by Logan Jacobs
“You still hungry?” I threw back at Aurora and then smiled at the captain. Fear made his eyes bulge and for a second I thought he might sack up and attack me, but then he dropped his sword, spun on his heels, ran in the opposite direction and jumped over the side of the ship. “Huh. Did not see that coming.”
Nova and Tempest tossed the bodies of the sailors overboard, and then we regrouped.
“That Man-Of-War is still heading toward us, Marc,” PoLarr said and pointed off to the horizon. Sure enough the large war ship, bristling with guns and probably about fifty people from the Nautillian navy, began to bear down on us.
“Okay,” I said as I picked up the captains hat that had flown from his head just before he jumped and popped it onto my head, “Nova, you, Aurora, and PoLarr head back to our ship and get the sails back up. Tempest, you and I are going to go pick a fight.”
“Shouldn’t we just try to outrun them?” Nova asked.
“Then we’d be looking over our shoulder the rest of this damn match,” I answered. “I have no idea what is on the island we are looking for. I doubt it is going to be as easy as X marks the spot. Let’s get rid of these jerks now. I’m going to draw their attention and try to keep them occupied. You guys get the ship in position so we can use the big guns up front. With any luck we can disable that flying gunship and get on with this match.”
“Aye-aye, skipper,” PoLarr said and winked at me.
“Okay, let’s do this,” I said and then got thrown into the air as a laser blast crashed into the deck of the ship.
Adrenaline spiked my blood as I spun into the air, and everything seemed to move in slow motion. While I cartwheeled out into the blue sky, I saw another ship, much like ours, as it came out of the sun with its cannons blazing, a Jolly Roger flag flapping in the wind, only this one had a weird alien skull instead of a human one.
On the wrecked deck of the sloop I could make out that my teammates were all okay, if not worse for wear. They’d been spared from the main part of the blast that apparently I hadn’t been.
“Typical,” I muttered to myself as time sped back up to regular speed just as I realized I’d flown out over the side of the ship and gravity took over, and I began to fall into the bright blue nothing.
Chapter Two
I fell maybe twenty feet through the air when a sheet of gold foil unfurled beneath me, and I sailed into it like a bunch of kindergarteners playing with an old school parachute. My hands grasped the thin, yet incredibly strong material, and held on for dear life. My downward momentum carried me until the material hit its end, and then I flew under the sloop in a long pendulous arc that carried me all the way around the keel of the ship and up around the other side.
Gravity was just about to take over again and send me falling again when I reached out and grasped the edge of one of the laser cannon ports. I hung there for a moment by my one hand while my other still held onto the torn material of the sail like a life raft and caught my breath, which heaved in my chest as if I’d just sprinted a mile.
The other pirate ship had hidden itself in a cloudbank that looked like an archipelago of islands and came out of the sun. It now flew toward our main ship like some kind of shark. From their angle, they couldn’t see the Man-Of-War approaching quickly from the other side of the sloop.
“Huh, you jackasses are going to be in for a surprise,” I muttered to myself and tried to get a better hand hold to pull up on.
“Marc?” I heard Aurora’s delightful drawl from above me. I glanced up and sure enough there was her gorgeous, pouty-lipped, face five feet above me. She had a gash across her left shoulder that oozed purple blood, and her bandana had come half off her head but she looked okay otherwise. “What are you doing down there, sugar?”
“Oh, you know, just hanging around,” I replied as cockily as I could manage. Imminent death was no reason to not try to play it as cool as I possibly could. “What’s going on up there?”
“You know, sugar, lasers, smoke, and destruction,” she grinned back.
“So the usual, good,” I groaned. “Hey, can you help me up?”
“Aurora?” Nova’s voice asked from out of view. A second later the Paladinian knight’s beautiful face joined Aurora’s above me. “Havak? How’d you get down there? Oh, shit!”
Laser blasts flew across the top of the sloop. Nova snarled, stood up so that I could see most of her torso, tapped the mechanical gauntlets that were still on her fists together and shoved both arms out in front of her toward the approaching pirate ship. I saw her fingers grip holographic triggers and pull. The laser cannons on our pirate ship blazed to life and returned the fire.
Nova’s aim was true and the volley of bright red electromagnetic radiation stimulated light crashed into the enemy ship and tore through some of their sails. The ship, clearly not expecting us to have recovered from their sneak attack, veered off to the right and pulled up, trying to get a better position. Then, it clearly saw the Man-Of-War and veered back. Nova keep up the barrage of laser fire but the ship passed our vessel’s line of fire.
“Little help down here, please,” I yelled up to remind my alliance mates that I was still down here. Aurora extended her arms, her fingers in a classic “devil’s horns” sign, as purple-black dark matter coalesced around each of her fists. A nanosecond later disks of the same dark matter formed under my feet and began to lift me until I was level with the side of the ship, and I jumped over.
The deck of the sloop was a big, giant mess. The laser cannon blast that had caught us off guard had blown a giant hole in the center of the deck and taken out the main sail. The mast lay over the side of the ship like a broken limb. Smoke poured from the hole in the deck and the sloop had started to list and sink below the level of our main ship. Tempest and PoLarr were at the back of the boat trying to disengage the grappling cable cannons that had gotten bent and tangled in the explosion.
“Time to abandon ship kiddies,” I yelled and motioned for us to get back to our pirate ship. Everyone nodded in agreement and without another word we clambered back onto our ship. “Trim the main sails and keep those cannon’s primed, Nova.”
“Aye-aye,” she nodded toward me. PoLarr, Tempest, and Aurora began to work the series of levers and pulleys that adjusted the ships gold foil sails. Once they were taut in the wind and catching their full surface area of sunlight, I spun the ships big wheel and yanked back.
Our big, three-masted ship spun in the air and began to climb, hot on the trail of the enemy pirate ship and practically directly into the path of the Man-Of-War.
“Marc,” PoLarr said as she joined me at the wheel, “we need to cut the sloop loose or it’s going to kill us with drag.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grimaced at her, “I know. I will. Just not yet. Can you hit those cable with your pistols if needed?”
“You know I can,” she grinned. “Just say when.”
“Okay,” I nodded. “Those assholes wanted us so bad, they are going to get more than they bargained for. You know, if that Man-Of-War doesn’t blow both of us out of the air first.”
I continued to yank back hard on the wheel. Unlike a real pirate ship, this one’s wheel levered back and forth on a hinge that controlled the ships altitude as well as direction. We caught a massive gale tail wind and soon shot up higher than the enemy pirate ship which was now off our port side and below us. The Man-Of-War sailed fast and straight for the other ship. Its cannon’s silent, waiting until the other ship was well within range before it was going to annihilate it.
The enemy pirate ship began to descend, hoping to fly under the belly of the Man-Of-War and into a thick layer of dense clouds under us, but this clearly wasn’t the Nautillian captain’s first time at the rodeo. He finally opened up with the giant war ship’s forward rail guns. Tree trunk sized laser blasts exploded from the front of the Man-Of-War and shot under the enemy pirate ship to keep it from going any lower.
I turned the wheel and shoved it forward to put us on an intercep
t course with both ships.
“Um, Havak?” Tempest asked, more than a bit concerned. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I want to give them their sloop back,” I grinned at her. “That Man-Of-War can’t fight two of us at once.”
The enemy pirate ship had opened up with their own cannons as they swung around to the side of the Man-Of-War, they hoped to stay under the level of the side cannon while being able to fire their own. They opened fire on the Man-Of-War with all they had and the sky flashed red with lasers. The pirate ship’s blasts splashed across the side and belly of the Man-Of-War but caused precious little damage. The hull was heavily armored.
I watched in abject fascination as the giant Man-Of-War tilted on its side, like some kind of toy boat in an angry child’s bathtub, so that all of its side cannons faced the pirate ship. Then they all opened fire and the pirate ship exploded in a huge ball of blue-orange flame.
“More speed!” I yelled at my ship mates and they moved quickly to adjust the sails. The Man-Of-War pulled out of its tilt and started to turn its attention toward us, the bank of twenty-five laser cannons on its hull slowly tilting in our direction. “Drop sail. PoLarr now!”
I spun the wheel as I shouted and Tempest, Nova, and Aurora yanked their levers. The sails flapped and dropped. The ship turned and then stopped practically dead in the air. The sloop flung out around us like a slingshot. Just as it was about to reach the end of the grapple cables PoLarr drew her pistols lightning fast and fired. The laser bolts flew true and blew the cables to bits.
The sloop flew out from around us, sailed through the air, tumbling and turning as it did, and then crashed into the Man-Of-War’s main mast. The mast snapped in two and the sloop, in a tangle of gold foil, crashed to the deck where it promptly exploded.
“Trim sails!” I yelled to my crew and shoved the wheel forward. Our own gold foil sails snapped back into place and filled with wind and solar energy. I aimed us down past the hull of the Man-Of-War, and we sunk under with inches to spare.
Another explosion rocked the big war ship and streams of thick black smoke plumed into the air as the ship began to list and spin.
I kept our ship angled downward toward the cover of the blanket of clouds. Just before we sank into the cottony whiteness I glanced backward.
The Man-Of-War struggled to stay in the air. I could just make out the crew, like green clad ants, scurrying about the deck of the ship to try to keep it aloft. There was one figure on the ship who didn’t scurry. It stood motionless and I could feel a hateful glare bore into my sixth-sense like a rage filled drill.
Then we were in the clouds and the destruction behind us faded away.
I tapped the button on the side of my eye-patch and reactivated my navigation reticle. A thin green line wound down through the clouds to a giant red X that blinked in my vision. According to the display we were forty miles away from our destination.
The deeper we got into the clouds the darker and darker they became until we were shrouded in clouds the color of fresh bruises.
Then the lightning started.
It crackled and crashed all around us as if we were inside a Tesla coil.
“Should we batten the hatches, captain?” PoLarr asked with a grin. “Not sure why saying that made me so incredibly happy. But it did.”
“That we should, PoLarr,” I grinned back. “I think we are all about to get very wet.”
“Promises--” Aurora began to say with a lascivious glint in her bright purple eyes.
“Nope!” I cut her off. “Not today, foul seductress! I have to concentrate.”
“You’re no fun,” Aurora pouted but then began to help the other ladies begin to secure the deck.
No sooner had they finished than we burst from the clouds and into a raging storm. Rain fell in sheets, and the wind rocked our ship from side to side as if we were in a hurricane sea. We were drenched in an instant, and it was all I could do to keep the ship on course.
Gales blew waves of rain over us to match that of any ocean.
“Everyone hold on!” I yelled over the roaring wind and tumultuous thunder.
Up ahead a dark shape slowly began to come into focus. As we got closer and closer the flashes of lightning illuminated the ever growing shape in funhouse strobes.
It looked like we were heading into the mouth of a giant skull the size of Maui that hung in the air like some kind of physics defying island. The X in my reticle blinked faster and faster the closer we got. We needed to go into the great island skull’s mouth.
The storm raged harder and harder, and we jostled on the wind like a toy boat in a typhoon.
Then we passed through the two-story house sized teeth of the skull and entered the depths of the island.
The wind and rain ceased immediately, and it was as if we had entered a vacuum. The sudden lack of sound was like a slap in the face. We had gone from a thunderous cacophony to nothing but the sound of dripping water.
At first we were in total blackness, but then the sides of the cave, or cavern or whatever the hell we had just gone through began to glow with light green phosphoresce.
It cast us all in an eerie otherworldly macabre light that made my teammates faces seem like skeletons for the briefest of moments before I blinked, and the image was gone.
And then we came out of the narrow tunnel into a cave in the center of the island that was the size of Manhattan. A bright yellow ball hung above us like a sun in the roof of the cave, and somehow we were now actually floating in a large lagoon full of crystal clear blue water.
A lush tropical jungle spread all around the inside of the city sized cave and up the sides. A small beach lay ahead of us with dark black sand that led up to the edge of the jungle. Said jungle then wound its way through the cave until it came to the base of a mountain with, you guessed it, a carved stone skull at the top of it.
What I at first had thought were giant birds flew in flocks high above us near the roof of the cave. I triggered my Occuhancers, tiny nanofilament contact lenses fused to my eyes, and got a zoomed in view.
Nope, not birds. Fucking Pterodactyls.
As we closed in on the beach, there was a rustling in the forest line, and then a goddamn Tyrannosaurus Rex burst onto the beach and roared as if it were auditioning for a Jurassic Park sequel. A second later a thirty foot tall bright blue fur covered gorilla swung out of the jungle canopy and punched the T-Rex right in the mouth.
My crew mates turned and stared at me in slack jawed shock.
“Skull island?” PoLarr whispered. “No. Fucking. Way.”
“Way,” I replied as I watched the gorilla and T-Rex begin to fight on the beach not two hundred feet in front of us. “Into the mouth of madness.”
Chapter Three
“That is something you don’t see every day, even in the Crucible,” Tempest pointed out once she had regained enough of her senses to speak. We’d faced all kinds of weirdness in the Forge of Heroes, the official name of the Crucible of Carnage, from giant sand worms to creepy alien mummies, but watching a T-Rex with the coloration of a macaw slug it out with a three story tall blue gorilla was cause for pause.
The two great beasts circled and swiped at one another full of fury and anger. The gorilla was clearly more agile and had more physical strength but the T-Rex’s midsize sedan sized jaws were filled with rows of teeth like a shark, and it was fast like a rattlesnake. Green blood matted parts of the gorilla’s fur where those jaws had sunk into the big simian’s flesh. They roared and chuffed so loud it hurt my ears.
They were too interested in killing each other to realize that our ship had floated over to the far side of the beach where there was actually a small dock. That was either good or very, very bad.
“I suggest we move very quietly and skip the beach,” I mentioned.
“Good call, I don’t tend to tan anyway, sugar,” Aurora nodded back. “What’s the play here, Marc?”
“Um, not sure just yet,” I admitted. “Not sur
e my last idea had been the best one.”
“Come on, Havak,” Tempest teased. “There is always something brewing in that twisted human brain of yours.”
“You have no idea,” PoLarr said to her deadpan.
When PoLarr and I had first met, god, what seemed like both a lifetime and just yesterday, she had Soul Gazed me. Her race was able to connect mentally to another, kind of like a psychic wi-fi, and we now each shared the others memories. It had given me PoLarr’s almost twenty years of skill in a firearm based martial art known as Ar’Gwyn, which was pretty freaking cool. It was like being able to shoot like Bruce Lee threw a punch; hard, fast, and deadly. PoLarr, well, PoLarr got thirty years’ worth of obscure film and TV references and an endless capacity to find fart and poop jokes funny.
“Okay, well, off the top of my head,” I began, then realized what I was saying and pointed to Aurora. “Shush it! Again.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything, sugar,” Aurora smiled innocently, which just looked sexy and very dirty, “you said top… not tip.”
“Right,” I emphasized as if I’d done it on purpose. I hadn’t. “Okay, so, the treasure we are looking for is up in that very inviting looking skull shaped cave at the top of the mountain over there. Tempest, I want you and Nova to chill on the ship. Get up in the crow’s nest and keep an eye out. Alas, we don’t have comms for this match so send up a laser flare if trouble arrives. Nova, keep the cannons charged and ready for action.”
“Aye-aye, mon capitan,” Tempest winked at me.
“Will do, Marc,” Nova nodded and cracked her metal gauntlets together. The cannons on the side of the ship came to life instantly. They were fairly quiet, but I glanced over my shoulder to check on the rumble by the jungle just in case. The great beasts were still going at it. The gorilla clocked the T-Rex in the eye, and it dashed off back into the thick trees. The gorilla beat its chest wildly and then took off after it.
