Bad Timing

by Rebecca Levene

  So here she was, in this scrapheap of a ship, a passenger of one of the oddest mutants Red had ever had the misfortune to meet. Red stole a look at her pilot now, peering at her from behind her veil of red hair. The woman had told Red to call her the Blimp, and it wasn't hard to see why. She was enormous. Fat didn't really do it justice - even calling her morbidly obese would be something approaching a compliment.

  It started with her calves, which bulged out through the fabric of her trousers so that all that could be seen of her feet were the tips of her big toes. Her thighs wobbled with rolls of flesh, though much of them was hidden beneath the rolls of flesh on her stomach. Red doubted the Blimp had seen her own legs for a very long time. She probably hadn't touched them either. Her arms, prisoners of their own vast swathes of fat, stuck out from her sides like two giant chicken legs. She might possess a neck somewhere beneath her double and quadruple chins, it was impossible to say. Strangely, on top of all this sat a very small, almost pretty face. Its hair was a curly blond, and its eyes were a penetrating blue. They turned to Red now.

  "What are you looking at?" she asked Red. Her voice was incongruously girlish, with a breathy catch in it that some men might have found sexy.

  Red looked away. "Nothing," she said.

  The Blimp laughed. "It's all right, sweetheart, stare away. I know I'm a sight you don't see every day."

  Red smiled, warming to her. "We're all mutants," she said. "We're the last people who ought to be judging on appearances."

  "True enough," the Blimp said amiably, sitting back from the flight console and stretching, pulling some of the rolls of fat a little tighter in the process. "When my mum saw what came out of her, she told the doctors I must be a freak of nature. But I reckon nature knew what she was doing. Come a fight, other people run out of energy before it's halfway over. But I carry around a spare battery - and once I get going, there's no stopping me. Most folks who judge me by appearances don't live to regret it."

  "Well," Red said, "it never hurts to be underestimated."

  The Blimp laughed, a jolly sound without malice. "So how come you're one of us, honey? I've been trying to figure it out, but last I heard red hair was an affliction, not a mutation."

  Red hesitated a second, but the Blimp seemed easy-going enough. "I guess you could say I'm a real monster," she said. "The old-fashioned kind." She widened her smile, baring her fangs.

  An expression of pure horror came over the Blimp's face, and she leapt back, putting as much distance between herself and Red as possible. "Stay away from me, you freak!" she shouted.

  Red mentally berated herself for thinking even for a minute that the Blimp might be different from all the rest. At least Johnny, aggravating as he was, had always treated her like a person. "I'm not a real vampire," she explained patiently. "Look-" She deliberately grabbed the jewelled cross which was hanging from the control console above the Blimp's chair. "Garlic doesn't give me so much as indigestion either, and the only thing that keeps me out of the sun is my complexion."

  She took a step towards the Blimp and reached out an arm towards her. The Blimp lashed out, knocking Red's arm away with surprising strength. "You bring those fangs anywhere near me and you'll be getting root canal work you won't forget in a hurry!" she said.

  Red felt her temper heating up. "Listen, you fat-assed moron. It's a mutation, same as yours, same as anybody's. If I'm a freak, what does that make you?"

  Before the Blimp could respond, the ship, there was a loud blast. A shower of sparks shot out of the instrument panel, and the ship juddered violently, throwing Red against the back wall and tumbling the Blimp onto her back.

  Red dived towards the controls, intending to steer them away from whatever the hell was attacking. Before she could begin to decipher the instruments, the ship gave another sickening lurch, flinging her face-first into the forward viewscreen. Through this, she was given a very clear picture of what was going on.

  They had arrived. Speed hung beneath them, a deceptively pleasant looking planet, patches of green and brown sitting in oceans of a deep, dark blue. But the attack wasn't coming from the planet. It was coming from space, from the thousands of tiny military satellites that had been hung around this quarantined world, poised to protect it from any intruders. As Red watched, a blinding white laser beam shot out from the nearest, searing into the side of the ship. She was ready this time, and clung onto the sides of the console as the ship shook and lurched.

  The Blimp wasn't so lucky. Still on her back, her arms and legs flailing uselessly in the air, she was flung against the back wall of the flight cabin with a jarring thud that left a large dent in the wall.

  "How the sneck do you steer this thing!?" Red shouted at her, staring helplessly at the ranks of switches, dials, knobs and lights which faced her. Several of the green lights flicked to red. She assumed that was bad news, but who could tell?

  "Get me up and I'll do it," the Blimp shouted back.

  "There's no time!" Red said. "Just tell me how to get us out of here!"

  "Fire the... Fire the rear left thruster on sixty-five deg... degrees forward," the Blimp shouted out as the ship lurched some more and she skidded over the floor like an upended tortoise. "But whatever you do, don't try to fire the central rear thruster - it's bust. Likely to blow."

  Red looked at the instrument panel in frustration. She couldn't begin to work out which switches worked the thrusters, let alone the rear left ones. The cabin was now filled with a choking brown smoke. Somewhere hidden from view, she could hear the crackle of the fire that was causing it. She could hear this, because she could no longer hear the ship's engines. Some time in the last few seconds, they'd stopped working.

  Swearing, she abandoned the instruments and leapt over to The Blimp. She reached down, grabbed her arms and pulled - but all that happened was that Red ended up flat on her front on top of the other mutant's enormous bulk. There was no way she'd be able to pull her up - it defied the laws of physics. Resolving instead to roll her over, she clambered to her knees, braced herself against the rear wall, and pushed, grunting with the effort.

  The Blimp rolled about a centimetre, then flopped back down again.

  The ship, continuing on its pre-set course, plummeted towards the planet. Red realised with a sudden, light-headed relief that they were through the main ring of the automated defence system. They might just make it down in one piece.

  That's when, somewhere behind them, a military satellite locked on target, opened up its laser cannons, and blew the top right off their ship.

  A few kilometres away, Johnny had his own problems. Unlike Red and the Blimp, he'd anticipated the defence system but it hadn't done him a blind bit of good. The shuttle simply wasn't built for this kind of action. Johnny pulled the ship to the left, to the right, to the left again, executing a complicated three-dimensional dance that took them safely past three laser beams that would otherwise have utterly destroyed them. Up ahead, though, the sky above the planet was filled with a cat's cradle of lethal energy rays. Johnny wasn't sure they were going to make it.

  Middenface hunched beside him, his face set in a fierce grimace of concentration, firing plasma torpedoes at anything solid that came within range. As Johnny continued his desperate manoeuvring, his partner managed to take out one satellite in their path, then another whose laser cannon was swivelling round towards them. The planet's surface loomed ever nearer, filling the entire viewscreen, the details of jagged mountains and wisps of cloud getting clearer by the second.

  Above them, the huge mass of another spaceship was navigating the minefield without difficulty. It wasn't even trying to dodge the laser blasts, just absorbing them into its matt-black surface. For a second, Johnny thought it would come to their aid, using its no doubt superior firepower to clear a path through the sky for the smaller vessel. But it just cruised casually past them as if they didn't even exist.

  As the larger ship moved away, Johnny spotted another satellite, cunningly hidden in the hi
ghest layer of cloud. Its unblinking electronic eye fixed on them, and he opened his mouth to shout out a warning, but Middenface was on it already, lashing out with a lethal burst of plasma fire. But his aim was off, and the plasma streaked down the side of the satellite without taking out its heart. As the shuttle streaked past it, so close Johnny felt he could have reached out and touched it, it spat out one last laser burst, like a dying man determined to take as many of his enemies as possible with him.

  Johnny twisted the shuttle sideways but he couldn't avoid the shot entirely. It raked over the side of the vessel and through the left wing, tearing it loose from the body of the ship with a horrible grating noise.

  The controls jumped in his hands, as if the shuttle was a horse that had suddenly decided it didn't much like the reins. He tried to control it, compensating for the lost wing and using the thrusters to steady them, but it was no good. They'd simply taken too much damage.

  Middenface was staring into the viewscreen with an expression of horror. Johnny didn't blame him. Beneath them, the planet's surface was rushing closer and closer, gravity pulling them down to meet its trees and lakes and jagged rocks just as quickly as it could. Johnny fought the controls vainly for a second longer, until they were wrenched out of his hands and the view began to twirl sickeningly around them as the shuttle went into an uncontrollable spin.

  "Johnny," Middenface gabbled, "I've never told ye this-"

  "Save it!" Johnny snapped. He'd be damned if he'd let it end this way. He'd be damned if he'd let himself get killed doing the work of a lowlife like Delater. If Johnny was going to die, it would be on his own terms. Snarling, he grabbed the steering lever again and pushed upwards with all his strength. Slowly, terribly slowly, it began to move. The thrusters spun round and fired back, pushing against the atmosphere in a desperate attempt to slow them down. Johnny used his last reserves of strength to hold the lever in position, then closed his eyes and prayed.

  Incredibly, it worked. The view - now of nothing but trees and rocks and sky- circled slowly around them one last time, then steadied out with the sky very definitely up and the trees very definitely down. He had pulled them out of the spin.

  Not a second too soon. Before he could draw breath, the shuttle struck the first of the trees, jarring them upwards with a force that snapped Johnny's teeth together and smacked Middenface's head back against his chair. The blows were constant after that as the shuttle ploughed through the top layers of the trees, branches snapping off as it passed, each slowing it down just a tiny bit, but none strong enough to resist its vast momentum.

  There was nothing Johnny could do now but cling on for dear life.

  Several kilometres above him, in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, clinging on was all Red could do too. When the entire top half of the ship had torn off, the contents of the cabin had whooshed away with it. As the wreckage plummeted towards the planet's surface below, the only thing holding Red back from certain death was the chair leg to which she was clinging with all her might. Beside her, the Blimp was holding on to Red's legs with an equal tenacity. Red felt like she was being stretched on the rack.

  The Blimp shouted something to her, but her words were ripped away by the wind.

  "What?" Red shouted back.

  "Chutes!" the Blimp screamed. The words seemed to use up the last reserves of her energy, and her hands lost their grip on Red's legs. Frantic, Red twisted round and grabbed her arm, fighting the immense forces pulling against her. For once, the Blimp's body mass was a benefit, the softness of her flesh allowing Red's fingers to sink deep into it, securing a grip. It must have hurt like hell, but the Blimp didn't say anything.

  "Where?" Red roared at her.

  The Blimp looked at her, blank-eyed, paralysed with fear.

  Red dug her nails even deeper into the other mutant's arm. "Where?!" she repeated.

  After an agonising second, the Blimp shouted back, "Under... the... chair!"

  Red turned her head, tried to peer underneath the seat that was her anchor. Around them, the air was getting warmer. The shattered remnants of the ship were beginning to burn, overheating as they tore through the ever-thickening atmosphere. Red and The Blimp would fry long before they smashed to death on the planet's surface. It wasn't much of a consolation.

  But the Blimp was right. There was an anti-grav chute pinned beneath the chair. With it, Red might just have a chance. Trouble was, to get it, she needed a hand, and one hand was currently engaged in the crucial task of clinging on to the chair for dear life. The other was holding on to the Blimp.

  Red only had to think about it for a moment. She let go of the chair, grabbed for the chute, and hoped.

  4 / HANGING AROUND

  His whole world was dark. It was also extremely painful.

  After a few moments, Johnny realised that he must have been knocked unconscious. A few more moments and he remembered why. The crash. Which meant he must have survived it. But what about Middenface?

  A loud groan followed by a stream of swearing from his left reassured him that Middenface was still with him, if not exactly fine. He decided it was about time he opened his eyes.

  The first sight to greet him was a snapped-off branch, sparkling with shards of glass from its journey through the viewscreen, its jagged edge poised centimetres from his left eye. An icy flush passed through his body. If the shuttle had stopped just a few milliseconds later... Very carefully, he released himself from the security webbing which had save his life, and climbed stiffly out of his chair. His cheek scraped on the branch as he squeezed past. Beside him, Middenface was doing the same thing.

  Once they were free, they both spun round, examining the damage to the shuttle. No doubt about it, it was a wreck. The branch that had smashed its way in through the front was just the most obvious piece of damage. The roof, miraculously, had survived relatively unscathed. But the floor was buckled and broken where it had scraped and bounced over the rock-strewn ground before finally coming to a halt. Every loose piece of equipment in the cabin had been flung against one wall or another, denting them and in some cases starting small fires which still smouldered as they watched. The instruments were very definitely dead.

  "Weel," said Middenface, "looks like we'll be finding our own way hame."

  From the outside - once they had blasted the jammed door open and eased their way through the smoking hole - the shuttle looked, if anything, even worse. And Johnny noticed something else, too. When he had first seen the trees of the forest as they plummeted towards them, they had been dusted with the vibrant green foliage of early spring. Now, the colour of the leaves was hidden behind the puffs of pale pink and purple and yellow blossom which hung from every branch. The air was heavy with the smell of pollen. Time was racing around them, and they couldn't afford to waste any more.

  Middenface too was peering round at the dense jungle, a thoughtful look on his face. He turned to Johnny, having to raise his voice slightly to be heard over the hooting and tweeting of the invisible wildlife all around them. "I dinnae suppose we've still got the trackers?" he said.

  Johnny held up the mangled remains of the device that Delater had given them. It had been intended to allow them to keep track of their position on the surface, to locate other members of the team if they got separated, and - most important of all - to home in on what Delater believed to be the location of O'Blarney's base.

  There was no way in hell it would do any of those things ever again.

  "I thought not," said Middenface. "So just how are we going tae find oor arses from oor elbows in this mess?"

  Johnny shrugged. "Keep walking in a straight line till we hit something interesting."

  "It's no' much o' a plan," Middenface protested.

  "Got a better idea?" Johnny asked.

  At that moment, the horizon was lit up with a brilliant streak of fire, as something hurtled from the upper reaches of the atmosphere into the jungle. Moments after it landed, there was the fierce explosion of fusion engines
going critical. The sonic boom reached them about ten seconds later. Johnny figured that meant the crash site was only a few kilometres away from their present position.

  "Aye," Middenface said. "I say we head that way."

  Johnny, already sweating in the jungle heat beneath his constricting armour, frowned. "Why? No way anyone walked away from that alive."

  Middenface looked at him, his face lit with a smile which made it look suddenly boyish. "Got a better idea?" he asked.

  Durham Red watched, mesmerised, as the ship plunged into the foliage a thousand metres below. For a moment it was lost to sight - then a fountain of molten debris burst upwards from the exploding wreckage. The shock waves rocked Red as she floated downward through the air.

  She was floating an awful lot quicker than she would have liked. But that's what happened when two people shared one anti-grav chute, and one of them weighed in at well over two hundred kilos. The chute was made of energy, not matter, so Red couldn't see it actually buckling under the pressure. But she could certainly imagine it.

  Red herself was buckling under the pressure too. The Blimp was clinging to her body with such force that Red was struggling to breathe. She suspected that a rib or two might be cracked, and if the pressure didn't ease up she wasn't sure how much longer she could last. She struggled, trying to loosen the other mutant's grip, but the Blimp just squeezed her arms all the tighter.

  Red opened her mouth to swear at the other woman, then stopped, as she realised that there was a burning smell in the air, and it wasn't coming from the crash site now only seven hundred metres below them. It was coming from the control pod of the chute that Red was clasping tightly in both hands. As soon as she'd registered the smell, she noticed that her hands were getting very warm. The pod was heating up. It was overheating.