"Starla" - Part Four

 

Part Four

            “They’re fish?! They’re smeggin’ fish!” Rimmer bellowed in disbelief.

            If it wasn’t for so much other unbelievable stuff I had seen today, I would’ve had the same reaction as Rimmer to these fish-people. “They’re called Mariners,” I heard Tiffany identify the alien visitors. “They’re interdimensional travelers like me.”

            “D-Do they…come in peace?” I gulped nervously.

            Tiffany shrugged. “It depends. They just want to recolonize on other worlds…though they may consider it an act of war if you deny them that right.”

            “Ohhh, man,” I gulped again.

            Suddenly, an imposing voice gurgled over the Red Dwarf’s comm. “This is Commander Amarillo! Prepare to be boarded!” They didn’t give us much choice – they were coming aboard the Red Dwarf one way or another. A shuttle shaped like a roe (think ‘caviar’ if it was big, metal, and rocket-powered) landed in one of the Dwarf’s docking bays. Before we knew it, Commander Amarillo and his squad were there in the control room with us.

            It was pretty clear right away which of them was Amarillo from the one Mariner dressed in gold-plated armor with a crown and a long red cape. He looked older than the others, with white ‘hairs’ around and in his gills (or ‘ears’). “Scan the homo sapiens with the heart monitor,” he ordered one of his soldiers.

            “Aye, Commander,” the soldier gurgled in compliance.

            He proceeded to remove a handheld device from underneath his breastplate, aiming it at each of our chests. The ‘scan’ was in the form of these gold holographic bubbles that lit up with heart shapes over our chests. They looked kinda cute.

            “This one doesn’t register any heartbeats, Commander,” the soldier alerted after scanning Rimmer.

            “That’s because I’m a hologram, you flounder,” Rimmer snipped.

            “Proceed,” Amarillo ordered, and the soldier continued.

            After he scanned me, he did Tiffany last. And then something weird happened.

            Whereas the rest of us (Rimmer excluded) all had a single heart bubble displayed from our chests, Tiffany had two. I looked on them, baffled and amused. “You have two hearts?!” I said to her. “That must be fun!”

            Tiff smirked at me, but that smirk fell once Amarillo approached her and said, “You are the prize we seek! You are the Tinkerer!”

            “I am,” Tiffany didn’t deny it. “How did you—?”

            “You will come with us!” Amarillo demanded.

            “Wait a bloody sec!” Tiff resisted, backing away from the two Mariner soldiers that started to come her way. “At least tell me why you’re so soddin’ interested in lil’ ole me?!”

            “We have no interest in you – you merely stand in the way of our goal,” Amarillo clarified. “It is what the Archivist warned us!”

            Tiff’s beautiful face twisted with rage at the mentioning of this ‘Archivist’.

            Whoever he was, he certainly made her blood boil just hearing his name (or title?), cursing it under her breath.

            “Enough of our time has been wasted,” Amarillo thundered. “Seize her!”

            “Wait!” Tiff again resisted in another attempt to sway the Mariners. “I can find you lot another planet – one that’s more peaceful than Earth… and has way more saltwater.”

            “This universe’s Earth will be our home, Tinkerer!” Amarillo asserted.

            “The people down there – their leaders – won’t let you claim it willingly.”

            A smirk formed on Amarillo’s large fish lips. “Then they’ll be fools to challenge one who has won many wars in the name of his people!”

            He was such a bullheaded and unreasonable being – a lot like General Holden.

            Once more, he ordered his soldiers to seize Tiffany, who was powerless to try anything else. The kids and I tried to make a move against them in her defense, but she made a gesture for us not to. Just as the Mariners were about to lay their flippers on her, Dave suddenly yelled, “CAT! DINNER TIME!!!”

            We all froze when he yelled that out. “You have a cat aboard this ship?” I queried.

            “You have a c-cat aboard this s-s-ship?!?!” Amarillo echoed, visibly frightened.

            One of the vent covers in the control room suddenly popped loose and fell off its hinges, allowing a black man in a suit to crawl out. He had distinctive, slicked-back, and typically styled black hair, reminiscent of James Brown. But the one striking feature I noticed about him, as soon as he stood upright next to Dave, were his oversized upper canines – noticeably larger than those of a human (reminiscent of a sabretooth’s fangs).

            This ‘Cat’ man was a hybrid of human and…well…cat.

            And he had the Mariners cowering in his company.

            “I heard ‘dinner time,’ which means one thing: fish!” Cat said, salivating at his lips. “And I see a whole lotta fish in front of me!”

            “All you can eat, mate,” Dave grinned. “Bon appétit!”

            The hungry Cat pounced on the Mariners, who immediately fled the control room. Cat chased them all the way back to the docking bay, forcing them to retreat inside their caviar shuttle. We watched them return to their primary ship on Holly’s monitor. “I don’t believe it,” I uttered in wide-eyed, open-mouthed skepticism. “One cat-man’s all it took to scare them away?!”

            “Of course,” Tiff said, as if it was a normal occurrence. “The Mariners once warred with the Catkind in a universe different from the Catkind of this universe. The loss they suffered was embarrassing – many Mariners were consumed in a victory bonfire that night.”

            I couldn’t even begin to process any of what she just told me. “Wow” was all I could gather to say.

            Tiff then started making her way back to her TARDIS. “It might not be too late to extend an olive branch to them,” she suggested with an ounce of hope. Even after everything that happened there aboard the Red Dwarf, she was still willing to try and save the very species that threatened to imprison her and make claim of my planet.

            Unfortunately, before Tiff could have left the control room, a sudden flash of light came through the windows. We directed our attention towards where the Mariners’ scaly, fish-shaped ship had drifted a mere second ago – only now, it had been obliterated to flaming pieces. It may have had some sentience, because I could swear that I saw its ‘face’ displaying shock as both it and its occupants were killed.

            “What just happened?!” I cried. “Was that us?!?!”

            “No,” Tiff coldly said. I looked over at her, seeing the rage on her face as she knew exactly what was the cause of the Mariners’ unfortunate demise. “That was the work of the Eradicator!”

            The Eradicator.

            Another one of UNIT’s special top-secrets – a powerful laser beam that could be fired into orbit and wipe out any extraterrestrial or interdimensional threat to Earth. Tiff told me that she had seen it in action before when she was a ‘different woman’ (whatever that meant).

            We left the Red Dwarf crew behind on their mining spacecraft, landing back on Earth – specifically the main HQ of UNIT’s American division, at the summit of the Empire State Building.

            There, Tiffany confronted the person behind the Mariners’ death: General Louis Holden himself.

            Surprisingly, we weren’t detained the moment we disembarked.

            The base was staffed with dozens of military personnel – people clad in black with a white UNIT emblem patched along the upper portion of their left sleeves. They all stopped in their work when they looked directly at Tiffany, as she marched straight up to Holden and screamed, “WHAT WERE YOU THINKIN’?!?!”

            Holden was undeterred by her rage. “I saw two alien ships in orbit of our planet, so I made the call to have one of them destroyed.”

            “What reason…no…what right did you have to make that call, without first analyzing the Mariners’ threat level?!” Tiff asked.

            Holden responded by walking over to a nearby comm station and playing an audio recording of our confrontation with the Mariners aboard the Red Dwarf. The part that he played was the last few words Tiff and Amarillo exchanged with each other…

            “I can find you lot another planet – one that’s more peaceful than Earth… and has way more saltwater.”

            “This universe’s Earth will be our home, Tinkerer!”

            “The people down there – their leaders – won’t let you claim it willingly.”

            “Then they’ll be fools to challenge one who has won many wars in the name of his people!”

            Holden turned the recording off after that last line by Amarillo. “War,” he told Tiff.

            “Amarillo was a blowhard of a blowfish,” Tiff remarked, somehow managing to find it in herself to make an aquatic joke at the expense of a dead fish commander. “All the commanders, captains, lieutenants, admirals, and even generals are like that in their species!”

            “You’d fit right in,” I threw in a quip directed at Holden, who merely side-eyed me, opting not to give me the luxury of a retort.

            Instead, he insisted, “I made the right call. That recording proves just that.”

            “Yeah, ‘bout that,” Tiff said. “How did you get that recording? UNIT couldn’t have bugged the Dwarf in such a short time.”

            “Not the Dwarf,” Holden said before gesturing my way. “Her phone.”

            Hearing this, I stiffened. “My phone?! How?! When?!”

            “The ‘how’ would be experimental nanotechnology,” Holden said matter-of-factly. “The ‘when’ was the day you met me at NASA.”

            “You’ve had my phone tapped since yesterday?!” I roared, understandably angry at the violation of my privacy. “You really are an obtuse jerk, man!”

            Holden’s eyes flared at the name-calling. “I will do everything necessary in my power to protect the Earth from alien contamination!”

            “Contamination?!” Tiff scoffed at his offensive use of the term, her arms crossed. “Men like you in power are what’s going to destroy the Earth, Holden!”

            Holden wasn’t listening to her. “Prep the Eradicator for another charge,” he ordered one of his subordinates. “Target the Red Dwarf.”

            “WHAT?!” Tiff and I both protested the heartless command.

            “There are people on that ship, General!” Tiffany warned him.

            “You can’t do this!!” I yelled.

            Our pleas fell on deaf ears. “Lieutenant Eris,” Holden addressed a fresh-faced Ghanan-American man who looked a few years older than me. “Escort the alien and the civilian out of this room and place them into holding.” Eris hesitated to comply, looking sympathetically at Tiff and me. “LIEUTENANT!” Holden exploded – I jumped at the drill sergeant-level volume of his voice. “I gave you a direct order!”

            “Sir, the Tinkerer is an ally and adviser of UNIT,” Eris said. “Maybe we should—”

            “Lieutenant Eris, either you do as you’re told or—”

            “Or what, Louis?!” A woman’s voice carried over Holden’s, speaking at a louder and more intense capacity. It also sounded younger by comparison. I looked to the base’s main entrance, from where this auburn-haired, hardcore-looking woman briskly entered. All personnel stood at attention in her presence, standing stiff as boards and saluting.

            All except for Louis Holden, who looked positively mortified.

            “General Dwonch,” he whimpered, his voice resorting to a prepubescent stage, losing all of its might and power. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he totally soiled his pants. It was the most scared I think I’d ever seen him.

            This ‘General Dwonch,’ the woman I was supposed to have met yesterday at NASA HQ, didn’t look so much like a traditional general at first glance. Rather than a uniform like the one Holden wore, she opted for a green leather jacket with the UNIT insignia printed on the back, along with a black crop top and black leather pants. I found out sometime later that she was a bonafide five-star general, whereas Holden was merely a three-star.

            Before she dealt with Holden, Dwonch briefly acknowledged Tiffany and told her, “Sorry. I was in Geneva at UNIT Central Control – typical boring meeting and whatnot.” She then returned on Holden and proceeded to berate him like the child he was. “Who do you think you are, Louis?! When I put you in charge, I expected better than the mess you’ve done in my absence!”

            Holden stammered, suddenly unable to find the words to defend himself, unlike before Dwonch entered the room.

            “Because of your actions, you will be court-martialed,” Dwonch told him.

            That threat snapped him back. “What?! You can’t! I did what I—”

            Dwonch wasn’t listening. “Lieutenant Eris, escort General Holden out of my building.”

            “Yes, ma’am,” Eris obliged without hesitation. The look of pleasure on his face made me giggle, as he grabbed Holden by the arm and led him out.

            Of course, Holden still had to be the one to get the last word as he declared to Dwonch, “This isn’t over!”

            As soon as he was gone, Dwonch shook her head and ordered her crew, “As you were.” Her subordinates returned to their work, with Holden’s last command entirely canceled.

            “Yvette, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Starla Becker,” Tiffany said.

            I found myself acting the same way Holden did in Dwonch’s presence, as she approached me with a warmer greeting than I received from him at NASA. “Sweetheart, I am so sorry for that idiot.” I tried not to laugh at how she referred to Holden. “When Tiff told me all about you and how you discovered the Red Dwarf, I wanted to meet with you, but I was swamped in Geneva and—”

            “It’s all good, General,” I told her, deeply appreciated by her winded apology. “All I care about now is getting my phone debugged.”

            Dwonch frowned. “Debugged?”

            She glimpsed over at Tiffany, who merely said one name: “Holden.”

            The young general groaned. “Jerk,” she muttered under her breath. Returning on me, she reassured, “I promise I’ll have UNIT’s best techs get to work on it.”

            “I appreciate that, General,” I said.

            “I sincerely hope Louis’s actions haven’t given you the wrong impression about what we’re doing here, Starla – we’ve already been under enough scrutiny by those basement dwellers in Think Thank,” she said. “Holden was right about one thing: we are here to protect the Earth…but we’re not doing it his way.”

            Her words were comforting. “I gotcha, General. And thanks.”

            “You’re welcome, sweetheart. And, please, call me ‘Yvette’.”

            That night, at the Starbucks where we first met, Tiffany and I had some dinner – a Tomato and Mozzarella on Focaccia for myself and a Ham and Swiss on Baguette for her, all with some Frappuccino to wash them down. It was a fitting meal to end on such an eventful day, which I was still overwhelmed by at the time.

            The only regret I had about it was that, because of the means in which the Red Dwarf manifested in Earth’s orbit, I could not receive proper credit for its discovery. “After all that, I’m back to being just a nobody,” I lamented between swigs of my Frappuccino.

            “Oh, luv, you’ve proven to be more than that today,” Tiff told me. “You’re not a nobody…you’re my friend.”

            I stopped eating my Focaccia when she called me that.

            I was greatly touched that she – this incredible being from another planet with a ship that could travel across space, time, and reality – considered me her friend. “I haven’t made very many friends in my life,” I reflected. “Except for one.”

            “And who’s that?” Tiff asked with sincere interest.

            “This boy I helped with an unusual dilemma while playing Fortnite this one time. He sounded so helpless and alone, so I did whatever I could for him.” I chuckled at the recent memory. “It was the weirdest experience of my life, but it was worth it to help that lil’ fella.”

            Curious, Tiffany asked me, “What was his name?”

            “I think it was ‘Craig’.”

            There was a look in Tiffany’s eyes that was familiar, stunned, and hopeful all at once from my mentioning of Craig.

            Noticing it, I asked her, “Do you know him?”

            She paused for a long moment, as if to consider whether or not she did know. Shaking her head, she finally answered, “Nah, probably not the one I’m thinking of. There are so many Craigs out there in the multiverse.”

            “The multiverse,” I scoffed amusingly. “It really exists, doesn’t it?”

            Tiff neither confirmed nor denied it, because I already knew the answer after everything I had seen. What I didn’t know was how I’d set myself up for the invitation of a lifetime from my new Time Lord friend: “You want to see it?”

            I couldn’t tell ya how fast I answered “Yes!” I’m sure I scared everyone in Starbucks that evening.

            As soon as we finished eating, we were back aboard her unique ship, bringing along some pizza for the Stump Kids (the name they preferred their little trio to be called). Before we jumped into the Infinite DC, I had to ask, “What about those guys up there in the Red Dwarf? What’ll happen to them?”

            Tiff smiled. “I made call to a friend to assist with that.”

            She then showed me a live feed of the Red Dwarf control room on the console monitor. I saw Dave, Arnold, Holly, and Cat chilling there in the room, just as a blue police box – the blue police box that Ruby Sunday spoke of – materialize to the surprise of the Dwarf crew.

            From it, a handsome black man emerged.

            “Hello, gentlemen, I’m the Doctor,” he told them. “I heard you need a ride back to the future – three million years into the future. What do you say we get there the long way around, eh?”