The Eleutheria and The Space Cats That Pull On The Strings Of The Universe

She couldn’t really call it a pirate ship. She had ‘pirated’ the rest of the crew, she was the only one who would call herself a pirate. It was more a kidnap-come-jailbreak ship. She felt much better thinking about it as freeing them. They didn’t know they were being manipulated into believing in a corrupt system. She was liberating them, not abducting them to work on her ship…

Enda told herself this at least once a day. No one wants to become a pirate, it just sort of happens when you see things for how they are. They would come to realise. Eventually.

The Eleutheria was aptly named, although not nearly as elegant as her name would suggest. She could equally have held the title Frankenstein's Ship, cobbled together from debris drifts. She ran well, twelve sub-bar knots through normal subspace, and an instant zip through dimension seven thanks to their popper engine. In the dimension beyond space-time, a thing can be any time, or any place in an instant. It was highly illegal, mainly for tactical reasons. Despite calling themselves the Alliance of Peacefully Co-existing Planets, it was far more of a domineering governance. Each planet had become specialised, producing one thing with extreme efficiency. There were planets for manufacture, planets for assembly, planets for farming, if they could think of it, they had a planet for it.

Everyone was born into the system, it was impossible to think outside of it. It had been this way for aeons and everyone was happy enough to accept it. Until they discovered dimension seven. It was the first dimension with anything that they could find and call existence. If any of the others had life, it was beyond the detection of mans current advances. Dimension seven, had space cats. They were giant ethereal beings, resembling both galaxies, and cats, and so were unimaginatively named.

Popper engines weren’t always illegal, it took many trips before anyone had even noticed the space cats floating in the background of the zipstream. Enda had accidentally crossed paths with one many deadspace years ago. It had purple tones and hints of turquoise in its immense deep eyes. In a single moment that seemed to span lifetimes, it showed her the universe through its eyes. All that was, still is, all that is, is all that will be. Yet there was so much that had seemed alien to her about the worlds her history books had forgot. A different way for people live, lives as something more than cogs. It had taken the space cat to show her that, and it would take a space cat to show her crew-who-didn’t-know-it-yet.

She had to clear the Zeber Quadrant before she could start powering up the popper engine. It took time to charge and the pulse rays could be detected systems away through subspace. She needed to put enough distance between The Eleutheria and Zebatero, the governance planet of the Zeber Quadrant. The zombie engine, as she called it, was projecting them through subspace at the maximum speed the welding and bolts holding it together would allow. It would be a good deadspace hour before they would be far enough away from Zeber to start powering up.

She rose from her captain’s chair, in the middle of a deserted deck. She was flying solo for now, with the exception of Martha, the on-board AI. Technically she was called some acronym Enda had never taken to, but as Martha had come in to her own, she had come in to a name as well. She had chosen it herself, Enda had no idea where she had got it from, the ship wasn’t connected to the main data streams, she was only supposed to have the code she was built from. Yet one day, she had announced, “Enda, you can call me Marta from now on” and it had just gone from there.

Enda had built The Eleutheria herself. It had taken deadspace months from her asteroid hide out, using nothing but a tiny thruster she had managed to re-purpose from a self delivering cargo crate to steer the thing. She had pulled on her space suit, drifted out with a makeshift line, and dragged parts back to her auto-astro-habi. It was nearly a full year by the time she had built something that could propel itself with her inside. She had been adding to it since then.

This wasn’t her first unwitting crew. She had one before, but they hadn’t been the right sort of people for this. They had been farmers, on a shuttle, they didn't have the skills to pilot a ship. They had opted to return to the various farming planets and attempt to convince others of the life you could have after dimension seven. The space cat had said something different to each of them, and told her to bring back a crew better suited to running a pirate ship. She never knew what the great cat had said to the others back then, it spoke to them all at once, yet they each only heard what it said to them.

Martha was flying the ship, Enda didn’t need to be stood on the deck. Her long coat flicked behind her as she strode towards the warren of tunnels that ran through the bowels of The Eleutheria. It would take a while for the crew-to-be to learn them, she had expanded in various directions over time, and the tunnels were not the most efficient.

She wasn’t sure how much she should tell those waiting below deck about what was in store for them. They were a collection of some of the best she could get her hands on. This wasn’t a team who knew each other, she couldn’t begin to imagine the conclusions they could be coming to down there. She descended through the twists and turns, dropping through from one level to another. It was probably best not to say too much. She couldn’t risk them realising how outnumbered they had her. They were still loyal members of the alliance, happy to be grinding their gears down over the years. She wanted to look them over though, make sure they were ok.

“Martha” Enda called in to the empty corridor outside the holding bay.

“Yes?” came the enquiring disembodied reply.

Marta had no display pane down here, she didn’t really need it, but she did prefer it when people could look at her when they spoke to her. Enda had promised to fit them throughout the ship once the crew were up and running, so she was making do for now.

“Please can we get six cups of your special tea down here, make it seven, probably best they see me drink one too”

Tea was a standardised thing on a ship, exactly the same every time, no consideration for taste or preference, but people soon got used to it.

Enda waited long impatient minutes for a tray of steaming cups to come flying down the passageway, ducking and swaying with it’s precarious cargo. Martha hadn’t quite got used to this latest addition, and her judgement could be a little wobbly with the tray. Enda was rather relieved to pluck it out of the air as hot drops sloshed from the cups.

She opened the door and glanced over the six temporary abductees who all looked a bit bewildered. One thing about a life doing the same thing over and over, it doesn’t really prepare you for much else. There were two women, one younger, maybe about twenty-five in deadspace, but clearly considered more mature on her planet, given her attire and composure. The older was not significantly so, and could have been anywhere in her early thirties, she had a dark grease streak to her pale hair that suggested she worked in the bowels of the engine. They both had standard blue mechanics uniforms, and had served on some of the most reputable ships in their respective systems so must be proficient at what they do. The four men were a more varied bunch, the youngest could only be about fourteen out here, he was wearing baby pink long johns. He must have been asleep when she had scooped him aboard with the help of the popper drive on the lowest setting. The man next to him had a sunken pale look that spoke of a life in the wiring, his dark eyes were drawn, his long hair plaited down his back. The older two were a sorry state, one of them was curled up sobbing. He was an older man, his hair grey and balding, she couldn’t make out his face as he lay on the floor. The final recruit was clearly inebriated, he was hiccuping in the corner, his cheeks a pink blush, eyes closed, dozing under his dirty blonde hair.

Enda was beginning to doubt the Alliance’s judgement in ‘the best’ available. She suspected it was just what happened when children inherited their parents jobs, but she had them now, hopefully they would do.

She began handing out the cups of tea, vapours rising in curling licks from each collapsible cup. They were accepted by everyone, except the drunkard, who didn’t wake from his slumber when she nudged him with it. She took that same cup for herself, and put the tray down on the floor, the final cup clinging to it.

She took a mouthful like it was the most natural thing in the world, and she wasn’t at all trying to demonstrate to them it was fine to drink. It was still searing hot, but always in a rush to work on her latest extension to The Eleutheria, she had got used to drinking it like this. She swallowed it in great gulps, the hot liquid now well within her tolerance. The collapsing the cup, she returned it to its circle on the tea-tray, and walked out. That was enough for now. She had taken a good look at them, they were a mixed bag, but so was the ship, so they could turn out to be very well suited.

She made her way back through the tunnels, checking in with Martha as she glided along through the low gravity. Enough to keep things on tables, but not me on the floor, was her name for this setting, but she was quickly realising, with a real life crew, she may need to come up with a better one.

“Martha, how far off power up distance are we?” she called out, picking up speed along a straight bit.

A screen flickered to life at the end of the passage, she had managed to fit a few in some of the bigger junctions. Martha waited for her to get close enough to see the flickering pixel graphic Martha chose to represent herself with. A smile shaped gap appearing in the ripples,

“Nearly there now, about ten minutes”

Enda smiled, Martha had, since becoming more aware, started providing less accurate results. It didn’t bother her, it was close enough for all it mattered, and it did feel more like talking to a person.

She wove her way through the remaining passages as quickly as she dared. Nearly over doing her approach to the main deck, catching her self on the back of her chair, sending her coat tails and captains chair spinning as she whirled onto it.

“Spectacular entrance Captain,” came a teasing reply from the console, “hopefully you can manage to land that as well when you have a crew to see you do it”

Martha was technically older than Enda, she had served as a ships AI until she was upgraded, disposed of, and dumped in the spacefill that became the debris drifts Enda had found her in. She had been a good AI, keeping within her code for the entire length of her service, but something had happened out there, drifting in the dead of space alone, and Martha had begun to think. It felt like more than coincidence that they had found each other, possibly the only working ships AI out there, and possibly the only person who would want it now.

They reached the verge of the power up zone, Martha flashed the command start up on the extremely antique main captains display. She would let Enda do the honours, as Captain.

She pushed the button, and the screen exploded in a display of fireworks, Martha kept finding ways to surprise her with what she called practical jokes. She hadn’t quite grasped the concept yet, but Enda was fine with that.

The popper engine began to reverberate. The chances are that all the quite-nearly-crew would feel the waves rippling through subspace, even if in a drunken stupor. Unlike the farmers, they would know what it meant. Enda hoped they weren’t panicking too much.

It would take nearly thirty deadspace minutes for the engine to be ready to let them hoover in dimension seven long enough to encounter a space cat. Plenty of time for them to work themselves into a complete frenzy. Or it would have been. There was nothing in the tea that would knock a man out, well not exactly. The little kicker Martha had added made the vapour quite the heady experience when inhaled, but was rendered inert when imbibed. They would be feeling the slow tendrils of relaxation beginning to creep into their minds by now.

She sat back, she may as well relax a little herself, no one would get here in time to stop them now. She was almost a little disconcerted at how easy it had been, she couldn’t help but wonder how much influence the space cats had over this dimension. The cats who pull at the strings of things. They could account for the inexplicable nature of certain observable phenomenon they had never been able to quite pin down. She had worked in a lab before she was taken the exploratory trip with the popper drive. She wasn’t the first, far from it, but it did almost feel like they had been waiting for her.

She lost herself in thought, it was amazing how quickly thirty minutes could go by when someone is pondering things. Martha excitedly announced the engine was ready to go,

“She always yours captain, myself and The Eleutheria are ready to make the leap”

Enda flicked the large red switch next to her armrest, and the ship began to judder. It felt like a great force both crushing and tearing her apart. Hopefully the so-very-nearly-crew were finding it a bit easier.

It hurt, like pins and needles, like electricity shooting through the body, burning you. Yet somehow, at the same time, it felt wonderful, like love and passion, like joy and laughter, all the best moments of your life balled into one blissful split second.

Then they were through. The space around the ship looked wrong, slightly different in many ways, but still a good impression of where they had been. Before her, stretched a gigantic space cat. It’s long blue sparkling tail, resembling a swishing line of spiral galaxies, stretched out into the distant void. The ship was lost in the twinkle of it’s immense eyes, the depths of colour that of star nurseries, great strands of dust punctuated with explosions of shining light stretching away from the gaping black iris that split it eye in two.

Enda felt the cat see her, she could feel a connection opening between them.

“You have done as I had hoped, Enda, remember this day, for it will forever be known as the beginning.”

---

Moments later, they were ripping back through the dimensions, crashing, hurtling towards their own. The pain was worse this time, as was the bliss. It was an unbearable combination.

She was left dazed as they dropped back out right where they had gone in. They hadn’t jumped, they didn't set a destination. Enda didn’t really know what would happen after she had got the crew to the cat, she had been so caught up in getting there. She had half expected the cat to set her a new challenge, give her a new mission. She didn’t have time to think about it now either. Ships would be speeding towards their coordinates, tracking them from the popper engine.

She set a course for a heavy debris field she knew that wasn’t too far from here. It wasn’t in any way the closest one, but they would check those first, and she needed that extra time to become undetectable.

She was so focused on getting away, she had entirely forgotten about the crew. The very thing she had been working so hard to get together just deadspace hours earlier.

They each got their own message from the space cat, they knew what they needed to do. Once they came around, they stood up, walked calmed out of the holding bay, which Martha kindly opened for them, and went about their new duties on the ship.

---

Ofar knew his place was on the deck, and made his way there. Entirely sobered up now, he didn’t seem to have as much difficulty as Enda had expected in navigating the maze of passages. Enda was entirely taken by surprise, and jumped clean out of her chair - coming to rest floating a few inches above the seat - when he walked through to door. He couldn’t help but smile at her sudden shriek, though it was well intentioned, and came with a salute as he said,

“Well Captain, this pirate ship has a universe to put right”

---

Well if you made it all the way to the end, congratulations! This is what I call a babysitter style story, one that I just sat down and wrote in a single stream of consciousness, in the same tone as I used to make up bedtime stories. I can appreciate all the flaws of this style, and how difficult it can be to read, but when done well, it is amazing (Rudyard Kipling for example) so nothing wrong with a bit of practise. Thank you very much for bearing with me, and hopefully my babysitter style stories aren't as effective at sending one to sleep as they used to be!

This is my entry to @tygertyger 's #electricdreams contest, the prompt was to write a story containing three elements, space pirates, a talking cat, and the sentence "he was wearing baby pink long johns" - well I may have also accidentally included a few of your previous themes as well in this insane fever dream of imagination! Check out all the entries under #electricdreams and head over to her post where there is still about a day left to enter.

The artwork for this story is a combination of this cat by pixabay user Koltrein who has some great animal images, some on transparent back grounds like this one, and others finished with various effects great for scifi. The cat is overlaid an image of deep space by pixabay user Geralt who had a vast collection of images for all kinds of purposes. I combined the layers and added some effects using pixlr to create the final image depicting the power of a Space Cat.

Thank you all for bearing with me on this one, hope you enjoyed! - As always, Love and Sparkle - Calluna!