A few minutes of this I found as boring as talking to engineers in a bar. How had the others coped? Judging from their expressions, quite badly. At last, the final Zog zogged off into welcome silence.
“One of them said that there is an event going on later?” I asked Martin.
“That will be a relief,” he replied.
“What goes on?”
“Every captive is taken before the Master, and either accepted into the Followers of Zog, or sacrificed to the Mad God.”
I thought about it. “On balance then, it might be a good idea to get away before that.”
The chanting from the hidden speakers started up again, and I noticed that quite a number of people were now chanting along. It wasn’t exactly a difficult chant to learn, and there wasn’t anything else to do in here, anyway.
“You can see why it will be a relief,” said Lewis as the chanting finally ended. “Ah. Highlight of the day.”
At the far side of the room, the entire wall folded back on itself, revealing a set of tables laden with food and drink. Most of the prisoners stood up and fell on the food, displaying quite appalling table manners.
“That’s the highlight?” I asked.
Martin had drawn most of the Free Union crews around us. “We think that the food is drugged,” one told me.
“But you eat it anyway?”
“It’s that or starve. And if you go to sleep, at least you don’t have to listen to the blasted chanting!”
The sound of the Followers of Zog celebrating their Word echoed all around the tables. At the other end of the room, the sound was mercifully lessened.
“Why haven’t you tried a breakout?” I asked.
“Lack of space suits,” Lewis told me. “The locks on the door are very basic. I could pick them in moments. But the first thing that happened when our ships were captured was that the space suits were all confiscated.”
“Mine weren’t. There are two suits hidden inside my Speedbird.”
Lewis and Martin looked at me with some hope.
“We won’t all get into one small space scout,” said Bill. “We’ll have to leave some of us behind.”
“No, we won’t,” I said. “Anyone of ours who isn’t totally under their mind control can come. We’ll take my Speedbird: and we’ll need the crews to operate those Vipers!”
“It’ll never work. We’ll just get killed,” sulked one of the prisoners.
“We’re going to be killed anyway!” pointed out Martin.
“Speak for yourself. I’m a pilot. They don’t kill the pilots, we all get to join. Celebrate the Word!”
“That’s defeatist talk,” I told him.
“No, that’s sense. The Word is Zog, and Zog is the Word!” He pushed off into the crowd of prisoners around the food tables.
Martin shrugged. “Sorry, Frank. But He’s been here longer than the rest of us, and I think that the chanting and the drugs have got to him.”
“He wouldn’t be the first, I suppose,” I agreed. “When shall we make a break for it?”
“Now would be a good time,” said a Free Union man in a pilot’s flight suit. “Charlie looks like he’s heading for the door to reveal our plan!”
“Let’s split before he splits on us!” agreed Martin.
In a tight group we walked towards the only door to the prison. Charlie was standing there, talking into a speakerphone. We broke into a run, and reached the door just as it was opened. Charlie walked through, and the door slammed shut behind him.
Only it didn’t, quite. Bill threw himself forward, sliding across the floor and managed to get one boot in the way. He cried in pain as the sharp edge of the door broke his ankle, but he had stopped the prison door from closing for us. Several desperate hands seized the edge of the door and pulled at it, chanting “Zog! Zog! Zog!” Several very motivated hands grabbed at the edge of the door and heaved, trying to open it wider. Being well motivated, we just about won.
Martin, Lewis and I pushed ourselves through the gap. Bill got slightly trampled, but we ignored his complaints. The corridor held only four of the Followers of Zog, and we threw ourselves on them and confiscated their weapons.
“Haven’t you heard about the Word?” pleaded one of them.
“I’ve heard the Word!” agreed Lewis.
The Followers of Zog stopped struggling and looked delighted. “Zog is the Word! Everyone is talking about the Word!”
Lewis punched the Follower he was holding so hard that the poor man slid several yards down the corridor and ended up against the wall. “Actions speak louder than some Words,” he snarled before jumping up and down (on another prone Follower of Zog) and wringing the hand he had used for the punch. “That hurt!” he moaned.
Martin had been directing some of the crew to carry Bill, who could not walk on his broken ankle. “Let’s go!” We started running down the corridor towards the airlocks.
Speakers set in the walls of the corridor started playing the chants of Zog, praising the Word. And intermittently calling on all loyal Followers of Zog to hunt us down and kill us in the name of their Merciful and Forgiving God. Naturally the airlocks were guarded, and the guards were armed. I shouted encouragement to my fellows, and they responded by running past me and falling on the guards. The exchange of fire missed me entirely, but I thrust myself into the thin of the fight as I heard more feet running after us.
Martin opened the airlock and we all pushed inside the space dock and locked the door.
“What if they open it from the corridor?” asked one of the crew.
Another promptly fired into the door lock, ruining it. A silence fell over the gathering and we all looked at him in horror.
“You do know that there’s no way out now, don’t you?” I told him.
“Yes, there is,” he replied. He pointed to the other door. “That takes us into the space dock. The ships are there. All you have to do is to get the space suits you told us about, take the control modules out of the service access ports, and then we fly away!”
Put like that, it sounded quite easy. Of course, it wasn’t. Each of the ships in the dock had a guard. Each guard had a weapon, and none of them had any scruples about using them. A fusillade of shots hammered around the airlock door. Martin peered cautiously around the edge of the door and aimed at one of the guards. He missed, but the shot went so close that the guard had to dive for cover, dropping his weapon. Another of the crew did the same, and before long the rate of fire from the guards fell away. Of course, they might simply have run out of ammunition, and then run away, or called for reinforcements.
Martin broke for the nearest ship. When he had taken enough steps to make it impossible to dive back into cover, firing started again. Some of the others who had weapons rolled out into the dock and began firing back, giving Martin cover to reach the ship and the dropped firearm.
Behind us, Followers of Zog began hammering on the broken door of the airlock. Slowly, they started to force the door to open. It was hard work, only a small crack, but soon they would be able to force the pointy end of a gun into the gap and start shooting at us. It was time to go.
“Devils take the hindmost!” I shouted.
After the idiots and the brave, frequently an interchangeable description in my opinion, had charged out into the slackening line of fire, I made my own run for it. To my considerable relief I made it to the Speedbird, with Lewis beside me.
“Look!” shouted Lewis into my ear.
I was glad to look as he had just deafened me. he was pointing at a lump sticking out of the Speedbird near the hatch. Lewis grabbed it, rammed his fingernails under the rim of the lump and pulled. It came away, leaving a hole in the hull. I gave a shriek of horror, but Lewis dropped the lump of metal on the floor, and slid a cover I hadn’t noticed into place to cover the hole.
“You’re free!” he shouted.
I didn’t mind being deafened by that. I opened the hatch and dived into the welcome shelter of my Speedbird. Two flig
ht suited crew members followed me in before I could lock the doors, to my annoyance.
“We don’t need to go EVA to get these ships free after all!” shouted Lewis at me as the hatch closed. I waved at him and bolted for the flight deck. Annoyingly, the others followed me and insisted on introducing themselves as Steve and Graham.
“What are your specialities?” I wanted to know.
“I’m a chef,” replied Graham. How entirely useful. We could throw hard-boiled eggs at the nearest space ship in self-defence.
“Engineer,” replied Steve. “Specialising in maintenance of defence pods.”
I smiled sweetly at him. It was time my luck produced something useful. “Check ours out then, in case these Zog nutters have damaged something.”
“Gotcha.” Steve walked purposefully off the flight deck and headed into the dark recesses of the Speedbird’s interior.
“Coffee!” I demanded.
Graham wandered off in search of the nectar of the Gods, and I prepped the Speedbird for flight. Steve reappeared on the flight deck.
“All seems good. I don’t think they’ve had time to mess with anything, Captain.”
Being back on a ship seemed to have restored some sense of military order. All to the good. The vidscreens showed that most of the Free Union flight crews were still pinned down by the guards, whose fire power seemed inexhaustible. Perhaps Zog did provide for his Followers? Anyway, I opened up the weapons controls and Steve and I laid down enough covering fire for the crews to reach some of the other Viper Scout ships. Outside, the firing slackened off.
I opened the comms computer.
“Have you heard about the Word? Everyone is talking about the Word!” shouted the speaker, then returned to a more normal volume. “Zog the Merciful and Forgiving would like to assure the candidates who have chosen not to attend his ceremony tonight…”
“That’s us,” said Graham unnecessarily. The coffee he was carrying however was entirely necessary, and I grabbed a mug gratefully.
“That he will not hold it against them when he judges them in the afterlife they are about to experience,” chortled the voice from the comms channel.
I waited no longer, but triggered the autodock release and the power lever at the same time. The Speedbird shuddered, and pulled away from the space station, gathering speed.
“Look out!” yelled Graham, as the proximity alert warning screamed in terror. That seemed to be such a good example that I joined in, and took immediate evasive action. The torpedoes aimed at us missed, and smashed into the docking area before exploding. The whole space station shook, and began to slow its rotation. Through the broad windows we could see the Followers of Zog experience the fun of being weightless, although judging by their waving arms they didn’t appreciate it as much as they should. I glanced at the vidscreens. We were being attacked by a StarDestroyer with a big image of Zog at his most Merciful painted on the nose.
“Where are the Vipers?” I shouted, and rolled the Speedbird out of the path of some other torpedoes. “We could use some help.”
“Following! They’ve all left the dock.”
I activated the defence screens and then fired a few mines out in the general direction of the StarDestroyer. “Good. They can help in this fight, then.”
Graham turned from the vidscreens to look at me. “There’s nothing they can do, Captain. When we took them over from The Merchant Princes, the weapons bays were all empty.”
I swore, and twisted the Speedbird again. “Tell them to get going!”
Steve started talking urgently into the comms computer, as I twisted and turned. The Speedbird lurched as one strike got through the defence screens. The sound of the hit hammered through the flight deck. Steve went white and Graham fainted. I cursed.
“Get in the rear and see what the damage is!” I ordered, and turned the Speedbird back towards the space station. Steve ran from the flight deck to the engine room to see what he could do. Graham woke up. He hauled himself up until he could see the vidscreens over the edge of the flight console; screamed and fainted again. Ahead of us loomed the just about rotating shape of the space station.
I would have liked to see if the Vipers had got away, but couldn’t afford to take my attention from the vidscreen. The proximity alert was winding itself into a frenzy and finally exploded, to my considerable relief. The firing from behind stopped, as the StarDestroyer realised that every missed shot would hit their own space refuge.
“What are you doing?” asked Steve, appearing at the door to the flight deck.
“Watch…”
I dropped one hand onto the directional jets control console and waited… then hit the appropriate button. The Speedbird dropped into a violent negative rotational turn, arcing between the ring of the space station and the inner core. I kept the turn going, and we shot out of the inner zone, passed below the StarDestroyer and kept on outwards. Steve reached across me and used the defence controls to spit a slew of space mines at the StarDestroyer behind us. As we accelerated, the rear vidscreen lit up as the mines began to explode.
“Good shooting!” I told him.
“Actually, the defence pod is so damaged I thought it best to empty all the mines in case any of them exploded inside your ship!”
“Oh.”
“Look, there are the Vipers!”
Ahead of us, the small flotilla of Viper scout ships waited for us. Behind us, the vidscreens showed a scene of mayhem and chaos, explosions and debris. The Followers of Zog were unlikely to be following us. I hoped.
Then the comms channel opened again. “The Word of Zog is Merciful. The Word, the Word, everyone knows about the Word. Do not think that you are forgotten. We will meet again.”
I reached out and turned that frequency off. “Let’s go home.” The Vipers formed up on the Speedbird, and after making sure that all the ships had the correct coordinates set into their navcomms, the whole group accelerated to VH, and flashed out of normal space, heading for Star Fleet Base.
Chapter eight
The rewards of virtue
“Star Fleet Base: this is Speedbird Six Sixty-Six, inbound, at outer reporting perimeter. Five unregistered Viper class scouts, also under Free Union control, in formation.”
“Speedbird Six Sixty-Six, report mission code.”
“Speedbird mission codes are, er… sorry. I seem to have spilt coffee on them. Again.” I spared a moment to glare at Graham, who had jogged my elbow at the critical moment and helped me completely obscure the codes needed for safe passage through the outer defences.
“Speedbird, hold position.”
I cursed and cut the power. The Speedbird drifted gently at the furthest perimeter from the huge space station, well aware that all the defence systems would be locked onto the scout ship. The five Vipers just behind me kept a ragged formation on us.
“Speedbird Six Sixty-Six, without mission codes your access is being sent for approval. Hold position.”
“Star Fleet Base, Speedbird: instructions acknowledged.”
Steve tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at the vidscreens showing the sides of the ship. In each a Stardestroyer had suddenly appeared. Clearly, we were under guard. Star Fleet Base was taking no chances with the sudden appearance of an unexpected flotilla at the outer perimeter.
“Speedbird Six Sixty-Six, Star Fleet Base. Report personnel onboard.”
“Speedbird carries myself and two others. Colonel Rosto’s men, recovered from a combat position.”
“Speedbird, the five Viper class ships in formation with you. They are unregistered vessels and accordingly will be treated as such.”
“Star Fleet Base, Speedbird Six Sixty-Six. These are our missing scout ships, recovered during an active mission under Colonel Rosto’s auspices.”
“Speedbird, you are ordered to disembark and transfer to the shuttle that will now mate with your airlock. No baggage is to be carried except any sensitive papers.”
I looked at Steve. He was as sur
prised as I was.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Is this normal?”
“Even I’ve never been treated like this before. Maybe it’s your fault?”
Steve glowered at me and was about to return a pithy retort or even hit me when the Speedbird trembled briefly from a gentle impact on the hull.
“Shuttle docking sequence completed,” announced a computerised voice through the comms system.
Feet, clad in heavy military boots, sounded on the stairs leading from the airlock. With a sigh that was almost as heavy as the boots, I left the flight deck to meet the visitors.
“What’s going on, Frank?” asked Steve.
“Are we in trouble?” asked Graham, his hand shaking as he drank more coffee.
“What do you think?” I asked, as a helmet appeared on the stairs.
The helmet was followed by a face with a stern expression and a fierce moustache. The body underneath that wore the uniform of a sergeant in the Free Union Space Marines, a notoriously violent and unpredictable bunch who no doubt all had issues with their parentage that would not bear rigorous examination.
The sergeant was followed by a captain and two troopers, the whole cavalcade being armed to the teeth. After them trailed a Reconnaisance Unit pilot I knew.
“Peter,” I greeted him. “What’s the craic?”
“Don’t talk to him!” ordered the captain. “Captain Russell is in trouble. Do you want to join him?”
Peter gave me an apologetic glance, and scuttled past us all into the flight deck.
“Captain Russell, you are under arrest, and being taken into custody. These other two men are being treated as potential witnesses and will be held as such.”
Now I was really confused. “What am I supposed to have done this time, then?” I asked.
“This time?” asked Graham.
“What do you mean, this time?” repeated Steve.
“No talking to the prisoner!” barked the sergeant. “Detail will form up!”
The two troopers promptly took up positions behind us, and the captain flapped a hand in the general direction of the stairs. The options were a bit limited, so reluctantly I made my way down the stairs into the airlock. The airlock was being guarded by two more marines, who gave me professional, blank looks and then pointed through the airlock. One of the troopers behind me gave me a shove between the shoulders, and taking that as a hint I left my faithful Speedbird and crossed into the marines’ shuttle.
Infinity Is For Losers Page 12