Rosa, the Dimension Pirate
By Matisse Mozer
Rosa didn’t learn how to pilot the ship until she was twelve, and even then, she wasn’t allowed to fly until her fifteenth birthday. Now it was two years later, and Captain Don Schaeder was trying to shoot her down.
“Hold on!” Rosa yelled, heaving her whole body sideways and taking the ship into a corkscrew spin. She stood on the bridge, hands interfacing with the holographic controls. Two lime-green torpedoes wove through the wings of her small ship and kept going, passing through white clouds and disappearing in the blue sky. “Goose? Goose, what’s our fuel look like?”
Goose Mackenzie sat at the navigation computer behind her. Four computer screens, six tablets, and two holographic displays all blinked rapidly, but Goose’s thin fingers whipped away at her six keyboards. “It’s about as it good as it was when we took off,” she said.
“We’re not empty yet.”
“Not yet, because we maybe have... And I do mean, maybe...”
“Goose, just give it to me!”
“We’ve got about five minutes of fuel left.”
Rosa swore.
Don Schaeder’s ship came into view overhead.
“They’re activating tractor beams, Cap,” Goose continued. “I can try to hack their navigator’s equipment, but without fuel, we’re gonna fall.”
Rosa took her hands off of the holographic controls and let her worn arms hang limp. The ship was meant to be piloted by a grown man with typical pirate muscles, not a teenager who never had enough to eat.
She weighed her options.
“Let them tractor us,” Rosa said.
Goose smiled. “I’m guessing that means you have a plan.”
“That’s a word for it.”
The ship buckled. Goose’s displays went dark.
They had seconds before the ship was in docking range.
Rosa ran, pulling Goose with her as she went, leaving the bridge behind, then running down the short hallway past the mess hall to the cargo load. The rest of her crew—two older men and one man from a dimension that hadn’t developed spoken language—all looked at the cargo bay door with unease.
“Goose,” Rosa said, “I need the smallest tablet you have.”
The ship gave a final rumble. The cold, recycled air was suffocating in Rosa’s lungs.
There was a BANG against the cargo door, and another, and another. Goose passed Rosa a small tablet, busted up at the edges but still functional.
Rosa turned the small screen to the program she needed, then placed it in her hip pocket.
The locks released with a gentle click, and the doors pulled to the sides. There were familiar faces on the other side: Barnes, the young man who towered over everyone and Jameson, with his dark skin, long gray beard, and piercing blue eyes.
Barnes and Jameson entered the cargo room and aimed their handguns at Rosa’s crew. Barnes glanced at the defiant Rosa and Goose. He smirked.
“That went on long enough,” came another low, gravelly voice from behind them. “Did you work out your little tantrum yet, Rosa?”
He came through the doors just as he usually did: with a long-barreled gun in one hand and a cigar in the other. His height, his powerful arms, his thick mustache and even the snarl on his face intimidated his foes, but they weren’t his calling card. Don Schaeder’s remaining human eye had died long ago and calcified, but it had been left in the socket for no good reason other than that it looked terrifying. His other eye, the bronze metal one had a black hole and green dot for a sensor; it darted in his skull as he surveyed the room.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he continued, “I’m proud, if anything. Stealing my map to the Treasure, taking a cruiser, even getting a crew—it’s all good stuff. You’re a lot like your old man.”
He was not Rosa’s father but he liked to think that kidnapping someone earned him the title.
“The only problem here,” Don Schaeder said, “is that you recruited a crew from prisoners.” He clicked his tongue, then turned to Rosa’s crew. “You all could have had lives when we returned home. You all blew it.”
“Slavery,” said the oldest crewman. “Slavery is not a life.”
“Sorry you feel that way,” Don Schaeder remarked.
He aimed his gun and pulled the trigger.
The bullet caught the crewman between the eyes. The man fell backwards with the gunshot, his eyes still open.
Rosa’s agonized scream echoed around them.
Don Schaeder turned his weapon to the younger man. Rosa understood his grunts and panicked gestures. Any human being would have. But Schaeder didn’t care. He fired.
Rosa closed her eyes. Counted the seconds. She could still get away. She had to get off this ship and make it to the Treasure. She just had to wait...
The final crewman’s final word was a curse. Then he, too, was gone with a blast.
She’d failed them. Good men, all of them. But Rosa’s plan was almost complete...
Then Goose screamed.
Rosa opened her eyes. Don Schaeder had Goose’s head in his gigantic hand, gun at his side.
“Those idiots betrayed my kindness,” he said. “But you, kid?” He nodded at Rosa. “You need to learn a lesson for all this, I think.”
He aimed the gun at Goose’s head.
Rosa took a quick breath and tapped the button on her tablet.
The ship’s lights went out. It was pitch-black now, save for the BANG of the next gunshot, but Rosa had tackled Goose, and the two girls fell to the ground unharmed. Goose opened her mouth and struggled to breathe, but the life support was out, along with everything else. Barnes and Jameson began choking.
Rosa got up and ran like hell.
She got to the bridge and activated the holographic displays. She hit the ignition on the ship. Everything came back on, but the life support wouldn’t turn on again until they were well out of range.
She made sure the cargo bay was still wide open, then she flipped the engines to overdrive.
The tractor beam was good, but not that good. Rosa’s cruiser tore away from its captor. She dared to look behind her: the cargo bay was empty, bodies and inhabitants shifted and thrown by the chaos. Goose would be okay, Rosa told herself. Goose had to be okay.
She swallowed the pit in her throat.
Goose would forgive her. She hoped.
The holographic displays flickered on and off. Goose had been right: they were out of power. Rosa set the steering to autopilot and went to the navigator desk, feeling herself go weightless as the gravity went offline. She saw the one device she needed and caught the small glass mechanism in her anxious hands.
Only thing left to do: get into an escape pod. Outside, the ground got clearer and clearer. Buildings, trees, even roads. She wasn’t going to make it.
Jack Hurwitz was living through the worst summer of his life.
Okay, so maybe he was exaggerating. He’d failed his classes, sure, and he wasn’t going to a four-year college right away, but what did that matter? He would go to community college, move out, get a job, live like everybody else.
The future would suck. It didn’t mean he had to hate the present, too.
Jack sat in the backyard of his stepmother’s home. After his grades came back, he’d gotten the cold shoulder for two weeks straight. Jack wondered how people managed to be pissed off at someone 24/7. Didn’t that get exhausting?
At any rate, he wasn’t going to get bored. A stolen beer from his father’s stash and a view of the afternoon sky told him that much.
And even better, there was a plane with one of those smoke trail things, probably about to write something in the sky. That was Colorado for you: a beer and an artist in a plane, and you were good.
Except the plane wasn’t changing direction. It was heading straight down, at a ninety-degree angle, as if his trigonometry teacher had drawn the damn thing. It caught fire and accelerated, landing past the town’s main street and clear west of the Thompsons’ property.
Another piece of the—what, maybe a satellite?—broke off, this one curving and shooting upward first, then coming back down with a vengeance. Jack stood up, cold beer freezing his hand.
It was coming right for his backyard.
Jack ran into the back porch. He put the beer on the windowsill and clapped his hands over his ears.
The impact shook his world. Laundry fell off the machines, plates fell from the kitchen cabinets and shattered, pictures in the living room dropped and exploded into glass shards. His parents were definitely gonna kill him now.
Jack lay on the linoleum tile of the back porch and watched the smoke trail rise up. He got to his hands and knees slowly. He glanced out the window. The satellite piece had formed a straight-up smoking crater where the tool shed used to be.
A loud banging noise came from inside the crater. BANG. BANG.
Satellites didn’t usually have people fighting to get out, right? Jack’s mind went to the first thing he could think of. It was an alien. Definitely.
He knew that aliens probably could do better than attacking Beaton, Colorado on their first invasion, but still. He had to see it. Jack took his beer from the windowsill, took a deep breath to give himself courage, and went to the smoking ruins.
A final BANG and a blue-and-green metal door fell off of the very-probably-alien-ship.
If they said, “Take me to your leader,” Jack was totally going to say he was the President.
The alien emerged. The alien looked an awful lot like a teenage girl.
“Holy shit,” Jack said. “You’re like a kid, aren’t you?”
She held a hand to her head and she was staggering as she walked out of the crater. Her skin was a tanned honey color, and she had a jet-black ponytail of thick curls. Jack didn’t know what he expected at this point, but her chubby cheeks and short, round legs weren’t part of it. And what the hell was she wearing? They looked like tattered rags.
She opened her mouth to speak.
The words that came out were the fastest, fiercest gibberish he’d ever heard.
“Sorry, I can’t understand you,” Jack said. He pointed at his mouth. “Are you an alien?”
The girl’s brow furrowed.
“You’re on Earth,” Jack said. “This is my parent’s house.”
“Earth,” the girl said. “Earth.”
That was a start. “I’m Jack,” he said. “Jack Hurwitz.”
The girl pointed to herself. “Rosa.” She held up a finger, like she wanted him to wait where he was, before going back to the crater.
The alien girl—Rosa—came back with a flat piece of glass in one hand, and a small black tablet in the other. Like an iPhone, Jack thought.
Rosa pressed a few buttons on the tablet’s screen. A piece of it detached, and when she removed it, it looked an awful lot like one of those micro earbuds. She offered it to Jack.
He mulled it over for about two seconds, then stuffed it in his right ear.
“Can you understand me?” Rosa asked, in clear-as-day English.
Jack nodded. “Sure. Welcome to Colorado. Is that your ship?”
She pulled a huge, long-barreled gun out of her back pocket and aimed it at his chest.
Jack dropped the beer.
“Is Don Schaeder with you? Is he here?” she asked.
“Don what? Is that a drink, or something?”
“Is he with you?” Rosa looked past him, at the house, back at the rubble, then up at the sky. Jack could basically feel her anxiety in the air. “Does he have the Treasure?”
“Treasure? What the hell are you talking about?”
Jack did a mental back-up. If this was a smaller ship that came from a crashing one, it was probably an escape pod. She had a gun, she had worn-out clothes, and now she was asking about treasure.
“Are you like, an alien pirate or something?”
Rosa kept the gun trained at him, but her features relaxed. She finally took a breath, then the gun lowered. “Where is this?” she asked.
“Colorado. It’s like, in the middle of the USA? Part of North America?” But then, when she showed no reaction, added, “You have no idea what those are, do you?”
“Colorado’s supposed to be by the waterfront.”
“No, I guarantee you, there’s no beaches around here. I mean, if there were, rent would be so crazy...I mean, I have a cousin out in Cali? That rent is insane, and you’re not listening to me, are you?”
She had the flat glass thing held up to the sun now. “Tell me something. Do you have wireless computation on in this reality?”
Jack tilted his head. “You mean like the Internet? You’re from another planet and you’re asking about the Internet?”
“I’m not from another planet. I’m not going to ask for your leader, Jack. I need an AC adapter.”
Jack snapped his fingers. “I have that! That, I do have.” He started toward the house, but stopped and said, “Come inside. I have, like, six phone chargers.”
This summer was going to be awesome.
This was going horribly.
She had landed fine, but her ship was lost somewhere out in the forest of an alternate Earth, one where the states and geography didn’t match up with what she remembered from this version of Earth. Her escape pod was busted beyond recognition. Her crew was dead.
But at least Jack Hurwitz seemed nice enough.
Jack led her through a hallway to a room cluttered with manuals, vaguely recognizable circuit boards, and multiple computer towers. Jack tiptoed through the mess to a table in the back and waved her through. “Be careful,” he said. “My dad sort of likes his mess where it is.”
He fished through the jumble of wires on the desk and held up a squid-like cable. It had a port to connect to the wall—Rosa recognized the AC out—and six different kinds of tablet interface dongles. “See if any of these work,” Jack said. “I mean, it’s probably like, stone-age-y compared to what you’ve got from wherever you’re from.”
Rosa looked at him. Jack was a pretty disheveled looking guy, now that she thought about it. Bushy brown hair in need of a cut, a shirt that was too baggy, pants with holes in the knees and calves. He had none of Don Schaeder’s intentionally terrifying look. There didn’t seem to be anything intentional about Jack at all.
But he helped her find an outlet and plug in her glass screen. It blinked gold, on and off. When it showed a solid gold color, Rosa ran her finger along the glass, then flicked it up into the center of the room. The map exploded all around them. It was a wirework—no buildings or specific locations—of the general area, with X and Y-axis coordinates on the edges. Jack spun around, watching the wirework rotate and calibrate itself to the size of the room.
Rosa held her hands out and twisted them. The map responded, spinning with her movements and soon there were three silver dots hovering in the air.
“This one is us,” Rosa explained, pointing to the one furthest from the other two. Then at another dot: “This is the Treasure I was tracking, so this one...”
“That’s your ship, right?”
“Right.” Rosa touched the point for the ship. Coordinates wrote themselves into the map. “You need to take me there.”
“Hold on. Nobody said anything about driving you around.”
Great. Now she had to actually be a pirate.
Rosa closed the map. “Here’s the deal, Jack. I’m from an alternate Earth,” she started. “Don Schaeder is the captain of the ship I was on. Pirates like us travel to different realities and steal the core of territories scattered around the planet’s surface. That’s the treasure. We keep taking more territory cores until the planet is drained. Then we go back to our Earth and sell them to the highest bidder, and half the time, they end up destroying the treasure to make something else. That means the dimension that treasure is from dies. If you don’t take me to my ship, right now, Don Schaeder will kill everything you know. I won’t let him do it, but I need you to work with me.”
Jack didn’t fall over. He didn’t even react. In fact, for such an easygoing guy, his silence was worrying.
“Fine. Do it your way, then.” Rosa reached for her weapon.
That seemed to wake him up. Jack rolled his eyes and held a hand up. “I’ll take you, don’t trip out. Jeez. Let a guy process dimension pirates for a second, would you?” He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “I mean...that’s a pretty neat story.”
“It’s not a story.”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard you and I saw the map and everything. Let me get my dad’s keys. Just tell me where to turn, yeah?”
Jack’s parents’ car was old enough that the stereo didn’t have an aux port, but at least the engine went fast. He pulled out of the driveway and started for the highway. Rosa directed him out past civilization and to the forest.
“Hey,” Jack asked. “Question.”
“Ask it.”
“When I get you to your ship, what happens then?”
“We’ll find a way to jump-start the ship, and then I’ll fly to the treasure’s coordinates.”
“See, that right there. That’s what bugs me. You’re still gonna take the...what were you calling it, treasure? Won’t that kill everyone here, anyway?”
“I don’t plan to sell it. Or let it be harmed in any way.”
“So…you’re just going to hide it?”
“Protect it, actually.”
Jack clicked his tongue. “Huh.”
“You don’t trust me, do you?”
“Not in the forty-five minutes since you crash-landed in my parent’s backyard, not really.”
Rosa spoke slowly. “There are a lot of Earths, but this one is mine. It’s my responsibility.”
“How does a pirate have a responsibility? Unless piracy is like, a completely different thing than what I’m thinking,” Jack said. “Swashbuckling and all that.”
Rosa relaxed back in her seat with a shrug and changed the subject. “Things look a lot different from the last time I was here,” she said. “Everything’s…greener. I’ll give it that.”
They pulled out of the main road and came into a clearing. The downed ship had left a lot of burned branches and foliage in its wake. Jack just followed the trail.
The ship had crashed in a ditch. Jack had clearly imagined something grander than what he was seeing: an inter-dimensional car wreck, with chunks of metal flung off and stuck in trees, and long plates of steel standing upright in the dirt. He parked the car before the ditch started to slope.
“Wanna check out your ship?” he asked.
They got out of the car and approached the wreck slowly. The ship was maybe four times larger than the escape pod with the same purple hull and same kind of thrusters.
The back area—what would be the trunk in a car—was wide open. It was dark inside.
They walked into the interior of the ship, Rosa feeling for handholds and a walkway, and Jack doing his best not to stumble and fall.
“Just keep going straight back,” Rosa said confidently. The air smelled like smoke and iron. “I think it’s...it should be this button here,” she said.
The cruiser came alive. Jack watched as the overhead lights came on to reveal a chair surrounded by computers and a large, open space in the frontmost part of the room. Holograms flickered, and Rosa stood in the middle of them, effortlessly touching the floating diagrams.
“The ship is working,” Rosa said. There was an accusing tone. “It was dead before I used the escape pod. Someone must have done something to it. I should check the ship’s logs.”
“I know what those are!” Jack shot a finger in the air. “Do you guys have a holodeck, too?”
“A what?”
He sighed. “Never mind.”
Jack sat in the chair by the computers. He spun the chair once, just for kicks, then froze. There was another pirate in the doorway.
“Holy shit,” Jack said.
The pirate was taller and older than both of them. He was leaning on the doorframe, his gun trained at Rosa but his hand shook as he tried to keep it pointed at her. He must have taken a blow to the head, judging from all the blood on the hand he pressed to it.
“You’re not going anywhere,” the pirate said.
Rosa regarded him with a shrug. “Hello, Barnes. I see you survived. Did you want a bandage?”
“Betrayin’ the Cap is a capital offense. You’ll be hanged for your actions, you hear me? And you’re giving me that map,” Barnes said.
“We both know you can’t touch the treasure without Schaeder’s equipment unless you’re originally from its dimension. It’ll blow you apart,” Rosa said. “But go find the treasure yourself anyway. Have fun with that.”
Barnes’ gaze darted to Jack.
He changed targets. Jack’s hands went up and his body went stiff with fear.
“He dies,” Barnes said. “The boy dies, or you give me that map.” The demand lingered in the still air. None one of them moved.
“Suit yourself,” Barnes said.
There was a gunshot and Barnes fell forward, lifeless as his blood poured onto the floor. Behind him stood another teenager, this one with her hair in a conservative ponytail, wearing thick glasses, and holding a gun in her hand.
Rosa’s hug was more of a tackle. “Goose!”
“I’m alive,” Goose said, gasping . Rosa’s arms were around the girl’s neck, tight. “Though if you don’t let me go, I’m gonna get knocked out again.”
“What happened? Tell me everything.”
“I hid in the cargo load and sealed myself in a locker so I wouldn’t fly out the back when you did that nosedive thing,” Goose said. She held the gun out with her index finger and thumb and placed it on the ground gingerly. “At least, I think that’s what I did. Blacking out from choking sorta does a one-two on your memory.”
Rosa winced. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
“Can I get a ‘sorry’ too?” Jack asked. “For, I don’t know, almost being shot?”
Goose glanced over Rosa’s shoulder at Jack. “Is he from this Earth?” she asked.
“I’m Jack,” he said, “and yeah, I’m from here.”
“This is Goose,” Rosa told him. “She’s my navigator and first mate. Plus, she’s the finest mechanic I’ve ever met.”
“She’s only exaggerating a little bit,” Goose added.
Then, the two girls’ excitement faded. They leaned against the doorway edges.
“So,” Goose said. “We’ve got the map to the treasure and I found some reserves to let the ship fly for another hour, at most. I mean, then the engine will have to be nearly rebuilt, but that’s the best I can get you...oh, and there’s an escape pod. For if we wanna run away again.”
“I have a plan,” Rosa said. She added, “But I hate my plans.”
“Most people do,” Goose said, then added, “but I’m not most people.”
Rosa exhaled and ran her hands down her face. “We can’t just go get the treasure,” Rosa said. “Don Schaeder is waiting for us to lift off. He’ll follow me until I have it, and then...but he won’t shoot us down until we land because he doesn’t want me dead, and he won’t know we’re landing at the treasure point.” Rosa snapped her fingers once, twice, and then she turned to Jack, the urgency in her eyes threatening to electrify him. “How quickly can you drive?”
When Jack first heard about treasure, he figured it would be something grand. Maybe a literal pot of gold, but also possibly an ancient crystal, or a magical key, or hell, a magical credit card, for all Jack knew. It was gonna be amazing.
Sitting in a Starbucks on Main Street wasn’t what he had in mind. He sipped his grande coffee and did some math: three hours of his time, five bucks for the coffee, and some likely-PTSD-inducing run-ins with weapons. In exchange, he was helping a cute girl save the world.
Not a bad deal, really.
The clock on the wall struck the top of the hour, and right on time, Rosa and Goose kicked in the door and pointed their guns at everyone. “Stay where you are, and nobody gets a bullet,” Rosa announced. “I’m not here for money. Stay still.”
Goose stayed near the door, her weapon trained on the manager. Rosa walked through the tables. “I need a volunteer.” A woman with her child on her lap let out a frightened sob. Rosa pointed the gun at Jack. “You. Up, on your feet. Now.”
Jack was no actor—his F in Drama confirmed that—but he did his best to have a shaky walk, shifting eyes, and a trembling lower lip. “What do you want from me?” he asked.
Rosa jabbed the gun in his back and they kept moving, walking behind the barista’s counter. The two college-aged employees backed away, their hands in the air. Rosa and Jack stopped in front of the register. Rosa took out the map screen and pressed it with her thumb. Instead of opening the wirework of coordinates, it sent up one beam of golden light, first to the ceiling, then shooting straight through the glass and down into the ground.
The building shook, gently at first, then with a decided rumble. Porcelain mugs, thermoses, and displays hit the ground and shattered. The tile at Jack and Rosa’s feet cracked from the inside, lifting up like a welt, and finally shattering through the ground entirely. The gold beam lifted up a small gold object from the hole and held it hovering in the air.
“That’s it,” Rosa sounded awed. But only for a moment.
She prodded Jack with the gun. He took the flat golden treasure from the beam and held the warm metal in his hand.
“Let’s move,” Rosa called. Goose nodded, still brandishing her weapon at the customers, as Rosa led Jack to the doors. He went outside first, followed by Rosa, and finally Goose went behind them.
There were no cars in the intersection, thankfully because this needed to be dramatic.
Goose turned her gun on Rosa.
“Fork it over,” Goose said. Rosa kept her weapon at Jack but focused her attention on Goose. “Give it back now, and you get to live.”
“Goose?” Rosa asked. She was a pretty lousy actor, too. “What the hell are you doing?”
“That doesn’t belong to you. The map belongs to Don Schaeder. If you ask me, so does the treasure.”
Rosa lowered her gun, eyes wide and arms open. “You’re not doing this. Tell me you’re not. Please.”
“I will kill you, Rosa. Give it to me .”
Goose could definitely sell it, Jack thought.
“Goose, you’re not from this Earth,” Rosa said. “You can’t even touch it.”
“No, but he can.” Goose nodded to Jack. “Give him to me.”
“This is my home,” Rosa said. “Don’t let Don Schaeder destroy it. Not this dimension.”
Goose did not relent. “Give it to me, or I’ll kill you, Rosa. I swear to God.”
This was the part that Jack sincerely disagreed with.
Rosa pointed her own gun at Jack’s head and pulled the trigger.
Then Rosa’s gun burst and shards of the wooden hilt and metal barrel flew, one chunk catching Jack in the eye and sending him to the ground howling in agony. Rosa fell beside him, cradling her hand and crying from the pain.
Pain had not been part of the plan.
The road behind them blurred, then re-focused. The purple ship of Don Schaeder, in its massive glory, hovered directly overhead. A shuttlecraft had landed in the street, its doors open.
Standing in front of Jameson and another man who Rosa did not recognize, was none other than the captain himself, smoking gun in one hand, cigar in the other. His mechanical eyeball watched the scene, emotionless. “Ain’t this a sight for sore eyes,” Don Schaeder said. “Just the one. Ha!”
Lifeless laughter from the crewmen filled the silence
“Gwendolyn, dear,” he said. Goose cringed. “Staying loyal to her captain over his renegade daughter. I’m impressed.”
“Thank you,” Goose said.
“You’ll be rewarded soon enough,” he added. “Now, about that treasure.” He motioned for Jameson. The older man pulled Jack to his feet and dragged the bleeding boy to his feet. “Open your hand, boy,” Don Schaeder said.
“Not on your life.”
Don Schaeder sighed. “Young people these days.”
He snapped his fingers. Jameson and the other crewmate took Jack by both arms and dragged him toward Don Schaeder. Jack’s legs scrambled and skidded on the pavement while his face dripped blood. Jameson took Jack’s hand and held it out, but he kept his fist closed.
Jameson twisted Jack’s arm, not hard enough to break it, but enough to force Jack’s hand open. The Treasure fell from his palm and landed on the ground.
“I’ll grab it, Cap,” Jameson said.
Don Schaeder yelled, “You blithering idiot, don’t touch it—”
It was too late. Jameson knelt down. The instant his hand touched the smooth surface of the gold piece, his body shone with the same golden light as the map, his skin illuminated from the inside.
For an instant, it was beautiful. Then his body turned in on itself. A golden black hole pulled his arms and legs and screaming mouth into itself and shut, just as fast as it had appeared. Then, he was gone.
“I tried to tell him,” Don Schaeder remarked. He knelt down and studied the treasure for a moment. Then he picked it up, flipped it in the air with his thumb, and caught it in his grip.
“That’s impossible,” Rosa said, her words slurring as her jaw hung. “You can’t be from here...you can’t.”
“I’m just like you, dearest daughter of mine. I’m from this dimension, too.”
“Stop.”
“You never wondered why a pirate would kidnap you? Let me tell you, I like my job, but it gets lonely every once in a while. You want someone to talk to, and children are so young and impressionable.” Don Schaeder stared at her, making sure she felt the weight of his presence. “Someone took me away, too, you know. Showed me what the world—what all the worlds—had to offer. I like to think I did you a favor, raising you myself.”
“I had a family!”
“And I gave you who you are.”
Rosa had a speech ready for the day when this happened. Things she had wanted to scream at him since she was a little girl. A lot of ‘how could you,’ maybe a ‘why this world,’ that sort of thing. But today, she could settle for brevity. “I am going to kill you.”
Don Schaeder pursed his lips. “Good luck,” he said.
Rosa pushed the button on the tablet hidden in her pocket.
“That reminds me,” Don Schaeder said. He clicked the hammer back on his gun. “Gwendolyn? You’ve been a great friend to my daughter. Shame you thought betraying her would make me happy. A traitor only gets one reward, you know.”
He took aim at Goose.
Sudden strong winds kicked up around them, dizzying Don Schaeder’s crewman and blowing his robes up into his face. He lowered his gun and covered his face with his arm.
Overhead, his ship exploded. Orange flames doused the violet craft, submerging the blue sky in jet-black smoke.
“What the hell happened?” Don Schaeder barked, his booming voice almost lost in the noise of falling metal. He dropped a hand to his right side. His artificial eye changed color, shifting from the standard green to the same purple as his former ship. “Readouts...we were hit by an escape pod? What in hell’s name?!”
Rosa moved. She crossed the short intersection and went into a slide, her hand reaching for Jameson’s handgun as she dove forward. But she wasn’t fast enough, even with the debris and cacophony of the exploding ship, and Don Schaeder pointed his weapon at Rosa before she could aim—
Then, he staggered back, clothes and flesh and blood flying from his shoulder. “Gwendolyn,” Don Schaeder snarled. Rosa caught Goose in the corner of her eye, ducking for cover after taking the shot. His wound bled like a waterfall and he sank to one knee. When he tried standing again, his leg gave out, and he landed on his back.
Rosa stood above him, gun pointed at his head, looking him right in his robot eye.
“A lot like your old man. Watching ‘em squirm,” Don Schaeder growled. “You made a mistake, though.”
“You will not belittle me. Ever again—”
“Turn around, kid.”
Rosa didn’t trust him as far as she could chuck his stupid robot eye. But Don Schaeder gave her the same semi-gentle smile he’d used on her for all these years, and she glanced to her right. The crewman she didn’t recognize still had his weapon. Jack Hurwitz was standing, cradling his bloody head with both hands, and the crewman stood behind him, gun to his back.
“Looks to me like you’ve got a choice,” Don Schaeder said. “Your old man or the treasure?”
“You planned this.”
“Don’t look at me! It was all you. And it wasn’t a bad plan. I’m not even mad, except for...that,” he said, pointing limply at his burning ship. “You made me proud, Rosa. You’re a bona-fide pirate’s daughter.”
Civilians hovered around the intersection. Most of them were looking up, pointing and screaming and taking photos. Sirens wailed in the distance.
She had to make a choice, like it or not.
“I want Jack,” Rosa said. “I want him. And the treasure. And I never want to see your face again.”
“You sure you won’t kill me? You won’t get this chance again.”
Don Schaeder searched her face for any weakness, any crack in a facade of bravery.
Rosa was damn sure he wouldn’t find anything.
Don Schaeder signaled to his crewman. The other pirate lowered his weapon. Goose approached Jack and the crewman, her gun aimed but shaking. The crewman backed away from Jack and the boy stood for a moment before falling. Goose was there to catch him before he hit the ground.
The shuttlecraft lifted into the air behind Schaeder and his remaining ally. Once it was directly overhead, a green light shone on the two men, and when it vanished, so did they.
The ship took off for parts unknown.
Rosa had let him live. She thought about that for a minute.
The infamous Don Schaeder, retreating as he bled, without his treasure and without most of his crew, disgraced and defeated by the girl he kidnapped. A killer would have done him in.
Rosa liked her way better.
Jack Hurwitz’s parents almost killed him. Their Infinity had been crushed under parts of the ship that had exploded over Beaton, Colorado. Their backyard and tool shed were left looking like imitations of the Grand Canyon. And to add to that, Jack would never see again out of his right eye.
He had to wear bandages for his first few weeks out of the hospital and then the doctors had him in an eyepatch until they were ready to operate. If his afternoons at home had been boring and lonely before, now he was a full-blown untouchable. Was he even going to go to community college anymore? It was a realistic question.
And did any of that really matter, when he knew about alternate dimensions and pirates and girls with chubby cheeks and guns?
Jack doubted that he would ever see Rosa again. But he hoped. And waited.
And on one autumn afternoon, months later, as a one-eyed Jack sat in the backyard counting the seconds, a purple cruiser materialized above the backyard crater. Jack finished his drink first this time.
The ship landed in the crater and the cargo doors opened. Rosa hadn’t changed a bit: her clothes were still ratty and full of holes, and she still had those stubby legs. She walked down the landing ramp and stared at him, her expression suggesting that she was waiting. Calculating.
“Question,” Jack asked.
“Ask it.”
“You’re not gonna pull out a gun and shoot me, are you? You guys do that a lot.”
Rosa looked away. “I need to give you something.”
“Is it a bullet?”
Rosa held out her hand. In it was the treasure, shining like the sun.
“It’s yours,” Jack said. “We had a deal. You saved the world, you keep the treasure. Just don’t destroy it, right?
“That’s all okay,” Rosa said. She bit her lip, tilted her head. “But it turns out, you need more than two people to run a ship. And the next Earth over is sort of deadly.”
“...so, Goose is doing okay? Speaking of your crew.”
Rosa furrowed her brow.
“Okay, okay,” Jack relented. He knew what she was getting at. It was just fun watching her squirm a bit. “If I’m gonna be a pirate, I have a few demands.”
“You don’t get demands.”
“One? And I’ve only got one. I don’t wanna see this Colorado ever again.”
“That’s doable,” Rosa said. “I can’t promise you won’t get shot eventually. Or get blown apart by shrapnel again.”
“Whatever,” Jack said. “Besides, what are the odds I lose two eyes and need an evil robot one?”
He started up the cargo bay ramp. Rosa followed him. “That’s it? Leaving your old life, just like that?”
“Rosa, my life is boring,” Jack said, pointing to his parents’ home. “The way I see it, it’s the pirate’s life for me. I’ve got nothing to lose. What do you think?”
“It’s not for everyone,” Rosa said, fighting a smile. “You can probably handle it, though.”
The ship’s door closed behind them. It rose up over Beaton, Colorado, and right as Jack’s home became another blip on the horizon, the ship blasted off for the next dimension.