Let me tell you, it said a lot about me that most of my saliva was still in my mouth.

Because this ship was the sexiest thing I have ever seen. Slick, sleek, bristling with things that go boom, and engines able to pound and pound into the best kind of dizzying speeds. The sensors could hear a moth fart in the vacuum of space, and see thousands of kilometres around the curvature of a planet by evaluating the light lensing from its gravity. The targeting lasers were so powerful they doubled as a cutting tool at five kilometres, and the supercomputer running the targeting systems could murder my ex-boyfriends from anywhere in the solar system.

Not that I was going to. Even if they totes deserved a dramatic and fiery death. Never mind that I dumped them.

But to summarize it quickly, Nightmare 2.0 was the spaceship equivalent of Luca's abs. If he was holding a machine gun at the time.

"Your drool is starting to soak your collar," Alcuard said. He somehow, astonishingly, managed to say that without a smirk, or a snigger, guffaw or chuckle. The multi-millennial old vampire is clearly closer to sainthood than I am.

"Right," I said as I wiped my mouth with my sleeve. "Pre-flight check, system status."

I spent half a minute scrolling through the various mechanical and electrical systems, trying my best to look like I knew what any of them did. Thankfully, their status was conveniently colour-coded, and all I really needed to do was look for something that wasn't green.

No idea what I'd do if one of them wasn't, though I suspect Luca would get sick of waiting and just portal his whole yacht over to Mars.

In fact, that question deserved to be asked.

"Why don't you just portal your yacht?" Alcuard asked before I could.

"I can't make a portal big enough," Luca admitted. "Shoving this warship through is about the limits of the technology."

"Really?" I asked. "You're going with 'it's too big to fit'?"

"Look, darling, portals are complicated. They also require power. And bigger portals are exponentially more of both. Most of the problem comes from the fact that without intervention, a portal is perfectly stationary when it appears," Luca said.

"Oh," I said, my eyes widening and the hair on my arms rising despite myself. For anyone who knew anything about spaceflight, that fact should make you wish you were on a toilet when someone told you.

"How is that a problem?" Alcuard asked.

My palm hit my forehead with surprising force.

"The problem is that nothing is stationary," Isabella replied. "When you're standing on the earth, you're spinning around it at about 1,200 kilometres per hour. Give or take, the closer to the equator you are, the faster you're going. And the Earth spins around the sun at over 100,000 clicks an hour. And from there it gets nutty, because the Sun spins around the centre of the galaxy roughly seven times faster than that, and the galaxy is travelling over two million clicks an hour. So a stationary portal would look like it's moving at almost three percent the speed of light."

"Oh," Alcuard said.

"It's a planet-ending weapon of mass destruction in the wrong hands," Luca said. "The real trouble with any kind of power is surviving long enough to become responsible with it."

"How did you manage?" I asked.

"I grew up knowing the consequences of uncontrolled power. I still live with it. I still burden others with it, and I hate myself for it," Luca said quietly. "And I trust those fuckers heading to my planet about as far as I can throw them."

"You know that you could use a portal to throw any of them across the universe," I said as I began the ignition sequence for the fusion drive. "I don't think that expression was meant for you."

"Touché," Luca conceded. I hadn't noticed before, but he had taken one of the chairs and had the systems maintenance board on display. And he was looking through it like he actually understood it.

"Luca, darling," I said, trying to imitate his snark-saturated drawl. "That's not a shopping list you're looking at."

"Ease off the fuel intake to the fusion drive. You've already overloaded the capacitors for the rail guns," Luca replied. "Also, unless you plan on trying to tow the moon, you should disengage the docking clamps."

"Right," I muttered and did as he suggested. I was also left to wonder when he managed to learn so much about spaceships.

"I invented portal tech," Luca reminded me as if he was reading my mind.

"Passive sensors have picked up the drive plume of a ship creeping close to Mars. No transponder, but the ship's onboard AI has id'd the vessel as a luxury cruiser called the... wait, am I reading that right? The Oar Gee?"

"Afraid so," I said, as I used the ship's lateral thrusters to gently push us away from the dock.

"Running engagement simulations now," Alcuard said. "Adding projections of up to six escort craft, all in stealth. Recommend we portal somewhere in the wake of that absurdly named vessel. A few railgun rounds will punch through the entire ship, and we can do that while still maintaining our stealth profile."

"Ooh, can we?" I asked.

"No," Luca said. "We get to the unobtanium. I'm not murdering that ship's crew and wait staff just because it's convenient. And vampy, stop wasting server resources projecting ways of conquering the Earth."

"I'm not-"

"I can see how much power the servers are drawing."

"Any luck?" I asked. "Owning a planet seems to be in-Vogue right now."

"Stop that, you two," Luca reprimanded us. "You sound like you're being set up to become the villains in the sequel.

"You're just jealous that my planet would be bigger," I retorted. Luca scoffed derisively, but I could tell that somewhere in his head he was thinking of finding a bigger planet to terraform.

Or take yacht building to a new degree of absurdity.

I giggled at my own thought and turned on the comms. "Luna docks, this is the cargo freighter Nightmare. Requesting a course for safe transit out."

"Cargo freighter? I can see the mass accelerator cannon out my window. Please identify yourself correctly, Nightmare." The snarky reply came instantly, as if the jackass at the control tower had been rehearsing his response.

"Docks, this is Luca Cardego. You may know the name," Luca said smoothly. "The Nightmare will be departing in one minute. By portal. Keep traffic away from us so that I don't accidentally chuck some poor commuter into deep space."

"Yes sir," the jackass at the control tower said like it was his first day at boot camp.

"Straight ahead, Miss Bonny, and put us into a 1G burn. Nightmare's navigation systems suggest that should be enough to keep us stable when we descend into my planet's atmosphere," Luca said. "Fifty seconds to transit."

I licked my lips and engaged the ship's engines. Feeling that surge of force pin me to the chair was a lovely feeling, even if it was very familiar after all these years. Nightmare surged into a 1G burn like an over-eager teenager.

"Aww, I feel the same way, chuckle-boo." I patted the console as I spoke to it encouragingly, hoping to coax out a good performance.

"Thirty seconds to transit," Luca said.

"So boys," I said as I prepped the flight controls for an additional burst of speed. I put on my best Marilyn Monroe voice, and added, "Ready fo be taken to heaven?"

"Where are the escape pods?" Alcuard asked immediately.

"Out that blast door. Standard survival kit has a bag of synthetic blood, as well as general snacks," Luca said as he unclipped his safety harness. "Ship's designed for a crew of sixty, so don't worry about sharing a pod."

"Hey, guys, what the hell?" I asked.

"Taken to heaven. That usually involves dying," Luca said. "I don't know if you noticed, but I'm really enjoying life."

"I didn't spend six thousand years in stasis to die in a drunken daredevil stunt. I'll take the escape pod," Alcuard added.

"Oh, you two morons! That was just a euphemism! Like saying this is going to be so awesome you'll need new pants when you land," I explained.

And realized just as it came out of my mouth that I really shouldn't have. "Izzy, that's disgusting," Luca said.

"So uncivilized," Alcuard added.

"You kiss your mother with that mouth?"

"Young people these days."

"Arg! Enough, you two jackasses!" I exclaimed

"Arg? Are we doing pirate talk now?" Alcuard asked.

"If she says 'land ho' once we go through the portal, I will use that escape pod," Luca said.

"I'm surprised she hasn't asked us scurvy dogs to swab the poop deck."

"Nightmare!" I exclaimed. "Set the ship to self-destruct!"

"Avast! Transit in five seconds," Luca said, sitting back down and buckling his safety harness.

"Are you sure you want to do that, Captain?" Nightmare asked. "I am a sleek and shiny new warship now."

"Never mind. Maybe they'll shut-up when we enter Mars' atmosphere," I said.

On the monitor, the tip of the ship had just penetrated the portal, disappearing into its inky blackness. The thrust carried the long shaft of the ship's hull through, plunging into the dark of unknown space until we were taken to exactly where we wanted to be.

Okay, I'm sorry. That was bad.

Anyway, a moment later, we popped out the other side of the portal, for a full frontal view of Mars in all his naked, terraformed glory. His hard-as-stone form sexily dressed in just enough green to be seen in public, but doing nothing to conceal the sleek shape and distinctive bulges that tantalizingly hinted at strength and power.

I was starting to understand the appeal of owning your own world. 

"Mine," Luca growled nearby.

The navicomputer flashed once. I tapped the prompt, and took a look at the course it was recommending to the surface. "The cave we found Alcuard in is currently two hours past sunset, and since the Martian day is only thirty-seven minutes slower than Earth, we have about ten hours to land and get vampy inside before he looks like King's Landing in season 8."

"Yes, let's avoid that ending," Alcuard said.

The next thing Nightmare did was send me a notification that it had the Oar Gee in its sights. And that Alcuard was already painting it with a targeting laser.

Not only painting it with a laser, but he was working Nightmare's servers hard working on simulations of a potential space battle. Scrolling down through the twelve thousand and fourteen results showed a surprisingly creative tactical mind in the classically sexy aristocratic vampire.

Then again, Alcuard had said he had annihilated his people.

"I said no killing and I mean it, you snobbish zombie," Luca said. "Now stop trying to glare a hole through their hull."

I laughed at that. Thing is, targeting lasers are actually extremely powerful, because they're meant to paint targets over millions of kilometres. The Oar Gee wasn't all that far away from us, and at this range, Nightmare's military-grade targeting laser might breach the Oar Gee's hull in another couple of minutes.

"Fine," Alcuard grunted sullenly, and the excess power was diverted back into charging the capacitors for the railguns and prepping the cyber warfare suite.

"All right, strap in and make sure you're comfortable. I'm going to start our deceleration burn," I said, prepping the controls.

Alcuard settled back into his seat, and Luca buckled himself in quickly. "Remember, I'm not giving you another ship if you bust this one."

"Shaddup," I said, and pushed the stabilizing thrusters into a quick somersault, pointing the engines at the planet.

"Alright, beginning deceleration burn," I said and punched the engines. The ship shoved the seat into me, and I smiled at the thrill of the ferocious force. I was also a little excited by how easily my new ship did that, the ease hinting at a lot more strength I could tease out when she ship and I were alone.

"Oh you lovely, lovely ship," I cooed as the engines shoved a plume of fusion plasma out into the upper Martian stratosphere. "We land in three minutes. Only a small bit of electronics trouble from passing into Mars' magnetosphere."

"Wait, Mars has a magnetosphere?" Alcuard asked.

"I had an artificial emitter built," Luca said, surprisingly nonchalant about spaceflight. But then again, Luca had surprising depth. Astonishing for a billionaire playboy philanthropist with a dark secret.

Almost like this is some kind of superhero origin story. And shit, now I'm starting to think like BIRD.

I eased back on the engines a bit, to shorten our descent. I wouldn't have dared risk it with my old ship, but a brand new military scout ship is a very different beast. We streaked through the sky like a slightly sluggish meteor, and the sensors were already indicating that the drive plume was so bright you could see your shadow.

About a kilometre from the ground, I punched the engines hard, and the conversations stopped when each of us suddenly weighed over six hundred pounds. Nightmare rocked and rattled with all the fury of a cruise ship being hit by a paintball. In less than a minute the ship had auto-engaged its landing protocol and set itself gently down on the Martian soil.

"Well boys," I said as I unbuckled my harness. "Was that good for you, too?"