“They’re not very generous, just put it that way. Oh shit!”
We had reached a point on the ship where I was nearly flame-broiled earlier.
“Now what, maestro?”
“Here, take a laser. Don’t poke your head around the corner and maybe we can blast ’em all when they enter the hall.”
“What corner?”
Soon the Zzurkwins’ lights revealed it for me. They filed into the hall like the fools Tripeman made them out to be.
I fired. Bob fired. The Zzurkwins fired back.
I saw two Zzurkwins go down, their legs collapsing. I cranked my laser setting up and aimed, as Bob brought another down.
I felt the heat of lasers passing close to my flash. Tripeman was thrown to the wall as a beam glanced his belly.
I cranked the laser to its limit and so did Bob. The Zzurkwins were about 10 yards away… We backtracked and pumped the triggers, shutting our eyes and hoping for the best.
Our volley brought at least six of them down, but three of the despicable bugs remained. One blasted Tripeman in the leg and Bob went down as his shot broasted another. I kicked one in the head, knocking him down before landing the full power of my leg upon its face--smashing it open on the blue floor.
I took potshots at the remaining assaulter as it ambled, heavily wounded, down the hall.
Bob ran to finish off any stragglers, not noticing that I wasn’t following. I saw something resembling a radio on a Zzurkwin belt and that was all I cared about.
I grabbed a laser light from the fallen foe and sealed myself in a generator room with the radio. I tuned the thing until I heard German voices.
“No sprechensie Deutch! English! English!”
More babbling occurred for a while, then, “German-Martian frigate number 73226; name your craft and location.”
“I have no idea as to either. Listen, you can’t be far…the transmission’s not taking too long. I’m near an asteroid belt, in a system with a Venus-sized ice planet and we’re in a banana-shaped craft, which is probably still smoldering. My name’s Floyd Pinkerton. I’m wanted by the Sun System Sheriff--but it was all a misunderstanding. I was, er…threatened into doing some things by pirates and… Hello?”
I thought I lost them, but continued waiting. The lights came back on, at half power, meaning the backup generators had kicked in. After nearly 10 minutes, the radio spoke again.
“Sergeant Schutt, Pinkerton. We’ve found your location. Where’s the Blue Maiden?”
“I don’t have the coordinates handy, but I do know where it is. Listen, please be quick. This is an alien craft we’re in now…”
“Yeah, right.” I heard raucous laughter in the background. “Whaddaya mean by we?”
“Me and this Tripeman guy…”
Silence.
Then, minutes later--“Listen, Pinkerton. You’re in deep, but you can get off a lot easier if you make sure Tripeman doesn’t get to an escape pod.”
It was then I noticed an ungainly form skulking in the corner of the room.
“This is what I get for saving you? First I saved your life on Earth and now I give you the only chance to get back to society.”
“You’ve been more than paid back in cigars and booze.”
“Pinkerton? Pinkerton, are you still there?” the radio buzzed.
“I’m working on sabotaging the pods. Over.”
I almost felt sorry for Bob. I waited for his tears--which never came. He just walked past the dying fire to the front of the ship. He stopped to mumble into the ship-controller mike for some quick steering, tipping me off to the fact that we had floated into an asteroid belt. (Thus we had cover, if we wanted it, since we couldn’t outrun anyone--Suzy could only chug a couple of hundred miles an hour and we certainly didn’t have time and space to work up a jump.) He raided my supplies and sat in his captain’s chair. Three cigars hung from his lips and an open beer was in each hand.
“Bob… How much did you hear? I didn’t offer to turn you in. I lied about the pods, sure, but that could get me a shorter sentence. You’d do the same thing in my position. Sorry, but there’s nothing else I can do.”
“You didn’t even negotiate with them? Geez, Floyd, how could you be so cruel?”
I almost hugged him and sobbed along. I couldn’t stand to see anyone so glum. Even a sponge like him. His eyes glistened hopelessly in the artificial twilight.
“Damnit, Bob. I feel bad doing this to you. I know I shouldn’t feel bad, but I do.”
“A lot of good that does me.”
“Bob!” I said, pointing at the control screen. “Get the Zzurkwin craft on!”
He only hung his head.
“Bob! Neither one of us has to go to jail! Now listen to me and put the craft on the screen!”
The color came back to Bob’s face. He spoke tongues into the mike again.
A greenish banana filled the screen. It was nearing Suzy.
“Phallic buggers, ain’t they?” I observed.
“If you were that well hung, you’d advertise, too.”
“Have the backup generators brought back enough power to fire?”
“Pfft!” Bob checked some gauges. “Yeah, for what that’s worth…”
“So, aren’t you gonna blast ’em?”
Bob’s head whipped around. “Whadareya, nuts?”
“Blast or be blasted. They’re not expecting it now. If they don’t hear from their French-fried friends soon, they’ll make a minor nebula out of Cruzy Suzy.”
Tripeman cracked his knuckles and croaked some terrible sounding syllables into the computer. Suzy kicked backward as a beam blackened the Zzurkwin craft.
He repeated the commands. Another hit to the Zzurkwins. Smoke was coming from their craft. Bob opened his mouth again, but before the sounds came, Suzy was grazed with another shot.
I fell against the wall, but Bob clung to his seat. He screamed into the mike again and again as I watched the Zzurkwin ship fall, bit by bit, into confetti.
“Good idea,” Bob said.
“I didn’t think so, but we weren’t overcome with options.”
“Neither did I--but it worked, so now it’s a good idea.” For Tripeman, that was deep wisdom. He delved into our supplies and fed his vices. “Now what?”
“Are you there, Pinkerton?” a German accent boomed from the panel. “Pinkerton? Tripeman? We’ve got your ship in sight.”
“Well Bob. Now that you’re warmed up…”
“Shoot them, too?”
“Yes!... No! Er… Let’s see what we’re dealing with first.”
A few Zzurkwin commands brought the German craft onto the screen. It made Suzy look like a shuttle with squirt guns. “It’s over.”
He had a point there.
I did one…two…three shots of vodka.
“Man oh man oh man oh man,” I said. “We were just beginning to have some fun.”
“Well, Floyd, what do you think? We’d have surprise on our side. Worked like a charm with the Zzurkwins.”
“Yeah, but we’d be gambling that they don’t have some advanced shields up that we can’t detect. And we’ll lose all hope off finagling short jail time, firing at a government craft.”
“But jail time?” He took a slurp of beer and wiped his brow. “Cruizy Suzy’s gotta look like a floating chunk of charcoal now. You really think they’d have shields up?”
“Pinkerton? Tripeman? Please respond.”
“Bob? I got an idea--can you launch escape pods from here?”
“Sure. Yippee.”
“Launch one.”
He obliged. The German craft veered its course toward the pod.
We both cheered, then stared at each other, silently asking, “Now what?”
“We’ve gotta do something!” Bob said.
“Let’s hit another pod. There’s a chance we’ll lose ’em and be able to park on an asteroid.”
“Then what?”
******
We landed on the biggest a
steroid we could scope out. Figuring, correctly, it would have some gravity of its own. Happenstance was on our side in a number of other ways, too--we felt we had a little coming to us, after all--including that the ’roid’s orbit appeared to keep one side continually facing the system’s star, ensuring some warmth to ease our power usage. That side was also conveniently the most level and thus landing-friendly.
“This is one of the nicer pods I’ve seen,” Spongey said, assessing the pod’s capabilities while I sought to catch any kind of transmission via its radio. “Can land on planets and re-launch, though it burns a whole lotta fuel. And plenty of fuel left…air-regeneration capability, so we could have, oh, months? So we got time, especially since we were able to stuff all of our rations in its storage…”
“My rations.”
“Hey! I thought we agreed that…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah… Hey. Did you walk around out there when I was sleeping?”
“Oh, sure. Top priority, goofing around,” Bob said, cracking another brew. “Had to plant an American flag on this sucker! Well, you know, the flag of the country formerly known as America. Carry around those conquering bastards’ militant flags for just such occasions! Whatever they call themselves.”
“Presbyterian Jihad’s what they call themselves. But it’s hard to call them conquering when all they had to do was parade in with no resistance.”
“When did that start, anyway? That push to eliminate all differences between the sexes?”
“Last Turn of the Century, really. I read some scholar who actually traced it back to it somehow becoming stylistically acceptable for men--straight men, I tell you, not in a desert or on a beach--to walk around in sandals and flip-flops.”
“Bleech.”
“Thankfully, that didn’t last too long. But you can’t blame just that.”
“True. Women have been getting tougher, too, so maybe it evens out?”
“Well, our military was still tough. Nobody saw it coming. The public wasn’t informed on anything. There was the Death of Journalism brought on by the rise of the Internet… Not to mention the near death of literature along with it...”
“And the cops were too busy prosecuting Crimes Against Wellness!”
“The whole Big Mother movement, ushered in by the acceptance of Secondhand Science…” Which reminded me to light a new stog. “Plus, everyone was walking around in a daze. Selfie media, what have you, constantly on their smart devices…”
“It was the SBCs that really did us in.”
“The Smart Brain Chip. Just proved how addicted to technology we are. Invent it, and we have to use it… You know, Bob. You’re just a Human digression. I was asking if you’d been out there because…”
“So, was it a digression when I saved your life…twice?”
“Once. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt this time, even though you probably would’ve run out of rations without me. And now I’ve saved you from Zzurkwins and certain jail…”
“I don’t think you could’ve blasted those boarding Zzurkwins yourself. And you’re forgetting that trail of cigars…”
“Three, maybe four cigars and… Look outside, damnit! There are boot prints!”
******
We followed to prints to a door in the ground. It took both of our efforts to open the damned thing--gravity made it light, but we had to be painstakingly careful not to sail off by testing the limits of the ’roid’s gravitational pull.
We then peered into a tunnel going straight down, far enough that we couldn’t see its end.
“You go first,” Bob said.
“Why me? We’re tethered together, anyway. Reeks like hell in this suit. Just had to start a beer fight, didn’t you?”
“I’m mostly dry already. You must have a defective suit.”
“I’m dry. Just smells. You wouldn’t know. Your nose is used to your malodorous self.”
He pushed me into the tunnel.
I floated downward, or what you’d call “downward” on a low-gravity asteroid, soon pulling Bob with me. I yanked the tether, then he shot “below” me…then he yanked and I shot below him… We crashed landed, tangled-up together, into some sort of…control panel?
We grabbed onto the panel, straightened up, got our bearings and began untangling the tether when…
“Holy shit!” we said, in unison.
We’d reached a chamber on another side of the asteroid, a wall of undoubtedly super thick glass the only thing separating us from the dark cold of space. It was as if we were looking through the picture window of a large spacecraft. The system’s sun illuminated a breathtaking view of the asteroid belt and a gas planet neighbor.
“You know what this is?” Tripeman said. “This is an observatory! These controls work telescopes!”
He putzed around a bit, soon evidently turning on something. A monitor screen emerged in the center of the wall of glass, showing our other planetary neighbor.
“Hey! That one looks Earth-like,” I said. “Not as blue-green, but with oceans and all. Can you get any readings through that control panel?”
“How the hell do I know? I’ve been at this a whole 30 seconds! But look! There are satellites circling that fucker! And… Damn. The writing on the panel here looks…Zzurkwin? Wait, there’s some English scratched into the panels underneath, too…”
“What the hell?... Well zoom in! Zoom in!”
As he did just that, we could make out a craft near one of the larger satellites. A banana-shaped craft.
“Oh balls,” said Mr. Erudite. “The Zzurkwin home planet?”
“Probably wouldn’t get a hero’s welcome there, Tubby. But that thing’s gotta be a lot bigger than Earth because that moon…no, the other one! That looks Earth-like, too, and it has oceans and it has…”
“A satellite itself!”
“So, the bugs have their own planet and a moon?”
“I’m guessing some other race lives on the moon.” I pointed to a diagram I found etched into the control panels, representing, apparently, each planet and moon in the system, plus the asteroid belt. The bodies we were viewing had stick figure drawings next to them as well. The large planet was indeed represented with a Zzurkwin pic. Its Earth-like moon’s with…a Human freaking being?
“Wait a minute,” Bob said, taking a gulp of beer through his PCAH (Personal Consumption Airlock Helmet). “How the hell are there people there? We’re missing a few pieces of the puzzle.”
“Gee, ya’ think so? But the English scratched into the control panels is encouraging…if puzzling as all crap. What’s it say?”
“They’re brief translations of the Zzurkwin, it seems. Stuff like zoom in, zoom out…”
“So it’d seem the Zzurkwins set this up, but Humans used it later… Mystery aside, that moon seems habitable and is the better of our two choices.”
“Oh no. That’s awfully close to a whole lotta Zzurkins… Wait! These controls work some other telescopes… Obviously added later. In fact, rigged sorta half-assed… But look! Here’s another planet that looks habitable!” Bob chugged what was almost a whole beer to begin with, opened another, and downed the better of that one, too.
The PCAH really is a wonder. Hold down a button, and the plastiglass face shield opens just enough to allow access for your can, bottle, what have you--as well as your fingers, hand and/or wrist--maintaining a perfect seal throughout your imbibing, smoking, what have you.
“Obviously a remote feed, doofus. Else it’d be marked in that etched system map. We’re not gonna reach a different star system in a freakin’ escape pod!”
“We do have mini-jump ability. And maybe this is one of those areas with star systems bunched closer together. C’mon! That thing looks really Earth-like!”
“That system can’t be close.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“Well, Bob. For some reason, somebody, or something, left that remote telescope viewing Earth itself.”
******
“That jussst can’t be Earth,” Bob said, now slurring his words. “It just looks a lot like it. (Hic.) Sho does that other planet, and itssh moon.”
“Look at the shape of those continents, dude. We’ve been over this…”
“Yeah… Just looks so healthy or whatever from space. Same as it always did, before…you know.” He slammed a fist into the control panels. “Why’d we have to make it so hell-ish? Mass shtarv…(hic) mass starvation, a body on practically any open patch of land… The U.S. had the right idea, walling off and forsh…force-fielding itself off from the rest…”
“Well, Bob, that’s what happens when you stuff 30-plus billion people on a finite body. And the Presbyterian Jihad took down those walls, just like they did the Great Wall of China a year or so ago--again, we’ve been over this, Stinko Boy. That’s how we figured out that the Earth feed is real-time, or close to it.”