‘Okay,’ I sighed, nodding. ‘I’m all in. Lead the way.’
We cracked open the door of the emergency exit and crept outside.
I wouldn’t describe the mining platform as a war zone. That would probably do a disservice to all those who have served in actual wars. But to a middle-aged widower from Littlewick Green who found himself at the arse-end of time and space, it sure as hell looked like one. Pallets and crates had transformed into billowing bonfires. Tarpaulin fluttered in the artificial wind like tattered flags on a Civil War battlefield. I saw the body of a toad-like engineer lying face down in a pool of engine oil, and hoped it wasn’t that nice old Milty Bootka.
It was somebody though. Maybe someone’s husband or father, too. And their death was all our fault.
Well… a bit our fault, for stealing the spaceship. Mostly the Skrelliks’ fault for shooting a burning plasma hole through the poor guy’s back.
‘Stick close, and keep your head down,’ whispered Pierre, crouching as soon as we left the stairwell. ‘We don’t want your brain removed by some stray shot or eager sniper. Heh. It’s just like being back in Viola’s factory again, right?’
‘Oh yeah. Exactly the same. Swap out the mad aliens for Victorian criminals and you could hardly tell the difference.’
We sprinted forward, hunched over with our heads tucked between our shoulders. The view above was still dominated by that architectural monstrosity, the Roaming Havoc, though around it little ships were fleeing the station like flies being wafted away from sandwiches at a picnic. Some of them made it out. Others were shot down by the frigate.
A small explosion went off in the direction of the energy silos. I ducked behind cover, even though they were still quite some distance away.
‘Just one of the Skrellik soldiers getting excited,’ said Pierre, tugging at my arm. ‘We should keep moving. Those silos will go up like an atom bomb if they aren’t careful. That amount of energy would go for a small fortune, but something tells me the Skrelliks aren’t that smart. Come on.’
There was a thin gangway connecting our platform to the next, on which the square block that was the equipment depot was situated. The infinite depths of space loomed up from either side and underneath, as did a sudden and unprecedented case of vertigo.
To keep my legs from collapsing under me, I cast my eyes away from the gangway and over to our original landing pad. The sleek, black body of our stolen manta-ray ship glistened under the broken, flickering lights. Half a dozen silver-black orbs with blinking red antennas floated around the ship, scanning it with green, holographic matrix grids. An equal number of bone-faced aliens were standing back from it, rifles at the ready.
I hoped the onboard computer wasn’t going to get in any trouble for helping us.
‘George! Hurry up!’
I snapped my head back towards the direction of Pierre’s voice. He was already nearing the other end of the gangway, and had a desperate and annoyed look on his face. I gripped the handrails, pretended that the endless space to either side was nothing but an incredibly detailed oil painting, and hurried over to him. I managed not to get shot, which was nice.
We took cover behind the same stack of crates that Milty Bootka had parked his buggy beside when he dropped us off. By some miracle they weren’t on fire or in pieces. Neither was the depot, much to our mutual relief.
We were about to make a dash for the reception doors when all the screens and speakers around the facility burst into life again. I looked back over my shoulder and saw the manta-ray ship rise up from its landing pad. The temperature of my blood dropped by a few degrees.
The face on the screens grinned and took far too much pleasure in the two words that followed.
‘Time’s up.’
Pierre and I ducked down and wrapped our hands around our heads, expecting the facility to erupt in a series of scorching (and quite possibly nuclear) explosions. But it didn’t. In fact, the only bang we heard at all came from above… and that was more of a rippling, ripping noise. I cracked open an eyelid and peered upwards. Pierre groaned beside me.
‘What are they doing here?’ he cried.
A galactic battleship was emerging from a wormhole above the mining station. It was easily twice the size of the Roaming Havoc and boasted about the same magnitude of firepower. Its metalwork was a glorious, shimmering blue chrome, and its shape that of an angry, armoured sea urchin.
‘Who’s “they”?’ I asked. ‘Is that the security team the foreman was requesting?’
‘Oh no, much worse,’ replied Pierre, his voice wavering. ‘It’s the goddamn Torri-Tau again, only this time with a few millennia’s worth of military might behind them.’
The battleship came to a slow stop beside the Roaming Havoc. Being the shape of a sea urchin, it was capable of aiming its plethora of gun turrets at the Roaming Havoc and the mining facility at the same time.
With a piercing screech the screens all switched channel. The bone-faced alien was replaced by a very blue man with cold, black eyes. He wore a cloak and there was a chain of gold hanging around his neck. From the middle of that chain hung a golden key.
‘Whatever it is you’re thinking of doing, Pierre,’ said the blue man on the screen, ‘I would strongly advise that you don’t. You should have stayed where we left you, you silly man. You would have been safe there. Your friend would have been safe there. Give up now and no harm will come to you. You have my word.’
‘That’s Makka-Soj, the Torri-Tau leader I was telling you about,’ whispered Pierre. He glanced over the top of the crates we were hiding behind. Everyone was watching the screens, even the Skrelliks still terrorising the station. ‘I should have known they’d catch up to us sooner or later. Goddammit.’
‘Does it matter?’ I asked, pulling him back into cover. ‘Can they stop us?’
Pierre grinned. ‘Not if we’re quick, maybe. Besides, how much worse than one warship can two really be?’
Nobody saw us sprint across the gap between our hiding place and the depot - or at least, nobody bothered firing at us if they did. We passed through the reception without administrative incident; the whole building was as deserted and lifeless as a hollow grave. Pierre and I stood on the balcony just inside the warehouse doors, looking down at all the abandoned equipment.
‘There,’ said Pierre, suddenly pointing across the hall. ‘Does that look like a mining vessel to you?’
In the back corner, behind a row of busy shelves, next to the type of wall-to-wall shutters you expect to find in a loading bay, was a vehicle. It looked like one of those little two man helicopters, the sort with snub-nosed fronts that are more window than frame, only without a propellor on the top or tail. It had a couple of small thrusters on its back instead.
‘If it’s between that and the flying forklifts then yeah, I’d say so.’
We hurried down a set of metal stairs and ran across the floor of the warehouse. I was already out of breath by the time we reached the mining craft.
‘You reckon you can fly this thing?’ I pulled open the door on the passenger side and studied the controls. ‘I mean, you needed a fair bit of help with the last spaceship we were in.’
‘Well, this isn’t a spaceship,’ replied Pierre, climbing into his seat. They were leather and looked as if they’d never been sat on. ‘It’s a converted exploratory vessel and the controls are way simpler. Look. Levers for up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards, and turning. Couldn’t be more easy.’
I shrugged. ‘I suppose it’s no harder than a video game.’
‘Wouldn’t know. Never played one. Get that door, will you? Looks like there’s an automatic button on the wall to the right there.’
I hopped off the vessel and jogged across to the red button to the right of the shutters. I paused, my hand hovering in front of it.
‘There isn’t going to be a vacuum of space on the other side of this door, is there?’ I shouted. ‘Because I’m not, erm, wearing a helmet.’
/> Pierre looked around at the warehouse.
‘Shouldn’t be,’ he yelled back. ‘Otherwise everything in the warehouse would get sucked out too, wouldn’t it?’
I punched my palm into the button and ran back to the vehicle. The shutters rose to reveal the great expanse of space outside… but the air stayed in place. I climbed into the vessel and slammed the door shut behind me, just in case.
‘Ready?’ asked Pierre.
‘Nope. Should we be wearing seat belts?’
‘Is there really much point?’
Pierre pressed the button for ignition and the vessel hummed into life. We looked at one another.
‘Well, it’s a good start,’ I said, encouragingly.
Taking longer than either one of us would have liked, Pierre managed to get the vessel to hover a few inches off the ground and turn it so that it faced the open bay door. Dust was billowing down from the ceiling as explosions and rifle fire continued outside. Pebbles of concrete pitter-pattered against the glass of the vessel’s windows. Everything felt muted from inside.
We each took a deep breath, and then Pierre rammed one of the levers forwards and launched us outside.
Things had not improved in our short absence. The Skrellik forces hadn’t blown up the entire facility as they’d threatened, but they were well on their way to getting there. They’d been joined on the ground by a sizeable squadron of Torri-Tau warriors - armoured blue men who weren’t afraid to bring a poisoned javelin to a rifle fight. Dead bodies lay on both sides. The airspace surrounding the station fared little better. Shimmering blue fighter jets chased down their industrial Skrellik counterparts, dancing around the shuttles of engineers still trying to escape. Each battleship was firing its cannons at the other, though both were protected by magnetic shields that glowed whenever they took a hit.
Pierre rose our vessel’s altitude as quickly as he could. I just sat there in our tiny, defenceless shell, praying that neither side would notice us. Soon enough we were directly level with the centre of the cosmic fissure. It was a straight shot, so long as we avoided crashing into the foreman’s office.
‘Bloody hell,’ I whimpered, staring at the glowing circle of white. ‘It looks like a solid wall from this angle.’
‘There’s still time to get out, if you want,’ said Pierre. He was smiling but there wasn’t much humour in it. You know where the door is.’
‘Very funny. Let’s get this over with.’
Pierre slammed the lever down. Once more we launched forwards, picking up more and more speed as we went. Ships whizzed around us. Rockets missed our hull by mere feet and inches. Everything became little more than a blur of black and orange hues.
We were halfway to the fissure when I made the mistake of glancing back over my shoulder.
The Torri-Tau’s battleship had launched a missile… and it was heading right for us.
‘Faster!’ I screamed, making Pierre flinch in his chair. ‘Your blue friends have fired a bloody rocket at us!’
Pierre slammed the lever forward again but it was already as far as it would go. ‘Come on, goddammit. Come on!’
‘Oh God,’ I moaned, digging my fingernails into the leather of my seat. ‘I knew getting past without them noticing us was too much to hope for.’
‘We’ve just got to get to the fissure before the rocket does,’ said Pierre, leaning so far forward in his chair he was practically standing. ‘How close is it?’
‘It’s a rocket - any distance is too close!’
‘How close is it?’
‘Fifty metres, maybe? No, forty… thirty… Jesus Christ, we’re going to die out here…’
‘We’re almost there,’ snapped Pierre, staring straight into the fissure. ‘Just a few seconds more.’
I could quite clearly see the red tip of the missile behind us. ‘Pierre, it’s getting closer… Pierre!’
‘Three, two, one…’
With a silent blink we disappeared into the white fissure…
…and the rocket disappeared after us.
Chapter Twelve
Everything went white. Everything appeared to freeze. Not in temperature, but in time. The universe took on a static quality all of a sudden.
Which is odd, because the universe is never static. It marches forwards, it sometimes repeats itself and, according to information that only recently came to light, it can even rewrite itself… but it is never, ever static.
It was not an experience I much appreciated.
‘Pierre, I don’t feel so good,’ I said, the words falling out of my mouth like a bag of marbles made of treacle. Somebody had taken a blender to my brain and turned it into mashed potato.
With great effort I turned my head away from the rushing whiteness beyond the windscreen and looked at Pierre. I wished I hadn’t. He was alive, and he was intact, but… but it was as if no part of him seemed to fit. Like he’d been painted by Picasso or something, but the oils were still running down the canvas.
I wondered if the same thing was happening to me. I tried to look at my hands, but I didn’t seem to have any. None that I could lift in front of my eyes, anyhow.
‘Kcis eb ot gniog m’I knight I,’ I tried to say, but all the words ran back inside my mouth instead, like milkshake sucked through a straw.
Pierre was moving. He was trying to raise his hand - he still had hands, at least - and point towards the back of the vessel. He was saying something but I couldn’t understand the words. I could hear them, and I could recognise them, but I could not understand them. I dragged my head further around to look where he was pointing.
Instead of shock or horror, I felt a sharp and violent pain in my temples. Only a few metres behind our mining vessel was the missile, still doggedly pursuing us, its metal shell showering apart.
It could have been a millisecond; it could have taken me a thousand years. In that timeless, spaceless fissure they were one and the same. I turned back to the controls and jammed the accelerator level forwards. But it was no use; whether set forwards or back, our speed - or lack thereof - remained the same.
‘George,’ came Pierre’s voice. His lungs were under six feet of salt water. ‘I think we’re going to…’
There was an explosion, or rather an implosion - the rear half of our vehicle was torn away into nothingness. An alarm went off in what was left of our cramped little cabin… but that could have been my imagination. For all I knew, the alarm could have been coming from everywhere else.
We were spinning, spinning through a gap between universes, spinning through a space where there was no up or down, no left or right, no right or wrong way round.
There was a horrible cracking noise, like the sound of a taut and frayed climbing rope snapping in two.
Then suddenly the white was replaced by blues and greens and silver chromes, tumbling in a kaleidoscope of colours and tones and blurred, shapeless streaks, and our screams turned loud and immediate as if they were actually coming from our own mouths, and the nothingness vacuum was swapped for a sharp, cold air, an air that whistled a shrill melody as we fell…
And we were introduced to the ground with a crash.
Chapter Thirteen
For a while I assumed I was dead, which should probably have been a pretty good indicator that I wasn’t. That’s about all I remember doing - assuming the worst. I couldn’t see anything, or hear anything, or even think all that much. Everything felt a painful sort of numb.
I didn’t know what state Pierre was in. I had no way of finding out.
I think I blacked out.
When I came to again, I’d regained my sense of touch. Sound was making a sluggish, reluctant return as well. Grass was brushing against my face, fresh with morning dew. I could hear it rustling. I could hear footsteps stamping it down. I could feel a weight pulling at my arms and legs - not towards the earth, but away from it.
People were talking. Well, they were exchanging grunts. Whether it was an actual form of language was impossible to tell.<
br />
I tried talking but only gurgles came out of my mouth. Nobody replied. But as far as I can tell, nobody hit me to make me stop.
There was blood in my mouth anyway. I tried to spit it out, but it stuck to my lips. It was easier to swallow it.
Somewhere through the grass, I blacked out again.
‘George. George. Wake up.’
I woke into a grey-green haze of a headache, my eyes all out of focus, feeling as if someone had injected glue into all of my joints. There was a faint ringing in my ears and my mouth tasted of copper and two-day hangovers. I blinked heavily as I cast my eyes in the direction of the voice.
It belonged to Pierre. I expected to feel relieved to hear his voice but instead I found looking upon his face to be surprisingly sobering; there was a long, wide, bloody gash across his forehead and a purple bruise was blossoming on the side of his neck. The stitching of his uniform had come loose and one of its arms was hanging off at the shoulder. I wondered if I’d fared any better in the crash. I lifted my hand to my face but it wasn’t my face that stung. My right arm throbbed something terrible.
‘Eurgh,’ I groaned, rubbing my right arm with my left hand. ‘What happened?’
‘The rocket hit us, I guess,’ replied Pierre. ‘We must have been catapulted outside of the fissure by the blast. God knows which universe we’re in right now. Well, I have a rough idea, but…’
For the first time since coming around, I took in our surroundings. We were in a cave, and a particularly damp one at that. Fields of moss and mould grew over the tall, damp walls. A crack in the rocks above us let in a small sliver of light; more flowed softly, muted and stale, from somewhere deeper in the cave. Water, either from rainfall or a subterranean stream, dripped from the ceiling into a shallow, brown pool a few feet long and wide. Pierre was sitting up against a stalagmite pillar. I was lying down, propping myself up on my elbows. Below me, and beside Pierre, were two sets of rudimentary bedding - blankets of straw and grass.
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