by R. T. Kaelin
He smiled and steered the Starcutter toward home.
*
Author’s Note:
The inspiration for this story should be obvious: the terrible Indian Ocean Christmas Tsunami of 2004. “What would it be like to be caught in such an event?” I wondered, hoping never to actually find out. “And what should people not caught in the destruction do in the aftermath of such a disaster?”
This story is my attempt to answer those questions.
The Starcutter and her crew are some of my main characters in the Blue Kingdoms, the world I’ve co-created with my friend Jean Rabe. Ali is inspired by Sinbad and may even be the fabled captain’s descendent.
My love of water—especially the ocean—is apparent in much of my work. Hardly a story goes by—either fantasy, or sci-fi, or detective, or horror—without some water reference. Growing up with our house on a pond and my grandmother’s house on the ocean, I feel a keen affinity for all things aquatic. One of the most obvious manifestations of this in my work is the book The Dragon Isles, now sadly out of print. Another is the 2007 release, Pirates of the Blue Kingdoms, as well as my stories in the other Blue Kingdoms books—Shades & Specters, Buxom Buccaneers (featuring another tale of Ali’s crew), and the ever-popular Blue Kingdoms: Zombies, Werewolves & Unicorns.
Chances are I’ll continue writing about rocks and trees and water for the rest of my life.
*
The Kid in the Park
by T.L. Gray
Resting on a park bench, warming my old, cold bones in the sunlight, I watched a young boy as he sat with his back propped against the trunk of an old oak. He napped with his baseball cap pulled down over his eyes and feet crossed at the ankles. A peaceful smile tugged at the edges of his lips and closed eyes.
The boy shifted, folding his arms across his chest. A worn-out glove bobbled in his lap, waiting, as if anxious to return to the game it was meant to play. The soles of his sneakers sported worn and tattered holes.
A single sunbeam pierced through a cockney of leaves, lighting up dust particles dancing all around him, stirred by the gentle summer breeze. Unnoticed and unrecognized, dogs passed him without as much as a sniff. Un-frightened by his presence, a spritely squirrel clamored in the leaves around him in a frenzied hunt for fat, delicious acorns.
Who was this boy? Why did he feel so familiar?
My old bones creaked as I pulled myself from the park bench. I ached all over. Though the world seemed dim and blurred, this boy’s presence crystallized before me; a mirage playing with my mind, I assumed.
Have I lost my mind after all these years?
I took a few steps toward him, thinking my shuffles among the crunching leaves would wake him, but he didn’t move. A few more labored steps closer and I heard him breathing. Barely able to hold myself erect with my cane, I bent to touch him on the shoulder. I didn’t want to frighten him, but I had to know who he was.
As my hand made contact with his shoulder, it passed through, his arm and body nothing more than a silvery mist. I jerked back and stumbled, but caught my balance before I fell. Had I flopped to the ground, it would have been painful. The boy, however, didn’t move.
With a shaking hand, I reached for him again, but this time his head stirred just as my fingers were about to make contact. I drew my hand back. He slowly looked up at me. I gasped. It had been years since I had seen it, but I knew the face well. Every freckle was just as I had remembered. A sparkle danced in those bright, blue eyes.
Oh, how vivid they once were, and what a dull gray they are now.
He smiled at me, revealing two missing front teeth. “Are you ready, old man?”
How could he ask me that?
My heart ached and my breathing became shallow. “How is this possible?”
He didn’t respond at first, just continued to stare at me, as if I should already have the answer. “It's time to go, old man. I've been waiting here long enough.”
Go where?
He jumped up from where he sat, dusted off the seat of his pants and turned toward a bright, white light in the distance. He turned back to face me, but this time he looked past where I stood.
A cold chill descended over me, seeping into of my old, worn-out bones. I didn't want to look back. An icy gust of air swept over me. I trembled all over.
Yet my fear didn’t stop me as I slowly turned my head and saw him: an old man sitting alone on the park bench with his head bent. He appeared to be napping, slumped over with his chin resting against his chest.
Fear evaporated like a fog meeting the sunlight, and my old bones filled with youth and vigor. As I straightened, adjusted the baseball cap on my head, and slid my hand into that well-worn leather glove, I walked with joy and peace into the light.
*
Duncan Derring and the Call of the Lady Luck
by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
The mission sounded simple: head out to the edge of the solar system and save the Princess Line’s Lady Luck from the Andromedan tumbleweeds. It was the sort of mission I was made for, and I fully expected to wrap her up in less than a day and be on my way. For once, my expectations were wildly out of synch with reality. Happens to everyone sometime, I suppose.
Duncan Derring, weapons and demolitions expert—what do you mean you never heard of me? Where have you been? It wasn’t exactly the kind of profession you’d expect tourism ventures to call upon, I know, but the galaxy held all kinds of odd dangers for these passenger ships. They weren’t outfitted with any weapons and only the barest sorts of shields. In fact, if I’d been the one hired to approve the design, they never would have made it out of concept. But no one asked me.
The Lady Luck was one of the newer liners, “a five star resort amongst the stars,” the brochures said, and they weren’t talking about the kind of stars you see in movies. She could carry a load of up to five thousand passengers, not counting certain odd-sized alien species, and provided all the dining and entertainment options anyone could imagine. She contained twenty-seven restaurants, eighteen bars, ten nightclubs, eight ballrooms, thirty-five shops, fifteen cinemas, and any number of other recreational and entertainment facilities. If I hadn’t been aboard a liner once myself, I’d have thought it absurd, but Princess Ltd. specialized in making absurdities reality.
I’d never seen the Andromedan Tumbleweeds, although I’d heard a lot about them, of course. Kinda goes without saying that, in my profession, you stay abreast of the latest developments. Floating in deep space between Neptune and Uranus, the tumbleweeds were freshly arrived from Andromeda, where the locals tired of the toll they took on ships and planets and used a fleet’s worth of force fields to drag them to the edge of their solar system and push them off on us. How nice of them, you might think, and you’d be right, but then you don’t know the Andromedans. No one ever called the Andromedans nice.
It took about two days at full on ultra-light engines to make the journey from my previous assignment, Ganymede Colony just off Jupiter. Why anyone had wanted to build resort towns in the Galileans was beyond me, but some people like looking at cool, gaseous masses, I guess. I certainly prefer them to some warm gaseous masses I’ve known. I was able to set the nav computer to auto for much of the route and catch some much-needed sleep. Despite my distaste for the location, the Ganymede Colony was a busy place and sleep had been more of a rarity than I’m used to. The custom-made feather mattress I’d installed in my quarters molded itself to the contours of my body as I slept. It took three tries and its sexiest feminine voice for the nav computer to awaken me. I warmed quickly as the heaters in my sleep pod brought my body temperature to normal and the blood raced through my veins again.
Yawning, I sat up, rubbing at the aches in my neck as I put my feet on the cold deck. The sensation got me moving faster as I slid out of my sleep jumpsuit and began strapping on my demolitions gear. At least as much of it as I could and still move around with speed and conduct ship’s business. You have to be ready to jump at a moment’s notice in this busine
ss, for both economic and literal survival, and the better prepared you were, the more successful you’d be.
As the Trini, short for Trinitrotoluene—aka TNT—slipped out of hyperspace, I found myself immediately at the heart of the problem. Until I’d encountered her, I would have never thought a nav computer could be programmed with a sense of humor. I figured a jealous woman of some sort must be behind her, because she was always pulling this sort of thing on me, and for once, I wasn’t in the mood. As accustomed as I am to dangerous situations, the sight of three tumbleweeds rotating seeming inches from my cockpit view screen stopped my heart.
I requested a location on the Lady Luck herself and found her frozen in space just inside the edge of the field. The report said she’d come upon the tumbleweeds unexpectedly and figured staying put and keeping pace was her only chance. Given the tumbleweeds’ propensity for random changes in direction with the slightest shift in gravitation, I’d say the Lady Luck lived up to her name. The readings my computer took upon arrival showed little influence from planetary gravitation at that particular moment. It was enough to make me relax again, which would turn out to be a regrettable mistake.
As I rotated the Trini and took in the view, I noted damages on the Lady Luck’s hull from unlucky encounters with a few of the surrounding tumbleweeds. The fact the liner was still functional and in one piece indicated the impacts had deflected the offending tumbleweeds away without disturbing any others. Such a disturbance would probably have caused a sizable enough chain reaction that my mission would have been pointless.
A voice came over my comm. “Lady Luck Liner calling craft Trini. This is the captain speaking.” The man used that annoying formal style most ship officers did.
“Yeah, I’m here,” I responded. “Just checking out the damages.”
“None necessitating more than a change of five thousand shorts so far,” she said. The Lady Luck had full on laundry facilities, too, so I figured that didn’t pose them much of a problem.
“How is it you came to be inside the field?” I asked, thinking only an idiot could have made such a colossal blunder.
“We were at full stop, under night crew. The weeds came upon us faster than we could bring her up to full and take evasives,” the Captain answered. “Our nav computer malfunctioned and the scanners read them as small debris.”
Given my own experience with nav computers, I didn’t bother to delve any further. When they weren’t in motion, the tumbleweeds always appeared smaller than their actual size to scanners. Pilots relied on nav charts and computers to pinpoint their location when they travelled this part of the system. But they always verified their presence with human eyes.
“Can you back her out the way you came in?”
“It’s not so easy to move a one hundred thousand ton liner,” the Captain said. “It’s a bit like backing Saturn through one of her rings. We don’t have the maneuverability. Backing up’s rarely called for.”
I checked my computer’s readings again. “For the moment, it appears you got lucky, but when the field reaches the influence of Neptune’s gravity, it could change in a hurry.”
“Can you try and have us out before then?” the Captain replied, as if I needed some amateur questioning my competence for the mission. But the thought of four thousand five hundred passengers suffering for the ignorance of their crew wasn’t something I could live with, so I set about my calculations for clearing them a path.
As I flew along the field’s edge, it became obvious I’d have to go in manually and set the explosives. My jetpack was quicker and I a far smaller target than my ship. The odds I would avoid entanglements with any of the weeds would greatly increase if I went alone. The catch was that I hadn’t used my pack in over a year and never in a situation rife with the risks I’d face here. All it would take is one wrong move, one wrong placement of an explosive, or one disturbance of the field to send the weeds into chaos, haphazardly spinning like their Earthen namesakes across space, colliding with each other or anything else in their way.
To complicate things further, Neptune’s gravitation was coming into range. Planetary gravity started influencing objects millions of kilometers out. On paper, the figures looked ridiculous but this wasn’t on paper. Even a slight gravitational pull could send the tumbleweeds into chaotic motion, which would be the end of the Lady Luck, the Trini, and me.
Finishing my calculations with due speed but proper care, I slipped into my suit and jetted out the Trini’s passenger airlock, making my way into the field. The tumbleweeds were even more intimidating up close than they had been through the Trini’s ports. The temperature inside my suit rose as adrenaline coursed through my veins. Spying my first target, I used the suit's jets to swing left and approach, taking care not to lose control or come in too fast.
I reversed my jets’ thrust, slowing my momentum as I reached each tumbleweed’s surface. Then I could set each charge and use my boots to push free before jetting off to the next target. Firing the jets too close might start the weeds spinning. The Trini’s calculations determined it would take twenty-two charges to both clear a path for the liner and deflect nearby tumbleweeds away from the Lady Luck. My plan included setting five more just in case something went wrong.
Thanks to my experience and skill, the execution came off without a hitch. As I released the last charge and clicked the activation button, ready to push off and head back to my ship, a motion over my right shoulder drew my attention. A door was opening on the Lady Luck. It appeared to be a garbage chute.
I punched the button on my radio. “Captain, don’t jettison anything, until you’ve cleared the field!”
But I was too late.
Debris shot from the chute into space, scattering as it hit zero gravity. At first, it appeared small and harmless. Then I saw the teddy bear.
“Who would throw that out?” I muttered as the smiling face and big fluffy nose floated toward me. A child was probably already missing it.
“It wasn’t us,” the Captain responded.
My time for pondering who might be responsible dried up quick. Floating out behind the bear and just starting its spin was a metal lamp—the kind I’d seen bolted to the walls of starliners in photos. A kind I knew to be heavy, and anything hard meant trouble. I could see from its slow spin I was right about its density and its random trajectory seemed to be taking it right toward the tumbleweeds.
My hands went into action, one reaching for the jetpack controls, the other for the explosive detonator attached to my belt.
Accelerating rapidly, I shot back toward the Trini, hoping to reach the airlock before I had to detonate the explosives. As I picked up speed, I glanced back and saw the lamp had maintained its tempo. I spun to face the Trini and hit the comm.
“Captain, get ready to fire thrusters on full at my signal.”
“We need time to strap everyone in,” he replied, his voice rising in pitch with the onset of panic.
“There’s no time if you want to live!”
And then things happened so fast that events remain a blur.
As I reached the Trini, I glanced back once more. The lamp was too close to the field. I’d run out of time. I flew around the ship, opposite the airlock, and began fumbling to open a small outer panel. Flipping it open, I pulled out the external control cable, clipped it to the belt of my suit, and keyed the comm again.
“Now, Captain!”
I hadn’t intended to yell, but adrenaline got the best of me. With one hand, I hit the detonator then used the other to fire the Trini’s engines. When my mechanic had suggested the outside control panel, I’d thought he was nuts. I’d never had occasion to use it but never had I been so glad to be wrong about one of his special features.
The cable did its job and kept me tethered to the ship as energy waves from the first explosions and the jolt of the Trini’s engines conspired to knock me loose. I grasped the controls with both hands and struggled to control the ship, flying her away from the impending
disaster.
Glancing back I saw a vapor trail coming from the Lady Luck’s engines as the mammoth struggled to get up to speed. tumbleweeds exploded around her just in time, disintegrating seconds before the Lady Luck moved into the space where they’d been. Debris flew chaotically all around her, some dissipating further as it struck her hull.
I watched helpless as the jettisoned lamp struck one of the tumbleweeds I’d wired and sent it tumbling toward the Lady Luck. I said a quick prayer that her designers had made the hull strong enough.
One after another, the tumbleweeds exploded in the order I’d wired them. The lamp’s victim should be coming up. It seemed inches from the Lady Luck, but then with the Trini accelerating away, I couldn’t be sure of actual distance.
Just as the tumbleweed was about to hit the Lady Luck, it exploded, sending shards flying outward in different directions. I winced as two larger chunks struck the Lady Luck’s side, but the resulting damage seemed minimal. The ship’s momentum had carried the liner away as pieces struck, thereby softening their impact.
The Lady Luck and the Trini continued sailing outward, well past the tumbleweed field to a safe distance, before we both slowed to a stop.
I took a deep breath, amazed we’d both survived it, then unhooked the cable and jetted quickly back to the airlock to climb aboard my ship. As I reached the airlock door I saw a fluffy brown nose there, wedged into the door frame. Grabbing the teddy, I floated inside and closed the door, counting the seconds the airlock needed to compress before slipping out of my suit and racing to the cockpit.
After firing up the engines, I circled around and flew along the hull of the Lady Luck, looking for damage.
“You okay in there, Captain?” I said into the comm.
The Captain’s voice dripped with relief. “Aye, Trini. A few scratches and bruises. How’s the hull look from where you are?”
“One minor breach so far,” I answered, eyeing the spot where a larger piece of debris had torn a hole in the liner. The opening appeared small, about the size of my fist. The ships' electronic seal would handle it. All in a day's work. I chuckled to myself as I turned the Trini back toward the liner and landed in a large white bay with windows to the stars overhead.
