The Time Trousers of Professor Tempus: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure Read online

  “CONTROL SIGNALS COLLATED. ASSEMBLING KILL-ORDER... VISUAL REPRESENTATION IS MATHEMATICALLY IDENTICAL TO HOW IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN. SLIGHT DISCOLOURATIONS MAY BE CAUSED BY FAULTY MONITORS”

  “You changed its colour? I’ve got to say, it’s really working for me, Eves”

  “CONTROL SIGNAL AWAITING ALIGNMENT OF…THANK YOU….ALIGNMENT OF RELAY STATIONS AT FIFTY…I DO NOT THINK THAT THE VISUAL REPRESENTATION IS OPTIMAL.”

  “Oh come on, Eves, you’re just saying that.”

  “NEGATIVE. VISUAL REPRESENTATION FEELS LESS THAN OPTIMAL THIS TWENTY FOUR HOUR CYCLE. SELF LABEL: FRUMPY..”

  Space made a sympathetic tutting noise and shifted in his seat, leaning closer to the screen and I could swear that EVA leaned in a little too. “Listen Eves, I’ve got something to tell you.” He started but I was pulled away at that point

  “Doctor,” I felt a tug at my arm and it was the Captain’s man, looking concerned, I turned to him, leaving this Captain to do his… thing. The diminutive fellow looked concerned ,“Not that I don’t have faith in the Captain’s ability to successfully woo an insane computer but are there any other avenues of enquiry we could be looking into? A big plug maybe? Or something to stick a fork into?” He glanced eagerly about the room.

  “I think I may have done that by now, if there were. Once EVA took control of the station’s functionals that was it. Here, look.” I raced over to my own personal console and brought up the grid for him to see. It was an elaborate spiderweb drawn in light but from its heart an odious red light was stretching along every pathway- the shutdown signal snuffing out all the station’s life support and external thrusters.

  “You’ve got to hurry him!” I cried to Ebenezer, and we looked over to the Captain, who had removed his tunic, ostensibly because the room was ‘too warm’.

  “Would that I could, professor” he said with a wince, “But I’m afraid, if you can’t muster any solutions, we are left to his musk and charm.”

  I fled to the window. Was this how my career was to end? Burnt to a cinder while a strange man flexed his biceps in front of a computer screen and another fellow busied himself by kicking in consoles at random? I looked to the skies outside, the black turning an angry shade of orange as our descent accelerated. I suddenly cursed agreeing to put the station above a star. It had seemed like a good source of solar energy and suntans but now it seemed like hubris. I shrugged off my labcoat as the temperature soared and I saw that the Captain was already ahead of me, sitting bare chested in front of EVA while making his pectoral muscles jiggle up and down to a hummed tune of his own invention.

  Then came the clanging.

  So many things were exploding in sparks on the deck that it took me a second to notice it. Monitors were blowing out in the heat, bags of popcorn were exploding of their own accord and the maddening alarm still howled. But behind all of that came the unmistakeable mechanical beat of metal fists on the bulkhead. Of course, I had almost forgotten about the killbots! No matter the certainty of our fiery demise EVA’s troops would still advance. I sprinted to the door, next to Ebenezer and stood back from the vibrating surface of it. Doom, doom, doom. The implacable fists beat their even rhythm into the metal, bending it inward with methodical force. Within seconds a latch shot free from the top corner and we jumped back from it. The corner of the door bent further down, revealing the tops of the heads of our assailants.

  Ebenezer and I danced back through the ruins of the room, back to the window which groaned as the surface began to warp under the sun’s heat. I looked out and saw that the black was now completely occluded by a rushing orange shell. We were burning up on entry. I looked back to the lab door which was almost completely torn free of its moorings, robots already stepping over the threshold.

  Ebenezer held out a small pistol to me, proffering the tiny weapon. “Some small consolation?” he asked through a thick sheen of sweat. I took it gratefully and levelled it at the my creations.

  “Why not?”

  We opened fire and our weak salvo pranged harmlessly off of the plexihadron shells of the robots. Two of the vanguard raised their arms to us, their palm mounted plasma cutters hummed with murderous energy. They took aim, the red energy sitting, barely restrained in their muzzles for us to see. They made ready.

  -and stopped.

  One by one their arms dropped to their sides, dead and useless. I looked to see the red of their lightbulb eyes dying into nothingness as they crashed to the ground. I spun round on my heels to the structurally compromised window. The roiling surface of the sun was still visible but now-somehow- so too was the black of space. I fixed my eyes on a distant star and it seemed to be stationary. After a second the klaxons faded and I could discern, distantly and blissfully, the solid thrum of our thrusters holding us in the heavens.

  I turned deliriously to Ebenezer, “It’s stopped. Then motors are back on somehow!” I said, hugging him. The display screen showed that red advancing web of EVA’s signal recede back to us, the calm blue of normal transmission standing in its stead.

  “Somehow?! Miss, if you talk like that I may have to favour you with a demonstration.” I looked around to see the Captain leaning back in his chair, smiling rakishly. Above him the now serene and slightly pink-flushed face display of EVA gazed adoringly down on the man.

  “It can’t be,” I gasped.

  “Professor Bathby, you wound me!”

  I had, conservatively speaking, probably around seven hundred questions swirling in my head about how and why we were not currently dead. I settled on an obvious one.

  “Who…Who are you people?”

  “I am Captain Space Hardcore and this is my faithful manservant Ebenezer Funkworthy. You may know our names from COAR’s recent military records or you may know us from the whispered rumours of our intrepid adventures throughout the galaxy. Where’er there is wrong we come to right it, where tyranny reigns you will find us fighting against it, where monsters prey on the weak we appear to defend the weak, where there is injustice we bring justice, where there is too much justice we bring some injustice. Where there is unease we bring ease, where there is distress we bring stress, where there is conflict we bring proflict”

  He struck a pose then, hands on hips and chest out, beaming down at me for what seemed like an inappropriate amount of time.

  “But why are you here?”

  To his credit his pose barely changed as he answered, “Responding to a distress call, of course. Priority one- a high value scientific station in distress in need of a little rescuing.”

  “What?”

  He waved a hand. “Oh, think nothing of it. You cry out for help into the vast unforgiving blackness and we were simply the nearest and most able ship to come speeding to your rescue. Saving days, saving nights, saving afternoons; it’s what we do.”

  “We didn’t send out a distress call,” I said simply.

  He seemed to falter, his chest deflating somewhat.

  “Yes you did.” A note of uncertainty as his eyes flickered over to his assistant

  “I can assure you we did not.”

  “Sure you did,” he blustered. “It’s just in all the confusion…it’s understandable really.”

  I shook my head, “Captain, we tried to. I assure you we tried to get to a distress beacon but all this happened too fast.”

  We three looked at each other in confusion for a long moment, taking turns to furrow brows at each other. Funkworthy spoke first.

  “Well, if we’re not responding to you then whoooo…”

  Our portside window bloomed orange as the explosion lit up the sky. We all turned to see one of our neighbouring stations rip apart in an impressive fireball which tore soundlessly through it as fireballs tend to do. The remains, propelled by the force of the blast careened off toward the sun. A few seconds later it hit the surface of the sun hard and the explosion filled the skies near us as the nuclear fire swallowed it whole. Once again orange fire filled our vision but died away quickly as th
e station melted away into nothingness on its roiling surface.

  There was an awkward moment of silence.

  “Do you think-”

  “Yes Cap’n, that was very likely the station that sent the distress signal.”

  He exhaled noisily, like a horse and looked at me. “Pretty lucky for you, eh?”

  I shuffled my feet a little at that, not sure how to respond.

  “Well, I mean, I do appreciate all that you did and all.”

  Ebenezer was already at one of our observation consoles. “Captain,” he said, “that station only had a modest staff on board and the ship is reading multiple escape pod signals in the area. If we leave now we could-” he thumbed towards the door and waggled his eyebrows in the universally acknowledged sign for ‘we’d better head out’.

  “Two for one, eh? Well, I guess that’ll do. We can pick up the pods and get out of this damned system before another space station falls into the sun.”

  And just like that it was over. Without another word to me he was away, simply spinning on his heels, swishing that cape of his and dropping a smoke bomb for reasons I have yet to fathom he was away. (Except for about a minute later when he jogged back in to retrieve his top and his pants from EVA’s console which he had forgotten).

  The next thing I saw out of the window was his ship streaking off into the black.

  And that was the first time and the last time that I ever saw Captain Space Hardcore.

  But maybe I shall see him one more time. On Kronis. If this story does as it should.

  Part One

  ʘ

  Party Time

  Chapter One

  A Pressing Engagement

  * * *

  The future isn’t what it used to be. The past is a madman’s dream of the present. The present is a fractured view of next Tuesday. Next August is the deja vu dream of a forgotten yesternow from the seventies.

  All time is a stretched yawn from an old clock rotating on the top of a sundial.

  except this time.

  This one eternal nowness when I hold you.

  In a forever-moment

  Waiting for a late train to depart from Shoreditch, needing a wee.

  Ian. S.P.F Freetopple

  The Cafe on the Inside of God’s Mind

  Ѻ

  “Bang!” I said dramatically, like an explosion would.

  In the silence of the bridge my words echoed. I nodded eruditely to myself then added, thoughtfully, “Pow. Ku-Thwomp. Whoosh!”

  “What are you reading?” Funkworthy turned in his chair suddenly, his tone off-puttingly annoyed for some reason.

  I looked up from the tablet. I, like most learned fellows versed in the Literary Arts, liked to provide my own sound effects to what I read; a practice that apparently grated the nerves of my second in command and most of the librarians I have had the misfortune to meet. He looked at me evenly from the navigation console so I reluctantly stopped making explosion noises and waggled the report at him.

  “Do you remember that affair on Station Hadron 11? The foxy AI that tried to drop us into a sun?”

  “The time we were almost plunged into a sun by a rogue AI? Let me think….Ah yes, it does ring a distant bell somewhere. No clue why, since that’s a rather mundane occurrence.”

  I sighed and ignored his sarcasm expertly. “Yes, rather a dreary one wasn’t it? Hardly a challenge at all, to seduce an AI. I do it all the time. That’s how I get free coffee from the machine in Headquarter’s fourth floor, you know. She’s getting a bit serious these days, especially since I switched to decaf.” I sighed again only more so.

  “Dreary, Captain? I almost died!” he cried. Good man, Funkworthy- always trying to cheer me up.

  “Even so, it wasn’t a great adventure. Predictable, pedestrian, a little vanilla, a little ‘petit bourgeois’ as the French might say. No, I begin to think there’s nothing challenging in the whole verse.” I put my chin handsomely on my fist and looked dramatically out of the starboard window. “I’ve climbed every mountain, old man, I’ve killed every foe, swam every ocean and then killed that ocean. ‘And Alexander wept for there were no more conkers left in the world’. That’s Shakespeare, I believe.”

  It was a constant concern to me that the standard of peril in the universe was decreasing. After all, one can only defeat so many villains before the villain ratio in the universe takes a precipitous and boring nosedive. I was my own worst enemy in that way. Well, someone had to be.

  “So why ARE you reading up on recent history?” Funkworthy pestered.

  “It’s a late entry into the Captain Space Hardcore Appreciation Society’s annual meeting.”

  Funkworthy rolled his eyes at that. Although he has assured me on many occasions that the rolling of eyes was a common biological trait of his people- rather like blinking or burping- that was in no way connected to disapproval, I had my doubts.

  I waved the tablet. “This one could win the prize for ‘most accurate/flattering/honest portrayal of a heroic action done by me’. The coveted ‘MAFHPOAHADBM’ gong. The winner gets two pictures of me- one in a pose of their choosing and one in a pose of my choosing. The good Doctor Bathby here is a strong contender this year in a crowded field. The author really captures one of the four essential aspects essence of my heroism; my sexual charisma.” I looked pointedly at Funkworthy.

  “I shan’t ask,” he said resolutely.

  He continued resolutely not asking for several dull minutes of me not talking, but I could see the suspense was getting to him.

  “Well, as you insist,” I said when he came back from the toilet. “I’ve managed to distil my ineffable heroic quality down to four pillars- the foundational strengths of Captain Space Hardcore, if you will. First is charm. The next is leadership- the ability to inspire thoughtless devotion and love from followers and lower species such as yourself. Next is my punching, which is a representation of my fearlessness and bravery in combat and the final one is my legendary wit. Charm and leadership and punching and wit- these are the essential foundations of me. CALAPAW!” I yelled, then made another explosion noise for good measure.

  “Where does modesty come in?”

  “Modesty is a weakness disguised as a virtue- like tact or haemophilia.No these, four things are the essentials of what it means to be me."

  "I’m not sure it’s healthy to think of oneself in those kinds of terms."

  "Pish, tosh and dog piddle! I’m not sure it’s healthy to declare war on a sentient planet but I did that last May and that turned out alright, if you ignore all the casualties. Besides, I’ve put thought and study into it. After all, I’ve been reading up on myself rather a lot for this competition and each tale shines a light on one of these foundational pillars. Bathby’s here is a fine examination of my allure. I don’t know if it’s the winning entry though. But I suppose I’ll have to make up my mind pretty damn quickly.”

  “We’re really still going to that?”

  I chuckled fondly “Of course! What else would I be doin-?”

  He cut me off immediately. God but the man loves to answer rhetorical questions as wrongly as possible (is there anything more vile than a rhetorical question?). “Off the top of my head, we have been asked to chair the peace summit of Rothulon 12.” I made a bored noise at that, Funkworthy continued, “No? Okay, well, there are the three distress signals we’ve ignored.” I made another, louder bored noise, this time with my mouth, “And of course there’s the small matter of the court appearance over that child paternit-”

  “Blah!” I cried. “All eminently ignore-able flim-flam;and you know my policy towards flim-flam. This party is important. After all, this has my name in it. Do any of the other things have my name?”

  “Well, the court appearance is-”

  “Blah,” I said again, loudly and slowly until he’d stopped speaking. “That was a rhetorical question. Don’t you know I use them all of the time?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me, not sure whether to
answer.

  “How far out are we from the place? Kronis station, isn’t it?” I asked, mercifully.

  He fiddled with some buttons and possibly a dial. “Um…A little shy of half an hour, sir, if we continue on our current course and speed."

  “Fantastic,” I said and settled back into the chair. It could have been the anticipation, the nerves or the ever-present negativity of my second in command but I had difficulty settling myself in my Captain’s throne. Ebenezer looked over at my fidgetings.

  “You seem more anxious than usual, sir. Is it anything to do with your attire? Even for you, it is a little on the ostentatious side.”

  “Nonsense, it’s just a tuxedo,” I sniffed

  “It’s a solid gold tuxedo.”

  “Semantics,” I sniffed.

  “You don’t think it’s a bit....gaudy?”

  “Not at all!” I shouted as I attempted to jump up in indignation. Unfortunately my entirely reasonable outfit hindered me and I instead clanged back down in my chair, looking fabulous. “Any chump with two pennies and a decent tailor can get a fabric tuxedo, Funkworthy." I spat the term. "But to own a gold tuxedo? Now that’s a man of substance, and that substance is gold!”

  “You have it on a little early though. You’ve been wearing it for two straight days.”

  “It’s a gold tuxedo, Ebenezer,” I said, by way of explanation. God love him, but the man could be dense. I should have pity on him since he had never, to my knowledge, owned any items of clothing made from precious metals so I couldn’t expect him to know that one wrings all of the value out of them that one can.