Kiki's Tale: Pirates of the Twenty-Wun Stars, #3

By Jerri O'Powell

    Kiki is an 11 year old little girl. Unlike most children in the galaxy, She was born and spent the first 11 years of her life on the pirate ship, The Twenty-Wun Stars. With her parents leaving the ship her first foray into normal life introduced her to her 12 year old Auntie Naya. The occasion of their meeting was a sad one, as Naya's mom was just killed in an explosion on another planet in a tragic accident. Kiki's first relations with her auntie are to comfort her in her time of loss

Soon however they find the explosion that took her mom's life was not an accident. It was the work of a civil war fugitive, turned confederate president, turned ultra-powerful godlike hero. Kiki's comforting turned to exposition of pirate law that says when family blood is spilled equal blood must be spilled to satisfy pirate justice.

He had to die, but what chance do two little girls on the other side of the galaxy have of killing the president of a confederate world with the powers of a god? Well if one is a powerful shapeshifting, genius, rehuman being and the other is from the high gravity world of Torrey 9… well still slim to none.

    Over three thousand years after the final battle over the soul mankind, between God, Satan, and Nefarious, destroys the earth, a new chapter begins. The resulting hyperspace blast from the earth's destruction flings the last of humanity into the furthest reaches of space on their surviving starships. Over a 300 years passes before these star cast seeds of mankind reclaim the stars, and begin to find each other. The first of the new worlds to find each other and reconnect old humanity on new worlds, would eventually form The Confederation of Republic Worlds. This union would be marked with the erection of the Jara Timekeeping Tower on Jara Prime, broadcasting a synced time throughout the known universe. This is the Jara Era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McMillian
• Release date: Jan 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201568337

Book preview

Neatly Folded

Keyanna, I’m not even going to pretend like I follow all that math. I get the gist of what you are saying and what we are trying to do, but I don't have EMA and I don't have mental implants. What I do know is that I’m a little scared of getting inside the guts of the thing that killed my mom. Isn't there some kind of way we can test this first, you know, throw a piece of fruit or a rock thru this tesseract thing you are planning on making? Naya asked me in our secret HQ in one of the unused bedrooms of her house. We hid it behind a wall of boxes.

It was a spartan little set up. There was a window that looked out onto the side of the house from the second floor, onto a view of the yellow grassy lawn (Torrey 9 grass is yellow.) and a high picket fence 25 yards or so away. In the room was a table, two chairs, and a computer from the university where I worked as a professor. Yeah it was a little awkward teaching a class as an 11 year old EMA genius, so I used the nanite shape shifting Jack Suit grampy Wayne made for me to change my appearance. I made myself look a bit more adult, a little tallers and of course I gave myself boobies. I mean, I know I’m gonna get them in time given my lineage. I felt like a 1.37 to 1 boob to head ratio was a modest choice. The suit was originally designed to let me survive in Torrey 9’s super high gravity without a gravity offsetter. In the past months however my rehuman body  had adapted to the high gravity, at least on-world. Once in Torrey 9 gravity for a few seconds my body changed to let me move around quite fine without a gravity offsetter or the Jack Suit. Sadly, unlike Naya when I leave Torrey 9, my body returns to normal, while she can still pick up cars.

    I got us a private encrypted internet line courtesy of the school and stacks and stacks of all the digital and printed media we could find on the Deslarian Civil War, Raimon Newman (and all his other names). We also got a lot of books on space-folding tesseracts, both technological and EMA generated. There were the works of the Queen of Deslar, Frea Solardine, who during the war routinely folded space to hop around the planet.

First of all, I said back to Naya, I’m awesome. Do you really think I would do anything that would jeopardize all this awesomeness? Second Raimon Newman tested this for us, it works. Third, I am so much smarter than he even could have been at his point of EMA decay when he must have started working on his tesseract. If he had read and understood Queen Solardine’s work, he wouldn't have killed so many people in his crude space fold. For that matter, he would not have created the temporal rift that sent my parents back in time. Fourth, I’m awesome…I started to say.

You being awesome is not a real point here! said Naya.

I beg to differ. The awesomeness of my awesome is awesome and a valid point in all situations about me. Fifth we are so much closer to Deslar here on Torrey 9 than they were on Neel 4 and we have a black hole powered Gravity Bender courtesy of my mom, well, when she gets here today at least. I said.

OK so the first 11 years of my life had been on a pirate spaceship… a pirate spaceship! I have seen extra dimensional beings, I have manned pulse cannons in ship battles between us and 3 other ships. I have been in raiding parties, both on my dad's back as a toddler (mom was not happy about that) and with a blaster in both hands just last year. Lets just say that life on a scientific research vessel with both my non-piraty acting parents was not agreeing with me.

I had been living with my Grampy Wayne, Naya and Uncle Dranny for the last few months on Torrey. That however was only a slight upgrade. Grampy Wayne and Uncle Dranny were certainly not moms and barely dads. They were both in their 30’s and easily distracted, this lent itself to some mischief. This proved to be even more so as Naya more and more expressed her need to enact some revenge on the man who killed her mom. We had quite a few little adventures procuring the equipment we needed to build the space-folding gear we were gonna use to get to Deslar and get her revenge. Naya was a good little pirate in the making. Even with our late night escapades all over Torrey 9, her grades never even slipped once. Naya was Equa-Torrean. That is to say her and her family had lived generations in the equator region of Torrey which had the highest gravity of 5 distinct gravity zones. The forest polar caps, with the lightest gravity, only 1.7 times normal, is where the planet's founder ancestors crashed after the big bang. After 27 years adrift in space, living mostly off of the only plant, the red tater, that survived the big bang in the ship agra gardens. It is said that this diet is by chance the only thing that let the first settlers of Torrey 9 survive after the crash. Over generations they adapted to the ever higher gravity away from the poles. It has only been in the past 1000 years or so that people have been living in the 5th zone, the equator region of Torrey with gravity is some places almost 100 times stronger than the poles. That's mostly in valleys between multiple mountains made of gravity curving minerals. They are by far the strongest people on the planet and are denoted with their darker than usual complexions. Even still on-world, the further Naya got from Torrey’s equator regions, the stronger she seemed. It was not ‘bend Torrean metal strong’, but strong. She was not gonna be lifting any cars, in the lighter gravity, but she could do two finger push-ups with ease. The gravity was so light to her further away from the equator, I once caught her sleep standing up. It was after all, past her bedtime when we stole that Klim Accelerator.

Anyway, back to today.

Keyanna, I hear you. I believe you and if I die trying to cut this bastard in half, I’m fine with that, but if we get crushed to some super-finite point inside a black hole space bending thingy because the awesomeness of your 11 year old pirate brain math is off, I am SOOOO not ok with that. said Naya.

Wait wait wait, is this cold feet? Do you not want to do this now? You have been ok with this for the better part of 6 months. All the planning, all the sword training, all the procuring... ok let's call it what it is, looting, all the stuff we needed to build the KAT machine and now you are having second thoughts? I said.

See that’s what I mean! The KAT machine! The KAT machine!? The Keyanna Awesome Tesseract machine. My mom is DEAD and it almost seems like this is an excuse for you to do something that is NOT boring to you. This is my MOM! This is about my MOM! said Naya, tearing up. I took a deep breath and hugged her tight.

I love you Auntie Naya. Fuck all the other pockshit. Whatever you wanna do, let’s do it. If you wanna go sit at your mom’s memorial, let’s go. If you wanna go get some Weask Food, lets go get some; extras spicy, like you like it. If somebody killed my momma I would move a sun to make sure they met some pirate justice at my hand and I think you would be right there beside me. Yeah I can’t lie to you. I enjoy indulging my pirate genius tendencies, but more important than that, I need to help make things right for you, or at least as right as they are gonna get. So if you wanna scrap all this and go hang out with our friends for a bit or if you wanna go sit in the tree where I found you that first day...let's do it. I said to Naya as she wiped the tears from her face and hugged me back. But if you wanna pull the trigger on this plan and go cut the bastard in half that killed your mom, let's be bout it. Whatever you wanna do.

Just tell me you are 100% sure this is gonna get us to Deslar intact said Naya.

Nothing is 100% but the fraction of the one percent that I question in my math is too many points to the right of the decimal to worry about, but if it makes you feel better we can call it the KANAT machine, the Keyanna And Naya Awesome Tesseract I said.

Really KiKi she said, pushing me off of her with a smile.

Whaaat, it has a better ring than NAKAT I said back with a smile.

"My god I don't want to be there the day that ego of yours fails you, worlds will be colliding. You need some rum. Once we get to Deslar