Category Archives: heroes

Canto 153 – Stealth

The corridors of the Ruined Palaces were empty and still.  Much dust danced through an empty-hall ballet as the stillness of disuse filled the place.  Then, as suddenly as a star goes nova, there was a loud crack as Jadalaqstbr brought Ged Aero into the palace by teleportation.

Ged’s brown fedora fell from his head and began rolling away. 

“Are you all right, Ged-sensei?”  Jackie’s brown face showed concern even though recently Alec Songh had led her to be a bit disrespectful and defiant.

“I didn’t know teleporting left you disoriented like that,” said Ged, trapping his hat with a foot before it rolled too far.

“It doesn’t do that to me, but Alec says it bothers him.”

“We may need to be quieter in a place we have invaded.”

“Yes, sorry,” Jackie whispered.  “Are you ready for me to go back for the next one?”

“Yes.”

At the word from the master, another thunderous crack marked Jadalaqstbr’s departure.  Ged used the moment to begin his planned transformation.  He changed his head into a tiger’s head for the sensitive nose, but it was not an earth tiger.  It was the head of a large black Talosian tiger.  And Ged did not settle for the mere body of a tiger.  The cat-form he created was sheathed in armor plates much like the armored auger-creatures of the planet Nix, supple yet impenetrable.  It also had wings like the great war-eagles of Barad Allamar, large enough to carry a ton of creature mass through the air.

When Jackie cracked the air next, it was Phoenix she carried.  She set him down and immediately imploded through space again.

“Ged-dono?” asked Phoenix, hesitation in his sarcastic voice for the first time that Ged was aware of.

“Yesss, thiss iss mmmme.  New formmmm.”  The tiger’s tongue was thick and slurred in his huge mouth.

“Good trick,” said Phoenix, nodding.  “I have one to show you, too.”

Phoenix’s transformation was even more alarming than Ged’s.  Fire started around his hands, and then began to crackle around his entire form.  He seemed to become a boy of living flame.

“RRRRrrrr?” questioned Ged.

“I call it fire-form,” said Phoenix.  “I am intact under here and able to breathe normally.  I’m really just wearing fire like anyone else would wear clothes.”

Ged nodded his massive head.  It was a good trick that might serve Phoenix well.

Jackie burst onto the scene once again with Rocket Rogers in her grip.  She dropped the cowboy-hatted boy onto the floor tiles and vanished yet again.

“Wow!” said Rocket, “I’ve been missing quite a party.”

“Look into my mind, Rocket,” said Phoenix from within the flames.  “You can do this too.”

Ged had been impressed during lessons at how willingly Phoenix would teach his skills to Rocket.  The cowboy fire-starter was a quick learner, too.  Ged wasn’t entirely sure he was comfortable with Phoenix becoming a better instructor than Ged himself.  He couldn’t deny, though, that Rocket could learn more effectively from someone who shared the same skills.

Jackie disappeared yet again.

Rocket burst into flame, his cowboy hat sizzling away to cinders.

“Dang!” said Rocket.  “I goofed.  I burned up all my clothes and my best cowboy hat.”

“Did you burn yourself?” said Phoenix’s fire-form to Rocket’s fire form.

“No, I’m okay.  I get the part about a cool layer just below the flame.  I can do the temperature layers just the way you pictured it for me, but I have to learn to get the thicknesses right.”

“You learrrn fast,” remarked the Ged tiger.

“Thank you, sensei.  Phoenix is a good teacher, just like you.”

 When Jackie reappeared she carried Shu Kwai, the final member of the strike team.  He was dressed in a white leather vest, tooled with interlocking spider designs, a white loincloth, and white tabai boots.  He carried a pearlescent trident with three wickedly sharp tines.  For a boy of twelve, he looked formidable.  He had learned enough martial arts skills from Ged and from Alec Songh to be deadly, even when he didn’t enhance his blows with telekinesis.  Like Ged himself, though, this boy was dedicated to winning any battle without causing any injury or death.

“Are we ready?” asked Phoenix within his fire-form.

“We will find our way easily,” said Shu Kwai with that quiet confidence that made him so spooky.  “The mission will be no challenge.”

Ged had to wonder if the Gaijinese boy was trying to reassure himself and the others, or was simply stating what he knew to be a fact.  Ged knew one of these three boys would end up being the leader of the entire group.  He simply didn’t know which.  But the time had come for action.  Ged’s tiger nose detected the approach of rotting flesh and circuitry.  Rot warriors were headed their direction.

Canto 152 – Ged on Mingo

The Ancient Red Dragon starship  popped out of jump space to find the planet Mingo bustling with activity.  The spaceways around the heavily industrialized planet were crammed with merchant ships of every kind, from gargantuan, cigar-shaped mass haulers to the smallest of independent beetle-shaped personal transports.  It wasn’t that no one noticed the dragon-shaped vessel as it arrived from the complex gravitic web of outer space; it was more a matter of everyone being too busy to care.

Three system defense boats came out to look over Ged’s Ancient spacecraft, but as they scanned it and found it was not alive, they quickly lost interest.  It had no weapons that registered on any kind of detector.  The human signatures on the routine life-scan would tell the transport police that nothing about this unusual craft suggested it was hostile in any way.

“Ged-sensei, we have arrived at the place your girlfriend is hidden,” said Billy Iowa, coming out of his clairvoyant trance.  “I see her in the palace below, the one called David King’s Hall in the Ruined Palaces District.”

“It is a shame we don’t have any computer database available on this ship,” remarked Ged.  “I suppose even if it did, it couldn’t tell us anything about Emperor Mong or his planet Mingo.”

            “We have to get down to that palace and save her,” asserted Junior, looking determined.

“Don’t get ahead of us, Smurf,” growled Alec.  “What are the Ruined Palaces?”      

            “It’s a place where the buildings have all been attacked at one time or another,” said Billy, looking with his inner eye.  “Their damage has been preserved as a part of the decor of the buildings.  David King’s Hall is one of the three biggest ones.”

            “Whoa,” said Alec, half-laughing, “why would they rebuild something and make it look like it’s still ruined?”

            “An evil sense of humor,” said Phoenix.  “It’s like something Bres might do.”

            “You put Bres down too much!” said Alec, suddenly hot.

            “No, he can’t be put far enough down, Alec,” answered Phoenix coolly.  All could see the air begin to sizzle around the Phoenix.

            “Yeah, whatever.”  Alec backed off from the subject.

            “We do have to go down there,” said Ged at last.  “We need to be prepared to use our Psion powers.  We know what rot warriors are, but we have no experience of what they can do.”

            Taffy King, who had only been looking at the back of Rocket Rogers’ neck before, spoke up.  “I grew up around them.”  Her blue snake’s eyes glowed with angry fire.  “They are like robots who don’t work right.  They lurch around and stumble into things, but when they are ordered to fight, they do it one hundred to one.  They overwhelm the opponent with bone-headed force.”

            “What are they really?” asked Sarah innocently.

            “Re-animated skeletons,” offered Rocket.  “I’ve seen them before on Bradalanth Colony.  They are bones and circuits and some patches of leathery skin.  Mechanoids with no brains.”

            “Monsters!” moaned Hassan Parker.

            “Remember, young ones,” said Ged, “they are easily defeated because they cannot think for themselves.  As long as we work together and let no one get overwhelmed by numbers, we should be able to overcome them.  I worry more about what other problems may arise as we try to get past Emperor Mong’s living minions.”

            “Geez, you sound like an old holo-cartoon show!” remarked Phoenix.

            “You disagree with something?”  Ged was suddenly a bit annoyed.

            “Oh, no.  You are right.  It just sounds so cartoonish!”

            “So, what will we do, Sensei?” asked Junior carefully, afraid of rousing more ire from Ged.

            “Sarah?  Can you help us see the distant places Billy can sense?”

            “Yes, Sensei.”  Sarah was capable of transferring images from one mind to another.

            “Jackie, if you see the place, can you teleport us there one by one?”

            The pretty, brown-skinned girl smiled at Ged for the first time in a while.  “You know I can!”

            “Well, then, that’s our way in.”

Overture for Part Five of AeroQuest

Well, here we are again at the start of the part of the space opera that begins a new volume, and it is the part after the last intermission where I summarize all the crazy stuff that happened in this somewhat-true-but-also-somewhat-exaggerated history of what, to you, is a history of the far future.  And I usually go over only a few main points before launching into a complicated story that you will never be able to follow because you’re not a genius like me, Googol Marou, scientist, historian, and really cool witness to a lot of these events. 

And I usually assure you that you can pick this up and read it even without having read the previous four volumes.  But, come on!  Can you really skip that much wonderfully insightful narrative and historical analysis and still truly understand the masterfully written material of this volume?  Don’t you need to at least buy the most expensive copies of all four books you can find and put them under your pillow so that story particles can irradiate your head in the night while you are asleep and make your brain mutate into super-genius levels of intelligence because the books are written so well?

Or you could just go back and read them.

Part One is called Stars and Stones.

In that first wonderfully written part, the two brothers, Ged and Ham Aero are fleeing from civilized space because, although they’ve already had a good career as space hunters, Ged’s Psion ability to change his shape has gotten him persecution from the Orion Spur Empire known as the Imperium.  As they flee, they are joined by a criminal boyhood friend, Trav Dalgoda, who is escaping from space pirates that he stole a valuable Ancient artifact from along with a kidnapped Nebulon Princess and her young son.

They escape from known space to a periphery planet called Don’t Go Here.  Here they legally lay claim to an entire planetary star system because they are the only people there with a spaceship.  But it is not an uninhabited planet.  There are millions of marooned spacers on that planet left there by the pirates that stole their spaceships.  They have developed a unique civilization there based on ancient holo-cartoons called The Flintstones. 

And so, the Aero Brothers liberated the planet by using Trav’s Ancient artifact to build an AI-self-aware starport whom Trav names Frieda and then commands her to design and build new starships.

Of course, the pirates who lost the artifact to Trav have to come to terms with the new power in with the Orion Spur, and so decide to start a rebellion against the Imperium and Grand Admiral Brona Tang.

But then we move into the part of the story that becomes Part Two, Planet of the White Spider.  In that part, Ged has to face the fact that a mysterious prophecy about a Psion called the White Spider seems to be directly describing him as the next chosen one to be the White Spider.

Being the White Spider of Prophecy requires Ged to move to the planet Gaijin with a previously marooned Psion Master from Don’t Go Here called Tkriashav.  Ged takes the Nebulon Princess’s son, renamed Ham Aero Junior, along with him to establish a new school for Psions. Junior has Psion skills.

Ham Aero decides to go along with Tron Blastarr, the leader of the pirates to fight for the Imperium and hopefully also stop Trav Dalgoda from destroying the entire universe for giggles.  The rebels try to conquer some new planets after taking and losing White Palm.  They gain allies and more Ancient-artifact troubles and one assassin on the trail of pirate leaders.  They settle on the idea that if they win, they will establish a new interplanetary government called the New Star League.

Ged finds allies in the leader of Gaijin, a goofy old Mandarin called Shen Ming, and an immortal from ancient Earth, Dr. Naylund Smith.  Dr. Smith’s charming young daughter Sara turns out to be a gifted Psion healer.

And then Ged must defeat the planet’s Black Spider leader in order to establish himself as the new White Spider.  This he does in a ninja-battle contest by using his shape-changing ability to turn into a dinosaur and eat the Black Spider, ironically absorbing the ninja skills as he eats his enemy.

Then Ged seriously begins putting together his Psion ninja class from the gifted but outcast children that Tkriashav finds and brings to him.

Part Three, Juggling Planets tells about the rebel pirate bands going from planet to planet, recruiting and invading worlds to add to their new planetary alliance.  Tron and Ham Aero add allies and friends to their cause, retrieve some of their captured minions, and learn certain secrets that advance their cause.

Ged and his students hone their skills and learn to work together.  The students get to know each other and form relationships.

And then Part Four happens, The Amazing Aero Brothers.  More characters come into the story.  Some characters die.  Some new villains arise and are defeated.  I give you even more historical and scientific insight into what happens.  And everything gets even more complicated.

What you most need to know is that Grand Admiral Brona Tang is defeated in the Battle of Planet Coventry by a super-powerful Ancient artifact called the Tesserah.  And then Trav Dalgoda immediately uses it to commit the worst war crime in the history of the universe.  After this battle ends, Ham Aero and everyone aboard his spaceship, including yours truly, are captured and held prisoner by Grand Admiral Brona Tang.

Ged Aero defeats his worst enemy who turns out to be a sort of clone of himself from the future.  And then he is handed the evil artifact known as the Tesserah and tasked with destroying it to save the entire universe.

Now, do you have enough information to read Volume  Five, It Ain’t Over Yet?  Or do you need to do some more reading first?