Bubba And the Aliens
Homecoming!

Homecoming

“It only took about six hours of actual flight time between jumps to get from Obujutte to Lakanica,” I started. “We left Bubba and Mikimo alone to say goodbye. They realized whatever happened between them on Obujutte could not carry over when she was back at home. Bubba might be a warrior and a hero, but he was also an earthling and holds no significant value in a diplomatic marriage.”

“If we had only known,” Dingo stated with a shake of his head.

“Wait, you are some long lost space prince?” Janet asked as she looked at Bubba. I assumed she was channeling any number of sci-fi movies where the hero happened to be just it.

Bubba shook his head. “No nothing like it, Dingo is referring to something else.”

“What?” she demanded.

“We need to kind of stick to the timeline for this to make any sense,” I said. “If we jump ahead and reveal what we learned out of sequence, we are bound to skip details that fill in the gaps in the story. We will get to Dingo’s vague referral in a little while. We will tell you about Hello in a little while. We will even get to the Elvi and Sesterisia in a little while, but right now we were taking the princess to see her father and collecting our blood money.”

“You already told me about the Elvi,” she reminded me.

“Yeah, you know about when they took the princess and when we rescued her, but we aren’t done with them yet. One of the things we did not tell you about, I forgot you would not know until now, was how Carmenelli made his money. His family owns huge appliance farms on Elvi.

“I know you are going to say appliances are made in factories, not farms, but it is not true on Elva. Toasters, vacuums, refrigerators, skillets, deep fryers, and whatever else you can think of are raised alive as animals on Elva.”

“Why does the word Fridge have a letter D in it, but refrigerator does not?” Bubba asked, seriously.

Janet did not bother to look at him. “What does this have to do with the princess on Lakanica?”

“Nothing, but it is going to be important later on in the story. I forgot to mention it when we were talking about Elva the last time. It’s important because some of the vacuum cleaners can be trained to be aggressive and used to attack people, as we would discover.”

“I replace it hard to believe,” Janet replied with a look of distrust.

“You’ve seen the marks,” Arlo said, lifting his shirt again.

“Not that they attacked you with a vacuum cleaner, but that they are alive. I admit when you said they threatened the princess with vacuums I dismissed it. How much damage could a vacuum do really?”

“They could suck out an eyeball and make you blind,” Arlo responded. “They have fangs on the end of their hoses where they grab hold and start sucking. Once they make it through the outer layer of skin, they can start doing real damage to internal organs.”

Janet shook her head dismissively. “We are talking about vacuum cleaners Arlo.”

“And I’ll never look at another one the same,” he said.

“The return of the princess was made without fanfare,” I started to change course. “Lakanica does not have a space station to dock ships. We parked in orbit and took a shuttle down to the surface. Mikimo had kept her appearance similar to Hello. She would enter the palace in disguise and then be kept out of sight for several days, or weeks until her father felt comfortable another attempt would not be made. Bubba chose to remain on the ship.”

“The week on Obujutte had given her a taste of freedom she had never known,” Bubba said sadly. “I felt like we had rescued her; only to send her to a different prison on her own planet. I could not bear to watch her walk back through the doors of her father’s house.”

“The Herpes came down with us,” I explained. “Since there is not really a tourist trade on Lakanica, we were given a few cabins in town which are set aside for pilgrims. Bipodecus would have to give a full account of all which had transpired. We would have to sign some paperwork to set up accounts at one of the banks to have our money put into.

“Arlo, Dingo, and I went to meet the king with Bipodecus as well as Mikimo. I have to admit, she seemed very forlorn standing in her father’s presence. Both of them thanked us for our efforts before she was whisked away in a gaggle of attendants. They would remove her disguise and dress her properly for her position as princess.

“All in all, it seemed very,” I paused to search for the right word.

“Anticlimactic,” Arlo supplied.

I nodded my agreement and could see Dingo doing the same. We all fell into silence for several moments. I met the gaze of each of my friends. We thought it was over at that point. It should have been over.

“I guess I need to tell this part,” Arlo said quietly. He looked at his beer bottle for a moment, then set it down on the coffee table. He stood up to pace as he spoke. He wiped his face with his hands and let out a long sigh.

“Hello showed up three days after everyone else left. I was able to send messages back and forth to Bubba on the ship each day. Think of it like email for outer space. Anyway, I was on the verge of giving up on her returning and figured I would just hang out until the guys could come and pick me up.

“She told me she had some family issues to deal with. It took a little longer than she expected. Her appearance, after an initial bit of relief, left me feeling a little empty too.”

“Why were you relieved?”

“I haven’t had many good relationships with women,” Arlo admitted. “I know what I am. I’m tall and geeky. I do not do well with emotions, talking about feelings, or even making future plans for that matter. I’m easily distracted by technology or historic discovery, or arcane scientific studies, or, by women who pay attention to me in spite of those things.

“I wanted some type of closure with Hello. The week away from her let me convince myself she too was just another distraction who had entered my life. From our long talks about so many things in the universe from politics, science, religion, philosophy, and whatever else came up had left me yearning for more knowledge in so many different areas.

“Jack was wrong when he said I could settle down somewhere on earth and write this off as some wild adventure. When we agreed to help rescue the princess, we were thinking small potatoes. The amount of money we could make would set us up for lives of leisure here, but they would be empty lives.

“Dingo wants to see and experience the universe. Although my desire is for much different things than his, I want to go out there and see those different worlds. The Palladians are much more along the lines of what I aspire to. Discovering and studying new worlds, seeing new technologies and understanding how they work, replaceing wonder in things people on other planets take for granted.

“It’s what I want now. Somewhere deep inside I knew Hello did not long for those same things. She too seemed to love knowledge, but she was a student of life, of wherever fate took her. Sadly, I felt I had exhausted the depth of her knowledge. There were hundreds of things I wanted to know she did not have answers to.

“At the same time, I felt it was wrong to have used her, and then to simply abandon her as if I had grown beyond her. I don’t know what I was really hoping for in the end. A sweet gentle parting where neither of us was hurt was the idea in my head. I couldn’t walk away from her without saying goodbye. It wasn’t going to be easy or quick though. I sent Bubba a message. I would need a couple of days.”

“I told him it was fine,” Bubba replied. “Everyone else was still down on the planet. Mikimo had begged her father to show Jack and them some of the wonders of their world. Crystal caverns and waterfalls and giant trees and stuff if I remember correctly.” We agreed he had.

“Hello and I had a nice reunion,” Arlo stated. “She arrived in the afternoon. We ate a wonderful dinner together and then walked along the lakeshore. We talked about the stars, about the planets I had not seen and did not even know about yet, about the mysteries of the universe. I think she could sense I was trying to say goodbye, but she was not making it easy.

“We went back to my tent and climbed into bed together. It was wonderful and amazing all over again,” he said with a sigh. “The next day changed everything.”

“Why was that?” Janet inquired.

“We had breakfast and then Hello asked me if I wanted to go to Lakanica and catch up with everyone. We could catch a shuttle up to the space station and book passage. I sent Bubba a message and told him it was what we would do. I packed up my things in a couple of bags and we caught a shuttle. I wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on. I should have remembered there was no spaceport at Lakanica. Being new to commercial space travel I wandered around a couple of the shops to kill time while Hello got our tickets.

“We walked up to a ship. She gave them a couple of boarding passes and we went inside. There weren’t stewards or anything. I didn’t see any rows of seats, but I followed Hello along until she walked through a doorway. When I stepped through, the door slid closed and I was surrounded by several people with guns,” he relayed sadly. “I was a bit surprised, to say the least. I wasn’t carrying a weapon of any kind.”

“What did they want?”

“They wanted to know who I worked for. I started telling them about the engineering job over at the factory. It confused them and they told me to shut up. Finally, Hello turned towards me and explained they wanted to know who had hired us to kidnap the princess.”

“You didn’t kidnap the princess.” Janet stated.

“No, we didn’t,” Bubba replied. “We rescued her and took her home, but it wasn’t the way they saw it.”

“Hello was not from Tzatziki,” Arlo explained. “She’s Ozkerian. Somewhere, way beyond the level we had been working, was a grand conspiracy. It involved both Lakanica and Elva and creating a disruption between the planets because of some sort of trade alliance. There is a substance on Lakanica which is used for magic on Oz. It’s called Methetractium. What little was produced was part of a trade agreement with Elva. Because magic is common on Oz, they want to add to their supply. Because of the reverence for the planet on Lakanica, not much of it is mined, or harvested, or whatever it is. I never got into the details of the process.”

“It seems like an odd departure for you,” Janet observed. “You usually are all about the details. What do the Elvi use Methetractium for?”

“I don’t know why the Elvi want it. At the time, it did not seem important,” Arlo relayed. “The whole thing with Mikimo was a paper tiger. Someone on Oz had suggested the kidnapping of a Lakanican girl to present to Elvis. Carmenelli had approved the idea but left the details to others. It was not until Mikimo was delivered to his home, and the envoy came to demand her return that he figured out she was a princess.”

“She was just a pawn in some sinister plan,” Bubba lamented.

“Initially, the Ozkerians were going to send their own force in to rescue the princess and return her to Lakanica. They could accuse the Elvi and suggest the king break his agreement with Elva. They assumed the Lakanica would have their own plan for this, but also assumed failure because they are not geared towards those kinds of operations, nor are most of the other races. The Ozkerians had planned to do this just a few days before the fifty-year jubilee. This would also cause embarrassment for Carmenelli, as they intended to send the video of the rescue to Elvis himself, believing he would never approve of the actions Carmenelli had taken.”

“Why didn’t Hello stop you?” Janet wondered.

“She was supposed to. But, because she is built like a pixie gymnast, Jack insisted she be far away from the action during the raid. Warning Carmenelli might have prevented the rescue, but it would have also meant a much greater risks in a later rescue attempt if she were moved to a more secure location. She saw trying to divert us was not going to work either, so she sent reports of our actions back to her planet.

“Carmenelli was freaking out anyway because he had been sold the idea Mikimo would be a docile ragdoll who would do what she was told. It was how she was treated in the palace of her father.”

“Why did they capture you?” Janet asked Arlo.

“Because they did not believe Hello, the spy in our midst, when she told them we were just a bunch of dumb earthlings. We were working on our own, not part of some unknown phantom interest who was trying to get the Methetractium. She had been playing the part of a fun-loving Tzatzikian to gather information from me and the rest of the crew to feed back to her handlers. It was all a cover. I don’t even know if half the things she told me were true, or just what she made up to fill the time and answer my questions. She tried to get a quick response team to Obujutte to capture all of us and our ship before we presented the princess to her father, but they took too long to decide to do so. Besides, Bipodecus had been making regular reports of our progress. It would be difficult for the Ozkerians to claim they had saved her. By the time they got to Obujutte, everyone was gone but me. They thought it was a brilliant move. Basically, I had to convince them we were just a bunch of dumb earthlings with a bit of luck.”

“Bubba would have been better for it,” Dingo quipped with a smile.

“Anybody but the brain of the group,” Bubba responded, pointing at Arlo. “I’m sure you could have convinced them within a few minutes of opening your beer swilling gob.”

“Well, it only took four or five hours of questioning before we arrived at Ozkeria. They took me down to the planet and opened my head up with some spell. They were able to flash the memories up on a video screen and see everything through my eyes. Once they figured out we were only in it for the money, they decided to let me go and send me back to earth.”

“Wait, they sent you back to earth?” Janet asked in confusion.

“Well, no, but it was their plan in the beginning. I assumed they would just kill me. I guess the same thing with the galactic council happened there. Some folks did want me dead and gone, others said just to dump me back on my planet. I should not be punished for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were going to do some kind of memory wiping thing to my brain and then drop me back on earth about a week ago. I heard mention of Los Angeles, but luckily it never happened.”

“Well, why not?” Janet almost demanded.

“Because every planet you go to, somebody is not happy with the way things are going and they think they can do it different and better if they have the chance. There is conflict on every planet of some sort. Someone who was sympathetic to my plight spirited me away out of the prison.”

“Helped you break out, you mean?” Janet assumed.

Arlo shook his head. “No, I mean they used magic to transport me out of my cell and onto a shuttle. They took me to Sesterisia and dropped me there. They said I would not be expected to be on that planet. They sent some kind of coded message to Bubba to tell him to get everyone back on board and go to Sesterisia to get me as soon as possible.”

“They should not have been able to break you out,” Janet said thoughtfully.

I thought it was an odd observation and turned to look at her questioningly.

She saw the look and closed her eyes for a moment. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly through her nose before meeting my eyes. “I was just thinking about fantasy books and stories. There should be some spell on the jail to keep Arlo there. Like the thorn bushes and the dragon in sleeping beauty or something like it, if magic actually was a real thing,” she explained.

“I would tend to agree with your argument,” Arlo opined. “I don’t have any idea how it was done. As a rule, I tend to not believe in magic. It does actually work on Oz, in my experience. You can see why we might not be welcome there. Besides my escape, we weakened their bargaining position a great deal because they were not the ones who saved the princess. They were still trying to get the Lakanicans to break the deal with Elva. I don’t think we should go back.”

“You all got back on the ship and went to Sesterisia,” Janet prompted.

“Well, not all of us,” Bubba said. “I was on the ship when the message came in about Arlo being on Sesterisia. I got in touch with Jack. There was no context to the message, no reason why Arlo had left Obujutte and gone to Sesterisia, just the message he was there if we wanted him.”

“Why didn’t you contact the ship?” Janet asked Arlo. “You were doing so on Obujutte. You should have been able to do the same on Sesterisia if they had the equipment.”

“They did, but back to the magic working on Oz. I had some type of spell placed on me. It affected my memory for a couple of days. Just a short-term memory thing, I guess. I had no idea how I had gotten to Sesterisia, or even where I was. I remembered going to sleep in my tent, waiting for Hello, and waking up in a seaside bungalow on a different planet. I later discovered I had been asleep for a couple of days. By the time I contacted the ship from the hotel, Jack told me they were on the way.”

“Then how do you know what happened to you on Oz?

“The spells wear off after a little while when you are not on the planet.

“What was Sesterisia like?” Janet asked.

“Let me give you a little back story before we get to Sesterisia,” I suggested. When I had her attention, I continued. “Osned had been living the life of a celebrity on Pilifin, as I think we mentioned much earlier tonight.” She nodded. “Well, after spending all that time on earth, being influenced by our television programs, movies, and tabloids, he had a much different perspective of what celebrity meant than what the citizens of Pilifin were accustomed to.”

“He blew his money on venom and refused to end his relationship with Dahlia, who was not only an earthling but an undersized and handicapped one in the eyes of the Pilifin monarchy and media. He could not be portrayed as a hero if he continued to live as he was. Dahlia was going to be sent back to earth and abandoned to her old life while he went through rehab on his planet.”

“He wasn’t having any of it,” Dingo opined. “He had too much time on earth being taught independent thinking. Which is what got him into trouble in the first place with the towels and all,” he pointed out, wagging a drunken finger.

“About the time we arrived on Obujutte, Osned and Dahlia took one of his family’s spaceships, with a couple of his buddies. They left Pilifin to come looking for us. He went to the mining planet we had originally been scheduled to be dropped off at and found out we never made it there. Dahlia began doing some research on Galactic news channels and saw the bit about the fight on Octavia. From there they began tracking us down, a few days behind us.

“They found out about the trip to Elva and the murdered citizens. They discovered Gilfoy and Elsa were wanted for questioning by the authorities there. We were not suspect,” I said pointing around the room.

“Why did he even care what happened to you?”

“Well, he felt a bit responsible for the whole thing,” Bubba stated. “See, Osned is not good at golf either. He had topped his second shot. It had only dribbled about fifty feet down the fairway. He was concentrating on not making the same mistake when he was hit by my drive. If he had connected solidly with his second shot, he probably would have been in the creek in front of the fairway when I teed off.”

“Apparently,” I intervened, “his interaction with his family and the way they treated him led him to believe they might not have been completely truthful when they told us, and him, they were sending us back to earth. Once he found out they sent us to the mining planet, he came looking for us.”

“Oh, the government lies!” Arlo exclaimed. “Big surprise there! Bubba is right. Osned felt partly responsible. He wanted to make sure we got back to earth safely. He made it to Obujutte to see me taken by the Ozkerians. He did not want to interfere with it, not knowing what the full situation was. He had some old buddy from his planet he had been partying with who came along for the ride. This guy could do crazy things with computers and was able to hack into the galactic system and figure out Jack owned Janet’s Lair, and where it was.”

“So, they followed you to Sesterisia?”

“Not exactly,” I answered. “When they first figured it out, we were still on Lakanica. They headed our way. By the time they arrived, we were gone. They were able to catch up with the Herpes. George, Sven, and Michael had collected their money from the bank and booked passage to Byano Two. It’s some sort of farming cooperative planet. They are going to set up an import/export firm to broker business deals for the farmers on the planet. The story we got, third hand, was they had had enough of adventure for a little while.”

“But you guys haven’t,” Janet observed.

“Some of us have,” Bubba replied. “I’m about ready to settle back down somewhere and forget about all this other stuff, but Jack says I can’t do it here. He says it’s kind of like people who win the lottery. The first thing you have to do is move to somewhere else, that way no one knows who you are.”

“I don’t think any of us are pining for adventure at the moment, but Bubba is right, we can’t stay here for long, or people are going to come looking for us.”

“Did they figure out how to tie you what Gilfoy and Elsa did on Elva?”

“No, but the Elvi were after us because Hello and the Ozkerians informed Carmenelli we were the ones who extracted the princess after Arlo escaped his cell. In as much as he was glad to be rid of the problem, he also could not take the assault as anything but an insult, especially when he had invited us to dinner and introduced us to the King.”

“They also told him we were going to be on Sesterisia, because Hello found out they left Arlo there,” Dingo explained.

“I say we got all this third hand,” I picked up, “because it took Osned a couple of days to track down the Herpes on Lakanica. Gilfoy and Elsa were like evil peas in a pod. They quickly saw the mayhem in each other and fed upon it. Dylan and Kristin had been together before any of this started, and Bob and Ella were left to figure out what they were going to be for each other. They were in the midst of sorting it out and enjoying some of the alcohol on Lakanica when Osned and Dahlia found them. It took a while to sort through their versions of what happened and get to the part where we had left to go to Sesterisia.

“We got to Sesterisia five days ago.” I looked to Arlo. He confirmed my timeline.

“Who got there? You said Bipodecus was with Danny Boy on Sesterisia. Why wasn’t he still on Lakanica?”

“The four of us, and Danny Boy took the ship to Sesterisia,” I explained. “Wait, no, Arlo was already there. Danny Boy had learned to pilot the ship from George, so we didn’t need the Herpes. I was back to being copilot. Dingo was doing something with himself.”

“Watching intergalactic porn and drinking heavily,” Dingo offered.

“Bubba was in his room thinking about Mikimo while we traveled to Sesterisia. Osned tracked down Bipodecus on Lakanica to try and get his version of what happened to us after we had been shipped off of Pilifin. Osned asked him to come along to Sesterisia to track us down.

“Bipodecus was in the middle of another ethical quandary. He was being hailed as a hero for engineering the rescue of the princess. He was scared to death people would replace out some of the actions he had taken, so he agreed to go with Osned.”

“Which is where the universe gets weird again,” Arlo offered. “Bipodecus had to go to the King’s Counsel to get permission to leave the planet. Someone got word to Mikimo that Bubba, and the rest of the crew, had gone to Sesterisia to retrieve me. She found some sympathetic soul, who wanted her father to suffer further shame. She used the skills she had learned from Hello to disguise herself. She was able to sneak off the planet to head for a reunion with Bubba, who she also had fallen in love with.”

“Is this true,” Janet asked Bubba with surprise.

“Yeah, it appears it is. However, things didn’t go according to plan exactly.” Dingo stated.

“What do you mean?”

“Where to start,” I said aloud as I pondered for a moment. “Okay, so the three of us, along with Danny Boy headed to Sesterisia. We left Lakanica six days ago. We got there five days ago. Danny Boy and I went down to the surface to look for Arlo. They put him in a hotel on Welkiv Beach, but only paid his room for two days.”

“Which was about the time I woke up,” Arlo added. “I was unaware of where I was, or how I arrived there. I was kicked out of the hotel with the clothes on my back and little else after I sent the message to Bubba telling him where to replace me. I would have to get back to one of the shuttle ports to access any money I thought. It looked like it was going to be a long walk to get there.”

“Bubba stayed at the spaceport,” I ventured. “He was not in any mood to see a new planet or search for Arlo. He planned to stay around the ship to check for messages every couple of hours to see if Arlo got in touch with us.” I added.

“Which I could not do,” Arlo picked up, “because I didn’t have a communicator with me. Accessing a computer was going to cost me some bit of money,” he explained. “I walked into one of the bigger banks. I was able to work my way through a variety of people until I found someone who could use my identification to access the bank on Lakanica It was going to be a couple of days before they would actually hand me cash. I did sweet talk one of the girls there into letting me send a message to the ship though.”

“Once I got the message,” Bubba supplied, “I contacted Jack and Danny Boy and told them where Arlo had sent the message from. I sent one back and told him to go back to the hotel. They were already in Welkiv at the hotel where Arlo had been. Dingo had finally woken up. He realized we were at the spaceport and went out to replace something different to drink and a girl to talk to.”

“Do you ever think with your brain instead of your crotch?” Janet asked sadly as she shook her head and rolled her eyes.

“I’ve gotten through life alright,” Dingo defended. “What more is there to life than enjoying it’s little pleasures? Besides, if I had been on the ship with Bubba, things would have gone differently when Hello showed up and asked him to come aboard.”

“How do you figure,” Bubba responded. “Nobody knew she was an Ozkerian spy. Well, Arlo knew, but none of us had talked to him. Well, not enough to know it.”

“Why was Hello there?” Janet inquired.

“She was working for the group who engineered the kidnapping. It was one more angle in whatever was going on way above our heads,” I answered. “Hello running into Arlo in the bar on Darfo seven was just dumb luck. When he told her we were going to rescue a Lakanican princess, she had to improvise.”

“Hello was there, and she got onto the ship because Bubba did not know any better. She brought six Elvi with her. They took Bubba captive and led him away to their ship.”

“I observed them passing with Bubba in the middle of their huddle while sitting at a bar in the spaceport,” Dingo provided. “I called Jack and told him Hello and a bunch of Elvi were with Bubba. He told me to hang tight and stay out of sight until they could replace Arlo and get back to the spaceport. I fit in well with the less affluent space travelers in the bar and slipped away with a nice Nasonic girl who worked in the bar and lived there on the space station.”

“What did Hello and the Elvi want from you?” Janet asked of Bubba.

“They wanted to know where everyone else was. I told them they were down on the planet looking for Arlo. Hello thought it was stupid because she knew we knew what hotel he was in. We should not have to look for him according to her. I explained they had kicked him out of the hotel, but he was going back there to meet everyone. They seemed to buy it.”

“But you didn’t tell them about Dingo?” Janet suggested.

“Well, I forgot Dingo wasn’t with them.”

“Which enabled me to save the buggers later,” Dingo said proudly.

“What’s he talking about?” Janet asked.

“He’s out of sequence again,” I admitted. “Okay, so we met Arlo in the lobby of the hotel in Welkiv.”

“You said you woke up in a bungalow,” Janet corrected.

“The hotel had bungalows on the beach,” I forced before we could chase another rabbit. “We went to the hotel bar overlooking the ocean. Arlo explained everything that had happened to him as much as he could remember. He was vague on details, but he remembered Hello’s betrayal, the trip to Oz, the escape from the cell there, and waking up on Sesterisia. It took a couple of rounds of drinks before we got to trying to figure out why they had left him there.”

“What did you come up with?” Janet inquired.

“More questions than answers,” Arlo offered. “We were wondering if my escape was the setup for a trap so the Ozkerians could get all of us together at the same time, but to what end we did not know. There was nothing to be gained from any of us really. We thought they might want the money the Lakanicans had paid us for the rescue, but on a galactic scale, it seemed like a pittance.”

“We called Bubba and told him we were coming back to the ship. He replied in an extremely odd manner. He told me he felt like John McCain waiting to see the king. When I put it together with what Dingo told us about him being escorted through the station, we realized he had been captured by someone, most likely the Elvi.”

“You didn’t realize it when Dingo called and told you about it?” Janet asked with surprise.

“No, because we sent the earlier message to Bubba before Dingo saw him surrounded by a contingent of men. Knowing there were Elvi on the space station, and they had Bubba, we contacted Dingo again once we had figured it out. We told him to meet us on the ship. We would contact him once we were in the space station.

“A group of Elvi was sent to the hotel to capture us. We were headed back to the ship by the time they got there.

“When we got back to the ship, we found a message from Osned telling us he was on the way with Bipodecus. He should be there within a couple of hours. They were on their cruise in from the outskirts of the solar system. We told him we suspected the Elvi had taken Bubba. His computer guru friend, Theo, began looking for ships from Elva docked at the space station.

“In the meantime, Hello called us. She told us they had Bubba and wanted to meet with us on Helguva. It was an undeveloped planet in the system. We would have to wear space suits on the surface, but we could all take shuttles down. She proposed they just wanted to talk with us and would release Bubba to us once we had answered all their questions.

“It was only a short cruise to Helguva, so we agreed. We were just about to leave the spaceport when Mikimo showed up, looking for Bubba. As we headed out, she caught us up on what had transpired with her. She begged us not to report her to her father. She wanted to roam through space with Bubba. At least she wanted the opportunity to do so and explore her freedom. Since we were going to get Bubba, we took her along for the ride, figuring it would be a nice reunion for him.”

“We never should have trusted Hello,” Bubba commented fiercely.

I nodded my head in agreement and could see the other guys in the room doing the same.

“So, you were ambushed on this other planet?” Janet queried.

“Yes,” I replied. “Danny Boy and Mikimo stayed on the ship. No one but us knew where Mikimo was. I was able to pilot the shuttle down to the surface but did not know how to use all the scanners and such to check for the number of Elvi we would be meeting.

“We landed, and through communication with Hello, agreed to meet in the flat area between the ships to answer their questions and get Bubba back. They allowed us to speak to him and he told us they had not harmed him, or even really questioned him in any way since capturing him.

“The three of us walked out there, unarmed, like idiots, to meet with Hello and two Elvi. I was in constant communication with Danny Boy. He warned us we were surrounded at about the same time we realized it. I told him to wait in orbit until he saw how things went down, and then decide what to do from there.”

“They brought us onto the shuttle, and then took us back up to their ship without saying much of anything. They stripped us of our communicators and took us to their galley because it was the only room big enough for everyone to fit into. Their ship was smaller than the Janet’s Lair. All told they only had a crew of about twenty. Twelve were guards and the rest just regular crew.”

“Hello asked us about our mission, about how we had gotten off the earth. You could see the Elvi freak out a little when they found out we were earthlings. Apparently, no one had bothered to tell them. They had weapons at the ready,” Arlo cut in. “This made us a little nervous too.

“We went over everything repeatedly. Hello answered our questions about what all this was about, including Arlo’s questioning on Oz. It was then we got the full story of the conspiracy to kidnap Mikimo. It wasn’t a random act. There was someone in the palace who stood to make a great amount of profit off the new deal the Ozkerians and Lakanicans would form after the contract with the Elvi was broken for the Methetractium. She never would give us a name. It was this person who gave the Elvi all the information they needed to abduct the princess in the first place and helped in her recent departure from the palace.”

“The fact Mikimo had been an embarrassment in the assessment of many in the palace contributed to it,” Bubba added with scorn. “They wanted to get rid of her so she would not be a distraction to the king. Her younger sister would be next in line for the crown. Her sister, Valtes, was more amiable to following directives than Mikimo had been.”

“Don’t speak ill of her,” Dingo admonished. “She might be your sister-in-law one of these days.” He said with a smirk.

“I was wondering why she was telling us all of this,” I stated. “It seemed like one of those scenes out of an old spy movie when the antagonist reveals everything for no other purpose than a monologue to chew up screen time. She even went on a wild aside about the irony of us all being from Kansas and how we had screwed up everything for her family more than once. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense until she talked about Dorothy killing her great aunt. Hello finally admitted she did kind of have a soft spot for us after all the time we spent together, but it didn’t matter because they were going to take us back to Elva to see Carmenelli one last time before we were all killed.”

“We didn’t want to all be killed,” Dingo said excitedly. “We knew the Elvi were nervous just having us on board. I asked one of them if they thought it was wise to ferry earthlings back to Elva, what with our reputation and all. It turned out to be a great distraction.”

“Before he could answer,” I explained, “Bubba launched from his chair and knocked the guard to the ground, wresting his weapon away and turning to shoot the two closest guards. At his motion, we all scrambled to action.”

“Why on earth would you do it?” Janet demanded. “Why would you attack the Elvi?”

“Didn’t you hear Jack say they were going to take us back to Elva and kill us?” Arlo asked perplexed. Janet held his gaze for a moment but did not respond.

“A general melee’ ensued,” I picked back up. “Arlo went for Hello, which I can’t really blame him for. She was trying to run from the room. A small ship is not a good place to be firing weapons. Someone sounded an alarm, but all the guards were in the room with us.”

“Somebody else released the vacuums,” Arlo interjected.

“Somehow, none of us got shot. Arlo would have, but as he spun Hello around to force her back into the room, one of the Elvi shot towards him. She served as an unfortunate shield and took the shot in the chest.”

“She died in my arms,” Arlo said after a moment. “Her question was the same as yours,” he said looking at Janet. “She asked me why we were fighting back.”

“What did you tell her?”

“She died before I had a chance to answer.”

“Within a minute, we all had weapons,” Bubba stated. “There were eight dead or wounded Elvi and the other four had surrendered. We let them take the two who weren’t dead to their medical unit. We blew up the controls for the door to their armory before we headed for the bridge.”

“The three of us with military experience,” I supplied. “We left Arlo in the galley cradling Hello. We knew he had not wanted her to die, no matter what she may have done. Of course, we didn’t know about the vacuums until they attacked us on the way to the bridge. We fought our way through them, and the extreme prejudice we used in dispatching them just about made our prisoners pee themselves. One of them threw up in the passageway.”

“Remember when Jack said firing weapons on a small ship was not a good idea?” Dingo asked. “Well, in our skirmish with the vacuums, several shots did go astray and into the bridge area of the ship, doing vital damage to the control systems. This initiated a self-destruct sequence inherent on all ships. It forces them to destroy themselves in unoccupied space while heading for the planet’s atmosphere.”

“It’s a safety device, so ships don’t crash onto planets, they blow up on an entry path and then the pieces burn up as they enter the atmosphere,” Arlo offered, subdued by the memory of Hello’s death.

“We began to hightail it back to the shuttle,” I explained. “We found Arlo in the galley trying to fight off eight vacuums. We quickly dispatched them and got to the shuttle.”

“What did you do with the rest of the crew?” Janet demanded angrily.

“We ignored them.” I answered. “There were two shuttles on the ship. We drug Arlo onto one and I powered it up. When the remaining crew climbed onto the other one, they opened the airlock and we both took off. I was a little more aggressive in maneuvering because I didn’t want them to close us in the airlock.”

“You, aggressive,” Janet suggested with sarcasm. “How many Elvi did you kill Jack?”

“Only eight I think,” I answered looking around the room. “I don’t know if they got the wounded out of medical or not, so maybe ten.”

“No, how many did you kill yourself? I can understand the Kelvekians. I don’t understand how you could kill another thinking creature though. How many Jack?” She was on the verge of tears.

“I don’t know for sure,” I answered. “At least two in the galley, maybe three. It happened pretty quickly.”

“She doesn’t know, does she?” Dingo asked with a sudden bit of sobriety.

“Know what,” she inquired.

The things I don’t talk to you, or Arlo, or a lot of other people about. We don’t talk about who we killed, or where, or even why most of the time.”

“My God, how many people have you killed?” Janet asked in sudden horror.

I shook my head for a moment. “I try not to think in terms of numbers. It’s not something to take glory in or be proud of. In this situation, and in others in the past, some people had to die so others could live.”

“Who are you to judge, to play God?” She demanded.

“In a kill or be killed situation,” Bubba spoke, “it’s not a matter of judgment. We could kill them, or we could die. We chose to keep living.”

“It’s not that simple,” she stated forcefully.

“When you’re staring at the end of a gun,” I responded, “it often is.”

Janet shook her head and stood up from the couch. She walked around the room looking at each of us in turn and shaking her head, tears leaking down her face. She walked out of the room and headed back towards the bedroom. I did not follow her. She would have to come to terms with this one her own.

After a couple of minutes, we rose as a group and started gathering up bottles, popcorn bags, and other things which had accumulated around the room. I asked Arlo to help me for a minute in the garage. Once we were there, I explained my idea about what to do with regard to Bubba. We would only have to keep the façade up for a few weeks until Osned picked us up.

The real problem now, he explained, was we had told Janet everything. Would she keep quiet around Bubba?