The hull rumbled slightly. The ship had started to shiver.
Lee looked out the great window in his cockpit and stared into the Drake Cutlass, which had stopped about two meters in front of the cockpit.It had been two of them. “Bloody pirates,” He thought.
A third ship had followed him from the Capital. He didn’t pay it much mind. It was just another Freelancer class. Just as the one he had.
It was a regular route for Lee. He was used to pick up goods in the Capital, never had any problems with pirates before. But it looks like his luck had run dry.
The other Freelancer had started to come closer about four hours after they left the Capital. Lee suspected something and decided to hail the Freelancer.
It didn’t answer.
Just as he decided to stopped trying to hail the ship, two Drake Cutlasses came out from behind a nearby moon. They were colored in red and black.
Lee realized quickly that there was nothing he would be able to do. The cutlasses would outrun him in a matter of minutes and his auto turret AI had been an outdated version for almost four years.
He turned off his engines. He was dead in the water.
He looked into the Cutlass cockpit. The man in there was masked, but he was grinning like a big baby.
The other Cutlass had started to boarding process, yet Lee didn’t want to give up his ship so easily. He locked all the internal doors and did his best to burn out the circuits. But the pirates weren’t amateurs precisely. They started to cut their way in, one door after another. They were in the living quarters.
Lee turned around from the grinning face and looked at the cockpit door. He gently stokes the inside of the cockpit and looked at the pictures on the wall, pictures of his mother, father and his sister.
He chuckled a little when he looked at one of the lower pictures. It was a picture of him and his sister riding a howercycle into a pit of mud.
Lee sighed for a bit. That was almost sixty years ago.
He sits down again, rubbing his old knees. They had been acting up these last couple of months. Must be the new gravity system he installed half a year ago. It said that it could cause some problems but what do you do? It was on a sale and the old one almost didn’t keep the water in the cup.
Lee sat back, looking at the door. He heard people outside laughing happily, and evilly. He knew he probably wouldn’t survive this. But he’ll be dammed if he gave up without some sort of fight.
He opened a locked on the other side of the walls of pictures. Inside he had an old earth revolver. “Very classic” people used to say. Lee didn’t care much. It had been with him since his father died.
The revolver had been in his family of almost two hundred years, he chuckled while looking at the gun, turning it over and around. “Good thing restoration technology improved over the years. Or else this would just be a lump of metal by now.” he said out loud while putting his free hand into the locker.
Lee took out a small box out of the locker as well. It contained four bullets.
Lee loaded up the gun with the four bullets. He knew that the bullets would not be enough to take out the pirates but at least they would remember him. "The Crazy Grandpa with a hundred year old gun." He chuckled again.
He heard that the pirates were starting to get through the door. It was bending.
Lee sat comfortably in his chair, pointing the gun at the door.
A couple of minutes passed.
And then the door opened and Lee pulled the trigger.
To be continued