Star woke up in his small room on his remodeled transport ship, the Excalibur. Stretching his arms, he reached behind himself and grabbed the side of his bed. Twisting himself nearly 360 degrees around, his spine emitted a series of cracks that were unimaginably loud in the silence of space. Then, he paused. Listened. Something, just outside his door.
Star stood up quietly, his robotic right leg whirring as it bent. Taking graceful, slow steps forwards, the thirty five year old man watched his door with an air of caution. What was it?
Clenching his right hand, Star recalled why he didn't trust anything, even inside his own ship. People always hurt him, no matter how hard he tried to not have them do so. An incident to tell at a later time, Star thought.
No point in mulling over it now, he supposed. Reaching forwards, the man tapped a button on a small keypad next to the door, deactivating the locking mechanism. Next, he pressed a second button just above that one, bringing the door sliding open. Star leaned out into the hall quietly, his long silver hair flowing silently down in the AG, or artificial gravity. Curious.
As the thief - pirate, Star thought, correcting his mistake right after he made it. He didn't like being considered a thief, - leaned out, he glanced left and right, watching the dark hallways with a simple air of satisfaction. Nobody was there. Then, the noise came again.
Thump, thump, thump. What was making it? Star's eyes moved across the walls, looking for something, ANYTHING out of the ordinary. But there was nothing. Curious. Star stood up straight and walked like the pirate captain he was. He was headed towards the cockpit, only fifteen yards from where his room was. The noise came again, louder. Outside the ship, perhaps? the pirate thought, thoroughly intrigued by this noise.
Arriving in the cockpit, Star looked up through the Nanoglass windows that surrounded the control panels. Something caught his eye, and swiftly disappeared. Was... Was that a foot? Star spun around quickly, moving at a swift pace towards his cargo hold at the back of the ship.
During this time, Star took a quick stop in his room to grab two short blades that didn't look that dangerous to most people, until they were at their throats. Energy katanas. Star's favorite weapon. He sheathed them in a pair of holsters on his back. Then, he inputted a series of commands into his console by the door and a table at the far end of the room flipped over, revealing an arsenal of roughly twenty different types of weapons.
Picking up a pair of black TL-4 Plasmaray blaster pistols, Star glanced at the doorway of his room quickly, then at a human sized box of glass that was tinted pitch black on one side, having a one-sided mental debate about whether or not to open up its contents.
No, Star thought. Never, ever, again. Clipping the blasters to his belt, he then turned his back, walked out of his room, pressing the button that switched the door shut on his way past.
Glancing at the low ceiling of the Excalibur, Star realized he hadn't turned the lights on yet. He'd deal with that after the current issue was- Thump, thump, thump.
Great. Now the thu- Thump. I mean to- Thump. The th- Thump. Thethumpsweregettingmoreandmorefrequentokay?!?! Thump. Star narrowed his eyes. The noises were growing more and more frequent as time went on, and it was rising rapidly from the level of 'Curiosity' to 'Nuisance.' HOPEFULLY it didn't go past that.
Star was in the cargo hold now, and he walked over to the right side of the ship, not even batting an eye at the rest of his cargo, some of which was making loud crashing noises inside their cages, muffled slightly by the cannon-level force fields covering them. Star glanced down at his left arm, which he barely ever paid attention to, even though it, like his right leg, was entirely a machine. Or, more specifically, SEVERAL machines. Several MILLION machines, as a matter of fact. Nanotech made up half of Star's normally strange looking body, having been born without a left arm, a left eye, or a right leg. They operated much like human appendages however, unless Star wanted them to do something... Different. Like he did right now.
Holding his human arm above the bright red button that would remove all the oxygen from the room, then open the door, Star mentally commanded his "army" of nanobots to crawl their way through his bloodstream, out of his body, and create a spacesuit. In moments it was done, Star' body covered with jet black nanites from head to toe. Thankfully, the nanobots could change their transparency for the most part, becoming as translucent as glass or as opaque as the metal that made up Star's ship, so he could still see as well as if he had merely put on polarized sunglasses.
Star's palm came down on the button, and he instinctively spun to face the exit to the bay as the door slammed shut with a thud. With a hiss of air, the bay decompressed, leaving the space as oxygen deprived as the void outside the large cargo door that was rolling away into the ceiling and floor at a decently slow speed. Imagine a garage door opening, except it has a longer way to roll up to open.
Once the area between the two doors was large enough for him to fit through, Star launched himself off the ground, at the bottom door, and rebounded off that, spinning in mid-space to adjust his flight path off the wall farthest from the door.
Shooting off of that like a plasma burst from his pistols, which he now had in his hands, Star slid through the gap with the precision of an acrobat. Until you considered his foot, that is.
He got his boot stuck on the bottom door instinctively, hooking him there in place for a moment before he drifted downwards slightly because of the AG he was still slightly stuck in. Reaching out his arm, Star sent a shot of three nanobots at a separate wall panel, hitting just above it. Though Star couldn't see it normally, his left eye was linked to the bots via some telepathic link, same as Star's mind, so he could see what they saw. They crawled down the wall towards a small area where the panel wasn't QUITE attached to the wall, and slid into the darkness of the complex wiring that linked the panel to almost all of the ship's functionality. They went up to one specific wire and modified the signal, disabling the AG for two minutes.
Star grabbed the still moving upper door and rode it for a few seconds, then released it and let the inertialess area of space outside his ship do the rest of the job.
Just five seconds later he was far enough above his sleek black ship to see what was making the annoying noise: A... Girl?
Star held out his hand towards the hull of his ship and a stream of black nanites crawled from his suit towards the metal, almost as if magnetized. Once five nanobots reached the ship, the string grew taut and Star was pulled down towards the girl.
The girl was dressed in an innocent white dress, extending to her feet from her shoulders. She appeared to be unconscious, unaware that she was floating through space. "Probably dead," Star muttered. "Ah well. I was hoping for something USEFUL, like a birino corpse or some fancy space mineral." A birino was a large beast, roughly the size of a small asteroid, that lived in space. For some reason, birino blood injected into the human body enabled one to breathe in space until the user gets harmed, and adults had hides tough enough to withstand a plasma grenade.
Just as Star turned away, he heard something. A sort of crackling, coming from the girl. Turning around, Star drifted slowly towards the lifeless body of the girl and saw something, a surprise to him. Sparks, shooting out of a gash on the girl's shoulder. Leaning closer, he saw that this gash had revealed circuitry, not muscle. Who was this girl? Star grabbed her foot and moved back towards the cargo bay, propelled along by his nanobot strands.
Who is this girl? Star thought as he re-enabled gravity inside the bay. Then, he slammed his fist down on the button that brought the cargo doors crawling to a close. As it did, an echoing thud reverberated through the ship, slowly silencing itself after a minute.
Star looked down at the robot-girl, incredibly intrigued at her sudden appearance in the asteroid field. "How did my scanners not detect you, girl?" he muttered. It was true. His ship normally was able to detect anything within a two mile radius of it, and this girl had been RIGHT ON TOP OF HIM before he noticed her.
System error, probably. Star thought. The Excalibur was ALWAYS experiencing some glitch or another, generally none were life threatening. The last one had been all of the lights turning off and back on in rapid succession, flickering ominously. Kicking the console had fixed that. Absentmindedly, Star sent a pallet of nanobots underneath the girl, likely an android - It made more sense the more Star thought about it - and began walking to the makeshift medical bay, to leave the girl there until she woke up.
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