by Allen Steele
—Edmond Hamilton; Outlaws of the Moon (1942)
“Are you Captain Future?”
The spacer who had come over to my table was a little smaller than a fuel tank, and built much the same way: massive cylinder for a chest, head like a valve. Gold bangles dangling from his right earlobe marked him as a cloud diver, and the top of his shaven skull nearly brushed the taproom’s low ceiling. How someone that huge made his way through the station’s narrow passageways, I couldn’t imagine; judging from the bandage on his forehead, he probably bumped into a lot of things.
“I said, are you Captain Future?” he repeated.
I glanced at Jeri. Sitting across the table from me, she looked calm as usual, but I noted that she had casually dropped her right hand so that it rested a few inches from the scabbard strapped to her left leg. That’s my girl: never taking any chances, especially when we were in hostile territory.
“Depends who’s asking,” I replied, keeping my own hands in plain view. “I mean, I don’t usually go by that handle. My former captain liked to call himself that, but he’s gone now. My name’s Rohr Furland, and this is my wife Jeri. And who may you be, m’sser?”
A polite enough answer, but it seemed to puzzle the big galoot. Too complex, I guess; a lot of information to absorb at once. He cast Jeri a look that seemed to write her off as a google not worth bothering with before he returned his attention to me.
“So,” he said slowly, “you Captain Future or ain’cha?”
A dozen pairs of eyes burned holes in my back. When we came in, a bar band at the front of the room had been strangling cats, or at least that’s what it sounded like they were doing. We’d suffered through the end of their set while we nursed our drinks and tried to pick out someone who resembled Jenny Pell from the taproom’s patrons, and sighed in relief when the band finally took a break. Now I wished they had kept playing. Our friend’s voice was a deep rumble that carried well in the narrow compartment; heads were beginning to turn.
And, sweet Elvis, I was really tired of being called Captain Future.
“No, I’m not Captain Future.” I picked up my beer stein, but didn’t bring it to my lips, and leaned back in my chair so that only the rear legs touched the floor. “Yes, the TBSA Comet’s my ship, and yes, it used to belong to Bo McKinnon, and I used to be his exec, sure, but that’s something that happened three Gregorians ago, and…” I shrugged. “Look, it’s really simple. I’m not Captain Future. You copy?”
The cloud diver peered at me through heavy lidded eyes. “So you’re not Captain Future?”
“No, I’m not Captain Future.”
He thought this over for a few moments. Then his face broke into a grin that would have made babies scream.
“You’re a dead mu’fucker, Captain Future.” And then he raised a fist the size of a cargo davit and swung it at me.
I was prepared for that. I kicked back from the table, and his fist missed me by a few centimeters as the chair toppled to the floor beneath my outstretched legs. The diver was caught off-balance long enough for me to bring the stein down on his noggin. The bandage made a good target and the stein was cheap ceramic; it shattered nicely and the thug sprawled across the table.
“Sorry,” I said, tossing aside the stein’s broken handle, “but I told you I’m not…”
“Rohr, look out!”
Jeri’s scream made me look up, but not quite fast enough. The diver had friends, and one of them rushed me before I was finished gloating. He wasn’t nearly as large as his mate, but his fist caught the side of my jaw just hard enough to put me on the floor.
He was bending down to pick up my chair—no doubt to offer me a seat, so to speak—but Jeri got to him first. My captain is pretty good with a charged rapier; she whisked its humming blade across his bare biceps and he dropped the chair as his arm went numb and started to bleed, then her backstroke paralyzed his legs and he went down.
Two large spacers on either side of Jeri hurled themselves at her, but her breed don’t call themselves Superiors for no reason; she may look frail, but I’ve wrestled with her enough to know better, albeit under different conditions. Ducking her head to miss the ceiling, she leaped straight up in the air on her long, double-jointed legs and somersaulted out of the way. The goons crashed into one another, missing her completely as she lighted to the floor, then she slashed the rapier’s tip across them and they were reduced to writhing heaps.
Someone else came at me while I was still on my back. Apparently no one on Evening Star knew about fair fights; on the other hand, is there ever such as thing? Jeri thinks so, which is why she opts for non-lethal swordplay, but I’m not as nice as she is. I kicked the chair into his groin, then scrambled to my feet in time to head-butt another clown who tried to take my wife from behind. He clutched his stomach and doubled over; a swift blow to the back of his neck and he was out cold.
So far, so good. Six down and we were still standing, everyone else in the room looked like they were beginning to think twice about taking us; although we were still outnumbered six-to-two, they were keeping their distance. For the moment, at least.
“Think we can make the hatch?” I murmured.
“Where’s the hatch?” she whispered back. She was busy watching the men encircling us.
“Umm…I dunno.” I peered through the gloom, spotted a narrow archway beneath a neon sign reading Aphrodite’s Shell. “Got it. About ten meters starboard, other side of the billiards table.”
Her blade whined softly as she swept it past her, warding off someone who was getting a little too close. “I think we can make it, if we hurry…”
“But don’t look like we’re hurrying…”
“Fresh apples.” She took a tentative step to the right and I followed her lead. “Ready? One…two…”
Then we charged the hatch. Screw subtlety.
They were upon us before we were halfway there. I found a half-empty pitcher someone left on a table; wasting beer is a sin where I come from, but I think Great Mother forgave me for throwing it in a fellow spacer’s face. It distracted him long enough for me to kick the table into his knees, and as he went down I swung the pitcher itself into the guy next to him. The pitcher didn’t break, but the impact was enough to knock him across his friend, who was still trying to get up.
Two more down, and I kept running. Jeri was holding her own—who am I kidding? she was carving her way through the crowd like a hemp farmer in a greenhouse—but I was unarmed and quickly running out of tables, chairs, and beer steins. So how about a pool cue? There’s one leaning against the billiards table; pick it up and see if you can make like Boom-Boom Osaka of the Tokyo Giants. The first guy I tried to slam jumped back; he came at me again, and I forgot about baseball and remembered what this thing was used for. I slammed the stick’s butt into his chest and managed to knock him into the table. Caught within its negmass field, he howled as balls pummeled him from all directions.
I might have laughed if someone hadn’t tackled me from behind. One second, I was on my feet; the next, my face was down amongst crumbs of fried algae trodden in the carpet. I gasped as the breath was punched from my lungs, then the stick was ripped from my grasp and a heavy boot came down on my spine.
The boot had claws on its toes. I know this because they scratched my back. Claws? Then I heard my wife yell my name from somewhere above and behind me, and I stopped wondering about clawed boots.
“Jeri, get outta…!”
Then someone kicked me straight to Mars.
It wasn’t a very long trip. When I came back, I was being dragged along one of the station’s passageways, my legs leaving tiny furrows in the carpet. My head pounded like a New Year’s hangover and my left eye wouldn’t open all the way, yet through the good one I could see the clawed boots I had felt on my back just before I was knocked out, marching just a couple of paces behind me.
If they were boots, though, they were the damnedest pair of footwear I had ever seen: reddish-brown snakeskin, with t
hree long, webbed toes on each foot, each ending in a small talon. What kind of person would wear…?
I raised my head a little and looked up, and saw that it wasn’t a person at all. At least not in the human sense. The face above me was utterly reptilian: an elongated snout containing a wide mouth, narrow eyes with yellow pupils and slot-shaped irises, a short bony ridge running from the top of the forehead back along the skull. He—she, it, whatever—wore a blue ConSpace jumpsuit, but the sleeves were rolled back to expose scaly forearms ending in three-fingered hands, one of which was carrying a Pax Navy flechette pistol.
“Please tell me that’s a costume you’re wearing,” I murmured.
The lizard-man glanced down at me; in reply, his mouth widened into something approximately resembling a grin, exposing a row of sharp, pointed teeth. A tendril of saliva dripped from the roof of his mouth as his forked tongue briefly slithered out.
“S-s-s-shut up,” he hissed. Nope, it wasn’t a mask.
“Rohr? Are you okay?”
Jeri was somewhere just ahead of me. I craned my head and looked past the two guys holding my arms, but couldn’t see her around the procession escorting us down the long corridor. Now I recognized where we were: Evening Star’s north axial passageway, heading in the direction of the hub. Must be getting pretty close, too; my body felt lighter.
“Right here, babe. How’re…?”
“S-s-shut up, as-s-s-shole!” The lizard-man quickened his pace so he could kick me in the side. One of his talons ripped a hole in my shirt and gave me a scratch. I yelped and shut up. Well, at least she knew I was still alive, and I knew likewise about her.
The corridor ended in a five-way intersection: two passageways splitting off to the left and right to the east and west airlocks, one heading straight ahead to the command center, the last two to ladder-rungs to short corridors that circumvented the hub and ended in the south axial passageway to the other end of the station. I expected them to take the corridor to the command center; now we could get all this cleared up, one way or another. A quick chat with the ombudsman, perhaps a kangaroo court; we’d be levied with a heavy fine for fighting in a public area and told to leave. No problem there; maybe Jeri and I hadn’t finished our business, but I figured it was about time for us to make our departure from Evening Star.
Oh, we were leaving all right. Without any hesitation, they took the right fork and headed for the east airlock.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Whoa, wait a minute…!”
The lizard stepped forward to give me another kick, but I twisted aside and managed to dodge his foot. My left arm nearly came free, but the guy holding my wrist tightened his hold. Same dude I had knocked into the pool table; there was a purple welt on his forehead, and he didn’t look very happy with me.
“We can work this out!” I yelled. “Just give us a fine, let us pay up, and we’ll be on our way! But I don’t think you want to…”
The human iguana kicked me again, this time hard enough to knock the wind out of me and open a deep cut in the side of my chest. Elvis, if someone was going to nanosurgically retrofit his body to resemble a reptile’s, the least he could do was trim his toenails once in a while.
They dragged me around a sharp bend and halfway down the corridor, passing the dockmaster we’d met only about an hour ago; heshe gazed down at me with complete lack of sympathy. A short pause in front of the hatch leading to the airlock, then it irised open with a faint grinding sound. By now my body was so light, it didn’t make sense to drag me; the two men holding my arms hauled me to my feet and thrust me into the antechamber. The bulkheads were lined with lockers containing EVA gear of both hard and soft varieties. I saw the ones Jeri and I had rented to stash our softsuits just after we had come aboard.
“Yeah, right, okay.” I halted before our lockers. “We get the message. Now if you’ll just…”
Someone laughed, not very pleasantly although with great humor, then I felt a cold oval against the back of my neck as iguana boy pressed his pistol against me. I flinched, almost turned around to fight, then reconsidered. One twitch of his finger, and a razor-sharp flechette would sever my spinal cord.
Just ahead of me, the mob parted just a bit and I saw Jeri standing in front of the candy-striped airlock hatch. Someone was holding her wrists behind her back; she was looking down at the floor, her long braid draped over her bent shoulders. She seemed to be mumbling under her breath. Superiors don’t pray—extropic philosophy doesn’t allow for a God interested in human worship—but that’s what she looked like she was doing. There are no atheists in foxholes, nor in airlocks for that matter.
Then an elderly woman eased her way past Jeri. I recognized her immediately: Jenny Pell, the person we had been sent to find. Her long blonde hair now silver-grey, her face wrinkled and slightly jowled, she was older than the woman in the holos the guys from Pax Intelligence had shown us, but the same individual nonetheless. My late father practically worshiped her, as did everyone who had fought under the serpent flag during the Moon War. Jenny Pell, co-founder of the New Ark Party, instigator of the Clarke County revolution, mother of the Pax Astra. It’s not often that you get a chance to meet a living legend. Under any other circumstances, I would be awestruck. Hell, I probably would have asked for her autograph.
She stepped past the mooks bracing me on either side and studied me with calm blue eyes. “Captain Future, I presume,” she said at last.
“Look, I tried to tell your friend back there, I’m not…”
“Sorry, but your reputation precedes you.” Her expression was sorrowful as she looked away. “As does mine, I’m afraid. Otherwise this wouldn’t be necessary.” She glanced over her shoulder at the lizard. “Frank…?”
“My pleas-s-s-sure.”
“Please forgive me,” Jenny Pell said, “but this has to be done.”
Then she moved aside and silently watched as Jeri and I were thrown into the airlock.
I fought as best I could, but there’s not much you can do when you’re outnumbered by Frank the Lizard and his cronies. The hatch slammed shut behind us, and I barely had time to grab Jeri before alarms began wailing and red lamps flashed.
“Hold your breath,” Jeri said against my chest.
Then the outer hatch opened, and we were blown out into space.
This man was one of the great mysteries of the Solar System. Everyone had heard of him. Everyone had repeated tails of Captain Future’s incredible exploits as a scientist, as a space-farer, as the most audacious of all planeteers. Everyone knew his name and that of the three strange Futuremen who were his comrades.
—Hamilton; Quest Beyond the Stars (1941)
Of course, you’re probably wondering how we got in this mess. I’m not quite sure myself, truth to be told. However, I do know it had a lot to do with reputation: mine, Jeri’s, and—perhaps most importantly—Bo McKinnon’s.
You remember Bo McKinnon. Captain of the asteroid freighter TBSA Comet, the man who gave his life to prevent a runaway massdriver called the Fool’s Gold from propelling an asteroid into Mars. One of the noblest acts of self-sacrifice in human history; when the aresians erected a twice-life-size statue to his memory at Arsia Station, no one even smiled when they chiseled his self-chosen nom de plume into its plaque: Captain Future, after the forgotten 20th century pulp magazine character whose adventures he had obsessively collected.
What nobody knows is that it was all a hoax. McKinnon didn’t overload the massdriver’s reactors in order to prevent 2046-Barr from colliding with Mars; he was out cold on the floor of the command center when Jeri and I blew up the Fool’s Gold with nukes launched from the Comet’s Navy-surplus weapons pod. Perhaps it wasn’t the nicest thing to do, and we felt really bad about it later…
No. Jeri felt bad about it later, but I can’t honestly say I did. Yet McKinnon had been infected by the same outbreak of Titan Plague that brought low the massdriver’s crew, so there was no way we could bring him back aboard the Comet without contaminati
ng our ship as well. What we did wasn’t very noble, but it saved not only our own lives, but also those of hundreds of thousands of aresians. In order to cover ourselves, Jeri and I concocted the tale that Bo had blown up the Fool’s Gold himself. No one questioned us, and in the final analysis everyone came out ahead: McKinnon gained respect, which was what he wanted, we stayed out of trouble, which was what we wanted, and the solar system acquired a new hero, which was what it needed. And that was the end of the story.
For the next three years, at least.
Under common law, the Comet now belonged to Jeri; after the Transient Body Shipping Association affirmed her status as its new captain, she appointed me as First Mate. By then our romance had become a marital affair, so we made things official almost as soon as the ship’s registry was transferred to her name. A bartender friend in Tycho City was also a licensed Justice of the Peace; he didn’t have any problems about formally tying the knot between a Primary and a Superior, although damned few friends of ours showed up for the ceremony, and the ones who didn’t let it known that they weren’t wild about an ape getting hitched to a google. We had a brief honeymoon on Earth—very brief: four days when we were supposed to stay for seven—before we gratefully returned to space. Earth is nice, if you happen to like high gravity, insects, and total lack of climate control. Personally, I think the place is vastly overrated.
Running the Comet as a family business should have been simple; just as before, our job was carrying freight out to the Main Belt, then hauling asteroid ore back to the Moon. Yet the story of how Captain Future saved Mars had spread across the system, and since Bo wasn’t around to wallow in his posthumous fame—just as well, for it would have made him even more insufferable, if such a thing were possible—then Jeri and I became the heirs of not only his ship, but as his second-hand celebrity. After all, we were the crew of the TBSA Comet, the last ones to see him alive. The Futuremen, as he loved to call us. It wasn’t long before I learned to resent that word.
A funny thing, fame. In small doses, it can be very good for you. Everywhere you go, you’re never a stranger; people want to meet you, buy you lunch or a drink, clap you on the shoulder, tell you what a great guy you are. Fame opens doors previously closed to you, presents opportunities you never had before. We received so many job offers, we had to turn some down. When we sought extra hands for long hauls, we never needed to post notices at the union office in Tycho, as McKinnon did when he hired me; there were always dozens of spacers wanting to work for us, even for short-term gigs, just so they could claim that they had once served aboard the Comet. The Exchequer Luna upgraded our credit rating to AAA, and when we decided to refurbish the ship, a brief meeting with a senior vice-president netted us a loan of 300 megalox, no questions asked. He even had us pose for a holo with him.