Tag Archives: AeroQuest 4

Canto 120 – Space-Walk

Junior Aero found the antique vacc suits somewhat clunky and uncomfortable compared to what the Aero Brothers had available on the Leaping Shadowcat.  Not that he’d had one on more than once, briefly.  But they had rigid sections in the thighs and upper arms that restricted fluid movements and joints that didn’t allow flexibility.  And there was no intelligence at all ln the helmets or in the systems circuitry.  It was like wearing the stupid Nebulon Danjer suits, one-piece protective organisms that Nebulons wore in space.  But even though levels of stupidness were the same, the current space-wear had none of the fluid movements that the totally stupid Danjer-critters allowed.

Ged was the one taking the lead.  He held the hand-rocket that moved them all through weightlessness in space.  All four students were tethered behind him.

Billy Iowa was tethered directly behind Ged.  Sarah was attached to his suit from behind him.  Junior had fastened his tether cord to the metal loop on the lower back of her suit.  And Gyro brought up the rear.  After the boobie-spotting plan hatched in the little blue guy’s evil little brain, Junior felt it was right to put him as the rear end of the line.  For a Nebulon, Gyro could be a real little rear end.

Stars filled the universe outside the airlock, nothing but perfect silence besides. 

The alien “seed-pod ship” was lit by Gaijin’s yellow star and Junior noticed how flower-like it really seemed to be.  Could it be just some sort of wandering interstellar organism?  Junior really didn’t know.  Still, it was no more deadly than anything else they had faced on Gaijin.  Even stiller still, it was certainly no less deadly either.

Ged signaled the start of the journey across open, airless space with the first blast from the hand rocket.  The line jerked each student forward in turn.

Sara turned and signaled that everything was okay.  Junior gave the “OK” sign back.

As they neared the big blossom-looking appendage, the scanner pad that Ged was holding identified the structure as an airlock.

As Ged drew near enough, prehensile tentacles of some sort reached up to take hold of him.

“Ged Aero-sensei, do we run for it?” Billy asked over the comm system.

“Let’s allow it to perform its apparent function,” their master answered.

Junior then watched in horror as the tendrils latched onto Ged’s suit and pulled him inside.  It looked for all the universe like the thing had eaten him.

“Ooh!  I don’t know about this!” said Billy, alarmed as the thing slowly consumed him next.

“Does it hurt, Billy?” asked Gyro.

No sound, of course, came back in reply.

“Sara, can you pull them out again?” Junior pleaded.

Sara didn’t answer as the blossom-thing swallowed her next.

Then it was Junior’s turn.

“Shneejara sohk nahl, Junior-san,” saluted Gyro as the thing grabbed Junior by the feet.  That meant in Nebulonin, of course, “It has been an honor adventuring with you, Junior-san.” Then, the moving, living tendrils were all over him.  He could feel them pulling at his suit, twisting, turning, and then, horrifically, popping his helmet off.  Slime covered his head and slid down into his suit.  All he could see was a faint reddish glow through the tendrils’ translucent flesh.  He sincerely hoped the slime was not digestive juices.

Scherzo 12  – The Debate in the Ready Room

In the ready room where the borrowed Tech Level 9 Vacuum Suits were stowed, Tiki Astro, Gyro Sinjarac, and Billy Iowa were all three busy trying to figure out how best to carry out their orders.  They had to prepare the five clunky-sized duro-steel deep-space suits to fit one normal-sized adult and four child-and-youth-sized bodies.

“It is going to be a difficult refit,” said Tiki, millions of calculations whirring through his Metaloid mind as he was thinking and talking.  “Gyro, you and Junior Aero are both ‘Nebulons, so you are really no bigger than ten-year-old boys of the humanoid persuasion.”

“Well, I don’t think you need to insult us just because we’re Space Smurfs,” said Gyro.

“You are calling yourself that name again, Buddy,” reminded Billy.  “That’s an insult to your race you know.”

“Oh, yeah… sorry.”

“No need to apologize to me.  I’m a Space Texan… I mean, Space Cowboy.  And neither of those names is an insult.”

“You are bigger than the Nebulons, but you are smaller than Ged Aero-sensei.  Your suit will have to be cut down to size too,” said Tiki.  “We best get started cutting and repairing.”

“Oh, no need for that,” said Gyro.  “My powers make it easy to shrink the suits to fit just by Psion ability alone.”

“Oh, right.  I am not familiar enough with how your powers work to add that to my calculations.”

“You don’t need to worry about the computer science-y stuff.  I can handle the modifications without that.  I just reduce the spaces in the atoms themselves with Psionic squishy-power.”

“Cool,” said Billy.

“Watch me fit this suit for Billy.”  Gyro’s hands began to generate a reddish glow.  He then touched Billy with one hand and the space suit with the other.  The glow transferred something unseen from Billy’s body to the bronze-colored vacc suit.  The suit immediately shrank to Billy-size.

Billy then tried the suit on.  Gyro had tailored it to fit perfectly without cutting it up and putting it back together again.

“That is much more efficient than the way I thought we would have to do this.”  The robot-boy tried to smile, but, being a Metaloid and clueless about how humanoids actually did that, it looked more like a pained grimace.

“Why do I get the sense that you have something evil in mind, Gyro?” Billy asked.

“Um, well… Sara’s the only girl on this mission.  I was just thinking…”

“She can read your mind better than I can,” Billy reminded him.

“But not if she doesn’t suspect anything.  And she does have mammary glands that the rest of us don’t have…”

“Breasts, you mean.”

“Yeah, um… I mean, I could just tell her because of those… well, she would have to be topless to make it fit right.”

“Is that actually true?” Tiki asked.

“Yes… um, kinda…”

“Tiki can’t read minds, and even he knows you’re lying,” Billy warned.

“Yes, but… well, for a chance to look at her perfect mammary glands…”

“Yeah.  She’s seen all of us naked.  But we never got to see her,” ruminated Billy, not-so-innocently either.

                                    *****

When Ged Aero-sensei brought the rest of the team into the ready room, Gyro and Billy were already suited up, all except for their helmets.

“Gyro has an easy fix for resizing the suits,” said Billy.  “All he has to do is read you by putting a hand on your shoulder and then resize your suits with his other hand.”

Junior Aero was wearing only a t-shirt and briefs, so Gyro demonstrated by slapping a small blue hand on his ,shoulder and then shrinking the vacc suit to the perfect small size.

“You have a really amazingly useful Psion power, Gyro-kun.  You are adapting to White Spider training really well,” said Ged Aero-sensei. 

Gyro grinned with obvious pride.

“He does have one small problem though,” said Billy.

“What is it?” Junior asked.

“Um… Sara, er… in the front you have… um…” Gyro gestured helplessly with both hands in front of him.

“The word in Nebulonin is spahnkharas,” said Junior helpfully.

“Oh, my breasts.  What about them?”

“To, ah… to shape the suit properly, um… you need to… take your shirt off?”

“Is that all?”  Sara quickly pulled her shirt off over her head.

Gyro’s eyes grew larger by a couple of sizes.  He reached out his small blue hand.  It was trembling.  He placed it on her shoulder hesitantly, never moving his gaze from those two gorgeous…

“Gyro, what’s wrong with you?” asked Sara, doubt creeping into her voice.

Gyro smiled.  “I can see your naked front parts, Sara.”

Sara smiled back at him.  “Just do what you have to do, Gyro.  Or I will ask Junior to remove your… What’s the word in Nebulonin, Junior?”

“Spahnschloop ar nembhis,” said Junior.

“Yes, your personal private parts.  With those gone you won’t be able to think that way so much anymore.”

Gyro turned a bit blue-white and quickly finished resizing and reshaping her vacc suit.

Once they were all suited Gyro and Billy were the last to place their helmets on.

“Gyro, honestly, that worked amazingly well,” said Billy.

“Yes, we got to see something quite beautiful,” Gyro answered.

“Put your helmets on while you still have all your spahnschloop ar nembhis.  She’s a powerful enough telepath to know what you are saying even though she has her helmet on,” warned Tiki.

“And don’t you forget it!” both boys heard her say in their minds.

Canto 119 – The Debate on the Bridge

The control panel on the bridge of the Super Rooster was made up mostly of the remnants of Dr. Naylund Smith’s old space ship, the one he had crashed and eventually junked a mere two hundred twelve years before.  But it was like riding a bicycle to sit in front of the familiar controls.  That, Naylund supposed was why Ged had asked him to be the pilot, taking over the role that Ged would’ve much preferred had gone to his brother Ham, but he would not take for himself.

“Thank you for organizing this mission, Naylund-sensei.  I am not used to doing the job of a space captain myself.”

“It is nothing, Ged-dono.  Sitting in front of these controls is a little like arriving home again.  And this is the first time in the history of Gaijin that the planet can mount a response to an incoming possible threat.”

“Have we learned anything more from the scanners?”

“Not much.  It is coming up on the viewscreen now.  It is still 5,000 miles away.  Computer, enhance viewscreen 500 percent.”

The image enlarged in the holo-digital viewscreen.

“That looks like a big piece of driftwood with a flower on its side,” said Sara, looking over her father’s shoulder.

“The sensors indicate the whole thing is alive,” said Junior Aero, sitting behind Ged.  “It functions as a space ship, though.  It maneuvers.  And it orients itself to the gravity well of the planet like an incoming spaceship.  It has to be something like the living space-whale ships of my people.”

Junior was born a Nebulon, blue-skinned and red-cheeked, and later adopted by the Aero Brothers.

Naylund looked at the plant-like thing and squinted.  Hoping to see… what exactly?

“I don’t think it’s connected to your terrorist, Ged.  It’s like some sort of seed pod.”

Ged looked at Naylund skeptically.  “It seems almost impossible that it would be a coincidence, Naylund.”

But Jai Chang, the ninja under the Avenger helmet, was a native-born Gaijinese who had never been off planet and never known to have any off-world contacts.  If there was a connection, it was not an obvious one.

“Sara, can you tell anything about it with your telepathy?” he asked his daughter.

“I hear voices, but it’s confusing,” she answered.  “Could the whole thing be a disguise?  I can read alien minds there… but it’s all garbled.  I can usually understand anything the mind I read understands.”

Junior suddenly also looked quite confused.  “I can’t read any computers on board, A-I or otherwise.  How can they navigate?”

“They can’t.  No starship we know of can operate without a computerized brain of some sort.  Anything less than Tech-level Nine wouldn’t be able to find its way through jump space.”  Naylund could only guess at the weird alien technology behind this interstellar seed-pod.

“There is a breathable oxygen-nitrogen-carbon dioxide atmosphere inside,” said Ged, reading the latest sensor scan.  “We will have to go inside.  Time to use your antique vacc suits, Naylund.”

“Be my guest.  I will fly the Super Rooster and wait for your return in the ship.”

“You and the robot-boy, Tiki Astro.  That should be enough problem-solving help to leave on this end.  I will take Sara, Junior, Billy, and Gyro with me.  We have five usable suits.”

“Don’t take any unnecessary risks, Ged-dono.  I am trusting you with my daughter, after all.  Something I would only do with the one true White Spider.” “I promise, Naylund-sensei.  On my life, I promise.”

Canto 117 – The Bogey… and Probably Not Humphrey Bogart

Ged and Shen Ming walked slowly back to the Administrative Offices in Shen Ming’s Tower. 

“You really can’t tell me anything more about this whole Avenger thing?”

“Ah, Ged-sensei, you know how it is for old men… especially really old men more than five hundred.  You forget stuff… you have hair growing out of your ears… you fart more often than you would really like…”

“No, I really don’t know about that yet.  I am older than I look, but I have not yet experienced aging as you have.”

“And you will not.  If I know anything at all about Psion shape-changers… and I probably don’t know anything, you will not age because your cells refresh themselves constantly with your ability.”

Ged nodded.  He wasn’t sure how much he believed it, but he knew it was a possibility that he had even sensed within himself.

“How old is Bres the Black Spider?”

“Him?  This I do not know.  He appeared in Kiro five years ago, having possibly come here from space in response to the White Spider Prophecy.”

“He thought he was the White Spider?”

“No.  He wanted to see the White Spider killed and the Prophecy defeated.”

“I see.”

“I hope so, Ged-dono.  At least as well as I see.”

Suddenly, Hassan Parker was running towards them at full speed, completely naked except for his red fez hat and his red courtesy towel.

“Ah, so… the naked child approaches,” said Shen Ming with an Alfred E. Neuman grin.

“Ged Aero-sensei!  You must come quickly!  There is a bogey in orbit!”

“Humphrey Bogart is in orbit?” asked Shen Ming.

“No, no… an unidentified…” Hassan had to stop and catch his breath.  He dropped the towel as he panted.

“Ah, a very beautiful child.  But not so very smart, I think.  He never seems to remember to wear pants.”

“Take your time, Hassan-kun.  Tell us what this is about.”

“…an unidentified space craft of strange design… in orbit… maybe connected to… the intruder.”

“Ah, connected to the Avenger it is not…” said Shen Ming.  “Master Jai Chang has never been off this planet.”

“Who spotted the intruder?” Ged asked.

“I was sent to tell you by Naylund Smith-sama.  He’s in the newly built spaceport, at the Super-Rooster on landing pad seventeen.”

“We have seventeen landing pads already?” Ged gaped.

“The Ancient Hammer of God builds things very fast,” said Shen Ming.  “We borrowed it from your planet Don’t Go Here, you know.”

“Ah… Ancient artifacts again.  I worry sometimes…”

“Ged you must go and investigate.  This lovely little Space Nudist is a good telepath, is he not?”

“Yes.  Only Sara Smith is better on this planet.”

“Very good.  I will take Hassan to help me find out why Master Jai Chang put on the helmet and where it came from.  You go defend the planet from terrible intruding space creatures.”

Ged hesitated momentarily.  There was something concerning about what Shen Ming had recently said and done.  But what he should do about it, and what it might have to do with the White Spider Prophecy… well, he was afraid to ask.

Tempi, one of Shen Ming’s messenger boys, spotted the intruder first.  He was riding on a PZ-27 anti-grav sled more commonly known as a pregnant penguin.  He was wearing a golden helmet with three spiked horns, just as Shen Ming had warned Tempi to look for.

“Master Shen!  Master Shen!  Your old enemy has come, like you thought he would!  What do we do?”

“Oh, my!  What, me, worry?  No, this is a job for the White Spider and his charges.  Run, Tempi, and warn young Master Shu or young Master Phoenix… or both!”

Tempi ran as fast as short legs could manage.

Shu Kwai was the first notified and the first to respond.  He found the helmeted intruder menacing a crowd of people in the courtyard with a pair of strange ray pistols. 

“Die, ugly, worthless Gaijin! In the name of the traitor Shen Ming, I slay thee!”

Shu immediately grabbed at the guns with his telekinesis powers, and though he couldn’t take the weapons away, he could pull the shots off target.  The rays splashed harmlessly on the palace walls and on the ground.  In fact, surprisingly damaging or burning nothing at all.

Swiftly Sara Smith was at Shu’s side.

“Can you grab his mind and put him out?” Shu said.

“No, I can’t.  His mind is shielded from my power in some strange way.  But I sense that as he fires, he doesn’t even try to hit his targets.  He’s… missing on purpose.”

Jadalaqstbr teleported into a group of children that were in danger in the middle of the courtyard.  She grabbed two boys by the arms and let a small girl wrap her arms around her neck.  Then she teleported them all to safety.

Shu and Sara gave chase as the intruder leaped up to the roof of the library.  Shu shielded them from the shots he took at the two of them, but they seemed to be incredibly weak shots.

Taffy King lifted herself up to the library roof and used her telekinesis to make a barrier that forced the helmeted stranger directly towards the trap that Phoenix had planned.

It was Phoenix and Rocket Rogers that stood at the end of the intruder’s path.

“Rocket!  The fire bubble to burn his oxygen!”

Rocket, at Phoenix’s command, sealed an air-tight dome of flaming air over the man and absorbed his ray-gun shots.

“Now, I drop him with heat…”

Phoenix’s temperature-spiking bolt took him down.

“You didn’t kill him, I hope?” asked Ged-sensei as he arrived at the scene.

Shen Ming arrived in time for the unmasking.

“Your messenger said this was some kind of old enemy, Shen-sensei,” said Ged.

“Ah, yes… yes.  Every three hundred years he comes around to threaten and maybe kill people seeking vengeance for something he imagines I did to wrong him.”

Of course, everybody present knew that Shen-sensei was more than nine hundred years old.  A vendetta that old was not surprising.

“So, you’ve never caught him before?” Ged asked.

“Oh, no… not quite like this…  This one is too old to remember his evil self, but he is called the Avenger.”

Phoenix pulled off the horned helmet.

“It’s Jai Chang our archery master!” said Ged in confusion.

“Hmm… now, that seems so unlikely.  I recall Master Jai is only thirty Earth years old.  A mystery this is…”

Shu noticed that the old man had a suspiciously jovial smile for the circumstances.

“We will take him to the infirmary and strap him down.  When he comes to we will learn more about what caused our faithful teacher to do this thing.”

Shu and Taffy picked Jai Chang up with telekinesis and floated him down from the roof and to the infirmary. Ged and his students looked at the inscrutable Shen-sensei and shook their heads in wonder.

Canto 114 – Desperate Men, Desperate Measures

Several system-defense boats, the so-called Atmospheric Police Force of the planet Coventry rose to surround the wrecked but recovering hulk of the First Half Century.

“Enemy craft!  Stand down with your weapons.  Prepare to be boarded by the Coventry Air Guard.”

Dana Cole turned to her beleaguered crew.  “Any chance we can escape or fight our way out of this?”

“Not without using that… that THING!” said a horrified junior officer whom she didn’t know.

“Yeah, that is definitely out of the question.”  She turned to the reanimated thing that was now her beloved Trav.  “We have to surrender now, lover.  I expect we will be facing trial.”

“Ah, a primitive justice system.  That sort of illogical display will prove most enlightening in these times of our intellectual progeny.”

“I’m not talking to the mind of Trav Dalgoda am I?”

“Decidedly not.  Tyrrix ManSel wishes to observe for the next decade or so.”  The dead eyes were lit from behind with a yellow luminescence.

“Yep, that can’t be good.”

“There is a possibility of incarceration and even execution, isn’t there,” said Tyrrix with Trav’s mouth.

“Yes.  If they don’t kill us as soon as they come aboard.”

“Well, if my database on the Xandar future is accurate, our ride should be showing up at any moment.”

“Our ride?”

Outside the viewport, two Blackhawk Corsairs, both in rather battle-worn condition popped out of jump space.

“We need the Coventry forces to back off for now.  By proxy orders of the White Duke.”  Dana easily recognized the voice of Razor Conn.

Through the viewport, the crew could see the system defense forces backing down.

One of the Blackhawks sent a half dozen air rafts out through its blast-blackened docking bay towards the First Half Century.

In moments, the leader of the Blackhawks, Razor Conn, stood on the bridge looking at Dana through mirrored sunglasses.  He was wearing a white, wide-brimmed cowboy hat like so many veterans of the Pan Galactican Border War.

“I take it this incident was mostly the fault of the evil Tesserah thing?” Razor said simply.

“Yes.  It seems to have a mind of its own.  An evil mind.”

“We are going to tell the Coventry government that we have the rogue warriors in custody and we will give this starship to them as compensation.”

“So, you’re not going to hand us over to be executed?”

“No, of course not.  We already know it wasn’t the fault of you or your crew.  Our own ranks are a bit depleted now too, so we will be taking you aboard to work for us.  We will only claim to have executed the war criminals.  Once the emergency is over, any necessary investigations can happen in a few years.  We have more pressing things to worry about now.”

“Oh?  Like what for instance?”

“That evil Ancient thing wants to kill us all.  Maybe the whole universe.  We have to find a more effective way to deal with it than just doing what it tells us to do.”

Dana looked at Trav.  “Are you telling them what to do?”

“Not I,” answered Tyrrix.  “Your friend speaks of the evil inherent in the Tesserah.  It is, after all, an ultimate Ancient doomsday sort of device.”

“Do you know how to get rid of it?” she asked Razor.

“No, but we have to figure something out.  In the meantime, I would ask for everybody’s company aboard Blackhawk One.  We really have a lot of work to do.”

So, I have no idea if anybody is following my Tuesday novel-writing posts or not. But since I have reached the halfway point in novel #4 of the series, I thought I would take a slight break to explain and re-elucidate the whole ugly process before it comes to life and swallows me whole.

The original intent is to take my horrifically bad first-published novel and expand, improve, and reorganize it into a series of novels. Basically turning one badly written swamp full of plot holes and monstrously confusing characters into five equally terrifying pieces of pulp-fiction parody-satire-trash… er, I mean, treasure.

I have also promoted the first book in the series with a free give-away e-book, to a rather insignificant degree of non-success.

The second part took a good deal more sorting and re-arranging as I had to gather scattered Cantos from the whole rest of the original manuscript and link them together more coherently than I had before.

That left me with the task of sorting out the messy middle of the original manuscript into as much of a novel-like form as it was possible to do.

All three of these books are already published and promoted at least once. Interest has been building. Some among the possessors of the free copy of the second book found it interesting enough to go back and buy copies of book one. Each new promotion found new readers. Nobody, however, has reviewed any of these books yet. But… we can’t have everything we want in life, right?

So, next Tuesday the story of book four will continue with newly written material that I have not written yet. The fourth book, AeroQuest 4 : The Amazing Aero Brothers, is written in two parts. Ham Aero’s part is about continuing the fight against the Imperium and evil Grand Admiral Brona Tang (the Darth Vader parody who leads the bad guys) . Ged Aero’s part will continue to be about training his students to meet a terrible destiny in the prophesied future.

And, of course, the fifth book will bring a conclusion to the series as a whole. But I haven’t really had time to think about that very much yet.