Outcast

by Guerin Zand

  Outcast

  A Spaceman’s Story

  Guerin Zand

  Outcast Copyright © 2018 by Guerin Zand. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by Keith A. Johnston

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Guerin Zand

  Website: guerinzand.wordpress.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/guerin.zand.5

  Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/author/show/16948548.Guerin_Zand

  Contents

  Introduction

  Don’t Blame Me

  Chapter 1

  The Dread Space Pirate Roberts

  Chapter 2

  The Erandisi Affair

  Chapter 3

  Another Assignment

  Chapter 4

  Catching Up with Friends

  Chapter 5

  The Welcome Home Dinner

  Chapter 6

  Another One of Julie’s Lectures

  Chapter 7

  The Plan

  Chapter 8

  Lunch with Stella

  Chapter 9

  It’s a Date

  Chapter 10

  A Few Drinks at the Earth Bar

  Chapter 11

  The Answer to the Ultimate Question

  Chapter 12

  The Mission Briefing

  Chapter 13

  Go Time

  Chapter 14

  The Negotiations

  Chapter 15

  Gamma

  Chapter 16

  A Captain’s Work is Never Done

  Chapter 17

  The Love Boat

  Chapter 18

  The Message

  Chapter 19

  What’s A Pirate to Do?

  Chapter 20

  Lihwa

  Chapter 21

  Aliens Showing Off

  Chapter 22

  Dinner with the Parents

  Chapter 23

  A Secret Assignment

  Chapter 24

  Time to Think

  Chapter 25

  Planning the Future

  Chapter 26

  A Short Visit Home

  Chapter 27

  The Rangers

  Chapter 28

  Ryvius

  Chapter 29

  The Reunion

  Chapter 30

  Back to Work

  Chapter 31

  Trinix

  Chapter 32

  Just Another Stupid Plan

  Chapter 33

  Taes

  Chapter 34

  This Never Happened to Captain Kirk

  Chapter 35

  Mission Accomplished

  Chapter 36

  The Inquisition

  Chapter 37

  The Little Dragon Slayer

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author Notes

  Introduction

  Don’t Blame Me

  I was alone. There were other crew members on my ship, but they would come and go over the centuries. This little ship was the only home I had known for a long time. I would occasionally spend time on the surface of the many different planets we visited, but I always returned to my ship. That is where I really lived. I spent a lot of time alone letting my mind wander, thinking many different thoughts. Back when I was a normal human and lived a simple human life on Earth, I would often get lost in thought when I’d walk the dogs or take a long ride on my motorcycle. Now I had all the time in the world to let my mind drift in circles on whatever subject caught my attention.

  I was sitting back one day, enjoying a tasty beverage and a good soak in my tub, and my mind wandered to the subject of God. Yes, I believe in God. I just can’t define God. To me, that makes perfect sense. If I understood God well enough to define Him, then in my way of thinking, I would be God. That obviously wasn’t the case. In one of my earlier books, I said maybe I’d write a whole book on the subject of God. I probably don’t have enough material for that, so I’ll try and boil all of what I know and believe in this one chapter.

  Although I believe in God, I don’t believe in religion. My distrust of religion came to me at a very young age. I was raised to be a good Catholic boy. There were too many inconsistencies for even a small child to accept though. We were taught if we didn’t believe in what we were being taught we could never go to Heaven. That only left Hell from what I had learned. Purgatory isn’t really a Catholic thing. How could this good God send all the other people, who weren’t raised Catholic, straight to Hell? It was no fault of their own. They didn’t choose where they were born or what their parents believed. Of course, when I asked these sorts of questions, I was told that I shouldn’t think that way. If a nun was nearby, I would receive a good swat with a hardwood ruler on the knuckles. Don’t get me started on nuns!

  Maybe a lot of people would have just concluded that the idea of God was bullshit, but not me. See, I looked around and saw a lot of really nice stuff. I was sure man hadn’t made this world, this universe, or puppies. If it was all simple random chance, then why was there an order to it? An order we studied and tried so hard to understand. The more we understood about this order, the more we became capable of. It was obvious to me there was more to the universe than one big accident. As I often liked to ask the “oh so smart” physicists of the day, the ones who liked to try and defend this thing called the Big Bang theory, “What went bang if there was nothing?” Now we can talk about the multiverse which of course only leads to a lot more questions in more or less a recursive loop. That’s because we restrict our scientific thinking to the boundaries of our physical reality. Reality is one of those things we made up to describe what we can understand, which as we all know, is limited.

  This led me to conclude that these uber-intelligent scientists, that claimed to be atheists, were just part of another religion, complete with their own ridiculous dogma. Here’s a news flash. Atheism is a religion! As with any other religion, the fundamental belief of their religion was, they’re right and everyone else is wrong. The religions that believed in God, or gods, all claimed that God, or gods, had told them this or told them that. I figured God must be a pretty busy guy just trying to make everything work. He probably didn’t have time for small talk. This also applied to prayer. I could barely keep up with my emails. I could only imagine how God felt about all those prayers. He probably had a really good spam filter.

  I so wanted a puppy when I was a little boy that I would pray every Sunday to God for a puppy. I would spend the entire church service praying for this, Sunday after Sunday. It wasn’t long before I came to the realization that I probably shouldn’t be bothering God about this. Like I said, He probably had some real important shit on His mind. That’s when I decided I should probably spend the time I was wasting on this silly prayer bothering my parents instead. It took a while, but I finally got that puppy. I was happy, and I bet God was happy I stopped bothering Him.

  The other problem God probably had with people was that we blamed him for everything that was wrong, or we perceived as wrong in the universe. To me, it was obvious that the things that were wrong were of our own making. Instead of praying to God to fix these things, or blaming God for our problems, we should instead fix them. I figured, just like my own puppy dilemma, people would be better off fixing their problems and let God worry about the
really important stuff. I think if God had something He would like to say to us all it would probably be something simple like, “DON’T BLAME ME.”

  I want to apologize really quick to the few women who may be reading this. I know what you’re thinking. How do you know God is a He and not a She? The simple answer is I don’t. I just refer to God as a male because it’s simpler than constantly writing He, or She, and referring to God as an It just seems a bit rude to me. I’m also sort of hoping God is male, maybe I’m even praying for that a bit. The truth is, I believe God is probably a female. If that’s the case, that would explain why I’m so truly fucked!

  One of those things people always blamed God for was the death of a loved one, especially a child. How could God let that happen? The child had its entire life to look forward to. That’s where they were wrong. Let me try to explain this as simply as I can. It’s the living that are the ones who suffered a loss, not the person who died. We all live forever. Don’t get confused by that term. Forever is not a mathematical term. Forever is not another way of saying an infinite amount of time, or eternity. Your lifetime is the measure of forever. A child that dies at the age of one lived forever just as much as an adult that dies at the age of one hundred. When you tell a three-year-old that they will have to wait until their next birthday for something, they’ll most probably respond with something like this, “But that’s like forever!” Out of the mouth of babes, right?

  As you grow older your forever consists of more time. I had this explained to me in junior high by a teacher in some class. She wasn’t a physics teacher, I think she taught English, but what she did was define the concept of relativity very simply. For that three-year-old, one year is a third of forever. For a forty-year-old, it is only a fortieth of forever. That’s why as we grow older, time seems to pass faster. Relative to our forever, it actually does. So when a small child dies, don’t wonder what they missed out on, they didn’t miss anything. They lived forever just like all the rest of us. What you should ask is did they have a good life, a good forever?

  After the last few centuries traveling the universe, I also realized that it wasn’t just humans that were the problem. I guess I gave us humans too much credit. Back before I knew anything about space travel, I still believed there were other intelligent beings out there. I thought God probably just made traveling between the different star systems really difficult to figure out so immature races would be left alone until they grew up and got past being idiots. Like little children, God kept us from wandering too far from home and getting into real trouble. There was a movie in the late twentieth century, Contact, which seemed to agree with what I believed. I thought when we finally made it out to meet other races it would be a peaceful and enlightening experience. As is often the case, I was wrong.

  When I was first introduced to the Collective I thought I might be correct. They were harmless enough, even if they were really annoying at times. The annoying part was especially true of the one race called the Bree. From what I learned, they were the oldest known race and pretty much at the top of the food chain. To a more superstitious type, these aliens might even be considered as gods. Their powers and abilities were beyond anything I could understand, but I was pretty sure they weren’t gods. The fact that they had the time to annoy me was proof enough of that.

  The Collective did believe they were special. Perhaps even chosen by God to watch after the universe and the younger developing races. Caretakers maybe, but if that was the case, they most probably belonged to a union. It was little things that made me think of them that way.

  When I was a young engineer working for McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis, Mo., I learned about unions and the idiocy behind them. I’ll give you only one simple example of this idiocy and then show you how I think it relates to the Collective, and the race known as the Bree in particular.

  In America, we had this ridiculous thing called Daylight Savings Time. In the spring we would set our clocks ahead one hour, and in the fall, we’d set them back an hour. Don’t ask me to explain why. It has nothing to do with what I’m trying to say.

  Anyways, at one of these times when we changed the time by an hour, I was working as an engineer. The clock on the wall in our office, right over my desk, was wrong and needed to be corrected for the time change. My boss said the electrician would come by and fix that issue and I should just leave it alone. This was in the 1980’s. The electric clock on the wall had a little shaft extending from the bottom with a little wheel at the end of that shaft. Any five-year-old idiot would know how to adjust the time on this analog clock. Why did we have to wait for a union master electrician, or an apprentice, to do what could be accomplished in the time it took to talk about it?

  More than a few weeks passed, and this clock was still wrong. This was really starting to bother me. I was an early worker and usually one of the first ones in the office. Finally, one morning I’d had enough of this stupidity. I reached up, no real physical effort required, and put the little wheel at the end of the shaft between my fingers. I turned the little wheel and fixed the problem myself. It was only a few days later the union master electrician came to our office, with an underling, and you would have thought I raped his five-year-old daughter.

  How many union electricians does it take to set the correct time on a clock? As many as they can get the company to pay for!

  “Who changed the time on this clock?” The master electrician demanded to know in a not so pleasant voice. “According to my paperwork right here in my hands,” He waived his papers around high above his head, so we could see he was not lying about having paperwork. “this clock was not serviced by any authorized electrician.”

  There was this look of fear on my boss’ face that I couldn’t understand. Since the clock was over my desk, this little confrontation was happening right in front of me. I didn’t like the way this asshole was talking to my boss, so I spoke up.

  “I did. What’s your fucking problem?” If that asshole was going to come into our office and think he could yell at us, I was going to show him what I thought of him.

  “Guerin, what have you done?” My boss asked. Again, I didn’t just rape a five-year-old. What was the big deal?

  “Joe, I simply fixed the clock that has been wrong for almost a month. People have been late to meetings. It was no big deal. I’ve been setting the correct time on clocks since I was a small child. See,” I displayed the analog wristwatch I was wearing to my boss and the rather rude electrician. “I even have the correct time on my watch. It’s not exactly rocket science.”

  Well, this was obviously far worse than raping a five-year-old it turned out. My boss and I were summoned in front of representatives from the union and management. In fact, the vice-president of the division I worked for was required to be there. He wasn’t happy about that.

  The union rep explained that they were filing a grievance against me and my direct supervisor. We had violated some bullshit, and I would even say, imaginary rule that was part of the union agreement with the company’s management. It was explained to me that setting the time on an electrical clock was the sole duty of the union electricians. I was not to ever do this again and any more union grievances filed against me in the future would result in dire consequences. This was going on my permanent employment record.

  As many of you may know, I’m a real asshole. Back in those days, I was probably an even bigger asshole than I am now if that was even possible.

  “Excuse me, but how is changing the time on a clock electrical work? The shaft and the mechanism to adjust the time is strictly a mechanical function. Shouldn’t a union mechanic perform this duty? I use computers to do my work. Typing on the keyboard is a mechanical process I perform daily on an electrical device. How is changing the time on the clock any different? I assemble computers, I replace bad circuit boards, I even plug and unplug these computers on occasion. I’m not required to call an electrician for that. If you’re accusing me of breaking some rule, then I think
you should at least present me with a complete list of those rules. Does anyone here have that list, and can they show me the rule I supposedly broke?”

  When you confront idiocy with the simplest logic, the idiots simply respond with silence and dumb looks. There was also a lot of frustration and a few of the attendees at this inquisition looked ready to do me physical harm. The vice-president of my division simply responded by saying, “Mr. Zand, would you please wait outside?”

  I left. I have no idea what happened after I left inside that room. About twenty minutes later my direct supervisor exited the room.

  “Let’s go, Guerin. Please, don’t do that again.” Joe tried not to, but he couldn’t help but smile and let out a little laugh as we walked back to our office.

  Of course, that was the first in a long list of union grievances filed against me over the years at that company. Maybe one day I’ll tell you how rolling a few chairs into a conference room caused the families of union laborers to go hungry at night.

  So you’re probably thinking that’s a nice little story, but what does it have to do with God and fucking aliens? The point of all of this is that I believe God wants us to fix our own problems, just like that clock that was wrong. I could have complained about that clock every day to my co-workers and supervisor. I could have called the vice-president and the union every day telling them that they needed to correct the time on that clock. What do you think would have pissed them off more, complaining to them every day, or me breaking a stupid rule? Maybe I should have prayed to God to solve the issue. What would have actually fixed the problem?