6.
 The worst happened just days later.
Mars and Apollo tried to convince Jupiter of the danger, but there was no reasoning with the old sot. Jupiter had four Persian dancing girls in the ship’s mead hall, plus a live tiger on a leash, plus two Abyssinian midgets, and a pair of Chinese female acrobats who kept cart wheeling around the huge, smoky, torch-lit room. Mars and Apollo quickly left when they saw it was hopeless.
Gathering some of the ship’s other officers, Mars and Apollo held a clandestine gathering in a small, unobtrusive tavern in a commercial district in the ship’s bowels. “We’ve got to have volunteers,” Apollo said. “We’re all guilty, we’ve all had our fun, but we think G.C. is onto us. We’ve got to get all the loose debris collected—swords, guns, cars, objects from one era carried into another era where they don’t belong. Waste—containers that could be traced back to Survey.”
The men and women agreed. A somber mood spread through the ship. Word got to Juno, and from her to her husband. Jupiter came flying out of his harem in a drunken rage, waving a stray power connector shaped like a gold lightning bolt. “Insurrection!” he bellowed, holding up his pants with one hand and the connector as if he were going to hurl it like a sword. Then he tripped over his jumpsuit and landed face first, unconscious, more from drink than the fall. Several crew members carried him to Juno’s quarters.
That very night, Mars, who was sleeping with two slender blondes from the Celtic wilds, sat up with a start. His sharp warrior senses told him there was a commotion going on not far away. The nude girls slumbered peacefully as Mars wrapped himself in a bed sheet and tiptoed into the corridors. Two crewmen were just running past, and he stopped them. They saluted and told him what had just happened.
* * * *
Diana did not relish the company of men, because she had dedicated herself to a young CLF officer from a good family, and after her Survey tour she planned to marry him in his native Gold Pendant system. Meanwhile, she slaked her needs in bed with the occasional attractive young female, preferably an athlete who could wrestle first and then make love. Diana liked the wrestling, and the Spartans were good at it, but they stole everything they could, so the gentler Athenian heterae often had to do…although they did not wrestle, but discussed philosophy endlessly, until Diana fell asleep.
Tonight, however, she turned her entire attention on the ship’s veterinary nursery, for a lioness had just died while giving birth to cubs. Births always caused a commotion among the staff. With the mother gone, Diana and her staff spent hours cuddling and petting and feeding the tiny cubs.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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