Canto 3 – A Game of “Bridge”
When Ged and Trav reached the bridge of the Leaping Shadowcat, Tron’s angry face already filled the view screen. Next to him stood the flame-haired beauty known as Maggie the Knife with one hand protectively shielding their small son, Artran.
“So! Ged and Ham both? How could you both be so stupid as to take up with that worthless clown?” growled Tron in a gravelly voice. His somewhat handsome face was marred not only by anger, but by a hideous laser scar that ran from the top of the left side of his forehead, through the eye socket of his artificial left eye, down to the left side of his lantern jaw.
“Tron,” said Ged as diplomatically as he could manage, “You know me. You know I would never take up with a swindler and a pirate like Trav willingly. You must also know that I have troubles of my own about now. If you leave us in peace, I can promise Trav’s presence aboard this ship will result in banishment for him. You will never see his face in Imperial Space again.”
“Ged, I respect you more than any other space man I know. Your word is good, and you never lie. I wish your worthless brother and I both had your integrity. We’d be kings among men. But Goofy stole a priceless treasure from us and both Slimeball Harris and Blue Death Jones just died trying to get it back. Both of their corsairs were destroyed by that rotten space barge Goofy was flying.”
“You’re moaning about Slimeball and Old Blue?” asked Trav in an incredulous voice.
“Well, those corsair ships were very valuable!” growled Tron.
“Oh,” replied Trav. “Sorry.”
“What if we give you the treasure, Tron?” asked Ham.
“No!” cried Trav. “You have to let me explain that to you in private, first!”
“Yes,” growled Tron. “Give me the blue metal box and the Nebulon slave girl. You can keep the rest. And you can keep Goofy forever, for all I care.”
“Now, wait!” interrupted Ged. “Slavery is just plain wrong.”
“Yes,” said Tron, “but this one is a princess among the Space Smurfs. She is the first daughter to the Sinjarac Warlord, whatever that means. We’re not just talking slave here, but a potentially valuable hostage for the Imperial Space Navy. They would pay well to get their hands on her.”
“Why a hostage?” asked Ham.
“You didn’t see the Imperial Scout Data we intercepted,” said Maggie softly in a musical voice. “A coreward border war has erupted between a huge convoy of Nebulons in their Space-Whale Cruisers and the Galtorr Imperium. Nobody in the Imperium seems to know why, but there is a massive migration of Space Smurfs going on just beyond the Imperial Border.”
“You can’t have the girl,” said Ged. “I’d be happy to give you the box, though.”
“No!” protested Trav. “You don’t know what’s in it!”
“What is in it?” Ged asked Trav. His eyes narrowed.
Trav blushed furiously.
“You have to give us what we want.” Tron seemed too confident. “We have corsairs blocking every jump route back into known space. Soon we’ll have a hundred of them here ready to board your crappy little safari ship.”
“Yes,” said Maggie prettily. “We will take the treasure anyway and you’ll all be skinned alive with a dull knife.”
“Oh, great,” said Ged.
“Are you ready with our little surprise?” Trav asked Ham.
“It’s plotted in the nav computer,” Ham answered.
“It’s time to hit it, then.”
Ham leaped into the pilot’s seat and slammed down on the jump button. The jump into lightspeed-plus was jarring. Space began to fold around the ship. The surprised faces of Tron and Maggie the Knife faded away into white static, soon replaced by a red-and-blue-shifting starfield in jump space.
“What have you done?” Ged asked Ham with shock on his face.
“You didn’t think I would start this leap of faith without at least one jump already planned and programmed?”
“Trav?” asked Ged.
“Oh, yes. I plotted a course to a planet almost nobody has ever heard of. It’s a place with the silly name of Don’t Go Here.”
So, what are Nebulons? Gyro Sinjarac on the left in the picture is an example from Aeroquest of a Nebulon. They are aliens who are human in every respect except for their blue skin. Interestingly they can even successfully interbreed with Earther humans. This is apparently due to either the evolution of Nebulons from Earther explorers, or, more likely, the galaxy being seeded with Earth humans and Earther DNA by the mysterious alien race known only as “the Ancients”. What is not debatable is that Nebulons have unique skin. The blue skin with high levels of natural copper sulfate in it has evolved as a protection from interstellar nebula radiation. No one who has learned their language and studied their culture has ever identified a planet of origin. Instead, the Nebulons have been a space-born race since humans first encountered them, travelling in their symbiotic space-whale space cruisers. They are a mysterious deep-space race of alien beings who use organic symbiotes, in other words, living creatures, as their pervasive technology.
Regrets…
Veterans day is here again. It means something different now that my son is a Marine. It was always a solemn and somber occasion in the past. My great uncle on my father’s side died in World War II, a training accident inside a Navy gun turret. My great uncle on my mother’s side was part of the second wave on the beach in Normandy. He was injured by a German grenade and moderately disabled for the rest of his life. I never got to hear war stories. He was too damaged to ever talk about anything that happened in the war. My mother’s cousin was flying a plane in the Viet Nam Conflict. It went up, and didn’t come down again. You think of those things, and wish it could be different. You pray that it will be different for your son who is a soldier.
But when the worst that can happen comes to pass… there are no regrets. Whatever future we have is rooted in the past. Pain and suffering are difficult to manage, but when you manage them, it leaves you stronger… better as a person than you were before. So I don’t take anything for granted. I was not a warrior in this life. I was a teacher, a story-teller. And I made some mistakes along the way. I have lost some whom I cared about very deeply. Ruben, Fernando, and J.J. are all gone tragically. I will always feel I should have done more to help them when they were boys and needed help. Miraculously with the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq I have lost no former students to war, though many of mine have fought. I pray that my luck continues to hold.
But there are no regrets. And “you can listen as well as you hear”, so listen to this. I love you.
Yes, I am talking to sons and daughters, to former students, to former colleagues, to everyone I have ever known. And even if I don’t know you, never met you, even if you never get a chance to hear this message… I am talking to you also. We are all one. We all live and love and strive together, and even if we disagree to the point of war… we still belong to each other. Thank you for being you. You needed to hear that at least as much as I needed to say it.
My son is coming home on leave for Thanksgiving. I will be giving thanks.
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