Pew! Pew! - Bite My Shiny Metal Pew!

by M. D. Cooper

  It backed reacted to my proximity by drifting backwards, pulling me through the breach.

  The suit was shredded to ribbons as we passed through the hole, long gashes in both sides and sleeves de-pressurising it almost instantly. As I passed into open space, I screwed my eyes shut, and pulled off the rapidly deflating helmet. As I let the useless tatters of plastic drift from my fingers, I replaced the helmet with the VR headset.

  The cold was indescribable. I could feel my limbs caking with ice, and the blood on my face froze solid in less than a second. But thanks to the synthskin, I kept moving.

  The drone’s cam filled my field of vision, and I twisted at its laser cannons until it spun sedately to face the Peter Hall. I squinted at one of the icons in its heads-up display, and swayed as the device fired a small thruster rocket and began moving towards it.

  It took a while to master the controls, given that any icon I glanced at for more than a moment seemed to be activated, but pretty soon I was thundering through the short distance between the two ships. I angled down a few degrees and jetted forward so that the saucer’s underside was floating over my head.

  I let go of one of the laser cannons for a terrifying split-second while I checked the remains of the suit still clinging to my freezing body, and then nodded to myself.

  “Full thrust,” I hissed to myself, aware I was expelling the last traces of my air as I did so, and the drone sped towards the Peter Hall. Or, more accurately, towards the jagged hole in its hull where the fighter had struck earlier.

  This hole was easier to navigate than the breach I’d put in the enemy craft, and in moments my feet were dragging along the frozen red carpet in the remains of the corridor.

  The bulkheads were still down at either end, but the double doors leading to the rehearsal room were unshielded. Too bad.

  Pew! Pew!

  The drone’s cannons made short work of the doors, and in a moment I was standing back in the transporter room, taking a deep breath as the emergency door slammed to the ground behind me.

  I whipped off the headset. Puff, Grizabella, Kraal and Gielgud were ahead of me, already turning in shock, but I had eyes only for the figure on the stage. A scrawny, confused, scared actor who’d just escaped a brutal death at the hands of light opera fanatics on the mean streets of Yorkshire.

  James Fanning. Me. Or rather, a pristine copy.

  “No understudies,” I growled, as my transporter clone opened his mouth to speak. I raised my arm, and slapped at the remaining flare on the ruins of my suit.

  The rocket blasted through the parted ranks of Puff’s company, and straight towards my double. I turned away as it sped straight into his open mouth, and detonated.

  There was a long silence, as bits of my new-born counterpart slapped the cosmic mural behind the stage, sending the whole expanse of fabric billowing. Well, I’d learned an important lesson about the limits of synthskin.

  “You sent me out there to die,” I growled at the old man.

  He began to say something, then stopped himself and shook his head. Then he beamed. “I sent you out to win. You know how to make an entrance, Fanning. Welcome to the crew.”

  In spite of being on the verge of hyperventilating, shedding icicles from every follicle and my nose threatening to drop off in a lumpen frozen mess of blood and cartilage, I couldn’t keep my relieved grin from my face as the actors clustered around to clap me on the back and draw me into tentative hugs.

  Puff’s smile dropped from his face. “Now clean that backcloth, it looks like we’re doing fucking John Webster. And mind Kraal’s North Pole, he’ll sulk for weeks if it’s so much as smudged.”

  Chapter 4: Opening Night

  The journey through what Grizabella insisted on referring to as ‘hypertime’ was a real anti-climax. I was expecting at least groovy hallucinations, a black obelisk and stars wheeling backwards against the Peter Hall’s portholes. Instead, a dull thumping noise sounded through the ship, and we all blacked out for ten seconds or so.

  And then we were in orbit around Jargroth, and on the bridge Puff was handing me the world’s scratchiest sackcloth robe for my Friar Lawrence costume.

  “Congratulations,” I told him curtly. “You’ve found the one fabric in the Universe that can scratch the shit out of synthskin.”

  “Serves you right for trying to breach the contract,” he said, and blew me a kiss. Behind him, Kraal was practising his swordplay in a mirror, and damn it, I felt like an utter tosser but it hurt me to even catch a glimpse of him in Romeo’s costume.

  “Focus,” said the old man, waggling the crystal tip of his cane at me. Its normal blue lustre was looking more greenish under the bridge’s harsh lights and holographic displays. We’re going to be performing in the Imperial parliament building in Jargrothopolis, which has been under rebel control for six months, but which has been abandoned by their Workers’ Council as it’s so close to the front line. Handily, it’s just two streets away from their War Office by the river, so we’ll send you over there after you’ve finished saying ‘there art thou happy’ five dozen bloody times to Kraal in Act 3, Scene 3. You’ll carry out a skilled espionage technique known as scanning everything there that’s not nailed down, before nipping back in time to give Juliet her sleeping draught in Act 4, Scene 1, with the whole interval in between to give you a buffer. Clear?”

  “Crystal,” I said, pushing his cane down as its bobbing flashing tip was getting on my nerves. “Now, how about you explain how just four actors going to stage a traditional production of Romeo and Juliet, if you’re sitting out on the sidelines as director?”

  I’d noticed a while back that Puff was a lot more pleasant to be around once the subject switched back to theatre. He chuckled. “All part of the smoke and mirrors, dear boy. We bulk out the cast with volunteers from the insurgents’ rank and file, with officers for some of the bigger speaking parts. All the lads are so busy trying to spot their mates and laughing at their stupid hats, they never stop to wonder why they’ve not seen any given actor for a while. And we make sure we cast a sufficiently senior officer somewhere in proceedings, so if there is any suspicion falling on us after the show, we’ve got a star witness who’ll swear blind that he was with us all the whole time, for the sake of his career and avoiding a court-martial for negligence, if nothing else.”

  I nodded thoughtfully as Puff wandered away to harangue Kraal about his footwork, and hoisted the hessian robes over my head. The entire wardrobe had been exposed to space during our encounter with the ILO, so intellectually I knew there couldn’t possibly be anything living in it, but even so my skin was crawling within minutes.

  “You’ll get used to it,” said a quiet voice at my elbow. Gielgud was folding origami swans, in some set dressing flourish that Puff had suddenly insisted upon shortly after we completed the hypertime jump. I watched in fascination as his brutal-looking cybernetic fingers folded and tweaked the brightly-coloured sheets of paper with care and precision.

  “Do you mind me asking? If this is so safe, how did you come to lose your arm?”

  He looked up at me with confused eyes. “But I didn’t lose the arm. The...” He took a deep breath. “I was created to be a mech. The arm and my brain are the only original bits of me left, after some dappy waitress crushed the rest of me in a hydraulic press just because she didn’t want to play Hedda Gabler. Or was I trying to murder her to ensure her kids didn’t form a future resistance movement? Sometimes I seem to remember it that way, but that all sounds a bit Banquo if I’m being completely honest. Anyway, Puff found me the rest of this body.”

  I took a step back. “Oh, crikey. Where did he...?”

  The little man shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. We tend to see a lot of battlefields, so I can’t imagine it was anywhere very pleasant. Griz managed to pull off a bit of jiggery-pokery with the transporter, and now here I am, a mech trapped in a humanoid body.”

  “Doesn’t that cause you huge existential issues?”

  He
made one final fold along the swan’s wing and inspected it for a moment as he considered my question. Then he held out the origami object to me with a smile. “Nah, not really. It hurts like hell when I wipe my bum with the wrong hand, though.”

  Grizabella took the swan from Gielgud’s hand before I could reach it, studied it for a brief moment and then tossed it over her shoulder carelessly. “Not bad, Gielgud. Just another four dozen to fold. Now, I’ve engaged the landing auto-pilot, we’re making planetfall in thirty-two minutes. It’s show time, ladies.”

  Space had indeed been boring, but landing was brilliant. I stood at a porthole and watched as the view turned from inky black through violets, greys, whites and finally brilliant blue shades, all set off by the dancing display of flames wreathing the Peter Hall’s base with re-entry.

  As we hit the atmosphere, Grizabella tilted the saucer almost forty-five degrees to reduce the buffeting, and I stared down on an alien world.

  It looked pretty standard, to be honest, like the final approach to Gatwick. Instead of fields fringing the city beneath us, however, I was looking at a flat orange mass of unchecked desert, with a mass of grey oblongs in the middle, which were gradually resolving into individual buildings.

  “They chose to colonise this place, right?” I asked Kraal. “Why wouldn’t they have... terraformed the desert or whatever by now?”

  He looked around, already in his Romeo costume. “That’s kind of what the insurgents are asking,” he whispered.

  We dropped at dizzying speeds towards the city, and I was almost bracing myself for a crash when the saucer levelled out just a hundred metres or so above the surface, and we began bobbing down gently like a sycamore seed in the wind.

  “Hangar tractor beam got us locked,” said Kraal, breathing a sigh of relief. “We’ll be down safe in a minute or two.”

  “Was it ever in doubt?” I asked as the tops of silvery tower blocks began to appear through the porthole.

  He shrugged. “It might look quiet, but there’s a war raging on these streets. You never know... and Grizabella’s a former galactic marine with a deeply impatient streak. I’ve seen her touch down in a built-up area and take out the entire theatre we were supposed to be playing.”

  The Peter Hall gave a sudden lurch, and spun at almost a right angle on its axis, until the tower blocks through the porthole were near-horizontal. Just as I was about to start swearing, a black shape whooshed past at the head of a fearsome contrail. The missile looped around, passing so close to the porthole that I could count its tail fins, before the ship flipped a full revolution on its vertical axis.

  As Kraal and I picked ourselves up from the ubiquitous red theatre carpet, the missile streaked away, apparently finally thwarted, and crashed into a distant tower block. We shielded our eyes as the city skyline exploded into a blinding sheet of flames.

  “Bit close,” Kraal commented mildly.

  I boggled, actually boggled at him. “Bit close? We nearly died!”

  He actually laughed at that. “Nah, no chance. Not with Griz on the stick. It’s a little bit of theatre in itself, the Imperial bunch letting off a pot shot at us as we land, though they know damn well we’re here to do a job for them.”

  “And what about the people in that building?” I asked.

  “Empty, I should think,” Kraal said with a shrug. “I mean, this is a war, and quite a shooty one at that. The only guys up that high will be snipers and looters.”

  I turned to look at the blazing wreckage of the tower block. “Back in my time, of course, there’s people who’d say the deadlier threat would have been the chemicals in the vapour trail.”

  “You mean the water vapour? Why would they ever say that?”

  “Because they’re thick cunts.”

  A nearby door bounced open, and Puff roared out of it, his hair all over the place. “What turd-licking arseferret set off that missile so close to my ship?”

  Grizabella was already pounding down the corridor, her catsuit replaced by Lady Capulet’s severe frock. “Regret to report we were forced to take evasive action within the tractor beam, Mr Puff. From the briefing reports, I’m inferring that Harkreth is manning the city’s defence grid.”

  All the pomp leaked from Puff like a deflating balloon, and he smoothed his out of control silver mane with fluttering fingers. “Harkreth? What demented dodderer gave that raving shitlord a commission here? Why in the name of Marlowe’s crusty balls was I not informed?”

  The two of them strode back to the bridge, Puff shouting increasingly scatalogical insults all the way.

  “Who’s Harkreth?” I asked Kraal.

  The enormous actor looked genuinely worried for the first time. “He’s... well, he’s former STI. Fell out with Puff after one too many imaginative bodily function-based epithets. Went mercenary, and turned out to be quite good at it.”

  This didn’t seem too bad to me so far. “Good for him. So what? Aren’t we working for his bosses?”

  Kraal waggled his fingers non-committally. “Yeah... sort of. I mean, yeah, this time. But this is a guy who knows where the bodies are buried, exactly who else we’ve worked for in the past... he could cause a lot of trouble. And I ought to be honest, he knows how we operate. He’ll know you’ll be out in the field tonight. He may well try and kill you and turn in your intel himself for the money.”

  “Oh. Thanks for the honesty. I guess.” We both turned back to the porthole, as the Peter Hall finally drifted down to a gentle landing in a warehouse-like building, whose roof folder back into place as soon as we were down.

  A few minutes later we were strolling down the exit ramp, Gielgud explaining to me that he’d been supervising the volunteer actors’ rehearsals via vidlink for the past few weeks.

  “Some of them aren’t bad, to be fair. It’s just a pain in the arse having so many understudies,” he grumbled.

  “Why do they have so many -” I stopped, but then trailed off when I caught his look. “Right, yeah, dead men’s shoes. Well, I won’t say I wasn’t tempted myself when I played Laertes...”

  “You’ve never played Laertes, Fanning, you self-aggrandising prickwaxer,” Puff boomed in my ear, though affably enough.

  “Not playing fucking Romeo either, am I?” I muttered.

  “That’s the spirit, dear heart!”

  The five of us gathered under the Peter Hall, looking out at the flat expanse of the deserted hangar without much enthusiasm. It looked to me as though there were supposed to be quite a few other craft in there with us, and their absence didn’t give me a great deal of faith in the current health of the insurgents’ war effort.

  A door creaked open at the far end, letting in a patch of blinding sunlight, which framed three figures in silhouette.

  They stepped towards us, at a sedate stroll. We exchanged glances, and I set off to meet them halfway. “We’re going to be here all day, otherwise. Curtain’s up in four hours.”

  Four hours later...

  “The which if you with patient ears attend,

  What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.”

  My prologue over, I stepped back as the lights clicked off for a moment so all the corpses could stop pretending to be dead. I slipped into the wings as two non-commissioned officers playing Capulet servants began bantering in the market, while the rest of the actors bustled around them looking busy.

  In point of fact, I had a strong suspicion that the “wings” in this theatre was actually something like the robing room for their emperor, but never mind. With all the waiting actors, props and bits of set, it was stuffed tighter than the wings in a proper theatre, so it did the job.

  Puff bustled up to me, flapping his hands in agitation, and unclipped the prop restraints from my wrists and ankles. “Change of plan, dear boy. Bugger ye hence right now and get the job done.”

  I looked at the old man in alarm. “Now? Seriously? Is this because of that Harkreth guy?” To be fair, at this point there were a fair few scenes including
Mercutio’s interminable Queen Mab speech before I’d be needed back on stage, but the shifting agenda unsettled me.

  “No! Well, yes. In a manner of speaking.” Puff’s eyes darted about. “The situation is escalating. We’ve had word of an assault later. The insurgents want to use our neutral presence here as an opportunity to mount an offensive. It wouldn’t be the first time buggers have tried to use us as human shields, but the difference is Harkreth would take great delight in shelling the Peter Hall in immediate retaliation and calling it in as unfortunate collateral damage.”

  I put a hand to my forehead for a moment and took a deep breath, trying to steady my nerves. It didn’t work. “Fuck, Puff, what did you say to this guy to piss him off so much?”

  “I could tell you, dear heart, but I’m afraid you’d never use a toothbrush again. Now, gather your cassock, and get on with it. I want us in orbit well before the balloon goes up.”

  And with that, he opened the door to the network of corridors surrounding the Jargroth parliamentary chamber, and marched me straight from the building.

  It was a strange city. Buildings sprouted from the ground in neat rows, which made the gaps between them streets by default. But though there was definitely some kind of tarmac beneath our feet, the desert beyond blew sand all down the thoroughfares until the city just looked like some kind of climate change propaganda poster vision of London amid sand dunes. But the temperature was dropping out in the desert now that the sun had set, and chill night air blew straight up my hessian robes as Puff bustled me through a side entrance. Forbidding office buildings squatted along the other side of the broad street, apparently ministries and civil service boltholes, which had been mostly abandoned until the conflict was resolved.

  “There we are. Leg it over there, round the corner, over a low wall on to the path leading to their barracks, two minute run and you’re there. Good luck.”

  With that, the door slammed and I was on my own.

  I sighed. They’d made it clear I wasn’t going to get a gun, but I thought they’d at least let me wear some pants. Still, they were only asking me to rob some people who’d been bribed into letting me rob them. For someone who’d recently won a space battle by steering a torpedo with his feet and then hang-gliding back through space off the back of a drone fighter, how hard could this be?