The Travelers 3

by Lee Hunnicutt

  I got up and went to the bar for a box of tissues and set it down next to Zoe.

  After what seemed to me an eternity, she stopped sobbing and sat upright. She took a tissue, dabbed her eyes and when she blew her nose, it sounded like a foghorn.

  She looked at me and asked, ‘How is he?’

  When she said ‘he’ it came out as a squeak.

  ‘He’s in a regeneration chamber. Joyce is going to call us when he comes out. He’ll be like new.’

  When I said, ‘He’ll be like new.’ she began to cry again.

  Mac looked at me in disgust and said, ‘You really know how to cheer a person up. Don’t you?’

  About that time I was looking around for a rock to crawl under.

  ‘What’s wrong with me? Why would I behave like that? Do I have a flaw that is just now emerging?’

  Mac said, ‘Sweetheart, we love you just the way you are and no you are not flawed. You are haunted by your past. When we first found you, you were near death from what those monsters did to you. Remember after Amanda healed your wounds, it took you months just to come visit us. Remember how Pete would visit you and show you we were different? Then slowly by slowly you came to trust us and we did our best to show you how much we cherished and loved you. It took you what seemed forever for you to accept us for what we were. We were your kind and loving friends and we will always be that. No matter what you do we will love you. You have a dark past and even though it is hundreds of years in the past, it never leaves you.

  Pete and I have equally dark pasts, different from yours but still dark and brutal and it never leaves us. Mine is from two bloody tours in Vietnam and Pete’s is from two years of heavy fighting in World War Two. We have to try and suppress it. Like yours, ours still haunts us. We control it as best we can. When it bubbles up, you have to tamp it back down and think of the present where you are living well, surrounded by people who love you.

  We all have baggage Zoe, all of us. You just have to live with it and do the best you can.’

  ‘What if I can’t?’

  ‘You will and we will be here to support you.

  When Joyce calls and tells us Asger is out of the chamber we will all go to see him.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can face him.’

  I said, ‘Sure you can. We’ll be there to give you support. Besides, he said he thinks he loves you.’

  ‘He did?’ she squeaked.

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  She put her arms around Mac and gave him a big sloppy kiss on the cheek. She then got up and walked to me. I got up to meet her and she gave me the same sloppy kiss on the cheek. She called Max over, dropped down on her knees and hugged him tightly and kissed him.

  She went back and sat down next to Mac, put her head on his shoulder and said, ‘All of this crying and kissing makes a girl thirsty.’

  I ordered a pitcher of iced tea and a bowl of lemons.

  We sat around talking about the adventures we had shared. It cheered her up. We laughed a lot.

  All in all, it was a good afternoon.”

  “That’s it?” said Jack.

  “What happened when Joyce called and you went back to the Skull?” asked Victoria.

  “Nothing much happened. The four of us went back to the Skull. Asger was looking and feeling great. Zoe was embarrassed and sat in a chair across from him. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

  Joyce brought us all a beer. Mac and I passed some pleasantries and Mac, Max and I left so the two of them could work things out. Apparently things did work out because every time the two of them are in town, we don’t see Zoe for about a month.

  He wants to marry her and have her travel with him, but one, I don’t think she’s the marrying kind and two, I’m not exaggerating here, I don’t think she can or wants to leave us.

  We are a very close and loving family and the adventures we share are unlike any in the galaxy.

  I don’t think she will ever leave us. The adrenalin rush is too great. Beside she likes to ranch.”

  Chapter 11

  Buffy

  Shortly after the teens and Victoria arrived at Mac’s planet, the three girls and the boys were at the Skull with Zoe and they asked about Buffy.

  “After Mac had sent out his call for customers and workers, Buffy was one of the first people to show up looking for work. She arrived in a small, old, beat up FTL fighter with four stasis chambers.

  Everybody who comes here be they worker, resident or tourist is scanned by Shawn. Part of that scan is to make sure they have no weapons, explosives or any device that could be used to do harm. Also, she scans their minds to find out if they are truly who they say they are or are they here to do harm either to other people or to the city itself.

  Those that are here to do harm are sent to the mines in Portugal. You’d be surprised how quickly the ‘those who wanted to do harm’ dried up.

  The scan proved to us that Buffy and those like her were who they said they were, making this one of the safest places in the galaxy.

  Yeah sure bar fights break out and people get hurt but these are spontaneous not planned acts of mayhem. As long as no one is killed it adds spice to the environment and it is usually confined to the sleazier side of town.

  The fights that break out in the casinos are broken up immediately and the drunks are confined in comfortable surroundings until they can sleep it off.

  But enough of the background story. Buffy trained to be a bartender and she was a good one. The customers loved her. She was offered management positions but she always turned them down. Just as the customers loved her, she loved being a bartender. She genuinely liked her customers and the people she worked with.

  She made good money and even better tips. In about fifty years she got a dog and upgraded to a large penthouse apartment. Except for a long weekend here and there she never took time off. She was the perfect employee and Mac knew it.

  Over the years after Mac opened the place for business Pete dated dozens of girls. Some were just one night stands and others lasted from a week or two, to several months until he met Buffy. She’s beautiful, intelligent, well read, educated, a lot of fun and a great conversationalist.

  I think Pete, although he’d never admit it, fell in love with her and she with him. They were together for over 80 years. Pete would get called away to hunt space junk and could be gone for over a year. But he always came back and when he did, the first person he wanted to see was Buffy.

  About 75 years into the relationship, when he came back things just weren’t the same and being a very perceptive woman, Buffy noticed it.

  And before he left the last time for five years he broke it off with her.

  She was devastated. At first, she didn’t leave her penthouse for almost a month and people who knew her said no matter how hard they tried to get her to leave her apartment and get her life back together she wouldn’t listen to them.

  Well her sorrow turned to anger and from what I have been told if Pete were around, she would have tried to kill him.

  The only person she would see or listen to was Mac. He didn’t try to console her because at that point she was inconsolable and didn’t want to hear the ‘There, there girl, you’ll find somebody else who deserves you and not some jerk who will walk out on you.’

  To understand Buffy, you have to know where she came from. All of these planets are inhabited by humans and war is a human condition. There has never been a time in human history that there wasn’t a war going on somewhere so to say Buffy came from a warlike planet is just pointing out the obvious.

  Like the Vikings, Buffy’s planet, which we called Germany, was more warlike than most and like the Vikings, the American Indians, and the Japanese, hers was a warrior society. What made her planet different, her world was a matriarchal society. A world run solely by women. They were the dominate sex and were the warriors.

  The men were used for breeding, raising the children, domestic work, farming and both skilled and menia
l labor. Women who weren’t warriors, had at one time served as a warrior but were now CEOs and upper management and middle management in the business world.

  There were three large kingdoms, or should I say queendoms, in Buffy’s world. Buffy had stayed in the military and had worked her way up to a high ranking officer in the Queen’s palace guard.

  She was living high off the hog until a palace coup was hatched by the aristocracy. As a result of the coup, the Queen started a purge of the aristocracy, including her family, palace hangers on, sycophants and the palace guard.

  Buffy saw the writing on the wall. She had no family for the Queen to hold over her head for retribution so she stole a small FTL reconnaissance ship/fighter and made a break for it.

  The ship normally had a crew of four with two service bots. One bot was an engineer that maintained the ship. The other bot was a domestic that cooked, did the cleaning and laundry. There were four comfortable staterooms, a small gym and rec area and a kitchen/dining room.

  Because of the vast distances they travelled and the time it took to traverse these distances, the Germans made the ship as comfortable as possible. The smallest crews on their FTL ships were four. They did this because they didn’t want to have a one person ship that took up to ten years to reach its destination. Most people couldn’t stand that long of a period in solitude. The crew of four was for human interaction. The crews were specially chosen for compatibility. Even then there could be conflict among the crew but when you were on a mission and there was conflict, you just had to gut it out or hibernate in a stasis chamber.

  Going on to Buffy, she now had a bounty on her head. She had to not only put as much distance between her and Germany, she had to pick a random planet that was developed. Which meant it had FTL.

  She could never stay in one place very long. She had to stay ahead of not only the German authorities but bounty hunters. At first, she did what she knew best. She became a mercenary or a body guard.

  She didn’t particularly like either job. Mercs do the dirty work the regular army doesn’t want to do and she tired of guarding indolent rich people and their spoiled offspring. She soon was able to get jobs as a weapons officer on freighters and passenger ships.

  This game of hide and seek went on for over 100 years. She had had several narrow escapes. Because of her extensive martial arts training, a few times, she had either killed or maimed her pursuers and she was getting tired of it. So when she saw Mac’s advertisement, she jumped at it and has never looked back.

  When she first came here Mac knew her background. She came from a violent environment and a misandrist society. He had to ask her if she could put her upbringing behind her and not kill everybody who offended her and not treat men like dirt.

  She said that she had put her upbringing behind her. She told him it was hard at first but after living in other cultures for more than 100 years she had learned to control her temper and her feelings towards men.

  She was true to her word. When drunks grabbed her wrist and tried to come on to her instead of reaching across the bar and snapping their necks, she would call security.

  She did date from time to time but nothing came of it until Pete asked her out. He was kind, attentive and funny. He treated her like she was the only woman on the planet. Their relationship was something entirely new to her and to her surprise, she liked it.

  As for Pete, at first, he found her cold and distant but he knew that dating her would be like that. After a few dates she warmed up. He found her to be a great conversationalist. She was not only beautiful but she was educated and interesting and after a while, funny. In short, he was captivated by her. Of all the women he had had relationships none compared to her.

  One might say they were in love which would have been unusual for Buffy. Men on her planet were used for procreation, child rearing, domestic chores and menial labor.

  Germany was like Sparta where boys were taken from their mothers at age seven for harsh military training. Except on Buffy’s planet it was the girls that were taken from their fathers at age eight for scholastic and military training.

  Four months out of the year they went to class six days a week for classroom training on history, math, science and language. The other eight months was dedicated to strenuous military training, martial arts, weapons, survival skills, field exercises and strategy.

  Graduation depended on how proficient they were not just in military arts but in scholastics. Buffy graduated at age sixteen. The average graduation age was eighteen.

  It must have been difficult to integrate into a culture designed for business and leisure and it must have been strange for her to attach herself to one man much less fall in love with him.

  Once they had been together for about a year, Pete told her she didn’t have to work anymore.

  She laughed and said, ‘I’ve grown accustomed to working. I like the relationship I have with my fellow workers and with you gone one or two years at a time, I’m not the type to sit around doing nothing.’ He said he understood and if that made her happy, he was happy.

  Every Friday night, Buffy and I would meet Joyce at the Skull for a night of drinking and telling lies. After running the Skull for over a hundred years, Joyce always beat us hands down with the best stories.

  Just because Mac had told us not to beat people to a pulp or kill anybody, it didn’t dull the edge for a little excitement and the Skull was just the place to find it.

  Buffy and I knew, to certain men who were from planets where our physiology was like the women on their planets, we were eye candy and invariably somebody would hit on us.

  We would politely turn them down. Most walked away but for the men, where on their planet women are their chattels, declining their advances it was an insult. They would get nasty and try to manhandle us.

  It was then we could beat them to a pulp, being careful not to kill them. At one time there were two dozen men off the same ship that we had to mangle.

  It was always great fun. After we had laid them out Buffy and I would sit back down with Joyce and order another beer.

  The first time this happened, Joyce joined the fray. I think she enjoyed it as much as we did. But when she figured out what we were doing, she stopped helping us and just sat back and enjoyed the show.

  When Pete was in town and she wasn’t working, they were inseparable. They were together for eighty years and they seemed happy. More than happy.

  When I asked Pete why he dumped her, he said he had just gotten a message from Stumpy ordering us, by us I mean Pete, me, Gyro and Max out on a huge salvage mission out in the rift.

  By Stumpy’s description we could be heading to a massive find. It would take years to get these missing ships up and running.

  Pete said it wouldn’t be fair to Buffy to be waiting for his return. If what Stumpy said was correct, we could be gone decades.

  Buffy said she didn’t care how long he was gone. She would wait for him. Pete would have nothing of it. He told her it would be cruel of him to expect her to wait.

  They argued back and forth until Pete said ‘Enough! My mind is made up.’ And with that he left. We sailed away that night. We didn’t return until you and Victoria were on board. We had been gone for five years.

  Oh and by the way, I invited Buffy to join us when she gets off work. She should be here any minute.

  When she gets here, we’ll play number one of our hit parade.”

  Sure enough, about a half hour later Buffy came strolling in. She was wearing what looked like a skin tight, single piece, sleeveless, red leather outfit. It showed off her magnificent sculpted body. From her wrists to about two thirds up her forearms were what looked like bronze forearm guards.

  Zoe and Joyce got up and walked over to greet her. Both women gave her a hug. The three of them linked arms and walked back to the table.

  Bruce the Hammer already had a cold beer waiting for her.

  Zoe introduced Buffy to Victoria and the teens and said, “We were ju
st about to play our top ten hits. I think we should start with number one. It really is the best hit. All the rest pale by comparison.

  Bryan had bowls of buttered popcorn delivered to the table. He grabbed a beer and settled down to watch the show. Bryan had no sooner sat down when the bat wing doors crashed open.

  The teens and Victoria were shocked to see a twelve foot giant enter the saloon. Everything about him was big. His head was at least a foot and a half wide. He was ebony black and his skin, if you could call it skin was as shiny as a freshly polished automobile. It turned out it was not just skin. It was a chitinous like armor that grew over his skin..

  He was wearing skin tight red leather pants and a matching vest that exposed his chest and stomach.

  On his chest and stomach, etched into his armor was a double headed broad ax with the handle running from the ax head down past his belly button.

  The monster walked over to the table where they were seated, plunged his fingers into the etch of the handle and like a magic act pulled the ax free from his chest and stomach.

  Once the ax was free he turned it so the ax was horizontal to the floor and slammed it down on the table, shattering any chitin that was left on the ax and its handle.

  The handle and ax were of a black metal but the honed edges were silvery and razor sharp.

  He spread his arm out from his body and hollered “Buffy!”

  While the people at the table sat in stunned silence, it didn’t deter Max. Prior to the giant entering to saloon Max had been asleep at Zoe’s feet but not anymore. He launched himself at the wrist of the hand holding the ax.

  He bit down so hard you could hear the chitin begin to crack. Max bit down harder and the chitin crumbled. His teeth were now through the amour into the flesh and down to the bone.

  The giant screamed in pain and dropped the ax.

  Meanwhile Buffy was on her feet. She placed her hands and forearms across her chest, palms down, parallel to the floor. She snapped her arms out wide and two broad swords appeared in her hands.

  The giant was frantically trying to shake Max loose and tried to grab him with his left hand and pull him off but every time he tried to do that Buffy would stab him in the arm pit. The best he could do was move his right arm in various directions trying to dislodge Max. Max was flopping around at the end of his arm like a rag doll but he never relinquished his grip.