by M. D. Cooper
A man fell through one of the open doors, wearing the stupidest assortment of silver gears duct-taped to his body-hugging-spacesuit, as useless as useless could be. He looked up at Katra and grimaced, leveling his gun at her face.
Out of nowhere came a flying blur of blue, screaming as her leg collided with his face. The pirate fell to the ground and little Jesi pinned him down with her knees, pummeling his face with punch after punch.
Katra had to look away, but looking away brought her eyes to land on the open doorway above them, where three more pirates were waiting to jump down.
Froz! Or Fuck! All the fucking expletives!
She grabbed her gun and started blasting them out of sheer terror. Blam blam blam blam blam. She couldn’t see if she had hit anyone, the world was bright with plasma beams, but she screamed and shot like there was no tomorrow.
“Run!”
Jesi grasped the dangling door, and with superhuman strength, managed to slam it shut above them. She grabbed the weapon the unconscious – and now unrecognizable – pirate had been holding and twirled it dangerously through her fingers.
“Lock and load, praise be to almighty MegaDeath,” she said, her grin terrifyingly large.
A nine-year-old with two guns was scary enough: a nine-year-old with an adult brain with a penchant for killing was even worse. But if that was all it took for Katra to live, she would follow the kid to the ends of the universe.
“I said run! Are you deaf as well as frozzing stupid?”
Katra’s knees buckled under her. She crumbled to the floor, terrified and shaking. Jesi grabbed her shoulder and forced her back up on trembling legs.
“That’s the opposite of running! Get out of here, frozzler!”
Katra didn’t know what happened to the men above the door, if she had killed them or not, but she found herself trusting the non-child to handle them. There was a strength that bubbled up from within, and she threw her legs forward on the ceiling which was now a floor, and ran.
A rally of blasts sizzled behind her, firepower exploding as she scrambled to escape. She clutched the gun to her chest, hoping desperately it wasn’t out of ammo.
She didn’t know the ship, and upside down it was unrecognizable. Katra dashed down the hallway of the sleeping quarters and made her way through the break room, where Owaitt was crumbled in a pile on the floor. She felt sad for an instant, seeing the thing so drained of life. If she could have helped him, she would have. But she didn’t know the tech, and that was putting it mildly.
Katra kept running, without looking back. The sound of gunfire was nothing but dim background music now. She took a breather, exhausted from the run – coupled with the panic – and leaned against the hallway wall, trying to calm her racing heart.
You’re okay, you’re okay, she repeated to herself. But it wasn’t helping: because now, not only was she thinking about the invasion of the space pirates. Which of course meant she was now thinking of a futuristic Earth she wasn’t sure she wanted to see. And then, she was thinking of everything else, too.
The fancy ceremony before the UN shoved her into a cryo-pod.
The look on her mother’s face when she told her over Skype that she was going into space, and wouldn’t be back during her lifetime.
Marcus, when he proposed to her, both the drunk proposal and the real one. The show of strength he put on to make sure she knew going to the pageant was a good idea.
Marcus.
Marcus, if you’re in there, say something…
But there wasn’t time for him to reply. There was a massive blade coming for her neck, and Katra threw herself to the floor to avoid being beheaded by a knife-wielding space pirate.
The floor smelled of elderberries, was her first thought. The second was wondering how to get up now that she was down. She hopped up to her feet – exercise twenty-three: Thirty reps, morning and night – and leapt away from the weapon.
But it wasn’t the only one there.
Her backpack fell to what had formerly been the ceiling as she backed up into the arms of another space pirate, right into its stupid over-decorated spacesuit. This one had opted for patches rather than gears, covering every silver inch with bright colors of space teams from across the galaxy. It would have been cool looking if it didn’t belong to someone who was trying to kill her.
Or the fact that one of them was moving, laughing at her, a purple jackal holding red vines in its hands.
At least, she thought they were red vines.
“Well, would you looky here?” the patch pirate chuckled, wrapping his arm over Katra’s collarbone, like that jerk she had dated sophomore year of college. It hadn’t been sexy then, and it wasn’t sexy now.
“Looks like we have a dislocated human on her way home,” said another, in a patronizingly high voice. “Isn’t that sad. Let’s show you another home, doll face.”
“Yeah,” said a third pirate, eager to get in on the action, “let’s show her a better home!”
“Bl’aké, I said that already,” said the creep right in front of her. A cursory glance showed that this one was tall and built like a wall, big enough to fill a doorway.
“Well, we’ll show her!” stammered the small one, Bl’aké.
The wall guy let out a heavy sigh.
“Maybe you should go back to the ship, kid.”
“Oh, come on,” Bl’aké pleaded. “Okay, fine, I don’t have the best one liners. Not all of us went to college for this, Granite.”
“Your name is Granite?” Katra couldn’t help but ask. The grip around her neck tightened.
“Because I’m impossible to break,” he explained, muscles literally swelling with pride. He leaned over to kiss a muscle.
Bl’aké was a fly in comparison. He was small, hunched over, with greasy hair and skin. Katra quickly considered her options: if men hadn’t changed in 13,000 years, she at least had a few tricks up her sleeves. Not that she wanted to use them – they were skills she wasn’t proud of.
Plus, aliens.
They looked human enough, with faces that had normal noses and eyes and mouths; bodies with the correct number of arms and legs. So what if their skin wasn’t in the rainbow of hues she was used to seeing – reds too red to be natural, lingering on the border of purple and even blue – they still looked like just anyone she knew back from Earth.
But she couldn’t speak for what was under those bulky suits.
And she didn’t want to know.
“You know, Granite isn’t really the hardest material,” she stammered, and realized maybe that wasn’t the best plan of attack.
The wall turned bright red. “What did she say?”
“I think she said that granite isn’t the hardest material,” Bl’aké repeated.
Granite rolled his massive eyes in exasperation. “Just go back to the ship, kid, before you embarrass yourself any further.”
“But I…”
“Look, kid, you tried, but you’re just not ready for quick, witty repartee with hostages just yet.”
The arm around her neck got tighter still. She found the air was taking longer to reach her lungs, and black spots swam in front of her eyes.
Pretty sure that wasn’t part of the ship’s futuristic décor.
“So what are we doing with her?” asked the owner of the arm.
“Not you, too!” Granite snapped. “Do you remember nothing from Advanced Hostage Taking?”
“It was in the first semester!”
“Exactly!”
And that’s when it hit.
There were no words to explain it. One minute, Katra was terrified, shaking, and sure this was all going to end badly. The next, her limbs were no longer her own, and with a move like liquid water, she slipped out of her captor’s grasp.
She grabbed his hand, ripped it backward, and stabbed her fingers straight into his eyeballs in one swift move. He screamed, doubling over, and she spun him in front of her, wielding him like a human shield. She wrenched the gun from
his hand, without even thinking, took aim at the pirates, all while using the patch guy to stop them from striking back.
Apparently, they didn’t care all that much for him, because instantly he was screaming in pain, plasma beams ripping his skin from his bones and burning ligaments and sinew as he stood.
She aimed at Granite, snarling. Her hand was steady and her aim was true, but the man was nimble. Bl’aké, on the other hand, was completely useless, getting hit despite the fact she wasn’t even aiming at him.
“Oh, I die, Horatio!” he screamed.
“Froz, kid,” Granite said to him, still shooting at Katra, “you really need to work on those last words!”
Then Katra heard it, the sound that filled her with dread – a single, sad, click.
The weapon was out of ammo.
She dropped it, ducked, and grabbed her own from the floor. She only used three blasts, until that one was dead, too. The strangers were faster than she gave them credit for, and had no regard for anyone’s safety. They didn’t need her alive.
She dropped the pirate and launched herself at them, her body acting on an instinct she didn’t think she had. Her hand went for Granite’s neck, sturdy and fast, crushing his windpipe and winding him, making him choke. Then a swing of her leg brought him down, and he toppled on the floor, going down like, well, a block of granite.
She went for a knockout punch but sensed the kid coming up behind her. With incredible dexterity, she shot her foot backward, her stiletto heel catching Bl’aké in the jugular. Granite screamed as the kid crumpled to the ground, but the sound was cut short as she grabbed his weapon and shot him clean in the head.
She stood over the corpses of the three dead space pirates, breathing heavily, her mind returning to her body. She was drenched in sweat, and adrenaline was finishing a circuit through her veins, but she was alive.
And she knew now that Marcus was too.
CHAPTER 4:
Katra finds a new calling
Jesi rushed in, screaming, guns at the ready. The scream died in the air as she took in the damage of the almost empty break room and dropped the weapons. The tiny girl whistled a long note.
“Impressive,” she said, scratching her head with the butt of the left gun. “I’d have expected you to be lying in a puddle of your own fluids right now. I was kinda hoping for it, so I wouldn’t have to carry your sorry ass out of this mess. But it seems like you can stand your own.”
“Dislocation has its perks.”
“Agreed.” The width of the smile on that tiny child sent shivers up Katra’s spine. She wondered if she would ever get used to it.
Or if she wanted to.
Jesi was already moving on to other things. She shut the door, leaving them alone in the boring kitchenette; well, alone except for the three corpses and the lifeless form of Owaitt under the table. The latter of which seemed to be Jesi’s primary concern. She crouched by the droid, ripping out the back of its head, flicking a switch that had been hiding there, off, then on, then in seven different directions.
A light filled the droid’s eyes, and suddenly, he wasn’t staring off into space anymore – he was staring right at Katra.
“Hello,” he said, with a pleasant, calm smile, “I am O-8, your personal service droid. How may I please you today?”
“Oh shmuz,” said Jesi, “I thought he was just a janitor. This is going to make things messy.”
“I apologize for any and all inconvenience my absence may have caused,” he continued, pushing himself up to his feet, “and must excuse my current lapse of memory. If you can remind me of your names and my purpose, I will get back to my station at once. I am here, after all, to please man.”
Was Katra imagining it, or had the robot just winked at her? No, she must have imagined it, droids weren’t supposed to be flirtatious, from the little she knew about their kind. Which of course was based entirely on science fiction, as Earth hadn’t invented them when she had left.
“I’m Jesi, and this is Katra,” said Jesi, “and our lives are in danger. You’re here to protect us and to take bullets.”
The droid ignored her, and the child sighed.
“Froz this body,” she said, “I didn’t think I’d be thrown back into action so soon, or I would have requested one that was mature enough to be seen by a service droid. Katra, you talk to him.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because you’re an adult capable of being serviced, and I’m a child it’s programmed not to see.”
“Oh,” she said, and then it clicked. “Oh. The droid is a hooker?”
“If you can call it that,” she said, “Pleasurebot is the current term. Don’t call it a sexbot to its face: they hate that.”
“So why are you saying it?”
“Because I’m magically invisible,” Jesi explained. “Now, will you please tell the overrated dildo he needs to protect us from the pirates?”
“I’m Katra, and you’re to protect us from the space pirates,” she repeated.
“Order it to see me.”
“That’s Jesi over there, you’re to listen to her too.”
“Thanks, kid. Now, O-8, or Owaitt, or whatever, we need to get to the pilot before the pirates do. We need to overtake the bridge, understood?”
“This is not in my core programming.”
“Yes it is, you just forgot.”
“I’m pretty sure I did not.”
“And I’m certain you did,” Jesi snapped, “so protect us.”
With plasma guns distributed among them, the trio was able to leave the break room and start towards the bridge. Yorick was the only one of the crew that Katra hadn’t found yet, and she so hoped he wasn’t lying dead somewhere on the ship for them to find.
The hallway was empty and eerily silent. The upside down world was difficult to navigate, especially with entire portions of the corridors plunged into darkness from whatever collision had caused the reversal in the first place. Katra clutched her pistol to her chest like a shield.
Then the world shifted once again.
First, the agonizing crunch. Then, the floor gave out. Katra floated freely in the air as the ship spun around her – or was she the one spinning? The gravity slowly shifted from the ceiling back to the floor, and they fell down the corridor in slow motion, feeling weightless for a split second before collapsing on the fake wood parquet.
Katra spat out blood. Her body would be full of blacks and blues tomorrow, and she would have to increase her iron intake to compensate…
No. She wasn’t a model anymore. She wasn’t a pageant queen. She wasn’t anyone at all.
It was painful to move, but she pushed herself up. Owaitt stood in the hallway, seeming unperturbed by the shift, except that the back of his head had fallen off.
“Let me get that for you,” said Jesi, hopping up on her spindly legs to place the fake skin back where it should be.
“Thank you, kind one,” the droid replied. “Are you well?”
“As well as I’ll ever be,” she said.
“What’s happening?” asked Katra. “Why do we keep rotating like this?”
“The pirates are ramming their ship into strategic places in Beyoncé’s hull to try and kill us,” she replied casually, “but I have a plan. Hurry up!”
Jesi dashed down the remaining length of the corridor, hair flying in her wake. She led them right to the bridge of the ship, a small room surrounded on all sides by monitors of the space outside.
A large, rusty bucket of a ship was docked to their left, a rift in the beautiful space beyond. It looked like someone had gone to the junkyard and asked for everything that the junker himself was throwing away. How on earth it survived the harsh environment of space, Katra didn’t know. She half expected to see a skull and crossbones painted on its side.
“Where’s the pilot?” she asked.
“No one wants the non-tourist route to Earth,” said the kid. “It’s on autopilot.”
“So why are the pirate
s attacking? We’re all rejects. No treasure to rob, no hostages to take.”
“Ask them when they’re dead, ok?”
Jesi threw herself into the massive pilot’s chair, an overwhelming monster of a seat made even more impressive by her small frame. It rose around her, as if to devour her whole.
The second she grabbed the controls, massive letters on the screen proclaimed “MANUAL PILOTING ENGAGED”. The girl chuckled.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked Katra. “I need you to man my back!”
“Right!” Katra couldn’t really say anything else. She hopped up on the second gigantic chair, just as massive as the first, and the memory foam cradled her body like it was made to fit her, and her alone. She snapped the harness on, tight, then reached for the black handles, feeling the power coursing through her.
With the wings of the chair, it was impossible to see anything else in the room. All she saw were the screens in front of her, black speckled marble that conveyed nothing of the depth of space.
“Owaitt, you make sure no one comes in this room,” Jesi ordered. “Shoot to kill.”
“I’m not allowed to harm another living being,” the droid retorted.
“Even if I order it?”
“It goes against my core programming.”
“Ah.” There was a pause. “Well, just do whatever you have to, to stop them from coming through, ok?”
“Jesipax, what are we doing?” asked Katra.
“We’re defending ourselves.”
There’s no sound in space, but whoever designed the turrets on this ship knew the value of good, comforting, resonating gunfire. Jesi squeezed the triggers and blasted out a lattice of beams towards the pirate ship, and was instantly rewarded with a victorious stream of Pew Pew Pew! BOOM.
“Yeehaw, motherfrozers!” she screamed.
The curse was growing on Katra. It seemed appropriate for this moment.
Katra gave her handle a sharp squeeze, and destruction bloomed like flowers from her fingers. As she turned the handle, the chair went along with it, the screens moving before her, giving the illusion that she was floating in space – a goddess of death with fire in her hands.