Baxter Moon, Galactic Scout (19 page)

The shuttle jerked, sputtered, only we didn’t stop. In fact our momentum kept sending us forward, but only now I had even less (actually no) control. We were blasting forward out of control. We were like a bullet, a big ten-ton bullet. That’s the thing about flying in space, once you get moving forward you actually need your reverse thrusters to slow you down. Or else you keep going either forever or until you hit something. In this case it would be the latter and the something would be the Searcher.

“Baxter, you’re going way too fast,” Kymm called from her ship. Just in case I hadn’t noticed. “You have to take control of your ship.”

“Elvin, you got to be able to give me reverse thrusters,” I pleaded.

Elvin studied his console. Zenna got out of her chair and moved over next to Elvin. They both stared at the console. Elvin pointed to the screen. “If we reroute this and this we should get reverse thrusters back online.”

“Baxter, you’re coming in too fast,” GiS said. “I can only assume you’ve lost your reverse thrusters and not your mind.”

“Nice to have you back in communication,” I said. “And that your instincts are just as keen as ever.”

“SC, why haven’t you been keeping us all informed?” K-999 asked.

“I’m sorry, K-999, but TVTrons are constantly attempting to infect us with a virus. It has put me a bit under the chips. I can still function, but it takes much of my capacity to keep them from overwhelming me. I have fought off over a million attempts in the last nanosecond alone.”

I looked at the screen. We were getting closer and closer to the Searcher. I looked back at Elvin and Zenna. “How you guys coming?”

“Ah, fine,” Elvin said. He moved his fingers over the console. “You have reverse thrusters now!”

We were going pretty fast. I didn’t want to slam on the reverse thrusters, but I also didn’t want to slam into the Searcher. I hit the reverse thrusters. We started to slow, but we were still heading pretty quickly toward Searcher.

“Kymm, I’m going to need you,” I said.

“I’m right above you,” Kymm called over the comm. “I’m locking on in three tics. Prepare your passengers.”

“You can’t, Kymm. Locking on to us at this speed could drag your shuttle crashing into the Searcher with us,” I shouted.

“That’s why she’s not going to lock on,” Chriz said over the comm. “I’ve rigged the tractor beam so it will throw a tractor pulse cushion around you. It will stop you but it won’t be connected to us. It will be like we’ve thrown a big soft cushy pillow around you.”

“Wow, what a great idea,” Elvin said. I detected a hint of jealousy in his voice.

“Buckle up and hold on, everybody,” I called. “This is going to be rough.”

Shuttles in space were meant to come to nice gradual stops. They weren’t really built to be going from 17,000 kilometers per hour to zero in under a tic, but in this case we didn’t have any choice. The instant stop would beat a next instant crash.

The shuttle slammed to a complete stop. All of us on board jerked forward. It wasn’t smooth by any means, but it certainly beat crashing.

“Gotcha!” Kymm said.

“Okay, maybe not a really soft pillow,” Chriz said.

“Nice shot,” I told her. “Now guide us in.”

I put my hands up on my head and relaxed. After all there was nothing I could do but sit back and relax.

“You seem very confident,” Princess Amana said to Kymm over the comm.

“I learned by watching him,” Kymm called. “You’re going to be fine.”

Within minutes we were safely docked on the Searcher.

We were all ecstatic when we got off our shuttles. We had done it! We had saved the diplomats. Now we just needed to warp to Earth and tell them what had happened. War would be avoided and all would be saved.

Of course it couldn’t be that easy. Could it?

K-999 confirmed our arrival to GiS. “We are all aboard. Fire up the light-speed engines and let’s get out of here.”

“We have a problem,” GiS said.

No, of course it couldn’t be that easy.

“I need everybody to the command center stat,” GiS said.

“I demand to know what’s going on!” Ambassador Plant said.

“I also demand to know!” Ambassador Marga said.

“There is a TVTron mothership-pyramid coming at us,” GiS said curtly.

I turned to the ambassadors. “You had to ask.”

We all hurried to the command center.

* * * *

Sure enough, when we reached the command center, there on main view screen heading right for us was a huge reflective-silver giant pyramid with an old-fashioned satellite antenna on top of each of its three base points. GiS was standing in the middle of the room nervously scratching his head with his foot.

“So that’s a TVTron mothership-pyramid,” Elvin said.

“That is correct,” SC said.

“Just once why can’t something be simple…,” I sighed. Sure, it wasn’t professional to sigh, but this was a matter worth sighing over.

“It’s locked on to me with a tractor beam,” SC said.

“Fire up the light-speed engines and get out of here!” Ambassador Marga ordered.

“Yes, fire them up!” Ambassador Plant reordered.

GiS turned to them. “The engines take an hour to come online.”

Ambassador Plant looked at the TVTron Pyramid in the view screen. It certainly was an impressive sight. He pointed at the screen. “But we don’t have an hour!”

“Hence the problem,” GiS said.

UHF-1 appeared on our view screen. It was smiling.

“Thank you for such a rousing attempted escape, I am sure our viewers will enjoy it. Still we can not let you back to your planet to warn them. We need more action. We crave it. We long for it. We live for it.”

“You have to stop them!” both ambassadors said at the same time.

“Yes, I know,” GiS said.

The Searcher opened up fire with two of its laser cannons at the TVTron pyramid. The shots glanced harmlessly off the pyramid’s sides.

“Why don’t you blast them out of the sky!? Nuke ‘em!” Ambassador Marga shouted.

“Our ship is not carrying heavy weapons,” GiS said. “Remember our deal?”

“Oh that’s right,” Ambassador Marga said. “We probably should have trusted each other more…” She stopped to think for a tic. “Wait a minute, you shouldn’t even have small weapons!”

“We brought them online just to fight some TVTron attack ships,” Zenna said.

Two giant robotic crane arms rolled out of the side of the pyramid. Another popped out of the bottom. Though we were still hundreds of kilometers away, we could see the claws and arms with our naked eyes.

One of the Aquarians pointed to the claws on the screen. “They are going to rip us apart!”

UHF-1’s voice came in over our comm system. “We find viewers savor having ships ripped apart far longer than they do if we simply blow them up with fast, boring lasers or missiles.”

This didn’t look good at all. We were being drawn closer and closer to the claws of death — literally.

* * * *

“One of your shuttles could ram the pyramid,” one of the Aquarians, a short man with no eyebrows and green hair suggested. “That would allow us to escape and to warn our planets.”

Elvin did a few calculations on a console. “One of our shuttles ramming the pyramid wouldn’t do enough damage to stop it.” He did a few more calculations. “Even if we hit it with both our shuttles, we still wouldn’t stop it.”

The princess turned to me. “Baxter, do something,” she said. It wasn’t an order. It wasn’t a request. It was a statement.

A simple statement, yet somehow it made me feel good. The princess wasn’t just hoping I would think of something to save the day, she knew I would.

I had to think and I had to think hard. We needed a big weapon and we needed it fast.

“Can we radio back to our planets and tell them the situation? At least we can avoid war,” one of the aids suggested.

Both ambassadors shook their heads no. “All communication is being blacked out.” The two ambassadors looked at each other.

“We have to learn to trust each other more,” Plant said.

“I agree,” Marga said.

The two exchanged grins. They shook hands. It would have been a nice moment if we weren’t all about to die.

“We should have gotten more done on the Explorer,” Plant said.

Then it hit me. Proving once again you never know where inspiration will spring from. “The Explorer!” I said.

Chriz turned to me. “No, Moon, we’re on the Searcher, try to stick with the program.”

“I know where we are, but we can use the Explorer. We can ram the mothership-pyramid with the Explorer!”

Ambassador Plant looked at me. “Son, the Explorer is a 20-billion-international-dollar piece of equipment. We can’t use it as a giant rock.”

Everybody in the room just looked at him. The ambassador sank back. “Sorry, sometimes I do politics first and think second.”

Ambassador Marga put her hand on his shoulder. “Our ship has already been destroyed, so now our planets will share an even stronger common bond.”

“Yes, good point,” Plant said.

Of course it would be a moot point if we couldn’t pull this off. I turned to my team.

“Do we have any access to Explorer?”

“We’re too far away,” Chriz said.

“That is correct,” SC said. “At this distance and under the current situation I can access the levels of their systems but not override them.”

“Let’s boost our signal.”

Lobi, Elvin and Chriz started kicking around ideas.

“We could super charge SC.”

“We could override the Explorer’s override controls…”

That’s the thing about super-brains, they may be super smart but sometimes they look for a complicated answer when the simple will do. By the time they finished sifting through all the options we’d be dead.

“We could….”

“We don’t need a lot of control. We just need to be able to ram it into a giant mothership,” I said.

The three of them looked at each other.

“We could send a single encoded-in-subspace command that basically says, fire up your engines and go this way,” Lobi said.

“Yes, if we keep the beam tight enough we could get through to them. They wouldn’t even notice.”

“How long would that take?” Kymm asked.

“One hour, two tops,” Lobi said.

I looked at the view screen. The TVTron ship wasn’t coming at us at high speed (I guess they wanted to build tension) but it still didn’t look like we had an hour.

“How long do we have until they reach us?” I asked.

“Five minutes,” SC said. “Six tops if they want to drag it on a bit for their viewers.”

“Then we need to send a transmission in four minutes,” I said.

“But Baxter!” they all said at once.

“Come on guys. I know you always overestimate your estimates to make yourselves look good,” I said.

“Yes, but not by a factor of twelve!” Lobi said.

“Well then work fast.” The three of them huddled together. They would come up with something. I knew they would, but I had to delay. Delaying was my specialty.

“SC, put me through to the UHF-1,” I said.

“They may not be accepting calls,” SC said.

I always prided myself as being creative and able to think fast on my feet. Now I had to put my money where my brain was. I needed an idea and fast.

“Tell them this will be a big ratings booster.”

Okay, it wasn’t the best idea. But it was a stall until I came up with something better. I knew I had something better in me.

UHF-1 appeared on our screen.

“Yes, what is it, humans?”

I had to play with his ego and his urge to entertain himself and his viewers at all costs. It came to me. We had to get him to play this up.

“So this is your big plan?” I taunted. “Crush us and then start a war between Earth and Aqua.”

UHF-1 just looked at the screen. He crossed his robotic claw arms. “Yes, it is,” he said defiantly. He stuck a little electronic tongue out at me. “I thought you said this would help boost our ratings…”

“Yeah, I did. It still amazes me that this is the best show you could up with,” I said, just stalling for time.

UHF-1 pointed at the screen with a claw. “I admit we didn’t spend a lot of time in developing the concept. We’re on a limited budget. We prefer to use our resources on equipment. We figure a good story will write itself. What’s your point, human? I’m sorry if you don’t like the way we’re killing you. But these are tough financial times so hard choices have to be made.”

Time was running out. I needed to come up with something to stall them. And I needed it about five minutes ago. An idea popped into my head. It wasn’t the greatest idea of all time. It probably wasn’t even in the top hundred of great ideas of all time, but it was all I had. So I went with it.

“You know what fans really love?” I paused to build suspense and give us more time.

UHF-1 let out a little sigh. “I’ll bite. What would the fans love?”

“A big chase scene. You can’t beat a good chase scene for building dramatic tension.”

UHF-1 looked into the screen. He was thinking. I could see it in his computer generated little beady eyes.

“Yes, that is true, that is why we let you escape from your first ship,” UHF-1 said.

“True, but that was kind of boring. Why not release us from your tracker beam and chase us around a bit. Clacking your giant claws and such. The viewers will eat that up.”

“You are just trying to delay,” UHF-1 said. “You want to charge your engines and escape.”

He was smarter than I thought. I don’t know why I thought that since TVTrons had pretty much had us on the run the whole time.

“You know it will take us an hour to charge our engines. Correct?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“Then chase us around for a half hour before you crush us,” I said.

“You wish to give yourselves more time to escape,” UHF-1 said.

“Well, duh,” I said. “We each get a little something. You get more footage and we get a chance.”

There was silence on the other end — calculated silence.

“The tractor beam has been retracted,” SC said.

“Move around,” UHF-1 said. “You have fifteen of your minutes.”

“Thanks,” I said.