Memoirs of a Timelord (8 page)

       The little firebrand had her people keep their guns trained on me, even though she had just seen that her weapon was useless against me.  I beckoned her closer before speaking.

       "You're welcome." I gave a smile, waiting for her to get my joke.

       Finally dropping her arms to her side, she holstered the pistol.  Tilting her head to one side, she looked me over before speaking.

       "You hungry?" Her eyebrows went up slightly.  "We were just sitting down to supper when those pirates tried to take us down.  I'm Command Lieutenant Roll." She held out a hand.  I was surprised to see the custom was still in use.

       "Do you have another first name besides Command Lieutenant Roll?" I asked before taking her hand.

       "Roxy." She answered while trying to deliver a very firm handshake.

       "Roxy Roll?" I gave that a laugh before jumping out of the cockpit.  "Jenna.  Jenna Ramirez.  I'm a tourist in these parts, just seeing the sights."

       "We are the Deep Space Exploration Vessel KuluMata.  We too are tourists in these parts.  Where are you from?" She smiled as we made our way towards the mess hall.

       "Earth." I said it without thinking.  There was a moment of silence before Roxy and her security dweebs all burst out laughing.

       "If you do not want to tell us then just say so, you don't got to get rude." Raising an eyebrow, Roxy gave me an amused look.

       I figured I musta done something wrong, or broken some local custom, so I searched my database and came up with nothing.  

       "You asked where I was from, and I told you. Why're ya giving me tude?"  I decided to stand my ground.  In the back of my mind the Guf was whispering little hints about my counterpart.  

       "No one is from Earth." She refuted my statement.  "It's a fairytale they tell kids to spell 'em to sleep.  Nothing more."

       "Believe what you want, but I'm from Earth.  Twenty-first century." I shrugged as we entered the dining hall.  I could tell that they were not convinced.  It was just as well, the real truth would have been even harder to swallow.

       Dinner was something different altogether.  Imagine eating at a restaurant where each course was a blend of multiple ethnic palates, a hodgepodge of world cuisine. Imagine Taco Meatloaf, or Green Chili Fettuccini.  It was different, and at the same time refreshingly homey.  Not that Didra's cooking wasn't first rate.  Actually her food was too perfect.  

       There was just something about the earthy quality of the cooking in their mess hall that made me homesick.  It tasted like real food, real imperfect food.  The potatoes even had lumps in them.  I ate cornbread, and I hate cornbread, but it was real, mixed and baked in an oven, cornbread.  

       I gotta admit that part of the experience of the moment was being welcomed like a hero.  The entire crew stood and clapped when I walked in.  I sat at the Captain's table, dined with the Command Crew and important officers.  Sure, I was a little star struck by it all, who wouldn't be?  I just saved eleven hundred people from annihilation without firing a single shot.  How Gandhi was that?  Even though I was disappointed that they couldn't help me get home, it was good to be among my own species again.

       

       The back story on these people was that they were a deep exploration vessel sent to investigate the possibility of colonizing the Blevis system.  But that destination was a decade away.  Hell, these guys were still three years out from their first stop; Ankrom, a pair of solar systems that orbit a massive Class 1 black hole.  The Voh needed new colonies and had picked out a few dozen planets along the way to examine.  They were a peaceful race, preferring commerce to war.  

       While I admired the ideal of it all, these people were rolling into the worst neighborhood in the dwarf galaxy with no weapon bigger than a potato gun.  They were like sheep speeding down the ramp at the slaughterhouse.  I had reviewed their navigational course against the DuNai records and it did not look good for the home team.  These people were outgunned, and unprepared for most of the species that dominated the regions.  This was a biologically mature sector of the galaxy.  Humans would be the new guys on the block, and you know what happens to the new guy in prison?

       It wasn't long before I was making regular stops on the KuluMata.  Lotsa times I'd bring Aldoo to show off to Roxy.  Veena and the Captain developed a thing almost immediately.  I think they'd known each other twelve hours before someone found them in a closet.  Heh, I wonder if he woulda been so enthusiastic if he'd known he was doing the nasty with a morphic being that resembled Playdoh in her natural state?  

       We never told them who we really were.  We would just 'coincidentally' run into them, usually right before they would come under attack by pirates or the local warlord.  It was a lot like making cameo appearances on Star Trek.  We'd show up, help them fight off the bad guys, and then we'd drink a few pitchers of Death, a local specialty. They were like long island iced tea, but without the tea and served afire.  Mmmmm Death.  Then we'd go dear hunting.

       So for the first coupla years, Veena, Roxy and me were like sisters.  We hung out all the time, got in fist fights together, went on shore leave together.  We were inseparable.  You could hear the buzz as soon as we walked into the officer's club on a Friday night.  Personally, I was in 7th heaven.  I'd never had a lotta girlfriends back in high school or the Army.  I mostly hung out with guys back in my old life.  So I was really digging the whole Three Amigos thing.

       Roxy was just this spunky little thing.  It was like she didn't even know she was five foot nothing.  One time I saw her take this drunk Marine and slam him face down on the deck when he resisted arrest.  He never even saw it coming.  What she lacked in stature she made up for in sheer intestinal fortitude.  

       But what really made Roxy fun was her sense of humor.  My girl had a scholarly knowledge of all humor dirty, rude, or crass.  She was a fountain of crude humor once you got a few shots of Ouzo into her.  Between her dirty jokes, and Veena's lecherous tastes, I had some of the best times of my life right there on that ship. I really felt like I had found a home, at least until I made a little discovery in the Engineering section.  But let's put a pin in that topic and come back to it later.  

       

       

       I remember the first time I saw a Rakagi attack craft.  The things look like death on a stick, they really do.  Just a massive ship composed almost entirely of weapons, engines, and launching bays for the boarding craft it carried.  If you absolutely, positively needed a planet destroyed by morning these were the guys you'd call.  

       So as you may have guessed, the Rakagi were a pretty formidable foe.  Sure, a mature Timelord could derail a whole fleet of these guys in a nanosecond...but I was far from being a mature editor.  I was what you'd call unconscious incompetent.  In other words; I was such a noob that I didn't even know I was dumb.  Hell, I thought I was Supergirl at that point in my training.

       See, we were on the ship so much that we had free access to the entire vessel.  The Captain used to call me and Veena honorary crew members because we did so much stuff while we were there.  One trip we realigned their shields and gave them a 241.33% increase in defensive power without increasing energy requirements.  Another time Aldoo made some mods to their deflector system that essentially turned it into a non-lethal weapon.  It was like being able to groin-kick the entire enemy crew without causing any real damage to their ship.  Sometimes I'd kick the pirates twice, just for the fun of it.

       Not to get sidetracked, but we had the run of the ship.  Seriously, I had my own parking space in the landing bay; had my name on it and everything.  No kidding.  We came and went like we owned the place, and they were always glad to see us.

       So here's the deal; the KuluMata was about a year out of Kaymus, their first real stop.  At this point we were passing through a sort of void known as the Miir Expanse.  Really it was just a buncha empty space named after the nearby stellar cluster.  Back home on Earth we wouldn't even notice such a place because we have lots of empty space between stars.  Hell, it's roughly 4 lightyears from Sol to the nearest star system.  But this is the Hulath dwarf-galaxy we're talking about here. 

       Lemme paint you a picture of the place.  Hulath was the Boss's training galaxy where he turned us apprentices loose to learn our craft.  No more than 375 lightyears from one end to the other, the place still had a staggering 1,234,691 stars, 502,405 singularities, 37 dark nebulas, and 16 stellar nurseries.  I have actually seen stellar clusters that were bigger than Hulath, really.  But the point I am trying to make is that Hulath was such a tightly packed little galaxy that there was always a nearby star or nebula.  Open space like the Miir Expanse was rare in Hulath.

       So this part of the trip was pretty boring, and I mean the kind of idle time that drives people nuts.  See, the thing about flying through a tightly packed galaxy like Hulath is that took a lotta navigational skill.  You were always adjusting for the latest source of gravity, plotting an optimal arc through the space.  But in the void, once the ship got up to speed there was nothing to slow it down.  Gravitational effects were miniscule so once you were on course the crew could shut down the engines and coast right thru at top speed.  So other than routine maintenance, the crew had nothing to do. 

       Veena and I used to do what we could to keep their spirits up.  Our parties were the stuff of legend...assuming you could even remember the event.  Yeah, they were those kinds of parties, with drunken revelry and a lampshade on every head if you know what I mean.  The term 'wanton abandonment' comes to mind when I think back to those days.  I mean, you had a crew that only worked a couple shifts a week because there just wasn't anything to do besides eat and sleep, so there was no harm in partying for 3 days straight; it's not like anyone had anywhere to be in the morning.  Drunk or sober we'd hurtle through space the same, right?

       So there we were rocking the house.  It was the Captain's birthday party so anyone not on duty had official permission to get blind drunk.  I had just introduced them to Rock & Roll, and they loved the stuff.  Add a few hundred gallons of Ouzo and you had one hell of a rockin' party.  It was a madhouse on the upper decks.

       So there we are tearing the joint up, dancing, singing, and a few other things I won't mention, and all of a sudden we notice that there is a Rakagi attack craft parked right next to us.  By the time the alarms went off we could actually see the thing through the windows.  The ship was a beast, and it had all 1,221 of its guns trained on our dinky little science vessel.  We were fucked with a capital F.

       Right away Veena and I refresh ourselves.  No, I don't mean we changed clothes.  Being morphic we simply reenabled the automatic protection systems of our Onkxs and immediately we were sober (gotta turn the damned thing off to catch a buzz).  Unfortunately the crew was still shitfaced drunk.  The First Officer actually hurled on the window when he saw the Rakagi.  Sure, a trained Timelord could have sent out a Kricter Wave and fixed all of them too, but we were not fully trained.  Unconscious incompetents, remember?  Veena and I thought we knew it all, but really we were just dumbass rookies.

       So on the KuluMata there was pretty much a sense of unbridled panic.  You have certain death parked right there in plain sight, and the Rakagi ship was blasting us with an audible comm beam that basically turned the hull of the ship into a giant sub-woofer that they used to deliver their demands.  In broken Voh, we were instructed to surrender our vessel, and strip naked for orderly processing (I don't know why...I guess they didn't wanna eat us with our clothes on..?)

       I was about to panic when Veena stopped me with a stern look. 

       "Ask yourself this: What in the hell is a Rakagi ship doing all the way over here in the expanse?" Her hand on my shoulder, she forced me to stop and consider the inconsistency.

       Right away I tore thru the database in my head.  It only took a nanosecond for me to become an expert on the people inside of that ship.  Right away I saw the point Veena was trying to make.  The Rakagi were from another neighborhood entirely, clear out on the far side of the Voh empire.  But there was another red flag in the processing; when I backdated the manufacture date of the ship itself I found that there was no way possible that it could have made it this far from home since its manufacture.  No way in hell.  Unless the ship had some type of relocation device installed, it simply could not have driven here from there in the time allotted.  It's pretty amazing having a computer installed in my brain.

       "So it's a fake?" I was uncertain how that was possible.  I had scanned the thing with my own eyes and it was legit.  We really did have a murder factory parked next door.