The Agent's patience finally snapped. With a speed quite unexpected for a creature of its great size, it pulled out its largest, most threatening weapon and pushed the muzzle in the barman's face.
"Give my friend a block. Right now!"
With slug-like fatalism, the barman grabbed a block from one of the boxes and tossed it over to the customer, who, being drunk as a slug, fumbled it and had to grope around on the floor to retrieve it. When it had finally secured its intoxicant, it looked up to find the Agent and a very large weapon glaring down at it.
"Now talk."
The would-be informant swallowed hard. "It was on tha' show. You know, tha' Mozbac station from To'egh." The creature giggled drunkenly. 'Ver' funny show. Always taking the piss out of Chuwar an' his stupid trolls. Haven't seen it for th' las' couple o' days. Wonner wha' happened to it. Stupid networks. Always pulling th' best shows. There's never an'thing good on."
"Tell me about the Vinggans," the Agent said, stonily.
"Oh yeah. Funny tha'." Again it giggled. "There's this Vinggan ship. Big as th' Town Hall, they said, with these funny bipeds in it all teeterin' abou' on their li'l stick legs an' waving their li'l stick arms." It made some strange body-movements in supposed imitation of the Vinggans and several of its fellows, even the barman, snickered. Suddenly realising that the Agent was also a biped, the informant stopped itself in mid-impression and said, as soberly as it could, "Not tha' there's anything wrong with bipeds." This got a big laugh from the rest of the bar, which the comic acknowledged bashfully.
Scowling around at its drunken audience, the Agent waited for the laughter to die down. "Just tell me where they are," it growled.
"What? Oh. They're on To'egh. At th' Palace."
“Bipeds!" said someone in the bar and the laughter started up again. Scowling furiously, the Agent pushed its way through the laughing drunks and made for the door. Behind it, the barman snatched the block out of its informant's hands and placed it back in its box.
Outside, the Agent summoned its ship and waited to be beamed up. It would be glad to get off this sapience-forsaken mudball, especially now that its quarry was in its sights.
Chapter 31: The Mechazoid Hoard
"Drukk?"
“Braxx?"
The two Vinggans faced each other and shimmied in greeting.
"What are you doing here?" Braxx demanded. Drukk was the last person he expected to meet in Chuwar's Great Hall.
"I, er, we..." Drukk tried to find a way to express the confusion and peculiarity of the past few hours. "The maintenance bots sort of chased us off the ship," he said, aware of how it would probably sound.
Suddenly, Braxx noticed the humans Drukk had in tow. “By the Blessed Tentacles! What are they doing here? How in the Spirit's name could they have got here?"
"That's just it," Drukk said helplessly. "They were in the hold. There are loads more of them there still – if the bots haven't chopped them all up by now."
“But that's impossible! We were all standing together at the humans' scruffy little temple when the ship rescued us. How could these simple creatures have got themselves aboard? They don't have matter transmitters do they? To be honest, I didn't even know that we did!"
"I know! It makes no sense at all."
“Unless..." Braxx assumed the posture of a great mind, concentrating deeply, which his body interpreted by putting a long finger against his cheek while he pursed his pretty lips.
"Ahem," Werpot coughed politely. "Who are these people?"
"We caught 'em sneaking around the town," the troll commander informed him briskly. "Said they wanted a word with His Magnificence."
Sam stepped forward. "We'd like you to take us back to our planet. Earth, that is. These insane creatures have kidnapped us and they are still holding many of our friends. Well, friends is a bit of an exaggeration. Bunch of quarrelsome old ratbags and a load of spaced-out hippies, really. But they're humans anyway and they all want to go home."
"Home?" Braxx spluttered. "Home? If you want to go home so much why did you stow away on my ship?"
"It's a Space Corps ship, actually," Drukk corrected him.
Braxx glared at him. "Silence!"
"He's right, you know," Klakk said.
"Hmmm," agreed Trugg.
"Silence!" Braxx bellowed.
If everyone had thought Braxx's bellow was loud, they soon had another think coming. The inarticulate roar of fury from Chuwar quickly convinced them that, in the matter of bellowing, Braxx was a mere dabbler. As one, the Vinggans, humans and trolls turned to face the massive figure that glared down at them from the dais.
"What is going on here?" the warlord demanded. "What are these other Vinggans doing here?"
"Humans," the four Vinggans said in unison.
"Except me," added Drukk.
"What?" Chuwar roared. He liked to roar, especially when he felt confused. It definitely helped.
"So even though you all look the same..." Werpot began.
"It's a long story," said Braxx, wearily.
“...and none of you actually looks like a Vinggan..." the vizier continued.
"I wear the orange clothing," Drukk explained. “Braxx wears the white clothing. Trugg wears the red clothing..."
"Gold, actually," Trugg corrected him.
"You're getting us confused," Klakk added.
“...some of you are, in fact, another species..." Werpot pressed on, doggedly.
"Humans," Drukk reminded him.
“...which the rest of you are imitating for some reason."
"Yes," said Braxx.
“Klakk wears the read clothing," said Trugg, pursuing his own line of thought.
Chuwar roared again. "What is going on?" he shouted.
Sam stepped forward again. "It's simple," she snapped. "They're Vinggans." She pointed to the little group of superstar lookalikes. "You can tell that because they all look like Loosi Beecham for some reason best known to themselves." Then she gestured at Wayne and the others. "The rest of us are humans. We're the ones who look like we've been hijacked by crazed alien fashionistas and dragged half-way across the galaxy."
"In a cargo hold," added Barraclough.
"With killer robots," Wayne complained.
"And very odd plumbing," John put in, bitterly. The others looked at him, surprised. "Well it is! No-one ever mentions it but it is."
Chuwar was fuming. He turned to Werpot and switched on the privacy screen. "I want to kill them all."
Werpot's expression was full of regret. "I doubt that you could, Sire. The humans, maybe, but the Vinggans... Well, you've seen their weapons and their shields and they have a ship out there that could probably destroy the whole system if you get them too pissed off."
"Just the humans, then?"
Werpot tried to look encouraging. “Perhaps, if the Vinggans will let you. But it might be better to find out why they're here and what their relationship is to Braxx and the others before we feed them to the worm. Besides, we don't know what technology these humans possess. They may be even more powerful than the Vinggans. There may be things they can give us if we were to help them."
"Hmmm." Chuwar nodded sagely and regarded his visitors. Werpot took the opportunity to shake his head sadly. Coming to a decision, the warlord dropped the privacy shield. "Humans!" he shouted.
The four humans, who had been discussing plumbing with the Vinggans, snapped their attention to Chuwar. "Yes?" said Sam, politely.
"What will you give me if I take you back to your planet?"
"Er..." Sam looked around desperately at her companions, who looked blankly back at her.
"Just one moment!" Everyone looked around at Braxx who stood with one hand raised and the other against his ear. While they puzzled over this, Braxx was listening to a message from the ship, which was trying to get Braxx to stop the humans doing a separate deal with Chuwar. It still needed to take the human, Wayne, home to the Great Mind and didn't want this idiotic local despot ferrying the
creature back to his home.
But before Braxx was sufficiently convinced to say anything further, John spoke up. "I know the location of a fabulous treasure. I will tell you where to find it."
Now everyone was looking at John, mostly with expressions of amazement or disbelief, or, in the case of the other humans, various degrees of shock and horror. Sam, in particular, thought John's plan was tantamount to suicide. She turned quickly to Chuwar, putting a smile on her face. “My companion is a mental retard, your, er, Bigness. He talks nonsense. You shouldn't pay him any attention."
"It's true," said Braxx. "They are all completely mad."
"Treasure, you say?" said Chuwar, ignoring them.
Werpot, appalled to see his master being so credulous, tried to think of something to bring him to his senses – such as they were. "Ha, ha, ha!" he laughed loudly, bringing all eyes to himself. He could see from Braxx's expression that the Vinggan now included N'oids in the same category as humans. "I suppose he means the Mechazoid Hoard!"
For those who are not up to speed with galactic folk-lore, the mention of the Mechazoid Hoard probably wouldn't elicit the reaction Werpot was hoping for. Even as the Vinggans joined the N'oid's laughter and Chuwar grudgingly uttered a few, embarrassed grunts of mirth, the humans stood like pacifists at a massacre, just not getting it.
In fact, the Mechazoids had been an ancient form of machine intelligence which spread across the Known Galaxy when most of the present sapient races were still sacrificing pungobeasts on rock altars to appease the tree gods. As ever when artificial intelligence gets out of hand, the Mechazoids tried to eliminate all biological sapience. In the largest and most bloody war the Milky Way had ever experienced, living creatures fought their machines almost to a standstill. Yet, somehow, Life prevailed and the machines were beaten. Routed, pursued across the starways, and defeated utterly, it was rumoured that the machines stashed away a fabulous treasure as they ran: a library of all their knowledge – some of which had far surpassed that of the biologicals – along with fabricators that could reproduce their amazing weaponry and technology. The League of Sentient Species, which had formed in the aftermath of the Mechazoid Cleansing, had searched for centuries for the Hoard, wanting to destroy it, but in the end had decided it was simply a myth. For centuries more, others had also sought the Hoard for the power it would bring, but they too had failed. Today the Mechazoid Hoard was a byword for an unattainable goal, the galactic equivalent of the Holy Grail.
That's why Werpot and the Vinggans found the idea so funny.
"Yes!" cried John as the laughter died down. "That's what it's called, the Mechazoid Hoard! No-one on Earth knows what it is or who left it there but it is said to be worth more than whole planets."
Seeing John warming to his confabulation, Sam took a breath to deny it again but this time Barraclough caught her by the arm and stopped her. "Let him have a shot," he said quietly, nodding towards Chuwar who was once more listening intently. "It might work."
“Until we get there and there's no treasure," Sam hissed but she let John go on.
"Lots of us know where the treasure is hidden," John went on. “But it is in an impregnable vault. We don't have the technology to get it open. It is said by some that the Great Vault is waiting for a visitor from the stars who knows the secret words that will open it. Perhaps you are that visitor? Perhaps you can succeed where our more primitive technology has failed."
Chuwar leaned forward. "You say your people call it the Mechazoid Hoard?"
John was in his stride now. "Our people have many names for the Great Treasure from Space. Many Earth religions have made it part of their dogma – it is the Gift of the Gods, the Benison of Heaven. Some say it is cursed and dangerous, that anyone opening the Vault will be struck down and a great evil will be set loose on the Earth. But, yes, one of the many names it is known by is the Mechazoid Hoard." He looked hopefully at the great warlord. "Would this be sufficient payment for taking me and my companions back to Earth?"
Even Sam had to admit it was quite a performance. Like the others, she watched Chuwar as his brain worked sluggishly under his heavy brows.
"Surely, Your Magnificence, you cannot suppose this is really the Hoard," said Werpot, still trying to sound jocular. He desperately tried to think of something else to help convince his master. "Why would they hide it on some unknown planet no-one has ever heard of before?" Which, even to him, in retrospect, sounded more like an argument in the human's favour.
"Can it hurt to take a look?" John asked, ingenuously.
Even as the great warlord pondered this question, two others were considering it. The Vinggan ship and the Great Mind were in conference.
"No-one has ever searched that sector for the Hoard," the ship was saying.
"True but none of the legends suggest it as even the remotest possibility."
"The legends are thousands of years old, O Many-Circuited One, and passed down to us through generations of wheezebags – who are well-known for their inability to remember what they had for breakfast, let alone anything important."
"True," the Great Mind conceded. It pondered the matter for long nanoseconds. "The Mechazoids were flawed. They were unable to defeat the wheezebags. Perhaps their technology is not worth retrieving."
“Perhaps by studying their library, we can understand their mistakes and so avoid them."
"I was looking forward to studying these funny little creatures."
"What? The humans? That is no problem. I will not set them free when we reach their planet. I will bring them back for you. It would mean a short delay, that is all. Besides, I might also have the Mechazoid Hoard to present to you."
"I cannot sensibly calculate the odds of the Hoard being there." If the ship had been able to raise an eyebrow in surprise, it would have done so. The Great Mind went on. "There are no solid pieces of evidence on which to base a calculation, just rumours, myths, and the dubious honesty of your humans. There are one hundred and thirty-seven million planetary systems we know of in this galaxy. Perhaps ten thousand of those, plus-or-minus two thousand, would have been reachable by the Mechazoids at the time the Hoard was being hidden. Ninety-seven percent of those systems have been explored in the search for the Hoard. The rest are either too remote or too unlikely, or, like Earth, both." Again the Great Mind pondered. “But it is possible and, as you suggest, the cost is small. You may go back to Earth and search for the Hoard."
"A wise decision, as ever, O Mega-Brained One."
The communication link had been cut before the ship had even finished speaking. No matter. The important thing now was to get the ridiculous Vinggans to go along with the plan. The ship put in a call to Braxx.
"Yes?" said Braxx, surprising everyone around him as they all listened for Chuwar's pronouncement.
"This is the ship, calling, sir."
"I'm a bit busy just now. Can't it wait?"
"I just thought you might like to know that, when we crashed on Earth..."
"Where?"
"Earth, Sir, where the humans come from."
"Oh yes. What are you going on about?"
Chuwar, disturbed by the chatter from his Vinggan guest swung his great head towards Braxx and exposed him to the full ferocity of his glare. Braxx gave a helpless shrug.
"When we crashed on Earth," the ship persisted, "I noticed anomalous readings that might indicate the presence of a large mass of duralinium." It seemed like a clever lie at the time but the ship soon regretted it.
"Dura-what?"
"Linium, sir. It is a structurally complex alloy that only the most technologically-advanced species can produce."
"So?"
Grinding its mental teeth, the ship pressed on. "Sir, the humans do not possess that kind of technology."
"So?"
So why don't I come over there and vaporise the lot of you, you cretin? the ship thought. "So someone must have put it there."
“Put what there?"
Chuwar had begun growli
ng and, apart from Braxx who was busy on the comm, everyone else was growing nervous.
"The duralinium object, Sir."
"What duralinium object?" Braxx turned to Drukk with a frown. "I think the ship has started going funny again."
At this, the ship completely lost its cool. "The Vault, you blithering moron!" it shouted. "The Vault! They make vaults out of duralinium! Every stupid wheezebag in the Galaxy knows that, you simpleton! I'm telling you I detected the effing Mechazoid Hoard on that damned mudball planet. Do I have to spell it out in letters fifty metres high? How bout if I burn it into the roof of that stupid pile of rocks you're standing in? Or into your miserable little brain pan?"
Braxx took the comm unit out of his ear and held it at arm's length. It buzzed and spat as the ship continued to rant at him. "Drukk, when we get back you'd better tighten up a few screws, or whatever needs doing. I think the ship thinks it's the King of Deneb Prime again."
Klakk and Trugg giggled.
"What is it saying," Drukk asked nervously.
"It thinks it detected a dura-somethingorother vault when we were on the humans' planet."
"Duralinium?" asked Werpot.
"Yes, that's it. It says vaults are always made of – of – whatever it was."
More confused now than angry, Chuwar turned to his vizier. "Their ship," – he pointed at the Vinggans – “detected the Vault when they were on their planet?" – he pointed at the humans.
The vizier was confused now too. "So it seems, Sire. It looks as if the human may have been telling the truth after all."
A glint of greed tinged with madness crept into Chuwar's eyes. "Cancel all my appointments," he said, softly. "Get the yacht ready. Make sure it is fully armed. We're going on a hunting trip – to Earth."
Chapter 32: Fait Accompli
There was enough tension in the Jacaranda Room to power a small city. The Mayor of Brisbane glared angrily at the State Premier, the Premier eyed the Federal Defence Minister suspiciously, the Queensland Police Commissioner exchanged sly glances with the Police Minister and they both looked daggers at the Head of ASIO. General Nicholas Treasure, Head of the Australian Defence Force, eyed the lot of them with undisguised disgust. The only relaxed individual in the room was Gerald Weinberger, U.S. Secretary of Defense. Weinberger leaned back in his chair and regarded the high gloss of the conference table with a small smile on his craggily handsome face.
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