Prologue: And The Trip Goes On

  In the darkness of deep space, four engines burned brightly against curtain of cosmic night. Like a beacon, the powerful engines left a glowing white blanket of oxidized fuel remnants in their wake. From an outsider's perspective, the visual presented of a lone space ship headed for some unknown destination seemed quite majestic, almost regal.

  But from an insider's perspective, this magnificent sight held only the most juvenile of scenarios possible.

  “Is there a dictionary somewhere in the world with your picture in it?”

  A hush descended over the escape ship’s bridge as Joseph lolled his head to one side. To his immediate right, the alien in the body of a not so middle-aged man’s body began to fiddle with one of the four control station panels. Instantly its worn-out screen flickered to life with a simple wire frame overlay of the section of the ship directly beneath their feet.

  “I mean…” He shot Justine a look of mild disdain and swiveled the ancient flight chair around to meet her gaze. “There just has to be. Why else would you continue to risk our lives in the hope that one day you might get lucky?”

  “Lucky?” The word burned a hole through the young agent’s very soul.

  “Yeah… lucky,” Joseph said callously.

  Ignoring her ominous tone, he toggled a few more switches and the overlay widened to show the entire space which contained twelve perfectly spaced pillars. Approximately two feet across, each column radiated waves of low-level artificial gravity which appeared as slow-moving digital dust on the screen.

  “Fifteen times you’ve crawled down there hoping to beat him. And fifteen times you’ve done nothing but risk blowing this ship up by daring to shoot one of those pillars.” He made the universal hand gesture for an explosion. “But you keep going, tempting fate because you can't stand to lose."

  "I'm just acclimating, Joseph." Justine spat back at his stupid face. "This time will be different."

  "Different?" He scoffed. "You know. Your attitude reminds me of an Earth saying I like a lot. What is the the definition of insanity? Doing something the same way continuously, while each time expecting different results.”

  "It's not so much a saying with humans, Joseph." Hoover offered. "More like a mantra."

  "I believe it." Joseph said. "And that's why there's got to be a picture of you in a dictionary, Agent Rushing. Your are the very definition of insanity."

  Before Justine could respond, Hoover’s voice broke loudly over their ear buds to answer his query. “Nothing in print, Joseph. Though, I did find time during our escape from the station to include an update to Wikipedia’s main entry for the words nutty and certifiable.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep, Agent Rushing’s decision to strand us on the other side of the galaxy was the warning sign I could no longer ignore. So, I tucked a few lines of non-reversible, self-replicating code neatly into that new phone’s data burst algorithms.” Hoover started to guffaw mercilessly at his own handiwork. “I even managed to prominently feature a rather unflattering picture of our resident thrill seeker for posterity’s sake.”

  “What?” Joseph asked in a nonchalant yet obviously curious tone. “Did she have a really bad DMV picture or something?”

  “No,” Hoover hesitated. He wished he had a camera on her face at this exact moment. “No, I went with something a little bit more retro… something from a long-lost prom?”

  “Prom…?” Justine’s mind hitched in mid-thought. Pushing their petty insults away, her thoughts began racing over the possibilities Hoover’s cruelty could enact. Trying her best to remain placid and uninterested, she knelt in front of the bridge’s sole elevator. Before her was the open hatchway which led to the fifteen previous defeats Joseph had been referring to.

  “Not that I care,” slowly, little trickles of sweat had begun to form on her forehead. “But was I wearing a pale blue dress?”

  “No,” Hoover’s laughter increased in voluminous spite. “I found one where you were dressed in a plum-colored ensemble and covered in what looked like heaps of matted up fishing line.”

  “Tiny bows…” Her voice, barely above a whisper, responded silently. Memories of an awkward senior prom began to pry away at the cracks of her resolve. And it took every ounce of her training to make a conscious effort not to act bothered by his accusations. “Plum, huh…?”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Without a physical reference for the little AI to see, Justine could only shrug and stare innocently into Joseph’s still perturbed eyes. He found her lack of response most intriguing. After all, in the short time they had spent with one another, the one thing lacking in Justine’s character was timidity.

  “She’s denying it.” Joseph commented into his earpiece’s microphone. “And not very convincingly I might add.”

  “Is she now?” On one of the empty desks, Hoover’s tablet kicked on without warning. The device’s emitters kicked into gear and a familiar blue start up orb appeared. “Notice the late 90’s spiral curl haircut, the copious amounts of hair gel slathered about”

  As he spoke, the orb dissolved away and morphed into a 3D image of a sullen teenage girl. “Semi fashionable for the time if done correctly,” Another chuckle rang out in their ears as the perspective zoomed in close on the young woman’s face. Right away, the features of a teenage Justine were easy to make out. “Not that this poor mess was done correctly.”

  The hologram zoomed in even further, highlighting a series of half-formed curls that swept across an acne ridden face. This horrific scene was punctuated even further by a tighter view of each individual strand of hair. Here, the haunting presence of a faulty flat iron was seared into each layer of her blonde hair.

  “I guess that’s one way to get rid of split ends.” He commented evilly as the image broke apart into a collage of similar pictures. Obviously from the same night, each snapshot was more horribly sad then the one before. “And what’s worse, from the dozens of pictures I found on your sister’s Facebook page. I can only come to the miserable conclusion that you were there all alone.”

  “So,” Justine said semi-calmly. Her facial muscles appeared to be suffering from electro-shock therapy. “I chose to go to that dance alone.”

  “Really…?” Hoover merged the collage back together and another 3D image sprang to life. This one had Justine sitting at a table as 2D images of teenagers spun around her. Soon, the image of a hunky guy in a white tux began to glow bright red like a gun sight. “So how come every time this guy walks past, you’re staring at him like he just gave you a reason to shoot him?”

  Joseph studied the slightly wistful look the young Justine gave from the 2D picture. At first, he didn’t quite understand Hoover’s meaning. After all, her look wasn’t one of anger or vengeance. If anything, she looked longingly at the teenage lothario like some lovesick puppy waiting to be shot by some make believe arrow.

  Then it hit him. That’s how she looked when she was shooting people with that new ray gun of hers. In fact, that was the same look he saw back at his house right before everything around him went black. “She was in love.”

  “What I was….” Justine tucked the slinger down inside the waistband of her pants. “What I was… was none of your concern.” She looked at Joseph angrily. In response, he turned back to the monitor in a pathetic attempt to avoid her gaze. “The only thing important now is taking care of this.”

  “Taking care of what?” Hoover mocked. “Losing isn’t an active thing, Agent Rushing. It’s a passive act that you’re surprisingly good at.”

  “Not this time, Hoover.” She lowered herself down into the chamber and instantly the dormant Slinger buzzed to life. In the darkness, a gleeful laugh echoed throughout the entire space. Undeterred, she said, “This time I’m going to beat him.”

  And by beat him, she meant beat him at the little game the two them had begun to play after about three days on the escape ship. Gravity Tag, Foster’s name for this time killer, was a sci-fi variation on the standard laser tag. Only instead of using guns that shot infrared beams of light, players used Slingers at their lowest setting to shoot small orbs of plasma.

  And instead of black wooden obstacles, players hid behind large, square gravity pillars designed to maintain artificial gravity on the flight deck. Which by itself presented a whole slew of tactical problems to solve. The second most important being how to navigate around in one third standard Earth gravity.

  Justine initially wanted to call the game Moon Tag since moving around down there reminded her of astronauts walking around on the moon. However, Hoover quickly shut down that possible name with an offhand remark about naked butts. Still, whatever the name, the conditions for battle were far from normal. Not that normal conditions mattered all that much to Justine. After all, she was a highly trained FBI agent with years of tactical training.

  Still, these conditions went beyond being abnormal. In fact, they were slanted in the direction of someone with Foster’s particular set of skills. Because this field of battle required a special kind of math to succeed. Or more accurately, Gravity Tag required one to be highly adept in geometry, trigonometry, and orbital mechanics.

  But why would anyone need to know about orbital mechanics to win a game?

  Well, that’s simple. Because the pillars placed beneath the plating of the flight deck created an artificial gravity field. And that artificial gravity field affected the plasma orbs as they rocketed toward their target. So much so that if you don’t shoot at the right angle, the bolt meant for your opponent would get caught in the gravitational distortion of the pylon.

  Once that occurs, the ball of plasma would start orbiting around the thing like a small electric moon. Well, either that or the shot would veer off course into another pillar where it would repeat the first possibility and get trapped. So, if you don’t account for gravity, you’ll never hit the other player.

  So, no matter how well Justine knew combat tactics, she was woefully behind the curve when it came to gravity tactics. Consequentially, she was currently in the middle of a 60-game losing streak. And no matter how confident her words sounded, the continuation of that streak was almost assured,

  Still, even if the outcome was certain, that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try. And as God was her witness, Justine was finally going to wipe that stupid grin off his stupid face.

  “Oh really?” Foster responded to her promise of victory in a voice dripping with malevolent charm. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Justine.”

  “Can’t keep?” Seeing a familiar flash of red, she ducked behind the nearest pillar and raised her weapon. “We’ll see about that.”