Marika wanted to be a space pirate when she grew up. While such an ambition is not unheard of among seven-year-olds, it distressed Marika’s mother, Lein, far more than it did the doting parents of any number of lads and lasses laying waste to their living quarters and threatening to space mutineers. Lein’s anxiety was quite natural, as she knew Marika would never be let into the family business.
She herself had never been past the bulkheads of the training quarters and into the docking pods and armories where the work of the family was done. Captain’s daughter or not, she knew that Marika would get no further, would marry one of her father’s men and spend her life in the quiet of the women’s quarters and the bustle of the training and common rooms, like any pirate’s woman.
Marika was not the sort of child to accept unpleasant facts, if there is, in fact, such a sort of child. She was charming and wild, an impetuous dimpled thing of green eyes and tangled mahogany hair, who ranged the common areas freely and scaled the walls and furnishings of the ship with nearly as much ease and grace as Pakriti, her monkat.
“Pakriti,” she would say, in the midday quiet of the children’s bunks, “we are going to get into the docking section someday and be brave and dashing space pirates. And I will wear a scarlet sash and a fearsome grimacing boarding mask, and you will wear long golden fang-tips, and we shall be feared throughout the shipping lanes of Noomed.” Pakriti mewed his sweet assent, and scratched between his shoulderblades with what Marika generously interpreted as a look of wistful anticipation.
However, Marika and Pakriti never seemed to get past the common areas, where the pirates’ women prepared the meals and the pirates lounged or used the training areas to hone their muscles and fighting skills for greater, richer, and more well-guarded prizes. No matter how they begged, the Captain laughed at the idea of a woman pirate, and the ship’s computer would NOT be convinced that Marika had any business in the masculine stronghold. And so the years wore on, with Marika begging, pleading, demanding and challenging, all the while trying to break into the docking sections and training herself with more vigor than any three of the actual pirates. Despite all her mother’s best efforts, she read nothing but romantic tales of piracy and derring-do, and even in her dreams she was the scarlet-sashed scourge of space, engaging five guards in combat at once, transferring thousands of marks of merchandise to her pods and sending the fat, bewildered merchants off on autopilot to the least luxurious parts of the galaxy, laughing as they shook their fists helplessly at her speedily escaping frigate….
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