All of My Maids are Robots? Pt. 12

"Yay!" I said. "Weridest and least crazy! I win the prize!"

"The prize is, of course, a kiss," Amelia said, smiling. "But...what about Albert Fitzland?"

"Oh, he's in my body. We actually have-"

"Target sighted!"

Amelia held up his hand and for a moment, all I had eyes for was Jeanette and Jeanette being cool as hell. And Jeanette was walking over to the crewman who was peering through a lowered down telescope that was, like, attached to the ceiling. Said crewman was a kind of...like...you know the guy from the hit music video from the hit song Move Your (Dead) Bones which was the ending credits song for the equally hit film Beyond Reanimator? He looked like that...but evil. Like, sinister. Like, he was just waiting for a chance to, you know...

Do something evil.

"It looks like a frigate, sir," he said, turning to Jeanette, who nodded.

"Roll out the coilguns, reef us down to combat sail, and beat to quarters."

Doo weee oo! That was a whistle -- and crew began to run too and fro, rushing about and getting things ready. They also started to twist and yank on winches, which caused more rumbling and groaning sounds to fill the ship.

"What's a coilgun?" I asked. "Is it like, uh, a gun that shoots springs at people?"

Amelia laughed. "No, Lucy. A coilgun is an electromagnetic weapon that uses a tiny bit of energies from the voltaic engine to create a magnetic field that launches ferroshot -- ferrous shot, that is -- at an enemy target. We tend to use roundshot, but there's also canister, sail cutters, tracking rounds..." He smiled. "It's just going to be roundshot for Jeanette's little outing here."

"Oooh," I said.

"Fire as she bears!" Jeanette said, then squealed and clapped her hands, jumping up and down in the middle of the deck. Amelia laughed, then whispered to me.

"Most captains don't actually do that -- now, if you don't have any more bombshells to drop upon me, then I will have to ask you to wait here, to examine the crew at work-" Amelia started to move away, but I put my palm against the screen, the crackling field humming faintly as I leaned forward.

"Hey, whoa, yes!" I said, blushing. "I want you to stay and...I want...to...you're the first non-machine that knows, you know? I..." I paused. "I just...it's a lot, okay? And I want to talk to you about it..."

Amelia smiled. He touched a control on a nearby console, and then the field hummed and shut down. Within a moment, he was sitting upon my lap. His fingers traced along my cheeks and then went down to my shoulders as he looked into my eyes. His voice was soft. "Then talk, Lucy..."

I gulped.

I...wanted to...just...explode with stuff about myself. Like, how, I had spent ungodly years of time on Earth utterly convinced that I was never, ever, ever going to be happy. How I had not just hated my body, I had hated my life, and the only thing that had kept me from dying was pure and simple fear that nothingness was all that was waiting for us after the big hard reset. I wanted to tell him all of that, all at once, in the tiny sliver of time we had between the beginning of the first coilgun's firing and the last.

But I couldn't find the words.

So, instead, I kissed Captain Amelia right then and there, which provoked an 'awww' from Mary -- and then, as if they wanted to announce the event to the world -- the coilguns going off.

BOOOOOOOOOOMBOOOOOOOOMBOOOOOOOOOMBOOOOOOOOM!

The sounds mixed together -- an unending roar that was maybe one tenth as loud as my beating heart -- the coilguns firing should have been really quiet, since they were like, in space, but what did I know, apparently space wasn't as quiet as I thought. But what shocked me even more was the sudden gushing sweep of grayish, ozone smelling fog that exploded into the room. Amelia drew back and I coughed, then wheezed, then whispered. "A-Are they freaking flintlocks or something?"

"It's coolant gas!" Amelia shouted over the ringing in our ears. "It's been rerouted, I-ugh!"

He collapsed against me, then, heavy and pressing. Then he was jerked back and away, collapsing to the ground. Mary, who was nothing but a bare shape in the fog, was crying out: "Young miss? Are you all right?" And the coilguns were going off again, with more roaring -- and more gouts of smoke, despite Jeanette's cry to 'belay that, belay that!"

I stood up -- and then a dark shape emerged from the fogs. They were human shaped, but beyond that, all I could really see that mattered was that they had some kind of metal pipe in their hand. They swung it at my head and I ducked it. I actually freaking ducked it! I was so shocked, so happy with myself, that I remained half crouched down for a solid two seconds before the boot slammed into my belly and sent me stumbling back into the air. The foggy shape sprang past me, and began to touch at the controls -- and the fog swirled...but I couldn't quite see who it was!

But I heard the humming sound of the projector fields coming online -- and then Mary flung herself next to me just before the fields fully initialized. She clung to the side of the chair, shouting: "Something has gone wrong!"

"Mary, get back!" I shouted. "They-"

Straps snapped out around the chair.

The chair dropped straight down and Mary clung to it, screaming in shock as the two of us tumbled out of the spaceship and into the icy blackness of space!

We tumbled, head over head, over head over head, over head. I was still strapped to the chair, but Mary skidded along the inside of the protection field, her back skimming and shifting around, sparks and crackles reflecting around the inside of the container. She managed to grab a hold of the top of the chair, squeezing tightly and arresting her constant motion -- well, constant motion relative to me. We were still tumbling.

"Good heavens!" she exclaimed. "Stars! ...fuck!"

"Yeah, in that order," I whispered. "S-Someone attacked Amelia! We have to make sure he's okay!"

"I think we have a bigger...prob..." Mary trailed off.

"What? What is it?" I looked around, then saw the line of her eyes. By now, the chair had started to slow in its tumbling. Don't ask me how. Space magic? We'll say its space magic. And with the tumbling slowing, we could see the Lilly...and we could see that her sails were beginning to come apart. In the eerie silence I had kinda expected from space battles, it was even more unsettling than one could have imagined -- the sails would seem to be utterly fine, and then something would zip through them with such speed that they would transform into a spreading constellation of reflective sail parts. Then more zipping somethings would cause spars to come apart.

Within a terrifyingly short time, the Lilly had been...freaking...demasted! And then a hole appeared in one of her gorgeous white-hulled protrusions of metal, near the butt of the ship. A spray of gas shot into space, vanishing almost instantly, and I had a feeling that she had just lost all of her make ship go juice.

"W-What is going on?" Mary asked.

"I...think it's...space pirates!?" I asked.

"...wait, no! There's another British ship out there! I can see the flag!" Mary said, pointing. What she was pointing at looked like an itty bitty orange spot -- but in just a few moments, it had grown to the size of my thumb...then the size of my palm. Then it was the size of the Lilly. No, smaller, slightly smaller. It was coming right towards us -- not the Lilly. I didn't see what nabbed us until it did so: A hook, slamming into the bottom of the chair with a claCLUNK. I yelped and grabbed Mary, dragging her down to hold her close as we were swept into the ship -- and then crashed down onto the deck within. The doors behind us closed and we were plunged into utter darkness.

The ship was in motion -- and I felt as if shit had just gone from zero to sixty in record time. I was still trying to process the fact Amelia knew I wasn't Albert! That...just...fucking what!?

"Well, well, well, look what we caught 'ere," a thickly accented, swaggering voice said.

A light turned on, stabbing down from the ceiling -- revealing a heavily muscled, really crude looking approximation of a human being. Like, he had a jagged slash of a mouth and tattoos and short cropped hair.

"You captured a noble lady, sir!" A cheerful maid voice said, then a very skinny, very tall maid looking robot stepped over. "Just like you planned!"

"Yes, I-" the pirate blushed, looking at the maid, who cheerfully adjusted his collar, then held out a scabbard.

"Here's your sword, sir, you left it in your cabin!"

"I know I did, I was...I didn't want to have a sword out, I-" the pirate put his hand on his face, and he sighed.

"Oh, sorry," the main said. "...do you want me to take it back?"

I blinked slowly. "...wait, you have a maid?" I asked.

"Of course he does!" the maid said. "Mr. Rufus may be a bit uncouth, and his profession isn't precisely enjoyed by the merchant houses, but at the end of the day, he doesn't hurt people. Your ship's perfectly fine, beyond some minor damage, and there's already rescue ships coming right out!"

"One of his accomplices clubbed Amelia right in the head!" I said, pointing at him.

The maid put her hands on her hips, turning to glower at Rufus. "Sir! Is this true?"

"I...I don't know, Mirry, I wasn't ON the ship, it wasn't MY accomplice! I'm just doing the gunnery and the grabbing!" he said.

"Well, I think we'll have to give your employer a piece of my mind!" Mirry said. "Why, I-"

A sudden explosion of crackling electricity washed over her body. Her eyes flared blue and Rufus cried out in shock and alarm, grabbing onto her as smoke rose from her...admittedly rather cracked, dented, deeply in need of repair body...and held her tightly to his chest. He looked back into the darkness.

"What the hell!?" he exclaimed.

"We'll blank this part of her memory..." a cold voice spoke from the shadows.

"Blanking memories, hurting my machines, that wasn't part of the DEAL!" Rufus exclaimed.

My eyes widened.

I recognized that voice.

Lord Thompson stepped into the light, glaring down at me.

"I'm-" he started. I clapped my hands over my mouth, my panicky, shocked brain doing what it always did, and...wanting to shout, at the top of my lungs, the exact worst possible thing to ever say in any situation ever. I managed, through literally putting my hands over my lips and biting my tongue, to not scream at the top of my lungs: Altering the deal, pray I do not alter it further.

Lord Thompson frowned. "...I'm altering the deal, Rufus. Pray I do not alter it further."

"HE SAID IT!" I screamed past my hands.

Lord Thompson growled. "Be quiet! Albert Fitzland Lancaster has never lost a game of Brdige in his life!"

I blinked.

"...what?" I asked, lowering my hands from my mouth as Mary pressed herself against me, trembling slightly, her fans whirring so loudly that it cut through the empty room. Then it clicked. "OH. Oh."

Lord Thompson nodded, smirking down at me.

"...ohhhhhh..."