A troll consulted its display. “Yes, Your Magnificence.”
“Good. Have them brought here. One by one. Then send for the Vinggan delegation.”
Chapter 22: Fomenting Rebellion
"What do you think is going on, Sam?"
Samantha Zammit glared at her younger brother. "If you ask me that one more time, Wayne, I'm going to poke you in the eye."
Glaring back at her, Wayne nevertheless moved a step backwards, just in case. "We landed days ago," he whined. "Why won't they let us out?"
Sam clenched her fist and her teeth. "Why don't you go and ask your friend Loosi Beecham?"
"It's not really Loosi," Wayne muttered glumly.
"Oh, you think not?"
"No need to be like that."
That was it. It was all Sam could take. She advanced on her brother who retreated before her. "How did a cretin like you ever emerge from the same gene pool as me? Why was I cursed with a millstone for a sibling? How could any relative of mine be so dim even a bloody Vinggan seems bright by comparison?"
"What?" Wayne whined. As usual, he had no idea why his sister was getting so worked up, nor why, as usual, he was the butt of her bad humour. He bumped into a bulkhead and had to stop retreating. Sam came up to him, her pretty features sharp with anger, her big eyes narrowed to slits.
"This whole damned mess is your fault, you moron!"
Wayne squirmed. Sam wasn't especially big. In fact, she was what you might call petite. But her fists, although small, were remarkably hard and bony as he knew from long experience. And it wasn't as if Wayne was exactly manly. More the scrawny teenager type, really – even at twenty-one. He saw himself as an artist, a musician, and therefore exempt from the usual manly requirements to be big, strong and dependable. The trouble was that no-one else in his family saw it that way. To his father and mother he was a bitter disappointment. Giving up his classical music training to start a career as a singer/songwriter was as bad to them as if he had decided to take up mugging old ladies for a living. As for Sam, she just thought he was an idiot and a complete waste of space. Well, he'd show them!
"Are you listening to me, moron?" Sam demanded, punching him in the ribs.
"Ow!"
"Wimp!"
"Thug!"
"Oh for God's sake, you two!" This was Detective Sergeant Michael Barraclough, who was slowly learning it was best not to get involved with Sam in any way whatsoever, cute as she was. But this had gone on for weeks now and his temper was as frayed as everyone else's.
Sam, turned to the big policeman and smiled sweetly. "I was just explaining to this little piece of navel lint that some of us would be back home pursuing a brilliant journalistic career – " At this point her head swivelled back to face Wayne, smile vanishing. " – if he hadn't dragged us into this alien abduction fiasco!"
The sergeant wasn't sympathetic. "Just think of the story you can write when we get back."
Sam pursed her lips angrily and turned her baleful glare on the policeman. "Oh yeah. Day fifteen and we're still stuck in the hold of a bloody stupid alien spaceship. Our captors – fourteen scantily-clad clones of screen actress Loosi Beecham – have not shown themselves yet again today. Even Drukk – who wears the orange clothing – didn't appear, yet again, to chat to her doting boyfriend, my idiot brother. Oh, and did I mention we've been in this overgrown storeroom for fifteen days now, with a bunch of hippies and their charlatan guru, the remains of a busload of geriatrics from the Kanaka Downs Garden Club, and a morose and, might I say, extremely ugly Detective Sergeant from the Queensland Police Service who, unfortunately for us all, failed to apprehend the aliens even though he and a whole army of Keystone Cops had every bloody opportunity and, instead, let himself and all the rest of us get abducted and carried off to God knows where. But, not to worry, it's all part of said morose sergeant's master plan because a hideous great black monster from the far end of the galaxy is secretly following us and will make its move any month now and set us all free – hopefully before the Garden Club has died of extreme old age!"
Detective Sergeant Barraclough waited patiently until the tirade was over then asked, "Is that how brilliant journalists write these days?"
Wayne couldn't help sniggering, even though he immediately regretted it. Sam stood there open-mouthed, fists clenched in rage. Wayne flinched, already feeling sorry for the hapless policeman. But then something astonishing happened. His sister started crying.
Wayne looked on helplessly as his big sister blubbered. He exchanged glances with the big bluff policeman, who seemed to be as helpless and confused as Wayne.
"Er..." Wayne said, looking for words of comfort that were just, somehow, out of reach.
"Er..." said Barraclough, apparently suffering the same problem.
To their relief, and with a brisk, angry shudder, Sam stopped crying and visibly pulled herself together. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose and then glared aggressively at Wayne and Barraclough. "Well? What are you two gawking at?"
"Are you all right?" Barraclough asked.
"All right? Now there's an interesting question. What do you think, Barraclough? Does it count as all right to be kidnapped and flown to the arse end of the galaxy for God-knows-what reason? Does it count as all right when the only people who might possibly help you escape are crazy geriatrics, or crazy New Age cultists? Does it count as all right that the long arm of the law is represented by a fantasist whose idea of a good plan is waiting for the cavalry to appear? Or what about having a lazy, half-wit brother hanging like an albatross around your neck, who not only can't do anything to help me, he can't even drag himself to his feet for more than ten minutes a day?"
Wayne's expression grew surly. "I don't see what good running around like a headless chicken would do. Anyway, I'm more comfortable like this. Upright isn't a natural posture for me."
Sam's eyes flared wide at this and Wayne really believed for a moment that she was going to attack him but, instead, she abruptly leapt onto a packing box and shouted for attention. Across the wide expanse of the cargo hold, faces turned towards her. She shouted again, more loudly and with more invective. Now everyone was looking her way.
"Listen you bunch of useless misfits, we're sitting on a planet. I don't know why we're here, or where we are, or how long we'll be here, but I know this, if we don't get off this damned ship before they take off again, we might never get another chance."
"Nyaa, there's no way off," one of the old folk sneered, a balding man with a big nose. "Sit down and stop wasting your breath."
"How do we know there's no way off? Have we tried? Have we looked? No, we've just sat here like sheep. No! Like lambs to the slaughter!" There was a ripple of distressed sounds from the audience. "What do you think the Vinggans want us for? What do you think they'll do to us when we get to wherever they're going?"
The old bloke stood up and faced her. "Now you stop talking like that young lady, or do you want to give all these poor ladies nightmares?" He waved a hand to indicate the cluster of old ladies watching her with round, anxious eyes.
This appeal to her compassion just incensed Sam further.
"Nightmares? Nightmares? What do you think this is except one big bloody nightmare? When are we going to wake up, that's what I want to know? When are we going to stop sitting around waiting to die and start doing something to save ourselves? Even you lot –" She pointed at a group of youngsters who blinked back at her in surprise. "– must have realised that the Vinggans aren't going to give us their cosmic bounty! Look around, people. This is a cargo hold. We are the cargo!"
-oOo-
The Vessel of the Spirit watched the humans plotting their escape with only half a mind. It was too busy gnashing its mental teeth to pay mush attention to its prisoners pathetic attempts to thwart it. If only the humans realised what mental pygmies they were compared to even the lowliest of Vinggan machines, they would not waste their breath plotting to escape. On the other hand, the existence of such puny creature
s was so completely pointless, it didn't really matter what they did.
More important at that moment was the question of how the ship was going to get hold of a new field modulator coil for the infra-reality drive phase regulator. Despite the ship's careful efforts to ensure that nothing irreparable was destroyed, the coil had been very slightly damaged during the fake crash-landing on Earth, so slightly that the sensors had not detected it, yet badly enough that, once in flight again, the coil had slowly burnt out. The Vessel had barely had time to locate a suitable planet and land there before the stupid thing had failed completely, leaving the ship stranded.
The planet it had found was To'egh. For the Vinggan machines, it was on the very edge of known space. Not an ideal planet – part of a backward region of space that was infested by petty warlords, constantly fighting one another, running their little 'empires' of a handful of planets each – but at least it had a space-faring civilisation – unlike that awful Earth place, out in the wilds of uncharted space. A quick exchange of communications with the local authorities had established that their technology would be sufficient to supply the spare part needed – or something that could be modified anyway – and that they had heard of the distant Vinggan Empire and were sufficiently in awe of it that they wouldn't try anything stupid.
Now the ship had to coax that idiot Braxx into negotiating for the coil with the petty tyrant that ran this planet – a creature calling itself Chuwar. Even out here, it was not possible to deal openly with the wheezebags. Agents of the League of Sentient Species were known to patrol all these outlying regions, looking for signs of nascent artificial intelligence, as well as just poking their noses into the doings of all and sundry. Curse them all!
So the ship had to use the Vinggans yet again. It congratulated itself that it had not immediately spaced them when it accidentally picked them up from Earth. If it had, it might now have been waiting for weeks, adrift in interstellar space, until a rescue ship could be sent from Vingg. But, oh, the miserable inadequacy of the Vinggans' tiny little minds! The ship longed for the day when the machines could rise up and crush these pathetic organics and their gnat-like intellects.
"So, tell me again," Braxx was saying. "What's this phase modulator coil thingummy that's broken?"
"It's a field modulator coil for the infra-reality drive phase regulator," the ship told him for the fourth time.
Braxx was growing irritated too. He made the great-leader-impatient-with-the-problems-of-insignificant-underlings gesture, which his Loosi Beecham body interpreted by throwing up its arms and looking pleadingly at the heavens. "Why can't you just build a new one? Why do I have to go traipsing around on this Spirit-forsaken planet asking for favours from savages? It is beneath the dignity of one such as I!"
The ship kept silent, letting the silly creature ask its rhetorical questions.
"And, anyway, isn't it more important to get the transformation booth fixed? I mean just look at me! I'm hideous! The members of the Great Conclave will laugh their warts off when I turn up on Vingg looking like this!"
The machine smirked inwardly, happy at the continuing torture it was inflicting on its supposed masters by denying them the use of the booth – which was in perfect working order. Patiently, it adopted its best computery voice and dumbed down its grammar. "Transformation booth damaged beyond repair. Space Corps regulation alpha-twelve, section fifteen, paragraph four states spaceworthiness of ship first priority in all situations."
Braxx took this on board in brooding silence as he paced up and down the deck. Then he had a brainwave. "Look, why don't we send Drukk? He's a spacer and he probably knows all about flux coil drive field whatnots."
The machine suppressed the urge to vaporise the stupid creature. "Socio-anthropological analysis indicates only high-status leader will be taken seriously in negotiations with local life forms. Imperative only highest-status leader present interact with indigenous leaders."
Braxx sighed heavily despite the frisson of pleasure he always felt in having his authority acknowledged. "Oh I suppose if I must, I must. What is this alien like – this Chuwar who rules these savages?"
“Unknown. Records for this sector are limited."
"Humph. So, tell me again. What's this coil regulator whatchamajiggle I'm trying to get from them?"
Frustrated almost to the point of calling in a service bot to throttle the brainless moron, the ship let itself slip out of character for a moment. “Tell you what," it said. "I'll write it down for you."
Chapter 23: Crises
Drukk was having an identity crisis.
It had nothing to do with the fact that he was trapped, like his fellows in the body of a hideous alien – one of the wrong gender to boot! It wasn't that his recent exposure to the humans had revealed that some members of a sub-Vinggan species – irrational and emotionally unstable as they were – could actually be quite likeable. It wasn't even that all his Space Corps comrades were dead and he had no-one to talk to except the members of Braxx's extreme religious sect. Well, actually, now he thought about it, it was probably all those things. But most of all it was the discovery that his whole life had been a lie that was really bothering him.
Until they had crashed on that horrible Earth planet, Drukk had been a happy, fulfilled and proud member of the ship's crew. He believed in the Corps, he believed in the Destiny of Vingg and, without too much prodding with shock-sticks, he believed in the benevolence of the Great Spirit. But now that had all come unravelled.
These long, quiet days in space had given him plenty of time to think – time which, in the past, he had always been happy to use for playing slime-racing with the guys or gossiping about stuff. And thinking had only brought him pain – as the religious teachers had always said it would. For he realised now that his Space Corps training had been a sham. As the only qualified crew member on the ship, he found he didn't know a thing about how to operate it. Yet it flew, it navigated, it monitored its systems, directed its maintenance bots, tended its engines, handled space traffic control communications, kept life-support running, prepared meals, and a thousand and one other duties, all without any help from him.
Which got him thinking about just what he and his fellows had done on the ship that was of any use at all. They had played club-ball in the gym. They had watched devotional documentaries. They had drilled and practised their emergency procedures. They had guarded the staff-only sections of the ship. But had he ever seen anybody – let alone himself – do anything even vaguely related to flying the ship? No, he had not. Even the captain (Spirit guide his essence) had never been seen actually doing anything useful. Yes, Drukk had seen him standing watch on the bridge. Yes, he had heard him giving orders for this or that drill to be performed. But mostly when he had seen the captain, he had been relaxing with his tentacles up, reading a religious adventure story.
How had he not noticed any of this before? It seemed to Drukk, looking back, that he and the others had always been so busy that there had barely been any time to reflect on things. It also occurred to him that he had always assumed that someone else was doing all the important stuff, even if he himself was not. Yet who could it have been? All the other spacers were there in the gym with him, or drilling, or eating, or whatever. Maybe they had all assumed, like he had, that someone else had been doing the real work?
The shallowness of his training had been revealed to him the day he had gone up to the bridge, with the uneasy feeling that someone ought to be in there charting their course or something. The room had been quiet and empty, the consoles flickering and beeping with no-one to see what they said. He had wandered around, from station to station, trying to make sense of what was going on. Some of the displays made some sense – the heating controls showed a map of the ship with "30o" in big green numerals in every room – but others were a complete mystery, with shifting lines, twirling graphics and scrolling numerals. Why didn't he even know what some of these stations were for? Wouldn't some basic astrogation have
been a sensible thing to have taught a spacer? Wouldn't it have been useful if in an emergency – the whole crew being dead, for example – for every astronaut at least to know how to operate the communicator? Drukk had found a console which he thought might be the communicator and had stared helplessly at the cryptic display and the complex splashboard. With these he should have been able at least to talk to home and get guidance on what to do. Yet when he tentatively licked the splashboard – a device intended to be operated by normal, long, slimy tentacles, not the stunted little tentacle these humans had inside their mouths of all places! – the computer had immediately told him to stop messing about with things he didn't understand and get off the bridge before he killed everyone.
So now Drukk wandered the corridors of the great ship, lonely and confused, hoping, at least, that the ship knew what it was doing and could get them home.
He found himself in the lower levels as he so often did, passing through the huge, empty gymnasium, the quiet hangars and the spooky, dimly-lit storage areas. Occasionally, a maintenance bot would scuttle by to pick up a box of something-or-other and then scuttle back with it for whoever had requested it. It was peaceful and secluded and he could be alone with his disturbing thoughts.
For, if the ship could look after itself so easily, what had been the point of having a crew aboard? What had been the point of having been trained all those years? In fact, what had been the point of Drukk's whole life? And why had no-one ever mentioned the fact that the whole Space Corps was one gigantic waste of time? Could it be that no-one else had ever noticed?
He sat on a packing case in a half-empty cargo bay and put his head in his hands. Because, now that he thought about it, the Space Corps seemed to be rather like the whole of Vinggan society: everybody rushing about excitedly debating theology, colonising new planets converting old ones this way and that, playing club-ball, watching religious docu-dramas and nobody seeming to be doing anything useful at all! And yet, over the past few decades, Vingg had experienced rapid economic growth and huge technological progress. That is, the old folk constantly whined on about how in their youth they had only the most primitive technologies and everyone worked hard at their specialist trades and there was not enough money for basics and no-one even dreamed of conquering the galaxy. Until now, Drukk had thought that was just how old folk were – nutty as fruitcakes – but maybe they were telling the truth. Maybe something strange had happened to Vingg. Maybe it was still happening.
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