In the cell he had been thrown into, the greasy-haired pirate that had been the first to detect the targets that turned out to be a trap was shaking uncontrollably.
Before being captured, he had injected himself with a large quantity of one of the drug cocktails he was hooked on, hoping that it would keep him calm.
Yet, he had taken a bit too much and now it had just increased his anxiety and made him unnaturally paranoid.
He was certain that he was starting to hear voices next to him. His dead comrades cursing him for surviving by selling them out.
"Why did you do it Raul? Do you really think that you’ll survive much longer. Now when you die, we’ll all rip your traitorous soul apart."
Hearing hateful and terrifying words in his head, and not being of particularly sound mind right now, the man, Raul, huddled into the corner of the room and began hitting his head against the wall.
It was around this ti that he heard the doors to the brig open with a soft whooshing sound.
Already paranoid as he was, Raul turned towards the bars that kept him locked in the room and waited in terror.
When he saw that it was just a young man that he did not know, he felt relieved that it was not more of his forr associates co to condemn him.
Except, the fear addling his mind from the drugs was not going to let him go easily. Instead, he began picturing the figure as so sort of entity co to drag him off to whatever afterlife there was along with along with the other pirates that had died.
"Wow, it’s worse than I thought. He must have taken a lot more of that crap than I thought." The blond reaper said to the witch beside him.
He then whispered to the woman, and the only words that Raul managed to pick up were, weapons, neutralize, and administer.
Without any other context, these words ant little to him, but he found them all to be horrifying.
His mind began imagining himself being killed by a vicious weapon, or having so lethal poison injected into him.
As his terror was reaching its peak, the bars of the cell he was in retracted, and the blond young man he believed was here to claim his life walked into the room.
At this he started screaming manically as the strong drugs eh had taken made it impossible for him to now decern reality from the poison in his mind.
When the person got closer to him, he lashed out in a frenzy as a last resort, but even with his body unable to feel pain right now and being able to go beyond his normal limits, Raul was still easily restrained and pushed to the ground.
A mont later, as he twisted his neck around to look up at the monster about to kill him, he saw it plunge a syringe into his arm.
Once that had happened, he figured that it was over now.
He was pulled up and pushed onto the bench in the cell, and the blond demon walked out of the room. Presumably to watch his final monts as he succumbed to whatever had just been injected into him.
What happened instead, however, was that clarity began to return to Raul’s mind.
Soon he recognized the syringe that had been jamd into him, and its contents that had been injected into his body.
It was the neutralizing agent he kept onboard his ship just in case he ever overdosed on the substance he took nearly every day. Sothing that had happened before.
"After surrendering and begging for your life, I didn’t think that you would be so stupid as to try and kill yourself with a drug overdose."
"T-that’s not what happened. I-I just wanted to take the edge off." Raul muttered as he felt himself becoming lucid again.
In just around a minute, his mind was clear again, and the only aftereffects left were that he felt a bit cold and weak.
Still, he now understood what had really happened.
He had taken far too much of his usual illicit substance and nearly drove himself mad before dying. And it was only because the rcenaries that had captured him gave him the neutralizing agent that he was still alive.
"Okay, I don’t really care about whatever your personal circumstances are. You’re only alive because you don’t have a bounty on you, and there’s information that I want from you. So, answer my questions and I’ll treat you fairly. Keep quite or lie to , and I’ll make sure that you end up in the roughest Alliance Police prison in this sector for the rest of your life."
Raul gulped as he felt the intense pressure coming from the young man.
This was his first ti dealing with soone like this.
They did not have the violent, sowhat crazed eyes of the leader of the pirate group he belonged to, but the man before him felt even more imposing sohow.
Without waiting for Raul to answer, the blond-haired man asked his questions.
All of them pertained to the group that Raul was a part of.
Things such as the number of ships they had, where their bases were, and what sort of defenses they possessed.
"W-what will I get in return if I do tell you?" Raul asked, knowing that he needed to get sothing out of this.
He had managed to stay alive sohow, and there might still be a chance for him, even if it was a slim one.
It was not the Alliance Police who had captured him. In that case, he would have had no chance of getting away.
But rcenaries were more likely to work within gray areas. Although, there was an equal possibility that they might just kill him after they got what they wanted.
"Well, don’t expect to escape jail ti. You’re a pirate that’s committed all manner of unforgivable cris. Probably more than I can even think of. Normally, your life would be over. You’d be spending the rest of it doing hard labor on a prison station."
"However, if you tell everything I want to know, and it all turns out to be true, I’ll hand you over to the police as soone that was just buying illegal drugs from pirates for the first ti. That’ll only see you getting a sentence of between twenty-five to thirty years. Maybe less if you can show good behavior while incarcerated."
Listening to what the rcenary had to say, Raul knew that this was a good deal compared to his other options, probably better than what he deserved.
Still, he wanted to avoid prison if he could. He was a coward at the end of the day, that’s why he had been the first one to surrender when it beca clear that the situation was hopeless.
He was a rat that would do anything to save his own cowardly ass.
"I-if you want t-to know. You’ll have to l-let g-go." Raul eventually got out while stuttering.
With the people that had captured him already willing to bend the law for his information, he figured that it was pretty valuable to them.
That ant that he might be able to negotiate for a better deal than having to rot in prison for a large period of his life.
’I just need to get away. I’ll travel to the other side of the Dramid Alliance and join so a new group. I can start over from there.’ Making a plan for what he would do once he escaped.
Yet, it seed that he had read the situation wrong.
While his captors did want the intel that he had, it was not to the degree that they were going to give him a better deal than they already had.
"Pirates are pirates in the end. I thought that you might be a little more grateful since I saved your life twice already, but I shouldn’t have had any expectations. You’re not our only captive, so I’ll get what I want from the other one. After that, I’ll decide whether it’s worth the effort of handing you over to the Alliance Police, or if I should just have you shot out into space."
Watching the man and the woman accompanying him starting to walk away, Raul realized that his only chance of avoiding death or life imprisonnt was about to slip away forever.
"No wait! I’ll tell you! Just stop! Stop!" Raul shouted desperately.
Fortunately for him, the man and woman turned around and approached his cell. He was not completely screwed yet.
"Fine, but for wasting our ti, I’ll be revising your cris. You’re now a repeat custor that was buying drugs from these pirates for the third ti. That will probably see you getting sowhere between forty and fifty years."
Raul felt his heart drop at the increase in the cris that would be reported and the new length of his expected sentence.
Right now, he was in his late twenties, so before he could have expected to get out in his forties or fifties.
The current deal though, would not see him released until his twilight years, and it was doubtful he would be able to scape up enough money for any rejuvenation treatnts that could extend his life at that point.
Nevertheless, he knew that trying to reject this deal or backpedal to the previous one would see him losing any shot he had left of ever being a free man again.
His only option was to tell Avery everything he knew, and hope that fate had an early release in store for him if he could just be a bit lucky.
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