Keeper and the PLANTERS part 7

Copyright (c) 2020 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

Keeper and the

 PLANTERS

Part 7

By R. Peterson

It took twice as much power to start shuttle 419 because of the cold. The bay doors on the Centurion were iced and had to be thawed with lasers. Teuth navigated the massive starship back toward a far less frigid orbit as soon as First Officer Jeff Bland was a safe distance away.

Jeff slowly shook his head when Clarence Wortha one of the most brilliant students interning aboard the rare species acquisitions vessel staggered from the cargo area into the shuttle’s cockpit. “What the Hell Pumpkin Head! Don’t you know it’s a crime to stowaway aboard a Mautese 17 chartered vessel?”

Clarence used his vine like arms and hands to insert a recorded audio disk into the shuttle’s control panel and adjusted the volume. The sound of Led Zepplin playing the opening rifts to Stairway to Heaven floated  through the cockpit. Jeff smiled, but his eyes still held a tint of malice. “Where did you get that?”

            “From your quarters!” Pumpkin Head held up at least a dozen disks. “I figured if we were going to die, we might as well have a soundtrack to embellish all our discomforts!”

            “We are not going to die!” Bland started to turn the shuttle around and then realized the Centurion had already gone.

Pumpkin Head laughed when he saw the look on Jeff’s face. “Elvis has left the building,” he snickered.

Bland stared once again and then shook his head. “Alright,” he said. “But it’s my party and we do everything I say … and I get to pick the next song!”

            “It may be your party … but I’ll cry if I want to!” Clarence was looking at a disk with a tiny hologram showing a dancing Lesley Gore as shuttle 419 sped toward the surface of Geelo one of the coldest Ice Worlds in the entire Inversijas system.

-------2-------

            “Do you think our captive Earthling will make it back?” Keeper asked Teuth as the Centurion reached the edges of space. The Ice World, Geelo, loomed far below them but ice crystals were still forming everywhere on the ship’s control level. “I lied to him … I lied to my friend,” Teuth moaned. “I knew he would try to rescue Leika from the surface. He won’t have three minutes. He will be lucky to have one. I wanted to give him hope … even if it was false. I have more than twenty-six mastery degrees from universities all over the universe but he has taught me more than any of them.” Strange almost crusty tears formed in the land-adapted cephalopod’s eyes. “I only wanted to give him hope.”

Teuth’s tentacles fluttered in the light array that controlled the ship’s functions. Keeper, the Centurion’s captain, moved close to his navigator, a most unusual gesture from a member of the Druellian race, a kind of living-hologram with no physical body.

            “You gave him everything you had,” Keeper said touching Teuth’s bulbous head. “No friend could ask for more.”

-------3-------

            The Centurion shuttle 419 was hurtling toward the surface of Geelo at the steepest angle possible. First Officer Jeff Bland, thought Clarence, the cadet everyone called Pumpkin Head, looked like a bobble figure from his past life on Earth as the shuttle rolled and lurched. He laughed. “Relax kid. Haven’t you ever ridden a roller coaster?”

Clarence was scanning all the ship’s function readings trying to discover why there was such tremendous turbulence in the small craft. He glared as he found the answer. “The reverse thrusters are engaged fully and we using all of the ship’s forward propulsion energy against them,” he yelled. “How could you not notice this?”

            “I call it driving with the brakes on,” Bland told him. “It used to generate a lot of heat in my old Ford Mustang back on Earth. I just hope it’s enough to get us to the surface!”

            “If by some luck we do reach the surface, how do you expect to open the pod the Porosities female is locked inside? We’ll have less than a minute on the surface and Navigator Teuth said the encapsulated cell is sealed by an unknown technology!

            “Probably made of a dark-matter derivative of Datonight.” Bland scowled. “Something that strong must be extremely brittle at these temperatures.”

            “Even if you’re right it would still take a huge hammer to crack it!” Pumpkin Head suddenly gasped.

            “You’re right kid,” Bland told him. “That’s why we’re going to crash into it at max speed. If it doesn’t break … we haven’t lost anything!”

            “That’s your plan? Crash this shuttle into the pod and hope it breaks? What then? What if the pod does somehow break apart … and by some miracle we all survive … what happens then?”

            “I haven’t thought that far ahead,” Bland told him. “I can only think of one ingenious thing at a time.”

Pumpkin Head entwined his vine-like arms together and began to say a prayer directed to the Gods from his home planet. Bland looked at him and snickered as he placed a new music disk into the ship’s audio system. The opening riffs to AC DC’s Highway to Hell blasted through the shuttle’s cabin at maximum volume. “Now aren’t you glad you came with me?”

-------4-------

            “We picked the wrong place to re-orbit!” Keeper pointed to the image of the massive Cruanium Battle Carrier speeding toward them on the overhead hologram.

            “There is no way we could have known,” Teuth said. All eight of his tentacles were in the light arrays trying to divert as much of the ship’s power possible to the shields. “The Gorwanian flagship and its support fighters were hidden inside one of Inversijas’ strange shadows. None of our detection systems can penetrate this abnormal kind of dark energy!”

            Keeper shrugged his shoulders and smiled strangely. “It looks like our first officer and Pumpkin Head aren’t going to be the only ones moving on to the next world!”

            “Clarence?” Teuth looked at the captain. “He’s with Jeff?”

            “He missed a class in Dark Matter Engineering,” Keeper said. “I searched for him and found a hologram of him sneaking aboard shuttle 419 just before it left the Centurion.”

            “Why would he want to go on a suicide mission?” Teuth was stunned.

            The Centurion was suddenly rocked by an enormous blast. Warning devices began to go off all over the starship.

            “I have no idea,” Keeper said. “But he does like Bland’s music!”

-------5-------

            First Officer Jeff Bland and Pumpkin Head were both fighting over the audio disks as the surface of Geelo roared toward them at a fantastic speed. “If this is going to be our last song, I get to pick it!” Bland was using all of his muscles but Clarence’s vines were strong.

            “You had your Highway to Hell … this is my turn!” Pumpkin Head wrenched the disk away from the shuttle’s commander and shoved it into the audio device. The Archies’ – “Sugar, Sugar” began to sweeten the cockpit.

            Bland’s eyes rolled in two directions and he began to pull hair from his head. “Do you know how many times I’ve listened to that song?”

            “I have no idea,” Clarence said. “But it does have a catchy tune.”

            “At least a million times,” Bland yelled. “It was on the radio every time I turned it on!”

            “What’s a radio?”

            “It doesn’t matter,” Bland told him. “It’s just something that I don’t want to remember … at this time.”

            “I understand.” Clarence reached for the eject-button … but Bland stopped him.

Jeff’s eyes took on a far-away look and after a few moments he spoke. “The first time I saw Janna Stone, this song was playing on the juke box inside Spare-A-Dime. That’s a little eating place on Earth. It was spring, and she had on an Easter dress that flowed around her like the halo that surrounds an angel!”

            “I’ve watched holograms of the women who live on the Paholainen mirror worlds,” Clarence said. “They are beautiful.”

            “I’ve been to the Galaxy of Heaven,” Jeff said. “Janna Stone was more breathtakingly beautiful than any of them!”

            “I wish I could have known her,” Clarence said.

The icy surface of Geelo now filled the entire overhead hologram. “If you hadn’t come with me,” Jeff said. “You might have taken your next vacation as a time portal to Earth in the year 1959. You would have been as captured as I was. I doubt you could have been forced to return.”

            “She was that fine?”

The Centurion was hurtling at unbelievable speed toward a small object on the icy surface. “She was!”

Jeff and Clarence looked at each other and smiled just before a horrendous crash and explosion … that no humanoid in the universe could possibly survive. And then there was darkness … a strange and somehow magnificent darkness.

-------6-------

            Teuth tried every navigation trick he’d learned since he was a cadet at an engineering flight school on Mautese 17, still the Gorwanian’s loomed closer. “We have about ten minutes before they’re in range with their big guns,” Teuth said.

            “Those weren’t their big guns?” Keeper was astonished.

            “According to the data readouts we were struck with a dark matter cannon at the power of seven,’ Teuth said. “That Cruanium Battle Carrier carries nine dark matter cluster cannons on its forward deck alone. Each one exceeds or maintains a power of forty-nine!”

            “I’m glad we didn’t get hit with one of those,” Keeper said. “We’d be in real trouble!”

The overhead hologram switched to an emergency channel.  Greina, the Plant Girl’s, rose-blossom face looked like a dried flower bud being attacked by ants. “We can’t hold her,” she yelled. “We can’t keep the Saggoplatapus captive. The creature has grown so large it’s ready to break the ceiling out of the Biosphere!”

            “Not now!” Keeper told the hysterical cadet doing Leika’s job. “I’m on my lunch break!”

Teuth looked at the captain with surprise as the hologram switched back to the pursuers. “Without my First Officer on board, I’m forced to do both of our jobs,” Keeper explained, “my calm and collected reasoning … and his malicious-wit and sarcasm.”

            “The Gorwat are within striking range,” Teuth declared.

The hologram suddenly changed. Gorwan’s lizard-face loomed like a planet. “You killed my Leika,” he moaned. “You killed my beloved Leika!”

            “What’s he talking about?” Keeper asked.

            “Gorwan is right,” Teuth said. “Our readings detect no life forms alive anywhere on the surface of Geelo.”

            “You drove a shuttle filled with explosives into her sleeping chamber on purpose!” Gorwan’s eyes bulged from his head with murderous intent. “I could destroy you with one blast but I want my revenge. I’m pulling your entire ship into my docking bay. There, and in other special rooms that I’ve provided, each member of your murderous crew will be endlessly tortured … until I decide that it is time for them to perish.”

            “That sounds like a pretty wild party,” Keeper told Gorwan.

Teuth stared at him. “It’s close to what Jeff would have said to his rival,” Keeper explained.

-------7-------

            On the surface of Geelo, a harsh wind blew frozen ice crystals around the wreckage. Pieces of charred metal most no bigger than an Earth dime were all that remained of some of Mateuse 17s most advanced technology. A howl, like a thousand wolves suddenly released from their cages, swept across the snow-covered waste-land as a shadow made of Dark Energy slowly left the wreckage site. There was no life on this planet and it was as if there never had been. Night was coming … as this part of the planet rotated away from the energy produced by the giant star Inversijas. The daytime temperature of -200 below zero would soon be replaced by absolute zero or -460 degrees Fahrenheit. No life forms without tremendous and very advanced shielding could exist for more than a few seconds. There was no advanced technology nor would there ever be again … only cold and death.

On an icy outcropping, more than seven miles from the wreckage-site, a round metal disk reflected the last rays of Inversijas’ light. Engraved on the disk, in the language of a very distant planet called Earth, were these words “J. FRANK WILSON and the Cavaliers - Last Kiss". A sudden gust of wind buried the disk with snow … and it was no more.

-------8-------

The Centurion was almost inside the massive Cruanium Battle Carrier when Greina, the Plant Girls face appeared on the hologram. She was furious! “The Saggoplatapus is breaking away the dome that covers Biosphere 3,” She screamed.

“Let the damn thing go,” Keeper told her. “Get the hell out of there … and let the damn thing go!”

Moments later the entire ship trembled. The massive biosphere that protruded from the front of the ship was closer to the Battle Carrier than any other part of the science vessel. Keeper and his crew watched as the clear dome covering Biosphere 3 exploded sending more than one-hundred twenty-five thousand square-miles of sea-water into the tractor beam pulling them into the battle cruiser. The ocean turned to ice instantly, and a moon-sized Saggoplatapus flew into the cargo bay of Gorwan’s flag ship. Massive explosions erupted repeatedly from the enemy vessel.

Minutes later, Gorwan’s lizard face appeared as a wavy-hologram just before the Centurion sped away. Behind him hundreds of Gorwanian soldiers could be seen fighting a losing battle with a monster from hell. The creature had grown exponentially in the amphibian friendly atmosphere and was literally tearing the inside of the massive battle cruiser apart.   “I’ll get you for this!” Gorwan promised. “I’ll have my revenge … if it’s the last thing I ever do!”

-------9-------

Weeks later Keeper and Teuth were together in the control room. The Ice Worlds seemed far away. Biosphere 3 had been repaired and they were manufacturing water from a hydrogen and oxygen rich gas-cloud. The ship’s navigator was still grieving … Keeper, as captain, was not given that luxury. “The Planters returned the Saggoplatapus to us for a reason,” Keeper said. “Perhaps they read and somehow alter the future.”

Teuth was quiet for a moment before he answered. “Does it really matter?” he asked. “Do the Planters really matter?”

            “I think all things matter,” Keeper told him. “Jeff and Leika both mattered to me. Their death was a most terrible tragedy. But there is a balance in all things … in good … and in bad. The truth and dreams are the only things that truly last forever. Perhaps we shall meet again. No odds are too great … in infinity. There never was a time when we were not here … there never will be a time when we do not exist. The mysteries of the universe are as infinite as the stars. Only love lasts forever … riding on the entwined paths of … light and darkness.”

THE END.

(Thank you everyone who enjoyed reading these space adventure stories … it is for you that I write)

Post script:

More than seven months later, just as the crew of the Centurion was preparing to enter a time warp to return to their own place in infinity, Teuth detected a beam of dark energy coming from the far side of the universe, possibly from the Planters, and moving toward them at an impossible velocity. The tiny burst of focused power hurtled through entire galaxies in a matter of seconds. There was no chance for avoidance or any time to activate any of the vessel’s shields. The entire star ship trembled once and then seemed to become a liquid. Darkness moved across the face of the waters … and then vanished in a burst of light.  

First Officer Jeff Bland, Clarence, the cadet everyone called Pumpkin Head and the Porosities female “Leika” appeared on the control level floor. They were real and not holograms. Bland was holding Leika who appeared to be waking from a long sleep. A wide-eyed Clarence gazed about the room. “Let go of me!” Leika slapped Bland hard across the face and stung him with her quills as she wiggled out of his arms. “Sleeping!” she said. “You always make your move when I’m sleeping!”

Jeff Bland looked at Keeper and grinned. “Wow!” he said. “What a ride!”