“Their torpedoes don’t seem to be dodging very well.” I frowned. “Internal torpedo controls should respond as soon as they see our grenades and change course to evade. Check out that two second response delay in their maneuvers—I’ll bet these torpedoes are remote controlled.”
CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!
Spud sent out another barrage of fission grenades and nodded as he, too, observed the subtle discrepancy. He spun towards another holo screen and ran his fingers over the data display.
“Got ‘em!” Spud cried. “Two Andart ships hiding in the Veil Nebula at 20.62 h D +42.03°. Obviously gunning for us through their titanium messengers. Armor at 30%.” He raised an eyebrow as he saw me lean over to our weapons holo. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to rattle their cage.” I keyed a few instructions into the holo and shot out the next volley of fission grenades—only this time, rather than aiming each grenade at an attacking torpedo, I guided our grenades to crash into each other and explode all at once.
The resonant blast waves rocked our ship onto its back and sent us flying several light years towards Deneb. Fortunately, grav sensors kept us tractored in our seats and we were able to regain control of the Scooter to re-con. We stared at the viewscreens in amazement as we watched all the surviving torpedoes retreating rapidly in the direction of the shrouded Andart ships.
“Andart ships withdrawing,” Spud announced, nodding at his holo. “In hyperdrive, I might add.” He paused. “Surely a distant grenade explosion shouldn’t have frightened them away. And they should not be able to hear sounds in space. What did you do?”
I leaned back in my chair, grinning broadly. “Our fission grenades are made of copper, tin, and silver, right?”
“Bronze, correct.”
“Well, the vibration of the fragmented bronze components was enhanced by the explosion and created a giant blast wave. The flash disrupted the remote wireless communications and flipped the torpedoes into default mode, sending them racing back home towards the Andart ships. Hope the Andarts have enough fuel to outrun their dangerous toys.”
To my surprise, Spud actually laughed. “In other words, as in Heracles’ sixth labour, you created a bronze rattle. Brah-vah.”
“De nada,” I shrugged, sitting casually on my hands until the adrenaline tremors wore off. I certainly wouldn’t want Spud to have gotten the wrong idea, you know.
* * *
Spud and I were given a hero’s welcome when we finally arrived at Kepler 6b. Turned out the Andarts had used their own communications disrupters to block our distress signals from getting through, isolating us from our pursuing pedagogue as well as any local intergalactic Zygfed patrols. Escaping the ambush relatively unscathed, without help from the Zygan “cavalry”, meant we’d not only passed our field test, but earned ourselves a commendation--and a chance to apply for Zygfed’s elite Sentinels team after graduation. The offer was tempting, but, after consideration, I declined. John‘s trail, and mine, was with Zygan Intelligence, not the Sentinel Corps.
I was amazed that Spud demurred as well. He told me it was because the Sentinel Corps would fill his “brain-attic with feckless experiences without satisfying his intellectual curiosity”. My pedagogue told me weeks later that he’d admitted he’d been loath to break up our team, considering we worked together so well.
I had to admit, that was a really nice thing for him to say. And even nicer was that he never snitched that I’d rushed into space without waiting for my pedagogue, my “training wheels”, in the first place.
* * *
Kingdoms like Zygfed need their warriors—but they also need their enemies. Nothing better than a passionate struggle between good and evil to hold an alliance together, right? And evil is a simple recipe. Take a teaspoon of the devil, a pinch of brute, add a name based on mors, the Latin word for death, simmer, and, presto! You have an archfiend that makes your side look heroic. You’ve seen it on our TV show (or, considering our mediocre ratings, maybe not): every week, Tara Guard and her cohorts fight the good fight for the Phaeton Alliance, against the dastardly killer Mordmort.
But, in reality, you don’t need horns, flaming retinas, and smoke from your facial orifices to represent evil. Zygfed’s enemy du jour is a balding, fifty-something human named Theodore Benedict, who wears bifocals and looks like a tax auditor.iii Evil exists all around us, and usually looks like a tax auditor. It’s the crimes, not the costumes, that make the villain; and Benedict’s crimes have included trying to violently overthrow the Omega Archon and His Highness’ government, and “damn the collateral damage.”
To achieve his malevolent aims, Benedict enlisted the Andarts, champion guerilla fighters from populated planets all across the universe, to launch terrorist attacks on Zygfed. My primary job for Zygint, and that of my fellow catascopes-to-be from Mingferplatoi Academy, would be to stop Benedict and his terrorist thugs and safeguard our King and his subjects.
Studying to be a Zygan catascope was hard work, but it beat spending four years at Earth’s military academies; I was done with the classroom study in only six months. I’m not going to bore you with all the details of our education. I mean, everybody has to go to school, right? Then, we moved on to our internships where we could focus on the fun stuff, learning to drive, fly, fight, and work our Ergals.
What’s an Ergal? It’s an instrument, a tool, that does, frankly, almost anything you could wish for, kind of like a Zygint version of a Swiss Army knife. An Ergal allows a catascope to transport from one location to another, change his or her appearance, levitate (lev), shape-shift matter (anamorph), become invisible, and, of course, travel in time. Sweet, huh? Our scientists say it works through a process called CANDI, Cascading Auxiliary Neurosynaptic Discharge Interaction, that sends wireless signals directly to the brain. Gary calls it magic, but then his generation is notoriously uncomfortable with new technology. My brother’s antique watch, I discovered to my amazement, was an Ergal, anamorphed to resemble a timepiece. Re-anamorphed to look like a cell phone, his Ergal would become mine as soon as I graduated. Sweet.
But, as always, there is a catch. Ergals are only provided to certain Zygan citizens, like Sentinels, and catascopes. And, using them without authorization is a crime. There were several thousand megabytes of policies and procedures that guided and limited the use of Ergals, all vetted personally by the Omega Archon, which we had to upload into our brains before our Ergals were assigned to us and activated.
For example, they didn’t want us using Ergals to turn the school bully into a pig or to go back and buy up all the stock in Microsoft in 1986. Darn! Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to use Ergals to change history either. Time travel was only allowed with specific authorization for a specific assignment, along with strict instructions to only “observe and preserve” while in the past. As much as you might be tempted to assist the Resistance in assassinating Hitler or to warn President Kennedy’s driver to avoid the grassy knoll, such unauthorized actions would land you a visit to the Omega Archon and an extended sentence in Hell, flames and all. And, even worse, if you survived our King’s Hades, you could be exiled from Zygfed forever. So, we get these wonderful tools with all these options, but the rules for using them are super-strict and the consequences of violations dire. I think that’s called “free will”.
Or in my case, “a challenge”.
Chapter 3
Terror Time
Hollywood—present day
“We’re done for! There’s no escape!” cried Spud. His T-shirt was in tatters and rivulets of sweat trickled down his muscular biceps as he sprinted ahead of the pack of rapacious paparazzi. He leaped into my silver Zoom Cruiser through the open right gull-wing door and, pulling it closed, rolled into the passenger seat of what, to casual observers, resembled a late model DeLorean car.
“Never give up, never surrender,” I quoted as I locked the doors and ordered, “Windows opaque.” Our s
ide and back windscreens became darkened and impenetrable. I activated navigation and scanning holos and observed that the advancing paparazzi were bearing down on us. Gunning the engine of the Zoom Cruiser, I streaked off down Cahuenga Boulevard, barely missing a camera-laden aggressor who had leaped in front of our car.
As we sped away, the hungry pack of photographers dispersed to their vans and SUVs, intent on motorized pursuit. Their driving skills were no match for my razor-sharp reflexes and the Zoom’s touchpad ‘fly-by-Ergal’ steering, but, with the heavy Friday afternoon traffic making the streets an action-film obstacle course, I wasn’t able to lose the paparazzi as quickly as I’d hoped.
Playing a futuristic space agent on TV gives you a great cover if you get caught working as a futuristic space agent on a real assignment. You can pretend the spaceship, the weapons, and the special effects are all a publicity stunt. On the other hand, being on TV does have its drawbacks. And they were gaining on us as we zoomed towards Burbank.
As we neared the studio, I steered a sudden hard right turn through a bolted aluminum fence into an empty construction site. Fortunately, the Zoom Cruiser’s titanium body trumped the chicken wire, and we were inside the lot without a scratch. The starcruiser’s tires bounced roughly over the packed rocks and dirt and then lurched forward and down with a sickening drop into a multi-storey well that had been dug out waiting for a future skyscraper’s foundation—and additional building funds. I could hear the screeching of paparazzi brakes as they tried to follow my moonshiner’s turn into the site. I could also hear Spud’s cry as we fell into the pit, “Lev!”
“I’ve got it!” I said confidently as, once below the lip of the pit, I invisible-ized my cruiser and activated levitation. Mere inches from the bottom of the abyss, the cruiser began to rise and, its wheels quietly retracting, invisibly glided up past the rows of paparazzi vehicles that were skidding to a stop at the rim of the excavated hollow. Hovering, I giggled as I watched the pushy photographers jump out of their cars and struggle to explain how our car had disappeared before their very eyes, avoiding a crash landing that would have provided the bottom-feeding lens hounds with weeks of lucrative photo sales.
As we glided off towards Universal City, even Spud cracked a smile. “Someday,” he vowed, wiping the beads of sweat off his face and chest with the remnants of his T-shirt. “I shall earnestly seek a more incognitious and solitary existence.”
“My brother Blair told me there was a bee farm for sale in Sussex,” I joked, as I touched down under a deserted freeway overpass near the rear studio gate and made my “car” re-visible and road-worthy.
“Ha,” was Spud’s only response. He continued scowling until we were waved through the entrance to the studio and heading for my designated parking space.
* * *
It was early evening, and I was praying it was the last take for Bulwark’s Touareg prison scene. I so desperately wanted to scratch my skin. To appear convincing as captives tortured by the evil Mordmort’s guards, Spud and I had had to spend much of the afternoon with the FX make-up specialists getting tortured by plastic and glue. After dressing in ragged versions of our Phaeton Alliance spacesuits, we had been imprisoned by the special effects artists as they’d slathered us with silicone wounds, fake blood, and painted gashes. Chell’s delicate artwork was no match for the industrial efforts of the FX team. We soon looked as traumatized as Chell would be if he saw us in this condition. And, unfortunately, their make-up really itched!
“Okay, kids,” Jerry shouted--to my relief--as the soundstage lights came up. “That take worked.” He waved at us, signaling our freedom, and, running his fingers through his thinning hair, turned to talk to the gaffer about his next shot, which was blessedly without us. I started peeling off the silicone even before I had stepped off the set. Spud and I were done filming for the week. I could now scratch away to my heart’s content.
As I’d predicted, Chell gasped when he saw us. “My God, what have they done to you? You need Dr. Chell’s first-aid!”
“Thanks, but a warm shower will do just fine,” I returned with a friendly smile, as John’s--my Ergal started to vibrate in a pocket inside my costume. Strange, we were off Zygan duty today. I pulled out the Ergal, now shaped as a late-model smart phone, and, holding it up, added, “I’ll take this in my trailer.”
Spud’s own cell phone Ergal vibrated a second or two later. He reached for it in his back pocket under his cigarettes and chimed in, “I, too, shall take this in her trailer.”
Our eyes met, and I knew Spud had also received the vibrating CANDI signal that this alert was an emergency. We set off for my dressing room at top speed. The sudden appearance on our soundstage of a holographic Aggellaphor, a Zygan messenger, would be very hard to explain to Chell, Jerry, and the crew.
* * *
Safely in my trailer, I activated my phone and hit the receive button on the Ergal’s keypad. The Aggellaphor messenger hologram M-fanned—appeared--before us and sat stiffly on the rim of my beanbag chair, looking quite irritated at our delay. “Zygint Central has received intelligence that Theodore Benedict’s Andarts may be mounting an attack on Zygfed territories and vulnerable protectorates in this quadrant within the next solar week. You are needed to help stop one of these temporal aggressions.”
“Contact metrics?” asked Spud.
“Temporal aggressions?” I interjected. Attacks throughout time as well as space? Could Benedict now be planning new guerilla attacks not only in the present, but in the future or the past?
Our questions were succinctly answered. “Eight Av 3778, 24-3, mark six, Sidon. You’ll be briefed further at Earth Core. Status: Condition One.”
The Aggellaphor X-fanned—disappeared--before we could get any more details. Aggellaphors are like that; not much for conversation really. In any case, the message was loud and clear. Condition One was of the highest urgency. We’d better get a move on to our local Zygint station buried in Earth’s core. And fast.
* * *
Still in our costumes, we immediately M-fanned to the warehouse on Hill and Alameda. Well, more precisely, to the giant green garbage bin in the alley behind the rundown building near Chinatown. Even more precisely, inside the foul-smelling garbage bin, where rats scurried from pile to pile of malodorous, worm-ridden trash.
I greeted the rats with a warm hello. Chidurians, from the Zygfed planet Chiduri in the constellation of Orion, normally appear as a gigantic crab-like species. Their universe-renowned fighting skills make them very desirable soldiers and guards. When assigned to work Security for Zygint stations on primitive non-Zygfed planets and protectorates like Earth, however, they often take the visible form of rodents of some sort to blend into the environment and keep a lower profile. Fortunately, the spoken Zygan language does sound something like a rat squealing, so any intoxicated human staggering down the alley near the bin would probably interpret the Chidurian’s squeaky greetings as a rodent infestation rather than their welcome.
And, the worms? No, they’re just worms.
We felt the warm light of the WHOiv scan bathe us for a few seconds before the metal wall of the bin facing the warehouse slid open to reveal a dark corridor that automatically lit up as soon as our feet stepped over the threshold. About thirty feet ahead of us was a titanium door that whooshed open after we’d passed a second WHO scan. We stepped into a small room and faced yet another titanium door. The school of hard knocks, and the resultant bruises, had taught us to grab the platinum railings that lined this chamber before the door behind us had fully closed. We kept our balance as the elevator started its death-defying drop with its usual sickening rush (no relation). After six months of navigating this gauntlet for Earth Core entry, I do so wish the impenetrable shields that surrounded Zygint’s Earth station would allow us to use our Ergals to transport in instead.
A minute or three later, the front door slid open to reveal the plasterboard walls and linoleum floors of the main entrance. Once we were out o
f the lift, a more intensive NDNA scanv cleared us quickly, and triggered the drab industrial decor to transition into the welcoming oak paneling and thick plush carpet of the Earth Core Station Reception Area.
Fydra, our Scyllian greeter, put down her fur-brush and, with her canine floppy ears flapping behind her, bounded up out of her chair when she saw our grisly appearance. “Rrrough assignment?” she barked with concern, as she wagged her tail and smelled our costumes with her moist snout.
Spud and I looked at each other and laughed. Scylla, the largest planet orbiting Sirius in Canis Major, requires olfactory education for all its citizens from childhood. Scyllians can smell a rat at fifty paces, which is why the Chidurians prefer to man their guardposts on the surface above. It took only a moment for Fydra to discover that our blood and wounds were synthetic, and, embarrassed, she stepped back and pointed one of her manicured paws at the red portal. “They’re all in Briefing Three,” she sniffed.
“Grrreat,” I responded, and added a conciliatory, “Thank you.” Scyllians are not known for their sense of humor. They take their responsibilities as the advance team for Zygint visitor—and themselves—very seriously.
We stopped cold a few steps beyond the portal to Earth Core Control, awestruck. The entire station looked like a Christmas department store exhibition. All the giant holos that filled the cavernous room were dotted with flashing red lights. Perspiring profusely, portly Station Manager Everett Weaver was anxiously running from one holo to another, jerkily jotting down data on an electronic tablet, and looking to all the world like he desperately needed a rest room. Condition one, no kidding.
We hurried to Briefing Room Three to find that our Chief Gary had just begun his presentation. I nodded to Wart--Ward Burton, Earth Core’s Assistant Chief--and to our fellow catascopes, the Drexel twins, Dieter and Derek, who, looking up at us from their seats, echoed Fydra’s alarm at our bloody condition. With apologies to Gary for the interruption, I reassured my colleagues that we were merely decked in impressively horrifying costumes for our TV show cover jobs. Spud and I each grabbed a—washable, I hope—plastic chair and tried not to rest our scarlet-stained arms on the polished cherrywood surface of the conference table.