"We've got to get the fuck out of here," said Rackham, surveying his crew. "Is anyone here suitable to drive?"

It was to Read's credit she didn't paste him a clean shot across his chops. "No, John, everyone here got shitfaced as fast as they could, and now they're useless." She watched the queasy rigger pulling himself up to the sails, looking like he was about to lose his grip and come crashing down to the deck any second. The carpenter staggered around, trying to help other sailors with odd jobs but unable to focus on any task for very long. And so, after the Bennet heaved to and raced back to report, they were barely prepared to sail off when a very large, very dark shape emerged from the thick fog and pulled up beside them. Had it been at all lit up, they might have noticed it long before.

"Ahoy," called out a bold British man's voice. "Identify yourselves."

Before Bonny could stop him, her lover called out "John Rackham of Cuba!" She hissed at him, demanding to know what he was thinking, but he shrugged her off.

On the much longer ship, one light went on as Capt. Barnet recognized this name as prominently placed on his to-do list. He waved to the First Mate, who waved to a sailor by the stairs, who waved to the Master Gunner, who carefully lined up one cannon to the William's stern.

"An' who're you, ya big jackass?" hollered Lovely Mari up to the dark shapes overhead.

Bonny cuffed her ear. "You idiot! What're you doing?"

"Well, who's this guy think he is? We're just havin' a nice lil' party to ourselves, he doesn't gotta piss all over it!"

Bonny went to seize Mari's collars, but there was hardly any three inches of her garment that didn't lead to something obscene. "We're pirates, buffoon! These seas are thick with assholes like this one, making careers of hunting people like us down!" Suddenly, the crash of wooden planks seized her attention. "Mary, John! We're being boarded! Nicholass, get us out of here!" She grabbed the ship's wheel herself and began to steer the William out of the bay and into the deep fog.

Sharp cracks rang out in the night. The deck splintered and burst around Mari's feet, and she glared up resentfully at the other ship: she could only just make out the shapes of men moving around, lining up shots with personal firearms, laughing and picking them off like rodents. She turned to see the drunken revelers scurrying a lot like rats themselves, scrabbling to dive below and hide in their cabins.

"You bastards!" Read yanked her beloved pistol from her belt and swiped Rackham's as well. She ran to the desk and stood before the portal. "If there's a man among you," she called into it, "you'll get your ass up here and fight like the man you're supposed to be!" When no one responded, she swore and fired a shot at the first writhing body she could make out, and she was drawing a bead on another when she heard conversation behind her.

"We can take them," Bonny was saying, impatience in her voice. "There's nearly 20 of us, and about as many of them. What, you think a couple dozen angry veterans couldn't hold off some royal pantywaists?"

But Rackham raised his hands placatingly and backed away from her. "It's not wise, I don't like it. Look, they've got us this time, but if we don't cause too much fuss−"

Read's jaw dropped. "You son-of-a-biscuit!" Her arm leveled at him like iron to a magnet, and had not the William taken a bad lurch at that moment, she might have done better than pierce his arm. Rackham collapsed and rolled behind the balustrade of the upper deck, shielding himself from her.

The Tyger easily kept pace with the smaller sloop, and Capt. Barnet's voice bellowed, "Stay and prepare to be boarded, or we will fire upon you!"

"Quarter! I request quarter!" yelled Rackham.

Bonny glared down at the flashy man who'd allured her for so long. "You pathetic little ass-munch," she said, drawing her leg back and swiftly booting him in the guts. "You and me, Read! It's always been you and me!" She stormed down the steps, pulled out her machete and flintlock, and awaited the British soldiers. Read finished reloading her pistols and stood beside her friend yet again.

"All those damned rats fled downstairs," Read growled. A cannon belched and the William's main sail was shredded.

Bonny stumbled and recovered as the Tyger blew the William's rudder into toothpicks. They'd been expertly disabled and drifted dead in the water. "I notice our posh new guest has fled the scene as well."

"That festooned doxy?" Read glanced around. "Good riddance to bad rubbish. Have at you, dogs!" They charged the steadily creeping crew invading their ship, staving them off at two points. The British soldiers were taken aback by the fighting prowess of these two women (believing them to be men), while Rackham struggled to protect his arm and avoid detection during the fight, waiting for a proper captain to surrender to.

The ocean roared and boiled around both ships. The William surged and ground against the Tyger; the larger ship made a much more impressive display of lurching and becoming unstable. Some of the British soldiers managed to leap back onto their own vessel, while the stragglers stayed on the William to get hacked apart by Read and Bonny or tumble into the ocean.

"The feck is this?" yelled Bonny over the roar of the waves. She'd never seen such a tumult, as though a volcano were erupting directly beneath them. The Tyger looked like it was in great distress, for all its stoutness. The William canted badly, and the women leaped backward to grab their main mast, watching the earth upheave.

"We're too close to shore for this to be a whale!" Read smirked at the terrified cries of the men downstairs. "Rackham! Are you with us yet?" She couldn't see the craven sailor behind the railing or the wheel, but what she saw instead gave her a start. Wordlessly, she pointed her pistol behind Bonny's shoulder. The red-haired woman spun around and scanned the horizon.

The horizon was entirely blocked by a massive structure, larger than a house. Water ran down its sides, leaving enormous spills of spun gold flowing to the left and the right, as the gigantic thing emerged from the sea aport the William. It entirely occluded any view of Negril, as well as the rolling hills and jungles of Jamaica altogether. Below the waterfalls of gold, two huge disks of red blinked at them, with pupils formed into hearts, a feature neither Bonny nor Read had ever noticed in Mari's face before.

But now that Mari's face was a dozen yards wide and high, every detail was laid clear to them, from her fine, mischievous eyebrows to the hideously long grin that rose over the railings and above the mast. Her chin flew past, dripping buckets of seawater upon the pair of fighters, and then her long and graceful neck, leading down to the foothills of her bare shoulders, and then…

The William rocked, creaked resentfully, then turned and slid over the mountainous slopes of Lovely Mari's gargantuan boobs. These were truly colossal now, glistening in the moonlight as they rose above the fog, nestling the piratical sloop deep within her abundant cleavage. Read and Bonny could only gape at each other in a mixture of horror and wonder as Mari "sported her dairy" in a manner previously unimaginable. The William groaned as it settled between the tremendous, heaving breasts, eliciting despairing wails from below decks. Each breast rose above port and starboard, reaching far beyond what the two women could see; the aft of their ship broke apart and crumbled down the giantess's bared sternum like so much cookie, but the bow dipped toward the horizon. Between the literal hillsides of the gigantic witchy's breasts, the two pirates could see the fog coating the ocean like an eiderdown upon a mattress, perhaps, reduced in size and far, far below them.

"Holy feck, Mary, she's going to toss us into the drink!" Bonny gasped, struggling to remain upright as the floorboards beneath her feet rose and twisted restlessly.

Read stared up at the huge jaw sheltering them. The main sail was sundered, laying wetly against the immense woman's cheek. "I don't think so, Anne. Just hold on tight, I think this damp lass has something else planned."

What crew remained on the Tyger stared up in horror as nothing less than an ancient goddess arose from the Caribbean Sea. Captain Jonathan Barnet, for all his experience and worldliness, was struck dumb to see the immense, nude woman rising up and up and up, endlessly above them. The poor bastards in the William were nowhere to be seen, doubtlessly shattered by the unconscious force of this giantess. The First Mate screamed somewhere behind him, giving frenzied orders to the crew to recover the ship amid oaths to the god he believed in to save him or otherwise intervene. Good men, hardened soldiers ran back and forth, manning the lines, dodging barrels and crates as they skidded like projectiles across the decks, doing their level best to withstand the abrupt storm that assailed them.

Far, far above, two pale, fleshy planets swung back and forth, raining water upon the men as densely as any thunderhead. His mind struggled to liken this being to anything familiar, but every time it drew up an analogy to a woman, something defied the comparison. There was her navel, sure, but half his crew could have hidden in it like a cave. The twin planets could have been her breasts, but everything he knew about physics insisted they should have crashed upon him, and while the 90-ton snow easily outclassed Rackham's 20-ton sloop, the giantess's bosom impressed Capt. Barnet with how consummately frail his craft was.

A river of water flowed around the giantess's navel and gushed over the hilly slopes of her sexuality. Decency demanded that Capt. Barnet look chastely away, yet he could not in this supernatural moment forsake the vision that presented itself to him. Lights of the distant town of Negril glinted between the goddess's soaking thighs, immense pillars that planted imperiously in the rough seas to support her astounding structure. He almost… the captain almost wanted to… leap overboard, and…

His crew screamed like banshees, pointing overhead. Capt. Barnet looked as well and saw one of the giantess's hands placing itself gracefully upon her impossibly massive breasts, and one slender, frighteningly powerful arm reaching across the night sky. The Caribbean Sea dripped off her bicep, showering the Tyger, as her paradoxically dainty hand wrapped around the entirety of the Bennet, far behind them.

*   *   *

The cube spun radiantly above them, faster and faster, whistling with mass against the air. The Teen, upon waking, gingerly prodded the side of his head and stared at the brilliant shape before coming to his senses and seeking out the SWAT Operator. He found him kneeling before a large book, an immense book, huge enough to crush both people in it like houseflies. Yet Drummond stood there, beside two large, black suitcases, staring intently at the swirling symbols and reading aloud words the Teen couldn't recognize.

"What are you doing!" the Teen yelled over the cube's noise. Drummond didn't respond. The Teen sat up, looking for his Bible and the velvet runner he'd appropriated as vestments: they were nowhere to be found, and he recalled with alarm that he hadn't been on the magic work table when Drummond knocked him out. He crept away from the man, then, and gave the frenzied cube wide berth as he checked out the perimeter of the table. From where he was able to go, without getting too close to his abuser, he couldn't spot his property anywhere.

A noise like a large steam valve erupted, making the Teen look around with alarm. From where he stood, the spinning cube and the large bowl above which it hovered more or less blocked his view of Drummond, and probably vice-versa. But to his right, beside the book and on the side of the table overlooking the rest of the room, a mist began to form. It was itself a spinning little mass, whorls of purple with sparks of shocking crimson, but it didn't whirr like the cube, like it was about to explode. Instead, this looked like a pot of boiling water, just without the pot or stove. It roiled a couple feet above the table, slowly growing larger as Drummond read on.

The Teen forgot himself in the face of incomprehensible stimuli. "Drummond! What the hell is going on?" He started to run around the bowl, then double-backed from the churning fumes and ran behind it, unable to guess what was going on with the swirling mass. Then he found himself behind Drummond, to his surprise, and the officer didn't seem to have noticed him. He only stood straight, arms spread and slightly raised, as he belted out the strange words.

The Teen felt like he was about to puke, as he slowly crept up behind the officer. The Teen was clad in slightly baggy jeans and a t-shirt; Drummond crackled with power and authority in his SWAT gear, purposeful-looking straps and pockets, and several visible weapons. "No way," the Teen muttered, slowly creeping behind him, "no way." And yet in seconds, there he was right behind Drummond, the bully, the sex-toy to the insane goddess. What now?

There was the officer's pistol, securely strapped to a black web belt by means of a black nylon holster, cradling the firearm with something like a tailored fit. A single cloth strap reached behind the pistol's grip, with a solid-looking brass snap to the holster. The Teen stared at it, trying to detect if there was anything else, some other trick, but he was unable to find anything.

His next idea was to stare at the holster and the snap, pantomiming with his fingers to replicate simply reaching out, flicking the snap open, and slipping the pistol out with quickness. But his fingers trembled and frequently he forgot to breathe, standing rock-still behind the scary, military-trained man. If he screwed this up, Drummond could probably kill him a dozen ways with just his bare hands. He seemed like the living embodiment of the badasses so many other guys claimed to be, except Drummond never bragged about it. He simply was a badass.

The Teen wondered if this was a bad idea. He stood there and watched Drummond, trying to figure out what he was doing. At his boot was a small rainbow-colored book, more reasonably sized for both of them. Through the top of its spine ran a large gold hoop, and from this ran a short length of gold chain to a huge, oddly shaped hook. Drummond didn't even look at this as he read, picking out the scrawls and glyphs on the vast pages. And he was waving his arms, too, wiggling his fingers around as he emphasized certain sounds and combinations of sounds. He seemed unaware of the swirling mass beside the book, the thing that was growing larger into the shape of a tall and narrow oval.

Drummond jerked and the Teen fell backward onto his ass. But the Operator only clapped his hands, pointed at the oval, and returned to writing. The oval began to stretch out into six points, an elongated hexagon of bright violet lights, surrounded by flowing red mists. Inside was a glistening sheet of black material, the Teen didn't know what, but this slowly cleared and became transparent. Beyond it was sunshine on green trees, just like existed outside of the chaotic witchy's cabin. Was it a door outside? The hexagon stretched and widened, now large enough to hold a man, and then larger than that.

The skin on the back of Drummond's head and neck was flushed, the Teen noticed, reddening and sweaty, and his arms were beginning to tremble. His words were beginning to meld, and then he held a long chord, a long and powerful note, and the Teen stepped up, flicked the clip with this thumb perfectly on the first try, and lifted out the Kimber Custom TLE II.

He stared at it in his hand, retreating once more. It was heavy, serious metal in his untried grasp, slightly warm, with an intriguingly textured grip. Wanting to study it more, he instead felt the pressure to use it, now that he'd stolen it, and so he raised it to the back of Drummond's skull and pressed the tip into his stubbly flesh, like he'd seen in the movies. He started to pull the hammer back, like in the movies, but it was strong and he wasn't sure what that would do. He didn't want to break it, and he didn't question that ridiculous notion.

Paying him no mind, Drummond continued to recite and perform as though his life depended on it. The Teen leaned around the side, catching a glimpse of his cheek shaking as he returned to pronouncing the arcane language, rivulets of sweat running down his skin. The Teen nudged him with the pistol, but Drummond stood there, strong and immovable and not open to external suggestions.

"Dammit," muttered the Teen. "I can't do anything right." He stepped back a few paces, squatted onto his haunches, and waited for the Operator to finish whatever the hell he was doing. After a minute, he decided to drag one of those wheeled suitcases over and partially hide behind that, in case it helped. He turned the gun over and over in his hand, always careful to point it away from himself and not at Drummond, either. When the spinning cube began to spit out sparks, just a few colored mini-meteors in random directions, the Teen raised the pistol and lined the center of the cube in its sights.

The Operator's hand wrapped around the barrel, holding it fast. "I wouldn't do that," said the older man wearily. The Teen yelped and tumbled backward, releasing the gun; Drummond simply put it away and fastened the clip once more. Then he leaned upon the suitcase to gasp for breath, then collapsed to his knees, holding his chest.

"Drummond?" Slowly the Teen got up and stood nearby, just out of arm's reach, but near enough to help if needed. "Are you okay? What were you doing there? Do we gotta worry about that?" He pointed at the cube, but the man didn't look up.

"Gimme a minute." Drummond's hands curled up shakily into fists, resting on his knees, as he gritted his teeth and breathed hard.

"Should I get you some water?"

"Just… give me a minute. Please."

Hearing please from the officer was more frightening than anything else. "I'm sorry about the gun. I didn't want to use it on you, I just didn't know what else to do."

Drummond shook his head. "I don't blame you. Shit's crazy right now. Time to do crazy things." It almost look like he laughed. "Help me with these."

Unquestioningly, the Teen wheeled one of the suitcases next to the glowing portal before the cube. The Teen could smell sweet air coming from the hole in space and got a better look. It was like he was looking at a TV screen of a small town, like a local news report anywhere in America. Except it emitted an actual breeze and, over the cube's buzz, he could hear light traffic.

He gaped at Drummond. "Are you serious? Is that home?"

The older man said it probably was.