Pirates of Vallahar, Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Plunder

         A lone red-tailed hawk soared high above the expansive chasm of Zander’s Gorge, its eyes searching the morning horizon for intruders. The small blue thread of the Minari River wound sparkling through the bottom of the canyon more than a mile below. The raptor drifted lazily over the crevasse as it spied a large flock of cranes below slowly making its way upstream. A strong, cold breeze wafted through the upper layers of the gorge not yet warmed by the rising sun. The hawk beat its wings as it steered into a warm air current, tail banking. It caught the updraft and circled higher, keeping a keen eye on the clandestine meeting taking place in the sky a mile down the sunlit canyon.
         The hawk gave wide berth to the visitors who’d arrived in his territory half-an-hour ago. The two airships hung motionless over the wide gulf, their wooden hulls bright in the morning sun. The smaller vessel was a weather-beaten, battle-scarred transport. The red and white skull and dagger insignia of The Death Mark pirate band was displayed prominently on its stained bulwarks. It certainly looked as though it had seen better days.
         The pirate ship hung just under the cargo bay to the stern of its much larger partner: A huge, lavish luxury liner; its massive hull decorated with dozens of ornamental carvings and markings. A gigantic, ornately adorned gas balloon was attached to the top of the cruiser by several long, sturdy-looking ropes. The cruiser dwarfed the nasty looking pirate vessel beneath, especially since the smaller ship had no gas balloon to keep it aloft…

         If the outside of the small transport was dilapidated, the inside was downright atrocious. The meeting room in the belly of the transport was filled with the aroma of low grade tobacco and five pirates who felt the need for neither soap nor toilet paper aboard their vessel. The room was dark, lit only by a dusty shaft of white sunlight pouring through a single porthole on the starboard side of the ship.
         The bearded King Buluk of Greyterd, owner of the massive luxury liner outside and king of a suspiciously named land, sat at the meeting table across from the pirates flanked by two scarlet-robed guards. He was a welcome guest today aboard the pirate cutter, considering the valuable merchandise he was offering for trade.
         Standing to Buluk’s right was a beautiful young woman in a skimpy, purple belly dancer’s outfit with curly blonde hair and a translucent lavender veil masking all of her features except for her vivid blue eyes. Her skin was so fair it was almost pink. She was obviously a slave, among other things. King Buluk wore a large white turban on his head and wrapped himself in layers of regal-looking red and white gowns. He had a black beard which hung down to his waist and he wrung his calloused hands in nervousness.
         Buluk’s deceptively young brown eyes twitched as the pirate captain squeaked at him from across the table in a high-pitched, irritating voice while scratching his fly encircled scalp.
         “How many did you say?”
         “Th-Three hundred, my friend,” Buluk responded in a quivering accent. He was seated in such a way that the pirates could see him and his men in the light of the porthole, but all the king could see through the glare were silhouettes. The pirate captain turned to his mates standing behind him and smirked. The slave-girl shifted her bare feet impatiently, creaking a floorboard. The pirate leaned forward into the beam of light and addressed Buluk again.
         “That’s only enough for eight.” The man had a greasy mop of black hair, tiny eyes set a little too close together, and a crooked nose illustrating several decades of mistreatment at the hands of enemies, and probably comrades. He was all skin and bones and was about a head shorter than the blonde slave. As he sneered at Buluk, the slave-girl noticed that the ghastly odor permeating the cramped room seemed to be centered around him. She didn’t bother hiding her displeasure.
         “But, but… I had needed twelve, sir!” Buluk pleaded. “Twelve was the number that we had agreed upon at our previous meeting, and as you see, my ship is quite large.” The king tried hard to keep his voice steady. The pirate’s confident grin disappeared menacingly.
         “Do you know how much those repulsor pads costed us?” he growled at the terrified king. “Do you know how many ships Captain Piper lost when we lifted these things from the stags?”
         “Yes, yes!” Buluk quickly assured him. “I have heard the tale. And a very… brave man Mr. Piper must be to attack a fleet of the Enemies, but be that as it may, I had thought that our original agreement was three hundred of my automatic rifles, valuable relics from the ancient world worth many tons of gold to be sure, for twelve of your alien anti-gravity plates?” The pirate captain’s leathery face contorted into a ridiculous sneer. As he sat back down in his rickety chair, he pulled a wicked-looking knife from his boot and proceeded to clean his fingernails.
         “Yeah, well… We only got eight to spare… but you’re welcome to go ask the stags if they got any more they could sell you,” the captain snarled at his grimy fingers. Buluk turned and looked up at the slave-girl. She flashed him a look of aggravation and folded her bracelet-encircled arms across her chest, staring disgustedly out the small porthole.
         “I see… Well, what if I were to offer you the lovely Jasperwina here?” he gestured to the shapely, half-naked girl. “She is the finest, most talented dancer in all of Vallahar… Show him wench!” She turned her head with a swish of yellow and glowered at him fiercely.
         “Well now, Bulk…” The captain rose slowly to his feet and appraised the toned dancer. The look in her eyes was poisonous. “You may be on to something… yes… we may be able to reach some kind of agreement here…” The grinning captain walked around the table and slowly approached the girl, wetting his lips in some nauseating fantasy. She locked eyes with him icily for several long seconds. Beads of sweat began to form on the pirate’s forehead. After a short staring contest, he returned to his chair looking a little unnerved. “The slave, plus the three hundred guns,” he said finally.
         “Of course,” Buluk added, “I will have to raise your amount to fourteen pads, respectively…” The pirate froze. Then, in an apparent attempt at intimidation, he clumsily jabbed his knife at Buluk’s face, stopping just inches from his nose. The king’s eyes crossed and he flinched, though it may have just been the shorter man’s fragrance.
         “Don’t push your luck, yer majesty,” the pirate growled in a paradoxically whiny screech. “We lost nine of our best battleships for these bastards! They don’t come cheap, get me? You want ‘em, I name the price!” The pirate goons murmured in amusement to each other while ogling the curly haired slave.
         “Yes, yes! Very good! Twelve it is, then! …Sir!” Buluk sputtered. “But you must supply your own ammunition! No bullets on the Maria. These are working relics, nothing more. Too many Militia patrols, you understand?” Slowly, the captain sheathed his knife and sank back into his chair. After a long moment of utter motionlessness, he burst into a fit of maniacal, caterwauling laughter. Buluk turned a slow, baffled look to one of his guards. The slave-girl gently massaged her temples at the discordant screeching. The pirate stood up and whacked the king several times on the shoulder.
         “You drive a hard bargain there, Bulk!” he shouted. “Looks like we got us a deal then, eh?” Buluk smiled thinly as the pirate grabbed his hand and shook it enthusiastically.

         The slave shielded her eyes from the brightness of mid-morning as she stepped out onto the upper deck of the transport and into warm sunlight. It was a welcome change on her bare skin from the dank, foul-smelling meeting room below. She adjusted her uncomfortable attire and tried to keep her distance from the pirate captain. The ‘repulsor pads’ were wheeled out onto the deck of the small ship, escorted by several men armed with swords, pistols, and other rusty weapons either fashioned long decades ago or else dug up from ancient, vacuum-sealed bunkers deep in the wastelands. She kept a wary eye on one small, deranged-looking man carrying one big, powerful-looking rifle.
         The strange rectangular devices were stacked and transported on a wooden platform that floated as if by magic two feet off the deck. There were four stacks of three on the sled with a large, complicated device of apparently non-human design sitting on top, and a separate, alien-looking control panel leaning against it.
         Buluk was fascinated by the heavy metallic plates sitting atop the drifting pallet. They seemed out of place on the simple wooden deck of the airship. He ran his fingers over the stack of black metal devices and then over the large mechanism on top, studying the advanced alien technology intently. The strange device was a bulky instrument centered at the top of a base inlaid with several readouts of faded, indecipherable writing and twelve electronic jacks of some kind jutting out of the bottom, six on each side. It was slightly corroded in some places, but was still in amazingly good shape for its age, as most ancient stag equipment was. It was hard to believe that this thing had been a part of a ship that could travel the stars more than a thousand years ago.
         “That’s your central processing node,” the captain explained impatiently, pointing to the device on top. “Without this baby your ship would be swiss-cheesed the second you switched on the control panel. This is the biggest one there is, but it looks like you’re gonna be needin’ it…” The pirate gestured up towards the massive red balloon holding the giant cruiser “Happy Maria” in the air just over their heads.
         The pirates stopped the sled in the center of the deck and the pirate captain turned to Buluk. “…Well, it’s all here, man. Twelve repulsor pads complete with a twelve-jacker.” After the king had slowly and carefully counted the pads and was satisfied, the pirate grabbed at the slave-girl’s bare forearm. With a dancer’s reflexes she jerked away violently. Her former master placed his hand in the small of her back and propelled her into the waiting arms of the pirate’s goons. They pinned her arms behind her back and stood behind their captain, muttering obscenely into the defiant girl’s ears.
         “Okay yer highness. You got the pads. I got the broad. Only one thing left.” King Buluk turned and nodded to one of his guards. The robed man shouted a command up toward the flight deck of the luxury liner twenty feet above. With a shriek of grinding metal followed by a wooden creak, a great horizontal door at the stern of the Maria began to crank downward on rusting steel pistons toward the deck of the smaller ship. Just before it reached the deck of the pirate ship, the hydraulics groaned to a stop and jets of air shot from several steel pumps along the sides of the massive wooden door. The pirate captain was obviously impressed. “Not bad. That must have taken some serious engineering.” Buluk smiled proudly under his bushy beard.
         “The Happy Maria is full of surprises.” The pirate captain turned to his first mate.
         “Ol’ man Piper’s still lookin’ for the Odin. If he sees this monster he just might forget all about her.” He gave the king a pseudo-friendly elbow. “I’d watch your back your highness! My boss is somewhere around these parts and he has a fondness for big-ass ships!” Buluk kept his eyes cautiously on the repulsor sled.
         Four crimson-cloaked men appeared inside the open cargo bay floating just above the bow of the small transport and placed a short, sturdy ramp from the end of the open door on a gentle slope down to the deck of the pirate ship. Then they went back into the bay and, a moment later, descended the ramp carrying a long, heavy wooden crate. They dropped it with a bang in the center of the deck and a red-haired guard handed the king a crowbar. The pirates crowded around as Buluk reached down to pry the lid open.
         “Three hundred AK-108’s,” Buluk stated as he proudly removed a sleek black assault rifle. He looked oddly comfortable with it. “Vacuum stored until just a few weeks ago. Perfect condition. Thirty round magazine, never been fired. Fifty in this one and six more on the way.” The pirate captain was drooling. The slave-girl assumed it was just a habit, though she too marveled at that many valuable weapons. Assault rifles, especially the kind massed produced before the fall of the ancient world, were a very rare commodity and worth a fortune to militia and pirates alike for their dependability. Of course gunrunning was also a quick way to get your ship and cargo permanently confiscated by any local militia that happened to need supplies.
         As the royal guards continued hauling several more crates aboard the transport, the pirate pulled out his knife and picked up one of the rifles. The girl watched his whiskered lips curl as he peered down the barrel sight and pulled the trigger. He examined the magazine and jabbed his knife carelessly into the breech. After a moment, he let the gun slip dramatically from his fingers back into the crate and looked up at the king.
         “Three hundred? Not bad at all, Buluk.” The captain sheathed his knife and rose to his feet. Suddenly, he pulled an old-fashioned, long barreled revolver from inside his dirty flight jacket. The two pirates to his right and left also drew their pistols as the captain pointed his gun at Buluk’s chest. “And now your majesty, there’s only one more piece of business to take care of…” Buluk’s eyes flashed in hatred as the treacherous pirate cocked the hammer back and smiled. “Thank you for doing business with The Death Mark…”

         Before anyone could react, the slave-girl reared back a muscular dancer’s leg and brought it up hard between the captain’s thighs from behind. The pirate wheezed, eyes bulging. As he dropped to the deck, Buluk deftly snatched the pistol from his hand and fired at the nearest gun-toting pirate sending him flying backwards in a puff of smoke. As the slave simultaneously sent each of her captors flying in opposite directions with a shove and a vicious elbow to the face respectively, one of Buluk’s bodyguards lunged at the other gun-wielding pirate and grabbed for his pistol, which fired off once into the sky. The king’s other guards drew their weapons, mainly daggers and a few rusty swords. The rest of the pirates did the same and advanced.
         The small rifleman charged the freed slave girl from behind with the butt of his rifle raised. With surprising agility even for a dancer, she spun around, grabbed the gun, and flipped him to the deck. Wrenching the clumsy firearm from his paws, she chambered a round and fired it into his chest. The king’s royal guards doffed their cloaks and scarves as Buluk pulled his turban from his head and ripped his robes and false beard away to reveal a handsome young man in his early twenties with the confident eyes of a veteran smuggler. As more of his men filed out of the larger ship and advanced on the disorganized pirates, he gave the blonde a smirk.
         “Bad slave-girl!” The girl ripped the sheer veil away from her face. Her soft, delicate features and fair skin strikingly complimented her intense, sapphire eyes.
         “Fuck you!” she spat. Several pirates began backing away from the two intruders, horrified and unsure of what to do.
         “That’s Juryrig!” one of them said in terror, pointing at the infamous ex-pirate turned freelance smuggler. As Juryrig casually turned to address his own men, the pirates took advantage and ran for the hatch, clamoring over each other to get below deck.
         “All right boys and girls! Let’s get these weapons back aboard my ship! And don’t forget my new repulsor pads either!” Juryrig shouted to several of his ‘guards,’ now minus their red robes.
         The nearly-naked blonde girl marched over to the pirate captain still writhing on the deck in the fetal position and dropped the rifle. She grabbed his arm, rolled him over roughly onto his back, and planted her bare foot on his chest. With effort, the captain forced open his beady eyes to the sight of her icy, hate-filled gaze. The girl grabbed hold of her yellow locks and tore them away. A mane of straight, jet-black hair cascaded down over her pink shoulders.
         “V-Vixie!” he rasped.
         "Surprise.” She grabbed two fist-fulls of the man’s hair and dragged him over to the starboard side of the ship. Without so much as a bon voyage, she hauled him up against the railing and spin-kicked him in his lumpy skull, sending him toppling overboard.
         Juryrig helped his men carry the heavy crates of machine-guns back up into the bowels of the huge vessel, and then returned to the deck of the pirate ship wearing his familiar leather flight jacket. He loaded a clip into a silver automatic pistol, shoved it into the back of his pants, and then grabbed a small package he’d had clasped under his arm.
         “Axel!” he shouted unnecessarily to one of the men who were preparing to push the repulsor sled up the ramp and into the cargo bay. “Hurry up an’ get them things loaded already for cripes sake. I’ll be right back.”
         “You want them loaded right now, or…” the red-haired mechanic joked sarcastically as he began pulling the floating cart towards the cargo ramp. As the young smuggler, known throughout Vallahar as Juryrig, made his way toward the hatch leading down to the gun deck, he stuffed the paper package into his jacket. Vixie, meanwhile, tore the long, translucent decorative strip that hung between her legs from the bottom piece of her skimpy dancing outfit and picked up the rifle she’d dropped.
         “Where do you think you’re going?” she called to Juryrig.
         “What’s the matter with you!” he scolded her, suddenly noticing the remains of the silky material lying on the deck behind her. “I traded sixty magnum slugs for that costume and you go and tear it up?!” Vixie gave him a look that clearly suggested he change the subject. “I had it measured and everything!” he tried again. Vixie raised her eyebrows. Resigned, he answered her. “I’m going to make sure there’s no prisoners down below, Old Toecutter’s known for being a slaver.”
         “Not anymore he’s not… Wait up, I’ll go with you,” she offered as she trotted over. “We’ll split up. I’ll check aft.”
         “Dressed like that?” Juryrig asked with a barely concealed smirk. He couldn’t hide his amusement. She knew he secretly enjoyed seeing her in her little outfit pretending to be a slave, even if he tried to play it cool. She simply shot him her her 'unamused' look and shouldered past him. “Don’t be too long!” he called after her as she jumped down the hatch. “Try to find out if he’s got a radio on this flying shithouse. If somebody sent a mayday, there’ll be more baboons on the way,” he trailed off as he walked down into the crew quarters. Vixie and headed into the bowels of the ship towards the aft repulsor array, and hopefully a radio room.

         The tall, young ex-pirate made her way down the hallway towards the equipment room she’d seen across from the meeting room when they first boarded the ship. The rest of the crew was nowhere to be found. Hiding from us most likely. Vixie couldn’t blame them. Ever since her short stint with The Death Mark she hated every one of them with a vivid passion. As soon as she had the opportunity to escape, she’d left them in her dust permanently. She never thought she’d be back aboard one of their ships. Least of all Bernard Toecutter’s hooptie.
         She found the meeting room and entered the dim, musty cabin across the hall. Sure enough, there was an old radio unit sitting on a table near the porthole. It looked like it had been left on. God forbid Juryrig ever invest in one of these… Vixie thought to herself. She laid her new rifle against the wall and clicked the radio off. As the static died, she heard a scuff behind her. She turned around just in time to duck a swinging cutlass. When the bearded pirate swung again, Vixie caught his wrist with both hands and kneed him in the gut. With a surprisingly powerful head-butt to the face, she sent him to the floorboards, his sword clattering beside him and blood running freely from his nose. Vixie reached over for her rifle. As the pirate scrambled to his feet, Vixie buried her left foot in his abdomen and immediately followed with the butt of her rifle across his forehead. With a final, fierce, round-kick to the head, he twirled in the air and smacked the wooden floor face first. Vixie casually returned the rifle to the radio table. As the pirate lay bleeding and fighting to stay conscious, she squatted down, hands on her knees. “Next time I won't be so gentle.”

         Deep inside the belly of the transport in the ship’s brig, three grimy young women in tattered rags sat huddled together inside a barred cell. The filthy cell had no furniture save a single, empty wooden bowl. The young women hadn’t eaten in days. This, evidently, would have been Vixie’s fate. Jasperwina’s fate, that is.
         The women jumped in fright as a sudden gunshot echoed through the hallway followed rapidly by several more. They looked at each other in bewilderment. Just then, an attractive, young pirate they’d never seen before appeared at the door of the cell. He produced a small pocketknife and inserted it into the lock. One of the girls rushed the bars, desperately clawing at the man’s jacket and crying to be let out. The other two soon followed suit. Juryrig ignored their wailing as he fiddled angrily with the stubborn device. After a second or two he gave up in frustration and pulled out his pistol.
         “Get back! Get back!” he shouted impatiently at them. The girls fled to the back of the cell in fright. Turning his head away, he fired into the lock mechanism. With a ringing bang, the device exploded. Three shoulder blocks later, the barred door popped inward and the slaves swarmed out, one on top of the other. The young man grabbed each of the shaking girls by the arm and prompted them none too gently towards the steps that led to the upper deck. “Hurry up! Go!” he shouted anxiously. The he bellowed “VIX, ALL ABOARD!” down the hall to no one in particular, startling the slave-girls as they raced for the hatch to the main deck in a panic.

         Vixie grabbed her rifle in response to Juryrig’s shout and headed back towards the topside hatch, leaving her screaming pirate friend behind: squeezed through the small porthole in the wall of the communications room up to his butt, legs kicking furiously, his torso hanging out a mile above the rocky floor of the canyon below. On her way through the lower quarterdeck, she almost ran directly into a band of dirty, frightened young women scrambling towards the stairs. Juryrig came around the corner and paused when he saw her. She raised a dark eyebrow.
         “Where’d you find the souvenirs?”
         “The brig, where do you think? Now get in the ship!” he barked hurriedly, grabbing the crook of her arm and pushing her up the hatch.
         “Hey! Would you relax, ‘Rig? We got the repulsors, we’re ready to split,” she said as she climbed back up into the open air. She started across the deck towards the liner’s open cargo bay at the bow of the small ship.
         “Yeah well, this little ‘sport’s about to do the same!” Vixie jogged up the ramp onto the extended bay doors of the larger vessel. She waited on the cargo bay door with her large gun propped vertically against her naked ribs. She flashed Juryrig a playful grin as he went by, herding the girls into the ship. He shouted a command into the cargo bay and slapped the switch to close the door. “Pedro! Get us the hell outa here!” Vixie swung inside as the door rumbled upward. A kid, hardly out of his teens, raced up the steps at the back of the huge bay and shouted to someone above.

         A stocky young man sporting a week’s worth of black stubble stood at the helm on the flight deck of the Happy Maria. Even the red robes of an imaginary royal bodyguard looked like unwashed bath towels draped over his shoulders. He took a swig of his canteen, which obviously didn’t contain water. A large, angry-looking head abruptly popped up out of the hatch on the lower deck and turned towards the helm.
         “Galloway!” Bruiser shouted. “We got ‘em! Get us movin’ now!” The helmsman frantically screwed the cap back onto his canteen.
         “Let’s snake the hell outa here!” he said ridiculously to himself. He hit a red button connected to a big copper cable that ran down into the ship beneath the large, wooden wheel. There was a terrible vibration through the floorboards below as he punched the throttle and spun the wheel crazily.

         The giant vessel slowly began lumbering away from the battered pirate ship on gasoline powered propellers. Suddenly, tiny explosive charges went off underneath the ship’s outer covering with several orange flashes under the hull. The ugly flanks of gaudy carvings and useless portholes broke away and fell into the canyon, and the plain wooden bulwarks of a battle cruiser sporting several cannon turrets shone in the bright sunlight. As the ship turned on its axis, the rest of the pretentious murals and decorations blew off from the ship and crumbled into Zander’s Gorge, revealing the unmistakable armored hull of the handsome, legendary destroyer ‘Odin’ underneath. The great ship lifted smoothly into the sky as it shed its disguise, leaving the smaller listing transport behind; her large, red, painted balloon the only ornamentation left.
         With a flash of yellow-orange, the small pirate ship exploded in a brilliant fireball, showering flaming debris down over the jagged rocks below. As the flaming mass fell smoking into the canyon, the Odin glided away into the cloudless atmosphere, small braided ropes dangling from the huge balloon, and made her way into the western skies with her valuable hijacked cargo. The red-tailed hawk keened a farewell as it circled widely the flaming wreckage of the Odin’s latest, unfortunate prey.