Memory's Domain

Boom.

The pilot and his acquaintance were rudely interrupted when they were vaporized by several thousand laser cannons.  Secret meetings of huge, mysterious alien battle fleets are not good things to disturb.
 

"Malcolm," said Fay, embarrassed, "I thought we locked the door."  Darr was smiling, rather annoyingly, at the couple before him.

Darr stepped out of the room.   He took one long look in Fay's direction before heading for the liquor cabinet.  A few minutes later, the viewscreen began to whine, announcing an incoming call.

Fay answered it.  The young lieutenant seemed to have trouble keeping his eyes off the place where Fay's robe was hanging slightly open.  So did Darr.  Malcolm held a credit card in front of Darr's eyes, distracting him from Fay.

The lieutenant finally managed to pull his eyes away.  They snapped back like elastic.  Finally, he began to stutter our his message.

"Ship in Gerator sector go bye bye, uh, wait, I mean, you  know what I mean.  Hey babe, how about Saturday night?"

Malcolm hit the cutoff key.  He called the base and asked for a more coherent and polite source of information.   The next victum of Fay's radiant beauty was a girl.  This particular girl liked other girls.  They called for a new officer.  The next man was a Mr. Simmons.  He had no interest in girls, but he couldn't quite keep his eyes off Darr's burly
frame.

The crew of the Wild Thing decided to investigate for themselves.
 

Mykle Telzah was out of fuel.  This is not a good thing when surrounded by thirty pirate starfighters.  With so little energy, the most powerful computer on a mobile platform (which happened to be installed in Mykle's jetpacks) could add, subtract, multiply, and divide eight digit characters.  Fortunately, the nearest starfighter was flown by an utter moron.  Mykle knocked on the canopy, which the idiot opened, forgetting to seal his flightsuit.  After pushing the corpse aside, Mykle "borrowed on a permanent basis" every last drop of stydrogen his tanks would hold.  He then set the ship on self destruct, ran a chaos flight simulation, and leapt to a nearby planet.

With his communicators back on line, he recieved a priority message from a Fred Simmons.  Apparently, a scoutship had disappeared, and the ships Wild Thing and Osprey had been dispatched to investigate.  Mykle felt a smile spread across his face, ran a flight simulation for the Gerator sector, and off he went.
 

A hole appeared in space.  The Wild Thing and the Osprey popped through.  By odd coincidence, they had appeared directly in the middle of the alien fleet.

Darr said something that made even Fay blush.

"I have a feeling that we're in a small amount of  shit," said Malcolm, turning away from the controls.  "Is it just me, or are those a whole bunch of missle tubes and laser cannons decorating those ship's sides?"

"Either that, or its a mass hallucination," replied Darr, his face aglow with the classic Darr "Danger High."  To Darr, deadly peril was almost better than sex.  Almost.

Saying nothing, Fay raised the shields, and activated the weapons.

The alien ships hadn't noticed them yet.  They did notice a few seconds later, when one of them ripped apart as the result of  the Wild Thing's souped up warpage weapons.

The aliens decided that now would be a good time to fire.

Unfortunatetly, the two shuttles were speeding away at 50 g's of acceleration.  They were a wee bit hard to target.  Then again, with several thousand laser cannons, its hard to miss.

Boom.

Mykle chose this moment to appear amongst the super battle fleet.

"Oops."

The ripples in space-time created by his entry hinted at his presence.  The fleet trained approximately thirty-three thousand lasers on him.  Mykle swallowed.  He decided to move back into the rapidly dissipating wormhole.  He felt a somewhat painful burning sensation as he moved back into the hole.  Thirty-three thousand lasers nearly hitting you can do that.

Malcolm and Fay briefly enjoyed one another's presence as the wormhole was being created.  Even Darr wasn't that quick.

They decided to screw the United Planets (not literally, that would be hard) and go find someplace with more bars to hang out at.  Even Darr conceded that the Wild Thing couldn't handle the situation.  At least, not while Darr was semi-sober.
 

Deiv had been a bartender for quite a lot of years, over the course of which he had seen quite a lot of strange things.  The large, gray-green tree that confronted him asking for the crew of the “dorky yellow and green spaceship” was definitely one of the odder things that he had encountered, however.  Deiv knew who the captain of the dorky yellow and green spaceship was.  That captain was his number one customer and long time buddy Darr Kal, however, and Deiv wasn’t sure that alien’s intentions were exactly friendly, seeing as it cradled a large, evil looking rifle type thing in two of its arms.

“Sorry,” said Deiv, “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”  He stuck one hand casually into his pocket, hand closing around the pistol hidden there, just in case.

“I think that you do,” said the alien.  “And I think that you will tell me, or else you will be,” it leaned forward menacingly, shoving the muzzle of the rifle into Deiv’s face, “space dust.”

Deiv swallowed.  Friendship was one thing.  Having a big alien gun shoved in his face was another, especially as he probably wouldn’t be able to draw the pistol before the alien blew him into the promised spacedust.  Darr was more than a friend, though, he was also a major source of revenue.  Deiv’s mind raced, trying to come up with a delay tactic.  Luckily (perhaps), he didn’t have to agonize over the decision for long.

“Hey, who’s looking for me?”  The voice behind Deiv was slightly slurred, but it was still quite recognizably Darr’s.  Deiv turned to face to drunken space captain, and opened his mouth to explain that this alien broccoli stalk was who was looking for him.

“You are the owner of the dorky yellow spaceship?” the alien interrupted, turning to face Darr, subtle menace in its strange, alien voice.  “Then you must die.”

The alien raised the strange, alien gun to shoot.  Its hand tightened on the strange, alien trigger.  Its strange, alien eyes narrowed in anger (all eighteen of them, arranged in even intervals up and around the trunk.)  “Asta la vista, baby,” it said in its strange, alien accent.

“Ooooooh Yeeeees!” The feminine voice echoed through the bar from the direction of the restroom, bringing all activity, including the actual pulling of the strange, alien trigger, to a surprised halt.  Everybody looked towards the bathroom.

“What in the hell was that?” somebody asked nobody in particular.

“Probably just Fay having an orgasm,” said Deiv, whipping out the pistol and blowing the gun out of the alien’s hands.  “She and Malcolm disappeared in there fifteen minutes ago.”

A few seconds later, Darr also had his gun out.  His eyes were clearing as internal nanites and adrenaline countered the effects of the large quantities of alcohol that he had been consuming.  The alien, faced with two nasty looking pistols, raised several of its larger limbs into the air.

“Uncle,” it said.

“That’s better,” Deiv said, “Now, if you’ll just get the hell out of here, I’m sure that we’ll all be-”

He was interrupted as the bar’s front door was blown inward, scattering bits of genuine, Earth imported mahogany around the room.  One piece poked a drunk’s eye out, but he was too drunk to notice, and nobody else really cared.  Incidentally, this was why he was drunk in the first place.  That nobody cared that is, not the splinter, since the splinter obviously entered his eye after the fact, and therefore couldn’tve been the cause of his drunkenness.  He was drunk because nobody in the universe cared who he was, what happened to him, or- oh, who cares.  Let’s get back to the story.

Three of the big, gray green tree aliens crowded through the wreckage of the door, each one toting an impressive set of weaponry.

“Oh shit,” said Darr, “I believe that we’re screwed up the ass.”

He dove over the bar and Deiv ducked behind it as the aliens opened fire.

If the bar had been on a civilized world, the aliens would have had an easy time of it. This was Deiv’s bar on Davy station, haven to all manner of frontiersmen, from honest miners to roughneck pirates, however, and most of the patrons were armed themselves.  Naturally, a shootout ensued.

It was brief and very bloody.  When it was over, all four aliens lay in pools of strange, green alien blood on the floor.  Several of the patrons also lay unmoving, in pools of blood particular to their species, be it Dragenian blue or human red (the drunk’s arm had also been blown off, but his internal nanite system took care of patching up the wound, and nobody really noticed or cared.)  The bar top was splintered.  The bottles behind it were broken, and Deiv and Darr were covered in the alcohol that had previously been in them.  Most of the chairs and tables bore the marks of bullets, and some were shattered outright.

Malcolm and Fay stepped out of the restroom, arm in arm.  “Whoa,” said Malcolm, “What happened?”

“Somebody doesn’t like us, I think” said Darr, holstering his pistol and vaulting back over the bar top.  He looked at the aliens in curiosity.  They definitely weren’t like anything in the catalogues.  A suspicion was forming in his mind.  “I wonder if it had anything to do with the space fleet that we ran into back in the Gerator sector,” he said aloud.

“Whatever it had to do with,” Deiv said, rising from behind the bar, rubbing a red welt down the center of his bald spot where an alien projectile had grazed him, “This is definitely going on your tab.”
 

The drunk that nobody cared about, the now one eyed and one armed drunk, stumbled drunkenly down the twisting corridors of Davy station.  He stumbled with a purpose.  He stumbled with intent.  He had a goal.  He a reason.  He wanted to find a nice, dark corner where he could curl up and let the world roll over him.

He found a suitable corner in the storage areas adjacent to the docks, between two large shipping crates full of who knew what.  Whatever it was, it smelled very strongly of oil and metal, strong enough even to mask the drunk’s own odor.  The gravity here was light, but his body was accustomed to shifts in gravity through long years of being a spacer.  He threw up anyway, more from the excessive alcohol in his system than the almost zero gravity.  The drunk shut his eyes, shifted so that he was not directly lying in the contents of his stomach, and waited for the world to pass him by.

The world instead came knocking on his door.  It came knocking in the form of whispering voices.

The first was whiney and snivelly.  “I am dreadfully sorry, oh Great One,” the speaker said, “but it was not I who recommended bursting in and opening fire on a bar full of ruffians.  It would have been better to wait, better to move quietly.  A subtle poison, a knife in the dark...”

“Oh shut up,” said a voice that sounded like it came from a classic twen cen 2-D action flick, “Just my luck to get stuck with a bunch of trigger happy recruits out of the academy.  I will handle this personally, and you will come with me.  I will do it with finesse, but my race does not like lurking in the shadows.  The time for direct confrontation will come soon.”

“Yes, it will, oh Great One,” the whiny voice replied, but surprise must be maintained.  If these people saw anything, they could give away the entire operation.  Our attack on-”

But we really don’t care what the drunk heard, do we?  I mean, nobody really cares about him, and he didn’t hear the last part of the conversation, since he drifted off into a drunken slumber.  He didn’t tell anybody, anyway, so what’s the whole point of knowing what he knows?  It’ll all be revealed in the end.
 

The door of the dark hotel room opened with a hiss, spilling muted light from the nighttime station corridor outside into the room.  A dark, mysterious, gray green tree alien-like shape slipped through the door, followed by a human shape.  They moved soundlessly across the room, towards the occupant of the bed inside.  There was the soft sliding sound of a pistol being drawn from its holster.

“Wait.”  The voice was that of a twen cen action hero trying, not entirely successfully, to whisper.

“What, oh Great One?”  The other voice was a whiny, snivelly voice, trying successfully to whisper.

“It is not the right person,” said the gray green alien.

“Really?” the human asked.

“As I said before, my race has better vision in the dark than yours does,” the tree alien replied.  “This is not the person that we saw through my agent’s field cams.  This is a female.  We have the wrong room again.”

“Damn,” said the human.

“Wha-” this time, the voice came from the bed.  Its occupant was stirring.

The alien and human hastily exited, the door sliding shut behind them.  The room’s occupant looked blearily around and then went off to bed, dismissing the sounds that she heard as bad dreams.  Outside, in the corridor, the evil alien and the human stopped to confer.

“Two bad rooms in a row,” the alien said, “I am beginning to doubt your hacking capabilities.”

“I am sorry, oh Great One,” the human sniveled, “But I know that I saw the man we’re looking for holding a data card that said something ‘one-two’ on the security camera.  It is not my fault that his thumb obscured the rest of the card.”

“We have tried,” the alien said, folding two limbs over his chest in a gesture that he had picked up from the human.  “rooms one-one-two, two-one-two, three-one-two, and now four-one-two.  Do you suggest that we try every single ‘something-one-two’ in this twenty story complex?”

“I am sorry, oh Great One, I have failed you-”

“Stop calling me that.”

“What?”

“‘Oh Great One.’  The code name is ‘Arnold.’”

“I obey, oh Arnold.”

“Dispense with the ‘oh’s.’”

“Yes, uh, okay...Arnold.”

“Better.  Now let us get back to the lift.  The night is getting old, and we still have sixteen rooms to check.”

The lift door opened just as they reached it.  There were five uniformed security guards inside, weapons drawn.

“Freeze!” said one of them.

“Station security!” said another.

“Gotcha!” said a third.

“Move and I’ll shoot!” said a fourth.

“I’m getting blisters from these damn shoes!” said the last.

“Shut up, Hodgson,” said the one who had said freeze, “We have a job to do!”

Arnold’s human assistant moved to put the alien’s bulk between himself and the nasty guns that the security guards were carrying.  The tree alien put up several limbs in mock surprise.

“What is the meaning of this?” Arnold asked, eyes betraying shock and bewilderment.  At least, his eyes would have betrayed shock and bewilderment to a member of his own race.  The expression was lost on the human security guards.

“We spotted you on security cameras in cargo area three!” the first officer said.

“A member of the same race that trashed Deiv’s bar!” said the second.

“And now you’re sneaking around a hotel at night!” said the third.

“You must be connected to the crime!” said the fourth.

“My feet really hurt!” said Hodgson.

“Shut up, Hodgson!” said the first.

The alien put up several more limbs.  “I surrender,” he said, reaching for his pistol with one of his rear limbs.

“Good!” said the first.

“Come with us!” said the second.

“We’ll take you down to the station!” said the third.

“And lock you up forever!” said the fourth.

“Shut up, Hodgson!” said the first.  He paused.  “Oh,” he said, “Sorry, I didn’t realize that you hadn’t said anything.”

Focusing back on business, the first officer stepped out of the lift, pulling a pair of handcuffs from his belt.  He paused, realizing the handcuffs would not be quite adequate to restrain a creature with twenty plus limbs.

“Men,” he said, turning to his men, “We seem to have a problem.”

With lightning speed, the alien wrapped two of his limbs around the lead officer, whipping the gun around from behind his back and holding it to the officer’s head.

“Surrender, or he dies.” Arnold said.

“Oh shit!” said the officers together.

“Ah ha!” said the snivelly human, stepping out from behind Arnold, “That’s got ’em oh-Gr,” he caught himself.  “Arnold.”

The officers looked at the Arnold.  Arnold looked at the officers.  “Now,” said Arnold, “Drop your weapons, step out of the lift, one by one, and stand in the corridor.”

The officers obeyed.  Arnold gestured to his human with a free limb to follow and stepped into the lift.

“We are now going to exit this station,” said Arnold, “If anybody disturbs us, your precious officer will die.”

“What about the captain and crew of the dorky space ship?” the snivelly human queried as the lift door shut.

“We will deal with him later.” Arnold said, and the door closed with a click.
 

Who are these mysterious gray green tree aliens?  What is their evil plot?  We are getting closer to (but are still a long way away from) answering these questions.

“Oh, Darr, it’s sooo big.  Oh, I don’t think that its going to fit.  Oh, oh, ugghh, mmmpfff.  Uh.”

Fay paused in the corridor.  Perhaps turning the corner at this point would be a bad idea, considering the sounds that we coming from around it.  Then again, Darr had never been especially careful about bursting in on Fay and Malcolm when they were having fun, and Darr wasn’t exactly asking for privacy, out here in the main corridor running towards the cargo bay of the Wild Thang.

There was a click, and the grunting stopped.

“Okay, thermal coupler installed,” said a female voice.  “Never thought it’d fit.  Let’s move on to the next one, shall we?”

Fay laughed and stepped around the corner to find Darr and a female space station tech hunched around an access panel that they had pulled aside.  This and a few other tasks were all they had remaining before the starship would be ready for flight.

The Wild Thang burst out of the docking bay at thoroughly illegal speed, followed by radio protests from the control tower.  Fay grinned wolfishly at her controls, and send the ship spinning through a wide arc around the station, twisting the ship in a spiral just to show off.

Darr relaxed in the captain’s chair, a squeeze bottle full of fine wine in one hand, the other resting loosely on the arm of his chair.  Malcolm grimaced at his post and decided not to comment.

“Well,” said Darr, as Fay set the ship on a course for the Davy Station Wormhole, several million klicks distant, let’s review our mission, okay?  Deiv says that we owe him a lot of money.  I don’t feel particularly inclined to dip into the alcohol fund, so I suppose that our best course of action would be to find the aliens.  According to station security, there is at least one surviving member of the race at loose.

“The major problem lies in the actual finding, of course.”  Darr’s brow creased in thought.  He took a glug of wine and then decided that he needed something harder.

“Brandy.”  He said.

“On its way,” said Feynmann, the ship’s computer and ship’s cook, distiller of all things stomach filling and/or mind altering.

“Perhaps the answers we seek,” Feynmann added.  “Lie in the Gerator sector.”

“You’re probably right,” said Darr.  “Malcolm, plot a course for the Gerator system in the Gerator sector.”

“Yes sir,” said Malcolm, at the Navigation console.

This next section is just here so that I can put in another cool set of * * * *

“Oh, Malcolm, yes, oh yes, yes, yes, oh, ugh, uh, oh yes, oh, oh, wait, Malcolm, come back!”

Malcolm helplessly drifted out of his lover’s arms, propelled away from the object of his affection by Newtonian physics.  He had gotten carried away again.  He hit the opposite bulkhead with a thump and launched himself back to where Fay was secured on the wall.  With a grunt, he re-docked.

They were interrupted a second time by Feynmann on the intercom.

“Report to the bridge,” he said, “We are about to enter the jump point to Gerator.”

Sighing, Malcolm decoupled, released the handcuffs securing Fay, and pulled on his clothes.  She did likewise, and they made their way to the bridge.

Darr was already there.  He nodded to them as they secured themselves at their posts.  A gleam was in his eye, and one hand firmly clutched a bottle of cognac.  They had chosen to enter the wormhole without decelerating, hoping to throw off any ambush.  That also increased the severity of any miscalculations that they had made in the course, and increased the likelihood that they would smash into the walls of the hole and be torn into a million pieces by tidal forces, but that was all part of the fun.

If they had been in a planetary atmosphere or a twen cen big budget Hollywood movie, their entrance into the Gerator system would have been accompanied by the scream of engines and the flare of rockets.  As it was, it was accompanied by a whoop of delight on Darr’s part, but the sound did not go beyond the confines of the ship.

The Wild Thang was not greeted by a large, evil secretive alien war fleet.  Instead, they were greeted by black, silent space, a million stars shining in the background.  The author has the almost irresistible urge to say twinkling, but, of course, the stars do not twinkle outside of an atmosphere.  Of course, the author has never been outside of an atmosphere, and thus he has the image of stars twinkling in his head, as, he is sure, does the reader.  Therefore, the reader might be excused in thinking of the stars as twinkling, as that would give an altogether “cooler” image at this point than a bunch of steady stars.  The stars, you see, should dramatically twinkle mysteriously to emphasize the non-presence of the alien fleet, but oh never mind, back to the story.  A few million shining, or twinkling, if one isn’t picky about the science, in the background, a few of them undoubtedly planets, but no alien spaceships.

Several hours of scans later, there was still no sign of the alien fleet.  Not a trace that they had been there earlier.  Not a scrap of metal.  Not a single scoutship.  Not a discarded beercan that had been tossed out of an airlock.  Not a single little...oh I think that the reader gets the idea.  They weren’t there.

“Now what?” said Malcolm.

This installment has been a long time in coming, due to prolongued writer’s block and a general lack of ambition.  Will the saga ever be concluded?  Will Darr and his friends ever discover the nature of the evil secret plot that the gray green tree aliens are
hatching?  Is there anyone out there who cares?  Stay tuned for the answers, none of which will be satisfactorily addressed in...Die Dumb VI:  the Search for Plot Ideas.