Just a story about a transvestite space gypsy.

NEW SPACETRAN .

Chapter 1.

Beverly was tired. Not just ‘tired — tired’ because of lack of sleep but also tired as in ‘weary’ — weary from the long years of isolation from her home world, the self imposed loneliness that was the only mechanism that enabled her to feel safe. Now her tiredness had plunged her into a miniature crisis. Not a life threatening crisis but an inconvenience that forced her to ‘space-walk’ when she didn’t feel like spacewalking and to check the hull when she was really too tired to give the inspection her total attention. Wearily, she sighed and secured herself into the space suite.

It was the end of one of a myriad intergalactic flights and she had not anticipated the heavy meteorite shower that had peppered her immensely strong shield as she slowed down to a veritable ‘interplanetary crawl’. Some of the meteorites had been as big as tennis balls and there was always the remote possibility that one or perhaps even two may have pierced the shield and managed to strike the hull. If they had, it was her own fault. She had been travelling too fast, too close to the inner planets, - a miscalculation stemming directly from her fatigue. She had planned on ‘zero-basing’ her jumping off point from Sol ready for the next intergalactic journey. Now she had to recalculate her voyage plans after checking out the hull.
However, Beverly was at least back roughly where she wanted to be, that was inside the orbit of Jupiter and in the proximity of old Sol again, the yellow dwarf that she once, long, long ago, thought of as ‘home’. More importantly, Sol was the Zero of Zeros in Beverly’s navigational nomenclature.

With Cold Albatross now in stable orbit around Sol she finally completed her hull inspection then ran some tests to ensure Albatross’s integrity after the unexpected Meteorite storm. Beverly’s tiredness had in part caused her to blunder into the meteorite shower ‘though in all fairness,’ she told herself, ‘It was a bloody extensive storm’ and she had never expected to encounter such a large widespread shower so close in to the sun. Normally Jupiter’s immense gravitational field would have swept up the billions of particles from grains of sand to the size of tennis balls and sucked them down onto Jupiter’s surface.

‘Shit I must have been tired to miss that!’ She scolded herself.

Now; - with her beloved ship ‘Cold Albatross’ in a safe, stable orbit again, she had time to take stock and have a sleep. When she awoke her first priority would be to check back on her previous voyage plan and examine her figures. Something had definitely gone wrong.

The subject could wait for now however, more important was her sleep. Within minutes, Beverly was curled up under her duvet and sleeping with her thumb in her mouth as she nearly always did. In the silent endless void, Cold Albatross drifted in her own planetary orbit around Sol.

She woke some time later and even before eating, she went to check her figures. It irked her that she had made such a simple mistake on what had long ago become her most regular and frequent voyage. The error just shouldn’t have happened. She deemed the mistake to be a reflection of the degree of her fatigue.

Eventually she realised she had made a tiny mathematical error during her transition from intergalactic time warp, to interstellar space warp. This had compounded itself when she transitioned to plain ordinary interplanetary sub-light speed. The navigational error in the final change-over meant her just missing that safe ellipsoid corridor that was free of meteorites in the ‘gravitational shadow’ radiating from Jupiter’s all protective immense bulk. She had consequently swept into the Solar system with the wrong approach and crunched straight into the shower. Fortunately, her reduced speed relative to the meteorites had been extremely low because the meteorites were hurtling towards Sol just as Cold Albatross was and their paths were only finely convergent. The particles had flashed up brilliantly on her detectors as they bounced off the Cold Albatross’s shield and ricocheted in all directions though mostly towards the sun. With the crisis over and The Cold Albatross now safely ‘parked in orbit’ between Earth and Mars, Beverly slipped into her living quarters and made herself a meal.

She was running short of decent underwear and other supplies so a raid on the Earth’s fashion houses and supermarkets was needed. For now though it could wait; food and yet more sleep called. Beverly hadn’t realised how tired she was.

Aboard Cold Albatross there was no night and day, no morning and evening; indeed there was no ‘formal, definitive ‘time’ at all save that of Beverly’s own personal body clock. Why should there be? Beverly was utterly alone and had been for years, the whole routine on the ship was Beverly’s routine.

The only other time that mattered was the immensely complex equations of time and time warping that enabled her ship to streak across the immeasurable intergalactic voids in what seemed to Beverly like earthly hours. Beverly understood the equations but no others did. That external time, the intergalactic time, the universal field of time was an external dimension and had nothing to do with Beverly’s internal clock.

For now that ‘internal clock’ said ‘food!’ and as she ate her meal, she reflected.

‘Nobody else understood those time equations’, Beverly reminded herself, ‘not nobody in the whole wide universe.’ The knowledge and solution of those equations were what gave Beverly the freedom to cross the universe.

And it was true.

Beverly was the supreme space traveller, the intergalactic gypsy, the star tramp, the planetary vagabond.

As she savoured her meal, Beverly adjusted her course and speed so that Cold Albatross would lazily spiral inwards towards the Earth until she was caught in stasis by the moon’s gravity above a chosen destination buried deep in a secret cave on the moon. As her speed progressively decelerated, the rendezvous would be in about six hours during which time she would end up parked out of sight behind the moon.

Beverly liked the Earth’s moon. It was the very first extra-terrestrial body she had visited and to this day, many years later; it still served as the beacon of her liberation, the first faltering step on her escape from hell on Earth. The moon was the first place that she ever felt safe; - safe from the childhood nightmare that had been Earth. Even as a small child long, long before she escaped, the moon had been her only companion; - the friend who brought light and companionship during the long dark nights of childhood terror. Some might describe Beverly as a ‘Lunatic’ and there was some truth to that description.

Beverly hated the Earth but she was condemned to revisit the planet where she was born, to periodically replenish her ship with food and clothes. Yes, she often garnished food from other worlds but she still hankered for certain favourite titbits that only the earth seemingly provided. Sadly, each return visit to Earth left her shivering with a morbid, primordial fear. Each new departure brought relief and joy as her heart sang while The Cold Albatross sprang once again for the stars and galaxies and best of all, freedom. With these mixed feelings she took to her bed again with nervous anticipation of the forthcoming revisit when she awoke.

The alarm dragged her from her sleep and she blinked myopically as she stared at the illuminated space outside her ship caused by Sol’s intense glare. A quick glance at the primary function meters above her bed reassured her and she sat up stretching like a sensuous cat.

‘Time to get up,’ she told herself, ‘time to go shopping.’

Her nervous anticipation made her hungry again so she drank some libi juice and split herself a vorten egg. Then, as she savoured the delicious, alien egg, the close approach alarm started to moan softly.

‘Shit what’s that?' She wondered irritably as she stepped into the control room. ‘I thought we were free of those bloody meteorites!’

However, to her surprise, a quick glance at the screen told her that an artificial object was passing close to her ship and it was heading for some place beyond Jupiter.

‘Probably another manmade probe,’ she concluded and frowned, - 'beyond Jupiter, well that was probably the best place for it.' It was no danger to The Cold Albatross for they were on diverging courses. She was spiralling in towards earth while the probe was being flung out, free of earth’s gravity and off on some immeasurable journey into near space, - that is ‘near space’ by Beverly’s intergalactic perspective. To ordinary earthmen, ‘beyond Jupiter’ was strictly ‘outer space’ to Beverly it was ‘next door’!

She plonked her breakfast plate on the control console side table and resumed eating her vorten egg. It was too tasty to let go cold. Earth didn’t have a monopoly on beautiful food.

She expected the alarm to eventually ‘calm down’ but to her annoyance’ the thing continued moaning invasively until Beverly was forced to take a closer look. She finished her egg first though. Vorten eggs were just too good to let spoil. Then she stepped over to the close approach monitor and took a closer look. She expanded the image and increased the gain on the analysis sensitivity to have a proper look at the dammed object. Her discovery shocked and angered her.

It wasn’t a probe; it was a manned space craft of some description!

“What the fu-,” she managed to stop her curse, for despite having lived alone for nearly forty years, she still suffered from the brutal censures of her shattered childhood.

The philosophies of the Jesuits were a perfect reflection of Beverly’s damaged psyche, - (give us the child, you can have the man.) She studied the output from the alarm then cursed mainly from confusion.

‘It’s a, - it’s a bloody space craft. What the hell is it doing all the way out here? Half way to bloody Mars!’

The space craft wasn’t by any means ‘half way to Mars’ but it was on a course to eternity and far beyond the Earth’s gravitational pull. Beverly’s instruments told her the craft had living sentients aboard and if that tiny cockleshell was bound for Mar’s (Which Beverly’s computers assured her, it wasn’t,) then whatever life was aboard it would be dead long before it got to Mars. The situation warranted a closer inspection for Beverly was bound by IGACOSOLIS, ‘The Intergalactic Convention of Safety of Life in Space.’

Reluctantly and with no little annoyance, she hauled Cold Albatross short round and set her on an intercept course. In little more than minutes, Albatross was standing off alongside the tiny craft and only then did Beverly realise the problem. The craft had been struck all down one side by meteorites, - possibly the same meteorites that had caught Beverly out. However, Cold Albatross had an immensely thick Titanium, ‘Starlite’ alloy hull further protected by the force shield. The primitive craft not 100 meters distance on Beverly’s port beam had nothing and the ghastly impact holes showed fatal damage. The crippled craft, -or whatever it was, was out of control and hurling towards certain disaster. If there were any living souls aboard, they were bound for hell or heaven and it would be a long slow death if they weren’t already dead.
Beverly sighed wearily.

‘Jee’ze, why did these stupid arseholes set off on such precarious adventures with so little margin for error?’ she wondered. Now she had her work cut out. She had to prepare the tractor beam then drag the blasted space craft aboard and it looked awfully bloody fragile! Then, finally she had to secure it in her capacious cargo bay and land it somewhere safe, preferably back on Earth. They were already some several millions of miles from the earth so the stupid buggers inside were probably dead or as close as. At the speed and trajectory they were following, Beverly calculated that they had been travelling for upwards of ten days. Before starting to get out all her rescue apparel, Beverly decided to check the derelict craft out first.

She manoeuvred to within a few meters then projected a powerful light into the dull lifeless windows of the derelict. She had given up on any possible survivors.
To her amazement a shocked face appeared in the window.
For long moments the face stared stupidly at the unrecognisable alien form of the Cold Albatross then eventually recognised Beverly’s human face in Cold Albatross’s side window. She was waving to attract attention. The face remained in shock and Beverly realised they were either too far gone to respond or just plain stunned by the alien apparition that had appeared beside them. Beverly now realised she really did have her work cut out and then some.

Tractoring another, smaller space ship aboard her own stout craft had never been attempted before. The tractor beam was not the most precise or gentle of tools; it was really a piece of ‘mining or cargo handling equipment’ used to yank mineral rocks out of an asteroid belt for quarrying purposes or lifting strong, purpose built, cargo containers that could withstand a clumsy impact. Tractor beams were never gentle and the fragile craft in Albatross’s shadow looked particularly vulnerable. Close up the damage was immense. The meteorite impact would not only have damaged the craft but also deflected it onto this crazy ‘towards - eternity’ course beyond Jupiter. After an hour labouring in her space suite, evacuating the cargo hold of her precious air and freeing the clamshell loading hatchway, Beverly at last had The Cold Albatross prepared to receive cargo. The tractor beam was attached to the derelict and slowly, painfully slowly; it was wound in inch by inch like a fish on a line.

Despite Beverly’s best efforts, there were the inevitable bumps and clunks as the fragile spacecraft banged against Cold Albatross’s immensely strong cargo hull until finally; the derelict came to rest in the cargo bay. Beverly closed the clamshell, equalised the air pressure and stepped into the cargo bay.

Once there, she poked her torch through the little triangular windows and identified at least seven occupants. Fortunately they responded to her light and immediately tried speaking to her. Beverly heard nothing for Cold Albatross had no radio communications whatsoever; she had never anticipated a need for any. When she had left Earth, it had been intentionally a ‘one-way-ticket’ with few expectations of ever meeting and greeting others. She reached into the front panel of her space suite and produced a notepad on which she wrote.

"Put on your space helmets. I’m trying to get in.”
The moment the crew saw the English writing they produced their own note pad and wrote.-

“We will unlock from the inside. Stand back for air blast to free door.”

Beverly did as requested and the hinged door flipped open as air whooshed out. Immediately the crew started to clamber out and stared disbelievingly around them before clamping eyes on the tiny space suited figure that had now retreated back behind the strengthened, cargo-bulkhead door. Beverly was now studying them from her own little citadel through the strengthened glass window in the armoured door.

The rescued crew continued gaping disbelievingly around them as they gradually realised they had been rescued by some sort of Alien ship. They still weren’t sure about the nature of the creature that had rescued them. Beverly realised they were frightened so she removed her helmet and signalled to them to remove theirs. As a starter she opened the window in the door and offered her hand to them. Still they hesitated.

Eventually they came to their senses for the exquisite little ‘alien’ obviously meant them no harm; - ‘hadn’t she just rescued them?’ they told themselves. Eventually the commander of the crew spoke through the little, open armoured window.

“Who are you?” He asked incredulously.

There was a painful silence before Beverly riposted a little facetiously.

“Uuhhm, excuse me, shouldn’t the question here be, - Who are you? I’m the one who rescued a bunch of castaways drifting away into space in what can only be described as a bloody derelict life-raft.”

The astronauts suddenly got the perspective and promptly identified themselves before describing the events that had propelled their craft off course and into deep space. Beverly continued twisting the knife as she enjoyed toying with their ignorance.

“And what in the hell prompted you to set off into space without even a proper engine in your craft. I’ve run my sensors over that piece of junk and I can’t find any plausible engine; - no crude rocket engines, no neutron thrust, no maglev, no warp, no nothing. You’ve gone in breach of all intergalactic law! By rights I could have you arrested for endangering other sentients’ lives by requiring them to come and rescue you. Though having said that, I doubt there’s anybody else out here in these backwoods, who could have reached you in time. What in Space’s name possessed you?”

The astronauts remained silent, stunned by the revelations that there was apparently some sort of interstellar community operating way out beyond their limits of knowledge and exploration. Finally one of them recovered enough to speak.

“Well now that we’ve thanked you for rescuing us, would it still be rude of us to ask who you are?”

Beverly was getting nervous, human men had always made her nervous; it was a hangover from a childhood of abuse. She decided to tell them little.

“You need only know that I am the owner and commander of this ship and that it is a fully registered, properly equipped, intergalactic ship. I am fully licensed to IG 1 standards to take any ship, anywhere, anyhow. Now I think it’s time I returned you to a safe place as per the IGACOSOLIS RULES. Am I right in thinking you come from that primitive planet?”

She pointed to Earth and they nodded.

“Right, then that’s where I’ll return you.”

“Gentlemen oh, and ladies I now see, If you’ll return to that firework you call a space ship, I’ll return you to that planet and say no more about the business of going into space improperly equipped. I just can’t face all the bloody paperwork and fortunately there are no other witnesses this far out in the boondocks! So please, ladies and gentlemen, back into your cockleshell if you please.”

She closed the armoured window in the cargo bulkhead door and pulled the opaque flap across thus curtailing any further chance of discourse. Before the astronauts had time to argue or ask any further questions, they felt the alien ship give a shudder, change direction and soon they were streaking towards Earth. The astronauts wondered if the ship would stop in time but their fears were soon conquered. As the huge disc of the Earth started to fill their views, the Cold Albatross gave another little shudder and hove to about five hundred miles above the earth. Beverly was debating how and where to deliver the stricken ship and crew. She was determined to embarrass the Earthmen for daring to ask who she was after it was her who had rescued them.

Beverly was a wounded, dysfunctional individual and her eventual plan perfectly illustrated that psychopathy. Once the astronauts were back inside their craft she descended easily to the planet surface and found what she was looking for. A large warship of a different nationality to that of the astronauts. In the dark, cloudy gloom of a wet Atlantic morning, the Cold Albatross slipped out of pouring rain clouds and silently deposited the stricken space craft onto the flight deck of a French aircraft carrier. Then she disappeared again before the few, early morning watch-keepers on the bridge had recovered from the shock. If it had not been for the arrival of a battered derelict space craft sitting on the flight deck and the emergence of seven bemused American astronauts, the French mariners would not have believed what they had just seen.