Aneka Jansen 7: Hope by Niall Teasdale

tests.’ She waited, hoping she was not going to have to try to make a run for it, because if that was the case, she was probably fucked.
    ‘LT-nine-six-seven-four, please hold for verification.’ Ella closed her eyes, but there seemed to be very little pause before she heard, ‘LT-nine-six-seven-four, you are cleared for lunar transition and return. Please note that your comms are coming through with some distortion.’
    ‘Noted, control. I’ll put it on the list for them to look at when I get back.’
    There was no reply and Ella cut in the antigravity system and pushed off the ground on thrusters. She would do everything by the book, at least the book back home, until she got out to the local moon. Push the ship up into low orbit, do one circuit and then fire the engines for lunar transition. She was supposed to be testing the engines, so pushing the flight out a little would not be unusual. Yes, this was going to work.
    Almost entirely out of interest, she actually did run the engine performance metrics as she powered the ship out of orbit. The sublight drive was a fusion torch variant and seemed efficient enough, if a little low in power for her current preferences. There seemed to be nothing wrong with the refit. Pinnacle engineers appeared to be proficient, though she had expected nothing less, even from people working on a fairly basic transport ship. A diagnostic sequence on the warp drive indicated that it was fully operational and Ella figured the time getting out to the moon would be best served by looking through navigation data for a destination planet.
    As the ship injected into lunar orbit to swing around for the return journey, Ella clambered under the main console, located the comms system power feeds and yanked them out. She was about to get back up and fire the engines when the vessel gave a violent shudder and alarms began going off. The torch drive was offline and badly damaged from the readouts she was seeing. Something going wrong with the refit seemed unlikely given that the thing was not even running, but there was no indication of anything on sensors which might have attacked.
    Warping in such close proximity to the moon was not exactly recommended, but she figured that it was the best option she had, and she was getting the engines ready when she heard a deep clang resonate through the hull. It sounded a lot like something had just attached itself to her ship. Internal sensors told her the airlock had been opened and she considered hiding somewhere, but there was not exactly much space to do that and she would almost certainly be found anyway.
    Ella got to her feet and stepped around the flight chair. If someone came through the door, she might be able to overpower them. It just did not seem like a likely outcome.
    And then someone did walk in, and the whole situation got that much stranger.
    Hope of Sanctuary.
    Captain Anastasia Kade was a very tall, long-haired platinum blonde with very long legs and an expansive chest. She was totally different from Aneka and also quite similar, which was not what had shocked Ella. She was, apparently, the leader of a bunch of pirates who had seen an easy target and gone for it. That was not that shocking either, though she was wondering what they were doing in the middle of a Pinnacle system.
    No, the weird thing was all the anachronism. Kade’s crew were a mismatched bunch dressed in all manner of random garments and carrying weapons which belonged in previous times. They were all Human or of a Human subspecies, but that was about all you could say about them. That, and that they were pirates, for want of a better term. Clearly audacious pirates, but pirates all the same. Kade was dressed in a shirt-and-corset affair which exposed a lot of cleavage. She was in extremely tight, hip-hugging trousers and ankle-length, high-heeled boots. She carried a sword and a large handgun which looked like it fired actual explosively driven projectiles! Everything was