Aspirant: A Sci-Fi Harem Adventure

by Whittaker, Maxx

  Fucking… Ewoks.

  And beyond them, beyond everything… The universe. Vast and black, glittering with a thousand studs of light. Closer is an enormous planet that swirls with dark red clouds and at this distance, the surface looks so alive it must be in a constant, continent wide category five hurricane.

  It’s too much. It’s been less than thirty seconds since we arrived. I can’t grok this.

  “Sam! Mika!”

  I spin in place, wide eyed. Another shock and I might dive off the edge of the ship screaming.

  Syl grips our arms. Tight. Her eyes are sharp, ignoring the insanity around us, entirely focused on my face.

  I redden, embarrassed. This is just another game the Citadel is playing. I’ve been through too much to be so overwhelmed and act so green.

  I glance up to Mika, who blinks and shakes her head. “Sorry!”

  “No need.” Syl releases us, extending her claws. “We must be ready for…” She stops and shakes her head. It’s good to know that this shit can make her speechless. “Whatever is coming!” She finishes with a wry grin.

  “Right!” Mika shouts over the constant noise. “This is… The goblins and the Klingon Warship… It’s just…”

  Goblins? Klingons?

  “What are you seeing?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?” She frowns at me. “We’re on a pirate ship full of goblins that just destroyed a Klingon Warbird.” When I continue to stare for a moment, not speaking, she swallows. “Why? What do you see?”

  “Ewoks!” I shout, worried that I’m losing it. I point up without looking. “And that’s a dragon.”

  Mika looks stricken. “Syl?”

  The Threvian’s scales bunch, as dense and protective as I’ve ever seen them. Her eyes are wide, like the control she showed earlier is in danger of slipping. “Gnarr,” she whispers during a lull in the thrum of activity around us. “Gnarr man this vessel, and that,” she says, glancing up, “is a God Worm.”

  God Worm. That sounds perfectly terrifying.

  But that’s not what I’m seeing. “What the hell?”

  Mika eyes widen in realization. “I forgot to tell you that part, after we… After.” She glances to Syl. “This place can control what your mind sees. Hears. It’s how we’ve understood Syl this whole time. How she can understand us.”

  That makes sense, I guess. “But up to this point, the Citadel has shown us the same places, same scenarios. Why–”

  The why ceases to matter as the ship bucks so violently that we’re thrown like ragdolls across the deck. We tumble, come to rest in a tangle of limbs as the ship pitches wildly.

  I raise on shaky legs, barely clearing the gunwale to peer over its edge.

  Great. Another dragon swims through the night, it’s mouth wreathed in molten flame. It spits a fireball that sails toward us almost lazily.

  The Ewoks shriek at each other, scrambling for the cannons as the projectile explodes against some kind of energy shield that hangs around the ship. It’s invisible until the flame licks against it, and when it hits the ship rocks again and spins in the opposite direction. I’m thrown from my feet for the second time, but this time Syl grabs me and holds me in place. The claws of one hand are dug deep into the deck, anchoring her as Mika clings to her torso with her eyes closed.

  We scramble up again. “What do we do?” Mika shouts.

  “Help them, somehow!” I glance around wildly; wonder how the hell we’re supposed to do that.

  “What the fuck are you lubbers doing on my deck!”

  The words are thunder washing over us, a roar we can hear over the distant shrieks of the dragon and the hoots of the Ewoks. We turn together to greet this new insanity. I think I’m prepared, at this point, for just about anything.

  Yeah. So much for that.

  It’s a giant. At least fifteen feet tall, she covers the deck in mighty strides, brandishing a huge cutlass that could split me from top to bottom like butter. She’s beautiful, with flaming red hair that flows behind her in some sort of unnatural wind. She rocks a body out of a Boris Vallejo painting. Mighty breasts strain to escape from a white blouse that’s barely constrained by a black vest and some kind of leather pants. She’s festooned with weapons; more swords, guns, even a fucking anchor on a rope that’s strung over her shoulder like a mace.

  Oh, and half her body is also metal. Like the ship.

  It starts at her hair, splitting her body right down the center. One eye sea green, the other black with a red Cyclon cornea. Her hair is half strands of flowing metal, and even one of the breasts heaving as she comes to a stop shines like pure silver. It’s impossible not to wonder, only for a split second, how low the split goes. If it divides her…

  God damn. What is this place doing to me?

  She stands over us waiting for an answer, a warrior goddess come to life. Her blade is longer than me, and she looks ready to use it.

  “New crew!” I shout, not quite aware of what the fuck I’m saying. Anything to survive this chaos for a few more minutes. Out of the corner of my mouth, I whisper, “What are you seeing?”

  “Half robot pirate queen,” Mika says like she’s ready to get on her knees and worship.

  I can’t blame her.

  She sizes us up. It’s unnerving the way her normal eye roams our bodies and her robot eye seems to change shape and color like it’s scanning us. After a second a dark metal eyepatch extends from her forehead, covering that eye with a click.

  For a long moment, her face is utterly impassive, and I’ve no idea if my bluff worked or makes sense.

  Then she shrugs. “Better than these little fuckers,” she booms, and I have to fight the urge to take a step back. “Saddled with them a few months ago, and they ain’t been nothing but trouble.” An Ewok scurries up, chatters at her in it’s strange clicking singsong language. The giant’s brow furrows. “I don’t give a serpent’s puckered areshole how hot the reactor is! We don’t clear the system soon, we ain’t clearin’ it at all!”

  She gives the little bear a kick that sends it bouncing across the deck like a ball before turning back to us. “Here's how this works, mates,” she rumbles like the worst, most stereotypical pirate of all time. “I’m Red Rose. I’m the captain, and yer bilge. For now. You man those cannons, and you kill anything that comes at us.” Frighteningly, her words are punctuated by the dragon swirling behind her head in the distance. “You do that, I don’t toss you into the voidy deep, and maybe we all survive the next hour.” Then she grins wickedly, staring at me unabashed. “And maybe after, I haul you back to my quarters to let off some steam.”

  I can feel the girl’s eyes fix on me. I bite my lip, hard, to avoid imagining the logistics. How the hell that would work. “That would be… Ah… Nice…” I cough out.

  “Gods damned right it would be,” she says. She glances to Syl, then Mika. “Fuck it, you two can come, too. Probably take all three of ya runts to tap me proper. But til then, we’ve a battle,” she says, pointing to where a group of Ewoks fire cannons after the retreating dragon. Beams of incandescent light stab the dark, chasing it as it flows around the shots with impossible grace. “Fight well, and if you must, die well.” She salutes us with her cutlass before she’s gone, running across the deck and jumping the twenty feet onto the upper level.

  “Well. This can’t get any weirder,” I say.

  “Don’t you fucking say that,” Mika grins. “Don’t jinx us.”

  “To the cannons?” Syl asks, eyes still on Rose as the giant spins an enormous wheel that’s fixed to the deck.

  “Yeah, lets. If I’m going to die a heroic death, I don’t want it to be surrounded by Ewoks.”

  “Goblins,” Mika says. “I don’t know what’s worse.”

  “Gnarr,” Syl says, shuddering. “They urinate on the dead before eating them.”

  “They piss… On the dead?” Mika looks ill.

  Syl shakes her head. “They claim that it adds flavor.”

  “Which cannons
?” I ask after the briefest of pauses while I try to get the image out of my head.

  “There,” Syl says. “The Gnarr struggle to aim, so they miss.” She points to the Ewoks I noticed earlier. They man a bank of cannons on the metal side of the ship, and Syl’s right. At least four of the creatures struggle to turn and aim each gun, so little they can barely move it.

  “I’ve never seen a warship move like that,” Mika says absently.

  “Whatever you’re seeing, they cannot maneuver quickly enough,” Syl says. “We must replace them.”

  “Sounds good.” We race across the deck as the dragon easily evades more shots. It twirls in a long ring, letting a beam of light shoot through its center. Mocking. At the end of its spin, it turns and spits a ball of fire at us.

  “Brace!” Rose roars.

  The fireball hits the shielding, cascades across it like lava. The ship jumps, throwing Ewoks off the guns, sending them tumbling like billiard balls.

  The three of us are ready. Syl’s claws gouge deep into the metal deck, carving it effortlessly, and we cling to her. It’s not much of a struggle; our bodies are so much stronger that’s it’s a momentary annoyance as we make our way the rest of the distance to the cannons.

  The guns themselves are huge. Aside from the fact that they’re entirely shining steel, they look like every tropey pirate cannon I’ve ever seen in a movie; huge end narrowing to a smaller barrel. There’s a little fuse at the top, though I don’t remember seeing the Ewoks use it for any purpose. There are two huge handles on the back, so large I can barely fit my hands around them. Damn, no wonder four teddy bears couldn’t handle this thing. How did they manage to kill that first dragon?

  There’s a little door at the back for loading. Except, there are no cannonballs. And I know that these things fire energy beams. “How do we make with the pew pew?”

  “The handles,” Mika laughs, peering closer. “Buttons.”

  She’s right. There are little black buttons on the far side of them. “Okay. Let’s see what these things can do.” I grasp firmly, ready for a struggle. The cannon is gigantic, looks heavy as hell.

  I lift it easily. It’s not light, at all. I can feel the strain in my muscles. Old me could not have moved this thing, and forget about aiming it. Now it’s almost laughably easy.

  Mika chuckles as she lifts hers. “I could really get used to this.”

  “Right?” I trade grins with her. “Now. Let’s kill a dragon. Or some Klingons. Whatever.”

  “God worm,” Syl corrects.

  “Yeah. One of those.”

  There’s something like panic in the dragon’s movements when it realizes the game has changed. Aiming the cannon takes a little practice with no sites, but the cannon fires almost as fast as I can pull the trigger. The three of us chase the monster with traces of light we paint in the darkness. We miss, over and over, but it’s a close thing.

  The dragon’s house sized eyes blaze as it turns toward us, giving up on its game. It speeds toward us like a missile, opening its mouth to engulf the ship in a torrent. Deep in its throat, a furnace blazes like a little star, too bright to look directly into even a hundred yards off.

  If movies have taught me shit, this is our chance. “Aim for the mouth… Or center! Whatever!”

  The other two fire with me. After a few misses we adjust, and in seconds, all three of us are pouring beams of pure light into the dragon’s mouth.

  It’s eyes widen as something terrible happens to its insides. It still flows toward us as its middle expands and stretches. We keep shooting, spilling energy into a mouth it no longer seems to be able to close.

  Just as it hits the energy shielding, it explodes.

  A shower of flame, skeleton, and flesh detonates across the shimmering energy field like a meteor of flesh. It splatters into flaming chunks that bounce off us, spinning away into the night. The shield strains like it’s about to buckle, turning from bright white to dark, burnished red.

  The impact is terrifying, like the ship’s been hit by the flaming fist of a god, and we spin away from it. Ewoks go flying across the deck, bouncing over the edge, and when they hit the energy shield they pop through with heartbreaking little shrieks.

  Before us, the shield turns darker. Little bits of flaming bone pop through, landing amongst us like grotesque hail, and we have to duck behind the gunwale to avoid getting our brains bashed out. One hits a prone Ewok in the head, killing it instantly. Which is a blessing, considering how quickly its fur starts to burn.

  We barely hang on to our cannons, speechless at the violence.

  Slowly, the ship rights itself. “Well done!” Rose shouts. “Not a bad test. Get ready! That was just a scout!” Her voice booms down from the captain’s deck. Poop Deck? Is that what it’s called? Why am I wondering this right now? I can’t tear my eyes from where the Ewoks still sail into the night, little bodies frozen almost instantly as they drift into infinity.

  “Did she say that was a scout?” Mika says.

  “Port side!” Rose’s words send us scrambling to the wooden side of the ship. We have to make our way around a little ring of Ewoks, kneeling and keening in sadness around their dead comrade. They’ve already put out the flames, but the little body is barely recognizable. I don’t look as I vault them. This isn’t real. They’re not real. It’s not really dead.

  This place is goddamned convincing, though.

  “Where are they?” Syl asks. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing.” Mika grabs a dark iron cannon, identical to her first aside from the fact that it looks far more authentic. “Just the planet. There’s nothing else that–”

  Shit. “There.”

  From the far side of the planet that hangs in the distance, shapes rise, almost too small to see. They swarm upward, turning toward us.

  Dragons. Hundreds of them.

  For a moment, I can’t think. One of them was enough to almost take down the shields.

  “Oh shit!” Mika says already firing. “Sam… What do we do?”

  “We fight!”

  Syl grunts her approval.

  I aim at the closest dragon, praying for a miracle. This is insane, ridiculous, but there has to be a way out, right? I push away the memory of the last trial, and it’s unwinnable conclusion.

  There are so many dragons that they almost blend together, but one has to be bigger than the others. Maybe if we find the commander, one that leads them, and take it out…

  The fleet closes the distance with terrifying speed. And at their head… “There!” I shout.

  One of the dragons is different. A robot.

  Longer than the others, it’s almost the size of the ship. Bright, shining silver makes up its body from tail to teeth, so polished that it reflects the star’s light into a thousand shards of brilliance as it draws near. Black eyes with pulsing red corneas, not unlike Rose’s, regard us with cold disdain. And when it opens its mouth, it's not fire that greets us, but pulsing red energy.

  And it has a rider.

  Another giant, this one even larger than our captain. She’s entirely real, not half robot, but that’s where normalcy ends. Blond hair streams behind her, a comet’s tail at least twenty feet long. Her face is startlingly beautiful, and she’s entirely naked. Her body is painted in an impossibly complex set of tattoos, from forehead down across tits as big as boulders, trailing along legs longer than I am tall. The ink blazes blue like electricity ignites it from within and makes her look like some kind of thunder goddess.

  An image completed by the axe she holds above her head. An axe crackling with lightning.

  It’s like something from the movie Heavy Metal come to life.

  “Do you see her?”

  “Yeah,” Mika says, eyes wide as saucers.

  “Rose!” The dragon rider screams across the night. I wonder again how the sound travels through space. Whatever. This is batshit insane enough that I’m not surprised the laws of nature don’t apply anymore. “Rose! I’ve come for w
hat you owe!”

  The captain strides to the edge of the poop deck, braces one leg up on the ledge. “Come take it, bitch!” She laughs, and there’s definitely a bit of crazy to it. “The Star Pearl is mine!”

  “There’s no reason to die today!” The thunder giant sneers. “You think that scrap of metal and wood can stop my army? You think you can escape?”

  “I’d rather die than give up my beating heart to a tyrant,” Rose shouts.

  “A tyrant you loved!”

  Rose bares her teeth. “That was a long time ago. Before you changed, Valka. ”

  “Then die. ”

  What the fuck is even happening? What are they talking about? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. The dragons burst into motion at some silent prompting, hundreds of swirls of color that flow toward us like a river of flesh. The thunder goddess leads them, axe incandescent in the dark.

  Without prompting, the three of us fire, all aiming for her. If we can kill her, then maybe the others will die with her, or lose heart, or something . Truth be told, I’m not thinking beyond survival at this point. There’s no time for anything but simple logic.

  Vaguely, some distant part of my mind knows that this is wrong. Even the last trial, when we were cornered by the witches and the Shepherd, there was some kind of logical progression to the place. But this… This is just random. Like the Citadel’s throwing everything and the kitchen sink at us all at the same time.

  Maybe because Astra broke us out? Broke the cycle of trials?

  I don’t know, and I don’t have enough time to contemplate it further. They’re almost on us. And so I fire again and again, and I hope.

  It’s pointless. The axe deflects every shot effortlessly, and though the beams splinter off into the cloud of dragons that surrounds Valka, killing them at random, there are so many it makes no difference. She still comes, snarling her hatred at Rose, throwing bolt after bolt of lightning into the ship’s shields.

  The captain returns fire, a massive blunderbuss tight against her shoulder. It erupts dark red flame, torrents that wreath the dragon and rider, but they’re as worthless as our cannon fire.

  We’re being attacked by an army of dragons led by a naked female version of Thor while on a pirate ship floating in space. That’s as crazy as this shit can get, right?