by M. D. Cooper
All except Grizabella. She carried on smoking, watching me through narrowed eyes, like a cat.
“I’m confused,” I said, only half-joking, “is this spy training or theatre training? I’m starting to lose track.”
“Maybe both.” She plucked the cigarette from her lips, stared at the cherry-red glowing tip for a moment, then seized my wrist in an iron grip and proceeded to grind it out in the palm of my hand.
I struggled in her clutches; I yelled as I heard the hiss of the burning cigarette smash into my smooth cool skin. I gritted my teeth and screwed my eyes shut against the incoming frenzy of pain… that never arrived.
After a moment, I opened my eyes. The torn remnants of the cigarette butt were cupped in my unmarked palm. Grizabella released my wrist, and I dashed the fragments to the floor.
“We’re kind of pragmatic,” she explained, “and it would be a bit of a waste parsing your entire atomic structure through the ship’s computer without making a few edits. You’ve got five layers of synthskin over your epidermis. It sheds and sweats just like the genuine article. But while it’s on there, you’re resistant to most mundane forms of pain and bladed weapons, tested up to three kilotons of force. In hostile environmental conditions, the pores will close automatically, so you can pretty much swim through an acid lake. You’re also shielded from X-ray and other deep scanning techniques - the synthskin’s smart enough to just report back the image of a normal human body. That cigarette was both to check the tech’s working, and a test of your acting abilities.”
I boggled at her, while all the time stroking the skin on my forearm. It felt no different, right down to the little hairs, occasional freckles, and the knobbly patch on my elbow. “What for?”
Grizabella rolled her eyes, then tried to smile. “OK, it’s probably not obvious from your point of view, but synthskin is kind of proscribed military tech, certainly not the kind of thing you ought to be packing as a touring actor. The security guys probably won’t stub cigarettes out on you, but they might give you an ‘accidental’ jab. Now I’ve seen your genuine pain reflex, I need to see you fake it.”
I was game enough, and began making yelping noises and pulling agonised faces. Grizabella actually laughed, and tossed back her hair as she took a full carton of smokes from her coat pocket. “Nice try. But we’re going to need to singe a few layers of that synthskin before I’m satisfied. You get caught, and the game’s up for all of us.”
It was the method workshop from hell. Even the miracle synthskin wasn’t indestructible, and my stomach began to turn at the rising stench of scorched flesh, as the deranged actor stubbed out countless cigarettes on my hand.
“You’re weird,” I hissed, as she finally reached for a fresh packet, “or just addicted to nicotine. Does it have to be burning? Can you not just give me a granny rub? Or a chinese burn?”
Grizabella paused, her lighter’s flame flickering scant inches from the three cigarettes that dangled limply from her mouth. She considered for a moment, then shrugged, and mumbled around the cigs.
“Well that all just sounds fucking degenerate. Can I not just stick the next one in your eye?”
“Is my eye synthskin?”
She sucked hard on one cigarette until it glowed white-hot. I could see the air shimmering around it. She took it from her mouth, and smiled brightly. “I’ve honestly no idea. But if not, we can just space you, re-teleport you, and I’ll have an even better idea of your pain reflex.”
Re-teleport? I had a sinking feeling that outweighed even the terror of seeing Grizabella advance on me with a deranged grin and a burning cigarette held tight between her fingers at head height, like a psychotic darts player.
I took a step back, trying to convey that it had the potential to be the first of many. Don’t break him… “Grizabella, how long since we left Earth? How many times have I been teleported?”
She giggled, and it stopped just short of being actually demented, but neither in all honesty was it even remotely reassuring.
“We’re actors, not cybernetics specialists, so it might have taken a few passes to get the details right, but don’t be so paranoid. We’ve only just cleared Martian orbit, once we hit the asteroid belt, we’ll make the hypertime jump.”
Hundreds of hours of teenage TV rebelled at that. “Hyperspace?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Astrophysicist, are we?”
Before I could answer that, Grizabella darted forward and stabbed the cigarette into my palm. I doubled over with a guttural cry, pressing the hand to my chest, even as I lashed out wildly with the other arm to push the mad actor away across the room. I crashed to my knees, tears springing to my eyes.
“Fantastic, and finally!” Grizabella crowed. “I totally believed that!”
“That wasn’t acting, you burned a hole in my fucking hand,” I sobbed through gritted teeth. “Get me an ice pack or something?”
She had the decency to look a little concerned as I rolled around on the floor cradling my agonised hand, but of course she blew it almost immediately. “Must have burned through all five layers of synthskin. Still, if you show the burn at security points, it should stop them checking you out too closely.”
“Ice… cold water… anything,” I begged.
“Uh, yeah. Right.” She looked around for a moment in indecision, then her face cleared and she darted towards the stage, where she flipped open a hatch and pulled out a heavy grey canister with a nozzle similar to a fire extinguisher.
“We, uh, never did clear up the eyeball thing, did we?” she said as she pointed the nozzle in the vague direction of my hand. “Probably best you shut them tight for a minute, just in case.”
“In case wha-” I managed before she squeezed the canister’s nozzle and a blast of blueish-white smoke enveloped me. I screwed my eyes tight shut and dreamed of murder, but incredibly the intense pain in my hand was subsiding.
“All better?” she asked after a moment, a little quieter now.
At first I couldn’t open my eyes. Then I tried harder, really putting my eyebrows into it, and was rewarded with the tinkling of tiny ice crystals tumbling from my separating lashes. Grizabella’s face was right in front of me, apparently checking my eyes for damage. With a sudden, dazzling, genuine smile, she put her hand on my cheek.
Now, normally I’d have been pretty into that, but given that she’d spent the last twenty minutes terrorising, confusing, and mutilating me, I was more filled with terror at what she might do to me next. But a moment later, she took her hand away, and showed me three sparkling crystal pearls, nestling in the palm of her hand. “Look James,” she whispered with a giggle, “I froze your tears into diamonds!”
“What the hell was that?” I asked. “Dry ice?”
To my horror, she nodded. “We’d be a pretty sorry theatre without a spot of liquid nitrogen kicking around. Oh don’t look so scandalised, like a pearl-clutching critic or some shit. Does your hand still hurt or not?”
“My entire upper body is numb to all sensation,” I said as I stood up, grasping at the canister for support.
“There you go, then,” Grizabella said. “Now, the next training session is a little more -”
A loud crunching noise sounded beneath us and the floor lurched, sending us both spilling to the ground. I thrust out a hand in panic to try and break my fall, and then blinked.
Somehow, I was standing upside-down with all my weight on one hand, swaying slightly as the room continued to lurch. Grizabella was just a few feet away spinning gently on her head, her face all serene and content.
She caught my eye on her next revolution, and winked. “Perfect timing, sort of. Yeah, gyroscopic implants. We all have them, they’re invaluable for physical comedy. Unless you’re really caught by surprise, you’ll never take a bad fall again.”
Then she frowned. “I suppose we’d better find out what’s going on, though.”
With no apparent effort, Grizabella flipped to her feet and ran for the door. I followed, jo
gging along on my hands for a moment for the sheer novelty, until that niggling wrist pain that I always worry might be an early sign of carpal tunnel syndrome kicked in, and I flipped to my feet as well.
The doors opened with a suitably swishy science-fiction noise, but then I saw what lay immediately beyond them, and I stopped dead in my tracks.
The threadbare red patterned carpet, the flock wallpaper, the framed photos of presumably venerated actors in dramatic black and white poses, the fake brass light fittings…
“We’re in a theatre?” I said, and the flat accusing tone of my voice halted even Grizabella in her tracks.
“No,” she said in a patient drawl, “we’re leaving the theatre… and we’re on our way to the bridge to see what all the shaking’s about. Try to keep up.”
I reeled as I recognised a photo of the Chuckle Brothers carrying a ladder, with hilarious consequences clearly imminent. “I can’t believe I fell for this crap. We’re just in a shabby old theatre! We never even left Earth, did we?”
Grizabella threw an anxious glance over her shoulder, and started to talk really slowly and gently, as though I was a particularly obtuse child. “I’m sure you were expecting flashing lights and turbolifts, but the Peter Hall is our home, and we fitted it out to be comfortable. And if we’re ever stuck for a venue, we can just open the cargo bay doors, roll down the ramp, and do the show right in here. You see?”
I didn’t, I was still convinced I was the victim of some kind of stupidly elaborate practical joke or prank TV show. The trick of getting me from the street and on the stage had been well-played, but this corridor could have been almost any theatre from Whitby Pavilion itself to the West End.
And I was full of these triumphantly rational deductions when the corridors shook and the section of wall nearest Grizabella vanished in a burst of green light.
In contrast to the earlier comparatively gentle lurches, the corridor tilted at least forty-five degrees, spilling me to the ground where I balanced on my left thumb, and watched in horror as a dreadful howling gale of escaping oxygen thundered down the corridor, threatening to bowl Grizabella through the ruined section of wall and into the inky void that was all that remained of a poster of David Warner’s Hamlet. If this was some sort of set-up, it had just become horribly convoluted.
I found my thumb floating up from the carpet as whatever artificial gravity had been keeping our feet on the ground packed in. So I hung helplessly in mid-air as Grizabella slipped towards infinity.
Grizabella had kept her footing, thanks to her gyroscopic implants or just blind luck, but she was reaching desperately towards the polished faux-brass handles of the nearest door with a hollow expression of grim resignation, even as the escaping air flattened and stretched her sharp features across her face.
I took a deep breath while I still could, and shut my eyes. In the black space behind my eyelids, I saw a stark choice unfolding, and I surprised myself with the decision I took. Damn. Turns out I’m a hero after all. I opened my eyes, and Grizabella was sliding backwards inexorably towards the jagged hole in the hull, even as blaring alarms sounded down the corridor over the sound of rushing wind, and heavy bulkhead doors began to descend from the ceiling, attempting to seal off the breach, and us with it.
I reversed my grip on the canister, and activated it, hoping its spray would propel me forward so I could save the day. On my first attempt, the nozzle twisted in my grasp, and slammed me into a full-length portrait of Dame Judi Dench as Titania. Synthskin and gryoscopic implants or not, my nose crunched into the wall and felt close to breaking.
I shook my head to clear it, and tried to ignore the droplets of blood that floated from my nostrils and hung before me in mid-air. Grizabella was starting to speed up, floating just feet away from space with nothing to grab, and the bulkheads half-closed.
I squeezed the canister again, my burned hand clamped tight around the treacherous nozzle. With a hiss of spray, I was blasted down the corridor as I’d first planned. Grizabella’s eyes widened as she saw me tumbling towards her. With the canister in one hand and nozzle in the other, I couldn’t grab her myself, but she looped her arm around my waist and clung on tight.
Unfortunately, that movement was enough to deflect my course so that both of us continued to drift towards the hull breach. I angled the nozzle ahead of us and gave the canister another squeeze, but the last perfunctory dribble of gas barely slowed us at all.
“Didn’t think that through, did you?” Grizabella whispered. The air was getting thin this close to the breach, and ice crystals were beginning to form in her thick hair. “It was supposed to be trust exercises next. You did catch me.”
The ruined wall lay ahead, like a proscenium arch looking out on the cosmos. And as I gazed on it, frantically trying to work out how to avoid breaking the fourth wall by, well, joining it, the inky void was abruptly filled by a sleek, silvery spaceship. The sort that seemed to taper down to one point in front of what I assumed to be the cockpit, with a few other pointy bits on the swept-back wings that looked a lot like exotic weapons. Presumably aware of the damage it had already done, the craft spun on its axis until all the pointy bits were pointing straight at us. A couple of horribly ominous pods on the wings began to glow with a decidedly unpromising lurid green miasma.
I was unclear about a lot of things, but I was very aware, suddenly, that I was drifting towards hard vacuum, defenceless, with a woman I barely knew clamped to my waist, staring down the barrel of an alien starship’s lasers.
Fuck it. I chucked the canister at the ship, a shallow gesture of defiance as much as anything. I was always shit at physics, so the canister’s potential as reaction mass had never registered until it was accelerating into space, and Grizabella and I were hurtling backwards down the corridor towards the closing bulkhead door and safety.
As we whooshed along, I tried in vain to orient us so we were closer to the floor, so we might be able to slip under the descending barrier. It was hopeless. If there was a trick to navigating in zero gravity, it was going to take more than one lucky panicked throw of an empty gas canister to master it.
My back slammed into the door, driving most of the remaining air from my lungs, a process completed half a second later, when Grizabella crashed into my stomach.
She slithered down the door nimbly, dragging me down to its base so we could get through. The fighter craft outside started blasting death rays or something at us, and it was a profound relief when the energy seemed to splash harmlessly across the air, a few feet outside the tear in the hull. They must have activated some sort of shielding, then.
I was gasping for air, and my vision was starting to blur and darken when I tipped forward and Grizabella dragged my feet under the door.
The gap was barely a foot by the time my torso was bumping along the floor, and I did my best to help by pushing myself backward with my fingertips, every muscle tensed against the buffeting wind of precious air escaping into space. So I was staring straight through the tear in the hull when the fighter abruptly exploded in a blossom of orange flame and shiny shards of metal. In spite of all instinct I felt my eyes widen in helpless panic as a jagged shard of fuselage was blown straight towards my face.
The bulkhead finally slammed shut, microseconds before we heard the clang of a sharp bit of detonated spaceship chassis thudding into the other side, right in front of my forehead.
The wind cut out instantly, but before I could even sigh in relief, the sudden stillness was ruined by the imperceptible hum of the artificial gravity coming back online. We both fell to the ground heavily.
Grizabella stretched her foot and pivoted upright in a moment. I tried to imitate her fluid motion, but following the zero gravity experience, my own confused sense of balance was in open conflict with the stabilisers, and I lurched into a standing position like Captain Jack Sparrow in the grip of one of Johnny Depp’s hangovers.
I looked at my trainer hopefully. “So that was like a holographic simulator exer
cise, right?”
She was looking at me closely, as though seeing me clearly for the first time. “No, that all happened. You just flew us out of a hull breach while taking out a hostile gunboat with an empty fire extinguisher. Now I think we need to get to the bridge.”
I prepared for a long jog as I hurried after her, but Grizabella barely made it ten feet before taking an abrupt left and flinging open a set of double doors.
The bridge was another revelation after the white space minimalism of the transporter / rehearsal room, and the Frank Matcham chic of the curving corridor. This new area boasted sleek modernity with white walls, blinking control consoles arranged around a central plinth, and a big-ass swivel chair at the back of the room, overlooking it all. But there was also a heavy element of dressing room shabbiness. There were towels hanging over several of the banks of flashing displays that lined the rear wall, bulky overcoats draped over the back of most of the chairs that ringed the podium, the floor was all but carpeted in dog-eared loose pages from scripts, and there was a row of wig stands on a shelf over a rack of otherwise quite exciting-looking rifles.
Puff and several of his actors/spies were clustered around the podium, cooing at something hidden from me but which was clearly illuminated by the console’s uplit glow. Kraal was standing opposite me, and gave a little cough when he saw Grizabella and I hesitating in the doorway. The other actors whirled round, and then tried to pretend they were just having a nonchalant stretch. Puff merely glowered straight at me, and waved his hand over the podium. It responded by throwing up a display of the Peter Hall floating in a starfield, with a bloom of flames visible just off what I’d decided to call her starboard bow.
He jabbed one plump finger at me, and not in a polite gesture. “Fanning. We were just shot at by, and took significant damage from, a Grellix-class starfighter. We were thinking of having a chat with them and asking them to knock it off, when they exploded, peppering our hull with probably-radioactive shrapnel. Care to shed some light on this, dear heart?”