Before continuing in her personal journal, Hoshi checked the back of her pants for the seventieth time. They were up, on her, and had no holes, so she sat back down.

"We chose to ignore their distress call. Too many things didn't add up. Oddities in the message they were broadcasting, that seemed to overplay  their plight. Oddities in the sector they were 'stranded' in, where reflected starlight strength is so great, we could run the impulse drives on solar alone. Oddities in their supposed crew size, very suddenly shifting downward on the third message, as though to make us less worried about being overpowered. We chose to ignore their distress call, but all that did was let them know that we were smart, wealthy, and had something very valuable that we were practiced in protecting. Before this, I would have thought it was the warp drive."

She looked over at the door to her quarters. The heavy but small waste receptacle was positioned just so. Anyone rushing in, after having defeated the new lock, would not be able to go directly for her.

"They pursued us, and Anfo and Bavmet quickly informed me that these were the ships of 'those who strike for gain', a species of piratical clans whose 'Capo Clan' for want of a better term outright owned several worlds located in or around Orion's Bow. They both then offered me their lives and their daggers in my defense--or more precisely, the defense of my honor. I tried not to smile as I informed them of the choices available to a human female. They in turn tried to be polite as they asked me to steer clear of 'their' women, lest I plant worrisome ideas. On the one hand, that thought has definite appeal. Susan B. Hoshi, stalking the stars, overturning every last male enclave of absolute power. Then I remember--certain Vulcans tried to impose values tests on early tech transfers. As a Terran, that makes my blood boil. So that fantasy faded fast. The nightmare was about to start."

She stopped, closed her eyes, and imagined Archer touching her on the shoulder. The exercise continued until she ran out of crew she knew by name, and she fought back a loud gasp.

"The space-pod rammed our lock, fusing them together without truly damaging our presumably valuable ship. Pasty-Chalk faced, they poured in, weapons drawn and ready to fire. They looked gaunt, and thin, but their weapons were more than mere lasers. They cut Jane Letcar in half, then pulled back. The one who ordered the trigger pulled was killed by a commander. Like us, I thought? Then I considered what the village elders must have done to the farmer that killed the golden goose. I watched them, from behind a barrel, as they undressed her body, focusing their scans on what I must euphemistically call access points. They smiled, but it wasn't a prurient smile. As I see that smile again and again, it was that of a hunter who just found a new breed of deer with three antlers and twice as much meat. So they went looking for more. They went looking for me."

Hoshi pushed herself away from the table, just slightly. Its closeness felt too stifling.

 "I crawled while I could not be seen at all. I squat walked when I thought they were merely distracted. I walked upright, hugging corners when I thought they might have heard me. I moved on my toes alone when I knew they'd heard something. And when I heard their clunky armor creak and shift repeatedly, I ran like hell. Because they now had me in their sights."

Her scrub-sink and exfoliator brush provided less comfort each time, but she would not stop using them thrice-daily for the next several weeks. Phlox would end up having to use a progressive salve on certain raw spots. Hoshi resumed.

"Call it pathetic, but I wanted to hear my Captain's voice. I got Malcolm, and then Travis, when I finally reached a comm-relay. I had to scream at them to get them to seal off the portion of the ship I was in. I had to threaten dear friends with the bringing of dereliction charges. I may or may not have been the proverbial damsel in distress, but I could not and would not have them playing knights errant. Because the evil knights weren't taking prisoners. They were taking heads."

Hoshi saw in her memory a vid about how all the older vids, about crazed criminals and nomadic immortals were just plain wrong. Short of an industrial tool or the like, heads simply did not come off cleanly or in one bold stroke. One horror piece about a legend-obsessed lunatic had been taken strongly to task for a window-frame decapitation using a thin sheet of glass. But Hoshi's horror was real, and the vid was wrong. The pirates' blades were the thing of fictions, and it spoke of a species dedicated to finding ways of making up close and personal brutal murder routine.

"It wasn't like in fiction. They weren't waiting around a corner. Five of them overtook and literally fell on me, their weight throwing hard to the deck. Only then did I stop and wonder why I was such a locked-on target. They must have passed several other different crew members, firing at or pursuing almost none of them. I didn't wonder for long. He held his weapon to my head and shouted something that tonally came across as a crude admonition to accept what was about to occur. I was thrown around to my stomach. At the top of my pants, I felt four fingers put themselves under the hem and then digging past my panties. As he was about to tug, time slowed to an infinite crawl."

Hoshi honestly wondered where the hell the ice water in front of her came from. She saw herself fetching it, and putting it down. But certain simple events now existed for her only in disconnect.

"If I had actually understood the exact words he had used, I might have been more scared and stayed put. But since I was a translator unable to translate, I focused on the oddest thing. I focused on the fact that the part of me this vile man was about to expose and then use was a part that I had not yet shown to any man on board, even those I had dated. It seems purely irrelevant, but my reactive mind wanted to kill my fear and raise up my anger. I was about to be violated. A position that couples use in trust and ecstasy was about to be turned to one of faceless destruction. The power and good feelings this creature would never know on his own he was trying to take from me, forever. Yet still I can't figure out how my opened palm met his nose, or how it struck so hard from so weak a position. Maybe the sight of his one hand reaching for his belt buckle made me not care anymore about his friends, or his weapon."

Her left eye traced the room without moving her head at all. Her right eye then did the same.

"I am most pointedly not the super-woman Captain Archer described in his log, after the incident. Yes, I killed those who held me down, punishing them for thinking so little of me that they left me a free hand. Yes, I armed some of our people with the invaders' weapons, making damned sure to wreck their containers, because I wanted my friends' heads back. Yes, I booby-trapped the pod, returning it to the now-dead people who wanted us solely because we were smart enough to have good things. No, not a super-woman. I am a little girl who didn't want her pants pulled down. Especially not by bullies from another town."

She breathed in.

"Of course, that's a ridiculous, demeaning, self-disrespecting thing to say. But I refuse to make myself into the Divine Wind of Enterprise. I know that I was to be the next step, after the horrid pictures they took of Jane. The first sample. Unlike the 'strike only' aliens, these Orion pirate clans do not withdraw after a major defeat. So another human woman has been made their first victim, whenever it occurs. I won't be there. I don't know her. I can't help her. And that kills me inside. She will be made a little girl before these monsters, and she'll feel the rest of the horror as the tug is completed, and the buckle is reached. I can only do what I did, helping myself and those around me."

She almost shut off the recording, then added on.

"But I must find a way to do more."

The comm-box sounded.

"Hoshi? Its Reed."

"Yes, Malcolm."

"Errrr..I just received the oddest request."

She tried to care.

"Okay. But how--how stands the ship?"

"Well, had they used gas or somesuch, we could have all been taken out quite easily. Doctor Phlox thinks that their very acquisitiveness made them avoid utilizing that, for fear one of us would have an allergic or toxic reaction."

*Don't harm the potential merchandise*, she thought in outrage.

"What was the odd request, Malcolm?"

"Its our Tellarite and Andorian guests. They've asked me to ask you if you would one day consent to meet with their wives and daughters. They want them to be exposed to you, apparently."

Thanking Reed, Hoshi Sato sat and tried to replace the image of that future first victim with a Tellarite or Andorian girl surprising and destroying a leering slavery-bent invader who then pleaded for his own miserable life.

The images eventually ceased their constant repetition, but never quite their competition. Yet Hoshi Sato understood herself just a little better.