by M. D. Cooper
Puff sighed. “Ach, tepid wankjuice and fuckeration,” he muttered, before turning around and hitting the troops with his widest grin.
“Harkreth, dear old thing! Whatever gave you that queer notion?” he bellowed out loud, his rich tones rolling back from the hangar’s far wall.
“I can’t be sure, Grin, but my suspicions were first aroused when my command post was infiltrated by unknown agents while the most notorious spy in show business was in town to entertain the enemy. Call me paranoid, but I couldn’t help but put two and two together at that point.”
“Me?” Puff boomed, “In a command post? Under cover of darkness? With my reputation? Ding dong!”
I looked on aghast as the old man threw the soldiers a lusty wink. Even worse, I was fairly sure a few of them were sniggering.
Puff raised his hands in a vaguely placatory gesture. “It’s really nothing to get so exercised about, dear heart! Just a teensy administrative cock-up - the boy here got caught in a skirmish, crossed the lines by mistake in all the confusion, and pinched your intel by mistake. Could have happened to anyone.”
“It really couldn’t,” Harkreth said, looking straight at me for the first time, with an expression of incredulity and almost awe that I didn’t like one bit. “So are you going to execute the miserable whelp?”
Puff smirked as I spluttered. “I probably should, of course, but decent actors are hard to find. And of course, he’s RADA-trained…”
“What? I’m bloody not -” I caught the old man’s sharp look and switched gears mid-breath, “-not in the habit of advertising that. It’s not always good for my credibility. Not edgy enough. Yeah.”
“Look,” the old man said, spreading his hands wide and smiling, “there’s really no harm done. The boy here ballsed up, but he’s proved his mettle as far as I’m concerned. Your security needs some work, and now you know where the weak links are. And the lad’s so anxious not to be shot, he’ll gladly scamper over to this side’s HQ as planned, and have your stuff for you in a jiffy or twenty.”
Harkreth looked far from mollified, but lowered his rifle. Behind him, the shiny black-suited soldiers also began to shoulder arms, though with a distinctly sulky air. Even though he was the one they were pissed off not to be zapping, I kind of understood. It was a bit like Chekov: you put a gun on stage in Act I, it needs to be fired in Act III. And if you suit up in sleek battle armour and pack every gun your quartermaster can think of for a cloaked commando raid across a warzone at midnight, you kind of expect that you’ll get to laser some fools before handing back the kit at the debrief. I strongly suspected they’d be taking potshots at anything that was stupid enough to move while they were traipsing back across the lines.
All in all, it was a shame when Grizabella ran from the ship with a broad grin on her face. “Guys, we made bank after all, I just brokered a sale to the insurgents! They asked a few pointed questions about what Jimmy was doing crossing the enemy lines when he was supposed to be doing soliloquies, but I told them, ‘Everyone’s a fucking critic these days, shut the fuck up and pay me,’ like you always do - and it worked!”
There was a long silence as Grizabella’s smile froze and grew ever more brittle as she noticed my horrified grimace, followed by Puff’s stoniest glower, followed by the chunky clicking of half a dozen laser rifles being raised and primed. “Oh… sodding grumblearsed buttnuggets.”
“Like I said, Puff, you dicked us.” Harkreth trained his rifle straight between the old man’s eyes. “Sorry, old man.”
Puff scowled. “Dicked you? You pox-ridden fartsack, I wouldn’t dick you with your mother’s.”
I nudged Grizabella, who was still standing with her face frozen in a rictus of shock. “You’d better do something. He dropped a Mom Bomb. It’s going to kick off.”
“Oh, hell yes it is,” she breathed. “You have no idea.”
Staring down the barrel of half a dozen nasty laser weapons, Puff took a deep breath, and stood a little straighter. With his free hand, he yanked the twine from his ponytail, and shook out his mane of silver hair so that it settled around his shoulders like snow. With a grand flourish of the same hand, he threw off his cloak, which fluttered and billowed to the ground behind him. He stood and faced the soldiers; a stocky bear of a man, who had no doubt played heroes, tyrants and warriors alike in his time, but for all that just an old man with only a stick to defend himself from a salvo of white-hot laser death. For all Puff’s grandstanding, I realised, this was a barbaric way for a great man to die.
“Are you quite finished?” called Harkreth, the faintest note of regret underscoring his jibe.
Puff answered only with a sad smile, and that was when I noticed just how tightly the old man was gripping his cane. And the rotating crystal that surmounted it seemed to be a lot more violet than the placid blue gemstone I remembered from my ‘audition’.
I took a step towards Grizabella, only to find she was already accelerating away up the ship’s ramp.
“You could have walked away, Harkreth,” Puff said in a calm tone, but one which carried weird harmonics that bounced around my frontal lobe and made me wish I’d made more considered life choices, “but you couldn’t let it lie. And now you have the gall to stand there and threaten me, when I’m nothing more or less than a very foolish, fond old man.”
Grizabella was out of sight now, back safely in the ship, but I barely noticed, as I watched with fascinated horror as the soldiers squeezed the trigger studs on their assorted laser rifles, plasma cannons and BFG-series artillery pieces. The weapons were not responding, and the troopers were understandably nonplussed, slapping the butts of their lethal weaponry, shaking the guns, and in one case straight out of the earliest silent films, even reversing their rifle and peering into the muzzle while pumping the trigger mechanism compulsively.
I took another step towards the ship. A moment earlier, I’d just been grateful that the assorted energy weapons were no longer trained on me, though I had felt a bit guilty about that. Suddenly, I felt a huge wave of pity for those very same soldiers, right down to their doubtless shiny black stealth socks. And that emption, and the impulse to scurry away up the ramp to safety, it all flowed from the ridiculous old ham actor leaning on a crystal cane before me.
As Harkreth scowled at his own suddenly useless rifle, Puff turned for a fraction of a second and fired off a conspiratorial wink at me. Given the eyepatch, he might just have been blinking, but there was that glint in the old man’s eye.
Puff took a deep breath.
Harkreth snarled, as his comrades continued to struggle with their unresponsive weapons.
The old man raised his free hand.
“Oh…” he declaimed, and his voice was beautiful, it was compelling, and I felt tears spring to his eyes even as the echoes began to roll back from the hangar’s far wall.
The soldiers were transfixed at the sound of the old man’s voice, lowering their guns, and cocking their heads as though to better savour those mellifluous tones.
And then the screaming started. The troops staggered, clutching themselves in sudden agony. I looked on in confusion and mounting revulsion as viscous pink liquid began pooling around their boots.
Harkreth, his visor still up, screamed loudest of all, in impotent fury as well as agony, and I looked up to see those cruel scarred features blurring, and running into each other.
Melting. They were all melting, pinkish fluid now seeping from every seam, join and vent in their ridiculous armour. As the soldiers began to collapse wetly to whatever remained of their knees, even the barrels of their useless laser rifles were beginning to wilt and drip darker liquid.
Puff stared at the unfolding carnage he had somehow wrought, holding the stricken men within the baleful gaze of his single eye. The screams intensified, beginning to sound unpleasantly like gargling as the soldiers began the grisly process of drowning in their own liquified flesh.
In a few moments the screams began to die away, as it became harder
to tell where the puddle of pink and black streaked fluid ended and where the soaking melting armour began, rivulets of liquid rust running over every surface.
One soldier cuffed at his own helmet in desperation, as though trying to escape his armour. Instead the heavy powered gauntlet collapsed into a splash of inky liquid, falling to the puddle below and sending droplets of liquid trooper flying into the air. The man’s hand had given away along with the gauntlet, revealing a bright white stump of bone that was running like candlewax.
The soldier fell forward into the puddle of his own remains, and continued to melt away into the floor, unmoving.
Harkreth was the last to fall, his bare skull gleaming white even as it began to run, making him look like a skeleton with a particularly sweaty hangover. He reached out to Puff with the remnants of one ruined arm, then froze and pitched forward to the ground where whatever was left of him burst apart, horribly.
A few moments later, it was all over. Where a group of soldiers had stood, there was now a widening slick of gently bubbling goo, predominantly dark pink, but shot through with streaks of reds, white, and a metallic black. The smell of hot fat assailed my nostrils, and I shuddered as the bile rose in his throat.
Puff sensed the reaction, and turned sharply from contemplating his handiwork. “I wouldn’t, lad. I think the floor’s quite colourful enough, don’t you?”
With a hard swallow, I did his best to compose myself. I stepped up to the old man’s side, gesturing at the puddle. “How did you - space stuff, right?”
“Not exactly.” Puff’s voice was steady, with no trace of those weird harmonics, but he looked weary, as though he was feeling every decade of the immense age he looked to have reached. The old man handed me his cane. It was almost uncomfortably warm, and he rummaged in his tunic for a moment before producing a box of matches.
I thought he was going to spark up a cigar or something, which would have been distasteful enough, but instead the old man balanced a match with its head against the strip, at a right angle to the box. Then he looked at me with a weary smile.
“Come on, dear boy. You’re not telling me you never moved an audience to tears?”
With his free thumb and index finger, he flicked the match, so that its head ignited against the strip and flared as it was already tumbling end over end towards the puddle’s surface.
The match landed with a sucking plop, and for the briefest moment, that seemed to be that. Then the puddle of melted troopers erupted in a creeping carpet of flame that quickly swept across the whole mess until it was alive with dancing, brightly-coloured ribbons of fire.
“See? It’s practically a chemistry lesson, all those different colours. Still, best not tarry...” Puff turned on his heel, grabbed his cane back from my unresisting fingers, and sauntered back up the ramp and into the ship.
I tore my eyes away from the display as the grisly remains boiled away in the fire’s intense heat. I’d signed up with a murderous psychopath, and I still hadn’t even had a chance to do any acting. For a long moment, I stared at the ramshackle old ship, and considered my options.
But I knew in my heart I was only taking a moment to indulge my finer feelings. I was both light years and centuries away from home, in the middle of a warzone consisting entirely of people I’d just robbed, and people I’d just been trying to rob. As such, I had the same survival chances as the single bottle of prosecco at a book launch. Which reminded me, I’d left half a drink on the bridge.
“On with the motley,” I muttered, and walked up the ramp, which retracted behind me. Moments later, I clung to the bar as the Peter Hall blasted off, leaving behind a hangar empty but for a puddle of dead soldiers, flaming gently like a Christmas pudding from hell.
The others would all be on the bridge busying themselves with take-off procedures, but I still had no idea about how the ship actually worked. So I reasoned I had a few minutes to myself with an unattended bar, and every reason in the world to get outrageously shit-faced.
Atmospheric buffeting made it difficult to mix anything, so I made do with a few glasses of wine on the way up. As we left orbit, however, I reached for the martini.
“Pour me one, while you’re at it.” Kraal appeared from the corridor, and sat on the bench over the torpedo tube.
I obliged without a word, and quickly took the drinks over. He watched me the whole time in silence.
“You’re wondering what the hell you’ve done to your life, right?”
I sat down next to him, and we clinked glasses. “I got past that hours ago,” I said, “Now I’ve moved on to wondering how an old man with a stick can melt a small army. And wondering what galactic power could possibly care about these petty little conflicts to the extent of hiring us.”
Kraal’s lips twisted slightly, clearly wondering how much he was allowed to tell me. Eventually, he tipped his glass towards me in a salute.
“I’ve seen actors fight for the mere privilege of auditioning for the STI. Not particularly impressive fights, granted, but they were slapping the air and flouncing like nobody’s business, and you were just plucked from a provincial stage in the deep past. Have you not wondered why Puff came to you?”
“Kraal, ‘dear boy’, I might not be a megastar but I’m still an actor. I let my professional ego deal with that kind of awkward question.”
The reptilian actor’s delicate fins rippled with a slightly more vivid green shade as he leaned forward. “I guess this is the first time you’ve spent more than a minute in this part of the ship. Perhaps you should take a look around.”
He threw back his drink, and walked out towards the bridge, pausing only to put his empty glass back neatly on the bar.
I stayed on the bench, staring at where he’d been sitting.
Or rather the framed black and white photo that hung on the wall directly behind his seat.
The framed black and white photo of my parents, dressed up as eighteenth century highwaymen and juggling.
While standing in front of the backcloth from the Peter Hall’s rehearsal room.
THE END
— — —
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A lifelong Doctor Who fan, Andrew Lawston sits in the pub and writes in a variety of genres from pulp superhero adventure to translations of 18th Century French literature. He is also an experienced theatre actor, and his King Lear was the toast of Croydon. Andrew lives in SW London with his lovely wife, lively cocker spaniel, and aloof black cat.
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Table of Contents
Stealing Trouble
; Chapter One: Auspicious Beginnings
Chapter Two: Blast from the Past
Chapter Three: Getting Down to Business
Chapter Four: Invitation to Garden
Chapter Five: Art Appreciation 101
Chapter Six: Tenuous Alliances
Chapter Seven: A Daring Escape
Chapter Eight: Frenemies?
Chapter Nine: Debts Paid
Invasion of the Kaviis
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
A Visit from my Cyborg Nana
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
The Horrible Habits of Humans
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
THREE MONTHS LATER
The Lone Ranger Returns
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Swarm of the Zom-Bees
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Vermillion
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7