by M. D. Cooper
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Zip! Zap! Boing!
by Andrew Lawston
The role of a lifetime doesn’t come without a catch.
Struggling actor James Fanning is out of options when he runs into the mercurial Mr Puff, who offers him the role of a lifetime in a touring production.
The catch? Puff’s production is touring warzones.
The other catch? Puff’s theatre company is the renowned Starship Troupers Initiative, who tour wartorn hotspots on Earth’s outer colony worlds, ten thousand years in the future. And James is about to discover the STI have their own agenda, which will soon see him fighting for his life on the remote desert planet Jargorth.
Featuring thrilling space battles, heroic acrobatics, and space marine theatre critics, Zip! Zap! Boing! puts the opera into space opera...
Chapter 1: Dress Rehearsal
A huge battlecruiser drifts over the Jargroth imperial court, briefly obscuring the twin moons Zerxia and Krellatewn, whose vivid purple light is the only illumination, shining through the jagged hole in the lofty domed roof and acting as a natural spotlight. My head is bowed as I step into the small patch of light, the vivid green plasma restraints at my wrists and ankles fizzing slightly, poised to dismember me at the slightest hint of transgression. I’m orbited by drones, bobbing and dipping in the chamber’s faint air currents. They too are primed to vaporise me at the first wrong move. The floor around me is already littered with fresh young corpses, both human and cyborg, and the watching crowd’s silent judgement already sits heavily on my shoulders.
Out in the crowd, a thousand heavily-armed troops are watching. Soon, many will be weeping with remorse, when they have heard all I have come to say. Others will be baying for my blood. And the eventual outcome depends on my words alone.
Slowly, I raise my shaven head to face the silent accusers on the floor of the Jargroth parliament, well aware how the harsh overhead light will make my cheekbones and nose look sharp, cruel, and haughty. So be it. I open my mouth.
“Two households both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,”
Two more circles of light slam down on to the stage, flanking me, and illuminating two grizzled old warriors brandishing greatswords,
“A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.”
A final spotlight shines down directly in front of me, illuminating a human female and a cyborg, entwined in death in each other’s arms, and both covered in blood.
As I draw breath to speak the next few lines, the female gives me a conspiratorial wink, which I acknowledge by flipping her off before disguising the gesture as a declamatory finger pointing to the heavens. As I do so, the rest of the lights go up, to reveal a sizeable fraction of the Jargroth army sitting in the galleries and stroking their beards thoughtfully, occasionally creaking in their heavy space marine armour as they reach for a humbug from a paper bag, or consult the holo-programmes that have been streamed to their gauntlet displays.
It’s all a long way from weekly rep at Whitby Pavilion.
And I expect you’re wondering how I came to be here.
Several Days / Ten Thousand Years Earlier
I took one last bow before the curtains descended, and then barely made it into the wings before the desultory round of applause died away, and the audience made a sustained dash for the bar and the toilets. I winced, and shrugged at Matt, poised on the ropes to open the curtains in case of a final encore.
“No bouquets tonight, Jim,” the old stagehand said cheerily, and we both grimaced as the rest of the cast streamed away around us.
“Any performance you can walk away from, Matt.” I skipped down the steps that led to the backstage area, my fellow actors already far ahead in their dash to get changed and round to the pub before last orders.
It wasn’t likely to be a great cast party. One week playing Macbeth to an empty seaside theatre in bitter January wasn’t the experience I’d expected whenever I dared to dream of a Shakespearean lead role. The actors would huddle in a booth in the grim old boozer round the corner that had become their home from home, and we’d make solemn promises to see each other in whatever shows we were doing next. We’d pretend we’d had a great time, and had made great art together, when in fact the only thing any of us would miss about Whitby was the price of a pint.
Full of these thoughts, I reached the glorified cupboard that passed for my dressing room. I wandered in, and reached for the bottle of water I’d left in front of the mirror. That final swordfight had really taken it out of me. As my understudy, on closing night the other actor no longer had any interest in ‘accidentally’ injuring me, so I’d thought Macduff might lay off. No such luck, though. He must have had a girl he was trying to impress in the audience.
“Thirsty work, isn’t it?” said a voice behind me, and I spat a gulp of water across the mirror, where it hissed and steamed against the hot light bulbs that ran around the outside.
Staring into the water-spattered mirror, I saw that an old man was sitting on the chair at the back of the room, right next to the hook where I’d hung my coat. In spite of the man’s considerable girth, he was perching on the very edge of the seat, his hands clutching an ornate cane that rested between his knees. His face half-obscured by his flowing silver hair, the man’s single visible eye was keen and bright. He was dressed in an odd beige quilted tunic, which was padded all over the place to make him look like an inflatable samurai. If we hadn’t been the only show in Whitby that week, I’d have sworn he’d just stepped off the stage.
“Don’t mind me,” he said cheerfully. “I needed a sit down.”
I shrugged. The Stage Door people had been notoriously curmudgeonly about letting even family members pop round after shows, so this didn’t feel like anything I should worry about particularly. I picked up some cotton wool pads, and began to remove my make-up.
“Did you enjoy the show?”
The old man frowned. “I did. Though ‘show’ seems a bit trite for the Scottish Play, don’t you think?”
I shrugged again. “If you say so. There’s more dry ice than a rock concert and at the Wednesday matinee they even started booing me in Act 3, so it felt more panto than tragedy. Who did you come to see?”
The old man’s lips twitched in a faint but genial smile. “Well. I’m in your dressing room, James.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.”
There was a copy of the show’s programme on his knee, and he picked it up, opened it at a page of text in the middle, and proffered it with a shy smile. “I don’t suppose you could... ridiculous, I know.”
I had a pen in my coat pocket, and it was in my hand in less than three seconds, even as I did my best to pretend that signing an autograph was no big deal and I did it all the time. I dashed off the loopiest version of my signature that I could muster, and then raised an eyebrow when the old man slammed the slim booklet shut briskly and stuffed it inside his tunic.
“Thank you, dear boy! Well, to business, I suppose. Now this run is ended, where is your career taking you?”
Something about his question put me on edge, I couldn’t figure him out. Was he an agent, or a fellow actor? It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he was both, a knackered old thespian turning to a desk job in the twilight of his career, but there was a brisk edge to his words that suggested he was just going through the motions of this conversation. Was he a journalist? It hardly seemed likely, but then neither did an agent...
I realised I’d been quiet for too long. “I, ah, have a few irons in the fire. But I’ll be off home in th
e morning to South London. Been on the road a while, I’m sure you know how it is.”
That last phrase was loaded with innuendo, trying to draw out this peculiar visitor, but he just smiled and gave a placid nod. “Indeed. So you’re not currently engaged in any acting work?”
Again, it was as though he was reciting a script. I shook my head.
“Very well. Cards on the table. I run a theatre company staging shows in... far-flung, shall we say, locations. In warzones, to be completely truthful to you. You ever thought about doing a spot of outreach work for a good cause?”
My mind was racing. I’d never thought of doing anything of the sort, of course. I was too fond of Britain’s crappy weather and Sunday roast lunches in pubs to go and do panto for orphans while wearing a UN helmet and dodging bullets. Still, I was dimly aware that sort of thing looked great on CVs, and there was another important consideration which might override my love of a comfortable life.
“Does it pay?”
The old man smiled, and patted his expansive belly. “Of course it pays. I didn’t develop this fine athletic physique by eating pot noodles off dry crackers, dear boy.”
I smiled too, as I climbed out of Macbeth’s armour, and into my jeans. He’d clearly met enough actors to know that he’d already sealed the deal with his last words.
“And what part would I be playing?”
He hesitated. “This and that, dear boy. Call it a repertory arrangement. We perform in some hairy spots, we sometimes need to change the bill at short notice through political and cultural considerations. Having said that, I was rather thinking you might fancy a crack at Romeo.”
I stopped short, standing stock still on one foot in the middle of putting the other leg in my jeans. Romeo. The part I’d always wanted to play, brainwashed into desiring it after what felt like three years of studying the play at school, but which I’d always thought I’d be too old for now I was pushing thirty.
“And where are you performing next?” I asked.
The old man looked a bit shifty at that question. But though my grasp of current affairs was patchy, I knew roughly where the major flashpoints were. I’d already assumed the Middle East, and if it was anywhere less fractious, so much the better.
I waved a hand as I pulled up my jeans and buttoned them. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. I didn’t train for three years just to be a resting actor. I’m in. When?”
He stood in one fluid motion in spite of his size, beaming radiantly. “We’ll be on our way very shortly, dear boy. But I’ve not introduced myself. I’m Joshua Puff. Artistic director of the STI.”
I winced at the acronym, but I shook his hand anyway, and grabbed my coat and bag. I took a quick look round the dressing room, but there was nothing else I could be bothered with.
“I’ll see you to the car park,” I said. “STI?”
“Yes,” he boomed as we left the dressing room and walked along the short corridor towards the stage door. “Starship Troupers Initiative.”
I shrugged. “How long have you been going?”
“I suppose from your perspective, we’re a very new company indeed. But I’ve been running the company for seventy years.”
We approached the stage door. I signed out with a flourish. Puff didn’t bother, and I didn’t blame him, Jeff was soundly asleep in his little office.
“Seventy years touring warzones?” I said as we stepped into the night. “You must lead a charmed life.”
The old man gestured at his eyepatch. “Almost,” he said quietly, and I cursed myself for my insensitivity.
The car park was windswept and covered in drizzle, though that was hardly unusual. It had emptied more quickly than usual, however, or perhaps I’d been talking to Puff longer than I realised. No wonder Jeff had fallen asleep, he’d probably got fed up waiting for me to leave. It was probably just as well I wasn’t coming back any time soon.
I panicked at the thought that I might miss last orders. Not that I’m an utter boozehound, but decompressing after a performance like that is important. I reached into my coat pocket for my phone so I could check the time, keeping up the conversation to mask my impatience.
“Why Starship Troupers?” I asked, as I fumbled the device into my hand.
He squinted at me, then sighed. “I would have thought it was obvious, but I forget the limitations of this century, dear boy. The STI operate across the galaxy, entertaining the combatants of hundreds of skirmishing colony worlds, ten thousand years in your, and Earth’s, future.”
Oh bugger. I regretted shaking the lunatic’s hand. “OK,” I said, weakly.
He cocked his head, looking a little concerned. “That’s probably a lot for someone like you to take on board, shall we find some sherry while you adjust to the culture shock?”
I smiled. “Not at all, that’s fine.” I needed to get to the pub right now, and I needed to make sure he didn’t see which way I ran.
“I’m glad you’re being so understanding. We’re off to a little place called Jargroth, a desert world that was doing rather well for itself with a tolerably advanced post-industrial civilisation until some grubby capitalists banded together to have a crack at their Imperial Highness. The Jargroth civil war is a particularly tricky conflict in that the rank and file are a touch more erudite than the usual grunts we end up serenading. Until a few weeks ago they were all software developers and marketing professionals. We need someone with a spot of classical training.”
I saw my opportunity. “I’m hardly classically trained,” I pointed out. That was an understatement. A GCSE in Drama and a depressing amount of networking events was a more accurate description of my background.
But he just fixed me with a funny look. “Ten thousand years in the future, you’re automatically about as classically trained as it gets,” he said. Which was disconcertingly logical, I had to admit.
It was time to call his bluff. “Well, I suppose we should get on with boarding your, ah, spaceship,” I said confidently, ready to make a run for it as soon as the poor old bugger’s delusion crumbled in the face of reality.
Puff nodded, with a broad smile, raised his cane and whistled. We both staggered under a sudden squall of rain, and when I’d wiped away the water from my eyes with the back of my hand, there was a spaceship hovering a few feet above Whitby Pavilion’s car park.
I could tell it was a spaceship because of the saucer shape, complete with iris hatch opening underneath to reveal a blaze of white light and an entrance ramp which was slowly extending towards us. It had to be said, though, that it looked a bit dilapidated. Something looking very much like rust covered the edges of the hull’s panels, illuminated by the theatre’s house lights and the UFO’s own brilliant light, making it look like a giant hovering jigsaw puzzle. Someone had painted the classic comedy and tragedy masks on the side, presumably to jolly the thing up a bit. But a good deal of the paint had cracked, melted, or burned off during the course of the ship’s various atmospheric entries, leaving two ravaged cracked faces screaming into eternity like half-decomposed clowns.
“The cloaking field’s pretty noddy stuff, and we don’t even use it in the course of our touring in case it’s misinterpreted as a hostile act. But it makes for an undeniably impressive entrance,” Puff explained.
I looked up at the impossible yet squalid shape hanging in the air, at the ramp extruding from the iris hatch like a rolled-up carpet. “I’m obviously no expert,” I said at last, “but is that thing even safe?”
The old man looked at me steadily through the pissing rain. “A tour of galactic battlefields and you barely flinch. And now you’re getting the jitters because you don’t like the paint job?”
“It’s not that I don’t like the paint job,” I assured him. “I love the paint job. I just think there could usefully be a quite a lot more of the paint job.”
The end of the ramp touched down on the slick tarmac with a wet clunk. Puff rested one foot on it and turned back to me. “I thought we covered
this bit. We find ourselves performing in the most dangerous areas of the known Universe. At best we’re playing to crowds of resource-hungry strategists. At worst, it’s victorious troops looting or retreating forces scavenging anything not nailed down. It doesn’t do to stand out with glossy tech. I’m sorry it offends your aesthetic sense, dear heart, but we prefer not to have our spaceship half-inched while we’re in the pub. Now come on, we’ve a hypertime jump to make.”
I laughed, and spread my hands wide. “You know, it’s tempting to hop aboard for a quick trip to Button Moon, but I’ve got a hotdesk in a Croydon call centre waiting for me tomorrow afternoon and a potential callback for a student film, so thanks for the chat, Dangermouse, but I’ve got a pub to get to.”
For a moment, Puff’s face crumpled in disappointment. Then he gave an expansive shrug. “Young actors are usually a little more anxious to declaim deathless prose across the cosmos, but I suppose in the end it matters not. Given that you’ve signed the contract for a one-night performance in Jargroth Prime, and a two week stint in the Spiral Empire in Tetnulion.”
I smiled, backing away. “I really haven’t signed anything of the sort. Watch out for asteroids and Zargoids, or whatever.” I aimed a deep and decidedly sarcastic bow in Puff’s direction, and began to turn away.
The old man smiled and, without taking his eyes from mine for a moment, reached in his quilted tunic and pulled out the programme I’d given him. My heart sank as I saw where this was going.
Sure enough, he plucked a single sheet from inside the programme, with the word ‘contract’ at the top, and my loopy signature at the bottom, with a whole bunch of text in tiny print in the middle.
I rolled my eyes. “Oh come off it. You’d have to be Othello-level gullible to believe that old chestnut’s in any way binding. You take your circus off to Bigglyboo Prime or wherever, and I’ll get on the train back to Croydon.”
Without another word or so much as a glance back, I walked away into the night. I’d barely crossed the road when a giant round shape flashed overhead, blotting out the night sky for a moment. Good riddance.
