Canto 69 – Coffee Time on the Shadowcat (the
Blood-Red Thread)
My first meeting
with Ham Aero and the crew of the Leaping Shadowcat was in the Trophy
Lounge on the lower deck of the Shadowcat herself. The charming white-furred Lupin boy, Sahleck
Kim, led me there when I arrived from the White Duke’s shuttle.
“So, you’re the
cabin boy?”
“Oh, yes, Dr.
Marou. It’s hard to believe, I
know. I’ve gone in a matter of a few
weeks from Count Nefaria’s dungeons where I was destined to die, to working
aboard the space ship of the great Safari Master and adventurer, Ham Aero. My future is suddenly bright.”
The child’s eyes
glistened like an excited puppy’s as he told me his tale of rescue. He led me to a seat in the Trophy Lounge
where I could sit and eat one of Sinbadh’s sumptuous meals. There was a stuffed head of a dragon-mouthed
pakoollie beast from the planet Samothrace looking directly down on my plate,
trying his hardest to ruin my appetite with his ugliness.
“My
boy, do you have any coffee?” I asked.
Sahleck grinned
in a wide-mouthed way that only Lupins can manage. “It’s one of Commander Sinbadh’s
specialties!” He said.
“Bring me
some. Please.”
The boy hurried
to the mess. At that same moment, Ham
and Duke Ferrari entered.
“I
guess, with Cloudstalker’s departure, you are the Captain of the ship again,”
said Ferrari of the curly moustaches.
“Oh, I think you
still out-rank me,” answered Aero modestly.
“Hello… You must be Professor
Googol Marou.”
Ham offered his
hand to me and I gladly shook it. “Yes,
I’m honored to meet a man who has traveled almost as much as any explorer.”
“The
reputation has not entirely been earned,” said Ham.
“This
is YOUR ship, Ham,” said Ferrari, frowning slightly. “I think you should be the captain.”
Ham smiled. “I won’t argue that now, Han. Have you met Dr. Marou?”
“No, no… Nice to make your acquaintance, Doctor.”
“I too, am
honored,” I said. “I am not used to
meeting such powerful inter-planetary politicians.”
Ferrari looked at
me as if he were slightly annoyed. “You
know the White Duke. He’s a bigger light
in this galaxy than I am.”
“Well, if you say
so.” I know I must’ve been grinning ear
to ear to hear my own friend being praised in this way. I wonder how Ferrari actually took that.
Ham looked at me
quizzically. “Professor, what’s in all
the boxes you had installed in the skinning and mounting lab?”
“Oh! My invention!
I have to tell you about it.”
Gleefully I related everything they needed to know about the Marou
Ancient Light Holo-Assembler Telescope and maybe a tad bit more as well. I explained how my sheer genius had allowed
events to be viewed from light years away, and thusly, years in the past.
“Umm, that’s very
good, professor,” Ham said. “I guess
that will come in handy…”
He didn’t speak
with enthusiasm, but I knew he was actually quite impressed with me.
As a writer seriously immersed in a particular work in progress, I find myself talking more and more to certain people who exist only in my head. They are the characters in my novel, The Boy… Forever.
The novel is itself an epistolary novel. That means, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it is made up of letters, notes, diary and journal entries, and other personal writing of the central characters. It also means that I have to become the different people who write these things. At least while I create each individual artifact that goes into the mosaic of first-person narratives.
Anita Jones, pictured here, is the letter-writer who starts the plot in motion when she gets a very disturbing letter from her cousin, Icarus Jones.
Icarus writes about his problem with becoming a midget, and his response to it being a plan to kill himself. It seems that he simply stopped growing at the age of ten. Now, being a fifteen-year-old in the body of a ten-year-old, he writes a suicide note in the form of a letter, and then goes to jump off a bridge into the Mississippi River. But when he does, he survives. Or, rather, he succeeds, but cannot remain dead. He doesn’t know it, yet, but he has become a human mutation known in the secret world of unknown things as an Immortal.
Tian Long, the Celestial Dragon
Icky’s problem becomes worse when it is discovered he is being pursued by another immortal, a sort of vampiric immortal who needs to consume the essence of other immortals to stay alive. He is a three-thousand-year-old Chinese Celestial Dragon who is able to assume a human form.
Neither Icky Jones nor Tian Long the dragon, though, really needs to be in my head. Icarus himself only writes the first and last letters of the book. Tian Long, the villain, does not have a say at all in telling the story. The only part of it he writes are the wizard spells he uses to confound everyone, and most of those are in Chinese.
Milton John Morgan, the Wizard of the Norwall Pirates
Besides the letters that Anita Jones writes to her cousin in Dallas, Dot Jones, the story is also advanced in the journal entries of Milt Morgan, one of the leaders of the boys’ gang in rural Iowa known as the Norwall Pirates. He has been asked by the Freshman English teacher to keep a daily journal and write every day in 1976. This he struggles to do, but gains writing and typing skills as he goes along, especially when he befriends Icarus and learns about the dragon pursuing Icky.
Milt is full of imagination and a sense of adventure, a thing that makes him an unreliable narrator, not above embellishing the truth as he writes his not-so-much- daily-as-infrequent journal entries.
Brent “the Cat” Clarke
The story is also taken up by Brent Clarke, the leader of the Norwall Pirates. Brent wants to be a policeman or a detective or something like that when he grows up. He takes careful investigation notes on everything, and he is the first one to become suspicious of the Chinese man and his step-daughter who pick a house in the town of Norwall that they want to live in right before the actual owner and occupant of the house mysteriously dies in a falling accident. Brent befriends the local Sheriff’s Deputy and sets out on a serious possible murder investigation that yields some very disturbing results. His notes are very detail-oriented and generally fact-based. He carefully records his own eye-witness accounts of everything.
Sherry Cobble, the nudist, calls herself the smarter and more beautiful twin.
Sherry Cobble, the more outgoing of the identical twins known as the Cobble Sisters, is a happy nudist with a very positive body image for herself and her twin sister. She is a very positive person over-all. She and her sister Shelly had started out keeping a “Lovely Nudist’s Diary” between them, but Shelly is not nearly as interested in writing and storytelling as her sister. So, Sherry takes over the diarist duties with the same sort of glee and enthusiasm she has for promoting nudism to her friends, especially the Norwall Pirates. It is her goal to eventually see all of the kids in Norwall naked and happy just as she and her sister Shelly always are.
Those four different character voices are the main voices I have to work with in telling this fantasy adventure story in much the same way as Stoker tells the story of Dracula.
So, if I begin to seem like I have a disordered mind full of multiple personalities, it’s because I am a novelist, not a mental patient or a vampire or even a Chinese dragon in human form. I am simply trying to tell a story by allowing four distinctly different characters to live inside my head.
I have been working on a new story that I have been writing in my head for at least twenty years. The novel was originally untitled. But I started working on it by calling it the Forever Boy. But that made it sound like a super-hero sort of comic-book story. So, I adjusted the title to The Boy… Forever.
I had the idea for a cover when I turned the villain’s primary hench-person into a character formerly used in a Dungeons and Dragons game.
Her name is Firefang, but as she enrolls in the Belle City High School freshman class, she is known as Fiona Long, whose name the gang shortens to Fi. The reason for the name change is that Fi is actually a red Chinese dragon disguised in a human form, a teenage girl.
Her stepfather is secretly a thousands-of-years-old Chinese Celestial Dragon disguised in human form. His name is Tian Long. And in order to stay alive for another twenty years, he must consume the essence of an immortal human being. That immortal happens to be Anita Jones’s young cousin Icarus who became immortal at the age of ten.
So, I tried putting those last two images together to make a cover. As you can plainly see, that didn’t work very well. The dragon seems to be coming out of Fi’s hair like a giant cootie. So. I tried to make it more of a collage.
That was still not good enough. So, I tried even harder to make it look like a collage.
I added the main character, Icarus Jones, and some color contrasts.
To me, that’s better. You are welcome to criticize. It will still be a while before the story is done. I may still change it more. But I am basically satisfied… not Forever… but for now.
It was difficult
enough to piece the whole story together before Artran left his parents, but
it’s about to become even more difficult to follow. Let me try to straighten you out about the
plot of this history. Well, maybe
straighten out isn’t such a good term. It’s
more like having a giant Gordian Knot of colored pipe cleaners without being
able to cut it apart with a sword.
Instead, you have to follow the ins and outs of the different colored
strands and try like hell to make out how it all fits together. That is by way of analogy, mind you. Don’t go thinking that this entire history is
made of literal pipe cleaners.
The thing is, it
started out as a straight-forward tale with two brothers leaving Imperial space
because of persecution. They were
determined to make a new and better home somewhere out in unknown space.
It’s surprising,
though, how quickly the unknown becomes a part of the known, and how the known
can become a heavy anchor that pulls you back to weighty things.
When Ged sent Ham
in the wrong direction, back into the Galtorr Imperium, we have the first fork
in the plot. Then came the Corsairs’
determination to work together, all except for the evil Monopoly Brigade, and
then, following that, Tron and Arkin and Razor and the rest all get split up
again. More forks in the path. In fact, everything gets pretty much all
forked up.
I see the story
going plot-wise in two directions at once, then with a couple of curly-cues, a
loop-the-loop, and a full back flip. It
gets even more complicated as Dr. Hooey and the Time Knights get involved. I mean, they started meddling with events
themselves, backwards and forwards in time.
It gets pretty hairy in an ugly, back-hair sort of way.
So, even though I
started this chapter in my history as a way to clarify how and where things are
going, I am more confused than ever myself.
You’ll have to forgive me.
Anyway, little
Artran leaving his parents for the first time is important because of the
result. He would fly off from the
impending Battle of Outpost and into history as one of the most
important explorers since Martin Faulkner himself. You’ll see what I mean as the story goes
along, that is, if I don’t get so balled up in it that I meet myself going the
opposite way and forget to tell you that part.
This is not just
a record of the doings of the famous safari masters, Ged and Ham Aero. It is not just a record of the rebellion by
pirates and politicians. It is a story
of how a small boy gets separated from his parents and discovers worlds
undreamed of in our philosophy. Oh, and
don’t forget about the “Teachers in Space” parts of the story. That’s important too.
But this Adagio
is entitled “Pathfinders” for a reason. Admittedly,
not a very good reason, as the path is very hard to follow. But hang in there. The story gets better later. I promise.
For one thing, I myself, Professor Googol Marou, am about to enter this story.
When Tron sent a
message to Frieda’s Starbase at Don’t Go Here, he requested Ged himself
come to Outpost for little Artran.
Frieda, however, knew that Ged was at Gaijin with Xavier
Tkriashav. She sent a courier in a brand-new
Express Boat to Gaijin. It was
listed for Tkriashav or Ged Aero only, but somehow it got delivered to Vince
Neill aboard the Megadeath.
Scarpigo Snarcs
wore an X-boat officer’s uniform as he gave the message to Vince.
“All right,
dude! I’ve heard of this kid-dude. It’d be an honor to serve Ged-dude and the
pirate-dude at the same time. We leave
immediately!”
“Thank you,” said
Scarpigo in his guise as Bill the Postman.
“I will just be hitching a ride.”
“Wha…?” said
Cold Death, his bright green Mohawk shaking in confusion.
“ME RIDE WITH
YOU!” said Scarpigo in that extra loud way you normally talk to stupid people,
as if they were deaf rather than merely mentally impaired.
“Okay, Bill,”
said Vince. “You can ride if you try to
be just a bit quieter. That gnarly voice
of yours can surely give me a headache.”
Nikki Sixx looked
over the coordinates to Outpost, tried to figure out the navigational
logarithms in his head, and then gave up; inserting the computer crystal with
the jump program that Bill the Postman supplied him with into the ship’s
navigational computer. The Megadeath
roared musically to life.
Now, travel
between the stars is a miracle of physics and mathematics that only takes place
in certain narrow corridors of gravity and space. A space ship creates a field around itself
that alters the fabric of space nearby. Space
will actually fold itself around the matter the star ship is made of. It appears to disintegrate in one place, and,
after a period in which the space-time continuum percolates around it, reforms
itself in the new location. The location
could be anywhere within a range of six parsecs, even empty space. But spacers only found it useful to travel
from star system to star system. Fuel
would eventually be necessary and none was available in empty parsecs of space.
Twenty-seven
hours after they had taken flight from Don’t Go Here, the Megadeath
arrived at Outpost. Immediately
they were surrounded by Pinwheel Corsairs.
“Alien ship of
unknown design!” called the nearest corsair, “state your business here.”
“Yo, Dude!”
warbled Vince Neill from behind his mirrored shades. “We come on a mission of mercy from Ged
Aero. We come to pick up little dude
Artran and take him to Gaijin.”
“We don’t
recognize you and we don’t know any Gaijin. Prepare to be atomized.”
“Whoa, not cool!”
said Neill into the communicator. He
immediately threw the Megadeath into maneuvers that the corsairs had
never seen attempted, let alone being able to catch up with them. The highly efficient ship made with Ancient
technology danced out of reach of all Pinwheel weaponry.
“Is this an attack?”
rasped Tron’s voice over the communicators.
“No, Dude. I just don’t want my biscuits fried by you!”
“Stop, then, and
prepare to be boarded,” said Tron.
“Whatever you
say, Dude.”
Despite everything
that was sensible, the Megadeath and her Rock-and-Roll crew had fallen
into the hands of a desperate pirate who faced total annihilation at the hands
of the Galtorrian Imperial Fleet.
The link above is still capable of giving you a free copy of this e-book until midnight on Tuesday, November 12th, 2019. By all means, click on it and get yourself the free Kindle e-book.
I write this plea as my third free e-book promotion is half-way done. It is, as expected, failing miserably. As of this writing, the promotion using Facebook and Twitter has managed to give away six free books. And one of those is me grabbing a free e-book for my own free Kindle reader on my laptop. So, basically, I can’t give away copies of my own book for free.
But writing this book was not a matter of making myself famous or wealthy or even acknowledged as a good writer. Those are not the things I need. I wrote this story because I myself have been badly damaged by life. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy when I was ten. I had teenage bouts of depression that nearly made me end myself. My sex-life did not develop normally and led to chronic prostatitis and the precursor to “Priests’ disease”, a prostate gland the size of a grapefruit. Yes, it may ultimately end in prostate cancer. And then when I finally made a family for myself in my late middle years, I was besieged by depression again, this time not my own, but others in my family. So, in many ways, I have lived a sad life.
The novel itself is a means to self-healing and recording how I rebuilt myself using love, laughter, and artistry. The singing orphan boy wearing clown paint and singing only sad songs is a metaphor for me and my struggle. The clowns that haunt the main characters’ dreams are also a metaphor. I was always known as the laughing teacher, the one who joked around in class, and let laughing grow into a means of instruction in the English classroom. I used humor to make learning painless. I used it to take away many other kinds of pain as well. The book is about how a family can be healed by someone who has nothing, yet selflessly gives everything to make that family come together and be whole. It is a story, just as the introduction claims, about what love really means.
But the world is stacked against lying truth-tellers like me who make up stories only to heal themselves. Facebook stopped me from messaging everybody who is a Facebook friend whom I wanted to send the book link from Amazon. They called it spamming, which really means, “advertising something on Facebook without paying Facebook lots of money.” I discovered on Twitter that sending the link in DMs makes more of my followers stop following me than it makes followers click on the link to obtain a free book. Ah, disappointment again. At least I gave away three more books than I did on the last promotion.
So, this is like a blacklight, shining on my promotional inspiration. It only shows in ultraviolet the opposite of what I thought I would see. And it resigns me once again to be only ignored as a writer of novels. I suppose it is my proper place in life.
Canto 67 – Scaling the Dragon (This Canto has been re-ordered in the re-write.)
The Dragon Gate of the city of Kiro, Gaijin, was a huge carving of an oriental dragon’s head which allowed a fairly good sized caravan to pass through its open mouth and into the city all at once. The shoulders of the dragon were carved from the south side of the gate in the immense city wall that, like a coiled serpent, circled the city and ended in a gigantic tail that rose up like a tower on the northern side of the gate. The carved dragon itself snarled in that crazed oriental manner and was colored red with gold trim edging each and every individual scale.
Ged and his students walked there and stood looking up at the edifice.
“Is it hollow?” blond Rocket Rogers asked from under the brim of his white cowboy hat.
“No, stupid, it’s obviously one solid piece,” sneered Alec Songh.
“Shut up, Alec!” shouted Friashqazatla. Freddy had become Rocket’s shadow, following him everywhere and imitating everything about him. His worshipful friendship had become indispensable to Rocket.
“How will we get inside?” asked Shu Kwai, ignoring the bickering and concentrating on the problem at hand.
“Can Jadalaqstbr do it for us?” asked Hassan Parker innocently. Hassan was still nude in protest for the group’s rejection of his Classical Worlds’ notions. He wore only the blue felt fez he always had on his head.
“She might teleport inside a solid part, not being able to see inside,” said Sensei Aero. “We don’t want to lose her.”
Jackie stood close beside Alec Songh, blushing as they talked about her, in spite of her dark brown skin.
“Can a clairvoyant look inside?” asked Billy Iowa, pushing up the front of the brim of his own cowboy hat.
“Maybe…” murmured Phoenix. His green snake eyes glazed over for a moment, and then he awoke from his brief trance. “No. I can’t see through some sort of fog inside this dragon.”
“What is it that we think is here?” asked Sarah Smith. The Gaijinese sunshine made her blond hair and snow-white body suit glow with reflected light.
“An alien artifact from the time of the Ancients,” said Ged distractedly, studying the eyes of the great beast.
“Possibly a space ship,” offered Phoenix.
“Some of the other artifacts we’ve encountered had a sort of mind of their own,” stated Ged, more to himself than to his students.
“Should I try to detect a mind?” asked Sarah sweetly.
“She’s a powerful telepath,” added Junior Aero.
While Ged was thinking, Alec Songh put his hands on Jadalaqstbr once again. She melted up against him and began to softly coo with pleasure.
“Alec!” said Shu Kwai sternly. Alec let go of her, both body and mind. He and Shu had talked at length about what was acceptable White Spider behavior in a public place. Seducing someone was not one of things that Shu was willing to allow.
“All right, Sarah. Perhaps that is a good idea,” said Ged at last. He remembered how telepathic Tara had been able to use the Hammer to create an entire downport on Don’t Go Here.
Sarah put her forefingers to her temples and began to concentrate. “Oh!” she said, almost immediately. “It is a dark and powerful mind! I can’t even get close to it!”
Junior took hold of her shoulders, concerned that she might somehow be hurt. His intentions, however, were turned inside out by the dark red mind that came flooding into his inner eye. Swirling patterns of circuitry and resistors flooded into his brain. A series of controls formed in his mind. Stunned, Junior blinked at the others and said, “I have it.”
“What do you mean?” asked Ged.
“It is a machine,” said Junior. “I can make it work by telepathy.” He concentrated for a moment on the controls arrayed before him in his inner eye. Red-gold-green-red. The mechanisms awoke for the first time in a million years.
With a rumble, the carven upper jaw of the dragon splintered and the roof of the huge mouth fell out, shattering on the pavement below. A long, thin lower jaw dropped down from the great carven head. The tongue rippled itself into a sort of stairway leading up into the dark throat. The dragon had come to life and now was offering to swallow them if they only decided to take the stairway.
Cautiously, Ged led the way. Rocket Rogers, then Shu Kwai followed him. Looking slightly panicked, Taffy King scanned the others and then followed Rocket up the tongue-stair. Friashqazatla went next. Then Billy Iowa and timid Gyro. Holding hands, Alec Songh and Jadalaqstbr went up. Phoenix, Hassan Parker, and little Mai Ling followed. Finally, Sarah looked at Junior Aero, who had opened this hatch, smiled, and led him, too, up the stair.
The planet Hyde
Park was different than most planets in the Thousand Worlds of the Galtorr
Imperium. Where most life in the Orion
Spur was made up of carbon-based life-forms, Hyde Park was rife with
silicon-based life-forms.
Instead of
forests of trees or plants, the countryside was overgrown with gardens of
living crystal, quartz, and harmonic stone.
The wildlife was made up of electro-energy creatures with crystallized
bodies, or even no bodies at all. The
amorphous stone men of Hyde Park communicated with no one but each
other, taking whatever shape struck their weird fancy. They could constitute and dissolve themselves
with the speed of thought.
Nert Cooblegooble
felt ridiculous in his red-and-white-striped pajamas. His blond hair was tied up in random pony
tails, and red freckles had been added to his face with a paintbrush. He stood next to a table advertising
fish-skin socks for sale.
“Stop fidgeting,
Nert!” said Mr. Crushcracker, waving his fat, smelly cigar. “You have to look business-like to sell these
things to tourists.”
“Why do we have
to play these silly pretend games?” complained Nert Cooblegooble, secretly
Arkin Cloudstalker. He looked dubiously
over at Madame Prong, who was obviously an ugly man in drag wearing a tight
blue dress over an overstuffed body and wearing gobs of makeup on his… er,
her eyes and cheeks.
“We calls ‘em as
we sees ‘em,” said Phineas Crushcracker, secretly Scarpigo Snarcs. “These rubes and yokels are used to seein’ us
like this. These secret identities are
critical to our roles as agents of the Thin White Duke. Now be quiet, or I’ll buy a supper club and
beat you over the head with it.”
Madame Prong,
secretly Zero Snarcs, put a swollen white finger to her badly painted red lips
and pantomimed shushing Mr. Crushcracker for saying the TWD-word out loud where
any stone could hear.
“There are no
humans about anywhere!” moaned Nert.
“Why the need for secrecy?”
“The rocks have
ears,” said Mr. Crushcracker.
“What is that
supposed to mean?”
In answer to Arkin’s
question, a man walked up to the fish-sock table. He was not like any other man either Arkin
Cloudstalker or Nert Cooblegooble had ever seen. He was made entirely of stone, a living
statue looking out apparently through carved stone eyes. He was an eerie, zombie-like figure that
moved and talked without expression, always a degree or two off of what would
be natural for a human man.
“Well, well!”
gushed Mr. Crushcracker. “So nice to see
you again, Mr. Lazerstone! How have you
been? How’s the missus and all the
little pebbles?”
The cold stone
voice that came from the hollows inside Lazerstone chilled Arkin to the bone
with dread.
“I don’t pretend
to understand your need for charades, Snarcs.
I do understand the position of the White Duke. I am ready to render aid. I can do far more than even Duke Keyser
himself realizes. Don’t mock me. I get tired of the human need to maintain personal
fictions.”
“Have you met
Nert Cooblegooble?”
“You know that
this man is different from the last human who you introduced as Mr.
Cooblegooble. Don’t play games with me
again.”
“Oh, you take all
the fun out the whole spy thing! This is
the Pirate King, Arkin Cloudstalker.”
“Yes. A noble reputation among those who travel
through the Hyde Park starport. I
believe you use the Knights as a privateer band working to liberate the people
of the Galtorr Imperium, do you not?”
“I do. I like your directness.”
“We are many, Mr.
Cloudstalker, but we are one.”
“Wait, I don’t
understand again. Is this a riddle?”
“No. It is merely a factor in the differences
between your kind and mine.”
“I don’t
understand.”
“Of course, you
don’t. You are like these
ephemerals. You do not have the Wisdom
of the Stones.”
“Oh!” interjected
Mr. Crushcracker, “You mean like, I can’t get no… satisfaction!?”
“Shut up,
Snarcs.” Lazerstone turned cold,
sightless eyes on Phineas Crushcracker.
“This meeting is important.”
“Help me
understand,” pleaded Arkin.
“Very well. The crystals of this planet are all
alive. They are all capable of
thought. In fact, they all share one
vast consciousness. We, the Lazerstone,
are capable of understanding everything about your kind and what they are doing
in our shared galaxy. We have seen the
unnatural evil and crimes of your Galtorr Imperium. We understand the need to put an end to
that. We also realize that only men like
you, Ged Aero, and the White Duke are capable of making your kind turn away
from violent animal ignorance and start harmonizing with the galactic symphony
of life.”
“That is all very
poetic,” said Arkin, still not fully comprehending, “but how are you going to
help us?”
“I will fight for
you. Soon you will see how important
that is for your future Empire.”
“My Empire?”
“Your Democracy
if you prefer.”
“Yes, that would
be better.” Arkin tried to use mental
x-rays to pierce the colorful stone of that impassive face. “Can you see me through those stone eyes of
yours?”
“He can see
through you, Nert,” said Scarpigo Snarcs.
“He’s an all-powerful monster from outer space. Booga-booga!
He can even tell what color underwear you have on.”
The humorless
stone face turned towards Snarcs.
“At least I have
enough respect for his underwear that I don’t feel the need to reveal what it
looks like. Not like the silk shorts with
printed pink bunnies on them that you have on.”
Snarcs turned
stone white. “How did you know about
those?”
“Lazer-vision,
funny boy. I see by using my perceptions
of relative density and wave-lengths of gravitons. Don’t cross me, or I might eat you in the
night!”
Phineas Crushcracker and Scarpigo Snarcs both cringed. Madame Prong held a rubber chicken in her hand with less than the usual gusto.
“By the way,” added Lazerstone, “Booga-booga! Scarpigo Snarcs!”
I have published part two of my rewrite of the novel AeroQuest. It is now available from Amazon in both Kindle e-book and paperback editions. It is liberally illustrated and far superior to the previous form of this novel published through Publish America and now out of print.
When the space
ship called Megadeath, the Rock and Roll Starship, docked at the now
prosperous spaceport of the planet Don’t Go Here, they interrupted a solemn
ceremony. Administrator Bam-Bam Salongi
was about to be buried in space. His
body, encased in a glass torpedo pod, was on display in Frieda’s central
administration hub. The relatively new
crew of the space port was gathered around for testimonials and remembrances.
Frieda’s
Metalloid form stood guard over the office.
The Dion girl named Taquira was kneeling by the foot of the makeshift
coffin and Tabitha Blue Arrow, in Lady Knight armor, stood over the head of
Bam-Bam’s final resting place.
Xavier Tkriashav
entered the office first, shock registering on his dark, inscrutable face. Behind him stood Captain Tommy Lee, Pilot Vince
Niell, Nikki Sixx, and slack-jawed Cold Death.
All removed hats and became silent mourners.
“What has
happened here?” asked Tkriashav.
“Fez Amin and the
Monopoly Brigade,” said Frieda. “He came
here and killed Mr. Salongi and kidnapped Tara.
We killed one of his Lieutenants, but he used Tara as a shield to make
his escape. I’ve tried to organize
pursuit, but we lost him completely in the Imperium.”
“We should not
have left you vulnerable to attack,” said Tkriashav, shaking his head.
“We were
unprepared for treachery,” said Tabitha, the Lady Knight. “It will not happen again.”
“We have ships
now to defend our home,” said the Dion, Taquira. “We just don’t have any pilots to fly them.”
“We are outward
bound now, to places where I know we will find a large number of willing spacers
ready to come here and help get that problem solved, at least,” said Tkriashav.
“I have places to go where I know all
kinds of Psions. We might even see if we
can strike an accord with the Nebulons we believe are migrating in mass towards
this part of the Orion Spur.”
“You know,” said
Tabitha, “you are opening your arms to all the peoples the Imperium loathes?”
“Yes,” said
Tkriashav. “That was the idea. All us rejects will band together to make
something far better than what Imperial Space has to offer.”
“You are a
hopeless idealist, Psion Master,” said Tabitha Blue Arrow.
“Does that mean
you will leave us and go back to the Imperium?” he responded.
“Of course not,”
replied the Lady Knight. “We need
idealists as leaders. It’s the reason I
joined Cloudstalker’s Corsairs to start with.”
“You are good
man, Psion Master,” hissed Taquira the Dion. She switched her brown lizard’s tail. “We like you a lot!”
“Tara wanted us
to tell Ged Aero that she loves him,” said Frieda. “I fear those may have been the last words
we’ll ever have from her.”
“I will have some
students I have to deliver to Ged on Gaijin,” said Tkriashav. “I will tell him the grave news.”
An emerald-green female
Galtorrian walked into the main office at that moment. “Ged Aero, you sssay?” she hissed. She was beautiful in a serpentine way,
snake-eyed and tressed with flowing green hair.
She wore the uniform of the Imperial Scout Service. “I must find Ged Aero.”
All eyes turned
suspiciously to her.
“Why do you seek
Ged?” asked Tkriashav.
“I must find the
fulfiller of the Prophecy of Zhan! I
have sssearched for him for yearsss. I mussst
find him if it costssss me my life!”
“We shall
see. You will surrender all weapons and
travel with me under guard,” said Tkriashav.
“Yesss, whatever
I mussst do. But, I mussst find him
before hisss enemiesss do.”
The pheromones she gave off at that moment made every male present feel as if he must fall in love with her. Xavier couldn’t help himself from feeling it too. He tried to probe her, but she was apparently a Psion too, though not a type he recognized.
Catch a Falling Star 