Chapter 38: The Ultimate Power Play
The digital zero hung in the air of the ruined lab, a silent echo. In the Staff Captain’s quarters, it manifested as a faint, almost imperceptible tremor in the deck beneath their feet. A hidden system engaging.
Hornpipe’s smirk returned, wider now, triumphant. “Ah. There it is. The dispersal units are in the ventilation shafts of the central promenade. Hundreds of passengers. A cloud of pure, aggressive mania. You lose.”
Mara didn’t look at Jan. She kept her eyes locked on Hornpipe. “Jan. Can you make him see something?”
“Obviously,” Jan said, her voice tight. She was already gathering her power, but it was a scalpel now, not a club. She needed precision.
“Make him see me,” Mara said.
Hornpipe laughed, a short, brittle sound. “More parlor tricks? I am inoculated. I’ve had a cortical damper installed since my… recuperation. Your lust magic is just static to me now.”
“Who said anything about lust?” Mara whispered.
Jan understood. She nodded at Fatima, who stepped to the side, her hands coming up, fingers moving in subtle, precise patterns—old Green Moon sigils for illusion and sensory binding. Jan’s power, the raw amplifier, flowed into Fatima’s structured spellwork. They wove it together, a tapestry of forced perception.
They didn’t attack Hornpipe’s body. They bypassed it. They attacked the map his brain made of the world.
To Hornpipe, the room subtly changed. The light from the brass fixtures warmed, becoming golden, intimate. The hum of the ship’s engines faded into a distant, rhythmic pulse. The sharp smell of ozone from the earlier magic was replaced by the scent of Mara’s perfume—jasmine and neroli—and something deeper, muskier, inherently female.
Mara, still standing before him, was the focal point. In his eyes, the silk belt of her robe loosened. It wasn’t a dramatic tear. It was a slow, deliberate slide of slippery fabric, giving way to gravity and suggestion. The robe parted.
Hornpipe’s breath hitched. His cortical damper didn’t block this. This wasn’t an emotional implant; it was a hijacking of his visual cortex. He saw what they made him see.
Mara’s body was revealed. Not in a pose, just standing there, real and devastating. Her full breasts, the dark nipples pebbled in the cooled air of the room. The curve of her waist, the flare of her hips. And between her legs, the neat thatch of dark curls, glistening with a wetness that looked impossibly thick and honeyed in the golden light.
He tried to look away, to shout, but his neck muscles were locked. The illusion held his gaze.
Mara took a step closer. The vision moved with her. She saw his pupils dilate, saw the confusion and involuntary arousal war with the fury in his face. She reached out and grabbed his wrist. His arm resisted, muscles corded, but the combined will of two Green Moon initiates was immense. She forced his hand down.
“You want to see real magic?” Mara purred, her voice a low, legal threat draped in velvet. “Here it is.”
She pressed his trapped fingers against her, not on her body, but into the space where the illusion was strongest. To Hornpipe, the sensation was explosively real. His fingertips met slick, swollen heat. The folds of her pussy were drenched, so wet it was a running leak, a constant, warm seep. He felt the hard nub of her clit under his exploring digit, and a shudder he could not control racked his body.
“It’s just an illusion,” he choked out, sweat beading on his temple.
“Is it?” Mara said, leaning in, her breath hot on his ear. “Then why can you feel how fucking wet I am? Why can you smell me?”
Jan, maintaining her half of the spell, pushed. She amplified the sensory feedback loop. The wetness Hornpipe felt wasn’t just damp; it became a gush. A sudden, hot flood of silky arousal soaked his pristine white uniform pants, darkening the fabric over his thigh, a shocking, intimate stain. He gasped, a ragged, horrified sound.
Fatima moved then. She came up behind him, not as an illusion, but as solid, pressing reality. One arm snaked around his chest, pinning his free arm. Her other hand fisted in his hair, yanking his head back to expose his throat. She wasn’t gentle. She was angry. This man had threatened a baby. Had threatened her friends. Had ruined her chance to finally read a novel on deck.
Her lips brushed his ear. “Khalas,” she hissed. Enough. Her magic was different from Jan’s—deeper, older, a thing of compulsion and truth. She wove it into the sensory overload Jan was creating. The pleasure-pain of the illusion, the humiliation of the soaking stain, the firm grip of her body—all of it became a key, a wedge to pry open his mind.
“You will speak,” Fatima commanded, her voice resonating with power. “You will tell us every location, every agent, every contingency. You will sing for us.”
She bit down on the juncture of his neck and shoulder. Not a love bite. A claiming, vicious clamp of her teeth. Hornpipe cried out, a strangled yell that was part pain, part something else entirely. The dual assault shattered his last defenses. The damper in his brain sparked and fizzled, overwhelmed by magical feedback.
His body went rigid, then slack against Fatima’s hold. His eyes, wide and unseeing, stared at the illusion of Mara’s glistening sex just inches from his face. Secrets began to tumble from his lips, punctuated by ragged moans.
“Cell B… in the boiler room… access code seven-alpha-gamma…” he gasped. “Neuro-agent canisters… are fake… distraction… real weapon… is sonic… in the ballast tanks… set to scuttle…”
Mara maintained her position, her face a mask of cold concentration. She looked over Hornpipe’s trembling shoulder at Jan. “What’s he seeing right now?”
Jan’s face was strained, emerald light flickering in her eyes like stormfire. A trickle of blood ran from her nose from the effort of sustaining such a complex, aggressive illusion. She managed a tight, grim smile.
“Don’t ask.”
Hornpipe was babbling now, a continuous stream of names, coordinates, fail-safes. The illusion Mara and Jan had built for him was now a feedback loop of torment and forced confession. In his mind, he was buried in Mara’s heat, drowning in her scent, every confession ripped from him by a pleasure so intense it was indistinguishable from agony.
Fatima held him fast, her teeth still locked in his flesh, her magic pulling the truths out like rotten teeth. “The secondary cell leader? Redmond. Where is he?”
“Observation lounge… now… waiting for… chaos…” Hornpipe sobbed. His hips gave an involuntary, pathetic jerk. A dark spot bloomed on the front of his stained trousers. He had come, helplessly, shamefully, against empty air, his mind and body utterly broken by the fabricated ecstasy.
Fatima released her bite with a sound of disgust. She let him slump to the polished deck, where he curled into a fetal position, whimpering, lost in the phantom afterglow of his violation.
The illusion snapped. Mara’s robe was neatly tied, her body covered. The only wetness was the sheen of sweat on her brow. She looked down at Hornpipe, then at the bloody bite mark on his neck, the stain on his pants. Her lip curled. “Fucking amateur.”
Jan wiped her nose on her sleeve, breathing heavily. “Ballast tanks. Sonic scuttling charge. That’s the real play. Sink the ship, blame it on ‘magical instability.’ Clean sweep.”
Godfrey, who had been lying by the door observing with detached canine boredom, stood up and trotted to Jan, nudging her hand.
Fatima was already moving, pulling her compact from a pocket. The mirror showed no reflection, only pulsing, malignant energy signatures deep in the ship’s lower decks. “He’s not lying. The signal is there. Big, and mechanical. Not magical. Our stones won’t find it.”
Mara pulled out her own phone, the mundane one. She hit a speed dial. “Zack. Shut up and listen. We need Liam and Hank. We need them to find a sonic charge in the ballast tanks. Yes, now. And tell Stacy to get to the observation lounge and… politely detain a man named Redmond.” She listened for a second. “How the hell should I know what a sonic charge looks like? It’ll be the thing that’s fucking beeping! Figure it out!”
She hung up. The three women looked at each other in the suddenly quiet cabin. The moon shone through the vast window, illuminating Hornpipe’s broken form on the floor.
“We good?” Jan asked, her voice hoarse.
“We’re not on vacation anymore,” Mara said, heading for the door. “We’re at work.”
They left the Staff Captain whimpering on the floor, surrounded by the ghosts of sensations they had painted inside his mind, and ran toward the bowels of the ship, the dog at their heels, the true timer now ticking in the dark, water-filled tanks below.
The heavy door to the service stairwell shut behind them, muffling Hornpipe’s pathetic mewling. The air here smelled of engine oil and damp concrete. Jan’s nose was still bleeding, a slow, insistent trickle.
“Zack’s with Liam and Hank near the forward lounge,” Mara said, reading her phone’s screen in the greenish emergency light. “They’re moving.”
“They don’t know what they’re looking for,” Fatima snapped, her heels clicking decisively on the metal steps as they descended. “A sonic charge could be anything. A brick with a speaker. A fucking tuning fork.”
“Then we find it faster,” Jan said, wiping her nose again. The metallic taste of blood was sharp on her tongue.
Zack stared at his phone after Mara’s abrupt hang-up, his face pale under the warm glow of a lobby chandelier. “She wants us to find a sonic charge. In the ballast tanks.”
Hank, bulky in a faded football jersey, scratched his head. “Like, a big speaker? That’s stupid. Sound doesn’t work like that in water, not for structural damage. You’d need a resonant frequency matched to the hull’s steel, pulsed with insane amplitude.” He blinked, realizing both men were staring at him. “What? I rebuild transmissions. Metal has a song. This is just a real loud, shitty song.”
Liam, his broad frame leaning against a potted palm, rubbed his beard. “Aye, but where do we start lookin’? It’s a big ship, and the ballast tanks are just… everywhere below the waterline. It’s all the bottom of the boat.”
“I know what it looks like.”
Bethany’s voice was crisp. She approached, no longer in her vintage dress but in the severe, charcoal wool suit of the Golden Wands, her pink hair stark against the dark lapels. Her sunglasses were perched on her head. “A Consortium sonic scuttling charge is a hexagonal prism, about the size of a lunchbox, with corrugated dispersion fins. It will be emitting a sub-auditory pulse your fillings would vibrate to if you got close. I can find it.”
Zack exhaled in relief. “Thank Christ. Lead the way.”
They moved as a unit, heading for a crew-only elevator marked ‘Machinery Access.’ As Hank pried the doors open with a mechanic’s pry bar he’d inexplicably produced, a skittering sound echoed from a ventilation grate. Small, greyish-green shapes tumbled out, chittering.
“The fuck are those?” Hank muttered.
Six gremlins, each about ten inches tall, with oversized ears and sharp, mischievous grins, formed a rough line. One saluted Bethany with a rusty screw.
“Allies, of a sort,” Bethany said, stepping into the elevator. “They hate organized technology. They’ll help.”
The descent was swift and claustrophobic. The doors opened not to a hallway, but to a narrow gantry overlooking a cavernous space—one of the primary ballast tanks. The air was thick with humidity and the raw smell of the sea. Dank, cold water sloshed forty feet below them. Pipes and conduits formed a steel jungle.
And there, clustered near a massive inlet valve, were three figures in dark tactical gear, Consortium rank-and-file. They were placing the final charge on a structural beam. The hexagonal device hummed, making the metal beneath their feet tremble.
“Hey!” one shouted, reaching for a sidearm.
Chaos unspooled with brutal simplicity.
The gremlins shot past Bethany’s legs like furry bullets, swarming the nearest agent. They didn’t attack—they deconstructed. Fingers pried at seam lines, tiny tools unscrewed armor plates, and one simply yanked the pin from a grenade on the man’s belt before scampering away. The agent froze, eyes wide with panic, holding the live grenade.
Liam moved with surprising speed for a landscaper. He didn’t throw a punch. He shoved a second agent hard against a pipe, knocking the wind out of him, then wrapped him in a bear hug from behind, pinning his arms. “Hank! The gun!”
Hank was already on the third, using his pry bar to expertly hook the man’s ankle and trip him. The pistol skittered across the grate. A gremlin pounced on it, dismantling the slide and barrel in seconds. Hank dropped a knee onto the man’s back, the breath whooshing out of him. “Stay the fuck down.”
Bethany didn’t watch the fight. She was already at the charge, her small handbag open. She pulled out a device that looked like a cross between a sextant and a spider made of brass. Its legs tapped against the humming hexagon, sensing. “Resonance pattern is set. It’s live. Dampening field in three, two…”
She placed a small, copper disk on the charge. A visible wave of silence emanated from it. The sickening vibration in the grating ceased. She repeated the process at dizzying speed, moving to the other two charges the agents had already placed. The gremlins, having reduced the first agent to a sobbing mess trapped in his own compromised gear, happily began disassembling the Consortium weapons into harmless, sparking scrap.
On the observation deck, the mood was different. Soft piano music played from hidden speakers. The night sky was a blanket of stars.
Stacy found Redmond and Ava by the panoramic windows. They weren’t locked in a lust-daze anymore. The Green Moon spell was broken. Redmond was speaking urgently into a communicator, while Ava methodically wiped down a glass table, her maid’s uniform crisp. Their movements were clean, professional, and cold.
“They’re reset,” Stacy murmured to herself, her hand drifting to the small of her back where her 9mm rested. She didn’t draw it. Not yet.
She walked forward, her athletic stride silent on the plush carpet. Redmond saw her first, his eyes narrowing. He gestured to Ava.
Ava turned, her expression blank, and reached into her cleaning cart. Her hand came out holding a Taser.
Stacy didn’t break stride. She closed the distance in two quick steps, her left hand snapping out to catch Ava’s wrist. She twisted, hard. The Taser clattered to the floor. A sharp, quick jab from Stacy’s right hand—a compact, powerful strike to the jaw—and Ava’s eyes rolled back. She collapsed.
Redmond went for his own weapon. Stacy was faster. She kicked the cleaning cart, sending it slamming into his shins. As he stumbled, she stepped in, grabbed the front of his purser’s uniform, and used his own momentum to throw him down. He landed hard on his back, the wind knocked out of him. She placed a foot on his chest, not hard, but firm.
“Don’t,” she said, her voice calm. She picked up his communicator and dropped it. Her heel came down, and plastic cracked. “Game’s over.”
The cleansing rippled through the ship.
In a starboard corridor, two Consortium agents rounded a corner, stunners raised, and found their path blocked by a writhing wall of living darkness. Vivian stepped from the shadows, her eyes glowing faintly crimson. Tentacles of pure night lashed out, wrapping around wrists, ankles, throats, squeezing just shy of breaking bone.
“They favor a low stance in close quarters,” Dale’s voice came from behind her, a little rough but steady. He leaned against the wall, shirtless under a borrowed jacket, his torso bandaged. “Sweep the lead leg.”
A shadowy limb complied. The first agent crashed to the deck. The second tried to aim. A shadow engulfed the weapon, and it dissolved into rust flakes and polymer chunks.
“Show-offs,” Dale muttered, a grudging smile on his face.
Elsewhere, three confused agents found themselves cornered by Robo-Mike and Robo-Casey.
“So, you guys are like, the bad guys, right?” Robo-Mike asked, his head tilted with authentic curiosity. “Do you get dental? Because the whole ‘trying to sink a passenger ship’ thing seems like it’d be a pre-existing condition for most insurers.”
“We could discuss the structural inefficiency of your sidearms,” Robo-Casey added flatly, picking at her fingernails. “The weight distribution is frankly amateurish.”
While the agents stammered, Robo-Molly stepped from an alcove and tapped each on the back of the neck with precise, robotic force. They dropped. “Thanks, guys! You were great!” she chirped.
The real Mike and Casey, with baby Rick safely retrieved by Molly and Ginny minutes earlier, executed “Midwestern Tourist Protocol G-7.” Mike stopped a pair of agents by asking for directions to the “big buffet” with relentless, sincere confusion, detailing a fictitious aunt’s dietary needs. Casey sighed audibly, filming him with her phone while subtly pointing at the agents’ feet.
Polluck the cat, a blur of orange and white, shot out from under a potted plant and tripped one with a yowl. The other agent, distracted, walked straight into Stacy’s waiting fist as she rounded the corner.
In the ship’s central control nexus, Shiv O’Connor examined a bank of humming Consortium equipment with disdain. “Cheap rubbish. All wires and pride.” She placed a hand on the main console. A subtle pulse of raw, O’Connor-family willpower—the kind that made men forget their own names and crave a woman’s laughter—washed through it. The machines didn’t break. They simply forgot how to work.
Johnny, beside her, adjusted a dial on a device that looked like a broken pocket watch. “Looping their internal security feeds back on a fourteen-second delay. They’ll see empty hallways.”
Brigid, her brow furrowed in concentration, sketched complex Archimedes Society equations in the air with a glowing finger. The symbols settled over the machinery, not disabling them, but transposing their essential functions. The anti-magic field generators began playing a soft, relentless chorus of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Near the main galley, Rebecca Franklin looked nervously at the charging agents. Charley Winkle, her mild-mannered fiancé, gave her hand a squeeze. Then he calmly stepped forward and tipped over a fully-loaded dessert cart laden with strawberry tarts and cream puffs.
A tidal wave of pastry and whipped cream cascaded across the polished floor. The lead agent hit the slick and went down hard, his stunner skidding under a trolley. The second spun, arms pinwheeling, before crashing into a stack of champagne glasses. Rebecca couldn’t help it—she giggled, a bright, warm sound in the chaos.
It was over in less than twenty minutes.
The ship’s actual security, finally alerted to the multiple, non-magical disturbances, found a series of unconscious or bewildered individuals in tactical gear, surrounded by copious evidence of sabotage—weapons, technical schematics, the disarmed scuttling charges. They found Staff Captain Hornpipe, babbling and soiled, in his quarters. They found Purser Redmond pinned under a fitness instructor’s foot.
The story, for the authorities and the news feeds, was compelling and magic-free: a terrorist cell from a radical technologist cult had infiltrated the crew. They had been thwarted by the alert actions of several passengers and some dedicated, if confused, service animals. The evidence was overwhelming, neat, and entirely terrestrial.
Long after midnight, they gathered in the largest undamaged stateroom, which belonged to Jan and Stacy. The mood was a physical release, a shared exhalation. Empty champagne bottles stood on the sideboard. Godfrey snored in a corner, paws twitching. Polluck watched from the top of a bookcase, unimpressed.
Molly and Ginny had returned a sleepy, unfazed Rick to Casey, who now held him against her chest, his small fingers tangled in her shirt. Mike’s arm was around them both.
“To not being fucking sunk,” Liam said, raising a glass of whiskey.
“To not being fucking sunk!” the room chorused. Clinks filled the air.
Mara leaned against the wall, Zack’s arm around her waist. She looked tired, but a real smile touched her lips. “We’ll have to give statements. For days. The paperwork will be apocalyptic.”
Jan, flopped on a couch with her feet in Fatima’s lap, raised her own glass. Her nose had stopped bleeding. “But look on the bright side, Counselor.”
“There’s a bright side?”
“We’ve still got half a cruise left.” Jan’s grin was wide, freckles crinkling. “And it’s bound to be a lot quieter without the tech goons on board.”
A beat of silence hung in the room. Then, the laughter started, genuine and ragged and loud, rolling out over the dark, quiet, and finally safe sea.