SPACE QUEST: MAMA'S TURN
(c) 2005, 2007 BY Anthony Durrant


The spacecraft floated through space, its engines long dead but its life
support systems still functioning. Inside, its occupant - a woman - slept on,
deep in the dreamless sleep of suspended animation.

Sensors followed the ship as it floated past a garbage barge, and a tractor
beam grabbed hold of it and pulled it into the garbage barge itself. Once the
spacecraft was in the barge, it was dropped anong a hash of spacecraft parts
and wrecked spacecraft. On sensing a breathable atmosphere outside, the
spacecraft shut down the filtered cosmic energy beam that was keeping its
occupant alive and shattered the cover of her cryogenic capsule to release the
Nirvano gas and allow her to awaken safely and normally.

Beatryce Wilco woke up and found herself in the cryogenic chamber of her
spacecraft, the Wanderer. Stretching and yawning, she sat up and looked
around. She must have landed - the ship's AI had woken her from her long
slumber. Rising to her feet, she headed for the door, which slid open for her,
then closed after she left the ship. Looking around her, she saw nothing but
space junk.

"Oh, no!" she cried. "I've landed in a garbage dump!"

Walking away from the Wanderer, which had powered down for safety now that its
occupant had left it, Bea fell down a hole and found herself in a large room
below the deck of the garbage barge. On the walls were long wires that powered
a series of old spacecraft lights around the room. Bea heard chittering noises
and panicked. She leaped, and her leap took her clear out of the rat burrow;
she landed on the barge's deck.

Heading back toward her spacecraft, Bea turned right and walked toward a giant
robot head - the head of a Showman Warrior. The Showmen had been built to
fight in the Cologne Wars, and had then been phased out of service and
scrapped; this one had ended up here. The grate on the robot's mouth was gone,
and Bea went inside - and into the hull of a wrecked spacecraft. The wires on
the left side of the tunnel at the other end had been deliberately pulled out
of their sockets.

"Someone's been here before me!" Bea cried. "But who?"

She walked through the tunnel and emerged on the other side - on a cliff that
was made out of space junk. Bea could see the floor of the deck below,
including a spacecraft-sized depression in the floor and a big hole in the
wall nearby that had since been carefully patched with decking from another
spacecraft.

"Someone has been here before me!" she cried. "Who could it have been, I
wonder?" Anthony Durrant 2.

July 9, 2007

Heading back through the wrecked spacecraft in the tunnel, Bea walked back to
the area where her spacecraft was, then headed toward the rats' burrow.
Turning from the rat hole, she stumbled on a Goodman Fighter, a type of robot
used to fight in the long-ago Robot Wars, which had claimed Bea's homeworld,
Lepton. Climbing into the Goodman fighter, and seating herself into the
control chair, Bea saw that there was a warning light on the control console
that read:

DANGER - POWER LOW AND FADING!

Looking around the control chamber, Bea saw that the reactor, which gave the
robot its power, had long since been removed. Climbing out of the control
chamber, Bea walked off again, and was suddenly grabbed by a giant pincer,
then dropped onto a moving conveyor belt. In a control room above the conveyor
belt, she saw a robot seated in a chair, staring at several monitor screens.
Seeing a chute right in front of her, she leaped into it and fell downward . .
. into the rats' burrow! Following the wires, Bea found they were attached to
a Vorillian Orb, a sphere with two wires coming out of the metal on top of it
and a skull-and-crossbones flag painted on the front. Bea grabbed the
Vorillian Orb eagerly, tore it from its mountings on the wall of the rats'
burrow, and leaped to the deck above the burrow, where she headed for the
Goodman Fighter.

Climbing back into the Fighter's control chamber, Bea placed the Vorillian Orb
in the reactor chamber in the middle of the fighter's console, but it turned
out that the connector wires were too long! Bea unplugged the wires and tossed
them away, wondering where she could get new ones.

"Oh, well!" she sighed. "At least I can pretend to be a Goodman pilot. I just
wish I could get this thingy to fly again!"

Bea went back to the Showman Warrior, and this time she saw that one of the
robot's eyes was missing. Climbing up the robot's face, Bea jumped through its
eye socket and slid down onto the lower level of the barge. In front of her
was a hole where the other spacecraft had been, but there was now nothing here
but space junk.

"There's nothing here but space junk!" Bea shouted. "Space junk and more space
junk!"

She walked over to a small spacecraft; the hatch was open, so she went in. On
one side of the ship was a junction box with two wires leading from it.
Grabbing the wires, she pulled them out of the junction box, left the
spacecraft, and climbed up the robot head, then climbed down to the deck that
her original spacecraft was on.

"Now I will be able to fly my Goodman Fighter!" she cried.

Anthony Durrant 3.

July 9, 2007

Heading over to the Goodman Fighter, she went into the control chamber and
used the captured wires to connect the Orb to the Goodman Fighter, then
replaced the panel that had originally gone over top of the reactor, but had
been removed by someone - perhaps the rats - when they took out the original
reactor. With the Vorillian Orb now hooked up to the Goodman Fighter, the
control chamber's lights suddenly flashed on, and the display on the monitor
changed. It read:

REACTOR INSTALLED - POWER RESTORED

But then it showed her a different display message:

UNABLE TO REACH FTL SPEED:

THE ION DRIVE IS MISSING

"The ion drive is missing!?" Bea cried. "What the hell - ?"

She climbed out of the Goodman Fighter's control chamber, and headed toward
the ion drive at the back of the Wanderer. Located inside a set of latches and
panels, the ion drive - which was the only thing that could run an FTL drive -
was safe from most people - but not from Beatryce Wilco! Ripping the hatch in
which the four panels were set off the back of the Wanderer, she threw it to
the ground. Now that the ion drive housing was opened, Bea grabbed the ion
drive and ran away from the Wanderer just before it exploded. To her surprise,
the shock wave of the explosion had thrown her atop the platform next to the
conveyor belt.

"Now, how on Lepton did I get here?" Bea asked. "Did I jump?"

"Yes, you jumped!" said the robot in the barge's main control room. "The last
time someone was dragged aboard in a spacecraft, he was lucky to escape before
I found him and blew him to atoms with my ray gun. That person's name was
Roger Wilco!"

"No!" Bea cried. "Not my own son!"

She jumped into the main control room, grabbed the robot, and threw him over
the side of the main control room's walkway. As it fell, it shouted:

"I'll get all of you humans if it's the last thing I ever do!"

"And it may be!" Bea shouted back.

Anthony Durrant 4.

July 9, 2007

Upon entering the barge's main control room, Bea looked at the screens and saw
the Goodman Fighter on one of them. Racing to the cargo lifter outside, she
jumped into a seat, and then ran to the Fighter's location, then jumped off
the lifter, landing on the deck - hard. Nearby was the robot's shattered body
- still as a doornail!!

"And good riddance to bad rubbish!" said Bea as she picked herself up and
walked away proudly.

She found the Goodman Fighter again, and placed the Wanderer's ion drive at
the bottom of the huge robot's backpack, clicking the drive into place very
neatly.

"Wait a minute!" Bea cried. "It took two men to muscle that ion drive into
place on the Wanderer! How on Lepton did I get so strong?"

Entering the Goodman Fighter directly, Bea sat down in the control chair,
buckled up, and pushed the button that closed the door to the control chamber,
then pulled the ion drive initiator and throttle control forward. The Fighter
lifted slowly out of the trash pile it was embedded , and started picking up
speed as Bea tried to fly it toward the roof - only to find herself still
stuck within the constraints of the barge.

"I'll have to blast my way out," Bea shouted, "in the same manner Roger freed
himself!"

Aiming the Goodman Fighter's wrist lasers at the bulkhead in front of her, Bea
fired and blew a hole right through the hull. She raised her shields to avoid
being struck by the fragments of the barge's hull as the Fighter was swept
through the hole into space! Once safely away from the barge, Bea forced the
fighter into FTL speed and sped away.

Tim's Tea Cozy, two standard hours later

Bea landed her Goodman Fighter on the pad next to Tim's Tea Cozy, opened its
breastplate, then climbed out. When she went into Tim's Tea Cozy, she saw
Timothy Kendall, a fellow Leptonian and the proprietor, seatind behind his
desk.

"Get me one cup of Xenonian Currant Tea, please," she told him, "and don't be
stingy with the sugar!"

"Comin' right up, Mrs. Wilco!" Tim said. "Damn, but you've grown bigger since
the last time I saw you."

"I?" Bea asked. "You must be mistaken, Tim!"

"Nah, nah!" said Tim. "You're so big now, you've outgrown your Space Force
Uniform - makes it look like it's shrunk!" Anthony Durrant 5.

July 9, 2007

She looked at the mirror on the back wall and saw a big muscular blonde in a
Space Force uniform that was much too small for her. Her hair went right down
to the small of her back, and her eyes were Leptonian green. Her face was
aquiline - and beautiful - and her muscled stomach was exposed to the air. Her
head just brushed against the teashop ceiling. Bea asked Tim:

"Is this me? How is this even possible?"

"Swelp me, Ms. Wilco!" Tim said. "I dunno!"

Then he handed her a cup of Xenonian Currant Tea. Sitting down at one of the
tables, Bea took a sip from her cup - it was good tea, as usual, and went down
well. After finishing her ea, Bea went over to the video game against the wall
to her left. It was in a crimson casing, and was called FIREHAIR™.

"I don't know why Roger and his brother Abner love these games so much!" Bea
cried. "But I'll be space-dipped if I'm going to leave without playing this
one, because it's - MAMA'S TURN!"

She inserted a buckazoid into the slot beneath the game console and hit the
start button. Bea discovered that FIREHAIR™ was essentially a game of what
used to be called "Cowboys and Indians." Essentially, she played the part of
Firehair, the Queen of the Sagebrush Frontier, who was trying to drive an
outlaw gang away from the village where she lived with a group of Native
Americans, the Dakotas. To her amazement, Bea was easily able to fight off all
the outlaws and kill their leader, Billy Claiborne. Once she had beaten the
game, the screen went dark, and the next thing she knew, her son's face
appeared on the video game monitor. He was older than he'd been when she'd
last seen him, grown into a handsome young man. She felt badly about having to
leave her late husband Mannequin at home with their two boys, but she couldn't
care for them once she'd embarked on her deep space mission. She remembered
waving goodbye to her two sons on the day she'd left to go to the Xenonian
launchpad, and seeing tears on their faces as she left them for what was to be
the very last time.

"Mom, help me! I'm being held prisoner by the Math Monster on the planet
Cygnus IV, and only you can save me!" the message read. "It wants to suck up
all my knowledge!"

Bea rushed out of the Tea Cozy and jumped into her Goodman Fighter, then
blasted off with all engines blazing, then shot into FTL speed before anyone
could stop her. Once in FTL, she plotted a course change to the planet Cygnus
IV to rescue her son Roger.

Once she'd arrived at Cygnus IV, Bea landed outside of what her ship's
computer had informed her was a native village. Instead of a native village,
however, Bea saw a huge

Anthony Durrant 6.

July 9, 2007

metal dome in the distance, gleaming brightly in the sunlight. Leaping from
the Goodman Fighter, she headed toward the dome.

"Roger may be in there!" she cried. "I've got to find him!"

On the way to the dome, she spotted a glowing object lying in the sand and
picked it up. It turned out to be a coin left behind by one of the villagers.
Taking it with her, Bea went into the native village and looked around, but
saw no one - the village was empty!

"Everything's so quiet!" she thought. "It's a ghost town!"

There was a small store to the right, so Bea went in and looked around.
Inside, she found several items: an Orat-on-a-Stick, a rather large magnetic
winch, a fuse, a Cubyx Rube puzzle, a battery, and a moddie - a behaviour
modification device. Taking these items with her, Beatryce Wilco went on
toward the dome. When she got to the dome's surface, a door opened in the
front, so Bea went into the dome itself, only to have the door slide shut
behind her. Bea was now in a hallway full of drones that had once been the
village people. As she headed down the hallway, she saw one of the drones
leave its alcove. Hurrying to the vacant alcove, Bea saw an interconnect
device and plugged herself into it using her bellybutton interface socket.
Once she was connected to the system, she was surprised to see calculations
and diagrams changing constantly around her, always replaced by new ones, none
of which Bea could understand.

"This must be the Math Monster!" she cried.

"Indeed!" said a loud voice. "But this area is for my drones alone!"

Suddenly, she was back in the alcove - the connection had been broken. Leaving
the alcove, she walked slowly along the hallway until she found an archway
that led to a second hallway. Once in this new hallway, she saw more alcoves.
Out of nowhere, a drone came toward her. Wondering what to do, she used the
magnetic winch she was carrying to zap it, shorting out its systems; this
allowed her to pass by unmolested. Eventually she found another arch and used
it to enter another hallway. Once she did that, another drone attacked, and
she zapped it with the same winch. Once it had fallen, she searched it and
found a control module in its chest.

By placing the module in her interface socket, Bea was able to learn that the
Math Monster had commanded its drones to find her and bring her into its
presence. Tucking the module away after removing it from her interface socket,
Bea headed through the hallway until she found a third arch leading to a third
hallway. As she headed around a corner, she found a pile of gleaming metal
objects: abandoned dental fillings, many of them still embedded in the teeth
in which they had been installed.

"Who could've done such a thing?" Bea wondered. Anthony Durrant 7.

July 9, 2007

Stepping around the pile of fillings, Bea was able to avoid tripping over it,
and eventually she found a fourth door, which led her into a large room with a
glowing red-and-white striped cylinder in the middle. Standing in front of the
cylinder was a huge black Goodman Fighter with claws for hands and glowing red
eyes. Bea shivered - she was in the presence of the Black Goodman, a walking
robot factory that fought the humans in the Robot War and was controlled by
the living brain of a person who had been horribly disfigured in one of the
explosions on their homeworld during the war.

"Where is my son?" Bea yelled. "What have you done with him?"

"He was never here, Beatryce Wilco!" the Black Goodman told her. "I used a
crude but effective image of him to bring you to this dome. I need you to
recharge my mechanism, which is powered by cosmic energy, so that I can leave
this planet and my hellish union with the Math Monster. You were permanently
mutated by exposure to cosmic energy, so your body will act as a living prism
for my cosmic energy beam!"

Bea was instantly frozen in place by a force field on the section of the floor
where she was standing. Then, the Black Gundam fired a beam from its forehead
toward the socket in Bea's bellybutton. Once the beam lanced through Bea, it
crisscrossed the room, bouncing off the walls until an energy grid was
established. The pain was terrible, but Bea's body had been specially treated
to absorb cosmic radiation like crazy, and she bore up under the pain bravely.

"AAHH!" she cried. "It hurts! It hurts!"

"My mechanism is now active," the Black Goodman said, "thanks to you. Now you
will be taken to one of the alcoves, where you will be changed into a drone
that will then be under my complete control. So long, Beatryce Wilco!"

Bea didn't question how the Black Goodman knew her name. Her mission was not a
secret - it was public, and the people of her long-destroyed homeworld who'd
settled on Xenon would have known about it - and her. The Math Monster would
have gained that knowledge when it melded its collective mind with the Black
Goodman's own human consciousness. Pulling the Orat-on- a-Stick out of her
pocket, she hurled it at the red-and-white-striped cylinder that was its
central core and cried:

"Not if I throw a monkey wrench into the works!"

The Orat-on-a-Stick hit the cylinder so hard that it smashed its outer shell
and penetrated into the core itself, causing disruption, and blowing the Math
Monster's mental control circuits to Jeremiah, destroying them completely and
freeing the Black Goodman from its control. Then she turned and fled, punching
a direct route out through the metal walls as if they were paper. As soon as
she was outside, Bea rushed back to her Goodman Fighter

Anthony Durrant 8.

July, 9, 2007

as fast as she could. Climbing into its control chamber, she replaced a blown
fuse with the one she'd found inside the store in an empty town, she quickly
completed the launch procedure and blasted away from the planet's surface. A
few minutes later, the Black Goodman blasted away from Cygnus II as well -
mere moments before that planet exploded with a terrifying flash of light.
Both Bea and the black Goodman accelerated to FTL speed at the same time to
escape the shock wave of the explosion, and when they came out of FTL speed,
Bea saw the Black Goodman on her viewscreen, waving to her from his position
out in space. Activating her thru space transmitter, she called:

"Are you all right, Black Goodman?"

"I am still intact, yes!" he replied. "And your cosmic energy transfusion has
made me feel like a new person. Thank you, Beatryce Wilco."

"So, what are you going to do now?" Bea asked the Black Goodman.

"I and my minirobots are going to help people across the Galaxy who are in
need of assistance!" he told her. "I'll start anew, and I'll throw away the
past - and the future I build will be something that will last! I'll begin
again - I'm going to change my life. I'll see if I can now fulfill my life.
I've been given powers greater than any man - and I'll use those powers to
help my fellow man. I shall make amends - and I'll live in praise of the
standard moment when I was able to begin again! FAREWELL!"

"Goodbye, Black Goodman!" Bea shouted as he blasted into FTL speed and was
gone.

She started to lay in a course for Xenon - but then she hesitated.

"I've got all of the Galaxy to explore," she said, "so why don't I go off and
find some fun and adventure for myself, now that I know my son Roger is safe?
Yes, that's just what I'll do - complete my original mission, which was to
search the Galaxy for sentient life forms! And perhaps I shall get to see the
wonders of the Galaxy, as well! My first destination is simple: first star to
the right, and straight on until morning!"

As she laid in the course, Bea looked at the stars in her viewscreen!"

"They're beautiful," she said, "and I'll bet there are planets round every one
of those stars. I might not be able to visit all of those stars in my lifetime
- and some of them may already have gone nova - but it should still be fun
trying to get there."

And as she hit the button that sent her Goodman Fighter into FTL speed, Bea
smiled peacefully, knowing that she was happy at last.

"I'll always love you, Roger, my son!" she whispered. "Always!"

THE END