The Time Trousers of Professor Tempus: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure

by Michael Ronson

  “’The other chap’? What do you refer to, sir?” I asked

  Humsworthy pointed languidly to the front door. “Oh you must have seen the line out there for 221B. That’s where the great Sher-”

  “We shall not speak that charlatan’s name!” came the thunderous roar of Hardcolmes, “especially when I am right in the middle of a deducing.”

  I nodded solemnly to myself. This was most certainly the Captain’s ancestor, of that there could be little doubt. But as he was busying himself with his deductions I had some of my own to make; Tempus had a scheme to wipe out this man so, while great detective told me why my eye colour meant that I was married to a mule I began to surreptitiously search the room for clues. I peered at the furnishings as he talked.

  Several minutes later, and after much slander he spread his arms expansively out. “You will see from my demonstration of sleuthing that I can solve any quandary quite easily. My fee is fifteen guineas per day and a bag of apples (to be used in part as bait for your wife and also for a trifle I am making). I shall have results no later than February.” He leapt to his feet and went to extend a friendly hand toward me. “Can we assume that the answer is yes?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re quite the contrarian”

  “No I’m not” I protested.

  “See?”

  “I haven’t lost any mules recently. Or ever.”

  “Why are you here then?”

  I took a deep breath. How best to go about this? I decided to keep it simple. “Sir, I am afraid that I am not seeking your help. I am offering my help to you. It is a matter of life and death, you see. There is a man I know who is seeking to end your life.”

  He arched his brow knowingly at me. “Oh. Is that all?” He cast his eyes over to Humsworthy. “Is it Wednesday already?”

  “Perhaps we should hear him out, Sherlton,” replied the veterinarian, who was setting aside his periodical and sitting up in his chair, regarding my solemn and worried expression with one of his own.

  “What for? He has no case for us, no love for the equine species and no conception of how many attempts have been made on my life.” He turned his gaze back to me, “I assure you, my friend, that I will be untouched by these machinations that trouble you so much. Do not worry your conscience. Besides, I’m terribly busy at the moment.”

  I allowed a beat to pass wherein we could attend to the sound of the grandfather clock ticking loudly in the room, and the sound outside of the steady stream of footfalls entering 221B. I raised a brow at him.

  Hardcolmes took a dignified second to smooth his moustache before taking a calm, teacherly tone. “My dear fellow, I am one of the top two consulting detectives in all of Londinium. Crime in this city is as rampant as it is cockney. I can assure you,every ounce of my acumen tells me that a case will walk through that door,” he pointed to the study door, “Aaaaany minute now.”

  He continued pointing. Then he continued some more.

  “Noooooowww.”

  He drew out the word, much as he drew out the pointing, which had yet to abate.

  “Now. Now….Now! Nnnnnnnooo-”

  Then the strangest thing happened. In the first time that night, and perhaps in his entire adult life, Sherlton Hardcolmes was proved right.

  The study door burst inwards. And a case walked in.

  ---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---

  Kxchzzzshhhhhhq!

  A gibbering skeleton, phosphorescent orange and screeching a noise like hoarse static sprinted dead at us.

  “Kchshhhhhh!” said Flex, imitating the noise crudely as we snapped around towards it. Delroy looped the shotgun strap from off of his neck and threw the weapon to me. Catching it one-handed (naturally), I sank to one knee, shouldered the weapon and shucked a round into the chamber in one sexy motion. The skeleton only picked up speed, its electric scream coming through more piercingly, its hollow eyes glowing eerily, its grinning mouth gnashing mouthily. It took a sudden lunge towards us but my muzzle tracked its movement like a hound tracking a sausage. I pulled the trigger and its head came apart in a spray of shrapnel. Chunks of cheek and discoloured cranium rained down upon us like morbid confetti at a murder-wedding and the bony body crashed through our party. I pumped another round into the holo-structed weapon.

  “Cha-chuck,” said Flex, a note of admiration in his onomatopoeias. I nodded gruffly at him, liking the way he punctuated my actions with vocal echoes of blaster fire or punches. I had been advised on many occasions that it was somehow improper to do it myself.

  “Give me one minute,” one of our number, Grace, yelled shakily as she worked at the wiring of some bay doors.

  I pointed the gun casually down the dim corridor and fired a couple of warning shots where a mass of skeletons were streaming down, like some kind of a bony river. The mass of holo-boned, hollow-boned bastards absorbed the shots and kept coming. The survivors around me looked from myself, to the skeletons, to Grace’s frantic hands and back again. Then back to me, then to Grace, then to her hands, then to Flex, then back at me. Then back at Grace. I too cast my eyes over to the engineer as she was working at the heavy bay doors, bundling together the wires of a hacked open security panel. She sparked two off of each other in a way that was simultaneously officious and clandestine and deep within the door housing a groan rumbled out.

  But that sound was competing with the cry of the skeleton army.

  The bay doors opened in that whooshing way that they do and the survivors rushed into the half light of the holobay. Delroy and I stood guard for the few seconds this took, but once all were safe, I ducked inside, sparing a second to let another few shots off, before Delroy ripped a handful of wires completely out of the bulkhead and stepping neatly inside as the door snapped shut.

  In the echoing darkness within we only had a second to listen to each other’s ragged breath.

  The thudding and the screaming arrived at the door. The skeletons hissed their interference screams and pounded their quite spooky fists off of the adamantium door, vexed by their own tardiness.

  As if sensing our unease a few backup lights flickered on and we took a second to look at each other. It was in these moments that the true leader has to make some kind of speech, I thought, to reassure his tr-

  “Alright,” Delroy said, rudely interrupting my thoughts as he ran his hand down the door, “this door won’t budge. Damn thing’s built to last. We’re safe in here. For a while at least.”

  But Flex said “Pwam pwam pwam” warily.

  All of us took a few unconscious steps away from the pounding at the door.

  We were a rough band of survivors and non-holograms thrown together by the whims of fate and the schemes of Rasputin; a motley crew with varying degrees of usefulness and attractiveness. Delroy Deloux and Flex I remembered vividly but the others had faded in my memory, which I attributed entirely to some effect that time travel had on the brain.

  “Why- why why why- are they bloody skeletons of all things?” asked Grace who was (in order of obviousness) a computer engineer, an employee of the facility, and a woman.

  I opened my mouth to speak but Delroy got there first. This time travel malarkey was really throwing off my rhythm.

  “Simplicity.” Delroy said simply. “Holo-structing a person takes a lot of processing power. Working kidneys? Nightmare to make. Rendering realistic hair? That’s a damn technological feat right there. And don’t get me started on knees.” He paused, leaving room for one of us to get him started on knees. When none of us did, he continued, grudgingly, “This resort has hundreds of suites, and each one can comfortably make a couple dozen living beings. More’n that and the system gets stretched. But skeletons’re easy. No skin, no hair, no blood, no knees ? This place could pump out skeletons for days.”

  “I was wondering about that,” said a portly customer, motioning over to the wall. It was imprinted with the logo of the resort- ‘Tremulon Holodecks- We C
an Pump Out Skeletons For Days’. He was a fleshy and hairless man, like an over-inflated toddler. His name was Q’uinc’y. I remembered him vaguely too- a pampered holidaymaker as soft as a silk kitten and about half as useful in a fight.

  “Makes sense now,” someone muttered; a tan and lean businessman I remembered was called Brecon Dento. Slick as oil on a greasy rain slicker and as selfish a man as I was a lover, he was the last of our group. The soldier, the onomatopoeia, the baby, the businessman, the doormouse and the hero. It was our brave band against the odds. The dirty dozen. The seven Samurai. The three musketeers. Ocean’s thirteen.

  While I was thinking about cool names to give us this Delroy character kept droning on. A note of grudging admiration entered his voice. “Rasputin’s playing it smart. Damn smart. Got a few decks dedicated to churning out these mindless skeleton drones, nothing else, nothin’ to tax the systems. That means he and his pals’ll be fine while he can safely accumulate a whole army.”

  “What kind of numbers are we looking at?” I asked forcefully, having not spoken in way too long.

  Delroy looked sadly over to Flex and raised his eyebrows.

  “A thousand? Two? Three?”

  Flex thought about it and raised four fingers and Delroy grimaced.

  “Four thousand skeletons?” Brecon balked.

  “No. Four thousand thousand.”

  “That’s almost four million,” I noted.

  “And four million is damn close to five million,” he said, shaking his head bleakly.

  “Nearly six million of those things,” Grace said in quiet awe. “They could wipe out the entirety of Tremulon.“

  We all stood there for a moment, each of us in silent terror trying to imagine the sight of seven million luminous skeletons washing over a planet at the whim of a holographic Rasputin. Looking around I saw the five pallid and frightened faces hanging around me in a circle like a gaggle of frightened moons. I pounded fist to hand and cleared my throat, I knew, after all, that I had the winning plan.It was about time I unleashed the thing. When you knew you had this much of a winning strategy you knew you could focus on the stirring speech.

  I struck a pose. “Listen, I don’t know too much about history and nobody’s ever accused me of being a scholar but I do know one thing about Rasputin; he was absolutely committed to the notion of complete cosmic domination. We need to do something, all of us together and right now to end this.”

  Each survivor shivered and averted their gaze, seemingly afraid of the prospect of facing an army of electric murder-skeletons. It was easy to get mad at them for not knowing the future and realizing that this all works out, but I supressed my rage at them (just barely) and let them voice their concerns.

  Q’uinc’y spoke waveringly first, pushing his words out of his toddler face like frightened word burps “Look, look, let’s calm down here for a minute. Surely we just need to get a signal out of here, get a distress signal to COAR and wait for a rescue team!” He looked to me for support, no doubt noting the military tattoos on my bicep, my proficiency with weapons and the way I kept casually mentioning my rank. I shook my head.

  “As a Captain, I have to tell you, we’re too far out for immediate rescue. Four solar days for a dispatch to this quadrant.” We all looked toward the bulkhead, which was still pounding under skeletal fists. “Think we can hold out that long? Captains like me would tell you ‘nuh-uh’.”

  Delroy nodded. “He’s right.. We’re out in international space here. Fewer laws, fewer restrictions, but also farther from help.”

  “We all know what we have to do,” I said quietly. “Nobody’s coming for us. We have to save ourselves. We have to save each other. But most of all, we have to save ourselves.” I had broken down our situation enough: time to ride to the rescue with my plan. “But never fear; I have a plan.”

  I relished the hope on their faces. Oh, it was good to be back on firm footing after that last adventure.

  “It’s simplicity itself. I think I proposed it before. According to the calculations that I just did in my head right now, we just have to do one thing to eliminate all the holos- blow up the reactor.”

  They all looked understandably confused and irritated at these words, probably annoyed with themselves at not having thought of it. I supposed I was cheating a little bit, though, since I had done this once before.

  After stumbling upon Rasputin’s plot in the control room there had been a time of great confusion, prolonged gunfire and an enormous quantity of skeletons. The long and unimportant result of this was that I had become temporarily pushed back, ceding control of the facility to the cabal of holographic monsters. I had, however, gathered with me this band of survivors.

  “I guess it would be on...hm...sub level six? Yeah, probably that,” I said confidently.

  Ah, blowing up reactors. It never fails. Whenever I have found myself on a battlefield and slightly confused as to what to do, I make a habit of striding up to the highest ranked officer, looking grimly around and then telling them solemnly that we need to blow up the reactor. And you know what? That’s usually an option. Most things have reactors in them, every reactor I’ve ever seen and fired missiles at has been blow-up-able. So I wasn’t surprised when Delroy had pointed me toward the resort’s own big glowing power thing and I had led this rag-tag team of survivors on a treacherous but glorious voyage down to the bowels of the station.

  “A T39 model reactor probably. Maybe I’m wrong,” I said, rightly.

  Oh, it had been a glorious mission. One of my personal top seven. I smiled to myself and thought about how ace it was going to be to do it again.

  “Captain?”

  It had been a hard journey, alright. And the six of us had to fight like hell to make it down. The survivors who had seemed to be the most useless had proved themselves to have hidden skills that saved our collective ass at the last second.

  “Em…Captain?”

  I looked over at Brecon, the belligerent and selfish banker. In the end it was he who had ended up sacrificing his life to blow up the reactor, redeeming himself in the process. It had been quite an arc for him, going from selfish to selfless. He died skydiving into the reactor, grenades clamped in his hands, screaming defiance as we had beat a hasty retreat, just barely making it out as the fireball from the ensuing chain reaction chased us down a hallway.

  “Space…About that reactor plan…”

  And Grace, the wallflower computer tech with no self-confidence had blossomed in the heat of battle into a fearsome warrior, throwing away her glasses, overcoming her stutter and vanquishing her overwhelming fear of holographic dictators in the course of our mission. Her blossoming had been an amazing thing to behold. If written down it would have made for a beautiful story.

  “You see there might be a tiny problem with that…”

  Even Q’uinc’y, the bullied butterball had turned into a fearsome ass-kicker under my guidance. He found out he had never been fat at all.

  “It’s not feasi- is he listening to me?”

  And Delroy and Flex, my two trusty sidekicks, ex-soldiers called upon once more to do battle under my guidance. What a team we had forged in the span of the ninety minute action-filled romp.

  “He’s not is he?”

  Oh yes, in that doomed suicide mission we had initially fought, developed a grudging respect and then formed a tight bond in the heat of battle. Finally we overcame and blew the reactor, wiping out all of the holographic hostiles and winning the day, each playing a part and rising to the occasion in our own way. But it was the incredible bonds and the personal tragedy and triumph of our rag-tag group that had truly remained in our memory.

  “Because you see…we can’t blow up the reactor.”

  They had made a movie out of our mission later. I hadn’t seen it though since it was probably just been turned into a bunch of clichés. We-

  “SPACE!”

  “What?!” I snapped, coming out of my reverie of memory.

  “We don’t h
ave a reactor!” Delroy shouted.

  I stared at him.

  “You don’t have a reactor?”

  “No.”

  “Wh-How?” I asked, already regretting my question. The leering face of Tempus formed in my mind.

  “We’re a green station!” he said as though it was obvious

  Grace added, “We’ve been a green station since the beginning. I mean, this place had been planned to have one big central reactor core but when it was under construction but a pressure group had us switch over to solar and wind energy instead.”

  Solar and wind power, I thought bitterly. How many lives would they claim? I grimaced and asked a question I already knew the answer to. “This pressure group; what was the leader’s name?”

  “Him? Well, I don’t see how that’s relevant but...Uh, Temple, was it? Professor Temp-” she furrowed her brow.

  “Tempus,” I muttered through gritted teeth.

  “What was that? I couldn’t hear you?”

  I ungritted my teeth and spat the name. “Tempus.”

  “That’s the guy.”

  “So we have no way of cutting the power. No reactor to blow up, no way to shut off these holograms. We’re outnumbered, outgunned, outgumbered, are facing down the greatest tactical minds of history powered by green energy and our one plan is a bust. Any other problems?”

  “We have one gun between us,” Q’uinc’y added brightly, keen to help.

  “Great point. One gun between us against an army of eight million,” I said warmly.

  “And we have to be low on ammunition,” Grace added.

  “True! We are!” I checked the gun “Maybe ten rounds.”

  “And the skeletons are opening the doors,” said Delroy.

  “And the skeletons are opening the doors,” I said wearily. “Great. On top of everything else... Wait- what?”

  “The skeletons are opening the damn doors!” he said, more urgently, wearing an alarmed look, and pointing an equally alarmed hand at the bulkhead. The two panels were being winched slowly apart, and the light from the corridors winked in from between a hundred bony fingers. Each one squirmed and found more purchase and opened the door a little more millimetre by millimetre. The metal squealed and the prying fingers gave way to some hollow skeletal eyes behind them.