4

That's how I got on the intergalactic pirate ship. And I spent more than 30 years on it. It was only many years later that I learned that our captain, Elaine, had left me on the ship because she saw me as just a boy who needed help badly. And she gave it to me. She became my tormentor, my mentor and my friend. Elaine turned out to be a very strong psychokineticist, and she taught me a lot about psi energy and various techniques. I owe a lot to her.

There is so much more I would like to tell, but my story is getting long. Let's get right to the day I died.

It was a normal intergalactic day, nothing to portend trouble. Well, seriously, there were a lot of things that did. Elaine, our eccentric captain, had decided to carry a very unusual cargo this time. Live cargo. The danger lay precisely in the race of our cargo. Humanoids with very interesting organs. If this organ was transplanted into a normal human, it rejuvenated the host's body, suppressing disease. The organs took root one hundred percent of the time, and there was never a case of rejection. Especially valued were vital organs - heart, liver, but no less valuable were all other organs.

There were very few representatives of this race left, and they could no longer stay on their own planet. Besides, they had a very powerful enemy - the Emperor himself.

You're probably wondering why we took this mission in the first place. I'll answer you with a quote from the great sage and philosopher, our mechanic Phil: "I don't fucking know how it works." And nobody said no.

When we were already near the Wormhole, or black hole, as they say, we were overtaken by the Emperor's elite squad - the Reapers or Heralds of Death. These people, no not people, because you can't call something that was never born human. These bioludes were grown in the Emperor's Womb, an incubator where they were implanted with brain implants that amplified their nerve impulses to an exorbitant speed. They had a killer reaction.

With the help of various chemicals, they were thickened with bones, skin, and muscle mass. In addition, various mechanical amplifiers were implanted in their bodies, which made them real monsters.

They communicated without a sound, transmitting impulses directly into the brain. Silent and deadly. When the biohuman was fully equipped, he was taken out of the incubator capsule and dressed in indestructible armor. An exoskeleton covered in metal that enhanced the already inhuman abilities.

These soldiers at "birth" were very tall - over two meters tall, and had impressive musculature. They believed in the techno-god and obeyed the emperor unconditionally. Pillars of the Empire.

Four cruisers separated from the main formation and rammed our ship, coming in from the right flank, thus penetrating inside. The autonomous anti-aircraft units failed to shoot down any of the cruisers. The easiest thing to do would have been to just dump our "cargo" and the Reapers would have done nothing to us, but we couldn't do that. Why, you ask? Because there's no turning back for us. If we took on a mission, we had to do it, no matter what, otherwise no one would want to do business with us. Reputation is paramount for people of luck, we must be reliable and stop at nothing. This applies to all children of fortune. Because if you betray your captain and crew, you'll be the scum of the scum. You won't be taken on any ship, no one will make a deal with you. This simple truth has made us nobler than a lot of dignitaries, those at the helm of power. For us simple cesspool rats, the word honor means a lot more than it does to others.

I'm getting off topic again.

Our captain made the decision to evacuate the cargo through the wormhole to save anyone. We didn't know what galaxy they'd be dropped into or what they'd encounter, but it was the only way to save them. Otherwise, if they stayed on the ship, they wouldn't make it out alive.

My radio buzzed.

- Rix, get to the control center. Your job is to stop the reapers from canceling the lifeboats.

Our team was cut out very quickly, I could hear everything on the radio. Those biomachines were unstoppable. Mikel, on his last breath, reported that two groups had gone to the escape pod bay, one was coming to me, and the last one was mopping up the ship.

A few minutes after the intrusion, the control center's front door, forty centimeter steel, exploded. Four fighters burst in on me. I looked at those huge bioludes and realized - I didn't stand a chance. But what can I do, orders are orders. My job is to hold them off while the lifeboats leave the ship.

I pulled down my belt of light and noise grenades and threw them at my opponents. There were four of them with different detonation times. The first one went off instantly, the second after a second, the third after two, and the fourth after three, but it was as if the Emperor's dogs didn't notice the flashes. Their helmets simply extinguished the light and loud sound. They didn't even stagger and swiftly approached me.

Without thinking long, I grabbed the plasma knives the Captain had given me and rushed toward the one closest to me. A single blow from the iron gauntlet was enough to knock me back. At the same moment they started firing special bullets - small rocket boosters - from their large-caliber rifles. These bullets are scary not only for their caliber, but precisely these turbo boosters. The only way I was able to escape at that moment was a hemispherical shield of psi energy. It's a technique our captain taught me. Against these bullets, I can only use a denser spherical shield, as it can cancel out the inertia of the impact.

After that, two of the four changed the angle of fire, but I held on for now. But to distract the enemy, I used another technique. All the time around me, there are micro particles of dust, metal, water, or anything else in the air. Using psi energy, I made them vibrate, thus causing them to become unstable. As a result, if it's sand, a small sandstorm rises, if it's water, vapor begins to surround me, blocking the enemy's view.

Turning the psi energy to dust and bits of metal, a dark dust veil surrounded me. I managed to dodge to the right side, but the Emperor's third dog somehow managed to anticipate my actions. And when I jumped out of the veil, I was met with a direct cross to the head. The only thing that saved me was that I had time to soften the blow a little, taking his fist aside with the first plasma knife, and at the same moment I struck the enemy's neck with the second plasma knife.

And everything happened again. The blow did not do any damage to my enemy. I retreated to the side, and the firing resumed. I had to raise my hemispherical and circular shields, but they were no longer able to protect me completely. At that moment, I decided to use another technique that the captain had taught me - to create fractional particles of air compacted with psi energy. Accelerating them with energy produced something remotely similar to a plasma weapon.

I threw this shot at one of the soldiers, it pierced him through, but didn't kill him, and he was still able to fight. The variants were running out of options, they acted very coherently and without a single sound. There was only one thing left for me to do - to figure out the leader of this group. In such foursomes there is always a leader, and if he is killed, all the others will hesitate for a second, passing the supremacy to another. And I think I know who the leader is.

I used a psi shot technique on him, trying to take the reaper out of the game, but the damage only slowed him down a little. All I had to do was get into melee range, and thus cut myself off from the other three.

In one jerk, I approached the biohuman, pushed my perception to the limit with psi energy, and slid between my opponent's legs, stabbing a knife through the place where in mere humans the ligaments are. He staggered slightly. I froze behind the opponent for a moment, at the same moment I saw an iron bar, and using psi energy, I accelerated the bar to an extreme speed and launched it at the opponent. And to my luck, the rod hit instead between his visor and shoulder joint, piercing his spine.

Their squad leader died, and the fighters hesitated, but literally for a second. I didn't have time to do anything, and the other three are already attacking me. But what I did was also a feat. I did, after all, kill one of them. Not many people could boast of killing an imperial dog.

I realized that these were my last moments of life. The attack was swift. One of the Reapers sent my body flying toward the wall with a powerful kick to the stomach, and at the same instant that I slammed into the wall, my chest was pierced by the second fighter's huge knife. The blade went in and out over my shoulder, tearing through everything in its path. I was only still alive because the blade entered the right side of my rib cage. My shields were unable to resist such a powerful blow.

As I was dying, I glanced out the porthole and saw the lifeboats separating from our ship and flying into the wormhole. The enemies were distracted, seeing the lifeboats as well. I took full advantage of this second, stabbing one of my knives into my enemy's eye. He let go of me and rolled onto his side. I fell, bleeding. I was moments away from certain death.

At that moment, the doors of the next airlock that led to the lifeboats flew aside, and Elaine entered. She was barely moving, holding the head of one of the dogs. Half of her face was missing, the bones of her skull showing through, but she was still alive.

This woman had single-handedly destroyed two squads of reapers. And that said, her level of power mastery was simply prohibitive.

In her other hand, the woman held a detonator that detonates the bombs placed throughout the ship. To activate the detonator, you have to enter a long code or psi energy into it.

Elaine looked me straight in the eye, I understood her without words. All her psi was going into keeping the pseudo-life alive, and her only hope was in me. She wanted me to blow those motherfuckers up along with the ship.

With the rest of my psi, I activated the detonator, looked at the two remaining reapers, and said with a smile on my lips:

- See you guys later.

I opened my eyes at the same moment.