At the fringes of my imagination I am pushing my little spaceships engines to the limit. A large pirate ship is trying to catch me. They want the meager amount of ore in the hold. I duck behind a small energized nebula, and they fall into my trap. They can see me and I can see them thru the deadly clouds. They try to accelerate around the obstruction and I tap my hand-held calculator using sensor read-outs for the numbers information I desperately need. In fifteen seconds I plug it into the claim launcher and let it clean up my hastily done math. “SOLUTION CONFIRMED” flashes on the secondary view-screen. I hit the plunger and my last claim marker leaves its tube under the left engine fairing. It flits away just outside of 186,000 miles per second leaving a bright arc that stabs into the beautifully colored clouds. I maintain my course and speed and watch as they do the same, gaining on me from thirty degrees back around the gas ball. The only thing I touch is the zoom button. The antagonist suddenly vents all atmosphere, and liquids. She relinquishes her arc and begins to cartwheel into the void. The claim marker did its job perfectly and skewered the Pirate ship dead center. The beacon begins to ping at me. I’ll have to get that thing back. There’s a ball of compressed carbon nearby that I need to plant it on.
At the fringes of my imagination I wipe my plate off and set it on the ground next to the warm embers. Here, near the edge of the mesa, there is a weathered crack 5 yards away to my slight left. I turn on my collapsible stool 12 degrees left and pick up my hard-beam plasma rifle. I hear the unmistakable rumble of a terra-bike echoing up from the valley between the mesas. He’s headed north. When I came thru last night I put my calling card right on the center line just beyond the last monuments of these “table-top-mountains”. I pull the multi-bolt back, twist it 90 degrees clockwise, push it forward, 90 degrees anti-clockwise, pull it back, and release it. As I level it the bi-pod pops out automatically and I hold the adjust button down until I find my angle of comfort. Rifle-butt settles into shoulder and the ear-piece in my right ear hisses to life. The transmitter is down there near my “card”. The bike clears the foot hills of the mesa and then the last monument. I hear the rpms drop. I slowly spell my last name just like it is in bright red spray paint down there. Then, right on queue, the dual-piston spiral-spinner engine roars to maximum power. He has seen my card. I have pulled the trigger. My goggles dampen down the glare that erupts just beyond the dry-sites as a plasma bolt 4 feet long and 4 inches wide heads to target. With a shower of sparks a black fan is burnt into the asphalt. The concussion of the bolt and blast knock boulders from the nearby monument. I hear them hit the ground with cracks and thuds. The last outlaw is gone. In his wake a lizard skitters across black, hot, snow.
At the fringes of my imagination I am watching the “Titanium Swan” from the cool sandy beach. She sits just this side of the horizon. Her light show has dulled from the pre-dawn extravagance that it was half an hour ago. The neck reticulates. “S-curving” back over the main fuselage. Metal-feathered wings stab up into the sky. The whine of her engines ripples across the calm surface of the bay startling bait fish. The body tilts back at 45 degrees. In one massive motion the neck stabs forward whistling the bridgehead skyward. The wings twist forward and sweep down squeezing water from the very air. The engines ignite thrusters boiling almost 4 million gallons of seawater to steam instantly. The tips of the wings almost touch the sea as the most beautiful launch one can ever witness happens before my eyes. Rainbows dance thru the steam-clouds as her lights surge on her engines exertions. They mix with the suns rainbow and they shake like timpani and koto membranes. The landing gear push off from the submerged pad and tickle back into the exhaust plumes just enough to tip the body slightly upward for the second bite of the wings into fresh air. The fuel mixture adjusts to a clean blue flame and she levels out into a flight path. The wings will not have to beat a third time today. She picks up speed and just before going over the horizon turns nose up and heads for the stars.
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The landing gear push off from a submerged launch-pad. It is open to the sea by a notched wall. Sea creatures are kept away by an uncomfortable yet weak electrical field, a biologically tuned sub-surface light show, and a concoction of harmless natural repellants derived from plants and animals found only in the oceans. The resulting salty powder that falls back into the sea is filtered out in a special system built into the launch pad. The salt goes to the public and the resulting clouds of steam go into the air to become percipitation. The fuel used is a special isotope of hydrogen that burns without forming soot in other elements that make up seawater. The only by-products are Water, potassium, and chloride, all in the correct concentrations.
November 17, 2009 at 5:50 p.m.One launch a day is what it will take to get the salt concentration of the worlds oceans back into acceptable ranges in seven years. (I'm a bit of a futurist I guess.)
I'd bet that the instantaneous boiling of almost 4 million gallons of seawater upon takeoff startled the baitfish too, just before it vaporized them and every other living underwater creature and sea bird in a couple mile radius.......
November 16, 2009 at 10:44 a.m.