A military popsicle comes out of the Trans-Utopian’s surprise deep freeze just in time to liven up the Raider’s quadrennial team-building cotillion.

Kenneth and Eugene discuss Black Light.

Synopsis:

The crew of the good ship Trans-Utopian is transporting Electra, a 25-year-old raider child and gun runner to Ganymede for judicial processing.

Unbeknownst to the crew, somewhere in the bowels of the ship, on the unexplored level 48, a convenient power surge sets a chain of events into action that leads to Colonel Bramwell, 104th Cavalry officer, being thawed out from the hidden deep freeze after 50 years in suspended animation.  His two fellow officers are dead, and the military computer system is past its Best Used By date and expires almost immediately after providing the bare minimum of narrative exposition.

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The ship has been detecting considerable raider activity in the area, they’re all heading somewhere.  Dante thinks they’re running away from something and is questioning Electra about that… or pretending to ask about that.  He’s really just interested in finding his son, Travis.

About this time Caravaggio announces there’s an intruder and, by the time Dante gets there, the Colonel has already captured Lucretia and taken the ship – HIS ship.  50 years ago, the Trans-Utopian had been pressed into service as a troop carrier during the Martian-Raider wars. While the crew try to explain reality to him, he isn’t interested, he just babbles on about being betrayed.

He locks Dante and Lucretia in the brig, along with the key, so they immediately escape after the Colonel is out of sight.

Caravaggio tries to alert Percy to the danger but…  Percy is Percy and the whole thing just succeeds in raising my blood pressure.  She goes to the bridge.  The Colonel arrives.  When confronted by Percy he realizes he really is living through this nightmare and gives up his will to live.

Completely understandable, it’s basically the same the reaction I have to Percy.  He wanders off to kill himself.

Dante and Lucretia stop him and lock him up in the same cage with Electra, for his own safety.

Dante suddenly has a hunch, maybe the Raiders aren’t running away, maybe they’re all heading somewhere.  Using the easily obtainable data on the Raider ships courses they’ve been spotting and using a simple plot, he concludes they’re all heading to one place.  Perhaps it’s a Raider cotillion?   

We don’t know if Dante really wonders that because, he’s tight-lipped and just changes the course to intercept the point where all the Raiders – his sworn enemy and dangerous military force – are congregating without bothering to tell anybody.  

This has Percy curious.

Dante tries to cut a deal with Electra.  Help me get my son back and you can go free.  What’s going on?

Oh, this, it’s just the strategically-dubious plan of holding a mandatory Raiders team-building retreat every four years.

Mandatory?  Then my son will be there!  If you can get me in, I’ll let you go free. He’d like Bramwell’s help, too.  He leaves them to consider the proposition.

In the cells, Electra is getting frisky with Colonel Bramwell – The Colonel Bramwell – brilliant military strategist Bramwell – the guy who staged the amazingly wonderful operation Black Light 50 years ago against the raiders – the plan so incredibly, strategically brilliant that he succeeded in being completely defeated by the Raiders and having his forces wiped out at their hands.

Naturally, the Raiders appreciate his strategic genius and have made him a bit of a rock star at their training academy.  Electra wants to have his babies, even.

But before she can ply him any further, Dante lets Bramwell out and gives him guest quarters.  Bramwell, having lost his own son in operation Black Light, feels Dante’s pain and agrees to help – alone.  Dante won’t let that happen and so the two of them decide to go on the suicide mission together.

Electra gets them in to the cotillion – or at least past the bouncers – and then Bramwell starts quoting Revelations, which should a warning to everyone that he’s going to go off the rails.  He uses a hidden ship to escape the Trans-Utopian and crashes into a tiny part of the Raiders resort venue, killing himself and possibly a dozen or more Raiders.

The party spoiled, the Raiders and the Trans-Utopian leave.

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