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"Exile mini: Our Man Bacon"
 
   For Derek

Not all the survivors of the Wedge Defense Force spent the years from 2288 to 2380 in hiding or in exile.

In the year 2360, 25 years after the fall of the United Galactica and the establishment of the United Federation of Planets, one man reappeared after decades of wandering and established himself quite publicly in the very heart of the civilized galaxy: Paris, France, on Earth, almost within shouting distance of the Federation Capitol.

There, he set up shop in an office tower that had once belonged to the WDF's deadly enemies, the GENOM Corporation, taking as his personal residence the rooms that had once been Maximilien Largo's office on Earth. That would have been blatant enough, but then he took it a step further. Surrounding himself with experts in the fields of science and technology, he set about improving the lot of the ordinary people of the planet Earth and beyond in ways that supposedly-public-spirited companies like GENOM could never hope to match. The discoveries that flowed from the laboratories and workshops of his tower made everyday life better for uncountable billions in innumerable ways... and every last one of them was made available to the public free of charge.

The enemies of the Wedge Defense Force could only stand by and fume as this man single-handedly made mockery of all the lies they had used to blacken the WDF and hunt its survivors. Every day, he bucked the tide of well-funded folklore and misinformation. By 2370, he was the most beloved and influential man on Earth, his reputation and public popularity making him untouchable. Even the Olympus world government could not challenge his position.

What few people at the time knew was that the bioroid rulers of Olympus wouldn't have challenged him if they could, because when he wasn't bettering the lives of every man, woman, and child on Earth (which was, after all, in line with their own stated goals), he was serving as their ultimate option, the agent upon whom they called when all other courses of action had failed. Though he answered to no one, he could be persuaded to help if the cause was just enough, and on those occasions even the masters of Olympus called him...

Our Man Bacon


August 10, 2371
Bacon Tower, Paris

Upon entering the lobby of Bacon Tower for the first time, President Tisiphone of the Olympus world government found herself in the unaccustomed position of being taken aback. The place wasn't at all what she'd been expecting. She had assumed, since it was in Paris (a representative slice of Old Earth if ever there was one) and run by an unreconstructed, old-style human to boot, that it would be disorganized in that particularly human way, with bric-a-brac scattered here and there and lots of pointless, inefficient decorative flourishes.

Instead, it might easily have been an office building in Olympus, designed and run by bioroids. Everything was sleek, modern, and purposeful, with just enough carefully blended aesthetic elements to show that thinking, feeling beings did work here, even if they weren't so sloppy as to let those feelings show at the expense of efficiency.

In fact, for a few moments, Tisiphone wondered whether the place might actually be run by bioroids. Everyone she could see, from one side of the cavernous concourse to the other, was a woman, and all appeared to have been selected according to some strict standard of beauty. They were all different, representative of just about every ethnic division she could think of among the peoples of Earth, but they were all breathtaking, or they would've been to a suitably oriented human, anyway.

One of them, a shockingly tall and Nordic woman dressed, like all the others, in the clean-lined silver jumpsuit of the Bacon Foundation, walked briskly toward Tisiphone with a clipboard in hand and said in almost accentless Japanese (which was, for various perverse reasons of geopolitics, the official lingua franca of Olympus),

<President Tisiphone, good morning. Thank you for visiting us today. Please come with me.>

"Where is Mr. Bacon?" Tisiphone asked in English as she followed the Viking woman into an elevator. "I told your majordomo I have urgent - "

Apparently ignoring the Olympian president's annoyance, the blonde spoke a few words in a language Tisiphone couldn't begin to identify. She was apparently talking to the elevator, for a moment later the doors slid silently shut and they began to rise.

"Chairman Bacon is waiting for you on level 67," the blonde said to Tisiphone with imperturbable good cheer. "Your visit overlaps with the last four minutes of his daily workout."

"Do you mean to tell me that, with a crisis of global proportions developing, the chairman of the Bacon Foundation is lifting weights?" asked Tisiphone archly.

"Not exactly," replied the blonde impassively, still smiling.


Death came for Derek Bacon out of the dark.

Well, not Death herself; though she was not a completely unknown visitor to Bacon Tower, she tended to just come in the street door like anybody else.

The sword hissing through the air toward the back of Bacon's neck, however, would have done a good job of involving her in this scene if it had connected as its wielder intended.

It didn't, though, because Bacon stepped out of its path with the nonchalant ease of a man going out to the stoop for the mail. Less casual, though hardly less easy, was his counterattack, delivered with enough power to send his attacker flying, and enough precision to ensure that she didn't fly into the just-arriving elevator and discommode the people inside.

Another of the circle of ninja attacked, silent and purposeful, with the wicked whirling blade of a thrown kusarigama, and a third pressed home a charge with a spear at the same time. Bacon ducked the thrown blade, grabbed the chain as it passed, and whipped it around the shaft of the spear, wrenching the spear from its owner's hands and the kusarigama's wielder from her footing. Thinking quickly, she drew a short knife from within her uniform, turning the off-balance stumble into a roll and lunge - but by the time she arrived he was gone, and she only figured out where he'd gone when the butt of his third erstwhile attacker's spear clonked her gently in the back of the head.

Tisiphone and her guide stood by the elevator and watched, the guide with that same imperturbable smile and Tisiphone with blank astonishment, as Bacon disarmed five more ninja and sent them sprawling to various corners of the room. Most were back on their feet, drawing secondary or even tertiary weapons, and regrouping to press the attack again, when a gong sounded.

All the ninja immediately ceased advancing, put away their weapons, formed a neat circle, bowed to the man at its center, and then removed their hoods. At this point, the fact that they were all lovely women somehow failed to compound Tisiphone's astonishment further.

"Thank you, ladies," said Bacon, returning the bow to the four corners of the compass. "Excellent workout, as usual. Michiko, you nearly had me that time."

"You exaggerate, Dereku-sama," one of the ninja replied; then, smiling, she added, "But thank you. Perhaps next time... "

Bacon grinned. "Perhaps. Right now, though, I see I have a visitor. Dismissed!"

<No. 1 Shadow Society: disperse!> Michiko barked in Japanese, and then the ninja all vanished - their leader not before, to Tisiphone's surprise, she had darted forward to give the big man a parting kiss.

Crossing to greet his visitors, Bacon paused at a small table to collect a towel, which he used to scrub at his short, sandy hair for a few moments, then draped across his neck. Bowing, he greeted his guest cordially.

This was Tisiphone's first face-to-face encounter with Derek Bacon, and her first impression of him was the same as most people's: My God, he's huge.

It was hard to say precisely where this impression came from. Bacon was a tall man, but not abnormally so, standing about six-foot-four in his bare feet. Tisiphone, like many soldier-class bioroids, was tall for a woman, and nearly matched his barefoot height in her heels. Nor was he a fat man - quite the opposite, in fact, since the retrogenetic treatment he'd received as a founding Wedge Defender had blessed him with the kind of metabolism that made such a thing pretty well impossible.

Mostly, the shock came from the breadth of his shoulders, which seemed in his simple white karate gi to be nearly as wide as he was tall, and the general sense of massive solidity about him. He had practically no neck, not because of hugely overdeveloped shoulder muscles as one saw in bodybuilders but simply because it was nearly the same diameter as his head, which was substantial. His hands and feet, too, seemed outsized somehow; like his head, they seemed to belong on a statue on a scale about 25 percent larger than the rest of him. If she hadn't just seen his grace and agility first-hand against that squad of ninja, Tisiphone would never have believed it possible.

The crackle of intelligence in his blue eyes, and the very slight but ever-present knowing smile on his square-jawed face, put the lie to any theory that his size and power came at the expense of brainpower or wit, either. This was a man whose formidability was as obvious intellectually as physically. For the first time, it occurred to Tisiphone that he might just live up to what her predecessor, Athena, had said about him when she had heard that Tisiphone was going to consult with him.

"He's a large man," Athena had said, "but his mind is right there." Tisiphone had wondered vaguely what the hell that was supposed to mean at the time. Now, seeing him in person, she wondered no more.

"Mr. Bacon," she said, collecting her wits. "Thank you for seeing me today."

"President Tisiphone," he said, "it's my pleasure. Thank you, Brynhildr, I'll take it from here."

"You're welcome, Derek," said the blonde. To Tisiphone's surprise (she wondered idly whether her ability to feel surprise would eventually erode under these conditions), instead of bowing or saluting, Brynhildr acknowledged the dismissal by stepping past the Foundation's guest and giving the chairman a sultry kiss, quite at odds with the Nordic cool of her appearance.

Derek returned the gesture, then met the blonde's eye and said quietly, "Later." Smiling, she moved off and disappeared down a side corridor.

"There goes one of the finest minds in nanobiotechnology today," said Bacon with a sentimental sigh. "So!" he added briskly, turning to his vaguely startled-looking guest. "What brings you to the Foundation today, Madame President?"

Recovering her aplomb, Tisiphone answered his question with a question. "Have you heard of the Black Dragon Society, Mr. Bacon?"

"I've heard of nine Black Dragon Societies, actually," said Derek as he led the way back into the elevator, "but - " here he broke off for a moment to say something else in that language Athena didn't know, after which the elevator began descending, " - seven of those are off-planet and the eighth is concerned primarily with fruit machines in Singapore, so I'm assuming you mean the one in Côte du Soleil."

"Er... yes, quite."

Bacon shook his head. "I told them it was a mistake to give those circus crazies their own country," he said, "but nobody listens to me. What are they up to now?"

"They have issued a credible threat of world cataclysm."

Bacon arched one eyebrow. "How credible?"

"Let's just say no one will be vacationing at Cap Verde for a long time."

"Hmm. Do they have a tsunami generator or a volcano inducer?"

Tisiphone shook her head. "We believe it is a gravitational anomalizer of enormous size. If properly - or perhaps I should say improperly - employed, it could potentially crack the entire planet in half like an egg."

"Well. We can't have that."

"My sentiments precisely."

The elevator stopped. Tisiphone expected the door to open, but instead, after a momentary pause, the car started moving backward. She blinked, looking around, then returned her attention to Bacon.

"There aren't that many places you can hide a gravitational anomalizer and still expect it to work when you push the button," Bacon observed. "Have you checked them?"

"All those known to the Olympus Planetary Survey," Tisiphone replied, then admitted, "Their database may be incomplete."

"Mm, I doubt it. My people compiled it. Okay, that probably means it's on the Moon." He said something else in the incomprehensible tongue. The elevator paused, then started sliding back the other way, only to hesitate again a moment later and then start heading down and to the left at what felt like about a 40-degree angle.

"I won't even ask how you can be so sure of that," said Tisiphone, shaking her head.

Bacon grinned, his face shifting from pensive to boyishly cheerful in an instant. "Good," he said, "you're learning."

A moment later the elevator stopped once more and the doors opened. Bacon stepped out, untying the belt of his gi, and Tisiphone followed, expecting to find them in a corridor or conference room.

Instead, they were in a gigantic cylindrical room that reminded her of nothing so much as a subway station, complete with the railed trench in the middle and the tunnel leading off into the darkness. The main difference was that the machine waiting at the platform wasn't a train.

It was a rocketship, like an old-fashioned hood ornament from the pre-Contact era, complete with silver skin, scarlet fins, and a brow of windows set conformally into its surface not far from the point. Jets of steam issued from service ports here and there as a small army of blast-suited technicians (all women, of course) swarmed around it, disconnecting hoses and cables, checking inside panels. and generally making ready.

"Attention," said a PA system overhead. "Attention. The Silver Arrow will launch in five minutes. The Silver Arrow will launch in five minutes. Destination: Moon."

A somewhat petite redheaded woman detached herself from the launch crew and crossed the platform to greet Bacon and the Olympian leader. Unlike the Viking, she did salute, and quite creditably too. She wore an obviously custom-built pressure suit, sleek and silver like the spacecraft, and carried the bowl helmet for same under one arm. On her chest, just above the various red- and blue-coded hose fittings for the suit's life support system, was an embroidered tag reading ROGERS.

"Flash," said Bacon, returning the salute. "How's she look?"

"Ready to go, as always," the redhead replied in a whiskey-and-cigarettes voice. "Have we ever let you down?"

"Not so far," Bacon agreed. "Tisiphone, meet my personal pilot, Captain Elizabeth Rogers. Flash, this is Tisiphone. She's the president of Olympus."

Rogers brightened. "Oh hey, so you're one'a them androids, then?"

"Bioroids," Tisiphone corrected her, "yes."

"Solid. You must be rated for pretty high G-loads."

"I've... never explored that part of my specifications table," Tisiphone admitted, slightly taken aback.

"Yeah, well, you wanna come with, you'll find out," Rogers told her.

"Er... no thank you."

Rogers shrugged. "Suits me, I won't have to re-do my mass/accel calculations. I just thought I'd ask. You ready to go, boss?" She looked at a giant chronograph watched affixed just above the wrist interlock of her pressure suit by an oversized black leather strap. "T minus 90 and counting."

"Be right there, Flash."

"Well, don't dawdle or I'll leave ya here," said Rogers. "Nice meeting you, prez." Now she kissed him - it seemed to be something they did only in parting - then turned and sauntered back toward the rocket, casually plunking her helmet onto its locking ring as she went.

"You certainly have a... unique staff," Tisiphone observed.

"Best rocket jockey I ever saw, and I've seen a few," said Bacon, "but her real strength is cosmodynamic engineering. She built the Silver Arrow with her own hands, and she'll do the Kessel Run in less than eight parsecs."

While Tisiphone was absorbing that, he went on, "Well, I must be going. Planet to save and all that. I'll call you with the all-clear, or if I need you to send up one of those nuclear missiles you don't have. That probably won't become necessary, though."

"Wait!" she said, catching his arm. "You're just... going up there? With no plan? What if they're expecting you?"

"I hope they are," he said. "If not, it may make getting into their Secret Moonbase a bit tricky. Anyway, don't worry about a thing. You came all the way over here by yourself, that shows you're serious about wanting my help. I'll take care of everything."

Then, before she could object or frame any further thoughts, he leaned, kissed her, and headed for the rocketship. "Ta!" he called, pausing in the hatchway to give a big Nixon-boarding-the-chopper farewell wave, and then the hatch closed and he was gone.

A retiring silver-suited tech collected his abandoned gi from the platform, and another came over to Tisiphone (who stood staring in stunned disbelief at the ship) and told her it would really be a very good idea at this point to get behind the blast shields.

"I came in person because he refused to see my ambassador, my military advisor, and my chief of staff," she said to no one in particular.

"Yes, Madame President," said the technician as she ushered the visitor behind the nearest blast shield. "I know."


The Silver Arrow exploded from her underground launch tube in the north of France like a projectile from a cannon, which was not entirely inappropriate, given that said launch tube had originally been dug as part of a German superweapon project during World War II. Her parabolic course carried her into an exotic compound orbit that required minimal maneuvering, conserving most of the terrific momentum she launched with and enabling Rogers to hold off lighting her atomic engines until she was well clear of the atmosphere.

Once that was done, the brutal thrust of those engines was sufficient to carry the Silver Arrow from the Earth to the Moon in a little under an hour. Bacon spent most of the trip dozing, strapped into the right-hand seat of the narrow cockpit. Rogers paid him no mind as she vectored the ship into a tight lunar orbit, shut down the atomic engines, and fired up the rocket thrusters again, then dropped out of orbit and brought the ship down until her fins were nearly scraping the dusty surface.

"Up and at 'em, boss," she said, reaching across the center console to punch Bacon in the leg. "I have Point T on my scope. Their air defense network's picked us up. Soon as we clear Eratosthenes, things are gonna get exciting up here."

Bacon straightened up a bit in his seat and unfastened his seat harness. "Guess I better get to work, then. You know the game, Flash."

Rogers gave him a grin, then reached up and shut the gold-tinted outer bowl of her helmet.

"Showtime!" she cried cheerfully as the Black Dragons' surface defenses opened up.

The Silver Arrow danced a death-defying minuet across the lunar skies as missile batteries, flex-mount quad-blasters, and annihilator beams did their best to intercept and destroy her. In the hands of a lesser pilot, the ship may well have come out the loser in this game, but Bacon's praise of Beth Rogers's skill was no idle boast. She built the Silver Arrow and knew exactly what the ship could and couldn't do - and the latter wasn't a long list. She flew in one end of the Black Dragon Society's defense corridor and out the other, booming back to lunar orbit at the other end without a scratch on her vessel - and without her boss.

In her wake, as the Black Dragon defense network slowly cooled in the near-vacuum of the lunar atmosphere, Derek Bacon climbed out of the Moon's newest impact crater, which his drop pod had just plowed in Mare Imbrium just north of Eratosthenes crater.

Naturally, he thought, looking north. They've hidden their gravitizer in the Mare Imbrium mascon.

His eye caught a glint of reflected light moving in the distance - sunlight flashing from the visor of someone driving toward him with a lunar rover. As he'd expected, the Black Dragons had detected his drop and sent a welcoming party.

Now for the part he wasn't really looking forward to.

Closing his eyes, he focused his attention inward, applying a deep meditation technique he'd learned from a member of an ancient sisterhood of... well, of crazy people, if he was honest, on the Rim decades earlier. His breathing and heart rate slowed, his body temperature fell, until all three became all but imperceptible. Slowly, in the low lunar gravity, he fell to his knees, then toppled forward in the dust. His last conscious act before command of his body failed altogether was to trip a pressure relief valve designed to seem as if it had failed and vent his spacesuit's atmosphere.

When the Black Dragon security party found him, they assumed he'd suffered a suit malfunction and perished. Eager to display their trophy to their leaders - what a propaganda coup the death of Earth's most famous action philanthropist would make! - they loaded him (with much struggling and cursing) aboard their rover and took him back to base.


In the bustling-but-orderly nerve center of the Bacon Foundation, a control room so huge and sophisticated it made the Military and Security Operations Command Center in Olympus seem like a school lunchroom, Tisiphone watched with stunned disbelief as the Black Dragons overrode the television circuits to deliver what their garishly garbed spokeswoman described as "a message of global importance."

She knew what it would be. They were going to gloat. And then probably destroy Olympus. Derek Bacon had failed. There was a monitor on one of the control consoles, visible from where Tisiphone stood, that told that story clearly. Two hours before, she had watched Bacon's vital signs, relayed by his spacesuit, fade and disappear from that monitor. His retainers, dozens of whom staffed this room with brisk and businesslike efficiency, seemed strangely unmoved by this terrible turn of events; when Tisiphone had tried to question them about it, they had only smiled strangely and gone on with their duties.

"People of Earth, your attention please," announced the haughty voice of Indra Tahar, the Black Dragons' leader (a tall woman of East Indian extraction who, for some reason, preferred to dress as a sort of cross between a circus acrobat and an 18th-century French noblewoman - Madame de Pompadour on the high wire, as it were).

Here it comes, thought Tisiphone, bracing herself.

"The Black Dragon Society hereby withdraws its demands of nine o'clock Olympus time yesterday," Indra declared flatly. "We have dismantled our gravitational anomalizer and will undertake no further acts of global extortion. Efforts will begin immediately to reconstruct the damaged resort area at Cap Verde. That is all."

The screen went blank and a great cheer went up from the Bacon Foundation staffers in the control center.

Tisiphone blinked and turned to the nearest silver-clad woman, who happened to be the tall blonde Bacon had called Brynhildr. "But... how?"

Brynhildr grinned. "Chairman Bacon must have... reasoned with her," she said.

"But... Chairman Bacon is dead."

Brynhildr's smile became a sly grin. "Is he, now."


The Silver Arrow returned to her berth at 11:14 that night, sliding into the "station" in a great cloud of steam from the rocket coolant with which the pad crew had flooded the rail trench in anticipation of the ship's arrival. Not until the turntable formed by the last ship's-length of rails had turned the vessel around again, ready to be re-launched, did the crew emerge from behind the blast shields and move in with their typical quick efficiency to hook up hoses and cables and open panels to commence maintenance operations.

Tisiphone was standing on the platform, just outside all this bustling activity, and watching as the Silver Arrow's hatch opened and three figures emerged, all wearing standard Bacon Foundation spacesuits. Derek Bacon... Elizabeth Rogers... and Indra Tahar!

"Good evening, Madame President," said Bacon cheerfully. "Nice of you to stick around and welcome us back! As you can see, the situation's been resolved."

"You... you died," Tisiphone sputtered. "I saw your telemetry."

Bacon's ever-present smile widened a little. "Did you like that? The old 'hibernate and open the trick valve' stunt. Works every time! I had to con them into taking me into their base without shooting me first, after all."

Tisiphone wondered whether she would ever cease to be surprised by anything this man managed to do. Instead of dwelling on it, she cast a glance at Indra. "What about her?"

"Indra's coming to work for me," said Bacon blithely. "It turns out she's quite an engineer. She built their gravitizer herself! I think she's just what I've been looking for to get my Trans-Pacific Levi-Train project back on track."

It was not until she was back in her office in Olympus the next morning that Tisiphone realized that, on top of everything else, Derek Bacon had made a pun out of his plans for the reformed villainess's future career.

She felt vaguely uneasy for the rest of that day.

"Our Man Bacon" - an Exile Mini-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
Special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2009 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


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Exile mini: Our Man Bacon [View All] Gryphonadmin Jan-18-09 TOP
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   RE: Exile mini: Our Man Bacon Bodhi Jan-19-09 2
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      RE: Exile mini: Our Man Bacon Mephronmoderator Jan-21-09 6
      RE: Exile mini: Our Man Bacon Gryphonadmin Jan-21-09 7
   RE: Exile mini: Our Man Bacon trigger Jan-21-09 8


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