current

Raid, or
How Team Alpha Saves the World
(Again)

by Barton Paul Levenson

     "This is it," said Commander Mark McMasters, the red-headed leader of Team Alpha.

     The other two members of the raiding party nodded. Blond, southern-accented Bobby Lee Jackson grinned hugely, chomping on his trademark enormous cigar. Across from him, black-haired Kurt "Snake" Disney gave a broad wink with the eye not covered by a black eye patch.

     "We're gonna clean these guys up, easy," said Snake.

     "All we need to know is where they are," said Bobby.

     "Don't be overconfident," said Mark. "This is no game. The lives of 20 trillion Americans depend on what we do here tonight."

     The three of them occupied a triangle of seats in the control room of an old SSTT-9900 space shuttle. The SSTT-9900 was only used for commercial flights; it mounted no weapons. With luck, the terrorists who had taken over the L-4 space colony wouldn't be expecting a team of Alpha Force Special Ops Special Operators.

     Each member of the team had been hand-picked by training specialists of the United Earth Freedom Force Defense League (UEFFDL). They each had a body worthy of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the good looks of Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, or, depending upon contractual availability, Tom Cruise. Their ages ranged from 28 to 33. Each was a qualified master sharpshooter, an expert in kung fu, aikido, judo, karate, savate, and kickboxing. They had the fastest reflexes of anyone living, could detect the sound of a pin dropping in the middle of a firefight, and all three had perfect stereoscopic vision, an extraordinarily hard talent to develop for Snake, who only had one eye. Their training, the hardest and toughest training in the Solar system, had made them impervious to pain, extremes of heat and cold, and hard radiation. And in addition, each was possessed of freakishly huge genitals.

     The terrorists were led by the notorious Abdul Muhammad Garcia, head of the feared Al Querida Qaeda.

     "And it's all because of The Sphere," said Mark.

     "Yeah, The Sphere," said Bobby Lee.

     "Sphere," repeated Snake.

     Colonizing the terraformed Mars, Venus, Ganymede, Callisto and Titan hadn't provided enough room for the burgeoning population of Earth. With great reluctance, the inhabitants of the Solar system had been forced to detonate the giant planets, Jupiter through Neptune, and use the mass of their inner, rocky cores to construct a gigantic sphere around the Sun. Humanity's teeming trillions occupied the inner surface of the great sphere, and their government occupied the Earth, which still existed as a planet but now rolled around just inside the equator of the gigantic, solid Dyson sphere known simply as The Sphere.

     To construct the track which held the Earth, the material of Earth's moon had been sacrificed. But to the moon worshippers of Al Querida Qaeda, this was sacrilege of the highest order. The Moon was sacred! Its death had to be avenged!

     They had started out with traditional terrorist methods, bombing public sites and sniping at police and paramedics when they arrived. For variety, they occasionally raped puppies on public access TV while chanting loudly to Satan. The whole of the Sphere had united against the evil group, and it had been thought that the last vestiges of them had been wiped out. It had been thought so, that is, until the old, abandoned space colony of L-4, previously orbiting harmlessly 238,000 miles from the inner surface of The Sphere, had suddenly changed course. The Sphere had then heard the voice of Abdul Muhammad Garcia on an illegal broadcast.

     "Silly Americans," he said. Since the 31st century, all humans had been known as "Americans," except for the rare few who were un-American. This shared ethos came from a common culture. Children under six were legally required to cry when Bambi's mother was shot and when the boy had to put down Old Yeller. Everyone ate at Starbucks and Mickey D's. As a result, all inhabitants of The Sphere considered themselves Americans.

     "Silly Americans," repeated the terrorist. "You thought to destroy the Holy Moon for your greedy capitalist scheme. Now you shall all pay, as I crash this old, abandoned space colony of L-4, previously orbiting harmlessly 238,000 miles from the inner surface of The Sphere, into Earth itself! The unspent fuel in the colony's gas tanks will create a fireball that will consume the entire Sphere. Thus will you perish for your crimes against the Holy Moon!"

     Blonde and shapely Jane Jackson Jones, President of The Sphere, had pleaded with the crazed assassins. "What good would it do you to destroy The Sphere? There will be no place left for you to rule if you destroy it all. Why eliminate trillions of innocent people who have never done you any harm? Eliminate me if you will ... fire a bullet into my heaving, white, naked bosom with its delicious rosy-tipped nipples ... but let my poor people live!"

     "No!" said Abdul.

     "Yes!" she pleaded.

     "No!" he refused.

     "Yes!" she begged.

     "No!" he insisted.

     "Yes!" she remonstrated.

     "No!" he exploded.

     At last the President had seen that all efforts to change the crazed mind of the terrorist leader were futile. In 24 hours, the L-4 space colony would crash into the Earth, the subsequent explosion destroying the entire Sphere. Jane knew then that she had to employ her secret weapon.

     She had summoned Team Alpha to the Elliptical Office. Her hands clasped on her immense rosewood desk, she addressed the elite soldiers with solemn, serious solemnity. "Boys," she said. "You know the situation."

     "Darn right," said Mark McMasters. "I had a feeling you'd be calling us sooner or later to sort out this crazy mess."

     "I'm afraid so. You've got to stop Abdul Muhammad Garcia. If you don't, the consequences will be terrible."

     "Madam President, we'll give it our best shot."

     "That's all I ask," she said. "Wait, one more thing. We're all facing imminent, horrible death. We've got only hours to contact our loved ones and tell them all that they've meant to us, to put our affairs in order, to get right with Him, the Man Upstairs. It's a time for introspection, for reflection on how we've spent our lives. I've got to have you!!!" And with that she had ripped off all her clothing and lain down on the massive rosewood desk, sending pens, notepads and high-tech devices spinning and crashing in all directions. Mark, as team leader, made tough love to her first, followed by Bobby Lee, who made love in his more gentlemanly southern manner, and then Snake, who got down and dirty. "Go," she said. "Go, and save Earth, and all of humanity."

     "You got it," said Mark.

     The shuttle approached the falling Space Station, coming close to the main docking port. At once the terrorists contacted them via sub-etheric sub-space sub-radio. "Incoming ship, identify yourself at once or face flaming, fiery death!"

     "Um, it's just us," said Mark in a timorous, trembly voice, not at all like his usual deep basso profundo. One who didn't know of his incredibly masculine identity would have thought the speaker a timid, pathetic soul employed in the service industry. "Um, you know. Maintenance. To make sure all the toilets are working correctly."

     "Well, I suppose you can dock, then," said the terrorist comm officer. "But if you try any treachery, your fate will be painful and deeply frightening!"

     "Okay," said Mark, with a broad wink at his companions.

     Mark docked the shuttle, making perfect contact as usual. The three adventurers then checked their side-arms. These were the most advanced and masculine weapons ever developed by the United Earth Freedom Force Defense League (UEFFDL). Almost two feet in length, with a 90-calibre aperture, the guns contained powerful superconducting batteries which built up a tremendously powerful tremendous force, then ejaculated bolts of pure, white-hot energy at the caressing touch of the mechanism's hair trigger. Each battery provided enough "juice," as it was known by professionals, for 12,000 well-placed shots. The guns' handy wrist straps prevented them from ever being shot out of the user's hand, and they would respond only to the fingerprints of the user who had imprinted them at the time of manufacture. Lastly, all their moving parts were lubricated with 100% testosterone.

     "Let's go!" said Mark. Instead of going via the airlock, he crashed through the forward view window of the shuttle, breath held for the vacuum of dark outer space, and then through the window of the docking bay. Bobby and Snake were right behind him. Waiting for the ship were over a hundred evil terrorists equipped with deadly fanato-rays. A terrific gun battle ensued. Due to the time-altering properties of the energy bolts, whenever a bad guy was shot or exploded, he appeared to be flying through the air in close-up slow-motion. When the firefight was over, Mark had been singed on one forearm and Bobby had taken a terrible hit to his left shoulder, but the 100 terrorists were dead, destroyed, on their way to Hell, and neatly stacked up in a ten-by-five-by-two three-dimensional array of better-off-dead terrorist corpses.

     "All right," growled Mark, oblivious to his pain. "Let's get to that control room and stop this hideous plot!"

     "Master! What will we do?" begged Shai'tan bin Shai'tan, Abdul Muhammad Garcia's evil and worm-tongued second in command, falling to his knees in front of his leader in the Space Station's control room. "The maintenance crew was not a true maintenance crew at all, but a cleverly disguised squad of UEFFDL soldiers! They will surely come here and kill us all!"

     "Get hold of yourself!" snapped Abdul, giving Shai'tan a tremendous, back-handed slap across the face. "Are you a fanatical terrorist warrior, or an effete, soft, westernized American pig-dog-rat-unspecified-but-denigrated-animal?"

     "I... Uh... the former," said Shai'tan.

     "Good," said Abdul. If Shai'tan had given any other answer, he would unhesitatingly have shot his subordinate and best friend in the face, in spite of their years of close, almost homosexual friendship. "This control room is solidly protected from outside attack. The walls are impervium thirty centimeters thick." (Being an evil terrorist, Abdul naturally thought in terms of the metric system.) "Cameras survey all routes. The door is bolted. And even if, by some ten-trillionth chance, the Americans should manage to force their way in here, we still have the incredibly powerful FyrePyre Device."

     "Not ... Not the FyrePyre Device!"

     "Yes!"

     "Surely not ..."

     "Yes! Yes!"

     "You can't mean—"

     "Yes! Yes! Yes!" Abdul threw back his unshaven head and laughed insanely.

     "Oh, Master, you are truly an evil genius," said Shai'tan.

     "Thanks," said Abdul. "I appreciate that."

     Mark, Bobby Lee and Snake rendezvoused just outside the main door to the control room. "Now how are we gonna get through that?" asked Bobby Lee. "That door is pure impervium, and it must be a foot thick."

     "Well," said Snake, with his usual grim smile, "Due to my somewhat shady, perhaps technically illegal, yet always honorable past, I have certain skills that can be applied in a case like this." And he took a screwdriver out of his pants pocket.

     "That won't penetrate impervium," pointed out Mark.

     "Not hardly," said Snake. "But it will do this!" And with that he worked the screwdriver into the door's hinges and managed to lift up the pin so that he could swing the door out the wrong way. He leaped back and the impervium door crashed onto the metal deck of the space station with a loud BANG!

     "Come on," said Snake. He drew his side-arm and stepped into the Control Room, followed closely by Mark and Bobby Lee.

     "So, Team Alpha!" cried Abdul Muhammad Garcia. "We meet again!"

     "And this time you're finished, Abdul!" said Mark. "You'll never again plot to destroy America! Now get away from those controls!"

     "You may think you have outsmarted me with your clever lift-the-door-pin-off-the-hinges trick. But I have my secret weapon!"

     "Secret weapon?"

     "The FirePyre Device!" And with that the crazed terrorist drew the deadly machine out of his pants pocket and flicked it. Three tunnels of hyperdimensional flame reached out from the evil contraption to each of the members of Team Alpha, enveloping them in brightly-colored special effects. They fell backward onto the deck, writhing in pain that was too much even for their incredibly masculine bodies. At last the awful flames died away, leaving our heroes injured and broken on the deck.

     "I guess as how this is the end," said Bobby Lee. "Mark, Snake, y'all've been the finest comrades in arms a southern gentleman could want."

     "See ya around, guys," said Snake. "Too bad we couldn't save the Earth. Once in a while there just ain't a happy ending."

     "Die, American pig-dog-rat-unspecified-but-denigrated animals!" said Abdul.

     Mark said, "We're not licked yet. There's one more thing we can do."

     "Ha ha, your bluffs frighten me not at all," laughed the evil terrorist.

     Mark took something out of his pocket. "This is an experiment. A device invented by the famous Dr. von Arktype in his secret lab. It's known as an M.I.D., for Masculinity Implosion Device."

     "What ... what does it do?" asked the terrorist, finally uncertain. Behind him, Shai'tan bin Shai'tan cringed in abject terror.

     "This," said Mark. He triggered the device.

     Instantly, all the testosterone in the room flew to the small black spheroid. The members of Team Alpha cried out in pain and the terrorists screamed high-pitched, womanish screams.

     In a few seconds the device stopped. Abdul looked down at himself. He had become a woman.

     "NO-O-O-O-O! NO-O-O-O-O!!!"

     "Yes! Yes!" said Mark. Since the Team Alpha members had such incredibly large stores of testosterone to begin with, they had merely turned into stylishly dressed metrosexuals, while the terrorists had both switched gender.

     "The Moon-God has abandoned me!" cried Abdul. And so saying, he performed the last masculine act of which he would ever be capable. He drew his automatic and shot himself repeatedly in both temples.

     Mark slowly managed to get up. He went to the controls, ignoring the cringing Shai'tan bin Shai'tan, who was too contemptible to bother with. The space station was coming closer and closer to the Earth. The mighty planet grew in the forward viewscreens, showing a cloudless surface with North and South America showing. The space station began to scream through Earth's upper atmosphere.

     With a mighty heave, Mark wrenched the wheel to the side. The Space Station made a J-curve and flew back into the inner Solar system. Earth was saved.

Barton Paul Levenson has a degree in physics.  Happily married to genre poet Elizabeth Penrose, his being both a liberal Democrat and a born-again Christian just confuses everybody.  He has about 30 published short stories and three novels coming out this year or next year.