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

by Michael Ronson

Tempus knew time but didn’t know Space. He didn’t know Space’s predecessors either. I looked up at the serene smile on Sheriff Holliday’s face and knew that he would never doubt that my shooting was his own doing. After all, this is how he had been shooting in his head for years now and anyone who said otherwise was likely just jealous, a liar, or both.

  I just had to hold out, until all of the terrified bandits turned tail on this impossible gunfight.

  “Mr Funkworthy!” he called from a nice piece of shade behind Raoul.

  I peered over and gave a last little check to all of the slow moving projectiles in the air, doing a quick finger tally. “Professor,” I called, after my little inventory. Should be all set.

  “Are we ready for this round to play out?”

  “Quite, quite. Trying to box me in with those rifle shots from the Winchesters, eh?”

  I pointed to a couple of sharp shooters on top of the saloon, one of whom had been screaming for his mother all match and biting at his own impossible hands out of terror. Tempus shrugged.

  “Well yes. Damnable time to cock, that’s the only problem with those things. Almost had you last time with them though, didn’t I? I could have had it in the bag with some automatic weaponry.”

  “Or a shotgun,” I suggested.

  “A shotgun would be lovely. A nice random spread of pellets? You’d be in hot water then.”

  I chuckled, shook my head ruefully at the prospect. “No doubt.”

  “These outlaws seem to favour their wheelguns, though.” he pointed derisively at one of his banditos who had just finished discharging his last round. He held his gun in a trembling hand as he lay sprawled in a foetal position, weeping into the desert floor.

  “Shall we?” he asked.

  I smiled pleasantly and headed to my trough.

  “As you like, Tempus.”

  ---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---

  “God damn you Tempus,” I muttered to myself as I laid shaking hands back on the wheel. The security grid passed serenely over us, apparently finding nothing suspicious.

  “Tempus, huh?” said the head from the footwell near me. “That what this is all about?”

  “Shut up. “ I said distractedly. Maybe I had been right on this one; maybe he was assuming that my own paranoia about his interference would trip me up. Set up a pattern then subvert it- that was exactly the kind of cowardly head-game that his kind would love. The calming blackness of deep space greeted me like a balm. The shuttle drifted serenely out of the Manhole and the universe with its eternal possibilities lay before me. I shifted the shuttle into a one and a half pulse speed- nice and easy- to push a little of the black between us and the prison. Behind us I could almost hear the shuttle doors closing and sealing the prison up like a box.

  “Wait, what?”

  “What?” Erdinger asked innocently.

  “What did you just say?”

  “I just said, ‘what?’”

  I grabbed the head and hauled it up into the co-pilot seat. “Don’t play games with me, Erdinger. There’s still parts on your head you can lose. You recognized the name I just said- Tempus, didn’t you?”

  Erdinger smiled a leisurely smile and cast his eyes around the cabin.

  “Tempus? Oooh yeah. One of my last jobs involved a guy with that name. Real egghead sort. Right before you lot in COAR scooped me up. Funny job that one.”

  I grasped the head in both hands and shook it. “Speak, damn you, speak. What did you do for him? What did you plan? Where is he now? Did you do something back at the Manhole? Speak!”

  I ceased shaking Erdinger who, despite battling some pretty obvious dizziness took the time to compose himself and smile tauntingly at me.

  “What did I do FOR him? Oh they really do keep you in the dark, don’t they? I didn’t do anything for that boffin. I killed him.”

  “What?”

  “Killed ‘im. Blew him up. Boooom. Puh-choooow. Pow.”

  Erdinger continued to make explosion sounds but I reeled back in my chair (not from the sounds but from his claim). It was impossible. It was paradoxical. It was more time travel mumbo jumbo and I could feel a migraine coming on as I tried to comprehend it. God, but my head was killing me. Instead I settled for shaking Erdinger’s head like a magic eight ball and asking it a question, like a Ouija board. I set the shuttle to a cruising speed that I deemed ‘un-suspicious’ as we pulled away from the prison.

  “Tell me everything.”

  “Love to. I love nothing more telling stories of my missions while some bloody traitor with his dick out shakes me around . But I think I had better make this one a short story. Maybe even a poem. Actually a haiku would be more suitable.”

  He slid his eyes over to the shuttle’s display readout and I followed his gaze. It was as though my looking at it made it a reality- like that old experiment about Heisenberg’s Cats- because as soon as my eyes alighted on the displays they all turned to an alarming shade of red- the kind of red that flashes and has noises. A siren sounded, followed by a klaxon (which were subtly different). I gripped the wheel and called up the rear displays.

  The exterior of the Manhole which had been a flat black cube in the previous time was now a spiky affair dotted with hundreds of tiny red lights, all of which were turning towards the ship. Red lights would have been bad enough on their own, but these were more. Turrets. Turrets and armaments of every size and description adorned the outside of the Manhole and each one was currently doing two terrifying things- 1) locking on to our craft, and B) powering up. The shuttle console started stuttering out the words ‘weapons lock’ over and over as each part of the array got our signature, but the amount of lock ons turned the noise into a shrill and experimental dance track.

  “Well, Rex- sorry, I mean Space, it looks like the end of the line for us. At least I get to take you to hell with me.“ He snarled. I threw him over my shoulder and gripped the wheel. This was no time for heads. I put my fist through the shuttle intercom and the alarms finally shut off.

  “What have you got, Space? Face it; you’re beat.”

  My fist was pale and shaking as I took it out of the ruined console. My mouth was dry. A hundred turrets zeroed in on the only craft in the quadrant and I sat there, naked, afraid and being heckled by a head. I always feared this was how it would end.

  “What have you got?” he yelled.

  CALAPAW? No. Not today..

  “Let’s see,” I said.

  The turrets opened fire.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Space Under Fire/ Things are Looking Dire

  * * *

  Some people die at twenty five and are only buried when they’re seventy five. Those people are vampires

  Benjamin Franklin

  Ѻ

  Hot plasma thudded into the side of the ship like fists thudding into a big cow. We could take them, sure, but not for too long. We were out here with no guns, gossamer shields and an engine so weak that it probably got bullied by mid-range mopeds and fancy blenders.

  Now, you don’t get the moniker of ‘legendary pilot’ by giving it to yourself (though that certainly seems to kickstart the process) no, you have to earn it. I’d flown in just about everything that could be flown in and three things that the laws of physics said could not, and each time I have done so it has always lead to some kind of glorious and thrilling violence, but a man could only do so much. With a craft as poor, and ugly and fridge-shaped as this a chap could only do so much hot-dogging. It was like going into a gunfight armed only with a winning smile, entering a decathlon on a unicycle that was on fire or entering a cosmic hyper chess tournament while in a medically induced coma. Sure, I had done all of that, but it wasn’t exactly optimal.

  I was taking evasive manoeuvres. Sure I was. I was taking evasive manoeuvres like a squid makes love to a lion- without the faintest idea of what I was meant to be doing, how I was meant to do it and with an equally high chance of being torn to shreds. A laser beam ripped into the hull, passing thr
ough our shields like a truck passing through a child’s wish, and I felt it gouge a trench of melted steel into our side. I winced as though it had torn a chunk out of me.

  I pressed the steering column down as far as I could, till my forearms burned and the engines gave a high pitched whine of protest. The smell of burning tyres filled the shuttle and though I had no idea what could be causing it, I could comfortably predict it was something likely to kill me. It could even just be burning tyres.

  The shuttle plummeted like a stone and tracer fire zipped around us, tightening in like a noose as we continued the freefall. As it fixed on us I pulled us into a sudden ascent and threw in a barrel roll for no particular reason, save desperation and an abiding belief in the power of flair. The red beams slid past us for a few scant seconds then started running us down once more. The whine of the engines was now a scream. The smell in the air had become smoke and the glow of the red alarm signs was now replaced with the glow of what I was pretty sure was fire.

  But maybe the worst part was the criticism.

  “Brilliant move!” cried Erdinger’s head as it fell into the back part of the cabin.

  “I think that extended our life by about fourteen seconds, hotshot,” he commented as I put us into a fresh dive and his head was catapulted onto the dashboard next to me.

  I‘ve been on a lot of ships. And I’ve taken roughly eighty nine percent of those ships into battle (Ebenezer once calculated that figure for me and presented it to me in a spreadsheet, I assume as some kind of congratulation) but in all of that time I’ve never had for company, a passenger who was actively willing death upon us. As far as drains to morale go, it was hard to top. I had to actually admire his level of spite but I had something I wanted out of him more than mockery of my driving. I wanted answers. And failing that an end to all the mockery, but really I would settle for answers.

  “You killed Tempus, you say. How? Why?”

  I retrieved him from the dashboard with one hand and wrapped a safety harness roughly round his forehead, plopping him into the passenger seat.

  “Just shut your mouth and die,” he advised.

  As if to answer his request a plasma barrage caught our aft starboard wing. Heavy plasma. It sizzled almost all of the way through. I transferred power out of that wing and into the three other engines and set us on a zig-zag pattern directly toward the prison.

  “Tempus is the man who’s going to kill us. You know what’s half of us? ‘U’. that means ‘you’.”

  Erdinger grimaced. That could have been the fact that two seatbelts were digging into his eye and ear, but I chose to believe he was flummoxed by my wordplay. I took the shuttle dangerously close to the surface of the prison and pulled up. We skimmed the skin of the place, wiping out a few turrets as our hull scraped into them, hurting us far more in the process. It was what military historians might call a ‘phallic victory’.

  “Fine. If you want to know, let these be my last words,” he grudged, “but you’re wrong. That man is dead. I had a simple job- wipe out his lab and everyone in it. Some company wanted him taken out. He was making strides in ‘temporal technology’ that someone wanted un-strode. So they hire me. Boom.”

  The shuttle shot up above the prison and I take us in a somersaulting path above it. We catch a few laser bolts in the belly and the computer tells me that the possibility of shields coming back online, is a madman’s dream.

  “So? What then?”

  “What do you think?! You’re COAR- they must have told you about me. I get the job done. I went aboard this Tempus’ lab- a small satellite lab above Heraldon’s sun. That place is rotten with labs like that.” A bell rings somewhere in my head, but I was too busy to pursue it. I poured life support power into thrust instead. “And I did what I did. Got aboard, planted my bomb, and got out of Dodge before they blew. The lab went down as did Tempus and his whole staff. Last thing they ever did was send out a distress signal, but that did no good. Job done”

  I spared a look down at him, just to transmit some disgust. But something he said had just ‘stuck in my crow’, as they say.

  “Send out a signal, eh?” I asked.

  If a head could shrink away, Erdinger’s just did. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Want to make yourself useful?”

  I didn’t wait for a response. I grabbed Erdinger’s head. I tapped in a course for the ship and then ran into the back of the ship.

  ---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---

  He ran back from the town limits, anger clouding his face already fairly anger-clouded face. Anger at me, sure, anger at my still unperturbed Sheriff in large spades, but most of all anger at himself.

  It had taken him long enough to realize. It’s the sociopath’s curse, I guess. When you view people as mere things to be manipulated, their emotions don’t really register even when they are yelling prayers loudly into your face for several hours while trying to cut off their possessed hands. Slowing those reactions down a thousand times doesn’t help much either. The first bandito had left the town limits a few rounds ago unnoticed and slowly but surely the other retreating criminals had gotten farther and farther away. His jogging between each of his meat puppets in each duel had gotten longer and longer but that same ploy that had proved his strength- the time slowing of his breeches- had outdone him by making their retreat so slow as to not truly register until it was too late. When the realization finally hit him each bandit was frozen in a dead run away from my indestructible sheriff who swatted bullets out of the air like they were mosquitos.

  Tempus had a few shots aimed towards us but they were wild now, desperate.

  Most of the men had thrown away their guns by now anyway, and a few of them were clamping their demonic hands where they could do no more evil- they were stuffed tightly in pockets, clasped in armpits of stuffed in crotches. I barely needed to deflect any bullets, instead settling in to watch Tempus manically try to rustle back the retreating criminals somehow, or, failing that, make their last few shots count.

  Presently he plodded back to the place where Raoul had once been (before Raoul had howled about voodoo, tried to saw off his own hands, cast aside his guns and ran screaming into the desert plains). He scowled there and looked at the precious few bullets shuffling leisurely through the air. All of them were misses. He looked at Holliday, who was mid-way through a laugh and who was also winking at a bar patron who was peering out of a window, jaw agape.

  “End of this round?” I enquired innocently.

  “End of the road” he growled back.

  I jumped a little at that. I expected him to be opening a fresh rift in time with that kind of talk but there was something in his hands that was not a flux capacitor knob. It was a gun. One of the discarded revolvers from one of the bandits. It looked comically large in Tempus’ grip. The man was no cowboy, quite the opposite- he was a time displaced professor from beyond the stars and the ancient metal weapon sat oddly in his grip but he was staring darkly at the frozen form of Holliday as it hung from his side.

  “Go ahead, shoot. You know I can deflect your bullet with one of my own.” I said. It was odd how blasé one could get about a skill over a short period of time, I thought. But Tempus wasn’t looking at me. He was staring fixedly at the Sheriff.

  “I’m not going to do it in the time bubble.”

  “What?”

  “Me and him, Mr Funkworthy. A real duel. No trickery involved.”

  “But he’ll kil- I mean, oh no! Don’t! That’s a frightful idea!”

  He looked over at me, my expert bluff having apparently failed. “You really have that much faith in this man, don’t you? You honestly think he’d win.”

  I looked at the Sheriff, his matching duster,waistcoat and gun combination, his sheriff’s badge and the way that he was winking at random strangers as his guns went off. Then I looked back at Tempus who was holding the heavy old Earth pistol like a ferret holding a parachute- which is to say unconvincingly.

  �
��I think he stands a good chance, but let’s see, by all means.”

  “You’ve learned nothing this whole time, have you? Since Kronis station? I mean to unmask this man as a fraud! He’s a charlatan every damn incarnation of him has been twice the ninny as the previous one yet you persist in believing in him. Without any aid, he’d fall just like anyone else. Faster, even.”

  “Let’s see it then,” I invited. But in truth there was a seed of doubt in me. After all, I’d seen this man do nothing of merit really. He had only shot through my own guidance and as for the rest? A matching outfit and a brief tour of town were a lot to lay one’s confidence on. I looked over at him and was dismayed to find that he was blowing an extremely, extremely slow kiss toward the saloon windows as his duster tented out to accommodate his time-travel mandated flatulence. Not the most inspiring figure. Tempus on the other hand seemed to burn with a single purpose.

  “Maybe you should fetch the other Funkworthy to watch this,” Tempus offered.

  “That’s just a weird coincidence. It’s a common name.”

  “‘A reliable old nag’ he said”

  “Shut up, Tempus. If you’re going to do this, do it. If I was just going to watch him shoot you, you could have saved us a lot of time and stayed on Kronis”

  He fiddled with his trousers, my own stirred in sympathy and the air seemed to flex inward as time yawned. “Such admirable faith,” he said.

  “Such admirable arrogance,” I countered.

  He looked over at me patiently. “I’m going to free you, Mr. Funkworthy. A life without him? It’s better for everyone, yourself included. Imagine how high you would fly without him. I bet you’d be a Captain in your own right.”

  “And you? What would you be?”

  He wagged a non-gun holding finger at me. “The time for explanations passed a few centuries from now, Mr. Funkworthy. Though I admire your persistence. Another trait you lend to this fool for no profit.” he smiled and shook his head. “Have you any last words before I restart time in this dingy, dusty place?”