The bus, British-made and at least fifty years old, had been making its way through the foothills. In a surreal moment in a surreal country I simply flagged it down and got on. I wasn’t sure whether the people on it were refugees or this was simply some ad hoc commuter service between townships, an attempt at normality flying in the face of what was happening all around. The passengers looked like refugees, dressed in rags and carrying wildly ambitious loads, but so did almost everybody. The Swiss was sitting amongst them. We regarded each other warily and stoically exchanged nodded greetings.
When the driver decided to run the roadblock and the firing started we both managed to get off and get under cover. When the Swiss tried to get back to the burning bus to retrieve his pack I held him back, but he shrugged me off. Perhaps the tribesmen’s diet hadn’t done much for me. Perhaps if I hadn’t tried to stop him he would have made it there and back again before the petrol tank caught. Perhaps if I hadn’t tried to stop him he would have lived.
His last words to me were ‘Pictures’, said whilst tapping his breast pocket. I found a terabyte memory card hidden in a pack of cigarettes. It held just over a thousand photos at ultra-high definition. I guessed he was a photojournalist for one of the glossies, or a freelancer for a high-end photo agency. There must have been some expensive kit that had gone up in the burning bus. No wonder he’d tried to get it back.
I scrolled through them. Portraits of tribesmen, every hair, crease, and gap tooth brought out in infinite detail. Camp life. Landscapes of mountains at sunrise or sunset, gnarled trees, tethered goats. A charred and burnt out truck, contrasted against the yellow of the desert. Like most professional photographers the Swiss had taken ten, twenty, thirty near-identical shots in order to identify the best at his leisure later. Expertly composed and captured, even his worst were better than my best.
But one group differed from the rest. Life in one of the border towns: people, bustle, noise, narrow dirt roads, whitewashed walls with daubed slogans, street hawkers. An air of threat and intimidation. The pictures had a snatched quality at odds with the rest, as though the Swiss didn’t have time to compose and position.
I flicked back and forth through the dozen or so shots. It began with a group of women in burkas, intrusive portraits, but then the Swiss seemed to follow the traffic in the opposite direction. Following, in particular, a handcart, making it way through a mass of donkeys, pick-ups, and bicycles. Children selling cigarettes desperate to make eye contact, armed militia daring you to. At one point the handcart man’s face fills the screen, blurred, too close to focus.
I guessed that the Swiss had seen something and needed to record it for posterity. But he had the sensibility of an artist, not a journalist, so what was it? He’d been allowed to openly take a dozen or so shots and he couldn’t have hidden such a high-def. camera – it would normally need a tripod – so it couldn’t have been anything too controversial.
But sensitive enough to hide the card in a pack of cigarettes.
Looking again, I tried to get as much information about the handcart man as possible. The blurred face, another decent one in profile, but mainly back shots. He wore an ankle length grey robe tied at the waist with a striped sash and had straight, short black hair which probably made him look younger than he was. The way he stooped I guessed at fifty. Other than that, well, let’s say if you were putting together an identity parade you wouldn’t have to look long in Pakistan for a line up.
The contents of the handcart were covered with a sheet except for... and then I saw it.
Hanging below the rear of the cart, in between the handles, was a large cage, rectangular, made of wood or metal, it wasn’t clear. The gaps between the bars were four, perhaps six inches. And looking out from between the bars was a...
I zoomed in to get a better look. A penguin? No, not a penguin. But not a chicken, or any kind of parrot, either. At least none that I recognized.
I flicked back and forth through the shots, now knowing what I was after. I could imagine the Swiss now, dodging through the Kasbah, pushing his way forward, trying to get ahead of the handcart, trying to get the right angle to get his shot.
But a shot of what? I joined up everything I could glean from the pictures. Two foot tall, maybe. Weighty. Flightless, surely? Its wings looked short and stumpy, but cooped up in the cage it was hard to tell. A large black head, almost spherical, which gave the initial impression of a penguin. A white line around a black eye, or just the light catching? I couldn’t tell. A grey body. They didn’t look like feathers, but it was a bird so it had to be. It was a bird... wasn’t it?
As Scott said, keep asking yourself: is this a story? I’d come here wanting to break exclusives about Chinese incursions into Pakistan, or US Special Forces being left behind, embedded, in direct contradiction to presidential promises and UN resolutions. But here I was, on the verge of discovering the penguin-chicken. Was this a story? Yes. But could I convince Scott?
I couldn’t believe that I was taking this seriously. But if I wanted to be the ZBC left-hand armpit correspondent...
A mile or so further up the road from the now cold, black remains of the bus was a settlement hardly worth the name. Wattle and daub, and dry stone walls. Windows hung with goatskin and plastic sheeting, not a pane of glass in sight. Dung fires with nothing cooking over them for my dollars to buy. I showed the pictures of the town to the few toothless inhabitants. Finally I found one with the intelligence to realize that I wasn’t just trying to dazzle him with digital pictures, but I was showing him pictures of something. With much finger pointing he indicated the general direction, and I guessed the level of animation equated to distance. I hitched a ride on a donkey cart climbing the hillside.
Just so Scott didn’t forget me I filed another story. It managed to be both rambling and come in at under sixty seconds, pure travelogue about the people caught up in the crossfire trying to scratch a living out of the dead earth between the rocks.
I could tell, as soon as he came on the webcam, that he was about to blast me out. But he paused, blinking, brow furrowed. “Davey. You look like shit. When did you last eat?”
I paused. I couldn’t recall my last proper meal, anything that had been on a plate, anything that needed cutlery or more than a moment to consume.
“I know what sleep dep sounds like, Davey. I know what malnutrition looks like. It doesn’t play well. Cable viewers like correspondents to look like they haven’t just stepped off the plane, but neither do they want them to have gone native. Kabul, Jalalabad, doesn’t matter. Get yourself back to the city, have a shower. Have some sleep. Shave and a steak. In fact, almost anything beginning with an ‘S’.”
“I’m on to a story, Scott.”
Scott leant back in his seat, grinning. “Yeah, something else that begins with an S that you need to find, Davey.” He began to count off on his fingers. “Sleep, shower, shave, steak, story. And anything else beginning with an S you can get.” And with that his figure blurred towards the screen and was gone.
I arrived a day later, limping with a blister. I’d slept in a crevice between rocks, breakfasted on icy waters in which I had also washed. The rest is kinda blurry. I remember patrolling the streets and the marketplace, grabbing people by the shoulders, trying to find the handcart man. Everybody began to look like him. Young, old, I kept making mistakes. I’d apologize. Mostly they shrugged me away. One or two were less accommodating. Guns and knives were revealed under robes threateningly. There were arguments. I reeled away before I got hit. I remember imitating a bird, miming a cage, waving my hands to indicate size, trying to get people to understand. A small crowd suddenly gathered, laughing at me. Me joining in with them. A headache. A blinding headache. The light hurting my eyes.
And nothing after that.
I woke up lying on straw in the gloom of a small barn or large shed. Chinks of daylight showed through gaps in the walls and roof. All around me were the clucking and scratching of chickens. My initial thought was tha
t I’d been taken hostage.
In the gloom it took some moments to realize that the penguin-chicken was looking at me, its head cocked to one side. It was even bigger than I’d guessed, almost half my height, its thighs as thick as its wings were stunted. I was too tired to be terrified. Too terrified to move.
And then it spoke in a clipped, robotic chant, barely recognizable as English. “You are required to direct this messenger drone to those in authority. Message from the General Tu’huaht of the Mininutian Fleet, which has blockaded your planet for the last one hundred and thirteen of your Earth days. All trade between your planet and other worlds has been denied to you. Your resources are dwindling, and your resistance cannot last. But the General Tu’huaht promises leniency in exchange for your immediate surrender. The General Tu’huaht also promises that any other course will result in destruction and slavery. Message ends.”
It blinked, clucked, scratched at the floor and pecked at some grain. And then it looked up again and repeated the message exactly, word for word, pause for pause, note for note. And then the chicken-penguin went on to repeat it three more times in exactly the same manner before stalking off to a dark corner of the coop. I stared into the darkness to look for any other creatures but it seemed to be alone, towering over the more familiar-looking chickens.
Then I realized that a man was sitting by me on a wooden stool, the handcart man. I had no idea how long he’d been there, whether he’d heard the message from the General Tu’huaht, whether he’d even recognized the sounds as words. He held his fingers up to his mouth to indicate food, at which point I decided that I was still a free man. I nodded.
“Dollars?” he asked, rubbing his fingers together.
“Dollars,” I nodded again.
Exhausted, I fell asleep with the thought that I had to get the message, the recording, because that was what it clearly was, on video. I had no idea what it meant. The world had been laid siege by the Mininutian Fleet? Our planet was cut off from other planets? This was crazy. Utterly crazy. But it was real. And it was a story. Even Scott would have been able to see that if he could see this.
Get a video? I wasn’t thinking big enough. Get the bird. Take it back to the States. This was Pulitzer Prize and Barnum and Bailey all rolled into one. My dreamless sleep was only disturbed by a single gunshot, or so I imagined.
When I awoke the coop was lit by oil lamps hanging from the wooden struts. It was night outside and the temperature had dropped by several degrees. I ached all over. I couldn’t tell whether I was recovering or going down with something.
A plate sat in front of me. Rice, beans, a rough flatbread, and a chicken thigh the size of a baseball bat. “Eat, eat,” the handcart man implored, pushing his dirty fingers to his dirty mouth, grinning.
In the barn the penguin-chicken was nowhere to be seen.
The Lightship
Neil Davies
1.
Commander Aldo Kinnear sprawled on the Rec Room bench, bruised, exhausted and scared. A soldier of the Fris navy, the long-time enemy of humankind, sat opposite, equally bruised. Perhaps it was also exhausted and scared, but Aldo was unable to read any emotion in the harsh, grey, jagged features. They were both armed, yet neither raised a weapon.
The bulkheads of the Lightship Neophyte creaked and groaned. The ancient engines throbbed. In Aldo’s imagination, the rhythmic vibrations felt through the decks of the old ship were its heartbeat, the quiet sibilance of the life support its breath. Neophyte was old, dying, but not yet dead.
It had been Aldo’s job to finish it off. He had not expected it to fight back.
2.
“This ship began broadcasting in 4052. That’s two years before the war began.” Aldo looked up from the data screen and smiled at Lieutenant Caulfield across the Rec Room. “Don’t you find that fascinating Eliot?” he said. “This ship was operational long before any of us were born!”
Eliot Caulfield, sitting on the worn, thinly padded bench that ran around three walls of the room, returned the smile of his superior officer.
“We’ve been here less than three hours and already you’re accessing the historical records of the place,” he said, pausing to take a sip of tepid coffee. “Isn’t that just a little sad?”
Aldo looked at the Beverage Dispenser that clunked and rattled when preparing a drink. He looked at the deck panels, several of them with loose corners. He looked at the stained table tops, the dim lighting, the bench that Eliot sat on, reminiscent of the lecture theatres at the Academy. Finally, he looked back to the small data screen rising out of the counter top, and the ingrained dust in its edges.
“This whole place is history,” he said.
“Once we’ve done our job, it’ll be ancient history,” said Eliot. “The only fascinating thing about this place is that it’s survived two hundred years of war with barely a scratch.”
“Two hundred and six years,” said Aldo. “Just to be superseded by Automatic Buoys.”
“That’s progress.”
“According to this, she’s been attacked by the Fris thirteen times,” said Aldo, reading from the screen as the lines scrolled upwards. “Over half of those times the crew of the Neophyte has been found dead, but the Fris never destroyed her, and never attempted to hold her either. She’s been repaired, re-crewed and started up again.”
“It makes you wonder what the Fris have been up to,” said Eliot, taking another sip of coffee. “For that matter, thirteen is not that many times over the two hundred-odd years she’s been here.”
“Looks like the Fris waited some time before each attack,” said Aldo.
“None of which matters,” said Eliot. “Because we’re here to shut her down for the final time and then she’s off to the scrapheap.”
Both of them started involuntarily as the bulkhead around them moaned and creaked, the sound echoing along the corridors outside the Rec Room long after it had stopped.
“I guess she didn’t like me saying that,” said Eliot, regaining his composure and laughing, unconvincingly.
Aldo said nothing.
3.
“We should have known,” said Aldo, muttering the words to himself. “We should have guessed.”
His fingers tightened on the Browning automatic in his fist as he saw the Fris shift in its seat opposite. With less than a magazine of smart-bullets remaining, he would need to use them wisely. The Fris’s energy weapon was almost depleted, he was reasonably certain of that. But he did not intend to take any chances.
The Fris did not raise its weapon, nor did it show any signs of aggression, only of weariness. When it spoke, its voice was deep, almost growling. But the Galactic was clear and perfectly pronounced, with a slight accent that Aldo could not identify.
“My people believe this place to be cursed. Haunted.”
“And yet you forcefully boarded us to take control of her,” said Aldo, his finger sliding from the trigger of the Browning to the trigger-guard. He was still cautious, suspicious, but he no longer believed a firefight was about to break out.
The Fris shrugged, a curiously human gesture that made Aldo strangely uncomfortable.
“Not all of us are superstitious,” it said. “But finding a like-minded crew can be difficult.”
There was a stutter in the throb of the engines, a shiver through the deck beneath their feet.
Aldo listened intently, but the engines settled back into their regular rhythm and he let out a breath he had not known he’d been holding. If the engines failed, the life support would follow. And he had left his Environment Suit in his cabin.
“This ship will die soon,” said the Fris.
“Then why attack us?” Aldo’s voice was raised, but he could not control it. “Why, time and again, have you tried to take her over?”
“We are at war,” said the Fris, no change in the volume or tone of its voice. “This place is strategically important. The Automatic Buoys are better protected and harder to control.”
There m
ight have been some truth in the answer, Aldo knew, but it was by no means the whole story. Thirteen attempts, fourteen including this one, and each a disaster for both attacker and defender. When there had been survivors, they seemed disoriented, making little sense, telling impossible stories. All but one were hospitalised, permanently, in padded cells. The other had committed suicide before they could reach him.
So far, Aldo was a survivor. But he was already beginning to doubt the reality of his experiences.
4.
The error in judgement lay in believing there was no imminent threat. After all, the last time the Fris had attacked had been almost twenty years ago. The Lightship was in the process of being decommissioned. Why would there be any danger? Consequently, when he settled for a short sleep after a hard day of inventory, Aldo stripped down to his shorts and t-shirt before climbing into the bunk he had assigned himself.
The two-pitch scream of the alarm dragged him from a much needed sleep. Exhausted, he dragged on his trousers and hurried out the door still fastening them. There was no time to find any other clothes.
He caught up with Eliot en-route to the Control Room. Eliot was fully dressed in his Environment Suit and Aldo caught the brief look of surprise on his face. He considered trying to explain, but decided there were more important matters to deal with.
“Who’s on duty?” he said as they hurried along the corridor.
“O’Connor,” said Eliot. “He’s steady. He wouldn’t have hit the alarm without good reason.”
Sergeant Mason O’Connor had been in Aldo’s command for over a year. Eliot’s assessment was justified.
O’Connor was at the old but functional main desk as they entered the Control Room. He wasted no time in explaining the alarm.
“There’s a Fris ship heading in,” he said, indicating the faded but readable scanner screen behind him. “This piece of junk didn’t pick it up until it was almost on top of us. They have cloaking, but nothing a modern scanner wouldn’t have seen through.”
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