We rode the cart to the windows that spilled light onto the catwalk. The room behind the windows was office space, complete with suspended Plas sheet ceiling inset with LED daylights. On the right of the open lobby were some space dividers, a couple of desks, concomitant chairs, a Telemutor Instant Communicator, a print station, even a counter toward the rear with coffee service and condiments.

On the left wall was a receptionist’s desk. There was no receptionist, of course, and no power to the Telemutor, the screens on the desks, or the printer. The coffee station was dark and smelled like stale coffee. An overflowing trash container built into the counter had a pile of crushed cups, balled up napkins, coffee stirrers, and other refuse at its base.

A door at the rear of the room opened into a short hallway with a couple of doors on either side, vacant unlit offices, a small conference room. A door at the end of the hallway opened into another corridor, which paralleled the walkway outside. The corridor was at least 45-50 feet wide and equally high and stretched to the vanishing point in both directions. A number of the shuttle carts were parked on the sides.

Another door, a double free swinging one, opened on the opposite side of the corridor. It was right next to a large, 40 foot wide roll up door that went nearly to the ceiling. Starc pushed through the swinging doors, Moon and I followed.

Inside was a large hangar fitted with pigeon hole berths for mini yachts, about ten on either side of the room, several berthed cigarette class ships like Talon. The far end of the hangar was dark. Neither Talon nor Shakara would have a problem getting in from the corridor.

I recognized Yorgie’s Space Rover there, gunmetal gray, sleek, powerful lines, all business, no fun. Blocky, but unlike Moon’s ship Yorgie’s Rover was made of big, imposing, intimidating blocks that didn’t look anything at all like Leggoes. He had a mini Masur cannon mounted underneath that he used to section asteroids, derelict ships, small moons and the like, into little salable pieces.

There were a couple others that I didn’t recognize. I’ll bet any amount that TeslaBeam is the Babe’s. Shirl Versacci always went for the best. I was thinking the Tesla could give Talon a run for her money. Heh, don’t tell Talon I said that!

Starc was headed for a plasmet stair that led up to an elevated office, the hangar control. It was lit up and I could see people inside. Was that the Babe?

(Slept in today. Need some reiteration here.

This is an excerpt from “Gathering Clouds,” the starter piece, found elsewhere on this site, that got this thing going. I’m not sure if I’ve explained the backstory.

Even so, just for GP, a quick sketch . . . Let me take you back to the halcyon days when dial-up Internet was the latest new thing and AOL membership was bloating like Tetsuo at the end of Akira. Some members of an AOL chat group dedicated to Babylon 5, a then current and fairly popular Sci-Fi television program, decided to co-author a “tag” story together.

One of us would write something and send it to someone else in the group, like ‘tag, you’re it!’ We had high hopes. Where would it take us? I can’t tell you whose idea it was, except that it wasn’t mine. But I liked the supposition and wrote “Gathering Clouds” as part of the ongoing story. I believe there were a couple of entries made other than mine but the idea didn’t get enough momentum to take off.

I wasn’t for lack of trying on my part. When I wrote “Gathering Clouds” I was trying to salt it with as much ambiguous material as I could, leaving loose ends lying all over the place, like a literary super Lego block with lots of connector artifacts. I was trying to make it easy for another writer to find a handle to continue the story. Unfortunately the story was stillborn for lack of participation. We all had real lives, time at a premium, so no one’s to blame. Just how it turned out.

That was then. I recently found “Gathering Clouds” in my archive and after reading it posted it to the old group for kicks and giggles. Yep, some of us are still in touch. @@@ Hail LOOUUUUUUU!!!!! @@@

So now I have this story with plenty of places to go, so, why not? Besides, heh, one of the old group, after reading my post, commented that it might be an interesting read. 😉

Once under weigh I thought about the old group. Man, we’d had some times. I wondered what they’d been up to these last couple of years. Did Yorgie get sober? He was always the toughest in a scrap, not many slinky hoopas could say they fought him and won. ‘Cause I don’t think any who did fight him actually lived to tell about it.

Is Moon still as enigmatic? There wasn’t any piece of tech he couldn’t figure out. And did Dobie ever get that ship he was always talking about? He always dreamed of a ship that could traverse the galactic circumference in two weeks.

Where’s the Ghost now? He’s the only one who really scared me. And don’t forget the babe—oh yeah, the babe! Thinking about her made my leather pants a little tighter. They always underestimated her, such a sweet, cute little doll. She was extremely fast, saved the team more than once because, in spite of her tiny form, she could be more vicious than the rest of us put together when she put her mind to it.

They called us mercenaries but we had a real sense of justice and never took jobs that didn’t seem ‘right.’ There were bounties on all of our heads in more than one backwoods pirate hole. Proxima was such a place but if Starc was there it must be worth the risk.

The plasmetal deck extended about 20 feet from the cavern wall and continued into the distance in both directions. There was a slidewalk but it was still. The wide catwalk was one out of many that encircled the installation at regular levels and darkened windows of rooms cut into the walls on the sides showed that, at one time, this had been a very busy place.

Starc explained, “When the first settlers, under the aegis of developer Planet Corp, came to Proxima two centuries ago this was where Manuel Igcenzio, the Planet Corp manager for this region, decided to put his water terminal. Originally an island several hundred miles away from the shore of what was called the Southern Ocean, the settlement became a city high on a mountain as galactic customers carried away about two thirds of the water that was here.”

“So why haven’t they recycled this place?” I asked.

“There’s still a couple bazillion cubic miles of water in what’s left of the ocean so they mothballed the installation just in case,” Starc replied.

“Just in case they need a fiscal bump,” I finished for him.

“Right,” he said, “and since Planet Corp owes me one for that nasty business about five years ago I’ve got the run of the place; I’ve been using it for my secret base for a couple years.”

“So what am I doing here?”

“About two months ago Chiraco, a Planet Corp rival, crashed what appeared to be a small asteroid in the desert about a thousand miles southeast of here. It was actually an automatic crust drill designed to penetrate the planetary crust in order to tap magma for the elements contained within. It’s a common practice with uninhabited, dead worlds.” Starc waved us over to a motorized cart and we all got in.

“And the Galactic Union? They’re just letting Chiraco extort Proxima?” I wondered.

Starc waved his chip across the cart’s control panel and the cart rolled toward the right side of the cavern. “They’d be the natural recourse if this wasn’t Free Space. As it is in this case, there is no legal solution. The  strong survive, the weak get plowed under.”

We reached the corner and took a wide bend to the left and continued down the long side of the cavern. The way ahead disappeared in the distance. About a quarter mile ahead a group of windows in the wall were lit. Starc said it was his command center and the others were there waiting for us.

The SuperSoldiers are back in the saddle again, I thought. I could feel the excitement building in me as I contemplated the not so certain future.

We stayed on the “El,” what they call the slidewalks, past several intersections. We left the pedestrian traffic and tufts of juveniles behind. A Hilton went by and, with an arch look, I asked Moon’s back, “Not staying here?” He turned, fixed those vertical irises on mine for the briefest moment, then turned his back on me again. Good old Moon!

Moon slipped a couple strips with me close on his heels and we headed toward one of those production facilities the townsfolk built with their water credits. The looming structure grew in the distance and soon took up the entire horizon.

The seedy buildings nearby were stark contrast to the crystal diode glitz we’d just endured. Flaking paint, windows askew and/or patched with cardboard, red brickwork in need of pointing, could be seen afflicting many of the three and four story structures; some were boarded up. It was obviously a very old, maybe even original, part of Igcenzio. Moon slipped the strips down to the street.

A short slideramp took us down to the tunnel-like “UnderEl,” at one time the street, now primarily used for simple bulk physical transport. LED panels, some flickering, others just dead, valiantly fought the overall gloom with varying degrees of success. Overhead the slidewalks made a shushing, continuous susurrus.

Moon walked to the corner and took a left. “Where in hell are we going,” I asked, “this can’t be right.” He stopped and did one of those over the shoulder glances again. Then he went to the nearest door of a particularly decrepit structure and knocked.

Starc, his nearly seven foot, fire plug body looming in the semi darkness inside, answered the door. “Starc!” I cried with a big grin. Starc’s brow furrowed and he hushed me with a finger to his lips. “In, quick,” he said with a little jerk of his head. We entered quickly.

Lights were low inside and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Moon kept walking into the building, I guess his eyes adjusted faster than mine. Starc closed the door behind us and I turned to my friend, full of questions. “Good to see you, too” he said. “C’mon.”

He led the way in the same general direction Moon had gone. Around a corner there was a rickety elevator just leveling up to the floor. Moon was waiting there and the three of us got on. “Moon here has been a fount of information, you know,” I said. “I couldn’t get him to shut up.”

“Good old Moon,” Starc said with a wide grin.

Moon almost smiled. It probably would have broken his face. He did move his lips to say, “Good old Moon.”

I had to laugh in spite of trying mightily to suppress it. If it wasn’t for Moon none of us would be present in this reality. “Home at last,” I said.

Starc waved at a sensor on the elevator control panel. His microchip implant, tucked in between the radius and ulna of his right forearm, relayed the coded data that started the elevator. Now, I’ve been in a large variety of gravitational circumstances in my life but when the elevator drops it still gives me a weird feeling in my stomach. And we were dropping fast—too fast to just be going to the basement. I looked at Starc.

“Bout half a mile to go,” he said with a smile.

The terracotta red walls whipped by, blurred by the speed of our descent. Starc just smiled that dimply smile and, his hands clasped behind his back, balanced on the balls of his feet, up and down. Finally the door opened.

We entered onto a plasmetal catwalk on a short wall and about two thirds of the way up from the floor of a stupendous rectangularish cavern. Light from Mini Suns mounted high above on the ceiling illuminated a maze of pipes of all sizes and configurations and toothy shadows added to the jumbled confusion. Some of the gargantuan pipes transected the cavern at various levels, smaller ones twined together in groups and ran off in every direction. Down near the other end one of the really big ones made an upward 90 degree bend and disappeared through a monolithic bracket in the ceiling. Tracks and cartage, storage bins and quiet, dead furnaces could be seen far below.

Starc, smoothing his pencil thin Clark Gable mustache with index and thumb, let me gawk for a few moments then he said, “This used to be a processing plant for water transfer.” He put his hands on the guardrail and looked out over the complex. “When the original settlers here sold the ocean water they only sold the water. They used plants like this one to extract everything else. The whole operation was quite profitable, you know.” He turned, “Come on,” he said, “there’s more.”

“Where are we going?” I asked Moon, not expecting an answer.

He turned to me and pursed his little lips. And then he stepped onto the southbound slidewalk. I quickly followed before he got too far away and resigned myself to the mysterious slide. I paced forward until I caught up to him. We were headed downtown. Moon jumped to a quicker strip and I stayed with him this time.

The civs in Igcenzio apparently like loose fitting clothing and pastel colors. I can understand the color thing, considering how colorless the planet is overall. Pantaloons, cinched at the ankle and waist, loose, blousy shirts and hooded cape things that drape their figures like togas all flailed in the wind on the slidewalk. That seemed to be the general drift of the latest style here. I didn’t see too many hats. Most of the people on the faster sliders had their hoods up.

We went into a commercial district, stores, shops, restaurants, and a variety of “entertainments” lined the slidewalk. All one had to do was step off at the right place, the slidewalk slows as you get closer to the stationary walkway, the “street,” immediately in front of the businesses.

Moon just stood there, stoically facing forward. The people on the street all seemed to be healthy and happy. Small groups of young were hanging out on the corner stations, panhandling and pestering anyone who would give them credence. Moon was the prow of a ship as we passed them. I stayed nicely tucked in his wake. Heh!

A sign caught my eye. Ooohh! It was a Burger Park! Cheeseburgers! I was ready to drag Moon off the slidewalk until I noticed this particular Burger Park used some kind of local eel for the burger. Heh, maybe later . . .

Igcenzio was just a little south of the equator about 800 miles or so from the vortex. As we spiraled in, the surface of Proxima unreeled below us. “Looks to be mostly desert,” Talon observed. “Yeah,” I agreed with a nod.

It was true, aside from the watersheds near the “oceans” most of the planet was covered by ruddy rock. Alluvial plains shot red fingers into the greenish blue waters. Closeups provided by Talon showed the desert areas dominated by scrubby bush that blanketed the land from horizon to horizon. Dried riverbeds showed there had been water on this planet in the past—and not so long ago as you might think.

The first settlers, in order to build the great production installations that make Proxima the manufacturing hub it is in this part of the galaxy, sold off about 75% of the natural water there. It might not sound like the brightest idea in the box but this is a fairly common practice considering how valuable water is these days. That’s just considering it’s value as fuel, not taking into account the myriad other uses there are for it.

“Locking into Igcenzio traffic pattern,” Talon reported as she shifted into the inbound corridor of the docking facility, still following Moon’s Leggo ship. “Final in 5 minutes . . . Igcenzio control on the com.”

I fielded the tower’s questions to their satisfaction and was given a berth for Talon. Moon and I would both deship at the Igcenzio version of Grand Central Station. Talon would find her own way to her berth as would Moon’s ship, which he called “Shakara,” by the way.

Talon touched down like a ballerina. Shakara was already down and a hatch was opening from which Moon stepped down to the plasmac. I unbuckled and popped the hatch. I noticed I was grinning, I was happy to see my old friend and as I shook his hand I remembered all the reasons he was such and it gave me a real good feeling. Good friends just don’t grow on trees.

The ships quietly lifted away and Moon and I headed for the slidewalks.

For as graceful a character as Moon is, his ship was an antithesis. The shoe-boxy, blocky, sort of rectangular construct looked assembled out of Leggos. Not totally out of the question, actually, so much is built with an infinite size range of those constructors these days. (Heh, remind me to tell you about the Leggo Wars!)

A face appeared on a virtual screen that popped up on the Viz to my left, Moon’s narrow Hexalian face inscrutable as ever. Good old Moon, I thought as I took in the small zoolander lips chiseled onto his faintly blue skin. He had a very flat nose, nostrils almost slits, with not much more than a sharp ridge running the length of it from the brow of his large, deep set, vertically iris-ed, golden eyes. They seemed to be looking right through me.

“Well?” I queried.

“I’ve been here for three planetary days already,” the blue mask stated with extreme economy of motion.

He looked really excited . . . You have to know Moon, almost nothing can break him out of his supernatural serenity.

For example, once we were chasing scavs out on some obscure rim world, Kronk’s World or something like that, and after whipping through vicious crystal spike warrens, through volcanic tubules, crumbling rock canyons and all kinds of nasty dangerous stuff we’d managed to kill all of the band but the leader who, at the time, was still giving us a bit of difficulty.

Moon and I were on hover speeders, and he, with his rather aerodynamic build, was in the lead. We were very close to our quarry but still not quite in striking distance. Then the scav thrust jumped onto a local freeway and zipped into the nearby small town. I guess he thought he could give us the slip in the narrow streets.

Moon darted away to the left and I stayed on the scav’s tail. The scav took a left and Moon dropped down on him as he turned the corner, his much heavier vehicle making a nice paté of the scav.

There were locals standing around on the street, gawking, as Moon calmly got off his speeder, went up to one of them and asked, “What time do you have?” He was told. “Thank you,” he said as he turned and calmly, stepping carefully over various globs of scav, returned to the speeder and took off.

Like, give me a cheeseburger, eh? No problem, yawn . . . I have to tell you it took me the rest of the day to work off the adrenaline buzz I had worked up. Heh!

“So what makes you so happy?” I asked.

“Not happy, concerned.”

I waited for more . . . dum de dum . . . “Okay,” I said, “why are you concerned?”

“You see the flame vortex in the southern hemisphere?”

“Sure, what’s that green stuff?”

“Some kind of biological weapon. It’s being generated by the vortex.” Moon turned and looked at something off camera. When he turned back, a smooth swiveling motion, he said, “If unchecked it will totally destroy the planetary biology.”

“Ahh,” I said, understanding dawning on me. Starc has people here, family. So does the Babe. “Where’s Starc?”

“I’m here to take you in,” Moon said, turning once again off camera, then, “We’re to rendezvous in Igcenzio.” With that the vid blanked and his Leggo batch began to drop out of orbit.

“Follow him in,” I said. Talon clucked, she’d been doing that lately, “Indeed.”

Mmmmmm, I love cheeseburgers! Talon pops them out whenever I want and she does it just right! Mmmm MM!

Coruscating coronas of multicolored light flashed past Talon’s Visio, the nearly 360 degree information display wrapping the pilot’s seat.

Her current setting was to display, adjusted to human vision, of course, the surrounding radiant energies received. I’m basically sitting here in the pilot’s chair, munching a cheeseburger, manual controls visible before me, sailing through quantum fractional space. I gotta tell you it’s like LSD without any LSD.   🙂

I watched the light show for a few seconds and then Talon announced, “Entering quantum totality in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .” The light show abruptly faded and I found myself sitting in space, that wonderful, so, so black carpet studded with so, so brilliant diamonds. Proxima was away in the distance, a bright speck on the horizontal about 2 o’clock from Wilson’s Star, the system’s centerpiece.

“Take us in, kiddoe.”

“Indeed,” Talon stated factually, then she added, “Leaving our assigned shift coordinates now.” I felt nothing, thanks to Talon’s inertial fractioning, as my POV began to accelerate toward the blip that was Proxima. We were soon in orbit.

Proxima, what a dirtball! The only color other than ruddy brown peeking through the dusky cloud cover were blue green fringes around the pitifully small oceans, not much more than big lakes really,  that dotted the surface below. There were tiny caps at the poles, like some crazy monk with a double tonsure. Heh, figure that out will ya?!

I noticed a green haze covering a large area in the southern hemisphere. It seemed larger after a few more orbits. That can’t be good, I thought. The patch was circular in shape and in the center was a great conflagration, a plume of evil black smoke rising high into the atmosphere.

“We are not alone,” Talon said and showed a translucent figure taking shape off the port bow.

“Hail the boat,” I greeted cordially. There was no reply. “Hail the boat,” I repeated. The vehicle to my left rezzed the rest of the way into the visible spectrum and I recognized it immediately. “Moon, you son of a bitch, say something!”