4.
 Mars rolled over, holding his aching gut, and prepared to crab-walk away.
Diana hastily released an arrow that clipped the angered Angle in one shoulder. The Briton dropped his broadsword and pawed dumbly at the intentionally superficial wound.
Mars took advantage of the moment to summon the light skimmer, which floated by. The wounded native stood gaping. As he held his shoulder, he cried out: “You have stricken Arthur!"
“Let’s find a better place,” Diana said.
Mars punched the All Up Exit, Emergency, and No More Fooling Around buttons.
Diana shrieked: “Hey! What’d you do that for? We wanted to spend a few days—.”
Even as the British plain, with its tumbled rocks and hoar-frosted greenery, dissolved into a uniformly opaque, reddish glowing force field, Mars told her about the object he’d seen. “Floating,” he said, holding his hands apart to show her, “like some kind of spy device. We’ve got to go back and tell Jupiter.”
Diana, who did not like Jupiter, wrinkled her lip but nodded in agreement.
* * * *
Within fifteen minutes, they floated through a docking pore in the side of Survey Ship Olympos. The ship and its crew had orbited Geos a century now. To offset the loneliness of long space duty, the crew were sexually well-integrated and equipped with all the game rooms and other diversions one could imagine. The huge ship even had a bubble-topped athletic field and an Olympic pool overlooking space.
Mars emerged in the Transport Room with a stomach ache, but otherwise unharmed. He was happy to see that Diana had also emerged unscathed from murky Z-space. Noticing that she still carried her bow and quiver, he convulsively clutched his empty sword sheath. Oh no! He’d lost it! He cringed at the thought of King Arthur blithely challenging all comers with an X-Caliber Mark Five Sword and Gamma Blaster. Somehow, he’d have to get back and retrieve it.
Diana, in her unaffected manner, dropped her torn jumpsuit around her ankles and stepped pinkly into a shower stall. As Mars sat on the bench examining his stomach, he heard her humming happily. “I’m hungry,” she yelled. “Aren’t you?” Steam rose and water massaged her from all sides. Then she sang a current hit song from Blue Star Station: “Starry starry night, bah bah bah boo...”
Mars shook his head and grinned. They were so innocent, the bunch of them, he thought, they had it so good, and few realized the risks they were taking. Let them play, he thought, there is nothing any of us can do if Galaxy Central intervenes; let us all have our paradise while it lasts.
* * * *
Jupiter was dismissive that afternoon as he and several of his top officers had beers in the lounge overlooking Athens below and the Home Spiral Galaxy above. “Baloney!” Jupiter said with a belch. Mars noted that the Old Man seemed to be looped most of the time lately. He still chased native women right and left, though, as if he had unlimited energy. “You say you saw an object floating in the treetops. I say you were dreaming.”
“You do sound a bit paranoid,” said Venus, the gorgeous technical librarian. She was safe around Jupiter—they’d had their fling fifty or more years ago, and he now preferred young native girls. This of course left Jupiter’s loyal and long-suffering wife Juno, who served as a dairy supervisor, feeling blue at times; then again, she’d had her fling now and then with the young men—and milkmaids—in her department, so she and Jupiter were said to have something of an accommodation. Divorce would be nasty, in any case, and the paperwork would have to go through the relentless, endless cycles of Galaxy Central bureaucracy. “You’ve been working too hard,” Venus added.
“I hope you’re right,” Mars said darkly.
Apollo, the Chief Surgeon, ran a scanner up and down Mars’s side. “No, I think our boy is in good shape. Any bad dreams lately?” He made a final pass around Mars’s head, shut his gadget off, and returned it to its holder on his belt.
“We’ll clean everything up when it’s time to go,” Jupiter said, bringing his fist down so the salsa chips jumped in their bowls. “But that’s a couple of hundred years from now, so what’s the rush?”
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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