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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (42320)	11/20/1999 12:43:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Respond to of 71178

(installment 4) This, I'm sure you remember from your school junk, was a time warper that was recovered in operational condition from the one unspoiled Archontes site cataloged over four hundred million years ago. The pussies officially requisitioned it for the usual round of futile research, but they had a plan, y'see. The sons of barnacles actually used the infernal thing. They sent probe after probe so far back into the past that Galactic Constabulary couldn't effectively trace the infraction. But I knew both time and location. The Kronos Device is pretty big, so security was a huge pain for the pussies. I waited for my moment, then sorta borrowed a Constabulary frigate and ran it straight into the vortex just ahead of their intended payload. Bet the bad jump made a real mess for them. I got real lucky, is all I can figure. Time theory states that the farther back you jump, and it only goes one way - backwards, the less likely you are to make it to your destination in a recognizable form. I was still breathing when I popped out in the home system. Or more accurately the dirt lot where Home was under construction, and let me tell you it looked like a union site. Garbage everywhere. But Jupiter was really something. The Constabulary made one serious try to get me. A small ship musta tried the same jump, but it came out as a squirt of gamma rays. I was halfway across the system at the time, but even so it fried me pretty good. I'm holding down chicken soup and a triple dose of puke blockers, but my thick beautiful hair is all down the recycler. Doesn't matter, all I need is just one more half hour. Those sonsabitches sent fourteen packages through the Device before giving up. One made it. It was a low-grade-smart bomb <laughter, raised voice> but I got it before it got me! <two minutes of labored breathing> OK so where was I? Right. Kronos. This far across time, the chances of coming out of the jump on your feet were about ten per cent. Of the seventy-some packages the pussies sent, six made it through, and I found'em all. What I found was that the pussies had got six working Spiders into the system - one on Mars (which was a glorious red-and-blue marble, just starting its abortive ecology) and five on the home rock. A Spider is smart and patient and absolute murder. These were crawling around the beach end of the single continent, plasma-grenading any patch of prebiotic slime that threatened to get lucky. There was no way I could land and take on a Spider. My stolen cop unit had some token weapons, y'know to keep up appearances, but nothing that would even make a dent in a Spider. I'd get plasma grenaded on general principle. What I did have was a towing rig and a half tank of fuel. I took one look around, and there were kilometer-sized chunks of nickel-iron as far as the eye could see. I picked out six good ones and let the ship do the rest. Man, cop gear is sweet ... it did all the number crunching and heavy lifting. The whole deal took thirty-one days, and all those primo cop drugs kept body and soul in one bag, y'know? I made six nice fat craters, and five of them splashed a Spider. Only trouble was I missed one; don't ask me how. It bugs me to even think about it. Hurts my pride. <cackling, long racking cough> Hang on, okay? I was running out of time ... the gamma burst had done me in sure as any needle gun, just slower. I'm on borrowed time here, and it's almost out. Well, there simply was no time to grab another rock and drop it on the Spider. This one had gotten educated, anyway.