SFSTORY: HMS Golden Lance #24 - Birth of a Hero

Diana Dark awoke with a jerk. But then she looked down at the man sleeping beside her and decided that he wasn't that big of a jerk, as far as men go. Though men did go pretty far in that direction, now that she thought of it.

The object of her affection, one Time Agent 357, lay sprawled on his back, mouth hanging open, tiny drop of drool running down his unshaven chin, a sound somewhere between a whistle and a wheeze barely audible above the whisper of the room's ventilation fans.

And he doesn't even snore, Diana said to herself wonderingly. Then she poked him in the ribs and told him to turn over and stop snoring, just on general principles.

Making sure that 357's headphones were still firmly in place, she climbed out of bed and barefooted her way over to her computer console. In minutes, she had checked her email, updated her website, checked to make sure that the proceeds from her webcam were still being sent to her secret unlisted account, and banned the six new aliases that Omegas had used to access the aforementioned webcam.

Diana then prowled the corridors of the HMS Golden Lance, which resembled a mid-70's ranch-style home more than a timeship with interdimensional capabilities. Nothing was amiss. Returning to bed, she saw the CD that 357 was listening to was about to repeat. Having an Earth female's usual respect for her boyfriend's privacy, she dug out an extra set of headphones and settled down to listen in...

Life story of Time Agent 357, chapter the first.

I was born in a small hospital just outside of my home town, which is located on my home planet in my home alterverse. I know that Val, my ship's computer, told me to be specific, as if I were telling my life story to someone who knew absolutely nothing about me, but I'm afraid that I'm going to have to fudge on some of the details.

My people are a fairly private people. Generally speaking, we don't share a lot of details of our lives with outsiders. We don't have a lot of experience doing so. You see, we never met any outsiders until just a few centuries ago.

Our home alterverse is, to my knowledge, unique in several ways. To start with, rather than being surrounded by dozens of very similar alterverses with only minor changes (like who won the last national election), ours exists in a relative void in the hypersphere. Unlike, say, the Earth of my friend Doctor Bing Von Spleen, we didn't have car keys and eyeglasses and other small items constantly and spontaneously jumping to other nearby realities.

Also, ours was unique in that there was exactly one (1) intelligent race in the entire universe, and we pretty much filled it up. No matter where we went, there we were. It is assumed that our race developed on a single "home" planet and from there spread to every other planet. The inhabitants of just about every planet claim that theirs is obviously the "home" planet of our race, even those planets which were colonized within the lifetimes of their inhabitants.

Finally, our altiverse is unique in that most higher animal lifeforms there are, for all practical purposes, immortal.

Not immortal in the sense of always having existed and always going to exist like, say, Omegas and assorted dieties I've encountered, but rather immortal in the sense that everyone lives forever barring accidents, acts of violence, the occasional suicide, and stupidity.

For my race, the aging process is pretty much along the lines of most other humanoid races I've encountered until late puberty, when the aging process begins to slow. Within a few hundred years, depending on the individual, aging grinds to a halt with an apparent age of late 30's to early 40's, based on average humanoid norms.

There exist elders among my people who have lived for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. We don't worship our elders as sources of wisdom, however. Our brains only retain knowledge for a few thousand years or so before it begins to fade.

I won't have that problem. My lifespan is only going to be roughly one thousand standard years. I'm what they call a genetic throwback. Like some of the lower animals on some worlds, I have above average strength, speed, reaction time, and (I like to think) intelligence. And I heal very quickly. Illnesses and injuries which would kill others of my race barely slow me down.

I was born after a fairly normal pregnancy, unique only in that it lasted nearly ten years instead of the usual 1.3 or so. Or, at least, that's what my sainted mother claimed on numerous occasions, usually after I'd done something stupid.

My first memories are those of being held by my mother, looking up at my father, and wondering what all the fuss was about. In the corner of the room, I saw my doctor holding an ice pack over a rapidly blackening eye. Apparently, my first act after coming into this world was to take a swing at him. I don't remember doing it, but I'm sure I had a good reason for doing so.

The nurse at least had the common decency to explain what she was doing before she stuck me with that needle. She ran some of my blood through a scanner right there in front of me, encouraging me to "ooh" and "ahh" at the pretty colors, while I tried to figure out how to get my mouth and throat to work so I could tell her the "low battery" light was on. I was beginning to think that being born wasn't such a good idea and that there should be a way to put it off until after I was fully grown. I broached the subject to my mother later, but for some reason she wasn't at all interested in discussing it.

When the scanner beeped that it was complete, the nurse looked at it, shook her head, and handed it to the doctor. The doctor held it up to his eye, realized that it was the eye with the ice pack over it, and shifted it to his other eye. Then he approached my parents with a grim look on his face.

"Gentlebeings," he said softly, "I'm afraid that the earlier tests were correct. He's mortal."

"Well," my father said bravely, "We'll just have to love him all the more in the thousand or so years we will have with him." My mother affirmed this and began babbling at me in the high-pitched, silly willy language that most people use with dumb babies and cute animals.

Or maybe that was the other way around.

"Have you picked out a name?" the doctor asked, apparently trying to change the subject.

My mother took a deep breath and rattled off the thirteen given names and the four family names that they had chosen. The nurse quickly typed them into her computer.

"A very nice name," the nurse muttered. "The computer here says that he is number 1,973,484,357 to be named that."

"Our little 357," my mother cooed.

And that's how I got my name. With an alterverse full of immortal beings, we ran out of unique names millions of years ago and started using numbers. My nephew, born a few hundred years after I was, is named after me. We call him 386.

My childhood was fairly normal up to the time I entered kindergarden. Until then, I didn't have much contact with other kids. My mother would make snide comments about how I would break them or something like that. She's such a kidder.

The normal kids are not told of our immortality until they reach adulthood. Something about the benefits of a normal childhood and having a fully developed psyche before being hit with the news.

Or so the theory goes.

It turns out that pretty much every kid figures it out themselves, or is told by other kids at school. We learn young and deal with it as best we can long before our parents can swallow their discomfort and discuss it with us.

Much like sex, but that's another story.

Myself, I figured out myself pretty early on what was different about me: not immortal, but hard to hurt and quick to heal. I had several death-defying adventures while still a toddler, which my mother claims is the reason why she developed grey hair at such an early age.

I remember being dropped off that first day at school by my frowning but loving father, my crying but loving mother, and our rusted but loving hovercar. To this day I still don't know why we used the hovercar, and frequently asked ever since I discovered that the downstairs "closet" was actually a perfectly good matter tranmitter booth. But my father kept insisting that I was not allowed to use it until I was older as it was too dangerous. Pish posh and nonsense. The auto recall circuit pulled me back from low orbit long before I would have suffered any permanent damage, and it was not like the closet was locked in any serious manner in the first place.

An edubot escorted me inside and introduced me to my classmates. I was born on a fairly rural and underdeveloped continent of the planet, so it there were only twelve other children with the same birthdate as mine who lived close enough to be in the same class. The ones I remember most clearly were Suzie416, whose family obviously used a slightly different naming convention, and 13.

I remember trying to shake 13's hand. He asked my name. I rattled it off as best I could, though back then I tended to get my four family names jumbled up. When I finished, he sniffed and walked away, leaving me standing there with my hand sticking out.

"Don't let 13 get to you," Suzie416 said, stepping forward to shake my hand. "He thinks he's hot stuff because he has such a low number."

"What's so impressive about having a number that ends in 13?" I asked. "I could call myself 7 if I wanted."

Suzie416's eyes got wide. "Oh, you don't know. It's not that his number ends in 13. His family is very rich and did an extensive computer search before he was born. They found a name so rare that it had only been used 12 times before in all of our history."

Wow.

End of the first chapter.

The tall, trim, dark-haired, humanoid male hunched forward in his command chair. His handsome face cut have been carved from granite, except where the slightest hint of a frown caused creases in his lightly-tanned forehead. He knew he should be concern. Hell^tm, he was concerned. Worried, even. But he knew that a good captain never showed such concern in front of his crew.

Never allow them to observe you perspiring.

Especially if he were the captain of a Maudlin-class time cruiser.

"Full alert," he ordered softly, but clearly. His crew lept into action around him. No two appeared to be of the same size, shape, species, or even gender, but they worked together with an almost frightening efficiency. They had to. Their Captain would accept no less. Nothing less.

"Shields to standard," he almost whispered.

"Shields to battle standard," came a quick reply.

"All weapons to standby," he added.

"Weapons room standing by."

He stood and, one at a time, made eye contact with each member of his crew, one by one. Each responded with a small nod, a quick half smile, or some other acknowledgement. He did not have to tell them what was at stake. He did not have to tell them how much he depended on them. They knew. No, they knew. They were a fine crew.

A damned fine crew.

Fighting back a powerful wave of emotion which might have produced a tear from the eye of a lesser man, he squared his already impossibly squared shoulders and said, simply, "Take us in."

There was a hint of a sound, almost like a collective drawing in of breath, as if every being present had anticipated that order but had secretly desired never to hear it. Every visual sensory organ was epoxied to its respective control station display. The tension was so thick it could have been cut with a knife, wrapped in brown paper, and sold to tourists at heavily inflated prices.

Minutes ticked by with agonizing slowness.

Those beings who normally blinked, tried not to.

Finally, just as some of the less experienced crew members started considering the possibility that they might be able to begin relaxing, alarms and klaxons began sounding. A muffled cry to some diety or another came from aft of the bridge.

"Belay that, ensign," he snapped. "We're not dead yet. Report!"

"We're out of the groove by 0.00003%, Captain!"

He slapped the intercom button hard enough to make his hand sting. "Engine room, what's our status down there?"

"We're running at 109% of norm, Captain! Whatever the problem is, it's not caused by a lack of power!"

"Dammit! I asked for 110%!" he snarled, then calmed himself with visible effort. He stared at the main dispay, creating and solving multiversal navigational equations in his head. "Helm, adjust our heading to 103 mark 15 mark 23.999 with a 7.38 degree roll to port."

"But, sir!" came the start of a protest.

"Do it, mister," he said slowly and clearly. "That was an order."

"Aye, sir."

The alarms and klaxons shut off one by one, leaving only the single blaring note of the full alert, which had been sounding throughout the entire scene ever since full alert was ordered. The Author requests that the reader go back and re-read that section again, this time imagining said single blaring note.

"That did it, Captain," one of the crew off to his right.

Shouts of joy began to sound from the crew members.

"Belay that!" he shouted, but his eyes were smiling. "Open the flight log and make it official."

One of the crewmembers did so, entering the current time, date, and location code, then recording these historic words:

"Achieved standard orbit around Time Central."

He went from bridge control station to bridge control station, shaking hands, paws, and pseudopods; patting shoulders, backs, and non-differentiated cartilidgenous masses; and telling everyone that they had done good jobs, but he expected better in the future.

"Time Central is hailing us," reported Fim.

"Thank you, Mif," the Captain replied. "Put it on the screen."

"That's 'Fim,' sir."

"Whatever."

Fim sighed, then blinked his eyes in twos and threes in sequence around his head until he'd gotten all of them at least twice. This seemed to have a calming effect on him. He then activated the screen.

On the screen appeared a large desk, covered in an even larger pile of papers, reports, letters, forms, and field trip permission slips that looked as if it were seconds away from collapsing and killing everyone within a square mile. The rest of the room looked worse.

Behind the desk were two humanoid beings. In the background was a human-sized turtle-shaped being of a remarkable blue color. The darker of the two humaniods grabbed a report seemingly at random from a pile on his left, scanned it briefly, scrawled a signature, then passed it to the turtle behind him. With speed seldom seen in sentient technicolor reptiles, the turtle logged it into the computer, then tossed it into a disposal chute.

(The report was sucked through the chute, routed to a sorting bay, where it was compacted with thousands of similar reports into a cube. The cube was jettisoned in the general direction of a black hole located on the other side of the solar system. The black hole sucked the cube in and added the mass of the cube to its own, causing the black hole's gravity to increase by exactly 0.00003%. Due to Time Central existing slightly out of phase with normal time, this increase in gravity actually made itself felt to the outside universe starting roughly two weeks earlier.)

Looking up, the dark skinned humanoid noticed that the screen was active and elbowed his companion. "Ah, Captain Morgen of the HMS Dentless. Right on time as usual, I see." The words and his lips were slightly out of sync, the communications circuits not quite compensating for the shift into normal time.

Captain Morgen examined the beings on the screen. The humanoids were known as Sean Landorian and Ian Lockheed, former captains in the Time Police's Internal Investigation Affairs Division. They were dead ringers for the 20th century Earth celebrities Billy Dee Williams and Sting, simply for the reason that all members of the IIAD were dead ringers for celebrities from that planet and that time period. Time Agent 357 had given the two IIAD officers the job of catching up on paperwork and keeping the place running until a new Time Chief could be selected. As the form requesting a new Time Chief was one of the first forms they had misfiled, this was taking a while.

"Any problems on that last assignment, Morgen?" asked Lockheed, who was the one who resembled Sting. Or perhaps Billy Dee Williams. No, it was Sting. Morgen had never been to Earth and had no idea what those people looked like.

"None, sir," reported Morgen. "It turned out not to be a full-blown invasion, but rather shock troops from a nearby altiverse. We held them off until reinforcements could arrive, then drove them back through the interdimensional gateway."

"Which you then sealed by personally flying a scout ship loaded with explosives into said gateway, teleporting to safety at the last second," said Landorian, reading from yet another report.

"Yes, sir," said Morgen, his chest swelling with pride.

"Morgen, you take needless risks, make entirely inappropriate demands of your crew, and are one pompous, grandstanding, son of a bastich," Lockheed said slowly.

Fim, and several other crewmembers, silently prayed that the next words would be "you are hereby relieved of duty."

"However," continued Lockeed, "you are one of the few members of the Time Police who have been consistently successful in holding back Greez Hyperiok's forces, which have been taking over altiverses (that is, alternative universes) one by one."

Landorian continued. "Your orders are to track down Greez Hyperiok and personally stop him using any means necessary."

Fim quietly began reviewing his life insurance policy. He couldn't remember if death by power-mad dictator was covered or not.

"Understood, sir! Morgen out!" Morgen stood and slapped his hands together in glee. "Finally, an assignment worthy of my talents. Tracking down and defeating an evil overlord!" In almost manic tones, he ordered sensor sweeps, search patterns, weapons drills, and as an afterthought cancelled all shore leave.

"Excuse me, sir," ahemmed Fim. "Might I remind you that I currently have some twelve years of accumulated leave time?"

"Fil, you know that I wouldn't cancel shore leave if it wasn't a bonafide emergency."

"Last month you cancelled shore leave so you could pick up your dry cleaning early. And that's 'Fim,' sir."

"Whatever." Morgen could not be bothered with details.

"And, if I may ask, sir, why are we going to the trouble of tracking down this Greez Hyperiok when Time Central gave us his coordinates?"

Morgen looked at him evenly. "Fin, you have no sense of style."

And with that, Morgen turned and, his chin of heroic proportions held just so, gazed upon the stars shining through the viewscreen, and wondered about the father he had never known.

"Be that as it may," someone was saying, "I had to suggest something. And stop holding that chin of heroid proportions just so. It makes it look like you're posing for a picture or something."

Greez Hyperiok looked at his chief flunky evenly. "Dijon, you have no sense of style."

Dijon Mu'tard, former cosmic-level Satanic Agent At Large and current chief toady of Greez Hyperiok, former Time Agent and current power-mad dictator, sighed and tried again. "Greez, no matter how you slice it, we're finally starting to see some resistance. Expansion has slowed to a crawl."

"Thousands of alterverses a day is hardly a crawl."

"Considering that the total number of alternate universes in the multiverse is very nearly infinite, anything short of a geometric progression is going to take forever and a day. If you could just let me borrow the ABPSARII for moment..."

"No!" shouted Greez forcefully.

Dijon referred, of course, to Doctor Spleen's ABPSARII, or Automatic Beet-Peeler and Sub-Atomic Re-integrator Mark II, which sat in the corner beeping and buzzing and contentedly and generally looking nothing at all like a food or sub-atomic processing device. An improvement on the original ABPSARI, this device could grant the user pretty much anything he asked for, as long as it was fueled with enough SPAM (Sickening, Putrid, Artificial Meat). A three-dimensional vector of a multidimensional substance, spam has actually been mistaken for food on some backwoods planets.

"But the ABPSARII could make you dictator for life!" Dijkon whined.

"No," Greez repeated. "We will do this the, as you say, hard way. We've already killed Time Agent 357 and his companions. The Time Police have barely been able to slow us down. We've pitted several god-like beings of near infinite power against each other, effectively cancelling each other out. All we have to do is keep doing what we're doing and we'll be supreme rulers of all reality in no time."

In another altiverse altogether, aboard the HMS Golden Lance for which this serial is named, while his companions planned for upcoming battle, the allegedly dead Time Agent 357 slept the sleep of the heavily medicated...

Will Greez Hyperiok be able to take over all of reality?
Will Time Agent 357 be able to stop him?
Will Captain David Morgen be able to stop him?
Will the write-in campaign save Farscape?

For the answers to these and a few other carefully ignored questions, tune in next week for ever more... SFSTORY!

Copyright 2006 by Troy H. Cheek. Free to read, but please reprint only with permission.