September and Tuesday looked at each other. Despite the fact they originated from the exact opposite edges of the human spectrum, they were both wearing the same expression. The stranger's dirty face twisted up in total rage.
“Sing it!” the Shiv-man bellowed, twisting the shank into Jimmy just enough to make him squeak. “Sing it!”
Sighing, September tried to put aside her pride. It wasn't easy.
“I'm A Little Teapot short and stout! Here is my handle, here is my spout...”
The stranger visibly calmed by the second verse. His blade stopped trembling and he drew it away from Jimmy's throat a little bit. Rather than letting go of the fat chef, the Shiv-man put Jimmy in a tight headlock with his free forearm and gestured with the blade for Tuesday and September (who had actually started doing the special little dance that goes with the nursery rhyme) to follow him. He retreated back into the darkness.
“Follow. Keep singing!” he growled.
September kept singing.
Within ten steps they were inside of what seemed to be the one and only room of the Shiv-man's home. He'd constructed a simple bed out of rolls of toilet paper and built a little fire in the far corner that seemed to be fuelled by aftershave. A pair of leather boots were boiling in what looked like a Unison soldier's combat helmet over the sole heat source in the room, as though the tanned animal skin was going to be the Shiv-man's dinner.
Their host traced the low roof with his eyes, as thought listening for something. An expression of relief suddenly appeared on his face, and the Shiv-man finally released Jimmy. Shiv-man retreated to his crude bed and proceeded to rock back and forth, whispering something under his breath.
“Gone,” he muttered. “Can stop now.”
“What are we hiding from?” September asked the very moment she stopped singing.
“Don't think about them,” Shiv-man hissed, rocking more violently now. He gripped his rag-wrapped feet. “They hears it when you think about them. Can't tell you about them. Can't think about them. They can hear our thoughts. But the nursery rhymes stop them. Yes! It blocks our minds from them, lets us hide. Yes, it blocks us. Keeps us safe. Don't know why. Just works.”
September leaned in closer, squinting. Her eyes snapped wide in surprise.
“Wait, are you Commander Eulogy?”
The Shiv-man growled from the depths of his beard to show that his teeth were coated in a thick layer of yellow scum. His uniform was an unrecognisable mass of scraps. It may have been the lighting, but his face seemed to be an odd green-blue colour.
“Means nothing. Nothing.” Eulogy was still rocking like a madman. “You can't stay. None of you. Alone, we can hide. But together? They can hear us. Matter of time. Time. Time. They can hear more than one. Four is more than one. I'm A Little Teapot. Mary Had A Little Lamb. Too many here. Too many.”
Eulogy snapped to attention and looked at the low ceiling in horror, as though he could hear something. It took a good five seconds until the others could discern that it was the same mystery noise as before. Unlike the last time they heard it, the whispering watery sound was getting louder, as though whatever was making it was angry. Eulogy bared his yellow chompers and raised the shiv in threat.
“Out! Out, or I'll stop your thoughts for good! They won't get me! I'm A Little Teapot! Mary Had A Little Lamb! Pop Goes The Weasel!”
It may have been the lighting, but September could have sworn there were a few tiny green mushrooms growing out of Eulogy's face. But that wasn't possible, was it?
“I need to know some things,” September said, attempting to interrupt Eulogy's insane ranting. “What's the current date? When did all the higher systems go down? What can we do to fix things? What is out there?”
But the time for words was over. Raving madly, Eulogy chased them out of his crude hovel and sealed his home shut with a barrier made out of an industrial-sized bottle of mouthwash. As nobody had been fatally stabbed by a mental case, their current situation was far from the worst possible outcome.
Tuesday waggled the Nokia time machine as the whispering noise in the darkness began to reach a crescendo.
“Okay, enough sightseeing, I think it's time to go,” Tuesday said lightly, knowing better than to panic.
Tuesday reached for the RESET button, but September blocked his thumb. It was the closest he'd come to holding her hand.
The background noise had taken on a distinctly sharp edge, as though there were entire worlds of anger and hunger within it...
“We haven't proven if this device is truly useful, yet,” September stated. “We can't go back with a lack of useful data. Look, I say we go far ahead to somewhere safe and work things out from there, okay?”
September suddenly clicked a curse word in fluent Swahili and violently shook her left hand as though it was on fire. While this gave Jimmy and Tuesday a fright, what happened next was much worse: all of the glowing holographic spheres vanished as though a switch had been flicked, leaving the three of them in complete and total shadow.
“My stupid Omni overheated,” September explained to the darkness. The whispering was still growing in volume. “It'll take a second to cool down. Just wait a moment.”
“Bugger that,” Tuesday retorted.
Tuesday twisted the Nokia's dial all the way to the right and pulled the trigger. September, Jimmy and Tuesday disappeared with a loud pop and a corona of electricity that lashed the immediate area with glowing, molten lines.
*
Tens of thousands of years later, a pile of yellowing dust than had once been a human skeleton exploded into a gritty cloud. Tendrils of lightning lashed about the dim room, searing glowing lines into walls of orange rust that were only held together by some sort of rampant green-blue fungus. The glow flickered, slowly transitioning into a trio of distinct human forms: one shapely, one lanky, one borderline circular. As soon as their bodies arrived all the way onto this new muddy bank in the timestream, the seasoned chronal-trippers took a moment to orient themselves. However, September wasted no time in snatching the time machine out of Tuesday's hands and jabbing a finger into his face.
“You are not to touch this again. Understood?”
Not bothering to wait for a response, September hooked the Nokia onto her belt and tapped at her now-cool Omni implant. A single lightscreen appeared with three red words: NO NETWORK DETECTED. No matter what, all September could get was NO NETWORK DETECTED. She took one look at the room before coming to a conclusion.
“The Frontier's alloys were borderline invulnerable to just about everything in nature, and that includes every weapon in The Unison's military databases. As all things in this Universe will eventually age and die in their own way, including the stars themselves, The Frontier's only weakness is time itself. We must be at least a hundred centuries in the future. Maybe far, far more.”
“It's a lot dustier than before,” Tuesday said, poking his finger into a thick coat of grime on what may have been a console. His hand went all the way up to his wrist, and he drew out a little brown knob covered in spindly roots. Tuesday smiled. “Hey, there's bloody potatoes growing on this console!”
“And for some reason we can see without any of the lights working,” September said with interest. She squinted at the stripes of blue-green fungus that covered more than half of the room. “This species of fungi is bioluminescent.” She breathed in deeply. It was unpleasant and earthy, but far from toxic. “And from what I can tell without any lab tests, somehow this fungus is absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen at a very efficient rate.” September squinted at a tiny neon-green toadstool. “I don't recognise the species, though. It's not in my long-term memory, which means it hasn't been discovered yet.”
“In our time?” Tuesday managed.
September turned her head like an owl and blinked.
“Exactly.” September fetched a little sample jar and used it to collect one of the bright mushrooms. She slid the tube into a notch on her belt. “That little fella sh
ould prove to be interesting once we're back at the lab.”
“Speaking of exactly...where are we, exactly?” Jimmy asked sullenly.
“The Department of Dimensional Plotting,” September said instantly. She dug into a pile of decay to reveal Mister Boodle's badly tarnished cage. She went to spin his little wheel, and it dissolved into dust. September sighed. “Everything has disintegrated. I don't think a single thing would still work anywhere on this ship. It's likely to be worthless from end to end. Check the door, would you, Robert?”
Tuesday went to walk out of the main portal and smacked into it nose-first. Holding his bruised shnozz, Tuesday tried striking the override pad to open it manually. The door didn't respond in the slightest. Looking inside the flat box that connected the motorised door to the ship's power supply, he made a worrying discovery: the wires were tarnished to literally nothing.
“Heh,” Tuesday grunted, “seems like all the doors are still sealed shut from before. By big magnets you said, right?”
“I don't want to explore, anyway. I want to go home,” Jimmy whined.
Tuesday barked a laugh and turned sharply on the spot.
“You must be joking! This is the chance of a lifetime, Slummer.” Tuesday snapped. “How could you not want to travel forwards through time? Don't you have any inclination to find out what happens in the future? Seriously! If we witness just one major thing we can use to our advantage, who knows what we can accomplish? Don't you want to have a bit of a warning about what's around the corner? Hey, maybe we could find out how you die, Slummer...”
“Shut up!”
“Okay, I think we should go back now,” September ordered, rescuing Jimmy without meaning to. “I think I've compiled enough data to warrant further testing of the Tuesday Equation. Officially designated testing, I mean. I know that we won't be able to do any relevant harm this far into the future – seeing as though mankind would be completely beyond recognition by now - but we're still better off not meddling if we can help it. Come closer.”
September flicked the RESET button and pulled the trigger. A tiny beeping sound chimed annoyingly and two hollowed-out yellow batteries ejected onto the floor with a hiss. They gently smoked a bit, but they certainly weren't glowing like before.
“Great. Fan-freaking-tastic!” Jimmy wailed.
“We just need some more Triple-A Nuclear batteries.” September noted. A look of concern appeared on her face. “Unfortunately, the type we need have a half-life of one hundred thousand years.”
Jimmy and Tuesday looked at each other. Then they looked back at September.
“And that means?” Tuesday pushed.
“Well, if their half-life is one hundred thousand years, and it turns out we're further than two hundred thousand years into the future, then that means we may be in the…well, we may be in a spot of bother, to put it formally.” Somehow, September managed to avoid swearing at the end of her statement.
“So even if we find the specific, rare-as-anything batteries that we need, they might be dead anyway?” Tuesday confirmed.
September shrugged. “Perhaps I could jury-rig other power sources together for a similar effect. It might take a lot of them, though. Hundreds. Thousands, even.” She sighed. “We better start searching.”
Digging through the deep piles of corrosion and dirt that had once been the Department of Dimensional Plotting, September quickly found the back-up computer for this particular room. It was wasted down to a half-eaten shell, but inside was only more bad news: its precious batteries had been removed. After checking through all the different piles, September and the others confirmed that the exact same thing had happened to every power pack and energy cell. They'd all been cleaned out.
“This place is useless. We need to get out of here.” September noted.
Tuesday scoffed.
“But I've already tr-”
Tuesday's words of doubt were cut off by September stepping forwards and kicking the sealed door as hard as she could. Her boot pounded through the ruined metal like a wrecking ball, and corrosion sprayed from the point of impact. The slab toppled out of its brittle frame, and when it hit the ground it was as though a bomb had gone off. Dust rained from every inch of the ceiling, choking and blinding them all. Coughing and covering their faces, the trio staggered into the outside corridor. It took some time to retch up all the mildew and dust they'd breathed in.
“Well, that's one way of doing it,” Tuesday finally managed, taking a step away from the prone slab September had just booted. Before he could move another metre, September's hand flashed up to stop him. Tuesday made a face. “What?”
September pointed at Tuesday's leading foot. Following her finger, Tuesday realised that his toe had sunk a good two inches into what he'd thought was solid floor. He pushed down a tiny bit and his foot carved through the ancient mesh like it was warm toffee. Tuesday huffed.
“Great. Bloody floor is ready to give. How are we meant to get anywhere walking on wet paper?”
September silently tapped at her Omni for a few seconds. Jimmy and Tuesday both startled as the entire derelict corridor turned into the sort of colour-coded line map you'd see on a weather report: a few solid green and blue borders were swirled through much larger patches of oranges, yellows and reds, seemingly at random. September didn't wait for the obvious question to be asked out loud.
“I've set up a structural integrity scan, converted it to a simple coloured grading system and linked it up to your retinal implants. Avoid the oranges and reds unless you enjoy the thought of plunging through six hundred stories of jagged rust before freezing to death in space.” September leaned close to Jimmy. “James, I'd advise that you stick to the solid blue spots. And, mmm, I'd prefer it if you stayed on the opposite side of the corridor to me. No offence.”
“Where are we going?” Tuesday asked.
September tapped away at her Omni instead of giving an answer, but she was immediately distracted by movement in her peripheral vision. Turning sharply towards the unknown lifeform, her bottle of hydrofluoric acid raised and ready to spray, it turned out to be some sort of thick green tendril snaking among the fungus mounds. Although it didn't appear to have a head of any traditional kind, the thing was raising itself up like an annoyed cobra. September moved to the side a little bit, and the tendril followed. Keeping her eye on the weird plant, she gave Tuesday a little wave.
“Do me a favour? Touch that for me, would you?”
His internal weasel cunning complained at top volume, but it was drowned out by his desire to win points with September. The moment Tuesday poked the tendril with his index finger though, an electrical shock blasted up his arm, sending him staggering backwards in surprise. He cussed in violent Guttertongue.
“Thought so. Those vines are conductive.” September noted without a hint of apology. She glanced at the lightscreen. “It's hard to tell with all this fungus throwing up scanner shadows, but it seems like there's a lot of those vines...and that they all appear to converge in the same place.” September swept her left hand in an arc. She finally looked away from the lightscreen, staring down the corridor and into the heavy gloom. “The moment you touched that vine, the readings went off the scale. I'm picking up a huge amount of electrical activity and radiation in a central point. It could possibly be the batteries, sure, or it might be some sort of lethal nuclear device, or something else entirely. No matter what it is, we may conceivably be able to use it to fuel the device to get back.”
Their trek resumed. Tuesday realised at this point that if he was waiting for an apology, he'd be waiting a really, really long time.
Slowly picking their way through the corridor, which was now knee deep in blue-green fungal growths, September led both losers to the nearest turbolift. Of course, trying to use the faster-than-the-speed-of-sound pods would be pointless, as the tubes had decayed to ruin by eons of stillness. And even if they did work, they were sealed tight with magnets. Of course, the only viable option was Jimmy Slummer'
s greatest enemy: stairs. Thankfully, the door that should have blocked them was thinner than paint chips, and came down with little more than a heavy breath.
Following September's lead, Tuesday began to carefully pick his way down the narrow emergency steps - which were rusted to an eye-watering bright orange - and everything was going just fine until Jimmy joined in on the climb. The staircase warped and shook on his fifth heavy stomp, and the structural integrity scan of the entire level instantly switched from green to red without any warning. Taken by surprise, the stairs canted at a sharp angle and the three time travellers staggered forwards. Tumbling for a corroded gap that was meant to be blocked by a safety handrail, the trio were only metres away from dropping into one of the longest open shafts in the ship. They'd be doomed to dive for more than seven hundred levels at terminal velocity until finally landing in the lowest cargo decks of The Frontier's underbelly.
In other words, welcome to Splat Town, population: three.
Scum of the Universe Page 43
