I needn't tell you of my deep shock. How would you feel if you were about to have your 26th birthday only to suddenly be the oldest living man?

The elf men left me to absorb what they'd just told me and continued about their tasks. They readied the machinery of the rocket for another flight and very soon I watched our ascent through the portals. I might have been frightened were it not for the fact that the deck of the rocket remained steady with no dizzying sways, even as we steered at angles to the ground.

My mind raced with more and more questions as the shock turned over on me. That I would never again see Morninghawk or my mother or Indiana ever again were plain enough, sad as it all was. What wasn't plain was how miraculous ships like this one had been around way back in my day. We were mighty proud of our steam engines and electrical machines back in my time, but we didn't have a real practical flying machine. Finding rockets and rayguns in 1879 was about the same as finding a Smith & Wesson revolver in King Arthur's Court!

One of the green elves, named Tsang, came near where I sat and I asked “Do you know, is there still an Indiana?”

“I'm not sure, where was that in your day?”

“The southern shore of Lake Michigan... er... the third largest lake on the continent.”

“Ah! The five seas, yes. There is a populated land there, we call it The Sea Chain.”

“Are you from around there?”

“Oh no,” he shook his head, tousling thick dark green hair. “I wasn't born on this world at all. I come from Tepik, one of the moons of Zidd.”

It meant no more to me than gibberish at first, but Zidd turned out to be a planet far far away from Earth. A lot of my hosts were either born on far off planets from places all across the galaxy, or they were descended from peoples from other stars.

I asked about the human species and sadly they could tell me very little.

“The term used today is 'humanoid',” Tando explained. “We are all citizens of Selenium, a nation of many planets and solar systems. We are all sentient humanoid races, much like yourself, and our bloodlines are largely interbred by now. I do know that much of the population has ancestry on your world. You must understand, though, to us you come from a time far before history so we can tell you very little about the intervening millenniums.”

A thought occurred to me “Does that mean that I might be of some use to your historians or scientists? I must be the worlds oldest person.”

“You might at that,” Tando smiled, “but be careful nobody tries to put you in a zoo! You might be the last pure-bred homosapien!”

I started to laugh when I was drowned out by the laughter of Tando's co-pilot, Mardo Tor. His laugh had no mirth in it and I found myself on my guard.

“Useful?” Mardo snorted. “Honestly, what use is an old fossil?”

“I'm as good as I ever was.” I said.

“You're a troglodyte,” Mardo sneered, “and I very much doubt your mind could even process the world we've built over the ages since your kind have been gone. What could you teach us besides how to build fires or live in caves or eat the flesh of your own kind?”

Tando shouted “Enough of that!”

“We didn't live in caves.” I grumbled.

“See?” Mardo continued. “This one wasn't even a good cave-man. He probably had no schooling at all and I'll just bet he left behind dozens of stupid spawn.”

With that I was on my feet.

I swung my fist... and he caught it!

I'd have given him the other one, but he twisted until it was behind my back.

Mardo laughed “Pitiful! Tando, you might as well take this one back and bury him all over again.

“Mardo Tor, if you don't stop this right away...”

An explosion shook the whole ship.

I found myself rolling on the floor. The cabin became suddenly smokey and through the portals I saw balls of fire bursting against the blue sky.

“The Satellite Lords!” shouted the pilot.

I climbed to one of the glass dome portals and looked out at a squadron of rockets coming our way, all painted up a shade of blue that nearly camouflaged them against the sky. Like naval ships upon the sea, these battleships of the sky launched exploding volleys towards us, shaking the very air we floated in!

Tando sat down beside the pilot and took up the controls, manoeuvring the craft away from danger.

I still couldn't get over how they had mastered gravity, since I did not sway or tumble as the ground suddenly flipped to be above our heads. From the rate that clouds and mountains flew by, I guess we must have been moving like a cannonball!

Tando shouted “Don't just stand there, men! Man the guns!”

Only then did I realize that the bubble I stared out of was a turret for a kind of ray-canon. I took hold of the handles and steered the shaft of black metal at the oncoming ships.

At first I couldn't get it to work, but then I discovered that a movable glass piece on top primed it like a spring. I pressed the twin triggers and sent rays of rainbow-colored death through the thin air at the enemy.

My aim was rusty, as you might guess, having to learn something this new that fast, but I managed to catch one of the rockets right on the nose. In a wink it changed into a streak of fire, slowly angling earthward.

Every free man was on a gun now, showering criss-crossing rays of death across the sky in front of us.

Flying bombs came at us and sent tremors through the whole rocket, the resulting smoke obscuring our view. Smoke choked up the air inside too from a near miss the gave the engines trouble. My eyes smarted, but I kept right on firing.

Tsang ran towards the back and dowsed the fire with some kind of hose.

Tando took us on a desperate bend, up above the clouds, and swung us down behind the ships of the Satellite Lords.

I fired up the backside of a few of them, but Tando did the job practically on his own with the front-end guns.

Great balls of fire blotted the sky and soon nothing remained but debris tumbling towards the ground.

“We got 'em!” I said.

“Don't count on it,” Tando shouted back, “that scout force might have had a full-sized battleship with it.”

“Full sized?”

A dark object appeared at the horizon. Whatever it was, the whole crew tensed at once. It came steadily on, obviously not afraid of our firepower.

The rocket grew closer and I began to realize the size of it. If our rocket was bigger than a locomotive, the black ship that came at us must have been the size of a whole train station!

“Can we shoot it down?” I asked.

“Maybe.” Tando said. “If we do we've got to be awfully sharp about it. They have some secret weapons.”

“I'll see if I can't shoot first...”

“Not yet! At this range it would only make them mad.”

The rocket engines of the bigger battleship made a low ominous rumble. I hoped that they simply weren't interested in us, but the dark mass came straight towards us.

“This is insane!” Mardo shouted. “Why don't they open fire? Why don't we?”

“Calm down.” Tando said. “I've got an idea yet.”

“Well, I wish you'd hurry up and do it.”

“That battleship is no toy, you can't just shoot it wherever you please. Besides, the head of our section was telling me he'd learned of a new weapon they had. Nobody quite knows how it works, but it's supposed to be...”

A weird high-pitched sound vibrated through our rocket, so saturating that it almost wiped out everything else. It had to come from the enemy ship, but what was it?

“Say,” I asked, “what are they trying to do, annoy us to death?”

Nobody answered.

“Can I fire now?” I asked.

Again, there was no answer. The noise kept up, but I could hear myself speaking and I could hear the engines on both craft.

“Fellas, what gives?” I shouted.

When they didn't answer again, I climbed down from the gun and looked around the cabin. Each and every one of them lay in his chair or sprawled on the floor. Some were passed out, others stills struggled with their hands over their ears.

So this was the new weapon, yet it did not work on me!