Miss Planet Earth

by S E Anderson

  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 pirates 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 re
ached 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.

  It was incredible.

  Never before had she felt so powerful. Not even when she won the Miss Universe crown, only a month before first contact was made. For a few weeks, she was the queen of the world as they knew it.

  Then the world got much bigger, and her title meant nothing.

  Today, she was the most powerful thing in the known universe. Today, her title meant something.

  She grinned a grin similar to Jesi’s, so wide that her jaw smarted, and honed in on the oncoming ships. Katra released the plasma from her hands, and they burst in reds and yellows before her.

  “Hahaha, that’s right, you’d better run!”

  She ducked as a beam flew right above her, crashing into the ship and making it rock like a spider in its web. The gravity shifted again, but Katra was latched into her chair and wasn’t going anywhere.

  She spun upwards and let out a stream of blasts. She wasn’t looking at Jesi’s work anymore, not while she was master of death. She blew up one of the small ships, which exploded with a computer rendered boom.

  “Haha! Yes!” she screamed.

  “Shut up and shoot!” Jesi shouted back.

  “Hell yes!”

  She pulled upwards, felt the chair shift and rotate under her weight, rocked once again as their ship took fire. She spun and let out blasts in rapid succession, attacking ships that were honing in.

  There had to be at least five new ones coming in close, while the largest was connected to the ship and hard to get. Jesi seemed focused on that one, silent in her concentration. Katra took it upon herself to defend the ship as Jesi got shmuz done, trying to take out the five ships by herself, all at once.

  And she was rocking it.

  Blast after blast she shot, feeling more confident with every passing second. The ships were easy to destroy, and she took to them ferociously, bringing them down like death with a scythe.

  “Hey there, hotty,” said Owaitt, with an oddly seductive voice, ”you going my way?”

  “Get out of my way, droid!” a stranger shouted behind them. Katra’s heart froze into a single block of ice.

  There was someone in the room.

  “Keep him out, Owaitt!” screamed Jesi.

  “What’s a sexy fellow like you doing in a dark place like this?” the droid purred. “Come with me, I know a much nicer place where we can…”

  “Get out of my way!” the voice barked.

  “You don’t want to go in there, it’s dark and smelly, and the women are so loud… wouldn’t you rather spend your next few minutes with me?”

  Katra took out the last of the ships, but she wasn’t in a cheering mood. She may have destroyed the invaders, but there was a real, living, breathing threat right behind her.

  And their service droid was doing the wrong kind of servicing.

  “Katra!” Jesi shouted, “a little backup here?”

  The pageant queen spun her chair around with impressive dexterity, rotating the head of her massive gun until she could see the parasite pirate ship peeking out from above the curvature of their bridge. Jesi’s own gun was on the other side, much better placed to take it out.

  “I’m too close to use the plasma,” she said, “our ship’s shields are extending over it. Can you…”

  “I don’t have a clear shot!” Katra tried to get in closer, to no avail. The bridge would blow if she tried anything at all.

  “Froz!”

  “I got the other ships – take down the shields!”

  She didn’t know where the words were coming from, but she conjured them on her tongue as needed. Marcus, again, pulling strings without showing himself. Was he even there, or was it just her reflexes? Katra didn’t know, but she was thankful he was right.

  Jesi slammed her hand on the shields, and the blue hue that surrounded the screens fizzled away. She let out a laugh of pure glee.

  “No, don’t!” screamed the intruder from somewhere behind them.

  “Don’t bother yourself with them,” intoned the droid, in an oddly sing-song voice.

  And then, the pirate ship exploded.

  The man behind them let out a wail like that of a dying cat. The intruding ship was nothing more but flame, quickly dying as the oxygen burned up. The star field ahead was full of debris, floating almost delicately before them.

  “You frozzlers! That was my ship!”

  “That’s why we blew it up, you frozzing frozzler!”

  Katra let herself out of her seat, knowing full well that she had the upper hand now. Well, they did. Jesi had brought down the space pirate’s ship, and this one had no place to go. He would have to beg for pity to survive.

  But of course, it couldn’t be that easy. Standing before her, clutching his head in his hands, was Yorick.

  “What have you done?” he sobbed.

  Ah, well. Katra had thought his beard was suitable for a pirate. She was more right then than she could possibly know.

  Chapter 5

  Well, things have gone better than expected

  “Chin up, dumb bolts,” said Jesi, seeming for all intents and purposes to have walked right out of the kitchen, not a gunfight. “You were trying to kill us.”

  “No, I frozzing wasn’t!” the traitor snarled. He removed his hands from around his cranium, leveling a bright silver gun at Jesi’s head. She didn’t flinch.

  “You can…” Owaitt started, before freezing with his fingers tentatively on Yorick’s muscular arm. His eyes glazed over and went dark, the android switching off mid sentence.

  “What the—” Katra started, as Yorick gently removed the droid’s arm from his before shoving him away. Owaitt crumpled to the floor like a rag doll, lost and forgotten at the fair.

  “He ran out of words,” Yorick said casually. “Strange. I didn’t think he was that kind of service droid.”

  “You told me he was a janitor,” Jesi insisted.

  “Well, he didn’t exactly have the time to tell me. Ran out of words right after an introduction. Absolutely awful memory. You’d think for a droid of his kind, he’d need to say a bit more.”

  “You’d think,” Jesi agreed.

  “Wait, the froz? Why are we talking about a low-grade sexbot when you blew up my frozzing ship?”

  “Because no one cares about your ship. It was stupid and ugly, just like you.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “You’re trying to rob a dislocation vehicle,” Jesi laughed, “we literally have nothing but complimentary foil! How much stupider can one get?”

  “I wasn’t trying to rob you!” he spat.
The man was sweating profusely, beads of water trickling down his head, which he wiped right into his hair in one swift move.

  “Then why the froz did you send a fleet of pirates after us?”

  “Because I had an offer! Look, I’ve been looking for Katra for years. I wasn’t going to just come over and talk to you both without a backup plan.”

  “And by backup, you mean half a dozen death ships.”

  “I really needed to talk, alright?”

  “Wait, with me?” Katra’s eyes went wide. She could feel them popping out of her skull, and had to rub them back in with the palms of her hands.

  “Yes, you.”

  “Ok, this makes no sense.”

  And with that, she threw herself back on the floor, staring up at the ceiling like a beached whale.

  “What are you…”

  “Shhh,” she spat. “This is all a dream. It’s obvious now! It’s a dream brought on by the cryogenic pod. I just got strapped in and my mind started hallucinating the worst. Imagining I show up late. That Earth as I know it is gone. Everyone I ever knew or loved is dead. My own fiancé isn’t here to reassure me. And now, space pirates, sexbots, and a loony nine-year-old are trying to convince me of… I’m not sure exactly, but my subconscious is obviously trying to work something quite big out.”

  “Did you eat cheese before getting into the pod?” Jesi asked, “That can mess with things in there.”

  “Don’t encourage this,” Yorick snapped. “Katra, I can assure you, this is all very, very real.”

  “And everyone I knew is dead.”

  “Yeah, but you know us now,” Jesi offered, “and apparently neither one of us wants to kill you. Even if we’d like to kill each other.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “Look, Katra, sit up,” Yorick ordered, “I definitely don’t want you dead. Jesi, though, you destroyed my ship, so you definitely deserve a death or two. Apparently, you don’t stay dead for long.”

  “My defining feature,” she said, slapping her hollow belly, “Always a child at heart.”

  “You’re abusing the frozzing system!”

  “Says the pirate.”

  “Look, you just killed my entire crew,” the pirate snarled, “I have a right to be angry.”