“Now you’re being the idiot, sir,” Beta replied.
“Waaa!!!”
Hadrian stepped close and grasped the count by his lapels—at which he paused and smiled, quietly muttering, “Finally! Got my chance to grasp actual lapels! How often does that happen?”—then dragged the man even closer. “This is what you get for being so impulsive! Remember, you’re married to a … to a … a bipedal cat, for crying out loud (which you just did, by the way. Cried out loud, I mean. Whatever, where was I? Oh, right, conversation resumed). Take Beta’s advice—but she’ll only offer the link to her shopping list and the annex once you’ve restored my ship. Come now, this is the real deal here. Everyone wins!”
“Sir!” Galk pointed to a nearby wall. “A giant cat shadow! Shoot it!”
“It’s just a—” began Nina, but it was too late.
Galk unleashed his Brachinator. Greasy light lashed out from the barrel. The shadow flinched, but the wall remained strangely unaffected. “Aagh! Ineffectual! Nina Twice! Nina Twice! Kill it! Kill it!”
At that moment, having suddenly regained consciousness, Buck DeFrank leapt to his feet and rushed the table, scrabbling for the nearest handheld. He froze, staring at the screen. “Look!” he cried. “The President’s tweeted what he had for supper! And here he is picking his nose—oh, that pic goes with the tweet. Silly me.”
“What president?” Tammy asked.
“Galk! Stand down and that’s an order! Buck! Buck up, Buck, and put down that handheld! Beta, keep your finger hovering over the Send button—”
“I would, sir,” she said, “but my hand just fell off.”
“Buck, fix that!”
Licking dry lips, eyes darting back down to the handheld on the table in front of him, Buck hesitated.
“Buck!”
“Right! Hand fell off. Got it. Hand job, screw it.”
“Oh,” said Tammy, “you were just waiting for that, Hadrian, weren’t you?”
“Count! See that shadow? Your wife is just fine. Now, have we got a deal or not?”
“Oh very well. The entire dinner’s ruined anyway. The whole evening, in fact. All my godlike powers and I can’t even get this right. I wasn’t even playing that harpsichord, not for real, it was just a recording. Fluffy dangling balls? Okay, let’s do it. You win, Captain Hadrian Sawback, and curse you your infernal devious genius!”
“Excellent,” said Hadrian. “Now—after said delivery of lacy bits and whatnot—we can resume our vital journey to the Kittymeow System and thus effect galactic peace for at least thirty-seven minutes, which is better than nothing. Well done, crew. We’ve survived another inexplicable encounter with unimaginably powerful alien entities obsessed with Terran history—I mean, what’s next, Nazis? Yeesh. Not only that, we have shattered the illusion of this massive inbred civilization of omnipotent but otherwise useless toffs, or at least this one example of marital dysfunction.”
The Willful Child vanished with a pop, making the chandelier tinkle again.
“There!” said the count. “I sent your ship back into space, full-sized and all. Good riddance!”
Beta stepped forward. “And here sir is the link. Order quickly, we haven’t got much time, but displacement ensures immediate delivery after packaging, processing, and confirmation of payment.”
The count snatched up his handheld. “Oh goody! Fluffy dangling balls!”
Hadrian clapped his hands. “Perfect! Our work here is done. Okay everyone, position yourselves for displacement. Hurry, before a gaggle of Greek gods show up.”
“I thought it was Nazis?” Tammy muttered.
A moment before the Greek Nazi gods arrived, the party displaced. Whew!
Still, hold that thought!
* * *
They displaced onto a ship they’d never seen before. “Oh crap,” said Hadrian. “Tammy?”
The chicken clucked. “If I had to guess, Captain, in the very moment of our displacement there was a multiverse discombobulation perturbation event in the effectuator field of the probability matrix that initiated a peri-quantum neolabial fold inversion of parallel duality within the nontemporal modality of infinite insisteon laminate stratigraphy, said neolabial fold inversion duo-displacing two parallel landing parties in distinct multiverse manifestations in a crossover event which as you know now constitutes a space-time quantum contradictory dynamic inviting catastrophic multiverse collapse and ultimate negation of all probability variants and that would be bad.”
Hadrian scowled. “What, again?”
A technician in a strange uniform walked into the Insisteon Chamber, stopped, and stared. “Who the hell are you people?” he demanded.
“Or not,” Tammy said.
“Displacement glitch,” Hadrian said. “What ship is this?”
The man gaped.
“Who’s your captain?” Hadrian pressed.
“Uh, Lorna. Captain Lorna. This is the USS Recovery.” He tapped his comms. “Captain? Emergency situation in the Transporter Room.”
A gravelly voice replied, “Explain.”
“Uh, best if you came down here, sir. Some guy named Displacement Glitch just beamed in with a bunch of other people.”
“On my way.”
Buck DeFrank leaned close to Hadrian. “Captain,” he whispered, eyes wild, “he just called you Displacement Glitch.”
“Yes, Buck.”
“Well? Is that your real name? I mean, I get it. Kinda sucks, as far as names go. What were your parents thinking?”
Hadrian patted the chief engineer on the shoulder. “It’s all right, Buck. It’s best we maintain aliases in this alternate universe.”
“Another alternate universe!”
“I know. There’s like, dozens of them.”
Buck looked around. “It’s like … like a mirror of our own universe, only different. Twisted, deformed, uglier.” He snapped his fingers. “I know, we can call this the Morning After Universe!”
The room’s door swished back, and in strode the captain in a resplendent blue uniform with gold braids.
“I knew it!” cried Buck, stepping forward with an outthrust hand. “You must be the captain! And this is the USS Love Boat! Oh man, I always wanted—”
“Buck!”
The engineer turned with a delighted expression. “This is going to be great!”
Hadrian shrugged apologetically and said to the captain, “Please excuse my chief engineer. He’s in opiate La La Land. I’m Captain Hadrian Sawback of the AFS Willful Child and it seems that we have displaced to the wrong ship. Rather, wrong ship, wrong universe, wrong everything.”
Steely eyes studied Hadrian. “I see.”
“Yes, well, isn’t this awkward! Tammy!”
The chicken looked up. “Captain?”
“Can you reconfigure the Insisteon oxyom insinuator to reverse the peri-quantum neolabial fold inversion and get us back to our universe?”
“Can I what? I just made that shit up!” The chicken flapped its wings. “I don’t know what the fuck happened! Stop looking at me!”
Captain Lorna raised a finger. “One moment, please. Let’s set aside the fact that you just had an argument with your pet chicken. I believe I may have an explanation. But in order to properly explain, we need to go to Engineering.” The door behind him swished open again and in strode six security officers with weapons out. “Ah,” said Lorna, “our escort.” He smiled winningly at Hadrian. “You’ll have to forgive my paranoia, Captain Sawback. We’re at war with the Radulak at the moment.”
“Clearly,” said Beta, “in this universe the Kittymeow Accords failed.”
Frowning, Hadrian said, “Captain, this isn’t necessary. I mean, do we look like Radulak?”
“Well,” said Lorna, “that’s the problem, isn’t it? Radulak look different just about every week in these here parts. I mean, sometimes they look like sunburnt Italians and then wham! Hulking brutes with Rasta hair and bad teeth—and that’s their women! And then it’s Arlo from Plane
t of the Apes, with a few of them having four nostrils—I mean, what’s that about anyway?” He shrugged. “Before you know it, they’ll look just like you and me, thanks to radical surgical alteration. Planting good-looking sleeper agents on our ships!”
“Mhmm,” mused Hadrian. “Actually, four nostrils make sense since the Radulak are Phlegmians.”
“Are what?”
“You know, communicating via saliva and mucus … no? Oh.”
“Think I’ll stick with Arlo, thank you. Anyway, no need to be unduly alarmed by my security team. We only keep them on our ships—all our covert Away missions that secretly transport us onto packed Radulak warships are enacted by the commanding officer and his or her XO and no one else, to make things more sporting.”
They set off down corridors and such. Hadrian walked at Lorna’s side. He nodded and said, “Yeah, I get that. I mean, what’s the point of being in charge of everything if we can’t idiotically leave everything we’re supposed to be in charge of and head off gallivanting in insanely hostile alien environments?”
“Precisely. Attrition rate’s hell, though.”
“Sure, but for some of us, it’s like we signed a contract that guarantees we’ll be back next week, ready to fling ourselves into the next solo adventure in insanely hostile alien environments.”
“Keeps us famous, too, doesn’t it?”
Hadrian made a modest gesture. “The reason I do all that has nothing to do with fame, Captain Lorna. No. I made a vow that no one on my ship dies. Period.”
“Really? I’m impressed. I mean, they drop like flies on my ship. Ah, here we are! Follow me!”
Lorna led everyone into a large chamber, the far end of which was glassed in. Inside the huge glass case was a massive brownish lump with electrodes attached to it via giant alligator clips.
An engineer standing near a control station turned and nodded. “Captain Lorna! I see we have guests! Are you sure they aren’t Radulak?”
“Of course not,” Lorna replied, “but I’m okay with revealing all our secrets anyway, because I’m just a reckless kind of guy. Now, do explain to our foreign friends here everything about our prototype FTL drive.”
“Of course!” The engineer walked toward the glass case. “This, friends, is the Spud Drive. And yes, it is indeed a giant potato. But not your normal potato. No, it’s a space potato. The exploratory mission known as Briar Patch One stumbled upon thousands of these in the Oort cloud of a modest red dwarf star—at first they were thought to be simple asteroids until a closer scan revealed that they were life-forms. That’s right. They were potatoes, but not potatoes as we know them.” He began pacing in front of the glass case. “Further experimentation with a potato brought on board the survey vessel revealed that when insanely powerful electrodes are attached to the eyes of the potato—”
“Hang on,” Hadrian interjected. “What kind of experiments on a potato involve attaching giant electrodes to them?”
“Well, they didn’t have a big enough microwave oven. Anyway, where was I? Oh right. Giant electrodes attached to the eyes. Throw the Big Switch and voilà! Instantaneous travel to anywhere in the galaxy! And maybe not just the galaxy! But any galaxy! And maybe not just any galaxy, but any of an infinite number of universes!”
Beta said, “Fascinating. By extension, then, sir, such a potato could be cut into french fries and if one such fry was subsequently inserted into one’s anus, one could then effect instantaneous travel for the butt-charged person in question, correct?”
“Well, only if they had alligator clips up their butts! Ha ha!”
“Which I have,” Beta replied. The robot turned to Hadrian. “Sir, I could return to our universe in such a manner, meaning at least one of us will survive and be able to resume a normal life. Too bad about the rest of you, though.”
Ignoring Beta, Hadrian said, “Captain Lorna, what has all this got to do with our appearing here on your ship?”
“Ah!” the engineer cried. “Captain Lorna, if I may?”
“Of course, Chief Whatever-Your-Name-Is.”
“Thank you, sir. And sir, you not knowing my name makes me think I’m not long for this world! Ha ha!”
“Yes, just so. Carry on.”
The engineer licked his lips and tugged at his collar, his pale forehead suddenly beaded with sweat. “Right. Uh, oh, right. You see, Captain From Some Other Universe, zapping the potato has some side effects. Most are known to us. For example, each engagement of the Spud Drive effectively bakes the subject potato, which is great for Roast Beef nights in the mess but that required expanding the Larder Units to accommodate extra vats of sour cream and chives and bacon bits, and also demanded that we keep on board as many as fifty space potatoes at any one time, which is why the USS Recovery is twice the size of any other Federation vessel.”
“You were saying about unknown side effects?” Hadrian asked.
“And that’s just it! They’re unknown!” He threw up his hands. “Could be anything! Including inadvertent multiverse inversion effects.”
“And did you just use up a potato fifteen minutes ago?”
“Why yes! We did!”
“Excuse me,” said Hadrian, “while I talk to my pet chicken.”
The doors opened again and in stomped a piebald cow with a heavy leather collar around its neck from which depended a big iron bell. Captain Lorna turned. “Ah! Good timing! This is my first officer, Daisy. As you can see, she’s a Cowian, one of the very few prey species to have attained sentience.” He patted Daisy on the shoulder. “Naturally, her species possesses a unique perspective on all matters of space exploration. Isn’t that true, Daisy?”
“I think we should run away,” the cow replied. “Who are these strangers? I don’t like strangers. Yes indeed, Captain, we should definitely run away.” The cow swung round, bell clanging, and ran through the doorway into the corridor. The sound of the bell dwindled rapidly.
Lorna frowned. “Daisy does that a lot, I’m afraid.”
Hadrian held up a hand. “I was about to talk with my pet chicken. A moment, please.”
“Of course! Go to it! I mean, sure, it’s ridiculous you have a chicken as an officer, hah hah! Oh and by the way, no one light a match any time in the next fifteen minutes. Daisy’s one helluva methane producer.”
“Ah yes,” said Hadrian. “I’d noticed. Buck! Put away that lighter!”
“Sorry sir. It’s what I do in the head, right? After a real stinker, I mean. Or,” he added with a frown, “in the kitchen, or living room, or worst of all, the shuttle! Holy crap I’ve curled the plastic at times let me tell you!”
Gesturing Tammy over to one side of the room, Hadrian lowered his voice. “Listen, we’ve got to get off this ship and back to our own universe.”
“The obvious solution is to displace the instant they use their Spud Drive again.”
“Displace to where?”
“Does it matter?”
“I think it might. And how do we even know we’ll end up back home?”
“Granted, the odds are infinitesimally small given the multiverse multiplicity exponential trigger effect that accompanies the passing of every single nanosecond in this time-space continuum. But I say hey! Let’s roll the dice and see what happens!”
“You’re not taking this seriously, Tammy. I mean, there’s something seriously wrong with these people.”
“You mean the cow first officer?”
“No. All those Roast Beef nights in the mess. Of course I mean the cow, you half-plucked holo-widget. But now that you mention it, does that cow even know it’s eating cow meat on Roast Beef nights?”
“Well,” mused Tammy, “it was my thought that they keep Daisy around in case they run out. You know, supper on the hoof and all that.”
Daisy took this moment to return to the room. “Ah! No longer strangers! What a relief!” The Cowian clopped up to Hadrian. “I understand the standard human greeting of shaking hands but as you can see, I cannot comply. However, you
are welcome to tweak my teat. Don’t worry too much if you squirt some milk onto the floor. We have resident cats on board for just that occurrence.”
Hadrian turned to Tammy. “Please, get us out of here!”
“Now now,” said Captain Lorna, “it’s starting to look like you disapprove of our universe. Not very neighborly of you. I’ll have you know that our Federation of Planets, being in an eternal state of war, has done away with all the irritants people like you and me find so … irritating. You know, things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, privacy, tolerance, inalienable rights to security, happiness and freedom from persecution. That’s right, all those obstacles designed to prevent us from being assholes and where’s the fun in that?” He smiled. “So you see? This universe isn’t so bad, is it?”
Nodding, Hadrian said, “Of course. The old Always-at-War trick. Sure. I get it. That nefarious slippery slope of fucking over everyone in the name of security. Inciting wave after wave of fear and paranoia in your citizens, backing them up against the wall until everyone who looks or talks different is the enemy. It’s a time-tested ploy entirely dependent on a subverted education system that either ignores history or revises it.”
“You are now talking politics,” said Daisy. “I’m frightened. I’m going to run away.”
They watched the Cowian flee the room again.
Another officer arrived. “Captain! We’re in sight of the Radulak Mother Ship, where resides the new Holy Standard-Bearer Wearing So Much Armor He Can Barely Move, making him probably the easiest Radulak to kill that ever existed. The last one I did in with a spoon, for crying out loud. Anyway, no doubt he’s surrounded by a thousand elite Radulak warriors, sir. Accordingly, I suggest you and I beam over in an attempt to kill the new Standard-Bearer, not to mention the ship’s Prophet Captain Who Can Barely Talk.”
“Excellent plan! Oh, Captain Sawback, this is my Special Ops officer, Bernard Burnthemall.”
As Hadrian made to speak, Lorna quickly stepped close and whispered, “Don’t say a thing about her first name, got it? I mean, yeah, it’s weird, a woman named Bernard. But we never mention it, any of us, okay?”
The Search for Spark Page 4