by Mark Roman
“I thought vee might play ze game of football for it. England v Deutschland. Just like the old days!”
Dugdale stared at him, not sure if he was serious. “Bollocks,” he said finally.
“Und if we lose you will win our Germartian base with all ze mod cons thrown in.”
Still Dugdale stared at him, but this time the sides of his mouth could be seen twitching. And then he spoke, “You’re on!”
“Capital, my dear fellow. Capital.”
The colonists erupted in protests and complaints. Dugdale raised his hands and his voice to quieten them. “Quit bleatin’ you lot. Remember who’s in charge ert mission. What I say goes. Anyone gotta problem with that?”
Brian Brush, who had been most vocal with the objections suddenly went quiet and pushed his cracked glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. He edged behind the bulk of his wife.
“Right then, Fritz. Kick-off at three tomorrow, up at Botany Base.”
*
“Now we are reaching this agreement I will be showing you Otto’s crowning glory,” said Helmut, leading them back out to the crater and down the terrace steps to the second landing down. Then he added in a whisper, “And I am not meaning his head. Ha, ha, ha. Crowning glory – head? Just a little joke, ja?”
“Just,” agreed Flint.
Behind some trees they came to a set of large paddocks, each surrounded by a sturdy fence made of massive cuts of timber. In the paddocks the muddy ground was covered in straw, mangled metalwork, and what appeared to be broken pottery.
“What the ‘eck you keepin’ in there, Fritz? Rhinos or summat?”
Helmut chuckled at a private joke. “Oh, you know, just a few chickens. As I told you, Hansie brought some chicks and hen eggs when we left the U, S of A ....”
As they passed the trees, more enclosures came into view and they became aware of movement behind the bushes. An odd noise, sounding like Bwark, bk-bk-bk, bwark seemed to be coming from the same area.
And then they saw it. It made those at the front stop in their tracks, and those behind to walk into them resulting in a mini pile-up of astonished colonists. Up ahead, strolling with heavy steps, and towering high above them, was a gigantic, monstrously overgrown chicken. It stopped and raised its head to its full height of around twelve feet and gazed down at them with its malevolent eye occasionally blinking.
“Gung!” said Brian Brush. “What on Earth!”
“Gung!” said Tarquin even though he had vowed never, ever to copy his father’s annoying utterance.
The rest of the colonists were too stunned to speak.
“Remarkable, isn’t she?” Helmut was saying. “Come round the side. There are more.”
Indeed, there were several more of the colossal fowl, each in a separate enclosure. One by one the birds stopped what they were doing and straightened up to give the visitors their evil-eyed stares.
“You see, Otto invented a ray that is promoting ze rapid growth of organic matter. Like cancer, but not as uncoordinated and lethal. All the cells are growing under the organism’s normal growth patterns and restraints.” Helmut lowered his voice. “We suspect Otto may have accidentally placed his head in the way of the beamings.” Helmut waved his hands either side of his own head to mime out abnormal cranial growth. “And the meat,” he said, “It is licking the fingers good. I must get Hansie to give you his secret recipe of Mars Fried Chicken. It is to die for. But it takes all four of us half a day to catch and butcher the damned things.”
Just at that moment, Adorabella let out a scream. “It’s him!” she shrieked, thrusting her arm straight out, with a trembling finger pointing to the other side of an empty enclosure on their left.
The colonists followed the direction she was pointing, just in time to see the shadow of a man duck for cover and scuttle into the bushes.
“It’s Brokk!” Adorabella was wailing. “He’s here, I saw him.”
“I will get him, Mumza,” said Oberon. Before anyone could stop him or warn him, he scaled the fence of the enclosure and was haring across it in the direction of his step-father.
Everyone gasped. For, although the enclosure had seemed empty, suddenly it wasn’t. A giant chicken emerged from a chicken-coop in the far right-hand corner. The beast stretched its wings as if awakening from a lovely sleep and began looking around to see what all the noise was about. And then it spotted Oberon who was barely halfway across its enclosure.
The boy was quick, but the chicken was quicker. With lightning speed, and the characteristically comic strides of its species, it reached the teenager in a flash. One peck and Oberon was lifted, head first, into the beak of the monster. His legs could be seen thrashing for a few seconds before they, like the rest of his body, were gone and all that was left of poor Oberon, were his discarded space clogs in the middle of the enclosure.
As the colonists screamed, the chicken froze, its eyes wide open, perhaps a human arm had caught in its throat. Then it blinked, squatted and produced a perfect egg – a reminder, to any philosophers present, that even in death, there is life. Then it returned to its routine chicken business of pecking at the ground.
23. Phishing for Clues
Lieutenant Willie Warner was gutted by what he saw on the infraviolet screen. Two clusters of life-forms had left the location of Botany Base and were heading for his giant alien bird-creatures.
“Stop!” he kept yelling at the screen. “Go back! Turn left! Turn right! Stop off and have a picnic!”
But all the while the bright points continued across the screen until the points merged into one. He shook his head in tragic despair for there was no getting away from the brutal reality that the colonists had discovered his aliens. His moment of glory had been snatched away from him; all hope of fame shattered.
A single glimmer of hope remained: that the bird-creatures were hostile and, perhaps even now, were wiping out his fellow travellers with extreme savagery and ruthlessness.
Willie slapped his face to rid himself of the wicked thoughts. The slap triggered an idea in his head about the murder of Penny Smith.
Messages. That’s it!
He set off for her former cabin, pulling himself along the corridor hand-rails.
Penny’s personal effects had been secured in her locker, but it was simple enough to break into. Amongst her silky blouses and delicate underwear, he found her blablet. This, however, was a far trickier nut to crack, for it required a password.
The few obvious ones failed: “password”, “mars”, “mayflower3”. Every third failure would cause the device to lock him out for a frustrating, teeth-grinding minute.
“HarOld?” he said after his fifteenth attempt.
“Who’s that?” asked an electronic voice from a speaker in the cabin.
“It’s Willie.”
“No, I meant: who’s HarOld?”
“That’s you.”
“Oh, is it? Sorry, I’ve lost my memory.”
“You don’t say.”
“And who are you?”
“Lieutenant William H Warner.” Willie realized that losing his temper would not help.
“Okey-dokey. Now that we both know who we are, can I be of assistance?”
“I doubt it, but I’m clutching at straws here. Can you access Penny Smith’s personnel file?”
“Sure. Any idea where it is?”
Willie closed his eyes. “It’ll be on a data storage device.”
“Ooh, you know your stuff, don’t you. Remind me who Penny Smith is?”
“Forget it.”
“I have done.” Then, as Willie turned, “Wait, don’t go. There are some files here. Pretty old. Haven’t been accessed for months. How about this one: Harry Fortune?”
“No.”
“Emily Leach?”
“Nope.”
“Sylvia Rothschild?”
“No. I want Penny Smith.”
“Penny Smith?”
“Yes, that’s the one!”
“OK, what do
you want to know?”
Willie paused for thought. “Anything on there that might give me a clue to her password.”
“Sure thing,” chirped HarOld, but then his tone changed. “Ah, hold on. There’s a problem.”
“What would that be?”
“The file is restricted access. I can’t tell you what’s in it.”
“But I’m now the captain here. So spill.”
“No can do. Need NAFA authorization.”
“Oh, for goodness sake!” He would have gladly strangled HarOld had there been a handy means of doing so.
“OK,” he said, calming his breathing. “Let’s try this. Did Penny Smith have a middle name?”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“All right. Did it start with an ‘A’?”
“Nope.”
“‘B’?”
“Nope.”
“’C’?”
“Nope.”
After several minutes of the most tedious question-and-answer game he had ever played, Willie finally arrived at Penny’s middle name: Zyzynnia. With eager fingers he typed it into the blablet. But it was not her password. He tried variants, like “Zyzy” and “Zyz”, but with no luck.
He looked up. “Did she have any pets?”
“Yup.”
“Cat?”
“Nope.”
“Dog?”
“Nope.”
“Rabbit?”
“Yes.”
Willie readied himself for another frustrating session. “Did the bunny’s name begin with an ‘A’?”
“Nope.”
“‘B’?”
“Nope. This is fun, isn’t it.”
“Nope.”
Eventually, he had the rabbit’s name – Welwyn – but it was also not the password. He screamed.
Over the next hour he worked out Penny’s date of birth, her mother’s maiden name, her mother and father’s middle names, her star sign. None worked. He felt like crying.
“Are you OK?” asked HarOld.
“No.”
“Anything I can do?”
“No.”
“Have you tried ‘Penny’?”
“No.”
“Try it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. No one uses their first name as their password.”
“Some people do.”
With nothing to lose, he tried “Penny.”
It didn’t work.
Shoulders sagging, he drifted back to the locker and put the device away. As he turned to go he noticed a little yellow Post-It note on the inside of the door. On it was written: “1234”.
“No,” he said to himself. “No. It can’t be. Not after all this time. Not after wasting a significant part of my life with a brain-dead computer. No.”
He tried it.
It worked.
24. The Fellowship of the King
Stan and Olli buzzed with excitement as they approached the recycling shed for their rendezvous with Cassie. They’d both sent HarVard a note excusing themselves from their normal duties.
As they approached they were surprised to see that she was not alone. With her, stood a very tall and shiny robot with a bullet-shaped head who they didn’t recognize.
The large robot glared down at him.
Olli laughed.
InspectaBot’s oculars rotated in confusion.
The three robots looked at him, wondering which of them should break the news.
*
After a lengthy trek through the desert the robots eventually reached Windy Point Canyon. They began wending their way between the high rock-faces that hemmed them in on both sides, looking left and right, up and down. It was dusk and their headlights threw ghostly shadows across the walls. Spooky apparitions loomed above them before evaporating into nothingness. Even for a robot, the canyon could be a scary place at night.
Suddenly they detected a strange noise that, to a human, might have been mistaken for the sound of bagpipes.
InspectaBot was pacing impatiently on his cybertronic legs, looking for something to inspect. But there was nothing here apart from rocks and sand and more rocks.
Stan spotted something. A shiny object had caught his headlights, so he broke from the group and cranked up his caterpillar power to a racy 0.2 horse-power to enable him to climb a gentle sandy incline.
First to join him was InspectaBot, engaging his yellow inspecting light. But all he could see was a tangle of electrical wiring and a burnt-out robot carapace. He switched off his light and turned away in disgust just as the others arrived and peered over Stan’s shoulder.
Cassie caught her breath.
Olli shrugged his shoulder joints.
Stan placed one of his grabbers on Cassie’s arm.
For a moment all the robots were too stunned to transmit anything. Their on-board computers were crunching the available data, trying desperately to make sense of it. What made the exercise particularly difficult was that they had never seen any flying saucers during their five years on Mars, so were having trouble picturing the scene of Zilli’s final moments.
Cassie carefully laid her friend on the ground and gently rested her head on a nest of wiring.
As they followed the wheel tracks left by Karl Eckrocks they became aware of screaming behind them.
*
The first light of dawn made the Red Planet even redder. All night they had followed the tracks. Olli had wandered ahead of the others whose batteries were running a little low. InspectaBot had come to a standstill, realizing his precious time was being wasted. There was nothing to inspect out here. Why, oh why had he followed this bunch of loonies? Now he was a little disoriented and unsure of the way back to the base.