by M. D. Cooper
I was pretty sure taking down an attacker, however accidentally, could only reasonably count as a good thing, despite the old man’s weird attitude, so I held my head high. “Just, ah, doing my thing.”
He grunted, and snapped his fingers. A hologram of the fighter shimmered into being over the podium, about the size of one of the smaller actors. Grizabella and I watched as its blasters again pulsed their vivid yellow energy beams, again splashing harmlessly over an unseen forcefield. Only this time, they were accompanied by a high-pitched screeching noise. Pew! Pew!
Then, from outside the hologram’s range, a tiny canister flashed into view, ploughing straight into the fighter’s undercarriage. It punctured the craft’s hull like damp tissue and vanished. Seconds later, the ship exploded.
Gielgud scratched his chin with his mechanical arm, almost knocking his teeth out with his grasping and whining servo-assisted fingers. He tried to style it out, staring at me seriously even as I smirked. “You had seconds, if that. How would someone from your primitive background know that the ionic reaction from passing our forceshields would send the canister into a ballistic slingshot velocity, let alone calculate the vector for the throw, given the quantum refraction index? What were you thinking?”
These guys were really starting to get on my tits, breaking my balls over a lucky break which had saved me, Grizabella, and quite possibly everyone else on board. I scratched my own chin, without injury, as I answered him steadily. “What was I thinking? If you must know, it was ‘fuck it’.”
The others all looked to Puff, who just stood staring at me balefully, his jaw clenched. Then the old man shrugged. “Suit yourself, dear heart. Let’s see if you can get that lucky again. We’ve got two more contacts, closing fast.”
“Look, I’m not trying to piss anyone off, it was just a lucky throw!”
Puff was unmoved. “Maybe it was. Now as I said, suit yourself. Your fox-fisting friends from the ILO followed us, and you’re the only one aboard wearing synthskin, so you’re leading the charge.”
He gestured behind me, where Grizabella was holding the world’s most pathetic bin bag spacesuit in one hand, wearing an almost apologetic grimace. Almost. “James, we’re kind of unarmed. And this thing is an internal emergency suit, in case of sudden decompression. You’re the only one who can survive in vacuum wearing this thing for more than three seconds. Not to mention the acceleration stress and hull rupture.”
I narrowed my eyes, suddenly very aware that I’d understood most of that. “What acceleration?”
Puff smiled with all his remaining teeth. “Torpedo tube 3, I think.”
Chapter 3: Press Night
The suit didn’t feel any less flimsy once I was wearing it, a kind of giant semi-inflated plastic bag with an internal microphone and distress flares mounted on the sleeves. As I was hurried along to the Peter Hall’s underbelly, Puff’s voice boomed from speakers apparently hidden behind every framed portrait of history’s theatrical luminaries.
“They seem to be low on inventory. They launched their second fighter, a ratty little drone thing, and their ship is joining the fray. Cone-mounted anti-asteroid laser grid, wouldn’t you believe it? Well, that’s fucking commercial theatre for you.”
“Yes, they’re bastards,” I agreed vaguely, for form’s sake as much as anything. “But what am I doing?”
A heavy sigh huffed from the speakers. “Sorting them out. We’ll put you on board their ship, you give them a damn good rogering. I’d have thought you’d be a bit more keen, after that business back in Whitby.”
“They’ll kill me!”
“Nonsense! That is, I’m sure they’ll try, but you gave a good account of yourself in that alley, and now you can stand on one finger and hoof them in the teeth.”
I dimly remembered a couple of lucky pops, and a portly face staring at me in a bellicose frenzy of bloodlust. “If you say so. And you’ll put me on their ship how… bugger, scratch that, I’ve a horrible feeling I just found out.”
We’d turned a corner and reached what at first looked like a small theatre bar. Indeed, Grizabella bustled straight up to the row of optics behind the counter and began mixing herself a gin and tonic. Ice cubes were already clinking in her glass by the time Kraal had pulled the threadbare seat from a bench on the far wall, to reveal an alcove, filled with…
“Is that a… torpedo?” I ventured, as the huge green man knelt over the hidden compartment, and started tapping on a small panel on the tapering grey cone-shaped object.
Kraal shrugged. “Kind of. We can’t carry live weapons. So no warheads, and even a guidance system would trip security scans. But the dumb shell is inert, and we never throw a prop away.”
With a satisfied bleep, the torpedo’s top half opened up along a seam I could have sworn hadn’t existed a moment ago. As he’d said the interior was completely empty, other than a pillow at one end. I had something of a sinking feeling, confirming my earlier thought. Kraal’s flourishing gesture and expectant look in my direction confirmed it, but I always like these things to be spelled out.
“You want me to get in that?”
He repeated the flourish. It seemed even camper. “Yeah.”
“And you’re going to fire me into the attacking craft? The one with the, ah, nose-cone anti-asteroid laser array?” I asked as I lowered myself into the snug tube in spite of every sensible instinct I possessed, the bag ballooning and billowing all around me to make the task all but impossible.
Grizabella spoke up, barely glancing in my direction as she twirled the contents of her tumbler, ice cubes clinking together like God’s own dice. “Definitely in that general direction. But we did just mention there’s no guidance system. And... to be fair, they’re probably going to at least try and avoid an oncoming torpedo. We’re giving them that much credit.”
I tried to sit up when I heard that, but Kraal pushed me back down. He looked a bit embarrassed about it but his grip was nonetheless emphatic. “But what if you miss? Do I just streak off into space?”
He shook his head as he lowered the lid. “There’s kind of a rudder at the base. We’ll be in radio contact, so if you’re veering off course we’ll let you know so you can give it a bit of a kick.”
I wanted to tell him exactly what I thought about that, but the lid clicked shut. Bastards.
They didn’t hang about, either. A clang sounded above me, presumably as they replaced the cover on the bench, then all went silent. Then I felt a vibration running through the torpedo. Then with a whoosh I accelerated so fast I suspect it was only the synthskin that prevented my balls from popping out of my ears.
With no particular noise to mark the launch, I began floating within the tube, making the pillow even more absurdly useless. Great. More zero-gravity. “So... am I in space?” I asked tentatively, though it came out considerably less articulately due to my teeth rattling with the acceleration.
“Observant fellow,” boomed Puff’s voice from a hidden speaker. “Course looks good, when you feel an impact, the casing will come apart. Pretty much just compressed air charges, but it’ll keep them on their toes. You’ll only get a moment for your big entrance though, so do come up swinging. Tits and teeth, dear boy, tits and teeth!”
“Time to impact?” I asked, mostly to stave off the headache Puff’s bellowing was starting to give me as his voice bounced around the confined space.
“Oh, not long,” he continued breezily. “Ah, the buggers are altering their intercept vector. Unsporting, but still you can’t blame them. Left hand down a bit.” He ended in a creditable Leslie Phillips drawl that had me rolling my eyes until I realised I didn’t know whether he could see me.
I nudged at the paddle between my feet. It was stiff and unyielding, but it finally seemed to budge a fraction of a degree.
“No! Left hand down a bit!” the old man bellowed.
I kicked the paddle to the right instead. “For fuck’s sake, would it have killed you to run me through this stuff before firing
me into a pitched space battle?”
Silence. Perhaps he finally had the decency to feel a little abashed. Crunch! Or maybe it was just show time.
A second crunching impact rattled every bone in my spine, and I fell to the torpedo casing’s ribbed metal floor with a thud as gravity reasserted itself.
No sooner had I fallen than I was flung into the air again as the torpedo bounced with a jarring impact. Something crashed into the left hand side of the missile, and we went into a spin for which no gyroscopic stabiliser could possibly compensate. If it didn’t ease off soon, I’d be going into battle covered in puke.
As we sailed through the air, however, the compressed air charges suddenly kicked in with a sharp pfft! The sound wasn’t dramatic, but suddenly I was drowning in light as the casing peeled away like flower petals opening to the sun, leaving me standing in mid-air like a very pissed-off stamen.
I was floating over the bridge of their ship, which looked much like the Peter Hall’s flight deck, only slightly smaller and with pitch pipes and ukuleles littering every visible surface. To my right, Sequins was busy careering through the hull breach that had let me in.
The other three were wrestling with control consoles even as their ankles rose into the air, and Go Compare had some sort of VR headset wedged over his huge skull. “Someone stop that draught,” he bellowed blindly, “I can’t hear myself shooting!”
Sequins and Courtesan looked up at me dangling in the middle of their bridge, and Courtesan reached for her boa with a savage snarl.
“Nice try,” I said, and fired off one of the flares on my suit.
The incendiary rocket spiralled drunkenly down towards the deck, belching sparks and flashes of magnesium bright flame as it went. They clearly weren’t designed for accuracy, or for range, but it did the job, heading straight for the singer’s snarling face.
I’d forgotten my basic physics again, and abruptly found myself sent tumbling head over heels by the flare’s ignition. As that meant I was facing the opposite direction when the flare exploded with a dull crump and blinding flash, I wasn’t too cross with myself. Bits of Courtesan hurtled in every direction to coat the walls of the bridge with a series of wet splats.
My bin bag suit rebounded gently from the ceiling and I completed another somersault. As I drifted back to the centre of the room, I realised Sailor had released his grip on the console, pushing himself off into zero-gravity so that his feet were aimed straight at my gently orbiting groin.
He was too close to risk my second flare, so I reached out and grabbed his feet, spinning backwards and using his momentum to slingshot myself down to the deck.
As my feet skimmed the floor, I grabbed the first lever I could reach and clung on with all my might.
Unfortunately it seemed to be a navigation console of some kind, and the whole ship lurched heavily to one side as a thruster fired somewhere out on the hull. My legs shot out sideways, but the sudden course correction sent Sailor shooting towards the hull breach. He collided with Sequins and they flew out into vacuum together. Pirouetting. Twats.
I realised the console I was clinging to contained one other object, the VR headset. As I tried to look around wildly, and believe me it’s hard to do anything wildly in zero-gravity, as I was quickly discovering, a meaty fist collided with the side of my head. I was knocked to the ground, and scrabbled around to try and grab something to keep me anchored there.
Go Compare was clearly unused to freefall as well, and was drifting backwards away from me, more or less at ground level, his arms windmilling in a futile attempt to slow his drift, and his round face filled with open bloodlust.
“You’ve holed my beautiful ship, you utter bastard!” the man wailed. “But you’ll perish too, and the drone’s firing on Puff and his melodramatic bucket of scum, even as we speak.”
God, he was really boring. My flailing fingers caught the edges of the headset, spilled to the ground when Go Compare slugged me against the console.
It was a squeaky tight fit pulling the gadget over my head while wearing the inflatable suit, but abruptly my field of vision was filled with a starfield, in the middle of which the Peter Hall was growing steadily bigger, as streaks of green laser fire blasted towards it. Its shields seemed to be holding, but also retracting closer and closer to the hull as they began to wither under the onslaught. If only I could...
I blinked with the sudden blaze of light as the headset was torn from my face. Go Compare punched me hard in the face, and I felt the distinctive crunch of cartilage as my nose broke beneath the synthskin. Warm blood again dribbled over my mouth, to rise up within the flabby helmet as bouncing droplets. I reached behind me, but the only thing I could feel was the discarded headset.
“Don’t you understand? Your only chance is to help me stabilise this ship! It’s over!”
I was fed up with my nose getting messed up. “It’s not over,” I said, fixing him with a steely stare over my ruined face, “not until the fat tenor sings.”
Flushing red, he raised his huge fist behind his head, ready to pummel my face beyond recognition.
Pew! Pew!
Go Compare’s huge round head burst like a watermelon, spraying blood and brains all over the few bits of wall which weren’t already decorated by bits of Courtesan.
The hull breach was filled by a spherical object bristling with laser cannons, about the size of a supermarket shopping trolley. The drone, reacting to the assault on its last known pilot. Another countermeasure someone could usefully have told me about earlier. I’d been so close to blasting the man with a flare the moment the torpedo had blown apart. I took a deep breath, which only served to remind me I was getting low on air and open to the vacuum of space.
“All sorted,” I said.
There was a pause, and then Puff’s voice came through. “Ah, James! Splendid work! We were always moderately sure you’d come through. Good show.”
There was a definite click as the channel closed.
“Thanks,” I said. “The ship’s holed, and the bridge is sealed off. So how am I getting back over to you? Matter transporter again?”
After another paused, the channel clicked open. “Back to us, dear boy? Not sure I follow.”
“Well, I cleared out all the bad guys, but this crate’s buggered, I need to evacuate pretty urgently.”
There was a slightly awkward cough over the channel, and I could hear some arguing voices in the background. Eventually Puff spoke again. “Ah, I thought you were a bit more gung-ho about going than I expected. We, ah, fired you at them, virtually unarmed, in a torpedo you were steering with your feet, does that not suggest anything to you about the nature of the mission?”
My blood ran cold. “This was a suicide mission?”
“Bingo! That’s the very word I was looking for! Good lad!”
“But, I’m still alive!”
“Yes, and we’re all suitably impressed by your resilience and pluck! But it sounds like you won’t be alive in a minute, by all accounts. Never mind, dear boy, we’ll power up the matter transporter and have James Fanning back with us in a jiffy.”
My momentary relief shattered as the real meaning of his words sunk in, underscored by Grizabella’s earlier comments. “You’re going to abandon me, and whip up a copy?”
More arguing in the background, but Puff’s voice was steady. “Yes, seeing as we’ve still got your print in the transporter’s cache. You’re pretty roughed up, and we’ve got a job to do. Now, be a good sport and clear the comms, would you?”
The channel clicked out, with a decidedly final tone.
Bastards! I looked around the gory wreck of the bridge, at the hole in the ceiling which had virtually finished sucking all air from the room, and the lethal drone that hovered just outside, passively scanning the surrounding area. My microphone began to bleep quietly, letting me know the suit was low on air. I was getting cold, and the bridge’s lighting flashed down into emergency red.
I was screwed.
I raised my arm to cover my face in an instinctive and futile gesture to try and ward off the killing stroke, only to be dazzled by a sudden blaze of light and, inexplicably, a round of applause.
After a few seconds had passed and I still hadn’t been skewered horribly, I finally lowered my arm. I found myself standing on a raised platform in a white-walled room about the size of a decent pub. Before me stood Puff, cane tucked under his arm, and flanked by a semi-circle of amused… people. They all looked human, more or less, but whether it was the woman’s six inch fingers, or the gentle greenish tint of the immensely muscular man standing behind her, or the cybernetic arm on the slender pale man opposite them, they all had a hint of otherness.
“Oh, very good,” bellowed Puff, with one emphatically final clap of his meaty hands before he retrieved his cane from under his arm, “then, fall, Caesar! Yes, capital!”
The others smiled encouragingly, but I had other things on my mind. “What the fuck just happened?”
Long-fingered woman rolled her eyes. “The fuck you think happened? Matter transporter, obviously.”
Behind them all, a pair of double doors were blown open in a ball of flame, triggering a howling gale. Almost immediately, a heavy steel shutter slammed down across the ruined doorway, cutting off the wind and flames, leaving a gore-streaked figure with their close-cropped hair full of ice crystals, their eyes obscured by weird glowing goggles, and the lower half of their face caked in blood. I looked closer, incredibly he looked sort of familiar...
Bastards, I thought again as I floated up towards the hull breach. Up close, the hole was surprisingly small, and there was no way my inflated spacesuit would pass through its jagged edges unscathed.
So be it. I took the deepest breath of my life, and reached through the hole to grab the drone with both hands, clasping the barrel of a laser cannon in each fist.