Captain Keith and the Ministers of Hate

Chapter II: Terror on Gacrux Seven.

Captain Keith and Private Timmy stepped cautiously down the gang-plank. Acrid smoke filled the air and the sky rang with the mournful cries of the villagers. 

"Suffering supernovas, Captain Keith!" said Private Timmy. "What in the galaxy happened to these people?"

Captain Keith's brow furrowed and his granite jaw clench in and anger that even his unmatched self-control struggled to contain. "Some monster has devastated these poor people, Timmy. And I need to find the beast and make it pay."

A frail hand touched Captain Keith's steely bicep. A quavering voice said, "Not a monster, Captain."

Captain Keith looked down into the withered face of an ancient Gacruxian fellow, his wrinkled visage marked by bruises and stained with dried blood. As the old gentleman used his cane to straighten himself up, he continued, "This destruction was not wrought by any beast; it came at the hands of men."

Private Timmy gasped. "Men?!?"

The old man nodded. "Earth men." His message delivered, the Gracruxian's antennae wilted, the strength left his legs and he collapsed to the ground like a sack of Neptunian ultra-peas. 

"Earth men? But, Captain Keith, how could that be? Gacrux Seven just joined the League of Planets. Earth leaders worked for a generation to bring them into the fold! Why would any Earth men want to harm them?"

Suddenly, Captain Keith crouched low, his hyper-keen vision having spotted something in the ash and grit on the ground. When he stood, his powerful frame once more filling the sky, he held in his hand a green patch.

Private Timmy leaned in to get a look.

"A patch?" he said. "I've never seen one like it before. Why does it have a cross and a flaming space ship on it?"

Captain Keith didn't answer immediately. His eyes, more fine-tuned than those of a Rigelian hunting falcon scanned the horizon. 

"These particular Earth men don't want more planets in the League. These men--these monsters--believe that Earth is superior to every other planet and they want all aliens to know their place."

"Great shooting comets! How could they be so backward and stunted in their thinking?"

"Ancient earth men were staggeringly bigoted and it's never fully left our race. This is a group of cowards who want to blame their problems on anyone different from themselves. This is a group of so-called men who want to keep Earth just for Earthlings. This is the work of the Ministers of Hate."

"The Ministers of Hate?" gasped Private Timmy.

"That's right," replied Captain Keith, "and I'm going to wipe them out. For good."

Captain Keith and the Doom Plague

Chapter 37: A Desperate Gambit

An eerie quiet greeted Captain Keith as he opened the airlock and entered Space Explorers Headquarters. The normally teeming halls were empty. In the silence, the hissing of the ventilation system seemed magnified to an ear-shattering volume.

Captain Keith moved as silently as a Plutonian ice-panther, his coiled sinews poised to react at the first sign of danger. His mind raced. His last contact with Explorer High Command had been twenty nega-minutes ago, and Colonel Ries hadn't indicated any problems. Clearly, that was no longer the case.

As he stealthily rounded the corner onto the main corridor, he saw them. Dozens of his comrades lay on the floor, strewn about like Centaurian ragdolls. Calling upon the medical knowledge he'd gained when he got his space-physician license at age 9, Captain Keith checked the pulse of one poor devil slumped up against the passage wall. Alive. But barely. Time, then, was of the essence.

Captain Keith flew down the hallway using every bit of speed that had allowed him to win the Epsilon V Mega-Marathon ten years in a row. His way was littered with Space Explorers laid low by whatever this intruder was.

Captain Keith's steely logic told him that he would find his adversary on the bridge. Whatever the goal of this invader, he reasoned, he would need to threaten those in charge.

Captain Keith paused outside the door to the bridge. He used his incredibly fine-tuned hearing to listen for any sinister conversation, any discharge of weapons, any sign of a struggle...but he heard nothing. He took a calm, deep breath and touched the contact. The door slid noiselessly open.

The scene on the bridge mirrored that he'd seen in the hall. Bodies clinging to life littered the floor. Colonel Ries sat slumped in his command chair. Carefully monitoring his surroundings, Captain Keith made his way to the colonel. As he reached down to check the old man's pulse, the colonel's eyes suddenly opened wide and turned upon Captain Keith.

"Cap-p-p-taaain K-k-eeeeeeeeeith," Colonel Ries hissed. Instantly, Captain Keith understood that these words were not coming from his commander, but from some other intelligence that was using the colonel like a Jovian ventriloquist.

"Who are you?" said Captain Keith, in his calm, firm baritone.

"Wearenot annnn enemy yyyyoooou canvanquishCaptainnnn," said the being speaking through his friend.

"Well," replied Captain Keith, "I supposed we'll have to see about that."

The colonel gave an ugly, rumbling cackle. "Nnnnoo, Captain. You cannotdefeat annn invader yyyyou cannottouch. You cannotdefeat annn enemy thatmultiplies exponentially by the second. You cannot destroooooyyy a foe that courses through men's very veins.

"A virus," thought Captain Keith. "I'm speaking to a virus."

With the speed of Venusian lightning, Captain Keith formulated a plan. His mighty arm flew forth and his steely fist fractured the nose of Colonel Ries. In the next pico-second, he pulled a sample vial from his belt and captured some of the stream of blood that poured forth from the old man's nostrils.

As the colonel collapsed back onto his chair, Captain Keith raced to his lab. "If my calculations are correct," he thought, "I've got about forty-five minutes to turn this blood sample into a cure. That's about seventeen more minutes than I need."

Captain Keith and the Mind-Thieves of Titan

Chapter I: A Creeping Dread

"By the fetid fumes of Mercury!"

Captain Keith ripped the Omniforum helmet from his head and hurled it across the room in what was, for him, a rare loss of temper.

Cia of Mars looked up from her star charts, her brow furrowed over her stunning azure eyes. "My love, what is the matter?" she asked, concerned.

His ire raised, Captain Keith stalked around the room like a Rigellian Multi-Tiger. "These fools on the Omniforum!" he spat. "The way they blather on, spouting nonsense and believing it to be wisdom. I try to understand their reasoning, to put myself in their thoughtspace, but their views are so astoundingly wrong-headed and illogical that I fear it will drive me mad!"

"Star of My System, there are beings whose path has taken them into a mental and spiritual black hole, from whence they will never return. To try to steer them from their course is as futile as it is noble."

Captain Keith paused by the window and stared out into the stormy Martian sky. "Cia, these are men who were my colleagues in the academy. They come from backgrounds so similar to my own. How can they have fallen sway to such vexatious ways of seeing the universe when the flaws in their ratiocination are so evident to me? Is it possible that I'm the one whose perspective has been warped? Could it be that my cognition has been corrupted somehow and that there's actually some wisdom to the idea that we are all made safer when everyone is in possession of Venusian vapor grenades?"

Cia went to Captain Keith and took his hands in her own. She fixed him with a gaze as steely as a Centaurian Hawk. "Star of My System, there is no being in the known universe whose logic is as impeccable as yours. Doubt that the sun will rise. Doubt that rain comes from clouds. But do not doubt the soundness of your reason."

Suddenly, the door of their quarters burst open. A figure collapsed through the threshold and spilled onto the luminous emerald Uranian marble of their floor. Captain Keith rushed to the figure and turned it over to reveal a face that wore the ghastly expression of one who has been pushed past his limits and has little hope of returning. The man's shiny pate was bruised. Blood caked on his swollen lips. His eyes bulged like those of the hypno-sloth of Tau Ceti IV. Despite this, there was, somewhere in this man's pitiable visage, something that was as familiar to Captain Keith as his own hands.

"Dannap?" He said.

"Captain Keith," the man rasped. "Have I actually reached you? Or is this another of their tricks?"

Cia had brought a sifter of Plutonian brandy. Keith waved its healing scent under the man's nose. He sat a little straighter, saw a little clearer. He reached for the cup and drank. The alertness the beverage granted him brought with it a sharpened fear. "If you are actually Captain Keith and not some fiendish illusion, tell me the name of the admiral who led the academy."

"His name, my friend, was Cor-L."

Dannap relaxed visibly. "Forgive me my suspicions, old friend. I no longer know who to trust."

Captain Keith helped Dannap into a chair. He looked at the man before him and tried to reconcile this figure with the care-free young lad whose flowing curls and roguish smile had made him the star of the academy. "Dannap, please, you must tell me what has driven you to this state."

"The conspiracy I have unearthed, old chum, is so insidious that I have never seen its like. I have stumbled onto a plan to take over the entire galaxy. Not with armadas. Not with warriors. With mind control. And almost everyone we knew from the academy..."

He took a drink,

"...is already taken."

Captain Keith and the Emperor of Arcturus

Chapter XXII: The Emperor Unmasked

Captain Keith twisted in the grip of the two Gremulak giants. Only his utter mastering of his emotions kept him from screaming in rage and frustration. To have been so close; one touch of his finger to the contact of his ZX9 Laser Gun and he could have toppled the tyrant who had managed to subvert an entire galaxy. He could have freed every sentient being in a thousand parsecs. 

But, no. If there was anything true about Captain Keith, it was that he dealt with the universe as it was, not as it would be in some schoolgirl fantasy. He'd failed. Somehow, after making his way across five systems without aid from the depleted Space Explorers; with C'ia and her small team taking on their own dangerous mission; after flawlessly infiltrating the mysterious Emperor's Inner Circle; after quietly dispatching the sinister G'orka and the sniveling Spy-sor, he--Captain Keith, who had once managed to spend a week in disguise as a member of the Neptunian Mega-Sheik's harem--had been detected, moments before he'd struck the killing blow. 

So be it.

The thing to do now was to adjust and create a new plan. 

The Gremulak giants pulled him to the base of the throne stairs and, there, they held him. The Emperor's hideously deformed vizier, Ban-1 descended the stairs and stood before Captain Keith. The stench from his greying, pustulous skin wafted over Captain Keith and he felt his gorge rise. He clamped his jaw shut; vomiting in front of a creature such as this would be a sign of weakness, one which Captain Keith would not permit himself.

Ban-1 ran his tongue over his cracked, peeling lips and gave a smirk. "Did you truly think, Captain, that the galaxy's most recalcitrant rebel would be able to pass through His Galactic Imperial Majesty's palace undetected?"

Captain Keith fixed his steely gaze on the cretin's watery eyes, took a brief moment of satisfaction when Ban-1's eyes wavered, then said, "I didn't care, as long as I get to feel your throat between my hands. And if you think you've avoided that fate, you're mistaken."

An unctuous voice came from the throne. "Oh no, Space Explorer, you will find that it is you who are mistaken, about a great many things."

The Emperor rose from his throne and descended the stairs, talking as he came toward Captain Keith.

"Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design. Your friends, including C'ia of Mars, are walking into a trap, as is your Rebel fleet. It was I who allowed the Explorers to know the location of the shield generator. It is quite safe from your pitiful little band. An entire legion of my best troops awaits them. Oh, I'm afraid the deflector shield will be quite operational when your friends arrive."

The Emperor was standing directly in front of Captain Keith now. There was something familiar, almost, about the shadowy face beneath the hood.

Spittle flew from the Emperor's lips as he spoke, "This is the end of your pitiful rebellion." He pulled down his hood and Captain Keith's eyes widened in horror, momentarily overcoming his legendary self-control.

"Thedo Nald! No! I broke your slimy neck," the Space Explorer gasped.

Thedo Nald smirked and ran a hand through what only the most charitable being in the universe might call his "hair." My minions found me in the wretched state you left me in. They nursed me back to health and convinced me that the best way to avenge myself against you was not to end your negligible life, but rather to take over the entire galaxy and remake it in my image." He laughed, a braying, oily sound that would make the femto-lemmings of Ceres run screaming off a cliff.

"This has all been about revenge against me?" Captain Keith could barely believe it.

Thedo Nald turned toward him. "You fool. Only now, at the end, do you understand." He nodded at the Gremulak giants. Captain Keith felt a sharp blow to his skull and he descended swiftly into unconsciousness.

Captain Keith and the Dreamlord of the Outer Rim

Chapter 5: In the Grip of Nightmare

The ground beneath Captain Keith's feet shifted queasily and he had to struggle to maintain balance. His training with the Cosmo-Ninjas of Arcturus VII had left him with the agility of a Jovian lynx, but even his unequaled equilibrium was failing him in this mercurial mountainscape. As he ran, great chasms appeared as if out of nowhere and land he'd thought was solid suddenly seemed to be a morass; he would've sworn his eyes were playing tricks on him, if he didn't know for a fact that his eyesight was the sharpest of any living creature in nine systems.

The sky was a fiery red, with impossible yellow clouds. His mind raced to identify the planet that might have such a firmament, but when he looked again, the previous welkin had been replaced by the cloudless starscape of midnight on Uranus.

Some instinct compelled him to look at his signal display. When the words on the display appeared to be gibberish, everything fell into place. "Dreaming," Captain Keith said aloud. That could be the only explanation for the chameleonic environment in which he found himself. But if this was a dream, what was the reality behind it?

As his keen synapses began to sift through the clues, he found himself face to face with a Corellian CyberGolem. The powerful creature raised its massive clay fists to the skies, the circuits where its eyes should have been sparked angrily under its furrowed brow.

"The dream is trying to distract me with physical danger to keep me from piecing together the mystery behind this place," Captain Keith thought, his blaster hand instinctively dealing with the situation already. As he pulled the trigger and sent a powerful bolt of deadly plasma toward the creature, Captain Keith's encyclopedic knowledge of every possible danger the universe offered reminded him that only blasters blessed by the Holy Men of Corel Major can defeat such a creature.

"But if I'm dreaming," his nimble mind offered, "then I can seize control of reality and turn this regular blaster into one that has been just so blessed." The plasma changed to a bright gold even as it left his gun and, as it hit the creature square in the chest, the monster screamed with pain and melted like a Rigellian chocolate candy dropped into the Firepits of the Mirken Asteroid.

His physical foe being dispatched so handily, Captain Keith quickly assumed the meditation pose taught him by the Venusian Ultra-Monks he'd studied with in his youth. He turned his mind inward and willed his conscious self to awaken and return him to the real world.

The ground beneath him shook and the mountains on the horizon suddenly erupted with jets of ash and lava which filled the sky. "An attempt to distract me," thought Captain Keith. He redoubled his efforts and sent one message to his body with all the concentration he could muster: "Awake!"

________

He sat bolt upright in a brightly-lit room, having snapped the restraints that had fastened him to the stretcher. His finely-tuned faculties immediately began to scan the room for clues as to the location of his imprisonment.

As his brain began to recall the circumstances that had led him to this place, a sneering orange face hoved into his field of vision. The jowly jaw, the beady eyes, the mass of inhuman hair; suddenly he knew in whose clutches he'd found himself.

"Thedo Nald!" he spat. "You disgusting fiend. What diabolical plan am I about to spoil now?"

"No!" Thedo Nald shouted. "The Nightmare Machine should have reduced your mind to l'k'thok by now. How in the name of Ming did you escape?"

Ripping the remaining straps from himself, Captain Keith jumped up and grabbed the quivering Dreamlord by his slimy throat. He squeezed as he looked into the foul creature's face and offered his deadliest smile. "Thedo Nald, the day I can't outthink you is the day I turn in my space badge and take up Neptunian Sheep farming."

With that, he snapped the disgusting blob's bloated neck and dropped its lifeless corpse to the floor. For the slightest microsecond, he wondered if he should have been merciful. "No," he concluded, "The cosmos is truly a better place without such a creature in it."

He walked from the room and closed the door behind him.

Captain Keith and the Ice Demons of Pluto

Chapter 10: Two Against the Horde

The alarm blared louder than the mating call of a Saturnian ultra-cat in heat. In mere moments, Captain Keith and C'ia of Mars would be awash in a sea of ice demons, all of them seeking the honor of destroying the most famous Space Explorer of all time.

Captain Keith's brow wrinkled in an incredibly rare sign of confusion. His hyper-naturally keen senses had not detected anything that could have tripped an alarm. None in the galaxy could match his stealth. He'd not been sensed by surveillance technology since he had attempted to sneak out of his crib at nine months old. And he would have gotten away then, too, if his NannyBot had not happened to roll through the room on a computer-glitch-created deviation from her normal hyper-nursery patrol.

"How in the name of B'rk'uvv did they spot us?!?" C'ia hissed.

"I'm replaying the last hour in my Mind-Theater from twelve different angles," said Captain Keith, "and I would swear by all that's Cosmic that they shouldn't have detected us."

C'ia quickly tied her hair in a thick braid and checked her ammunition. "I don't care if there be a million Ice Demons, my chork'lak. You and I will slay them all." She lifted her beautiful face and gave a throaty laugh.

Captain Keith drew her to him with his mighty arms. He looked deep into her eyes and then kissed her full, pouty lips. As her tongue ran playfully across his teeth, Keith suddenly pulled back.

"This reminds me of the time on Sirius 3, my love. When you, Professor Nargus and I repelled the Twillian invasion. We left a pile of dead Twills a mile high. Do you remember?"

C'ia smiled. "Of course, I do, my splendid Captain."

Deadly photons flew from Captain Keith's gun and blasted a hole through C'ia's midsection. Blood trickled from the corner of her beautiful mouth and her eyes widened with shock. Her jaw worked, but she could form no words.

Captain Keith slid his ZX9 Laser Gun back into his holster. "I don't know who you are, monster. But whoever sent you was unaware of the Martian diamond C'ia of Mars has embedded in her tongue. A good rule of espionage is that you should never kiss someone if you don't know what they kiss like."

As the shape-shifter slid to the ground and breathed its last, Captain Keith turned grimly to the horizon and prepared himself for the hordes of ice demons who would soon be charging toward him, blood in their eyes. "Let them come," he thought. "My will is steel and I am ready."


Illustration by Katarzyna Zalecka

Captain Keith and the Mega-Parasites of Io

Chapter 7: Showdown in Jupiter’s Shadow

Captain Keith gritted his teeth and called upon all of his steely reserve not to show any outward sign of pain as the Mega-Parasite’s tendrils coiled cruelly around his spine.

The creature smiled, its jagged teeth forming a mountain range of horrible evil in its mouth. A voice that could extinguish a supernova emanated from inside the thing. “You should know, Captain Keith, in these your last moments, that, after your spirit leaves this corporeal form, I will use your body to infiltrate Space Explorer Headquarters and rain death upon those pitiful humans you call friends.”

The tendrils worked their way between Captain Keith’s vertebrae and the flagitious fiend began to inject its malignant venom directly into the hero’s spinal cord. Calling upon his encyclopedic knowledge of every horror the solar system had to offer, Captain Keith determined that he had approximately ninety-seven seconds before the toxin reached his brain and ended his valiant existence. That meant he had not a nano-second to lose.

As the nerves in his back exploded in a paroxysm of pain, Captain Keith willed his arms to take action. His puissant hands grasped for the tentacle with which the Mega-Parasite held Captain Keith in a vice-like grip. The same mighty sinews that had once crushed the skull of a Plutovian ultra-bear now pried the Mega-Parasite’s muculent limb from around his throat.

The beast redoubled its efforts and his voice roared in Captain Keith’s ears. “Why do you struggle, Terran? Your doom is writ!”

Captain Keith used the hand not vying with the tentacle to reach for his trusty ZX9 Laser Gun. The holster was only inches away from Captain Keith’s fingers, but it took every bit of his Herculean strength to bridge the tiny distance, as the Mega-Parasite fought him with all its brawn.

Captain Keith could feel the creature’s toxins working their way toward his brain. He knew that the moment of truth was upon him. If he failed to reach his gun, his life and the lives of every Space Explorer in the galaxy was forfeit. The searing pain in his back must be overcome.

The creature hissed in Captain Keith’s ear, “The first victim of my wrath will be your beloved Cia of Mars. Oh, how I will enjoy her sweet, sweet agonies.”

“I guess you didn’t realize, creature,” Captain Keith said coolly, “my wrath is bigger than yours.” And with that, his finger closed on the contact and sent a beam of deadly red light through the creature’s brain. The brute’s grip went slack and Captain Keith shoved the thing away. As the vacuum of space carried the creature from him, Captain Keith adjusted the setting on his ZX9 Laser gun. He took aim and sent another blast toward the Mega-Parasite, this one blasting the thing’s body into atoms.

The pain in Captain Keith’s back subsided somewhat. He began focusing his mind, controlling his body on an almost microscopic level and willing the toxins to leave his system.

He knew that the other Mega-Parasites might still be headed for Space Explorer Headquarters. His job, then, was far from over. The agony in his spine would have to put circumvented if he was to be sure that his Space Explorer brethren and the beautiful Cia of Mars were safe.

Image by Redspotgames