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A Pistol With One Shot

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black cell (n.): An originally-improvised form of prison or brig cell used by various independent drifts and starships designed for long-duration flight, a black cell is adapted from an airlock, in which the outer door is not equipped with a docking collar, and the inner door is only controllable from the outside. The prisoner is often (although by no means always) held in as much comfort as a standard cell would provide, supplied with air, water, and food, but always retains the option of opening the outer airlock door and choosing a quick death by spacing.

Opinion is mixed where the use of black cells, improvised or designed, is concerned: whether they are a means of providing their prisoners with an honorable alternative (or, in many spacers’ eyes, a way to spare their comrades the life-support burden), versus offering only a sadistic choice between a quick death and a slow, as they clearly do in those cases in which water and food are not provided. As in the case of so many technologies, it’s the application that determines the ethicality.

– A Star Traveler’s Dictionary

 

Hatred

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Groggily, the prisoner raised his head as the door above him slid open. He tensed his muscles, but the welded wire bonds that attached him to the ore cart were too strong; all his struggles achieved was the cracking open of old scabs, and the oozing of more pinkish-yellow blood from his wrists and ankles. He could not even clear his mouth of the foam that had hardened there. All he could do was glare at the dark silhouette outside that door, and the bulky shapes that flanked it, in impotent fury.

“Boys, watch him and make sure he doesn’t try anything.”

“Uh, estrev -”

“Because I am about to indulge in monologuing. And I hate being interrupted when I am monologuing.”

The bulky shape, a linobir by the sound of its voice, took that as the warning it was and fell silent.

“Since we have never met, my dear Sen Kal, I thought perhaps you deserved a brief introduction. Certainly there will be little time for anything else, given the magnitude of your failure.”

“Beginning, of course, with attempting to contract me and my organization to assist with your meat-market. Did you really expect any different result? I may have abandoned the society and scruples of my prissy cousins for the sake of an ambition suited to my talents, but I am not, shall we say, entirely lost to decency.”

“And then,” the silhouette sighed, “there is the matter of our little game of dominance. You showed no promise at all, I am afraid. Outmaneuvered at every turn. Had you shown even marginal ability, you might have proved a useful tool. Had you recognized how outclassed you were and pled my mercy, you might have lived. Humility can be a virtue… for the low. But if there is one thing that I simply cannot abide, it is an incompetent who does not realize his own incompetence!”

“In any case: know, then, that it is Anatev Sarathos who has defeated you. I’d say it was a pleasure, but I fear it was not even that. And so, farewell.”

The sefir jerked in one last hopeless attempt to escape.

The door closed.

The door beneath him opened.

 

Trope-a-Day: Thrown Out the Airlock

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Thrown Out The Airlock: While purportedly an old space tradition to deal with pirates and mutineers, in practice, the penalties attached to littering anywhere remotely close to a trafficked orbit and the sheer waste of organic compounds are more than enough to persuade most salty spacedogs to Just Shoot ‘Em… or at the very least, throw ’em out there on a line so you can get ’em back.  A few of the dimmer and more brutal kind of pirates – and slavers, et. al, who really don’t want to get caught with their cargo – excepted.

Firing the buggers out of a missile tube, warhead included, or deliberately aiming them into a decaying orbit (in this case with suit), on the other hand… that’s been known to happen.  But it’s still kind of a gratuitous way to make a point, even to the aforementioned dim and brutal pirates and slavers, and definitely still something regarded as an atrocity, if a minor one.

Of course, the average naval anti-piracy patrol doesn’t have to pick up after the aftermath of that sort of pirate very often before its commanders are feeling just a mite atrocious…