Cargo Cult

by Graham Storrs

  "Your Excellency?" The slight N'oid raced onto the bridge, trying to disguise his panting. He'd made it from the observation deck to the bridge in just under fifteen seconds. A personal best.

  "Where do you keep disappearing to, you scabby little runt?"

  "Just attending to ship's business, Sire. I strive always to ensure your comfort."

  In fact, Werpot had been hiding. The royal yacht was, by Chuwar's decree, monstrously large – big enough to contain Chuwar, the crew, his entourage and the crowd of soldiers he'd brought along, and still have room for the entire Tullakian Massed Pipes and Bongos – and Choir. Even so, three weeks aboard the yacht in the company of an angry and impatient warlord had frayed the vizier's nerves to the point where he felt that stepping out the airlock might just be preferable to one more second in the company of that great, stupid, puffed-up, nano-brained, stink-footed monotreme!

  Chuwar glared at him from beneath heavy brows. "Are we there yet?" he asked.

  Werpot choked down a scream. "No, Sire. Our estimated time of arrival is seventeen hours from now. As I mentioned the last time you asked – and the time before that – there is a display over here..." He indicated a viewscreen about the size of a Klebin troll which displayed the words, “Time to arrival: 17 hours.”

  Chuwar made a dismissive gesture and growled at the screen. "I can't be expected to learn every damned instrument on this whole ship! Look at them all!"

  Werpot cast his eye over the dozen or so instruments on the bridge. "No, of course not, Sire." The real bridge was several decks below them, where the real captain and a crew of ten seasoned spacehands piloted the ship. Chuwar's bridge was just for show – and to make the great tyrant feel important, naturally.

  "Why aren't we there yet?"

  "Sire?"

  "You heard me." Suddenly distracted by something, Chuwar studied his vizier closely. "Doesn't that skin of yours itch, Werpot?"

  The N'oid drew himself up and avoided his master's eyes. "Actually, yes, Sire, it does." It was not something that was spoken of in polite N'oid society.

  "Are the guns ready?"

  "Yes, Sire. Everything has been ready for three weeks, Sire. The crew is exhausted from being on battle alert for all that time. Perhaps we could give them all a short break before we arrive?" Werpot himself was feeling pretty wiped out.

  "I don't pay them to be exhausted, Werpot. I pay them to be alert. If anyone's slacking, I want them brought here to me. Do you understand?"

  Realising he'd almost said enough to have half the crew summarily executed, Werpot got a grip on himself and forced a smile. "They're a fine bunch of men, women and things, Sire. No problem there I assure you."

  "Good. Good." The warlord paced the room, distracted again. He picked up a multiphase linear neutron flow reticulator and inspected it closely. Then he put it down again and continued his pacing. Werpot watched him, despair filling his hearts. The crew might be exhausted but Chuwar appeared to have endless resources of nervous energy. Still, he consoled himself, if he could just stand it for seventeen more hours, they'd arrive and Chuwar would have something other than waiting to occupy his mind – such as it was.

  Reaching the far end of the bridge, Chuwar stopped in his tracks and turned to the forward viewscreens, peering into the infinite grey of infraspace as if he'd lost something out there.

  "Are we there yet?" he asked.

  -oOo-

  The senior civil servant who burst into the Defence Minister's office was red-faced and sweating. Not a man used to physical exercise, he had nevertheless sprinted the fifty metres between his office and the Minister's.

  "George?" she asked, taken aback by his abrupt appearance. Beyond him, her PA was looking distressed and flustered. "What is it?"

  He closed the door behind him. "The Parkes observatory says something large has just appeared in space."

  “Pardon?"

  "It's a ship, Jessie. A bloody big one."

  "Oh my God."

  "It looks like they're back."

  The Minister tried to think, but the enormity of what was happening kept thwarting her efforts. "Is it coming here?"

  "It's heading for Earth, yes. Flat out like a lizard drinking, they say."

  "No, no. Is it coming here? To Australia?"

  Realising he hadn't even thought to check, George shook his head. "I don't know. I..." His mobile phone rang and he pulled it out of his shirt pocket, squinting at it in deep concentration as he tried to work out which of its brightly-coloured icons would answer the call. “Baskin," he snapped once he'd fathomed it. He listened briefly. "I want regular updates," he snapped and then had to study the phone again for a moment before he could hang up.

  "Well?" the Minister wanted to know.

  “Pine Gap has it on radar too."

  "Damn, now the Americans know."

  "They can't say where it's going to land. It's changing course. But it will reach orbit in seven minutes. If it bothers to orbit, that is. They say it might just come straight down."

  "Seven minutes?" The Minister was on her feet. "I've got to call the PM! We've all got to get to the bunker. Seven minutes? They couldn't give us more than seven bloody minutes?" She gripped the edge of her desk and tried to calm down. She needed to focus. She grabbed her desk phone, a finger hovering over the PM's fast dial button.

  She looked up at George. "Call General Treasure. Make sure he's in the loop. Make sure he's doing something. Shit! You know what to do George. Just go and do it."

  George nodded and left the room. Wandering back along the corridors of Parliament House, he felt sick with anxiety. He knew they'd just had five days of contingency planning meetings at a really nice tropical island resort, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what the hell they'd decided. Come to think of it, hadn't they all agreed that they needed to do it again, real soon, to work out the details? Maybe at a rain-forest resort next time.

  “Bugger," he muttered to himself. “Bugger, bugger, bugger."

  -oOo-

  General Treasure got the call while he was still in the air travelling from Amberley back to Canberra. "Has this got anything to do with those kangaroos?" he wanted to know.

  “Kangaroos, General?"

  “Bit of a bloody coincidence don't you think? We arrest the kangaroos and suddenly there's a spaceship in orbit! I don't like the look of this. Get off the phone, George, I need to call Amberley." He hung up and shouted for his ADC.

  -oOo-

  At the other end of the line, George looked at the handset, purring quietly in his hand. “Kangaroos?" he asked himself. "That bloke's always been one galah short of a flock." But he hadn't time to worry about it now. He needed to get to the bunker before they shut the doors.

  -oOo-

  "General?" Wimbush appeared from the back of the plane where he had been having a quiet snooze.

  "Tell the pilot to turn the plane around. We're going back to Amberley. And get me that young Major from the pit site before you go."

  Wimbush took the phone without comment and dialled the number. When Totterdell answered, he handed it back to the General and made his way to the cockpit.

  "Is that you, Les?" the General wanted to know.

  Totterdell recognised the voice immediately, besides, no-one else called him Les. "Yes, General. How can I help you?"

  "I want to know you've got those roos safely tucked away, Major. I want to be sure you're guarding them with everything we've got."

  Totterdell sounded a little nervous. "Er, yes, sir. I'm not sure we could actually hold them if we wanted to, sir, but they're being very co-operative. I don't think they'll be going anywhere."

  "I'm not talking about stopping them getting out, Major. I'm talking about stopping anyone else getting in."

  Now Totterdell sounded distinctly alarmed. "Anyone else, sir? You mean, like, more kangaroos?"

  "I mean like ships full of invading aliens, man. I mean alien armies. I mean War of the Worlds, Major. There's a ship on its
way right now from outer space and it could be parked on your roof in about two minutes. And I want those roos safe, do you hear, Major. I don't want them busted out, or beamed up, or borne aloft in chariots of fire. They're my roos and I'm keeping 'em. Got that?"

  "Er, yes, sir. Ah, a ship, you say?"

  "Good man. Now get off the line. I need to talk to the Base Commander." He stabbed the hangup button. "Wimbush!"

  His ADC appeared in the aisle, staggering as the plane banked into its one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn. "Yes, sir?"

  The General waved the phone at him. "Get me Air Commodore Braby on this thing will you, and make it fast."

  Chapter 35: Landing

  "Have you been drinking Nicky?"

  Air Commodore Barnabas Braby was one of the few men in the Australian Defence Force who would have dared make such a suggestion to General Treasure and even he would normally have been more circumspect. Yet what the general had just told him to do could only be the result of one of those extended lunchtime binges his political masters were so fond of.

  "Damn it Barney, this is a direct order. Scramble every damned thing you've got on the ground and keep the lot of 'em in the air until I tell you to bring 'em down again. Is that clear?"

  "Clear as mud, if you don't mind me saying so, mate."

  "Just do it, Braby, or your next posting will be to bloody Naru. Once they're up, get yourself somewhere safe. There's a bloody spaceship heading our way and my guess is your lot will be in the front line this time. I'll be at the base in an hour. Now get off the line and get it done!"

  With a crisp "Yes, sir," the Air Commodore put down the phone and called his 2IC. “Aspen, give the order to scramble everything." He spoke fast, to forestall the obvious objections. "I want to see everything that can fly in the air and flying right now." He had to raise his voice to stop the Group Captain speaking. “Right now, Aspen. Orders direct from God Almighty.”

  With a deep frown Group Captain Aspen yessirred the phone. Within seconds calls were being made up and down the flight line. Moments after that, senior NCOs were running about shouting and officers and men were to be seen throwing themselves through doors, into and out of hummers, up and down ladders, and sprinting for their posts.

  Aspen watched the pandemonium he had unleashed from the tarmac beside 1 Squadron. He really needed to ask Braby what was going on.

  "Get over to the Air Base Command Post, Aspen,” Braby barked at him when his return call finally got through. "Seems there's a UFO on its way. We've got about two minutes.”

  "Yes, Sir," he'd said. "Did you say two -?" But Braby was still speaking.

  “And while you're at it, I want every last civilian off the base right now. Every airman with weapons training should report to the armoury and be issued with sidearms. Do not lock down the base. Do you hear?”

  “But standing orders -”

  “Standing orders be buggered. If you were an invading alien spaceship, where on this base would you land?”

  Aspen struggled with the idea. “On the runaway, I suppose. It's the only clear ground. But -”

  “So we don't want our people locked in there, do we? Not if they might need to make a hasty retreat. Anyway, there's no time. You've got one minute.”

  -oOo-

  "Well how am I supposed to know?"

  John Saunders was becoming more and more irritable. The Vinggan ship was in a stationary orbit over South-East Queensland and he was peering into a screen that looked disturbingly like a Google Maps image of the terrain below him but without any towns labelled or roads marked. He could recognise a few things – Moreton Bay, Stradbroke Island, and a fuzzy greyness cutting into the green bushland that must have been Brisbane itself.

  "Amberley's in the West somewhere, over there." He pointed at the image. "Can you zoom in or something?"

  "I don't know," snapped Braxx. "Drukk! Where's Drukk?" Everyone on the bridge looked around for a moment.

  "You sent him to fetch the vehicle operator," said one of the Loosi Beechams.

  "I'm here," shouted another Loosi, dragging one of the humans into the room. This copy of the lovely megastar wore a skin-tight orange dress, which John remembered well from their recent adventures together.

  "Is that the vehicle operator?" Braxx asked.

  Marcus Grogan, aspiring author and erstwhile vehicle operator, struggled in Drukk's surprisingly powerful grip. "Let me go, you alien bimbo! I'm not a bus driver. I – am – not – a – bus – driver! How many times do I have to say it?" He looked wildly about him at the roomful of staring, identical faces. "Je ne suis pas un conducteur d'autobus!" he shouted, surprising no-one with his mastery of high-school French since the translation field rendered it automatically into Vinggan, or, in John's case, back into English.

  "It was felt," John said into the ensuing silence, eyeing Braxx accusingly, “that since you did such a fine job of finding my house that time, you'd be able to point us in the right direction for Amberley."

  Marcus goggled at John as if he had revealed himself to be the ringleader of this mob of alien celebrity impersonators. "Amberley?" He bawled. "Amberley? How the hell am I supposed to find my way to Amberley from bloody space?" He noticed the big display and threw a dramatic arm gesture its way. "I'm a writer, I keep telling you all, not a bloody... Hang on."

  He stepped closer to the display. John was surprise to see him blush hotly. "That's Amberley, just there," Marcus said, sheepishly. "That little grey splodge next to Ipswich."

  John peered at the image. "How the hell did you find it?"

  Marcus shrugged. "I should know it, really. I was born there at the base hospital."

  John rolled his eyes in frustration. Instead of hitting Marcus, he turned to Braxx. "OK. We've found it. You can take us down now."

  -oOo-

  Corporal Emily Brownlowe took the gun and the ammo clips she had been handed. The armoury was a low white building with a white-painted corrugated iron roof. Airmen were busy inside queueing weapons up and passing them through a barred window to the people filing past. A Flight Sergeant at the window pushed a clipboard at her.

  “What's going on, Sarge?” she asked as she signed.

  The sergeant looked past her and shouted, “Next!”

  So she stepped aside, checked her weapon, inserted a clip, chambered a round, and headed back towards the HQ Building. The queue at the armoury was already growing long and she was glad she had been one of the first to get there. The morning was far too hot to be standing in line.

  According to the messages popping up on her computer screen, the base had jumped straight from the lowest to the highest alert status – and it was not a drill. Then came orders to lock down the base and evacuate all civilians, then to cancel the lockdown but still evacuate the civilians, then to report to the armoury. It had all the signs of a cock-up somewhere in the senior ranks, but who was Brownlowe to question the wisdom of her officers? Someone in the armoury queue had said there was an alien spaceship coming. Aliens! Ever since that nonsense on the news a few weeks ago, all anybody ever talked about was aliens.

  Apart from the large number of people running around looking confused, things seemed pretty much normal. The sun was high, the low-rise buildings sat peacefully in the morning sunshine, and the sky was clear and blue and cloudless. A group of four men went hurrying past her, heading for a nearby car park. Civilian defence contractors, she assumed, from their lack of uniforms, their flabby, overfed faces, and the nervous glances they gave the weapon she was strapping on.

  As Brownlowe walked, she looked up at the sky. The F/A-18F Super Hornets of 1 Squadron, were out at the moment on a routine flight. She envied them being away from whatever was going on. In all directions, the sky was absolutely empty. All directions, that is, except straight up, and even then, all she could see was a small black dot. A small black dot that was growing even as she watched it. In fact, it had become quite a large black dot now, and was still getting bigger, and bigger, and...

&n
bsp; With a cry of alarm, she threw herself to the ground. This wasn't a spaceship, it was a bloody asteroid. A big one. A wipe-out-all-life-on-Earth one. And coming in so fast it would tunnel half-way to Europe before it finally stopped, leaving a big crater behind where Australia used to be.

  She peeked up at it again as its shadow enveloped her. She had only a moment to register its gigantic bulk hurtling down at her and to think, This is it. I'm going to die.

  Then it stopped dead, just a metre above the ground.

  The non-impact was so sudden, so strongly at odds with her every intuition of what was proper for massive, hurtling, megaliths, that Brownlowe felt as if she had bounced off the ground. It took her many thumping heartbeats to realise she hadn't. That, in fact, nothing had happened. Except the impossible.

  The gigantic spaceship – not an asteroid after all – hovered above the main runway, right next to the hangars, bigger by far than any of the puny buildings around it, making the gigantic C-17 heavy lifter standing beside it look like a toy plane. There hadn't even been a rush of air, she realised. She rose unsteadily to her feet, finding her legs were shaking and would hardly hold her.

  "All right," she told herself, unaware that she was speaking out loud. "A gigantic, alien spaceship has just landed on the runway at Amberley. It's probably an invasion and we're all going to die.

  “Fine.

  "No problem.

  “Right."

  She picked up her hat, dusted herself off and straightened her uniform. "I'd better get along to my office then. We can't let the base face total destruction without Corporal Brownlowe at her post now, can we?" She put on her hat, tipped her chin up, and moved off, not noticing she was stumbling along in the wrong direction.

  -oOo-

  On the bridge of the Vinggan spaceship, the screaming slowly died away as everyone realised they were not, after all, going to die in a horrible fireball. One by one they pulled their gaze free of the viewscreen that had shown them plummeting at terrible speed towards the ground below and looked sheepishly about them.