I know this is just a lot of boring exposition, but it needed to be gotten out of the way. A bit of calm after the storm in the last chapter. The next section should be more interesting, I hope, and it's mostly done, so be patient with me please.
Rayman (and Ly whenever she turns up) are © UbiSoft Entertainment; everybody else in this story, the plot, and the setting are © me. Not totally original, but oh well.
Incidentally, I see that we' ve lost almost all formatting function on Fanfiction (dot) net now - can't indent, can't add empty lines to separate sections or even asterisks or other characters to separate them. This is getting so ridiculous I may stop posting on this site. But you can also see this story at rayfan (dot) deviantart (dot) com.
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Chapter 11: The Tormenting of Elly, Part 1
No one could remember a time like this on the Insurrection. The pirate ship had never been so busy, so tightly run, or quite so nervous. During Blargh's lengthy term as first mate, the crew had thought they did very well at raiding, pillaging and creating havoc among populations. But in the weeks and months since Blargh's replacement by Piranha, the pirates were finding out that they had only been lounging around, pirating in their sleep, compared to the work being forced on them now. At the same time, in the old days there had been endless grumbling among the crew at the unabashed corruption of the senior officers, at the unfair distribution of booty, at the preferential treatment given to some officers and crew at the expense of the rest, at the favoritism of robots over humans, at the toleration of bullying and thievery, and at Anaconda's indolent acceptance of it all. But all that had changed now. It certainly had.
The being who had emerged from his still-secret cabin (after an unexplained disappearance for a whole day once the invasion was under control), took up his duties as First Mate doggedly and efficiently, but with no trace of the personality that had overturned the whole ship a short time before. Indeed, with his distant, abstracted look, he hardly seemed to be there at all; but if something caught his attention he would snap back to the present with such force that anything directly in his path was liable to regret it. And heaven help anyone who startled him, or pestered him for any reason. Even on a pirate ship where casual violence was taken for granted, and where officers wouldn't be respected if they didn't slam around a few underlings once in a while, the stories about Piranha that whispered through the crew caused some shocked looks.
He was good at his job, though. He planned raids, and when he had to fight fought with silent ruthlessness. He came as required to Anaconda to give his reports, and showed no response to the Boss's little barbed jokes. After he was given the first mate's usual task of sharing out the booty, he oversaw the distribution with strict impartiality, to the astonished delight of most (and the deep resentment of a few).
So apart from the occasional outburst of temper, Piranha paced methodically through his busy days. He grimly took up each task he thought needed to be done, disposed of it quickly — though sometimes with an arcane logic utterly bewildering to the persons involved — and then went on with equal grimness to the next. If he showed no sign of enthusiasm, still he never hesitated for a moment to take action.
What he didn't do was smile, joke, meet anyone's eyes (unless with an intimidating glare), listen to anything except necessary facts, or even talk. If he wasn't annoyed about something (though that would be rare), he was liable to go through a whole day without ever speaking a word except as directly required by business. After a while even the robots began to get the uneasy sense that they were dealing with a machine.
Four days had passed since the start of the invasion by the time Elly finally returned from the slave quarters to Piranha's cabin. It was late evening. He was sitting alone at the table in the dimly lit room, and he looked quickly around, surging to his feet as the door was unlocked and opened. Then, seeing who it was, he sat slowly down again; though his large eyes, glittering with small points of light, stayed on her.
She paused at the entrance, looking back at him. Then she locked the door, hung up her cloak, and silently walked over to the galley to check what was in it. Everything was clean and orderly, but there was no food left. Without a word she returned to her cloak and put it on.
He was beside her before she reached the door. Those black eyes were fixed on her face. He opened his mouth a little as if to speak, then closed it again.
She glanced at him and he took a step back. She went out the door. He returned to his chair and sat down.
When she returned with some food, he turned his face away as she came in. She set out two plates and sat down at the opposite side of the table. Neither of them looked at the other. They didn't eat much, either.
Later, as he was getting into bed for the night, he glanced over at her. She was trying to curl up in the hard chair by the table. He shook his head.
"Elly," he said — it was the first time either of them had spoken — "What are you doing?"
She didn't answer. He let out an exasperated breath.
"Will you lie down? You can't sleep in that chair. — No, not on the floor. Don't—" He stopped. Then growled, "Elly. Just get in the bed."
As if by remote control, her slight form stood up and drifted across the floor. She arrived at the foot of the bed and gingerly edged herself onto the farthest possible corner, curling up like a cat.
He sat up, looking at her for a moment. He gathered up a blanket and tossed it in her direction. Then, turning away, he lay down himself. It was quite some time before either of them fell asleep.
The next day, a couple of hours after Piranha had left in the morning, while she stayed to pick up her usual chores, Elly was startled as she was sweeping the floor by the door bursting open.
Piranha stomped in, half-carrying, half dragging a large folding cot. He lugged it past her as she stood watching, and flung it on the floor near the bed. With a few quick, unnecessarily abrupt motions, he unfolded it. Then glared at her.
"You sleep on that from now on," he said. "Then maybe you'll feel a little more safe. Don't know why I didn't think of it before." He stormed out again. She watched him go. After he'd left, locking the door behind him with a violent clank, she walked over to the cot and arranged a blanket and pillow on it. Then sat down on it and sighed.
He didn't return that night, nor for the next few days. He must have gone into some other cabin to sleep. Eventually he did come back, in a more subdued fashion, and they gradually fell into a routine that was peaceable, at least on the surface. There still wasn't much conversation, though.
New First Mate or not, the ship's business of piracy went on as it always had. Well, not exactly as it always had. The raids on the planet continued, with the ship moving periodically to a new location after a given area was cleaned out. Booty was stuffed into the cargo holds, prisoners were taken. Anaconda would emerge from his solitude from time to time to check up on things, but in general it was Piranha's critical glare the crew had to deal with. And it was often the most unexpected things that brought fire into his eyes. As a result, however, raids began to go faster, more booty was gathered in better condition, and there was less damage to the captives. Piranha disliked waste, and you didn't want to inspire that look he'd get if something had been wrecked in a casual moment of fun. After a while, they weren't even burning down the villages anymore. Not as many pirates were killed or wounded, either. It seemed that most of the injuries used to happen in the fires, or by pirates being accidentally shot by their own robot shock troops during disorganized melees.
As the changes accumulated, one of the more revolutionary ones was that Hacker — who, having unfortunately been forced to swear loyalty to the first mate, now had certain obligations — somehow found himself leaving the ship and leading the raids on the villages. He hadn't ventured into battle in so many years that the first time he showed up, all the robots present froze in whatever their awkward position and stared, with only their heads slowly turning to follow him as he slouched by. He growled, shouldering his heavy weapons, and muttered something unintelligible. But after that day, it was he who led the fighting. It was a promotion, he explained to anyone who cared to listen.
The ship's ancient ways were shifting bit by bit, not only in battle but inside the ship itself. The corridors became gradually cleaner; there was more purposeful travel through the halls and less lounging about; doors, walls, equipment, and even some of the damaged lighting fixtures that had been dim, sputtering, or extinguished for uncounted years, began to be repaired. Small alterations throughout the ship began to have the cumulative effect of brightening the place up a fraction, of lightening the dismal atmosphere to some tiny degree. This was somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that it was getting harder to have any fun in the place.
Piranha clamped down unmercifully on brawling, gambling, and drinking in the corridors, until people could be heard grumbling that this ship wasn't supposed to be no blistered kiddie playground. Unlike Anaconda, or Blargh, or other officers in the past, he didn't let the unimportant things, the little daily crimes slide — he was on top of them with vampirish ferocity. It was futile to protest that nobody had cared in the past if Joe stole Jal's booty while he was down on the planet fighting, and it was his own fault for not hiding it well enough; or to point out, very reasonably, that it really didn't matter if the men's food was half-spoiled, hardly any of them would actually die of it. Invoking tradition got you nowhere. When Piranha got it into his head that he didn't like something, he wouldn't leave it alone until he had changed it. On the other hand, most of those who came to him with complaints about the changes, about other things that needed to be changed, or about almost anything else, he would simply brush aside — sometimes with boredom, occasionally with a flamethrower.
On the whole, the crew was a little in shock, not sure what to think of the first mate. That grim, almost demonic character was unrecognizable as the lively person who had defeated Blargh. His strange ideas led to mutterings and discontented talk among some of the pirates, though others found his new rules something of a relief. And nothing could mollify that temper of his. It was just not a good idea to be in his presence at any time, and you'd be better off running on a discharged battery than to cross his path when he was annoyed. As with all officers, endless, ever-changing rumours circulated about him, about secret schemes he was up to, about his alliances or rivalries with Anaconda, Hacker, Tulik and many others. But, unlike with other officers, there wasn't much said about theft or embezzlement. Anybody except the most criminal could see that that wasn't true. The distribution of the booty proved it. And though he was constantly on that hair trigger, it had to be admitted that with very few exceptions the persons he lashed out at with violence deserved it. At least by Piranha's peculiar standards.
Which wasn't to count the brawls he got into most evenings in the officers' bar. But that was understandable. Anybody had the right to get into fights on his free time. Even an officer needed to relax.
For Elly, things were tougher if anything than for the rest of the crew. She had the freedom of the ship, she could come and go as she pleased, though Bubo and his friends still maintained the security patrol barricading the old section. But Elly found that wandering through the corridors had become intensely uncomfortable. Whereas for most of her life she'd been largely ignored, now eyes followed her everywhere: eyes of unnerving, even lewd curiosity, of envy and resentment, of eagerness to wangle some kind of favour. Ridiculous as that was. None of them, slave or pirate, human or robot, had any conception of her unimportance. It was hard work to convince them of the futility of trying to bribe her. Even if she'd been inclined to accept, she had no influence with the First Mate. She couldn't even talk to him.
So she spent most of her time in the cabin, chafing to find something to do, sleeping too much, brought to the verge of tears at times by the boredom and purposelessness of her life. She ran errands and sewed and cleaned and made a few half-hearted efforts to make the cabin a little more livable, but in the end, she didn't really want to disguise it as anything other than the featureless, anonymous, meaningless prison it was. A prison where she was trapped with a brooding cellmate who day by day became more incomprehensible; who, she was beginning to fear, was slowly becoming insane.
There were evenings when he would come in, silently eat whatever she set in front of him, then remain where he was, sitting motionless at the table while Elly did her best to clean or work on his clothes or attend to some other small task. It was like breathing in a vacuum, as though some vicious weapon had sucked all the air out of the room. Or like trying to move through a crushing, oppressive forcefield that slowed her limbs and her mind and made her want only to shrink into a small, hapless knot.
When she looked at him sitting there, his eyes often shut, rarely glancing at her — he showed no signs of emotion, or even awareness. His body was like a piece of equipment parked for the night and turned off. But the sense of oppression in the room was so overwhelming it was all she could do sometimes not to flee out the door just to see if there was any air left in the ship.
The thought of the few days she'd spent down in the slave quarters at the start of the invasion kept coming back to her, with a sense of dismay. She had become a personal slave now, living in a cabin, eating pretty regularly, and no longer subject to the whim of every pirate on the ship. To return to the desperation of that old stray life would have been terrible. But at least in those days she had known what to expect. Now, nothing was predictable or understandable.
Piranha's silent brooding was hard to endure; his fits of wild restlessness were worse. There were evenings when he couldn't seem to stop striding nervously back and forth in the cabin, exuding an agitation she couldn't call anything but crazy.
She'd first seen it one night when, sleeping on her cot, she was startled awake as Piranha suddenly jolted out of sleep with a gasp. She looked over — he was sitting up, a look of panic on his face. Then he hurtled off the bed as though it was on fire.
Hesitantly, Elly whispered, "Piranha?"
He froze in shock, gaping at her for a moment without recognition. "She's — she's after me," he panted, "she's looking for me again."
Elly blinked. A bad dream? But he thought it was real.
He was hastily pulling on his clothes.
She sat up anxiously, tucking the sheet around herself like a fragile shield.
"Can't sleep," he was muttering, yanking on his boots. "Can't let my guard down like that. Mustn't sleep."
And he raced out the door.
Leaving Elly to curl up on her bed, weak with apprehension. It had been scary enough having to cope with a sane Piranha. What was she supposed to do now?
[End of Part 1]