Last Stand (Stag Privateers Book 1)

he expected to see in a normal young man; the gunner didn't show emotion. It was anyone's guess whether he even felt them.
Pushing the uncomfortable topic from his mind, Aiden toggled his communicator headset's mic to one of the common broadcasting frequencies. “I like to take ships whole so I can strip valuable parts and cargo from them,” he told the target dryly. “But if I blow you up I can probably still salvage some useful stuff from the debris. This is your one chance to surrender.”
The target's captain replied, voice strained with fear and the tattered remnants of his defiance. “Who is this? You've just fired on the DMS Fleetfoot, a trading ship operating with the full sanction of the Deconstructionist Movement! You'll be hunted across the stars for this.”
Tell me something new, Aiden thought wryly. “Is that a refusal to surrender?” he asked, eyes on Barix. The Ishivi was monitoring the target's systems closely, to make sure the enemy crew wasn't making hasty repairs to get them operational again.
A stream of curses from the other captain assaulted his ears. “We're surrendering!” the Deek eventually snapped. “Powering down our systems now.”
Aiden waited until Ali and Barix both nodded confirmation to him, then relaxed slightly and leaned back in his chair. He hadn't really expected the enemy to try to go out in a blaze of glory; the strength of a Deek's conviction was directly proportional to the strength of their combat advantage, he'd found.
Too bad there were always endless morons willing to pick up a weapon for the Movement, giving them that advantage.
“Fleetfoot, prepare to be boarded,” he said. “Approaching now. Keep your systems unpowered, disarm your crew, and have everyone gather in your galley lying facedown. Any resistance will be met with lethal force.”
“Understood,” the other captain growled, sounding as if he was speaking through gritted teeth. “Complying.”
Aiden closed his eyes, letting the inevitable adrenaline of battle, even a feeble one like this, slowly drain out of him. Then he toggled his mic. “Fix, you're with Ali at the forward airlock. Prepare to board the Fleetfoot and subdue its crew.”
“Understood,” the combat android replied, its tone almost as clipped and emotionless as the gunner's.
Ali was already away from her station, holding her cauterizer and kinetic force multiplier, or KFM, in either hand. She always kept the weapons close nearby, her human's safety and wellbeing her top priority. Aiden stood and reached for his own cauterizer, the same one he'd been issued over two and a half decades ago when he'd joined the Preservationist Fleet as a pilot cadet.
“You're in the chair,” he told the gunner as he started after his companion. “Fly us in to dock with the target, and if you see anything suspicious you have my permission to blow the Deeks into the void.”
“Understood, sir,” the gunner said, smoothly standing and slipping past him to take the pilot's chair.
Ali was waiting for Aiden at the bridge's forward exit. “You're going to come too, aren't you my love?” she asked in weary resignation.
He nodded. “Staying well behind you, waiting until you've confirmed it's safe before I go anywhere.”
For a moment he thought his companion was going to do her best to talk him out of it again. She'd tried numerous very rational and compelling arguments, such as that the enemy could've booby-trapped their ship, or contaminated their air with some sort of nasty chemical or biological agent. He'd eventually told her to stop challenging him on the issue and undermining his authority and after that, she'd grudgingly given up.
Although he doubted she accepted it.
As they stepped out into the corridor, Barix called after him from his station. “Might I state for the record, as usual, that I strongly object to you sending out an advanced sex robot prototype that's worth as much as this ship as part of a boarding team?”
Aiden snorted and kept walking without bothering to reply. As if it was my choice.
Thanks to her companion programming, Ali's core priorities put the wellbeing of all humans above any other consideration, even her own continued functioning. She insisted on being part of boarding parties, so she could do her best to incapacitate enemy combatants before Fix killed or injured them. She also wanted to take that spot to prevent another member of the Last Stand's crew from being forced to put themselves in danger.
Stupid HumanAssist Enterprises and their stubbornly idealistic quest to try to patch up the minor nicks and scrapes of human suffering, all the while refusing to do anything about the madmen blowing huge gaping holes in society. Did HAE really think they were going to make a difference that way?
Aiden had been tempted to try to tinker with Ali's programming but had avoided doing so because, for one thing, it was impossible. Even the Ishiv twins, with their genius level intelligence and carefully honed technical skills, couldn't have had a hope of cracking HAE's coding, even with years to work at it.
Years during which he'd be without the services of his new adult companion, which he wasn't about to deprive himself of. Besides, given how the two had salivated over the prototype technology, he would've sooner trusted Deeks to reprogram her.
The only saving grace was that since Aiden was Ali's imprinted human, she was willing to give some leeway in her core priorities in order to follow his commands. He had, after a lot of effort, managed to snare her in various logical traps until she'd admitted that if it was a choice between killing an evil, murderous enemy or letting a member of her new crew die, she'd reluctantly kill the enemy. But only if she'd exhausted all other options. Thankfully, she'd also agreed that the same logic applied to maiming and incapacitating.
And he couldn't complain about her work; Fix was a combat android specifically designed for boarding and capturing valuable targets, and somehow Ali kept up with him even under her restrictive parameters.
He might have nothing but contempt for those HAE