Dale Mettam

by The Pub at the Center of the Universe (retail) (epub)

  The sphere immediately began to swell, then popped and in a flash, Toast was standing on the disk, wads of lint stuck in his ruffled orange fur.

  Toast glared at his surroundings, the look of rage that had been on his face when Lu shot him was still present.

  “Toes Tee Toes and Plaach Plaach,” Officer Pobble addressed the prisoners. “You are both free to go.”

  “Before meal time?” whimpered Plaach.

  “This isn’t a hotel we run for criminals,” sneered Officer Pobble. Oh yes, he thought, they know not to mess with me.

  “How long you bin doing this?” said Toast.

  “Three years,” said Officer Pobble swelling with pride.

  Toast nodded, as if considering this. “And you used one of these before?” Toast pointed to the disc beneath his feet.

  “Many times,” said Office Pobble.

  “It’s just that the first thing they teach you about Rehydro-Discs is that if the suspect was caught while brandishing a weapon, make sure he’s safely contained before releasing him from the sphere. That’s because, if, for example, the suspect was caught while wielding a knife say…” Toast pulled his knife from behind him. “Like this one. You don’t want to be close, as he’s likely to be very, very pissed.”

  Officer Pobble realized too late that rather than being the beginning of his career, it was to be the end.

  His final thought, as Toast plunged the knife into Officer Pobble’s chest, and he gasped for air, life seeping slowly out of him, was a question.

  How do they make that chicken smell so damn good?

  Plaach and Toast strode down the main promenade with purpose. Anyone who saw them knew instinctively to get out of their way. The effect of silent and barely contained violence was only slightly diminished by the way that Plaach was hungrily devouring the large plate of Kenturkee Fried Chicken Wings, bones and all.

  “I want to know where they went and I want them in my hands,” Toast said.

  “Are you sure you don’t want some of this?” Said Plaach. “It’s the best I ever tasted.”

  Toast suddenly stopped and spun, facing Plaach, who could not fail to recognize that the look on Toast’s face could mean only serious pain for anyone who crossed him at the moment. Toast glanced down at the plate, then back at his partner. Then back at the chicken.

  “It does smell good,” he reluctantly conceded.

  Plaach gave him an encouraging smile and offered the plate up to Toast.

  Toast looked at the plate again, then back at his partner. The temptation grew too strong, and he finally snatched a piece of chicken from the plate and stuffed it in his mouth.

  After one chew his face turned from resolute purpose to one of mild disgust, before he spat the partially chewed chicken on to the floor.

  “How do they do that!?” he implored.

  “What?” asked Plaach, a look of mild shock on his face at Toast’s reaction.

  “Make it smell so good, but taste like that? And more to the point, I knew it would taste like that, but I still thought it would be good this one time!”

  Plaach shrugged and glanced at the piece of the floor.

  “Look. I want those two that got the drop on us. Do you know what that kind of thing will do to our reputations if it gets out we were taken by a greener and a girl?”

  “Quite a small girl as well, really,” said

  Plaach.

  Toast glowered at him, but the unspoken warning was completely missed by Plaach.

  “And, to be honest, it was just the girl,” said Plaach, still eyeing the chicken on the floor. “The greener didn’t do much at all.”

  “And that makes it better?” exploded Toast.

  “Well, I guess not.”

  “OK, I want you to go down to the jump chambers and persuade someone there to tell you where they went,” said Toast.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Plaach. “I’m gonna beat the norks out of that Kenturkee Fried Chicken franchise, and then I’ll meet you at the jump chambers. Make sure you also persuade someone to offer us a complimentary trip while you’re there.”

  Plaach was still looking at the chicken on the floor.

  “You got all that?” Toast asked doubtfully.

  “Yep.” Plaach nodded. “Find where they went and get us booked to go there.”

  “Any questions?”

  “You gonna eat that?”

  Toast sighed and turned to leave but stopped.

  “Oh yeah,” he said turning back to his partner who had bent to retrieve the half-chewed chicken. “One more thing. I don’t care what shape I might be at the time, you ever kick me against a wall again and I will kill you!”

  With that Toast launched a wild kick at Plaach that lifted him off his feet and three feet forward, sending the remaining chicken flying from the plate, and Plaach skidding across the floor.

  Chapter Twelve

  Kirk felt as if his lungs would explode at any moment. White flashes exploded around the edge of his vision, or at least what would have been his vision had his eyes been open. He was certain this was caused by nerve endings bursting as he slowly died. The scream was starting to wither now, but the fear that accompanied it was not diminishing at all.

  “Will you cut that out?” Lu asked, annoyance evident in her tone.

  He stopped screaming and immediately took in a huge gulp of air. His lungs felt a little better and the bursts of white light seemed to fade slightly.

  “I really need to concentrate. We’ll only get one chance at this,” she muttered.

  Kirk cautiously opened one eye. He immediately regretted it as his relief at being still alive was replaced by a feeling that this was only a short-term reprieve.

  As he looked out, he could see the giant String freighter just ahead of them. All around both ships, he was amazed at what the inside of the breech looked like.

  At first glance he could see what appeared to be long streaks of light whizzing past them at great speed. Having seen his fair share of space movies, he was confident that these must be the light from stars now moving too fast to see as the glowing specs that sat relatively still in the night sky at home.

  But a little more concentration suggested that rather than being white, they were actually the full spectrum of colors, and all at the same time. And the space around them, he assumed, was the same inky blackness that he knew, but then it seemed that it could well be completely white, instead, but also at the same time, and when he got that feeling, the streaks of light seemed instead to be more like a complete absence of light.

  He remembered a computer screen saver he had once sat for hours watching, as lines and geometric shapes danced around the screen in randomly changing colors. Now he had the uneasy feeling that this must be what it was like to see that display from the computer’s point of view.

  “Cas?” he asked. “can you get me a better fix on the visual translations here?”

  “You are flying solo there, pal,” replied his F.R.B. “This kind of thing will fry my circuits.”

  He glanced at Lu, but the look of intense concentration on her face made the decision to ask her if what he was seeing was real, something that could wait.

  She seemed to feel his gaze and gave him a quick glance accompanied by a grim smile. “Having fun yet?”

  Kirk didn’t respond. He looked out at the tattered front of the loader again and almost fell out of his seat as one of the worst damaged arms suddenly began to shake violently, then as it ripped free, it seemed to hang in space for a moment, before disappearing as they carried on plunging after the stringer.

  Kirk spun in his seat and tried to see where the broken arm went and immediately regretted looking behind.

  When he was a child, Kirk spent several months terrified of t
he dark. After his parents put him to bed at night, the light from a street lamp outside was the only source of illumination. As he lay in bed, the shadows in the room seemed to slowly pull together, growing and swimming closer to the end of his bed. As an adult, he learned that it was a combination of the light playing tricks on his eyes and a vivid imagination, but as a child it scared him to the point of tears, and those memories were now flooding back.

  Behind the small loader, the darkness was swallowing up all available light, inching closer and closer to the tail fins that sat on the oversized engines. The distorted, nauseating colors and non-colors of the breech tunnel were being swallowed up by the blackness as the fabric of space healed the breach with relentless purpose.

  “Can this thing go any faster?” Kirk whispered.

  “I have the engines running as low as I can at the moment. We are mostly being pulled along in the stringer’s slip stream,” she replied.

  “What?” screamed Kirk suddenly focusing all his attention on Lu. “Do you have any idea how close we are to being swallowed up by... by... nothing!?”

  “Look,” said Lu, her tone firm now, “I’ve never done this before, so a little quiet would help me focus. Okay?”

  “You’ve never done this before?” Kirk was bordering on panic.

  “Actually, no one has ever done this before,” said Casio.

  “Technically, no one has ever done this and survived to report the incident,” said Sarge, offering surprisingly little comfort to Kirk.

  “I stand corrected.” Casio seemed to be enjoying Kirk’s unease. “However, I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty, I am glad I don’t have my visual sensors working right now.”

  Kirk sank into his seat and began to whimper.

  “Would it make you feel any better if I told you I had plan?” Lu said.

  “Is it as good as your plan for stealing this loader?”

  “Better.”

  “Are the odds about the same as your plan for escaping to steal the loader?”

  Lu gave him a quick glance, but said nothing.

  “Less than fifty/fifty?” Kirk began to feel sick.

  “Actually the odds on surviving this long, inside a breach, on a ship like this are so extreme that we are currently throwing the laws of statistical analysis into chaos the longer we survive,” observed Sarge.

  Lu gave him a weak smile. “Any plan is better than no plan, right?”

  Kirk began to whimper again.

  “The plan is very simple,” Lu explained. “In a minute, I’m going to increase power. That should push us forward faster than the Stringer is going, since it’s traveling on inertia now. The snapped string is pulling it through the breach and we are being pulled along in the ship’s wake. By increasing our speed, we technically go faster than the stringer and we can make some progress.”

  Kirk looked at her dubiously.

  “Then all you have to do is use the remaining workable arm to clamp on to that communication dish there.” She pointed. “And we piggy back through into normal space.”

  “What do you mean I use the remaining arm?” Kirk asked.

  “Well I’m going to be doing everything I can just to get us close. You need to do that part.”

  Kirk gave her a worried look. “It’ll be easy, just think of something that has a similar method of operation from back on Earth and Casio will do the rest. Then you’ll be familiar with the controls and it will be straightforward from there.”

  Kirk still looked unconvinced.

  A large red light began to flash in the center of the console.

  “What’s that?” asked Kirk.

  “This thing comes fitted with proximity sensors. Pilots sometimes can’t see where they’re going if the cargo pod they have is too large, so they have sensors to let them know when they’re close to another ship.”

  “So are we close enough to grab a hold?”

  “Actually the sensor was triggered from behind,” said Lu.

  “But there aren’t any ships behi....” suddenly

  Kirk understood.

  “Real space is closing in. Are you ready, because it’s now or never?”

  Before he could answer, Lu hit the thrusters and they lurched forward. With steady purpose the loader crept closer to the Freighter just ahead.

  Kirk could see the communication dish looming large before them, but was having real trouble trying to focus on the arm controls. For the first time he began to feel very aware that he was alone in a very large, very hostile universe.

  “Are you ready?” Lu asked. “I don’t know how long I can keep us this close, and if you miss, we’re finished.”

  Kirk gave her a frustrated and angry glare.

  “No pressure then?”

  Suddenly it came to him. As a child, summer vacations always revolved around a quest. To get a fluffy toy with the robot arm in the glass-case before air, returning nothing to the chute that moments earlier had promised to deliver his furry bounty.

  He studied the controls and they seemed to melt into the ones that he had studied and worked for some many years back in his youth. After a while, the prizes had become irrelevant. It had become a matter of pride. Boy against machine. As he looked down at the slot that had appeared for him to insert his coins to play, he tried to ignore the fact that he had never once managed to snag even the most threadbare looking toy in the glass cube.

  “Better do it,” Lu ordered. “This is as close as I can get.”

  Kirk looked at her and could see the strain as she wrestled the loader, struggling to give him the best chance to do his part. He reached for the control handle, palms sweating, and moved the arm forward.

  As he looked outside, the arm looked much less robust than it had before. Thin metal rods extended and the wires that operated the claw at the end flapped violently. Even the claw looked less like the industrial machinery he had noticed before, now more like three thin curls of metal that he had begun to suspect were shaped at the bottom to encourage retrieved booty to slip away during the pick up, rather than grasp tightly.

  Concentrating intently, Kirk focused on steering the arm, nudging it gently to the left.

  Forward.

  Up.

  Up.

  Left again.

  Forward.

  Then he started to become aware of a strange aroma. At first he couldn’t place it, mainly because it seemed ridiculous that he would be smelling freshly cooked donuts and cotton candy, but the scent was definitely there.

  Then the music started. The muted disco renditions of Queen,and Whitney Houston.

  He suddenly realized. “Cas, quit that,” he barked.

  The smells and music cut out suddenly. “Sorry.” The F.R.B. sounded sheepish. “I assumed that associated pleasant memories from the boardwalk would make it easier.”

  “Well it doesn’t,” snarled Kirk. “Just reminds me how bad I am that this.”

  He slammed down on the large plastic button that was lit red from beneath, and the claws closed around the structured framework that connected the communication dish to the rest of the freighter.

  As he watched, Kirk held his breath. The claws closed, and then pulled back towards the Loader. For a second, they seemed to slip, and the small ship lurched, but the claws held.

  Kirk let out a huge sigh of relief and rubbed his strained eyes. When he looked again, Lu was watching him with a broad grin spread across her face. He smiled back weakly.

  “Good job,” she said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Captain Dexter Sitee was checking his readouts. He was worried whenever something seemed to hit his ship, even more so when it happened traveling through a breach.

  “Slug,” he said addressing the ship. “Do you have any idea what
that was?”

  The String freighter, Star Slug’s sensor systems were not all they should be at the best of times. Dexter had cobbled together smaller sensor arrays from other ships into one large enough for the freighter. As a result, readouts usually took longer to come through to him and often included contradictory information, as weather, proximity and defensive protocols all struggled for dominance.

  “My usual sensory capabilities are being severely hampered by the dimensional distortions we are experiencing in the breach, Captain,” Slug purred.

  “Do your best,” Dexter replied. Suddenly the comm system let out a violent screech of static.

  “Slug? What was that?” “It appears that someone is hacking into our communications system, Captain,” came the ship’s sultry reply.

  There was a second blast of static, but this time a clear signal rode the end.

  “... you hear me? Sitee, come in.”

  “Who is this?” said Dexter. “I warn you. If you are pirates, this ship carries the latest defensive and offensive systems, and my crew of well-armed, violent, slightly sleep-deprived men look forward to anyone trying to board us.”

  “Cut the crap Dexter. We both know you’re alone, and your violent crew is made up of that ragtag collection of robotic trashcans you modified to save on paying a crew.”

  A slow smile crossed Dexter’s face. “Lu?”

  “Better believe it, you old pirate.”

  “Where are you? And how are you getting a signal to me? I’m currently in a breach?”

  “I am approximately ten feet away from your top com-munications dish and would appreciate you telling me where the nearest airlock is to that. If you have any ideas about getting me and a colleague inside it as quickly as possible, that would be a bonus,” Lu answered.

  “What?” Dexter exclaimed. “I’ll explain when we get in.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chief Security Officer Skake looked down at the lifeless body of Officer Pobble. He shook his head slowly, a look of grim determination on his face.