Mutant Space People: Part 2

Evil Ninja Robot with Space Cannon

Part 2:

“Red Alert! All Hands on deck!”

For the second time that night, Lieutenant Simkins was startled awake. Blearily he groped for his uniform jacket and gun belt. Moments later he was sprinting down the corridors to the bridge, stumbling over his untied shoes. Red alerts didn’t allow time to dress properly.

Unsurprisingly, Ensign Baxter was there ahead of him, looking ready for parade. Even his boots were polished. Baxter looked smug. Simkins wanted to smack the grin off of his face, but allowed his sense of rank and decorum to stifle the urge.

“Gee, Ricky. As my senior officer, shouldn’t you be showing me a better example? Unbuttoned jacket, crooked gun belt... what would the admiral say?”

“Peace, Georgey. Don’t want to end up on astropod duty.”

Baxter was momentarily taken aback, and Simkins walked away before the ensign recovered his wits. He was about to approach the captain when he became dizzy. He grabbed the nearest chair to support himself, and was suddenly looking down on the bridge, as though he were on the ceiling. He saw Baxter making a rude gesture, and then he was just as suddenly back in his own body.

He spun around to look at Baxter, who was standing there completely innocently. Simkins shook his head and continued on his way. What was wrong with him? Why did he keep having these strange visions, and why did they keep involving George Baxter?

“Simkins! I need you at your station. We’ve just received a warning shot from the robot armada. You’ve got to check the positions of their ships before we engage.”

“Aye sir.”

Of course he wouldn’t be part of the battle. He was the map boy. Sure he was the best they had at charting, but it’s not like it was a crucial job. Especially when they were about to face the full force of the robot fleet. There were so many other things he could do. Things, he noted, that would be much more likely to earn him a promotion.

He looked around the bridge. Several officers had shifted into sturdier forms, in preparation for battle. One junior lieutenant had the unusual talent of electrical empathy. He had already melded to the central computer system, ready to read power levels and give damage reports with accuracy and speed that the computers would never match.

Baxter was standing near the captain with his usual smirk. Although there was outwardly nothing amiss, Simkins suddenly felt a surge of warning and danger. He had no idea what it meant. His empathy powers, until now, had been all but useless on humans. Even if he understood the warning, though, none of the commanding officers would listen. “I just have a feeling” never worked before, and it certainly wouldn’t work now, when it involved their pet crew member.

Shaking it off, he turned away and sat himself at his mapping station. One by one he scanned the area, made some calculations, and plotted each enemy ship on the star chart. None of them had moved at all in the last month, and he was unsurprised to find that they still had not.

As he charted, he noticed an odd empty space in the robot formation. He scanned several times, just to make sure, but nothing showed. It was an unusual move, and his empathy power kicked in again, warning him that something was going on. But what? What good was a talent that didn’t even explain itself?

In frustration, he let his head fall to the desk with a thud. He was tired of everything. Of map duty. Of having a useless talent. Of being passed over time and again for promotions. He wished that the battle would just start. At least it would be something different in his routine.

The lieutenant tried to get back to his work, but it was so mindless that he ended up just staring at the half-formed chart. He focused his eyes on the empty space and wished for some sort of destructive power. Laser vision, maybe, or spontaneous combustion. Anything that would destroy that stupid unexplained hole.

For the third time in a few hours, Simkins was jerked into a strange vision. He wouldn’t mind so much if he just knew what was going on, but he didn’t have the faintest clue. This time the vision was not of a person or a place that he could recognize. In fact, it just looked like a blank patch of outer space. He squinted at the area, trying to see better, and suddenly it zoomed in.

He now knew exactly what he was looking at: The robot armada. The formation looked exactly like it had for the past month. Or almost exactly. There was something vaguely different about it. Something that lurked in the back of his mind.

The blank space! It wasn’t blank. And that wasn’t the worst part. It was filled in the worst possible way. There, in the midst of an already powerful fleet, was a scythe ship. Simkins gulped, and the vision was gone. He was back at his station, staring at the fleet maps. He checked the scanners again, adjusting them to specifically search for hidden ships, but nothing appeared.

What in the universe was going on? Was he seeing the future? Was he just day dreaming in his boredom? Was he hallucinating as the result of an odd sickness? None of the explanations seemed to be right, and no matter what he told himself, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were all in big trouble. He knew enough about his own talent to recognize that much as fact and not imagination.

“Simkins! The charts!” The captain shouted, sounding remarkably like Fleet Admiral Carson.

Quickly he penciled in the scythe ship, knowing that it would be better to be prepared and be wrong, than to brush it off and be right. He ran the chart over to the captain, trying to decide how to explain his newest addition.

“Scythe ship, sir!” He blurted.

“What?!”

“This gap in the formation, sir. It’s hiding, or will hide, or something, anyway, they have a scythe ship.”

“Make sense, Lieutenant. Are you telling me that the scanners picked up a new ship?”

“Well, no. But–”

“The scanners didn’t find it, and the ship detected no movement?”

“Right, sir, but– ”

“Do you take me for a moron?! I want facts, Lieutenant, not hunches.”

“But Sir–”

“Mandy-and-Paul! Get over here.”

“Aye, sir.” Rang the stereo voice.

“Take Simkins to the war room. He needs a time out. Watch him and don’t let him interfere with battle preparations.”

Simkins slouched and followed the double crewman to the door.

“Maybe you should “peace” Ricky. Don’t want astropod duty.” Baxter mocked.

Simkins ignored him. Something very odd was going on here, and he was the only one who knew about it. He, who the rest of the crew deemed useless and full of fairy tales. He trudged after Mandy-and-Paul, wondering if he really was sick. Or crazy.

At least the captain had summoned Mandy-and-Paul for the job of effectively imprisoning him. Most of the crew was slightly wary of the two-headed oddity. Some were even afraid. Whether it was his natural ability to sense intention, or because he, too, was something of an outcast, Simkins felt completely comfortable around the melded twins, though he never did ask how it had happened. At any rate, they usually gave great advice.

“Mandy-and-Paul, I just don’t know what the trouble is.” He complained after explaining the situation to the double crewman. “I know for sure it isn’t just a dream. There’s something real about it. Am I seeing the future or something?”

“You know that is impossible.” Rang the double voice. “The future is too changing, too fluid to catch glimpses of it, no matter the talent of the one.”

“Yeah, I know. But what else could it be? I mean, it isn’t my talent, I don’t think. All I can do with that is just “feel things”. And the first vision couldn’t have really happened anyway, right? Baxter couldn’t have been on a robot ship.”

“Baxter does have the ability to teleport.” Mandy-and-Paul remarked.

“Do you guys think he really was there?”

“We can hope not, as that would mean terrible things for our fleet. But it is not impossible.”

“If he was, that would mean he was a traitor. Maybe even one of the leaders behind this whole war. I don’t like him at all, but why would he do that? As if he isn’t progressing fast enough where he is.”

“Greed knows no limits, Richard. For such a person, even the rank of fleet admiral would never be enough.”

Simkins was about to reply when the loudspeaker blared out, “You two... or three... or whatever... All of you, get to the bridge ASAP!”

They ran down the corridors at full sprint. Mandy-and-Paul was faster, courtesy of three legs, and burst through the doors first. Simkins crashed through after, and ran right into the suddenly still back of the twins. Straightening his jacket, he looked around to see what had made them stop short.

There, on the view screen, was an enormous scythe ship, with its cannons pointed directly at the bridge.

"Oh, we are in such major trouble."