by Tammy Walsh
“Nice,” he said. “But not my dream. Do you wish to know what my dreams are?”
No, I didn’t, but I smiled sweetly and nodded.
He leaned forward and whispered in my ear, his grip on my arm so tight, I thought he might break it.
As his dreams spilled into my ears, I quickly realized that his dreams would soon become my nightmares.
Egara
“You must be pleased to be reunited with your beloved shuttlecraft,” Piggy said.
My escort had been silent or outright demeaning the entire time I’d had the misfortune of stumbling across the hateful little man.
Now, after Agatha had been taken from me, he was all chatty and happy smiles.
I wondered if secretly he didn’t enjoy the role reversal.
As a captain, even of a pirate ship, I outranked him by some margin as a merchant’s lackey, and he knew it.
Right now, he was top dog and he kept a close eye on me as he led me to my shuttlecraft for me to inspect.
I ran my hands over it, taking some comfort in her coolness.
I was touching a part of me that I thought I’d lost all those months ago when I’d been convicted of piracy and sent to the slammer.
I felt a connection to the machine and felt the warm humming in the depth of the vehicle’s soul.
We’d shared many adventures together and it was easy to form connections with things when you were under pressure.
That had always been true.
I was closer to my crew than I was to anyone I had ever met.
Anyone except Agatha.
She completed me in ways I had only ever dreamed about, the kind of fated mate they taught us about in schools, the sort of love every couple experienced at some point in their relationship—even if it was short-lived and never stood the test of time.
I already had that with Agatha and I wondered how long our relationship would remain special after she put her life on the line to save mine.
She gave herself to Draw to save me.
She thought I would fly off the handle and fight the ugly piggy creatures.
She was right.
I was going to do just that.
Now I had possession of the shuttlecraft but didn’t have the girl of my dreams.
She’d left me in the arms of another creature.
Another male creature.
That little word—“male”—made the situation a thousand times worse.
When I ran my hands over the shuttlecraft, I wasn’t running my hands over its smooth surface but Agatha’s perfect skin.
She was naked and in my arms.
She trusted me not to harm her.
I could do whatever I wanted with her and she could do the same with me.
It was the kind of connection my people dreamed about.
I had let her leave in the arms of a monster, a creature that was likely touching her the same way I was touching this ship.
The sour truth was, I had to let her go.
There was no choice.
If I didn’t, they were only going to kill me or else send up a flare and call the guards and their drones down on us.
This shop of theirs would drill into the ground and the hole it produced would be covered over by the sand, disappearing as if it had never existed.
The reward they would get for me wouldn’t be a lot but a little was more than nothing.
I had studied Draw carefully as he left with my girl on his arm, and looked for any sign or signal he secretly passed to his men.
There wasn’t one, so far as I could ascertain.
They didn’t need to honor their deal.
In fact, I expected they wouldn’t.
They could quietly slay me and Draw could have his way with Agatha and, in all likelihood, enslave her.
It would be clean and efficient and the prison would never have to learn the truth.
They would dump me in the desert and cover me with sand.
No one would ever know the truth about what happened to us.
I had no intention of letting that happen.
Any of it.
Least of all the idea of Agatha being used by that sick bastard.
I only hoped I could get free of these guys before creeping up to Draw’s room and saving her.
Intense anger bubbled inside me and threatened to spill over.
If I lost control, I would lay this grinning buffoon out and then tear the weapons from the second guard, whose blaster pistols were aimed at my back.
I had to be more careful than that, more diplomatic.
“I want to see her,” I said to Piggy.
“You’ve seen her already,” Piggy said. “Get a move on.”
“I want to see inside her. She looks fine out here but if I can’t see inside, there’s no way to know if you’ve stripped her out and left me with nothing more than an empty tin can.”
“She’s complete. Now, move—”
I slapped his pointing finger aside and twisted his arm behind his back.
I spun him around so he faced his buddy, who raised their rifles at me.
With Piggy in the way, they lowered their weapons.
I released my grip on Piggy, who checked his arm to ensure I hadn’t done any lasting damage.
“Put some ice on it and it’ll be fine,” I said.
Piggy glared at me and sneered, wiggling his nose back and forth in a gesture that betrayed his fear.
I turned to face the shuttlecraft and marched over to its hatch door.
“Take him inside,” Piggy said.
“But sir—” one of the armed guards said.
Piggy turned on him and slapped him across the face.
“I said take him inside! Don’t make me repeat myself, fool!”
He lashed out at the guard because he couldn’t lash out at me.
I was too big, too strong, and too fast for him to do much with.
Piggy took off, probably to follow my advice and put some ice on his injury.
I tapped my foot impatiently as the guards approached the back hatch door and unlocked it for me.
One guard stood back, his rifle glaring at me, and the underside plasma glowing brightly the way it did when it was being warmed up in preparation of being released.
He was making a mistake holding it ready like that.
It would explode if he wasn’t careful.
That was the problem with plasma.
It was powerful but unstable.
If you charged it up for too long it could explode and backfire.
That was why I insisted my crew use phasers rather than the more powerful plasma rifles inside the ship.
When you were in the depths of space, a weapon of such power was a bad idea, especially if your crew suffered from itchy trigger fingers.
Blast a hole in the hull and suddenly you could be sucked into space and die from both intense ice and fire in the same moment.
The second guard pressed a button on a set of controls on the wall and the shuttlecraft’s hatch door whirred open.
It thunked into place, making a loud clunk noise as it set down on the metal grating.
I was disappointed to see the locks attached to the shuttlecraft’s underside were still in place.
“I need to fly her around,” I said. “Check to make sure she’s space-worthy.”
“No flying,” the guard with the itchy trigger finger said.
He glared at me, the light from the plasma container shimmered and cast ugly lines over his face.
He looked like something from a terrible nightmare.
“I need to fly her,” I said stubbornly. “Otherwise I’m going to have to check her engine systems. And do you know how long that’s going to take me?”
Not long, in truth, but they didn’t need to know that.
“You can’t fly her,” the guard at the controls said. “We don’t have the keys to unlock the most valuable items.”
It wasn’t difficult to guess who did have
the required authority.
Draw.
But there was also a chance he had a second who might have access.
Better to be safe than sorry.
“Only Draw has the authority?” I said.
“Yes. Now are you going to check the ship or aren’t you?” the guard at the controls said as he joined his buddy with the quivering forefinger.
If I just waited a few more minutes, that rifle would explode and destroy the two guards.
Then I could scoop up the second rifle and disappear through a door in the back that would take me upstairs to Draw’s quarters.
A simple, but effective, plan.
“Ease down on the plasma rifle,” the second guard said, dashing my hopes. “You know you always overdo it.”
The guard eased up on the controls and let the rifle power down.
Ion steam issued from the tip of the rifle.
Damn! It was so close to blowing too!
I stomped inside the shuttlecraft and pressed at the buttons randomly in an effort to appear like I knew what I was doing.
I wasn’t the greatest engineer but I was a damn good pilot.
But no matter how many buttons I initiated and switches I flicked, nothing worked.
“Hey,” I said. “Where’s the power?”
“It’s been disengaged,” the smarter guard said.
“So re-engage it. I need to check she still works.”
“As I said, she works. Have you seen enough?”
He motioned for me to come out of the shuttlecraft but I couldn’t do that.
Not yet.
I’d come down to my final and least-preferred option.
I was going to have to fight my way out of there.
But I’d need a weapon to do that.
“All right,” I said. “Let me check one last thing.”
I approached the front of the cockpit.
Under the pilot’s console was a button that worked independently of the main power system.
It was the distress beacon.
As this shuttlecraft belonged to my ship, it would receive the transmission first and be compelled to investigate.
I leaned under the console and said a quick prayer to the God of Small Chances that these industrious creatures hadn’t thought to disable the distress beacon too.
I licked my lips nervously and pressed the button.
The light flashed in time to the signal it sent into space.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
But that wasn’t all the distress beacon was capable of.
I’d asked my engineer to install a small cubby hole where I could store a single phaser in case I should ever fall into a situation such as this.
I reached for it and said another prayer—he was going to get a bunch of messages in his inbox from me today.
I felt at the tiny hole and slipped my finger inside.
I wiggled it around until I felt something hard, round, and narrow.
I think that’s it…
Isn’t it?
I yanked it free.
It fell and was going to clatter to the floor, getting the guards’ attention for sure.
I adjusted the angle of my arm and caught it.
“What are you doing down there?” the guard with the itchy trigger finger said, edging further into the ship, his gun trained on me.
“I had to check the engines still work,” I said. “You won’t put the power back on, remember?”
I pushed myself up onto my feet and randomly pressed a few of the other buttons.
Hopefully, they weren’t anything too important.
“Yep,” I said. “I think I’m pretty much done here.”
The guard eyed me suspiciously.
He was too dumb to realize what I’d done.
Too dumb by half.
“Why are you standing like that?” he said.
“Standing like what?” I said, keeping my hand tucked behind my back.
“Like that. With your hand behind your back.”
Yikes. Not so dumb after all.
“I’m not standing here with my hand behind my back,” I quipped.
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Where’s your buddy?” I said. “The smart one. Let him do the thinking for you, huh? You’re not making any sense.”
The guard pursed his lips and if I didn’t know any better, he had either summoned the memory of the taste of the sour fruit lemdox or he was growing even more suspicious.
Or he was constipated.
One of those for sure.
“Show me your hand,” he said.
I extended my hand to him.
“Not that one. The other one.”
“Okay.”
I tucked my first back behind my back, pretended to drop the phaser into it, and then brought out my other hand that still held the phaser.
“You just switched hands!” he said.
“No I didn’t, look,” I said.
I opened the hand facing him.
A small dexterous action and the phaser was suddenly in my fingers.
“Oh,” the guard said.
Then, belatedly realizing what it was, his eyes bulged in surprise.
I fired at his chest at point-blank range.
Even for a phaser, this distance could be dangerous.
His arms flew to either side and his body jittered on the spot before collapsing to the floor.
His buddy rounded the back of the shuttlecraft, still in the process of tucking himself in from his restroom break, when his eyes fell to his buddy on the floor.
His eyes bulged in realization and he reached for the plasma rifle slung across his shoulders on a strap.
The beauty of the miniature phaser was it wasn’t powerful enough to knock you off your feet when you fired it, unlike a plasma rifle.
It saved valuable seconds.
The drawback was it only had a few good shots, and every one counted.
I caught the guard in the foot and he screamed as he went down.
Great, I thought. Now all his buddies are going to come investigate.
This time my target wasn’t moving and I shot him in the chest.
The shot hit him cleanly but didn’t have half the effect it did when it struck his buddy a moment ago.
Crap.
The phaser was out of juice already.
At the blow, the guard’s arms flew out and his rifle struck a fine collection of ancient helmets from some forgotten tribe.
It wouldn’t delay him for long.
I dropped to the floor on the other side of his buddy’s still-writhing body.
I reached for his plasma rifle and pulled it to me.
Out the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the second guard bringing his rifle around.
Uh-uh.
I yanked his buddy’s slumped figure over to use as a shield, confident he wouldn’t open fire on his own friend.
I was wrong.
I heard the sharp “zing-pop!” of the plasma rifle, akin to the sound of scraping shards of glass against each other.
The guy on the floor shuddered even harder, spooning me and gyrating with his cock at full mast, attempting to pierce the fabric of my pants.
“Dude!” I snapped.
The guy couldn’t help it—as the froth raging from his mouth could attest.
I eased the rifle around the shuddering guy but another blast of enemy fire slammed into the shuttlecraft controls above my head.
“Quit blowing holes in my ship!” I yelled.
I needed to hurry.
Not only was Agatha upstairs with King Pig but the other guards would soon show up.
If they got here before I managed to vamoose…
I’d be locked up in solitary confinement before you could say, “To hell with you, God of Small Chances.”
I analyzed my options.
I could either try and fire around the flailing fi
gure on the floor beside me again—and fail—or I could wait for the rifle fire to blast a hole through the shielding body and fire back through the hole—a little gruesome for my taste, and not the most reliable option as I had no idea where the hole would form.
Or, I could get a little creative…
I couldn’t aim at the guard out there but I could aim at the stand the traditional helmets had been placed on.
I took aim and fired.
I struck the base of the helmet rack.
It teetered and collapsed forward, atop the guard lying on the floor.
The helmets clattered.
This was it.
One chance to return fire.
Don’t get scared now.
I eased up onto one knee and took aim.
The guard tossed a pair of helmets aside and brought his plasma rifle up.
I pulled the trigger.
The bolt exploded out the end of the rifle like liquid magma fired from a rocket launcher.
It crackled through the air as it dived headlong for my target.
It didn’t even matter where it hit him.
It singed the top of his head and ignited his cap like hay on a midsummer’s day.
I smelled it immediately as the guard’s entire ensemble erupted into flames.
He let off a single shot that struck the far wall.
I ran to him and kicked the rifle from his hands.
Not that he was in much mood to fight about then.
He kicked and flailed and fought and patted the flames to put them out.
“Roll, asshole!” I said.
As his attempts weren’t working so well, he did as I said and rolled.
He crashed into a nice collection of extinct species’ furry hides.
They immediately burst into flames.
Some people could never catch a break.
I reached for his plasma rifle when a bolt of liquid lightning struck the floor in front of my hand.
The other guards drew down on me, racing up the ramp.
They were not good shots.
Their bolts flew everywhere and nowhere.
Say what you like about perfect headshots but it’s hard to beat a crowd of frantic shooters.
If they fired a hundred shots, odds were good at least one would find their mark.
I took the hint and left the rifle where it was.
I ran toward the back of the hangar for a door I knew had to be there.
I was relieved to find I was right.