Chapter Text
Chapter 3 - The Pirates Are Out to Get You…
About half an hour later…
Alice wasn't sure how she'd ended up tied up - what with being a hologram and all - but she was sure that she didn't completely hate it…
Perhaps in a less stressful environment than being smuggled off the ship they called home, being held over the shoulder of some tattooed nutcase, she might have almost enjoyed it…
No, think about the fact we are being abducted now, not the possibility that Edith was correct about you, Alice… she chasisted herself in her own thoughts.
"We've checked the ship. There's fuck all aboard it." One of the goons told the red haired woman, the one that was quite clearly in charge.
Simply put, her whole demeanour screamed "I am in charge" - brilliant red hair, with a black leather outfit that showed her curves off pretty well; something the woman had probably used to get the army of dumb muscle that she called a crew on her side…
Regardless of how the muscle was recruited, their search hadn't exactly been the most peaceful, if the screams she had heard were anything to go by; screams of "Oh god, she's in the pipes!", "Oh fuck!" and "Christ, Cook is dead!" were all… pretty good indicators that Sinon, as hopeless as she was as a mechanic, was indeed an excellent rat remover.
And she had no qualms; their attackers were vermin…
"Though, uhh, we did find an old floppy disc? One of the really big ones…" Another one said, almost confused at the obsolete technology…
That was not good for them; they had found Yui's back up drive. She wondered why she was not particularly surprised that Yui's entire memory was stored on a floppy disc…
And then the disc was bought in.
Both she and Kirito spared a glance in surprise as a floppy disc the size of a room was brought into the airlock by two people… they were not kidding about it being one of the "really big ones", were they!?
"What's that for; a dinner table?" The woman asked derisively.
Both of them agreed wordlessly to keep quiet, merely glaring at the woman in response.
"Boarding action detected! Lower decks!"
Alice bit her lip in response to that. Yui was a bit late with the announcement, and considering they already knew they had been boarded - it was hard to be oblivious to that fact, really, considering they were tied up in front of their attackers…
"This ship really is a lump of junk, isn't it?"
"You have no idea…" Alice sighed, before realising what Yui had said - lower decks, which was not where they were being held, nor was it where the pirates had appeared…
The look of confusion that she and Kirito shared at that realisation was one that thankfully wasn't picked up on by the pirates… who else was attacking them?
"Boss, it's them! The Lyu-ack!" One of the woman's lackies radioed through before he died.
The woman sighed, as if she was not concerned by the death of her subordinate, but more concerned by the fact she would have to actually do something for once… "Oi, girlie, go and buy me time to escape, and I'll pay you back if you get out of it." She turned to a younger girl who she had initially assumed was a secretary of some kind, but it had quickly become apparent to Alice that the girl was just as much a hostage here as they were…
As the young girl in pigtails pulled out her weapon reluctantly, Alice was doing her best to attempt to break free of the holo-ropes she found herself restrained by, and in a dark part of her mind, she remembered a way of freeing her hands… by breaking her thumbs.
It would hurt no doubt, and- wait, she was a hologram; she didn't feel pain, so this would be uncomfortable, but nowhere near as much of an impediment as if she were still human…
With a faint crack that made her feel a little nauseous, her hands slipped free of the bindings, though she maintained the facade that she was still restrained for a few seconds, calling the woman over towards her in order to spring her own trap. "What is it?"
"Have you ever been punched in the face by a hologram?" Alice asked sweetly.
"No, no I haven't. Why?"
As if to answer her question with a rather violent response, her fist smashed into the woman's nose, turning it the same colour as her hair, and forcing her to stagger back clutching her bloodied nose… "You little bitch!"
"Yui, airlock 1, now!" Kirito shouted, barging into the woman with his shoulder, and forcing her back further into the airlock. He only barely managed to stop short of the door, the wall of metal closing between them and trapping her in the airlock.
"Hah, what now? You eject me into space? Or are you just going to keep me here as a prisoner?"
"Indeed, and we shall take your ship too. After all, it will not be that you are using it…"
"You absolute- kid, kill them both! Avenge your captain, you useless whelp!"
The young girl looked towards them both, and despite her hands being on the plasma-knife attached to her belt, she seemed genuinely terrified of them. Her eyes darted around the place, looking for any kind of escape from the situation, whilst her hand was not tensed over her knife, but was more fidgeting with it… Alice had been right after all, she was just as much a hostage as they were. "N-no, Cap-Miss Rosalia! I won't keep doing this!"
"Listen here you little rat, when, and it is when, not if, I get my hands on you, I won't keep you safe anymore, all those side-eyes the boys have been giving you, let's see how you do when-GHHH!"
Three seconds was all the woman had mustered; barely long enough to decide where to grab - her throat, in a vain attempt to hold her breath, or anything that would prevent her body from being ejected into the icy loneliness of space.
In the end, she grabbed at her throat, but it did not matter in the slightest which course she had taken, being pulled out of the airlock without a single word - just a single groan of terror as she fell away from their sight.
"Oh dear, my central processor slipped." Yui said with an almost terrifying level of sweetness; one that was not particularly consistent at having jettisoned someone into the icy veil of space unprotected. "I am terribly sorry, Papa. I hope I haven't inconvenienced you…"
Alice could only muster a strangled breath in surprise that Yui was genuinely capable of taking actions like that of her own accord. Kirito, on the other hand… "Yui…" He sighed in frustration.
"Is-is she…" The young girl fell onto her knees, almost as if her legs had given way beneath her as the adrenaline of the situation wore away…
"I doubt she will be in any state to follow through with her threat." Alice comforted her. "Or to do anything, really."
"Well, it's been twenty seconds now, any oils or liquids on her skin will have frozen to the point of frostbite, and she'll have blacked out by now. Give it a few more minutes, and she'll be dead. A bit longer, and she'll be frozen solid as she drifts in deep space, only to be hit by-" Kirito explained the mechanics of how the pirate captain would have died in rather more detail than she wished to know.
A glare from herself was enough to tell him that the young girl didn't need traumatising any more; and what happened to the human body in the vacuum of space definitely met the category of "traumatising", especially when that body was a person they had known…
Even if that person was a cowardly pirate captain who was threatening to have her crew do unspeakable things to them.
"They'll kill us all now…" The young girl said, a realisation setting in, whilst Kirito looked around for anything they could use to fight back.
"Hey, Kiri-dude, are you guys still alive up there? We've got the pirates all dealt with down here…"
/-/
Klein was a man who had a code of honour.
That in itself wasn't unusual, he thought, though his friends had reminded him that most people do not usually write their own code of honour down on their bedroom wall, nor do they usually have it engraved on their own suit of armour that they had tried to fashion themselves…
He'd soon come to the realisation that he was no master blacksmith, and that the suit of armour was nothing more than scrap metal after his attempts, but that's besides the point, he thought.
As Klein, the samurai of deep space, and navigation officer of the Centoria, he had standards to uphold - those standards being that he was now beholden to impress their second set of unplanned guests.
The first set of unplanned guests had been pirates, hellbent on looting their stuff, and he had done his best to handle himself as they all tried to fight back.
That hadn't gone so well, and whilst Sinon did her best impression of a xenomorph, ripping and tearing her way through the pirates with her claws, he had been forced to resort to more… underhanded tactics to handle the pirates.
Was it in line with his code of honour to push one of them down the stairs to dispatch them? No.
Was it about the only way he was getting out of this to fight another day? Yes.
Then, as all seemed hopeless (bar Sinon tearing through the swathes of pirates sent after her anyway), they appeared, and their commander in particular, almost like an angel…
Soldiers of a proud warrior race, no doubt, who were almost identical to human beings, except for some features that if Klein thought about it, reminded him more of fantasy elves than a race of space faring aliens, though he was not complaining about that part; not one bit…
Mainly as the commander of the "Knights", as they called themselves, was a complete babe!
About Kirito's height, with beautiful tanned skin, deep purple eyes, and short purple hair, he honestly wondered if he'd been beaten, and she was simply the image of an angel he was seeing, but she was very much there.
"I would appreciate it if you would please stop staring." The commander asked.
"Ah hah, yeah, sorry 'bout that." He laughed nervously. Yes, she was drop dead gorgeous… but she had just demonstrated that she knew how to use that sword, and his only real defence was a big stick.
"Are you the only survivors?" She asked.
"Don't know, I don't know if…"
"They're all dealt with." Sinon popped out of the pipes, her turquoise hair dangling out as she did. "If that doesn't earn me a raise, I don't know what will…"
"You have a felisapian aboard… interesting. I have never seen a tame one before."
"Felisapian?" He asked, trying to work out the hell that was. Felis-ohh… "Oh, you mean Sinon? Yeah, I wouldn't call her tame…"
Based on how she had managed to rip through the pirates, he would probably suggest she was more feral than anything else. Terrifying was also a good fit, if they were coming up with words to describe her too.
"What else would you suggest for a creature that lives on your ship, like that?"
"Errmm…" He paused to try and think of a word to describe Sinon that wouldn't result in his rapid and unscheduled disassembly from her claws. The most obvious word there was "stray", but that carried connotations that would no doubt get him disemboweled by the catgirl - sorry, Felisapien, even. "She's a member of our crew."
"Well said, as she does appear to be glaring at us…"
"She has a name, you know…" Sinon told them pointedly, though it was kind of difficult to take her seriously as she dangled out of the pipes.
Thankfully for him, she decided to jump out of the pipes, and taking the phrase "a cat always lands on their feet" to its extreme, Sinon was able to land almost perfectly, despite having been inverted…
"Apologies, that was rather rude of me - I am Kizmel of Lyusula."
"Klein of Tokyo." He bowed at her, earning a roll of the eyes from Sinon as he did, and a small chuckle from Kizmel.
"In my culture, we only bow for royalty, and I assure you, I am not royalty; Klein of Tokyo."
In contrast, Sinon's introduction was a relatively muted one, offering only her name and a polite nod. "Sinon. Chief engineer."
Not bloody likely, he thought to himself - it was her brief stint as chief engineer that was why they were here in the first place!
"Ahh, then you can advise me if the pirates stole anything resembling a probability drive from you then." Kizmel asked politely, and the look on Sinon's face was one that he would treasure; the first time she really had not got an answer for a question…
"Yeah, chief engineer, did they steal our probability drive?" He asked with an amused smile, before Sinon parsed her claws at him, and he backed away a little…
"I don't actually know what one of those is." Sinon admitted, a pained look on her face at having to admit that. "But I think we know someone who might."
Tapping his commlink, he called up to the flight deck. "Hey, Kiri-dude, are you guys still alive up there? We've got the pirates all dealt with down here…"
/-/
After the walk up to the flight deck - which Klein had sworn felt a lot shorter when he was being chased… though he admitted that probably had more to do with being chased than it did the distance involved - the realisation that both groups had wound up with a tag along had set in.
They had brought back Kizmel, a gorgeous warrior babe from an alien planet - probably - whilst Kirito and Alice had found a young girl who seemed to be stuck with a thousand yard stare…
"Probability drive?" Kirito asked, trying to wrap his head around the concept. "Never even heard of one."
"Papa, a probability drive is a device that adjusts the probability of events around its installation." Yui began to explain. "For example, the probability of Klein getting with Kizmel is roughly one in four trillion-" He gave the ceiling a death glare, the closest he could get to glaring at Yui, whilst Alice and Sinon fought back their laughter. "- but with a probability drive nearby, the improbable becomes probable. It can also be reversed so the most obvious outcome of an action becomes the least likely outcome - for example, if I were to bounce a rubber ball off a wall, the most probable outcome is that it bounces back. In that setting, the rubber ball may become a cricket ball and hit Klein in the genitals instead."
"Why am I the punching bag today!?" He asked, finally fed up with Yui's use of him as an example.
"Yui, can we do this explanation without insulting Klein, please sweetie?"
"Yes papa. As I was saying, it adjusts the natural order of things, as well as interfering with cause and effect. For that reason, these devices are deeply dangerous in the wrong hands…"
"Did we ever have one onboard?"
"No, stowaway, we did not."
"Umm, I might be able to help there." The young girl, Silica, said quietly. "We had one onboard - the crew used it to make it more likely ships would end up where we wanted them, and make it easier to loot them…"
"Which would explain how we ended up where we did then." Alice answered. "For once, Kirito, you are off the hook for your error in navigation."
Ever a better man than he was, Kirito ignored the hologram's comments and carried on. "Maybe we should, you know, destroy it before-"
"Dear lord, man!" Kizmel cried out, aghast at the suggestion, and everyone looked at her with a sense of confusion - if it was so dangerous to the fabric of reality, then why shouldn't they destroy it in order to prevent anyone else getting their hands on it?
"Papa, that would be very ill-advised. The drive operates by ripping small holes in the fabric between realities, and then repairing them once they have been used to adjust the probability of certain events. As such, destroying it risks reopening the tears in space-time and destroying the universe."
"So, it's a bad idea then." Klein agreed, not understanding the technical details… but knowing, at the very least, that the end of the universe was bad for all of them.
"So, what do we do with it then?"
"I have an idea…" Alice said, with a proud look on her face as they headed over to the pirates' ship to disable the probability drive…
/-/
"This… was your idea?" Kirito asked, looking at the small sticker now placed on the operating console - a sticker marked "defective equipment". "A sticker."
"It discourages me from using things." Alice answered, defending her plan to them. Somehow, Kirito thought to himself, that didn't surprise him that a warning sticker would actually put Alice off from using most machinery, even when the sticker wasn't all that relevant to the problem at hand.
She was just that OCD sometimes…
"Well, I must say it is certainly a… unique way of handling the problem." Kizmel thought aloud, though he could just tell that "unique" wasn't a compliment here… "We tend to just deactivate the machine though."
"I thought you said we couldn't do that!"
"I said destroy, not deactivate." Kizmel pointed out. "How do you think maintenance was done on them if they could not be turned off?" The more Kirito thought about that, the more it made sense to him - maintenance would be difficult, especially when the machine could make your spanner suddenly turn into a spaniel whilst you adjusted a bolt…
"Yeah, that makes sense…" He sighed, and pretended they hadn't all just been complete idiots in forgetting that you can turn a machine off without blowing it into a million pieces. "Wait, how do you do that?"
"Like this." Kizmel flipped a switch on the side of the machine, and it began to power down.
"Wait… how did you do that?"
"I believed human equipment also had on-off switches too?" Kizmel asked, and for the second time today, Kirito found himself fighting the urge to slap himself really hard for not assuming that it simply had an off switch.
Like every other machine ever did.
"We are all idiots, aren't we?" Klein asked, and he found himself nodding in agreement. "We thought of smashing it up before we thought of, oh I don't know, flipping the off switch!"
"Speak for yourself." Sinon told them, even though she hadn't exactly thought of it either. "So, what happens now though? Someone could just, I don't know, do this?" The catgirl reached over and flipped the switch again, before a violent bang hit the ship, and set them flying again…
"What just - phh- happened?" He asked, having ended up with Alice's ponytail in his mouth from the impact - how the hologram simulated hair that well, he would never know…
"I believe the probability of something colliding with us just increased exponentially." Kizmel pointed out, and he decided he really, really hated this machine.
To the point that, had such an idea not been suicidal for the universe, he would've beaten it to diodes with a breaker bar.
"Uhh, guys, you might want to see what just collided with us…" Klein told them, looking out of the window in shock.
"Yet more pirates?" Asked Sinon.
"No."
"The Earth?" Asked Alice.
"Also no."
"Go on, enlighten us what just… you have got to be kidding me." Kirito said in complete shock at what he was seeing. That was impossible… wasn't it?
How on… well, the notion of Earth, had that hit them?!
An exact, and he meant exact, replica of the Centoria had sideswiped them from somewhere, despite the fact that every single sensor on both ships seemed to suggest there was absolutely nothing else around for hundreds, if not thousands of light years…
"Interesting…" Kizmel said, nodding as if this wasn't a complete failure of the laws of time, space and physics…
"Should we be concerned by their reactions?" Alice asked Sinon, before looking out the window herself. "Yes is the answer, yes we should."
"It can't be that-" Sinon paused. "Okay, it is that bad. Shouldn't we have exploded into nothingness by now though from the paradox?"
"Yeah, about that…" A new, though extremely familiar voice, told them from across the other side of the room. A voice he initially didn't fully recognise until he turned around to face the person it belonged to…
Himself.
"This is where it gets complicated." Alice spoke, but not his Alice. A different Alice that looked almost entirely identical to his Alice, except for the absence of the H on her forehead.
In fact, the entire crew was here, bar one notable absence - Sinon.
For the first time since they had been aboard the Centoria, Silica - their Silica - spoke up. "Is this just a bad day, or is this normal?"
"Oh, you have no idea how bad of a day this really is…" A slightly scratched up Silica told her counterpart, and Kirito wondered exactly why there was a cat with them, and yet they hadn't found…
Oh.
"Oh my god." Alice fought back laughter at the same realisation, whilst Silica began to pet what he assumed was Sinon, who - unsurprisingly for a cat - was not massively impressed by the enthusiastic young girl petting her… "Well, at least she cannot cause any more mechanical issues now…"
"That's uhh, kind of why we're here. Sinon turned herself back into a kitten." Klein - the other Klein - told them, and Kirito seriously had to wonder what the heck her biology actually was, if she grew up from a kitten into… Well, Sinon!
The other Silica was probably right - this was going to be a very bad day, he now reckoned...