by Brian Hughes
“How dare you!” Cissy’s voice had now assumed the inflection of total outrage. “You crushed my employer…”
“It was an accident.”
“You let loose the most vicious killers in world history...”
Hogan hurled his arms above his head in a display of bewilderment. “One bloody mistake and y’ never hear the last of it. Look, Cissy...”
Bringing his narrow eyes level with her own diaphanous ovums he gave her a meaningful stare. “You just can’t go around treating people the way you do. You never possessed me. You have no right to possess another human being. Try accepting people the way they are or leaving them alone in future.”
Then the tears began to well. Tears large enough for beetles to drown in.
“What bloody future?” There was a tremble in Cissy’s voice that meant it was teetering on the edge of despair. “I mean, be honest, how the Hell are we supposed to get out of this one? I was born alone. I’ll die alone. Well, apart from a selfish bastard with a square jaw and a crap computer! Nobody’s ever loved me. Nobody’s ever said one nice thing to me in my whole life.”
Commander Hogan wasn’t a bastard. Well, actually he was. But even the most hard-hearted, obstinate, selfish bachelor of bastards has a soft spot somewhere and Marshal’s had just been touched by this dramatic appeal.
“For what it’s worth Cissy…” He spoke in the softest tone that he could muster. “I l...l...” The word was proving to be a stumbling block for his tongue. “L...like you. You’ve sort of grown on me throughout our little adventure.”
There was a pause for thought. “Like a tumour.” He smiled optimistically, adding, “I think you could be very pretty with a bit of work. If that’s what matters to you.”
“Really?” Cissy raised her ungainly features, her nose all blotchy and red.
“Yes, really...” He squeezed her tiny hand gently. Not gently enough to prevent her fingers from overlapping with a painful crunch but gently enough to reassure her anyhow. “Now let’s try and get out of here before we’re chopped into mincemeat and fried in a giant wok.”
Cissy stirred herself into action. “What do you recommend?”
Hogan stared at the impenetrable exit, held into position by rusted rivets. “Do you reckon y’ could bite a hole in that door?”
Chapter Ten: Great Expectations
A shudder broke through the stillness. It sounded as though somebody had dropped a wrecking bar onto the floor of the cell. It was followed by the sort of vibrating noise that cartoon characters experience after falling down a manhole. The sound concluded in a cacophony of crashes appended by several unrepeatable oaths.
Momentarily the brig turned blue as a dazzling brightness surged into every cranny. In the centre of the wall Commander Hogan’s skeleton pulsed violently, one smouldering digit still thrust into the wires of a circuit board. The exhibition concluded with a deafening buzz before the room was plunged back into darkness.
At length Hogan emerged into the circle of light cast from the bolt hole, engrossed in a rectangular sheet of metal. His hair had sprouted into incinerated helter-skelters that stood erect from his head.
“How’d you get on then?” Cissy unwound her fragile fingers from her knees, clambered to her feet and peered expectantly at the object.
“Well…the door’s shagged...” he muttered disconsolately. “Another couple of minutes of that and me large intestine would have been shagged as well.”
“So we’re stuck?” Cissy’s bottom lip curled downwards.
“Far from it. I managed to connect ANN’s neural net up to the ship’s main computer. So long as her personality doesn’t ‘back-up’ the door should open any moment.”
A pregnant couple of minutes crawled past. Neither spoke, both waiting patiently. Then a vacuous clunk stretched out from the darkness and the four-inch-thick slab ground open revealing a slender shaft of light peppered with dust motes.
“There y’ go. Am I a genius or what?”
“What?”
When it came to electronics Commander Hogan probably was a genius. And like most others of that ilk he had no knowledge of the depth of his ability. Unfortunately the programmers of ANN’s neural network, despite their insistence to the contrary, were not geniuses at all. Their flippant inclusion of several worthless back-up personalities was about as much use in an emergency as a chamber pot made from salt.
The room erupted into a ‘Sight & Sound Sensation,’ orange and blue lights flickering maniacally around the walls. A shriek that sounded similar to a sea lion with tender haemorrhoids assaulted their ears. ANN’s back-up system had failed, the image of a fat, blubbery drunkard swimming immediately to mind.
“BOLLOCKS! Let’s get out of here!”
Number Thirty-four, Ashbourne Road. A black outline of a black house with black bushes. A black telegraph pole sprouted up from a black stone wall set against the deep black backdrop of the black night sky. Absolute blackness.
Well…almost!
One marginal crack of light could be glimpsed every so often from the corner of the window, as though somebody was trying to spell something out in Morse code.
Allison Moore gently folded the curtain back into place. She breathed heavily, pacing the lounge, completely swamped by her fluffy dressing gown. A pair of slippers with rabbit’s ears growing stupidly from the toes swallowed her square feet. The garbled sounds of Adult Ricky danced a polka across the room from the television housed in the corner.
Allison Moore, although only short, had a much greater sense of self-importance than her stature required. She moved across the carpet like a small opera house on wheels, revolving at the ornate fireplace before returning to the curtains and carefully tugging them apart once more.
She peered out into the night with her piggy eyes.
Nothing! Not even the customary cat scrounging in the bin by the gatepost. Her gaze fell instead on her own reflection in the latticed windowpanes. She checked the watch cutting into her freckled wrist like cheesewire, then stared back out into the diminishing perspective of the night.
“Where are they? They should have been here by now!”
Corridors scattered in all directions. Tunnels constructed from the same bolted metal as the cell but with yellow and black chevrons. Dark forms pounded, echoing across gothic intersections, their guns raised for action and their sunglasses glistening.
Two figures flattened themselves into pastry-stars against the wall. So motionless that, had it not been for the slow breathing and the occasional flash of brace, one might never have known they were there at all.
At length Marshal Hogan craned his head forwards into the dim grey light that filtered throughout the great craft. It was followed a few seconds later by Cissy’s own head about a foot lower down.
“I just don’t understand. There ought to be an Emergency Escape Shuttle!”
“Perhaps somebody’s borrowed it.” Cissy squealed rather than whispered. “It might return in a bit?”
That hadn’t exactly been meant as a question but the sentence had crumpled up towards the end.
“No!” Hogan snorted, checking the ceiling above his head. “They’re only for use in an extreme emergency.”
“Such as?”
“Such as when the Firestar collides with a bloody big asteroid. Or a planet!” He turned to look at his companion. “Or gets eaten by the great galactic monocled amoeba! This one was obviously stolen! God alone knows why.”
He tapped the brackets where the shuttlecraft ought to have been attached. “Curiouser and curiouser.”
“So...” Cissy slapped her hands together, attempting to maintain an ever-hopeful smile. “What now?”
“The medical lab.” Hogan indicated the general direction with a nod. He wasn’t altogether sure how he came to have a chart of the craft ingrained into his memory, but right now there wasn’t much point in worrying about it. “There should be some sort of escape hatch there.”
He lurched forwards
, then reached a thoughtful halt.
“There might also be some sort of explanation as to what’s going on around here.” He nodded to himself. “It’s about time we found out, don’t y’ think?”
Allison tucked her rotund toes beneath her gargantuan bottom, allowing her suet dumpling features to stare out from the gurning mantle of her dressing-gown collar. Through the fog of steam that rose from her cocoa she could make out the dial on the domed carriage clock adorning the mantle-piece.
Its hands slowly turned, chopping up the minutes into a never-ending progression of seconds.
Quarter past nine. And she’d said they’d be here at nine o’clock sharp.
Her pale lips, that against all odds were almost as freckled as her face, blew a circular hole in the miasma. The clock dial became more visible but the hour remained the same.
With the sort of slurp that an aardvark would have made in an ocean of insects she settled uncomfortably into the armchair and stared straight through the Ricky Lake Show. On into the depths of her own worried imagination.
She checked her watch.
Then she shook it and held it up against her ear. Not that it did any good. Digital watches have never yet been known to tick. Somehow the action made her feel a smidgen better.
“She said nine!” she repeated getting up from the armchair and nervously patrolling the apartment. She stopped by the shovel and bucket leaning up against the slate fireplace. Two implements of the long night’s work, damp and bespattered with mud. “I do hope that nothing’s gone wrong this time!”
The medical laboratory wasn’t exactly what Cissy had expected from a technologically advanced civilisation. She tried to take into account that the Great Empires had been at war for thousands of years. But still it proved impossible to equate what basically resembled a garage that would have had the Thailand Health Authority turning in its grave with what she’d imagined before they’d entered.
Twenty-four hours ago Cissy would probably have broken down into tears as her dreams of progress were shattered. But twenty-four hours can sometimes be a long time and Cissy was growing adjusted to disappointment.
There were no glass doors with engravings of snakes entwined about staffs on them. No grumpy but amiable doctors wielding asthma-inhalers and studying old-fashioned mono tape-recorders hung about their necks on fragile cords. No gigantic wall-panel that made a sort of musical heartbeat with illuminated pointers that meant bugger all.
What there was instead was a series of greasy pewter tables, cluttered with saws and evil looking instruments. Not to mention the circular metal bands with ferocious spikes running through them at fantastic angles. Something bubbled and spat by her hand. It might have been an experiment that some scientist was conducting. It might just as easily have been somebody’s teapot. Cissy wasn’t exactly sure of anything in life anymore.
One thing that the laboratory did contain that managed to raise Cissy’s spirits a fraction was a hatchway. It was embedded into the floor with a wheel at its centre. The sort of wheel that was designed to turn with a steaming hiss as the air lock was broken.
Hogan wiped the oily sheen from an untended monitor with the cuff of his coat. Then he studied the angular characters on the display, his forehead knotting into a frown.
“Who the Hell is Amanda Duck?”
“Amanda Duck?” Cissy tiptoed up, glad to be of some assistance. She stared at the monitor, not wanting to show her ignorance about such highly advanced matters. “Amanda Duck’s the local welfare officer.”
Hogan screwed up one eyeball. Cissy decided that she ought to add more.
“She often calls on Mother. To see how she’s getting on.” She thought for a moment. “Mother doesn’t like her much. She used to belt her with her walking stick and call her ‘An Interferin’ Slag!’”
Tugging a diamond shaped box from a slot below the monitor, Hogan studied it in the dim glow. It was black with yellow buttons, inscribed in the same peculiar calligraphy as everything else onboard the Firestar. However, this object was surmounted by a lethal looking needle, stabbing upwards from one corner.
“What’s that?” enquired Cissy.
“It’s a DNA reconstructer.” Hogan twisted it between his palms, trying to determine its current setting. Unable to penetrate the layer of grot on the LCD he dampened one corner of his shirt cuff with a salubrious tongue and set about polishing the surface.
“What does it do?”
“Would y’ believe that it reconstructs DNA?” He shoved the instrument carefully into his pocket. Then he smartly span around, examining the other artefacts strewn across the worktops. In the distance the banshee’s wail of the sirens continued.
“Don’t you think we’d better make a move,” said Cissy, disguising her anxiety by picking up a serrated blade and staring at it blankly.
“Ah…now that’s interesting!”
Hogan studied his reflection in the large metallic sphere occupying a sizeable portion of the chamber. The globe was bolted together around a central seam, having been constructed from two separate halves. The words ‘arrogant,’ ‘vain’ and ‘bastard’ fleetingly traipsed through Cissy’s mind, successfully avoiding the route that led directly out of her mouth.
Surrounding the pedestal on which the larger sphere was set several smaller objects, about the size of cricket balls, were balanced. Hogan lifted one with cautious respect.
“What’s interesting?”
“That is!”
Cissy stumbled forward, cupped her hands and managed to catch the shining orb the commander had thrown casually towards her. Hardly daring to move, her imagination now running rampant, she raised her bullfrog eyes and peered into his narrowing expression.
“Remember me telling you about that Tachyon Bomb?”
“No...”
“No…you probably don’t.” Briefly disappointed by his cohort, Marshal continued regardless. “That’s because you never listen, Cissy. You ought to try it sometime. You never know, y’ might learn something to your advantage.”
“What about it?” Sweat was starting to straddle Cecilia’s temples in frightened beads.
“Well, a Tachyon bomb of that size...” All eyes now fell on the gently humming globe in the nest of Cissy’s fingers. “Should be enough to turn one of our glutinous friends into a smouldering bucket of boiled semolina!”
“About this size...?” Cissy nodded at the object and swallowed steadily.
“Yeah. Generally leaves a crater about the size of St. Pauline’s Cathedral in London.” Hogan plucked another from its dais and gave it a scuff with his sleeve. “Not very stable y’ see. Creates all sorts of problems.”
“St. Paul’s!” corrected Cissy. When fear had a stranglehold her more pedantic nature tended to move into the unoccupied sections of her nervous system. “So! Let me get this straight. You’ve just chucked a highly explosive bomb at me, right?”
“God no!”
Turning back to the larger globe Hogan licked the top phalanx of his middle finger. Then he attempted to smooth out his bushy eyebrows whilst staring intently at his distorted reflection. “No. This is the mother Tachyon bomb.”
Cissy gawked, almost dropped the sphere, steadied her nerves and shouted, “What? That bloody thing?”
“Magnificent feat of modern engineering!” He breathed a small patch of condensation onto the Tachyon Bomb’s shell before polishing it with admiration. “The Tachyon particles are all directed at the central column of...”
“And what sort of BLOODY CRATER WOULD THAT MAKE?”
He stopped short, chewing his upper lip in cogitation. “About the size of North Wales.”
He nodded in agreement with himself.
“Roughly,” he added. “From what I’ve heard that’s not exactly a bad thing...”
“So...so...” Cissy hunted desperately for the correct words. “What the Hell’s going on?”
“I’m not sure.” Hogan tapped his lips, then with a massive, heart-stopping mov
ement of the arm ripped a circle of metal from the hull of the bomb. Along with it came a collection of wires and fuses. Cissy’s heart reached her mouth where it pumped dramatically, caged in by the metal bars of her teeth. “The bits of the jigsaw puzzle are coming together. There’s some sort of picture starting to emerge. But…”
He cast the assortment of circuitry onto the deck.
“There’s one or two pieces still missing.” Having checked the monitor screen behind him once again Hogan continued, “Where’s Patternoster Row?”
“Patternoster Row?”
That was where the conversation ended. All along it had only been a matter of time before some blundering guard came charging through the door. And that’s exactly what one did right now.
It was closely pursued by several more. Proud figures dressed in black uniforms buttoned about the necks. They bumped into one another with the sort of remarkable stupidity normally reserved for bluebottles and plate-glass windows. The room filled with chattering and squealing.
A shadow stretched through the doorway. It was accompanied by a second patch of darkness, this one sporting a bulbous head.
Both shadows crinkled over the rivets and danced across the arc-welded joints. Seconds later Waldorf staggered forwards, his knees buckling under him as the momentum of the top half of his body outweighed that of the lower half. The lengthy fingers of Colonel Vosh stretched out behind him, at about the height of the small of his back.
Waldorf regained his composure following which an animated conversation sprang up.
It was a pity that Cecilia was unable to translate because the discussion ran something along the following lines: