd never click with her why nobody else chose this lively existence.

Not when she warped to her home in a pirate-filled starport in Barnard's Star.

Not when she at last lay on her bed after half a decade of being flung through space by her financial ambition.

And most definitely not when she lost her capacity to ever click things again with the reckoning of all her consequences in one final act.

She'd never figure it out, being a mangled corpse floating away from the orange-white explosive ball that used to be her one safe harbour.

A certain well-armed freelance group in society would make an excellent payday out of this.

Death by the obvious cause. The pirate's classic vengeance-filled breath forms an arc to circle back to bite them in the rear.

And so another freedom-loving dreamer is snuffed out.