“They were going to rape us!"

“You're safe now. Take their weapons and barricade the door" John said, nodding towards the pistols the pirates still grasped in their nerveless fingers.

One of the other terrified women looked up at him with wild eyes and sobbed, "But you can't leave us!"

"We have to save the rest of the crew," John replied brusquely. "Don't worry! everyone else,

We'll be back to check on you, once we've rescued " Alyssa said, smiling at them reassuringly.

Leaving the women to follow his instructions, John and Alyssa moved back into the corridor, and headed back to the previous intersection.

»*Be careful now, the others might have heard our gunshots,* John warned Alyssa, and she nodded as she glanced at him.

They could still hear the sounds of a gunfight around the corner to their right, and after quickly checking the other corridors, they moved to follow the sounds again. A set of double doors was wide open, and the flash of gunfire could be seen coming from in the room. John darted silently across to the other side of the door, so that both he and Alyssa could get into position on either side of the doorway. He glanced into the room and saw that the freighter crew were in a dire situation.

“Surrender and we'll spare your Lives,” a hulking pirate barked, his voice sounding harsh and strangely metallic. The pirate boss, and around a dozen of his men, were spread out behind overturned tables in what used to be the ship's mess. They were armed with a variety of pistols and rifles, and were shooting at the kitchen sporadically.

“Fuck you, slaver!" came the reply from the far side of the room, where two men were huddled behind the kitchen unit, firing wildly with their pistols. Blood was sprayed over one side of the kitchen, and John could see a body on the floor to their side. He spotted a door behind the brave freighter crewmen, and terrified faces peeked around the corner, watching the exchange.

There's a lot of them,* John warned Alyssa. *Take the right side and work your way to the centre, I'll take the left.*

The resolute teenager crouched to avoid crossing lines of fire with him, and sighted the far pirate on the right through her scope.

*0K, go!* John thought, giving the signal to his young lover.

They strafed along the row of marauding pirates, round after round Slamming into unarmoured flesh, turning this end of the room into a charnel house of red ichor, as blood sprayed in riotous abandon all over the upended tables. The pirates were taken completely unawares, and were unable to react in time to the shocking appearance of the attackers behind them. One of them close to the middle leapt over the table, in a desperate bid to escape being killed by Alyssa, only for the two freighter crewmen to shoot him as he exposed himself from cover.

John blasted the last of his pirate targets, bullets stitching their way across the man's chest as he whirled to face him. The man cartwheeled backwards and crashed into the tables, accompanied by the sound of an ominous click as John's magazine ran empty.

Alyssa had taken out five of her six designated targets, the Calypso crew shooting the sixth, so she targeted the burly pirate leader. Aiming for centre mass, she fired two bursts at his chest as the pirate Captain whirled to face them. The bullets ricocheted harmlessly with metallic sounding pings, leaving the hulking brute unscathed. Now they could see him clearly for the first time, it was apparent that the pirate leader was a heavily augmented cyborg. His torso and right arm were blocky and armoured, his normal body parts changed for bionic replacements.

“I'm gonna fucking rip you apart!" The enraged cyborg bellowed with a synthetic roar, as he charged towards the two of them.

John was reaching for a spare mag to reload his assault rifle, when the Pirate Captain barrelled into them. The pirate clipped Alyssa's arm with his bulky shoulder, knocking her sprawling down the corridor before he then slammed into John. The impact of the cyborg's four hundred pound frame sending him sailing through the air, before crashing into the wall opposite, knocking the wind out of him.

The furious pirate Captain stalked after him, before reaching down with his cyber-arm, to grab him with his massive metallic fist. The powerful servos whirred loudly as he hauled John up off the floor, and slammed him repeatedly into the wall.

"You little insect!" he roared in John's face, before hurling him down the corridor.

John groaned in pain, his back and shoulders throbbing from the brutal battering, and he desperately tried to reach for his rifle and magazine that had been knocked just out of reach. The cyborg stomped up, and booted the rifle out of his outstretched fingers, before leaning down again with his bulky augmented arm to pin John to the floor.

"Brrt!", “Brrt!", "Brrt!" Alyssa's rifle barked as she fired three bursts, all aimed for the Pirate captain's head this time, but again the rounds ricocheted away harmlessly.