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  “Slight edge?” complained Ramirez. “They’re going to plough through us like an eighteen wheeler running over a gnat. We’re not even going to slow them down.”

  “We have to try,” said Stiers. “Fleet chose us because we’re the best.”

  “Or the least regarded,” suggested Ogden.

  “In the movies the good guys always win,” said Ramirez.

  “Have a little faith, people,” said Stiers. “They may be big and bad but we have right on our side.”

  “Sure, maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Gowan. “Maybe they’re allergic to Hispanics.”

  “Or maybe pussy scares them off,” Ramirez retorted. “Drop your drawers, Gowan. Show them what they may fear most.”

  “You drop your own,” she snapped back. “Maybe they don’t fight so well when they’re rolling about laughing.”

  “Give me some facts and figures here and stop arguing. Where do we make contact and how long have we got?” asked Stiers.

  “Not long,” said Ramirez.

  “A year of training and rehearsal and that is your best estimate?” complained Ogden. “Not long?”

  “Okay. Not as long as we had before all this talk,” said Ramirez.

  Ogden sighed and raised his eyes but Gowan was a little more precise – and only a little more. “Very soon,” she said.

  “Let’s run some pre-checks then,” said Stiers. “Make sure weapons are unlocked and ready to fire. Ensure our recording and transmitting equipment is functioning and on line. Make certain all sensors and scanners are recording and sending their data to Fleet.”

  “My bowels have suddenly gone weak,” said Ramirez.

  “No time for that crap,” said Stiers.

  “I doubt it will matter when we are all atoms,” said Ogden. “One atom, I would imagine, is much like another.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Ramirez. “I’ll hold it all together.”

  “You smell bad enough without crapping your britches,” muttered Gowan.

  “I heard that. Believe me, the only comfort I take from dying is that you’ll be right along there with me.”

  “If you guys focussed instead of arguing we might survive this,” said the Captain. “Berate them, Ogden. You’re second in command.”

  “Behave, children,” said the Englishman. “Your Captain needs his thinking time planning a way out of this dilemma.”

  “The way out is back there,” said Ramirez, sticking a thumb in the direction of Earth.

  Gowan had been studying her computers, working out exactly what the anomaly represented and how fast it was travelling. She was so unhappy with the result she double checked.

  “About two minutes till contact,” she said and her voice choked.

  “Ramirez, take over third weapons control,” said Stiers. “Give it another minute, Gowan, in case that thing changes direction then take the second weapons control. Ogden will remain at tactical and first weapons and I’ll just relax here and smoke a cigar. After all, I did my bit getting you here.”

  Ogden thought that with Stiers you were never really aware of whether or not he was joking. However, the Captain had taken out and lit a small cheroot, contrary to standing orders, but far from relaxing had taken a forward leaning position at navigation controls. The front viewscreen showed nothing but stars and darkness. Ogden thought, who needs cloaking devices? Just paint your ship black. He had no idea whether or not the aliens were capable of cloaking their ship but sensors indicated it was likely enough. Cloaking made mass hard to register. The bigger the ship, the more light was bent and that took energy. His own small craft was not so equipped – nor were any others in the fleet. All their energy generating capability was focussed on the weaponry. Despite the basic chameleon cells that covered their hide, cloaking devices had never been perfected except for a few technical-minded geeks in Japan who had co-operated in developing personal cloaking devices in order to spend illicit time in female – and sometimes male – changing rooms at local schools.

  One individual had managed to sneak into his teenage neighbour’s room where he was able to enjoy her sexual athletics with her boyfriend as much as they did. It was only when his batteries began to lose their charge and when his errant sex organ stuck out from behind the cloak that he – or rather it – was discovered. The sight of a floating detached stiffy was too much for the girl who saw it as the ghost of her late abusive father. She needed two years in therapy while the voyeur required nineteen stitches to the groin area after the boyfriend had finished with him.

  So without the complexity of a cloaking device, the small Earth craft was in pursuit of unknown dangers and foregone death. Ramirez, who had often tried to acquire one of the Japanese personal cloakers, moved to the third weapons display which gave him control of the weapons at the rear of the craft. He expected to see little action from there but it was nice to see the dwindling Earth and think of his family.

  Ogden had control of the forwards weapons array, focussing his attention on the central weapons while Gowan had those either side. Control of the ship was now in the control of the Captain who was expecting a chucking about worse than any breaking-in-a-bronco ride he had ever endured in Texas. Stiers was transfixed by duty and to protect the lifestyle he loved, would have been the first off the boat at Okinawa had he been born then. He was Captain and thereby charged with the duty of protecting those under his command, but the trouble was he had no idea how. When sure and certain death looms dark as a moonless, icy, winter night, there seems little to protect against it. Ogden considered that for an American, Stiers was quite noble. Not regal in bearing but willing to lay down his life for what he believed in. Ogden had little regard for himself or his safety. He considered the not inconsiderable bulk of him had died with the passing of his wife. He would do what he could to protect his shipmates and save Earth but hope and faith were not large parts of his makeup. He pondered the afterlife and wondered if it existed. He would like to see his wife again but not as two old fogies on the cusp of their extinction. Instead he desired to meet her again when she was young and relive the life he had so much enjoyed.

  “This is it, folks,” said Gowan. “We’re almost there.”

  “Is there a chance you could be a tad less generalised?” asked Ogden.

  “Generalised,” scoffed Ramirez. “Is that your word for sex, Ogden? Because if so, I’d like to generalise her myself, and trust me, I don’t have a stomach to get in the way.”

  “Yeah,” said Gowan. “You don’t have a dick to get in the way either.”

  “I am pierced,” said Ramirez with a mock laugh.

  “It’s more than any woman would be,” said Gowan. She turned back to her displays. “Fewer than 20 seconds, Ogden. No, hang on, it’s slowed slightly. They may have seen us.”

  “They want to make sure they swat us on the way through,” suggested Ramirez. “I’d hate for them to miss us.”

  “They won’t,” said Stiers.

  “We now have thirteen seconds,” said Gowan after recalculating. “Just long enough for Ramirez to have sex with himself – as usual.”

  “Pie in the sky, no time to reply,” he responded. “Oh, ring my bell, it’s the thing from Hell.”

  The black of the sky changed colour slightly as a massive shape appeared in front of them. “Sensors all on line and recording,” said Gowan.

  “Another Defender class ship is penetrating space ahead of us,” said Ogden. “I do not understand why.”

  “Identify it,” said the Captain.

  “Too late,” said Ogden. “It passed inside the cloak.”

  The massive shape filled their viewscreen as it materialised, still travelling fast. It was only possible to see a tiny portion of the hull of the vessel as it decloaked without pausing. They had time to make out bristling weapons arrays and not much else before it was upon them, still in the decloaking stage. A giant blackness filled their screens even as they brought their futile armaments to bear. Their generators whi
ned to full capacity and beyond but they managed to fire off a few disruptive shots only before the cloaking field struck their small craft in a burst of fire and energy. Their tiny ship disappeared in a tumbling mass of heat and light as they span over and over and the craft,s gravity compensators surrendered to their fate.

  Ramirez managed the last words. “We’re dead,” he said and would have appreciated the rhyme. The craft vanished in a cloak of blackness where the alien ship now occupied that space.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Silence pervaded the blackness which was deeper than space and even more silent. The huge alien ship had noticed a destabilising shock from its decloaking mechanism and the commander had ordered a full halt by reversing engines while any damage was investigated. To the aliens, such an event was even more rare than a tail on a Supresian house cat, which never had tails. Supresian house cats, which were nothing like Earth cats except for their whiskers, would only eat food which they hunted – although many of the domesticated variety limited their hunting to conveniently placed food dishes. Supresian anthropologian Chargrin Darfurgel had determined the cats had suffered in prehistory by being caught by their long tails then eaten until evolution had abandoned the long devices. The subsequent eventual loss of tails affected the creatures by ruining their mating method whereby the female would strut past the male, tail held high, giving the Tom a brief aroma of heaven. As part of their evolution, the females learned to attract males by finding them little gifts like deceased insects or maybe I-Pads.

  Alarms sounded throughout the gigantic vessel while beings with many arms and legs scurried about trying to find the source of their problems. All the onboard lights had extinguished and most of this scurrying was done in the dark resulting in much falling over so many feet. But the darkness was even deeper and more silent on board the small craft that was the cause of their trouble.

  Four bodies lay at awkward angles in various parts of the craft while the emergency systems automatically attempted to restore some kind of gravity to a grave situation. The craft was now level to the plane of Earth with Ramirez floating high on the ceiling. The other three had not moved from the floor. If they were breathing at all, it was not immediately visible. Their chests did not rise and fall although Gowan’s was still as majestic. Simultaneously, as gravity returned, all four breathed in heavily and their personal human systems began to function. Ramirez dropped to the deck with a loud thud and an expression of pain with a curse or two thrown in as his head made contact with the floor. They shook themselves into a state of awareness as Ramirez complained, “I’ve bashed my head.”

  “Which one?” asked Gowan.

  “This one,” he said, pointing.

  “Oh, the important one.”

  “Are we still alive?” he asked nobody in particular. “And where’s that alien ship that bashed us?”

  “I don’t think it bashed us,” said Ogden who looked quite pale. “I believe their decloaking device did whatever damage it has to us.”

  “Find that ship,” said Stiers. “Let’s have a damage assessment, and talk to Fleet and tell them we weren’t made welcome.”

  Gowan had been establishing their position and seemed puzzled. “We are not where we were,” she said. “None of the computer charts line up and Earth and the Moon are further along in their orbit round the sun.”

  “How much further?” asked Stiers while Ogden checked her figures and Ramirez checked her other figure.

  “About a week maybe,” she said uncertainly.

  “A week?”

  “We are now well outside the moon’s orbit,” she said. “I don’t know exactly where we are. I can’t establish communications with Fleet.”

  “We can’t have been floating here for a week,” said Stiers. “They would have located us by now.”

  “Unless they are all dead,” suggested Ramirez. “I’m hungry enough for it to have been a week.”

  “Are you thinking about your stomach?” Ogden asked him.

  “Makes a change from thinking about his other organ,” said Gowan.

  “He is quite a boy,” sighed Ogden.

  “Nope. He just wishes he was.”

  Ramirez said, “Hold on tight, the lady’s right. I can’t tell where we are either. Everything has changed. I can’t even see that hulking great ship. And there is no sign of any of the fleet.”

  “There’s a first,” said Ogden. “I agree with Ramirez. Wherever we are is not where we should be.”

  “Just do a comparison check with the stars,” said Stiers. “That will locate us. Meanwhile I’m setting a course for Earth so we can discover what is happening with the war.”

  “I think we lost it,” said Ramirez. “If we have been out here for a week and nobody has come looking for us, I think we can assume life on Earth will mostly comprise large lobster-like insects.”

  Ogden said, “Lobsters are closely related to cockroaches. A chap I once knew planned to breed them and compress their meat into fake lobster tail shapes called desert lobster.”

  “I doubt they would have sold,” said Gowan. “The idea sounds preposterous.”

  “At that time there were plenty of cockroaches and few lobsters,” explained Ogden.

  “Well our home planet is probably rife with them now – ten foot tall ones. If we could farm them in place of cattle that would bring down the price of lobsters,” said Ramirez. “Damn. All this talk of food is making my stomach rumble.”

  “Thank the Lord for that,” said Gowan. “I was just about to run a diagnostic check on the engines.”

  “Talking about diagnostics,” said Ramirez. “When did you last receive a full medical check? Did they find any male parts?”

  “About the same number they found on you I expect.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. You’d be much fitter if you had to lift my equipment out of bed every morning.”

  “Why don’t you two get married,” snapped Stiers. “Here we are, who the hell knows where, and you two are bickering over who burned the toast.”

  “Aye, Captain,” said Gowan. “Lucky I can do two things at once.”

  “Yeah, pick your nose and break wind,” muttered Ramirez but a scowl from Stiers focussed him back on his work.

  Several minutes of quiet followed as the Captain steered the craft back towards Earth. Finally Gowan said, “The only star configurations that make sense are if we are in May 1994.”

  “How does that make sense?” wailed Ramirez. “You are a century out.”

  “It is obvious our instrumentation has taken a battering,” said Stiers. “Run a thorough diagnostics now before we have to go back into battle. I don’t want to face the aliens again with our computers playing Hungry Henry.”

  “I have been running surface diagnostics,” said Ogden. “I concur, Captain, but I think the problem may be deeper within the atomic core of the central computer system. As you know, we write everything on atoms but the whole system has received a thorough shaking.”

  “The word is pronounced thoro, not thorrer,” said Stiers.

  “I am speaking the King’s English,” said Ogden.

  “Get used to the fact that eighty million of you speak it that way, and almost half a billion of us speak it my way.”

  “Well, I won’t apologise for doing it correctly,” said Ogden sniffily.

  “Can anybody smell toast burning?” asked Ramirez of nobody. “Anyway, I agree with Miss Prim and Proper here. Our graphs show us a hundred years in the past. We are going to need some serious diagnostics to put this right.”

  “Get on with it then,” said Stiers. “I’m driving the boat.”

  “Let’s round ‘em up and get ‘em branded,” said Gowan cheekily and the Captain smiled to himself.

  A less miffed Ogden said, “The problem may be in the routines. The computer core seems undamaged. I’ll run more tests.” He glanced at the Captain. “I’ll be sure to be thoro.”

  “See, Ogden,” said Stiers. “You can speak English if you try.
How can you make thoro rhyme with horror?”

  “How can you say precipitation instead of rain?” mumbled Ogden, who was not generally given to mumbling.

  “Listen in, people,” said Stiers. “I am taking us towards Earth but at a slow pace until we can confirm our systems are in order. Stop whatever you’re doing, Ramirez, and check our weapons systems are functioning. I don’t want to come up against the thing again with our chambers empty.”

  “Sure, Captain.”

  “How is that computer check coming, Ogden.?”

  “Still running diagnostics on the core. About two more minutes, Captain.”

  “What about you, Gowan. How are those systems looking?”

  “They are still looking like we’re in 1994,” she said. “Mid May as far as I can guess.”

  “Don’t get your panties knotted, but you do know that can’t be the case,” said Ramirez. “Time travel forwards is mostly theory and time travel backwards is impossible. It’s basic physics.”

  “It is theoretical physics,” corrected Ogden. “That just means we have not yet figured our how.”

  “I do not intend to miss this battle by the best part of a hundred years,” said Stiers. “Somebody make sense of these figures. Check your figure again, Gowan.”

  “I’ll check her figure for you if you like, Captain,” offered Ramirez. “It looks about 34-24-36 from here.”

  “Just about the perfect form,” commented Ogden.

  “You do think about sex, Paunchy,” said Ramirez. “And here I was putting you down as a Viag-Ufferin addict. One blue and pink pill and an hour of poking holes in the sheets.”

  “Unlike your goodself, my mind does consider things other than sex,” said Ogden.

  “Has anybody yet been able to communicate with Fleet?” asked the Captain and tilted his cowboy hat back even further – a sign of deep thinking. A chorus of noes greeted this and he sighed. “Me neither. Our communications seem fine but I must consider they have been destroyed.”

  “All of them?” asked Gowan.

  “It can’t be that,” said Stiers. “There are too many for them all to have been lost this soon.”