Bikini Planet

by David Garnet

  “The eternal questions. Where are we going? Where do we come from? What’s the purpose of life?”

  “I’ll settle for the first two. Where did we come from? No, where did you come from? Why were you on that ship? Were you being taken to Clink?”

  “Clink is for common criminals. I am neither.”

  Kiru was about to tell him that she’d been on Clink, but decided it was best not to say anything about herself yet.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Escape pods are designed to head for the nearest inhabited world. That isn’t necessarily where I want to go, so I reprogrammed the controls.”

  “What if I want to go there?”

  “Hideaway? That’s nearest. You want to go back?”

  “No, not there.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  It made no difference, and Kiru shrugged. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “You won’t have heard of it.”

  “Where?”

  He told her, and she hadn’t heard of it. Not that it made any difference because she didn’t believe him. They were probably heading somewhere else, to some other planet she’d also never heard of.

  “If you weren’t being taken to Clink,” Kiru asked, “what were you doing on that ship?”

  “What makes you think it was heading for Clink?”

  “That’s where we came from.”

  “We?”

  “Ah…” said Kiru.

  “You mean the convicts who broke free from Arazon and then attacked Hideaway?”

  Kiru nodded. “I was with the space pirates, but not with them. If you know what I mean.”

  “You thought you were on an excursion trip for jailbirds? A relaxing holiday on Hideaway, then back to the prison planet?”

  “Okay, I was guessing.” Kiru shrugged. “I was captured, locked up, I’d no idea where I was or where I was going. But you seem to know.”

  Eliot Ness nodded. “I thought I knew. Then I discovered what was really happening.” He paused, shaking his head in disbelief. “So I made my excuses and left. How did you work out what was going on?”

  Kiru hadn’t worked out what was going on. And she still didn’t know. She shrugged again because it could mean anything.

  “You’re a clever girl, Kiru.”

  No one had ever called her that before. In fact, very few people had called her anything. She’d spent most of her life being ignored. When she was a kid no one took any notice of her, and as she’d grown up, no one ever listened to what she had to say. Eliot Ness, however, had no alternative. As well as not talking about herself, she should say as little as possible about anything, or else he’d soon discover she wasn’t as clever as he thought.

  “Lucky for us the ship had escape pods. Even luckier, this one is still functional.” Eliot Ness glanced around. “So far.”

  “Don’t all ships have lifeboats?”

  “No. And probably not ships with a suicide circuit.”

  Kiru stared at him. “It was no accident? The ship was deliberately destroyed?”

  “Yes. We were on board a time bomb.”

  Despite her symsuit, Kiru shivered, and her voice was a whisper as she said, “We were meant to die?”

  “Most people are meant to die,” said Eliot Ness. “But I have other plans.”

  Kiru was born more than three hundred years after Wayne Norton.

  In those three hundred years, Earth had revolved around the sun three hundred times.

  In galactic terms, that was less than the blink of an eye.

  When their distant ancestors were still struggling for survival in the fertile slime of Earth’s primeval ocean, a globule of molten magma erupted from the white-hot core of a star in a remote solar system.

  For hundreds and hundreds of millions of years, this lump of alien ore had drifted across the galaxy, its course varying every few aeons as it came under the gravitational influence of the nearest star. Every sun it approached, every speck of interstellar dust it encountered, every single atom of hydrogen created on its course, helped guide the meteoroid toward its destiny.

  CHAPTER TWENTY- THREE

  Wayne Norton stared.

  Of all the sentient beings in the universe, of all the mindless creatures in the galaxy, how had he ended up trapped inside a lifeboat with Grawl?

  It had to be him. Norton had heard all about Grawl from Kiru, and there was nobody else who could possibly match such a description.

  He was short and seemed almost as wide as he was high. His shapeless overall couldn’t disguise the strength and power of his body. Even his bald head looked muscular.

  Grawl was like a bullet.

  A bullet might miss its target, a bullet might only wound.

  Grawl was more deadly than a bullet.

  He kept looking at Norton.

  Norton took a step back, tried to take another, but he was up against the bulkhead. He had to get out.

  If he left the escape capsule, he’d die.

  Definitely.

  If he stayed, he’d also die.

  Probably. Possibly. Maybe.

  “I’m so sorry to intrude, sir. I wonder if I might share this lifeboat. Your lifeboat. I won’t be any trouble, sir. You won’t even notice I’m here.”

  Grawl gazed impassively at Norton’s naked body. His hand went to the heart-shaped pendant around his neck, stroking it.

  And Norton realised that although he might not die, his mind could be erased and replaced.

  Which was just as bad.

  Or worse.

  He stood more chance of surviving the frozen vacuum of merciless space than he did with Grawl.

  “Okay. Yeah. Sure. Sorry to have bothered you. I’ll leave. Now. Immediately. At once. Even sooner.”

  Norton turned. The hatch was shut, and he couldn’t work out how to open it. He wished Kiru was here.

  No, that would be far worse. Kiru trapped with Grawl.

  For a moment he’d thought that might be the case. Kiru had climbed into the capsule, found Grawl already there, and she’d been forced to hide.

  But the lifeboat was so small, with every cubic inch assigned its own vital function, there was nowhere to hide. If Kiru was here, Grawl would have known.

  She must have been in another escape capsule. When the ghostly guard attacked, Norton had rolled beneath a different lifeboat and lost his bearings.

  He ran his hands over the hatch, searching for a lever or button or handle. As he did so, he felt a vibration. The lifeboat was moving, dropping free from the doomed spaceship.

  Norton glanced around at Grawl, who was no longer holding the amulet. He didn’t want to annihilate Norton’s brain and take over his body. The body he wanted was Kiru’s, and who could blame him for that?

  He nodded, once, slowly, almost imperceptibly.

  “I can stay?” said Norton.

  Grawl did nothing. He didn’t move, didn’t nod, didn’t react. Most importantly, he didn’t shake his head.

  “Thank you, sir, that’s very kind of you, sir. My name is Wayne Norton. I’m very pleased to meet you.”

  Norton stepped forward, holding out his right hand.

  Grawl looked at the hand, and kept looking. Norton realised he must have been counting his fingers, and he let his hand fall back, clasping it with his other one to modestly cover his groin.

  “Had to leave in a hurry,” he laughed. “No time to get dressed.”

  He knew Grawl couldn’t speak, but if he let Grawl know that he knew he couldn’t speak, then Grawl would know that Norton knew who he was. A little knowledge was a dangerous thing.

  As was Grawl.

  “I, er, didn’t catch your name, Mr…?”

  Grawl still didn’t move or react.

  “Ah, well, maybe we speak a different language. Maybe we’re from different worlds. Although you look human. And you can tell that I am. Ha, ha, ha!”

  Grawl blinked.

  “Where are you from, sir? I’m f
rom Earth, myself. Nice little place.”

  Grawl was also from Earth, of course, but Norton had to pretend he didn’t know.

  He wondered how he could ever become friendly with Grawl. It was inevitable they’d become more than casual acquaintances. In an escape capsule like this, there was no alternative.

  Weil, no, there were several alternatives—the most likely being that Grawl would kill him.

  The guy had probably never had a friend in his life, and Norton would never be on more than nodding terms with him—because that was all Grawl could do, nod or shake his head.

  Norton was still standing by the hatch. He leaned against the bulkhead and folded his arms, trying to look casual. But uncovering his private parts probably wasn’t such a wise move under the circumstances—under most circumstances, in fact.

  He shifted position, resting his left hip and shoulder against the wall, which meant he was side-on to Grawl, and he let his right hand drop down across his thigh, shielding his most vulnerable area.

  “So,” said Norton, and he nodded.

  Grawl did nothing except look at him.

  “Here we are.”

  Grawl still did nothing.

  “Yeah.”

  Grawl continued to do nothing.

  Norton supposed that was all there was to do, although he wished Grawl would look elsewhere while doing it.

  There was far more room in the lifeboat than in the cell, and at least he could stand upright; but Norton felt much more cramped, far more of a prisoner.

  It was going to be a long voyage.

  “Are we going anywhere, do you know? Are we just drifting?”

  A long, silent voyage.

  They stood looking at each other for a long while. In silence.

  To pass the time, Norton thought of a whole series of questions which Grawl could answer with a single nod or shake of the head. Asking them would also have passed the time. But even if Grawl replied, it wouldn’t have been much of a conversation, and Norton decided to save them for later. In case Grawl ever became more communicative.

  Suddenly, Grawl moved. He raised both hands, and Norton quickly stepped back as far as he could, which was all of eighteen inches. Grawl held his left hand up, sideways to Norton, and rested his right hand horizontally across the fingertips.

  His hands were in the shape of a single letter.

  “ ‘T’?” said Norton.

  Grawl nodded.

  While he waited for Grawl’s second letter, it was Norton’s turn to do nothing. But then Grawl turned away and opened a cupboard in the hull of the lifeboat. It was full of jars, pots, and containers, and he set to work. He made himself a drink. It must have been tea, Norton realised, something he hadn’t heard of for hundreds of years.

  “Tea!” he said. “Oh, I see. You meant ‘tea’ the drink, not ‘T’ the letter. Sorry. I didn’t understand. I thought you were spelling out something, and I was waiting for the next letter, and I thought, ‘This is going to be a long conversation if he has to signal every letter.’ Yeah. Please. I will have a cup of tea. Thanks. Kind of you to offer. It’s not my favourite drink. I’m more of a coffee type of guy. But at the moment I’ll drink anything. No. Not anything, of course. Tea will be great. Really great. Really. I can’t think of anything better. Thank you very much. Yeah. Please. Yeah. Thanks.”

  Grawl turned around again, raised his right hand, lifted his index finger. For a moment, Norton thought he was mocking him, doing something Norton no longer could. Then Grawl put his finger to his lips.

  If anyone else had made such a gesture, it would have been a simple request. When Grawl did it, it was a menacing threat.

  Norton became silent. But didn’t get a cup of tea.

  He watched as Grawl pulled a handle on the wall, and part of the bulkhead was transformed into a seat. Grawl sat down and drank his tea.

  There was a similar handle near Norton. He pulled it, and a shelf slid open, hitting him in the groin.

  “Ahhhhh! Ohhhhh! Uhhhhh!”

  When Grawl glanced at him, Norton immediately became silent again, clutching at himself in agony.

  Grawl had killed Kiru’s previous boyfriend. If he even suspected that Norton knew Kiru, ever found out what they had done together, Grawl would rip him apart.

  What had happened to Kiru? Had her capsule survived the detonation and escaped safely? Even if it had,, he’d never see her again. The galaxy was a big place.

  Despite that, Norton planned to spend the rest of his life looking for Kiru.

  If he had a life.

  Which all depended on Grawl.

  Space is cold, silent and infinite.

  The chance of two different objects from different eras and different parts of the galaxy being on convergent trajectories is incalculably small. The probability is higher than zero, however, and even a one in a trillion trillion chance is likely to occur once every trillion trillion times.

  So it was with the escape pod and the chunk of ancient galactic debris.

  The two objects, one natural, one synthetic, were travelling in different directions, at different speeds. Although the former was much smaller than the latter, had there been a less tangential collision it was the lifeboat which would have emerged as the smaller. Much smaller, in fact. Transformed into thousands of very small particles.

  They passed one another in less than a millisecond, only a few cubic centimetres of matter attempting to co-exist in the same three-dimensional area of space during that time.

  The effect on the meteoroid was minor. It lost a tiny fraction of its mass and an even lesser percentage of its velocity, although its path across the galaxy now differed by almost a complete degree of arc. On it went, on and on, out into the universe, forever and ever.

  The spacecraft suffered damage to its tail, losing a heating fin and part of a propulsion unit, and it was also showered with countless dust particles.

  A lifeship could survive without a heating fin, without a propulsion unit; but those within the ship could not survive without the air which began slowly leaking out through all the microscopic holes in its hull.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “What’s that?” asked Kiru, as the lifeboat suddenly shook and she heard a loud bang.

  The vibration only lasted for a moment, then everything was still and silent again.

  And Kiru realised the sound had been outside.

  “I don’t know,” said Eliot Ness. “It’s as if we hit something. Or something hit us.”

  They looked at each other. The only thing outside was space. Empty space.

  “If anything was wrong,” said Kiru, “wouldn’t there be an alarm?”

  “The warning system was switched off when I disabled the distress signal.”

  “There’s no distress signal?”

  “No. We don’t want anyone tracing us.”

  “We don’t?”

  “We didn’t. But—” Eliot Ness stood up and went to check the control screen—“we do now.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “You were right, Kiru. We’ve been hit. We’re always getting hit by interstellar dust, and the hull is constantly sealing itself. The particles pass straight through the ship, straight through us.”

  “Through us?” Kiru glanced down at herself. There were no marks in her symbiotic suit. She pulled it open, examining her torso for holes.

  “In and out,” said Eliot Ness. “Too fast and too small to cause much damage. Our bodies are like the hull. Self-repairing.” He sat down again. “This time, there was more than dust. One of the propulse lines has been wrecked, which will slow us down, and one of the thermofins is missing, which will cool us down.”

  “We’re going to freeze?”

  “Yes, but don’t worry about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’ll already be dead by then. Pressure inside. Vacuum outside. Too many holes in between. All the air’s going to leak out.”

  Kiru took a deep breath. While she c
ould. “How long have we got?”

  “Forty-two hours, eighteen minutes and thirty-six seconds. Plus or minus three hours, twenty-two minutes and nine seconds. Approximately.” Eliot Ness paused. “That’s for both of us.”

  “With the symsuits on?”

  “That is with the suits.”

  “What about an escape capsule?”

  “This is an escape capsule. Lifeboats don’t have lifeboats.”

  “Just checking,” said Kiru. “Looks like we should have headed for the nearest inhabited world.”

  “We wouldn’t have arrived there yet.”

  “But we’d have gone in a different direction, so we wouldn’t have been hit. At the beginning, we were only a few hours away from Hideaway.”

  “A few hours, a few minutes. It means nothing. Or it means the same. In falspace, everything is relative.”

  Space travel was not across space, Kiru was aware, but through it. Because interstellar distances were so vast and voyages lasted so long, very few solar systems could ever be reached within a lifetime—either human or alien. The quickest route between two planets was non-linear, skipping across true space and time, dancing through false time and space.

  Falspace was a dangerous realm, where ships still vanished: wrecked by the storms of time, torn apart upon the reefs of space, trapped in the endless depths of eternal flux. The one way out was via an escape pod, buoyed up to the surface after the vessel had sunk: Lifeboats could only travel in real space, in truspace.

  Which was why they took such a long time to get anywhere.

  And why few survivors lived long enough to make planetfall.

  “In any case,” said Eliot Ness, “the pod wouldn’t have recognised Hideaway as a destination. It doesn’t have fixed co-ordinates.”

  “That’s not what you said at the time.”

  “Neither of us wanted to go there.”

  “That was then. This is now. I’ll go anywhere.”

  “There’s nowhere near enough. Not even in ninety-one hours, twenty-one minutes and thirty seconds. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…”

  “Maximum air supply for one of us?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do we do?” asked Kiru. “Wait to die?”