* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Chapter 11: Starship BloopersThe dull crump of distant ordinance discharges faded gradually (mercifully) as Leela’s parents led the little group onwards through the confusing maze of pipes and tunnels. Leela looked back occasionally, uncertain and worried, and Fry tried to reassure her.
“They know what they’re doing,” he said.
Leela didn’t reply.
Occasionally, Morris would stop to ascend a ladder up to a manhole cover, checking on their position and looking for the Planet Express ship. After the fifth or sixth time, he returned down with a vertical grin on his face.
“It’s up there,” he said. “Sticking out the side of a Burger Queen, but it seems intact.”
“Did you say ‘burger’?” Zoidberg salivated and ascended the ladder three rungs at a time.
“Well, thanks muties,” Bender said. “I don’t care what anyone says – you guys are Homo Superior.” With that, he set off climbing after Zoidberg.
“Yeah, thankyou for everything,” Fry said.
“Don’t you mention it, Philip,” Munda said, kissing him on the cheek.
“Remember what we talked about,” Morris added, shaking Fry’s hand.
“I will sir.” Fry climbed up the ladder, leaving Leela alone with her parents. There was a long silence as Leela stared at them, her face a conflicted mass of warring emotions and unasked questions.
“The other mutants,” she said quietly, “they believe I’m going to somehow liberate them from the sewers. Is that what you believe too?”
Morris and Munda glanced at each other uncertainly.
“Leela, you don’t have to do anything for us,” Morris said.
“That’s right,” Munda added. “We’re already so proud of you…”
“But you hope, don’t you?” Leela pressed. Her parents said nothing. “You deserve so much better than this, all of you… all of us,” she sighed. “If there was something I could do to bring about change,” she said, “then I would… but what? I’m just one person… I don’t know how…”
“You just do whatever your heart tells you, Leela,” Munda said.
Leela watched her parents for a long moment and finally came to a decision.
“All right,” she said, nodding in affirmation. “When I return, I’ll find a way – things will change, I’ll see to it… somehow.”
She hugged and kissed her parents, and they watched her disappear up through the manhole. Together, Morris and Munda shrank back into the shadows and vanished.
Fry, Bender, and Zoidberg were peering cautiously around a street corner when Leela rejoined them.
“What’s the hold-up?” she asked, following their gazes to where the Planet Express ship sat at an odd angle, lodged into the side of a fast-food restaurant. Hamburger patties and Freedom Fries had spilled out everywhere.
“Fuzz,” Bender explained, pointing at the police holograms that marked off the area, and the patrol hovercar parked indiscreetly up the street.
“Looks like they’re waiting for us,” Leela said in frustration. “Dammit – we won’t make it; we’d need time for Bender to get the ship running again.”
“Hmm…” Zoidberg dragged his eyes away from the foodstuff spilled on the road and glanced back and fourth between his friends. His mind ticked over.
“So we’re boned again?” Bender groused.
“Maybe… we could hijack another ship from somewhere,” Leela said doubtfully.
“No need, no need!” Zoidberg said with regal self-importance, stepping in front of the others with his claws on his hips. “The robut is needed to fix the ship, the cyclops female to fly it, and friend Fry must save the Universe for some reason – that leaves only me, brave Doctor Zoidberg to distract the police long enough for my dear friends to make good their escape!”
“But you’ll be captured!” Fry argued.
“No, wait,” Leela said. “They don’t want him – nobody does. They’d just let him go once they figure out we’re gone.”
“Good plan,” Nibbler said distantly from Fry’s shoulder.
“Zoidberg, are you sure about this?” Fry asked, taking the Decapodian by the shoulders.
“Come now, Fry – you would do the same for me,” Zoidberg said.
Fry stared blankly at him for a prolonged moment. “Yes,” he said woodenly, straight-faced. “Yes I would.”
“Thank you, Zoidberg,” Leela said, giving the lobster an impatient push. “You’re a true friend. Goodbye.”
“Don’t drop the soap!” Bender added.
Zoidberg edged around the corner and glanced up the street to where the patrol car still sat in wait. “Alright,” he muttered. “Zoidberg away!”
Smitty and URL watched through the window of their car as a red lobster waddled slowly across the street toward the crashed green spaceship. The alien paused to eat some of the uncooked hamburger patties off the road before continuing on.
“Looks like something’s finally happening,” URL droned languidly. “Aww yeah.”
“That’s one of the fugitives Momcorp tagged,” Smitty said, consulting his info screen. “Guess we’d better beat him until he tells us where his friends are.”
“Time for some old-school abuse of power.” URL switched on the sirens and drove the hovercar forward.
At the wail of klaxons, Zoidberg broke into a hasty scuttle, whooping in fright as he went racing away from the PE ship and down a side alley. Patrol car 718 followed and disappeared from sight.
“That brave lobster,” Leela said. “Come on – now’s our chance!” Together, she and the others dashed across the street.
With the ship’s electrical systems down, it took Bender’s strength to operate the manual release on the emergency access door. Then they were all inside, the ship dark and quiet, and the deck slanted at an awkward angle.
“Bender,” Leela said. “Can you pull the same trick you did with the Mustang and get us operational?”
Bender managed to shrug, despite the lack of mobile shoulders. “I guess,” he said. “Of course, this bird’s a lot more complicated than that gas-guzzling contraption.”
“All I need are engines and manual control. We can repair the other systems once we’re away.”
Bender narrowed his eye shutters. “Of course, we’re gonna have to talk about money,” he said.
“How about I take off your head and stick it somewhere your arms can’t reach?” Leela replied automatically.
“Alright, alright,” the robot growled, stomping away toward the engine room and muttering homicidally to himself.
Leela and Fry made their way to the bridge, where Leela set about replacing burnt-out fuses in the control console. Nibbler hopped up onto the navigator’s station, and without anything else to do, began licking himself noisily.
“It’s even worse than we feared,” Fry said from one side. “The coffee machine isn’t working.”
“We’ll just have to rough-it,” Leela replied, sitting down in the command chair to wait for Bender to degauss the engine components. “Just out of curiosity, Fry, what did you talk about with my father?”
“Uh…” Fry began to blush a deep pink. “Um… y’know… just guy stuff.”
Leela stared at him fixedly.
“Geopolitics,” Fry conjured at last. “We discussed geopolitics, as he and I both often do.”
Leela sighed. “You don’t even know what that is, Fry.”
“Sure I do,” Fry said confidently. “It’s like when mountains and gorges argue with one another.”
Nibbler let out an expressive groan.
“You don’t have to lie to me, Fry,” Leela said, turning her attention back to the console. “I know my parents have some strange ideas about you and I, but they’re just old romantics eager to see me settle down. Don’t take any notice of that stuff.”
“Oh…” Fry looked at his feet dejectedly. “…Okay.”
“I just can’t manage to convince them that we’re only friends.”
“Huh. That must be annoying,” Fry muttered gloomily as he walked away.
“It’s silly, don’t you think?” Leela glanced up from the console and looked around for Fry, but he’d left the bridge. “What’s his problem?” she wondered aloud.
Nibbler groaned again, louder, and buried his face in his paws. Leela was about to comment when the ship shuddered suddenly and the lights flickered on and off. The low drone of power returned, and running displays on the control console gleamed.
“Okay, we’re alive again,” Leela said, and then into the shipwide intercom: “Everyone strap yourselves in.”
As the impulse thrusters came online, Leela backed the PE ship out of the ruined Burger Queen, dislodging rubble from the nose section. The little green freight ship hovered for a moment before Leela tilted it to a diagonal inclination, with its main engine nozzles pointing at the ground.
With a tremendous blast of exotic energy, the Dark Matter engines flared into life, and the Universe shifted position around the stationary ship.
Zoidberg, though being held down on the pavement by Smitty and URL, managed to twist his neck and watch the ship soaring off into the sky.
“Go, my friends!” he warbled happily. “To freedom!”
“Shut up, you slimeball!” Smitty snarled, whacking the lobster over the head with his lightsabre baton.
“Damn,” URL droned, watching the ship grow smaller. “Looks like the fugitives pulled a fast one on us stupid cops. Ohh yeah.”
Nearby, a manhole cover suddenly flew upward from the ground and clattered down right next to URL.
“What the hell,” the robot cop muttered.
From out of the manhole, an unrecognisable shape clambered on twisted limbs. The battered metal object was covered in deep claw marks and viscous green blood. With its ion thrusters no longer operative, Ultima had to drag itself along with its forelimbs.
“Is that a robot?” Smitty said, looking at the blackened mass of twisted metal.
“Maybe it used to be,” URL replied.
Zoidberg looked on in silent terror.
Ultima noted the Planet Express ship passing just out of visual range and surveyed the short list of systems that were still operational. Happily, the robot brought its fusion booster online and ignited it.
A small thermonuclear explosion vaporized a section of road in incandescent white fury, sending Zoidberg and the two police officers tumbling head-over-heels through the air. Ultima shot upward in excited anticipation, following the PE ship’s vapour trail.
Up, up… the Earth’s layers of atmosphere fell away one by one. The ionosphere was a brief crackle of static. Out into the void; satellites whizzed past. There, directly ahead: the Dark Matter drive, now ready to spool up to full power…
Ultima tried firing lasers, and found they were all damaged. The gatling guns were jammed. All its missile reserves were spent. Railguns weren’t receiving power. The severely-damaged war drone turned in desperation to its antiphoton cannon, which had been out of alignment since the battle on Mars. Theoretically it might still fire, although the danger of blowback was great.
Ultima took the risk, targeting the Planet Express ship’s engines. It fired, or tried to, and the particle accelerator mechanism in the antiphoton cannon bucked violently and promptly exploded. Ultima was thrown into an erratic spin, damaged components flying away from it in a great arc. The robot’s systems went offline briefly, and when it came back to consciousness the Planet Express ship was long gone, and it was falling slowly into a Lunar orbit.
Undaunted, Ultima patiently set about devising a series of extensive self-repair protocols. It would wait. The target would return in time; the certainty of that fact burned bright in the robot’s fractured mind.
Turanga Leela would return, and the hunt would resume… in time.
Ultima had all the time in the world.
* * *
Long hours passed after the prisoners were brought aboard Mom’s personal interstellar frigate (shaped, oddly, like her head) in High Earth Orbit. The Momship had departed the Sol system for destinations unknown, and Professor Farnsworth was taken away to review secret research data, leaving Hermes, Amy, and Scruffy to be shoved by henchmen into a holding cell.
And so they waited, as the corporate matriarch’s ship’s engines thrummed endlessly. There were no windows, no way to tell where they were or how much time had passed; just the dull grey bulkhead stamped with the logo of Mom’s Friendly Holding Cell Company.
The monotony was painful. Without a single scrap of reading material besides the labels on the cot blankets, all three of them were bored to death.
Scruffy had had enough.
It was time to take action.
“So,” he grunted, leaning close to Amy, “how’s about you get nekkid fer us?”
The elbow to his solar plexus had him wheezing on the floor for a full minute, after which he went and sat beside Hermes instead.
“Folk was less uptight about their bodies back in the twenty-nine seventies,” he muttered grumpily. “Scruffy remembers those days – peace and free love…”
A few decks up, Professor Farnsworth continued to read through volumes of detailed scientific reports, emitting occasional grunts of “Oh my…” and “…Fascinating.” He was learning everything that Ogden Wernstrom’s team had discovered from the Brainspawn.
His attention was drawn inexorably to the section that described the role and nature of the ‘Mighty One’.
“Sweet merciful Zombie Jesus on a dollar bill!” he said in alarm. “That idiot Fry is our only hope!?”
Meanwhile, on the bridge, Mom paced the deck while Larry and the Helmsman looked on nervously.
“How much further?” she snapped, glancing through the forward screen.
“Impossible to say, ma’am,” the Helmsman replied. “We’re following the residual radiation trail from the point of last contact as best we can, but there’s no way to tell how far it’s gone… Although there is one thing…”
“What?!” Mom rounded on the man, and he shrank back.
“…It’s definitely headed back towards Earth,” he said.
Mom looked out through the screen again, searching for the elusive research vessel. “We can’t let it get there,” she murmured.
The door to the bridge whisked open and Professor Farnsworth shuffled in, glaring at everyone through his two inch thick glasses.
“This is an outrage!” he bellowed. “You all should be ashamed of yourselves!”
Mom put her hands on her hips and turned to meet his glare. “I don’t care if you disapprove of what we’ve done, you old fool,” she retorted. “Risks must be taken in the march of progress, everyone knows that.”
“Progress?” Farnsworth repeated incredulously. “That’s how you justify giving me a cabin without a bathroom? It’s disgraceful! I had to relieve myself in an ashtray, dammit! It overflowed! I demand a stateroom with full amenities!”
Mom groaned in irritation. “Have you reviewed the research data yet?” she asked, forcing some patience into her voice.
“…The whuhh?” Farnsworth looked blank.
Mom massaged her temples and ground her teeth. “The Brainspawn!” she hissed.
“Don’t change the subject!” Farnsworth snapped. “We’re talking about the Brainspawn here, not your favourite shoe store – get with the program, dammit!” He shuffled past her and sat down in the ship’s command chair with an audible creak of ancient bones grinding against replacement joints.
“And have you had any ideas?” Mom seethed.
“Whuhh? Oh yes – Good News Everyone!” the Professor said. “I have devised a mechanism that can shield a person’s Delta brainwave, the wave that the creature feeds off, so that they can approach without the Brainspawn being aware.” He produced a dog-eared napkin covered in blotchy scrawlings and fed it into a nearby computer console; a scratchy hand-drawn electronics diagram appeared on the computer screen.
“It looks like a helmet,” Larry observed, looking at the diagram with its circuits and valves.
“A helmet? Oh my, yes,” Farnsworth said. “It won’t protect from the stupidification field if the Brainspawn becomes aware of the wearer through some other means and strengthens said field, but it should allow someone to get close, remaining relatively invisible to the creature.”
“Excellent,” Mom said. “Have the ship’s matter synthesizer whip a few of them up.”
“Do it yourself!” Farnsworth snapped angrily.
“Uhh… ma’am?” the Helmsman said suddenly.
“What?” Mom glared at the interruption.
“Begging your pardon,” the man said, “but we’re picking up the ship on long-range scanners.”
Everyone on the bridge stared at the forward screen. Ahead lay a starfield; a splatter pattern of light against black velvet. One distant point of light was tagged with a yellow box graphic as it moved across the stars.
The SS Brezhnev had been found…
* * *
Leela piloted the Planet Express ship onward through deep space for some time before finally realizing she had absolutely no idea what their destination was. As Bender joined her and Nibbler on the bridge she shut down the Dark matter engine, leaving the ship to coast silently, and turned to the little three-eyed alien.
“Where are we going?” she asked simply. “Where is this monster Brainspawn?”
“We are not going to confront the creature yet,” Nibbler said. “We are not yet equipped to face the beast. Our destination now is the exact centre of the Universe.”
“Your home planet?” Leela looked up as Fry entered, now wearing a replacement red jacket from his cabin. For some reason, he appeared subdued and downcast.
“Affirmative,” Nibbler said. “We must travel hither to Eternium, that we may retrieve the one weapon powerful enough to end the threat of the Brainspawn once and for all.”
“Is it a Holy Hand-Grenade?” Bender asked.
“Even more powerful still,” Nibbler replied.
“Okay,” Leela said, bringing a series of star-charts up on her console. “Whatever the weapon is, it’ll take us a long time to reach the centre of the Universe in this ship.”
“Not necessarily.” Nibbler tapped on the nav-console he was using as a seat and brought up the same charts. “If we make use of sub-space spiderholes at these two locations…” He highlighted coordinates on the touch-screen. “…We should be able to cut the journey down from a decade to about a day.”
“Spiderholes?” Fry asked in confusion. “Don’t you mean wormholes?”
“No, these are made by planet-sized interdimensional spiders,” Nibbler replied. “There are no interdimensional worms.”
Leela punched in the coordinates and re-lit the main drive. The ship lunged ahead on its new course, which took it away from any area of space that was detailed in the map database. They were shooting onward into the depths of uncharted territory.
“‘…Here be monsters’,” Leela said to herself, engaging the autopilot, and the others stared at her. “It’s what mariners used to write,” she explained sheepishly, “on maps, when they reached the edge of what was known.”
Fry grunted and stuffed his hands deep in his pockets. “That’s because people are always afraid of the unknown,” he said sulkily. “They prefer everything to be laid out, all simple and predictable. Taking a chance on something new would be too scary, so they just call it a monster and tell it they only like it as a friend…” He trailed off. Leela was staring at him with an unreadable expression.
“Yeah, those ancient mariners can bite my shiny metal ass,” Bender said, completely missing the subtext.
Fry turned away. “I’ll be in my hammock,” he said. “Wake me when your stupid Universe needs saving.” With that, he walked away, and Leela chewed her lip anxiously, wanting to say something, but unsure of what.
The hiss and clunk of the bridge door opening and shutting seemed to echo with abrupt finality.
“What’s Captain Yesterday’s problem?” Bender said.
“…I am,” Leela replied guiltily.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Planet Express Employee Lounge
UBBFriend: Email This Page to Someone! 
posted 09-21-2007 04:12
posted 09-21-2007 17:11
I almost feel bad for Zoidberg. He could use a hug but I'm not giving it to him. Great update coldy. The story is so good. Can't wait for the next chapter.
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