Operation Hail Storm

Java Sea ― on the cargo ship Hail Nucleus

Hail had reviewed a few hours of Eagles video when an instant message popped up on his screen.

The message was from Dallas Stone in the ship’s security center. It read, Hey Marshall, we have a security situation that may require your attention.

Hail checked the time on the corner of the monitor. It was about two in the afternoon. Hail’s stomach grumbled, reminding him that he had not eaten in the last twelve hours.

Hail typed a reply to the instant message, On my way. He hit send and logged off of his computer.

Hail left his little office and walked back to his bedroom. The first shirt his hand touched in his closet was a blue polo-shirt. He yanked it off the hanger, pulled it over his head and left his stateroom. It only took him about three minutes to walk the seven-hundred feet to the security center. He knew this because he was kind of a math guy and knew that the average person walked about four-feet per second and the security center was on the other end of the ship. Simple math yielded the solution — one-hundred and seventy-five seconds for a one-way pedestrian trip.

Seven-hundred feet later, Hail held up his proximity card to the scanner and the lock inside the bulkhead door to the security center clanged open.

Unlike the last time he had walked in and hardly anyone had payed attention to his arrival, this time six happy faces were all looking at him and they were all smiling.

Hail looked confused.

“What the heck is up and what’s so funny?” Hail asked.

Six laughs and then six smiles faded into six devious grins. Other than Pierce Mercier, who was sitting at one of the two analyst stations, no smile in the room was older than twenty-two years of age.

“Pirates,” Dallas Stone told Hail.

“What?” Hail heard himself say, but he already knew what Dallas was telling him. He simply didn’t believe him.

“That’s right,” Dallas said, laughing. “Some dumb-ass pirates are approaching us in a twenty-foot wooden fishing vessel. What are they thinking?” Dallas slapped himself on the side of his head.

The expressions didn’t change on any of his crew’s faces. His pilots and analysts just stared at Hail with big grins plastered across their animated faces. Working in the security center was a pretty boring job. Up to this point, the Nucleus had never been attacked, so this minor low-risk diversion from the monotony had his young crew excited.

“This should be interesting,” Hail laughed, clapping his hands together.

Tayler informed Hail.

“Oh, they also have a mother-boat sitting about a quarter-mile off our port side, but it looks like they only have a single fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on its bow.”

Dallas turned to look at his monitors and said, “Check it out.”

Hail squeezed in between Dallas and Tayler’s stations. Dallas pointed at a set of screens that had video playing on them. One screen showed a view from a camera on Prince shooting directly down on the small wooden boat. The small craft appeared to be powered by an outboard motor. A driver was muscling the tiller through four-foot waves. Hail saw five men on the boat, some with shirts, some without, but all of them had a rifle of some type slung over their shoulders. Stone’s other monitor displayed a video being shot from one of the Nucleus’s gun ports. The camera mounted in that particular port was sitting at an angle of forty-five degrees to the sea below. A crisp and clean image of the approaching vessel was being electronically streamed from the port camera to the security center. Hail estimated that the pirate’s wooden boat was about a thousand-yards off the Nucleus’s port side.

“Is our deck clear? No one is up top, are they?”

Dallas answered, “The deck has been cleared and we are locked down.”

Tayler said, “Queen has a close-up of the mother-boat and I have that video up on this monitor,” she told Hail, pointing at the screen closest to her boss.

Hail turned his attention to Tayler’s monitor. Her screen showed a white boat that was much larger than the wooden boat. It was newer in design and age. The mother-boat appeared to be made of fiberglass. It was white and shiny and sat low in the water. Only three men could be seen on its deck.

Hail realized that a fiberglass boat was not the best attack vessel, but then these dirt-poor Indonesian people didn’t have the luxury of being picky. They had probably liberated it from pleasure seekers or fishermen who had entered an area of the Java Sea that they now regretted. Hail thought how desperate these pirates must be to think they could pull up next to a massive cargo ship in a dinky wooden boat and try to take over. He actually admired them in a way. What balls.

“What do you want to do, Skipper?” Dallas asked.

Indecisiveness was not part of Hail’s character. He was raised by a decisive man in a decisive manner and indecision had been interpreted as a weakness by his father. But Hail had to think this situation over for a moment.

“I don’t know,” he said to buy some time. “It doesn’t even seem fair…” and he let his sentence trail off.

He started again. “I mean; I really don’t want to vaporize these poor fools unless we have to. Does anyone have any thoughts?”

Lex Vaughn, one of the two weapon controllers suggested, “We could get close and personal and scare them away?” Vaughn had just graduated from high school and had recently joined Hail’s crew on the Nucleus. He had tested very high on the online flight simulator exercise that Hail’s team had developed, and so far Hail thought that Vaughn was fitting in nicely.

Titus Penn, the other weapon controller suggested, “Or we could just open up with one of our ship’s fifties in front of them. That would scare the hell out of me if I was a pirate in a crappy wooden boat.”

Penn’s addition to the crew had been much different than that of Vaughn. Titus Penn had been orphaned years ago in an atrocity that had taken his parents’ life. With no other living relatives, Hail had become Penn’s guardian, as he had for many of the other young people on board. Penn was only fourteen when his parents had left his life. For the last two years he had been schooled, fed, housed and nurtured aboard the Nucleus. The ship had become his home.

Hail considered both options for a moment.

He watched the small pirate boat bounce across the waves under full power. Water was shooting up from the sides of the boat as the pirates closed within five-hundred yards of the Nucleus.

Hail’s next question was directed toward both of his weapon controllers.

“What do we have in our medium class that is charged, armed and ready to fly?”

Both of the young men began to flip through screens on their monitors.

Penn was the first to report, “I have Ratt and Scorpion ready for launch.”

Vaughn said a moment later, “And I have Poison that’s good to go.”

“That sounds good,” Hail said, his tone balanced and assertive. “Hand off Ratt to Stone so each of you are flying singles. Open the hatch on the deck and get them airborne.”

“Yes, Sir,” Penn said, transferring the flight control of the weapon with the code name Ratt to Dallas Stone.

The assignment made sense, because Tayler was still controlling the inflight attack drone code named Queen. And Dallas’s drone Prince was static and clipped to the underside of blimp thousands of feet above the Nucleus.

Vaughn pressed an icon on a screen and reported, “The deck hatch is open and we are good to spin up.”

The three pilots, who had each been assigned a weapon, pulled in a bar from the sides of their stations that swiveled into place in front of them. The bar had a combination of joysticks and flight controls mounted to its stainless steel surface. Each of the young men placed their feet on control pedals under their stations.

Hail asked Tayler, “Can you please bring up the video on the hatch camera and track the group until they go over the rail?”

“Will do,” Tayler said, transferring the video from the hatch camera to the monitor closest to Hail.

Hail’s stomach growled loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.

“I think we should get some popcorn,” Hail told his crew.

“Yaaaaa,” squealed Alba, clapping her hands together. “Popcorn and an action movie.”

Alba was occupying the second analyst station next to Pierce Mercier. Both analyst stations were built behind the pilots’ stations and elevated on a second tier. Behind the analyst stations was a third tier that held Hail’s big captain’s chair. Alba was the oldest young person in the room. She was twenty-two but Hail thought she acted more like sixteen. She had graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Foreign Language Study. His analyst had short dark hair and Hail couldn’t recall ever seeing the vivacious woman without a smile on her face. Alba Zorn’s job was Security Analyst and specifically she was the ship’s language specialist.

“Of course you guys are flying,” he told the pilots.

“And your hands are full too,” he said to Tayler.

“So that leaves me and Mercier and Alba to share the popcorn.”

For the first time since Hail arrived in the security center, the two data analysts looked pleased to be sitting one row back from the action.

“Can you do the honors?” Hail asked Pierce Mercier.

Mercier picked up the phone, dialed a six-digit number and requested a bowl of popcorn.

Hail watched Dallas and Tayler’s monitors. He considered climbing up the two tiers behind him and sitting down in his chair, but he had done a lot of sitting today and felt like standing. Standing burned more calories than sitting and that might be the only exercise he got today.

Poison, Ratt and Scorpion’s cameras were transmitting video to each of the pilot stations. Each of the weapon systems lifted off from deck two and began flying toward the light above.

“Don’t forget the lemonade,” Hail told Mercier before he hung up the phone.

“Yaaaaa,” Alba yelled, clapping her hands together again. “Popcorn and lemonade and an action movie. Dang, most people would have to be on a cargo ship in the middle of the frickin Java Sea to get an afternoon of fun like that.”

“Clearing the hatch in three, two, one, hatch cleared,” reported Tayler.

“What do you want to do, Skipper?” Dallas Stone asked.

Hail looked at the monitor that showed the pirate’s boat slowing as they approached the port side of the Nucleus.

“Take the drones over the starboard side, stay low, circle around the back of the ship and come up from behind the pirates. I think a surprise meeting would be best.”

“Roger that,” Dallas said.

In a tight group, the three weapons traversed the width of the ship, flying just feet above the white cargo containers. Hail watched the video until the drones disappeared over the starboard railing.

Hail looked at Mercier sitting in front of his station, doing nothing except waiting for popcorn, and asked him, “Mercier, please get a camera on these pirates and let’s see if we can ID their country by what they are wearing.”

“Sure, Marshall,” Mercier said, “But you don’t need an analyst to tell you that it doesn’t matter where they are from. They are here for money. If they can take control of the ship, they will hold it until they received a ransom.”

Hail huffed and said, “Well, we know that isn’t going to happen. Please humor me.”

Mercier touched his screen and opened another gun port on the portside of the Nucleus. The angle from this camera was much better than their previous view. Mercier zoomed in so close that instead of five nondescript pirates, five ugly men with stained and rotten teeth appeared on Mercier’s monitor.

“Transfer it to big screen number two up top, please,” Hail requested.

Mercier touched a few icons and the video from his small screen appeared on one of the big screens mounted on the wall above the crew.

“Maybe I won’t have that popcorn,” said Alba cynically. “Can you pull the camera back a little,” she asked Mercier. “Sometimes close is too close.”

“I just want to see their clothes, or whatever clothes they have on.” Mercier said. He zoomed out about four feet.

Mercier studied the pirates for a moment and said, “I can’t tell anything by the dirty rags they’re wearing. Indonesian or Malaysian maybe. It is so damn hard to tell. They are all carrying AK-47s, if that helps at all?”

“Yeah, right,” Hail laughed. “Every man, woman and child in this hemisphere carries an AK-47.”

“Just coming around the stern of the ship,” Dallas reported.

“Stay low, stay low,” Hail told him. “I want you guys almost touching the water. What’s the status on the mother-boat?”

Tayler moved her joystick and re-centered Queen’s camera on the boat below.

“They are still a long way away,” she said. “I don’t think they’ll be able to see Ratt, Scorpion and Poison from that distance. And even if they do, they won’t have a clue what they’re seeing.”

The pirate boat touched the hull of the Nucleus. At twenty knots, a light touch from the massive cargo ship was amplified into a violent jarring of the small pirate craft. The pirates all fell down in the middle of their boat and then scrambled back up to their feet.

“What are they doing?” Hail asked.

“Not much,” Mercier replied. “If they have done this before, then they are expecting our ship to start making sharp turns. The other thing they would anticipate is getting hit in the face by a firehose shot from a panicked crew on deck. None of that is happening and they’re wondering why.”

“OK, so what are they going to do next?” Hail asked Mercier.

“If they follow international pirate protocol, or IPP,” Mercier joked, “Then they’re going to swing hooks up to the railing and climb aboard.”

“Well, we can’t have that, can we?” Hail said emphatically.

“Where is the popcorn?” Alba asked.

“We’re almost up to them,” Dallas informed everyone. “Thirty meters.”

“Pull back on the camera about five feet,” Hail told Mercier.

Mercier zoomed the camera back until it showed the wooden boat next to the Nucleus with a perimeter of five-feet of water surrounding it. The waves were hammering on the little boat and Hail wondered how long the pirates could hold out under those current conditions.

“Are you guys ready?” Hail asked his pilots.

“Ready,” they all said.

“Alright, bring up the drones and meet our pirate friends.”

There was a lot of commotion down on the sea below. The pirates’ little boat was tipping from side to side and bouncing around from the five-foot wakes that rolled off the Nucleus. The pirates didn’t seem to notice the three remote flying machines that had just appeared above the dirty lip of their boat. The flying saucer-like aircraft, roughly the size of a big hula-hoop, hovered above the water, keeping perfect pace with their boat. Ratt was flying in front of the bow of the pirate’s boat, and Scorpion and Poison maintained a measured three-foot distance on each side of the pirate’s wooden craft.

For what seemed like a minute to the security crew, but was closer to fifteen seconds, the pirates remained oblivious to the strange objects that hovered and surrounded them. The pirate, who was in the far back of the boat wrestling with the powerful outboard engine, was the first man to notice Ratt hovering directly in front of their boat. An instant later, his expression turned from confused to fearful when he noticed the other two air machines on either side of his boat. The pirate working the tiller yelled something to his men who scanned their surroundings and took in the strange sight as well. Initially, the grimy and water-soaked pirates looked at the objects as if they were alien invaders that had come to earth from outer-space, which wasn’t far off the mark from their perspective. Then the pirates all seemed to recognize the outline of a weapon hanging underneath each of the flying saucers that they were very familiar with. Matter of fact, each pirate in the boat had one hanging over their own shoulder. The only difference was the 45 caliber fully-automatic mini-gun that was mounted under the remote controlled drones could fire at double the rate of the pirates AK-47s. The flying guns also held a hundred and twenty rounds of barrel-fed ammunition. The pirate’s AK-47s had a single magazine of thirty rounds.

One of the pirates was so startled by the site of the strange contraptions that he inadvertently squeezed off a burst of fire. Two of his six rounds hit the top of Poison’s Kevlar cover, the part the pirates would describe as the top of the flying saucer. Those two 7.62 rounds harmlessly skidding off of Poison’s domed surface and bounced off the side of the Nucleus, making movie ricochet sounds. Two more rounds hit the mini-gun mounted under Poison and went pinging off into the ocean. The last two rounds missed everything entirely and harmlessly disappeared into the distance.

The blast of gunfire drew the attention of the rest of the pirates and they raised their guns up to their shoulders and took aim at the closest alien.

Each of the cameras mounted to each of the flying weapons streamed the video back to the security center on the Nucleus. The video that arrived showed five pirates that looked both scared and angry.

“What do you want to do, Marshall?” Dallas asked. “We have them at gunpoint.”

Hail looked at the pirates. They stared back at him through the eyes of his avionic soldiers.

God, what would it be like to be one of these guys, Hail thought. Born into abject poverty; having to scrape for the very basics of life. And the kicker was that their lives would never change. No retirement. No relief. Day after day, doing whatever they had to do to eat and keep a cardboard roof over their heads. Death might even be welcomed after a lifetime of that. Hell, maybe even after a decade of that type of existence. Today, however, the Hail crew would not be the answer to those prayers or any of their problems.

“Alba, do you know Indonesian?” Hail asked.

Alba put down the bowl of popcorn that had just arrived and said, “I know a little of the Bahasa Indonesia form of the language. It is the official modified form of Malay.”

Hail responded, “I don’t know what any of that means, but it has to be better than nothing. Open a microphone and speaker channel on Ratt.”

“Give me a minute,” Alba said.

Down on the water, the pirates appeared both confused and paralyzed. They stared at their flying captors, apparently trying to make up their minds as to what to do next. Their choice was to either continue on with what had become a very odd abduction scenario, or cut their losses and return to their mother-boat.

Hail looked over the Indonesians closely, trying to determine which one was the leader. Their body language was being continually interrupted by the bumps and dips in the ocean. The man sitting down at the back of the boat and operating the outboard engine had it easy. The others were doing their best to remain standing, while keeping their guns trained on the targets surrounding them.

Hail decided that it really didn’t matter who was in charge. There were no decisions to be made by the pirates. Hail was making all the decisions on their behalf. Live or die. It was all a matter of one command that exited his mouth and entered the ears of his pilots.

“I have the comms open, Marshall,” Alba reported.

Tell them this, Hail said. “This is the captain of Hail Nucleus. Turn your boat around and go home. Turn your boat around and go home. If you do this, then no harm will come to you or your men.”

Alba made an adjustment to the TC Helicon Voice Modulator and set the dial for BARITONE MALE. She slipped on a headset and adjusted the microphone in front of her mouth.

She then translated Hail’s words into the microphone.

Hail and the crew waited for a reaction.

The pirate that was closest to Ratt was so startled when the weird thing started talking, that he fell back into the boat and opened fire. His volley of led was not aimed well and the rounds uselessly shot skyward.

Hail shook his head and said to Alba, tell them, “Turn your boat around right now and go home or we will open fire.”

Alba repeated the phrase in her best Indonesian.

The mechanical Indonesia voice that came out of Ratt was low, loud and clear. Hail could tell that all the men in the boat had understood Alba’s instructions. They just didn’t like the message. They began arguing with one another. There was a rapid fire of curt exchanges that didn’t appear to resolve the situation. The pirate who had fallen down in the boat, got back to his feet and purposely pointed his weapon at Ratt and appeared to be ready to fire.

“Screw this,” Hail said. “Vaughn, what kind of angle do you have on their bow gunwale?”

“I’m good,” Vaughn said, “But Dallas needs to move Ratt out of the way.”

“I’m on it,” Dallas said, tilting his joystick to the right. “I should be clear now.”

The pirates looked happy when the flying gun-alien-thing that had been hovering over their bow began to move away from the front of their boat. To Hail, he sensed they thought that their recent gunfire had scared the thing away.

“Fire,” Hail ordered.

Vaughn lifted the safety latch and slid in his finger onto the trigger of his left joystick. On his screen, he centered a red laser on the top rail of the pirate boat. Confident with the fix on his target, Vaughn fired the machine gun. The speakers in the security center crackled with loud static as the barrage of brass and lead peeked and distorted the drone’s microphones.

The pirates jumped and launched themselves toward the back of their boat as Poison spit out bullets. Chunks of wood and flying splitters chattered off the bow of their vessel. The pirate driving their boat cranked the motor hard to the right. As the roar of gun fire subsided, the vessel veered away from the Nucleus. The barrel on Poison smoked, leaving a dull grey cloud behind it as the flying weapons maintained their original speed and position next to the Nucleus.

“Should we pursue them?” Dallas asked.

Before Hail could respond, Tayler, who was still flying the attack drone Queen high above, said, “The mother-boat is on the move and closing rapidly on our position. There is one guy manning the fifty cal and they are vectored to reach us in about forty-seven seconds.”

“Get one of the port cameras on them,” Hail requested.

Being one of the few crew members with free hands, Mercier pulled up the console and took control of the camera that had been tracking the pirates below. He pointed it up and out toward the sea. It took him a few minutes of scanning, but he finally acquired the inbound boat, drew a crude box around the vessel with his finger and set the camera to auto-track.

Hail studied the fiberglass boat that was approaching the Nucleus. From the front, it looked like a twenty-six foot Boston Whaler; year unknown. The only modification from the stock craft was the addition of a large 50 caliber Browning machine gun that pivoted on a stand mounted on the front deck. As Hail scanned the pirate boat for other weapons, puffs of smoke began appearing from the barrel of the machine gun. A second later, the sound of the gunfire arrived at the drone’s microphones and was piped up to the security center.

“We are taking fire from the mother-boat,” Dallas reported.

“Range?” Hail asked.

“Two-thousand yards,” Dallas answered.

“We’re still out of their range. Those 50s won’t hurt us.” Hail said.

Hail told Dallas, “Pop a few grenades in front of them and see if that slows them down.”

“You got it, Skipper,” Dallas said. “I’m putting Ratt on auto-suspend.”

In avionic terms, auto-suspend for a drone was similar to auto-pilot on a plane. By suspending the drone, the aircraft continued at its current direction and speed, unless it encountered an obstacle, in which case its programming would run an avoidance sub-routine.

Dallas took control of the ship’s porthole that was already open and shooting video. He touched his screen and activated the gun cluster control. Dallas switched aiming control to his right-hand joystick and the servo-motors on the gun turret jumped to life. A thick red laser beam shot out across the sea.

“Bringing the XM on target,” Dallas announced. He then focused the tip on the beam about fifty yards in front of the oncoming Whaler.

“Let me know when, Marshall” he told Hail.

“Fire a burst,” Hail told him.

Dallas pulled the trigger and the XM307 grenade launcher chugged out four metal bombs that spiraled through the air like tiny footballs. Two seconds later, the tight group of grenades exploded with such force, that the drones hovering next to the Nucleus juddered.

In front of the Whaler, water was hurled up into the air and thunder rolled across the ocean. The grenades had all exploded under water. The shock and awe was simply a fireworks show. All the shrapnel from the grenades sank safely to the bottom of the Java Sea. The mother-boat remained intact.

The Hail crew expected a reduction in speed or possibly a change in direction. But to everyone’s surprise, none of a chunthat stuff happened. The Whaler kept pouring on the juice and the gunner opened up again with the big fifty caliber machine gun.

“Distance?” Hail asked.

“Fifteen-hundred yards,” Tayler responded.

“Where is the little boat?” Hail asked.

“Heading back toward the mother-boat,” Dallas answered.

“Screw these guys,” Hail said. “Bring up the railgun.”

“Yeaaaaaah, the railgun!” Alba yelled, grabbing the bowl of popcorn again. “This movie just keeps getting better.”

For the second time, Dallas switched weapon devices and assigned himself the railgun control set.

Dallas pressed some icons on his monitor and somewhere far away from the security center they heard a loud metallic ka-thunk that reverberated throughout the ship.

“The containers are unlocked and we’re elevating the gun,” Dallas said.

The pirate manning the machine gun on the Whaler was the first man to see a new and disturbing site. A door on the end of a large cylindrical cargo container flapped open. And then, seemingly defying gravity, two huge containers, connected end to end, began to rise from the deck of the huge ship.

The pirate gunner on the Whaler turned and yelled something at his fellow pirates who all rushed up to the bow. The cargo containers began turning in the Whaler’s direction, slowly, like the head of a lethargic snake. When the barrel finally came to rest, its dark mouth was pointed directly at them. Now each of the pirates on the Whaler could clearly see that the containers were not floating in midair. In fact, some sort of massive lift had moved the containers into this threatening position.

More urgent words were exchanged on the Whaler.

More bullets sprayed out of their machine gun at the big ship in front of them.

More distance was reduced as the pirate ship continued to close on the Nucleus.

“Charge the capacitors,” Hail ordered.

Dallas looked for the correct icon and replied, “Bringing up the grid.”

A deep 60 hertz hum began vibrating the hull of the Nucleus. The heavy harmonic tone came from the transformers as they sent thousands of volts into the huge capacitor farm. During all the test firings of the railgun, the exact same sound of corona discharge had been experienced. The weird sounds of fluid being ionized around a conductor had been anticipated inside the security center. Everything was as it should be.

The pirates watched as a glow appeared from inside the dark cargo container that was pointing its enigmatic opening toward them. At first, a blurry blue hue could be seen inside the black hole. Then as the gun began to take on a charge, the hue mutated into a red and yellow type of fuzzy static that jittered around inside the tube.

The pirate who was at the wheel of the Whaler pulled back on the throttles and the bow of their craft dipped and then dug into the waves. The pirates were now clustered up front on the bow of the Whaler, staring so intently at the Nucleus that the pirates on the small wooden boat came to a stop as well. The men in the little attack boat turned to look over the shoulders at the strange sight, apparently wondering what the hubbub was all about.

The sound coming out of the weird metal tube was terrifying only because it was like nothing any of the pirates had ever heard. In nature, the only thing comparable would have been a beehive strapped to a pirate’s head. But there was more to it than just that. Each of the pirates could physically feel the sound. Their skin prickled. Their teeth vibrated. The insane buzz was accompanied by a low hum that seemed to move the air around them.

The pirate standing next to the gunner on the Whaler dropped his rifle on the deck and jumped into the water without warning. The other pirates didn’t seem to notice. The glow inside the container was getting brighter. Two semi-circles of red and yellow, with a vivid core of blue, took on a physical form. The colors were more than just a shape. They were alive somehow. The sound got louder and the pirates on the Whaler were still hypnotized. None of them were moving. Everything seemed to stand still. Their boat was immobile. The waves that had been lapping at both of the pirate’s boats had been vibrated into nothing more than faint ripples. The breezed died away and was replaced with the faint smell of insulation being burned on a wire.

The gunner on the Whaler turned and screamed something at the other pirates, but his voice had been reduced to nothing more than queer vibrations of undiscernible tones. That’s when two more pirates on the Whaler jumped into the water and started swimming for home. That left four pirates on the Whaler and five on the wooden boat. But now, the pirate that was driving the wooden boat turned and began distancing themselves from the white mother-boat.

On board the Nucleus, Hail asked, “What’s the firing status?”

Dallas checked his screens.

“Almost charged. About another fifteen seconds.”

Back down on the water, the buzzing bees had been replaced with a sound of a thousand woodpeckers hammering their beaks on the inside of the metal shipping container. The air around the vessels became electrostatically charged. The pirates turned to look at one another as the hair on their arms and heads began to elevate. The thick anchor-chain on the deck of the Whaler rattled and then scuttled across the deck, magnetically snapping together and forming a huge ball of metal. Two more of the pirates had seen enough. They dropped their guns on the deck and exited the Whaler. That only left two combatants on the mother-boat. The gunner and the driver.

The edges of the cylindrical container had become less defined as the atmosphere surrounding the railgun became murky with ozone and electrons. The light inside the hole was so bright that the pirates had to shield their eyes. The gun’s fire warning tones blared from the ship’s horn and the last two pirates, who were literally shaking with fear, threw in the towel and bailed off the boat head first, so scared that they forgot to unstrap their guns.

“Fire!” Hail ordered.

Dallas pressed the button.

There was a deafening sound like a redwood tree being broken over God’s knee. A bolt of lightning shot from the container, followed by a depleted uranium projectile, followed by a ring of purple fire. The concussion and transfer of energy rolled the Hail Nucleus twenty-degrees to its starboard side. At five-thousand miles per hour, the projectile took less than a tenth of a second to impact the Whaler. The kinetic energy was so immense that it looked like a magic act had been performed. One second the Whaler was there, and then a tenth of a second later it was gone. The boat had been turned into a fiberglass dust cloud that hovered for a moment before breaking up and dissipating as the ocean breeze returned.

Inside the Security Center, Hail grabbed onto the back of Dallas and Tayler’s high-back chairs, riding it out as the ship rolled back and forth, trying to find its equilibrium.

“Holy smokes!” Alba yelled. She set the popcorn on the floor next to her and got to her feet and started clapping. “Damn, that was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.”

Hail looked up at the monitor above him. There wasn’t much to see. The small wooden pirate boat had stopped and was picking up the privates who had abandoned their vaporized craft. They all looked shaken. The Indonesians looked like they could hardly wait to put some distance between them and the cargo ship from outer space. Hail thought they might even consider retiring from this line of work.

Hail smiled and instructed Dallas to secure the railgun.

“Let’s get the drones back on board,” he told his pilots.

Hail took a moment and mulled over the events, thinking that he may have missed something.

“Does anyone need me for anything else?” Hail asked his crew.

“No, we’re good, Skipper” Dallas responded. “We’ll let you know if there is more fun to be had. Don’t worry.”

“I’m sure you will,” Hail said.

Smiling, Hail turned and walked to the door.

Once outside in the hallway, the walk to his stateroom seemed longer than it had been thirty minutes ago. His stomach growled, his eyes were tired, his back hurt and it had been years since he was in this good of a mood.