Captain S'Ploork eyed the display on his bridge and agreed with his first officer - this ship would be fine prize. It was an older "Elder Jewel" class cruise ship, so it was either the private property of some super-wealthy entity or was full of beings of lesser wealth.
S'Ploork was an octothorian, an amphibious species evolved from multi-legged life on a water planet. Octothorians were an advanced race, having mastered organic technology to solve their planetary problems. They tended to look down on "airheads" as lesser beings. As with any society, some would always feel the choices of the government weren't their choices. S'Ploork was one of those who felt their world should not have joined the Galacticum.
His original occupation was "freight carrier", but times had gotten tough and a being's gotta do what a being's gotta do.
What Captain S'Ploork had chosen to do was "piracy". It was easy pickings, and filled his holds with valuable cargo & entities he could sell on the dark markets or ransom through anonymous middlemen. Not to mention all the high-value odds & ends and hard currencies those entities might possess at the time.
Their modus operandi was to approach a suitable target from stealth and perform a surgical strike on its engines & comm array. This would render the prize immobile and unable to call for help. At that point, the pirates would dock and fill the target ship with just enough poison gas to render the occupants unconscious. The pirate crew would then board and attach slave hoods to all the occupants, because one thing Captain S'Ploork learned from watching other pirates was "no witnesses". Witnesses always seemed to be the key in bringing other pirates to justice, but Captain S'Ploork wasn't gonna let that happen to him and his crew.
Softening the target
The pirate ship achieved perfect positioning behind the lumbering cruise liner and dropped its stealth field while simultaneously firing calculated shots into the ship's drive & comm array. Success! The target was dead in space and no transmissions had been made!
The pirates docked and rolled their poison generator into the airlock. A junior officer in a vacsuit set the generator to "50% O² saturation" and sat down on it, waiting for it to signal completion. For the duration of the operation, the amount of O² in play would give the playboys and princess' on the cruise ship bad headaches & lightly burn their breathing & ocular organs, but they would survive and recuperate after they regained consciousness.
The "assault"
The poison generator beeped signifying 50% poison gas saturation reached. The junior officer babysitting it signaled the boarding party. With the exception of his chief engineer, Captain S'Ploork and his crew were vacsuited up and entered the cruise liner.
Nobody was there. Captain S'Ploork ordered his crew to initiate their local targeting scanners and to move around the ship until they found the passengers.
Captain S'Ploork loosened his stunner in its holster and headed for the cargo / luggage hold with two of his men.
They arrived at the cargo hold to find the hatch open and the hold almost empty. There was a table and seating pods for some species that bent in the middle, an inactive TriD screen, a cushioned rectangular platform with textiles neatly covering it, a modular area with food items and associated preparation equipment and - at the far end of the hold - an individual stasis pod that was still in cooldown mode & leaking vapors.
"Find out what was in that!" ordered Captain S'Ploork.
"It was set for tyranosapiens terranus horrificus" reported Lieutenant C'Ringe, who went on to volunteer "I've never heard of such a species".
"I've not either", the captain responded. "Let's get back to searching for the goods & spoiled gentlebeings"
The captain's comm buzzed: "Captain, this is Sergeant C'Raph. All our groups have searched the ship and found no beings anywhere but the ship's auditorium. The weird part is that there are four unpowered blast doors keeping us out."
Captain S'Ploork ordered most of his crew to start manually cranking open the blast doors and sent two officers to the bridge to see if power could be restored to the closed doors. If the passengers were so wealthy they felt they needed such protection, they must be loaded and Captain S'Ploork was gonna help them get out from under it.
"Captain, we've just gained access to the bridge (it had another unpowered blast door in the way). There's nothing here - all the controls & displays have been removed."
"So it's just an empty compartment with a good view of space?", Captain S'Ploork asked.
"No sir, there's a couple of modules plugged in here. They're each bigger than we are."
"I don't care how big they are - WHAT are they doing there?"
"Captain, they're just humming and showing blinkenlights" responded the officer. "Captain, one has a data plate on it - here's an image:"
Transcription of image
Holoemitter - Class 7 - Type AZ4
Serial d2a770d86d22f2812bec-0688-A
Property of Terran Military
End image transcription
". . and here's an image of the data plate from the other one, Captain:"
Transcription of image
Electronic Warfare Pod - Class F - Type U/G2
Serial 8316803a55aa-dac229c9
Property of Terran Military
End image transcription
Captain' S'Ploork's crew finally had the final blast door unlocked and were levering it open. Captain S'Ploork looked through the widening opening and saw hundreds of entities all passed out in their auditorium chairs. He rubbed his grasping appendages together at the prospect of great loot.
. . then the lights went out.
"All crew! Check in!" Captain S'Ploork ordered. "Get some light into this auditorium so we can start bagging Rich Billy & his friends"
As two of his crew set up portable floodlights at the auditorium door, it became evident that something was wrong. There wasn't an auditorium any more - it was just another empty cargo hold. The life signs on their local scanners had disappeared, too.
"Sir, this is the prize bridge - all the lights just went off on those two modules."
static "Sir, this is ChEng. I'm getting some weird readings here on the bridge. I've never seen anything like them before, but if I made a guess, I'd say our ship is dying. Systems are showing weird readouts and then just going dark ✱static✱. Comms are spot^✱static✱"
"Everyone back to the airlock!" ordered Captain S'Ploork. "Equipment expendable - return as quickly as you are ab-URK"
Gravity on board their prize ship had just doubled.
Functionality of a roach motel
The Octothorians struggled toward the airlock as fast as they could under the heavy gravity and were a couple turns away from reaching the outer hull when the ship shook momentarily.
"Did something hit us?" asked Sergeant C'Raph?
They struggled to increase their speed, and reached the outer hull. Captain S'Ploork found the nearest porthole and looked out to see what was left of his ship floating away from their prize as it underwent chaotic rotations due to various hull points failing & venting atmosphere. Two of the largest holes in the ship appeared to be where the airlock should have been and the closest escape pod to it (the escape pod was there, but weirdly melted & warped)
"What happened to our ship?" one of the lieutenants mouthed.
The airlock cycled open and an almost-furless biped entered the corridor. Despite the heavy gravity, it was easily dragging the ChEng behind it.
The ChEng was not in good shape, as its vacsuit had begun melting where the biped had grabbed it (along with the appendages underneath) and as the poisoned atmosphere started working on it, it moaned "Captain, I used the kinetics on it, but the projectiles just bounced off, and then it picked some of them off the deck and ate them. Kill it! Kill i-". The ChEng succumbed to the poison atmosphere (likely a blessing as their vacsuit & appendages kept rotting away)
The biped looked around at the fifteen heavily armed pirates. The pirates stared back at the biped.
None of the pirates had ever seen such a creature before, and what a creature it was . . .
It was bipedal with two upper appendages with grasping subappendages at their ends. It had a little fur on its upper nodule and less down at its lower bifurcation. It had some sort of tubule and sack nestled in the lower fur. All this was evident as the creature was not wearing any coverings.
It had various openings on the dorsal side of its upper nodule, with the lower opening covering a two rows of what looked like white rocks. The being's dermal opening surrounding these rocks was very flexible, with the being keeping this opening as wide as it could most of the time (exposing the white rocks to the fullest extent)
The middle set of nodule openings kept flaring as the biped's thorax expanded & contracted. Was this creature breathing this poison atmosphere, the Captain wondered? What sort of thing could withstand a 50% oxygen atmosphere?
After a couple ticks, Captain S'Ploorg roared "KILL IT!".
The furless biped yelled something in an untranslatable language: "!won ytivarg lamron ,rehtoM"
Normal gravity returned to the ship and the pirates felt like a huge sack of pebbles had been removed from their backs. They all scrambled to draw their weapons and get in a proper tactical formation in order to obey the Captain's order . . .
. . except there were three less pirates, as the biped blurred around the corridor using the body of the ChEng to smash their helmets (and the heads in them). The ChEng's body had pretty much fallen apart by this time, and the biped dropped it.
The remaining pirates opened fire with their weapons, which mostly missed the biped (who was moving at an unholy speed). Those shots that hit their mark were almost literally shrugged off by the biped.
Three more pirates succumbed as the biped bent one of its upper appendages and used it to crush them almost flat.
The Captain noted matter-of-factly that everywhere the biped touched on his crew, their vacsuits split open and started dying. What in $DEITY'S name had he gotten himself into?
The biped grabbed another Octothorian (with the creature's distal appendages easily penetrating the hapless crewmembers' vacsuit & body) and swung it around as a bludgeon against two other pirates.
One of the pirates hit the biped with a shockrod set on "kill", but the only effect it had on the biped was to leave a reddish spot where it was struck and to make it go absolutely berserk.
It balled up one set of its distal appendages and shoved it through the pirate that had struck it with the shockrod, followed by shoving the same balled up appendage through two more pirates before the appendage was covered in pirates. That was not enough for the biped as it started swinging the three bodies around, crushing the remaining members of S'Ploork's crew.
The Captain's brain clicked. Was this the tyranosapiens terranus horrificus that had been in stasis?
The biped screamed a primal scream. "!TIHS GNILLIK EVOL I YTIED$" it yelled as it began gyrating its bifurcated section. Captain S'Ploork noticed the fleshy tubule there had grown exponentially.
"It's just you and me now, girlfriend", the human says in Galactic standard, as it leaps toward Captain S'Ploork . .
