To Infinity

by Darren Humphries

  “They didn’t pick up your thoughts?” Lyssa asked.

  “Ah well, I was,” Crump glanced in Keely’s direction, “and I don’t mind admitting this, a bit scared so I started humming to myself. You know, show tunes. ‘Shuttlepod with a fringe on top’ - that short of thing. I think that it confused them so they just, sort of, ignored it.”

  Haynes nodded understanding, having came across that same phenomenon in humans often enough.

  “I watched them through the pod window and realised that they must be telepathic from the lack of other communications and so I built the resonator from spare parts that I cannibalised from the pod’s systems.”

  “Very resourceful,” Lyssa complimented him.

  “Well an administrative officer on freighter haulage has a lot of time to read Popular Electronics,” Crump shrugged modestly. “All this other stuff I managed to salvage from other piles of junk they left lying around,” he indicated the crates and boxes. “It’s a mixed bag, I’m afraid, so I have as many boxes of eyepatches as I have electronics components and nothing that can be used as an offensive weapon.”

  “And the boa?” Haynes came back to the point that had been bothering him.

  Crump blushed, “Oh that. The last effort they made to flush me out was to turn off all the heating in this section and allow it to cool. I had to wear everything I could find. I guess I just forgot to take it off again. There aren’t any mirrors around here.”

  “So an insect race after our sugar,” Haynes mused, his mind starting to race, but a race with a destination this time.

  “If they were after the sugar what are they doing here now?” Keely asked Crump, who looked nonplussed.

  “I have no idea where here is,” he replied. “No portholes or viewscreens down here.”

  “Edge of the Bliss system,” Haynes told him automatically without thinking about it. Most of his brain was on auto-pilot now, shut down to allow the sneaky sections the capacity they needed.

  “The freighter’s cargo was raw sugar on its way for refining,” Crump remembered the manifests as clearly as if he had them in front of him. To be a successful First Officer (administrative) it was vital to have an almost photographic memory. “Then we were going to deliver it to the Bliss system.”

  “Computer?” Lyssa queried.

  “The refinery was destroyed by the Halreptors eight days ago,” the computer supplied, guessing what she wanted to know (although it preferred the term ‘predicting from an assessment of known behaviour’).

  “With all those cakes and puddings and stuff that party must have been one of the highest concentrations of sugar in the galaxy,” Keely said in a hushed tone of wonder.

  “So, have you got a plan now?” Lyssa asked Haynes, recognising the signs on his face.

  “Yes I have a plan,” Haynes announced triumphantly, then added with less conviction, “though don’t ask me to work out the chances of success.”

  “Two hundred and fifty million to one against,” the computer calculated instantly.

  “You don’t even know what it is,” Haynes complained.

  “Don’t need to ,” the computer informed him. “The four of you against a ship load of naturally armoured giant killing bugs with nothing more than amplified show tunes as a defence? I think I’m being generous.”

  “The Halreptors are an insect race and this spaceship isn’t so much a spaceship as a spacegoing hive right?”

  “Go on,” Keely encouraged him, grateful that she could actually follow the conversation for a change.

  “So, at the heart of every hive there’s a ...”

  “Queen!” Crump exclaimed, slapping his hand against his forehead with enough force to leave a red mark. “Of course, why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Do you think that you could get us to her chamber?” Haynes asked.

  “Once I figure out where it is,” the freighter survivor assured him excitedly. “And I’ve got enough bombs to blow her up.” He waved a couple around to reinforce the point.

  “Will you put those away!” Haynes told him firmly. “I mean far away.”

  “What are they made of anyway?” Lyssa complained as the smell that invaded her nose cleared away the after-effects of the telepathic burst.

  “Like I said,” Crump explained cheerfully, “I didn’t have any weapons so I had to make fertiliser bombs.”

  “So that’s what you managed to scavenge?” Haynes questioned, “Eyepatches and fertiliser.”

  “No,” Crump shook his head as he stowed the smelly bricks away in his pack, “just eyepatches. No fertiliser. I had to make them from my own...”

  “I’m sure that’s about to be more information than I need,” Lyssa interrupted him, “and I’d just like to say ‘yuck’.”

  “What?” Keely came to Crump’s defence immediately. “It’s about survival. What wouldn’t you do to survive?”

  Haynes thought back to the manner of his escape from Srindar Djem and realised that he was certainly in no position to throw stones in this particular glass house. “Fair enough. Can you take us to the Queen’s chamber?”

  Crump shrugged, “No, but I’ll go looking for it as soon as the bugs enter their dormant phase. Would you like something to eat? I haven’t got much, but I can offer you canned prunes, walnuts, bran flakes and powdered eggs.”

  “I’m surprised that you were able to produce any fertiliser at all,” Haynes muttered, but only to himself.

  The Halreptor ship remained motionless in the centre of the small ship’s viewscreen. It hadn’t moved since swallowing up the vessel that had been the focus of the pilot’s recent attentions. It was clearly still under power because even in deep space there are currents that will start an unrestrained object to drifting (gravitational fluxes, solar winds and the like), but the Halreptor ship’s position was exactly as it had been down to the millimetre in every dimension (every one that he could measure at least).

  A tiny readout blinked a short message before darkening again.

  “What kind of energy?” the pilot questioned the computer about the discharge of energy that had been detected by the passive sensors.

  “Psychic,” the computer responded in a low tone. Since sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum there was no need to be quiet, but it seemed appropriate somehow, “and artificially generated.”

  “Artificial?” the pilot questioned. “How can you tell?”

  There was a burst of music from the speakers and a young man sang about the joys of flying his woman through the rainbow rings of Theta 7, something that the pilot knew from personal experience would have required a ship with military class armour and shields, not to mention a year’s supply of anti-radiation pills.

  “What was that?” the pilot asked after a few moments’ silence.

  “Music,” the computer responded literally. “It’s from Stardustmania, which we have in the entertainment records if you would like to hear some more of it.”

  “Human music?” the pilot mused thoughtfully. Was there really the chance that Haynes was still alive inside that giant alien vessel? It seemed that he might be, though why he should be broadcasting popular musicals defied explanation.

  The pilot reclined his seat once more into a comfortable position from which to resume his patient, watchful waiting.

  Why is it, Haynes mused as they peered down through a carefully carved hole into the Queen’s chamber at the heart of the Halreptor vessel, that all the words used for ‘big’ are so small?

  Take ‘big’ itself for example - only three letters. Consider ‘large’, ‘giant’, ‘grand’, ‘great’, ‘vast’ and not one of them with more than five letters. It seemed unjust somehow.

  This diversion of thought was, he knew, just to stop him from considering the other immediately obvious property, which was that the chamber, as well as being huge (four), was crowded to the point of overflowing. Over every inch of floor space black bodies scuttled, each of them larger than a man and possessing enough built in s
harp edges to make a chainsaw weep. Where there wasn’t enough floor space, they scuttled over the lower walls and where the walls ran out they scuttled over each other in a wide (four), sea of bodies in motion, each with its task to carry out for the good of the community.

  “It’s humungous,” Keely whispered, awed by the sight.

  “Gigantic at the very least,” Crump seconded with much the same inflexion.

  “Enormous,” Lyssa agreed and the motion was carried.

  “Oh be quiet,” Haynes told them irritably. “What is this, a convention of thesauruses?”

  “I thought they died out millions of years ago,” Crump commented, earning him a look of pure scorn from Haynes that would have upset him had he not been blissfully unaware of it.

  “Surely it’s ‘thesauri’,” Keely suggested with a frown.

  “I could take a look at it for you,” Crump offered.

  “Look at what?” she asked.

  “Your sore eye,” he clarified.

  “But I haven’t....” Keely gave him a playful tap that rattled his teeth. “It was a joke.”

  “Just barely,” Haynes muttered.

  “You know what you need?” Crump retorted angrily. “You need to lighten up a little.”

  “Oh yeah?” Haynes squared up to him over the open hole. “I’m stuck inside the most vicious war vessel ever built, light years from any assistance, surrounded by tens of thousands of hostile aliens, each one of which is itself a slice-o-matic death machine in its own right and you think that lightening up is going to make everything better?” His hands tightened on the edge of the hole, which crumbled slightly under the pressure.

  “Hey, it’s worked for me,” Crump leaned forward threateningly.

  “Well, I’m not you Showtune Sam,” Haynes snarled, also leaning forward until they were almost nose to nose. His eyes watered at the smell, but he stood (well, crouched) his ground. “I’m a real boy...”

  “Will you two cut it out before we choke on the testosterone!” Lyssa hissed and reached forward to restrain them both.

  The combined weight of the three of them bearing down on the freshly-carved edges of the hole was too much. The oddly-textured material that made up the interior of the ship cracked like crazy paving and then broke away in chunks that rolled lazily through the air before shattering in a haze of dust on the floor of the chamber below.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” Haynes accused Crump and dived for the stable lip of the rapidly-enlarging hole. It danced away from his fingers in a cloud of fragments and he was suddenly left in mid-air, suspended by nothing. Accordingly, he started to fall, thinking desperately, I threw myself off one of the floating palaces of Bliss and survived. It can’t end like this!

  It ended in an impact that was far less bone-crushingly fatal than he had expected. It hurt like nothing he had ever hoped to encounter and he wondered if he was destined never to breathe in an inwards fashion ever again, but the swarm of yellow sparkles cleared slowly from his eyes to afford him a view of the chamber ceiling with a big hole in it and two pale, concerned and distant faces peering down at him.

  They looked even more concerned when they stopped looking at him and started looking at the Halreptors that were rapidly surrounding them.

  With a sharp wince induced by the pain in every bone that his body possessed (and possibly some others that it was still paying for by mail order), he slowly moved his limbs and head and was gratified to find that everything was still attached and even managed to work. Not trusting himself enough to sit up yet, he rolled over onto his stomach and looked around.

  The reason that neither he nor Crump, who had apparently also taken the fall, were little more than red lumps of dead meat on the floor was because they had both, along with a sizeable chunk of the ceiling, landed on the bed where the alien queen had been residing. The queen herself was standing (well, towering was probably a much more accurate description) several feet away with two lines of warrior aliens between her and Haynes, all of them brandishing very, very deadly-looking appendages. Her compound eyes were the colour of a sunset destined to delight a shepherd’s heart (but only at night). Haynes couldn’t guess whether this was normal or a sign that she was madder than a Djemese Pig waking up from a vasectomy.

  Crump lay a foot or so away sprawled across the soft, and now heavily-impacted, surface of the bed in a crater of bedding. Haynes could see that he was breathing. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that fact.

  “How would it be if I sat up?” he asked the Queen experimentally and moved a leg. Several hard-edged carapaces quivered threateningly, but nothing more, so he slowly twisted himself into a sitting position, finding along the way that his breathing was easier now, but no less painful. “I promise not to hurt you if you promise not to impale me.”

  The aliens remained still, watching him with more eyes than was comfortable for any sort of human. Haynes wondered what they were waiting for until the front row of warriors parted slightly to admit Lyssa and Keely.

  “You’re alive!” Keely threw herself at Haynes and hugged him fiercely. The pain of it almost made him pass out again, but he steeled himself against the faintness. It wouldn’t seem manly to faint from a hug.

  “No thanks to your new boyfriend,” Haynes grumbled when he could finally breathe again.

  “It’s clear that you’re not badly hurt,” Lyssa said harshly, the relieved smile on her lips ruining the effect. “Any idea what to do now?” she added, looking nervously around them at the ring of aliens.

  “Everything is going very much to plan,” Haynes assured her, gathering enough strength to disentangle himself from Keely’s embrace and stand.

  “Well then I’d like to point out that I’m not a big fan of this plan,” Lyssa said, looking around the ring of heavily armoured aliens again.

  “If that’s a motion then I’d like to second it,” Keely added.

  “Oh ye of little faith,” Haynes accused them.

  “It’s less to do with faith and more to do with imminent death,” Lyssa replied.

  “What do we do now?” Keely asked the question again.

  “Give them a chance to surrender.”

  “Apart from that being utterly ridiculous considering our current situation, do you know the Halreptor word for surrender? Or any other Halreptorese for that matter?”

  “That has been taken care of,” Lyssa said.

  “Really? How? Oh!”

  The reason for Keely’s squeal was obvious immediately and not, to Haynes at least, unexpected. Lyssa had spoken in an unusual monotone that almost sounded like somebody else using her vocal chords without her experience. They also didn’t have her permission. She was stood absolutely upright, her spine straight enough to make the proverbial ramrod slouch away in hunchbacked embarrassment. Haynes wondered if that was her vertebrae he could hear creaking. Each finger on each hand was spread as far from its fellows as was possible without becoming detached. From the wild look in her eyes, it was not a pleasant experience.

  “Have you hurt her?” Haynes demanded.

  “There is pain involved, but no permanent damage is being caused,” Lyssa, or her body at least, told him, adding darkly, “at least not yet. “

  “What’s going on?” Keely demanded, once again a pace behind the action. “What are they doing to Lyssa?”

  “The Halreptors are a community creature with a hive mind. This many of them this close to a telepath...”

  Keely looked appalled, her hands flying to her mouth, “You mean they taken control of her mind.”

  “I doubt anyone could take control of that,” he told her confidently. “It’s more like they’ve locked her out of her body’s control room and taken over that. She’s there but can’t do anything.”

  “A crude, but effective summation,” Lyssa said.

  “You mean they know everything I’m thinking?” Keely was even more horrified.

  “It’s not that good from our side either,” Lyssa’s voice poi
nted out.

  “Hey!”

  “Well, now that you have us exactly where I want you,” Haynes wasn’t sure whether he ought to be facing Lyssa or the alien queen, so he selected somewhere between the two. “I am willing to accept your surrender.”

  The alien’s face was unreadable, not least because the few features it had were encased in immobile exoskeleton, but fortunately Lyssa’s expression conveyed a quizzical expression, betraying what the Queen was feeling. Haynes allowed himself a satisfied smile. This mode of communication had its advantages.

  “Surrender?” Lyssa’s body queried.

  “Glad you agree,” Haynes said briskly. “The terms are very simple - total surrender, our unconditional release and the promise that there will be no more attacks on our shipping. Why are you attacking our shipping anyway?”

  “What you call sugar,” said the Queen through Lyssa’s mouth.

  “Sugar? That still makes no sense to me,” Keely complained.

  “No, it makes perfect sense,” the computer said in their earpieces,” adding smugly, “I told you, I worked it out ages ago. I tried to tell you, but was ignored, as usual,” the computer said haughtily. “It was obvious really when I analysed the targets. The freighters were all hauling sugar or sucrose-based products in their manifests, the colony worlds that were hit were all agricultural worlds with a significant sugar crop output, either cane or beets, and Bliss...”

  “A pleasure world,” Keely pointed out, “with no agriculture to speak of, but hosting the biggest, most decadent party ever conceived requiring....”

  “...huge amounts of confectionery,” Haynes finished the analysis, which had been repeated solely for the benefit of the Halreptors’ ears. Or Lyssa’s ears that they were borrowing.

  “The third largest concentration of refined sugar in the known universe,” the computer added for good measure.

  “The other two being what?” Lyssa demanded, both her head and that of the Halreptor queen snapping around to face the ship.

  “Mine to know and yours to guess.” The computer did not possess a tongue to stick out, but it gave the perfect impression.