Star Travels Tales of Science Fiction Read online

  INTRODUCTION

  Welcome to the first Keyboard Books collection, an imprint of RainWood Press. In this collection Keyboard Books offers four short tales from future past and future present, all from the field of science fiction. Eventually you will find Keyboard Books that are dedicated to fantasy, horror, ghost stories, superheroes and more. These short stories speculate beyond the ordinary. Between these virtual pages you’ll find a time travelling P.I., a lemonade stand to quench your alien thirst, an extraterrestrial toy, and a future, if somewhat sinister, Christmas adventure. Four timeless stories star in this issue. At the end of this compendium you’ll find the author’s biography and a little more about Keyboard Books. Thank you for travelling the story telling universe with Keyboard.

  Press Enter,

  Rhea Rose

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  1.Jack Sprott: Continuum Cop

  2. The Lemonade Stand

  3.Shadow Hunter

  4.Chronos’ Christmas

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This collection is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Keyboard Books

  Star Travels

  Copyright © 2014 by Rhea Rose.

  Smashwords Editon

  Cover Image from Shutterstock, 2014. Images by

  artists at Stock.xchange.com and Deviantart.com, 2012.

  Cover designs by RainWood Press.

  ‘Jack Sprott: Continuum Cop’; first publication, 2014, in Star Travels, Keyboard Books, an imprint of RainWood Press, Vancouver, British Columbia.

  ‘The Lemonade Stand’; a version of this story appeared in TaleBones, Fall 2001, Fairwood Press, Seattle, Washington. USA.

  ‘Shadow Hunter’; A version of this story appeared in On Spec, volume 1, Edmonton, Alberta, 1989.

  ‘Chronos’ Christmas’; a version of this story appeared in Tesseracts, edited by Judith Merril, Press Porcepic,Toronto, Ontario, 1985, and Christmas Forever, edited by David Hartwell, Tor, New York, 1993.

  The Electronic edition of Star Travels published by RainWood Press December, 2014.

  Jack Sprot: Continuum Cop

  Did you kill my wife ass-hole? You? Or you?

  The first bell of the day rang.

  I scrutinized the passive faces of the Lincoln High students as they scurried in the hall; I looked for ones with wife-killer written on their faces.

  They all looked like little murderers to me.

  It was 2420. I was locked inside a one-way viewing time-tank. I held my cigarette and inhaled deeply. I was smoking again after some delinquent bastard had followed me back to my twenty-second century home and killed Marie.

  Before she’d died, Marie had purchased a surprise birthday present for me. She left it wrapped on the top shelf of the bedroom closet, where I’d found it the day after her funeral.

  A time-P.I.T.C.H.

  The acronym stood for Portable Incremental Temporary Chrono Hopper— the gadget became my last link to Marie. She’d given me the top of the line model for my P.I. work; it had programmable voices. With the time-pitch I could move freely into different time-zones without having to wait days or even weeks to book a time-tank.

  “Two minutes to maximum mobility, baby,” said Rhonda, the voice programmed into the pitch. “Remember to wear your time-fogs. I can’t save you every time you forget to put those glasses on.”

  After Marie’s death, I’d found Rhonda’s voice a nice distraction. Lately, though, she wouldn’t shut up, but she was right about the time-fogs. If I forgot to wear them during a time-transport then I slowed right down, unable to move—much.

  “Don’t look now, baby,” she said warningly, but someone’s entering your time-tank.”I freaked as I realized someone had entered the rear of the tank. I cursed myself, cursed my luck, and cursed the intruder as I stood mostly immobile, only able to smoke. I remained helpless while a hand slipped around to the left inside liner pocket of my black leather duster coat and stole my time-pitch.

  Rhonda disappeared and so did my chance of getting home.

  When the time-tank finally released me, I stepped out into the hall and noted the slick eyeballs of the security cameras observing me. A bantam-bot, about the size of a house cat, skittered up to me and squeaked, “Halt.”

  I lifted my Doc Martians and anticipated the delicious crunching sound the little bot would make when I crushed it, but the little robot scanned the ID on the sole of the hovering boot and scuttled away.

  Disguised as a teacher, my job brought me to Lincoln High, school for the underage criminal. Tucked up under the black leather sleeve of my duster, a syringe loaded with nanobots seething to create medical mayhem awaited their target, any target, but at the moment I didn’t care about any of that. I needed a coffee and a smoke, or I was going to lose it, and then I remembered that this century banned coffee.

  I wanted to bite something.

  The tank released me, and I eventually found my assigned classroom, the only one in the school. Slowly I slid the protective metal shutter back into the wall-pocket to peer through the one-way viewing door.

  While I stared out across the faces of time’s worst future criminals, (these guys hadn’t even been born yet in my time zone, not even their parents had been born yet), I thought about Marie’s words of encouragement on the day I’d told her about my desire to take on a second job and go into the field of private investigation time-travel. Being the wife of a cop is never easy, but she showered me with kisses, stroked my hair, hugged me until I couldn’t breathe, and then pulled me into bed. We’d dreamed about the extra cash I’d make as a P.I taking us to a hot, warm country to soak our bodies in rum, sand, and soft kisses.

  Marie was no dame, she was a real woman. A fresh breath of partnership in a polluted world of shallow women all of whom I’d had the unfortunate luck to find until I’d found her.

  I slid out a teeny tiny heat grenade and thought of her as I melted a hole in the classroom door.

  The ‘modification’ of these bad guys in their future unraveled their lives in their pasts. If I rubbed them out at some point along their future time continuum after they’d already committed their heinous deed then eventually the perp got a disease in his or her past, something like; cancer, ALS, heart attack, or some other terrible fate took them out before they could ever commit the future bad deed—it was just like the perp never existed. This time dissolution resulted in some minor cause and affect adjustments in the time-stream, but nothing anyone ever noticed, or cared much about. We, in the business, called it the anti-karma effect, “What doesn’t go around, doesn’t come around.”

  Offing my wife’s murderer anywhere along this future timeline would do the trick. The killer would die in his past before he could meet and kill Marie in his future. My job required me to find the most discreet time and place on the spectrum of this time- continuum to make that happen.

  A rough headcount revealed thirty-two students to shake up with my kick-ass method of demanding respect. Someone in this very group of adolescents had taken the life of my wife.

  I felt like offing them all.

  To their credit the twenty-fifth century school district equipped me with a lock an’ load brain boggle which allowed me to deal with any advantages the bad kids from the future might possess. The long strands of blue and purple nano-hair plugs of the boggle rooted directly into my frontal lobes. Tugging a strand of that hair enabled me to run an update on the drugs and weapons I
might encounter in this classroom.

  “Key-rised,” I said under my breath as the update flashed before my eyes. I wished I had some of those drugs for myself, even one caffeine pill and I’d feel a whole lot better about things. My hand shook. I’d pre-wired my coat and underclothing with a flexible skin grid to counter an electrical attack, but that might not be enough.

  I did a personal weapons check: gun, knives, shirikan blades, pyro-spray, lighters, chopsticks, smoke bomb and one mini grenade, all tucked sweetly and neatly into the pockets of the lining in my coat. Marie used to take care of my weapons for me, polishing my grenades, sharpening my shirikan.

  My practical gal.

  I stuck my head through the hole and grinned. I greeted them with, “Sit down. Shut up.” I kicked out the remains of the door. “Boys and girls, today there’s no door.” A girl in the back row fainted.

  “Ah, I see I got somebody’s attention. Wake her up!”

  Three students jumped to the task.

  “Do it gently!” I ordered. I held up the huge semi-automatic syringe. “Any of you future-fucks not know what this is?”

  Silence.

  “Black death, cholera, ebola and probably something worse all wrapped up in a nifty little package. I patted the dart and slipped it expertly back up my sleeve. I scanned the class, looking for the leader of the obstreperous pack of students. I walked down the aisle leaving a wake of turned heads.

  Behind me I heard someone—

  “Why don’t you take your big dart dispenser and shove it up your skinny ass,” an unidentifiable kid suggested.

  “History lesson,” another voice shouted and the next thing I knew the class jumped on top of the desks, hollering like old time TV actors on the warpath. The dart slid free of my sleeve, and I shot a little of its radioactive yellow up into the ceiling. “Don’t let a single drop hit you.”

  Every kid in the place fell to the floor.

  Suddenly the class crawled like lizards toward me. I pulled out my mini germ grenade. “Fire in the hole,” I said calmly, pulling the pin and rolling the bomb gently across the floor. “I wonder what super germs are in it? Have you been vaccinated for SARS? I doubt it – that was a killing disease centuries ago.” I skipped lightly over a crawling young man who grabbed the grenade and heaved it out an open window; the ensuing explosion excited a puff of smoke.

  “I hope those germs aren’t airborne,” I smiled.

  “Mr. Pimple,” a female voice called to me, a tall blond. Her eyes reminded me of Marie’s. This girl might be beautiful if she hadn’t disfigured her face with a death mask tattoo and sewn the corner of her lips together with leather stitches that hung loose at the corners of her mouth, like she hadn’t quite finished her spaghetti.

  I reloaded my syringe-slinger, which looked a lot like a caulking gun, with nasty precancerous cells. I swung it slowly around the classroom, resting my sights on the girl.

  “Call me, Veronica,” she said in a sexy way.

  I scanned her through my brain boggle. I quickly lowered my weapon when the boggle warned me of a genetic relationship to my wife. A gush of despair washed over me–a tear leaked from a corner of one eye. I stopped in my tracks, too flooded with emotion to think. How was it possible that this girl was related to Marie? I watched lamely as Veronica made her next move.

  She pulled out a wooden straw, placed it between her blackened death- lips and blew a small dart at me that hit the sleeve of my coat disrupting the coat’s electromagnetic field. I flared for an instant like the filament in an over-powered light bulb and then my shield died.

  I knew it, and so did everyone in the classroom.

  The shock to my system brought me back to my sorry senses. Three giant steps separated me from the room’s red panic button. I sprang up onto a desk, dove to the floor rolling as far as I could to the other side of the room, narrowly escaping the sting of a couple of laser-taser light-pins that pricked the kid to my left. The student flipped like a landed fish.

  “You hit Jason, you ass-hair,” Veronica said to someone over her shoulder.

  I punched the panic button. I smashed it with my fist and the plastic cover splintered into a shower of red. A steel door slowly slid out of the walls and windows.

  Three of the students made for the exit with me. They tumbled out into the hall at the same time, narrowly escaping the heavy, closing door which clanged as it shut in the students behind them, the trapped students pounded on the steel door, wanting out. I heard their muffled cries of outrage which made me glad for the door.

  “They’re stuck until you release them,” Veronica assured me.

  She’d made it out.

  Veronica tried to stand, but the spiky heel on one of her shoes snapped away. She stumbled but caught her footing. A bantom-bot scuttled up to her. The limping Veronica scooped up the bot and dropped it into the large purse strung across her shoulders. The bantam-bot tried to climb out of the bag, but Veronica caught it and snapped off one of its legs.

  “Where’s the staff in this school? The dossier said a staff existed at this school,” I said.

  “Funny,” Veronica remarked.

  “What’s funny,” I asked.

  “You asked the same thing the last trip you timed-in here.” She sneered at me.

  I wanted to hit something. I’d been here before. That meant I wasn’t successful the first time.

  “There’s the Silibot,” said the other two boys sitting cross-legged on the floor, their backs against the walls. They snickered and repeated the word ‘staff’ over and over until I let the glistening tip of the dart of peek out from under my sleeve. I didn’t want these kids to see how lost I felt.

  Then I saw the Silibot, roller-blading down the empty hall toward me. The lovely and shapely synthetic robot teacher came to a spiral stop in front of me. I felt her scan right down to my marrow.

  Breathe, Jack, Breathe.

  I walked a tight circle around her, my dart dispenser pointed in her direction, she definitely looked human—enough.

  She pushed my dart down to the floor and rolled over it crushing it into tiny glittering dust and sulfurous yellow goop. She took my free hand into her hers. I looked into her quartz eyes, and I realized she provided a very sophisticated techno-matrix of devices and was quite possibly my only chance at finding my way out of the future and back to my home.

  “My time-pitch? I want it back! One of your reprobates stole it.” I let go of her hand

  “Did you ask the bantam-bots where it might be? My capacitor can locate one of those little rascal bots for you.” She put her hands on her voluptuous robo hips, closed her eyes and her corporeal façade appeared to disappear, waver, and then, just as quickly returned. Her blue quartz eyes grew wide with a mixture of emotions, fear and awe.

  “Your time-pitch--it’s in the basement,” she said, in a frightened whispery voice, “Something’s strained your time-pitch. Something unauthorized has come through!” Silibot said, sounding panicked and excited at the same time.

  “Let’s find the pitch,” I said

  My heart broke at the sight of the pitch. I lifted each half of the orb that was once the time-pitch and gently pushed the two palm-sized metallic case parts together, but a split along the seamed edges kept the pieces from forming a complete seal. I pushed as hard as I could and held them there.

  “Jack, honey-babe,” I thought I’d never see you again! You saved me. I love you.”

  Rhonda’s voice from the pitch!

  I quickly let the orb once again fall in two.

  The weakened orb, now rendered dangerous, could let anything fall through into this chrono-zone, or fall out without anyone knowing where they came from or where they’d gone.

  Silibot whirred over to me, her large, crystal blue eyes fixated on the luminescent globe parts in my palm.

  The click clack of a single stiletto made us turn. The lithe form of Veronica limped towards us. My finger hooked gently round another germ bomb in my pocket.

&
nbsp; “Wait. There’s someone else. Who’s that?” Silibot pointed away from Veronica to someone at the end of the hall.

  “Eh?” I spun around in the opposite direction in time to see a man slip quietly down the hall.

  I took off after him.

  The last thing I remembered was seeing a pair of black boots, exactly like mine, the coolest Doc Martians I’d ever seen. And then he threw a germ bomb at me.

  When next I opened my eyes, I found myself sitting on a chair behind a desk in front of the time suspended students I’d left locked in the classroom. My long black duster coat lay over me; the level of pain pulsing in my skull made me feel like vomiting.

  “I feel so shitty,” I said. “I think he hit me with a migraine shell.”

  “You were dying, but I inoculated you,” Silibot said from across the class. “I had to save you in order to save him,” she said pointing to the me standing at the back of the room.

  Beside her stood another man holding some type of laser weapon. I rubbed my eyes,—Silibot with her arms around another me!

  “What the eff—“

  Silibot did a quick heel-toe slalom between the students’ desks roller blading towards the real me. She stopped at my desk, behind her the students sat still, a frozen forest of bodies in various positions of distress.

  “I’ve frozen them in time,” she said, indicating the students. “He,” she turned and pointed to the me at the back of the room, “is a nastier version of you, from another time-line, and I love him,” Silibot said.

  “Great. I came here to kick the students’ asses,” I said, nodding to the suspended students. “Now I get to kick my own ass.”

  I leaned in close to the robot, using her as shield against the possible laser fire of the other me, who knew what kind of arsenal he’d brought with him. When I next peered over her shoulder, I noticed that my competition had left the room and took the laser with him.