9: Fightin' Time, Part Three
Last time on We’re Not in Edison City Anymore, Captain Happily Married had just defeated John Cute with the help of the Wombat, the Green Moth, the Mauve Mosquito, and others in the band of heroes that defend the city! As our heroes regroup after their stirring victory, we jump thirty years back and another dimension to the lunar colony where Sam Superlative Jr is fighting off an alien invasion, but first a quick commercial note:
Thirty-Seven Years Ago, Humanoid Colony on the Veronii One moon of Verin Prime
Sam Superlative Jr. couldn’t tell how the battle as a whole was going; from his perspective; it was all dots on a screen and thunder in the distance. The moments seemed to crawl by as he worked the targeting controls and fired at the dots, and as each moment passed he wondered if he should intervene in a more direct way. He had the run of superpowers, flight, super-hearing, super-strength, laser-vision, and a few extras he’d never gotten around to trying; why not use them? On the other hand, he was on an unfamiliar world’s moon fighting aliens and he had no idea what they could do. He’d already talked to a squid-being who could mind-read. That was one thing he couldn’t do, and it gave him the willies.
Then everything changed in an instant; he heard a terrifically loud boom much closer than the others, and the door of his gunnery station flew open. “Uh-” Sam said.
He heard running footsteps in the corridor outside, and Cork, the leader he’d spoken to earlier, appeared in the open doorway. “We’re evac-ing, come on!”
Sam hurried after him. “Where are we going to?” It seemed the most pertinent question; he had a hundred others, but he figured he’d stick with that for now.
“Don’t know,” Cork said as others rushed around him and the whole group kept on down the corridor. “Not here though. They’ve breached our defenses and they’ll be landing in five.”
“Hours?”
“Minutes. Our only shot’s a blind transport. We’ve got to get to assembly stations now.”
They turned a corner and found a large room with a single square pad in the center. “Oh, good, we found ours,” Cork said. “Right, everyone in the center. You too, whatever your name is.”
“Wait,” Sam said. “A blind transport? Does that mean what I think-”
“It does,” Cork said brusquely. “I don’t know where you’ll end up. That said, neither will they. Good luck.”
“Wait, wait-” Sam began, but he was caught in the flow of people running onto the pad. Cork pressed a button on the wall, and everything flashed. In that instant Sam saw creatures in heavy armor storm into the room, guns blazing.
Another flash, and he saw Cork falling, and he moved to help, and then flash
And he was standing on a field of a light blue sort of grass, underneath a pale green sky.
Sam looked around. He wasn’t alone. Further down the field, a large brownish animal, like a cow but a few sizes too big, stood amidst the grass calmly chewing on it. The animal raised its massive head and looked at him with great dark eyes.
“Groo?” the animal said, in a deep querying tone.
“You got me, bud,” Sam said, and laid down on the grass. All of a sudden he felt very tired. He had no way of knowing that this was a usual symptom of non-targeted intergalactic transport, nor that this is one among other reasons why this method is highly regulated and rarely used in standard systems except in extreme emergencies. What he did know was that he was alone again, he had no idea where he was, and he didn’t even know what “Groo” meant.
On the bright side, he reflected, he was still alive. And that meant he had a chance of getting back to Earth. As he stared up into the pale light-green sky, Sam almost smiled. “There’s always that,” he said. “At least I got Earth.”
“Groo,” agreed the animal.