Ladies Who Launch

URCHINS, BE ADVISED: RIBALD CONTENT AHEAD

When I tele-transported into the master bedroom of my orbiting satellite home after a lengthy absence, it wasn’t a celebratory musical fanfare that greeted my return, but rather the irritatingly harsh howl of the space vessel’s emergency claxon telling me the place was about to explode. 

22,300 miles above New Babbage, there was quite plainly something very, very wrong with the spacecraft as pipes and various other ship-bits were vibrating with such magnitude that books and other unsecured items were being shaken off the shelves. Hastily making my way to the control deck, I beheld the evening’s next surprise: a trio of young ladies — all quite unknown to me — frantically trying to recalibrate the satellite’s balky power systems. Before they could notice me, I ducked out of sight to observe and eavesdrop… and to determine if the oddly dressed trio were friends or foes. Their backs to me, I could see one girl with short-cropped auburn hair wearing a wickedly short skirt standing next to another girl with long black hair and an even shorter skirt. The petite Asian on the right with the glasses and the plait was dressed normally enough… at least she would have been if she had been wearing women’s clothes instead of a gentlemen’s frock coat and trousers. 

Listening in on their animated deliberations, the one with the long, black hair seemed to be especially panicked. “… antimatter annihilation along a recursive hyperdimensional fracture. Literally an explosion that feeds itself more explode-y stuff to explode!”

The girl with the glasses was thoughtfully studying the readouts on the main control console. “These gauges seem to indicate regulator mechanisms throughout the entire ship are in overload.”

“How can you tell?” asked the long-haired brunette as she worked the controls in a frenzied manner and checked the meters to see if anything she did made any sort of difference. “This system is mad!”

“Can’t you turn off that damn siren??” shouted the one with the short hair. “I can’t concentrate!” 

The Asian girl with the glasses reached beneath the main console and in a bold, forthright manner ripped out several wires in an apparent attempt to silence the warning claxon. It didn’t work. “I was sure it had to be one of them,” she said looking at the handful of wires with an air of disappointment. “I figured it must be cross connected to the output meters, but I can’t quite see where.” 

“This whole console is wired up crazy!” said the brunette in the “Howdy, boys!” skirt. She was clearly frustrated. “Nothing is where it ought to be. Who built this thing, M.C. Escher?”

The one with the short, auburn hair was underneath the console fiddling with the wiring. She stood up and pointed at a series of switches to her right. “I’m pretty sure these initiate an emergency jettison sequence.” She sounded confident, albeit stressed. “All else fails, we should be able to launch the generator into deep space.”

“Crap!” exclaimed the brunette. “If I’m reading this right, there’s free meson leakage in all of the secondary SEM shunts. The system is trying to correct itself, but the secondaries weren’t built to handle that kind of load. The feedback is causing un-phased antiquarks to spill into the reactor chamber. For all I know, it might already be chaining. Maybe, maybe not, I just can’t tell from these farkakt instruments!”

By that time, China girl was smacking the sides of monitors in an effort to, I don’t know, make them say something different? She picked up a device I didn’t recognize. I assumed it was something she’d brought with her. “No good news from the vario-scanner. Instability increasing, distortion field increasing… we could be only minutes away from some serious atmospheric events down on Earth… like a continent-sized hurricane with massive amounts of lightning just before the whole hemisphere catches fire!” 

“No choice then,” said the auburn-haired cutie. “We try a brute force shutdown of the primary reactor. Overload the breakers till they actually break, pull everything we can out of the backup power links to mitigate the spillage and re-stabilize the system. If that doesn’t work, we shoot the whole damn thing into space and hope for the best. Ready? Initiate overload on my mark, in 3, 2…”

Suddenly, the claxon went quiet. The shaking stopped. The levels on the meters fell to normal. The displays stopped flashing up fearsome looking warnings in that maddening way they sometimes do. 

Auburn looked confused. “What just happened?”

“I just happened,” I said as I stepped out into the open.

“Good lord!” exclaimed the brunette. “It’s Space Elvis!”

Assuming she was reacting to my sparkly, somewhat outlandish interplanetary party clothes (but not quite knowing what she meant) I pressed on. “This regulator over here needs to be realigned periodically. It’s just throwing a few levers, but if you don’t do it every once in a while, this place has a way of letting you know it’s feeling neglected. You’re not who I was expecting to find here. Did that rotten kid sublet my habisphere?”

Auburn looked more annoyed than surprised at my silver-clad presence. “What rotten kid? Who are you?”

“I’m Declan Evermore,” I said with a bit of a bow and a slight swish of my glittery cape. “This is my satellite you’re on without my permission. Is my lodger anywhere about?”

The China doll spoke up. “We scanned the satellite. Other than a few harmless microbial life forms, the place was completely vacant when we arrived. Where did you come from?”

“Did I mention this is my place? Who are you three? How did you get in here?”

“This is Dr. Qian,” said auburn gesturing toward the young lady cross-dresser with the glasses, “and this is Lady Gwendolyn. I’m just plain old Audrey.”

I took a good look at “plain old” Audrey. “Wrong on two counts, I think,” said me. I sometimes wish I could stop being so damn charming. “And the ‘How did you get in here?’ thing I asked about?”

“We’re just awfully damn clever,” said Lady Gwendolyn. “Of course it helps to have a dockable space craft.”

“A spacecraft? Where on Earth did you get a spacecraft?”

“Asks the man with a space station in orbit above late Victorian Europe,” her ladyship retorted.

“*Late* Victorian? I suppose you’re probably right about that. I mean, how much more time can that old cow have left? Especially the way she eats!” The realization struck like a hammer blow from a blacksmith. “OH JESUS BLOODY CHRIST!! TELL ME YOU’RE NOT MORE FUCKING TIME TRAVELLERS!!”

“Wow!” said Lady Gwendolyn, managing to look both shocked and shaming. “Coarse! Coarseness! Of an undiluted and rude variety, I might add! And I thought the gentlemen in this era were supposed to be so refined. I hope you know your filthy language and aggressive atavism are both offensive and ahistorical. You shouldn’t be this big of an asshole.”

I was much too put out to bother apologizing for my language. “Time travellers! Experts at making people’s tomorrow’s crappier than their yesterdays… and then messing up their yesterdays as well! I don’t even care what you were doing here, you’re leaving! Now!” 

“I was detecting enormous power spikes from my laboratory below in New Babbage,” said the doctor. “Like massive solar flares, but with far too much concentrated energy, plus the EM spectrum signature was all wrong. I summoned my colleagues to help me look into the problem… a very serious problem you apparently created through your own negligence!”

“Talk about nerve!” I was feeling rather resentful considering I had just saved the western hemisphere from certain doom. “I live here… occasionally. I certainly don’t need a bunch of female day-trippers poking their powdered noses into my dresser drawers and blaming me for things!”

“Where did this satellite even come from?” asked Audrey. “It all looks very period-appropriate, but, obviously, the technology behind this thing is from somewhere else entirely. One of your alien friends, perhaps? Or did humans build it with found alien technology? Care to tell us how a spaceship with a poorly designed, extremely high-maintenance antiquark reactor came to be parked in geosynchronous orbit above New Babbage?”

“What probing, personal questions from someone I’ve only just met,” I said. I was blowing smoke, naturally. It’s not as if I could have elaborated on the origins of the habisphere even if I had cared to. To this day, I have no idea who actually built it. I won the thing in a card game. 

“Once again,” I said in an authoritative manner, “I would remind you that you are guests here! Actually, you’re not guests, you’re trespassers! I’m within my rights to toss all of you out of here and into open space! It’s an environment I find quite comfortable, but I imagine it might leave the three of you a bit breathless.”

“Good lord! Even more rudeness,” said Lady Gwendolyn. “Let’s drop him off in 13th century Mongolia… let Genghis Khan kick his ass for a while.” My initial jolt of rage having subsided, it became incredibly obvious to me that her ladyship was shamelessly flirting with me. Her patronizing tone and vicious threats weren’t fooling me: The sight of me in my extremely close-fitting, otherworldly togs had no doubt inflamed the poor girl’s passions. An experience shared by her two friends, I imagine, but short-skirt seemed especially keen — responding, perhaps, to my nearly-open shirt and strategically exposed chest hair. Or maybe it was the cape. It’s a dreadful burden that men and women find me so powerfully attractive. 

“Your lodger,” said Dr. Qian disregarding her companion’s violent suggestion, “the ‘rotten kid’? Would that be Arconus Arkright? You haven’t spoken to him lately, have you? Was he supposed to be watching the reactor?”

“I haven’t been back here in quite a while,” I confessed. “I have no idea where Arkright is. Maybe he’s out shopping.”

“I doubt that,” said Audrey. “We haven’t been able to locate him for quite some time. And when the Temporal League can’t locate someone, they’re what you’d call ‘extremely missing.'”

“Maybe it’s your fault,” I offered. “You time travelers love to interfere with history… maybe you accidentally erased him. Or maybe he’s just hiding from you. He can transport himself over interstellar distances. Makes him one of the all time great hide-and-go-seek players. Why are you even looking for him?” 

“Not really your concern,” said “plain old” Audrey.

“I’m concerned about all of my brothers and sisters who bear the powers of the Esselian Sanctions. Our extraordinary abilities tend to set us apart from others. It’s a great responsibility… like being able to travel through time.” It was time to change the subject; I can only not talk about me for so long. “I’m starting to get hungry. What shall we have for dinner?”

Dr. Qian looked doubtful. “Weren’t you ready to throw us out into space a moment ago? Now we’re invited to dinner?”

“Uninvited drop-ins always make me a bit bearish,” I said. “Plus you future-people always seem to catch me off guard, but I always recover! Stay for dinner and we can have a fantastic meal and a sensible discussion about the problem of Mr. Arkright.” I convincingly pretended I wasn’t actually picturing a wine-drenched game of “Lord Manly Tickles the Naughty Maids.”

“‘The problem of Mr. Arkright’ is temporal,” said Audrey, “not culinary.”

“I just single-handedly saved half the Earth!” I said. “Surely a celebratory sip of something bubbly and alcoholic is called for?”

“You know,” said the doctor to her companions, “since the immediate crisis seems to have been dealt with, is there some compelling reason why we’re still here talking to this… gentleman?”

“None!” said Lady Gwendolyn. “It is beyond time to go!”

“Enjoy your evening, Mr. Evermore,” said Audrey, sounding very insincere. “I’ve no doubt you’ll do that single-handed as well.”

After being thrown a few final sneers from my visitors — sneers that were most certainly intended to mask their unspeakable, salacious desires for further time in my presence that circumstances forced them to sacrifice — the threesome crossed the deck and left through an airlock. I’d say they left in a huff, but, in point of fact, they left in a small shuttlecraft which decoupled from my space house and sped away toward Earth.

Looking around the empty room, thinking of absent guests, I began to wonder: Where the devil are you, Arkright?