by M. D. Cooper
But he didn’t.
Because the next thing that Jesi said, was “I didn’t kill all of them.”
And there was a knock on the hull.
CHAPTER 6:
The new crew: just like the last crew, only snarkier
Outside the ship, drifting above the window, was a spacesuit. A spacesuit, which most likely contained a person – the lone survivor of Jesi’s deadly rampage.
Katra refused to admit she had the larger death toll, as she wasn’t sure if she was meant to be proud or ashamed. Three men dead by her own hands, five ships destroyed by the end of her gun. At least she was alive. And, whoever was out there, was alive too.
Alive, and knocking.
Quite politely, in fact.
“Should we… should we let him in?”
“Yes!” shouted Yorick, the exact instant Jesi yelled “No!” which of course made things complicated.
“I’m the captain,” said Jesi, “and we don’t need any more traitors on board.”
“He’s alive! In space!” Yorick stammered. “Pirate or no pirate, space law dictates you must give him amnesty on your ship.”
“That makes us two against two. No. I don’t like that balance.”
“Then turn Owaitt back on,” the pirate suggested, “and he’ll give you the upper hand.”
“He won’t defend either party!” Jesi kicked the crumpled body on the floor, which shuddered but didn’t otherwise move. “He’s an android! He’s programmed never to turn on his creators.”
“Then take out his humanity chip.”
“His what?”
“His humanity chip.” Keeping his hands plainly visible, Yorick scooted over the top of Owaitt’s body and flipped him over, exposing the skin behind his neck. He pressed firmly there, revealing a latch, which opened to a whole mess of wires. Katra watched in awe as he extracted a small chip, like something you might put in a camera.
“There,” the pirate said, handing Jesi the chip, “now he doesn’t remember the laws of robotics, on top of everything else.”
“Idiot!” the girl took the chip, only to throw it back into Yorick’s face. The tiny thing bounced off his fleshy nose. “Now the droid could kill us in our sleep!”
“Wake him up, tell him you’re his best friend, and I promise you nothing bad will happen.”
“And why would I believe anything you say?”
“Because, I desperately want you to save my friend,” he pleaded, “they’re the only thing I have left in this world.”
“Fine,” the girl said, rolling her eyes wide. She gazed over at Katra, shooting a look that said something like can you believe the shmuz we put up with?
Katra was beginning to really like the non-child. She was too terrified not to.
Jesi leaned over and pressed Owaitt awake. The droid’s eyes brightened and became lively once more. He sat up quick as a whip, scanning the room in confusion.
“Hello,” he said, a cool, calculating smile touching his lips. “I am O-8, your personal service droid. How may I please you today?”
“Ok, let’s do this all again,” she said. “I’m Jesi, this is Katra, and this is Yorick, who is our prisoner and not to be trusted.”
“Very nice to meet you. I apologize for any and all inconvenience my absence may have caused and must excuse my current…”
“Look, we need you to go and let this guy in through the escape hatch. He is also not to be trusted. Can you do that?”
“…lapse of memory. Finding the man. Letting him in. Is that my purpose? I am here, after all, to please man.”
“Leave the pleasing for later, just bring him here, okay?” Jesi let out a heavy sigh as the droid got up and marched away. “Froz. Remind me never to buy a service droid.”
“The reminder has been noted,” Owaitt said, while still walking away. “And shall be said promptly and efficiently.”
“Service droids,” Jesi scoffed. “Now, is anybody hungry?”
They assembled in the dull break room, once the outer latch had closed, and the corpses of the men that had littered the ship were cleared, or as many as they had managed to toss into the airlock before giving up. It was a lot of work for a woman who had the body of a nine-year-old, and a beauty queen in stilettos who had been frozen for thirteen thousand years. Yorick hadn’t said a word as he silently tossed his fallen comrades into the icy cold of space’s embrace.
But now, there was no sign they had ever existed, save for a red streak on the floor of the break room. Jesi decided that would be a job for Owaitt, once he got back from wrangling the stranger in from the hull.
Apparently, it’s not easy bringing a space drifter back inside. It was an hour or so later when the droid returned to the break room, alien in tow.
And a massive alien at that.
Katra has never seen any species other than a human before, and this one dwarfed her like a Goliath. Its head was soft and rusty brown, with small tentacles along the jawline like a mollusk. The mouth was all gums, and no teeth, yet he had a menacing growl when he stepped into their little den.
Even when he saw Yorick, the expression didn’t change, though Yorick turned into an excited child.
“Podulk!” he said, rushing to his friend with glee, “my first mate!”
“I am not your first mate.” His voice was monotonous and level, showing none of the excitement his captain vomited out.
“You are now! Everyone else is dead!”
“Ah. Then the promotion is logical.”
“Stop that,” said Jesi, “Who the froz are you to be giving out promotions? Need I remind you that I am captain here? Do I need to wear a hat or something?”
“Any captain that needs to wear a hat to assert their rank is no true captain.”
“Screw you, asswipe. Your face looks like the shmuz I just left in the hallway.”
“Then that is a handsome looking shmuz, captain.”
Jesi rolled her eyes and looked back to Katra, who was desperately trying to stay out of all this by rummaging through cabinets. She caught the glance and held the girl’s gaze.
“Katra here’s my first mate,” she said, “And you two are my prisoners until we say otherwise. Is that clear?”
“As transparent as the tears I weep for your eventual demise.”
“Oh, froz you, you radiant ball of sunshine.”
They sat there, at the table, the stranger Podulk waiting in the doorway for anything to happen, for the silence to be broken. No one seemed to want to do the honors.
“Owaitt,” their captain finally said, “set the ship back on its course to Earth. Let’s leave this place behind and get this over with. I want to be swimming in gold by the end of the day.”
The droid said nothing as he slipped out of the room. Good, thought Katra – he’d last longer before the next time he crashed. Then she found herself wondering how quickly this all was beginning to seem normal to her. Just a few hours ago, in her mind, she was saying good bye to the people of Earth, and stepping into a smelly metal canister. Now she was sitting in a room with aliens and robots, with her fiancé’s mind uploaded into hers.
It had been a long day.
She hoped they’d reach Earth soon, but then again, she wasn’t sure she wanted to get there in the first place.
“Maybe you should start by telling us the plan,” Jesi urged, “if you actually have one?”
“I’ve been planning this heist for fifteen years, of course I have a plan.” Yorick reached for his pocket. Jesi flinched, and he slowed down, showing her he wasn’t going for a weapon. Instead, he retrieved a map.
A terminal map. The kind you found online when you were trying to plan where to eat while on a layover.
“This thing cost me a normal life,” he explained, spreading it out carefully on the table before them. “I found it on a ship I was working on. The second I realized what it was, I took it and ran. It’s what made me a pirate in the first place, and I’ve been looking for you, Katra, every sinc
e.”
“How touching.” Jesi leaned in, her legs on the chair to support her small frame. “And the treasure is…”
“Here,” the man pointed, without really looking. It was at an Aunty Anne’s pretzel stand. Katra’s mouth watered at the thought of it. She still hadn’t eaten and missed the taste of home.
Yorick gazed into her eyes intently. “I needed to find someone who knew the location of the terminal, and no one was alive from that time to tell the tale. But I found the legend of the lost queen of the universe, the first Miss Planet Earth. I knew you were out there. I couldn’t stop hoping I would be the one to find you.”
Katra’s heart leapt inside her chest. There was something oddly magical to the idea that someone had waited all these years for her, even if he only wanted her for the information inside her head. But the look in his eyes at that moment made Katra feel like she had won every pageant in the universe.
“Oy, you two, just froz and get it over with already,” Jesi scoffed.
And then again, there was nothing like a nine-year-old telling you to get it on to kill the mood.
“In any case, that is a goal, not a plan,” the girl continued, stabbing her tiny finger at the ancient pretzel stand. “What I need to know is how you intend to sneak past the turnstiles. The entire planet is a theme park.”
“Well, that depends on the location of the airport. Katra?”
He tossed a coin sized chip on the table, and the space above it exploded with color. A gigantic planet Earth swam into view, casting eerie blue and green light across the room. It was Earth, but not the Earth Katra had left: the shorelines were different, craggy and shorter than they should have been, the landmasses smaller. Katra struggled to get her bearings.
“How do I…” she asked, pointing at a spot. It was a general approximation of the city she knew as Atlanta, but it was hard to see at this distance.
The second her finger approached the globe, the massive thing started to grow. She whizzed towards the Earth, moving her finger until she reached the point she was sure once held the airport. It was in the middle of a green area.
Yorick let out a grunt.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, realizing he should have been excited.
“It’s right in the middle of one of the game zones,” he said. “A survival one.”
“Well, this sounds like fun,” Jesi exclaimed.
“Our approach will have to be different,” Yorick continued. “We’ll have to sneak in, but luckily, I have a few contacts on the inside. We might raise alarms, not that they can do anything about it while a game is in place. We find the treasure and high tail it out of there are quick as we can.”
“Not much of a plan.”
“Not much of a crew,” said Yorick. “But we can do this if you trust what I say.”
“Meh.” Jesi dropped herself back on the chair. “I don’t like this, and I certainly don’t like you. If you screw me over, I’m playing the kidnapped card.”
“The what?”
“I’m a child.” She grinned. “At least in body, if not spirit. One look at me and they’ll have you arrested. I risk nothing in all this.”
“So you’ll follow my lead?”
“If it gets me my jewels? Hell yes. Let’s go break into Triassic Park!”
CHAPTER 7:
Return to Super-freaky funland dark-side death-zone powered by MnM
Katra pretended not to be surprised when the dinosaurs came into view.
Yorick had been right: it was easy to get past the security fence surrounding the planet once known as Earth. As a matter of fact, there wasn’t anyone there to check as they flew by, riding close to satellites and other abandoned stations so as to appear as nothing other than space junk.
“The entire planet is an escape game,” the former captain chided, as he piloted the small crew around the minefield of space junk in orbit. “The entire point is that it’s more difficult to get out than to get in. That’s how FunCorp makes its profit, after all.”
It was only now, as they whizzed above the lush green countryside, that Katra really understood why. Or, well, she saw why: down below were massive forms the size of houses, wading through the sea of grass and dwarfing the trees around them.
She wanted to ask, are those real? She wanted to ask why they were everywhere, who brought the dinosaurs back, and what they were doing here. Part of her also wanted to know why they weren’t feathered, as science had begun to understand when she had left Earth yesterday.
In her mind, this wasn’t Earth. It couldn’t be. The only thing it had in common with her homeworld was the color – lush green land, bright blue oceans, oh yes. Apparently, her peers hadn’t succeeded in ruining it. But the coastlines were wrong, the orbit was wrong, hell, even the stupid name was wrong. In her mind, this was just some other planet, a foreign world, far away from home.
“Most of the Crowners – what we call the treasure hunters looking for Earth’s lost royal jewels – have been looking on entirely the wrong continent,” said Yorick, flying the ship low above the grass, sending a herd of massive beasts careening out of the way. “Most are still looking in the former United Kingdom, believing Charlotte left everything behind when she fled. I’m the only one with the map of Atlanta airport, showing precisely where she dropped the loot – to avoid customs - when she sought refuge in the sovereign state.”
“But it’s been 13,000 years,” said Katra. “What makes you think they’ll still be there?”
“Trust me. I’ve been studying this for most of my adult life. If the jewels had been found, I’d know about it.”
Katra just had to trust him then: this oddly handsome stranger who flew the ship around the dinosaurs just to torment them. She was impressed Jesi was letting him pilot the thing at all, but she just sat in the copilot’s chair, sipping a silver box of something probably alcoholic. What looked like a cute nine-year-old with her juice box was actually a deadly monster bordering on getting wasted right now.
“The airport would be around here somewhere, according to your information, Katra.” Yorick pointed at the view screen, excitement burning on his facial features. “We’ll have to rely on ground scanning to find it from here.”
“Just do your thing,” said Jesi, surprisingly chill for once.
Yorick pressed a few buttons, and red dots appeared on screen, away from the dinosaurs, closer to the tree line. He nodded slowly to himself.
“What are those?” asked Katra.
“The players, and the game keepers,” he said. “Everyone is chipped the second they step foot on this planet. Anyone who works for FunCorp, or anyone who’s playing. I just hacked into their tracking system, thanks to that contact I told you about. This way we know how to avoid them.”
It took well over an hour of the ship flying in a large grid pattern before they found anything substantial. But when they did, Yorick burst with excitement.
“We found it! We frozzing found it!” he screamed, leaping out of his seat. “Jesi, land this thing, will you?”
“I’m the captain, you twat,” she snapped, but he was already out of the bridge and running down the corridor. “Katra, you follow him.”
Podulk, who had been standing calmly behind them all, let out a grunt and followed Katra as she left in search of the captain. Only Owaitt remained with Jesi, and Katra had a feeling that that was exactly how Jesi wanted things.
They found Yorick in a windowless white room, throwing on heavy boots and grabbing a stuffed backpack. He didn’t look anything like the pirate captain they had met a few hours before: he looked like a kid about to go on an adventure.
“You can’t go out dressed like that,” he said, indicating Katra’s fanciful clothing, “This isn’t going to be a walk in the park.”
“I killed three of your men dressed like this,” she replied, shocked by the steadiness in her own tone. “I think I can handle whatever my ancient homeworld throws at me.”
“Fair warning: this place h
as changed a lot since your time.” Yorick stepped onto a silver pad in the middle of the room, the edges of his body becoming silvery. “It’s not the same Earth you left.”
“Tell me about it,” she grumbled.
Podulk said nothing. Per usual. But he handed out small, tan colored nuts for them all to take. Yorick stuck one in his ear; ah, they were coms. Very Star Trek.
“Right,” came the voice in Katra’s head: Jesi, who burbled a cute little child’s burp. “I’ll monitor things from here. If you even think of betraying me, I’m blasting you all from the sky. Okay?”
“Of course,” Yorick said, rolling his eyes as if to say can you believe the shmuz we have to put up with? He threw Katra a wink, and she felt the heat rising to her cheeks. Damn, that handsome pirate.
And the three of them dissolved into nothing.
Katra’s eyes opened to a lush green world. For a minute, it felt like home. Like the great plains of the far west, that Katra has visited as a child when her parents took her on a tour of the great USA. So different from her home in Columbia. The grass stretched out like a sea before her, broken only by the occasional tree and the herd of…
Dinosaurs.
Suddenly, it didn’t feel so much like home anymore.
And then she threw up.
“Ah, yes, transportation does that sometimes.” Yorick seemed to notice her discomfort, taking her hand and giving it a comforting squeeze.
“Sorry.” Katra wiped her mouth with her free arm.
“They’re not real,” he said. “They’re robots. All part of the game, of course.”
“The game.”
“In this one, the competitors are dropped into the wilderness, and given a week to find their way to the exit,” he said. “Though the exit can only be guessed through clues in the environment. You have to serenade a pterodactyl at one point, lull it to sleep so you can retrieve an amulet that shows you the way if you…”
“Please stop.”
“Sure.” He grabbed a gadget from his belt and held it up, following it like a man would follow a Google map. Katra followed solemnly.