Crowbar obligingly scuttled into the interior of the shuttle wall, squeezing his flexible body and arranging his pseudopods around various bits of conduit until he was entirely inside. Delilah put the wall panel back in place, securing it firmly. Crowbar had assured her he could escape from worse.

  Then she waited. The pirate station’s computer took control of the shuttle’s navigation and guided it in. The rings were much larger than she’d realized, and seemingly made of the same substance as the larger sphere around them. The spherical module at the center irised an opening, and the shuttle entered. Clamps seized the vessel and dragged it to the floor of the deck. Delilah tried to prepare herself, sitting in the pilot’s seat, hands gripping the armrests.

  The shuttle door opened, and an outlandish alien hauled itself in through the opening. It had three real eyes and half a dozen more in the form of precious stones somehow embedded in its face, and its body was draped all over with golden chains, so many that it rattled as it moved. It held a short blade, also improbably made of gold. A soft metal, terrible to make weapons from, but Delilah supposed it would run her through well enough. “You’re Counter,” she said, recognizing the glittering ensemble of the pirate quartermaster from Hyperion’s Revenge.

  “How d’ye know my name, you rotten sea biscuit?” the alien growled in a masculine voice that, Delilah thought, was sampled straight from the TV show.

  The moment she’d been waiting for had arrived. In one episode of Hyperion’s Revenge, the pirates had captured a Naval crew, but one of the crew members had secretly been a pirate spy in disguise, and he’d spoken a pass phrase to reveal himself, and been taken straight to Starbeard’s quarters to report. She only remembered the line because her friends had made a joke of the phrase, imbuing it with sexual innuendo with waggling eyebrows and lascivious grins. “I know what’s inside Davy Jones’s locker,” she said.

  Counter froze, then reared back. “No,” he said. “It can’t be. After all this time–”

  “I need to see Starbeard.” That was the next line. She was going to stick to the script, even if Counter wasn’t.

  “Welcome… home, matey?” Counter’s reply was tentative… but it was the right words, and Delilah relaxed.

  Beyond the stark lines of the hangar, the station was an impressive replica of the sets from the show, as best she remembered. There were brass lamps, rough-carved beams, wooden floors, flame-kissed barrels, cargo netting hanging from the ceiling, pillars inexplicably encrusted with barnacles, and crooked shelves holding bottles of mysterious liquid. The pirates couldn’t have cobbled all this together from materials pillaged off the ships – they must have amazing fabrication engines.

  There was artificial gravity in this part of the station, too, just like in the pirate haven on the show, though back then it had been pure speculative fiction.

  Counter bellowed as he led her through the station: “Make way for the emissary!” She saw a few other pirates, peeking around corners or peering through half-closed doors, and one even briefly lifting a trap door on the floor. Finally Counter stopped before a set of tall wooden doors carved all over with krakens and sea serpents, and rapped on it with his golden sword.

  “Enter!” Starbeard’s voice called.

  The doors swung wide, revealing the captain’s quarters. Starbeard sat on a stool behind a wide table covered in food – fat bunches of grapes, some kind of roasted bird, a mountain of potatoes, bubbling casseroles, tureens of soup. The spread was probably all just nutritional mush shaped and flavored by a food printer, but Delilah’s mouth watered anyway.

  Starbeard beckoned with a pseudopod holding a good facsimile of a half-eaten chicken leg. “What’s all this then, Counter?”

  “She says… she says…”

  “I know what’s inside Davy Jones’s locker.” Delilah looked around, and shook her head. “Starbeard – the real Starbeard – won’t believe this. You’d better hope he’s flattered instead of horrified.”

  “The true Starbeard lives?” Counter said, aghast. “Then – he found it?”

  “The Mountain of Youth?” Delilah said. “Oh, yes.” The pirate king’s ultimate (stupid) goal was to find the location of a legendary cryovolcano, reputedly located on one of Saturn’s moons, that spewed forth an icy vapor composed of unknown chemicals that would make anyone who bathed in its spray immortal. “You lot must have gotten your hands on that old film Starbeard’s biographer made, and… what? Decided to follow his example?”

  Counter was buying it completely, but Starbeard gazed at her with no visible reaction. “We meant no insult by taking on the trappings of his people,” Counter said. “But we saw in Starbeard a kindred spirit–”

  “Why don’t you leave me with the emissary,” the alien Starbeard said, dropping the chicken leg. “We have much to discuss. About, ah, opening lines of communication with the other Killbot Bay, and the like.”

  Counter scurried out, pulling the doors shut behind him. Delilah sat down in a wooden chair across from Starbeard, and propped her feet up on the table. She was getting into this. “I didn’t want to frighten your quartermaster, but you should know, it’s a dangerous thing to take the name of a pirate as fearsome as Starbeard for your own–”

  Starbeard took off his hat and tossed it on the table, then tore off his eyepatch. There wasn’t even an eye underneath it. “Has anyone else who arrived on your ship seen the show?” he demanded, in a rather less dramatic voice than before.

  “The show?” Delilah said.

  “Hyperion’s Revenge! It’s not a documentary. It’s a fictional entertainment, and, I think, not a very good one… but I’d rather my crew not figure that out. I don’t want a mutiny on my hands.” His skin flushed an unhealthy looking shade of green. “I was afraid this day would come. You’ve put me in a very difficult position. Do your crewmates know the truth? Did you tell the people on the Rathole?”

  Delilah opened her mouth, then realized any answer she gave could be dangerous. If she said only she knew, one stab would solve the problem; if she said everyone knew, it might invite a series of stabs at other people. “I’ll answer your questions after you answer mine.”

  “What’s to stop me from just killing you, and sanitizing the Rathole?” he asked.

  Delilah didn’t have an answer for that.

  Starbeard sighed. “I’ll tell you what’s to stop me. The chance to talk to someone who isn’t delusional for a few moments, that’s what. This life was all so much simpler when I still believed.”

  “How did… all this… happen?” Delilah said. “We know this was some sort of Axiom facility–”

  Starbeard shoved back from the table with the clatter. “The Axiom? My people called them the Fundamental, but you mean the same race, don’t you? Yes. The old masters. They built this place, and they put my ancestors here to run it, tens of thousands of years ago. How did you people come to learn of the Axiom?”

  “We’ve had some encounters,” Delilah said.

  “And lived to tell about it.” Starbeard shook his head. “They have truly fallen low.”

  “They built this place,” Delilah said. “But why? Is it some kind of weapon?”

  “You’d think that, but no. This place was supposed to save the universe. Or, at least, the galaxy. The Fundamental were long-range planners. They knew someday this universe was likely to end, via heat death, the big crunch, or, in the hypothesis favored by the sect who built this place, the Big Rip. Do you know what that is?”

  Delilah nodded. That was Intro to Cosmology stuff. “The idea is, the universe is expanding, and eventually it will expand so thoroughly that matter itself will be pulled apart – molecules, atoms, even subatomic particles, torn to pieces.”

  “That’s right. This station was meant to help keep the local agglomeration of matter together.”

  “You mean you can reverse entropy,” Delilah said.

  “Only on a very local scale,” Starbeard said. “There were supposed to be trillions of these stations built – we were just the first one, the prototype and proof-of-concept. These stations were meant to encircle the entire galaxy, and protect it from destruction, creating a bubble of stability in an ever emptier universe. But this place was created during the last days of the Fundamental Empire, with various factions arguing about the best way to preserve the future – some wanted to tunnel into other universes, and some wanted to develop a form of psychic time travel to project their consciousnesses back… there were all sorts of approaches. In the end, our faction failed. They were supposed to be indestructible in war, because they were able to reverse entropy, but based on a report from the last survivors, their enemies froze them in stasis instead, and then flung them into a singularity. Their enemies stopped them from changing, then slowly ripped them apart – it was an ironic form of execution, you see, to mock the plans of our founders. The Fundamental liked that sort of gesture.”

  “So you’ve just… been here?” Delilah said. “For millennia?”

  “I’ve only been here for centuries,” Starbeard said. “Before my generation, we hatched from our incubators, absorbed the memories of our forebears, and went back to work, as if our work mattered. We kept the engines going, and we collected and analyzed the samples–”

  “Samples?”

  “We were meant to monitor the progress of the Big Rip,” Starbeard said. “The station constantly opens wormholes to different points in the galaxy, and draws in whatever matter it finds there. Usually it’s just space dust, but occasionally we get bits of asteroids, atmosphere, core samples from planets, chunks of crust, and the like. The station analyzes those samples to chart the progress of the Big Rip.”

  “How… how is it progressing?”

  “Who cares?” Starbeard said. “We can’t do anything about it. This station alone isn’t powerful enough to protect itself from being torn apart eventually, and we’ll all be long dead before that happens anyway. I haven’t looked at the data in centuries. We were hopeless here, going through the motions, until one day…”

  “The sample you collected was a ship,” Delilah realized.

  “I know now it was a mineral scout vessel,” Starbeard said. “Only one pilot inside… but he was a fan of Hyperion’s Revenge. He had all the episodes of his favorite show in his data banks, to pass the time while he was out on long lonely voyages. He even had his own version of the captain’s hat. This hat.” He tapped the tricorn on the table. “We didn’t know what the ship was, you see – we’d never seen anything like it. As for the pilot! We’d never even heard of humans. We didn’t understand him, and when we boarded, he attacked us. I’m afraid we killed the man. The entropy engines can work both ways, you see. They can increase disorder, too. If deployed correctly, the main engine on this station could disintegrate a planet, but we hardly needed that much power to take care of one human.” Starbeard slumped. “We tore him apart. A little rip.”

  “And then you watched the show, and you thought it was real.”

  “We’d never seen fiction! There was enough data in the ship’s banks for us to learn the rudiments of the language. Once we watched Hyperion’s Revenge, we realized we were pirates too. Didn’t we steal from the unsuspecting universe, taking what we wanted, unstoppable? Starbeard was an inspiration to us as well. He was trying to attain immortality, wasn’t he? Just like we tried to do for the galaxy. He sought eternal life in geysers of alien ice. The story was beautiful. And… I’ll be honest with you… we needed something. We needed a culture. An organizing principle. Every generation got a little smaller, because a certain number of us failed to thrive when they realized our mission was futile, and when the ancient masters never came to check on us, and we never heard from anyone else. Here we were, bound inside this inescapable sphere! Some of us chose to die, and that number got greater with every passing century. Until we found a new purpose.”

  “You started taking ships deliberately,” Delilah said.

  “Using the data in that first ship, yes,” Starbeard said. “We tuned the sampling engines to make them open more frequently in inhabited regions, and as we learned about the human colony systems from later ships, we started raiding those, too. That gave us a purpose, and made us feel powerful. We emulated Starbeard! We treated our prisoners humanely, and never killed them.”

  I guess it’s a good thing it was a children’s show and not a gritty drama, Delilah thought.

  “We would have ransomed them back, like they do on the show, but the sampling engines don’t work that way. Things come in, but they don’t get out. We have short-range teleporters, and we’ve tried them at the edge of our prison, but the walls are too thick for us to reach the other side. We can’t get out of here. The Fundamental didn’t see us as people; they saw us as part of the equipment. We were never supposed to leave. Since we couldn’t visit other worlds, we settled for turning this world into a different one.”

  “When did you find out the truth about the show?” Delilah said.

  “It didn’t take long. I’ve been keeping up this ruse for a long time. I soon saw other entertainment programs on other ships. I talked to some of the prisoners, and learned about ‘fiction.’ Starbeard wasn’t real. Hyperion’s Revenge wasn’t even highly regarded as a lie. I didn’t think my crew could handle realizing their role model was created to amuse alien children, so I’ve hidden the truth from them.”

  “You’ve hurt people,” Delilah said. “You’ve brought people here and trapped them. So many of them have died, lost, taken from their homes. You have to stop this.”

  “Their suffering is nothing compared to ours,” Starbeard said. “But… I agree. Something needs to change. The prisoners on the Rathole give us a little entertainment, attempting to escape, sometimes attacking us, but I’ve sensed uneasiness in my crew. All this is beginning to seem pointless, too. I’ve been thinking, the real problem is… we don’t have a Forrest Flood here.”

  Delilah blinked. “You mean… you need an enemy?”

  “Human entertainments often have antagonists,” Starbeard said. “How would you like to be our Flood? I could even claim you’re the great-great-something-granddaughter of the real Forrest Flood, sent here to root out the heirs to Starbeard’s legacy. I’d provide you with a ship, and you could crew your vessel with the rabble from the Rathole. I’d outfit you with an entropy engine, so you wouldn’t have to worry about taking real damage. Think of the fun we could have!”

  “That… doesn’t sound fun.”

  “Does it sound more fun than sitting on the Rathole waiting a few decades to die?” he said. “We’re stuck in here. We have to pass the time somehow. Or do you fancy being torn apart atom by atom? If you don’t play along… you have to go. I can’t risk your knowledge getting out and infecting my crew. I know killing you is not what Starbeard would do, it’s not very sporting, but, well… this is just a role I’m playing.”

  “Well. When you put it that way.” She cleared her throat. “Starbeard, I’m Delilah Flood, and I’m here to end your reign of–”

  Then the lights went out, and the gravity too.

  Starbeard shouted things in a language she didn’t know.

  “Hey, Delilah,” Ashok said in her earpiece comms. “Grab a sword and try to get back to the hangar, would you?”

  There was a sword on the table somewhere, but she didn’t want to reach for it in the dark and slice her hand off, so she planted her feet on the edge of the table and shoved herself through the air toward the double doors. She pushed through them, and there was some light out there, because some of those brass lamps held actual flames. Counter was floating in the middle of the corridor, his gold gleaming as he flailed around and failed to reach rafters or wall. Delilah went past him and plucked his golden sword from a waving pseudopod as she went. He squawked, but she ignored him, grabbing onto a chandelier and swinging herself down another corridor toward the station’s hangar bay.

  “What happened?” Delilah said over her comms.

  “I woke up the boss,” Winslow rumbled in her ear. “Grigsby came along. Crowbar managed to turn off the lights and gravity on the station there, and Ashok is dispatching some drones to help him take down the entropy engine.”

  “Once the pirates aren’t indestructible anymore, I think it’ll perk up the prisoners on the Rathole,” Ashok said.

  “So basically everyone else did something wonderful except me,” Delilah said. “Good to know.” She was nearly to the hangar.

  “You are the reason for my success,” Crowbar spoke up. “The operations control center was occupied by four pirates playing cards, and I could not have possibly overcome them all. Soon after your arrival, however, another pirate burst in and told them there was an emissary here from the real Killbot Bay, and they all rushed away, allowing me free rein to tamper with their systems.”

  “What you did, Mears,” Ashok said, “was social engineering, and that’s the kind I’ve always been the absolute worst at. Wait in the hangar for my drones to arrive. A bunch of little mes are on the way, and they’ll help you–”

  Something snagged Delilah by the ankle and swung her into the wall. She didn’t have weight, but she still had mass, and though she turned to take the impact on her shoulder instead of her head, it still jarred her. She swung her sword wildly, but that just made her corkscrew around inelegantly. A pirate she hadn’t seen before crawled up her body, grabbed the sword, and shoved it through a loop on his belt, though his squidlike body didn’t really have a waist. “The captain wants you on the flagship,” he said, and then everything went blurry.

  They thumped to the deck of a ship where the artificial gravity still worked, and Delilah realized she’d just been teleported. She lifted her head. The pirate wore a red bandana over his bulbous head: just a generic unnamed crewperson, in terms of the show.

  She punched him in what passed for his face, and he squawked and dropped the sword. She got to her feet and pelted down the corridor. The interior of this vessel was modeled on the Hyperion’s Revenge from the show, a wild mixture of old-timey wood-andbrass and twenty-second-century-modern glass-and-metal. Her roommate Bree had been a far bigger fan of the show, and probably had the whole floor plan memorized, but Delilah was just looking for a place she could duck out of sight. “Ashok, I’m on the flagship!”