"How the Hell Did I Get Here? - part 1" by Sean Daily

“How the Hell Did I Get Here?”

“You… named your vessel How the Hell Did I Get Here?”

“Is there something wrong with doing that?”

“Um… no,” said the customs agent, starting to fidget slightly in his kiosk. “It’s just that… well, why would you…”

“Oh! That’s easy. I found myself asking that almost every time I landed on a planet.”

A pause of several seconds, as if that explained everything.

“So why did you –“

“Well! I figured if I just named my ship that, big bold letters on the nose cone announcing it to the whole world, I figured I’d save myself a little trouble.” The… person standing in front of the kiosk scratched his head. “In retrospect, I guess it wasn’t such a hot idea. But you know, twenty-twenty hindsight and all that, eh?”

And the person let loose with a bray of laughter that turned the head of everyone in Customs. The agent in the kiosk widened his eyes, smiled gently in the manner of one confronted with a madman and checked once again for where he’d stowed his gun. Not that it would have made much difference here.

The person standing before the agent was a calerre. He had a long reptilian muzzle; wide dragon-like wings, now folded and stowed, sprouting from the back of his patched spacer overalls; short stubby reptilian tail at the base of his spine. In other words, a god damned dragon man.

What wasn’t reptilian was his near-manic animation, every muscle almost audibly quivering like violin strings. The deep , pupilless eyes flashed with a childlike innocence and wonder common to all calerre and that other races had miscalculated and underestimated, to their chagrin.

“I understand…” the agent said, lying his ass off. He punched the registration and name into his computer and groaned.

“Something wrong?” the calerre said, perking up.

“There seems to be some, er, irregularities in your records, Mr. Hatenne,” the agent said, starting to sweat.

“Really? Lemme see.”

And with that, Mr. Hatenne vaulted over the kiosk’s shoulder-high partition and landed inside, slamming the poor agent into the back wall away from his computer… and his gun. The agent’s face was paper-white now.

“Please! Mr. Hatenne!” he said. “Please! You’re not supposed to be back here!” Mr. Hatenne’s wings were wide, and they filled the tiny kiosk. The agent’s vision was filled with leathery yellowish flesh. He could see just bits and pieces of Customs past Mr. Hatenne.

The room was paralyzed. A few armed officers had detached themselves from their stations, but were unsure what to do next. Close combat with even an unarmed calerre could be lethal. The agent gave them a pleading look and tried to wave them off, to no avail.

“Now, let’s see here,” Mr. Hatenne said. “How does this thing… Cool! You still use these! I haven’t seen these in… Why do these computers always ask ‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ I mean, if I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t’ve… Now where’s…”

A few moments of muttering followed.

“Lies… lies… slander… defamation… libel… Okay, that I did, buy you don’t have an extradition treaty with them so ha!”

“M - Mr. Hatenne…”

“Oh please, it’s Socalle,” Mr. Hatenne said, still bent over the computer. “I hate last names. And you know so much about me, I feel like we’re family already.”

The agent said a quick goodbye to his family and steeled himself.

“I - I’m afraid that, in light of your past record – and your present behavior – that the government of Gideon will have to deny you entry.”

The calerre stood up, bolt upright, and the agent closed his eyes and cringed.

The blow never came.

He opened one eye disbelievingly and then the other, even more disbelievingly.

The calerre was looking over his shoulder, past his wings. His eyes were wide, and the hurt was obvious and deep within them.

“Really?” he said, and his was almost the voice of a child told that his mother had died.

“I – I’m sorry, Mr. Hatenne.”

The great wings slumped.

“I’m sorry, too.”

“There’s no need to apologize, Mr. Hatenne.”

“No,” he said, sighing. “There is. For what I am about to do, there is. SHIP, DO YOUR STUFF!”

The Mongols invaded Gideon Astrodrome.

There was a huge crashing and banging, belt-fed guns eating bullets and spitting them out, high explosives, tracer rounds spanging off metal and stone, orders being called, the screams of men!

And above it all, the roaring of high-performance lift engines.

Those without guns in Customs dove for the deck. Those with drew them and pointed them every which way at an enemy that seemed to surround them, but would not show itself. A few random rounds were expended, but the only casualties were a computer monitor and some tracks of fluorescent lighting, and the round-expenders felt much better.

It was only afterward that people realized that, as the roar of the engines receded, so did the sounds of battle.

In the ensuing investigation, detailed analysis of approach sensor logs and security cameras led authorities to the conclusion that Mr. Hatenne’s ship did not fire a single bullet or beam, did not even have weapons. The battle was merely a high-fidelity recording of a battle, played through speakers of breathtaking power and quality, given the size of Mr. Hatenne’s ship. Playing a recording was not technically – technically, very technically – an illegal act.

Where Mr. Hatenne had obtained such realistic sounds of pitched combat, the board of inquiry did not speculate.

Where Mr. Hatenne had disappeared to in the ensuing chaos, the board could not even imagine.

But it was decided, after careful deliberation, to seal the records of the event, make sure that they never ever ever saw the light of day again and then hopefully forget all about it.

No such luck.

* * *

Several heavily armed and armored vehicles screeched around the corner a block ahead of Socalle. He tensed momentarily, until he saw them continue to accelerate around the corner and down the street, towards the Astrodrome's entrance.

He didn’t expect anyone to think of looking for him outside the spaceport yet, because conventional wisdom said he shouldn’t have been able to leave it. The whole facility was encircled by miles of fifty foot-high double concrete walls, erected at fantastic expense to the taxpayers and which gave the spaceport the air of a supermax prison. The walls were topped with broken glass and coils of concertina wire, and more wire lined the walls at ten, twenty-five and forty foot heights. There was no way to climb over, burrow under or drive through such an impressive wall.

They obviously forgot that calerre had wings…

So here he was, on the streets of an alien city, no friends, no contacts and with his ship probably being chased by half the Gideon Orbital Guard. And it was the low-rent part of town, too, where spaceports were typically built – ugly, not nice.

Socalle searched through his pockets. He came up with an old root beer barrel and thirty-nine credits from a planet with an unhealthy exchange rate, bordering on pull-the-plug-and-call-the-morgue, with Gideon.

He shrugged. Something would come up. Something always did in his life.

He popped the root beer barrel in his mouth, unwrapped the cellophane wrapper with his tongue and spit it out, then jammed his hands back into his pockets and, whistling a tuneless little ditty, set his feet in whatever direction felt best.

He started walking.