The Shape-Shifters, Chapter Thirteen. Louis Shalako.

It really is a nice truck, ladies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Thirteen

 

Ted and Jeff cruised slowly past…

 

Ted and Jeff cruised slowly past the coffee shop, staring at the front window, but to little or no avail. The angle was wrong. With the brilliant white light coming off the snow, the glare on the shop windows prevented them from seeing in.

“I saw him go in there, Jeff.” Ted was insistent. “It was Frenchie for sure, and he had a moll with him.”

“A what?” Jeff gaped.

“A moll—like a chick, a broad, a dame.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. I knew this would happen.” Ted was so fuckin’ immature.

“We really can’t keep popping up every place he goes.” Ted’s mind crawled along at a snail’s pace, but Jeff agreed so far.

It wasn’t that much of a stretch to look for a parking spot, one where they could use the mirrors. That way if Frenchie came out on the sidewalk and began walking in their direction, he wouldn’t catch sight of their faces, and they could fire up and pull away.

Jeff was learning, but he was learning pretty good. It was all just a matter of logic and foresight, he reckoned.

They sat in the truck, engine running, while Jeff adjusted the right side mirror using the remote control.

“There. That’s it.” Ted had a proper view now.

Watching that passenger side mirror...

Ted could monitor the sidewalk as well, and take some of the workload off of Jeff.

“So you figure the best thing to do is grab him when he comes out.” Ted nodded. “I guess that’s pretty smart, if we can do it.”

“It seems like a one-in-a-million shot. And honestly, I think we have to bring in a couple of other guys. We have to sleep sometime. Hell, we got to go and fill up on gas sometimes. That’s how we lost him earlier.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Ted agreed.

It was a good thing for them that Frenchie, this Gagnon character, was shoveling his way all over town, or they would have lost him for the day.

The two of them were talking it out, planning, or pre-planning, finding all the little problems as they went. Ted even had a few rough sketches of the surrounding country, although they were pretty basic.

“One of our questions, did they have a vehicle? And what happened to it? How well planned was it?” Jeff had nothing but questions. “Did these guys have a place to go and hole up? You’d think they would, right?”

“Yes.” Teddy agreed with all of that.

He had a clipboard with all sorts of news articles on there. Holy crap. At this point Jeff wasn’t sure just how seriously he was taking it. Not so far. But Ted seemed to be going all out. Not that a little hard information wouldn’t be helpful. Ted had a real road map, and a pen, and some blank paper. Huh.

Jeff drove to where they were meeting Slick Wilson and Harry Morden. Before they got to the place, Jeff turned the volume down on the music.

“You do the talking. But don’t tell them one or two things they don’t need to know. Let’s just find out if they want to do this first. Once you tell them about it, you’ve pretty much committed all of us to something, a conspiracy or something.”

“We shouldn’t actually be carrying too much stuff around with us.” Teddy gave his clipboard a little shake. “But the other guys will want to know everything. You know that.”

“Yeah. If we split four ways, it’s still a hundred-twenty-five grand each. That’s all I know.” Jeff had a gentle flush of something visceral.

The whole notion was a real cure for constipation.

...what is this, the cure for constipation?

“Where are we going to go for a briefing?” Jeff had to ask...Ted was serious, or so it seemed.

“I guess down in your basement. That will have to do. There they are.” Teddy sat up as the other pair came out of the door of Wilson’s place and then stood by the end of the driveway.

“Shove that stuff under the seat for a while. If anyone asks, we’re doing estimates for roofs, or siding, or something.” Jeff pulled to a stop.

The boys got in, and the truck moved off again.

Jeff became uncomfortably aware of a cop car a couple of blocks up ahead, as if guilt was written all over his face. The feeling quickly subsided, and he realized it was just silly. They can’t read your mind, right? The cop car cruised past uneventfully.

Slick and Harry sat in the back, not having much to say this morning.

“We’re going over to my place.” Jeff was driving nice for a change.

“Got any beer?” Slick asked with no hesitation.

“Maybe a couple.” Jeff made the admission cautiously.

“You can’t get too drunk. We have an idea we want to run past you guys.” Ted looked over the back seat.

“You want to get stoned and go hunting tonight. Yeah, we know.” Harry, still looking a bit hungover.

They all laughed. Jeff and Ted left it there for the moment.

 

 

END

Chapter One.

Chapter Two.

Chapter Three.

Chapter Four.

Chapter Five.

Chapter Six.

Chapter Seven.

Chapter Eight.

Chapter Nine.

Chapter Ten.

Chapter Eleven.

Chapter Twelve.

 

Images. Louis.

Poor old Louis has books and stories available from Smashwords. He also has images on ArtPal and Fine Art America.

Thank you for reading.

 

The Challenge of Writing Science-Fiction. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako.

One of the great challenges of writing something like Tactics of Delay is that it is science-fiction that must happen three to five hundred years in the future. Proper science-fiction usually focuses on an extrapolation of current science, and tries to predict the future in a relatively short term. In that sense, Tactics is more of a space-opera, one that I have tried to make realistic. This almost presupposes starting off in the present day, with a level of technology that we don’t really have. It presupposes a commitment that we don’t presently have, a commitment to exploring and colonizing nearby star systems.

There’s just no way that this story could be happening fifty or a hundred years in the future.

For that reason, it is extremely hard to guess what the technology might look like, or how it might be applied, and what the results might be so far in the future. In that sense, the story stands a good chance of becoming little more than a rehash of twentieth and twenty-first century military science. (The truth is, the author doesn’t even know very much about that either.) The other thing is that writing a book is an exploration. At some point one recognizes that this thing could go on for a million words. But a novel is more like a hundred thousand words. At that point, one accepts the limitations and tries to figure out an ending that doesn’t leave the reader disappointed. It has to round off at the end, the work a coherent whole that is understandable, readable, and not too wanting in the final analysis. It is, after all, just another form of entertainment.

It is, hopefully, a story.

The fact that we have FTL space-ships and laser communications at great distances only underlines that fact. The analogies are there, calling them ‘ships’ clearly connotes the sea.

The military story is a recognizable trope, and to the reader, men and women in goggs, guns, mines, bombs and rockets are all too familiar in the present day.

That’s not to say there isn’t any science to the story. That science actually helps us to date it forwards, rather than in the past, as an archaeologist would do.

It would take a minimum of three to five hundred years for the process of terraforming a planet like Denebola-Seven, even if the process started first thing tomorrow, in the year 2017. 

Still, if the planet already had an atmosphere and some kind of proper topsoil, fresh water and the right amount of ‘solar’ radiation, i.e. sunlight, Terran species such as corn and soybeans, pine trees, even Terran fish species, and domestic animals, might be well established within fifty to a hundred years of initial colonization. If the planet already had its own plants, animals, insect-like and bird-like species, it would greatly help the process. That’s not to say imported species would be entirely dispersed all over the planet, but they certainly would be within a zone around concentrations of human activity. It’s interesting to speculate how quickly an imported bird species, one with a massive migration, would take to develop something similar in a wholly new environment, one where there is competition from native species, and at the same time, uniquely new opportunities for feeding and breeding.

Imported insects (and other life-forms) that thrived, would spread out and continue to spread out until they had penetrated all conceivably-livable ecosystems and would, over time, reach a state of ‘equilibrium’, one subject to the terms and conditions of that particular planetary environment.

It’s also interesting to speculate as to how governments and self-governance would form under new social conditions. In the story, we find that the few towns and cities are governed and policed—the rest of the planet is almost utterly devoid of human life and so they have developed no overall, single planetary government. The tax base is very small, and all things human have to be paid for. This is probably true of the sentient native culture as well. Yet one might sort of expect a single, united planetary government to be among the first things to happen. In the Old West analogy, such things take time. This is arguably why the planet is a member of a Confederation of independent planets, and also why they have contracted with the Organization, also members, for their defense.

Development, the establishment of the rule of law, spreads out in a wave, from a centre of power and culture. It’s a lot like insects in that regard.

And then there is the wealth. The Unfriendlies are there for a reason, after all. That is the key to the frontier, and its winner-take-all mentality. It’s an entire planet, one eminently suitable for human life, with a minimal ability to defend itself.

It is a story of human nature, as much as anything else.

Over the course of writing such a thing, we squeeze in as many themes as we can get.

We also learn something in the process.

END

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Thank you for reading.