by M. D. Cooper
“Yeah,” BAMF grunted and peered at the not-Letches. “Why’d you fools do that, anyway?”
The clones all glanced at one another and shrugged.
“If this were a story,” Ramsey mused as he gnawed on his carrot, “I’d say it was a small plot hole, or maybe a weak plot device.”
As he spoke, a pair of tall boots followed by a corseted figure in tight leather appeared on the ship’s ramp. “You guys done out there yet? Isn’t this place going to blow?”
“Stick!” Lashes called out. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, you know, I figured you could use a hand.”
The ship’s ground defense weapons lowered from within its hull and trained on the Letches.
“Hey, Letches, now why don’t you lower your weapons?” Ramsey said.
“I’ll take that back now,” BAMF said as she seized her rifle and slammed its butt into one of the not-Letches’ head. “Fucking clones.”
“Where’s the Van?” Lashes asked.
“Still up in orbit,” Stick replied while gesturing to the sky.
“Then how’d you get down here?” Ramsey asked.
“Easy,” Stick said. “I jumped.”
“Fool, you’re crazy,” BAMF grunted as she gestured for the not-Letches to drop their weapons and back away.
Ramsey motioned for Ben, Sam, and Missy to get on the Gettsbird.
Lashes followed and Ramsey grinned at the clones. “Well, it was nice knowing you, but we’ll be heading out now.”
“You can’t leave us here!” several of the Letches yelled at once.
Ramsey laughed and walked up the ramp. “Watch me.”
A few of the not-Letches attempted to follow him, but the ship’s defense turrets fired shots into the ground in front of them and they fell back.
Inside, the Gettsbird was as clean and sleek as it was on the exterior. He followed Stick to the bridge and watched as she readied the ship for takeoff.
“They had one guy in here getting it prepped,” she said. “I made him pass me the access tokens and then I cold-cocked him, as BAMF is so fond of saying.”
“No AI?” Ramsey asked.
“Nope, just a dumb non-sentient AI that I can boss around.”
“Good, then send a recall signal to our shuttle and get us out of here,” Ramsey directed.
“What about us?” Sam asked from the bridge entrance.
Ramsey turned to the young man with his girlfriend at his side, both looking exhausted.
“Do you want to go back to Port Kendall?” Ramsey asked. “I imagine that Getts may not be too fond of you right now.”
“Good point,” Sam said. “Any chance you’re stopping at a station in New Eden on your way outsystem?”
“Maybe,” Ramsey said. “Or you could come back to Yedsi with us.”
“How you gonna get back there?” BAMF asked from behind the pair.
“We’ll fly sub-light, don’t worry,” Ramsey said with a wink.
“Don’t be a fool, Colonel. It’ll take a hundred years to get back there.”
Ramsey smiled and as he placed a fresh carrot in his mouth. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.”
REUNION
They left the Gettsbird in a high orbit around Gettsmoon after transferring via shuttle to the Van.
Below, the moon looked much as it had when they arrived. Their scan picked up the research facility’s destruction on the island’s northern coast when its self-destruct detonated, but none of the light was visible through the thick clouds.
Lashes insisted that they send a system-wide message about what Gettscorp had been up to on the moon, and ensured the warning got to the moon’s inhabitants.
When they all piled into the Van’s rec room, Petra was there, waiting with open arms for Ben. He crashed into them and they engaged in a long embrace, and deep kiss.
“Told you,” Stick said, giving the others a knowing look. “Not brother and sister.”
“Oh, we’re brother and sister,” Petra said with a smile. “We just share a special bond.”
“Uh…yeah,” Lashes scowled. “Your bond is supposed to be just DNA and parentage, not saliva, blech.”
Petra ignored her and looked back at Ben. “Did you get it?”
“Yup,” he said with a nod.
“Excellent.” Petra whipped out a plasma pistol and pointed it at the others. “Now, if you’ll all file down into the shuttle, we’ll be on our way. Oh, and don’t think your moronic ship’s AI can help you. I have her firmly in hand.”
“Nice one, Girl,” Stick said with a smile.
“How did you know she was hacking you?” Lashes asked.
“What?” Ramsey shouted around his fresh carrot. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“Did I do that? I don’t remember telling her to shut up,” Ramsey asked the crew.
“Beats me,” Stick replied. “You’re a bit mean to my Girl. You tell her to shut up a lot.”
“What? Me?” Ramsey took out his carrot and placed a hand across his chest.
“Maybe it’s another one of this story’s plot holes,” BAMF said with a wide grin.
“Fuck…does this mean we’re not getting paid?” Lashes asked.
TIDY LITTLE WRAP UP
Ramsey decided to do the right thing and turn Ben and Petra over to the New Eden authorities. It turned out that Ben was smuggling a pure strain of the bacteria out for his own uses, and the entire kidnapping had been a ruse.
Gettscorp and all their assets were frozen, and Gettsmoon was evacuated and quarantined. Everyone in the system who had eaten seafood in the last few years made immediate appointments to see their doctor.
After some rather extensive and intrusive tests, the New Eden H&S people had pronounced the crew of the Van clean and granted them permission to dock anywhere, which they did at Pegasus Station. Sam and Missy disembarked to start a new life together on one of New Eden’s other planets that had very few oceans—after they made the talk show circuit.
* * * * *
“Hey BAMF?” Lashes asked.
“What?” the huge woman said as she sat down with a pot of soup and began scooping it into her mouth with the ladle.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry. The colonel made me do it.”
“Sorry for whaaaa…” BAMF’s voice faded and she looked dizzy. Lashes tried to catch her, but the woman was too heavy and her face slammed into the pot splashing soup everywhere.
“Get…you…” a muffled mumble came from the soup pot.
“Yeah,” Lashes sighed. “At least when BAMF wakes this time we won’t have to carry her toast points far.”
On the bridge, Ramsey watched as Stick set the ship on an outsystem lane to their jump point. He gave his fresh new carrot a bite and smiled.
“I love it when a plan comes together.”
THE END
— — —
Want to read more by M. D. Cooper?
The stories of Colonel Ramsey and his Delta-Team take place in the broader
Aeon 14 universe (which is great, but not typically this amusing). Learn more about it at www.aeon14.com.
Be sure to keep an eye out for Pew! Pew! Volume 2 when the Delta-Team visits The Disney World (as in a whole planet of Disney).
Books by M. D. Cooper
Aeon 14
The Intrepid Saga
Book 1: Outsystem
Book 2: A Path in the Darkness
Book 3: Building Victoria
The Intrepid Saga Omnibus – Also contains Destiny Lost, book 1 of the Orion War series
Destiny Rising – Special Author’s Extended Edition comprised of both Outsystem and A Path in the Darkness with over 100 pages of new content.
The Orion War
Book 1: Destiny Lost
Tales of the Orion War: Set the Galaxy on Fire
Book 2: New Canaan
Book 3: Orion Rising (coming June 22nd 2017)
Visit www.aeon14.com/orionwar to learn what’s next in the Orion War.
Perilous Alliance (with Chris J. Pike)
Book 1: Close Proximity
Rika’s Marauders
Book 1: Rika Outcast (coming August 2017)
The Sol Dissolution
The 242 - Venusian Uprising (In The Expanding Universe 2 anthology - coming June 15th 2017)
The Delta Team Chronicles
A "Simple" Kidnapping (In the Pew! Pew! anthology you just read)
Touching the Stars
Book 1: The Girl Who Touched the Stars
About the Author
Michael Cooper has been writing since he finished Return of the King and had to have more. Lately, he has turned toward science fiction and is working on the Aeon14 series of books, which surround a colony ship leaving the Sol System.
When he's not writing novels or software he can be found spending time with his wife and daughter, or in his wood shop building furniture.
Find M. D. Cooper’s books on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/M.-D.-Cooper/e/B008I6L0Q6
Social Links
Aeon14 Fan Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1768305096738079/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/soyarma
The Methane Lake of Excruciating Tedium
by Felix R. Savage
On Titan, hell is other people.
Climatologist Beddard Godwin is elated when he gets a chance to work on Titan, a moon of Saturn so cold that liquid methane forms lakes on the surface. But his sensitive and orderly soul recoils from his fellow scientists, who pass the endless nights with practical jokes and hair-raising exploits whilst turning their research outpost into a pigsty. Beddard takes to boating on the methane lakes to get away from them.
Alone on the frigid surface, he contentedly composes romantic poetry and contemplates the toxic clouds. But when a mysterious passenger appears in his boat, he discovers that there are much, much worse things than other human beings on Titan…
DAY 51
I keep reminding myself that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I came to Titan to study the methane lakes.1
I am not a janitor.
I am not a robot.
I am not a housekeeper, such as our resident tyrant Samuel Pushever assuredly employs in the deluxe digs where he lives when employed, as I wish he had remained, at Princeton.
I am NOT here to tidy up after my esteemed colleagues. That is Kirsty’s job.2
I have concealed my annoyance from the others, Diary, and have even attempted to conceal my feelings from you, why I do not know—aspirations to the terse, factual style of Victorian explorers’ journals? How ridiculous I am sometimes—but as of today, I have had it.
These people may be world-leading scientists. They are not even minimally civilized.
Bereft of their human and robotic support systems, they leave their clothes on the floor, their boots on the heaters, meal wrappers on the table, crumbs in the keyboards of the computers we must share, and their shit, unbelievably, floating in the toilet.
I plungered the bloody thing out again this morning, wishing that every turd I sent on its way to the recycling unit were some vital body part belonging to Pushever.
Or Ramaswamy.
Or Zoya.
Or Hiroto.
Or Kepler.
Especially Kepler, I decided as foul water splashed up into my face (splashes travel a very long way in 0.14 gees) and the braying laugh of Kepler herself punctuated my travails.
Kepler has long red hair and freckles. Her parents named her after Johannes, who discovered the laws of planetary motion. She has lived up to the sobriquet by trekking solo across the Mare Tranquilitatis, rappelling into the crater of Olympus Mons, and discovering fossilized bacteria in some ghastly Europan ice dig. I suppose she thought Titan would be her greatest adventure yet. I am not above a bit of schadenfreude.
“I need to use the jakes,” she informed me.
“Give me five minutes to finish this,” I said.
“Why are you doing that, Ben?”
“Because,” I replied, “if I did not, we would be ankle deep in sewage within 24 hours.”
“It smells really bad,” she said, and strode intrepidly off to look out of the window, whilst crossing her legs.
There is only one window in this place. it dominates the room we call the kitchen. The hab consists of 4 bedrooms, the toilet, the pantry, a cave crammed with the machinery that keeps us alive, and this squalid common room, which functions as a kitchen, living-room, shared office, recreation room, and on at least one occasion has witnessed bloodshed.3
All there ever is to see outside the window is rain, or else no rain.
We arrived on Titan in the middle of the winter, which lasts for 12 years, and is therefore the only season we will ever see, as our residency lasts one year. 303 days from now, the ship is coming to pick us up.
Personally, I like the sight of fat methane droplets sliding at snail’s pace down the triple-strength transparent aluminum, and the patter of rain striking the roof. It is inspiring.
After sorting the toilet, I washed my hands (Ramaswamy: “You know that’s the exact same water, right?”) and cleaned the wrappers, spills, smears of Vegemite, constellations of hot chocolate granules, grease pencil doodles, etc. etc. off the kitchen table. I then made a tomato sandwich for lunch. Tomatoes are another thing I find inspiring, especially in their rehydrated form. Whilst eating it, I composed the following poem:
Red and juicy
Flavorsome and zesty, despite 38-year shelf life
Opium of my palate!
You say tomato
I say bread’s soulmate.
Dashed-off, but it contains a seed of profundity, I think. Maybe I should have gone for the MFA, instead of selling out to Big Science.
Nonsense. Psychroplanetic climatology is my passion, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity…
I cannot exist within the four walls of this glorified shipping container for one more day, let alone 303 of them. I must get out. I am GOING out. I may be some time.
1 Hypothesis: The methane lakes of Titan experience turbulence due to sub-surface convection. I made my name arguing this view and related points in a number of journals with necessarily low standards of proof. Such fame as accrues to a leading psychroplanetic climatologist has not liberated me from teaching undergraduates. One good thing about this place is that there are no undergraduates within 1,300 million kilometers.
2 Kirsty is our Station Manager. During the long and tedious journey out, Pushever seduced her. Now she spends hours editing and rewriting his drivel. It is just plausible that she has no time or energy for housekeeping duties, although these are clearly stipulated in her contract. She is truly, madly, inexplicably in love with Pushever, who resembles a goateed llama, and we all suffer for it.
3 Pushever vs. Zoya, over a container of odiferous mould which she claimed was going to be yogurt. The argument climaxed when she threw it at him, drawing blood from his nose. O frabjous day! But Pushever won on a technicality: you
cannot make yogurt from long-life skim milk powder.
DAY 52
Ramaswamy attempted to come with me. With his chummiest smile he said I ought to have a safety partner. I saw through him immediately: he just wanted to bitch about the Pushever / Kirsty situation. He is a Scottish nationalist of Hindu extraction, which may explain why he does not know when he is beaten. He thinks Kirsty just needs to be cured of Pushever, as if the man were a case of the hiccups. (That is rather good, must use that in a poem.) Anyway Ramaswamy cloaked this all in cloying concerns for my safety. I informed him that I have been messing around in boats since the year humbledy-hum, and anyway, I have done this several times already.
The only difference between the Irish Sea, where I bobbled around in dinghies in my salad days, and Lake Eerie4, which starts 50 meters from our front door, is that the former is made of water, the latter of methane.
At a temperature of minus 200 degrees.
With 45% the buoyancy of water.
Translation: damn near anything that were to fall into it would sink, including Dr. Bennard Godwin, Ph.D, exosuit and all.
However, I never feel unsafe on the lake. On the contrary. As the boat edges away from the shore, I always feel a profound sense of relief at temporarily escaping my colleagues, and today was no exception.
The black, oily surface of the lake is shrouded in the same thick red haze that covers the entire moon. Visibility is a scant few meters. A gentle wind perpetually blows for reasons having to do with atmospheric circulation, although I mustn’t say too much about that, or Hiroto5 will accuse me of plagiarizing his work, not that he or anyone else will ever see this diary. I keep it on a voice recorder, which I have with me now, in the exosuit. I never let it out of my sight.