The Captain and the Queen

by D. A. Madigan

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

part 2 of 4

Ignoring the large selection of fetish outfits and accessories (for such did not fit the persona she intended to project today at all) Jessica finally pulled a tight pair of blue jeans and an equally tight brightly leopard skin tank top out of the closet and slipped them on. She turned, gestured, and the air shimmered in front of her, condensing into a seven foot tall, four foot wide oval of silvery reflective surface. She regarded herself dispassionately. Yes. The clothing was well within the limits of her ‘normal’ behavior, and accurately depicted someone who cared little for appearance and gave little thought to it. At the same time, the clothing was form fitting to a point where the astounding female physique inside it would arrest the attention any human with a functional pair of testes. She should have no difficulty finding some pretext for getting Jason to a point where he could be secured and brought back... home... again.

She noticed a fleck of green under one nail and raised her hand to her face pensively. A scale, from the Ool who had failed so inexplicably. She had had to exterminate it, of course, in front of the others, and she had had to do it slowly, and painfully, and with her own hands. To maintain terror and set an example. Nontheless, she actually did not blame the poor serpentman for its failure. She should have had Jason wrapped up like a Christmas package (she snorted, what a human thing to think!) long before. But at first she’d been unsure he was truly her long lost charge. Appearance meant little; she herself, in the Glory Days of ancient darkness, had had a considerably different seeming. But, although certain characteristics had been present that reminded her strongly of her ancient foe... Jason had certainly been filled to the brim with the same arrogance, humorlessness, and insatiable greed for learning she recalled so fondly from the old days... still, in so many other ways, he had seemed so bumbling, so foolish, so short sighted and lacking in wisdom... in short, so human.

And then things had become very very busy and she had let her attention wander to other areas. It was only the temporal intrusion of the legendary starship from the future that had refocused her attention on the human boy, and confirmed for her that he was, indeed, the Hierophant. Why else would the near-mythical warrior Kane have transcended time and space itself to rescue him...?

Well. Enough cogitation. The Ool had had a clear memory of Jason’s disappearance in its mind as she had slowly executed it. The shimmering effect that had surrounded Jason could only mean the Venture had arrived, was in orbit, and had yanked Jason off of Earth mere seconds before they would have effected his recapture. Most likely, history had already been slightly altered by that event, but the conservation principle was on her side. In the original timeline, the Hierophant had been re-captured and sacrificed on time, and the channelling of his immense mystic energies had reopened the long closed doorway and allowed the Elders to return once more to their kingdom the Earth. History tended to conserve itself, therefore, there would be a strong temporal inclination in her favor to get Jason back in time for the Serpent Star’s rising in the near future.

With an irritated sigh, Jessica flicked the scale off her finger. She did not let her calculations do more than brush over the certain knowledge that if Jason could not be recovered in time, then another powerful thaumaturge would have to be sacrificed in his place... and there was only one other such currently on planet Earth. If the Hierophant could not be sacrificed, then the Serpentmen of lost Lemuria would turn on their Queen. And that could never be allowed.

She raised her slim fingered hands and concentrated, a line of effort furrowing her smooth-skinned brow. Darkness pooled around her, rose up like a tide of impenetrable blackness outlining her statuesque profile, and swallowed her whole. Seconds later, the room was empty save for her sleeping husband, who rolled over uneasily as his slumber was disturbed by a sudden wave of unearthly cold, before subsiding with a murmur back to deeper sleep.

At the Mt. Palomar Observatory, Dr. Selmar Indrishna was tapping in coordinate changes to the programming of the main telescope. He did this deftly, his brown fingers flowing fluidly across the keyboard. Nothing about his demeanor betrayed the fact that he had no authorization whatsoever for what he was doing, and that once it was discovered, as it inevitably would be, he would immediately lose his job and all standing in his professional community. Such things were of no importance. Since prehistory, the Doctor’s lineage had been devoted servants of the Elders and allies of their chief servitors the Ool, and he had his orders. An artifact of advanced technology was somewhere in Earth orbit. It was his job to pinpoint its coordinates. If he succeeded, he would be rewarded richly, and better, he would be remembered with favor when the Elders walked the Earth once more. If he failed... best not to think of the consequences of failure.

He stared at the monitor screens, moving his gaze in increments from the high density color TV screen to the left to the CRT filled with rows of cascading numbers on the right. The big telescope was sweeping the quadrants of the visible sky while the computer ran star chart comparisons at speeds that the human intellect could barely comprehend. He had only a few moments before someone came running in to see why the telescope was no longer pointed at Mars...

There. A pinpoint of reflected light in the sky, repeating on several time lapse photo stills, where none should have been. Data from the radio telescope indicated that it radiated electromagnetic energy in the frequencies generally used by humanity. Indrishna moved his mouse pointer to hit the PRINT icon and half a second later, a laser printer the size of refrigerator spat out a single sheet of paper. Then he COPIED and PASTED the screenful of coordinates into a standard email window, tapped in quickly the address ‘serpentqueen@miskatonic.web’, and hit SEND. Now, even if he didn’t get out with the hard copy, the Ool should have the information they needed.

Below him on the observatory floor, Indrishna could hear a clatter of approaching footsteps, and urgent shouts. He shoved the hard copy into his pocket and ran for the nearest doorway marked EXIT, his other hand fingering the small leathery egglike object his contact had given him a few hours before, along with his orders.

In case of emergency...

The Serpent Queen stood within Jason’s house, very still, eyes closed, probing the area with a range of senses far beyond those of normal humanity. The tingling electron signature in the air confirmed that Jason had been removed from this area with energy-dislocation technology. The focused particle beam had pulled him through the wall on an 80 degree vector leading up off the surface. The starship would be... THERE, roughly... then... but what really would matter was whether the beam’s signature retained enough coherency for her to piggyback a shadowcast along. The cold vacuum of space would not touch her in darkform, of course, but if her human body were to materialize short of the starship, there was nothing in her repertoire that she could shapeshift into that would let her survive the exposure, even if shapeshifting could be done that quickly, which it couldn’t.

Abruptly, her left hand began to tingle. She raised it in front of her eyes and concentrated; in the center of her palm, a pulsating, sickly yellow crystal seemed to emerge partially from the flesh. A snakelike voice hissed in Lemurian. She listened for a few seconds, then said two words and let the crystal subside back into her metabolism.

So. They had the coordinates of the Venture. Now she could darkshift there easily. Better, she could take along several others. Even now, a small squadron of Ool was hurrying through the sewers to this location. Once they arrived, the group of them would follow Jason to the starship and recapture him. It should be simple. He would be distracted, bewildered... his mind awhirl. Easy prey for the Serpent Queen and her followers.

One more detail to take care of while she awaited the group of Ool soldiers. Mentally, she attuned her thoughts to a particular marker she had previously memorized. In her mind, an image of Dr. Indrishna quickly formed. He was hustling down a steel fire escape. Security guards were clattering along above and behind him. He had a hard copy in his pocket; the information contained there would probably be ignored, but there was a chance, if he was captured, that some human somewhere might start putting things together. Couldn’t have that...

She concentrated, mentally shaping a few inhuman ideograms in the darkness behind her closed eyes, and the piece of paper burst into flames. Indrishna screamed at the sudden burning agony as his trousers pocket flared up. He stumbled and fell from the fire escape, twisting in the air as he tumbled forty feet, hitting the tarmac below with a soggy thud.

As the final finishing touch, Jessica psychically flicked open the vapor-egg in the doctor’s pocket. A cloud of toxic green gas immediately enveloped him. If the fall hadn’t killed him, the poisonous mist would, all but instantly.

He had served well, she noted to herself mentally. She would remember to have his family rewarded appropriately when the Elders came to Earth. They could be high up on the sacrifice list. Such an honor would doubtless thrill them. While other humans were worked to death, or used as incubators and meals for Ool egglings, their essence would be consumed by the Elders themselves. It was the most exalting possible death any human could aspire to.

On the Venture, Jason stared around the bridge set — for that was how he still thought of it — with wonder and irritation. Wonder because, well, it was the Venture’s classic bridge set! He half expected to see Navigator Sulumein sitting at the navigation console and Technician Oahu in a miniskirt up at communications, but no, it was as empty as the rest of the ship. Irritation because, well, it was as empty as the rest of the ship, and worse, now the stupid computer wasn’t letting him do what he’d come up here in the first place to do. Upon arrival, he had stared at the depiction of the planet Earth on the main viewscreen for several seconds, until he had suddenly remembered what he was doing there.

“I really think the Captain would want me to have access to his logs,” Jason repeated again, trying to keep the aggravation from his tones.

“Access to Captain’s logs is reserved to Alpha clearance personnel,” the computer also repeated, in that same ‘I’m talking to a moron’ tone it often affected with Jason. “Give vocal authorization codes or accede to retina scan for personal identification.”

“God DAMN,” Jason muttered. “Okay, what CAN I have access to?”

The computer hummed for a second. “Executive Commander Spartan has prepared an interactive briefing tape on our current mission in case of this eventuality,” it then said. “You may display this on any monitor.”

“Why the hell didn’t you SAY so?” Jason roared. “Here...” He looked around. The temptation was just too much. He sat down in the Big Chair. “Display this briefing tape on the main screen.”

The image of Earth vanished, to be replaced by a picture of someone Jason didn’t recognize, wearing a blue uniform tabard somewhat similar to those he had seen on Space: the Final Frontier, but somehow... realer. The person had greying hair that was very short in the front and on the sides; as his head was turned when the image formed, Jason could see a long grey ponytail pulled back with some kind of metal ring hanging down past his shoulders. The person’s ears were distinctly pointed and rather longer than a TV Voltan’s. As the person turned to face outward, Jason saw a blunt, square face with an obviously once or twice broken nose, a nearly lipless slash of a mouth, and probing dark eyes. The image’s skin tone was a faint but distinct green.

“Spartan here,” the image said, in the clipped, dispassionate tones of a Voltan. “This briefing tape has been prepared in the event that the crew does not survive temporal transposition. This tape is interactive. I will begin narration; feel free to interrupt with any questions at any time.”

“You don’t look anything like Spartan,” Jason said dubiously.

There was a quick stuttering jump cut, as if the image on screen had suddenly been spliced. Then the face there replied dryly “Actually, I look exactly like Spartan. I simply bear little to no resemblance to the human actor named Leon Nevsky.”

Jason’s mind whirled. “Look, maybe this is off the subject, but you and the computer keep saying stuff like that. Now, how in the world can a fictional show like Space: The Final Frontier actually be real, and if it is real, then... why is it so different from the show?”

Once again, the image seemed to jump and stutter. Then ‘Spartan’ said “There are many hypotheses that could explain this phenomenon. Unfortunately, in our few travels to the 20th Century, we have not had the luxury to investigate how, indeed, so much of our 23rd century timeframe could have been reproduced in the late 20th century as an inane and generally quite offensively unintelligent dramatic entertainment program, or, indeed, why so many of the details are wrong. Applying the Voltan logical paradigm of Uren’s Scalpel, we would generally aggregate to the simplest hypothesis. Time is, of course, multidimensional and non-linear; sentient beings perceive it in its entirety but for the most part are unaware of this. It is quite likely that the human Gerry Brodenrury had several compelling but distorted glimpses of an actual future, which inspired him to create that vapid and foolish fiction known as Space: The Final Frontier.”

Jason pondered this. “So, you mean, there is a starship Venture, but it doesn’t necessarily look the way it does on TV. And the same for Kane, Spartan, Oahu, Sulumein, Lenin, Paddy, Skinny... oh, man, don’t tell me Jane Renane isn’t the galaxy’s biggest hottie in actual reality!”

This time the image on the viewscreen jumped and quivered for several seconds. Finally, almost reluctantly, it began to speak.

To be continued...