Little Annie Asteroid

The Rock Jam on Upper Utula III

[Trigger Warning: This story contains "fowl" language and alludes to "triggers."]

Quälpooň played the decrypted plasma fax message again.

Request your urgent attention to orbital rock jam & demand confirmation of resolution. Invoking Clause 82 immediately. Also Criminal Code for Illegal Dumping. Penalties and interest will accrue.

Best regards.

MTR, Provisional Ass't Director, Trade and Import Registry, Upper Utula III.

Message sent today, marked urgent.

Quälpooň shouted "OFF!" at the voice command microphone and then shattered the plasma player with his iron-knuckled gloved fist. He picked up the parts in one handful and threw them against the boardroom wall just missing the nuclear cuckoo clock. The crash scratched the steel wall as the player smashed into several more pieces that hovered like ocean flotsam in the low-gravity.

"We are already losing money on this $#@!*&+@# haul of $#@!*&+@# rocklets!" He screamed at his subordinates and crew, drops of yellow spittle spraying from his drooping multi-color mustache onto the five cringing and heavily bearded men and women who were seat-belted to their executive chairs at the small oval conference table.

"Clause 82 means, as you useless $#@!*&+@# bums well know, that the TIR can now start charging ME rent and dumping fees and penalties - DUMPING FEES!!! - for this pile of debris we've hauled over here for mining and grinding, and if YOU do not come up with a solution to the problem IMMEDIATELY then I am going to personally throw you one by one into the garbage composter and feed you to the cabin rats! I am not going to lose any more money on this job because of your incompetence!" Quälpooň pounded the boardroom table one more time causing everyone's cups of mash-grog to lift up with the impact.

Quälpooň glowered. Nobody moved. They stared at the table.

"WELL?!?!?!?" screamed Quälpooň and brushed an iron pitcher off its magnetic coaster onto the floor with the back of his hand. The pitcher drifted down while the mash of rum and butterscotch infused hemp syrup hung glob-like in the air and then began to elongate slowly onto the floor.

Leŋawolpena spoke up sheepishly. "We could try using the starboard lifeboat to nudge the larger rocks out of the way and then..."

"$#@!*&+@#!!!" screamed Quälpooň. "You know there are hundreds of thousands of rocks out there and that would take eons, and in the meantime Upper Utula will have shaded out before the rocks start raining down on it and everyone on the planet would die, if not from the impacts, then from the interruption of photosynthesis ultimately causing starvation and asphyxiation. And worse than that, I'd go broke; and I AM NOT GOING TO LOSE ANY MORE MONEY, DAMMIT!!!"

Whereupon Quälpooň pounded the conference table one more time and one of its legs broke causing the table to tilt and all the crystal mash-grog mugs to slide softly off their magnetic coasters onto the floor where they did not break on impact.

"... or we could just get into the starboard lifeboat ourselves," whispered Aótarone, "... and then we just hightail it out of here and let Upper Utala fend for itself. No witnesses, you know. We did that before when we got into a similar jam, a few years ago and..."

Goolpath, Dtahlathũng and Schoonkar, quiet till then, nodded their beards slowly and muttered approval.

"I know what the $#@!*&+@# we did before!" screamed Quälpooň, and that's exactly why we can't do it again, because everyone this side of Betelgeuse knows what we did before, even if no witnesses lived to tell about it! And even though we bribed our way out of it once, it will cost us ten times as much to bribe our way out the second time and after several more million deaths, that's going to get $#@!*&+@# too expensive, and I don't have enough money, thanks to you bums!! So you need a better idea. I mean what do I keep you all around for, if all you do is stare at the table and mumble to yourselves??"

"... maybe it's time for us to call in... Little Annie Asteroid... " mumbled someone at the conference table.

They cringed as Quälpooň was about to pound the table again. Quälpooň's face turned bright red, but he recovered himself. He thought a moment. Then he sneered quietly: "Yeah, maybe it is time to call in Little Annie Asteroid."

* * 2 * *

The airlock opened and a buckskin-clad Annie Asteroid strode in followed by her android valet/spittoon wearing a holstered laser-tipped cigar cutter. She pulled a whiskey flavored cheroot from her over-the-shoulder cigar bandoleer, bit off the end and spat. Her bowl shaped copper-headed valet/spittoon raced over and caught the cigar tip in mid-air. Ka-ping.

Annie Asteroid struck a match with a scratch of her thumbnail. She lit the cigar and sucked deeply. She curled a single blue smoke ring into the faces of the six space desperadoes who had sent her the urgent call for help.

"Annie Asteroid, at you service, gents and ladies. Who's in charge here?" She looked up into their mistrustful eyes and cleared her throat snarlingly. The grimy clutch of space rowdies in their dirty iron-studded overalls towered over the 4 foot 8 inch tall Annie Asteroid, but they felt uncertain and overawed by her brashness.

"So you're Little Annie Asteroid?" sneered Quälpooň. "You look like a, like a tiny little... shrimp! Ahaw haw haw!"

Little Annie Asteroid tapped the ash on her cigar and spat to her right. Her android valet/spittoon caught the ash and spit on the fly. Ka-ping.

Annie Asteroid's eyes narrowed. Her dusky ankle-length duster caught a breeze from somewhere and luffed like a leather sail. An Enno Morricone soundtrack to a Sergio Leone spaghetti western whistled through the ceiling speakers.

(Source of Audio ¹)

Holstered at her waist, the pearl handles of two sawed off charged particle blunderbusses glistened in the artificial light. Her bowl-headed android spittoon menacingly held aloft its ruby laser cigar cutter.

Annie Asteroid hissed: "Nobody calls me 'shrimp' twice, Mister." She stared at the six bearded men and women massed before her. Nobody moved. The eyebrow over Aótarone's patched left eye began to twitch. A space fly buzzed languorously around the ceiling fan that slowly churned the rising plume of cigar smoke. The cabin rats cowered in their hidden cracks of the spaceship and fearfully gnawed their forepaws. The pendulum of the captain's nuclear cuckoo clock softly metronomed the silence.

At last, Annie Asteroid snapped her fingers and broke the spell. "Gentlemen and ladies," she said; then paused and looked over her hosts to confirm that she used her words most advisedly. "Gen-til-men and La-dies, so what's the deal? You rang me up, so let's get right down to business. I'm very busy these days and I don't have time to waste."

"Well," said Leŋawolpena, "you see we have this bunch of space rocks that we've, uhh, corralled from an outer meteor belt; or maybe they were just, you know, "lost" from the space yards of some other populated planets, I don't rightly remember right now. And we just moseyed these rocks along to this here milling planet, Upper Utula III or whatever it's called. And they've got one of those typical dark market grinding operations where they crack rock and extract the minerals and cast ingots or whatever for resale at less than wholesale, you know what I mean? And, it seems, we corralled just a few too many, and now the Upper Utulans, or whatever they call themselves, are a little put out because we have so many asteroids and bolide hulks that we're blocking out their light just a wee bit, and the gravity from this here Upper Utula III is starting to draw these puppies in, because we, ahh, miscalculated just a little bit and, our mass of rocks have their own gravity, and we and Utula III are all blocked in because everything is getting closer and starting to accelerate so..."

"So tell me something I don't already know," growled Little Annie Asteroid.

"So," said Dtahlathũng, "one of their honchos at their Trade and Import Registry got a mite testy and has given us a rather strong, ahh, request, to move our haul of rocks out of their light stream, and especially before we have a major catastrophe on our hands, because they've started to fine us, and maybe worse still if things get still worse. Like Upper Utula III and a whole bunch of people could get just a little bit killed, you know, just a little bit killed, and we could lose a whole lot of money, too. And we had some ideas how to deal with this, but... "

"I told you to tell me something I don't know," scolded Little Annie Asteroid.

"Awright, Ms. Annie," interjected Schoonkar, bitingly annunciating every syllable with clear irritation. "Why don't you make things easy and tell us what you already know, okay?"

"Ahaw haw haw!" snorted Quälpooň as he stroked the green and orange whiskers of his braided beard.

Little Annie Asteroid spat to her left and tapped her cigar into her android spittoon.

"I know that you yahoos are dammed sloppy and your telecom security is pathetic. After I got your e-mer-gen-cy call, I hacked into your ship's records and read several months of your internal and external communications you supposedly stored se-cure-ly in your nebula cloud server. So I know where you lassoed your pretty load of dark space rock, and if I wanted to check - which, mind you, I don't, anymore than the Upper Utulans care to know where you got your product - but if I did care to look, I'd wager there's a proprietary brand or two etched onto the surface of those little doggies.

"And I know that you all got real greedy and brought in a whole lot more space rock than you can handle - which isn't saying too much because there isn't a whole lot that you idiots can handle - and now you're in deep dragon shit right up to your tobacco-juiced mustaches, right? Because you idiots are about to wipe out one of the most lawyered, marginally legitimate and vengeful of this galaxy's dark rock trading planets, and that ain't too good for business, is it? I know that you wanted to use a kinetic jackhammer to solve your problem, but that would only make ten or more asteroids for every one you smashed apart. And you thought about using tactical nuclear mines to blast open some space, but that, too, would just create radioactive dust particles that would likely be even more hazardous with no appreciable reduction in overall mass. And you wanted to bulldoze here and there and shove things out of the way.

"But this isn't a two-body problem or a three-body problem but a multi hundred thousand body problem and any one move affects another, so you could never figure out how to readjust your rocks without rocking and rolling even worse. And you ran out of ideas. And you ran out of escape routes, too, right?

"So finding yourselves in a jam (namely, you are so many slices of toast!), you called me in because you guys have a re-pu-ta-tion, don't you now? A re-pu-ta-tion for cutting out when the heat is on. And so your financial well being - and probably your very existential being - is on the line. And that's why you called me, Annie Asteroid, to save your space bacon. Now, tell me, what's the deal?"

The space rustlers spluttered at Annie Asteroid's insults. But she was right, of course, so they ate their pride (and their space bacon) and just grumbled.

Quälpooň spoke. "So you already know the deal, Miss Annie. What can YOU do for us, you little Shr... ?" He caught himself in mid-sentence.

"The deee-al," replied Annie Asteroid, " is not what I can do for you, but what YOU can do for me! Because only I can save your worthless, idiotic, rock-rustling butt-heads. The DEAL is a minimum of 100 million universal credits, transferred upon delivery of completed services, plus a 60/40 split of anticipated gross revenue on the sale regardless whether the transaction is completed - and 60% is my take - on whatever you would have gotten for this haul, PLUS costs and expenses... AND MILEAGE and fuel surcharges to get to and away from this fleabag planetary system, of course. Your obligations will be guaranteed by an ironclad first position UCC Article 1 security interest in your crappy rust-bucket of a space ship and an equally ironclad UCC Article 1(A) security interest on your crappy rust-bucket lives.

"That's outrageous!" Screamed Quälpooň as he pounded the head of one of his subordinates for want of a table to bang on.

"That's fine," said Annie Asteroid sweetly, or as sweetly as she could say anything. "I'll just be going on my way then. Ciao, kiddos. Hasta la vista. Thanks for the memories and all that. Have a good time when the grateful Utulans, or such of them as survive this catastrophe, toss you into one of their ore grinders as a reward for having destroyed their entire dark rock cracking and peddling operation. Bye now. Ta ta!"

She ground her cigar into the ship's floor, spat in front of her and turned to reenter the airlock exit as her spittle was caught mid-air by her android valet/spittoon. Ka-ping.

"Now hold on a minute, Miss Annie," said Quälpooň jabbing his leather gloved fingers into the airlock door to keep it from closing. He smiled his gold capped crooked teeth like a politician looking for babies to smooch. "How about if we negotiate something, you know, like... say... a crate of genuine Commando Super X Cigars and a contingent 2.5% commission on profit net of expenses after taxes?"

"How 'bout 100 million universal credits, payable upon delivery of completed services, plus a 60/40 split... plus the cigars, MISTER!" she roared in reply. "It's a take it or leave it proposition! And, in case you're thinking about it: nobody stiffs Little Annie Asteroid!"

Quälpooň ground his crooked gold teeth and pounded the head of another one of his subordinates. "Okay, Miss Annie, it's a deal. But you better get the job done right." He breathlessly swore to himself "You pint-sized cheating little space SHRIMP!"

Little Annie Asteroid's android valet/spittoon quickly scrolled through on a tiny screen the 1,800 page Terms of Service agreement that Quälpooň and each of his crew signed, without reading, with a swipe of their hobnailed leather gloves.

"Cuckoo, cuckoo," said the captain's nuclear wall clock.

* * 3 * *

The six space buccaneers watched from the port-side observation window as Little Annie Asteroid cautiously maneuvered around the logjam of space rock in her single-seat space scooter. Now and then, she would pull with a grapple or push with an extension poll to rearrange a small meteor a little more here or there relative to the others. She extended from the nose of her scooter a several hundred foot long slender rod tipped with an anti-matter anti-magnet. With it she gently tapped the flanks of some of the tumbling rocks. The black market rock rustlers could see her in the scooter cockpit framing the asteroids with the flats of her hands and making line-of-sight reckonings of angles and distances.

"How is she going to pull this off?" wondered Goolpath out loud as she twirled one of her green drooping mustaches. "Is this all for show? Little Annie Asteroid isn't using any digital mapping, no artificial intelligence, no quantum algorithms, no deep doo doo learning, no neutron bombs, no infinitely stochastic computer modeling, no nothing."

"I heard," replied Leŋawolpena, "... and it's just what I heard somewhere or other... that she does all the a-rith-ma-tic in her head, like she's got some kind of in-tu-i-tion or a feeel, you know what I mean?"

"And I heard she's like a high stakes pool hustler," said Dtahlathũng. "She ain't a-fear'd of nothing and always walks away a winner."

"And I think she's too damn expensive, and a cheating little shrimp!" said Quälpooň mostly to himself. But he, too, watched closely as Little Annie Asteroid's space scooter darted gingerly around, between and through the thickness of hundreds of thousands of congested rocks inexorably being drawn by their own and Upper Utula's gravities into an inescapable spiral of darkness and death. "And she's too damn expensive," he repeated.

* * 4 * *

After several Earth-equivalent hours of reconnoitering, Little Annie Asteroid announced by a cosmic voice mail to her rustler clients: "I am ready, Gentlemen and Ladies. It is time to take your seats. Time to buy your bags of popped hull barrrrnacles, chocolate covered Goooobers and rrrrumiedumdum sodie-pop. The currrrtain rrrrises momentarrrrily. Buy yourrrr sou-ven-irrrrs at the front airlock door. Place your bets on the table, gents and ladies and sit back and enjoy the show! And get ready to pay the agreed upon price for the salvation of your gnarly, money-grubbing, twisted souls!"

Quälpooň and his crew, the cabin rats, the space fly and the nuclear wall clock cuckoo bird all pressed their faces against the observation window, each one of them peering through quantum binoculars at Little Annie Asteroid's tiny scooter flitting around the logjam of hundreds of thousands of slow rolling space rocks. Little Annie Asteroid extended from the nose of her scooter the several hundred foot long pool cue tipped with the anti-matter anti-magnet. Her copper headed android valet/spittoon hovered in the vacuum outside the scooter and gently rubbed chalk on the tip of the cue stick.

"Black metallic Asteroid 46B-omega 9 in the corner pocket," announced Little Annie Asteroid by cosmic communicator, and with her long cue stick she tapped a small tumbling rock into another trajectory.

"Red siliceous asteroid 777-calypso 4, left side pocket," she said and tapped another asteroid into another orbit. Little Annie Asteroid framed a cluster of nearby asteroids with the flats of her hands and made one more line-of-sight reckoning.

"And nowwwww... prepare for break, Gentlemen and Ladies..." After a few practice thrusts Little Annie Asteroid swiftly jabbed her astral cue stick and struck a large white carbonaceous rock that, in frictionless space, careened into two more that transferred kinetic energy into a chain reaction of more and more and more asteroids until within 45 minutes the entire gigantic cluster of space rock was moving in a choreographed dance of bumps, spins and shoves that unshaded the light corridors of Upper Utula III, left not a single large asteroid heading for a collision with that planet, and only micro meteoroid dust that would burn up entering into its atmosphere.

An hour later the Provisional Assistant Director of the Trade and Import Registry for Upper Utula III sent a plasma fax:

Well done, Captain Quälpooň. We have... for the time being... canceled your room reservation at the Upper Utula III penitentiary. We also will immediately terminate the imposition of additional penalties and interest for illegal dumping under Clause 82 of the TIR master contract.

However... due to the random dispersal of hundreds of thousands of space rock, you will be cited for littering and violation of the UUIII revised environmental code that will be enacted later today and applied retroactively.

Thus, in expectation of the new law being passed, fines and penalties of several millions of Universal Credits have prospectively been imposed, in addition to the already accrued penalties and interest for illegal dumping under Clause 82, and not (yet) including contract cancellation and termination fees provided by Clauses 104-119 of the master agreement.

Our lawyers will be in touch with you soon to arrange terms of payment; and in anticipation of your insolvency, an impound team and tow vehicle are presently on their way to secure your vessel and sell it on Space Bay for salvage value with any deficiency, of course, remaining to be paid in monthly installments with compounding daily interest accruing at 24%.

Best regards. MTR, Provisional Assistant Director, Trade and Import Registry, Upper Utula III. Have a nice day!

"$#@!*&+@#!!!" screamed Quälpooň as he drove his leather hobnailed glove into the cabin wall, narrowly missing the nuclear wall clock. The clock bird jumped out and screamed: "Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Abandon Ship! Abandon Ship! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!"

"Damn right!" hollered Quälpooň. "Man and woman the lifeboat and let's get out of here before that little shrimp...

* * 5 * *

At which moment, as Quälpooň and his crew struggled to make room for themselves in the cramped lifeboat by throwing out the cabin rats, the space fly and the cuckoo clock bird who were also desperately trying to get away, Little Annie Asteroid and her valet/spittoon strode through the airlock.

"Are we in a hurry to go somewhere, Gentlemen and Ladies?" she asked puffing a black cheroot as she twirled her pearl handled charged particle blunderbusses. Her android valet/spittoon reached across the lifeboat with its ruby laser cigar cutter and carved the words "Out of Service" right through its front windshield, thus rendering the lifeboat as nonfunctional as the dysfunctional lives inside it.

"Cuckoo!!! Cuckoo!!! Cuckoo!!!" screamed the nuclear cuckoo clock bird. It petulantly flew out of the lifeboat back to its hole in the wall clock. En route, the bird pecked Dtahlathũng's and Goolpath's hairy noses and then dropped a load of cuckoo doo on Quälpooň's head.

Quälpooň, wiping his head with the back of his hobnailed glove, stepped out of the lifeboat to take full responsibility for the situation.

"I take full responsibility for the situation," croaked Quälpooň, choking on the abhorrent thought put into his mind by the author of this story. He stammered and disavowed the author's out-of-character confessional drivel. "Hold on a minute! Who wrote this confessional drivel?"

Author: I wrote it, of course. Now read your lines, Quälpooň.

Quälpooň: No way! This is totally out of character! What is this, some kind of morality play? I'm going to talk to my agent. I'm the bleeping star of this story and I refuse to talk like some whiney nincompoop! It's in my contract!

Author: You are NOT the star of the story, dummy. Annie Asteroid is. That's why her name appears in the title, not YOURS!

Quälpooň: Maybe my name isn't in the title, but I appear first and I appear last, so I'm the most important player here. Besides. If I have to read those lines, then I QUIT!

Author: Okay, okay. Fine. Have it your way, Quälpooň! Spool it back again and take it from the bottom of page 8.

Quälpooň, wiping the load of cuckoo doo off his head with the back of his hobnailed glove, stepped out of the lifeboat and refused to take any responsibility for the situation:

"This is all really your fault Little Annie Asteroid because if you hadn't actually delivered on what you said you would do, we wouldn't be in this mess, now would we? Well, maybe a different mess, but not this one! Now we don't have the money to pay you, we've lost control of our ship and we have to get out of Dodge before we end up spending the rest of our lives breaking rocks in an Upper Utulan debtor's prison. And what's more," he continued pointing a doo-smeared finger of speech at Annie, "if you pull the trigger on your short barrel blasters, then you'll blow the ship's outer pressure hull and everything will implode and you and me and all the rest of us are going to go bye-bye. So why don't we just call it a day, shake hands and let bygones be bygones, hmmm?"

"Well, maybe two out of three," said Little Annie Asteroid amusedly, "but I ain't shaking no hand that's been wiping nuclear cuckoo doo! And remind me, Mister, what was it I said nobody dared call me twice?"

"Shrrrrimp!" trilled Quälpooň obligingly and smiled his gold-toothed political smile.

"Oh, right," hissed Little Annie Asteroid. "Thanks for reminding me. Now that you have said it twice." She spat to her left and her android valet caught it in its brass spittoon. Ka-ping!

Annie's pupils narrowed to razor blades as she blew a smoke ring toward Quälpooň and his crew who were cowering under a tarp in the lifeboat. An Enno Morricone soundtrack to a Sergio Leone spaghetti western whistled again in the background.

Time froze. The nuclear cuckoo clock sounded 36 o'clock. Time unfroze.

"Well, then, Gentlemen and Ladies," said Little Annie Asteroid a few moments after time had defrosted. "I guess I'll just be one my way." She holstered her pearl handled blunderbusses, doffed her black felt rhinestone studded stetson and carefully stepped rearwards into the airlock without turning her back on Quälpooň and his crew.

She was instantly joined in the airlock by her android valet/spittoon, the cabin rats, the space fly and the nuclear cuckoo bird (who, flapping one wing good-bye, stuck out his tongue and said something in bird to Quälpooň that loosely translates as "pffssssssst"). The valet dipped its copper spittoon head spilling the collected cigar ends and spittle onto the floor of Quälpooň's ship, and the airlock doors sealed with a slurp.

A few minutes later and hundreds of millions of parsecs away, Little Annie Asteroid made a spooky action at a distance photon cell phone call to Quälpooň.

"Gentlemen and Ladies," she said, "I neglected to remind you of a couple of things... the first, in case you've forgotten, is page 788 of our 1,800 page Agreement and Terms of Service (which I am certain you carefully studied before digitally signing), which provides at paragraph 3088(d)(1)(iii) subpart (S)13, certain rights and remedies in the event of a subscriber -- that's YOU, my friends -- breaching its contract with Little Annie Asteroid -- which, of course, is me. And that remedy is an immediate acceleration of fees, costs, damages and penalties. Are you good for the gold, Gentleman and Ladies?"

"Sure," sneered Quälpooň in response. "We've got money coming out our ears right now! All you gotta do is come back and get it, you little SHRIMP, ahaw haw haw!"

"Ahaw, haw, haw yourself," calmly replied Little Annie. "And the second thing I forgot to tell you yokels is that in anticipation of you bums being true to your re-pu-ta-tions and not making good on your fi-nan-ci-al obligations, I took the pre-cau-tion of sinking the cue ball, so to speak, subject to ex post facto adjustment if, in fact, you surprised the hell out of me and actually did pay your bill. But that not being the case," Little Annie Asteroid continued, "I see no reason to adjust anything."

"Whaddya mean?" growled Quälpooň and his crewmen and women by photon speaker phone.

"Well," said Little Annie Asteroid, "just about now you might look out your port-side observation window. And remember, nobody stiffs Little Annie Asteroid. And nobody calls me 'shrimp' twice! Bye now. Have a nice day!" And her spooky action at a distance photon phone transmission winked out.

Turning quickly aside, Quälpooň and crew gasped and stared out the observation window. They watched in terror as the quick tumbling carbonaceous sphere of cosmic rock that Little Annie Asteroid had used to set the others in motion - her cue ball, so to speak - loomed rapidly bigger in the window frame as the asteroid, now close enough to see its surface fissures and craters, flying like a cannonball toward the flank of what would soon no longer be their ship.

END

(... or not?)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ennio_Morricone-The_Good,_The_Bad_And_The_Ugly.ogg (including copyright notice)