And Now, Time Travel

by Christopher Brimmage

  Blackness began creeping across the edges of Ginny’s vision. She frowned and wished she could rub her eyes. Suddenly, the yellow goop of the creature that she had just devolved transformed into a shade of pastel pink. It grew large and angry. Tentacles formed from its sides and stretched toward her. Her heart raced and she panicked. She fired her Time-Phaser over and over and over at the pink blob. She heard nothing but grunts from the pinkness and saw nothing but the growing blob until Alex screamed over the microphone, “Ginny, I repeat, we have incoming! Do you copy? Ginny! I need your undivided attention!”

  She shook her head, and it felt like she was coming out of a trance. She realized that there had been no pink blob at all, that she had been firing her Time-Phaser over and over into an already-devolved yellowed ball of former-beaver-creature. She felt like she was going crazy, and shame washed over her at her loss of control. She slapped the side of her bubbled helmet a few times to shake the feeling. And then she noticed the rogue B.I.T. agent’s ship—shaped like a numeral eight—far out on the horizon. It sat still for a couple seconds, and then jerked forward with sudden speed.

  Ginny called back over her intercom, “I copy. Sorry, my head was elsewhere for a moment.”

  Alex nodded and replied, “Well, keep it here for now. Everybody hold position until I give the signal. Then we evade up and starboard by a hundred yards. Ginny, you and the Arthurs will have reason to break formation earlier than the rest of us. You’ll know what I’m referring to when it happens.”

  “My! Name! Is! Art!” Normal-Art and Older-Art screamed simultaneously over the microphone.

  “Arthurs, from here on out, I’m going to need everyone to maintain radio silence unless I’m giving an order,” replied Alex.

  Ginny heard both Arts sigh, but they made no other reply.

  The incoming ship opened fire. Its first shots missed wide, slamming against the cocoon of ropes and trees wrapped around the hull of the B.T.S. Unicorn Husker. Ginny glanced over her shoulder to check whether Drillbot’s hiding spot had been hit. The blasts hit the ship far above the robot, so she nodded and faced forward once more.

  “Hold steady,” ordered Alex as he loosed laser arrow after laser arrow into the distance, killing dozens upon dozens of the cute little beaver-creatures. “We need to set the bait for just a little while longer.”

  The ship fired again, this time missing less widely to the other side of the group. This payload also connected with a random portion of the Unicorn Husker’s hull far above Drillbot.

  “Hold,” ordered Alex once more.

  And then the ship opened with another volley, launching a steady stream of laser bolts toward the center of the group.

  “Evade!” shouted Alex. He jerked his saddle up and to the right, easily dodging the bolts. The officers and Purple Shirts and Older-Art similarly dodged. Ginny did the same—using one arm for the device’s handlebar while holding her Time-Phaser in the other—and came out unscathed. Normal-Art, however, jerked his throttle forward and twisted the handlebars as far to the left as they would go so that his saddle merely spun out of control in a tiny circle. He was about to be thrown from the saddle, so he gave up on all attempts at evasive action. He let go of the handlebars, leaned down, and hugged the front of the saddle to hold himself steady. The Gravitron Saddle stopped moving.

  He looked around to see if anyone noticed. Then he said, “Uh, guys, I’m having problems with my-”

  One of the laser bolts glanced across his right arm. Ginny heard him scream into the intercom. She watched as he was launched from his saddle. He smacked against the hull of the B.T.S. Unicorn Husker and tumbled down toward the earth. He was now silent and limp.

  Older-Art’s voice entered Ginny’s helmet through the intercom, saying, “Gin, if memory serves me correctly, this is the moment Alex was referring to when he said you, me, and my idiot younger-self will have reason to break formation earlier than the rest of the group.”

  Ginny shrugged. She placed her Time-Phaser in a holster built into the saddle and jerked her throttle forward to fly after her ex. As she swooped toward him, she glanced over her shoulder and watched the remaining members of the group scatter in all different directions as the ship bowled through the area in which they had all just been floating.

  Ginny turned back toward Normal-Art. She leaned over in the saddle and grabbed him with her left hand. She swung him up onto the seat behind her and pulled his arms around her midsection. They remained limp and unconscious, so she pulled them up through the straps that held her respirator to her suit and cinched the straps down, so they held his hands tightly in place. She heard Alex yell over the intercom, “Drillbot! Now!” She ignored it.

  She glanced up at Older-Art and noticed he was smirking. “What?” she asked.

  His smirk turned into a half-grin. He pointed to his younger-self’s hands and said, “Oh, if only I’d been conscious for this when I was younger. But I wouldn’t have appreciated it.”

  Ginny looked down and realized she had strapped Normal-Art’s hands to her so that they were cupping her breasts. She sighed. She reached to change their positions, but before she could do so, Older-Art screamed, “Look out!”

  Ginny glanced up to see five of the cute beaver-like creatures using their jetpacks to blast toward her, each holding two mines apiece. They were nearly atop her. She managed to kick one off course with her right boot while Older-Art hit one with a bolt from his Time-Phaser, but the other three attached explosives to her Gravitron Saddle before using their jetpacks to zoom away.

  Ginny cursed. She looked away from the escaping creatures only to see hundreds of arrows flying her way. She cursed again.

  “Ginny, c’mon!” screamed Older-Art. He holstered his Time-Phaser and held out a hand toward her.

  She clambered up atop her saddle so that her feet stood upon its middle. She pushed off and leapt toward Older-Art. She grabbed his open hand. He used his free hand to jerk his throttle forward. The trio zoomed away from Ginny’s saddle just as the arrows crashed into the mines. The mines and the saddle exploded.

  “Yes!” screamed Ginny in delight, feeling like an action movie hero.

  She felt exactly that way until Older-Art was blindsided by a figure she wished never to see again. As the figure crashed into Older-Art, his hand was jerked free from Ginny’s. It happened so fast that she had no time to react.

  Older-Art’s Gravitron Saddle flew out from under him and careened away into the distance. Ginny was knocked aside by the force of the intruding figure. She flipped end-over-end in the opposite direction, falling toward the earth.

  As she flipped, her view traded off between the earth below her and the action surrounding Older-Art. The next time she flipped to face him, she saw that a flaming phoenix with the head of God-Art had snatched him from the saddle. A flip later, the phoenix had transformed completely back into God-Art, and he held Older-Art in place by wrapping his arms and legs around the mortal.

  Ginny cursed. On the next flip, she could see that God-Art’s filthy cockroach sidekick—wearing a ridiculous spacesuit with a bubbled helmet—was perched upon the god’s shoulder. The next flip, lightning flashed between the bug’s antennae. The next flip, both God-Art and Older-Art were gone.

  Ginny cursed again. On the next flip, the pair of hands strapped around her chest squeezed her breasts. Ginny brought the heel of her boot up behind her, kicking Normal-Art squarely between the legs. Ginny heard him scream a curse over the intercom. The act brought her no joy, for her mind was racing with anxiety over the abduction of her lover. But she kicked him again, anyway.

  “This is Ginny,” she said over the intercom. “I’ve lost my Gravitron Saddle and need extraction.”

  She glanced back toward the battle and saw a horde of the beaver-like creatures coming toward her.

  “Sooner rather than later,” she screamed.

  Chapter 30

  DESPERATION

  The robot’s drills burst through the view screen, send
ing shards of glass flying into the bridge for a brief moment before the vacuum of space overpowered the artificial pressure machines and sent the glass hurtling back out into the blackness.

  “You want to take care of this damned robot?” Agent 27142 screamed at God-Art. “You’re a god, I’m pretty sure you can take him!”

  Agent 27142 glanced over at the god and dread filled his stomach. The god had transformed into a flaming phoenix. In a flash of power, the phoenix leapt through hole left in the ship by the demolished view screen and twisted to dodge past Drillbot’s murderous drills. The god flew away, leaving Agent 27142 to fend for himself.

  “You bastard!” Agent 27142 screamed at the god, realizing he had been abandoned and was likely about to die. But visions of 29333’s corpse raced through his head, and his bowels turned to steel. He refused to die until he tasted vengeance.

  The drills slashed toward him with murderous fury. He leaned back as far as he could, dodging a swipe by less than an inch. He knew this futile evasion would not keep him safe for long.

  He glanced around the bridge. The Timeflow Gun lay strapped in a holster attached to the wall over near the now-empty passenger seat. If only Agent 27142 could reach it, he could use it to do something wonky to the robot, maybe even reverse time on it so that the robot no longer existed or send the robot careening through time to another earth. But the gun was too far away. Agent 27142 would need to unstrap himself, get over there, unstrap the gun, and change its settings before the robot could swipe its drills at him again. There was no way he would make it in time, not without being severed in half.

  Agent 27142 cursed God-Art once more. And then he noticed his ticket to survival—a pair of antennae wiggling in his peripheral. He pulled Henry free from the holster around his waist.

  “Henry, you awake?”

  “Yes,” replied Henry. “Just sitting here trying not to die.”

  Agent 27142 sighed. He said, “OK. I need you to get ready to jump.”

  “Already am.”

  “Good,” said Agent 27142. “Now jump!”

  Lightning flashed between the gourd’s antennae. “At once!” exclaimed the gourd.

  “And take the robot with you!” yelled Agent 27142. As lightning began to flash out of the antennae and toward Agent 27142, Agent 27142 spun Henry so the lightning flash was directed toward Drillbot. Agent 27142 threw Henry at the robot. The gourd narrowly missed the robot’s slicing drills before colliding with Drillbot’s torso. Henry’s lightning erupted in full force.

  “Wait, wha-” Henry began to say. But everything happened so quickly that Henry must not have had time to adjust, and within milliseconds, both Henry and Drillbot disappeared.

  Agent 27142 grabbed the control column of the ship and jerked it sideways. He spun around until he found God-Art’s fiery bird-form flapping across the blackness of space. Beverly rode atop the god’s neck like a cowboy on a bull, her forelegs gripped tightly around feathers flowing from the phoenix’s head as she tried not to be bucked off. Agent 27142 watched as the phoenix’s head and torso transformed back into the god’s humanoid form. Beverly now sat on his shoulder and gripped his ear.

  The god crashed into a figure that was sitting upon one of the floating saddles. The figure had been reaching a hand down to rescue a pair of purple-suited B.T.T. agents who had lost their saddles—one of them the grunt that Agent 27142 had earlier hit with his turret. As Agent 27142 aimed his turrets to engulf the god in a barrage of lasers blasts, the god transformed completely back into his humanoid form and then disappeared with his abductee in a flash of lightning that erupted from Beverly’s antennae. It happened so fast that Agent 27142 had no time to stop it.

  Agent 27142 cursed. Rage filled him. There could only be one person whom the god would abduct, and it was their common prey. The god had utterly betrayed Agent 27142, and now the god could achieve his goals without compensating Agent 27142 for his services.

  Fury clouded Agent 27142’s vision. He decided that he would achieve some semblance of vengeance today, even if it was not upon his optimal target. He spun the ship, looking for someone upon whom murder would provide a modicum of satisfaction. There! He locked onto the obvious mastermind behind the trap that had lured him close to the damned robot: the man with the horsehair crest atop his space suit. The man was currently fending off a swarm of BeavBoks.

  Agent 27142 unstrapped himself from his chair. He removed his Scatter Gun pistol from his holster and held it in one hand. He unhooked the Timeflow Gun from the wall and shoved it into the holster from which he had removed Henry, using a buckle to clasp it in place. You can never have too many guns, he thought.

  Agent 27142 gunned his throttle toward the man. He opened fire with the ship’s turrets, but the man had apparently noticed Agent 27142 without looking away from his fight with the BeavBoks. The man jerked his metallic saddle up and to his right, evading Agent 27142’s blasts with seemingly little effort. However, this man’s maneuver was identical to the one he had performed the previous time Agent 27142 had opened fire upon him, and overreliance on it was a behavior that Agent 27142 predicted. Agent 27142 had already steered his ship to compensate, bringing him in close so that he might feel the pleasure of striking the man hand-to-hand and killing him while looking into his eyes.

  As Agent 27142’s ship zoomed beneath the man with the horsehair crest, Agent 27142 leapt upward out of the busted view screen. Agent 27142 managed to grab one of the flaring engines of the man’s saddle with his left hand. He ignored the pain as the heat of the engines burned through his flesh. He swung upward as hard as he could, bringing his left foot up so it crashed against the man’s helmet.

  This kick caused the man to jerk forward in the saddle, which in turn caused him to gun the throttle and blast toward the earth. As they zoomed forward toward the planet, the man powered down his weapon and holstered it before attempting to regain control of the flying saddle. Agent 27142 jabbed his Scatter Gun pistol into the ribs of the man, but just before pulling the trigger, the man elbowed Agent 27142’s hand. Agent 27142 cursed, because the jostle knocked the pistol away from the man’s ribs, and when Agent 27142 fired, all he hit was a spot near the engine of the metallic saddle. The man then grabbed Agent 27142’s wrist and elbowed his hand until he dropped the Scatter Gun pistol. It drifted away into space.

  Following the blast from the Scatter Gun, the saddle’s engines flashed with light and part of the device’s metal carapace disappeared. However, the device sped up. Agent 27142 cursed at the unlikelihood of that happening. Then he cursed at the pain in his melted hand. He let go of the engine and used his uninjured hand to grab the man by the back of the space suit. The saddle began breaking apart and its engines glowed bright red.

  Agent 27142 and the man zoomed together toward the earth atop the careening saddle, both struggling and fighting and kicking against each other as they flew into the atmosphere. Then Agent 27142’s opponent managed to get his legs under him, crouched against the saddle, and pushed off.

  The saddle exploded, and the force of the blast launched the pair even faster toward the earth.

  Chapter 31

  DRILLBOT MAKES A NEW FRIEND

  All Drillbot could see for a moment was bright lightning. The brightness overwhelmed his optical receptors, and they winked out. Blackness encompassed him for a fraction of a second. Then his optical equipment reset itself and he found that he was floating next to his assailant in the simultaneously colorful and colorless space between realities.

  Drillbot roared his version of a roar, which sounded a lot like gears grinding together. He aimed below the bubbled space helmet and stabbed the gourd in its center with his right drill. He noted with annoyance that a piece of its yellowed inner flesh sprayed into the ether and stuck to his left telescopic eye.

  “Noooo!” screamed the gourd. “Please!”

  Drillbot frowned his version of a frown. The impaled gourd spun round and round on Drillbot’s drill. The gourd groaned.

&n
bsp; “[whir] You can – CLACK – You can talk?”

  Though the gourd had no face and Drillbot could see no way for it to express emotions, he could sense that the gourd was both scared and annoyed.

  “Of course, I can talk! You can hear me, can’t you?”

  “[whir] Affirmative.”

  Drillbot powered down his drill. The gourd spun a few more circles before the drill slowed to a halt.

  “I feel like I’m going to be sick,” said the gourd.

  Drillbot focused on the piece of gourd stuck to his telescopic eye. He did not like the prospect of more of this creature’s innards landing on him. “[whir] If you are – CLACK – if you are going to be sick, please refrain from – CLACK – refrain from vomiting or expunging any more of yourself onto Drillbot.”

  The gourd sighed. “I’m a freakin’ vegetable. I can’t vomit, you fool. When I get sick, I turn from orange to white and exude a noxious gas.”

  “[whir] Oh. Feel free to get – CLACK – to get sick, then. Drillbot does not breathe.”

  The gourd sighed again. “I take it you are Drillbot?”

  Drillbot nodded. “[whir] Affirmative.”

  “Hi, Drillbot. I’m Henry.”