With one last twirl on her feet, she crawled in and pulled the cover closed over her head.
The next thing she remembered, Lieutenant Sherri, dressed in black, was picking her up out of the sleep chamber and taking her down into the courtyard, floating in the cold Chicago night air.
A few minutes later, the lieutenant put her down in her wheelchair, saluted, and left.
Dot looked at her old, wrinkled hands in the dim light, then felt the deadness in her legs.
Had she been dancing on those legs?
Had it really happened?
Had she just dreamed it all?
It had been a wonderful dream. The battle had been scary, but the dancing and being young had been more than she could have ever imagined.
She needed to try to find out the answer to those questions.
She moved her chair out across the hall and through Brian’s door.
He was in bed, his head turned so that he could see her as she rolled up beside him.
Even in the dim light, she could see his smile and the twinkle in his eyes.
“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” she said, “before I’m really going to believe that all happened.”
He laughed, managing to not cough. “I felt exactly the same way at first. And every time I end up back here in this old worthless body, I wonder if I actually did everything I remember doing.”
“So it was real?” she asked, looking around the nursing home room, so far from the ship on the edge of the borders between Earth’s space and other alien races. The room was in a faint light from the hall and the nightlight in the bathroom. The big wall clock ticked, filling the room with a constant reminder that time was moving forward.
This was so far from the battle with the Warsticks.
“Very real,” Brian said. “And very important. We’re the only ones that can go out there and defend this planet. We’re the only ones old enough to withstand the time travel length to get to the edges of the EPL borders.”
He paused for a moment and the clock ticking got seemingly even louder.
Then he said firmly, “Earth needs us. Amazing as that may seem.”
A shiver ran down her back and she took a deep breath, looking into the wonderful eyes of Brian Saber.
“I thought I was long past the point where anyone would ever need me.”
“A few years ago,” Brian said, “so did I.”
They sat in silence for a moment, letting the clock tick on.
Finally she took a deep breath and realized just how tired she felt.
She slowly pushed her wheelchair back from his bed and turned it toward the door.
“Join me for Christmas breakfast?” she asked.
“I’d love to,” he said, smiling. “And maybe soon we can go dancing again.”
“Do you think that’s possible? Really?”
“We’re usually called for a mission at least once a week, if not more often,” he said. “I think a dance or two just might be arranged.”
“Thank you, Captain,” she said. “For the best Christmas present anyone has ever given me. I will see you at breakfast.”
“The pleasure will be all mine,” he said.
She wheeled herself across the hall and to her bed.
A few moments later she was on her back, staring at the ceiling, remembering the feeling of standing, of walking without help, and of dancing.
Especially dancing.
She so loved to dance.
Tonight hadn’t been a dream. She knew that now. She had fought aliens for the Earth Protection League.
She had danced with the most handsome man she had ever met.
And she would dance again.
For the first time in years, she actually had something to live for. Tomorrow at breakfast, she’d talk to Captain Brian Saber about all the wonders out there in the universe.
About her duties.
And what Earth needed from her.
It felt wonderful to be needed again, especially on Christmas.
She closed her eyes after a few minutes and drifted off to sleep.
And for the first night in a very long time, she didn’t need to dream of dancing.
THE SECOND MAJOR MISSION
Over Two Years Later
NINE
February 12th, 2021
Actual Earth Time
Location: Chicago
DOT WAS FEEDING Brian his applesauce one spoonful at a time when he saw their target.
Around them, the Shady Valley Nursing Home went on with its normal lunch routine, but today was going to be anything but normal. In fact, the survival of the human race might depend on what happened next.
He didn’t want to think about the cost of failure. As the cliché often said, failure was not an option this time around.
The banging of dishes and the rumble of people talking made it almost impossible for Brian to be heard. So he and Dot had a signal for when he wanted her to stop with her feeding him his applesauce, about the only solid thing he could really eat these days. He didn’t much mind, since the stroke had also taken his ability to taste anything.
And smell anything, and considering how little control he had of certain body functions since the stroke, he considered that a gift.
He blinked his right eye and she instantly pulled back, taking a napkin and wiping the drool from his chin.
Being eighty-eight was bad enough, but being mostly paralyzed from a series of strokes really sucked more than Brian could ever say. Thankfully Dorothy “Dot” Leeds made it bearable. And took care of him far more than she should. But she said she loved doing it and didn’t mind in the slightest.
She was his best friend and had been for years before she had joined the Earth Protection League. Now they were in love, but both of them were slowly dancing around that topic.
The last stroke he had a year ago had taken most of his movement, but not his mind, and he could still speak, mostly softly.
He blinked twice, their signal for Dot to get close. She leaned in so she could hear his hoarse whisper over the noise of the others eating lunch, her wonderful, eighty-seven-year-old face still showing the signs of the beautiful younger woman he knew so well.
“What is it, Brian?” she asked.
She then turned her ear slightly so she could hear him clearly over the noise. They had had many great conversations in that very fashion.
“Doctor Jack Dalton, sitting at the second table over.”
Her head snapped around to find Dalton.
Then she turned back to Brian, her eyes bright. “Heavy, brown, knitted sweater with the orange food stains?”
“Yes,” Brian whispered.
He wished he could have nodded, but that wasn’t possible anymore.
They both watched for a moment while Dalton struggled with a plate of food on a tray before he managed to get it arranged. His hands were twisted almost closed by years of arthritis, and they shook.
Brian had no idea how Dalton could even hold a spoon, but somehow he managed, which was a lot better than Brian could do.
Dalton’s very thin gray hair didn’t do anything to cover a mottled scalp, and his thick, gray eyebrows seemed more like large bugs on his wrinkled face than anything else.
That man, that ninety-one-year-old scientist, had to be on the mission with them in the next few hours. Or Earth and the entire Earth Protection League might not survive. That’s what the generals had told them this morning.
Dot and Brian had been given the responsibility of recruiting Dalton. Brian had no idea how they were going to do that. Not a clue, short of just kidnapping him, with help from younger EPL service people, of course. He doubted he and Dot combined could kidnap a plate of food from the lunchroom without help and planning.
Brian knew that likely the mission would be a suicide mission. If Dr. Jack Dalton did come with them, there would be a high chance he would never return to Shady Valley Nursing Home.
Of course, if he didn’t come an
d didn’t help, there was a high chance that none of them would return.
And that Earth and Shady Valley Nursing Home might not even survive.
As Brian had always figured, it was better to die out in space fighting than sitting in a wheelchair with drool on his chin.
This mission would be no exception to that.
TEN
February 12th, 2021
Actual Earth Time
Location: Chicago
AFTER SEEING DALTON, Brian wasn’t hungry, but Dot insisted on finishing feeding him, whispering to him that he had to have his strength up for the sex later on.
That made him blush. She liked when she could get the great Captain Brian Saber to blush.
Then she finished her lunch as well, and with some help from an orderly got Brian’s wheelchair moved out into the hall where they could intercept Dalton when he came out of the lunchroom.
She could walk along behind his chair pushing it slowly, but getting him out of that cluster of tables and chairs of the lunchroom was always too much for her.
She stood, holding onto the back of Brian’s chair, thinking and waiting.
This was so important, she had no idea how they were going to make it happen, and she was scared, more scared than she had been piloting any ship over the last few years.
They had to make this happen. They had no choice from what the general had told her in a rage call direct to her phone this morning. Never before had she been contacted by anyone from the EPL directly in her room.
Brian said that had only happened to him once as well, and they had almost lost Earth in that battle.
Brian’s finger tapped the arm of his wheelchair and she looked up.
Dalton was using a cane as he slowly approached, his hand knotted around the top of the cane.
She stepped forward, holding onto Brian’s chair but standing beside it.
“Doctor, my name is Dot Leeds and this is Brian Saber. Could we have a minute to talk to you?”
Dot had left off their Captain titles purposefully. She had become a captain of her own ship just over a year ago. She had made it to captain faster than even Brian had. But she had had Brian helping her.
Now, with Dalton, there was simply no point in making the guy think they were crazy right off. He was going to think that anyway in a few minutes as it was.
She remembered she thought Brian was crazy when he told her about the Earth Protection League.
“I’m not a medical doctor,” Dalton said, slowly moving to go past them.
“I know that, Doctor Dalton,” Dot said. “Until you wrote a paper on the subatomic connection between space and time and matter, you were considered one of the top physicists of all time. Maybe greater than Einstein.”
That stopped him, so Dot kept going.
“Please, just a few minutes of your time?” Dot asked. “I know you are new here, just arrived last week, but there is something urgent we need to talk to you about.”
She could tell that Brian wanted to give her some support, but the best he could do was a slight nod and even that was amazing. That stroke had taken so much from him a year ago.
Thankfully, what happened to this body here on Earth didn’t affect him at all sixty years out in space.
Dalton stared at her for a moment, then at Brian. Finally, he nodded. “I guess I don’t have much else to do.”
Step one down. Dot could feel the relief.
Now came the hard part.
As Dot moved around behind Brian to push him behind Dalton, she noticed Brian managed to slide one finger over the edge of his chair and push a hidden button on his wheelchair signaling the League to stand ready.
Good. At least that much was done.
“In here,” Dalton said, moving toward his room as they had figured he would do. He had a private room, as they all did. The League could be in his room within seconds when Dot gave Brian the signal to push the button again.
And Dalton’s room had a somewhat sheltered sliding door to the interior garden, lawn, and patio area that the home surrounded. That would be the way they would all leave.
She knew for a fact she wouldn’t be going back to her room today for her normal after-lunch nap. Both she and Brian would be doing a rare daytime extraction for this mission.
That’s how important it was.
And if they didn’t win this coming battle, she wouldn’t be seeing her room ever again either.
Doctor Dalton went into his room and pulled a chair over, then got another one for Dot.
The room looked the same as the rest of the rooms, but Dalton had an old table surrounded by three chairs. He had some papers on the table and had clearly been working on something there.
Dot wheeled Brian to a position between the chairs, then using the bar on the end of Dalton’s bed, she went back and closed the door, lowering the room into almost complete silence.
“So what’s this all about?” Dalton asked. “And what could be so important that you would need to talk urgently with someone as old and discredited as I am?”
“Eventually your name will be honored,” Dot said, smiling at Dalton as she sat beside Brian. “Because your theories are completely right. But you won’t live to see it, I’m afraid.”
He laughed. “What? Are they sending old people back from the future?”
Brian cleared his throat and then said as loudly as he could, “That’s not how your theory works, is it, Doctor?”
Dot was impressed that Brian could talk that loudly.
Dalton again laughed. “No, it isn’t.”
“You suggested in your work,” Dot said, “that time and matter and space are connected. Completely connected — not in the way most scientists believe, but in much deeper ways, correct?”
“Yes, so what?”
“You happen to be the right age,” Brian said, “to help out humanity with that wonderful mind of yours, and maybe save us all.”
He just stared at Brian and shook his head.
“Doctor, please listen to me all the way through,” Dot said. “I am certain you will not believe me, but when I tell this story, please keep in mind your very own theory. Please? The story will only take a few minutes.”
“I suppose my nap can wait that long,” he said, shrugging.
Dot smiled.
She indicated Brian. “This is Captain Brian Saber, the most decorated ship’s captain in all of the Earth Protection League. My name is Captain Dorothy Leeds, but my friends call me Dot.”
The Doctor started to speak, but Dot held up a hand to silence him. “The entire story first,” she said.
“The Earth Protection League was formed back in a time long before Atlantis, when mankind first reached out into space. We were helped by other races we met in our local space neighborhood, and the League was formed and maintained even as mankind kept falling back into dark ages. Since governments don’t last, no government knows about it.”
“As years went by…” Brian said, his voice as clear as Dot had heard it in some time. Clearly he felt it critical that he help. He was always such a fighter. That was one of the many things she loved about him.
Brian took a deep breath and went on. “The EPL expanded its borders farther and farther out into space. The EPL now controls, with the help of many other races, a sphere sixty-plus light years around Earth.”
“For centuries,” Dot said, picking up the story, “everything was fine, until about ten years ago Earth-time. The League was suddenly attacked by what we call ‘The Dogs,’ an alien race bent on taking over and destroying Earth and all of Earth’s allies.”
Dalton started to say something, but Dot held up her hand and stopped him. Then she went on. “The Dogs were eventually beaten and pushed back to their borders, but not without a great loss of life on all the Earth bases out closer to the frontiers.”
“So the League needed help,” Brian said. “But because of your theory, it would be difficult to get help from Earth to the border quickly.”
“In other words,” Brian said, “I am eighty-eight sitting here. But if I go out sixty light-years using the Trans-Galactic Drive, I will arrive twenty-eight years old. And when I make the return voyage, arriving here within a half hour of when I leave, my body is again back to this state and age.”
That amount of talking clearly tired Brian out. Dot could see that and she slipped his oxygen mask over his nose for a moment. He hated being in that old body. Just flat hated it. And she didn’t blame him either.
“Over the centuries,” Dot said, continuing the story that Dalton needed to hear, “scientists have managed to shelter the brain waves and thought patterns from the changes that happen as a body moves through great distances, so we keep our older minds in our younger bodies.”
“You two are writing a book, aren’t you? Some sort of science fiction book to make fun of my theories.”
“We are not,” Dot said, staring at Dalton. He was clearly angry and those bushy eyebrows were clutched together. “And they’re your theories, Doctor. You proposed them; you had to know this would be an upshot of your theory if you were correct.”
That shut the great physicist up completely.
The silence in the room seemed to crash in around them. Dot could hear her own heart beating and from what she could tell, Brian was breathing a little harder than normal.
Dalton leaned back, his old hands trembling, his face suddenly tired, but he was clearly thinking.
Finally, after a long moment of silence, he asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because the Earth Protection League needs your help,” Dot said. “Way beyond me to explain what they need you to do. Our job was to recruit you. And go with you. And have our ships run support for you.”
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