by Toby Frost
‘I’m glad you’re glad to be aboard,’ he said.
‘I’m glad that you’re glad,’ she said.
‘Bleargh,’ Carveth said.
Rhianna smiled over them all, like a saint. ‘I’m going to have a little lie down, if nobody minds. I could do with a rest after this morning.’
‘Of course,’ Smith said. ‘Do you need any help?’
‘I’ll be fine, thank you,’ Rhianna said, and she pattered back down the hall.
Carveth watched her go. ‘It’s alright for her,’ she said. ‘Just look at her arse; it’s not like some sort of horrible bus accident. Me, I only have to walk past a scone and I turn into a barrage balloon. You can stop looking at her arse now, Cap.’
‘Sorry,’ Smith said.
‘Besides, you’re forgetting that she’s a scary freak.’
Carveth peered into Gerald’s cage. ‘Leaving aside the fact that she once turned into a great big ghost, she’s un-reliable. Whatever powers she may have, she can hardly control them.’ She squeezed Gerald’s water bottle thoughtfully. ‘What we need is an army. Like Suruk’s people.’
‘Indeed,’ Suruk said. ‘Excuse me.’
He turned and left the cockpit. Carveth watched him go, heard the door to his room swing shut. She peered at Smith. ‘What’s up with him? He’s run off as though I let one fly.’
‘Strange,’ said Smith. ‘I’m not sure what’s on his mind. Oh well, how long ‘til we can land somewhere and sort out these repairs?’
‘Didcot 5 should be alright to land on. We’ll be coming into high orbit in about three hours. Ooh, what’s that?’ A light flickered on the dashboard. ‘That’s odd. There’s a message coming through.’
She pulled down the communications monitor and watched as the message tapped its way across the screen. The printer chuffed and tapped the message out onto a roll of tape.
‘Well,’ she said, reading from the tape. ‘Looks like there’s an automated beacon down there. Let’s see. . . Please land on this planet.’ She glanced around. ‘From the sounds of it, it’s just a repeated signal, being given out by a machine. But it’s nice of them to say that, isn’t it?’
‘It certainly is.’ Smith nodded at the planet in the centre of the navigation screen, striped with intermingling gas layers. It looked like a ball of raspberry ripple ice cream.
‘In that case, we ought to accept its offer.’
*
A science officer’s goggled features appeared on the inter-com, its antennae waving. ‘Glorious commander, I request an audience!’
462 glanced up, irritated. On his desk was a bucket of water and a bag full of kittens, but now that would have to wait. He put the bag down and prodded the intercom.
‘Enter.’
His guards showed the scientist in. Ghast scientists looked very much like drones, except that their coats were white instead of black. The scientist twitched and sniggered as it came in, a common habit among its caste.
‘All hail Number One!’
‘All hail,’ 462 said, sourly. ‘Sit.’
A bio-chair unfolded from the floor, engineered to take the special stresses of Ghast anatomy. The scientist flicked out its lab coat and stercorium and sat down.
462 said, ‘You have interrupted my nutrition hour. This had better be good news, minion.’ He pointed up at the picture above his head. Although the room was human in design, the motivational poster was newly added. It showed a sunset with Ghast characters underneath. ‘Read it out.’
The scientist swallowed hard. ‘Teamwork: what we do to avoid being shot.’
‘Quite. I hope you have been productive.’
‘Yes, Glorious Leader, indeed. We have been most pro-ductive – but – but our results have been unsuccessful. We have compelled our praetorians to drink tea, to bathe in it
– we have even sucked out their blood and replaced it with warm tea – but to no avail. We cannot give them moral fibre. It is impossible.’
‘Rubbish! I was sent to this wretched world for a reason, not to hear you make feeble excuses about impossibility!’ He paused, trying to remember. ‘Maybe there is some other way. DNA splicing, selective helio-stranding, perhaps? Can one mate with a teabag?’
The scientist shook its head. ‘No, Mighty One. Even the humans cannot breed with tea.’ It giggled involuntarily, and looked sheepish. ‘Excuse me.’
‘Go. Continue your work. I will send you more praetorians if you run out.’
462 watched it leave. Idiots, he thought. Perhaps the research would become a little less impossible if he had a few technicians shot.
Grinning at the idea, 462 picked up the bag, only to find that it was empty. In the confusion, the kittens had got loose.
A drone slipped in, and passed him a message and scurried out. 462 read the message, screwed it into a ball and spat out a long, complex curse as he strode to the door.
Two praetorians stood guard outside. ‘Follow,’ he said.
They took a staff hover-car from the Ghast compound to the old Senate house, now the Hyrax’s palace. The new regime had started as it meant to continue: there were bloodstains on the street outside the palace, and armed thugs muttered slogans as they watched the road.
The praetorians shoved aside a pair of robed Crusadist guards. ‘Get me Gilead,’ 462 barked, and he turned up the collar of his trenchcoat against the sun. A cultist led them inside, and at the top of the stairs 462 pushed him out the way and strode into what had been the office of the governor two days before.
He interrupted an argument. Calloway and the Grand Hyrax were yelling at one another across a mahogany desk. Calloway looked round and cried, ‘Thank God, someone sane! Tell this madman that he can’t have his way!’
462 was not greatly interested. ‘What does he want?’
‘He wants to abolish talking,’ Calloway said. ‘Talking!’
‘Not talking!’ Spit had gathered in the Hyrax’s beard.
‘Only speech! Listen, idolator, and learn the truth!’ He jabbed a grimy finger at Gilead, who sat by the wall, sullen and brutish. ‘He is not a true Edenist! He rejects my sacred laws! Oh Holy Annihilator,’ he cried, gazing at the ceiling, ‘thank you for making your humble servant such a genius! All praises to the Annhilator, through me!’
‘He wants to ban talking!’ Calloway cried.
The Hyrax nodded and tugged a wad of hair from his beard. ‘Aye! Banning speech will cause misery, and misery is piety! For everyone else. Words are engines of sin, and thus I shall reduce sin by banning all words, except for “The Hyrax is great”. How can people sin then, if every time they speak they must sing my praises? How will women call me a grubby little sleaze then?’
462 looked at Gilead. ‘Well, well, Gilead. I allow you to run this planet and yet already I find you humans squabbling like. . . little squabblers. What is wrong now?’
Gilead stood up. His bullish head on his robot body made him look like a lump of corned beef on the end of a fork. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he said. ‘We just need to iron out a few. . . er. . . creases.’
‘Creases?’ 462 shuddered with fury. ‘Creases? You should be crushing this planet, and you argue about puny human speech?’
He paused and his vicious eyes moved to the window.
All four upper limbs behind his back, he gazed across the city and his voice became distant. ‘I have just been informed of two disturbing developments. Firstly, the human ship which escaped during the raid on the space-port was the John Pym, the vessel of Isambard Smith. I am disappointed that you did not tell me, Gilead.’ He turned, and the bright sun caught on his metal eye. ‘I wonder: did you fail to tell me because you did not consider it important enough, or because you feared my response?’
‘Now look,’ Gilead began. ‘I hate that hellbound denier as much as anyone—’
‘And secondly, your men fired on mine! How dare you!’ he shrieked, and the room froze around him. Even the Hyrax was still, staring at the Ghast with wide, frightened, angry eyes.
‘Your morons shot at my troops! The praetorian legions are under my control! Nobody may throw their lives away but me!’
‘They got confused!’ Gilead protested. ‘You unbelievers all look the same!’
‘The same? How – how – do I look like a pink moron with two limbs too few and a moustache?’
‘Maybe we can come away with some positive action points from this,’ Calloway suggested. ‘These issues would seem to impact on—’
462 drew his disruptor pistol and pointed it at Calloway’s nose. ‘Shut up.’
Calloway made a small, terrified noise. ‘Oh my God,’ he squeaked. ‘I just touched base.’
462 shot him. The spin doctor spun on the spot, fell against the wall and 462 shot him three times more.
‘Consider yourself downsized, Mr Calloway.’ 462 holstered the pistol. He looked around the room. ‘Things must change, gentlemen. Until now there has been too much. . . how do you say it in English. . . pratting about like a great big fanny. No more. I myself will deal with the John Pym. In the meantime, let this corpse be a lesson, Grand Hyrax. There will be no other incidents like this.’
462 turned to the door. His praetorians waited for him there, ready for violence.
At the doorway he looked back. His eyes had narrowed into cunning, venomous slits. ‘I have read your new laws. Pathetic. Pointless edicts about women. A waste of time.’
‘Don’t forget fairy-sin,’ Gilead put in. ‘We need to get tough with fairies.’
‘I am not interested in semantics, Gilead.’
‘Them too. Big-nosed heathens.’
462 clenched his fists and mouthed a short prayer to Number One. ‘Fine. Have your little religious tyranny, but remember, both of you: I put you here, and soon you will pay me back. The Ghast Empire let you take this world. We made you – you in particular, Hyrax. We made you. Don’t forget it!’
*
The ship cut through the lower layers of cloud into a savage storm. ‘Bit bumpy!’ Carveth said, and the Pym rattled, sending the dashboard ornaments into a frenzy of nodding.
‘Hold it steady,’ Smith said. ‘Got somewhere to land yet?’
‘Thought I’d try somewhere flat,’ Carveth replied. The scan was distorted by the storm but, even so, it looked like strange, untrustworthy ground. The land undulated into weird, wind-blown shapes: hills, crevices and thin, curving pillars that could pierce the underside of the ship like a spike.
One of the legs touched down. A sensor bleeped, the ship creaked and rocked and as Carveth cut the thrusters they felt the undercarriage settle onto the springs. The engines stopped and suddenly they had landed.
‘What a craphole,’ Carveth said. ‘Let’s have some tea.’
Five minutes later they met in the sitting room. Carveth printed off the screen of the diagnostic computer and spread the sheets across the table. Suruk crouched in an armchair in the corner, sharpening a knife while Rhianna searched through the galley cupboards for anything pleasant to eat.
‘Right, everyone.’ Carveth brushed her small hands together, making her look unexpectedly competent. ‘I’ve had the computer analyse air samples, and it’s good news, sort of. This is a type sixteen unclaimed world in semi-primeval state. Solid ground, light atmosphere, no native life. Rock structures are probably silicate with a high sodium content.’
‘In practical terms?’ Smith said.
‘I have no idea. I just read that off a printout. But it’s breathable.’
Smith sat down at the table and glanced over the print-outs. They reminded him of the last maths exam he had taken when he was fourteen and, incredibly, they made even less sense. He studied the map warily, in case he was called upon to find its hypotenuse. ‘So a human could live out there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Or a Ghast,’ Suruk said. His whetstone slowly scraped down his knife.
Carveth shrugged. ‘It’s a very primitive place. You’ll love it, Suruk. No sentient life forms for you to kill, though.’
The M’Lak peered at the map. ‘Small, windy and without intelligent life. We have found your homeworld, little woman.’
Carveth frowned. ‘It bothers me, though. The odds are all wrong. Naturally breathable worlds are about as common as an Amish striptease.’
‘Well,’ said Smith, ‘what about the signal you mentioned? Might someone be planetscaping it?’
Carveth nodded. ‘It’s possible, although they’ve got a long way to go before it reaches Basic Kent Standard. Someone’s been here, but – well, if it wasn’t for the signal and the building, I’d have thought they were long gone.’
Smith said, ‘Building?’
‘Yes, the one with the shuttle next to it.’
‘Shuttle?’
‘So what would everyone like for dinner?’ Rhianna asked.
‘Dinner?’ cried Smith, and, feeling that he was getting stuck in a rut, he added, ‘What’s the choice?’
Rhianna held up two cardboard packets in a manner that struck him as oddly erotic. ‘Well, we’ve got synthetic ham, or synthetic lentil curry.’
Smith looked at the boxes. Both had pictures on the front: the two meals looked like different forms of toddler sick. ‘I’ll skip the synthetic ham, if you don’t mind. I’ve gone off the stuff ever since they started abbreviating it to Sham. Synthetic lentil curry, please.’
‘Slurry for me too,’ said Carveth. ‘So, what should we do?’
‘Check for our enemies,’ Suruk said. ‘If we have to slay anything – which would of course be a dreadful shame –it is better that we should go hunting for it, and not it for us. We should at least scout the area.’
‘Building and shuttle are next to each other,’ Carveth said. ‘It wouldn’t take more than ten minutes if we took the car, even in this storm.’
‘We’ll drive over there,’ Smith said, ‘all four of us. Will the car still work?’
Carveth shrugged. ‘I can’t see why not.’
‘Right,’ Smith said. ‘We’ll finish dinner, then drive over. It’s going to be nasty out, so wrap up warm. Can someone find Rhianna a pair of boots?’
In the cockpit, the tape was spooling out of the printer.
Carveth had seen the first part of the message, the part that said, ‘Please land on this world’. Now, unnoticed, the ticker was clicking again. More paper rolled out of the slot. It read: and save us from this hellish place.
6 Damned Children!
The car picked its way through the storm. Great pillars of rock loomed over them like giants emerging from the mist.
Muffled against the cold, Carveth pointed with a mittened finger. ‘Just over this hill,’ she said. A huge column formed out of the storm and she peered at it.
‘Don’t like the looks of this, Boss.’
Smith’s pistol was at his side. The shotgun was in the boot, along with his rifle. He wore goggles and a hat. ‘No?’
She shook her head and turned the heater up to full. ‘I don’t know. These columns look way too phallic to be natural. It gives me the willies.’ Carveth leaned in and studied the dials on the dashboard. ‘We should be there by now. Almost on top of it—’
A shape burst into view like the prow of a ship cutting through a bank of fog. It looked like a green metal cliff.
The car bumped past the battered flank of a military shuttle, its green sides pitted and scratched. The cockpit was dirty and there were no lights on. Beside the cockpit, ten feet above the car, the chipped cartoon of an eagle winked and gave them a cheery salute. Letters around the drawing said: UFSAAF.
‘Free States,’ Smith said. ‘It’s allied territory, at least.’
A buggy stood beside the shuttle, a tarpaulin whipping around its wheels. It was solid and heavy, built for this kind of terrain.
Carveth looked up at the shuttle. The wind had scrubbed the paint away from the sides, leaving streaks of bare metal. ‘Must have been here ages.’
‘They wouldn’t have just left it here,’ Smith said. ‘They must have abandone
d it for a reason.’
‘I don’t like this,’ Rhianna said. ‘It just feels. . . wrong.’
Smith pointed straight ahead, squinting into the storm.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said, ‘what is that?’
It looked like the carcass of a gigantic beetle, minus the legs. It lay flat on the ground, sixty feet long, engineered to weather the storm.
Smith stopped the car. ‘Ghasts. Everyone out.’
They opened doors and hurried, heads down, to the back of the car. Carveth opened the boot and took the shotgun. Smith took the rifle. They said nothing as they loaded up. The wind set the bobble flapping on Carveth’s woolly hat.
‘I suppose you’re going to say that we have to look inside,’ she said. Her gloves made heavy work of the gun.
‘The very fact it seems to have been made by Ghasts is reason enough,’ Smith replied. ‘Who knows what evil Gertie has been plotting in there? Ladies, stay here,’ Smith said. He looked at Suruk. ‘Fancy something new for the mantelpiece?’
The alien lowered his mandibles and gripped his spear in both hands. ‘Let us begin.’
‘Can I help?’ Rhianna asked.
Suruk shook his head. ‘It may be booby-trapped. Let us who have no boobies go first.’
Smith jogged out, bent low, rifle ready. Suruk paced beside him. The wind battered them and howled at their ears. Smith glanced left and right, at the high towers around them, and wondered if these too were the work of Ghasts. The dark, sloping side of the building rose up ahead.
Rhianna watched them disappear into the wind. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
Carveth fumbled out a pair of binoculars. ‘Hang on. They’re going in. . . up the back.’
Suruk was first. At the rear of the structure, a high, spherical iris lock stood open, its edges puckered and frozen from disuse. He stopped at one side, waited for Smith to catch up, and nodded at the inside. Smith nodded back, and together they lunged around the doorway.
It was a hall, high-ceilinged and dark, lit only by a few half-dead florescent roof-lights. The floor was ridged, the walls also. Smith had the nasty feeling that he had climbed into something’s ribcage via its fundament.
