‘Our finest hour,’ Ross deadpanned. ‘They’re having a re-enactment.’
There was a sound of gunfire which prompted Iris to produce a pair of binoculars and look to the beach. German soldiers were there now too, being mown down by armed members of the evacuation fleet.
‘I confess I’m not a keen student of the period,’ she said, ‘but nothing I read about Operation Dynamo mentioned the captains of the little ships machine-gunning the evil foe.’
‘No, but I think the biggest piece of revisionism at play here is the fact that the Daily Mail was actually pro-Hitler and vocally supported the Nazis. Obviously this was a very long time ago and things are different now. The paper has moved a lot further to the right since then.’
Iris steered the cruiser around the island then on towards the horizon. Having set her course, she turned around in her seat and checked back with her binoculars.
‘What you looking for?’
‘Making sure we’re not seen taking off. You should have a look too. Good to have an extra pair of eyes.’
‘If you’re worried about the Integrity finding out about flight between worlds, I’m afraid that spaceship has sailed. I saw a bunch of them fly away in a troop carrier during the raid that bagged the Sandman.’
‘Well, that’s a cheery thought as we fly off towards their home-world.’
‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’
‘It was only ever a matter of time,’ she conceded. ‘And I guess that’s all the more reason to make sure nobody reports to the Integrity that there’s a vessel headed straight for their airspace.’
Ross scoped back and forth across the little island and beyond.
‘Looks clear to me,’ he reported. ‘What about you?’
‘Shiny,’ she replied.
Liberator
Ross shifted restlessly in the little cabin, with literally nothing to distract him outside its windows. The vessel had undergone a few minor transformations once it was out in the void, but essentially he was flying through space in a speedboat, with only marginally more room around him than had he been in the passenger seat of Carol’s Audi TT.
That was where he had first kissed her.
He hadn’t meant for it to happen like that. He was planning to choose his moment; not because he wanted to play it cool, but because he didn’t want to blow anything by appearing impatient for a physical element. She’d been dropping him off at his house after they’d been to the cinema together. They’d both hated the movie, but liked the way each other hated it. In that respect, he was happy that this second date had been redeemed. He wanted to leave on the right note, get out of the car with both of them smiling, both of them looking forward to doing this again. But she laughed so much at the last thing he said and they looked at each other just a little too long … and it happened, and it was exquisite.
He couldn’t afford to think about that, though. He had to put it all from his mind. But the more he tried, the more Carol kept slipping back in. He was aware he would find only further torment and confusion there but he couldn’t help thinking about her, and about the version of himself that had walked out of the scanning machine and gone back to work.
What had happened? All those things he had resolved in his head: had he put them into practice? Presumably, because they’d had not just one kid, but two. How many years had passed out there? What ages were they? Where did they live? He wondered about daft little details, like what kind of décor Carol would have insisted upon for their living room.
He missed her. He ached to talk to her, to share what had happened out there in the real world. Above all, he wanted to see the kids. They said you didn’t miss what you never had, but the game had seriously changed since that phrase was coined.
Was what he was enduring worse than the pain felt by Bob back on Graxis? Probably not. Bob was missing something that had become a fundamental part of him, something he couldn’t imagine life without. Ross was missing a life he’d never led, like an old man’s regrets. But unlike that old man, this life had been lived, was being lived, yet he wouldn’t get to experience any of it. He wouldn’t get to hold his children, to play with them, hear them laugh, comfort them when they cried, or a million other things he never knew the value of when he stepped into that scanner.
If there was any comfort, it was that he must have made Carol happy. There was a version of himself out there that was what he’d aspired to be; a version out there that had put right all the things he’d been screwing up.
Way to go, man. Proud of you, he thought, trying to be magnanimous. You’re a better man than I.
And a lucky bastard.
Ross stared dead ahead as the ship hummed lightly with power and motion. He was looking for anything that might resemble even a dot, but he could see only blackness.
‘I’m trying very hard not to ask: “Are we nearly there yet?”’
‘Appreciate it.’
‘You said that last place was the nearest world to where we’re going?’ he asked.
‘It’s the furthest distance between any two worlds, truly the furthest known extremity of the gameverse.’
‘I take it nobody has explored beyond it?’
‘Pointless. There’s nothing beyond it: just endless space created by repeating subroutines.’
Ross understood. It was just like when you noclipped out of any game. You could keep going forever, but you’d never reach anything, and you’d have to come all the way back or quit out.
‘You’d best settle in and get comfortable,’ said Iris. ‘It’s a long way yet.’
‘Yeah, I’ll put my head back and turn on the radio, listen to some tunes.’
‘Actually, you could if you want to. There’s a music interface on board.’
She pressed a button and music began to play over an unseen but extremely high-fidelity sound system. It was New Song by Howard Jones, a track to which Ross had a sufficient emotional connection for him to wonder whether it was a set-up. It had been a huge favourite of his mum’s, which was why it inveigled its way into his heart too, assisted by a confused interpretation of the lyrics. He had probably heard it several times growing up but paid it very little heed until the advent of his interest in computer games caused his ears to prick up at the feather-haired Howard singing about being ‘lasered down by the Doom crew’. Ross had laboured under this misapprehension for a while before later discovering that the track hailed from 1983, that ‘lasered’ was actually ‘laden’ and that the capped-up D was only in his imagination.
For all that, it stuck with him even more, and he couldn’t hear it without picturing his mum in their old kitchen, singing along to a mix-tape as she made a pot of soup.
‘Is this your choice?’ he asked inquisitively.
‘No, actually, it’s yours. There’s almost limitless music accessible in the gameverse, so this gizmo taps into your memory and creates a playlist of what it thinks you want to hear. I normally set it to random, because otherwise it can be a little too much like musical psychoanalysis. Then I forget it’s on random and wonder what it says about my state of mind that I’m listening to ‘Pervert’ by Nerf Herder.
The electro-pop synth notes gave way to a more insistent beeping he didn’t remember, not even from the twelve-inch remix.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, but even as he spoke he recognised the graphic display to which Iris was now paying rapt attention.
‘Convergence alarm.’
‘I can’t see anything,’ Ross reported, looking to starboard from where the monitor indicated another ship was approaching.
‘Probably small, like us. Moving a little slower though, so most likely packing heat.’
Iris made a course correction, and only seconds later the convergence warning sounded again.
‘Who would pirates be hoping to catch flying way out here?’ Ross asked.
‘Way out here, it won’t be pirates. Someone back on Little England must have seen us and phoned the Neighbourhood Watch.’
/>
Iris made another alteration to their course, which at present speed ought to avert the convergence, albeit at the expense of taking a longer route to their destination. No sooner had she done so than the alarm sounded again, beeping and flashing more insistently this time. They were no longer being invisibly flanked from starboard, however: this line of convergence was now coming from the bow, and the projected point of intersection was far closer.
‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’
The first craft had been playing sheepdog: guiding them right into the path of a bigger, closer threat.
‘I still can’t see anything,’ said Ross, as panic began to take hold.
‘That’s because it’s black on black.’
Ross stared ahead into the void, trying to make out any kind of shape beyond the prow. When finally he saw movement, it was too fast to be a ship. It was zooming towards them at hundreds of feet per second, giving them no time to manoeuvre.
‘Incoming!’ Iris shouted, but the torpedo hit before Ross could even brace himself for impact.
He felt all of the speedboat’s puny fragility as it was struck, killing all of their forward momentum and buffeting them like a moth in a hurricane. No matter what he tried to tell himself about the rules that applied here, the reality was that he was out in space in a vessel he’d have been dubious about taking too far off the Clyde coast.
He saw it now, the Integrity ship: a ghostly shape only visible as it bounced back light from inside his own craft. It was the size of a naval destroyer, at least a hundred metres long and thirty high, bearing down on them at a steady clip; no need for hurry as they were the ones who had been speeding towards it.
A second torpedo impacted from starboard, fired by the smaller Integrity vessel. Ross watched various instruments flash erratically, many of them blinking their last and fading to black.
‘We’re down to emergency distribution,’ said Iris. ‘That means everything we’ve got left is being diverted towards simply holding us together. We’re dead in the water and we’ve got about two minutes before we break up.’
‘How long before they can fire again?’
‘There’s a sub-distribution within the weapon attributes: power of torpedo or speed of recharge. But it really doesn’t matter how you arrange the numbers, they add up to the same thing: we’re borked.’
One of the screens on the dashboard flashed back into life, a pulsing symbol in the centre of it.
‘What’s that?’ Ross asked.
‘They’re sending us a warp invite, asking us to call up our HUDs and beam aboard to surrender. Makes no difference: at this distance, if they blow us out of the sky, we’ll force-spawn aboard their ship anyway. It’s over, Bedlam.’
‘Actually, I’m thinking of changing my moniker to Albatross.’
He watched another couple of instruments cease blinking as the power drained, all the juice going towards the doomed task of preventing the vessel from coming to pieces. Adding insult to injury, the convergence warning came online again, in what Ross considered a pointlessly power-sapping act of redundancy.
However, a glance at the screen showed him that it wasn’t redundant: it was reading a new convergence.
The huge black Integrity destroyer had detected it too, and was altering its course in a hurry, its diversion pulling it away from spawn range, and with nowhere to respawn, an eternity of feeling like rising vomit in an endless throat awaited them after the speedboat imploded.
‘What is that?’ he asked, pointing to the new blip on the radar.
‘I don’t know,’ Iris replied. ‘But nothing bigger than a torpedo is supposed to move that fast out here.’
Ross turned around and looked behind. He caught a glimpse of something, but the form itself was lost in a dazzle of illumination, much as the shape of a car is obliterated from the retina on a dark night by it suddenly turning on its headlamps full beam.
‘Aren’t laser weapons not supposed to happen out here either?’ he asked.
He made out the true shape of the Integrity destroyer for a fraction of a second before it was ripped apart by a blaze of energy, the plasma weapons delivering a quite devastating payload of damage in a matter of moments. The outriding sheepdog ship was nippier in its attempts to flee, but in the twinkling of an eye, it was space-dust too.
When the lasers stopped firing, Ross was finally able to get a good look at their source, and laughed out loud as surprise collided with the relief he was already feeling. Whoever had come to their rescue had done so in a detail-perfect replica of the Liberator from Blake’s 7.
‘We’re getting a new warp invite,’ Iris reported. ‘I’m leaning towards thinking we should accept.’
‘It would simply be impolite not to.’
The Captain
The ship may have been modelled on the Liberator, but the spawn pods were pure USS Enterprise. Ross looked up from the platform where he had materialised and saw three men in differently coloured but similarly designed uniforms, vaguely reminiscent of Next Generation era Star Trek but with a flavour of Space 1999 flowing through it like raspberry ripple. The one at the front wore light blue and stood with his hands clasped behind his back, a non-threatening posture he could afford because he was flanked a few feet back by two men in dark green, each bearing what Ross recognised as electro-driver rifles from Painkiller. The guns weren’t being levelled, just held at arms, but the distinction hardly mattered. If he and Juno harboured any bad intentions, they’d have about a quarter of a second to act upon them before being insta-gibbed by a messily devastating combination of shurikens and lightning.
‘Hello,’ said the man in front, a cheery soul sporting the unique combination of a pink goatee beard and blue spiky hair. ‘My name is Reverend Scapegoat. Welcome aboard the Manta-Ray. And you are?’
‘Eh, Bedlam,’ Ross replied, still a little dazed from both the teleportation and the rush of having just escaped total catastrophe. Something about the ship’s name rang familiar, but he couldn’t think why.
‘I’m Iris. Thanks for saving our asses out there.’
‘Our pleasure. By the way, this is Kill-Streak and Roid-Rage. We think of them as our guest services team. If you’ve got your sea-legs back, we’ll take you to meet The Captain.’
They followed Reverend Scapegoat up through two levels of decks, his guards at their backs always a few paces behind. Ross noticed security cameras peering down from the walls, and guessed they were being monitored as they made their way to the bridge. The place was like a compendium of sci-fi design, every doorway revealing glimpses of décor or equipment paying its dues to different classics: Predator, Alien, BSG, Firefly, Star Trek and even Gerry Anderson.
‘Who is the captain?’ Iris asked.
‘That’s her name: she’s just The Captain. She’s in charge: her ball, her rules.’
‘Those laser weapons,’ said Ross. ‘How can …?’
‘The Captain,’ Reverend Scapegoat answered. ‘She’s not just in charge of the ship. She’s one of the Originals; kind of the secret Original, in fact. A secret very few people know about back on the gameworlds, because this is her domain out here.’
‘So the weapons, the speed … She controls the protocols?’
‘Her ball, her rules.’
‘And she designed this ship?’
‘No, that’s more of a group effort. We all have our little assigned areas so us geeks don’t fall out. Nothing worse than a Next Generation zealot and an original series evangelist going fifteen rounds over how the engineering deck should look. The Captain doesn’t worry so much about the ship’s aesthetics; she’s more concerned with its attributes.’
‘Her ball …’ Ross suggested.
‘You got it. Mostly the ship obeys the same protocols as everybody else. The Captain doesn’t bend the rules unless it’s in a good cause. Or just really funny.’
Reverend Scapegoat pushed a button and stood aside as two doors swished apart with a sound familiar to anyone who has boldly gone. Ro
ss was half expecting to see William Shatner or Patrick Stewart awaiting him on the bridge. Instead he was greeted by the sight of someone he recognised instantly and who belonged at the tiller even more than either of those.
That was when he worked out why the ship’s name was familiar. It had been the name she’d intended for that boat she had always remained so optimistic that she would own when she retired. And Ray had been her husband’s name.
‘Agnes?’
She looked twenty years younger than the last time Ross had seen her, but the brightness in her expression was unchanged. She gave Ross a devilish smile and spread her arms to indicate the majesty of her surroundings.
‘Dr B. You’ll see I managed to get myself that boat after all. Now, you want to tell me what you two eejits were doing all the way out here in a glorified pedallo?’
Ross could see their destination on the bridge’s huge view-screen, small compared to all the other worlds he’d observed from outside. It was a compact and nondescript tablet of blackness, the only contours visible on the topside being mere ripples at this distance. Maybe it was the sci-fi overload of the Manta-Ray’s interior, but it kind of reminded him of the carbonite slab imprisoning the frozen Han Solo. This was due to the uniform depth of its four sheer vertical planes. On other worlds, where there were subterranean levels, from beneath it was often possible to see through the walls, tunnels and lift shafts, or at least see the reverse sides described in negative like the outside of a huge mould. On this place, there was no way of knowing whether there were chambers immediately on the other side of the outer walls or just hundreds of feet of solid rock.
‘It doesn’t look very big,’ Ross observed.
‘It was smaller still the first time I saw it,’ said The Captain. ‘Way, way back when I was charting the system. It was just a black lump floating in space: shapeless, not all clean lines like it is now. It was an anomaly. There was nothing on it: it wasn’t a gameworld or a satellite of a gameworld. It had no discernible purpose, so I paid it no heed. Once I knew this was the only object so far out, I didn’t come back this way for a long time. I remember telling Solderburn about it though, and he seemed very curious. I don’t know if he ever checked it out. I’d have been keen to hear his findings if he did, but I didn’t see him again before he disappeared.’
Bedlam Page 34
