“What is this?” said the voice, “do you, heron, wish to represent your world?”
“Now hang on a minute,” he interrupted, “you can't possibly think that a heron is up to the task?!”
“The heron of which you speak, has shown itself to be most capable of descent at great speed. You, Mr Martin, have also demonstrated your considerable intellect.”
“Because I threw myself off a car park?!”
“Yes,” replied the voice humourlessly.
“Look,” he began in heartfelt earnest, “I'm not sure what’s exactly going on here, but I am quite certain that somewhere along the lines someone has made the most magnificent blunder, and that in terms of my life, not one second of it was supposed to take place here. So, I propose that you drop me off at the next port of call, where we can then begin to forget this little muddle, say our farewells and proceed on our separate paths. You can then get on with doing whatever it is that disembodied voices do, perhaps pursue a career in film trailers or some form of conscience grooming, whilst I can go in search of a strong cup of tea and an affordable psychiatrist. You know this all makes perfect sense, so come on pal, how about it?”
The room was silent.
“Er, hello,” said Pete.
“Mr Martin, we have decided that your planet is too insignificant to exist, and we therefore intend to vaporise it. However, we offer you one chance at reversing this fate, by convincing us that your planet, and the life that occupies it, really does deserve its place in our universe. This defence can be instrumented by either one of you, the heron, the boulder, or you Mr Martin.”
Pete took a moment to absorb this information.
“So you're going to destroy the earth, unless a heron, a boulder, or myself, can talk you out of it?”
“Yes,” confirmed the voice.
“Even though a boulder can't talk, a heron has a very limited vocabulary indeed, and I'm uncertain as to accept anything as certain ever again?”
“Squawk,” confirmed the heron.
“Right,” he declared, “I better do it then.”
“Fine,” began the voice,” if you would just follow the lights outside, we will shortly begin the trial.”
The voice ended and he was left standing dumbstruck in the room. The heron had calmed down, and was now perched on one of the metal beams that crossed the ceiling, watching him with an expression that could only be pity. He noticed this, and pulling a loose chip from the impassive boulder, then hurled it with all of his might at the heron, in an attempt to knock the bird from its both real and imagined high-ground. The heron however, proved more than a match for the earth's representative, and side-stepping at the last moment, the stone then ricocheted off the metal beam only to adopt a return angle and ultimately impact with Pete’s left knee. Limping, Pete made his way out of the room, to where some lights would show him where to go.
2.
““Hey there space heads, it's your old mate Slip here, broadcasting today from the Milky Way, with hit after hit designed to enlarge the mind. That was Superego with Space may be Big, buy my Head is Bigger, and I just know that all you funk-stars would have dug it, if only there existed a spade big enough! Today folks we're talking about the Co-leen, are they evil, misguided, or just mad, mad, mad?! And if you want to have your say, just give us a shout here at Renegade T.M. and we'll try our very best to pay attention. Okay, lets go to our first opinionator, which is O. Gee from the pleasure planet of Vart. So O. Gee, the Co-leen?”
“Hey Slip, yeah, I think that these Co-leen are all wrong. I mean I had this cousin right, and he got himself all blown up with his planet when these guys came along and said that they were all losers. Well I know Hok, that's my cousin, had his troubles, but he really seemed to be getting himself together, what with getting off the glue and starting a balloon business, and then to have it all blow up like that, well, it ain't right! If those jerks ever tried anything like that with me, I'd tie them all up, remove all of their clothes, and then take great pleasure in leisurely cutting off their...”
“Okay, I think we get the picture, let's go to another caller now, this is Dulph from Nerk.”
“Hello Slip.”
“Hi Dulph.”
“What I want to know is how come, when all we seem to hear about these days is the Co-leen disintegrated this planet, or vaporised that world, why know one's doing anything about it?”
“Good point Dulph, however, there are some people taking up the fight, and if you want to lend a hand yourself, you need to contact Folk Actively Resisting Co-leen Expansion, or F.A.R.C.E., who are based on Krassis, no hang on, Crinkle, my acutely cute right hand woman, has just regrettably informed me that they no longer exist. It seems that when the Co-leen got wind of it, they quite unrelentingly smashed their base on Krassis into submission, and were that not enough, then turned the once proud, high cultured planet, into a giant water slide world, forcing the resistance to stand around all day, shouting at kids to cross their legs. Well, so much for that.”
“Yeah, well I think we really ought to be putting up a bit of fight.”
“And so do a lot of us Dulph, it's only these dudes are packing some serious planet destroying punches, and that previous attempts at reasoning with them, have all ended in the somewhat disheartening disappearance of the reasoner. Anyway, thanks Dulph, you've probably given us a little too much to think about.”
“Cheers Slip.”
“So, yeah the Co-leen are mean, and pretty dangerous too, just let your old mate Slip give you a few words of advice: when the going gets tough, the smart start running, and with this in mind, it’s Runaway by The Cor.””
While Pete followed the lights that the disembodied voice had instructed him to do, it just so happened that but a stones throw away, (albeit one in space), the Renegade T.M. team were doing a show, aboard the spaceship Humdinger. Renegade T.M., (or Renegade Transcranial Modulation), was the most listened to radio station in the universe, and had risen to its dizzying heights of infamy, in the hands of its main disc jockey, one Slip McGroovy, whose say as it is style, combined with an unerring belief in his music-bound destiny, had launched the once small-time, back-galaxy, pirate radio station into the realm of universally accepted stardom. In the past, Slip had toured with the like of Baab, L. Viz, and the Beebles, playing electric-air guitar, but those days had long gone, and he now made it his own personal mission to re-educate the universe in the matter of music that actually mattered. His mission had taken many twists and turns along the way, yet he looked on his current state of affairs as distinctly more twisty than turny, without quite fully understanding what was meant by either.
In Slip's eyes, the Renegade T.M. team was undoubtedly the finest, strangest, and perhaps smallest in the history of space radio, consisting as it did, of only two others. Crinkle, Slip's “acutely cute right hand woman”, was the force of reason for the crew, which without her, would add up to little more than: if x, then y, where x is hungry, and y is eat. What also underlined her indisputable membership of the team, was her quite uncommon beauty. A red headed vixen with piercing green eyes, she had been known to turn the most asexual entity into a puddle of wanton desire. Her figure was full in all the important ways, although her height bordered somewhat disagreeably around the four foot mark. This was because her home planet had a rather plumped-up opinion of itself and because of this, a quite unreasonable gravitational force. Her height then, (which although perfectly average for her species), did mean that she occupied a universe full of precarious chairs and over-abundant doorways, and this bothered her a great deal. Crinkle was always asking Slip whether “my legs look short in this skirt”, or “does this dress make my arms look stumpy”, and he would then be forced to reply, with an ever-dissipating interest and emotional gravity, that “no, you look great, really you do,” before adding with fading hope, “can we go now?” However, Crinkle's distracting diminutiveness was probably all for the best, for it was likely that if she ever became as happy
with her appearance as the male populace of the universe was, then she would most certainly become a sort of demiurge, and more powerful than either you, or I, could possibly imagine.
The third and final member of the Renegade team was the quick-thinking, pale-looking, impulse-acting alien, Fendel. The technical mind behind Renegade T.M., he descended from a species that found stuff a little too interesting, and for this trait, had teamed up with the verging on the dangerously too interesting Slip and Crinkle. It was in fact his innovation that had resulted in Transcranial Modulation (as in Renegade T.M.), which meant the ability to broadcast radio waves to everyone everywhere. Fendel had reasoned that if he discovered the wave frequency of thought itself, he would then be able to use this frequency in order to broadcast directly into people's minds. The trouble was that thought did not exist in any traditional way, where an atomic structure could be measured to ascertain such a wave frequency. However, he figured that to determine the atomic structure of thought itself, it followed, that one would simply have to think it up. He then went on to measure the wave frequency of (what he imagined to be) the atomic structure of thought, and found that, to the distress of conventional science, the whole process had actually worked. As a result of this, it was possible to listen to Renegade T.M. by simply thinking about it, and for this one, entirely monopolising fact, it was the most listened to radio station in the universe. The Renegade team were fast becoming the most famous voices of all time, they were however, currently one short. Fendel had become a little too interested in the topic of the Co-leen superiority complex, and having taken one of the Hundinger's scout ships, then set off towards the nearest Co-leen vessel, in the hope of having a little chat with them about it. As a result, he was presently sitting in a holding cell, aboard the same Co-leen space ship that Pete found himself wandering around, facing the charge of being grossly inferior.
“Slip,” began Crinkle, “I’ve found him.”
“Wah, who said that?!” started Slip.
“It's me you great lummox, I'm down here.”
It should probably be made clear at this juncture, that Crinkle's description of Slip as that of being a great lummox is an entirely accurate one. Though he may not have been the tallest of chaps, whatever he lacked in length, he certainly made up for in girth, and where his diminutive companion feared the enormity of doorways and colossal nature of chairs, Slip, on the other hand, viewed them as a rhino might view a kitten in a sumo contest. He was always breaking things, and it really came as quite a surprise to the other members of the team, that they had survived aboard a spaceship for as long as they had, when considering the large number of crucial systems about, made from the most delicate little wires and all held together by only the flimsiest of plastics. Of course, Slip had broken a few things, and the crew now found themselves without an onboard murder matrix, a working plasma toothbrush, and the top hat was missing from the game Monotony, though they had somehow learnt to get by without these basic necessities, (I dread to think). Slip's sheer scale was then further offset by his mass of red curly hair, and unruly, beaded beard, which bounced about him with a quite haphazard abandonment whenever he so much as sniffled. When seen altogether, he was a terrifying sight that gave onlookers an immediate urge to be somewhere else, however, behind the girth and all the hair, beat a heart of gold and a most worthy leader of the Renegade gang.
“Down here, you donkey!” repeated Crinkle.
Slip peered over his mixing equipment and found Crinkle.
“Oh yeah, hey babe!”
“I've found him, I've found Fendel!”
“Right, sure thing,” he readily agreed, not really listening.
Slip was letting his eyes feast on the delicacy that was Crinkle. She had spiked her short red hair, and her fierce green eyes seemed even fiercer for the contrast. She was wearing a tight black top and a short red skirt, knee-length black boots went on to complete the look, one that Slip imagined would be hard to top, even by the fashion planets of Berutha 7. He felt himself slipping into that state of mental detachment not uncommon in her presence, so pulling himself together, began rummaging through a stack of old Massive Retreat records.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Sure babe, Fendel right, where is that crazy dude?”
“He's on board a Co-leen ship nearby.”
“Co-leen?!”
This came as somewhat of a shock to Slip, he then remembered that this kind of absurd and dangerous thing was always happening to him and his crew. Just the other day he had done a radio piece on whether hurt and pain were good for a musicians soul, which had resulted in the suicide of a few minor resurrectionalist bands who were having difficulties making it big. He was up on charges of seventh degree murder, and forced to pay damages of 400 Jollies, (about enough to buy a couple of records, or a temporal banana), and to apologise to all aspiring musicians out there. He had paid the fine, but then followed the piece up with a debate between himself and Crinkle, as to whether music and death were inexorably linked. The debate went along the lines that musicians who could not break into the big time, were probably just not very good, so they might as well be dead. Following on from this rather un-socratic conclusion, he had discovered a rather irrepressible desire to explore under-charted space, and as result, the Humdinger had set off at full speed for a galaxy somewhat misleadingly named, the Milky Way.
“Slip!”
“Yeah, so the Co-leen huh,” he said, apparently experiencing the sensation of thought, “well we'll bust him out!” he finished fervently, punching the air with an extended finger.
“Sure thing Slip, we'll just whack the Humdinger into battle mode, then attack the Co-leen at mach point silly speed, with laser canons and whole host of quite incredibly destructive missiles, and then tell them to hand over Fendel, or else we'll disintegrate their entire species' history, using our time erasing ray gun?!”
“Yeah, right on Crinks, that's what we'll do. Battle stations everyone, we're going to war!”
“Slip,” she sighed.
“Yeah?,” he said, frantically throwing records around, looking for the button marked “battle mode”.
“We don't have any of those things.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” realised Slip.
“So what about Fendel?” she asked, beginning to get desperate.
“Look,” he began, imagining himself to be addressing a large host of adoring fans, with a huge Slip McGroovy flag waving gently behind him, “Fendel's a member of the Renegade team right, and in my books, that make him a pretty damn important person. I know that if the situation was reversed, if I was ever in a stitch, he would risk everything to rescue me, he'd move planets if he thought it would help, and it's my duty, no, my honour, to do the same for him. Today, he may be a prisoner on a Co-leen ship, but let me assure that, tomorrow, Fendel will be back where he belongs, with the Renegade team!”
“So you've got a plan?” she asked excitedly, falling for his hyperbole.
“Of course, set course for the Co-leen vessel,” he ordered confidently.
“And then?”.
“And then,” he replied less confidently, pausing to consider his next response, “then we'll work it out when we get there.”
3.
Fendel stood in the Co-leen prison cell kicking his heels. He had been in the cell for over an hour now, and was beginning to feel a sensation that he would usually go out of his way to avoid, boredom. He stared at the Co-leen guard who was on duty, and decided that he must be a more than typically stupid Co-leen guard. Half a cycle ago when he had flippantly ordered the guard to release him, the guard had saluted him before crying out “an alien trick, I won't be fooled so easily!” It was then he had realised that outwitting this guard would be like outwitting a dyslexic tanning shop assistant in a spelling competition, and he now felt quite certain that he would be on his merry way in the next five clicks or so.
“Er, excuse me,” began Fendel.
“What is it worm
?” replied the Co-leen guard.
“Oh it's nothing really, don't worry about it.”
“What?” said the guard, somewhat unsubtly checking his zip fly, “tell me, what is it?”
“No, no, it doesn't matter, honestly.”
“Come on, tell me,” urged the guard, indecorously sniffing his armpit.
“No seriously, it's nothing.”
The guard looked forlornly at Fendel, but then clocking onto his obviously outward obstinacy, instead then started to get angry.
“I demand you tell me what it is!” shouted the guard, on the verge of a temper tantrum.
“It's nothing really,” he responded unfazed.
“TELL ME!!!” yelled the guard, pointing his laser rifle directly at him.
“Okay, okay, fine,” he acquiesced, “all it was, was that I was just wondering how it felt to be trapped out there like that, that's all.”
“What?!” asked the guard, with a look of confusion.
“Well,” he repeated, “I was just standing here in my cosy little prison cell, wondering how you must feel being trapped there outside like that.”
“What do you mean trapped, I can leave any time I want to.”
“Oh yeah?” he said unconvinced.
“Yeah,” replied the guard, “watch!”
And that said, the guard promptly left the prison block, and returned a few minutes later with a coffee.
“See, trapped you say, ha!”
“Is that fresh coffee?” asked Fendel.
“No, instant.”
“Humph,” he snorted derisively.
The guard looked a little hurt by this, and left his mug of coffee to one side.
Renegade T.M. Page 3