She keyed the comm. “Tell Kaelen I want seventy-thirty or I take the convoy myself.” A pause. “And send him that recipe for scorch-pepper stew. He looked thin last time.”
Culinary: The Siren had a molecular synthesizer, but Sara considered it a failure machine. Her “galley” was a hot plate, a rusty blender, and a spice rack that was her most prized possession. Tonight’s meal: a can of synthetic protein chunks, flash-fried with real garlic paste (smuggled from a Terran agricultural world) and a dash of scorch-pepper from the Pyrean system. She ate it with a silver fork—the only item from her mother’s house she’d kept. It tasted like rebellion. Space Pirate Sara Uncensored
Social: Pirate networking was not parties. It was encrypted dead-drops on decaying space stations and tense, weapon-visible meetings in nebula-side cantinas. Sara’s true social life was a rotating cast of contacts she’d never met in person. Tonight, she tuned into a private channel: “The Bilge-Rat Roundtable,” a rotating pirate podcast where captains discussed heist techniques, reviewed ship models, and gossiped about which sector’s navy was easiest to bribe. She never spoke, but she’d earned the callsign “Mug” for her famous coffee heist. The episode featured a heated debate on the merits of magnetic grapples vs. tractor-beam parasites. She smirked. Amateurs. She keyed the comm
“Entertainment status?” she asked the ship’s AI, a grumpy subroutine she’d named Dusty. He looked thin last time
She was halfway through an episode—Rigel was negotiating with a sentient gas cloud—when an alarm chirped. Not a threat. Better. A transmission .
She unpaused Captain Rigel. The gas cloud was singing. Sara Vex, space pirate, smiled, and for a few more minutes, let herself believe in heroes. Then she would become the villain they deserved.
She didn’t respond immediately. Instead, she opened her personal log and added a new entry. Not a report. A memory.