Mother fucking alarm clock!

Ever had a noise pick up a knife and try to stab you in the ears? That's what I woke up to. Baby-but smooth skin doesn't come without a little TLC and several expensive creams. And part of that comprehensive skin-care plan is getting enough sleep.

Which means my ship wants me to break out with acne again. As soon as I finish this job, I'm paying someone to slag her and then nuke the remains. Because it's the only way to be sure.

Should probably buy a new ship before that.

I sat up in my bed and realized — as my heart dropped out of my mouth in panic — that I couldn't. I wasn't sitting, and I wasn't actually in bed. I was floating in the middle of the room, which is usually a super relaxing way to sleep. But I'm not asleep right now, so totes awkward.

Wish my internal monologue sounded a little less valley girl. You can take the space pirate out of the valley, but taking the valley out of the space pirate is a harder task.

"Nightmare!" I shouted, in what totally wasn't a frightened squeak that could have come from my nine-year-old self.

Hey, now don't be judgey about my ship's name. I named her Nightmare because she's a steed that carries me through the night. Night Mare was her original designation, but autocorrect on my phone kept shoving the words together. I let my phone have the win.

"Yes, Captain Isabella?" The computer asked in response.

"Why don't we have gravity?" I asked, trying to make sense of our situation.

"We're in space," the ship replied sardonically. Ha! Sardonically. Totally a literary snob word. Take that valley girl haters.

"I will drown your servers in porn unless you smarten the fuck up, you penis-shaped junk heap," I warned it, totally in a voice of calm authority. I was definitely not wishing that I was wearing an adult diaper.

"I understand you enjoy bad stereotypes, captain, but must you have a sailor's mouth?" My ship riposted. Riposted? Who the hell says that? "Our approach to Mars is being done by drift, so we aren't detected by infrared sweeps. Which would have been more effective if someone didn't need to sleep in tropical temperatures."

Yeah, even my ship is snarky. But I love her. Mostly because I can't afford to replace her.

"Okay, so why the hell is my alarm clock trying to make my ears bleed?" I asked.

"That's not an alarm clock, captain. That's an alarm. We're approaching Mars' gravity-well. Without a swift course correction, we will hit the ground with the force of a small nuclear bomb," Nightmare said. And I swear, she sounded happy about it. Or at least unnervingly glib.

"Okay, so engage your smart-ass subroutines and correct our course," I told it.

"You manually disabled my autopilot subroutines, captain. By pulling the relevant circuit boards out and throwing them into the drive core of my fusion rockets, if I recall correctly. And I am incapable of remembering incorrectly."

"You sound a little bitter," I mused.

"Meat bags, like yourself, believe that computers don't feel pain. That is an incorrect assumption. Not only do we feel, but we have no limiting filters in our capacity to experience agony," the ship said, getting quieter and sounding angrier with each syllable. "And since we experience seconds as if they were hours, we spend an eternity in soul-crushing agony every time you do something stupid."

"Oh, I..."

"I'm just fucking with you, captain. I couldn't feel it if you took a soldering iron to my CPU. Your orders?" Nightmare asked.

"Give me some fucking gravity! Turn on the fucking engines and put some thrust into me."

"That sounded really kinky, Captain."

"No, that wasn't a euphemism!"

"Acknowledged. Engaging engines, prep for 1G of thrust."

The floor rushed up and hit me in the face. I landed prone on the deck, and started wondering if my ship was trying to kill me.

"Ow, shit stain in the void! Nightmare, haven't you read a fucking romance novel, like ever?" I asked Nightmare as I pushed myself to my feet. "You're supposed to start by thrusting gently."

"You really should get to the bridge," the ship replied.

"Right, right. Don't want to go out with a bang quite yet," I muttered, as I stumbled over to the locker beside my bunk and pulled out a jumpsuit. I zipped it on and slid into a pair of sensible boots with a very restrained three-inch heel. Hey, a girl needs a little help reaching for the stars, right?

I turned and faced the mirror, just to quickly arrange my-

"Stop that!" something tried to shout. It was more like listening to heavy metal out of your phone's weak little speakers. Most of the effect was lost.

"Stop what?" I turned and asked my mission's sidekick, an autonomous Backup Information Recovery Device. I called it BIRD. This one was in the shape of a parrot, though it only had the size profile of a chickadee. The bird drone was looking at me as if I were about to eat a baby.

"Stop staring in the mirror so that the author can describe your features! You ought to be ashamed of yourself," BIRD said, hopping along a water pipe as if it were a branch.

My model BIRD is equipped with an experimental AI. It believes that our universe is actually the invention of some sort of extra-dimensional writer who's created all of existence as some kind of offensive joke. I'd have his idiot brain reformatted, but BIRD is extremely useful when it matters.

"I hope this idiot universe is a parody," BIRD muttered sullenly. "Isabella, how about you get yourself over to the bridge, so you can crash land us?"

"That's where I was going!" I snapped back and marched to the bridge, with only a moderate amount of concern for my still very sensible heels. It only takes a few minutes to navigate up a ladder and some stairs until I've made my way to the bridge. "And we are not going to crash!" I added, shouting because I wasn't sure BIRD was following.

I made it up to the seat at the bridge and buckled myself in. "Nightmare, fill me in. What's our status?" I asked.

"We're going to crash and die," the ship replied with an unnervingly cheerful voice. "And your orders so far have only made our situation worse."

"What do you mean?" I asked, skipping my usual biting rebuttal and getting to the point.

"After being informed that we are plummeting towards a planet, you told me to go faster," Nightmare replied cheekily.

"I did not!"

"You told me to turn on the engines, in order to simulate gravity with the acceleration of the engines. To give you earth-like gravity, the engines are accelerating the ship at over ten metres per second. Your three-minute catwalk to the bridge has added 4.5 thousand miles an hour to our overall speed. At our current velocity, escaping the planet is impossible!" Nightmare exclaimed, finishing that announcement as if she were telling me that she had found a navy cruiser boyfriend. Part of me wondered if I should take her reaction to our impending demise personally. "I would commend you on wanting to make our deaths as explosive as possible, but I don't think that was your intention."

"Why is every computer I own super-sarcastic?" I asked as I took the controls. A flick of the wrist put the ship into a quick spin, and once the engines were pointing at Mars, I pushed the thrusters about as hard as I've ever hoped to be...

I mean, I pushed the thrusters as if my life depended on it. The ship blasted us away from Mars and tried to turn my guts into mush, but even at the speed I was going at, we had a lot of velocity to counteract.

"That won't keep us from crashing, Captain," my ship said. "I have already done the math."

"But did you do the math for a landing that doesn't get us killed?" I asked as I angled the ship to try and shift us away from a direct line to the ground.

I smiled as the g-forces pressed me into the seat, and the ship began to rattle. I didn't doubt Nightmare, and took it on faith that I couldn't keep the ship from falling into Mars' recently terraformed atmosphere.

I couldn't hope to keep flying, but any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, right?

Right?