Had the four not been sealed in their armor, they would have noticed the a distinct smell of burning vegetation, but they couldn't miss the wreath of green-tinged smoke that drifted.

"I would say that boded bad."

Slide scowled. "Really bad."

Sternwood revved his chair. "I'm out of here."

Lupo, for whom desertion was a capital offense, reached for his blaster, but Slide stayed his hand. "Let the poor bastard find himself a bolt-hole if he can. I mean, look at him."

Moments after Sternwood had sped away a rip appeared in the outer shield's integrity. The edges of this energy wound sun-flared with such intensity that it momentarily blanked over the repro-vision. The inner shields briefly burned with white fire and died. A Convair saucercraft came through the resulting gap, flowed by a beamship, and then whole slew of assorted pirate vehicles. Although their gunports were wide open and still hot from the bombardment, no fire was directed at the Eloi ship.

"As soon as they get a few of the bigger ships through they'll be looking to board us."

"Soon as the burn through whatever passes for a hull, they'll doubtless send in a scouting part of war ferrets."

Lupo watched the pirates close on the biocraft with a detached, nosferatu interest. "I imagine they'll kill everyone aboard."

Rosa Coote checked the defenders as though assessing numbers. "They will preserve enough, I suspect, to sodomize and otherwise have their piratical way with.

"Does that mean the next episode will be seamless and shameless cross species rape and pillage."

"I would expect so."

Mina Harker agreed. "Vertebrates and invertebrates, all going at it."

Story so far: Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, in the company of Mina Harker, Rosa Coote, and Lupo the nosferatu, finds himself cursing his continuing run of monolithic bad luck as the Pirates of the Lower Quadrant board the Eloi biocraft bent of an surfeit of rape and pillage far in excess of any old fashioned “kill the men and carry off the women.”

The clear plexiglass helmet of Slide's space armor was locked down tight, and mercifully muffled him from some the cacophony that howled all round; the shrieking glossolalia of sexual depredation that fragmented the smoke-filled and still burning cortex of the biocraft as the Pirates of the Lower Quadrant exacted their savagely traditional tribute. He stepped back hurriedly as a bouncing sag-sack morphed into something quite unrecognizable; complicated, dripping, and obscene. The ugliness leaped high and then fell with a pornographic squelch on a pair of young Eloi, male and a female, hurling them to a deck that was already awash in loathsomely multicolored fluids, and wrenching furiously at their delicate protesting flesh. The helmet also preserved Slide from the overwhelming stench of secretion, distention, debasement, disgorgement, and bodily abuse, all around him, as Slime Things slathered any entity that came within range of their drool, and priapic molluscs rammed rampant appendages into orifices never designed to accommodate such calcium-based erections. Bodies heaved, mandibles snackered, limbs and tentacles waved and intertwined to the point of lewd and grossly indecent surrealism, and, all the time, protesting voices howled in the face of polymorphous violation. To his immediate left, a crew of quasi-amazons of Nardaz with cabalistic tattoos displayed under Lucite body armor, and sporting heinous strap-ons, slapped and sodomized more stripped and screaming Eloi, irrespective of gender, bending them over control consuls, forcing them spreadeagled against bulkheads, or simply taking the submissive casualties of onslaught on all fours on the befouled deck, hard-riding them like dogs amid the muck. And even Slide had to raise an eyebrow when one huge, chromadryn-soaked hot-for-the-lethal centurion dispatched her lust-object with a deathblast, execution-style, at the lustmorde moment of rapid-fire multi-orgasm. The Saphs of Nardaz prided themselves on knowing how to party, but Slide suspected the homicidal showing off as an attempt to exceed the extremes of excess, and a trying their damnedest to look the Baddest of Bad among Very Bad Company. Even in the confusion, and with smoke-impaired vision, Slide could see that the Saphs had their corruption cut out for them if they were to claim the dubious title they seemingly so desired. StormKlown Nialapods, with exposed ganglia seething in slop-sacs, locked cloud minds with random victims, and ripped the raw and glowing orgone-skeins of conscious energy straight from the brain. Meanwhile, the Corsairs of H'nad had secured a side ventricle of the cortex and were already setting up their ceremonial hempen devices, while Holy Rounders with electro-whips collected what they liked to call - while laughing nastily - their subjects for geometric stress experiments. The Treens simply killed. These were the crews from the x-quad Telezeros that Slide had watched performing in space, as the Pirates of the Lower Quadrant had swung into massed attack. As old-school Treens, they could do nothing else. All concepts of less drastic or more subtle sources of excitement had been bred out of them during the era of the Mekon. The zom that was with them had no such limitations. The indigenous and semi domesticated tusked tracker dog of Northern Venus had retained all of its physical instincts, plus a few additional and conditioned nasty cross-species conditioned habits. The Treens and their pet/mascot advanced down the one of cortex's radial access passages, fusing everything that moved with their raypistols, and soaking up the death-release energy shimmer in the horizontal flat-tubes of their purpose-modified gold band-wrap. Like the sag-sack, the Saphs, and the Corsairs, the majority of the invaders went after Eloi. The biocraft was, after all, the pirates' common-prize, and that made its inhabitants the designated victims. A few attackers, however, were not so discriminating. The Slime Things, the Nialapods, the suc-Grreeezz, and their ilk went after any creature, friend or foe that had an aperture that suited their purpose. The constant small arms fire also led Slide to suspect that, in the confusion, crew beefs and interspecies rivalries were also being settled, and when the butchers bill for the engagement was calculated, the reality would be that more pirates had been slaughtered by their own than by the pathetically inept Eloi defenders with their delicate bows and spears. What other reason could their be for the sudden attack by a motley crew of lipstick-lace pervo-humanoids on three Mk 1 Warrior Cylons except the yarons-old cry of "Remember the Galactica?" Slide was thinking of withdrawing from the cortex to some less active area of the ship, when Rosa Coote moved into his field of vision. Like him, she was still in full space armor with the helmet locked down. Her voice came over his helmet radio, like a throaty crackle. suggestive. "You're sitting this orgy out, Yancey Slide?" "I don't think the party needs my help." "I never took you for a voyeur, Slide." "I'm not here to watch." "And definitely not tempted to strip your suit and go carnal?" Slide shook his head. "I don't think so." "Not even after a couple of shots of mugwump juice?" "No way?" "Yellow-bug powder?"

"Get thee behind me, Coote."

Maybe a century or more earlier, Slide might have gone into full demon rut and given even the Saphs a run for their money in debauchery, but too much happenstance had been battering on him for full twelve episodes and more. Inclination to debauch was at low ebb, drained by cumulative circumstance. Also he had more than a passing concern with what might happen next. The Pirates of the Lower Quadrant were going at their riot of rapine as though there was no tomorrow. But tomorrow never knows, and Slide was interested in having a tale to tell beyond the moment, plus some guarantee of a future in which to tell it. He was far from certain how long the biocraft would stand up to this kind of treatment. The big Eloi ship was, after all, a living entity, self-aware, and if the now-missing Sternwood was to be believed, sensitive, maybe to the point of petulance. In a more conventional metal and electron vessel, the cortex would be the bridge, the nerve center of all ship-board operations. It the command center had fallen to the pirates with such ease, he could easily image that orgies of carnage that were going on in other, less crucial areas of the ship.