by Toby Frost
‘Well then.’ Smith turned to Rhianna. ‘I suppose this is it.’
‘Until we meet again,’ she said. ‘Isambard, take care. And try not to do anything too heroic. Or stupid.’
‘You take care too. Especially with the washing.’
She came close, and he could smell patchouli oil. ‘Remember, Isambard… this is au revoir, not goodbye.’
‘Can we settle for “Bye for now”? It’s neither permanent nor French.’
‘Done.’ She kissed him. ‘You’ll be in my dreams.’
‘Mine too. Can you wear the dress that’s sort of see-through?’
‘I’ll do what I can. Good bye.’
‘See you soon!’
They kissed again, and Rhianna stepped away to join Ingrid and Raumskapitan Schmidt. Smith smiled at the Raumskapitan, knowing that he would look after most of Rhianna’s needs – except that one.
Looking round, he saw Carveth and Petra swapping bottles.
Schmidt said, ‘The nearest Edenite port capable of maintaining such a vessel is called Deliverance. It’s three days’ travel from here – two with an engine like yours, provided you go in a straight line. From what I have heard, you can expect a warm reception. They’ll try to burn you at the stake.’
‘That sounds likely. Well, thanks for your help.’
‘My pleasure. But the only people getting in and out of Deliverance are Crusadists and mercenaries. As soon as they see you they’ll start firing.’
‘We’ll take our chances.’
They shook hands. Schmidt took three steps and turned. ‘Oh, Captain Smith? One more thing.
Viel Gluck.’
Smith turned at the door of the John Pym. ‘ Danke! ’ he replied. ‘I mean, thanks.’
Beast of Eden
‘So,’ said Carveth, slowly lowering her biscuit into her tea, ‘we’re going to fly into the Republic of Eden, find the ship that blew up our convoy and – assuming we’re not very dead by then – well… then what?’
‘Put it out of action,’ Smith replied. ‘Locate the enemy vessel and either destroy it completely or mark it in some way so that our own fleet can find it and finish it off.’
‘And then back home for curry and beer?’
‘That’s about right,’ Smith replied. ‘Of course, we’ll have to finesse some of the fine points, but you’ve got the basic idea.’
Carveth took her biscuit out the tea and bit off the soggy bit. ‘But we’ve just escaped from the space-Bastille, and now we’re going into a police state. Can’t we just cut our losses and bugger off home?
It sounds to me like a case of “Out of the frying pan and into the Scottish gourmet”.’
‘Don’t worry. Suruk and I have come up with a plan.’ Smith got up and, still carrying his mug, walked to the door that led into the hold. ‘Suruk? Are you in there?’
‘I am just coming,’ the alien replied.
Suruk struggled through the doorway, carrying the ship’s tactical display unit and a piece of chalk to draw on it. He stood the board at the end of the table.
‘Behold!’ Suruk said. ‘I have applied my full skill as a hunter to this conundrum. Stealth is of the essence here. We must approach the enemy unseen if we are to avenge the vessels it has destroyed. It is for that reason that we will be painting our spacecraft red.’
Carveth stared across the table.
‘Schmidt told us that the Edenites will attack anything not on their side,’ Suruk explained. ‘It is well known that the Edenites hire many mercenaries and errant warriors. By decorating our craft, we will fool the enemy into thinking that is us.’
‘A disguise,’ Smith said.
‘Indeed.’
Carveth nodded. ‘Perhaps this isn’t as crazy as I thought. Although we will still be going near the Edenites, so some level of crazy is still there. We’ll hardly be invisible, though.’
‘Invisibility is relative,’ Suruk explained. ‘If you wished to go unseen among a crowd in one of the cities of Earth, would you paint yourself in stripes, and run nude on all fours? Of course not. But if you wanted to hunt zebra, that is another thing. . you see?”
‘So if you were to hunt zebra, you’d paint yourself stripey and run round naked?’
‘It was just an example. But resembling dangerous pirates, we will be able to enter their citadel by stealth.’
‘Along with the thousands of other dangerous pirates,” Carveth said. “Alright then… what do space pirates look like?’
The alien flexed his mandibles thoughtfully. ‘Truly, it varies,’ he declared. ‘But this season’s colour is a deep, blood red. Chains and spikes are popular accessories, along with battering rams and
boarding gear. It is a bold, dynamic look, based around a few key pieces.’
‘Pieces of eight?’ Smith put in.
‘No, pieces of other people.’ Suruk took a biscuit from the table. ‘As for the individual space pirate, hair is lank this season and patches are in. There are a few major brands to look out for, as well as major scars and tattoos.’
‘What the heck.’ To Smith’s surprise, Carveth seemed willing to assist. ‘We can make our own outfits. Rhianna’s got some big white shirts – we can take it from there.’
Smith sipped his tea. ‘Good work, Suruk. It’s a splendid plan. We’ll sail in under false colours.
And there’s that flag on the trophy rack we took off the Deathstorm Legion. That’s got a skull on it, even if it does have antennae. Although flying under a Gertie flag might damage our moral fibre.’
‘Then we are agreed.’ Suruk stepped back and gestured towards the blackboard. ‘These are some modifications we could carry out.’ He had sketched a picture of the John Pym, together with a chalk drawing of himself, swinging what looked like someone’s leg. A selection of useful notes adorned the diagram: ‘the ansestors’, ‘Blud!!’, ‘Fols beerd’, ‘pile of heads’ and, predictably, ‘chanesor’.
‘As you can see, we will need to paint the outside of the ship. All we need now is blood,’ Suruk said. ‘Lots of blood. Failing that, red paint.’
‘Okay,’ Carveth said. ‘It’s a good plan. I’ll give you a hand.’
‘Most kind,’ Suruk replied, reaching to the machete on his belt. ‘Right or left?’
*
‘All clear!’ Carveth shouted, slamming the door behind her. Smith stood in the side airlock, squashed between the two doors. The little counter spun in its brass dial until Sealed appeared. He turned round and opened the door. Space, as usual, was big and dark. Stars flicked by, quick as fireflies. Strange, he thought, how in ages past men had been so fascinated by such a lot of old nothing. It looked much better in the mapbooks, where most of it was Imperial pink.
He checked the magnetic strips on his boots, then stepped out into the void. He found himself standing at right angles to the John Pym, sticking out as though the ship had sprouted him as a new, misshapen wing. He climbed towards the upper hull, shaking his head at the larger patches of rust. Those, although regrettable, weren’t surprising. Nor were the patches of frozen avian-droppings or the dents, as if from gunfire, where something larger than a bird had done its business when they had landed on Urn.
He would not have been greatly surprised to find a washing line wrapped around the dorsal fin, trailing pairs of smalls frozen by the deathly grip of space.
Suruk was already on top of the ship. He wore a modified spacesuit, doctored to accommodate his head and some of his smaller trophies. As Smith watched, the alien bounced down the hull with a power-screwdriver in one hand and a bag of skulls in the other, pausing on each bounce to attach a skull to the John Pym before bounding away like a fiendish version of the Easter Bunny.
The M’Lak leaped up and landed elegantly beside Smith. Suruk raised a gloved hand and waved.
Smith leaned in to talk – the radio links were somewhat crackly, and shouting helped – but forgot that they were wearing space helmets. Suruk staggered back from the force of his headbutt and Smith g
rabbed him quickly before he could float away. In their suits, behind limb pads and brass helmets, they looked like a pair of deep-sea divers geared up for a game of cricket.
‘Gosh,’ Smith said. ‘It looks pretty good – convincing, I mean.’
‘Thank you, Mazuran. I do have some experience of the art of decor. Back home I used to decorate the family home with my ancestors. Only the ones I disliked, of course.’
‘Good work, old chap.’
‘A pleasure.’ Suruk laughed over the intercom. ‘A plethora of skulls for the vessel of doom!
Regrettable that the seer is not with us. She would appreciate my efforts, I feel.’
‘I think she’d want something a bit more – what’s the word… chilled.’
‘I am chilling.’
‘Not in the same way.’
Suruk took a bounding step towards the airlock. He landed elegantly and spun to face Smith, reminding Smith of being taken to see Beatrix Potter On Ice as a child. ‘The job is a good one,’ the M’Lak declared. ‘All ship-shape and fashioned like Bristols – assuming that the ship in question is shaped like a hawk of bloody death and Bristol has taken up skull-collecting. Come to think of it, I do not know why you did not have it done years ago.’
*
Smith was last in. Suruk helped him remove his space helmet, not quite twisting his head off in the process. The alien looked different, Smith thought. In order to give the impression of being a deadly, murderous space pirate, Suruk had combed his hair and was smiling slightly more than usual.
‘Listen,’ Smith said, ‘I’ll lend you my space fleet jacket. You can say you took it as a trophy.’
‘A wily plan, Mazuran. In return, I will lend you my favourite t-shirt. It says Slayer.’
‘I’ll be alright. I’ve got an old tweed jacket that’ll do the job.’
‘Tweed?’ Suruk rubbed his mandibles together thoughtfully. ‘For a pirate?’
‘I bought it in Penzance.’
‘Excellent.’
As they entered the cockpit, the radio emitted a hideous roar. Carveth leaped up in the pilot’s seat. Gerald, the hamster, dove into his sawdust. A spider dropped dead out of its web. Cackling laughter and guttural snarls filled the room.
They stood silently as the radio screeched around them.
‘Suruk,’ said Smith, ‘turn that off!’
Suruk leaned across and flicked the off switch.
‘Apologies, friends. I took the liberty of tuning the radio to my homeworld. That was Thought For The Day. Today’s thought, it seems, is Attack! ’
A ball of fire throbbed in the centre of the windscreen. Perhaps aptly, the Edenites had built their base on a volcanic planetoid.
Smith pressed a button on the front of the radio, and it dispensed a copy of the Ethervisual Times.
He crouched down and worked the dials. The little needle moved from Sane and Decent into the red area reserved for aliens, dictators and car review presenters.
‘ Do you want answers to life’s big questions? ’ the radio suddenly inquired. The voice strained to be chummy. ‘Do you yearn for peace on earth, goodwill to al men and riches beyond mere wealth? Do you believe that the meek will inherit the earth? Then get out of my face, you pansy communist, or I’l shoot you and set you on fire! If you want to save your soul, you freak, and maybe have some chance of not being incinerated for witchcraft right damned now, surrender al your worldly possessions to us. In return, you will receive a machine gun and a special hat –’
Smith flicked off the power switch. ‘Welcome to Eden,’ he said.
The Edenite fortress-port grew in the windscreen. It looked like a single bloodshot eye, a burning ball of liquid fire. The Edenites had sunk huge pylons into the lava, deep into the core of the world, and had built a city above the flames. They called it Deliverance.
*
Major Wainscott awoke to find a woman in a conical hat standing over him. ‘Arise, oh Arthur,” she cried, ‘for you are the true-born king of all Britain!’
‘I knew it!’ Wainscott sat up rapidly. ‘I always knew it was – oh, it’s you…’ He looked around the bay, with its rows of hypersleep chambers stretching out like cigarettes in a case. ‘Very funny, Susan. Take that stupid newspaper off your head before I remove it.’ Clad only in his underpants, he watched the rest of the Deepspace Operations Group getting up.
Wainscott climbed down from his slab and glared down the length of the room. ‘Bloody hell, woman, this floor is freezing.’
‘Huh. What do you want me to do, Boss, fetch your slippers?’
‘Of course not. That’s the robot’s job. Wallahbot!’
A wallahbot rolled slowly down the length of the room, its spindly arms dispensing dressing gowns and tea. ‘That’s better,’ Wainscott said, snatching a mug from the tray. ‘Now then, what are we doing here?’
‘Guard duty for the conference.’
‘Ah yes. Right, let’s have some breakfast, eh?’
Not bothering to close his dressing gown, he strode into the ship’s messroom, sipping his tea as he walked. Susan, neat in her own dressing gown and slippers, followed him like a worried mother supervising a small child.
‘Ten o’clock GMT, by God,’ Wainscott said, checking the clock. ‘Know what time that is, Susan?
Sausage time!’ He advanced to a dispenser set against the wall and began twiddling a pair of knobs, as if cracking a time-locked safe. The machine responded by ejecting a synthetic sausage, spear-like, into his face.
Susan brought Wainscott a paper plate and, after he had dusted the sausage off and added some scrambled powdered egg, they sat down to breakfast with the rest of the Deepspace Operations Group.
‘I suppose we’re near the target,’ Wainscott opined, jabbing at the sausage with a plastic fork. ‘It’ll be interesting getting to work on a space station – I mean, looking after one instead of destroying it.
Hullo, Nelson. Is that bacon you’ve got there?’
‘Allegedly,’ Nelson replied, holding up a droopy item. ‘Looks like the tongue of my boot.’
Susan fished a piece of paper out of her dressing gown pocket and spread it on the table. ‘Let’s see. Given that we’re awake, the journey must be over. So, first up, we’ll dock and unload the gear in the hold. Then I suppose we can start getting security set up for this conference.’
‘Party hats and such.’
‘Metaphorically speaking, yes. Of course, most aliens can’t wear hats.’
‘Quite,’ Wainscott replied. ‘Funny shaped heads.’ He scooped up a forkful of runny egg and tasted it warily. ‘This isn’t egg, it’s baby sick. And why aren’t there any biscuits here?’
‘Hey!’ Craig called down the table. Seeing that there were only five people in the Deepspace Operations Group, he didn’t have to call far. “Remember those digestives we got on Sirius Four?”
Nelson laughed. ‘Yes, and the one you had was soggy.’
‘It doesn’t matter if it’s a digestive!’
A sudden clang shook the room. Wainscott was up on his feet in a second, fists clenched and raised, dressing gown flapping. ‘Alien attack!’ he cried. ‘To arms, troops!’
Susan sipped her tea. ‘We’ve just docked,’ she replied.
‘False alarm, everyone!’ Wainscott announced. He was impressed by how quickly his men had got back to eating their breakfast. It was almost as if they had not moved at all. Very wily. ‘You not eating, Susan?’
‘I’ll give it thought once you’ve closed your dressing gown.’
Wainscott dressed whilst listening to the Galactic Service on the wireless. In the galactic West, the Senarian Lancers had stormed Aggrio XII, and together with the King’s Own Moonlanders had crushed Praetorian Armoured Legion ‘Grinding Death’. Scummy alien prisoners were being shipped into penal servitude by the thousand. Meanwhile, the prize bull had run off into Top Field, and was being hunted down by the Archers.
That’s where I should be, Wainscott thought as he pulled o
n his largest combat shorts. Not on Top Field, but in the thick of it. Fighting for Britain. A stick of dynamite in one fist and a flimsy spineless Ghast neck snapping in the other. Stark bol ock naked. Or a dirty lemming man – they think they know how to fight up close but I’l show them… cutting, shooting… putting the right wires together and boom – boom. .
‘Are you alright in there?’ Susan called.
Wainscott suddenly found that he was getting dressed. ‘Fine, fine.’
‘I just thought I heard manic laughter, that’s all.’
‘A mere delusion, Susan,’ Wainscott said, strolling out to meet her. ‘You want to watch out for that. Don’t want to lose your edge, do you?’
‘Do your flies up,’ she replied.
W waited for them near the airlock, lounging against a scrollworked bulkhead. He looked as if he had been awake for some time. Beside him stood Rick Dreckitt, android bounty hunter and Service employee. Dreckitt wore a long coat and Panama hat. He seemed to stand in a pool of shadow, even in a spaceship, and despite being dry managed to look as if he had just been caught in the rain.
As the Deepspace Operations Group arrived, other teams filed out of the side doors and into the hold: communications personnel, staff from the Imperial Office for Variety and Sanctioned Amusements and even a squad of cheerful soldiers from the First M’Lak Rifles, sent to maintain order among the visitors and decapitate anyone not queuing properly.
‘Ah, Wainscott!’ W said. ‘Sleep alright? Good. We’re going to be busy from now on, I suspect.’
Dreckitt nodded. ‘Word on the street is that this space station joint is a dive. We’ll need to tidy it up before the guest planets arrive.’
Wainscott said, ‘Eager to help out, are they?’
‘It’s a hell of a grift for them. They want protection, and we’re the biggest racket going.’
W flipped open a small black notebook, in which he kept useful information and a list of people he suspected of treason. ‘So far, we’ve got confirmations from the Morlock high lords, although one does suspect that they’d turn up to a drawer being opened if they thought they could batter someone with it afterwards –’