Time to Dream: A Captain Brian Saber Story Read online

  A Time to Dream

  A Captain Brian Saber Story

  Dean Wesley Smith

  A Time to Dream

  Copyright © 2013 by Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover Design copyright © 2013 WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © 2013 Philcold/Dreamstime

  “A Time to Dream” was first published in 2000 in a slightly different form in Guardsmen of Tomorrow from DAW Books,

  edited by Marin H. Greenburg and Larry Segriff

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  One

  Captain Brian Saber of the Earth Protection League could tell there would be a mission. Tonight was the night. The first mission in over a week. The border skirmish on the third moon of the Garland Star Cluster must have flared up again. Or something else threatened the security of Earth. The League was needed to stop the threat. He was needed, and he was ready.

  Across the small nursing home room the old clock on the wooden dresser ticked, echoing in the small space and dim light, demanding his attention just as it did every night as he lay in his bed, awake, waiting. When he’d first arrived at the Shady Valley Nursing Home outside of Chicago six years earlier after his second stroke, that old clock had let him count down the seconds until he died. Long seconds, never-ending seconds that he had wished would go by faster.

  Now the loud ticking in the night of that old clock counted the minutes until the next mission, until the time he could become young again. And the time waiting, getting older and closer to death went by too fast now.

  Far too fast.

  Now he wanted to stay alive, to stay with the missions and the Earth Protection League, to get the chance to be young enough to wear his Proton Stunners and fight the good fight against the enemies of Earth.

  The clock ticked.

  Time went by.

  Down the dimly lit hall outside his room’s door a nurse laughed at an unheard joke. Captain Brian Saber coughed, the sound weak and pitiful in the silence of the nursing home.

  He glanced at the clock. He could barely see the hands in the light from the hall, but he could tell it was only a little after ten in the evening. It was still far too early for them to come for him.

  He tried to roll his eighty-three-year-old body over on its side, but only succeeded in shifting the sheet slightly under him. He hadn’t had the strength to pull himself out of bed for over two years, let alone roll over. And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d walked across this small room on his own to the bathroom. A nurse’s aide always had to carry him and plop him on the cold toilet, then carry him back to his bed or wheelchair.

  The small strokes had just kept eating at him, taking parts of him bit-by-bit. The doctors said they had them under control now, at least.

  He laughed, and the laugh again turned into a rough cough that sent his old heart pounding. He forced himself to calm down and to not think about how he was at the moment. He hated thinking about how old he was, how frail his body had become, how dependent on others he now was. He reminded himself that none of that mattered like it used to.

  Now he had the missions for the Earth Protection League. The missions gave his old life purpose, his continued living in this way station of the dying a valid reason. And even though there hadn’t been a mission for almost a week, he knew tonight was the night.

  He could tell.

  It was all in the details. For example, the night nurse had left the rail on his bed down. The nurse never did that, except on mission nights.

  They had also cleaned him up early and put him to bed. They never did that either unless there was a mission to run.

  Of course, when he had first talked to them about the missions after his first one, they had all laughed at him. They had said there was no such thing as the Earth Protection League. They claimed that he had just had a strange dream.

  But he knew better.

  He’d gone on a mission, gotten young again. He had helped Earth defend itself against the evil scum of the galaxy. And since that night he’d gone on many, many more missions.

  Tonight he was ready again.

  Hell, he was always ready. There was nothing else for him to do.

  The clock ticked the night away minute by minute, second by second. On the night of a mission, waiting was the hardest. Sometimes he wished he couldn’t tell when a mission was. It would make sleep easier.

  So he forced himself to think about other things. First he thought about his long-dead wife, Margaret. She would have laughed at him if she knew what he was doing. But she wouldn’t have minded. She had always supported him in everything he did, one of the many things he had loved about her.

  Their children, Strom and Claire didn’t have time for him much anymore. They didn’t even live close and had their own lives, their own jobs, their own kids to raise. He hadn’t bothered to even hint to them about the missions. There would have been no point. They were part of his past. None of that compared with his life now as a Captain in the Earth Protection League.

  He watched the clock as it ticked away the time.

  At some point along the way, at least an hour after midnight, he dozed off.

  Two

  “Captain Saber?” the young, male voice said.

  Strong arms picked him up from the bed and moved quickly toward the sliding glass door that lead into the center court of the nursing home. “We need your help again, Sir.”

  “Always ready to help,” Saber said. His old vocal cords managed to barely choke out the words. Those were the same words he always said at the start of every mission.

  He glanced at the old clock on the way out. Three-sixteen in the morning. He would be back shortly.

  If he lived.

  The sliding door to the outside was open and the Chicago night air was cold against his old skin. But the young soldier who carried him didn’t even pause. He strode across to the center of the court and then tapped a badge on his wrist. A white beam of light from above lifted them quickly into the transport ship.

  Saber knew that around the country the same thing had happened, or was happening, at least forty-one other times as his crew was gathered from their perspective nursing homes and retirement apartments.

  The young man with the strong arms quickly moved to a silver, coffin-shaped sleep chamber and laid Saber down slowly on the soft cushions.

  “Any hints as to the fight?” Saber asked. “The nature of the mission?”

  The young soldier smiled. “Couldn’t tell you if I knew, sir,” he said. “But they never tell us grunts what’s happening on this end. I just wish I could be there with you.”

  Saber laughed. “I wish you could, too, son.”

  But both of them knew that wasn’t possible. The reason the eighty-thre-year-old Saber was going instead of the young soldier was because of the problems with Trans-Galactic flight. Simply put, it regressed a human body. If that kid had come along, he’d be nothing more than a baby, if that, when they dropped out of Trans-Galactic flight.

  And so far no one could figure out why it did that, or so he was told. He had heard all the explanations of relativity, the curved nature of space, and the different fixed states of matter, but it still had made no sense to him.

  All he knew was that he was old when the flight started and young
again when it ended. The farther and faster the ship flew, the greater the distance from Earth, the younger he got. Then, when he came back to Earth, due to the fixed nature of matter in relationship to space and time, his body got older again.

  Or at least, that was what he understood happened when they tired to explain it to him. It must have been very strange for whoever invented Trans-Galactic flight that first time, discovering that a person’s age totally depended on their location in space and time.

  He often wondered if the Earth Protection League had a group of middle-aged soldiers for shorter-range work, but he had never been in a position to ask anyone.

  He was just glad space flight worked this way.

  The young soldier patted his shoulder. “Have a good trip, sir.” Then he closed the lid on the coffin and tapped it twice as a signal to Saber that it was secure. In this old body, it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t have been able to even push the lid open if he tried.

  A moment later the rose-smelling gas filled the chamber and he drifted off into the sleep of the dead as the Trans-Galactic ship jumped out of Earth orbit and headed toward the center of the Galaxy.

  Three

  The top of the coffin snapped open with a hiss and cool oxygen bathed over his face. Captain Brian Saber snapped his eyes open, then held his arms up to look at them. What he saw was the young skin and shapes of youth. He flexed his fingers and the muscles under the skin rippled.

  It felt wonderful!

  No pain, no aches. Just the sense of health and youth.

  Yes! He had made it again.

  With both hands he grabbed the sides of the sleep module and lifted himself out, kicking over the side without so much as a caught heal. The feeling of youth was simply wonderful.

  He still wore his old man’s nightgown, but he quickly pulled that off and tossed it back in the coffin. He’d need it for the return trip, if he lived through this coming fight. If not, they’d need it for his body. And tomorrow morning his kids would get a call that he had died peacefully in his sleep.

  He flexed the muscles in his shoulders and neck. His body was one he barely remembered from his youth. Yet each time he went on a mission, this body returned, good as ever. Whatever the strange relative-matter-physics involved in Trans-Galactic travel, he loved this body.

  Quickly he dressed in his uniform of the Earth Protection League. First the leather pants and high boots, then a silk blouse that flared under his arms and fit tight over his shoulders. Next he put on a leather vest over the blouse that had the EPL triangle symbol on the chest. Then he strapped on his twin Photon Stunners, one on each hip.

  Brushing a hand through his full head of dark hair, he turned and glanced at the only mirror in the small room. The reflection that greeted him was one of his youth, control, and power. He couldn’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two. Only the knowledge and memories inside the young body were of the old man who had, seemingly moments before, been asleep in a nursing home room just outside of Chicago.

  He patted the Stunners on his hips, them with one more quick look in the mirror, he turned and strode out of the room, turning right toward the Command Center of the Galactic-Transport ship. He knew this ship like the back of his young hand. He’d been on board it for dozens of missions now, had flown it through some of their toughest space in this sector of the Galaxy. It felt like home, far more than his home back in Chicago had ever done.

  Throughout the ship his men would be awaking, dressing, getting ready for whatever faced them tonight. He didn’t wait for them, but instead strode directly to the empty Command Center and dropped into the Captain’s chair.

  His chair.

  Around him there was only one other station on his left, with a high-backed chair like his and view screens above it showing the blackness of space.

  In front of him a small screen on the panel flared to light and the smiling face of General Datson Meyers filled it. He had deep blue eyes, white hair, and more wrinkles than almost any human Saber had ever seen. Yet the face was one that seemed comfortable with command. “Glad you made it, Captain Saber.”

  “Glad to be here, sir,” Saber said. “What’s happening?”

  The smile cleared form the face of the General, making some of the wrinkles vanish instantly. “The Dogs have broken through.”

  “What?” Saber said, stunned. The Dogs, as everyone in EPL called them, were a race of ugly aliens that occupied the territory along one of the EPL’s borders. They looked like a bad cross between a huge slug and a ten-legged poodle. They were the meanest damn things Saber had ever fought, and he had fought them often along that border.

  Unlike the dogs on earth, humans and alien Dogs hated each other with a passion that didn’t allow any type of agreement beyond fighting.

  The general went on. “They broke through our outer defenses yesterday. Our allies in the League and border patrols couldn’t stop them.”

  “That bad, huh?” Saber asked. A feeling of dread was quickly replacing the wonderful feel of being young again.

  The general nodded. “This morning we got data that leads us to believe that they are headed to Earth to destroy the center of the League once and for all.”

  Saber looked intently at the general, not letting the worry filling his chest show. “How many ships did they send?”

  “Over five hundred got through the border and are headed for your position at a slow Trans-Galactic speed,” the general said. “Your job is to try to slow them down even more, give us time behind you to form a second and third line of defense.”

  “Understood,” Saber said. “We’ll slow them down. Maybe knock their numbers down a few. You can count of that.”

  The general nodded. “I knew I could depend on you, Captain.”

  The screen went blank.

  Saber sat there in the command chair, stunned. This would be the last mission. He would die young and in deep space, just as he had always hoped he would. Better than in his sleep in the nursing home back on Earth. He just hadn’t expected this last mission to be so soon.

  But Earth and the League needed him. He would not let them down!

  He took a deep breath, shoved the fear aside, and got to work.

  Quickly he ran his fingers over the controls in front of him. It showed that there were eleven other League ships in formation beside his. And each ship was manned with forty-two people like him and carried forty single-man fighters. One of the big transport ships might be a match for a single Dog Warcraft, but a single-man fighter wasn’t. It would be like sending a mosquito after a real dog back on Earth.

  “What are we up against this time, Captain?” a cheery voice asked behind him.

  He glanced over his shoulder at his second in command, Carl Turner. Carl lived in a nursing home in northern California and was gaining on one hundred years of age. At the moment he was a brown-haired man who looked like he was in his middle twenties. He had a spring in his step and a smile that could light up a room, and often did. They had worked dozens of missions together before and had become best friends.

  “The Dogs broke out of their fence,” Saber said. “We’re supposed to try to slow them down until the League can mount a decent defense behind us.”

  “Shit,” Carl said as he dropped into the chair beside Saber and stared at the screen. “How many?”

  “Five hundred of their warships. Twelve of us.”

  “The League have any idea how we’re supposed to do this?” Carl asked.

  “Nope,” Saber said, smiling at his friend. “They left it up to our ancient wisdom to come up with something.”

  “I hate it when they do that,” Carl said.

  “Yeah, me too,” Saber said, laughing. “You work on finding out how much time we have until they get here, what speed they’re moving, so on, and I’ll brief the rest of the crew.”

  He pushed himself easily to his feet and strode across the command center toward the crew area. He could have done this task from his command chair, but he wan
ted to feel young again, walk quickly again, just one more time.

  Four

  It was halfway through the briefing with the forty members of his gathered crew that Captain Brian Saber came up with the plan that just might save them. And Earth.

  He sprinted back to the Command Center of the ship and dropped back into his chair. “How long?”

  “Five hundred Dog Warships will be on our front steps in exactly thirty-five minutes.”

  “Perfect,” Saver said. “Have our ships get ready to match their Trans-Galactic speed.”

  Carl glanced over at him. “Perfect if you like getting your butt kicked by slug-looking poodles.”

  “How old are you, Carl?” Saber asked, his fingers working on the board as he talked.

  “Six months short of the big one hundred,” Carl said.

  “And how long did it take us to get from Earth to this position?”

  “From what measuring point?” Carl asked.

  “Earth time?”

  “Forty or so years,” Carl said.

  “Shipboard time?”

  “Six days, ten hours, and a few odd minutes.”

  “And it will take us that long to get back?” Saber asked, “Right?” He finished the work on the command board and turned to Carl.

  “Shipboard time,” Carl said. “They’ll speed up the ship slightly on the return voyage and we’ll end up back in our beds less than thirty minutes after we left, Earth time that is. You know that.”

  “So how are the dogs handling the same matter/relativity problem on their flight toward Earth?”

  “How the hell would I — “

  Suddenly Carl stopped and smiled at Saber. “I see where you’re headed Captain. Their life spans are shorter than ours, right?”

  “Exactly,” Saber said. “Which is why they are moving at a slow Trans-Galactic speed, because they don’t dare go any faster or they would end up Dog-pups when they reached Earth.”