Homestar Saga

Chapter 40: Mimsey Get Your Guns

The Captain brought the Recompense to a stop. "We'll park here. Yvian will take the crystal ship-"

"The Skygem," Yvian named it.

"That works, I guess." Lissa half approved with a shrug.

"Yvian will take the Skygem to the equipment dock," Mims continued. "Lissa and I will follow in the Encounter. We'll make sure Skygem's hooked up to a power source and pick up a few supplies."

"Supplies?" Yvian furrowed her brow. "Didn't the SDF restock our food stuffs a few days ago?"

"They did."

"Then what...?"

"The SDF doesn't hand out MAC rounds," Mims told her. "This is where I keep my ammunition."

The trip didn't take long. Skygem embraced Yvian's presence and helpfully flooded itself with the methane and other chemicals she assumed the Lucendians breathed. She had to ask it to depressurize before they docked. She didn't want to leak dangerous chemicals into the station's air supply.

Yvian had been curious to see the inside of a pirate station, but the hangar bay looked pretty much the same as every other equipment dock she'd been to. A large, clean, well lit space. This particular docking section used transparent material to divide the compartments, allowing a clear view of the other ships sitting in the bay. She looked to her left as she exited the Skygem, waiting for Mims and Lissa to debark.

The ship she was looking at was not the Random Encounter.

"Other side, Yvian." The Captain's voice piped in through her comms. Yvian turned to the right and saw him and Lissa walking down the ramp of his ship. He gave her a wave. She turned back to look at the other ship. Now that she knew what she was looking at, she noticed its guns were... different. A sleek, simplistic design, one she'd never seen before.

"There's another Encounter parked over there." Yvian told him, pointing.

"I know."

"It's got weird guns."

"I know."

Yvian felt a little silly. The Captain used this place as a supply depot. Of course he knew about the other ship. But as long as she was stating the obvious... "I thought the Random Encounter was a custom ship."

"Nope." The Captain pressed a button on the far end of his compartment. A door slid open. Yvian started for the door to her own docking section. "Standard Federation fighter. I've got fourteen of them stashed here."

"How'd you get the humans to give you that many ships?" Lissa asked.

"They didn't." The door to Yvian's compartment opened. Lissa brushed past Yvian, one hand holding the strap of the equipment bag slung over her shoulder. Yvian followed. They'd decided not to bring anyone onto the Skygem without Yvian acting as escort. They didn't want the Crystal Guardian aboard to wake up and do something drastic. Mims continued, "A lot of humans have come sniffing around the Confed over the years, trying to hunt me down. I take their ships once they don't need them anymore."

"Only fourteen?" Lissa sounded surprised. She took a large cable out of her bag and handed it to Mims. "I'd have thought more people would've come here than that. I mean, once they're here, it's not like you're hard to find."

"What do you mean?" Mims walked the cable over to a connector in the floor of the compartment.

"You didn't even bother to change your name," she told him, walking around the side of the Skygem.