To more fully enjoy this story in living, breathing HTML,
please visit our website at:
/~vivian
Now offering over 140,000 words of pure prurience!
--------------------------------------------------------
Jasmin (part VI)
by Vivian Darkbloom
"It's good to be on your toes when coming out of an infraspace
corridor," I was explaining. "The transition to Einsteinian space
can result in all sorts of anomalies, and it's best to be ready
for any contingency."
She smiled widely. "Piece of cake," said, still riding high on
her recent fame. "After all we've been through, I think we can
handle this." She leaned back, kicked her heels up on the edge of
the Spectre's console, and leaned back in the chair, lacing her
hands behind her head.
I made a "Hmm" of uncertainty, but not wanting to nag, remained
silent.
We watched the countdown to the transition to normal space, and
when it reached zero, the view screen lit up with the usual
wildly shifting oil-on-water glow of psychedelic colors, which
gradually settled into darker and darker shades which eventually
became the black of space hung delicately with the magical
twinkling of stars.
"See?" she smiled at me with reckless hubris.
There was an ear-splitting rumble, the sound of the hull of our
ship being seized in the harsh grip an Imperial klepto-beam. I
knew what was next -- the auto-scanner beeped with an incoming
message. The comscreen lit up with a horribly familiar face.
Darvo stood in his familiar pose and get-out, with his gang of
tough-looking biker-clad bullies around him. Only this time, a
man next to him was wearing a brown hooded robe with a white
silken rope belt.
"Greetings," greeted a horribly familiar voice over the
comsystem, with the sonority of gravel in a garbage disposal.
"Shit!" I said.
I followed my lover's gaze out the glassene window above us, to
the image of the hideous giant `W' of Darvo Wedge's ship, the
sleek white contours burning bright against the black backdrop of
the void, terrible emblem of the overfed self-righteous
right-winged puritan zealots, who terrorized the skies.
Jasmin's smile had vanished, and her face had gone ashen grey,
though I thought I would never see anything more pale than her
usual fine ivory complexion.
"That's the man who stole your cryo-regulator," I informed her.
My heart pounded alarmingly as I frantically gestured over the
holo-controls projected into air in front of me, waving, sliding,
and twisting my hands to bring up the klepto-beam deflector
shield. "I only wish I had been able to complete the final
testing on this thing. I guess this is it."
As Darvo's voice droned on, I punched the button to activate the
deflection shield. The ship lurched slightly, but the beam still
held it fast.
"You know, those klepto-beams are really annoying," I said,
firing up the debugger, which caused about seven different
tracking screens to appear in the air in front of me. I watched
the columns of color-coded symbols cascade by in an upside-down
waterfall as they scrolled up and off the screen.
"Tell me about it," she said softly, watching helplessly the
useless instrumentation in front of her, complaints from various
subsystems regisering in flashing red lights all across it. "You
know, this guy is really starting to get on my nerves."
"Hup. There it is," I reached pointed my finger to the erroneous
coefficient. "It was minus-Xi, not Xi. Let's try again." I looked
at her -- her frightened eyes met mine. "Pray for a miracle," I
said.
"OK," she replied, closing her eyes and putting her hand to her
heart.
It must of worked, because this time when I threw the switch the
ship broke free.
"Now," I continued. "Get us the hell out of here, while I work on
making us invisible."
"Got it." Even as she was opening her eyes, her hands flew across
the console. Damn, she's good. Within a few seconds we were gone,
I had the second set of screens up on the other side of me, and
Darvo's Mercedes was a dot in the rear-view screen.
I flicked the holo-switch to bring up the cloaking field, and the
indicator pulsed green in confirmation of correct functioning. We
had disappeared once more. "Whew!" I said.
"Not quite `whew' yet," she said, pointing at the radar screen.
"Torpedo, bearing in from 160 degrees. Impact in twenty seconds."
"Can you shake it?" I asked.
Her hands played on the controls. "No luck."
"It must be tracking on the infrared of our exhaust. We could try
to shoot it down," I suggested.
"We'd need to slow down, and risk it catching up to us."
Darvo's voice droned on through the comsystem.
"Better ready the escape pods, I said, moving to unbuckle my
flight belts.
"There's no time," she shot back, bent over, energy and
concentration focused full bore on the console before her. Her
eyes were locked on the gauges and display screens as her hands
deftly manipulated and modulated the controls.
"When I count to three," she continued, "I need you to
simultaneously shut down the thrusters and seal the
thrust-manifold doors. Exactly on the count of three, that's very
important."
"Won't that cause the afterburner system to seize up?" I asked.
She briefly glanced at me, with the flicker of a smile of grim
amusement. "Let's hope not, because if it does, I'll make you go
out and unjam it."
"Thanks," I replied, preparing to do as she had asked.
"Something else that would help, my dearest," she said, "That I
know you'll be good at."
"What's that?"
"Open up a comlink and try to distract them." I thought for a
moment, then a devilish grin crossed my face. "I knew you could
do it," she said, seeing my expression.
Heart racing, amazed that we could even think in terms of humor
with doom so ominously impending, I flipped the comswitch lever.
"Oh, Darvo," I interrupted.
"Xithnous," he chortled in reply as my face appeared on his
comscreen. "Imagine my surprise."
"I apologize for the inconvenience," I continued, "But we seem to
have a faulty thruster jet. Keeps making the ship wander all over
the place. We've been meaning to get it fixed, but we've been so
busy, you know how that goes."
"Yes," he replied, voice oilier than a bag of fast-food
french-fries. "I do seem to recall some nasty things you said
about the Inquisition on the television. Unfortunately, you were
quite incorrect, you know."
"Yes Darvo, I do know. You see, I've been reflecting on my past,
and the little voice of my conscience spoke up and said that I'd
better mend my ways, and you know what? This time I listened."
"That's reassuring," he said. "By the way, it's really too bad
about that little torpedo that got away from us. We've really
been meaning to get it fixed. But after it's done destroying your
ship, I'm sure it won't be any more bother."
"Right. So back to my feelings of repentance, I was wondering if
you might be willing, given my impending doom, to perform the
Noxigothian rites of purification."
"Well Xithy, my boy, there really isn't time..." The man in the
hooded robe cleared his throat.
It was the solemn vow, promise, and strict duty of all
inquisitioners to perform the rites of purification when so
requested. I figured that with a high magistrate of the
inquisition standing right there, along with all the other
witnesses, he wouldn't be able to weasel out of it.
"...Ah yes. I suppose I could. Yes, well." He looked helplessly
around. Someone handed him a thick, fancy, brown leatherbound
book with gold lettering on the front and spine.
"Well, here we go," he sighed, opening it.
Everybody in the frame bowed their heads reverently as Darvo
began to read the sacred text:
hackus jackus inna shackus
pug-a bugger chuga lug
sperta lerta fordi zerta
finger zinger linger pink
Jasmin cocked her head to listen. She hit the mute button so she
could talk to me without being heard. "Doesn't that sound
like..."
"I know. The Noxigothian sacred scriptures, inscribed in the
venerable ancient language of fair Noxia."
"No, I mean something... oh, never mind. Get ready..." she said.
The gravely voice over the comsystem continued to drone:
zingus blingus cunnilingus
winken blinken hotrod linken
hoitus toitus zulu coitus
zoinka boinka goinka oink
"Ready, on three..." she repeated, her hands dancing across the
controls with graceful rapidity.
In the front viewscreen, I saw a growing image of something
familiar-looking. Gradually I recognized it as the tail-thruster
of a Mercedes GJ-130. It grew with dismaying rapidity, now nearly
filling the screen.
She counted: "One... Two... THREE!"
Exactly as she commanded, I hit the switches to shut down the
thrusters and seal the thrust-manifold doors.
What she did simultaneously, I never would have thought of. She
caught the very final burst before I silenced the thruster to
wrench the ship around into a course perpendicular to the one we
had been following. Thanks to the G-force damping, we didn't feel
a thing of course -- my coffee didn't even spill. I took a sip of
it.
Her timing was perfect. Now her eyes were glued to the comscreen.
The droning continued:
dingle pringle titty tingle
porkus lorkus diddly dork --
There was a muffled explosion in the background of the comsystem
transmission, and we could see the lights flicker on the other
ship. In the rear viewscreen, a seemingly tiny explosion flared,
then a nasty pale-yellowish glow began to envelop the receding
W-shaped ship behind us.
Darvo stopped reading. "What was that?"
"We've been hit, sir. Our own torpedo, looped around and struck
our left engine. The napalm-field reaction has commenced. Sir,
I'm afraid this is it."
"NO!" shouted Darvo, his eyes filled with a combination of fear
and anger.
Mayhem and commotion broke loose on board the other ship. "Man
the escape pods!" someone shouted.
"The field would surround them too, only a lot more quickly,"
replied the voice of someone better-informed. "There is no known
method of escaping the napalm field."
What happened next, I found oddly touching. Darvo turned to me
and pleaded. "Xithnous, can't you shut this thing off? I know
you're a mathematical genius. Isn't there a way to counteract the
field? I'll pay you, whatever you like -- name a price!"
I unlocked the mute switch. "I'm sorry, Darvo," I said honestly,
"truly I am. I have no way to help you."
The signal began to break up and fade as the field started to
interfere with the transmission.
All around him, men were sweating, shedding clothes to cool off.
He looked away desperately, that was the last thing I saw as the
image turned to complete static snow.
"Are they all going to die now?" she asked, voice laced with a
hint of panic.
"Jasmin," I said, "look at me." Our eyes met. Hers were filled
with an unfathomable expression, the combination of triumph and
dismay, heroic satisfaction and sadness.
"Jasmin," I said, "You did the right thing. You made a sensible
decision, and saved our ship, not to mention your life and mine.
They were the ones who fired the torpedo. You can't blame
yourself for that."
She looked down. The most skillful words I could muster had
fallen clattering to the ground, useless.
"I've never killed anyone before," she said. "We did that
manoeuvre as an exercise a million times in school, but it was
just a game..."
"Listen," I said. "You didn't kill them. They killed themselves.
All you did was to turn their own lethal force back on them."
She released the clasps on her safety straps and ran back to into
the ship.
More slowly, I followed. I found her sobbing on the
patchwork-orange armchair in the lounge, and sat down beside her.
No more words. I reached out to hold her, and she turned to face
me and wrapped herself around me in desperate abandon, clinging
to me as her sadness melted into mine, and I found my tears
flowing as well.
Our emotions ran together as I realized that an era of my life
had ended. True, there would be other inquisitioners to contend
with in the future, but by far the nastiest and most despicable
was gone forever. I hardly believed it, unable to shake the
feeling that it all had just been a dream.
But as time went on, the irrevocable truth solidified before me.
Later I played back the tape from the rear viewscreen monitor,
and watched with morbid fascination; and, I confess, a sense of
satisfaction, as the hideous burning `W,' that had terrorized so
many, collapsed into a cluster of glowing cinders.
On the news that night, they confirmed that the ship had been
found, the bodies identified, and that the analysis had shown it
had been destroyed by its own torpedo. I exhaled a deep breath of
immense relief to hear that our presence had not been mentioned,
suspected, or even hinted at. The whole thing was presented as a
mysterious mechanical malfunction, investigation complete, case
closed.
The Emperor expressed suitable anguish, and announced the
memorial services. Frankly, I think the Emperor was not inclined
to ask too many questions, feeling himself somewhat relieved to
be free of the thorn in his side of a figure who had been a
constant political liability.
____________________________________________________________
Never mind that Darvo's countless hundreds of innocent victims
had never enjoyed such dignity, we decided the next day to hold a
memorial of our own. It was mostly silent, but we lit candles and
read some poems, and she picked some flowers from the hydroponic
garden, which we cast out into space as a blessing. Then we
planted some new sprouts in the soil of a small flower-pot that I
had rummaged from the back of a compartment where the gardening
supplies were.
It was a solemn occasion, but eyes were dry, and it felt like the
beginning of a release and getting on with things.
____________________________________________________________
next part
_______________________________________________________
For more stories, please visit our site:
/~vivian