The Space_Time Displacement Conundrum Page 25

  Containing the shudder that coursed through him, Captain Quasar strode onto the bridge. "Course set?"

  Hank nodded. "One problem, sir. It takes us straight through Goobalob space."

  "Wonderful," Quasar muttered.

  Could this day get any better?

  Episode 77: Five Hundred Years Later

  "Half a millennium should be long enough for them to forgive and forget, don't you think?" Leaning back in his deluxe-model captain's chair, Quasar maintained a façade of confident ease, even as his blood boiled at the thought of encountering another vessel full of Goobalob toll collectors.

  "We did destroy one of their ships and its entire crew complement," Commander Wan reminded him.

  "And they sent those delightful bounty hunters after us. I'd say we're even." Quasar clenched his jaw, and the muscle twitched on command. "Wouldn't you agree?"

  It wasn't long before his theory was put to the test.

  "Your vessel has been identified as a United World Space Command star cruiser, the Effervescent Magnitude," droned the myriad-eyed Goobalob on the viewscreen. "Please confirm."

  Quasar nodded, rising from his seat to stand with his arms folded. "It's been a while since we came this way."

  A few of the gelatinous creature's eyes blinked. "Your vessel was last seen in our system more than five centuries ago. Yet video records indicate no visible changes in appearance—"

  "The years have been good to us."

  "You owe more than thirteen billion credits in overdue fees for trespassing through our space and for destroying one of our toll ships." The Goobalob paused. "However, with the ascension of our new high commander, such matters are no longer our concern."

  "Oh?"

  "We have since transformed each of our taxation offices into voting centers. Would you care to enter one of the ten thousand contests we currently offer? All results are displayed in real-time throughout the galaxy, giving every species an equal opportunity to make their voice heard."

  Quasar blinked. He didn't know what to say.

  The Goobalob continued without inflection, "Perhaps you would be interested in entering Starship Captain of the Year—"

  "Maybe some other time. Right now, I've got a villain to locate."

  "We also offer Galactic Villain of the Year—"

  Quasar nodded to Wan, and she ended the transmission. "Take us through, Hank." Breathing a little easier, Quasar returned to his chair. "Any sign of your cousin?"

  "Humph." Hank shook his head.

  No surprise there. As soon as he'd gotten his hairy mitts on the Formidable Grace, Lank and his crew of Carpethrian and human pirates had set off in the opposite direction to pillage parts unknown. Captain Quasar always kept a mental to-do list, and about halfway down he'd posted, Keep a wary eye on Lank & Co.

  So much for my fleet, he mused, wondering if the future that Steve had foretold was relevant any longer, since the Hermo now had coordinates to Opsanus Tau Prime. Imagining Steve harassing Lank and his crew as they navigated the rivers of their own respective pasts was enough to bring a broad smile to the captain's face.

  "We should reach Zhan's planet in two days, sir," Hank reported.

  Quasar couldn't possibly keep Asteria and their child in the conference room that long. Already, the two of them had been in there for hours, and he was hoping he'd be able to delay interacting with them even longer. But now, with so much time to kill and with nothing better to do—

  "You have the bridge, Number Wan." He strode to the exit. "Let me know the moment we reach orbit."

  She nodded, assuming the captain's chair with ease. Perhaps she would command the next ship in his fleet. He could see that as a definite possibility.

  "Oh look, it's Daddy!" Asteria knelt on the floor beside their son as he disassembled the last of the chairs that had been positioned around the conference table.

  "The boy's good with his hands," Quasar remarked, wondering what else would be taken apart if he kept them here much longer.

  "Barty Junior's a genius! Aren't you, Barty Junior?" She pinched his cheek.

  He may have had the outward appearance of a pre-teen, but he still babbled and drooled like an infant. It was fairly disconcerting. As was the breastfeeding, which seemed to occur at the drop of a hat.

  "You wanted to tell us something, Darling?" Asteria gazed at Captain Quasar as she cradled their son awkwardly.

  "Uh, we're going to move you into my quarters—"

  "Did you hear that? We're going to live with Daddy!"

  Not exactly—but he couldn't have them living in the conference room indefinitely. It was uncouth. "I'll have my security chief escort you. Please, feel free to make yourself at home."

  She winked at him. "Don't keep us waiting."

  "I have my duties to attend to. You may not see me for a few days."

  "Days? Where will you sleep?" Her unibrow arched in concern.

  "We starship captains can sleep on our feet, don't you know?" He flashed her a winning smile. Then he nodded crisply and turned to leave.

  It was a good thing his captain's chair had a reclining feature. For the next two nights, he slept on the bridge, snoring away while the night crew monitored the ship's systems and maintained their heading.

  On the morning of the second day, Captain Quasar found himself awakened by Commander Wan at his elbow.

  "Are we there yet?" he mumbled, wiping drool from his chin. A formidable rust-colored planet glowed on the main viewscreen.

  She nodded, raising an eyebrow. "Perhaps you should freshen up a bit, sir."

  "Perhaps I should."

  After a lengthy trip to the nearest head, Quasar returned in pristine condition, ready to finally face down the ogre responsible for Earth and Carpethria's demise.

  "Hail the bastard," he ordered.

  Captain Quasar was not impressed by what he saw on the viewscreen. Nor was he intimidated. If this fellow believed a hideous scowl and incredible amounts of facial hair would do the trick, he was sadly mistaken.

  "You must be Zhan." Quasar rocked back on his heels, muscled arms folded. "So, we meet at last."

  "Who the hell are you?" Zhan spoke in a throaty whine, his black eyes twitching under prominent brows. "How did you access this channel?"

  Episode 78: Emperor Zhan

  Quasar's fists clenched beneath his crossed arms. "You're not an easy man to track down."

  Zhan grimaced, baring stained teeth. Lank had been right about his taste for the addictive Goobalox tunneling worm. "Who gave you the codes to my private channel?"

  "Is this a bad time? Should we call back later?" Quasar set his jaw.

  Zhan's eyes narrowed to slits. "You are human," he spat. "What are you doing in this quadrant? Playing hero?"

  "Yes. Tell me this, Zhan—"

  "Emperor Zhan to you!" He seethed full-frame, his nostrils chuffing across a mustache that drooped below his chin. "I have locked all surface-to-orbit weapons on that little star cruiser of yours. At this moment, my most powerful battleships are circling the planet to hem you in, both before and behind. Get that through your thick Cro-Magnon skull, Mister Hero!"

  "My name is Captain Bartholomew Quasar—"

  "To me, your name is Cannon Fodder!"

  "You may wish to reconsider." Quasar paused. "We have in our cargo hold one of the annihilation bots you left on Earth. If you destroy this ship, that thing's power cell will take out your advancing fleet—along with a sizeable chunk of your planet."

  The corner of Zhan's mouth jerked. Otherwise, he remained stoic. "What is this annihilation bot of which you speak?"

  "You should know. You dropped a few thousand of them back on Earth, once upon a time. But I suppose your memory may have dimmed over the centuries."

  Zhan clucked his tongue. "What would I possibly have against Earth? Nothing but ash heaps, from what I recall."

  "You made a mistake, Zhan," Quasar said. "You left survivors, and one of their descendants told us all about you."

&
nbsp; "My reputation should have preceded me!"

  Captain Quasar glanced at Hank. "Had you ever heard of this guy?"

  Hank shrugged and shook his shaggy head. "Not before we met Bill."

  "I am Zhan, Galactic Emperor of the Universe!"

  "Battleships approaching," Hank grunted. "Raise shields?"

  "Might as well." Quasar dropped into his chair. "Listen, Zhan, you've got two options here. Either you agree to my terms, or we all go up in a giant blast—"

  Zhan pounded his fist, and the image shuddered. "How did you get this channel?"

  Quasar bared all his teeth. "Notice anything?"

  Zhan squinted in revulsion. "They are blindingly white."

  "Unlike yours. That Hermo chew-slug dealer ratted you out, Zhan. You really should have paid better."

  "I don't know what you expect to achieve, human. Flying out here like some sort of space cowboy. But it's obvious you are in need of a lesson in humility."

  The screen went dark. Quasar glanced over his shoulder at his first officer. She shook her head. It wasn't a transmission failure. Zhan had actually hung up on him.

  "Captain." Wan's left eyebrow contorted as she surveyed her console. "We are being boarded. A dozen armed intruders are on Deck 12—heading toward the engine room." She cleared her throat and met his gaze. "They materialized, sir."

  Apparently, Zhan possessed the same trans-phase technology as Asteria's people. An adversary able to pass through a star cruiser's plasteel exterior—would they move through the Magnitude's interior walls in the same fashion?

  Quasar clenched his jaw. No matter what, he was up to the challenge. Leaping from his chair, he pounded the right armrest with his fist, and a Cody 52 Special emerged with a hiss of pneumatics from a concealed compartment, its chrome cylinder and barrel glinting in the artificial light. Chambering a pulse round, Quasar glanced at Hank.

  "Think you can handle a few enemy ships?"

  "They're locking weapons," Hank said.

  "Let them. Our friendly neighborhood emperor won't open fire. He knows full-well the blast radius of one of his annihilation bots." To his first officer, Quasar barked mid-stride as he headed for the exit, "Have Gruber and his team meet me on Deck 11. You have the bridge!"

  A few minutes later, Quasar climbed out of a ladder alcove on Deck 11 to find himself greeted by Chief Gruber and a complement of six armed men sporting atom rifles. The captain took a moment to catch his breath. Would it really have been so difficult for the Magnitude's designers to install an elevator or two?

  "Ready for business, Captain," Gruber announced, the armpits and chest of his uniform already stained with fresh perspiration.

  Quasar cocked his Cody 52 for effect and eyed the eager faces around him. "Let's clean house."

  "We've got twelve hostiles below us, sir." Gruber consulted the thermograph on his forearm and cursed. "Should've brought more men."

  "Nonsense." Using sophisticated finger gestures, Quasar broke the security team in half, pointing them down opposite ends of the corridor. "These intruders think they can walk through walls? We'll show them how to walk through floors."

  "Huh?" Gruber frowned.

  Quasar tucked the Cody 52 into his belt and grabbed the chief's rifle. "Watch and learn."

  He hammered back the charger bolt and aimed it at the floor. The other men glanced at each other with uncertainty.

  "Time to be heroes, boys." Quasar flashed a winning smile.

  Squeezing the trigger, he sent a white-hot beam of energy into the deck, burning straight through to the corridor below. With a wink, the captain reached for his Cody 52 and jumped through, landing in a crouched position.

  Zhan's soldiers surrounded him immediately. They were easy to recognize: on each of their face shields was a holo-screen transmitting the emperor's less-than-handsome face.

  "Allow me to introduce my drones." Zhan's voice sounded like a chorus in unison, the same hideous expression on all twelve of his soldiers as they leveled their snub-nosed rifles at the captain. "Lay down your weapons."

  Quasar rose, planting his feet shoulder-width apart. "I don't think so."

  Streams of particle energy and unstable matter rained down on both ends of the corridor as Gruber's men dropped in from above.

  Episode 79: Trouble with Drones

  Oddly enough, the emperor's confident expression didn't falter. "I would be careful, Captain. One shot fired at any of my drones will set them all off. They have been armed as a chain reaction, you see. Programmed to detonate at will." Zhan chuckled, but it sounded more like a growl. "My will."

  "Then it appears we are at an impasse," Quasar said.

  "How so?"

  "Have you forgotten our bot?"

  The holo-images of Zhan growled deep in their throats. "Let us say for argument's sake that I believe you—"

  "Scan our cargo bay. And while you're at it, scan the crew member in there on Deck 6. He should register as a recent Earth emigrant. He remembers you well—not that he's ever been graced by your unhandsomeness. Knowledge of your atrocities was passed down through the generations."

  Zhan ground his teeth. "You seem to think you have the upper hand here."

  Quasar shrugged. "Maybe because we've rigged that bot with a detonator and are prepared to drop it into your planet's atmosphere. According to our scans, the air you're breathing down there would ignite instantly, burning your planet to its core—even if the bot were to explode hundreds of kilometers above the surface."

  Zhan's gruesome teeth made a reappearance. "Listen to yourself, Cowboy. You say that I tried to destroy your planet, but you would be doing the same to mine! Do you not realize your own hypocrisy? You must be mad."

  "I want an apology."

  "What?"

  "You owe it to Earth's exiles spread out all over the galaxy. I'll make it my life's mission to carry your formal apology to the farthest reaches of space so that all men and women, boys and girls, senile old people and drooling infants will know that you regret what you did, and that you humbly beg their forgiveness. I'm willing to do whatever it takes to right your wrongs, Zhan."

  "What about your crew? Are they willing to die for your misguided sense of justice?"

  "They've done it before and lived to tell the tale. The choice is yours. Give me your apology, or we'll have it out right here, right now."

  The Zhan faces blinked once. "You are seriously insane," they murmured. For a moment, it appeared that Zhan would acquiesce—an intense battle raged behind his eyes. Then he said, "I do not negotiate with lunatics."

  The drones' face shields went dark as the Effervescent Magnitude rocked and rumbled, explosions near-missing the hull on both port and starboard sides.

  Quasar activated his communicator with a head jerk. "What's going on up there?"

  "Two battleships are in range," Wan reported. "Heavily armed."

  "Drop the bot."

  "Sir?"

  "You heard me. Route the detonation sequence to your console. Give it five minutes, and plot a course to get us out of here AFAP." He deactivated the communicator and reached slowly for the wall panel, keeping an eye on the drones as he activated the screen.

  Violent tremors coursed through the ship as if it knew what dangerous weapon was about to be released into the void. On the wallscreen, Quasar watched as the bay door crept open and the massive annihilation bot tipped out into the black, rotating end over end as it met the planet's gravitational field and succumbed to its pull.

  "What are they doing?" Gruber whispered, staring at the motionless drones.

  Frozen in like manner, Quasar replied in his best imitation of a ventriloquist, "Watching us."

  "Why haven't they attacked?"

  On the wallscreen, two of Zhan's battleships, along with a dozen more that had joined the fray from the surface, synced their tractor beams to create a web-like energy field. The descending bot drifted straight into the center of their net and hung suspended between the fleet, immobilized. Zhan's ship
s coasted on impulse power away from the planet, dragging the bot with them.

  The holo-screens on the drones came back to life. The emperor's full-framed face appeared as outraged as ever. "Who would do something like this?" he growled. "Why?"

  Quasar's heroic gaze met the drones eye to eye—in a manner of speaking. "I came here for one thing, Zhan. Destroying your ships and your planet weren't high on my to-do list. You've obviously scanned us, and if you can send your drones inside my ship, then you probably already know what I'm prepared to do next."

  "You demand an apology? Anything I say to you would be mere words! What are they worth to your kind?"

  "It's the principle of the thing, Zhan. No human worth their DNA could say your actions haven't affected them in some way. Leaving your bots on our planet to blast it to pieces—and don't even get me started on those awful sea nukembers—that was a serious act of war. When Bill told us what you did, I couldn't believe such a wicked fiend existed." Quasar paused. "But once I have your apology recorded, nobody's going to take you seriously ever again."

  Zhan's eyes narrowed. "Words, Captain Cannon Fodder. Just words. They do not make or break great leaders such as myself. I am known for my actions. You may have occupied my fleet of battleships with that ticking time-bot, but know this: After we resolve this situation, I will be coming for you, and there will be no corner of the universe safe from my wrath!"

  "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, all I'm asking for is a simple apology. And for you to take back these drones. They're kind of creeping me out."

  "Or I could detonate them now and take your ship apart in an instant!" Zhan shrilled.

  Quasar didn't skip a beat. "Do that, and no one will be left to stop that bot from exploding out there. Give me what I want, and I'll end the countdown. You have my word."

  Zhan's foul teeth reemerged. "Very well."

  Gruber started recording with the audiograph attached to his forearm.

  Episode 80: The Gift of Now