Star Travels Tales of Science Fiction

W
elcome to
the first Keyboard
Books collection, an imprint of RainWood Press. In this collection
Keyboard Books offers four short tales from future past and future
present, all from the field of science fiction. Eventually you will
find Keyboard Books that are dedicated to fantasy, horror, ghost
stories, superheroes and more. These short stories speculate beyond
the ordinary. Between these virtual pages you’ll find a time
travelling P.I., a lemonade stand to quench your alien thirst, an
extraterrestrial toy, and a future, if somewhat sinister, Christmas
adventure. Four timeless stories star in this issue. At the end of
this compendium you’ll find the author’s biography and a little
more about Keyboard Books. Thank you for travelling the story
telling universe with Keyboard.

Press Enter,

Rhea Rose

Table of
C
ontents

Introduction

1.Jack Sprott:
Continuum Cop

2. The Lemonade
Stand

3.
Shadow
Hunter

4.
Chronos’
Christmas

All rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This collection is a
work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.

Keyboard Books

Star Travels

Copyright © 2014 by Rhea Rose.

Smashwords Editon

Cover Image from Shutterstock, 2014. Images
by

artists at Stock.xchange.com and
Deviantart.com, 2012.

Cover designs by RainWood Press.

‘Jack Sprott: Continuum
Cop’
;
first publication,
2014, in
Star Travels
,
Keyboard Books, an imprint of RainWood Press, Vancouver, British
Columbia.

‘The Lemonade Stand’; a version of this
story appeared in
TaleBones, Fall
2001
, Fairwood Press, Seattle, Washington.
USA.

‘Shadow Hunter’; A version of this
story appeared in
On Spec, volume
1
, Edmonton, Alberta, 1989.

‘Chronos’ Christmas’; a version of this
story appeared in
Tesseract
s,
edited by Judith Merril, Press Porcepic,Toronto, Ontario, 1985,
and
Christmas Forever
, edited
by David Hartwell, Tor, New York, 1993.

The Electronic edition of
Star Travels
published by RainWood
Press December, 2014
.

Jack
Sprot:
Continuum
Cop

Did you kill my
wife ass-hole? You? Or you?

The first bell of the day rang.

I scrutinized the passive faces of the
Lincoln High students as they scurried in the hall; I looked for
ones with wife-killer written on their faces.

They all looked like little murderers to
me.

It was 2420. I was locked inside a
one-way viewing time-tank. I held my cigarette and inhaled deeply.
I was smoking again
after some delinquent
bastard had followed me back to my twenty-second century home and
killed Marie.

Before she’d died, Marie had purchased a
surprise birthday present for me. She left it wrapped on the top
shelf of the bedroom closet, where I’d found it the day after her
funeral.

A
time-P.I.T.C.H.

The acronym stood
for
Portable Incremental Temporary Chrono
Hopper—
the gadget became
my last link to Marie. She’d given me the top of
the line model for my P.I. work; it had programmable voices. With
the time-pitch I could move freely into different time-zones
without having to wait days or even weeks to book a
time-tank.

“Two minutes to maximum mobility,
baby,” said Rhonda, the voice programmed into the
pitch
.
“Remember to wear your time-fogs. I can’t save you every time
you forget to put those glasses on.”

After Marie’s death, I’d found
Rhonda’s voice a nice distraction. Lately, though, she wouldn’t
shut up
,
but she
was right about the time-fogs. If I forgot to wear them during a
time-transport then I slowed right down, unable to
move—much.

“Don’t look now, baby,” she said
warningly, but someone’s entering your time-tank.”I freaked as I
realized someone
had
entered the rear of the tank. I cursed myself, cursed my
luck, and cursed the intruder as I stood mostly immobile, only able
to smoke. I remained helpless while a hand slipped around to the
left inside liner pocket of my black leather duster coat and stole
my time-pitch.

Rhonda disappeared and so did my
chance of getting home.

When the time-tank finally released me,
I stepped out into the hall and noted the
slick
eyeballs of the security cameras
observing me. A bantam-bot, about the size of a house cat,
skittered up to me and squeaked, “Halt.”

I lifted my Doc Martians
and anticipated the delicious crunching sound the
little bot would make when I crushed it, but the little robot
scanned the ID on the sole of the hovering boot and scuttled
away.

Disguised as a teacher, my
job brought me to Lincoln High, school for the underage criminal.
Tucked up under the black leather sleeve of my duster, a syringe
loaded with nanobots seething to create medical mayhem awaited
their target, any target, but at the moment I didn’t care about any
of that. I needed a coffee and a smoke, or I was going to lose it,
and then I remembered that this century banned coffee.

I wanted to bite
something.

The tank released me, and I eventually found
my assigned classroom, the only one in the school. Slowly I slid
the protective metal shutter back into the wall-pocket to peer
through the one-way viewing door.

While I stared out across the faces of time’s
worst future criminals, (these guys hadn’t even been born yet in my
time zone, not even their parents had been born yet), I thought
about Marie’s words of encouragement on the day I’d told her about
my desire to take on a second job and go into the field of private
investigation time-travel. Being the wife of a cop is never easy,
but she showered me with kisses, stroked my hair, hugged me until I
couldn’t breathe, and then pulled me into bed. We’d dreamed about
the extra cash I’d make as a P.I taking us to a hot, warm country
to soak our bodies in rum, sand, and soft kisses.

Marie was no dame, she was a real woman. A
fresh breath of partnership in a polluted world of shallow women
all of whom I’d had the unfortunate luck to find until I’d found
her.

I slid out a teeny tiny heat grenade and
thought of her as I melted a hole in the classroom door.

The
‘
modification
’ of these bad guys in
their
future unraveled their lives
in their pasts. If I rubbed them out at some point along their
future time continuum after they’d already committed their heinous
deed then eventually the perp got a disease in his or her past,
something like; cancer, ALS, heart attack, or some other terrible
fate took them out before they could ever commit the future bad
deed—it was just like the perp never existed. This time dissolution
resulted in some minor cause and affect adjustments in the
time-stream, but nothing anyone ever noticed, or cared much about.
We, in the business, called it the anti-karma effect, “What doesn’t
go around, doesn’t come around.”

Offing my wife’s murderer anywhere along this
future timeline would do the trick. The killer would die in his
past before he could meet and kill Marie in his future. My job
required me to find the most discreet time and place on the
spectrum of this time- continuum to make that happen.

A rough headcount revealed thirty-two
students to shake up with my kick-ass method of demanding
respect
.
Someone in this very
group of adolescents had taken the life of my wife.

I felt like offing them all.

To their credit the twenty-fifth century
school district equipped me with a lock an’ load brain boggle which
allowed me to deal with any advantages the bad kids from the future
might possess. The long strands of blue and purple nano-hair plugs
of the boggle rooted directly into my frontal lobes. Tugging a
strand of that hair enabled me to run an update on the drugs and
weapons I might encounter in this classroom.

“Key-rised,” I said under my breath as the
update flashed before my eyes. I wished I had some of those drugs
for myself, even one caffeine pill and I’d feel a whole lot better
about things. My hand shook. I’d pre-wired my coat and
underclothing with a flexible skin grid to counter an electrical
attack, but that might not be enough.

I did a personal weapons check: gun, knives,
shirikan blades, pyro-spray, lighters, chopsticks, smoke bomb and
one mini grenade, all tucked sweetly and neatly into the pockets of
the lining in my coat. Marie used to take care of my weapons for
me, polishing my grenades, sharpening my shirikan.

My practical gal.

I stuck my head through the hole and grinned.
I greeted them with, “Sit down. Shut up.” I kicked out the remains
of the door. “Boys and girls, today there’s no door.” A girl in the
back row fainted.

“Ah, I see I got somebody’s attention. Wake
her up!”

Three students jumped to the task.

“Do it gently!” I ordered. I held up the huge
semi-automatic syringe. “Any of you future-fucks not know what this
is?”

Silence.

“Black death, cholera, ebola and probably
something worse all wrapped up in a nifty little package. I patted
the dart and slipped it expertly back up my sleeve. I scanned the
class, looking for the leader of the obstreperous pack of students.
I walked down the aisle leaving a wake of turned heads.

Behind me I heard someone—

“Why don’t you take your big dart dispenser
and shove it up your skinny ass,” an unidentifiable kid
suggested.

“History lesson,” another voice shouted and
the next thing I knew the class jumped on top of the desks,
hollering like old time TV actors on the warpath. The dart slid
free of my sleeve, and I shot a little of its radioactive yellow up
into the ceiling. “Don’t let a single drop hit you.”