Captain-Lieutenant-Corporal Zoom Strikeson, First-In-Command of the Republican Space Fleet, Saviour of Kruma-1, Honorary Chieftain of the Anders System, pressed the button next to the cabin's door. It fell off.
He grumbled. The plastic had aged and he kept forgetting to screw in a new one. He wondered idly for a moment how many important things he'd forgotten during his life.
Absent-mindedly, he grabbed the button off the floor and slid it back into place. He pressed it gingerly, and this time the metal door slipped aside, allowing in the last rays of the evening's dying light. He treaded nimbly down the space pod's narrow stairway, took a few steps forward on the small landing pad in front of his house and breathed in the cool air.
Zoom reflected on the insane events he had just survived. He'd flown his swift little ship, spearheading the fleet, to the unruly System Progeria-B. There had been lasers and explosions and the Proggies had even had proper doomsday devices. Several of them. Although when you're fighting a war on home ground, that's kind of an empty threat to make.
During a quick round of repartee in the middle of a duel against a particularly skilled opponent, he'd also been informed by means of sudden shocked silence that you couldn't just call the Proggies "Greennirs" anymore. That had been an... uncomfortable few seconds. Then he'd shot the guy, so they were even.
Times were indeed a-changing.
He'd done the daring deeds, close escapes, heroics and quippy banter that were expected of him, and had made sure the peace negotiations were well under way before he'd left. He had been shot, stabbed, zapped and, in one case, awkwardly massaged.
All things considered, it had been an alright adventure.
He rubbed an itchy wound that was still healing.
Maybe he should've stayed with the fleet. Being the hero of the day (again) would have brought with it any number of babes and free drinks, cheering crowds and medals, and yet he'd left his secretary to deal with the celebrations and flown home. He could have hung around for a few days. God knew he'd earned it.
He looked up. A slender silhouette passed by a window. It was his wife.
No, this was what he'd earned. Somewhere in there were her and their new-born twins and his old mum. What he had now, finally, was time. These quiet moments with them were what he lived for, not the antics. This, here, was precious. This was real.
This made it worth making it out alive from the explosions and the lasers and the awkward massages.
Zoom Strikeson smiled.
As he approached his home's front door, he glanced at the sky one more time. They were going to call him in again, probably sooner rather than later, and he would go. But the adventures, he conceded privately, were interchangeable. They didn't matter. Coming back did.
With a hand on the doorhandle, he glanced at the pod he'd arrived in.
It was only now that he noticed he'd landed with one of the supporting stilts smack in the rosebushes.
Oh dear. He was as good as dead.
***
Luckily, Zoom never got into trouble for the garden.
Unfortunately, this was because later that night every living creature on the planet was vaporised by the doomsday device he'd taken as a souvenir and hadn't remembered to disarm.
He knew he was forgetting something.
May 2018