Markus and I stood on the upper deck of the pirate ship, absolutely drenched from our underwater journey, dripping like we were covered in faucets someone forgot to turn all the way off. Facing us were four pirates, evenly mixed between the sexes, all of whom were holding spears or long hooks or equally vicious looking weaponry. They were dressed mostly in dirty rags, with splashes of color here and there—from what I could tell, newly looted fabrics distributed amongst the crew.

These people were outcasts from civil society, naturally suspicious of outsiders. They examined us closely, which reminded me that my wet clothes were stuck right to my figure. I resisted the urge to shrink with embarrassment. We had appeared here out of nowhere, with only our word to back us up. Our approach would require great care and subtlety.

“Take us to your leader!” I said, because I possessed neither of those.

“You are not armed,” said a woman, larger and more muscular than the rest. Her tone was almost a question.

“We offer not arms but victory,” said Markus. “If we might but speak with Kulades, all will be made plain.”

“You come from Lord Horcutio?” asked another pirate. This one was male, bald, with shaggy hair and beard the color of driftwood. He was wielding what looked like a harpoon made of some large crustacean’s shell.

“We are,” I said. “We bring counsel. Kulades can triumph this day, but he must follow our advice.”

“Kulades does not need your advice,” spat the tall woman, “to hunt a limping tulim.”

“The tulim,” I answered calmly, “is full of pilgrims on their way to worship at the Great Tree of Kives. You are emperiling a hundred souls who even now cry out to the goddess for aid.”

“Let them pray,” she snarled. “They will not be the first. Lord Horcutio rules these waters.”

“He does,” said Markus. “That is why he sent us. Will you waylay the messengers of your captain’s father?”

That seemed to give them pause. Sensing an opening, I jumped in.

“Surely Kulades will know whether we speak the truth,” I said. “And if we are lying, how did we get up here? The seas are yours, and the hull is smooth.”

Captain Ahab nodded to She-Hulk, and they fell in around us as we were marched to the front of the ship.

“Infiltration stage one is complete,” Markus subvocalized.

It was time to meet a demigod.

*

“Would I be correct if I said effects follow causes?” Val had asked during the planning session.

Paraphycisists are twisty bastards and you can’t trust them to make anything simple.

“No,” I guessed.

“In fact, I would,” said Val, looking just a bit smug. “In realspace, we have cause first and then effect; they are all oriented in one direction, which we call time. Now, what would happen if cause and effect still applied, but they were oriented in multiple directions? Such that, for example, one effect could influence a cause that was part of its own causal chain?”

“Hey, that’s what I meant when I said no,” I complained.

“It just keeps changing?” asked Markus.

“Understandable deduction,” said Val. “But that answer assumes these interactions happen sequentially, as they would in realspace. In etherspace, we find that the best models are those that have them executing simultaneously.”

“Then how do etheric entities experience time?” I said.

“By sympathy,” said Val. “There is time in realspace. Consciousness is an etheric substrate whose state is reactive to its moment-to-moment interaction with this plane of existence.”

“What about gods? They don’t have anything over here.”

“Correct,” said Val, nodding to me. “A godseed might qualify, being housed in a physical body, but a fully grown god and certainly an ascendant god does not possess consciousness as we experience it. This has tactical implications.”

A slight sneer passed fleetingly over Val’s face.

“Amateur moirologists often build plans around the idea of planning to take an action, then relenting once they’ve forced the oracle to act. This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of our opponent. In the first place, counterfactual futures do not exist and the oracle has no access to them. In the second place, oracles do not act iteratively. They are the quintessence of a concept given agency. They don’t try different behaviors to see what changes, because realspace does not change that way. Instead, an oracle reacts as their character dictates to the conditions of realspace, which they experience simultaneously—past, present, and future.”

The commander was tapping her fingers again. “Val, we appreciate the explanation, but this is a lot of theory with no application.”

“The application is simple,” said Val. “We accept that Kives wins.”

*

The mooing from Kulades’s sea beasts was louder here as we picked up pace. We were a minute from contact at most. As we approached the front of the ship, Markus and I got our first glimpse of the demigod. He was easily seven feet tall, wearing a cloak of many-colored sea shells that had to weigh far too much. His hair was black, and his arms were massive, sun-dark, and seemingly covered in fish scales. In his right arm he had a huge spear, probably nine or ten feet long, and over his left shoulder he rested a massive freaking sword, made out of some kind of bone and studded with some kind of teeth. I’d guess shark teeth, but apparently they didn’t have those here.

“Lord Kulades!” called the muscly woman who was guarding us. “These two appeared on the topdeck! They claim to be messengers from Lord Horcutio!”

Kulades turned, and man were those some muscles. Buddy was only wearing a skirt, made from rich purple cloth and belted with gold. His face was pretty darn ugly. Looked like an Easter Island head. He glared suspiciously at us.

“What manner of messengers are these,” he growled in the lowest voice I’ve ever heard.

“We come from Lord Horcutio,” said Markus. “We bring tidings about the coming battle.”

“Speak, then,” rumbled the giant pirate. “Then I will return you to him.”

I surmised that meant he was going to dump us overboard, and from the glint in his eye, he expected that to end messily for us. Without the waterjets, we’d be sharkbait. Er, not that they have sharks here, dammit.

“Three boons he grants you,” I said, stepping forward. I took off the necklace I was wearing and held it out to him. “First, this talisman of victory. While you wear it, the wiles of Kives shall do you no harm.”

He stared down at it, considering.

“It looks like no other gift of my father’s,” he said at last.

“It was stolen from Kives,” I said. “The second boon he grants you is a warning: the angels of Kives will descend. With this talisman, you may slay them, for your nature will be hidden from them.”

Kulades grunted. He handed his spear to the nearest crewwoman—whose reliability he secured with a rumbling growl that had her paling—and snatched the necklace with a swipe of his long, simian arm.

“I will wear it,” he rumbled. The chain was too short for his neck, so he looped the sparkling chain around the throat of his cloak.

“Val, how’s the connection?” Markus subvocalized.

“Excellent,” said Val. “Ah, this is fortunate. Our friend here is broadcasting his will to all the marine life in the area. Stall him a bit longer.”

“Where the hell are those angels?” asked Markus. “Did the pilgrims forget how to pray or something?”

“The third boon is a promise,” I said, ignoring them. “When your crew board the trade ship, you personally must hold back but a moment. Then attack, and Lord Horcutio will lend you his strength.”

Kulades stared at me for a long time.

“When we board the ship?” he repeated.

The mood shifted.

“They are spies,” rumbled the demigod. “Hold them.”

Markus and I were both immediately seized by the crew around us. Kulades stepped closer to us. He reached up, grabbed the transmitter and ripped it off, throwing it on the deck. He spat on it.

“Show them my glory,” he ordered. “Then I will flay them.”

He turned his back on us as rough hands held us down and forced us to look at the Friend of Heaven.

“Behold,” bellowed Kulades, pointing his sword at the ship, “a delicious oyster, full of pearls! Brace for impact!”

With a titanic keening noise, the creatures pulling Kulades’s ship submerged. We jerked forward. The front of the ship smashed into the Friend of Heaven, splitting it open. Its defenders tumbled to the deck, water rushing inside its guts. The hippocampi charged ahead, flanking the dying ship. The water below them churned with carnivorous mouths.

The angels hadn’t come. I knelt, wide-eyed, looking at all the people we’d just gotten killed.

*

“Phase one of the plan is to enlist a ship full of pilgrims,” said Val. “Anyone willing to give up their livelihood for a time to travel to Kives’s new holy site will have a strong connection to her. A ship full of them will be a target she can’t afford to ignore. That means our battle will involve four groups: the pirates, the pilgrims, Kives’s angels, and us.”

“That’s just asking for chaos,” said the commander.

“Not if we take a secondary role in the battle,” said Val. “We’re not here to kill all of the pirates. Just the demigod who claims affiliation with Horcutio. We insert Markus and Lilith with the pilgrims, then have them infiltrate the pirates before the raid. Fighting with the pirates means the angels will show up, defend the pilgrims—who will be desperately praying for aid—and maybe even kill Kulades for us. In the meantime, we’ll use the transmitter to collect the souls of the hippocampi killed in the battle.”

“That’s a lot of assumptions,” said the commander. “How certain are we that Kives will deploy the angels?”

“I mentioned that amateurs plan to relent from an action,” said Val. “We will not. Kives has been the ultimate target this whole time. If she will not defend her followers, we’ll kill them ourselves during the boarding action. It will be a small wound, but it is from many such wounds that Kives will die.”

“I’m not comfortable with this kind of wound,” I said. “The whole point is to save people.”

“It should not come to that,” said Val. “If she fails to intervene, she is lessened. If she intervenes, it is Horcutio who is lessened. The rational decision is obvious.”

*

They were all going to die, and it wasn’t even our fault—the deaths wouldn’t be tainted with hatred for Kives. She’d let them become martyrs instead. We’d failed.

“Lilith, Markus, prepare to flash,” said the commander. “There’s no point in letting him flay you alive.”

“They’re all going to die,” I said, not bothering to subvocalize. “This bastard of a goddess isn’t going to save them.”

“It is a noted behavioral tendency of the species,” said Val.

“You fucker!” I yelled, drawing looks from those around me. “You said she would!”

“Spy,” said Kulades, not turning away from the disaster unfolding before us. “Who do you speak to?”

“No one,” I said.

“Pain,” he commanded. The pirates holding me threw me to the deck as Markus shouted something. A foot impacted painfully with my ribs, rolling me over the deck. Something snagged on my hand—the transmitter.

“Val,” I groaned. “Have transmitter. Help?”

“Get it on him,” he said. “I have a contingency for this.”

Another kick rolled me on my back. Two pirates dragged me in front of Kulades, I guessed so he could question me without missing the show.

“Answer,” he said simply.

“Take this,” I groaned, holding up the transmitter. “You’ll hear.”

He stared down at me. In a sudden surge of violent motion, he snatched it up and threw it overboard. Fuck. Then he reached down and picked me up by my wrap like I weighed nothing.

“Answer,” he said again, taking a step forward.

“O-Okay,” I said, gasping, pawing at my wrap. I found the hidden pocket. “Look, I’ll tell you.”

Kulades kept walking forward, toward the end of the ship. Markus was yelling.

“Please, just stop!” I yelled. “I’ll tell you!”

He just looked at me darkly, expression like stone. My searching hand got the pouch open.

“In the name of Kives,” I said, drawing my disruptor pistol, “die, you piece of shit.”

I shot him in his stupid Easter Island face, and everything went to hell.