by Dave Barsby
The gent disappears out the front entrance, likely wondering how the queue disappeared so quickly. Rogdo shrugs at us. “Let me do the talking,” he says and inserts his datacard into the slot. The screen comes to life, showing a very basic, primitive font – green on black.
10START PROGRAM
20‘A’ = ‘0’
30PRINT “How many questions would you like to ask of Electrobrain?”
40RUN ‘voice analysis’
“Three,” Rogdo says awkwardly.
50ADD ‘3’ TO ‘A’
60IF ‘datacard account’ >= ‘3000000’ THEN GOTO 90
70PRINT “You do not currently have enough funds in your account to cover your questions. Please insert another card or return when funds are sufficient.”
80END PROGRAM
90PRINT “Please ask your first question.”
100RUN ‘voice analysis’
“Who is currently attempting to assassinate Princess Larisa of Almudena, Rogdo Flavian and the crew of the Diablo III?” Rogdo asks.
Open database
110CROSS-REFERENCE “Princess Larisa of Almudena”, “Rogdo Flavian”, “Diablo III”, “assassinate”
Found: 12 matches
120CROSS-REFERENCE ‘all’ WITH “recent”, “impending”
Found: 1 match
130PRINT “Gustavus Ionian Vitari, 73rd Senator of Almudena.”
140DELETE ‘1’ FROM ‘A’
150IF ‘A’ >= ‘1’ THEN GOTO 170
160END PROGRAM
170PRINT “Please ask your next question.”
180RUN ‘voice analysis’
This is a shock. Is the computer accurate? There is an audible gasp from one of the group. All this, and it turns out Almudena’s lone surviving senator is behind the assassination attempts.
“Does that say it’s Senator Vitari?” gasps Drift in surprise.
190CROSS-REFERENCE “Senator Vitari” WITH ‘program history’
200PRINT “Yes.”
210DELETE ‘1’ FROM ‘A’
220IF ‘A’ >= ‘1’ THEN GOTO 240
230END PROGRAM
240PRINT “Please ask your next question.”
250RUN ‘voice analysis’
“You fucking idiot!” Rogdo shouts at Drift. “Nobody say another word!”
Processing.
Error.
Voice analysis does not detect question.
260PRINT “Please ask your next question.”
270RUN ‘voice analysis’
Rogdo sighs. “Where is Senator Vitari currently?”
Open database
280CROSS-REFERENCE “Senator Vitari” WITH “current whereabouts”
290PRINT “Nimbus Hotel, Jubogo Beach, Camera-7, Serren Cluster”
300DELETE ‘1’ FROM ‘A’
310IF ‘A’ >= ‘1’ THEN GOTO 330
320END PROGRAM
The screen goes blank. That is it. Three questions asked, three answers given. One a complete waste of time.
“Get out of here,” Rogdo says. “Go on, get the hell out! The lot of you!”
We all file out silently. I feel immense relief. Finally we know who wishes us dead, and where he is. Working out why he wants us dead might be tricky, but on the bright side, I am not Drift. Rogdo cuffs him over the head.
“That’s coming out of your share,” Rogdo tells him.
“That’ll take years,” Drift responds.
“Then it will teach you to keep your mouth shut!”
“Excuse me,” Tima interjects, “but aren’t we forgetting something? Senator Vitari?”
“Yes, well, we can’t discuss it here,” Rogdo answers, glancing around him. “Let’s get back to the Diablo, and we can work it all out there.”
I look at Larisa, expecting her to take the news the hardest. I am correct – she seems catatonic. I take her by the arm and lead her away once it becomes clear she isn’t going to move without assistance.
The journey back is a melancholy affair. No one is talking, everybody is deep in thought. I can’t quite work it all out myself, why the Electrobrain would single out Senator Vitari as the bad guy. After all, wasn’t it just blind luck he wasn’t killed with the other senators? Surely he was unaware of Rogdo’s two-pronged mission on Almudena. So why has he so suddenly become corrupt, happily ordering hitmen?
We are in for a shock when we return to our ship. The Diablo III has gone.
Well, technically it is still there, just not in the same shape we are used to. All that is left are thousands of unidentifiable, smouldering pieces. It looks like the most difficult jigsaw puzzle in the entire galaxy (well, technically that isn’t true either because there is, of course, the infamous, never-solved Jig-Jig, a 6-billion piece 4-D map of the galaxy where pieces have to be placed in position lengthways, widthways, depthways and in the correct time period).
We stand, stunned, staring blankly at the wreckage. The carnage has settled now, no popping electrical systems, no fires. It is fair to assume the destruction of the Diablo III was the thunder-and-smoke we witnessed on the way to the Electrobrain, so the event took place nearly two hours ago.
It is fitting that Rogdo is the first person to break the silence.
“Oh my God,” he whispers. “They’ve blown up my ship!”
“The bastards have killed Torque!” Hiaelia shouts.
“And they’ve destroyed my dress!” Larisa cries, before falling to her knees in despair. Well, I guess everyone has their own priorities, and we know she feels quite passionately about this one.
We are so engrossed in the wreckage before us, it is several minutes before I realise Johnson the Trader is standing calmly next to me.
“Messy bunch, the Goths,” he comments. “So, where is this ship you want to trade?”
“I think you’re standing on part of it,” I answer.
11. THE DIABLO IV
“I’m a generous man,” Johnson the Trader tells us, frowning at the chaotic remains of our spaceship. “There’s plenty of scrap metal here, maybe something salvageable. I can give you 500 tabs for the lot.”
I seem to be the only person who has heard Johnson’s offer. The others are still trying to soak in the view. Okay, so I am still trying as well, but Johnson seems to be directing his comments largely at me rather than Rogdo, who is weeping quietly.
“Oh, my beautiful dress,” Larisa repeats, still collapsed on the floor. “Do you have any idea how much that cost?”
“Cost?” Rogdo says monotonously, in a dream-state of shock. A terrible thought hits him and slaps him back to reality. “Shit!” he says, almost calmly. “My money!”
“Is he okay?” Johnson asks me.
“Well,” I quietly say to him. “His ship just blew up with 250 million tabs in it, so no, I don’t think he is really.”
“Bummer,” Johnson succinctly replies.
“What the hell are we going to do?” Sanshar asks the crowd. “We have no transportation, no weaponry, no money.”
“No change of clothing,” Larisa points out. She looks at herself and bursts into a fit of tears.
“Well, let’s at least look through the wreckage just in case,” Tima suggests.
“It’s no use,” Larisa tells her. “The material doesn’t react well to extreme heat.”
“Not your fucking dress! Maybe some datacards survived.”
Tima heads purposefully into the wreckage, thankful to have something to occupy her mind other than “We’re stranded and gonna die!” which is exactly what Drift utters at that point. Determined to be a little more optimistic, Sanshar and Dirk join Tima in scavenging. Hiaelia still isn’t convinced it is worth their time.
“So,” Johnson the Trader says, slapping his hands together. “Are we going to be doing business?”
“With what?” Rogdo reasonably asks.
“Well, don’t any of you have money?”
“Look,” Rogdo says quietly, drawing up close to the trader. “We have nothing left. Someone is trying
to kill us all and we need to get off this planet. We need help.”
“Sounds like you do,” Johnson answers jovially.
“I have money,” I hastily point out as it looks like Rogdo is readying to punch the trader. My news calms him a little.
“How much?” he and Johnson ask at the same time. I remove two datacards from my leather trousers.
“This one is mine, it has about 6,500 on it…” Johnson starts laughing. Undeterred, I continue. “And this is the one you gave me,” I tell Rogdo, handing it to him.
“How much have you used?” he asks, studying the card.
“About 25.”
“25 thousand?”
“No, just 25 tabs.”
Rogdo turns to the trader, sucks in a deep breath and takes his time. “Do you…by any chance…possibly have…in your possession…an interstellar vessel…capable of sustaining us…for 2,999,975 tabs?”
Johnson slowly stops laughing when he realises Rogdo is deadly serious. “Three mill? You want to buy a nine-berth spaceship for three mill?”
“Yes,” Rogdo answers. I don’t think that is enough, so I nudge him for more. “Please,” he adds.
“Well,” Johnson the Trader says, “people can never say Johnson the Trader isn’t a reasonable man. I have an old cargo tug…I am fairly confident it can sustain life…bit battered but should work okay. It’s still out of your price range, though.”
“You can sleep with any member of my crew,” Rogdo blurts.
“What?!?” Tima cries, closely followed by Hiaelia and a rather nervous Drift.
Johnson laughs again. “Okay, okay, I get the idea. You’re desperate. Here’s what I’ll do. We’ll take this cargo tug, strip it to its bare bones – engine, life support, artificial gravity – and you can have it in return for that three mill and all this scrap metal. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Johnson the Trader snatches the datacard from Rogdo before he has a chance to alter his mind.
“When will it be ready?” Rogdo asks.
“Ooh, say, tomorrow afternoon?”
Rogdo looks around briefly. “What do we do until then?”
“Watch over my scrap. We’ll be round to pick it up in the morning. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to make a call, tell my people to start ripping the guts out of that old tug.”
Johnson nods in appreciation, spins on his heel and leaves with almost all our money.
“Found anything yet?” Rogdo asks the foraging group.
“No,” Tima calls back, then disgustedly mutters “Sleep with any member of the crew!”
Rogdo takes me to one side, puts an arm around my shoulders. He looks at me reassuringly, nods.
“What would you say to using that datacard of yours to buy some much-needed supplies for the crew?”
“Well,” I respond, “we all need to chip in and do our bit.”
“Excellent. We’ll go shopping in the morning. Now…” he leans in close, whispering. “I know we are on a tight budget here, but I’ve just lost my beloved ship and a quarter of a billion tabs, I’m still stuck with the Princess, someone is still trying to kill me, and I’ve just lost two members of my crew – one to an explosion, one to love…do you think, maybe I-?”
I hand him my datacard. “Okay,” I say. “But just the one bottle.”
The last trickles of the dying sunset are evaporating into the dark immensity of night, a final tangible thread of memory from the spectacular display it presented to us just half an hour ago: a blob of orange ice cream melting on the horizon, painting yellow, red and ochre onto the pregnant bellies of distant rainclouds [my editor suggested I remove this sentence as it is overlong, pretentious and out of context with tone of the book – I told her to do one as I think it is inspirational and beautifully descriptive].
We have cleared a small section of debris to form a rudimentary circular camp. Surprisingly, the grass underneath the remains of the Diablo III seems to be largely untouched – it is squashed down, but only a few clumps are scorched.
Rogdo returns from his shopping trip with a large bottle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes, to treat himself apparently. I find that a bit cheeky, considering he has ‘treated himself’ with my money. However, despite being outlawed, cigarettes are cheap and plentiful here, so I don’t feel it is worth a complaint. The Captain takes his time overseeing the clean-up operation (and drawing on the first of many cigarettes) without actually helping. However, he finally contributes when he rips up part of the nearby wooden causeway to fuel a nice, bright camp fire. Apparently the vandalism of the causeways for heating purposes is so commonplace, the festival organisers are resigned to replacing them every three months.
It has been a long, trying day, and there is little chat once we have ‘feasted’ on the nearest items Rogdo could grab from the shops – soft, doughy cookies, melting vanilla ice cream, tinned anchovies and raw potatoes. Dirk’s culinary compositions are no more surprising than they are tasty, with anchovy-stuffed potato wedges laboriously heated over the fire on what seems to be the door to my cabin’s foot locker, and an uninspired but perfectly adequate dessert of cookies and cream. To her credit, Larisa doesn’t complain a single time that back home she’d be dining on truffle-stuffed pheasant or the like. Instead, it is left to Bolland to voice what everyone’s taste buds are crying out to say.
Once Bolland and Dirk have been separated, we attempt to play an entirely unsuccessful game of I-Spy. ‘Tent’, ‘wreckage’, ‘stars’ and, of course, the two Gs – ‘grass’ and ‘Goth’ – is all we manage to spy after half an hour of fruitless searching, though to Tima’s credit, she tries to enliven things a little by insisting on a more accurate description. As soon as the game opens up to include the size, shape and colour of tents, wreckage and Goths, we all realise it is best to just go to sleep.
Once it has been established that Larisa’s request of males and females sleeping on opposite sides of the camp fire is not popular, the group unanimously vote for her sleeping area to be occupied by the next best thing – me. The ground is hard and brittle as I lay down on my back, resting my weary head on my hands. Larisa is twisting and turning to my left, vainly attempting to locate a comfortable spot. Finally selecting a position that will only paralyse her with stiffness for ten minutes when she wakes, she arches her back and breathes out heavily.
“Do you know you can get permanent back damage from wearing corsets?” she asks no one in particular. “Tima? Do you think we could swap clothes tomorrow?”
“Not a chance,” Tima responds sleepily, already settled on one side with her eyes closed. “That won’t fit me, remember?”
“Oh, I was joking about that,” Larisa answers. She waits in hope for a response, but it will be a long wait. She sighs and gazes upwards. I raise myself on one elbow and beat the ground beneath me as though it is a plump pillow. I’m not quite sure what I expected, but the ground is as unyielding as ever and now my hand hurts.
Rogdo has located an intact but empty storage box, one of the few things from the Diablo still recognisable. He sets it down next to the camp fire, uses the flames to light a cigarette and cracks open the seal on the bottle. I take it as a sign he isn’t going to be sleeping any time soon. He stares soberly into the flickering tongues of flame. It shouldn’t be too long before the staring ceases to be sober.
“Is it not wonderful?” Larisa asks me. I look across at her, but she isn’t expecting any form of eye contact during this conversation.
“What is?” I ask, desperately scanning my memory implant for something that could be considered wonderful out of today’s debacle. “Or is not. Or…what are you on about?”
“The sky!” she responds as though I have less intelligence than a gnat. “Just look at it.”
It is impressive. Not a wisp of cloud mars our view, the only distracting light comes from a sparse scattering of campfires. I have never actually stared at the stars from what could be construed as a countryside location; only ever from a city whe
re the smog and streetlights dull the clarity of the night. This view is almost unnerving – the sky so black, the pinpricks of light so vivid and piercing. This planet doesn’t even have a moon to get in the way.
“It is,” is all I say in response.
“I used to do this a lot when I was a child,” she tells me.
“What?” I ask. “Camping?”
“In a sense. I used to sneak out into the rear grounds and sleep under the stars. Of course, everyone knew I did it, and there were always at least two security guards hiding in the nearby bushes lest anything happen. I had a thick, cosy sleeping bag then, and a pillow. The ground was softer, the grass pliant and springy. There wasn’t the sound of parties in the distance, or the smell of charred metal. And, of course, the stars were in a different configuration. But otherwise, it is exactly the same.”
“Except its chilly, you’re adult, surrounded by people you hardly know and have a price tag on your life,” I point out.
“It is the wonderment that is still the same,” she chides. “The body may grow, the mind may mature, but childhood dreams and a sense of wonder never truly leave you. Do you never think about your childhood? The dreams, the desires?”
“Yeah, but they were silly dreams.”
“What were they?”
“I…I’m not telling you.”
“Please?”
“I…I wanted to build a time machine and travel back to 20th Century Earth. Watch civilisation change with the electronic age – mass engineered transportation, computerisation, the first ever foray into space. Either that or own a flower shop.”
Larisa giggles.
“How about you?” I ask her.
“Well, I was denied the clichéd little girl’s dream of becoming a princess through virtue of already being one. No, I wanted to go out there. Out into the galaxy. So many wonders, so many planets, so many people. I wanted to see it all.”