Interstellar Caveman

by Karl Beecher

  He stared Spudge straight in the eye. A bluff, of course. As ever, the trick was hiding it. Tiffin didn’t flinch, didn’t blink. After years of training officer cadets, he’d become good at cold, ruthless stares.

  It looked like Spudge was folding like a raw recruit.

  “Wait!” he cried. “No, don’t kill him. I… I think there might be a way to fix the engine.”

  But Tiffin had to be sure. “Oh, you’re just saying that. Like you said, you left the key piece back on Procya.” He charged up the pistol.

  “No, wait,” urged Spudge. “I could rig it. I could take a plasma containment regulator and repurpose it. Use a scroob array to replace the warp inducer and turn down the input frequency—”

  Tiffin held up a hand to silence him. “All very interesting. Will it work?”

  “It won’t be full speed, but it’ll be warp speed nevertheless.”

  Tiffin let his arm drop and smiled. Spudge may have some nobility, but that wouldn’t get him far in the great poker game of life.

  “Very well. Hop to it.” He gestured at the ladder that led down onto the engineering deck. “After you. And no tricks.”

  Spudge led the way down the ladder into the bowels of the ship, a dingy space lit only by arrays of illuminated buttons, tiny screens, and dim blue running lights. A long passageway cut through a cramped cluster of machinery of all shapes and sizes.

  At the bottom of the ladder, Tiffin jabbed the lad with his pistol and gestured towards the far end. They walked past banks of control panels, past stacks of pipes that ran the length of the place, past giant cylindrical power generators that murmured like a thousand cats purring in unison.

  Finally, they arrived at the engine’s central core, a long, solid-looking metallic construction three metres tall and shaped like a squashed hexagon. Power conduits sprouted out of its sides and disappeared into the bulkhead.

  Tiffin stopped Spudge by the engine. “Okay,” he said. “What do you need to do?”

  Spudge pointed to an open panel at the base. “The regulator rod was in there. I can shut off one of the generators and take a containment regulator…” He pointed up at a square-shaped housing where a conduit entered the top of the warp engine. “… from there. You see it?”

  Tiffin strained onto his tiptoes. “Do you mean th—uugggh!”

  Suddenly, he was tumbling to one side. Everything was momentarily surreal. He was shocked to catch sight of his own feet flying through the air and the pistol spinning from his grasp. He came crashing to the ground, his cheek smacking into the floor with a fleshy thud.

  The wind was knocked out of him. He felt dazed. For a brief moment, he thought a meteor had hit the ship. After a few seconds, he got his breath back, and his mind cleared. That couldn’t have been something hitting the ship. There was no crash, no shudder.

  Then he noticed his feet had come to rest atop a small conduit that ran along the floor. He’d tripped over it. Wait a second…

  He hadn’t tripped. He’d been pushed over it.

  Where was the kid?

  From behind him, Tiffin heard scrambling footsteps. He sat up, but Spudge was nowhere to be seen. He picked himself up off the floor and looked around desperately. Then he saw it: a hole in the wall opposite, just barely large enough to fit a person. It was an entry point to the service tunnels that ran the length and breadth of the ship.

  Tiffin heard the sounds of clambering coming from within.

  “Hey!” he yelled.

  He grabbed his gun from the floor, then ran over to the wall and peered into the hole. Too late. He’d arrived just in time to see a foot disappearing upwards into one of the many tunnels that branched off this one.

  “Come back here!” Tiffin’s voice rattled and echoed along the tunnels. He listened as the sounds of Spudge’s crawling grew fainter.

  That slippery little bastard!

  Tiffin considered giving chase—or, more accurately, giving crawl—but then thought better of it. The constricted space would make it impossible to use his gun properly. Plus, Tiffin rarely ventured into the service tunnels. A grease monkey like Spudge, on the other hand, doubtless knew them well; ideal if he fancied laying a trap for a pursuer.

  Before Tiffin could assess the situation further, he heard something very unexpected and very unwelcome coming from the deck above: the voice of Tyresa Jak.

  “Tiffin? Are you there?”

  He froze. It couldn’t be. Had she boarded?

  Tiffin scrambled back to the ladder and then crept back up it as quietly as he could. Slowly, he glimpsed over the top of the shaft and scanned the passageway fore and aft. Nobody there, except for the unconscious Colin.

  “Inspector J. J. Tiffin!” came Tyresa’s voice once more. “Come in Tiffin.”

  Then he realised it. The voice was coming via the comm speaker. She was trying to contact him.

  He clambered up and dashed to his makeshift control panel on the wall. Via a small tactical display, he saw a ship identifying as the SS Turtle, in pursuit and closing fast.

  When he opened the channel, the image of Tyresa Jak, sitting at the helm of her ship, appeared onscreen.

  “Jak?” snapped Tiffin. “What do you want?”

  She glared back. “Isn’t it obvious? I want the people you’ve kidnapped. Power down your vessel and surrender, right now.”

  “Ha! Fat chance. In a minute, you’ll be eating my space dust, so give it up.”

  “We know your warp engines have been disabled, Tiffin. You have no chance of escape.”

  Damn. “I’ll have them up and running any minute now. The boy’s down in the engine room, fixing them as we speak.”

  “Bullshit,” said Tyresa. “I don’t believe you. We’re closing in with our tractor beam now.”

  “Come any closer, and I start firing!”

  She shrugged. “I’ll have to chance it.”

  Fine. A shoot-out it was then. He had to get to weapons control on the bridge.

  Tiffin jogged down the passageway to the elevator and jabbed the call button. Nothing happened. He pushed it again. Nothing. The panel was dead. That made no sense. This was the finest Erd technology, the elevator never just gave out.

  Never mind, he thought, giving the doors a kick. There were other ways to do it.

  He ran back to the wall panel and ordered the computer to re-route weapons control to an adjacent panel. The controls promptly appeared. Operating everything would be very cumbersome, but he had no other choice.

  He punched the weapons activation button, but a red-lettered message appeared on the panel. It read, “WEAPONS OFFLINE.” He hit it again. Nothing happened. With another jab, a second message popped up:

  “THE PROGRAM ‘WEAPON_SYSTEM’ HAS STOPPED RESPONDING. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR — WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.”

  What the…? Tiffin’s felt his eye begin to twitch. That couldn’t be an accident. She must have been sabotaging his system somehow.

  “Jak!” he yelled. “What are you doing to my ship?”

  “Stop stalling,” she replied. “It’s time to give up, Tiffin, there’s no escape. We’re almost within tractor range.”

  Sweat trickled down Tiffin’s brow. Desperation grew in the pit of his stomach. He needed to swat this fly and turn his attention back to Spudge. He looked around frantically for an idea. There must have been something he could do.

  His eyes fell on Colin, still slumped over in the wheelchair, but now beginning to stir. An idea formed in his mind.

  Fine, thought Tiffin, thinks she’s got a poker face, eh? Let’s see how good at bluffing she really is.

  He turned back to the panel.

  “Look here, Jak, I want to show you something.” He patched the visual feed into his ship’s security cameras. “What do you see?”

  “Stop playing games, Tiffin—”

  “What do you see?”

  Tyresa sighed and looked at her screen. “A room. No… an airlock chamber.”

 
; “Very good.”

  “Tiffin these games won’t work. Tiffin?”

  He marched over to the wheelchair, grabbed its handles, and turned it around.

  The semi-comatose Colin, eyes still closed, began to slur. “No Mildred, I told you, I don’t want to go to your party.”

  Tiffin, ignoring the ramblings, pushed him along the passageway.

  “Oh, all right, Mildred,” sighed Colin. “But please be gentle with me.”

  The Inspector reached the airlock door. Tyresa should have been able to see them now.

  “Tiffin!” came her voice, right on cue. “Tiffin, what are you doing?”

  He elbowed the door release button. The heavy, airtight door slid aside, revealing a dark chamber the size of a service elevator. He pulled the wheelchair inside, then retreated back through the doorway, leaving Colin inside rambling incoherently about “who should be the one to tell Keith.”

  Once back outside, Tiffin closed the airlock door, then turned and looked at the security camera. “You hear me, Jak?”

  “Yes,” came her voice.

  “Your friend is in the airlock. If you continue pursuing me, I’ll open it and flush him out into space.”

  “Tiffin, no! That’s insane. I can’t believe you’d do that.”

  “If you want him so badly, then you can have him…”

  “Let’s talk about this—”

  “… but you’ll have to scoop him from outer space first. In the unlikely event you collect him quick enough that he doesn’t suffocate, he’ll need urgent medical attention. I hear there’s a very fine hospital on Procya called Saint Barflet’s actually.”

  “Tiffin, please, this is not—”

  He ignored her pleas. “Time to decide, Jak. You want to fold? Or shall we put our cards on the table?” He placed his hand on the airlock controls. “I’m more than willing to show my hand.”

  “Listen to me, there must be so—”

  Her voice ended abruptly with a brief scratching noise. Then, Tiffin could hear nothing but static.

  “Jak?” he called out. “Jak, are you still there?”

  No reply.

  What was going on? Had something happened to her? Had communications been cut off? Or maybe she’d cut them off herself? Futile, if so. If she thought she could play mind games with Tiffin and win, she had another thing…

  WHOMP!

  He nearly jumped out of his skin. Behind him, one of the airtight doors—which normally descended in emergencies when there was air pressure loss—had come hurtling down and closed off the rest of the passageway.

  Tiffin stared nervously at the formidable sheet of metal. What the hell was…

  WHOMP!

  Another door came down on the other side of Tiffin. He was now enclosed in one section of the passageway, effectively trapped in an airtight box measuring just a few square metres. He jabbed at the door controls, but they stubbornly refused to do anything.

  Tiffin fought against rising panic. How the hell was he going to get out of there? The only thing working was the airlock door, and that could hardly be considered a legitimate exit.

  Just as that thought went through his mind, the lights on the airlock control panel blinked off. He tapped it. Dead.

  Something was going very wrong with the ship’s systems. But how?

  Tiffin heard a knocking above him. A shuffling sound that sounded like… well, like someone crawling. He looked up and saw it.

  A service tunnel in the ceiling.

  It finally dawned on him. There was no problem with the ship. It was Spudge. He was already in the service tunnels, designed to give engineers access to all the ship’s systems. It didn’t take a huge leap to imagine the little shit worming his way around and hacking into everything.

  “Spudge!” screamed Tiffin. His voice rattled around the confines of his little compartment. “Are you there? Spudge, if you can hear me, I’m not angry anymore. If you come out again, we can settle this sensibly. I promise, I won’t hurt you.”

  He heard another rattle above, immediately whipping up his gun-toting hand and firing a shot into the ceiling. The sound of the burst echoed around the walls, almost deafening him. A shower of sparks and white-hot fragments rained down, forcing him to shelter his head in his arms. When he looked up again, he saw he’d left a charred, fist-sized indentation in the metal.

  “Sorry about that,” he croaked. “Just a reaction. I promise I won’t hurt you, starting from now.”

  The crawling sound continued. Tiffin could tell it was passing over his head. What was the lad up to? What could he access in this section?

  Tiffin got his answer a moment later when he heard a hissing sound, like compressed gas rushing through a value. It was a sound feared by every spacefarer, especially one trapped in a tiny airtight space. Gas was rapidly on the move, but what type of gas and in which direction?

  He turned to the controls on the wall panel and called up an atmospheric analysis. Various figures popped up. For a moment, everything looked nominal, but then he noticed the measured oxygen level change. It dropped from twenty percent to nineteen. Then it continued dropping: eighteen… seventeen. The oxygen content in the air was reducing moment by moment.

  It wasn’t long before Tiffin began to feel light-headed.

  “Oh, I see,” Tiffin called out at the ceiling. “Going to suffocate me, eh, Spudge? Spudge!”

  No response.

  Tiffin’s body began to react to the reduced oxygen. His heart began to pound. His breathing grew laboured. The wall panel revealed oxygen at fourteen percent.

  “Come off it, Spudge,” he slurred. “You’ve made your point. I don’t know you well, but I know a killer when I see one, and you’re no killer.”

  Thirteen percent.

  Twelve percent.

  The sweat poured from Tiffin. The walls around him became blurred. He began to feel weak. Then he heard a clattering beside him as his pistol slipped from his grasp and fell to the floor.

  He leaned against the wall, hands on his knees, gulping at the air. “Spudge, my lad,” he called out, sliding to the ground. “You may think this is the right thing to do, but listen to me. You’re just playing with valves up there, but my life is in your hands. You don’t know what it’s like to kill someone. Believe me, son, you don’t want to know. It takes a strong will to live with the guilt.”

  Oxygen was at eleven percent now. Once it went below ten, he was a dead man.

  “You think you could live with it? I think not… I think… not…”

  He felt faint. He felt sick. He could barely keep his eyes open now.

  Well, he thought as his vision faded, it was a painless way to go at least.

  CLUNK!

  The hissing stopped. Tiffin no longer heard anything, save for the ambient hum of the ship. With his remaining speck of strength, he squinted at the wall panel. He could just about read the fuzzy number: ten. The oxygen content had levelled out at ten percent. It wasn’t low enough to kill him, but it was enough to render him unconscious.

  “Oh,” he moaned. “You clever little shit.”

  Finally, his vision turned completely black and sound melted away. He slid sideways, and his head thudded to the floor.

  And then, the red alert siren blared out. A computer voice announced, “Warning! Collision course detected. Warning! Collision course detected.”

  “Oh,” moaned Tiffin, as consciousness finally abandoned him. “You stupid little shit.”

  42

  “Tiffin?” bellowed Tyresa. “Come in, Tiffin. Are you there?”

  A blank screen stared back at her.

  She tried desperately to re-establish contact with the Mosquito—different frequencies, various call-signs, even basic radio contact—but no response came.

  Ade, sitting at an adjacent console, interrupted. “Ma’am, it is worth noting that communications did not end normally. The link was not closed, it was broken.”

  “Broken, how?” asked Tyresa.

&nbs
p; “Best guess: some sort of power loss.” As Ade spoke, an alert sounded on his console. “Ma’am, the Mosquito is entering the gravity well of Procya’s moon. It appears to be on a collision course.”

  “Shoot ’n shit!” she cried, bringing up the tactical display on her own console.

  It was true. Tiffin’s vessel was being pulled towards Mera, Procya’s only natural satellite, hurtling at full cruising speed on a course that would bring it crashing into Mera’s northern hemisphere.

  “Time to impact?”

  “Five minutes, forty seconds.”

  She tried once more to contact Tiffin. Again, no response. If threatening to crash into a moon was another of his mind games, she had no idea what he was trying to achieve with this one.

  She slumped back in her chair and struggled to think, her head swam with questions. The only hope of rescuing Colin was to stop Tiffin’s ship before he could achieve warp speed, but she remembered the Erd man’s promise to flush Colin into space if the Turtle continued the chase. Would he really do it? She couldn’t be sure. But what about that power loss? The ship might genuinely be in trouble.

  “In tractor beam range yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” replied Ade.

  Even if they did get into tractor beam range, Tiffin still had his shields up. The tractor beam couldn’t work until they were down.

  “Unidentified vessel!” came a man’s voice, loud and authoritative. “This is Mera Defence Station. You are on a collision course with Mera, respond immediately.”

  Tyresa answered the call. “Mera Defence? This is Tyresa Jak on the SS Turtle.”

  “Adjust course,” replied the voice. “You’re on a collision course.”

  “I’m not the colliding vessel,” explained Tyresa. “I’m pursuing the colliding vessel. I have reason to believe that ship has lost power and is unable to manoeuvre.”

  Mera Defence paused then spoke again.

  “Understood, Turtle. Then I suggest you break off pursuit and fly clear of the offending vessel.”

  “Huh? What are your intentions?”

  “To destroy the vessel before it reaches us.”