A grave hush had fallen across the room.
Norman slumped.
“Er … what?” Redbeard asked into the quiet.
“The Pirate Code is clear,” Tone E explained. “We must enact the Zeta Protocol. Everyone, to your ships! Scatter across the galaxy! We’ll reform once another safe haven has been identified … watch for the signal!” Well, they could always rebuild again somewhere else. The most important thing was that his people stayed safe. He thumped the gavel against the podium with extra force. “Now get moving!”
6
Harry
Harry sat on the comfortable medical bed in Haven’s medbay, staring blearily into a bucket of specially-formulated-for-donkeys feed, courtesy of the kindly Dr. Brenneke. Another bucket held fresh, cool water. Beside those lay a crate of high-quality hay.
Alas, none of it seemed appetizing in the least.
Well, not to him, anyway. Not after the revelation of Slurzies and pizza.
Buddy, on the other hand, seemed all too happy to get back to normal donkey rations. Harry eased up on his control of his host, and Buddy eagerly stuck his muzzle into the grain bucket, nearly inhaling the stuff.
Doctors Brenneke and Bonecrusher had stayed with him, and both now sat on their respective stools, making their observations about his behavior and movements. He was still hooked up to some machines that beeped along with the beat of Buddy’s heart, and Dr. Bonecrusher appeared to be forcefully jabbing notes into his tablet.
Or maybe he was just playing a game.
It was hard to tell.
Dr. Brenneke, on the other hoof, was entirely focused on Harry. She wheeled her stool closer to his bed and gently stroked his neck, smiling. “Good to see you’ve got an appetite, Harry.”
Harry felt it necessary to specify it was Buddy enjoying this meal, not him. He reasserted control over his host and pulled his head out of the bucket. “That’s Buddy,” he tried to say, but his mouth was still full of grain, and mostly all that came out were sloppy, slobbery globs of feed. He closed his mouth in horror as the goop splattered the front of Dr. Brenneke’s lab coat.
She stopped stroking his neck and wheeled her stool backward.
Harry swallowed, checked to be sure he’d gotten it all from between his teeth, and said, “Oh no! Oh geez, I’m so sorry! I didn’t realize—”
To his surprise, Dr. Brenneke chuckled. “It’s all right, Harry. C’mon, I’m a vet. I’ve been splattered with much worse, trust me.” She walked her stool over to the automatic paper towel dispenser, then proceeded to wipe down her lab coat.
“Oh.” Harry’s ears lifted. “Well I’m still sorry about that. I was trying to say, Buddy has quite an appetite right now. He likes this stuff. But I don’t know … I kinda think it tastes like cardboard. Have you ever tried cardboard before? It doesn’t taste very good. I got some Zoomels for Redbeard a while ago, and they came in a box. I had to carry it with my teeth, because I don’t have any hands, obviously. I mean, I was thinking maybe at some point I could get some cool modified armor, you know, that maybe has some robotic arms, but Captain Cass said I couldn’t have a weapon—”
“Harry,” Dr. Brenneke said gently.
“Yes?”
She tossed a handful of soiled paper towels into the wastebasket and wheeled her way back over to his bedside. Her kind blue eyes fixed him with a serious yet sympathetic gaze. “Are you all right?”
Harry swallowed, still tasting the cardboard-like grain, and considered her question. He looked down to his front legs, to Buddy’s front legs. The right one below the knee had been replaced with a prosthetic. A fake leg made of some sort of lightweight alloy. And his left hoof, too, was now no longer natural.
Buddy didn’t seem to notice any difference.
It felt a little strange to Harry, because he couldn’t really feel his front feet anymore, at least, not like he had before.
But there was also something else bothering him. Something he couldn’t quite put his hoof on, whether natural or manufactured. His ears drooped. “Sure,” he said. “I mean, I’m alive. Buddy’s alive. I was really worried about him for awhile there.”
Dr. Brenneke smiled and patted his neck. “Yes. That was very brave of you to go into the restoration tank with Buddy.”
From the corner of the room, Dr. Bonecrusher grunted. “And stupid,” he muttered.
Dr. Brenneke twisted on her stool to give him a glare, but he didn’t look up from his tablet screen. She hissed a sigh and turned back to Harry. “Don’t listen to him. It was very noble of you to stay with your host, Harry.”
“Yeah.” He looked down at his legs again. “I guess … I guess I just wish he could still have his real legs.”
“Well, that’s why you need to stick to this cardboard food,” Dr. Brenneke said firmly, picking up the grain bucket to set it down in front of his nose again. “All that other crap you were eating before cost Buddy his legs. And could have cost him a lot more than that. You’re lucky you were able to get back to Haven when you did, otherwise…” She shook her head.
“Suck it up, donkey,” Dr. Bonecrusher added. “Laminitis used to kill ungulates, you know. Be grateful you live in an age of scientific enlightenment!”
Harry’s ears flattened. “K—kill?”
Dr. Brenneke pursed her lips and rolled her eyes. “Wilcox Bonecrusher, I swear … one more unkind word out of you and I will petition The Big T for your transfer to, well, anywhere but here … you hear?”
To Harry’s surprise, the giant purple-skinned monstrosity that was Dr. Bonecrusher shrank a bit on his stool. His brilliant blue eyes narrowed, and he grumbled something under his breath, then jabbed at his tablet screen with even more force.
Dr. Brenneke shook her head, addressing Harry once more. “It did used to almost always be fatal, yes. But, with the advances we’ve made in medicine, that is no longer the case. You and Buddy are in the clear now. You should both be perfectly fine from now on … as long as you watch what you eat.” She shook the grain bucket for emphasis.
Buddy’s stomach growled as if on cue. He really wanted to stick his head back in that bucket and chow down. The donkey obviously did not think the grain tasted like cardboard. There was even drool beginning to pool in his mouth.
Harry swallowed it back. “Okay,” he said reluctantly, resigning himself to a lifetime of eating tasteless food. Maybe at one point, before the restoration tank, this news wouldn’t have been so terrible. But if he was really fused to Buddy’s spine now….
His head drooped lower. He’d never gotten to try a donut.
There was a moment of silence, in which the only sounds were the beeping from the heart machine and some kind of soft musical number from Dr. Bonecrusher’s tablet.
Then Dr. Brenneke perked up and set the grain bucket aside. “But hey, didn’t you just say you wanted some robotic armor with arms?”
Harry’s ears lifted, a glimmer of hope lighting in his chest. “Yeah…”
“Well, your prosthetic leg there is a lot like a robotic leg.” She tapped on it with one finger.
Harry looked down at it with a new perspective. “It is?”
“Yep. And Captain Cass said she’s made you a full-fledged pirate now, right?”
Harry nodded. “Uh huh.”
“Well that’s perfect then. Did you know a lot of the more famous pirates are known for having peg legs?”
“Peg legs?”
Dr. Brenneke nodded. “Yep. Prosthetic legs. A lot like yours. Peg legs, eye patches, and parrots on their shoulders … that’s what people think of when they think of pirates!”
Harry’s ears straightened all the way up now. “Really? Is that why The Big T has a parrot and an eye patch?”
“Mostly. And now you have a peg leg! How cool is that?”
“Wow!” Harry lifted his right leg and peered at it more closely. Now that he really took the time to look at it, it did look pretty cool. A lot like Captain Cass’s mechanical leggings, actually. A shiver o
f goosebumps raced across his skin as he realized his new similarity to the captain. Maybe I can still become a badass just like her!
“And maybe we can take a visit to engineering and see if they can get you some accessories to plug into that thing.”
Dr. Bonecrusher snorted and rolled his eyes from his corner, but remained otherwise silent.
Both Harry and Dr. Brenneke ignored him.
Harry leapt to all four feet on the bed, his earlier melancholy and the cardboard food forgotten. “Really?! Like what kind of accessories?”
“Oh, I’m sure we could find something to—”
A harsh, shrieking alarm interrupted her, and yellow lights started flashing in the corners of the room.
Harry yelped with fright and cowered down on the bed, only barely tightening his control of Buddy before the poor, petrified donkey tried to bolt away in the small space, which would probably have just ended with him smashing into a wall. “Oh no, what is that!?” he yelled over the noise. “It’s so loud, I don’t like it!”
Dr. Brenneke had also clapped her hands over her ears, but Dr. Bonecrusher only scowled and hurled his tablet across the room, where it shattered against the wall.
Dr. Brenneke spun on her stool to regard him. “Was that entirely necessary?”
“I was just about to set a new high score!” he roared over the noise. “Damned alarm!”
“What is it?” Harry asked again. “What does it mean?” The last time he’d heard an alarm like this, they’d been running for the docking bay on the Federation flagship, hoping to get off the thing before it blew up. Well, he hadn’t really been running, himself, Spiner had been carrying him. Or rather, Node in Spiner’s body had been carrying him.
Harry blinked at the memories. Wow, things had certainly gotten pretty crazy on their last adventure.
But still. The alarm back then hadn’t been good news, and he suspected this one wasn’t good news, either.
“The Zeta Protocol’s been activated,” Dr. Bonecrusher said, standing from his stool. “Never thought I’d hear this one.”
“What’s the Zeta Protocol?” Dr. Brenneke asked. Her hands were still over her ears.
Harry tried to do the same thing for himself and Buddy, but his donkey body wasn’t built for such a thing. He settled for pulling his ears flat against his neck.
“It means we’re borked,” Dr. Bonecrusher answered.
“Borked?” Harry repeated.
Dr. Bonecrusher shrugged and glanced toward Dr. Brenneke. “Er … trying not to swear around the lady.”
“ATTENTION,” a computerized voice blared out from the loudspeakers. “ATTENTION ALL RESIDENTS OF HAVEN. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. ZETA PROTOCOL HAS BEEN ACTIVATED. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE NEAREST DOCKING BAY IN AN ORDERLY FASHION. HAVEN MUST BE EVACUATED IN THE NEXT TWENTY MINUTES. I REPEAT, THIS IS NOT A DRILL. ZETA PROTOCOL HAS BEEN ACTIVATED.”
“Oh dear,” Dr. Brenneke said.
“E—evacuate!?” Harry blurted.
7
Harry
Captain Cass burst into the room at just that moment, her mean-face plastered into place. Or was that focus? Harry wasn’t sure there was a difference. Close behind her, attempting to scrunch through the doorway at the same time, were Redbeard and Kitt. Kitt hissed her irritation.
“Blimey, sorry,” Redbeard protested, before letting Kitt squeeze into the room first.
“Harry, Doctors,” Cass said, urgency plain in her voice. “We need to go.”
The computerized voice continued to repeat itself in the background, as if to emphasize her point.
“Umm, what’s going on?” Harry asked, looking around in agitated confusion. Nobody was making any sense. Haven was supposed to be a safe place, so why was there an emergency evacuation?
“It’s tha Effin’ Feds!” exclaimed Redbeard.
“What?” Dr. Bonecrusher looked incredulous.
“There’s no time.” Cass’s mean face had creased into a hard frown. “We’ll explain on the way out of here. We’re leaving. Now. Everyone.”
Harry waddled away from the exam table, awkward as he continued to adjust to walking on prosthetics.
“Wait!” Dr. Brenneke trailed behind Harry, trying to pluck still-attached electrodes and cables from his body. “Harry’s going to need some better food. You,” she pointed at Redbeard, who grunted his surprise, “take that bag of grain in the corner with you! Have your ship’s food systems analyze and replicate a sample, so it can make more when you run out.”
“Oh, yay,” Harry said, half-heartedly, before being struck by a brilliant idea. “Hey! Maybe Node can make it taste better.” But not before he had a talking to about his treatment of Spiner during the last mission...
Redbeard shrugged and hurried over to pick up the indicated sack, then threw it over his shoulder.
Cass tapped her foot impatiently. “Right, let’s go.”
#
Harry and the rest of their small group of pirates gathered in an open space at the center of the docks as Cass and several other pirate captains paused to exchange a few tense words with Tone E. None looked too happy.
“Arrrr,” Redbeard muttered. “What’s going on?”
The huddled group exchanged glances before Kitt spoke. Apparently she had the best hearing of the present company. “They’re arguing about who is taking on the extras. The pirates with no crew assignments. Our captain is insisting that we don’t have any more room. She’s losing that argument…”
A moment later, the cluster of captains broke apart, and a sour-looking Cass approached, Norman Bieber and Zuckberg in tow. The latter, for his part, was wagging his tail with excitement as he tried to bury his nose in the stocky, furry little engineer’s bottom. Norman’s flat tail thwacked the dog across the face, then he tried to scoot along faster.
“Blimey,” Redbeard muttered, then he shouted, “Oy, where’s tha’ traitor and me sister goin’!?”
Shuffling off in the distance, toward Tone E’s ship, were Djerke and Redbeard’s twin sister, Sonia.
“Never mind them,” Cass barked. “Load up.”
“Wha’ do ye mean, never mind?” Redbeard was working his way up to frothing at the mouth.
Cass got right in Redbeard’s face, her features tight with an anger Harry didn’t usually see turned on her own crew. “This isn’t the time, Red. Stand down.”
Her tone was so intense, Redbeard actually flinched.
Apparently satisfied with his response, Cass stepped away and marched to the already-open loading ramp to the SS Bray. A silent Spiner was close on her heels.
Kitt put a hand on Redbeard’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. They’re going with the Big T. No way that slimy sleazeball is going to slip away from Tone E.”
“I’m na worried. I jus’ wanted to be tha one to space tha bastard…”
Zuckberg ran circles around Harry as they marched toward their ship. “Exciting, isn’t it?” he proclaimed.
“Very,” Harry replied. Though he could do with a little less excitement for a while.
“Nice legs,” Zuckberg commented, panting.
“Thanks.” Harry was feeling unusually glum, but wasn’t sure he could put a hoof on why. Maybe there’d be time to think later. That thought was answered by the echoes of a cow mooing and a rooster crowing. He had a feeling he’d have plenty of time to think while cleaning up animal excrement from the cargo hold. Unless…
Harry eyed Zuckberg speculatively. If Harry was a real pirate now, and not an intern … maybe Zuckberg could be the new intern! “Hey, Zuckberg?”
“Yeah?”
“How would you feel about becoming a pirate?”
Zuckberg slowed to match Harry stride-for-stride. “I don’t want to be a pirate. I want a harem, remember?”
“I remember,” Harry replied, as they stepped up the ramp into the hold. “But I think you’d make a great pirate intern in the meantime…”
8
Cass
Cass marched onto the bridge of
the SS Bray in a particularly fowl—argh, no, foul— mood. She was getting quite tired of this cargo hauler and its hold of smelly, noisy livestock. Not to mention that unreliable, downright insubordinate computer, Node. Every time she thought she might break free of this regrettable burden, someone kept throwing a wrench into her plans. What kind of pirate captained a cargo hauler?
Not for much longer, she swore. As soon as this next crisis was dealt with, she was going to make it a top priority to go get her precious Girlboss back. And offload all these damned animals. And sell this stupid ship.
Worse than having to pilot around a cargo hauler that smelled of animal shit, though, was the fact that the Federation had somehow discovered Haven’s location.
That was bad news. Very bad news.
Bad news that needed to be sorted and addressed as soon as possible.
She clamped down on the churning anxiety boiling in her gut, swallowing it back. There was no time for that now. She had to be the calm, strong leader her crew needed her to be, and get them the hell out of here before they were blown to smithereens.
To add insult to injury, of course, were the other two non-crew she’d been forced to bring aboard. Tone E hadn’t bought her excuses of ‘no more room’, knowing full well a cargo hauler sported a lot more space than most of the other pirate vessels.
Not that the engineer wouldn’t be handy in a pinch, come to think of it … but that damnable dog? No, it just wouldn’t do. But she didn’t see this resolving any time soon. Sometimes, she wished she could be as impulsive and morally unfocused as Redbeard.
After ordering the engineer, Norman, to run a comprehensive set of ship diagnostics—which should keep him out of her hair for a while—she stomped onto the bridge, willing her powered leggings to punctuate her dissatisfaction. Her trusted crew followed again, swiftly taking up their usual stations, as the ship rattled to life with the powering of the engines.
Harry, where is Harry? She looked around, surprised that he wasn’t up there with them. But then, neither was the annoying dog. Just as well. If Harry was keeping Zuckberg out of their way, that was more than she could’ve asked for.
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