Annie - "Drop dead Jed" pt2

Who: Jed Calvert and "Annie"
Where: A second before Jed is killed
When: Blue Dwarf
<snip>
"So what happens in the future after I die?" he asked.
Annie smiles at him. "It's better."
Jed rolled his eyes. "All rainbows and puppies I bet!" He sniggered.
Annie had a thought. "I can show you what it would be like if you did
stay alive if you want?"
"If I did stay alive? You sound like ah'm already dead!" he said.
Then Annie pointed to the hole in his chest again. "You almost are!"
"Okay I want to see." Jed said.
</snip>
Annie had frozen Jed at the very moment before he died. It is always
hard to define a moment, as Jed was vaporised in less than a second,
would a moment before see him absolutely fine, but a moment later see
him absolutely dead? The time between these moments was actually
infinite, despite how small they were. Even Annie could see that,
even though she was a reasonably inexperienced time-traveller. She
had been doing it for only a short time, although with all the
travelling she'd done, it could have been anything from 1 to 10,000
years, how do you keep track?
It had been difficult for her at first, most members of the "Agency"
she represented were born into the job, they were called Avatars,
from the Karangeth Universe. From the but Annie has only half Avatar,
so it didn't come natural. Luckily though she had the enthusiasm to
learn how to control and manipulate vast universes. Even though she
did seem to keep meeting the same people. One of those was Jed
Calvert who she stood in front of now. He'd been responsible, (both
directly and indirectly) for plenty of mess she'd had to clean up.
Jed Calvert stood in front of her with a frozen laser beam straight
through his chest. Annie took a deep breath and held him by the hand.
Calvert grinned at this in an obvious and slightly perverted way.
Annie grimaced in disgust and then clicked her fingers.
Everything changed.
They were now in space. Or so it looked like before Jed had a proper
look around, they were stood on an orbital platform, a monitoring
station around a large planet. A glass viewing dome towered overhead,
giving them an unobstructed view of the blue-green planet below.
Although the planet was more green than blue.
"Is that Earth?" Calvert asked.
Annie nodded. "That's Earth in the not-so-distant future." then she
caught herself, "the future that WOULD be if you didn't die."
"Ahh. Makes perfect sense." Said Jed.
"Hey, time-travel is really complicated. I'm only just getting to
grips with it myself you know! The hardest thing is working out the
correct grammar and tense!"
"Whut's with all them thar... wormy bits?" Jed said, pointing to
Earth. It was covered in many large strands of what looked like
tendrils, poking out of the land and winding around cities and
mountains.
"Ah now, that's the important thing!" Annie said, pleased for him to
have noticed. "It's the same thing that's also on those ships over
there."
Annie pointed and Jed looked. Four ships were orbiting the Earth, one
of which Jed recognised immediately. One was the Blue Dwarf, and the
others were similar shapes and designs. This was pretty normal for
the Jupiter Mining Corporation to build all of their ships pretty
much the same, they didn't have much of a budget for designing really
cool looking spaceships, especially as they never seemed to actually
DO any mining. One of the ships was purple, another was green, and
the other was... red.
"Wull I'll be darned!" Jed said. "So they finally find the Red Dwarf
in the future eh? The JMC've been looking fer that baby fer years!"
Annie nodded. "Remember this isn't going to be the future, only the
future if you stay alive."
"Yeah yeah, gottit."
One thing that was very obvious about the JMC ships though was that
they were all wrapped in the same green tendrils that the planet was.
Tendrils smothered each ship, long green tendrils like the legs of
spiders that were hugging it tightly. Jed immediately thought it was
a new type of weapon by the Hymenoptera to disable the ship, but it
seemed that each ship wasn't any worse off for having it. In fact
they were better. It made each ship glow with a magnificent kind of
energy.
"Whut's wrong with them? Have the Hymenoptera killed them or summin?"
Annie pursed her lips. "No... quite." She said, as if he was close to
figuring it out, but still so far away.
"They're definitely not disabled if that's what you mean. Watch this."
Annie pointed as several news ships entered the area. Jed immediately
recognised them as SpaceCorps ships. SpaceCorps ships looked
significantly better than JMC ships. For a start, they were designed
to look intimidating, and were often covered head to toe in gun
ports, or other such defensive capabilities. Secondly they were
almost always painted in "military grey", or other shiny colours.
Thirdly, they had a better overall design that the basic JMC ships,
which were just big long bricks, and lacked any curve on the entire
design.
Jed shrugged. "SpaceCorps? So whut?" There was nothing unusual about
SpaceCorps ships approaching Earth, it happened all the time.
The JMC ships started to move. The Red Dwarf moved first, and the
Blue Dwarf came up alongside it, with the other two trailing a bit
behind. Then the Red and Blue Dwarves started shooting at the
SpaceCorps ships. Green pulses of bright energy came out of the
tendrils wrapped around each ship.
"Eh? Whut's goin' on?" Said Jed. "The JMC and the SpaceCorps at war?"
<TO BE CONTINUED!!!>