Scum of the Universe

by Grant Everett

  Out of everything that Tuesday enjoyed doing instead of actual work, Corridor Hockey was his favourite. It basically involved using his mop to whack urinal cakes across the heavily waxed floors at top speed, sending them skidding into assorted targets. Narrow ventilation slots were perfect for this game, as were the undersides of forklifts. He had to be careful, though, as one time he'd hit a yellow puck into a thermal exhaust port that led directly into the reactor core. If it had been a photon torpedo, the entire ship would have been blown into specks of fallout. Long story short, Tuesday decided to be more covert in his games, and that meant aiming for rodents instead.

  As the weeks crawled by, something that Tuesday seemed to be dedicating more and more time to was thinking about was how pointless his life had become. Take his attempts with September, for instance. In truth, Tuesday knew that all of his romantic attempts with the beautiful dimensional plotter had gone straight off a cliff like a lemming who'd run out of Zoloft. She had tolerated him at one point, which meant that September was far more civil towards him than the other crew members, but that hadn't extended to an actual conversation for almost five and a half weeks. From what Tuesday could tell, the only reason September hadn't cut all contact with him was because Tuesday was on a first name basis with the Fleet Admiral, and she was doing her best to figure out why. After all, September loved mysteries: she loved the shattering noise they made when she glanced at them. Unfortunately, a mystery wasn't enough to make him friendship material, let alone a lover.

  So, eight weeks after a trial that had apparently never taken place, Tuesday was busy slamming urinal cakes at the rats on the Camembert Level of the cargo bay when one of them swore at him in very clear Unglish. In fact, the cursing rodent seemed to be able to shape his words better than most humans. Tuesday was so surprised by this turn of events that he froze for a second, and that was enough time for the rat to slide into a crack between sealed boxes of soft cheese. Of course, Tuesday was in pursuit a moment later.

  Following the little critter at top speed as it raced between pallets, jumping from pile to pile and moving faster than Tuesday could comfortably keep up with for long, the rodent eventually tripped, hit its head on a SLIPPERY WHEN WET sign, and almost knocked itself out. Tuesday was on the rodent in a second with the sponge end of his very clean mop and, without a pause, scooped the bugger up and zipped it into the huge belly pocket of his orange coveralls, where it struggled ferociously.

  “Feg off!” the rat snarled, its words muffled.

  “Not gonna eatcha,” Tuesday soothed, zipping the slot. “Just gonna figure out how it is you're talkin'.”

  Taking his prize to the nearest turbolift, Tuesday realised that his shift wasn’t over yet. Shrugging, he considered the consequences for less than a second before disregarding them. After all, he had friends in high places.

  Travelling up to the bridge of the ship, where the old Fleet Admiral was asleep at the helm, his papery skin relaxed and almost wrinkle free for once, Tuesday reluctantly woke Aslan and pointed at the wriggling lump in his pocket. Sighing toothlessly, the Fleet Admiral jammed his falsies back in and waved his younger version towards the exit.

  “I'm not here to answer every minor question you have about the future, Tuesday. Go ask somebody else. And try to be more convincing when you pretend to work! I've had to cancel fifteen complaints against you just this morning. I'm not made of ink.”

  Tuesday nodded sadly and left without bothering the Fleet Admiral any further.

  He couldn't even stand his own company. It was depressing, to say the least.

  Tuesday's next logical stop was the Department of Dimensional Plotting. As Tuesday walked into this space for the first time in a month he saw that September was so busy with her work that she was using both hands as well as her mouth to wrangle the red dimensional plotting arcs into a precise maze of threads. It looked like she was playing a game of three-dimensional Twister against herself.

  Tuesday heard a squeak and looked down at September's hamster, Mister Boodle. The sweating rodent had just finished off a long run on his wheel, and he nodded up at Tuesday in polite recognition. Tuesday cocked his head in confusion at how human that gesture had been, but he decided not to worry about Mister Boodle for now.

  “What?” September snapped, tying together no fewer than seventeen red lines at once. They all turned green with a cheerful chirping noise. “Don’t bother me when I'm working, Robert. I'm trying to prevent the ship from getting spread across dimensions like so much smooth peanut butter, and to do that I need to concentrate. And you're meant to be working, as well! Go away.”

  “This is important, Sep.”

  “Don't call me Sep. My mother called me that.”

  “Okay, then – September. This is important.”

  Tuesday opened his pocket and the filthy cargo rat instantly leaped for the door. Tuesday’s mop whipped down, smacked the creature into the air like a urinal cake hockey puck, and he effortlessly caught it one-handed. Tuesday quickly swapped the biting rat with the fluffy bundle of cuteness known as Mister Boodle, locked the perspex lid of the hutch, and flourished his hand at the nasty black creature.

  “See?” Tuesday smiled. “What do you think?”

  There was a pause for five long seconds. September looked at the rat, then back at Tuesday, then back at the rat again. She fixed Tuesday with an unimpressed snarl.

  “Have you been drinking, Robert?”

  “Duh. But you've got to check this out anyway. Watch.”

  Tuesday whacked the cage. The rat startled, but immediately went back to silently twitching its nose and looking for a way out. Suddenly, the rat stopped moving, tensed its entire body, closed one eye, and defecated so explosively that the entire cage was spattered with faecal matter. September turned red in apoplectic rage.

  “Get that thing out of here!”

  “Fing!” the rat said in affront. “I'll give you fing, rotten humie!”

  September paused with her mouth open, still pointing at the verbose rat. She moved her lips a little bit and stopped again. She finally managed a few more words.

  “Did that rat just speak?”

  The rat sighed and looked annoyed.

  “What, just because I'm a rat I'm not allowed to speak? Typical racist human scum…”

  September thought about this for a moment. Shaking her head was the extent of what she could manage for now. Wondering whether she was going utterly insane, September slowly approached the cage until her nose was an inch from the perspex. The rat bared its teeth and raised the middle digit of a rear leg, clearly flipping her the bird.

  “So what's with the talking?” Tuesday asked bluntly.

  September shrugged. “Maybe it's a mutant. Or an escaped genetic experiment. Or perhaps somebody accidentally swapped their personality with it.”

  Mister Boodle opened one eye, looking as guilty as a hamster could manage, but in a matter of moments he fell asleep in Tuesday's arms and began to snore gently.

  September held her forehead. She thought deeply, and the galaxy moved.

  “Look: there are no scars, or track marks. This rat is surgically untouched. And I very much doubt it's a mutant, as rats aren’t due to become this intelligent until just before we blow up the galaxy in half a million years.”

  “Plenty more galaxies where that came from,” Tuesday shrugged. “So now we know what didn't happen, what did happen?”

  “You could consider asking me,” the rat suggested.

  September looked at the black mass of mange and yellow teeth.

  “Ask for biology advice from a rat? Are you serious? Do you even have a name?”

  “Of course I have a name!” The rat looked insulted. “Nibble-Nibble-Squeak-Squeak, actually. Nibble for short. Though admittedly, my full name is far more poetic when you say it in ratspeak. Go on. Arsk.”

  “Okay,” Tuesday said, cracking his knuckles noisily. “Then talk, Nibble. Tell us what we want to know, and there's a good chance we
'll let you out of here with all four feet still attached.”

  The rat shrugged.

  “All right, then. Deal. Well, it all started after I'd finished eating a huge cockroach one morning. See, this particular roach didn't go down so well, as it was far too salty and had too much yellow stuff in it. So I went to the drain closest to my nest for a drink. I smelled something...weird in the water, though. I thought nothing of it, as every sewage outlet on the ship has a broad spectrum of tastes, but then the strangest thing happened: I started to think stuff that was more complex than food-sex food-sex food-sex food-sex, run run run run run...stop.”

  “Is that what rats usually think?” Tuesday asked.

  “Sort of. It’s a lot more profound when you’re a rat.”

  “I bet.”

  “So anyway, within days I'd really started to work things out. For instance, I figured that if I found a way to collect my food in a more efficient way - perhaps by farming it – it would make my life easier. Just as I'd decided to start breeding roaches in little enclosures so I could trade them for things with other rats, I tripped over my own clumsy paws and swore out loud for the very first time. I'm telling you, I spent the next ten minutes screaming profanities just because I could.”

  “Sewage outlet?” September interrupted.

  “About sixty metres under where this diphead kidnapped me, near the water treatment plant. You know, the one just to the left of the urine recyc and faecal conversion tanks?”

  September scanned the rat from whiskers to tail with her Omni implant. The rice-sized device in the web of her hand was equipped with all sorts of diagnostic equipment, and it only took a few seconds to get concrete results. September gaped at the lightscreen projection.

  “Robert, my Omni says that this rat is loaded with the same learning and recall chemicals that I was feeding into your brain through that chemical injector. Maybe they weren't careful enough when they disposed of the injector, and it ended up in a toilet somehow?”

  “They burned the injector in an incinerator bin. I asked.” Tuesday grunted.

  September looked down at the rat, who was nosily trying to pass wind without success.

  “Nibble, how many other rats drink from that particular source?”

  The rat shrugged. “A hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred thousand.”

  September and Tuesday looked blankly at each other.

  “Oh dear.”

  “And that's not counting mice, pigeons, snakes...”

  “I get the idea,” Tuesday snapped. He went pale as his brain caught up with his ears. “Wait...snakes? There's snakes on the ship?”

  “Just a family of boa constrictors. They don't eat much. Escaped from one of the research departments. Really pleasant neighbours, as long as it isn't a Friday.”

  Tuesday looked nervously about the Department of Dimensional Plotting, checking if there were any creepy-crawly reptiles sneaking up on him. Every shadow now held the promise of a bone-snapping death. He casually stepped away from the nearest ventilation grille, and decided that things were getting far too complicated for his tastes.

  “Time out! Look, September, I say we let Jimmy fry this sucker and call it a day. As I'm currently living on precisely two percent of my garnished wages, this is so far above my paygrade that it isn't even in the same solar system.”

  “Jimmy?” September repeated.

  She froze, a look of total horror on her face. Without another word September picked up the cage by its carry handle and rushed out of the automated door. Sighing, Tuesday shadowed her all the way down the corridor, trying to think of some way to stop her from making this rotten day even more complicated and difficult than it already was.

  “What are you doing?” Tuesday whined. “Where are we going?”

  He squeezed into the same turbolift as September just before it sealed, but she was so distracted that she didn't so much as acknowledge the question.

  The look on her face clearly meant it was all bad news.

  Like anybody who wanted to head to Alpha Deck, September and Tuesday made a dangerous ten-second trip alongside the thrumming radioactivity of the white-hot engines. Within moments they stepped onto the trashed level where Tuesday, Jimmy and all the other clinical defectives lived. Marching away from Tuesday without giving away a single clue, September burst into Jimmy Slummer's room. Frightening the fat man so badly that he almost fell off his concave bed, September started firing off questions before Jimmy's chest pains had a chance to fade.

  “You, Slummer. What did you do with the Queen?”

  “Queen?” Tuesday said in surprise.

  “Queen?” Jimmy squealed.

  September gripped Jimmy under his third chin and slammed him into the wall. Tuesday had no idea that September was capable of such violence.

  “I gave you very simple instructions, James. You were to go down three levels, place the little lead box in the nearest incineration bin, and cremate it twice on the top setting, just to be sure. You were to keep it at arm's length at all times, and you certainly weren't meant to look inside of it. A grass parakeet could have understood such a simple message.”

  “Cremate what?” Tuesday complained, feeling left out.

  “What did you do with the box?!” September roared, spittle flying.

  “I was going to cremate it! I promise!” Jimmy blubbered. “But just before I put it in the bin, it suddenly seemed like a really really good idea to rattle it next to my ear, just to see what was inside...and then it felt like an even better idea to go back to my room and have a look inside of the box...”

  September looked like she was about to fall down. Somehow she managed to hit Jimmy's bent bed, rather than the floor. She swallowed, crunching her eyes shut as hard as she could manage. She looked nauseous.

  Her next words were almost impossible to hear.

  “James, did you open the box?”

  Jimmy faltered. He eventually squeezed out one more word without sobbing.

  “Yes.”

  September's face darkened.

  “And?”

  Jimmy's face pinched into a spiral of pain.

  “It...it jumped into the toilet, miss.”

  Tuesday had to move really quickly to prevent September from kicking Jimmy's arse into a mountain of bruises. It took almost five seconds until September had managed to regain control over her rage. A few Alpha Deckers peeked into Jimmy's room, hoping to see a fight.

  “Can somebody explain to me what is happening?”Tuesday demanded, finally letting go of September.

  She bared her teeth at the fat chef. He unintentionally took a step away from the dangerous expression.

  “Two months ago, I asked James to do one thing: to destroy the box containing the Hiver Queen I'd stolen from Eulogy. As James has the IQ of bread mould and the self-control of a rabbit jacked full of Viagra, it seems that the Queen was able to exert enough control to make him think it was a good idea to place the lead box close to his head. At such a short distance the Queen was obviously able to dominate him and coerce him into opening her little prison. As he's a total simpleton, James believed that these thoughts were his own, and so he followed them. Of course, the Queen then immediately escaped into the toilet. Correct?”

  “Maybe she drowned?” Jimmy suggested quietly.

  “Hivers are aquatic.” September said in the same tone you'd use to explain to a thick child for the twentieth time that weeing on top of a closed toilet lid wasn't the correct way to go potty. She seemed too drained to be angry anymore. “They thrive in almost any liquid, especially water.”

  September gestured towards Nibble.

  “The Queen has obviously laid eggs in the sewage outlet, and when Nibble had a drink he must have consumed at least one of them. As soon as the egg registered it was inside a viable host it would have hatched and promptly crawled all the way into Nibble's head so it could latch onto his brainstem. Within a matter of hours, as you can see, Nibble experienced a substantial increase in inte
lligence levels.” September gave a defeated wave towards the rat. “There's no way he's the only one. There could be thousands. Hundreds of thousands. More.”

  “But why would the Hiver Queen want to make rats smarter? What's in it for her?” Jimmy asked. “Is it because she's nice?”

  September sighed at the idiocy.

  “Because it is a necessary component to creating a full-sized Hive. First, the Queen invades hosts with her offspring, then she improves the hosts in all sorts of ways, then when the time is right she can use them for whatever she wants. Generally, the first thing she'll do is kill off anything that may pose a risk to her Hive.” September was lost for words for a moment, but then her expression changed. “I doubt she managed to recruit any humans as hosts, though. The water purification process would kill off her eggs before they could reach any people. The crew may be safe from direct domination for now.”