Retroactivity

If you've been checking my blog religiously, you should go back and check again; I just added a post dated for Dec 30th. Yay flexible time-space continuum.

While I'm here, I'd like to express my displeasure at the quality of my Netflix instant feed on my X-Box. It usually works fine, but now that I've got Windows 7 up, its all gone to shoot.

Eh, while Ive got this box here, I might as well...

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"Random Encounters"

Red Three checked the clock. Thirty seconds until the cruiser Discovery came out of the slipstream tunnel over Io. Then Red squadron's fighters would be ejected out into vacuum and possibly the biggest dogfight in Three's long career flying with the group. A quick final check showed everything to be in order, both with his own craft and all his squad-mates. Three closed his eyes and waited for the eventual hum that would signal sub-light speeds.

The hum never came. Instead a loud explosion awoke Red Three from his meditation. His instincts took over at that point. As soon as the slipstream outside shifted to solid matter, he jammed the accelerator and blasted out of the hangar bay. A quick glance showed that only a few of his companions did the same. Reds Seven, Eight and Eleven had made it out in one piece. The rest of the squadron never emerged from the growing fireball that was the Discovery.

Red Three flicked on the comm. “Red squad, form up on me. I'm taking point.” As the four fighters assumed a diamond formation, Three struggled to collect his thoughts. He knew random things like this were bound to happen, and he simply had to adapt. Hoping his voice sounded more confident than he felt, he continued: “There's no time to worry about what happened to Discovery. I'm sure the field techs will have plenty of answers once we've secured Io Station. We've got a mission to do, and you know we can do it. Three out.”

Under normal circumstances, the view through Three's cockpit would have seemed pretty, or even beautiful. Beneath them, the moon of Io was lit up with the cities of the colony buzzing about in the night, while in front, Jupiter had begun to rise over the horizon. Above lay only the endless stars twinkling gently.

But the real gem, in Three's eyes, hung dead center in his sights. Io Station, the moon's primary defense and communication nerve center. If they could disable that, the entire moon would be put effectively out of the war, or better yet, open for reclaiming by the Solar Federation.

The trick, as his commander had put it, was in disabling the station without destroying it. Simply destroying it would be a piece of cake. Line up a squadron, launch a volley of torpedoes, watch the station fall victim to gravity. But destroying the station would only let all of Io's already restless defenders off their metaphorical leashes. As it was, all the ground installations around the moon were remote-controlled by the orbiting station. If the stations communications relays could be frozen without going offline, they whole moon's defences would be locked in “sleep mode.”

That was the theory, anyway. Three never was much for the technical side of these operations. He just needed to know when and where to shoot. Going into this mess, he'd been confident that was going to simply be flying cover, while the wing leaders did all the technical stuff. Instead now he was left in charge of the only wing, trying to remember where exactly the service hatch was and which button would launch the drone needed to sabotage the array.

Before he could get too lost in thought, Three's radar began to ping as enemy combatants entered range. The once pristine vista had erupted with silver and green specks of Colonial Resistance fighters. It wasn't enough to blow up two thirds of Red Squad before the battle began, these Collies were out for the whole she-bang. Three decided he wouldn't give them the satisfaction.

“Red group: break left and pick up targets of opportunity!” As the fighters swerved left Three barely glanced a volley of laser fire they had narrowly sidestepped and breathed a sigh of relief inwardly. “Stay close and try to work your way towards the station.”

For the next few minutes Three saw the space above Io as a swirling, swarming mess of confusion. He had only split seconds to react each time a fighter zipped through his targeting scanner. He counted five kills confirmed before his screen began beeping for his attention. His targeting computer had located the entrance to the service passage.

“Red Group, form up on me. We're only gonna get one chance at this. Eleven, you and I will head straight into the tunnel. Seven and Eight are to wait outside the entrance and make sure no baddies come in after us. Got it?” A trio of affirmatives rang out through Three's headset. “Okay good, let's gun it!”

The formation turned directly for the station, and accelerated as fast as they could towards their goal. Three focused his shield strength toward his aft in preparation for any unwanted tailgaters, and set his orbital mine to its most narrow sensitivity. With any luck he could drop it in behind him and halt any unwanted company in the shaft.

As Three's fighter pulled away from the melee, he felt a sense of calm about him. Again his view was unobstructed by the chaos of battle, and he saw only the calm certainty of heavenly bodies hovering in place. Jupiter had now moved to take up almost the entire sky in front of him. Then, suddenly, it exploded.

“What the hell just happened!?” Three spat.

Eleven decided it wasn't a rhetorical question and answered with a helpful “I dunno, sir.”

Red Three watched in horror as, in the space where Jupiter once was, a cloud of vapor began congealing into a singularity: a black hole. Even now the pull of its super-dense gravity was tugging Io out of its orbit. Io station dramatically tumbled away from Three and disappeared into the black hole's maw. And Red squadron, or what was left of it, now found themselves locked in a dive they could not pull out of, headed straight for oblivion.

At times like this, when times looked their worst, great men have often uttered their most poignant, elequent, final words. “Fuuuuuuuuuuck,” Three groaned, as he stared at the black abyss growing before him. The speedometer on his screen began scrolling out of control as he was sucked into a single particle. There was a moment impressive physics to gawk at as, for a mere instant, the nose of his craft seemed to stretch from the view-screen on into infinity, and then.... blackness.

The black cockpit opened to reveal a pair of pink pigtails attached to a head smiling back in at the pilot. “Hi Gary! Have fun?”

“No”, grumbled Gary as he pulled himself out of the simulator. “I was, but then I got sucked into black hole. Did you have something to do with that, Zirc?”

Zirconia smiled at her friend. “A pilot's gotta learn think on their feet. You never know what could happen in the middle of a battle, right?”

“I know that the planet Jupiter is never gonna go supernova and turn into a quantum singularity. That's just retarded.”

“Well how do you know? It could. Maybe.”

“No, it couldn't.”

“See Gary, this is why you're stuck on as a bell boy on this stupid cruise. You've got such a narrow mind.”

“No, Zirconia.”Gary couldn't believe he had to say this. “Planets do not explode.”

“Krypton did.”

“Krypton was made of Kryptonite. That stuff's bad news no matter what's involved.”

“Well, maybe Jupiter has some Kryptonite too?”

“No, it doesn't. We've checked.”

“We who.”

“I dunno. Scientists. Besides, Kryptonite is fictional, as in, not real.”


“Sure, Gary, and you're whole 'Solar Federation' is as real as it gets.”

'How did this conversation get this far in the first place?' Gary wondered to himself. To Zirconia, he simply said “Just shut up.”

The two walked in silence together for about ten feet before Zirconia had a brilliant insight.

“Does the Hamburglar work for McDonalds?”

“What?”

“Cuz if he does then he'd get free food, so he shouldn't have to be stealing it all, right?”

“What in the Sky are you talking about?”

“C'mon Gary, I'm hungry. Let's grab a bite.”

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Yay bizarre fiction. I hope to continue this work in the future.