‘How did you get here?’
Wobbler frowned.
‘How did we get here?’ he said. ‘One minute I was . . . was . . . and then here I was. Here we were.’
‘Come to that, where did all the milk and burgers come from?’ said Bigmac.
‘It’s all right,’ said Yo-less. ‘I told you. We’re not really here anyway. We’re just anxiety projections. I read about it in a book.’
‘That’s a relief, then,’ said Wobbler. ‘That’s worth knowing when you’re a billion miles out in space. Anyway . . . so how do we get back?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Johnny. ‘I generally do it by dying.’
‘Is there some other way?’ said Yo-less, after a long, thoughtful pause.
‘I don’t think there is for me. This is game space. You have to die to get out,’ said Johnny. ‘I think you can probably just fly back. I’m not definitely sure any harm can come to you. You’re not playing . . . in your heads, I mean.’
‘Well—’ Wobbler began.
‘But I should go soon, if I was you,’ said Johnny. ‘Before some more players arrive.’
‘We’d stay and help,’ said Wobbler, ‘but there’s no guns on these things, you see.’
He sounded worried.
‘Yeah. Silly of me not to have dreamed of any,’ said Johnny, kindly.
‘Yo-less might be right and we’re just stuff in your head,’ said Wobbler. ‘But even people in dreams don’t want to die, I expect.’
‘Right.’
‘You going to be in school tomorrow?’
‘Might be.’
‘Right. Well, then . . . chow.’
‘See you.’
‘You hang in there, right, Johnny?’ said Yo-less anxiously.
‘I’ll try to.’
‘Yeah, give them aliens hell, my man!’ said Bigmac, as the tankers turned.
Johnny could hear them still talking as the three ships accelerated away.
‘That was a foe-par, Bigmac. Johnny’s on the aliens’ side!’
‘What? You mean they’re on our side?’
‘No, they’re on their side. And so is he.’
‘Whose side are we on, then?’
‘We’re on his side.’
‘Oh. Right. Er. Yo-less?’
‘What?’
‘So who’s on our side?’
‘Eh? He is, I suppose.’
‘So is there anyone on the other side?’
The ships became dots on the radar, and then vanished off the edge of the screen.
Where to, Johnny had no idea.
I may have wished them here, or dreamed them, or something. But I mustn’t do it again. Maybe they’re not really here, but I don’t want to see my friends die. I don’t want to see anybody die.
At least I’m on my side.
He scanned the sky. After a while the Captain said: ‘You are not leaving?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Until you die, you mean.’
Johnny shrugged.
‘It’s the only way out,’ she said. ‘Fight until you die. That’s how all games go. You just hope you can get a bit further each time.’
There were still no more attackers on the screen. The fleet looked as if it wasn’t moving, but it had built up quite a speed. Every second was taking it further from game space. Every second meant that fewer and fewer players would have the patience or determination to go on looking for it.
He helped himself to some of the horrible nourishing soup from its spigot.
‘Johnny?’
‘Yes?’
‘I believe I upset you some time ago by suggesting that humans are bloodthirsty and dangerous.’
‘Well. Yes. A bit.’
‘In that case . . . I would like to say . . . I am grateful.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘That you are on our side.’
‘Yes, but I’m not bloodthirsty.’
‘Then I think perhaps a little while ago someone else must have been flying your ship?’
‘No. It’s hard to explain it to you,’ said Johnny. First of all, he’d have to be able to explain it to himself.
‘Shall I embark upon a less troubling topic of conversation?’
‘You don’t have to,’ said Johnny. ‘I mean, you’re in charge. You must have things to do.’
‘Oh, spaceships fly themselves,’ said the Captain. ‘They keep going until they hit things. There is little to do. Tend the wounded and so on. I seldom have a chance to talk to humans. So . . . What is sexist?’
‘What?’
‘It was a word you used.’
‘Oh, that. It just means you should treat people as people and, you know . . . not just assume girls can’t do stuff. We got a talk about it at school. There’s lots of stuff most girls can’t do, but you’ve got to pretend they can, so that more of them will. That’s all of it, really.’
‘Presumably there’s, uh, stuff boys can’t do?’
‘Oh, yeah. But that’s just girls’ stuff,’ said Johnny. ‘Anyway, some girls go and become engineers and things, so they can do proper stuff if they want.’
‘Transcend the limitations of their sex. Outdo the other sex, even. Yes. It is much the same with us. Some individuals show an awe-inspiring desire to succeed, to make a career in a field not traditionally considered to be appropriate to their gender.’
‘You, you mean,’ said Johnny.
‘I was referring to the Gunnery Officer.’
‘But he’s a man – I mean, a male.’
‘Yes. Traditionally, ScreeWee warriors are female. They are more inclined to fight. Our ancestors used to have to fight to protect their breeding pond. The males do not do battle. But in his case—’
A speck appeared on the radar.
Johnny put down his cup and watched it carefully. Normally, players headed straight for the fleet. This one didn’t. It hovered right on the edge of the screen and stayed there, keeping pace with the ScreeWee ships.
After a while, another dot appeared from the same direction, and kept on coming.
This one at least looked like just another player.
There was a nasty equation at the back of Johnny’s mind. It concerned missiles. There were the six missiles per level in Only You Can Save Mankind. Once you’d fired them, that was it. So the longer he stayed alive, the less he had to fight with. But all the attacking players would have six missiles each. He’d only got four now. When they were gone, it’d just be guns. One missile in the right place would blow him up. Losing was kind of built-in, in the circumstances.
The attacker came on. But Johnny kept finding his gaze creeping to the dot at the edge of the screen. Somehow it had a watchful look, like a shark trailing a leaky airbed.
He switched on the communicator.
‘Attacking ship! Attacking ship! Stop now!’
They can’t speak, Johnny thought. They’re only a player, they’re not in the game. They can’t speak and they can’t listen.
He found he’d automatically targeted a missile on the approaching dot. But that couldn’t be the only way. Sooner or later you had to talk, even if it was only because you’d run out of things to throw.
The attacker fired a missile. It streaked past Johnny and away, heading on into empty space.
Not real, Johnny thought. You have to think they’re not real. Otherwise you can’t do it.
‘Attacking ship! This is your last chance! Look, I mean it!’
He pressed the button. The ship juddered slightly as a missile took off. The attacker was moving fast. So was the missile. They met and became an expanding red cloud. It drifted around Johnny’s ship like a smoke ring.
Someone, somewhere, was blinking at their screen and probably swearing. He hoped.
The dot was still on the edge of the screen. It was irritating him, like an itch in a place he couldn’t scratch. Because that wasn’t how you were supposed to play. You spotted some aliens and you shot at them. That was what the gam
e was supposed to be about.
Lurking in the distance and just watching made him uneasy. It looked like the kind of thing people would do if they were . . . well . . .
. . . taking it seriously.
The Captain sat in front of her desk, watching the big screen. She was chewing. Anything was better than waterweed, even – she looked at the packet – even Sugar-Frosted Corn Crackles in cold bovine lactation. Sweet and crunchy, but with odd hard bits in . . .
She inserted a claw into her mouth and poked around among her teeth until she found the offending object.
She pulled it out and looked at it.
It was green, and had four arms. Most of them were holding some sort of weapon.
She wondered again what these things were. The Chief Medical Officer had suggested that they were, in fact, some sort of vermin which invaded food sources. There was a theory among the crew that they were things to do with religion. Offerings to food gods, perhaps?
She put it carefully on one side of her desk. In the right light, she thought, it looked a bit like the Gunnery Officer.
Then she opened the little cage beside the bowl and let her birds out.
There had been things very like alligators among the ScreeWee’s distant ancestors, and some habits had been handed down. The Captain opened her mouth fully, which made her lower and upper jaws move apart in a way that would make a human’s eyes water.
The birds hopped in, and began to clean her teeth. One of them found a small piece of plastic ray-gun.
The watching ship was moving, still keeping at a great distance, travelling around the fleet in a wide circle. It had watched one more attacker come in; Johnny had got rid of this one with a missile and some shots, although a flashing red light on the panel was suggesting that something, somewhere, wasn’t working any more. Probably those secondary pumps again.
He found he was turning the ship all the time to keep the distant dot in front of him.
‘Johnny?’
It was the Captain.
‘Yes? Are you watching it?’
‘Yes. It is moving between us and the Border. It is in our direct line of flight now.’
‘You can’t sort of steer around it?’
‘There are more than three hundred ships in the fleet. That may be difficult.’
‘It seems to be waiting for something. I’ll . . . I’ll risk going to have a look.’
He let his ship overtake the fleet and run ahead of it, towards the distant dot.
It made no attempt to get out of his way.
It was a starship just like his own. In fact, in a way . . . it was his starship. After all, there was only one starship in the entire game, the one You flew to Save Mankind. Everyone was flying the same one . . . in a way.
It hung against the stars, as lifeless as a Space Invader. Johnny moved a bit closer, until he could see the cockpit and even the shape of a head inside. It had a helmet on. Everyone did – it was on the cover of the box. You wore a helmet in a starship. He didn’t know why. Maybe the designers thought you were likely to fall off when you went round corners.
He tried the communicator again.
‘Hello? Can you hear me?’
There was nothing but the background hiss of the universe.
‘I’m pretty sure you can. I’ve got a feeling about it.’
The tiny blob of the helmet turned towards him. You could no more see through the smoked glass of the helmet than you could through a pair of sunglasses from the outside, but he knew he was being stared at.
‘What are you waiting for?’ said Johnny. ‘Look, I know you can hear me, I don’t want to have to—’
The other ship roared into life. It accelerated towards the oncoming fleet on two lances of blue light.
Johnny swore under his breath and kicked his own engines into life. There was no hope of overtaking the attacker. It had a head start, and a starfighter’s top speed was a starfighter’s top speed.
It was just out of gun range. He raced along behind it.
Ahead, he could see some of the big capital ships of the fleet manoeuvring clumsily out of the way. They spread out slowly, trying to avoid colliding with one another. Seen from the front, it was like watching the petals of a flower opening.
The attacker roared for the middle of the fleet. Then it rolled gently and fired six missiles, one after another. A moment later, two of the small ScreeWee fighters exploded and one of the larger ships spun around as it was hit.
The attacker was already heading for another fighter. Johnny had to admit it – it was beautiful flying. He’d never realized before how badly most players flew. They flew like people who lived on the ground – from right to left and up and down, woodenly. Like someone moving something on a screen, in fact.
But the attacker rolled and twisted like a swallow in flight. And every turn brought another ScreeWee ship under its guns. Even if they had been firing back, it wouldn’t have been hit, except by accident. It pirouetted.
The Captain’s face appeared on the screen.
‘You must stop this!’
‘I’m trying! I’m trying! Don’t you think I’m trying!’
The attacker turned. Johnny hadn’t thought it was possible for a starship to skid, but this one did. It paused just for a moment as its jets slowed it down, and then accelerated back the way it had come.
Right down his sights.
‘Look, stop!’ he shouted. He had a missile ready. Why even bother to shout? Players couldn’t hear, they only saw the game on the screen—
‘Who are you?’
It was a very clear voice, and very human. The Captain sounded as though she’d learned the language out of a book, but this voice was one that someone had really used since they were about one year old.
‘You can hear me!’
‘Get out of the way, stupid!’
The two pilots stared at one another across a distance that was getting smaller very, very fast.
I’ve heard that before, Johnny thought. That voice. You can hear all the punctuation . . .
They didn’t crash – exactly. There was a grinding noise as each starship scraped the length of the other, ripping off fins, ripping open tanks, and then spun drunkenly away.
The control panel in front of Johnny became a mass of red lights. There were cracks racing across the cockpit.
‘Idiot!’ screamed the radio.
‘It’s all right,’ said Johnny urgently. ‘You just wake up—’
His ship exploded.
Chapter 7
The Dark Tower
It was 16:34° by the thermometer. Time was different in game space.
No matter how often you died, you never got used to it. It wasn’t as if you got better with pract—
She’d heard him. Inside the game.
He sat up.
The ScreeWee were inside the game because it was their world. Wobbler and the rest hadn’t really been in it; he was pretty sure he’d just dreamed them in because he needed someone to pilot the food tankers.
But he’d heard her in Patel’s. That ringing, sharp voice, which made it very clear that its owner thought everyone in the whole world was dim-witted and had to be talked to like a baby or a foreigner.
On the screen, empty space rolled onwards.
He had to find her. Apart from anything else, no one who flew like that should be allowed anywhere near the ScreeWee.
Wobbler’d probably know who she was.
He found the room moving around him when he stood up. He probably really was ill, he thought. Well, not surprising. What with Trying Times and stupid school and parents trying to be friends and now having to save an entire alien race instead of getting proper sleep, it wasn’t surprising.
He made it to the hall and took the phone off its base and brought it back upstairs. He’d just extended the aerial when it rang.
‘Um, hello – Blackbury-two-three-nine-nine-eight-zero-who’s-that-speaking-please?’
‘Is that you? This i
s me.’
‘Oh. Hello, Wobbler.’
‘You ill or something?’
‘Flu. Look, Wobbler—’
‘You seen the papers today?’
‘No. Mum and Dad take them to work with them. Wobbler—’
‘Thing in the papers about Gobi Software. Hang on . . . says, “NO ENCOUNTERS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST KIND.” That’s the headline.’
Johnny hesitated.
‘What does it say?’ he said, very cautiously.
‘What does “inundated” mean?’
‘ ’S’like “overwhelmed”,’ said Johnny.
‘Says that Gobi Software and computer games shops have been . . . inundated with complaints about Only You Can Save Mankind. Because they made that offer of five pounds if you shoot all the aliens, and it says people aren’t finding any aliens. And Gobi Software are in trouble because of the Trades Descriptions Act. And they keep on using the word hacker,’ said Wobbler, in the sneering tones of one who knows what a hacker really is and knows that most journalists don’t. ‘And there’s a quote from Al Rampa, president of Gobi. He says they’re recalling all the games, and if you send back the original discs they’ll send you a token for their new game, Dodge City 1888. That got four stars in FAAzzzzAAAP!.’
Recalling the games . . .
‘Yes, but you haven’t got the original discs,’ said Johnny. ‘You hardly ever have any original discs.’
‘No, but I know the guy whose brother bought it,’ said Wobbler happily. ‘So it was just a problem with the game, right? You weren’t mental after all.’
‘I never said I was mental,’ said Johnny.
‘No, but . . . well, you know,’ said Wobbler. He sounded embarrassed.
‘Wobbler?’
‘Yes?’
‘You know that girl who was in Patel’s?’
‘Oh, her. What about her?’
‘D’you know who she is?’
‘She’s someone’s sister, I think.’
‘Whose?’
‘Goes to some kind of special school for the terminally clever. She’s called Kylie or Krystal or one of those made-up names. What do you want to know for?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just because she complained about the game in Patel’s, I suppose. Whose sister is she?’
‘Some guy called . . . oh . . . Plonker. Yeah. Friend of Bigmac’s. You sure you’re all right?’
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