5 Minute Freewrite: Interstellar trade, pirates....and tea.

"Jack, it looks like our supply ship got hit," the Federation gunship pilot drawled over the troop bay intercoms.

Damn, not another cargo ship hit. These pirates are taking things a bit too far.

Bodies floated in the debris field as our patrol gunship Murphy's Law pushed into the area around the ruined freighter. Resources were thin and few ships were able to get a fighter escort. I tightened up the combat harness and the reactive armor plating covering my torso. My standard issue Marine hardsuit synched with my zero-gee rated smart gun loaded with frangible rounds, it would stream video from the weapon directly to the heads up display in the helmet and could detect movement and paint targets. This would be a weapons-hot sweep of a disabled ship that looked like it had been ransacked with the atmosphere vented. There were at least nine crewmembers among the wreckage, but there might be survivors inside the cracked hull of the ship, and I intended to find them.

"Sarn't, the records say that this ship was hauling dry goods including coffee and real tea leaves," PFC Cho radioed the rest of the squad over open comms, "Shit, I could really go for some of the good stuff after all of this synthetic crap."

"Time to rock," I announced to my squad of four lined up at the airlock.

We needed to link up with the derelict ship and clear the compartments and hopefully pull someone living out. The pirate attacks in the Ginsberg system had become more frequent and they were more bold in fresh colonies without sufficient military presence. So there we were, an under crewed Frontier Federation patrol gunship tasked with covering a large swath of territory recently cleared for colonization.

My charge as the NCOIC of the marine contingent was to engage and clear out the human parasites killing innocent spacers.

Photo by Shot by Cerqueira on Unsplash