All Chapters of Making of a Space Tyrant: Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

Place: Jupiter's OrbitDate: August 2nd, 2615The wall of the ship was opaque, for it had to be thick and solid to contain the pressure of air and to insulate against the cold of empty space.But there were portholes, multiply glazed tunnels that offered views outside, and naturally I was interested.The view really wasn't much. Jupiter, the colossus of the system, dominated as it always did, about the apparent size of my outstretched fist. Its turbulent cloud-currents and great red eye were looking right back at me. The planet was almost full-face right now, because the sun was behind us.Our progress toward the planet was so slow that the disk seemed hardly larger than it had been when we started three days before. But giant Jove was always impressive, however distant and whatever the phase."Ship ahoy!" our temporary navigator cried. I didn't know whether this was standard space procedure, but it was

Place: CallistoDate: January 2nd, 2615They came resplendent in the military uniform of the Maraud police, delivering the foreclosure on our property. I mentioned the debt and mortgage our father took on to insure an education for his children. He was in arrears on the payments, of course, because all peasants were. That was the way of life on Callisto.My father, Major Hubris, was an intelligent man with minimal formal education. He knew very well that the big landowners were systematically cheating the peasants, but didn't know how to stop it. I had progressed far enough in my education to have a fair notion of the situation, and was confident that by the time I reached maturity I would be able to set about reversing the downward trend for our family. But until that time, the Hubrises were vulnerable—and that vulnerability had abruptly been exploited.Foreclosure—that finished us before we could begin to fight back.W

Belatedly I remembered that capsules were color-coded in an obvious manner, as it could be exceedingly awkward to open them in a vacuum to check their contents. Glaring orange was the code for explosives.Explosives are normally used for excavation work. It is not feasible to light fuses or whatever in a vacuum—oh, yes, they do have a fuse that burns in empty space, with its own oxygen built in—but it takes special equipment to start it going. So most small explosives are contact-detonated.The effect of this one did not seem great, but of course this was a mini-charge, and the debris settled out almost instantly, because there was no air to buoy it. Had that bomb struck our transporter, those of us who were not directly injured would have died from suit destruction. Even a little bomb is devastating when it detonates in your face! My father had caught on and swerved just in time; we had struck no craterlet.The saucer swerved to ge