The One_A Cruise Through the Solar System

by Eric Klein

  “Jim, where is the communications module you removed?”

  “Here in my pocket,” Jim Flavin replied. “But why? They damaged the communications console after I took it out.”

  “Can I have it, please? I may be able to get it working.”

  Looking over at Bill, Jackie says, “See, I told you he was some sort of serious troubleshooter.”

  Flavin hands me the chip. I take Dodge’s Death Star charm out of my wristpad and hand it over to Dodge. “I think this is yours. Can you put it somewhere safe for now?”

  “Sure. I can connect it back to my bracelet.”

  As we slip into the relative darkness of the walkway around the elevator shaft, the silence is disquieting, but I’m used to working with my hands in the dark. Creeping along, we move behind the elevator shaft and then come to a ladder.

  Englehorn says, “I’m glad we didn’t get a chance to put in the monitoring sensors and cameras here before we took off. I was afraid that the movement of the elevators would distract Vena before she was used to the rest of the ship.” After leading us up past several floors, he finally exclaims, “Ah, here we are.”

  We enter a service area. “Over there is the storeroom for Callahan’s, and here we are under the ballroom. This soundproof area is where the ship keeps the extra chairs and stuff when not in use. Now, if I’m not mistaken, this is about where his throne was set up. Let’s see what is going on.” He touches a control panel and we can hear voices from above through a tiny slot in our ceiling.

  We can hear Kong explaining, apparently to the female scientists, passengers, and pageant participants and their families. “Please understand the situation; you are all my prisoners. And, like prisoners of a Viking raid, you now belong to me and my men. As I’m sure you can imagine, out here it is hard for the men to find wives, so we have to take them as part of the pillage. I have made my choice, and in a day or so my men will pick from each of you whom he wants as his wife. Your roles will be simple – obey and take care of your new husband. Behave, and you will be treated well; don’t behave, and they have the right to beat you or sell you back to work in the mines.”

  Fay is getting more and more pissed off. She heads to a set of stairs and starts climbing, the ceiling moving out of her way. I follow, and we enter the ballroom just to the left of the throne.

  Kong smiles, “Ah, it is my princess anticipating my call and coming to me.”

  Fay goes straight to him as if for a hug, then says, “Wrong! Try ‘prince,’ as in Diana Prince.” He looks at her uncomprehendingly as she grabs his shirt, jerks him out of the chair, and knees him in the crotch hard enough to lift him from the floor. She keeps hitting and kicking him, avoiding all of his efforts at blocking. “Here we are, far from the planet of our race’s birth, and you want to reinstitute slavery and want to force women to be some sort of nineteen-fifties, TV-happy, servile wife? Maybe if you had tried this a hundred years ago, you would have found fainting flowers looking for big strong men to control them. But you didn’t look over the qualifications of the contestants, or even the schedule of events, very well.”

  A female voice calls out, “Shai Dorsai!”

  Kong gasps, then looks up and mumbles, “What do you mean?”

  “Look around. You must have thought that that fifty men were enough to keep these women cowered, like this was some damn nineteen-twenties space opera.”

  The various beauty contestants and scientists have already taken down every one of the pirates who were guarding them. There are a few exceptions. The Wawatai sisters are each swinging a guard in a circle as if part of some elaborate dance move. And towards the door there is Vivian Dandridge, who has all two-hundred-plus kilos of Sam, his eyes rolled back in his head until only white is showing, his legs swinging off the ground, literally in the palm of her left, cybernetic, hand.

  Behind her, Madame Sul-Te-Wan has the pirate who was guarding her in a tight embrace, but his head is listing just a little too far back as she lays him on the floor. She looks at Fay. “That is not the first time I have had to deal with a man trying to get a little fresh with me. But it will be his last.”

  “Jake, did nobody bother to tell you that once we got to Dione, the contestants were scheduled to give a martial arts demonstration? Almost all of them have at least one black belt. These are not beauty pageant contestants from two hundred years ago, where looks were enough. These women are frontier women; they stand alongside the men and do what needs to be done. None of that ‘but it’s not women’s work’ nonsense. Every one of us here is smart, capable, and – looking at the results – better than your men at martial arts.”

  Sitting up on the floor, Kong says, “It doesn’t matter. I have disabled the drive unit on the Venture, and no one knows you are on Skull Asteroid. When I recover from this you will all be punished.”

  Fay looks over at me. “Wrong again. The patrol - ”

  I interrupt her, “And the whole system.”

  She raises an eyebrow, “… and the whole system knows where we are by now, that you committed the hijacking, and everyone got to see you take your fall. Say goodnight, Gracie.” And she hits him with a Hangul front kick that knocks him cold.

  “Excuse me. Now that the lecture is over, may I make a suggestion on how we can take the rest of the pirates?”

  “Yes, dear. You have a suggestion?”

  “Since it seems that the pirates underestimate what you ladies can do, let’s use that. If we go over to medical, I’m sure we can find or make tranq patches. Then you can all go and quietly take out the rest of the pirates without the chance of anyone else getting hurt.”

  “And what will you be doing while we take them out?”

  “I think the Captain and I need to see what condition the ship is in, and if we can get regular communications running and the engines back online. I would send Jim and Ethan to find the chief engineer and any other crew that we can find, wake them up, and get them to work. Later, we can see who else is on this rock and separate the pirates from the prisoners. But this is just a suggestion. You seem to have it under control, and far be it from me to wish to take leadership away from you.”

  Twenty minutes later the various women are off having fun. A typical encounter would be one or two of them coming up to a pirate.

  “What are you doing here? I thought you were all locked up with the King.”

  “Oh, we just left the King in the ballroom. He was telling us how the choosing was going to work, and we came out to see our choices.” Going in for a hug they slap a tranq patch on the pirate’s neck. “So far the choices have been subpar at best.”

  Chapter 22

  “We pray for one last landing

  On the globe that gave us birth.

  Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies

  And the cool, green hills of Earth.”

  “The Green Hills of Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein

  A day later, when the patrol arrives, they cautiously board our ship to find the ship’s proper crew hard at work making repairs.

  Entering the bridge, “Lieutenant Geneva Williams, Solar patrol. Good to see you back in command, Captain. I take it you don’t really need us?”

  Dave looks at Fay and grins, “Glad to have you aboard, Lieutenant. Actually, we really are glad to see you. I am hoping you can help us with a problem.” With a wink towards me, “Could you join us down below?”

  Dave, Fay, and I lead their lieutenant to the ballroom. Inside, he finds the pirate men all unconscious and floating in reverse gravity

  “As you can see, Lieutenant, we need you to take this bunch in and see that they face justice. We are not really equipped for prisoners, and my medical officer does not like to keep them sedated any longer than necessary. Most of their crimes are well documented. It seems Jake likes to be able to relive them, so he kept extensive holo-logs. And, of course, his confession
was recorded.”

  “In that case, Captain, it is a good thing we brought in some prisoner transport ships.” Dropping some of his formality, “But what to do with their base?”

  “Well, my ship’s communications have been repaired, and the pirates found on the base are now all under Ethan’s command or have been imprisoned here in the ballroom with the pirates.”

  “Can you wake Mr. Kong so we can properly charge him? And how is it he is floating like that?”

  “No problem to wake him, but you will need to talk to BJ about the floating.”

  “Lieutenant, the floating is something I came up with after my last job. You see, here in the ballroom they have a fairly sophisticated anti-gravity setup. And, it turns out, there are some panels in the ceiling, too. I guess they were added to help with custom lighting and such. I set Jake floating over a reduced-gravity panel with the one in the ceiling set at a slightly higher gravity. I found a point of natural buoyancy for him. On the other hand, the area around him is set to five gravities, in case anyone approaches or he gets out.” I tap a few keys on my wristpad and Jake lowers to the floor. I wave Dave and the lieutenant on.

  He walks over and rips the tranq patch off Jake’s neck. After a minute or two, Jake starts to wake up.

  “Jake Kong, you are under arrest for the hijacking of the L.S.S. Venture, assaulting a patrol agent, more counts of wrongful imprisonment than I can list right now, piracy, sabotage, destruction of United Nations property on Ceres, murder of one Michael Lally, and attempted murder of Captain David Englehorn. Additional charges will be added as we go over your records. As to which authority will be trying you first, so far we have the United Nations, United States, and various colonies all looking to try you for your crimes. You have the right to remain silent, and I suggest that you take it, as your rights to an attorney will vary depending on which authority is trying you. In all cases, anything you say can and will be held against you in the various courts of law.” Turning to his men, “Take him to the brig on my ship, the rest of his men can be transported as they are. Get instructions from the ship’s doctor on how to do it safely.” Turning back to us, “What do we do with you and the rest of the individuals here on Asteroid Twenty Fifteen TB One Forty-Five?”

  “Some of the former prisoners want to stay, and there are some of the symposium participants that consider this to be a great base of operations for some serious science and mapping of the Kuiper Belt,” Englehorn says. “They were looking to see whom they could get to fund a telescope and a research program. After all, where else will they find an already habitable space that has such a useful orbit and potential for real research? And with its orbit passing close to the Earth and other bases they can, legally, get supplies as needed.”

  “I guess the United Nations would go for that. Not sure who would end up getting to administer it – and that is not my headache anyway – but if it prevents it from becoming a base for more criminal activity, you have my vote.”

  “As for the Venture,” Englehorn says, “we should have it space-worthy in a few hours. Right now, my Chief Engineer is running the last system tests to be sure everything is shipshape.”

  A patrolman runs back in.“Lieutenant, he’s dead!”

  “What do you mean, he’s dead?”

  “He grabbed a bunch of tranq patches off the table outside. We thought he was trying to use them on us and backed away to cover him. But he wasn’t after us; he slapped ten of them onto his own arms at once. It was enough to stop his heart, and the medics could not revive him. They say that with that much tranq in his system it would have taken a fatal dose of adrenaline to revive him, and when they tried with as much as they dared his heart ruptured. The last thing he said was ‘beautiful but deadly.’”

  Figure 10 Earth Poster Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

  Sitting in Callahan’s the night before we take off for Earth, Fay and I are cuddled close together.

  “It was nice of the pageant contestants to vote you Miss Congeniality. I did not realize they could vote for someone that was not a contestant, too. But, apparently, it was unanimous, and the organizers on Earth could not find anything in the rules against it.”

  “BJ, what about us? I know that we were more or less temporarily married, especially on Titan, but what do you want for the future?”

  Sensing apprehension as her shoulders tighten, I look into her eyes. “I like it right here with you in my arms, but to paraphrase what my namesake said, ‘Oh, it wasn’t the patrol. It was beauty that captured the beast.’”

  Suddenly sitting upright, “What do you mean your namesake? That was from the end of the movie.”

  Pulling her back into my arms, “You mean in all your research about me, and you never realized it? BJ is for Bob James. I had an Uncle Rob, so I was Bob, thus BJ. You see, my parents met at a revival of the original King Kong, and named me Robert for Robert Armstrong, whose character was Carl Denham. And James was for the lead screenplay author, James Creelman. Now Fay Wray’s character was hired to play Robert’s love interest. So, it was fate that we should come together, and – if you are willing – I would like to make this a long-term arrangement.”

  Her face brightens with a smile all the way to her hazel eyes. Just as she leans in for a kiss, she pauses and frowns. “What did he mean ‘initiated the conference?’”

  ~ The End ~

  Fay and BJ will be back in Just Two: A New View of the Solar System

  Special treat

  Just Two

  A New View of the Solar System

  Chapter One

  Just as she leans in for a kiss, she pauses. “What did he mean, ‘initiated the conference?’”

  Taking the kiss before asking, “What did who mean? Fay, what are you talking about?”

  “When he was explaining why we were captured, Jake said something about the conference being initiated to get the best minds together, as if this was all planned. By whom?”

  “Brain, please replay Jake Kong’s speech about them organizing things.”

  “Playing entry date: Wednesday, twenty-seven September twenty-one fifty-two at twelve thirty-seven oh one universal time: ‘We organized the pageant on your maiden voyage so we would have beautiful women as wives for my space pirates. A bit cliché, I know, but it has worked since the founding of Rome. The science conference was initiated to get the best space physicists and engineers in one place so that we could get them to work on new designs and improvements for us, both in terraforming our asteroid, but also for better ships to keep ahead of the patrol. Those that were invited, and subsidized in order to make sure that they would attend, are the best practical technical people for implementing the new theories into our fleet of ships. It was a glorious irony that you designed and built this for us, and were chosen to captain on it – just so I could get my revenge. Oh my, you sly dog!’”

  “Stop playback. Go back just a little more, and play that back.”

  “Playing entry date: Wednesday, twenty-seven September twenty-one fifty-two at twelve thirty-six thirty universal time: ‘This is why my backers and I sponsored your development of this ship – so that we could hijack it as a better and more flexible base of operations. But it is lonely out here, and the men were getting restless. We organized the pageant on your maiden voyage so we would have beautiful women as wives for my space pirates.” His face breaks in a rueful grin. “A bit cliché I know, but it has worked since the founding of Rome.’”

  “Stop playback. OK, Fay. Listening to it again I see we have even more questions to figure out. Jake was claiming that his backers were behind the pageant and the conference being on this trip. So that means that there is some sort of an organization behind him.”

  “Actually, there was more. He said that they were behind the development of the ship, so they were involved with Dad’s backers, too.”

  “Right, I hadn’t thought of that.�
��

  “And that makes the attempts on his life somehow an inside job. We never did find out who that waiter was, or who set up all of the ‘accidents,’” with air quotes.

  Appendix 1: Acknowledgments

  This story started as a combination of a vivid dream that was most of chapters one and two, and the push of my brother in-law Assaph Mehr and my friend Jonathan Maas. Both are active writers in their own right Jon has published 5 books and an indie movie while Assaph has two books out in an on-going series) to actually write one of my own. As I started writing this novel, I discussed it with my family and they kept asking the hard questions.

  Not hard as in difficult to answer, but hard as in they actually needed to be spelled out. So when my son Arbel asked, “How does a space economy support pirates? If they already have a ship and a base, doesn’t that mean they don’t need to be pirates?” he got me explaining how I envisioned the pirates as being similar to the Somali pirates who are acting off the east coast of Africa. They have fast ships and skilled crews, but are still taking cargos and holding ships for ransom to fund the rest of their operation. This idea was already in my head, but by asking the question he forced me to articulate it, and thus the concept is better defined in the story (and has led to the concept of a prequel story I have yet to write).

  When it came to discussing the symposium and the places where the scientist/engineers or pageant contestants come from, I had some vague ideas, but my wife, Prof. Ramit Mehr, had other questions that could be explored. What was different about each colony? How were they founded and by whom? I already knew this would affect the ethnicity of the characters, but how it would affect the personality or desires and needs came into a whole new light – admittedly this led to a week of side research about each of the colony moons or planets to understand what was there and why people would be there. She also was immensely patient with my many strange questions (what would you call a poster session where they use holography rather than posters? She helped me come up with Holoster), so for putting up with my typing and asking strange questions, I’m (as always) indebted to Ramit.