Federations

No sooner had he arrived—talk about timing! I mean, really!—than a giant chainsaw suddenly appeared in the sky and started carving away at (are you surprised?) the throne room . . . and the antechamber. People screamed. People ran. People coughed from flying sawdust. People of several different flavors got turned into hamburger of several different flavors. People inside the palace, caught by the paralyzer ray that went with the saw, didn’t do much of anything.

Guards outside the palace started shooting at the parts of the chainsaw crunching through the walls. Quick-thinking Rufus Q. Shupilluliumash fired at the power button instead: a dot a centimeter wide three kilometers up in the air. Being a Patrol-trained markshamster and luckier than Lucky Pierre, he hit it dead on, the very first try.

The chainsaw stopped chainsawing. It fell out of the sky and smashed one of the ritziest neighborhoods—actually, several of the ritziest neighborhoods, because that was a big mother of a chainsaw—of Galactic Central to cottage cheese. Our bold space cadet cared nothing for that, though. He was doing his duty, and he was damned if he’d let common sense stand in his way.

Dashing toward the chainsaw’s survival capsule (How did he know where it was? He just knew. This is that kind of story.), he was Rufus Q. Shupilluliumash on the spot when a saurian humanoid, an ammonia/ice blob in a hotsuit, a kumquat, and a Frenchman came staggering out.

“You’re under arrest!” he shouted, covering them with his ever-reliable blaster. “Suspicion of firing a chainsaw without a license and operating an unauthorized space drive within city limits. Don’t nobody move!”

Nobody didn’t move . . . or something like that. “What do you know about the Royal Drive?” the Frenchman sneered. “How do you know it’s unauthorized?”

“It must be unauthorized, because I couldn’t Google it. And I know the Royal Drive uses the hellacious energy output from mixing”—our space cadet paused to build the moment, for he was indeed punster as well as hamster—“chamber and antechamber to propel your spacecraft across the Galaxy in pursuance of your nefarious ends. But now you’re busted, space scum!”

The Frenchman, the kumquat, and the saurian humanoid blanched. Rufus Q. Shupilluliumash presumed the ammonia/ice blob did, too—it is, after all, what self-respecting villains do under such circumstances—but the hotsuit kept him from being sure. Palace guards came up behind him. “What do we do with them, sir?” they asked respectfully.

“Take them away,” the hamster replied grandly. “They will trouble the spaceways no more.”

Your omniscient narrator also has the pleasure to report that, shortly thereafter, Space Cadet Rufus Q. Shupilluliumash became Ensign Rufus Q. Shupilluliumash, with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto. (Of course, he knew that wouldn’t happen. Didn’t you?) Our space cadet’s actions in this case were deemed to be in the highest tradition of the Space Patrol.

PRISONS KEVIN J. ANDERSON AND DOUG BEASON