Mercenary

by Dave Barsby

  “As a Cat,” Sanshar interrupts, “it is my duty to inform you we only have a few seconds left and I am the only person fast enough to get there and release the compartment in time. So, if you don’t mind, excuse me.”

  Sanshar leaps off her seat, pushes past a clearly shocked Dirk and scarpers down the corridor.

  “SAN!!!” Rogdo bellows angrily down the corridor after her, but her golden brown fur is just a blur at the far end.

  “Drift,” Tima calls. “Drift, try again. Try the engines, try the button, try anything just don’t let her-”

  We hear a thunk and the ship jerks even more wildly than usual. A red light starts beeping urgently on the control panel.

  “What?” Rogdo asks. “What is it? What? What?”

  “Phase One of Waste Container Removal complete,” Drift says in a depressed, monotonous voice. “She’s sealed the hatches…” A second red light begins to beep even more urgently. “…and released one lever,” he continues. “One to go.”

  The rapid beep flatlines and the ship rocks forward, knocking most of us off our feet.

  “And there it goes,” Drift finishes. “The Diablo IV is slowly but surely pulling free of the black hole’s magnetic gravity.”

  “And San?” Rogdo asks. Drift merely looks at him.

  “Could we maybe use a tractor beam to rescue the other compartment?” Larisa asks once we have all regained our footing.

  “Doubtful,” Drift answers.

  “Why?”

  “One, grabbing the other compartment will just make us too heavy again and we’ll be back to square one. Two we don’t have a tractor beam. Three, all your suggestions are so stupid we ignore them anyway.”

  “Well!” Larisa answers huffily. “There is no need-”

  I place one hand on her bare, scratched and soot-stained arm to silence her. “But I was only-” she begins again. I shake my head.

  I may not have liked all of the crew of either Diablo, but it is still quite heart-breaking when one of them leaves. Thus far we have abandoned Yew and lost Gronk to love. You may notice I don’t include Torque in my list, but as I never met him he was effectively a non-entity to me. Sanshar is the first crew member to have actually died. Well, at the moment she is drifting to her death, but same thing really. I’m not sure how I feel about this. In one respect I am rather cold to the concept. She is a mercenary, a vicious, murderous criminal willing to take massive risks for a massive payoff, and this time the risk caught up with her. But in another respect, she is a fun character who obviously enjoys a good laugh, is embraced by the crew, always helps her fellows out of danger no matter what and even, during our trip to Camera-7 before madness set in, she actually let me stroke her. Lovely fur. Soft and shiny and so finely woven. Lovely fur.

  The concept of never seeing her again, of her actual death, is unable to register in my brain. It feels like she has just stepped outside for a moment. The silence in the cockpit is indeed deathly.

  The shuddering of the Diablo IV is slowly dissipating into a more normal, gentle rumble. The stars don’t move, the view is static, but we can feel that we are finally breaking the pull of Adminitus.

  It is almost as though everyone has been holding their breath throughout this entire escapade, because as soon as the juddering stops and Drift announces “We’re free,” the whole crew breathes a collective sigh of immense relief.

  Drift turns to look at Rogdo. Eventually we all do the same.

  “What now, Sir?” Tima asks.

  Rogdo looks upset, as though he may actually start crying in a moment. It is an act that will not do his reputation any good at all, so instead he sucks in a deep breath.

  “We’d better get back after Vitari before his trail grows cold,” he says.

  “Not entirely practical, Sir,” Tima tells him.

  “Or desirable,” Hiaelia adds. “We just lost San.”

  “What we want and what we need to do are two completely different things,” Rogdo insists.

  “Well, what we need right now,” Tima says, “is to figure out where we are, how many light years we accidentally travelled and if there is somewhere in this system where we can set down and repair our damaged engine.”

  “I have to say I concur with that, Sir,” Drift adds.

  “But if we don’t get Vitari, this is all for nothing,” Rogdo whines. “We must get him before his trail goes cold.”

  “Out here, it isn’t so much a case of his trail being cold as his trail not existing,” Bolland says, plainly refusing to add the ‘Sir’ suffix to his statement.

  “We need to make repairs,” Tima insists.

  “Besides,” I pipe up, finally ready to join in the conversation. “Vitari’s kept a souvenir of Larisa’s.”

  Rogdo looks puzzled at me. He shrugs his shoulder as if to say “so what?”

  “Her gauntlet, Rogdo,” I tell him. “Her left gauntlet.”

  Rogdo shrugs a “so what?” again.

  I sigh. I really can’t be bothered explaining every little detail to him, so leave it for him to work out in his own spare time.

  “Let’s just go there, can we?” Drift asks, pointing to a small blue-green planet the Diablo IV has been lazily floating towards.

  “What is it?” Bolland asks.

  “A planet you moron.”

  “Yeah, right, but which planet?”

  “Dunno, it isn’t on any star charts or navigation databases.”

  “We’ve discovered a new planet?”

  “What about Vitari?” Rogdo asks again.

  “The planet looks pleasant enough, and sensors indicate it can sustain us. Maybe we can repair the engines there, then catch Vitari. I only mention this because if we try to work the other way around it will take us roughly five hundred and sixty two years to reach the nearest viable navigation route. Never mind us, this ship will not last that long.”

  “Okay!” Rogdo shouts. “The planet! Head for the bloody planet and stop whinging the lot of you!”

  So we do.

  15. BOB

  This new planet isn’t quite what we are expecting. A few minor conurbations, we thought, maybe a city or two. A civilisation in an early or even pre-space travel era. Just a civilisation in general would have been nice. Something. Anything.

  What we get is a planet consisting of large oceans of blue and small land masses made up entirely of mossy-green pebbles. There are no trees, no grass, no large rocks nor living creatures aside from a bewildering variety of piscine lifeforms. This planet doesn’t even have a moon, or tides, or wind. It is the most visually and kinetically arid planet I have ever encountered.

  The Diablo IV sinks two feet into the pebbled island when it sets down. We all file out, needing fresh air and a view that may take our minds off Sanshar’s loss.

  “Oh,” Rogdo breathes when he first sets foot on the ground. He turns to Drift. “Is this really the best place you could find to land?”

  “It’s an uncharted planet,” he answers, “and for good reason. This is it. This is all there is, across the entire globe.”

  “Damn it,” the Captain points out casually.

  “So, err, what do we do?” Dirk asks, watching Tima slump to the floor, rest her back against the ship’s hull and place her hands over her face.

  “I dunno,” Rogdo answers. “I didn’t want to come here in the first place.”

  “Oooh!” I suddenly call. “I claim the right to name this planet as I see fit! I will call it ‘Bob’.”

  “We’re not calling it Bob,” Tima wearily tells me, briefly releasing her face from her palms.

  “I can call it what I like.”

  “It’s a planet.”

  “So?”

  “So, we’re not calling it Bob. That’s stupid.”

  “I claimed the right. I say Bob. Bob it is. You must comply.”

  “I will not call it Bob!”

  “Then I must insist you do not set foot any further on Bob until such time as you apologise for the hein
ous slur.”

  “Can people do that? Call a planet whatever they want then bar other people from setting foot on it? Yes? What do you mean, yes?”

  “Bolland nodded yes. He should know. He’s a scientist and intelligent and everything.”

  “Fine, Bob it is.”

  I mentally chalk up a victory.

  “You know,” Tima continues, “I would have thought you and the rest of us would have more pressing things on our minds than naming a planet.”

  “That’s right,” Rogdo chides me. “Like finding Vitari.”

  Tima mutters in exasperation. “How about finding some way to repair this ship?”

  “Yes!” Rogdo calls. He wags a finger at me. “See? Repairing the ship. That’s important.”

  “How can I help with that?” I ask. “I know nothing about engines or electrical systems or what have you. All I know is-”

  “How to name planets?” Drift quips.

  “How to write legally water-tight and litigation-free articles that damage reputations, actually!” I threaten.

  This seems to quieten everyone. Hiaelia crouches at the water’s edge and carefully dips a finger into it. Rogdo stands imperiously with his hands clasped behind his back, staring at the horizon. Drift and Bolland head for the front of the vessel to see what damage they can spy. Dirk goes back inside the ship, and later reappears with three chairs. When questioned about them it transpires he’s ripped them out of the cockpit. Larisa takes two steps and loses her balance. In boredom, I kick a small stone. My foot squeezes it into another stone, allowing it to ricochet a sizeable distance. It clangs rather noisily off the hull, shattering the peaceful quiet. As the ringing echo dies down, the air is filled once more with the soft crunch of pebble under foot and the gentle lapping of water on the stone beach.

  “Not much chance of repairs here,” I point out quietly.

  “Not much chance of anything,” Hiaelia responds, sniffing the water on her finger tips. She licks it. “Saline content fairly standard for a fertile ocean, I think.”

  “Did you just make that up?” Rogdo asks.

  “Yeah. Did it sound good?”

  “Very impressive.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So you think we can catch some fish?” I ask. All eyes stare at me. “I’m sick of the tinned food,” I whine.

  “God, you’re sounding like the Princess,” Rogdo jibes.

  “True,” Larisa answers, lying defeated on the floor. Her high heels just can’t cope with the shifting nature of the pebbled ground, so she has elected instead to remain where she fell for the duration of her stay.

  Drift and Bolland return with their damning verdict on the front of the spacecraft: “Can’t see much, we’ll have to go in the other way.” They walk into the ship.

  “Is the water safe?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?” Hiaelia returns, believing the question is directed at her because she’s the only one near the ocean.

  “Well…you know…safe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because at the moment I have a rather thick layering of exhaust fumes about my person and I wouldn’t mind removing it before it gets dark, otherwise all you’ll see is a set of floating teeth every time I smile.”

  “Well, it hasn’t melted my fingers yet,” she responds. “But there’s probably something in there that will eat you.”

  “Really?”

  Hiaelia doesn’t respond. I suspect she’s joking, but I’m not quite willing to trust that suspicion. I decide to remain caked in dirt for a little while longer. I am convinced that Larisa will be the first to break, so I can just follow her lead if she survives her wash.

  Being an uppity princess covered in muck, she snaps like a twig at the slightest provocation, so I only need to wait a few seconds to see if the water is safe.

  When Larisa, still struggling to walk over the pebbles in her boots, reaches the water’s edge, she seems to be in a gloomy mood. Maybe all the recent events have finally hit her, maybe she realises the trouble we are currently in, maybe she’s entertaining suicidal ideation again, or just having an off day. Either way, she calmly, sourly wades into the water up to her calves, then seemingly without motion allows her body to pitch straight forward. After the splash, nothing visible remains.

  After a brief glance round, the rest of us all realise there is absolutely nothing to do. As the only three people with the inclination to move, Rogdo, Hiaelia and myself secure a makeshift deckchair each. I wriggle to a relaxed position and close my eyes, planning to rest a little and wait for the outcome of Larisa’s survival chances. I don’t actually go to sleep, rather I use this opportunity to relax, let the peaceful surroundings wash away my gloom, and let the conversations of the others further their own characterisations.

  They start by complaining about recent events. Rogdo displays his arrogance by insisting everything will be alright, and that it hasn’t been a complete disaster thus far anyway. The argument that follows could only be more heated if some of us are actually armed.

  After a while I realise the childish bickering is going to reduce characterisation to cardboard cutouts rather than enhance it, so I filter out the incessant noise. In the background, I hear Larisa wade out of the water, lose balance and fall over again.

  By the time I feel like moving again, night time has set in. There is no moonlight to bathe the land, but likewise there is no cloud cover, allowing the full brightness of the stars to shine through. It creates a dull, pale shimmer over the ocean which reflects lazily onto the hull of the Diablo IV. I suspect I am now just a set of gleaming teeth.

  With the lack of light unnerving him, Rogdo salvages some scrap paper and cloth and sets up a small campfire. Soon the fire is blazing nicely, though its power will quickly run out. It brings my mind back to our location – a world without features, not even any wood to burn. It astonishes me how such an environment could exist, fuelled only by an ocean and green pebbles. Aquatic life often needs some input from land-based foliage such as rotting bark to sustain it, but the rich silt created here has formed entirely from rotting piscine lifeforms. The lack of tide is also quite disturbing. The nearby star still exerts a little pressure on the ecological system to create gently lapping waves and a noticeable rise and fall of the sea levels, but the lack of a moon stifles the ocean’s potential to be as violent and chaotic as it deserves to be.

  But what really confuses me is the lack of wind. Maybe we have landed on an off day, but I suspect this is not the case. Not only does a lack of wind also affect the ocean’s movement, it severely dampens erosion, making you wonder quite how the landmasses found themselves turning into smooth, oblong pebbles without any external pressure. There should be wind on a planet, there should be waves on the ocean, there should be some form of living entity on the land. Planet Bob is starting to scare me.

  “Planet Bob is starting to scare me,” I point out. Tima jumps.

  “What was that?” she demands, her voice quick and breathing ragged.

  “What?” I respond.

  She breathes a heavy sigh of relief. “Oh, it’s you. Stop lurking in the shadows.”

  “But I’m…” I begin my defence. Then I remember – I am still caked head to foot in the black sooty residue from Vitari’s exhaust ports. I am The Teeth.

  “I guess I’ll go and wash, then,” I mention, but already everyone has lost interest in me.

  “Hold up, chompers,” I hear as Drift, proud of his new nickname for me, exits the Diablo IV. Bolland follows him, looking glum. “You may wanna hear this.” Drift immediately occupies the seat I was foolish enough to displace myself from only moments before and slaps his knees. Bolland successfully lingers in a depressing manner.

  “So we’ve checked out the engine,” Drift begins happily. He pauses for dramatic effect (believe me, it worked far better then than it does on paper now).

  “And the verdict?” Rogdo finally breaks the silence.

  “We’re fucked.”

  T
here is another pause of stunned silence. Rogdo is plainly not happy with the verdict.

  “Now, Drift, you know I don’t like it when you start talking in technical terminology. How about trying it in layman’s terms?”

  Bolland decides that, as the scientist, he should give it a go. “Well, we have a fair-sized gash in the case of the dimensional rigging matrix, which means if we turn on the wormhole drive, the gate will spill out and open all over the place. We were quite sublimely lucky last time that it just flung us across space.”

  “By rights,” Drift picks up the baton, “what it should do is turn us inside out, mix us together, fire us into another dimension then send us to bed without any supper. Basically bad stuff.”

  “What do we do?” I ask.

  “Well, before we can use the drive again, we have to repair it, fill in the crack, patch it up, blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter. There are no salvageable parts of the ship strong enough to work as a patch, and there is absolutely bugger all on this planet we can use. Well…maybe one thing, but it’s an extremely long shot.”

  “What?” Rogdo asks, then when Drift pauses for dramatic effect again, he fills in the gap with the same question. “What? What is it? What?”

  “Bones,” Bolland tells us. “If we can get hold of enough bones and process them, they have the correct composition for holding back the tide of dimensional plasma.”

  “Aren’t bones kind of brittle compared to, say, steel plating?”

  “They’d work in this instance. Wormhole techy stuff. I won’t bore you with it.”

  “Good. Where do we get bones from?”

  “Well,” Drift begins. “We could go fishing and hope there are some whales out there. Quite how we’ll catch them, I don’t know. I think even getting out to sea is a problem in itself.”

  “So, when you say long shot…”

  “It’s about one in a billion, yes.”

  “We’re fucked,” Rogdo points out.

  For those of you who haven’t sampled the joys of fishing at sea, let me fill in for you why this is such a massively tricky problem. First and foremost, we will need a boat. A fair-sized boat if we are to hunt whales. A canoe, dinghy, raft or pedalo just will not do. Second, we need some way to attract the whales. Whales generally don’t go for a worm on a hook, so the traditional method of baiting aquatic lifeforms is another option we can rule out. Besides, all we have left in our stores is tins of peaches, asparagus, fungrot and some form of unpronounceable bat meat. I don’t believe fish would consider any of that to be particularly tasty – I know I don’t. The third problem will be to locate exactly where the whales are situated in this vast ocean planet. Normally, sonar comes in handy here. Spaceships tend not to rely on sonar, so we are all out of that. The fourth tricky aspect involves the actual killing and subsequent gutting of the whale. We have no saws, long knives or harpoons with which to accomplish this task. We have even lost the only weapon we had at our disposal when Bolland’s pen-gun was left behind at the Nimbus Hotel reception desk. The fifth problem, and one which especially concerns me, is that we have absolutely no idea if this planet actually contains something as large and useful as a whale. This, in my opinion, makes the odds of one in a billion seem rather optimistic.