Who Ordered the Gigaprawn? (Pirates of Drinax)

King Oleb of Drinax has given the crew of the Morrigan a new mission: find the lost Sindalian message globes hidden across plague worlds, dead systems, and drifting wrecks, and uncover the path to an ancient imperial treasure.

Dragonsdome, Number One, The Trojan Reach 

Dragonsdome was exactly what you'd expect from a city built at the bottom of an ocean and run by a penal bureaucracy: damp, overlit, and suspicious of your shoes.

Caitlin stepped off the sub-funicular with the kind of cautious optimism usually reserved for suspicious buffets. Behind her, Morwen emerged, calm as always, followed by Quinn, who immediately began cataloguing pathogens. Maltz whistled, low and impressed, while Scarred-Snout sneezed violently and blamed it on the purple hue of the lighting.

“This place has the charm of a flooded bureaucracy,” Caitlin observed drily, eyeing a sign that seemed to have both mildew and opinions.

Ahead stood the Warden’s Court - a slab of imperial concrete held together by centuries of paperwork and passive aggression. It was flanked by two statues, both of which were either heroes or ex-wardens, depending on how you interpreted the number of surveillance drones they were swatting.

A small, prune-faced vizier intercepted them near the entrance, wrapped in a robe that twitched with paperwork and mild existential fatigue. His eyes had all the warmth of a tax audit, and his general demeanour suggested he’d rather be somewhere else.

“State your business,” he said, in the tone of someone who’d said it far too often and never once heard a satisfying answer.

“Looking to speak with the Warden,” Caitlin said. She smiled her pilot’s smile - part charm, part warning label. “We’ve got questions about an old Sindalian courier. You might have records about it, probably sealed.”

The vizier looked her over like she was an application for something wildly implausible, like honest taxation or ethical piracy.

“Her Excellency the Warden, Lord-Regent of the World of Number One, does not grant audiences to tourists.”

“We’re not tourists,” replied Morwen.

“We hate tours,” added Maltz.

“I prepared a 10-page presentation,” said Quinn, holding up a data chip.

The vizier blinked. “You’re serious?”

Caitlin leaned in. “Deadly.”

A pause. A sigh. Then a clipboard emerged from the folds of his robe like a bureaucratic dagger.

“You’ll need to impress her.”

Caitlin eyed the clipboard. “How?”

“She likes pirates. Or rather, stories about pirates suffering. If you’ve got anything involving cannons, explosions, or ironic deaths, you might be in.”

Scarred-Snout’s ears perked up. “We have many stories.”

Maltz looked thoughtful. “Do we tell the story with the false astrogator and the cargo bay full of dentures?”

“No!” said everyone else.

The vizier gestured toward a waiting room made of bolted plastic and faint despair. “Wait here. Try to look suitably heroic, yet morally ambiguous.”

Caitlin sat down, crossed her legs, and began mentally editing her pirate tale for dramatic effect and minimum legal exposure.

Morwen stared at the ceiling. Quinn cleaned a seat before using it. Maltz tried to charm a vending machine. Scarred-Snout rehearsed an anecdote involving fire, a frying pan, and an unfortunate noble.

Eventually, the vizier returned, rubbing his temples. “She will see you. Please don’t make her cry.”

“Does that happen often?” Caitlin asked.

“You’d be surprised. Pirate stories can be quite moving.”

He led them past security checkpoints that tested for weapons, poisons, treasonous thoughts, and pirate-themed enthusiasm. Past paintings of stern men with swords and suspicious moustaches. Past a mural depicting a triumphant trial that, on closer inspection, involved sentencing a space whale.

Then, finally, the throne room – cavernous, over-designed, and suspiciously damp, as though the decorators had confused majesty with mildew. At the far end, atop a throne large enough to host diplomatic summits, sat a small child. About eight, by the look of her. Long dark hair, drowning slightly in a too-large military-cut uniform, ceremonial keys swinging from her neck.

They paused.

The child beamed.

Caitlin leaned sideways to the vizier. “So, where’s the Warden?”

The vizier cleared his throat. “That is her. High Warden Rannib, Keeper of the Keys, Governor-General by Appointment of the Star Dragon, Grand High Chokey, Administrator of the Starport and Lord-Regent of the World of Number One.”

Scarred-Snout looked between the vizier and the throne. “That is a very small lord-regent.”

Rannib swung her legs. “Are you pirates?”

Maltz coughed. “Not in the legal sense.”

“We have stories about them, though” Caitlin offered carefully. “Very educational. Morally complex. Lots of shouting.”

Rannib leaned forward on her oversized throne, eyes wide and hopeful. “Did anyone asplode? Like, chunks of pirate everywhere, and someone had to clean it up with a mop and apron?”

Maltz opened his mouth. Caitlin cut in first.

“There was a pirate with a plasma charge and no spatial awareness.”

Morwen nodded. “He asploded.”

Rannib clapped like a deranged seal. “Yessss! Tell me everything! If it’s a boring story, you’ll be kicked out of the airlock. If it’s a good one, you might get snacks.”

Caitlin whispered, “Right. Impress the tiny overlord, gain access to Sindalian secrets, and somehow not end up as a bedtime example. Easy.”

---

After many tales of doomed pirates, including at least three ironic deaths and one incident involving explosive decompression, the crew were granted access to the ancient archives of Number One.

The archives were ancient, pristine, and aggressively proud of it - thanks to a local cultural movement that mistook obsessive record-keeping for civic identity. Among the data slabs and lovingly overlabelled drawers, Quinn unearthed a long-forgotten entry: a Sindalian courier ship, limped into the system after the Battle of Thebus and was promptly seized for breaching a secure area. The warden back then locked the courier ship - and everything on it - in an everglass shell and dropped it into a very deep trench.

Dragon’s Deep, as the trench was cheerfully named by someone who thought subtlety was for cowards, had once served as the ultimate punishment. Prisoners were sealed in bathyspheres and dangled over the abyss until they repented, expired, or annoyed the Warden enough to snip the cable. What happened next could best be described as “crunchy.”

Getting to the bottom of the Dragon’s Deep would require a submersible tougher than Caitlin’s liver. Fortunately, such a vehicle existed. Unfortunately, it came with a captain who had some very peculiar ideas about what constituted ‘fun’.

---

The Barnacle was what happened when a perfectly respectable deep-sea prospecting sub was left in the hands of a woman who regarded the laws of physics as "annoying suggestions" and safety regulations as "a thing for other people." It had a vaguely whale-like shape, a hull that looked like it had been repaired with equal parts enthusiasm and duct tape, and an interior that could best be described as "aggressively lived-in."

Captain Balamira Greenfell, its owner and operator, greeted them with a broad grin and the air of someone who had seen everything the ocean could throw at her and had decided to laugh in its face anyway.

“Welcome to the Barnacle,” she said, slapping a bulkhead, which groaned ominously in protest. "She's the fastest, toughest, and most aggressively water-tight thing on this miserable rock, and if any of you get nervous, just remember; you're statistically more likely to die in a spaceport noodle bar than in one of my dives. Well, unless we hit a pressure ridge. Or a gigaprawn takes offense. Or the reactor casing finally goes."

The inside of the Barnacle was an exercise in creative space usage. The necessary controls for keeping a submersible submersing appeared to have lost an argument with a snack avalanche and never quite recovered. The reactor casing doubled as a stove. There was underwear drying over the communications panel. A suspicious stain on the ceiling had no logical explanation.

Quinn took one look and visibly processed several different reactions before settling on mild horror. “This is a submersible?”

Greenfell clapped him on the shoulder. “Not just any submersible! My submersible!”

Caitlin eyed the cockpit and nodded. "This will be rather like plunging into the hostile depths of the pitiless ocean in someone’s one-bed apartment…”

Maltz cheerfully thumped a support strut that looked like it was held together with epoxy and good intentions. "You always did have a knack for picking the rides with the best chance of spontaneous implosion."

Morwen, who had already sized up every escape route and weak point in the vessel, merely crossed her arms. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Now, now," Greenfell chortled, flipping switches with the casual ease of someone who was not particularly invested in the concept of safety, "let’s not be hasty. We’ve got a long drop ahead of us. You lot settle in, and I’ll make tea before we all die horribly, eh?"

Scarred-Snout’s ears twitched. “Oh, I like this one.”

The Barnacle’s engines rumbled to life. The air inside vibrated with the peculiar, unsettling sensation of pressure equalization. The ocean, vast, dark, and pitiless, awaited.

The submersible had barely settled into its descent before Greenfell, cackling, flicked a few controls and sent the entire craft into a leisurely barrel roll. The viewports spun through a dizzying panorama of abyssal blackness, glowing jellies, and the occasional startled fish.

“Oh, no! We’re all going to die!” she screamed dramatically.

"Why would you do that?" Morwen growled, gripping a railing with one white-knuckled hand.

"Bit of excitement!" Greenfell called from the pilot’s seat, upside-down and completely unbothered. "Got to keep your wits about you when you’re dropping into the depths of watery hell."

Caitlin, hanging onto the back of her chair and laughing, nodded approvingly. “I like your style.”

Greenfell cackled. “Aye, I figured you might. You strike me as a woman who knows how to appreciate a good, terrible idea.”

“You have no idea,” Caitlin said, tipping her flask in salute before taking a long pull.

Maltz, strapped securely in a chair, wagged his tail. "Is this going to be one of those situations where the two of you become best friends and encourage each other into increasingly poor decisions?"

Caitlin shot him a glare. "That was one time."

"You got into a drinking contest with an Ithklur."

"Yeah, and I won."

"And then you both stole a yacht."

"And sailed it through a gas giant," Morwen added, deadpan.

Greenfell beamed. “Now that’s the sort of reckless insanity I respect.”

Caitlin and Greenfell exchanged nods of mutual appreciation.

Morwen sighed. “This is going to be awful.”

The Barnacle plodded onwards, engines humming with the misplaced optimism of something small and crunchy in a world of predators. It skimmed the seabed like it was hoping the abyss wouldn’t notice.

Caitlin was plastered against the viewport, grinning like a maniac. “Look at the size of those things! That one’s bigger than the Morrigan! What is it?”  

Greenfell, cheerfully pushing buttons that may or may not have been meant to be pushed, cackled. “That’s a gigaprawn! Apex predator of Number One! Mean as hell, dumber than a bucket of bricks, and ugly as your worst hangover!”

Said gigaprawn turned sluggishly towards the sub and considered it with the sort of slow, stupid malice one usually finds in bouncers deciding whether they’re going to let you into a nightclub or break your legs. Maltz made a very small, very polite sound that was almost certainly Vargr for I do not like this.

The Barnacle descended, deeper and deeper, leaving behind the towering monstrosities of the abyssal plain as it sank toward the real nightmare below.