by Dave Barsby
I look up at the hotel. The predominant orange looks rather sickly up close. I can see the turrets, ten storeys high, swaying wildly with the light breeze. A lot of the plastic roll-up windows are creased. The entire structure wobbles like a jelly waiting for a gargantuan scoop of vanilla ice cream to nestle on its roof.
There is what sounds like a desperate scuffle for purchase behind me, and I turn to see Dirk has upended. Being of a tubular shape, he has managed to fall over so his back neatly rests in a large groove in the fabric. His limbs buck wildly, but he is losing the battle – there is no way he is going to get back on his feet without assistance. His bucking creates ripples along the causeway which manages to bowl over Drift.
“Oh, crap, this is ridiculous,” he comments, leaping back to his feet in an obvious attempt to make Dirk jealous.
“A little help?” the Gubarian calls. I am not one who rushes to his assistance. The sight of a giant, dark blue caterpillar lying on its back with dozens of short limbs flailing uselessly in the air is somewhat hypnotic.
It takes three people to push Dirk back onto his feet, but he still seems wobbly and unsure. The polythene floor squeaks with every step, making the sight even more comical. Through an amazing feat of self-discipline, I stifle a laugh.
“I think maybe you’d better sit this one out,” Rogdo tells him. Dirk reluctantly nods. “Tell you what,” Rogdo continues. “Get back to the ship with San and prepare for a dust off. I’ve got a feeling we may need to leave the system quickly.”
“Okay boss,” Dirk answers quietly, ashamed at his lack of bouncy castle coordination. He heads back towards the reception, while the rest of us turn and continue on our long walk up the causeway. We are two thirds of the way to the entrance when I hear a similar commotion in the distance behind me. Another look reveals that, just two yards shy of the reception area, Dirk has upended himself again.
Rogdo sighs.
“Guess we better head back,” Hiaelia says.
“Nah,” Rogdo answers. “Someone is bound to help him. Best thing is to keep going.”
“Pretend we saw nothing?” I ask.
“Something like that.”
The interior of the Nimbus Hotel is quite alarming. There isn’t actually any specific difference to the exterior composition, but the same sickly orange decor and wobbly floor in an enclosed space immediately brings out feelings of claustrophobia. Elegant, refined ladies and smartly-attired debonair gents are randomly bouncing off the walls, trying to keep a brave face as they ricochet into other elegant, refined ladies and smartly-attired, debonair gents with a yelp of surprise. Just the walk to the elevators poses a great many threats, and I wonder how anyone could possibly cope with serving food in such an environment. My unspoken question is partially answered when we pass the bar area. If the swaying bar stools and pliable floor doesn’t get you, the numerous spilled drinks and green olives will surely guarantee a spectacular slip at least once during your stay.
We select an empty elevator and step inside. I immediately feel unsafe. The elevator possesses no doors (after all, if you fall down the shaft you’ll probably bounce straight back up to your floor) and it lists terribly to one side. I try to distribute my weight evenly, but anyone who has tried surfing on an airbed will testify it isn’t the easiest task. I am not too convinced by the manner of the elevator’s operation either – giant elastic bands attached to the roof and floor which are heated and cooled respectively so the elevator is carried up or down via elasticity. Many a time I have been fiddling with an elastic band and received a rather nasty welt on my cheek when it ruthlessly snapped. These elastic bands are very big, and I would expect to receive a welt on my decapitated head if one were to snap. I feel uneasy all the way up to the sixth floor.
The elevator stops surprisingly smoothly. In a panicky state, I make the mistake of jumping out of the elevator into the adjoining corridor. I pinball off the walls three times before slumping in a heap on the gently undulating floor.
“Wrong way,” Rogdo tells me, striking out towards Room 612. Admitting defeat, I crawl most of the way there. Both Bolland and Drift lose their footing en route, though they are brave enough to stand up again before moving on.
As befitting the intense lack of security, the padded door to Room 612 is operated by Velcro. Rogdo rips the door open and rushes inside. As he stumbles and bounces off a polythene cabinet before collapsing on the bed, the rest of us nervously edge inside. The room is surprisingly small, a box barely large enough to move around in. Bed, cabinet, wardrobe, en suite bathroom (god knows what using that is like). There is a fold-back plastic patio door leading to a small balcony. But no senator. After unnecessarily checking in the bathroom and under the bed, Rogdo rolls the patio door to one side and steps onto the balcony. Driven more by intrigue than common sense, I join him.
A balcony really is one of the sillier concepts in the hotel. For a start any weight applied to its unsupported floor causes it to list, and the flexible polythene guard rail doesn’t look as though it could help anyone. However, the view from six storeys up is spectacular. The sea shimmers jauntily in the mid afternoon sun, a scythe of islands ringing the horizon. Closer to home, we can see the tip of a soft yellow beach lapped by clear water. The rest of the beach is obscured by a line of palm trees, the canopy swaying gently in the refreshing breeze. These lead into a thick and comparatively ugly promenade of light grey tarmac. All this ends in yards of luscious green lawns leading up to the hotel’s undulating skirts. Living up to the planet’s name, the view demands the use of a camera for posterity. However, Rogdo and I have been distracted by other things.
“Looks like Dirk is still stuck,” he says, glancing across to the left. However, it isn’t a flailing caterpillar near the reception area that I have noticed. Rather, off to the right towards the spaceport, I can see two people struggling. One is a powerful, greying man in his early seventies. The other is a pretty woman in a fetish outfit.
“Oh shit,” I call. “He’s got the Princess.”
Rogdo looks across in the same direction. The balcony bucks wildly and my heart tries to force its way up my windpipe.
“Dammit!” he shouts and buries his fist in the guard rail. Details are unclear from such a distance. It looks as though Larisa is putting up a good fight, but Vitari has a strong grip around her wrist and is successfully dragging her into the spaceport.
Rogdo rushes back inside the room, ushering everyone else to head for the elevator. “Come on, let’s go, let’s go!” he calls.
I step back inside in time to watch the chaos as five humans attempt to scramble through the bouncy door at the same time.
“San?” Rogdo calls into his wrist communicator. “Where are you?”
“Back at the ship,” comes the reply.
“Heat it up! Vitari’s making a break for it with the Princess.”
“Will do, but my paws aren’t designed to operate a broken-off control stick.”
The crew have successfully negotiated the doorframe and lie in a heap on the corridor floor. Only a disappointed Rogdo remains standing. He beckons to me.
“Come on!” he insists.
“He’ll be long gone by the time you get there,” I tell him.
He tuts once, then disappears down the corridor, closely followed by his scrabbling cohorts, bouncing and collapsing over each other on their way to the elevator.
Now, I have never been one to be adventurous or courageous. Never. So what happens next surprises me as much as it does anybody. It is an act that even Rogdo would consider suicidal. I turn, rush out onto the balcony and jump over the guard rail.
Around half way down my seven storey freefall, it hits me just how insanely stupid my plan is. It is at this point I start screaming and flapping my arms. I sink five feet into the hotel’s blow-up skirts, my breath knocked from me like a punch to the solar plexus. The rebound takes me three quarters of the way towards the edge of the skirts. I feel this is as good a place as any to rest a moment,
catch my breath and silently vow to never talk to another mercenary again.
I slide the rest of the way off the skirts onto the lawn. A small but attentive crowd of seven confused onlookers study me with furrowed brows. Unsure how to react, three of them applaud. Bizarrely, considering the seriousness of the situation, I actually start to bow.
This slight hesitation is enough to convince the onlookers I am mad, as I stumble, stare in shock then perform a brief half-bow before running away as fast as I can. I cannot see where Larisa and Vitari have gone but I have a rough idea of where the spaceport may be so head in that direction. My brain hasn’t yet caught up with my actions. What exactly do I plan to do when (and if) I catch up to them? They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but believe me it won’t work like that this time around. If he points a gun at me, I can’t exactly see myself triumphantly shouting “Aha, I am a journalist, so you lose!”
The hotel’s spaceport is a little distance from the bouncy castle itself. It is an ugly slab of concrete hidden behind a thick line of healthy green trees, with a series of dull grey parking bays raised ten feet off the ground. The ships on display showcase the best in aesthetic interstellar engineering, a wondrous collection of beautiful, sleek, multi-coloured designs. It is a stark shock to the visual cortex when you have been so used to the two Diablos. The sight could have taken my breath away but, not the fittest of people, I am already wheezing and sweating profusely from my brief run. I ascend the twenty or so steps into the spaceport itself and, panting heavily, scan the area. There is no sight nor sound of Larisa and Vitari. Could I have failed so miserably after such a heroic effort?
My legs already feel weak from the exertion, but I draw upon my last remaining ounce of determination and start jogging further into the spaceport. Surely if I spend long enough I will find her. Dead or alive, I don’t yet know, but she must be in here somewhere. I suddenly realise there is no guarantee Vitari even dragged the Princess into the spaceport – the last thing I saw before my ridiculous jump from the sixth floor of the hotel was Vitari dragging her in the direction of the spaceport. I mentally curse myself and begin my search.
Almost immediately I realise just how tricky a search like this may be. Each ship is raised on a slab of concrete ten feet high, with steps leading up to the platform. This means that if I want to search each ship, I will have to go up and down steps and up and down steps and up and down steps and then probably collapse and die of a cardiac arrest. And this is before you even consider the possibility of Vitari hiding round the other side of a platform.
Fortunately, there is always one thing you can rely on in such a situation – the damsel in distress will scream and lead you to her position. Now, I’m not saying I heard Larisa call for help, then immediately rushed to the scene and saved the day. The more accurate version is this:
“Get off!” comes the half-annoyed, half-disgusted scream, shattering the lazy quiet of a spaceport at rest. I stand to attention, listening. There is no more. The scream, from what I can determine, came from the direction of…well, therein lies one of the trickier elements of this foolish rescue attempt. When you are in effect in a maze and want to head in a particular direction, you quickly realise wings would be ideal at this point. Having never shelled out 4 billion tabs for a morphing upgrade, I have to make do with striking out in the general direction and seeing if I can somehow work my way round.
It is, I estimate, eighty seconds before I am actually heading towards the location of the scream. By now Rogdo et al must have successfully negotiated the evil bouncy elevator and are currently sliding and stumbling their way down the hotel’s causeway.
Finally I see what I am searching for in the distance. Vitari’s ship is a slate-coloured, grandiose affair. Polished to a shine so bright the craft at times looks transparent, it has a sleek, pointed nose and a heavy, chunky rear. It combines power with beauty to devastating effect.
In the foreground, halfway up the long gantry steps to the open maw of the ship’s hangar, is Vitari and Larisa. The greying senator seems over-exerted, his face turning the colour of a purple fruit – so, purple. He is puffing quite confidently, as though it is a sport he must win at all costs. He has one hand on the stairs’ guard rail and the other around Larisa’s left wrist. She seems content to just lean back and allow gravity to do all the resistance for her – typical princess, never worked a day in her life. She doesn’t even seem too concerned about shouting for help. Maybe she’s given up, maybe she doesn’t care. Or maybe she has another plan up her sleeve (metaphorically, of course, unless corsets come with sleeves in your part of the galaxy). So, here we have it – a ruthless killer close to a heart attack as he slowly drags an uncaring, unwilling and basically unsupportive captive to his ship.
I start running towards Vitari’s ship but my energy levels have all but been exhausted. By the time I finally crawl over the top step onto the platform, Vitari has successfully manoeuvred Larisa to the hangar bay. I am unable to climb the gantry. I am unable to shout out. I merely gasp and lie on the floor.
I’ve been right all along – courage and adventure just don’t suit me. I am not heroic. I’ve made the effort, I’ve tried, but in the end I am only useful for tapping away at a keyboard and reporting on how other people are heroic.
However, in this story no action goes unnoticed and unwanted. My cunning tactical plan to collapse on the platform, thus spurring Larisa into action works a treat. Realising (wrongly) that help must be nearby and she is about to be saved, Larisa triumphantly boots Vitari in the nuts. The ageing senator immediately doubles over, but his grip on Larisa’s wrist remains despite her three attempts to shrug it off. So Larisa does the most sensible thing you can imagine, something so sensible you’d never consider it when in such a perilous situation unless you were an uppity princess who knew you were superior to most humans.
Before Vitari even has any idea what is going on (not too difficult to imagine because all his mind can think of is “Ooh God, me plums!”) Larisa unbuckles her gauntlet. She allows her wrist to slip out of the pliable leather band, and Vitari finds himself clutching a strip of cow hide.
But Larisa hasn’t quite thought this all the way through. Now, her dead weight has nothing to counteract it, and the gravity she had been so reliant on to save her now reveals itself to be her mortal enemy. She inevitably pitches backwards, collapsing down the steps. It looks painful. I have just enough energy to wince and whisper “Ooooh.” Larisa rocks and rolls all the way down the gantry stairs, a good 50 of them.
She lands rather like a cat, on her hands and knees. Unlike a cat, it looks as though her landing is rather painful.
Vitari looks on from above, his face a deep purple, his eyes watering and his body hunched. “Gaaaaaah!” he calls, finally releasing the build-up of mind-numbing pain from his mashed groin.
Dimly, through the bass drum thud of my heart and deep, ragged breaths, I hear a commotion far away and slowly building. It takes me a few seconds to realise it is Rogdo and the crew. At last they’ve bounced out of the hotel and are in hot pursuit (well, maybe ‘tepid’ considering how long it has taken them).
A few seconds is also how long it takes for Vitari to realise the impending danger. He grimaces and brandishes Larisa’s gauntlet in front of his face.
“I’ll get the rest of you later!” he calls vehemently and throws the gauntlet behind him deep into his ship. Then he presses a button just inside the hangar door and the stairs begin to retract.
Larisa shakily gets to her feet and, swaying a little, stumbles over to me. “Thanks for all the help,” she mutters sarcastically and kneels down beside me. Energy starting to return, I summon up the power to rise to a kneeling position myself.
“I tried my best,” I pant.
The stairs have retracted deep into Vitari’s ship and the hangar door is airlocked tight. We hear the massive, thick exhaust tubes cough as the engines are powered up.
“He’s going to get away!” I cry, the exertion o
f the last few minutes finally impacting upon my brain.
“Well, at least he kept my gauntlet as a souvenir,” Larisa answers.
“Oooh, the tracker?”
“Yes. Now could we get a move on, please? Judging by the size of those engines, I would rather not be on the landing platform when his ship takes off.”
It is funny Larisa says that (well, not exactly ‘funny’, more a terrifying prediction) because as Vitari’s ship slowly lifts off the concrete using its anti-grav plates, it begins to tilt. Upending itself to a 70˚ angle, the sleek, robust dart aims its 2-metre wide exhaust ports directly at our heads. Smoke is already burping from the gaping maws of the exhausts, and where there’s smoke, apparently there’s fire. I am not about to hang around to find out.
Using a combined effort, the bruised Larisa and my knackered self struggle and stumble and drag each other to the edge of the landing area. We jump the ten feet down to the spaceport base but land awkwardly and collapse on the floor in pain (well, I do, I don’t know about her – you can’t blame me really, my ankle is twisted and it bloody hurts so what do I care about someone else at this point?) Larisa grabs me and rolls me closer to the ten foot wall leading up to the platform. We hug tightly and bury ourselves as deeply as possible into the join between wall and floor.
A split second later, Vitari purges his engines – a totally unnecessary but I suspect rather aesthetically impressive feat that spews billowing clouds of dense black smoke, hot air and broiling fire onto the surface of the landing platform.
Fortunately for us, the immense power of the purge causes the deadly fireball to smash into the centre of the raised platform before channelling it out horizontally. The proximity of the fireball roaring across the sky over our heads is enough to remove any possibility of breathing, while I feel convinced my hair will be singed to a few stubbles and my entire clothing may be turned to ash. But the fireball is over in a second, as Vitari’s ship thrusts its way skywards. With the intense heat of the small nuclear furnace dissipating, it is left to the thick, cloying smoke to slowly roll downwards, covering us in layers of soot.