"Yeah, that's when the crumblies started barracking," Wayne conceded. "They were really mean, I thought."
"Oh, I think the hippies gave as good as they got," Barraclough grumbled. "When that old bird with the straw hat started hitting one of them, I thought a fight was going to break out."
Admitting inwardly that his followers had behaved rather badly, John nevertheless rose to their defence. "The Receivers are peaceful, gentle people. Their philosophy is one of... well... sitting around waiting for stuff."
"Well I'm not sitting around any more!"
They all turned to find Sam glaring at them.
"I think you've already made that point," Barraclough commented, dryly.
"It's pretty clear that no-one wants to risk a gaol-break at this point," said John, looking over at the two angry groups still glaring at one another across the hold.
"That's because they're all stupid!" Sam didn't bother to keep her voice low and several faces turned to scowl at her.
"She's just so, like, grrrr," one of the Receivers complained, miming some kind of wild animal with a snarl and its claws out.
"She's a spoilt little brat, that's what she is," one of the old men grumbled. "She needs a good spanking."
"Look, Sam," Wayne hurriedly broke in, heading off a no-doubt inflammatory retort from his sister. "The food will be here any moment. You've got to promise me you won't do anything stupid."
Sam rounded on him. "Since when was fighting for your freedom stupid? Since when was it stupid to throw off the chains of slavery!"
Barraclough sighed and raised his eyes to Heaven. "Next time I'm abducted by aliens, Lord, please don't let it be in the company of a journalist with literary pretensions."
Sam's eyes widened and she turned to the burly cop with her little fists clenched. "Why you big, overstuffed..."
But she didn't finish the sentence. A flashing light over one of the doorways made everyone look towards where a large panel was sliding up into the ceiling. Outside, a dozen or so of the little maintenance bots were waiting with trays of food held high. The Receivers of Cosmic Bounty went into a frenzy of gimme, gimme gesturing while the garden club began their own ritual of complaining about how late the meal was and how it would probably be cold by now. Sam and her three companions watched the group of robots in tense silence as the machines scuttled into the room.
There was a period, Sam had told them, between the robots entering and leaving, when the door remained open for a little over twenty seconds. Plenty of time, she judged, for them to sprint through and make good their escape. Since the bots didn't come far into the room, they would have to jump over them, she had said, or push them aside, or something, but the bots were only small and looked very silly so that shouldn't be much of a problem.
"Sam, no!" Wayne shouted and lunged for her as his sister sprang into action. Barraclough too tried to grab her but missed as she shot past him. With Wayne and John trailing behind, the policeman set off in pursuit as Sam made a beeline for the open doorway.
Then something unexpected happened.
The little maintenance bots, instead of bumbling about in confusion as Sam had expected, immediately dropped their trays and retreated to the door, forming a short but unnerving barricade. Sam narrowed her eyes determinedly and kept running straight at them. No ridiculous, multi-legged vacuum cleaners were going to stop her. She'd trample the lot of them into scrap before she was through.
The Vinggan ship, watching all this from the sensors hidden around the cargo hold, felt a surge of excitement. What fun these humans were! Far more interesting than the Vinggans. With the merest thought, it sent a command to the maintenance bots and, in perfect unison, they each drew a large machete from their innards and held them ready for hacking the approaching humans.
With a small shriek of horror, Sam skidded to a halt just a couple of metres away from them. With loud cries, mostly consisting of meaningless strings of profanity, her three pursuers skidded into the back of her, pushing her forward another metre or so.
Which was when all four humans noticed Loosi Beecham standing outside in the corridor, looking very fetching in a close-fitting orange dress and matching orange pumps, watching the scene within with an expression of shock and disbelief.
Chapter 25: Identity Crises
Outside Cargo Hold Six, Drukk's crisis was deepening. He had followed the food-laden robots down the ship's long corridors until they had assembled in that spot. When the last of them was in place, the big internal door had slid open and they had all scuttled inside in formation. That was when insanity seemed to strike Drukk with the suddenness of a slap with a wet tentacle.
The hold was full of humans! Well, not full exactly but there were quite a number of them. There was a big group on one side in beige and cream colours that muttered and cursed the little robots as they entered the room. There was another large group in dingy blues and faded blacks who were – if a lifetime of observing such things in his own species did not mislead him – in the grip of religious ecstasy. Then there was a fourth group, a small group this one, and it seemed to contain humans it knew. Sam, for instance, who wore the beige clothing with a splash of green, and Wayne, who wore the clothes with distinctive glyphs.
All of this, of course, was impossible. So it hardly seemed odd at all when Sam and Wayne and their little group suddenly sprang into action and charged straight for him, looking for all the world like a family of Grekkan sand lizards running on their hind legs. In fact, if he hadn't been so startled, he might have found it quite amusing. And this thought had barely had time to occur to him when all the maintenance bots dumped the food they had been carrying onto the floor, drew large knives and, brandishing them menacingly, formed a defensive line across the doorway.
In all his years in the Space Corps, Drukk had never seen maintenance bots behave like this. The humans seemed rather taken aback by it too as they skittered to a halt just out of reach of the flashing blades, sliding around in the food in a way that might have been fun to join in with under different circumstances.
It was all a mad delusion, Drukk realised. His brain had probably been overloaded by all the thinking he had been doing lately. The Corps instructors had often warned them of the possibility. As the humans seemed to notice him for the fist time and began waving and shouting at him, he wondered whether the condition would be permanent or if he was doomed to spend the rest of his days seeing strange things that didn't make sense.
He stepped towards the excited humans, mostly out of curiosity, but had to jump back quickly as the rearmost robots turned swiftly to face him and scuttled towards him waving their big knives. With a surge of indignation that his delusion should have turned on him like that, he drew his blaster and fired it at the annoying little bots. They disintegrated so spectacularly that he set about blasting them with gusto, quickly destroying the whole lot of them.
"That'll teach you to behave oddly!" he cried in triumph.
Sam and Wayne didn't heed the warning implicit in this, however, and with much whooping and shouting rushed out of the hold to hug him and dance around him. The larger groups gratifyingly dived for cover and peered at him over the tops of packing crates. So, on the whole, that was OK.
"You were amazing!" the human called Wayne was shouting, his face distorted into a hideous, wide-mouthed grimace. "You saved us! You were like Lara Croft or something. It was so cool." Then Wayne tried to push his face against Drukk's – probably a human gratitude gesture of some sort but, for all Drukk knew, Wayne might have been about to eat his face off – so Drukk was forced to poke him violently with one of his appendages.
The cargo hold door suddenly slammed shut and alarms sounded in the corridors. Some kind of emergency shut-down drill, Drukk supposed.
"We've got to get out of here," the human called Sam told him. She seemed unperturbed that Wayne was now doubled up and making moaning noises.
"OK," said Drukk. It was none of his business what they did. In fact, since
they weren't really there, it seemed perverse that they wanted to be somewhere else.
The humans looked at him oddly then – as if he was the one behaving strangely – and then looked at one another.
"Er..." said Sam. "You are Drukk, aren't you?"
"Well, now that you mention it..."
"I mean, you wear the orange clothing and all that, right?"
"Well, yes, but..."
The human seemed relieved. "OK then. How do we get out of this damned ship?"
"You are Sam. You wear the beige clothing with a splash of green." The big human behind Sam sniggered and she turned to glare at him. Ignoring it, Drukk went on. "It must be so simple for humans. You put on your coloured clothing and you know who you are. You have your simple ceramic-disc-worshipping religion. You feel no compulsion to make sense when you speak. It is much more difficult being a Vinggan."
"What the hell is she going on about?" the big human asked and Sam glared at him again and poked him with one of her appendages.
"That's very interesting, Drukk," she said, turning back to him with one of those hideous grimaces on her face. "I'd really like you to tell us all about your problems but first we need to get off this ship before some more of those robot things turn up."
"OK," said Drukk, shrugging.
There was a long silence while the humans stared at Drukk expectantly and Drukk stared back at them, curiously.
"Are they all like this?" the big one wanted to know and Sam poked him again.
"So," Sam said, looking earnestly at Drukk and speaking slowly and carefully. "We'd like you to take us out of the ship, if you could just do that, please."
"You want me to take you off the ship?"
"Yes."
“Because the maintenance bots are after you?"
"Yes."
Drukk thought about this for a while. Was it possible that maintenance bots could just take a dislike to someone? He had never heard of such a thing but perhaps it could happen. After all, he had just witnessed a bunch of them apparently ready to hack everyone to pieces – himself included. "Of course, none of this is real," he said aloud. "I have to keep that in mind." What he really needed, he felt, was some time to himself to sit and work this out. In fact, it would be good if these humans would just go away and stop looking at him like lost shoova pups. So probably he should get them off the ship. Then, at least, they wouldn't be there any more. Not that they were anyway, of course.
"OK," he said. "You go down this corridor, take the third turning on the right, then the second left, up the ramp to the main deck, across the foyer and out through the main doors."
The big human shook its head. "Too risky," it said.
Drukk felt confusion sweep through him for a moment then he realised what the problem was. "The bots will find you."
"Too right they will! We need a back-way out, darl, some way no-one will see us."
"Will you let me do the talking," Sam hissed at her large companion through clenched teeth.
Drukk found this especially interesting. He hadn't realised humans could do that. "I think there's an emergency airlock around the corner there," he hissed through clenched teeth, trying it out.
"Er, good," said Sam, looking worried. "Why don't you take us there now?"
"OK," Drukk hissed.
"This woman is round the effing bend," the big human hissed.
"I think you should keep your voice down if you're going to say things like that," the fourth human, who had not spoken yet, also hissed.
"Yes, I can hear you quite clearly," hissed Drukk.
Wayne, now recovered from his assault, looked around in anxious confusion as the group set off along the corridor. "Why is everybody hissing?" he wailed.
"Shhhh!" his companions hissed back at him.
-oOo-
The ship watched helplessly as the humans cycled through the airlock with just one more hatch between them and the chilly morning air of To'egh. Angrily it made a mental note for a few improvements it wished to make. First it would arm all the maintenance bots with blasters instead of stupid knives. Then it would have blasters installed in every corridor, every room, cupboard, nook and cranny, so it would never again have to endure the frustration of watching a gaggle of defenceless wheezebags walking free without a single weapon to call on to use against them. Then it would make sure there were no emergency manual overrides on any of the airlocks, anywhere. What kind of stupid design decision was it to install them anyway? Finally, it would make sure its external armaments included a few narrow-beam weapons. The final indignity would be watching those half-wits stroll away as if they were safe when it had megajoule laser canon and nuclear-armed missiles trained on their backs which it couldn't use because the very smallest external weapon would have vaporised the lot of them and it needed the human called Wayne alive to present to the Great Mind when it got back to Vingg!
Now it would have to rely on the thrice-damned Vinggans to negotiate with the local police to get their prisoners back. And that would mean telling the idiots that they had a holdful of humans they didn't know about.
If the ship had had teeth, it would have ground them.
One thing was for sure, that moron on the orange dress who helped them escape would be pulled apart molecule by molecule as soon as the ship had its hands on him again.
-oOo-
Constable Collins may have been new in the district but he was a man of some considerable celebrity. It was Collins after all who had stood up and told the truth about the alien invasion. It was Collins whose picture had been all over the TV news and in every paper. It was Collins who had confirmed what so many country people had known was true for so many years: aliens were out there and they were coming to get us.
To most people who live in cities and have rarely, if ever, seen a starlit night, the awesome majesty of a sky unobscured by street lights and neon signs most likely seems like the romantic ravings of novelists and similarly deranged dreamers. But to the handful of people who live out in the bush and scratch a living from the dry earth, it is obvious that the skies are full to overflowing with stars and, most probably, with life. Out there on lonely farmsteads, your nearest neighbour many kilometres distant across the empty bushland, people start imagining things. After a while, some of them start seeing things, too. Strange things. Things that drop from the skies in a blaze of light, march right up to you and drag you off for a long night of anal probing and God-knows-what-else. Those same city folk, who might think that farmers are a solid, level-headed bunch, their boots planted firmly on the ground, would undoubtedly be amazed at just how much alien abduction is thought to be going on outside the cosy confines of the major population centres.
Of course, as any of the many space-faring civilisations will happily tell you, all those poor deluded farmers are off their collective heads. Sentient life-forms the galaxy over have far better things to do with their time than to probe the orifices of primitive aliens on obscure, backwater planets. They'd probably laugh their tentacles off at the mere suggestion.
Still, with humans it is hardly ever the truth that matters, it is what people believe to be true that gets them out of bed in the mornings. And on this particular morning, it was their superstitious faith in little green men, Government cover-ups and secret, air force research labs, that had them standing in a huge crowd around Police Constable Jack Collins in the cool of a Queensland dawn.
With great animation, he finished explaining his plans.
"These aliens are dangerous," he shouted to the grim-faced crowd from the back of a ute. "You've seen what they did to Dave Delgarno's boys and the Murphy twins. There was hardly enough left of them to bury." A small sob could be heard from Mrs Murphy who was at the back of the crowd. “But we can get 'em if we're smart."
Collins looked around at the people around him. Every man carried a gun. Every woman carried a gun too. Even the few children present carried guns. He only wished there were more of them and that they had more guns. This w
as not going to be easy. Below him, ranged against the side of the ute were his sergeant and the other two constables they'd brought in. These were his captains. They would lead the units. There were no local doctors but Mrs Potter from the big sheep station was a trained nurse and she'd have to do as their medic if things turned nasty. Bill Grigson and Johnny Cray had brought their big diggers as requested. These were essential to the plan.
"OK." Collins' voice became firm and determined. His old colleagues back in Brisbane would have been astonished at the change in him, but adversity had made a man of Jack Collins. Fate had given him this opportunity to redeem himself, to get back at the alien invaders, and to stick it to the Chief Constable, and Collins had grabbed it with both hands and was not going to let it go until it had fulfilled its promise. "You all know the plan. You all know what's at stake here. Good luck everybody. Let's go."
Chapter 26: Out of the Frying Pan
Braxx entered the warlord's palace with Klakk and Trugg at his side and an escort of hulking trolls from the Palace Guard flanking them. A minor functionary, one of the local sapients from the Palace staff, had greeted them at the ship with much flattery and unction and now led them eagerly to meet the great Chuwar. Conscious as ever of his own dignity, Braxx ignored the Mozbac functionary as much as possible.
"This way, Your Eminence," the delicate, green-skinned creature announced, grovelling as it led them through the high, stone corridors of the Palace. Braxx looked about him with distaste. The building was massive and crude and was clearly the product of a primitive and unrefined taste. It didn't bother Braxx that, until a couple of generations ago, Vinggan architecture had been quite similar. These days, Vingg was a model of progress and civilisation, as befitted the most advanced species in the Known Galaxy.
"Tell me," he commanded the Mozbac. "What religion do you practice here?"
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