Chapter 20

“Petty officer Karen,” said Alan as he patted the slab side of the powerful machine of war, “It’s not getting that’s the problem, it’s the keeping.”

“He stole them,” Eris nearly shouted.

“I stole them from a thief, which makes that a legal purchase, right Petty officer?”

“Right sir!”

“You have them all hypnotized, that’s got to be it,” said Eris.

“Maybe just a little bit, ma’am,” said CPO Bryant.

“We’ll be backing up to the hangar door on the back of this mining asteroid. We need everything not bolted down brought aboard, and the stuff that is bolted down needs to be unbolted and brought aboard.”

“Aye Aye sir!”

They worked for hours, dragging everything they thought would be useful or evidence out of the mine and stowing it securely in the SS Peake. The Peake had an enormous belly and even with two brand new fighters on board, there was plenty of room for more. “Long range scan shows someone approaching,” said the Captain of the Peake on Alan’s headset.

“Thanks Elliot. Everyone, back on the boat!” called Alan and his crew quickly grabbed the last few items and headed for the Peake. “Section chiefs, I want a good role call and I want it now. We gotta shit and git.”

“Shit and git?” asked Eris as she rummaged around in a case of rations that they just liberated. They liberated about 25 cases of MEALS, PREPARED.

“It’s Navy talk, you wouldn’t understand it.”

Eris tore open a pouch that promised to be STEW, BEEF. SAVORY, and inspected the contents. “Sissy says you like these,” and she sent an individually wrapped portion of fruit cake sailing slowly toward Alan. Just as it reached its midpoint in its journey, the Peake opened her throttles, and the fruit cake made a hard turn and rocketed through the spacemen and slammed against a bulkhead.

“I get it now!” cried Eileen. The fruit cake zipping through the briefing room illustrated Dr. Aldini’s device perfectly. The fruit cake was relatively motionless, and the world was racing past it. A perfect example of Dr. Aldini’s device.

“Yar!” came the response from a few of the spacemen. They just cleaned out a pirate’s treasure chest. They were now the pirates! Alan let the troops enjoy the moment, but they soon headed off to their bunks.

Alan sat down at his terminal and made a list of the items they liberated from Scarver, using the notes his crew gave him. Then it was a quick review looking for duplicates and by the time he was done, his eye was getting blurry. After a couple of hours of cataloging their take, he saved the document to the network folder, then to a removable drive, and then he sent a copy of the list to Pandora.

It was then that he realized that the room had rotated. Many rooms in the crew portion of the SS Peake rotate with acceleration and deceleration to make the deck down and the chairs useful. When coasting, which was most of the time, they all rotated to a horizontal orientation. At that moment they were increasing speed, so the handholds on the side of the main hallway were now a ladder. Luckily, being the mission commander, his bunk was close to the briefing room. He climbed down the ladder in the dimmed hallway, and he found that a light was on in his bunk. He slid in and found that Eris was in his bed and was reading a novel. Alan was still wearing the underwear he had on after turning his environment suit to life support, so undressing for bed merely meant pulling off his socks and his t-shirt.

“Pandora isn’t mad,” said Eris as she read.

“Mad about what?”

“Us.”

“What ‘us’ are you talking about? There is no ‘us.’”

Eris waited for Alan to get under the covers and said, “Most women would be angry if they found out that their husband was in bed with their sister. Naked.”