Our shuttle looked like a comet vomited up by a Saturnian taper enthralled in the throes of hawking up the fattest of space crew encompassing hairball, but with a sleek, crisp technological chassis beneath it. The craft itself had sharp lines and looked like the sort of thing straight from a 1950’s era science fiction film, except coated with a healthy sheen of unhealthy rocks, sand, gravel, hair, space mucous and lobbed on a trajectory almost entirely out of control.

It was almost perfect for a stealth operation, but not perfectly so, since the trajectory was plainly “Earth to Mars”, making it exactly the sort of phlegm comet likely to rouse suspicion, especially with the “No More Earth to Mars” coalition of those selfish bastards of Neptune. Fortunately, people these days are less likely to listens to them than Uranus, a joke I never get tired of.

We drifted a wide, fast, arcing trajectory, but more than that we had to run silent, with all primary entertainment, navigation and gravitation systems turned off positions. It’s bad, but not so bad, since we still had all secondary entertainments, navigations and gravitations available to us. We had the 80-inch entertainment screens activated, but not the bigger ones, and that sucked for us, since we’re all future people. But the only thing more unsettling than having to endure medium-screened televisors, was the fact that we were required to tumble end over end, all sorts of side and crazy way, all night and day with no humanly predictable pattern.

The inside of the ship was perfectly plush, loaded with every creature comfort a captain or swashbuckling galactic adventurer could demand. The hallways hummed with the very sound of runaway technology. The steel grate flooring butted cleanly to the brushed aluminum molding, the cabins were each 10,000 square feet with awkward fountains modeled after the ancient Roman greats. We were supposed to empty the water out of them but couldn’t spare the time, so their waters sloshed in all directions as our journey gyrated sickeningly forward. The bathrooms were not just clad not just with a healthy plating of gold, but fabricated entirely of solid gold from spigot to bidet.

Hey, if the jets of water tickling my netherberries aren’t spouted from mouths of gold, I have to ask if it’s good enough for me, and that’s the same attitude you’ll find from even the lowliest of billionaire astronaut. If you don’t believe me, just ask any of them, and I’m sure they’ll tell you.

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