The Reaper Chronicles

Ship Witch

    "Captain! They're moving directly at us! What do we do?" Lemar, Goob's navigations officer pleaded. Incarthid Pirate Captain Goob the Dreadful was stoic. After several moments of silence he raised his hand, signaling the portraits of the men on his screen to be quiet.

    "Reverse thrusters! Halt your ships!" He barked. "Don't move." He repeated. "They must be tracking our movement somehow, they can't see us if we don't move." At that a round of awed sighs escaped the mouths of his inferiors commanding the group's secondary vessels. Goob himself could feel the slight forward lurch as his ship reversed thrusting direction and slowed to a halt. The ever present thrumming of his ship's engines wound down until it was but a quiet hum. Every vessel in the pirate band slowed to a complete halt, motionless in the cold void of space. Almost as if in synchronization with their ship's engines, the constant chatter that occupied the vessels also quieted until it wound down to a dead silence, only permeated by the barely audible humming of fission reactors in the background. Every eye watched in anticipation the image of the small militia craft on the captain's display, heading in the direction of where their squadron would be, had they still been moving forward. One eternity. Two eternities. Then the tiny ship changed course, directly to where they were sitting.

    "THAT BITCH!!" Goob screamed, tearing out the few scraggly hairs of his recessed chin that he had gripped in anticipation. "She said we'd be invisible!" The pirate captain breathed heavily for a moment, his right hand abstractly searching for chin hairs to stroke. After a few moments, he decided on his next course of action. "Bring me the witch."

    Dashay--Goob the Dreadful's trusted second in command--was the first to respond. He was a thin lad with a single mohawk of hair running down his head. Goob had tried to tell him that it looked ridiculous and in return Dashay had replied that he would only grow out his side hawks when he was as great a man as Goob himself. Dashay left his seat and set off to retrieve the witch. The rest of Goob's slack-jawed crew didn't even move until the door leading out of the command room had slammed shut. "You all could learn a thing or two from him." Goob said scornfully.

    Princess Jaline was roused from her sleep by the only pirate on the entire Arurian-forsaken ship that had even a half decent looking haircut. His (blessedly) singular mohawk bobbed as he bowed his head to hide his rising blush which he tried to pass off as a nod of deference. It was the most complicated line of thought that Jal had seen from any of the Incarthid thus far. The fact that he was blushing at the sight of a near-naked woman as developed as herself also meant that he still retained at least some measure of virtue despite his circumstances and line of work.

    "Yes?" Princess Jaline asked lazily as she lifted her arms high above her head in a stretch that that not only sent her long, shiny, black hair cascading down her front and back but moved her body in a way that would make it near-impossible for a young man on a ship with only male crewmates to ignore. Dashay's eyes nearly fell out of his head at the sight of the witch's chemise threatening to fall from her smooth, slender shoulders. His blush grew hotter before he snapped his eyes dutifully to match Jal's at which point it began to fade a little--but only a little.

    "Quit your w-witchery." Dashay sputtered out.

    "Oh poor, sweet, Dashay, but that had nothing to do with my magic. That was of a more... natural kind of magic."

    "Your lies won't work on me, witch."

    Jal rolled her eyes and let her full, red lips pull into a smile over her pale face. "Ah but why would you keep a witch aboard your ship if not to perform witchcraft which the lot of you find bewitching?"

    Dashay frowned and had to ponder that sentence which, the witch realized, began to pull his thoughts back together, and away from her. When people thought hard, their eyes tended to wander, and Jal couldn't have the only semi-intelligent creature aboard at full mental capacity with eyes roaming her chambers or he might begin to notice the antenna from the bomb she had been building sticking out from beneath her mattress. For all they knew, she was but a popular street mystic from some small planet off the orbit of Greshit-6--and she would prefer to keep it that way until the time came to blow their entire fleet into nonexistence.