SFSTORY: HMS Golden Lance #37 - Alpha and Omegas

The HMS Golden Lance settled gently on a well-kept lawn, somehow managing to squeeze its landing gear between the white picket fences. A hatch opened and a group of people climbed out. They were, in no particular order, Time Agent 357 (Champion of Truth, Justice, and the Ability to Consume Large Amounts of Alcohol in a Single Sitting), Diana Dark (sweet, innocent girl from Chicago, or at least as sweet and innocent as any girl from Chicago can be), Ralph the Giant Space Weasel of Anthrax V (actually a friendly, easy-going weaseloid from Leibowitz IV and an accomplished ukulele player in his own right), Doctor Bing Von Spleen (the galaxy's foremost Spamological Engineer because he personally killed the other threemost), Omegas (former streetwise servant of Heaven), and Valerie McSteel (robotic avatar of the VAL 9000 computer which was the heart, soul, and lower intestine of the HMS Golden Lance for which this serial is named).

Also with them was 357's mother Mildred. "So, 357, will you and your friends be staying long this time? I think I have space in the guest rooms for everyone."

"Not this time, Mom," 357 answered. "We've got a few minor plot points to wrap up before we can call this adventure finished. In fact, we need to be going now. Load up, everybody!"

Grumbling that they had just unloaded, the group made their goodbyes to Mildred.

"Remember to write," Mildred chided 357. "I do worry so when you're gone."

"Don't worry, Mother. I may venture far and wide, but I will always find my way back home." With that, he entered the HMS Golden Lance and warped away.

A short time later, in a universe far, far away, the HMS Golden Lance materialized out of Netherspace into normal space. In the ship's dining area, the wrap party was in full swing. Evil had been defeated. The ABPSARII had been recovered. Large amounts of beer were being consumed, streamers were being hung, music was being played, food was being eaten, and passive verb tenses were being overused.

Ralph was strumming his ukulele like he'd never strummed one before. Diana climbed on top of a table and began a dance which would have been illegal on her home planet. 357 listened to Doctor Bing Von Spleen tell the story of how he'd saved a planet that one time by recycling his own bodily waste. It was the third such telling of said story, but 357 didn't mind. Valerie McSteel had adjusted her internal processes and had the android equivalent of a good buzz. Even Omegas seemed to be enjoying himself, sticking in close to the crowd instead of staggering off to drink on his own as he was wont to do.

Everything was going so well that Time Agent 357 almost didn't notice when Omegas, who had been drifting aimlessly through the group, suddenly shoved Doctor Spleen aside and grabbed something off the table behind him.

"Look out!" 357 shouted. "Omegas has the ABPSARII!"

Omegas. No one knew the origin of Omegas. He appeared to be a male humanoid of unknown species, but hinted that he was much more. Most knew he had once been a servant of Heaven, yet he was not mentioned in the classical literature. As a servant of Heaven, he commanded awesome powers. Back then, if one wanted to list the Top Ten Most Powerful Beings in all of Creation, one would have to put Omegas way up there. But his powers had since been stripped, drained, taken, given, and duplicated many times. No matter how hard and how many times he had tried, he had never been able to regain his former power levels. He just didn't have the means.

Until now.

ABPSARII stands for Automatic Beet Peeler and Sub-Atomic Re-integrator Mark II. Created by Doctor Bing Von Spleen, the original ABPSARI was designed to... Well, even Spleen doesn't remember anymore. But he discovered, thanks to sabotage by rival scientist and hot piece of tail Rader Vogel, that when fueled by SPAM (Sickening, Putrid, Artificial Meat) the ABPSARI could alter reality at the most basic levels. SPAM-powered interdimensional, time-travelling ships soon became readily available. Entire new industries sprung up overnight. Nobody could top such an invention.

Doctor Bing Von Spleen tried anyway. He combined his ABPSARI with an advanced search engine and the computer processing power of a small planet. The resulting ABPSARII (note the II) could take a request for any place, person, thing, or condition, then search all possible alternative universes (alterverses for short) and all possible times, find that place, person, whatever, and make it a reality for the person who held the ABPSARII.

That's a great deal of power. Power best left in the hands of someone who would use it wisely.

Power currently in the hands of Omegas.

Time Agent 357 quickly drew his favorite sidearm from the holster at his side. The telechronal displacement pistol fired beams of pure chronatic enery, capable of sending individual atoms of a target into the future or past up to 10,000 years, effectively shredding said target.

Diana Dark did a triple backflip off the table and extended her unbreakable staff towards Omegas. She carefully aimed the blow at a (presumed) nerve cluster in his (apparently) well-muscled arm.

Valerie McSteel might have been running the operating system of a peaceful time exploration vessel, but that didn't change the fact that her hardware was the latest and last production model of the famous NEKKID (Networked Electronic Killing and Kamikaze Infiltration Device) series 69 battle androids. The electron blast from her hand was sufficient to crater a small moon, though she had dialed it back just a bit to keep from holing the hull.

The VAL 9000 computer, known to her friends as Val, activated internal defense measures.

Doctor Bing Von Spleen and Ralph the Giant Space Weasel of Anthrax V, true to their characters, dove for cover. Spleen began a desperate struggle to save all the beer. He figured the safest way to transport it would be inside his own stomach. Ralph, knowing that he could not affect the battle one way or another, settled down to read the newspaper.

Omegas scattered their attacks with a wave of his hand. He had apparently been holding back lately, and had already regained a much greater fraction of his original power than anyone had suspected. Still, that would not be enough to protect him forever from the combined forces arrayed against him.

Omegas didn't need forever. He was a fast typist. Before his protective force bubble could batted aside, a new one shimmered into existence, summoned by the ABPSARII itself. Omegas cackled maniacally as he continued to type.

=357!= shouted the overhead speakers.

"What?" 357 answered, recognizing the sultry yet annoying voice of the VAL 9000 computer.

=I'm registering massive energy flows. Omegas is sucking power from the very fabric of reality itself. Long before he regains his former Heavenly power levels, this whole region of space will be unstable. Omegas may destroy this entire alterverse. We have to stop him!=

"Tell me something I don't know!" shouted 357.

"That's not Omegas!" came a voice from under the table.

"What?" 357 dove under the table. Luckily, his fall was broken by Doctor Spleen. "Ralph! What are you talking about?"

"I just downloaded the latest news," Ralph explained, rattling the highly advanced newsreading technology in his hand, which resembled nothing more than a newspaper from 20th century Earth. "It confirms that Omegas is currently in use by a different author in a different storyline."

"Could it be an Omegas from the future or past, just as I've encountered Doctor Spleen here-" 357 paused to indicate the moaning form of Doctor Bing Von Spleen beneath him "-at different points in his life?"

"Omegas is a timeless immortal being. It doesn't work like that for him. Ditto on alternate versions from other universes. They're all the same him."

"How did you get to be such an expert on multidimensional manifestations all of a sudden?"

"Well, there's this cute little sidebar to the article here..."

357 left Ralph to his mutterings and confronted Omegas with the news. "You're not Omegas! Who are you?"

"I am Omegas," said the being claiming to be Omegas. "Or, at least, a part of him."

"You must be Sagemo!" Diana shouted as she rattled her staff off the force bubble yet again. "His evil twin!"

"Omegas has an evil twin?" 357 sputtered in disbelief.

"Not exactly. Omegas was at one point stripped of the majority of his powers and the evil temptations they caused. Without them, Omegas became weak and ineffective, like the 'good' Kirk in that Star Trek episode, while the powers and evil formed an identical being who took the name Sagemo. They tried to fight it out, but were transported into the heart of a supernova and had to rejoin in order to keep from being destroyed."

357 fired another round at the force bubble. "If they rejoined, then why are there still two of them?"

"That was only one time of many," Omegas said almost conversationally, pausing in his typing. "The two halves were incomplete, but both learned something from the experience. Eventually, I learned to split myself into two complete semi-powerful halves, like the 'twinning' episode of Farscape. The plan was that each half would adventure in the multiverse until he could regain his powers. Once that was done, they would rejoin into a being with twice the power of the original Omegas. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually, I would be the most powerful being of all, more powerful than my former bosses, and could overthrow them. However, thanks to you and this ABPSARII, I can take a shortcut."

"It'll never work!" 357 exclaimed. "We'll find a way to stop you."

"Oh, I have no doubt that you will," Omegas admitted. "That's why I've been programming something very special into the ABPSARII. As your mechanical friends have mentioned, reality itself is becoming unstable due to the amount of power I'm absorbing into myself. I've shaped that instability into a trap for you. A trap that you will never be able to escape!"

Outside the ship, an anomaly grew from nothing to something slightly larger than the size of Rhode Island, which exists only so long as people continually compare it's size against other things. As it grew, the anomaly changed from brightest white to darkest black. Had Doctor Bing Von Spleen had the time to look at it, he would have thought that it looked somewhat familiar.

357 did have time to look at it and did think that it looked somewhat familiar. He suddenly knew what he had to do. He pulled Diana close for a kiss. Time seemed to slow around them as the kiss lingered.

"Wow, what was that for?" Diana said dreamily. "Hey, why has time slowed around us?"

"Standard Time Agent trick," 357 said. "It's an old dramatic convention that allows heroes to say goodbye in situations where not enough time actually exists."

"Don't say goodbye, 357. We'll get through this somehow. We always do."

"We will this time, too. Just not together. Goodbye, my love!"

Time Agent 357 shoved Diana Dark aside and slapped a button on his belt buckle. As the flow of time returned to normal, he shouted at the ship computer, the VAL 9000, and launched himself at Omegas. "Val, execute escape plan 9 immediately!"

Compelled by programming directives she could not ignore, the VAL 9000 executed the order. In the next few microseconds, sensors and scanners were completely burned out as they searched for a safe haven for the crew. Nanoseconds later, teleportation crystals were shattered as they attempted to teleport the crew twice as far in normal space as had ever been previously attempted. A picosecond after that, the main engines overloaded.

Time Agent 357 felt, rather than saw, all his friends teleported to safety. Diana Dark, Doctor Bing Von Spleen, Ralph the Giant Space Weasel of Anthrax V, and even the android known as Valerie McSteel, were teleported to places unknown but assumed safe. As he knew they would, the teleporter circuits fried themselves before they could get a lock on him through the force field he'd just activated.

Omegas, though by no means in full possession of his former Heavenly power, nonetheless sensed the overload in the engines and exerted his will to stop it. This took a considerable amount of his attention away from directing the ABPSARII on how to best maintain his force bubble.

Intentionally or otherwise, the ABPSARII's force bubble was based on the same basic technology as the electrochonatic force field which 357 used. The two fields flexed and partially merged when they met. The sources of both fields realized that this was a bad thing and adjusted themselves to rectify the situation. The two fields repelled each other and snapped back to their former selves with a smack that sounded like twin guillotines.

"Ha!" shouted Omegas, who had just successfully suppressed, shunted, and otherwise dispersed the energy from the overloaded engines which should have been turning the ship into something resembling a nova just about then. "You should have known that even if you penetrated my force bubble, you couldn't hurt me when I'm at this power level!"

"I wasn't trying for you," 357 stated calmly. He held up his hand to show Omegas what he was holding.

One half of the ABPSARII, rapidly disintegrating into nothingness.

Omegas stared down at the other half in his own hands, trying to will it not to dissolve away. But his will was shaken, his powers in disarray, and his underwear bunched up in the back. Faster than it takes to tell, the Automatic Beet Peeler and Sub-Atomic Re-integrator Mark II was no more.

With a scream of primal rage, Omegas was on 357, battering his way through the force fields. "I may have lost the ABPSARII, but I still have enough power to destroy you!"

"That may be," 357 answered as he adjusted his force field to accomodate both Omegas and himself. "But you don't have enough power to escape this field before this ship is trapped forever."

"What do you mean?"

"That anomaly you just created? When you suppressed all the power to the HMS Golden Lance's engines, you also suppressed the thrusters keeping us from being sucked into it!"

"Nooooooooo!"

Diana Dark, Doctor Bing Von Spleen, Ralph, and Valerie McSteel materialized in a tangled heap on the bridge of the HMS Dentless, Captain David Morgen commanding.

Well, Captain Morgen was doing something. Currently, he was running around in circles shouting something about an intruder alert.

Fim, first mate and chief alien flunky, his skin currently a lovely shade of pink, blinked the 87 eyes he had that day and greeted them. "Please excuse the Captain. You interrupted his nap. We detected your ship and were approaching to see if you required assistance."

Diana looked about her. "Hell(tm), yeah, we require assistance. Time Agent 357 is trapped aboard that ship with a repowered Omegas. We have to get back there to help him."

"Too late!" an anonymous Ensign shouted.

On the main viewing screen, the HMS Golden Lance was just disappearing into the anomaly.

"After them!" Diana ordered.

The anomaly fizzled out of existence.

"No!" Diana cried. Valerie McSteel caught her as she collapsed.

"Look!" someone shouted.

The anomaly had returned. Something had emerged.

The "something" appeared to be a ship, or rather what one could call a ship if one were legally blind and in a charitable mood. It tumbled end over end in a stately if somewhat nauseating ballet, sailing quickly away from the anomaly but moving more slowly every second. One part of the hull, a cyan-ish blue in color, sported the name "HMS Golden Lance." This was perhaps the largest and best preserved part of the hull. Another part said "HMS As Yet Unnamed." A third could possibly have read "USS Challenger II," if one squinted and looked at it sideways. Several other identifiers were simply unreadable, hence they did not even qualify as identifiers. It was obvious, even before the reaction chambers split, the engines shook loose from their mountings, and the warranties expired, that the ship could not escape on its own.

"Close on that ship!" ordered Diana, back on her feet. "Prepare to grapple! Ready the teleporters!"

"We can't get a lock," Fim reported. "There's some kind of temporal exclusion effect. We literally can't do anything that would affect their passage through space/time."

A research vessel appeared, well within the temporal exclusion zone, which towed the battered remains of the HMS Golden Lance away from the anomaly. The anomaly fizzled out again.

The research vessel and the HMS Golden Lance shimmered out of existence.

As those about the HMS Dentless watched wordlessly, the HMS Golden Lance shimmered back into existence and was sucked into the anomaly again, only to be rescued once again by the research vessel.

And once again.

And again.

Doctor Bing Von Spleen, who had just finished yet another beer, explained. "It's obviously a time loop. Time Agent 357 and Omegas are returning to the anomaly from which I rescued them in my research ship. There they will spend 150 years together until they forget why they're fighting and combine their efforts to escape, starting the whole loop all over again."

Ralph tottered up to Spleen. "Time loop? You mean we're going to have to go through that all over again?"

"No, Ralph. We've already been through it and are out. 357 and Omegas, however, are stuck inside. They will relive this adventure over and over."

"I refuse to accept that!" Diana shouted. "We're breaking 357 out of that loop!"

"Can't be done," Valerie told her. "And even if we could, that would break Omegas out of the loop as well. As powerful as Omegas is, the time loop is the only way to hold him."

Spleen patted Diana on the back. "With Omegas, or rather this aspect of Omegas, trapped in the loop, he can never become an all-powerful threat to all of reality. Time Agent 357 knew this would happen when he had all of us teleported to safety. He sacrificed himself to protect all of us."

"But it's not fair! He deserves better than that!"

"Look at it this way," Valerie whispered. "In the loop, he will meet you, get to know you, and fall in love with you, over and over again. Doesn't that make it sound better?"

"Well, maybe," Diana admitted between sniffles. "But that doesn't mean I'm ever going to stop trying to figure out a way to rescue him without releasing Omegas!" she added fiercely.

Valerie hugged her tight. "In that case, I'll likewise dedicate my life to helping rescue 357. Doctor Spleen, are you with us?"

Spleen belched politely. "I'm too old for adventures in time and space. I'm going to try retiring again. But I do have a nice little timeship I can sell you cheap..."

"Thanks, we'll take you up on that. How about you, Ralph?"

Ralph buffed his claws against his pelt. "Sorry, but I've been away from home too long as it is. But do feel free to visit anytime."

The HMS Dentless blasted away into another universe, leaving behind a simple warning buoy.

"Warning! Temporal anomaly! Do not approach!"

"Atencionay! Piso Mojado! Nay trespassiona!"

"Warning! Temporal anomaly! Do not approach!"

Doctor Bing Von Spleen went on to retire and lived a long, productive life. He died peacefully in bed at the age of 143 in the arms of a 19 year old redhead, shot by her jealous husband. His friends and family turned his funeral into a six week long drug-induced orgy. His former professional rival Rader Vogel was quoted as saying "He would have wanted it that way. Pass the KY."

Ralph returned home and never ventured into space again except for vacations and the occasional zero gravity 2nd honeymoon with his 500 wives. He turned over the mantle of Giant Space Weasel of Anthrax V to his oldest son, Ralph Jr.

Captain David Morgen and Fim of the HMS Dentless had many further adventures, some of which may some day be chronicled in these pages.

Diana Dark and Valerie McSteel will return in TIME DETECTIVES.

Time Agent 357 never did find his way back home.

THE END

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