Category Archives: humor

Canto 113 – Prisoners on the Shadowcat

Ham sat at the pilot-seat controls aboard his safari ship, looking out the main portal into the cavernous docking bay of the Bregohelma.  It was depressing.  Trying to suicidally destroy his enemy, he had become a mere prisoner instead.

Admiral Tang didn’t see him as anything more than a flea that needed to be slapped.  He was glad he and his crew were not dead, but he was irked by the fact that he had been far less of a factor in the Battle of Coventry than had his friend the Goofer.  And worse, now Goofy and all those potential allies on Coventry were all dead too.  What step comes next?

There was activity in the docking bay.  Armed men in combat armor were filing in, keeping together in highly organized tactical formations.  Dang!  Imperial Marines!  There would probably be little hope of surviving this encounter.

“Boss!  Yo, Boss!”  Sinbadh came stumbling into the bridge of the ship with an armload of unattached plasma gun parts.  “We gots plenty o’ buccaneers ready to board us!”

“Yes, I know.  Stow the guns away.  We are gonna meekly surrender and hope they don’t kill us.”

“Blimey, Cap’n!  We surrender without a fight?”

“Yes, my friend.  The Madonna is pregnant.  Sahleck is a little boy.  Professor Marou is really, really old…”

“Not that old!” I said as I revealed myself from where I had secretly been watching Ham from behind the bulkhead.

“Hey, Professor, what were you doing hiding back there?” Ham asked.

“Well, I…”  I tried to think of a quick excuse.  It suddenly wasn’t necessary.

“Ham Aero!  Han Ferrari!  Come out!” came the strangely compelling voice.  We all felt a deep black fear swelling in our guts and pulling us painfully toward the voice like a nose ring attached to a chain being pulled by a steady, relentless strength.

“Good Lord!” swore Ham.  “It’s Admiral Tang, and he has us in his power.”

Ham was right.  It was Tang’s special Psion power.  He could manipulate us with our own fear.  He controlled us completely.

“Don’t shoot!  We’re coming out!”  I heard Duke Ferrari saying it from the exit ramp beneath us.  And there was no choice.  We filed out of the Shadowcat like puppets on strings.

Admiral Brona Tang was not only the scariest being I had ever met up to that point in my life, he was also the biggest.  He was easily six foot eleven, and encased from head to toe in powered battle armor.  The armor was even a bright red color, as if to emphasize the blood he had spilled and the blood he still intended to spill.  His face was a red mask with black eye portals, an alien, evil sort of face.  He also wore a hat on top of the helmet, a wide-brimmed red hat that looked vaguely like the kind of hat worn by Catholic friars in the long-ago Dark Ages, the fourteenth century.  In fact, as I thought of it, images of the Inquisition and power-mad Cardinals leapt to mind.

“Good.  You have decided to relent and surrender.”  The voice was electronically enhanced and almost sounded like three voices in one to me.

Ham, Duke Ferrari, and I stood in front, as if to shield the others.  Sinbadh stood behind with the poor Nebulon Madonna on one side, and the trembling Lupin boy, Sahleck Kim on the other side.  The wolfman put a hairy paw around the shoulders of each.

“Neither you nor your brother can escape me, Ham.  I have you in my possession, and one of my most trusted agents is by Ged’s side, reporting his every move.  Your brother is even now beginning the quest that will dispose of that Ancient device that proved to be such a thorn in my side here at the Battle of Coventry.”  Tang laughed.  “I couldn’t ask for a sweeter vengeance.”

“Who… who is the agent?” asked Ham, against the force of Tang’s terrible will.

            “Ah, no!  It’s not that easy!  How do I know you haven’t manifested some terrible Psion power too by now?  It runs in our families.  Mine comes from my father.  Your brother’s is from Mammy Aero, a powerful Psion as well known to my father as Ged.  My mind is shielded, and I will tell you nothing.”

“Aren’t villains always supposed to brag about their evil plots to take over the galaxy?” I asked sarcastically.

Tang laughed again.  “I know you too, Dr. Marou.  I learned of you from those accursed Time Knights.  You are the one person here that future history books guarantee had to survive this encounter.  The same is not true for the rest.  Most of you will live no longer than the coming battle against Tron Blastarr at Outpost.  Oops!  Did I give something away?  How about this; I am committing what remains of the entire Imperial Navy to that battle.  I am going to win it and put an end to any possible time line where your so-called good guys can win.  The Imperium has kept order for hundreds of years.  It will last for thousands more.”

Sinbadh winked his doggy eye at me.  “Clever how ye got him to spill the ol’ soliloquy there, Doc.” he whispered.  “Tip o’ me hat to ye.”

“What will you do with us, then?” asked Ham.

“You will sit right here in the docking bay, prisoners aboard your own ship.  I am told I cannot destroy you tonight.  It has to wait for the battle.  But if I can outthink and kill a Time Knight, I can kill you.”

Canto 112 – The Megadeath’s New Super Powers

“Let me understand what you stupid… stupid people are saying!  You left the defenses of Outpost and Don’t Go Here to go galivanting all the way to Coventry?  And in only three days?”  King Killer had never shouted so loudly nor had a face so red as it was in that meeting.

“Dude!  It woulda been two days if we hadn’a parked invisioble to watch the battle.”  Nikki Sixx appeared shocked that Admiral Killer was so mad.

“Wha… ?” burbled Cold Death stupidly.

“Chill oh soon-to-explode-from-rage dude,” said Vince Niell from his safe place behind mirrored sunglasses.  “We followed the orders of the Hooey-dude, man.  We know how he worked for you in escaping the Imperium, bro.  We just assumed that you gave him the orders he gave us, dude.”

“Vince, grab some whiskey.  I need you skunk-levels of drunk so I can understand every word you are saying.”

Besides the Admiral and the crew of the Megadeath, Admiral Tron and his wife Maggie the Knife were also present.  Maggie, taking a cue from Admiral Killer went to the bar in the back of the conference room and grabbed two bottles of Mundoploovian Suicide Ale to help make Vince more understandable.

“And where was Captain Lee in all of this, Gentlemen?” asked Tron sounding dangerous.

“Oh, he weren’t with us,” said Nikki Sixx.  “He and Pamela left the ship to go be rock and roll stars to the stars!  Hooey said they was gonna be megastars!”

“So, he officially abandoned his command and went AWOL?”

“Um, yep, thass about the size of it, boss,” said Nikki.  Cold Death nodded stupidly but vigorously to back him up on that.

Maggie put the Suicide Ale down in front of Vince.  Then she stuck her shiny knife in the table for emphasis.  This particular table had numerous decorations from years’ worth of Maggie’s pointed emphasis.

Vince drank quickly and narrowly avoided vomiting out his liver.  He became instantly drunk.

“So, tell me this, Vince, dude…  How the hell did you make a round trip to Coventry and back in only three days?” King Killer asked.

“Your friend the time knight brought his little time machine booth device on our ship, interfacing his chrono-circuits with the Megadeath’s Ancient computer brain.  It reduced a three week trip to two days via a built in time-accelerator that we knew nothing about until the good Doctor Hooey showed us it’s enhanced space-travel ability.”

“And do you think these other Ancient-built space ships are capable of doing the same thing?”

“I am unsure of the probability… but I believe I can find the device in the other ships if they are indeed present.”

“Okay, Vince,” said Tron, “what was this other nonsense about watching the battle invisioble?”

“Well, of course, the mispronounced word was intended to represent invisibility.  The Megadeath, it seems, has a most efficacious ability to go into stealth mode.  We delivered the good Doctor Hooey into the Bregohelma with his timeship.  And then, per his specific instructions, we became mere observers of the gnarly… err…” Vince had to take another swallow of Suicide Ale.  “… most great and glorious battle ever seen since Ancient times ended.”

“Okay, tell us what happened,” demanded Admiral Killer.

“Well, sirs, if it please you, the ship we rendezvoused with was the stolen Apatosaurus Battleship.”

“Did you attack on sight?”

“Of course not, sirs.  Our orders were to deliver the good Doctor Hooey to the battleship.  He was supposed to meet up with the Lizard Lady there and help her destroy the Bregohelma.”

Everybody gasped at the name of Admiral Tang’s flagship, including Cold Death who had forgotten he knew all of this particular battle story already.

“How were they going to do that with one battleship against Tang’s whole fleet?”

“They were trying to convince the Imperials that they were going to turn over the stolen Ancient tech, since Lizard Lady portrayed herself falsely as an Imperial spy.  And when the two ships docked, the Apatosaurus Battleship would blow up and take out the Bregohelma along with it.”

“Did the plan work?”  Maggie asked, obviously hoping that it would in spite of having been told the final outcome already.

“Naturally, it did not.  But this must’ve been a part of the plan all along, because we were asked to remain invisibly as observers to the battle that followed.”

“That’s when you saw Ham’s safari ship and the First Half-Century?” asked Tron.

“Of course, sir.  They flew in bravely to take on Tang’s entire fleet.”

“And what happened after that?”

“Well, it was obvious that the First Half-Century was also equipped with some kind of Ancient weapon system of immense power.  The thing went off and destroyed all of the Imperial ships but one, the Bregohelma.  But Tang’s ship, as well as the two attacking ships were all rendered powerless and completely damaged when something caused the Ancient weapon to target the planet and blast away about a billion people in the planet’s largest three cities.  It was a horrible tragedy.  And the three starships were dead in space for a while.”

“Why didn’t you step in at that point and finish off the Bregohelma?”

“We couldn’t.  Dr. Hooey told us not to interfere with the battle or we could alter time-lines and keep our side from winning the upcoming Battle of Outpost.”

“Bummer!” said Maggie.

“Naw!  Itsa good thing, Mama,” said Cold Death, risking Maggie’s notorious wrath.  “Itsa meanin’ we is gonna win dat battle what ain’t happenna yet.”

“Can you give that man a Suicide Ale too please?” asked Tron.

“To make him talk better?”

“No.  To kill him if possible.”

“Continue, please, Vince.  What happened to Ham Aero and the other ship?”

“Admiral Tang’s ship moved first.  They completely loaded the little safari ship on board their ship and took off at a slow crawl.  The First Half Century hadn’t gotten more than life support working when we had to leave to bring this report to you.”

“I wish you would’ve at least rescued Ham and the Duke,” said Admiral Killer.

“Doctor Hooey specifically told us not to.”

“Oh.  Did Hooey survive the explosion, do you know?”

“No.  As far as we know, both he and Lizard Lady are now dead.”

“I really don’t know if that’s good news or bad news,” said Admiral Tron.  “It is good that such a large part of the Imperial Navy was destroyed.  But we may have lost the heart of the rebellion.  And what are we gonna tell Ged Aero?”

“The truth, I would surmise,” said Vince Niell, shortly before passing out dead drunk.  Cold Death finished his ale.  Sat down next to Niell.  And passed out too… where he began snoring loudly, thus proving that he was not, unfortunately, dead.

Canto 111 – Evil Coffee Makers Boil

The Leaping Shadowcat and The First Half-Century both came out of jump space together into the system of 1232 Ardonnis, the home system of the high-population world called Coventry.  Immediately, the situation became the silent-operatic equivalent of Beethoven’s Knock of Doom in the Ninth Symphony.  Daaat Daaat Daaat Dooooh!   Three hundred of the Imperium’s newest space ships, ships of the line, tenders, and support ships were all arrayed against the two ships of Ham and Ferrari’s tiny rebel fleet.

Ham leaned on the pilot’s control panel and let his jaw drop as he gazed out the Shadowcat’s viewport at them.

“I see the Bregohelma!” he cried.  “Admiral Tang is out there himself!”

“We are so dead!” moaned Duke Han Ferrari.  The Duke twisted the right end of his handlebar moustache nervously.  “I will surrender myself to them, and maybe they will spare you and the crew of the Shadowcat.”

“Give me some credit, Duke,” said Ham sullenly.  “I may not be the famous space hunter, Ged Aero, but I can be a hero too.  I will NOT desert my friends.”

“Hey, Ham-boy, old Jester!”  The call came from the command deck of the fighting space frigate, The First Half Century.  “Do you see what I see out there?”

“Yes, Goofy, I’m afraid I do.”

“Wow! Old Jester, I mean literally WOW!  We can win glory in battle like this against impossible odds!”

“Goofy, we are going to die!  Don’t get all hammy over it!  We have to make them pay for it the best we know how.”

“Oh, you got it, Ham-ster!  I am putting the Crown of all Stars on my head right now.  I can use the powers of the Ancients to defeat this bozo!” 

Ham slapped his right hand over his forehead in total frustration.  There was a good reason that Mammy Aero had once banned little Ham and little Ged from playing with the demented little goofy child.  That boy just wasn’t entirely right in the head.

“Belay that!  You don’t need to melt your brain to die in this battle.  You need to fight the way they taught you back at the Space Academy.  We need to go down with honor.”

The video communicator snapped on and showed a smiling one-eyed Goofy with the three-orbed alien thing pulsing yellow, orange, and lime-green lights all over the bridge of the military ship.  Goofy’s crew were resolutely manning battle stations in the background.  Ham could also see the unearthly Tesserah thing pulsing and glowing with menace behind the Goof.

“What’s that Tesserah thing doing?” I asked the view screen, feeling I had to insert myself into the dire problem to find some sort of sensible solution.

“That, old Scientist-Jester, is an Ancient weapon now fully primed and ready to be used against the enemies!”

I have to tell you, I was more than a little alarmed as a scientist and scholar.  This situation seemed sure to end only one way.  We would be atomized by space-born weapons systems or torn atom from atom by Ancient alien energies.  Even I didn’t see a way out.

“I order you to stop what you are doing right now!” said Duke Ferrari, trying to take command of the situation.

“No, your Duke-ness.  I can do this!  Watch!”

Goofy Dalgoda made a face like he was having a painful bowel movement, and then the space between the Tesserah and the Imperial Fleet was suddenly ablaze with alien energy, like a strange ochre lightning in the vacuum of space.

Fifteen Imperial ships disintegrated before our disbelieving eyes.

“Wow!” I said, being the first one able to speak. “Mr. Dalgoda?  Are you actually able to direct that power?”

“Yessir, old Mr. Science Dude!  I can drop that beam on the head of a pin.”

Ham was suddenly smiling again.  He was a very handsome man when he smiled.  “Let them have it, then, Goof!  Give ‘em all you’ve got!”

The Goofy One did not have to be told twice.  Blasts arced out into space on all sides of his ship.  For three hundred and sixty degrees all around, the small capital ship laid waste to larger and more powerful space behemoths.  The Wargod Class Dreadnaught called The Benjamin Franklin, ruptured like a dried gourd and spilled its disintegrating seed into surrounding space.  The Nimitz Class Fleet Carrier, the Colonel Green, launched a thousand fighters as it rolled over in space and dissolved.  One by one all of the fighters winked out of existence too.  It was like watching silent fireworks.  It was all I could do not to shout “Ooh!” and “Ahh!”  There was a terrifying beauty in so much fire and death.

“Goof?” asked Ham anxiously, “Can you target the Bregohelma?”

“Oh, Ham-boy!  We have to make the old red bird see all of this destruction first!”

A huge blue bolt of energy surged out of the Tesserah and painted a wide swath over the most populous of the cities below on the planet.  Everyone was suddenly sick to their stomach as almost a billion innocent beings on the planet below were consumed by alien energy.

“Trav!  What have you done?” cried Ham.

“I did just what the crown said I should.  I used my mental connection with the Tesserah to start cleansing the planet below us.”

“Trav!” wept Ham.  “They were on our side!”

As Ham pleaded, I suddenly saw Commander Dana Cole on the view screen.  She had a laser weapon in her hand.  “Forgive me, Ham!” cried Dana Cole as she cut off one of Trav’s arms with the laser.  “He’s possessed by that alien thing!  I have to stop him.”

Trav Dalgoda was still laughing as he used his remaining arm to gesture and make a smaller blue splash of energy launch toward the planet.

“Forgive me, Trav.  I do love you,” said Dana as she sawed off his other arm.  Trav was still smiling as he tried to gesture with a foot.  She cut the leg off too.  Then the other leg.  Finally, with a destroyed look of regret on her face, she cut off Goofy’s head.  The crown grew dark and the Tesserah grew silent.

All of us aboard the Shadowcat were still stunned.  Trav had nearly saved us from catastrophe.  Then he made everything a billion times worse.

“We can still win,” growled Ham resolutely.  “I can crash the Shadowcat into the bridge of the Bregohelma and destroy Admiral Tang.”

Trav’s former command, the frigate, was battling the last remaining ship of the line, and apparently winning.  We actually could rule the day if we made the ultimate sacrifice Ham was suggesting.  All on the bridge of the little safari ship looked each other in the eye and nodded yes to it.  Ham fixed the navigational controls on the target, dead center on the bridge of the Admiral’s Flagship.  Full throttle we began to plunge toward her.

In my mind, the symphony had reached a crescendo, cymbals clashing, drums rumbling, and violins soaring.  I was prepared to die in that instant, as we all were.

Sinbadh, the Lupin space cook, stuck his head in the doorway to the bridge.

“Ham,” he said, “ye has made me poop meself!”

Ham laughed bitterly.

Canto 110 – Ship to Ship 

It was the commander on the bridge of the Bregohelma who first spotted it as it came out of jump space.

“What the hell is that?” he complained in a nasally voice while looking out of a face that was not the face of a weasel, but that only obvious because DNA scans had proved he was human and he didn’t have a tail.  He looked around the bridge for someone to give him an answer to his question.  But almost everyone on bridge duty at that moment was an undead rot-warrior, a skeletal dead body reanimated with electronics and controlled by a computerized brain.  And all of them, at that moment were still trying to compute how to get the answer out of “Hell” since that was where the commander had requested it from.

“That looks like a… dinosaur,” said Wormheart Toadsucker, who was only slightly less dead-looking and probably less intelligent than the rot warriors.  “You know, like the ones on the planet Dionysus.”

“It can’t be one of those.  It’s in space.  It just appeared in far orbit around the planet.”

“You should have one of the smart ones scan it,” said Wormheart.  “I need to go alert Admiral Tang.

“Okay, which of these mud-brains is a smart one?”   The commander looked at every vacant-eyed face on the bridge and then started scanning himself.   Amazing things began popping up on the scanner-screen report.

The red-armored admiral appeared on the bridge moments later with the boot-licker Wormheart groveling along behind him.

“So, what does it appear to be?” asked the admiral in his ultra-creepy modulated voice.

“Well, it’s a kind of starship like I have never seen before.  The scanner computer can’t completely identify it.  It seems to be some sort of alien artifact from the time of the Ancients.”

“Ah, that might explain the weird dinosaur shape.  The Ancients were of so much higher a tech level than we are now that many of their relics seem totally inexplicable to us.”

“Yes, but this one has a primarily human crew.  They are not even mostly Galtorrian/human fusions like you might expect.  Just plain Earther types.”

“And it is coming towards us under power.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Are the shields up?”

“Um… they are now.”  The commander quickly corrected his oversight.

“Find out what they want.”

As soon as the admiral commanded it, a visual appeared on the commo-screen.  The Lizard Lady herself appeared in the middle of a bridge full of oddly-dressed human crewmen.

“Are you not an Imperial spy, Captain?”  Admiral Tang asked, lowering his voice to basement levels of creepiness.

“I am.  And I have stolen a flagship of the new fleet you will face if you try to invade the Outpost system of Tron Blastarr.”

“That is remarkable good work, um… what is your name?”

“I am an original Galtorrian, simply called Lizard Lady.”

“You will be remembered as a hero to the Imperium, Lizard Lady.”

“Ah, but the mission is not yet fully complete.  We need to pull up to your ship and dock.  This is Ancient technology, and we will need your brilliance to fully control it.”

“Very well… we should be able to…”

Suddenly another sleek spaceship of Ancient designed popped out of jump space directly beside the dinosaur-shaped ship.  After a few moments in which no one had time to do another scan, the new, sleek ship disappeared once again.

“We are moving in to dock with you now, Admiral,” said the Lizard Lady as she gave orders quietly to her pilots and then swiftly left the bridge before Tang could ask her anything.

The dinosaur ship lurched forward and was approaching at an impossible docking speed.

“Shields on maximum!  Back away from them fast,” ordered Tang, obviously sensing a trick.  “Fire everything at that ship now!”

Lasers, plasma cannons, nuclear missiles, and Gauss cannons all fired at the incoming ship.  It did not fire back.  Instead it ignited and blew up in what would have been a spectacular fireball if it had blown up in an oxygen or hydrogen-rich atmosphere.  The shock-wave nearly obliterated the Bregohelma as it was, but apparently it was too far distant for the resolution of the mission that the Lizard Lady had planned.

                                    *****

Dr. Hooey’s time ship, the Star Wars, materialized in the Bregohelma’s cargo bay.

The door of the phone-booth-like thing opened and the Lizard Lady stepped out to confirm her present location.

“Is it the proper cargo bay?” asked Dr. Hooey from inside the time ship.

“It is,” she answered.  “Now that we are in the proper place, we only need to move to the proper time.

“Very well.  The time according to which of the prophecies?”

“Yes, according to all of them.” She stepped back into the time ship.  It made its normal grinding sound, and promptly disappeared into the near future.