Chapter 116: Pirate Base

Hours later, the ship pulled up to what Itto swore was not a planet at all. Itto said that to be a planet, something not only had to be big, but also needed to orbit a star. This was not a planet. It might have been the remains of one, but for all intents and purposes it was just a very, very big chunk of orphan rock sitting in space.

You couldn’t have figured it out otherwise, though. It was big, round, and built up with all the cities and lights you could want. It had its own satellites, both natural and of the signal-relay variety, and was orbited by dozens and dozens of ships besides theirs.

“And why are we here, again?” Sean asked. “If they are likely to kill us.”

“You haven’t been listening. Coming here was the dangerous part, because it’s a pirate base. There’s pirates everywhere around it. Pirates blow shit up and steal.”

“OK. And there are pirates here, too?”

“Yes, of course.” Itto said. “It’s a pirate base.”

“And they aren’t going to kill us and steal why?”

“Listen, the deal is that even pirates need somewhere to restock. They need supplies. They need repairs. They need rest. And they need to be able to do it without getting blown up. That’s what this place is. It’s a rest stop, a retirement spot, and a hideout all in one, for anyone who can get here in one piece. If you so much as look wrong at a ship here, you have to deal with the pirates. All of them. At once. They don’t want trouble at the base.”

Itto grabbed a few smaller guns and tucked them away in his clothing, inconspicuously.

“Then what’s that about?” Sean said. “If it’s so safe.”

“Just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean people don’t do it. These are pirates, Sean. Don’t start anything, but if someone else does, be prepared to end it. That’s standard operating procedure.”

Clearance finally came from whatever landing authorities regulated traffic for all the tired but murderous criminals that populated this place, and Itto’s ship landed on the planet in a blink, doors automatically opening at Itto’s command to let them out.

“So what now? We resupply, and leave?”

“It’s a little harder than that. Like I said, they got a pretty good scan on us during that chase. Which means they know what the ship looks like and its identification signals. They can find us anywhere, now.”

Sean had clued Itto in on some of the facts related to why he was getting chased. Not that he won Earth’s Apocalypse competition, obviously, but that he had somehow pissed off Eike’s entire species by mixing it up with one of their princes.

“And since you somehow managed to stir up one of the dominant military forces in the system universe…”

“Yeah, got it. You need to mess with your ship.” Sean said. “Change the license plates, or something.”

“Or something. It’s complex work and only a few people can handle it.”

“Do you know where to find one of those?”

“Don’t worry.” Itto said, looking moderately fearful. “I’m sure she’ll find us.”

On cue, Itto’s eyes flitted over to a sudden parting in the crowds around the spaceport, and dropped to a small, small woman walking over with an even smaller cane. One Sean’s high SAV score told him she didn’t even need.

Itto stood very still as the woman approached and faced him. Proportionally, she looked small compared to Itto, but that didn’t appear to matter. Itto wilted a bit as she examined him, waiting for her to finish without interrupting at all.

“Ugly,” The woman said, finally, “Is a poor trait to try and pair up with careless. People might forgive one. They aren’t going to forgive both.”

Sean liked the woman instantly. Itto listened to her insults, took it, and stood waiting.

“I understand you can’t do anything about the face.” The woman touched his cheek lightly then pulled her hand away, shaking it as if the contact had made her dirty. “Too much to fix. Not everyone can be rich. But you’d think you’d do something about the careless part, Itto.

“I wasn’t careless.” Itto said. “I was on a normal trade route, travelling normally.”

“Ah.” The woman said, her gaze shifting to Sean. “So it’s this one, then. Who was it, anyway? Pirates?”

“The blond guys. Military assholes.”

“Ithians?”

“Maybe. I never learned their name.”

“Ithians, then. Not a great idea to piss them off, frankly. I’m assuming you had no choice?”

Sean thought about this for a moment before deciding not to lie.

“No, I could have probably pissed them off less. A little, at least.” He smiled weakly. “They were just such assholes I couldn’t help it.”

“Itto, I like this kid. I’m assuming he has to get somewhere?”

“Something like that.”

“Hmm.” The woman sized up the ship, looking up and down the hull as if considering what she could do with it. “Let me think on this. Come by my place in an hour. You still know the way, I hope?”

“I do.” Itto said.

“Good. I’ll see you then. Don’t get in any trouble in the meantime.”

The woman walked off, clicking her presumably useless cane on the ground as she went. Itto watched her go, then let loose with a frustrated sigh.

“That woman,” Itto said. “Is more difficult every time I see her.”

“You deal with her that often?”

“Every few years, at least. Don’t worry too much. If she decides to help us, she absolutely can.”

“And will she?” Sean asked. “Help us, I mean. She seemed pretty undecided.”

“She probably should. I’m her son, after all.”

Twenty or thirty minutes later, Sean found the Shanktuary. For all that it didn’t seem to want to materialize on ships for whatever reason, but he had a notification that it was once again assignable almost as soon as they hit the ground. Finding a place to install it was as simple as wandering through the ship dock area until the traffic thinned, waiting for an unobserved moment, and plopping it in a not-too-visible portion of the ground.

Itto was off doing some business at the moment, having said that one did not simply walk into a meeting with his mother without appropriate gifts. That gave Sean about an hour to work with, which he hoped would be enough to finish what he had in mind.

He put the Trash Compactor MK II prototype down on the workbench, carefully slackening the weave until he could get at the metal-and-glue guts of the thing. He had a lot of time to think about his armaments lately, and what each of them did for him.

Right now, his combat style ran almost entirely off of being weird. He was strong stat-wise, sure, and he could do some neat magical time tricks. But when he managed to kill someone or something, it seemed that it was mostly because he brought so many unexpected moves to the table that other people were at a disadvantage by the time they adjusted to it.

In terms of delivering weird in a consistent, works-in-most-situations kind of way, the Mystereamer was king. At this point, it had absorbed so many different enhancements it wasn’t clear that it even could be enhanced anymore. As a general thing, ten or so wounds from the dagger, however minor, seemed to be enough to get the average enemy slowed down with a sampler platter of weird elemental damage, bizarre time effects, and good-old-fashioned cuts.

Where that failed, it was usually because he couldn’t cut them at all. If that was because they were too fast, he had the Sticky Hand glue-whip to hold them in place, various kinds of throwable glue, an actual glue-gun in the form of the Ba-glue-ka, and his Hard Time skill. All that added together to make him pretty uncomfortable with his enemy immobilization game. These days, he was faster than almost everybody he ran into, and he had enough tricks to even the odds when he wasn’t.

When he couldn’t hit someone because they were simply too armored, a combination of immobilization and the Heavy Heart had proved to be pretty good. The amount of force it could put out was truly staggering, and the weapon was still integrating its Fighter’s Heart core and improving all the time. The only downside to the weapon was its slow warm-up time and long effective range. It took him more seconds than he liked to get up to full momentum, and left him open to attack the whole time. It had its place, but that place was definitively against slow, big opponents at fairly big distances.

Other weapons hadn’t kept up as well. The Spectral Sticker and his Spectral Darts had once been big parts of his game plan as long-range and mid-range weapons that could shove damage straight through considerable amounts of armor. The darts were now lost to him, replaced by the inferior but much cheaper Spike weapons, and filling out his long-range tactics in a different way.

The spear was a weak spot. He still carried it just in case, but it had long since fallen behind in terms of its ability to do damage. Worse, he couldn’t see any clear way to improve it. The handle was wood given to him by a dragon and the point was a magic bear’s tooth, neither of which were clearly enhanceable objects by any means at his disposal he knew about.

Maybe Brett could have thought of something, he thought. But I’ll have to make do by myself.

What he needed was a mid-range weapon that could handle armor, but could also be put into action quickly with a reasonable amount of control. And while the Trash Compactor MK II probably only needed a little bit of work to move from prototype to actual system-buffed completion, he didn’t feel great about actually finishing it as-is.

For the first time since he had died, Sean opened Brett’s pack with an eye for actually putting the materials he had left to good use. Loading them up onto the table, Sean found there were several kinds of leathers present in small quantities, mostly scraps Brett probably couldn’t find a use for during their time together. He was only interested in two.

Rat Leather Strips

Rat Leather is tough, and not much else. If you need clothes that will last you the rest of your life, rat leather is the cheapest, most abundant material that has a chance to make that happen.

Zeus Leather Strips

The remainder of the remains of the skin of a slain pseudo-god. Zeus Leather was the highest quality leather-based material crafted during the Earth Apocalypse era. There will never be more. Use wisely.

If Sean was going to use up the leather, he was hoping to do it in a reusable way. That meant a couple things. The first was making a handle that was both janky enough and tough enough to go the distance. For that, he assembled several pieces of rebar, enough to bundle together into an inch or so worth of handle. It wasn’t high quality material, by any means, but it was the exact kind of material his Shankmaster skill loved, and he was counting on that to fill in the quality gaps.

The second thing it meant was that he was making tape. Sean had plenty of Plug Mud, and sticky apples galore. In the past, his attempts to combine the two had been unimpressive, usually not turning out much better for any given task than one or the other would be. Now, he fed the sticky apples through the material processor to make a fine paste which he mixed into some Plug Mud in a container. Then, he fed it some time energy.

He was trying something a bit different here than what he had done with the Plug Mud alone. When he had done that, he was actively trying to give it the time part of time energy. Here, he was focusing as much as he could on the energy half, trying to see if he could offer it as a sort of fuel for the alchemy instead of a component. He ran himself dry feeding as much energy into the process as he could, finally giving up just before the system acknowledged his efforts.

Oh, yes. Sean smiled as he read the notification. That will do just fine.