The ship cruised
silently thought the voids of space causing hardly a ripple on the fabric of reality,
Joshua Make-piece knew his ship and how to control it, and she had seen him
through a number of close calls in the past few years. He liked this time of
the day, the quiet time, time when his crew had logged off for the day leaving
him at the helm.
The concept of
day and night didn’t really exist in space, with no orbiting sun there was
nothing to reference against, so the ship kept count for them, though their
enemies didn’t care what time they attacked and he could count four times so
far that he’d had to get out of the bath in order to decapitate some bad guy or
other, and he’d usually had to refill it afterwards as the water seemed to go
cold quickly in space.
It had taken him
almost half a century to collect his crew, travelling the far flung reaches of
the universe picking up the best, the brightest and the toughest that he came
across. Mad John McGrunderer he’d found on a small asteroid, as he survived on
all that remained of his planet, though he didn’t like to talk about what
happened to the rest of it. Plain Jane the Ninja Queen had joined him after the
massacre of Aisle Two on Tesco seven. Gunder Jack and Psycho Bill had escaped
from Juniper 21 using only a used toothbrush and a bag of marbles, and Bill Brain-Smasher
was just a very good cook. He stared out into the darkness before him, lost in
his own thoughts when there came a knock at the door.
“Enter.” He called,
in his crisp English accent.
“Beggin your
pardon, Captain.” Mad John grinned, “But me and the boys just wondered if you
fancied doing something. You know, to pass the time sort of thing.”
“You mean a
rescue, or an attack on a heavily defended outpost?” The captain’s eyes sparked,
“Maybe to go head to head against the Jukiluk Bird of Ontar one, naked and armed
with only a spatula?”
“No, not really.”
Mad John shook his head. “Jane was thinking of Monopoly.”
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