ALTERNATE
TALES OF THE STAR FORCE
STAR BLAZERS—THE
PRINCESS AND THE SURFER
Being the seventh part
of THE NEW COMET--- BY: Frederick P. Kopetz
This Act is being completed with the
Cooperation and Assistance of Derek A.C. Wakefield (as usual)---Freddo
ACT FOUR: TALES OF
ISCANDAR AND BALAN
I.
PRESSURE CONTINUES
In
Orbit Over Planet Earth
Space
Battleship Argo
May
13, 2207: 0621 Hours (Standard Earth Space-Time)
“No!” cried Sasha as soon as she
wiped her eyes and sat down again at her post as soon as the Salute had ended
and the Argo began to gather more
speed in order to blast out of orbit to begin their journey. “Enemy
ships! Appearing all around us!”
“Appearing?” said Domon.
“Visual, Sasha!” barked Commodore Wildstar. He recognized
the pattern at once. “Sandor? It can’t be, but..it is! They're using the Gamilons' technology again!”
“Hmmm…The Comet Empire is using the design of the Gamilon Space
Matter Instant Transporting Equipment,” replied Sandor. “They call it SMITE.”
“Pulse lasers, ready to fire to port!” said Domon. “Kitano,
evade!”
Kitano looked back to Commodore Wildstar, who nodded.
“Evasive action!
This is going to be a hard turn, people!” said Kitano.
The Argo turned to evade
the first few Cometine missiles as planes started to launch from the aft deck
of the Princess Astra. “Captain Conor
is launching a torpedo squadron and a fighter squadron to protect our task
group!” said Homer as he caught a signal.
“Tell them we’re also launching planes!” snapped Derek. “Domon,
scramble the Black Tigers!”
“Yessir,” said Domon.
A moment later, the available twenty-four planes of the Tigers
began to roar out of the Argo’s lower
bay again as Lieutenant Angie Hartcliffe, who was now serving on the ship in Flight
Control since she was now expecting (she wasn’t permitted to serve as a fighter
pilot while carrying a child). She sat in her bay above the flight deck
directing the Tigers off the ship. She had sort of reconciled with
Bryan
ruined my life doing this to me, Angie thought as she
worked, watching the Tigers flying out on their latest mission. She shut her
eyes as she recognized her own former Tiger, the Surfer Girl, taking off with its name painted out, and now under
the command of a new nugget Ensign who had just been assigned to the Black
Tigers.
Angie then recognized the next plane on the deck. Number 013;
“Lieutenant, cleared for takeoff,” she said wearily into her mike.
“’avin’ fun up there, luv?” said Hartcliffe.
“Don’t rub it in,
“Acknowledged, luv,”
said
A moment later, the short-haired, hornrimmed-glasses wearing
Senior Lieutenant named John Wochinski who was the Section Chief of Flight
Control came up to Angie and said, “Mrs. Hartcliffe. We are in combat. You will
watch your damn emotions on duty. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yessir,” said Angie as she looked down at the boots of her
unwelcome yellow on white uniform.
“And it’s not our fault you’re pregnant,” he snapped.
“Sir, permission to speak freely?”
“Hartcliffe’s was the last plane out-granted.”
“I didn’t ask for this, sir: And I didn’t want it. And my
emotions and hormones are going berserk, sir.”
“It takes two to tango, Mrs. Hartcliffe,” said
Wochinski. “And we have another pregnant woman on this ship. Mrs. Wildstar does
her job and never makes any sort of
excuses. Got that?”
“Yessir.”
“You quit using what you did as an excuse! Now get back to work!
Or we can just ship you home to knit booties in a ground command if you’d
prefer that.”
You
boys’ club chauvinist pig, Angie thought as she wiped away a tear and
went back to tracking the Tigers.
Around
the Argo, two minutes later, two
Cometine destroyers had warped in and had made strafing runs against her. Two
more had also strafed the Princess Astra.
“Main enemy fleet spotted,” said Sasha. “Three light carriers,
three battleships, and fifteen more destroyers! Range, fourteen megameters..”
“Sir,” said Homer. “Admiral Carson says he can bring the Eighth
Battleship Squadron into range of the enemy fleet in four minutes. He says
they’re at RPX-225, thirteen point five megameters off our starboard bow…”
“Confirmed,” said Sasha. “Their speed is nineteen space knots;
slowly accelerating…”
The Argo shook from
another hit, but Commodore Wildstar thought, “Domon, what’s the range of the
wave motion cartridges again?”
“Twelve megameters; same as the uprated main guns,” said Domon.
“We could just do it. They should be in range in about ninety
seconds. Homer, recall Hardy after they make one run against the enemy, and
then have the Princess Astra recall
her planes after they do the same. A spread of wave motion cartridges from our
nine man guns and the Princess Astra’s
six main mounts would be fifteen percent of the firepower of the wave motion
gun. Domon, have the gunners prepare wave cartridges.”
“Yessir,” said Domon.
General
Pijar watched the battle from the bridge of the Velgannas in a bad mood.
“They’re fighting too hard, Major Dristna,” said Pijar. “I thought
this would throw them off-balance, but…”
“It looks like this attack isn’t bothering them at all. We warp
them in, they just fight them off. We even tried that at close range with the
destroyers, but…”
“They’re just shrugging off the destroyers, even though they’ve
taken six major hits already,” said Pijar. “They say the Argo isn’t quite a mortal ship. They say it has eerie supernatural
powers of some kind. I thought those were drunken tales they shared in the bars
on the Eritz Gatlantis. Now, I start
to believe them..”
“Sir, we have to hurry,” said Dristna as a lower-ranking officer
saluted him and handed him a padd. “Radar says that the major enemy fleet is
now three time-units away…no..make that two…”
“Recover planes, begin making preparation for departure,” said
General Pijar. “Use the bow SMITE units to send in the last two destroyers;
they can warp back to our rendezvous point after we finish.”
“When will that be?”
“Later. We will see the Argo
later on,” said Pijar. “When they have no place to hide…”
“Great plan, sir,” said Dristna.
“What? Just one run?”
said Hardy as he and his pilots began to attack the enemy fleet.
“The Captain says do what damage you can and then head back,”
replied Domon in his headset.
“We
can do lots of damage,” said Hardy with a grin as he watched two pilots from
the Avengers scoring hits. They were a Pellian refugee squadron from the
Blackeye Galaxy now based on the Princess
Astra who were flying EDF torpedo planes, and they seemed to take pride in
their work.
“You have your orders,” said Domon. “Wildstar thinks we can get
all of them with a few shots now. They’re not hanging back any longer. Why’s
that?”
“Overconfident,” huffed Hardy as he evaded some laser fire and
tore in towards one of the Cometine carriers with his nose guns blazing. He
smiled evilly as he noticed a few members of the Cometine maintenance crew on
the flight deck being turned into burned bone matter, gristle, flesh, hair,
teeth and eyeballs in a hurry by his handiwork. Ya ugly green scalawags, he thought. How do you like that? he thought again as he pumped two missiles
into the carrier and left it in action but burning before heading back to base.
Bryan Hartcliffe screamed a warwhoop as he attacked a destroyer. Then,
he laughed evilly when he and his wingmen saw the destroyer going up like a
torch, and then he heard, “Hardy to second squadron. Return to base! The Argo’s going to fire!”
“Roger, even though it was a fun day for us,” said Hartcliffe.
“Back to base!”
The planes began to head home a moment later.
“Our planes are out of the target area now; and it its now nine
megameters to the enemy fleet,” said Nova as she had gotten up and was helping
Sasha with some calculations. Sasha’s stomach was very queasy about now after
about close to half a stomach-churning hour in combat. “Derek, I think we’re
clear to fire those wave cartridges…”
“Domon?” said Commodore Wildstar.
“We’re
in range now,” said Domon.
“Open a channel to the Princess Astra,
Homer…,” said Derek. “Audio only.”
“Yessir, “ said Homer. “Open!”
“This is the Argo!” said
Wildstar. “All Earth and Iscandarian units-OPEN FIRE!”
A moment later, the Argo
fired. After the wave cartridges were fired, the guns were quickly converted to
fire in regular firing mode again for another round.
General Pijar watched in shock as one of his battleships, five of
his destroyers, and one of his carriers was quickly reduced to wreckage.
“Damn! Major, this is not to our advatange!” said Pijar. “One last
stand, and then, we…”
“General! The Earth battleship squadron is approaching our rear
flank from around their moon! I wish Zordar really had destroyed that thing! We’ll be trapped soon!”
“Make preparations to warp out!” snapped Pijar. “We’ll deal with
the Star Force later! We need to get out of here with our own skins intact!”
Nearby
on the flagship of the EDF Eighth Battleship Squadron, an Andromeda-class space battleship known as the Orion, Admiral Carson said, “What is the first ship of ours in range?”
“The
“Have them open fire first!”
Soon, General Pijar was howling in frustration as fire came in
from the
A moment later, General Pijar warped away in defeat, with just two
carriers, two battleships, and twelve destroyers left. But, he had done a
measure of damage that day.
There were dead on the Argo,
and she had taken damage.
Not
a bad start to my day, he thought as he emerged from warp a few
minutes later out beyond Pluto. And maybe
I get deal with them again out here beyond their asteroid belts that used to be
Minerva and Brumus…he thought.
II.
A TIME OF QUIET
Between
Earth and the Moon
Space
Battleship Argo
May
13, 2207: 0930 Hours (Standard Earth Space-Time)
“That was some battle,” said Eager a while after the battle. He was on the Argo’s bridge, but Nova had just come up
a little while ago from Sickbay where she had been helping Dawn and Doctor Sane
tend to the wounded and dying aboard ship. She was still in her nurse’s tunic,
and she was pushing a coffee cart.
“Where did Sasha go?” said Nova, puzzled at why Raiden was at the
radar.
“Girl got spacesick or somethin’” said Raiden. “Hadda go running
off to her room after you got called away, ma’am. She kinda threw up all over
that pretty blue uniform o’ hers.”
“Poor dear,” sighed Nova. “Well, she’ll get over it in a few days.
It took me a little while to gain space legs when we started out, and…I’ve been
helping her out with some Trinox…so she doesn’t have to make a formal sick
call…that’s all she needs now; her confidence is already shaken up enough.”
“I remember this one time after our first space warp back in 2199,
Nova,” said Homer. “Didn’t I hear you being sick in the head?”
“Homer, why did you have to remember that?” said Nova.
Sandor came onto the Bridge a moment later.
“How’s the damage?” said Commdore Wildstar.
“It could’ve been much worse,” sighed Sandor as he wiped some
grease off his hands with a rag. “Luckily, Peale kept casualties to a minimum
on the third bridge.”
“I should probably recommend him for something,” said Wildstar.
“How are we on the warp test schedule?”
“On time if Sasha can get here on time,” said Nova. “Derek, what
do you think about my plan?”
“It sounds good. Let’s start executing it now.”
“Yessir,” said Nova. She turned to Kitano. “Would you move over to
Analysis for this warp? I’m going to be at the helm so we can put Sasha through
all the numbers for calculating this warp to Mars from Area 14, Bisect 19. It’s
routine, but I’ll do it by the book.”
“Aye aye, ma’am…” said Kitano. He moved over while Nova went over
all of the instruments, memorizing again what was needed so she could show
Sasha each step of the procedure.
Sasha came up a moment later, wearing a fresh uniform and looking
very sheepish.
“Nova, is Daddy okay?” she asked. “I haven’t been able to see him
down there for a few hours. And there’s this one nurse down there that keeps on
giving me dirty looks for some reason. I don’t know why. She’s got kind of a
funny face I remember from somewhere, but…”
“He’s fine,” said Nova. “And we’ll discuss that bit later,” sighed
Nova, feeling more than a little like a mother right now in more ways than one.
“Now go report to the Skipper. We were waiting for you.”
“Yes. Sir,” she said as she reported to Derek. “I’m very sorry
that I got ill…I..”
“No apologies needed. Sasha, wait over there by the port side
computer terminal for Nova. She’ll help you on your next assignment;
calculating our space warp test.”
Sasha swallowed hard at that one. She knew the theory and the math
behind it very well, but the thought
of actually calculating a live warp
(and this would be the first space warp she had taken since her childhood) made
her a little queasy.
She met Nova by the computer, and sighed as they got to work
together at punching in all of the equations and formulae needed to time the
warp correctly in time and space.
TWENTY
MINUTES LATER….
Sasha stood before the Captain’s console with Nova at her side,
holding a magnetized smart card filled with punch marks and data.
“Sasha, tell the Captain the info that you will be uploading for
the warp,” said Nova.
“Aye, aye,” said Sasha. Sasha looked up at Derek and said,
“Captain, I have calculated that the best location for the warp to Mars is Area
14, Bisect 19. Best timing is 1001 and twenty seconds.”
“Homer, signal the Princess Astra, have them sync with
these figures…” said Commodore Wildstar.
“Yessir,” said Homer.
“Hold the card,” said Nova. “Take it with you to the radar,
Sasha.”
Sasha did so. Nova showed her where to insert it and how to do a
run of the data and then correct any errors. “Now, we will upload this data to
Navigation and you’ll set the timing for automatic from your post. I normally
do the whole job from there, but this is to show you what we have to do. I’ll
actually be warping the ship with your data, and…”
“You’ll be?”
“Yes, it’s to serve as your instructor. We’ll go through the
procedure step by step. Kitano will help me.”
“Ma’am, did you ever do this before?”
Nova raised her eyebrows. “What?”
“I mean…warp the ship and all…”
“I usually calculate it, but, yes, I’m trained to run the helm,
too,” said Nova. “I’ve warped the ship a few times. Venture showed me how to do
it before you were even born. Why are you doubting
me, Sasha?” said Nova with her hands on her hips. She sounded a little put out
about it.
“Just a weird feeling I have about this warp. I’m scared,” said
Sasha.
“We all get a little scared whenever we have to perform a space
warp,” said Sandor. “It’s normal.”
“I’m a little scared of her
behind the wheel of a car,” whispered Sasha. “Sometimes, she and Uncle drive a
little crazy. And I hope my sense of direction is good. I don’t want to have
the ship plunge into another universe and run into Coruscant or some weird
place like that.”
“That universe is fictional,” said Eager.
“How do you know that?”
said Sasha.
Nova cleared her throat as they got ready for the warp.
There was a long checklist that was memorized by Navigation.
Kitano recited “check” to each step, helping in the training as Nova looked
over Sasha’s steps from the helm.
“Timing matrix,” said Nova.
“Checked and locked in. Ship now running on automatic timing.”
“Wave engine pulse rate,” said Nova.
“Normal. Engineer, transfer power couplings and all fusings to
Helm control,” said Sasha.
“Transferred,” said Yamazaki.
“Astral compass heading,” said Nova. “Nominal from helm. Radar,
does it agree?”
“In sync,” said Sasha from her post. “Astral compass heading true
gamma aye.”
“Wave engine power levels,” said Nova.
“Power surge building up,” said Yamazaki as the power curve came
up. “Buildup to one hundred twenty percent in fifty seconds.”
“Secure all hands,” said Nova.
Then, Sasha flicked up a switch. Her voice, a little nervous,
sounded over the ship’s PA for the first time. “Attention, all hands! Two
minutes to space warp! Make sure all crew and movable objects secure! Ready for
the warp surge, it may…”
Nova raised her hand. “Ninety seconds to warp! Bridge crew, check
safety harnesses!”
The harnesses snapped to and locked.
Nova, the last one harnessed, ran over to Sasha to check hers.
“That should be tighter…that’ll do it…”
“It’s squeezing in my boobs,” she whispered as she took a deep
breath.
“You get used to it. You’ll make it.” Nova ran back and locked
herself in, expertly making sure that her harness was on just right for her own
changing figure due to the twins. “Radar, final timing, sync!” Nova called out.
“Fifty seconds to warp!” cried Sasha as she remembered to flick on
the klaxons. “Thirty seconds to warp, all hands. Chrono on automatic. Execute
aye or nay?”
“Aye,” snapped Nova. “Check time-space sensor graph!”
“Peaks reading!” said Sasha as she and Nova brought up the
distinctive pattern of pulses as the sensors read the waves and valleys of time-space
in the region. “Nearing point of peak 422 Alpha Reckoned, confirmed via
automatic astrolabe.”
“Go or no go for Peak 422 pattern!” barked Nova.
“Go!” barked Sasha.
“Go or no go for main engine thrust wave and auto surge tachyonic
dampers!” cried Nova. “Analysis, confirm!”
“Go on engine,” barked Yamazaki.
“Go on check from Analysis,” said Kitano. “Radar, upload final
course compensated lock to helm!”
“Uploaded!” snapped Sasha
as she punched several buttons and everything went green at her post. A chime
rang from her board’s main workstation screen over the surge of the wave
engine, and the radar scanning mode changed as a message appeared on the
rectangular screen below the large radar hemispheres. WARP SYSTEMS LOCKED. DANGER.
FURTHER ADJUSTMENTS WILL ABORT WARP. Do you want to adjust? Yes/No.
Sweating like crazy, Sasha
hit the button below NO. Lights began to flash on her screen as a strange but
familiar graphic came up.
“Go for final warp
countdown!” said Kitano from his post.
“Execute!” said Derek from
his post.
“Warp countdown!” said
Nova’s voice over the speakers as she made further adjustments at her end and
prepared to make the warp. “Dimensional lock true azimuth! Twenty seconds!
Fifteen seconds!”
As the blip went over the
peaks and valleys in fine detail and made its usual bleeping noise to
convergence lock, Nova called out, “Ten seconds to space warp! Nine! Eight!
Seven! Six!”
I’m scared, I’m scared, I’m scared, I’M SCARED,
thought Sasha as she almost wanted to cry while everyone else looked so calm.
“Three …two..one…zero…CV
lock, ready!” said Nova as all the lines converged as she had seen so many
times. Kitano gave her a thumbs-up as she looked back at Derek, who snapped,
“GO! WARP!”
“WARP!”
repeated Nova as she pulled back the throttles.
Sasha watched as, outside,
the Princess Astra, travelling ahead
of them, suddenly turned into a long stream of lights as it flashed away into
subspace.
The wave engine roared, and
Sasha felt a kick from behind, as, too awed and shocked to remember to close
her eyes, she saw the stars outside suddenly turning into weird streaks of
light as she got a disconcerting feeling that she was going to float right out
of her harness as all of the lights roared past in a weird convergence that
felt as if time-space was going down a weird drainpipe into a sink…
The Argo then blasted into subspace with a weird, pulsating, keening
roar that was both felt as well as heard.
Lights roared past Sasha’s
eyes, and then through them. Sasha almost wanted to scream as she felt lighter
than air, dizzy, and strange as she saw things turn transparent….
Like Sandor’s uniform. With
shock, she could see that his arms and legs were not normal, but were filled
with all sorts of weird wires and circuits rather than bones and muscle.
He’s a cyborg! Sasha thought in shock. And why does he have mini fusion bombs built
into those things? This is weird!
Sasha looked up and then almost
screamed as she saw a skeleton sitting in Nova’s see-through chair. A skeleton
with two tiny skeletons near the pelvis, just floating in mid-air…
Then, flesh and bone grew
back over the skeletons, and Nova was just apparently sitting there clad in only
semi-transparent underwear. She kept her eyes firmly closed during the
dizzying, weird lightshow.
Lights and what looked like
whole galaxies flew at Sasha in this weird world of blue light that was filled
with distorted, strange humming noises and roaring winds. She screamed as she
saw a sun coming at her hair…
And, she screamed again and
looked down and saw she had on no uniform.
I’m naked! Sasha thought. In front of everyone, I….
Time does strange things between universes, between dimensions…responded her
mother’s voice. It is normal. Sasha, close your eyes!
Why?
It could drive you mad…close….
Sasha looked down at
herself and saw her own heart beating. It was weird, nauseating, and
fascinating all at once.
Then, Sasha felt sick. She felt
like she wanted to really, really
barf.
She did. But a galaxy came
out of her mouth and roared away in weird streaks of light, and…
Suddenly, everything went
dead and black.
More flashes came, and
something like lightning went off.
When a very, dizzy, sick,
and disoriented Sasha looked around again, she saw Mars in front of the Argo. All looked serene, peaceful, and
quiet, save for two things. One was a weird humming noise in her ears that took
a moment to fade away, and the other was the fact that her lap felt wet.
Sasha looked down and
gulped.
“Nova?” she squeaked.
“Sasha, nothing to worry
about, we made it through all right,” she said with a smile as she walked
towards her niece. “Great job on those calculations! Kitano is taking back the
helm, we’re right on course and on benchmark, I…what’s wrong, Sasha?”
“I got sick again, auntie,”
she said in a small voice. “All over my lap this time..”
“Why?” said Nova as she
looked. “Oh, poor dear! I’ll get a rag and wipe you off. How’d it happen?” said
Nova as she ran for a medkit.
“I did something really
stupid.”
“What?” asked Nova as she
came over with the rag and shushed Eager from whispering stuff to Homer, who
was nearby to watch. “What happened?”
“I opened my eyes when we
warped. It was weird…what I saw scared me!”
“Well, now you know why we
close our eyes,” sighed Nova as she opened the medkit.
III.
DEKE’S OBSERVATIONS
The
Sanzar System
Between
Iscandar and Gamilon
May
15, 2207: 1100 Hours (Standard Earth Space-Time)
“So what do you think,
sir?” asked Stripes as she and Ivan flew in formation beside Deke Wakefield as
they beheld the two planets that were before them right after having blasted
off the Wasp’s deck and made a turn.
“I’m trying not to,” he
said.
“But we’ve read about them
at the Academy, seen them in holos; it’s amazing to actually see Gamilon and Iscandar up close and
personal for the first time,” said Stripes. “They’re beautiful.”
No comment on Gamilon, thought Deke as he looked
to his left at the homeworld of Desslok and his race. The planet was mostly
dark green, with many traces of craters, mountains, rocky formations, and seas
on it. It was shrouded partly in clouds, and there were many glittering cities
on its surface. You can see the lights of
his arrogant cities right from orbit, and it probably looked and smelled far
worse when it was still polluted, thought Deke. The place still looks weird…and I hear even the sky down there is
green. Yeccch! I wonder why they need our help…looks like Desslok can make more
than enough trouble by himself, thought Deke as he saw a squadron of those
weird green and yellow organic-looking destroyers going past in the distance.
The thought that he was looking this close at the ships and homeworld of the
race that had killed his parents and sister during the bombings and their
aftereffects made Deke almost want to throw up. The fact that he was
remembering the courteous but cold eyes of Desslok made it even worse.
The planet gave him many
complex emotions. Sasha was born here,
he thought. She has eyes like this
planet; glittering, pretty, mysterious. I’ve never met her mother, of course.
Her father is all right, but…her mother? I guess we’ll have to meet someday. I
wonder if she’s all too perfect like that planet. Yeah…she had a pretty planet
to sit on while the barbarians next door were making us sit in stinking cities
under the Earth like tombs, slowly starving, dying of radiation sickness, and
being poor. An image of Sasha Morningstar came to Deke’s mind and he
thought, I wonder if Queen Starsha can
picture a woman looking like her daughter leading a food protest dressed in
nothing but two rags and plastic sandals? I wonder if she’d give a damn about
something like that. Peaceniks. And we’re supposed to be protecting them with
the big, bad-assed Gamilons right next door? Man, give me a break!
The thoughts were driven
from Deke’s mind as he had to check in with New Fiji Island Ground Control,
which had picked them up.
Deke was all procedure again
as he led his squadron down into a clear, almost cloudless, painfully blue sky.
When they were lower, Deke felt the inside of his canopy and found that it felt
just a bit warm…possibly from the air outside?
He followed an
astro-compass heading right towards a great island-like Continent near the
equator filled with bays and islands that looked very small from the
air-islands that were very bright against a deep blue sea that looked like old
pictures of Hawaii that Deke had seen-pictures from before the wars.
Finally, Deke found
Whatever the heck that beach is called, I’d love to go there with
Sasha, he thought. There didn’t seem to be much around it; it looked
like a great spot.
The beeping of his controls
brought him back to where he was. “Trojan leader,” said a southern North
American-sounding voice from Ground Control-someone from Earth on this alien
planet. “You’re cleared for landing on Runway 18 West. Acknowledged.”
Deke looked down at the
criss-cross of runways at the southern part of the island-and noticed that the
numbers were marked in Terran characters as well as two other kinds of
characters. “Ground control, Trojan Leader here. Acknowledged. Ready for
landing. Group will follow me in…”
“Acknowledged,” said Ground
Control as Deke glanced down and counted the runways-looked like there were
five of them, with a sixth being dug out of the island before his eyes. He
focused on the navigation lights and beam for Runway 18 West and prepared his
Tiger for landing on Iscandar with butterflies in his stomach.
After Wakefield landed his
plane and filled out the needed paperwork after he and the ground crew had
parked it nose-outwards in a landing bay that was was also a blast revetment
for the planes, Deke lugged his seabag and other bags off to a BOQ complex that
looked strangely Terran, and rather bleak. He found out his billet was a
building known as Building 305. he also found upon landing that the island was
hot, sandy, humid, and seemed rampant with green tropical growth in the
sections that weren’t paved.
He also noticed odd-looking
people walking around. He was military and quite regulation in his EDF blues
and flight boots, but he noticed people walking around in hula shirts and
shorts; while some had on khaki pants.
Is this Iscandar, or
“Hey!” said some guy with
reflectorized sunglasses, a hula shirt, EDF blue pants, and flip-flops as he
came up. “You one of the new guys?”
“Are you Earth Defense?”
said Deke.
“Yeah, I’m Junior
Lieutenant Ed Wilson, section leader with the Black Aces. Who the hell are
you?”
“Sir,” said
“Yes I did,” said
“You need a hula shirt and
flip-flops, sir,” said
“When’s the last patrol you
flew?”
“Last night. Got a green
dude’s recon boat. They’re sniffing around this place. The non-peacenik
Iscandarians, which you will find a few of, and the Gamilons, agree with us
that some serious crap is on its way here. Which is why you’re here. I hear
scuttlebutt the big strategy is to try and stop Invidia out here before she
ever gets to Earth.”
“How are you talking with
Iscandarians and Gamilons?”
“They live with us. Here on
this island,” said
“And they’re on our side?”
said
“I…don’t want to talk about
it,” Deke replied.
“Whatever,” said
“Thanks,” said Deke. He was
very depressed.
He wondered if he’d ever
get back home again to see Sasha alive.
An hour later, in Building 305,
after debriefing the squadron, Deke filled out more paperwork, and knowing he
would have some time to himself, he dragged his gear and DJ and his sticks into
a small cinderblock-lined room that was very hot. He flicked on an Earth-made
climate control unit that sounded like kind of swamp cooler that was built into
one of the cinderblock bulkheads and the first thing he put on the desk was his
picture of Sasha. He shut the door and locked it after a minute.
Sasha, he thought. Have you ever been to this island? It’s hot here. Hot. The sun is very
bright, and the air is different. Would you know about this place? I think you
would.
“It’s weird here,” said
Deke to himself as he pulled off his shirt and lay down on his bunk in his
pants, undershirt, and dog tags while banging on the bunk with his drumsticks.
“I’m married, and I can’t talk about it. I have a half-Iscandarian wife, and I
can’t tell anyone here about her. I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again. My
ex-fiancee’ is now an enemy, judging from that talk we had several weeks ago.
Sasha, I’m separated from you, far away, on your home planet, part of it that
seems to be a dump.”
Deke picked up his water
glass and threw it against the wall until it shattered. “I want to go back to
Earth! Damnit! Sasha, I miss you! I
want to go home! I want this damn war to be over already! All right?”
Then, he wept, banging his
bunk in rage and utter frustration.
Later on that day, after
flying a mission, Deke took a liberty call with Brew and Bangs and found out that
there was a whole town around the base on the island.
To Deke it looked weird;
some buildings looked Terran, while others looked Iscandarian; they looked
crystalline.
“Who lives here?” said Deke.
“Scientific colony, I
heard,” said Bangs as she munched on some Iscandarian fruit that looked like an
apple. She had changed into a short skirt, white top, and sneakers, while Brew
wore flip-flops, long khaki shorts, and his EDF blouse, which was half-open.
“When are you getting
flip-flops, man?” said Brew.
“Never,” said Deke. “I hate
them.”
“Don’t like having your
feet out or something?” asked Bangs.
“Don’t mind that-I just
hate straps between my toes. I’ll wear Roman-type sandals, not those things.”
“We gotta get him in a hula
shirt, Bangs,” said Brew. “We get him outta that uniform, maybe he’ll loosen up
a bit?”
The town was full of people
in civilian clothing of all kinds; Terran, what he guessed to be Iscandarian
(quite a few women with longish, light hair that reminded him of Sasha in
light, long single-colored pastel dresses that blew in the breeze), and some in
darker clothing but a somewhat tough Terran appearance that he guessed had to
be Pellian.
Deke heard weird music
around a corner, and found some orange person in white robes playing something
that looked like a cross between a sitar and a balalaika. It sounded weird, and
his moaning singing in an alien language sounded just as weird to Deke.
“Haa..aiiie…laga ega v’ra transha ete showw ega, zhan, jeeee, eta evada,
oooooo…”, sang the orange person as people threw money into his cup.
“Ah, yes, you people, I see
have you just met the local Rikashan,” said a deep voice behind them.
“How do you know he’s a
con-man?” said Deke as he stared down the Gamilon.
“I understand a bit of his
song. Singing about how he’s crippled and needs alms. What a joke. The man has
two legs, and I think he has two arms. I see him coming out of the liquor shop
every night with a new bag after he sings all day. We’re allies, Earther
barbarian friends. Want to help me roll him so I can make a donation for the
honor of my superior?”
“First, I may be from
Earth, but I’m no barbarian,” said Deke.