Scum of the Universe

by Grant Everett

  Tuesday took a good look at the network of articulated docking girders that ran along the perimeter of the tarmac. The crimson leviathans sprouted from regular intervals along the line of the Starport like a metal forest in deep Autumn, and their branches formed an interlocked web high, high above the concrete to gently guide larger ships all the way down to the ground without causing an apocalypse in the process. An entire fleet of Unison dreadnoughts could easily have docked at the same time with plenty of room to spare. Tuesday doubted that any starship in history had ever been big enough to require all of them at the same time.

  Continuing down the other side of the hill, half-skidding and doing his best not to fall over on the trampled grass, Tuesday noticed that the closer he got to an ideal view of the tarmac the more media people he could see. Tuesday groaned. From what he could tell, every reporter on the planet seemed to be here. A quiet exit from Seven Suns had been his core objective, and this was anything but quiet. It was bloody Cirque du Soleil down there!

  For now, none of the reporters seemed too interested in taking any photos of the supplies with their retinal cameras. Tuesday assumed that either they'd already taken plenty of snaps before he'd arrived, so there must be more to this event than piles of boxes. Tuesday, always the last to know, listened intently to the nearby reporters as they all recorded audible notes into their Omni implants. He absorbed snippets, but not enough to go on. He eventually gave up on trying to learn by osmosis, and tapped somebody's shoulder. The guy was a generic citizen of Seven Suns: he wore an immaculate suit, had a short-back-and-sides haircut, possessed the perfect smile of a movie star, and was about as memorable as a cardboard sandwich on brown bread.

  “What's going on here, bud?”

  The reporter gave Tuesday a sour look. He obviously didn't want to be distracted right now.

  “You are aware that sarcasm is against the law, right?”

  Tuesday grumbled.

  “I'm serious.”

  The reporter's irritation turned to confusion.

  “Did you suffer a head injury or something? What do you think is going on? The Frontier finally sails today!” The reporter's expression turned to outright pity at the blankness on Tuesday's face. Glancing at the tarmac for a moment to make sure he wasn't missing anything, the reporter spoke very slowly and very clearly. “Look, pal, The Unison has spent the better part of fifty years constructing The Frontier. She's a long-range ship that's been fitted out with a one-of-a-kind drive that'll allow her to slide through neighbouring dimensions in order to get from one point to another way faster than anything else in the history of space travel.” The reporter glanced at the tarmac again. It remained still, and uninteresting. “Her construction began almost immediately after some local boffins picked up an ancient, intelligent signal from a neighbouring galaxy. As everyone knows, before now The Unison has never successfully managed to break beyond the limits of the Milky Way. This means that zapping back a reply to the point-of-origin was out of the question, as it would take a thousand years or longer to go all the way there with our current methods. Funnily enough, it turned out to be quicker to research, develop and build The Frontier and jump over there in person than to simply reply to their message. All up, it's hoped that the voyage will take a little under a decade. They have more than enough supplies to make it back again, but they're also carrying plenty of snap-frozen colonists in case they feel the need to set up a few outposts along the way. Right? All clear now?”

  “Wow,” Tuesday nodded. He raised a finger. “Just one more question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What's a galaxy?”

  “What's a...” the reporter shook his head in pity. “I thought people like you were weeded out of the gene pool before birth. Shouldn't you be in an institution somewhere?”

  Deciding that head-butting the reporter might draw a little too much attention, Tuesday decided to get busy doing what he did best: conniving. It seemed as though The Frontier would be far beyond the long, long reach of The Unison for ages, perhaps even forever, and if Tuesday could somehow manage to get on board it might be a platinum opportunity to start a brand new life away from Seven Suns, Ms Humple, his Binary Star medal, and everything else that went with this pus-filled pimple of a planet.

  But how? There was no way that a ship of this rarity and cost would let just anyone aboard, as The Unison had some stupid policy about “only accepting the best, brightest and most skilled,” and lots of other requirements that immediately counted Tuesday out of the running. Tuesday was well aware of his shortcomings; after all, they outnumbered his good traits by such a margin that possessing a moderate skill in flower arranging really didn’t cut it. Tuesday may be an idiot, but he wasn’t delusional.

  Or maybe he could just try another Starport...surely there was more than one?

  A hologram of Mister Drizzle suddenly appeared on the back of Tuesday's hand.

  “Heya, Mister Tuesday! I've got an incoming call from the Mayor's office demanding to know why you're heading towards the Starport. To summarise, he says you've been explicitly told that all Starports are off limits unless you are accompanied by an approved handler. The message contains a total of nine expletives and two threats of physical harm.”

  Tuesday stopped cold. He'd assumed the spooks wouldn't notice his escape attempt straight away. As usual, he was wrong.

  “Ah, could you tell them that their readings are incorrect, and I'm currently heading into a MacDeath restaurant?”

  Mister Drizzle gaped a little.

  “But you-”

  “Please?” Tuesday smiled. “I'd appreciate it. After all, we're friends, aren't we?”

  Mister Drizzle huffed a little, but nodded.

  “Okies. But only because you asked nicely.”

  The hologram disappeared. He wasn't sure why, but for some reason Tuesday had an overwhelming feeling that he should be kinder to the avatar of his Omni. As any form of intentional niceness that didn't result in some sort of immediate benefit went against the grain of his character, Tuesday consoled himself with the fact that he didn't mean a word of it.

  Rubbing at his face in anxiety, Tuesday knew he only had a few minutes before the spooks and goons turned up to drag him home. There was simply no time to get to another Starport. It was now or never, because if Tuesday was deemed a flight risk, there would never be another chance for him to leave.

  This was it.

  Rudely steamrolling through hundreds of people who had camped out for days to get such great seats, Tuesday eventually made it all the way to the chainlink fence on the closest edge of the tarmac. Three unsmiling Unison guards dressed in siege armour and armed with stun rifles manned a blinking barricade, wordlessly daring anyone to come closer. They’d set up large warning signs to clearly describe the current level of security.

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN.

  Barging through the media scrum, Tuesday flashed his Binary Star medal at the guards. He was met with nothing but a stony silence and cold eyes. Once the troops realised that the media gimps were photographing this scene, they suddenly looked a little uneasy.

  They had every right to be worried. After all, Tuesday was about to use his considerable rat cunning to lie, cheat and steal his way out of peril.

  “See this?” Tuesday asked innocently, smiling for fifty nearby retinal cameras. “This says I have unlimited access to everything on Seven Suns. If I wanted to, I could walk into the Mayor's office and do some serious damage to the little boy's room. And I have.”

  “Your point?” the smallest, meanest guard asked.

  “This ship that's due to turn up at any minute, The Frontier? When it comes down to pick up all that cargo, it'll be in the jurisdiction of Seven Suns. Vis-a-vis, on this planet. Or close enough to it, anyway. So when it gets here, I want to check it out a bit.”

  “No,” the head guard snapped. “Final answer. Move back.”

  “I'll just be a minute,” Tuesday wheedled. �
�It's for publicity purposes. The Unison can always use a positive write-up from a well-connected celebrity, yeah? I hardly need to tell you how many one-star reviews the military gets.”

  The cameramen were getting bored with this. They’d already photographed Tuesday plenty of times, and he didn't sell newspapers unless he was doing something moronic, like accidentally gluing his scrotum to a street sign, or head-butting the Dark Pope at a urinal in an upmarket Noonclub. But then things got interesting: as the guards had already made it very clear that the answer was a solid “no,” they decided to crystallise the situation by pointing loaded stun rifles at Tuesday's face, bowels and crotch. Staring down the rifled barrel of the weapon aimed at his teeth, Tuesday suddenly became very aware that the term “non-lethal” had always been very loosely defined.

  But then a sudden vortex lashed the considerable crowd from one side to the other, rudely snatching away hats and self-updating newspapers and even the occasional handbag. Tuesday slowly looked up to the stratosphere like everybody else to witness what must have been the index finger of God Himself pointing in accusation at the world of Seven Suns. The photographers did their best to hold their line of sight steady as something monolithic descended from the clouds, but the sight was too much for many of them, and their retinal cameras went unused.

  A starship bigger than Tuesday's dreams descended slowly and carefully, blotting out the sky more and more as it swelled into sight. Two of Seven Suns’s glowing moons were still peeking around the massive starship's edge, illuminating the sterile white hull of the brand new vessel in a spectacular way. It was still factory-floor immaculate, without a single pockmark or dust scar, and the designation FRONTIER was a three-kilometre-long golden word embossed along the ivory gleam of its port and starboard sides. The entire Starport seemed to be getting dimmer and dimmer the closer that the ship got to the tarmac.

  The Frontier gradually came to rest at the very apex of all the docking girders with the gentlest of kisses. The closest support arm to Tuesday's location, big as it was, strained and creaked deafeningly under the stress. Tuesday wouldn’t have been surprised if all the other girders lining the edge of the Starport were making the exact same noise. A team of very smart people had staked all of their lives on the guarantee that this docking would be totally safe to attempt, as crashing the biggest starship ever built before its maiden voyage would be an irony of larger-than-Titanic proportions.

  Everything stopped.

  Tuesday's cigarette fell out of his mouth.

  Coming to a complete stop with no ill effects, the colossal starship hooked onto the near-invisible heights of the support structure with thousands of magnetic anchors. As it inched across the sky, The Frontier gradually blocked out both of the glowing moons that were tanning this part of Seven Suns, and this sent the entire Starport (and five blocks in every direction) into the first natural blackout it had ever suffered since colonisation. There were no streetlights to counter this darkness, as with a new moon rising every five minutes there had been no point in spending money on public lighting anywhere on Seven Suns. You might as well install refrigerators in Antarctica.

  For a moment, nobody spoke in the darkness. No more photos were taken.

  And then everybody except for Tuesday fell down and began to scream in hysterical terror.

  *

  Just a block away from the Starport was a deep cave that plunged deep below the surface of Seven Suns. Inside of it lived the original inhabitants of this world, a race of photosensitive beings that had been permanently driven underground by what mankind had done to their sky. After centuries of subterranean dwelling, these pale, vile creatures made Gollum look like Robbie Williams, and their hatred had only festered with each passing day. When they weren't dedicating their time to planning vengeance on mankind, they kept busy listening to morbid goth-rock songs, writing disturbing poetry about dead roses, and painting their sharp facial needles black. They eagerly awaited the time when they could wipe humanity away like a drop of absinthe from a PVC corset, but for a long, long span all they could do was wait.

  Looking up at the hated dot that was the distant sky, the creatures realised with glee that the white circle far above had disappeared for the first time in hundreds of years. The endless starlight had finally vanished!

  Putting on their best spiked dog collars and plastic corsets (all black, of course), the fiends took up their rifles and prepared for war. Flapping their insectile wings and shrieking with ultrasonic glee, the beings prepared to spread bloody carnage as they reclaimed their world from the invaders…

  They didn’t get very far in their campaign, though, as the creatures were a slightly smaller relative of the common mosquito. Within two minutes the entirety of their elite vanguard regiment – the very finest of their warriors - was demolished by a large sneeze from a Labradoodle, and a flock of budgerigars consumed the survivors without needing to chew. The Goth Warchief in charge of this military catastrophe did his best to salvage the situation by landing on the nearest human and buzzing a request for peace talks directly into their ear. As the human didn't speak a single dialect of Mozzie, she immediately slapped the tiny insect into pulp and flicked away the smashed remains.

  Now feeling horribly depressed, even worse than the time they’d run out of black nail polish, the survivors regrouped and came up with a better plan: sue the state for damages, claiming psychological hardship, and retire on the profits.

  Suffice to say, it didn’t work. After all, this wasn’t Amerika.

  *

  It took Tuesday a good five seconds of standing in the total darkness to figure out what was going on. After all, of the hundreds of media representatives and tens of thousands of ship-spotters who had turned this place into a much lamer version of Woodstock, Tuesday was the only one not shrieking in horror, clawing at his eyes and begging for death. It was certainly a conundrum...

  And then he suddenly understood the situation: none of these people had ever experienced being in the dark before. After all, a chain of stars and reflective moons danced across the sky in a perpetual afternoon, and the entire civilisation of this world was built from naturally-occurring glowstone mined in local quarries. Anything less than blindingly bright was something that Seven Suns residents only knew about in a theoretical sense.

  Far above on the sleek underhull of The Frontier, domes the size of apartment blocks slowly pointed towards the supplies on the tarmac and glowed green. In response, dozens of pallets began to shoot up towards the ship at the speed of sound, filling The Frontier's massive cargo area with all the supplies that it would need until it was decommissioned (or blown up by some idiot with a hot cup of coffee and a conveniently flat console). The glow was enough to highlight the vague details of the shadowed crowd as they wailed and thrashed about, but just barely.

  Tuesday watched the tarmac's concrete surface crackle under the pressure of hundreds of gravity elevators working in tandem, and he despaired. His dread was well deserved, though; after all, Tuesday had just suffered an idea. Historically, the rotten things only paid him a visit just before his life went straight off the rails in some sort of catastrophic way. To make things worse, this particular idea involved hopping into a military-strength gravity elevator with no seatbelt, no insurance, and no in-flight movie.

  Far as Tuesday could tell, the shrinkwrapped pallets seemed to be holding together just fine under the stress of blasting into the sky at speeds well beyond a thousand kilometres an hour, but how would his body fare? Would the pressure smash him into paste? He might not be an expert in anything that you could name, but Tuesday was pretty darn sure that riding one of those pallets was the exact opposite of safe.

  And then, looking higher still, Tuesday's heart dropped into his shoes as the thinnest possible line of sunlight crept around the edge of The Frontier's hull...

  Slamming the capped toe of his shoe into the crotch of the nearest Unison trooper (who was still screaming in terror at the darkness), Tuesday head-b
utted the next one in line and frog-jumped over the third. Bolting through the no-go zone, fuelled by the knowledge that those grunts from The Unison would be on his heels in seconds, Tuesday's feet thumped against the fissuring concrete at top speed. His lungs burned and his knees ached, but Tuesday's eyes were doing just as much work as they scanned for a desirable pallet. Unfortunately, all the stacks of supplies he passed were simply too dangerous. Riding an industrial-sized pallet of monomolecular blades, antimatter missiles, hypodermic suicide syringes and far worse would only make an already dangerous escape ridiculously lethal...