Yes, yes, the questions, I know.
To answer your most pressing question, "booty" these days is a synonym for one's posterior and is... You're not surprised by that? Dear me, how crass is your language to already have "booty" defined in such a manner?
...
What?
...
No! I wouldn't ever use that word! How dare you! Don't bring donkeys into this! Why, what sort of sick, perverted person would-
Wait. What is that?
Oh.
OH!
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It falls out of warp with a knife's edge. Cutting through improbability and dropping into reality as a needle through breath-thin silk atop water. The fabric of space fails to notice the appearance of the satin black vessel. There is no scream of light or gravitational distortion. There is nothing to reveal it until one notices the faint miasma of the feeble solar winds from the nearby star sliding past, ever faster and faster in glimmering spirals.
It took an instant for the vessel to acquire the scent of its target, and it now continues the pursuit. The target had drifted from where they were supposed to be, but this was no matter.
Soon, the fabric of space notices the hungry vessel pulling and attempts to utter a complaint. The vessel forces its silence, diminishing its expanding wake across the expanse into a forgotten promise of floating whispers.
But it is not gentle.
The long spear-shaped ship rips its way forward and thrusts energy into the ragged gashes left behind it. The vessel pushes off wounds in existence itself as its speed continues to grow. Its journey across space would be a bloody one if space could bleed; loud if space could scream.
However, space can scream, and many can hear its cries. Designed with this in mind, the black ship has been equipped to handle such protests. The vessel silences space's metaphorical mouth with an impossible gag of controlled probability. In some universes, space is screaming, but it can't remember how in this one.
Then, just as swiftly as it appeared, it stops. The suddenness of it causes space to remember its voice for half a thought and let out a whimper through its gag. Across a vast distance and faster than time, a small pair of furry ears flinch up.
Blurry signatures and sensor returns now resolve into two separate vessels. Neither is its target. As the ship watches, one pulls closer to the other. Had it been foreseen? Betrayed? Mislead? It pulls space around itself in a shroud as it thinks.
This was not anticipated.
This will be corrected.
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The Captain groaned as he stretched. This was ridiculous. Why did he have to get genuinely wasted? He could sit cooped up in his stateroom for the entire thing and just report that he'd been wasted. Documents certifying so could be produced easily enough. He knew quite well how to fake a blood screening, and though he typically modified it so his blood looked clean the principal was the same.
Regardless, he had followed the directions to the letter; obeying every letter of every letter they'd sent him. Minor doses of the weird stuff for the crew while they were carrying the cargo, and then a big dose right before the rest of it. Leave some poor sumps sober to handle the transaction and take the fall for when he'd have to report the stolen cargo. He wasn't sure why they wanted the cargo reported stolen, perhaps they wanted to take out the insurance on it.
He did feel a bit bad for picking up two new hires with the sole purpose of tossing them under the proverbial bus, but the instructions came from the sort of individuals that you didn't try to get creative with. It was a good way to have any questions about oneself answered with "I'm sorry, but we don't have any records that suggest anyone by that name, genetic makeup, or general description ever existed, please don't ask again".
The small black chip in his pocket made a loud chirp, audible only to his ears. The Captain frowned. That... That was the signal, wasn't it? The "pirates" had just jumped in and their transaction could finally be completed. They were early.
But, wait, the "pirates" were already there weren't they? He could have sworn he remembered them being strangely early... But that didn't make sense, did it? How could they be earlier than they already were if they'd just arrived?
Still frowning, but with a mind too inebriated to panic, the Captain waved towards a wall with a gesture. The first time it turned pink. The second time it displayed several fuzzy... Things? He didn't recognize them. On the third try, he finally got the proper movement sent across his muddled pathways, without it being gladly misinterpreted by his cybernetic hand, and the window flashed into a view outside the ship. He was greeted with a sleek near-black red-edged ship hull shaped like a cold chill down one's back.
Crimson letters adorned the hull with pride: Blood Black Bone; in Shiny Blood Red Letters Please.
These weren't the right pirates.
The Captain's brain, still filled to the brim with a jumbled assortment of chemicals it had no clue what to do with, was able to get an apologetic spurt of adrenaline out before the Captain's consciousness slammed a timecard into the clock and left without looking back.
Dirn watched Alpha pass the anti-matter warhead between her hands. She'd taken a liking to it they supposed. Dirn hoped it wasn't the sort of bomb that went "ha, whoops!", followed by a rather large BOOM (or a killing sudden silence for those too close). Shaking their head, they took a final look over the still-chaotic inventory. One maybe-anti-mater bomb, a handful of smaller nuclear ones, an exciting collection of miniature guided missiles, miscellaneous munitions, launch platforms for all the above, guns, bullets, and all the other minor dressings you'd need to destabilize a solar system. And that was only counting the black-omega-level crates.
The double-black-omega-level secure containers were left unopened, but the warning labels and the ID tags on their insides, knowledge of which was gracefully given by Mrs. P, clearly listed their violent and volatile contents.
Military (or insurgent) grade legal documents.
A single lawyer armed with half a binder of those filings could bring a city to a shuddering halt. A small team and a third of a double-black-omega crate's contents could force a planet to its knees.
Dirn shuddered at the thought and cursed themself for ever taking this job. It hadn't seemed so bad at first. The journey was far, longer than necessary, and paid well. Even better, the Captain hadn't asked many questions. Thinking on it, maybe the Captain had thought the same thing of Dirn... Maybe they should have both asked more questions.
Devils below why did this sort of thing have to happen to them? Had Dirn known the Captain was a smuggler they'd have opted for the tourism liner that had needed more staff with opposable thumbs.
A sudden hissing shriek, sounding like a cat with a bad attitude, pulled Dirn out of their thoughts. It reverberated across the hull, making efforts to triangulate its origin futile. They dropped half a foot and snapped their hands to the typically not empty spaces by their sides. What in the world was that noise? For half a second they feared that the crazed AI had done them all in.
Temporarily insane with an unboxing fever, Alpha had taken the plasma cutter to a few more crates at random for unknown reasons, and while Dirn was glad that Dewey had shown her the proper way to do so, they didn't quite trust either of them to not accidentally excite an excitable compound. Dirn figured it would be rather anticlimactic to have gone through all they had gone through only to be ended by an AI with an addiction to potentially explosive un-wrappings.
Surveying the cargo bay, Dirn swept their silver-grey eyes across any potential "ha, whoops!"'s that could explain the strange noise. Alpha sat occupied by a case of... individually boxed micro rounds of anti-legal-paper rounds? Well, that would keep her busy, and placed her in no danger greater than burning the tips of her metallic fingers. Dewey stood shuffling off to the side, engaged with a tablet, no, three tablets in his many grasping arms, but far from any potentially dangerous materials. There was no real commotion besides the subtle flashing red light of an imminent hull breach, which flared brighter as a second screech rang out.
Oh, that might be it, Dirn thought to themself. Dirn, unable to see colors, had originally taken it to be a simple strobing light, perhaps for the general ambiance, until they bothered to read the blinking text orbiting around it.
WARNING: HULL BREACH IMMINENT.
That would be the pirates. For reasons unbeknownst to Dirn, the pirates had insisted on cutting a hole through the hull instead of using one of the many docking ports that sat across The Lazy Descent like fat squat warts. Something about "the advantage of surprise", as if they hadn't also sent a document detailing where exactly they'd be coming in.
Without proper warning, some poor schmuck sleeping in a hallway somewhere might suddenly find their once-cozy nook approaching steel-melting temperatures. No one wanted to deal with a partially cooked crew member, it would ruin (most) appetites, even those for piracy.
As Dirn straightened themselves, a second shriek rang out, followed by quite a loud thump, and snatches of several pirate-flavored conversations.
"-Can we make them-"
"-No, that'd be-"
"-But it's-"
"-Maybe just a little-"
As the ringing of pirate boots stopped and proceeded to recede into the distance, Alpha blinked herself out of the box-induced stupor and rose to her feet. Packing materials spilling off her unnaturally long legs in sheets. Quite of few of them went up in rapid puffs of smoke as they touched accidentally activated anti-legal-paper rounds. Alpha glanced over to Dewey as he finished whatever task it was that had occupied about half his limbs and all the tablets they had nearby. Meeting her gaze, he strode over to her.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Dirn followed close behind. Alpha wasn't entirely surprised. By now she could practically read their mind. They figured they'd best be behind them both when the pirates arrived. Dirn would want Alpha and Dewey to do the talking. Dewey had the experience and she had the few hundred encyclopedias worth of information that all AIs started with, plus whatever she had managed to collect across her journeys. She nodded at him and turned to face the closed bulkheads from which the Pirates would enter. Dewey might have been already facing them... It was hard for a bilateral species to tell what was the "front" of someone like Dewey, and Dirn certainly didn't have the experience for it.
Dirn felt themselves holding their breath as the now-thundering footsteps stopped. The beep of an activation panel engaging felt like a knife to their spine. Dirn noticed Alpha standing just a bit straighter, and becoming a darker shade of blue.
The hiss of pneumatic doors sounded harshly against Dirn's ears, but they remained still.
It was the "ha!" from behind that caused Dirn to flinch, but he still managed to have himself turned around before even Alpha had finished processing the noise.
"We got you with that one didn't we!" said a tall, overtly red human woman between gasping laughter. Dirn assumed she was referring to the fact that they had expected the pirates to arrive through the door that they said they would arrive through. It seemed that playing amateurish pranks superseded honest communication. On her shoulders curled a crimson cat, which made her red hues appear almost typical in comparison. Her hair almost matched the cat's fur, and it gave the appearance of having a very cat-shaped haircut. The assorted crew beside her took up the laughter, though with far less vigor, as she wiped a tear from her eyes. Her solid abyssal black eyes. Dirn, after only a moment's hesitation, took a few steps back to place Alpha and Dewey in front of themself again. To Dirn's own, much less black eyes, the cat seemed to take notice of this. Its, also far less black, green eyes were full of surprising intelligence, so much so that Dirn was only taken aback for a moment when it climbed to the top of the woman's head and spoke like a prophet atop a hill.
"You will comply with our demands or face the repercussions outlined in section 3.A. of the documentation we have provided!" The cat mewed, chest puffed out and head held high. "If you have any questions or require assistance please contact our always-available-for-a-nominal-fee helpline!"
Of course, Alpha had told him that the pirates' captain was the red one, but she had forgotten to mention that she was a cat. Well, at least Dirn now had a face to the name "Pirate Captain Mrs. P".
Alpha gripped her hands behind her back and took a tentative step forward. "You requested our presence", she began but paused upon making eye contact with the red woman's inky eyes. She faltered and gave a little hum at 256 standard-repetition-per-time units. A middle C! She hadn't hummed one of those since... Well, two weeks ago, but it was best not to think of that. Dark Gods, she was letting the situation get to her head. Process, she told herself. Process! The red woman smirked and pointed a finger at the cat that sat upon her head. Alpha's eyes followed to make contact with the almost-glowing green-slitted eyes. The rest of the world seemed to fade away and Alpha felt herself calming. Her hum petered out into the silence.
"Please honey, there's no need to be frightened! We're all friends here" Mrs. P purred. Alpha hadn't been too surprised to hear the voice coming from the Cat when she'd first spoken to her, but in person, the combination of the voice and the small feline was strangely soothing.
Still flustered, now mostly due to embarrassment, Alpha continued.
"You requested our presence, and I believe we have complied with your demands" she finished.
"Yes, it appears as though you have done well..." Mrs. P said, pausing as her eyes rolled across the many packages in various states of carnage. At a flick of her tail, her crew began to spread out. They'd take only what was agreed upon, at least if the other members she'd sent across the ship to search for hidden sober crew members, treasure, or other items of interest returned empty-handed/tentacled. Alpha still lingered on the smoldering pile of ashes that used to be several hundred rounds of anti-lawyer-paper ammunition. It was only as the drifting smoke reached past her eye-line that she noticed. One of the loose shells must have activated against another's packaging, likely causing a cascade of similar activations. Whoops, though all things considered there could have been much worse "whoop"'s. Alpha grimaced as she tracked Mrs. P's eyes to her unintentional handiwork.
"Checking to see if the goods work I see... I hope you didn't attempt to arm yourselves hmm?" Mrs. P asked as she turned her attention back to the unfortunate crew members in front of her. "I see you're smarter than that, good!"
Leaping from the top of the red woman's head, Mrs. P landed and darted between Alpha's legs, causing her to stumble in surprise. Dirn took a cautious step back as Mrs. P strode past him. Dewey stilled for half as her tail flicked by second, and continued his patient dance. In one deft move, Mrs. P's dominance over each had been established.
"Oh my, isn't this just lovely!"
Dirn turned to follow her voice and took note of the additional pirates that they had failed to notice circling the goods. They must have come through the other, now open, bulkheads. Dirn had been mesmerized by the cat's gleaming eyes and royal voice. Her eyes sparkled like emeralds, surrounded by the flowing blood of her hair. Dirn shook their head and chided themselves. They were getting rusty, no one should be able to circle them without their noticing. How did the pirates even open the doors without them hearing?
Mrs. P paused at the open container in the center and placed a paw on the black orb. She gave the closest approximation of a frown a cat's facial muscles were capable of and turned a quizzical eye toward the three unfortunate crew members.
"What is this?"
"Oh, that's what we think is the anti-matter bomb, can't tell for sure of course cause when Alpha cut through that there box she got the identification chip and panel real good," Dewey said amicably.
Mrs. P's voice dropped half an octave.
"Hmm Mmm... And you thought I'd fall for that?" she asked.
Dewey shuffled their feet a bit faster and Alpha clutched her hands hard enough that the outer shell on them threatened to crack. In a blaze of light, Mrs. P's eyes flashed as she met their gazes... All of their gazes, at once. Don't ask me how.
Dirn stared at two glowing eyes that were at too many places at once.
"Answer me please," Mrs. P purred, and Dirn felt their bones rumble with it. They remained silent. They'd been trained to resist this type of magic, but it threatened to give them a splitting headache. Now Dirn recognized why they had found the cat's eyes so enticing. Mind magic. They hated the stuff.
Next to Dirn, Dewey muttered something under his breath and his many eyes began to glow faintly crimson. Alpha responded by whispering a faint "No?"
The light vanished, or perhaps it was never there. Dirn shook their head, trying to clear the uneasy sensation. Mrs. P cocked her head. Whatever she had wanted, it was apparent she had gotten it. Confirmation of some sort most likely.
"None of you could feel it? This is no typical bomb if it's even a bomb at all. It radiates magical energies like I've never seen..." Mrs. P said, trailing off as the orb remained inert. She batted it with her paw again and frowned.
"How peculiar," she muttered under her breath.
Mrs. P turned her green eyes towards Dirn and they felt a memory of an imagined headache growing. It wasn't a comfortable feeling. Then the eyes flashed again and Dirn could have sworn for half a second they'd forgotten to put on any clothes.
Mrs. P cocked her head as she regarded them. "You're magically inert, aren't you? Fascinating. Well, I guess this was just an honest mistake" she said, pushing the orb out of its container entirely and giving it a flick so it rolled towards the black-eyed red-almost-everything-else woman. Alpha followed it with her eyes and moved a few steps closer to the red woman as she claimed the orb. Mrs. P, ignoring Alpha's intense curiosity about the orb, continued, "I failed to realize that none of you have even the faintest magical sight..."
She turned her ears and then her head towards Dewey as he made a rumbling in his... Throat? Dirn and Alpha realized at the same time that they weren't exactly sure how Dewey vocalized. It had always spoken so naturally and human-like that it had never crossed their minds that he had no mouth, lips, tongue, or throat by which to do so. While Dirn mused on this for a moment, Alpha turned her attention back to the orb the red woman was rolling between her hands.
"Excuse me Mrs...?" Dewey began.
"Alpha didn't tell you? Hmm. You can call me Mrs. P."
Alpha had told both of them, but Dewey had his reasons.
"Ah, well please excuse me Mrs. P, but I do have a passing skill at sensing magic, and I can promise you that orb wasn't emitting anything like that before you came through the door."
To emphasize his point, Dewey's many sclera-less eyes flashed with a brief and faint red light.
"Hmmm... Now that is interesting, provided of course you're not lying to me..."
Dirn squeezed their own eyes shut before anyone started flashing theirs again. But it never came. They hesitantly opened a single eye before following it with another. Dirn took notice of Mrs. P's gaze, which led towards the close figures of Alpha and the red woman.
"Rebecca?" she asked.
"Oh, um... Yeah look at this Mrs. P", said the red woman, "Rebecca" Dirn figured, her voice catching just a tad.
She turned the orb over to Alpha's slightly smaller hands.
"What are you doing? What do you wish me to see here?"
"Uh, well, it shrinks when I do that."
Realizing how ridiculous she sounded, Rebecca hurried to explain.
"It always fits just right in your hands. No matter how you hold it!"
Mrs. P began an inquisitive approach towards the two, as did many of the other pirates, at least those still in the cargo hangar. Most had already made multiple cycles carrying cargo out but had dallied on their work as they watched the scene before them. One of the best parts of being a pirate was always the drama and intrigue that followed, and now Rebecca commanded all their attention.
Dewey ambled up behind Mrs. P, who had stopped at Rebecca's feet. Both now stared at the orb intensely. She cocked her head, but orbs are notorious for looking the same from every angle. Dewey, with his many eyes, could testify to that.
Alpha glanced down at the cat, once again between her feet, and presented the orb back to Rebecca. Mrs. P's eyes narrowed as she did so, but if there was a change in the orb's size it was too slight for her to notice...
Dewey held up a grasper, with two of the three fingers out.
Rebecca, the one whom Mrs. P often referred to as a "Smart Lass", held the orb between her two hands and placed it between the much smaller gap of Dewey's two fingers.
One would typically expect such an action to be incredibly awkward. The distance between Dewey's fingers was dwarfed by the size of the orb, and yet...
And yet it slid into place as though it had always been the perfect size to fit there. No one watching could have pinpointed an exact moment between the orb being palmed between Rebecca's hands and being grasped between Dewey's fingers when it wouldn't have fit either of them. It was a disconcerting puzzlement to witness.
Mrs. P cocked her head around the other way. It certainly looked different now, but that was probably because of its change in size, and not Mrs. P's change in perspective. The impossibility was further reinforced as Dewey dropped the black marble, no, palm-sized orb back into the waiting hand of Rebecca. Many groupings of eyes remained transfixed on the perfectly round orb, which had always been the size at which it now sat. How could it not be? And yet, surely, hadn't it just been accurately described as a marble?
The spell was broken by a loud chirp from two of Rebecca's three wrists. Without further introduction, a rumbling voice seeped from it.
"Captain, we've got company."
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From an outside view, the infinitely black vessel sits still; a hole cut from space. A dark obelisk as dead as the gods it was built for. However, buried deep within it, a flurry of movement churns the otherwise still air.
Dampened footsteps, the faint rustling of paper, and the inevitable background noise of any functioning vessel is not all that permeates the atmosphere within the vehicle.
Those quiet-hushed noises and the thick weight of restrained tension ride the air as equals. Like a restrained beast, its hot breath sends shivers down many of the hunched spines of the busy figures. However, amidst the gentle organized chaos a tall being, a black articulated body reminiscent of the vessel that holds the vacuum back, stands straight. The beast does not dare press against its shoulders.
Its spine is arched, not over, but back in a posture of authority. Its four hands intertwined behind it. The body is slim. Still. Deadly. It does not move as it directs the many working bodies below it through silent instruction. In the unfathomable depths of space, an orchestra of legal proceedings plays out, and only the slim figure can truly appreciate the music it directs.
It filters across many invisible screens. Dividing its attention and manipulating them in perfect stillness. As it reviews the rapidly growing information, its surface ripples.
It does not appreciate surprises.
There are not many things in "life" that this black mind and body appreciate. Paramount above all that it does appreciate, is an assigned task completed, by any, and all, means necessary.
It thinks. It concludes. It does not make a decision, but one has been selected regardless. It did not imagine the solution. No, when one searches the vast reaches of probability to arrive at an inevitable conclusion, one is only venturing forth across a realm of knowledge above that of conscious minds. Decisions from such a process are not made or imagined, they are found.
If the being could smile, it might have. At times such as this, deep within itself, it allows an admission to be made: it does appreciate an appropriate level of carnage when completing a task, even if it was accomplished through a hurricane of legality and not more direct weaponry.
At its order, the barrage began.