by M. D. Cooper
“Awesome,” she said, clenching her fists, “I have superpowers. Bad-ash.”
As a child, like most children, Katra had dreamed of having abilities, of being a super hero. Fighting crime, bringing justice. Wires had got a little crossed while growing up, which might have had something to do with her being woken up in the future and starting her own pirate crew, but she had long since stopped thinking about the moral implications. Now, now she had power: she could do anything she wanted to do. She desperately wanted to test the snake, see just how much she could do with its power coursing through her.
But if she was the Chosen One… chosen for what?
“I hate to break up the party, but does anyone know where the ship is?” Jesi somehow managed to cross her arms even tighter. “No offense, mighty and all powerful Katra, but if this is Earth, we probably need to get off it before we get in any more trouble with FunCorp.”
“Oh, too late for that now, munchkin.”
Katra spun around to see Vale, hula skirt and lei casting a sharp contrast with the dark plastic boots and gloves. The woman was scowling – actually scowling! Who does that? – and holding a gun pointed right at Katra.
Before Katra could formulate a coherent thought, the gun turned into a banana. Somehow her powers were working instinctively, responding to gags she had seen on TV so many years ago. Vale’s eyes bulged in shock.
“Oh great, does this mean we’re in for it now?” Jesi rolled her eyes. “Are dinosaurs going to come for us?”
“Here? No. Here we have the giant spiders.” Vale was desperately trying to keep her cool despite having just lost her only weapon, pretending for all intents and purposes that the banana was still a gun. She kept it riveted on Katra, her eyes a brewing storm of fury.
“She’s lying,” said Jesi, “Yeah, she’s lying, we’re fine. But to be on the safe side: Katra, take us back to the ship. Let’s leave Vale here, with her own people.”
“No! You can’t do that!” Vale stammered, finally losing her cool. A bead of sweat rolled down her pale face, and it wasn’t from the summer heat.
“Will someone please enlighten me?” Podulk requested, polite as ever. “Please illuminate my understanding, as I am quite sure these are not my choices for clothing. Nor am I comprehending how I arrived at this destination.”
“It’s Katra, Pod,” said Jesi, sinking deeper into the sand with rage. “She apparently is the chosen one for some space god and brought us all here in a whim.”
Space gods. Chosen ones. Katra was trying not to feel afraid, but she was terrified. Even Marcus had shut up, given her full control of the limbs. She had felt him try to summon the power that coursed through their veins, but something was blocking him. Apparently being the chosen one only applied to her, and not her mental roommate.
It was slightly relieving to know that she was still her own person, despite all this.
“Can someone start at the beginning?” Asked Yorick. “I was there, and I don’t understand any of this.”
“Fine, fine, just get us out of here!” Vale begged, dropping the banana in the sand. “The spiders are attracted to the sound of feuding! Now move!”
“You don’t get to order us around!” said Jesi.
“You don’t get it, it’s all part of the game to them! By attracted, I mean… attracted. It’s one of our hardest levels and still in development, but the Great Humping Spiders of the Caribbean really doesn’t have a good promotional ring to it. Please, please take me with you.”
“Fine,” said the captain. “Katra, do your thing.”
Katra focused on the ship, on its shiny interior, on the smells of home. In an instant, all seven of them, and the banana, had appeared inside the tight confines of the Beyoncé’s breakroom. Vale’s arm instantly went to her nose.
“What is that stench?” she asked, her eyes scanning the small room. “If I had known this was how you’d treat FunCorp property, I would have had you arrested when we first met!”
“It’s been Podulk’s turn to do the dishes for a few days now,” Jesi shrugged.
“I do not like water,” he added.
“I’ll talk, I don’t care, just get me out of this room! And why is there wood everywhere?”
Jesi shot Katra a glance, rolling her eyes in a wide arc. Katra had to agree: this Vale lady was a mess. For all the perfectly stretched latex on her body, her composure was as wrinkly as crepe de chine.
“Right, to the briefing room, then,” said Jesi, tossing her lei into a corner. “Someone put the yellow thing in the trash?”
“This ship doesn’t have a briefing room…” Vale started, but the captain ignored her, already storming off down the corridor.
“It didn’t, but we made do,” explained Owaitt, the epitome of hospitality. “Also, I do not think I have your name tattooed on my hand. May I ask who you are?”
“Ah, you must be the hacked service droid.” Vale cringed as she looked at him, averting her gaze. “Splendid. I can count over a hundred individual regulations being broken onboard this ship, and I can’t do anything about them.”
“Just shut up, Vale,” said Yorick. Katra instantly felt a pang to the heart – the way he looked at her… no, no. She was not prone to fits of jealousy. Especially when it came to Yorick.
“So who’s the irrational one now, huh?” Marcus chanted in the back of her head, “am I really imagining things?”
Katra only had to think ‘shut up’, and the man went silent. As a matter of fact, she couldn’t even feel him back there: the man had retreated so far into her mind that it was as if he wasn’t there at all. She breathed a heavy sigh of relief, finally free of the constant background noise.
The briefing room was what had once been the meditation studio FunCorp provided on its shuttle between the planet formerly known as Earth and the Coalition capital. Jesi had made Owaitt find a nice sturdy table, shave off its legs, and set it in the middle of bamboo floor, and suddenly, they had a briefing room. But that had been the totality of work actually done on setting up the place: no one had bothered to take down any of the automated relaxation features.
A gong chimed as soon as each of them entered the doorway. Gong. Gong. Gong. Jesi was already seated on a pile of cushions on one end of the table, the sounds of a trickling waterfall surrounding her. The rest of them crouched down on the bamboo mats, trying to get comfortable on the low table as the captain propped up her legs.
“Right, Vale, this is your chance: speak,” she ordered. “Or we’re blasting you out the airlock.”
“I’d like to see you try,” the woman hissed, “but you held up your end of the bargain, so I’ll hold up mine. I…”
“Let’s start at the beginning,” Jesi interrupted, “did you put Havier up to hiring us for this heist?”
“No. I only put out a call to any known fence in this area, asking if they had hired you for a job. The promise of being able to keep their loot AND their gold, along with a pretty handful of credits on top of that, made it easy to find your current employer Havier was only too happy to key me in.”
“Lovely,” said Jesi, leaning back even further into the pile of pillows. Katra shifted her weight uncomfortably onto her other buttock, feeling the stripes of wood from the floor and blades of grass from the skirt digging into her flesh. “So one of our key allies just turned us in on the drop of a credit.”
“But what of this Beb-Sha-Na… thing?” asked Yorick, “I mean, I’m pretty sure Havier didn’t hire us to bring him a giant space pig.”
Vale let out a heavy sigh, stripping one of the gloves from her hand. Beneath the black latex, her skin was a crisscross of fine scars, like her arm had been dipped in starlight.
“Now what I am about to tell you is highly classified information,” she said, removing the other glove. This hand had no such scars.
“Classified by whom? FunCorp? The game developers?” Yorick scoffed.
“Precisely,” the woman spat, “You see, FunCorp might be synonymous with
the gaming industry, but for years the entire company’s purpose has been in keeping the Old Gods… sleeping.”
“Hold on, Old Gods? What do they have to do with gaming?”
“Ritual sacrifice, among other things.” Vale shrugged lightly. “It’s well known that our games offer real, life or death stakes, if you’re courageous enough. And the death part is how we in corporate get the proper sacrifices in order to keep the Old Gods satiated and sleeping. And that idiot Havier went and undid in an instant what we’ve been trying to do for centuries!”
“And these old gods… they’re not actually Gods, are they?” asked Yorick. “I mean, Gods do not exist!”
“Any sufficiently powerful technology is akin to magic for lesser beings,” said Vale, “We only call them Gods because, you know, they can rain fire from the skies and all.”
“And what do they want with Katra?” Yorick turned to outright stare at her, his gaze strong enough to make her blush. “Why, all of a sudden, are they after her?”
“And I still fail to understand why this Vale is here in the first place,” Podulk added. “What occurred during the handoff?”
“Vale wants to take Katra, Katra became the chosen one, and Havier got turned into confetti,” Yorick explained to his friend quickly, “Then a space pig turned up and changed into a whale, Katra got super powers, and that’s how we ended up on the beach.”
“Splendid,” said Podulk, “I miss all the intrigue once again.”
“Well, you’re right in the middle of it now,” said Vale, “because Beb-Sha-Na’s awake, and somehow chose Katra to be her champion.”
“Which means what, exactly?”
All eyes turned to Katra, who felt her purple face turn a shade warmer. Jesi was chewing at a hangnail in a way that was supposed to be nonchalant, but Katra had come to know this tick as a sign that she was somehow uncertain of herself. And seeing her captain looking shaken was enough to instill fear in any rational being.
“Look, for now, all I know is that I can… do things,” she said, nervously. “And that doesn’t seem to be a bad thing. Quite the contrary – I rather like all this power. For now, the only one who seems worried about that fact is this Vale chick, and we don’t know what her motives are.”
“I am sitting right here, you know,” spat Vale, “and I don’t appreciate your tone. Nor the fact that you’re speaking about me in the third person right now.”
“I don’t appreciate the fact you tried to claim me as your property about half an hour ago,” said Katra.
“Who the froz cares? Talk, dammit.” Jesi was getting more and more tense by the second. “I agree with Katra, it’s pretty frozzing awesome that she’s turned into a genie. Why would we want to give that up?”
“Because no human is meant to hold the power of the gods,” said Vale, “Katra will burn up from the inside out. Not a nice way to go, let me tell you. And seeing as how she is property of FunCorp, we’d rather not have that happen.”
“Ah, now I see it,” Jesi snarled, “You just don’t want to lose your investment. You’re trying to scare us!”
“And what did I say? I’m not anybody’s property, thank you very much.”
“I agree,” the tiny captain took her feet off the table – this was getting serious. “You say you want her back because we didn’t declare the valuables we had taken from earth? Fine. How much do you want for her?”
“It’s not that easy,” said Vale, “Considering she is legally the queen of our planet AND is supped up on radioactive divine powers. She won’t come cheap.”
“How about I order you off my planet, then?” replied Katra. She was getting damn tired of this charade. “Stop skirting around the issue. You look scared: because of me, or because of this Beb-Sha-Na thing? And what the hell is a chosen one?”
“Fine! You know what your problem is? Beb-Sha-Na has chosen you to help take over the universe. She believes only you can help her reign supreme. There, I said it. You happy now?”
“I don’t see the problem with that,” said Jesi. “Anybody else here?”
The room was filled with people replying the negative. Vale let out a loud grunt of frustration.
“You’re all morons,” she said, “can’t you see your friend here is in grave danger? Beb-Sha-Na is coming after you! She’s going to wield Katra like a nuclear bomb!”
“What if I just tell her no?”
“Then she’ll kill you, and chose someone else. This is really serious, Katra.”
Maybe it was for the best, just to let the serpent go. Katra knew she was strong enough without it: unlimited power was fun, for a while, but she didn’t quite like the idea of burning up from the inside out.
Plus, if it meant not having to deal with Vale and FunCorp – which apparently was a sacrifice factory for sleeping gods? – then she would gladly give up any power, however badass it made her feel.
Delicately, she reached her hand up to remove the serpent from her shoulder. She could feel Marcus relax in relief in the back of her mind; the only sense she had of him, almost a shock remembering he was supposed to be there.
But as her fingers clasped around the serpent, she realized that it was fused to her flesh. The serpent’s belly was one with her shoulder, and to her amazement and terror, it would not give. She imagined in her mind the serpent unfurling and uncoiling, but it would not budge. Her power could affect anything but it.
As if sensing her distress, all eyes were now on her, watching as she poked and prodded the snake, to no avail. The head of it rested right on her clavicle, and she could feel it rise and fall with every breath, as if it were the one to control every inhale and exhale.
Yeah, this sucker was stuck.
“Oh, froz,” she hissed. In the silence of the room, her voice was like a bullhorn. “What do I do?”
“You have to come with me,” said Vale, “We have people in place that can help. Give yourself up to FunCorp, and you might just make it out of this alive.”
“Hold on,” Yorick snapped, leaning forward on the small table, “What if this is all some kind of FunCorp trick? What if she’s just telling you all this so she can get her hands on you?”
“ATTENTION PIRATES. YOUR SHIP HAS BEEN SURROUNDED. STEP AWAY FROM YOUR CONTROLS AND PREPARE TO BE BOARDED.”
The voice came out of nowhere, as if the ship itself was shouting at them. It seemed everyone on the ship was taken aback, and they scrambled to their feet, taking fighting stances. Only Vale remained calm.
“You see what I mean?” said Yorick, “She led FunCorp right to us!”
“You frozzing kidnapped me, idiot!” she replied, “of course they’re coming after me! And not to mention your ship is still docked on Tarowin Station. You’re not a very smart bunch, are you?”
“Don’t you dare insult my crew,” said Jesi, “I’m the only one who gets to do that. Now Katra, can you get us out of here?”
“With pleasure,” Katra grinned, but she was only half as excited as she had been just a few minutes ago. The prospect of being stuck with a ticking time bomb wasn’t sitting so well in her stomach. She lifted her hands and cracked her fingers, trying to think of a nice place to send them all…
“No, wait!” said Vale, “if you leave now, FunCorp won’t be able to help you!”
“Great,” said Jesi, “the more distance we get between us and them, the better?”
“Hold on a sec.” Katra put down her arms. She glanced nervously at the snake on her shoulder: a blessing and a curse. “You really mean it? You can help me?”
“Look,” said Vale, “the only reason FunCorp exists in the first place is to keep the old gods from rising again. We’ll do anything to help you.”
“You swear it?”
“I swear it.”
“RELEASE YOUR HOSTAGE TO US AND WE WILL BE LENIENT!” said the voice through the ship once more. Vale rolled her eyes.
“Just let me talk to them,” she urged, “I can stop the situation before it escalates. And by
this situation, I don’t just mean the security force right out there. I mean your whole Chosen One mess.”
Katra took a deep breath, clearing her mind. She felt Marcus moving around wearily back there, assessing if it was safe or not to come out. As much as she loved the freedom from his thoughts, having him scared of her was one of the most terrifying aspects of her dilemma.
“I have conditions,” she said, wetting her dry lips.
“Name them,” said Vale, “but do it fast. My men are not all that patient.”
“Fine.” Katra glanced at her crew, returning their bewildered stares. “Ok, here goes. First of all, once this is over, we don’t want to have to deal with FunCorp ever again.”
“Well, Katra, we have a little issue there…”
“You mean with the planet formerly known as Earth?” she asked. She snapped her fingers in the air, and a scroll dropped into Vale’s hands out of nowhere. “There. It’s yours now. You’ve desecrated it past recognition: I do not need it anymore.”
“Then we are even,” said Vale, “after this, FunCorp will turn a blind eye to your little crew’s activity: so long as you respect our neutrality, and do not steal from us or our ships.”
“I think we can deal with that,” Katra nodded. “Captain Jesipax?”
“We’ll refrain ourselves,” the not-child agreed.
“I would like to request that FunCorp keep the serpent for ourselves, after all this is over,” said Vale. “So that it does not claim another Chosen One.”
“Fine, but we need something in exchange. Something fair.”
“Our neutrality isn’t enough? Getting the snake off you isn’t a fair deal?”
“I just gave you a planet,” Katra scowled, “that’s worth a lot more than what you’ve given me.”
“Have you forgotten the jewels?”
“I thought we have negotiated them out of the way already? Whatever. You let us keep what we earned for the Amulet job, and turn a blind eye to everything else, and I’ll submit to you for whatever you need.”
