Blood Sabers

by Burbaugh, MF;

We Meet a King

  and Our Fate

  Then there were three of us. Linda and I, and a little robot holding a sword and a flag. Well, a pair of red panties on a stick really. We were the only ones left against the Blood Sabers. I told Rodel to take the ship out as soon as the GC cleared the fold. He said it didn’t matter, he’d never make it. The ship needed to stay to keep up the jammers. He’d fire two hypersonic jumpers at the last second and hope they beat the nova to the fold.

  We marched on the city. We used a few boomers and swords only, almost no power left, we knew we’d need to hope we had enough. A couple hours work and we finally entered the throne room.

  A king sat there, unafraid and unconcerned.

  He looked at us; Rodel’s robot had a good speaker for playing his infernal bagpipes, which now was a translator.

  “I take it the girl is the Bronze Goddess?” he asked.

  “I have the pleasure of being that hell spawned bitch, yes,” she said.

  “I take it you are Jake, her mate?” he asked me.

  “Yes, I am he,” I said.

  “You are, I assume, Rodel, a former First? Brother to our Goddess?” he asked, as those around him were shocked.

  “I believe that is who I am, yes,” Rodel said.

  “My Goddess made us to kill you. You were not supposed to know of us for many hundreds of years to come. Just the others, but such is destiny.” He looked around.

  “My planet is destroyed, I congratulate you.” He momentarily paused “We tried to meet her wishes, but failed. Perhaps if she hadn’t ran off to the father so damn fast the outcome could have been in her favor.” He saw looks from some of his people. “She hasn’t existed since my creation. We worshiped emptiness.” He smiled.

  “Well, all I can do now is take a few millions of you with me.” He raised his hand.

  “There is no one left but us three, Rodel, kill the jamming,” I said.

  The king’s crews scanned monitors and confirmed, nothing, nobody but one little ship in orbit.

  “Impossible! It takes months to get your big ships airborne. It’s a trick,” he said.

  “Sorry, no trick, they are all gone, just us three.”

  “You stayed? Why?” he asked.

  “Had to, to keep the idea we were still here and attacking. Yes, we know the planet is wired to blow. We are but the servants of our people.”

  “Then we shall meet our fate together.”

  I heard Rodel say, “Interesting,” as the king’s hand went down.

  Linda said, “Now,” and we sat in a bubble while we were placed in the middle of a sun being born, or dying.

  I came to inside the bubble with Rodel and Linda. We floated in space. I saw nothing anywhere close. I had no clue where we were.

  Linda said, “You were out a long time. You okay?” She sounded weak and far away.

  “I think so,” I said, as I tested muscles and joints. “You?”

  “I’m fine, minimal power again, but we’ll live a while longer.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I was out long, but so much was happening and I had to keep removing the radiation from you and Rodel. I, I just don’t know.” She sounded like she wanted to cry. “Rodel said we were moving at about three fourths light and away from the galaxy’s elliptic. He sent one word toward Camelot, ‘Alive’, and shut down.

  “We are moving away and we have nothing that can go that fast. I haven’t much power, and as you see, we are not going to pick up a lot out here.” She looked around.

  I floated to her and smiled. “We did that which needed doing, let us be happy.”

  I thought for a few hours, there was nothing else to do. “Who uses more power, you or me?” I asked Linda.

  “I do. You just siphon off mine…why? Got an idea? I have been sitting here for days and I don’t.” She was all ears.

  “Maybe. Got enough to drop the bubble and bring it back?” She nodded. “Do I have enough to bring up my sabertooth?

  “I want to drop bubble and mount the sabertooth and charge you two wide open. If we time it right I flip off him towards you and you pop the bubble back just before he gets there. He becomes a farting mule against the bubble.” I looked for her approval.

  “Um, why not just stand against the bubble sideways. I can pull it square against you. You call it to your side but it will be outside. I let the bubble go round, it gets thrown back, then just hold your hand out and it will try to come straight to be petted?” She smiled. “Less work and energy.”

  We did it her way. The sabertooth bounced out about twenty yards when Linda popped the bubble and sure enough it came headfirst when I held my hand stretched against the bubble and scratched its head. I walked to the other side of the bubble, the way we wanted to go, and held my hand. It tried to get to my hand and was against the bubble and started farting. It was soon clear it was farting at maximum to try to get to us.

  Linda started laughing but crying too. “So simple I could have done it weeks ago,” she said.

  I told her we just needed a match to get a cozy fart fire trail going. I was joking. She wasn’t. She got as close as she could and pushed the sword into the bubble and it sparked a blue spark and there was soon a constant torch going out my poor cats butt.

  I looked at her questioningly and she pointed to Rodel’s back. In his solar panel we could clearly see the flames. Power.

  Rodel sensed the power and came up enough to see what was going on, observed, laughed, and powered down.

  Linda added her pet, and by moving around, his farts lit off as well.

  She wasted enough power to bring the temp in the bubble to normal and I popped out of my suit.

  “Shall we let our wives know we live?” Linda asked, smiling mischievously.

  I rode cyclones, I sat atop tornadoes that disappeared, and I was in the middle of hurricanes and typhoons, waves so high we could see nothing as we crashed. She pointed to a wave and we crashed it in but there was no beach, just open water as she collapsed.

  Somewhere on a big GC, almost to Camelot, a woman woke in the night and screamed, “They’re alive!”

  Days later a single eight-man Destroyer headed to space with five women in it, in a direction its captain swore she heard waves crashing.

  Rodel was recharged enough to swear he was getting power from lightning going off someplace.

  We surfed almost five days. I had to waste the power to suit back up. The bio suit took care of all bodily functions and turned all excesses to energy.

  About once a week we rode monsters, but only for a day or two. I knew in my soul Aawasa was coming.

  Rodel said we actually reversed our direction sometime in the night. If nothing else we were heading toward home.

  I figured it had been several months, Rodel said more like six weeks. He was getting a weak signal; he amplified it and played it. Five girls singing, “and ah 1 ah, and ah 2 ah,” and Aawasa’s voice, “We come, my husband, we come.”

  We did small waves about once every twelve hours after that. Rodel had us dismiss our pets, with a job well done.

  Without warning a small ship shot past like a rocket but ass end first, its four wave-rider engines belching flame for all they were worth. A day after that Aawasa’s voice said, “Well lookie thar girls, I do believe we got us a passel of hitchhikers!” in some hillbilly drawl. Brigit laughed.

  They were coming up on us from behind now, slowly.

  “Linda pretended to raise the dress she didn’t have on and wiggle her leg and stuck out her thumb. “Going our way?” She giggled.

  We dropped the bubble, stuffed Rodel and us in the hatch and cycled. Linda kept all back, “We’re still frozen, give us time to thaw.” She only wasted the energy to keep the temp up during sex.

  We popped off our armor. Aawasa wrinkled her nose, then the others did too.

  “Bio suits or not, you two are ripe! Go shower!”

  We gladly obliged. We started with t
he coldest water, which felt scalding, then after a bit we brought in more and more warmth and soon there were seven of us crammed in that little four-man shower room.

  “They said you were dead, they saw the vids from the hypersonic that got out. They swore nothing in the universe could have survived that. My soul kept saying no. We were almost back, something far away kept tugging at me. For several days I felt something, then in the middle of the night it hit me! Someone was riding waves! There is only one someone whose waves I feel.” She kissed me.

  “Once I focused on it the others noticed too. I was going to hijack the GC but thought better and presenting myself to the captain. She never knew we were on board. I asked to have Camelot get us a ship for immediate departure, we had some hitchhikers needed to come home and, well, here we are.”

  “The twelve hour cycle was perfect. We changed course after one fold and realigned on it from there,” Katawasa said.

  “How far away did we get blown?” I asked.

  “Not far,” Rodel said, “about 80,000 light years. The nova actually made a fold and shoved us right through it! This may be a handy bit of knowledge for the theorists.”

  We dried off and sat down and I combed Matawasa’s hair while sipping tea. “I guess that about wraps this adventure up then.”

  Aawasa, wise beyond her years, told Linda to move her sword to the front. She did.

  “Nope, hate to say it, we are not done,” Aawasa said. “She moved the sword, the power was given to complete a mission. She still has that power, ergo the mission is not yet complete.”

  We Arrived in Camelot a full three months behind the rest. Mentally tired, but physically we were almost back to normal. I did find that Aawasa had recovered her sword.

  Mi-LL had a beautiful, small of nose and mouth, black-haired boy with pale blue skin and huge blue eyes. She was happy and said they were working on a girl now. Linda made it happen.

  Every bit of data, every scrap of information was scrutinized. We found nothing we missed. Why was the mission still on?

  A team from Earth took a GC back to the fourth planet area and sent jumpers out through every fold. Standard precautions, each new fold got four Seekers and a searcher and a jumper. Almost six months went by and we found two more ships. One an old NASA single and the second was a dead Koteck craft with a few dead A-Humans, but not long dead. A jumper brought us the news. I ran it by Rodel. He kept saying seven or eight, he didn’t remember. We knew seven were destroyed. Maybe there was an eighth?

  Five more months slipped by, a quarter of the way across the galaxy from us another Koteck planet was found, and not five jumps from it an A-Human planet, still alive. We scrambled everything we had.

  The Koteck Planet was space aware and a few ships tried to stop our little armada of six million troops and all our support gear. They lost. As we moved toward it they shot missiles and various energy robbing detonations, more like large EMP bombs. These were not the Blood Sabers; they were Koteck, and died like them, usually running away. In six days that planet was literately a burning cinder.

  We had all three of our A-Humans with us. We found the eighth planet was about twentieth century Earth level, minimal space technology, and scared as hell. Took Mi-LL a day to get them to turn on a video so we could speak. They were shocked. We weren’t Koteck or Blood Sabers. We assured them we were but poor little humans and a few of their own.

  Mi-LL handled the talks. They knew all the other A-Human planets were destroyed and they tried to hide, but the Koteck found them only recently and killed many. “They said they were coming back with more to eat our babies,” one of the leaders said.

  We told them, as it stood right now we think we had killed all the Koteck and hopefully all the Blood Sabers as well; if not, we would. We agreed to leave a bunch of jumpers and Seekers and searchers in orbits covering all their system and our Puddle Jumpers would let us know if anything came back.

  We dropped off two of our three A-Humans. Mi-LL liked Camelot and she would remain there and raise a family. She even found another wife for her husband.

  Diplomatic relations was established and we all headed to our homes. We were a few jumps away from Camelot. I woke and Linda sat there looking at me and smiled. “My husband, I have good and bad news.”

  “Good first please?” I asked.

  “I’m pregnant again,” she said, smiling tenderly.

  “Ooook, bad news?” I asked.

  “I can’t move the damn swords.” And she jumped in my arms. “Just a plane ol’ dumb blond now.”

  Aawasa was there, and said, “Now the mission is over, my husband.”

  “The good thing is now we can move the swords away from us to fix range and intensity problems.” I laughed.

  Queastra hollered from in back, “Get with it, and ah 1 ah, and ah 2 ah,” and we all cracked up.

  We returned to Camelot.

  Epilogue

  The Chief informed us that, though we may have occasional normal lives where we had no idea who we were, when needed the universe would reunite some of us to test our mettle and revive us if needed.

  A queen and king along with a sensei and his family of Earth had moved to Camelot, leaving behind a single President of a capitalist country called Earth and head of the EMM. An honest and fair government, with seers to ensure it stayed that way.

  Mars’ Queen was elected its first male President. A small planet withdrew from the coalition and went quietly its own way as promised, and a despicable communist government became a highly profitable and robust capitalist nation as did the one on the other side of its ocean. For a little while, the universe we knew was at peace.

  A defective robot played to a father and his mate, songs from the hearts of man and almost-man. Songs of praise and love and more stars were born in the heavens.

  High in the mountains a ship sat near a cave and inside two swords sat locked together, glowing fiercely. Daring any to try and move them.

  Finally, a young great, great, great, grandfather played with all his kids, and his six wives, and the kids of many courtesans, Queens all, and Aawasa said, “Well, maybe I did overdo it a bit this time,” and all laughed mightily.

  We were content.