by Scott Innes
Suddenly, I clocked Caroline walking out from the shuttle bay entrance. I was stunned – had she had a change of heart already? I doubled back hurriedly.
‘Caroline?’ I said. She was surprised to see me.
She laughed, putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘It was lovely of you to bring me here, eyes closed, a big surprise and all of that. But it does mean I haven’t packed a bag or anything.’
‘Oh,’ I said stupidly, the penny dropping. ‘I didn’t think of that.’
‘You’ve thought of enough,’ she reassured me. ‘Now go on and catch that spy.’
With a spring in my step, I walked away again – and right into the endgame at last.
I peered into the window of McGivern’s, the Compound bakery. It was the end of the day and they were closing up but, buzzing from giving Caroline her send-off, I had my eye on that final caramel éclair. I licked my lips in anticipation, when suddenly the door to the bakery flew open and out came Gerry. Behind him, clanking heavily onto the cobblestones, was Barrington12.
‘Kev!’ Gerry cried, red-faced and husky. ‘Kev, thank God – it’s urgent! You need to come with us!’
Offering no immediate explanation, Gerry trotted hastily to the corner of the street and peeked around the corner, down towards the infirmary in the distance. I overtook the slow-moving Barrington12 and joined Gerry against the wall, peering out at whatever had so transfixed him.
‘Gerry, what…?’ I asked – and then I saw. Keeping to the shadows of the quiet Compound streets was the man of the moment.
‘What’s Leigh doing?’ I asked in a hushed voice.
‘Barrington12 and I have just been to Flix,’ Gerry said, gesturing to the brightly lit Compound cinema across the way. ‘They were showing an afternoon of sport-themed films – Cool Runnings, Field of Dreams, that one with the fast cars – Rush, I think it was called.’
I knew the one he meant. I didn’t like the film one bit – a complete hatchet job, actually. Yes, Ian’s an erratic driver, but would it have killed them to include a little bit of his football career? He deserves better.
‘Anyway,’ Gerry went on, ‘as we came out, we bumped right into the General as he walked down the street. He had his head bowed and his beret pulled down low – almost like he was trying not to be noticed. It was well dodgy as far as I was concerned.’
‘Just a bit,’ I agreed. ‘Go on.’
‘He gave us a right rollocking, told us to watch where we were going and that we didn’t know who we were messing with. And then, get this, Kev: he said, “I’ve got important business to attend to tonight, get out of my damn way.” And then he hurried on, head down. That’s when I decided I needed to find you immediately.’
As we looked on, the General vanished around a corner, heading into the grounds of the infirmary. I gasped as I realised.
‘Oh heck,’ I said, putting my hand to my forehead. ‘You know where he’s going, don’t you?’
Gerry looked at me blankly.
‘Think about it!’ I said. ‘What do we know is behind the infirmary building?’
Gerry considered this thoughtfully, then his eyes widened.
‘That stash of mucky magazines in the hedge!’ he cried. ‘Of course!’
‘No,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘The tunnel! Leigh is heading back out of the Compound again to his secret little shuttle so he can jet off and deliver an update to the bloody L’zuhl!’
‘Oh God!’ Gerry said in dismay. ‘I should’ve known. What do we do?’
‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ I said darkly. ‘We take our own shuttle and we tail him. Wherever he’s going, we’re going too. It’s high time our dear General was exposed for the treacherous vermin that he is.’
‘But, Kev,’ Gerry said, ‘how are we meant to do that? The Compound’s in lockdown.’
‘Precisely – they’ve got a skeleton crew at the bays as a result; I’ve just been down there. We just nab ourselves a shuttle – Barrington12 can fly the damn thing.’
I started to head in that direction – and then stopped.
‘But hang on though,’ I said, thinking. ‘What if we lose track of Leigh? If he gets into the air before we do, we’ll have no idea where he is. Damn it.’
‘I didn’t think of that,’ Gerry said, crestfallen. ‘If we hurry, we could follow him down the tunnel maybe? Stow away in the back of his shuttle somehow.’
‘Get real,’ I muttered. ‘It was a tiny one-seater job he had out there. What are we going to do, tape ourselves to the wings and hope we don’t fall off?’
‘IF I MAY CONTRIBUTE TO THIS DISCUSSION,’ Barrington12 said suddenly, ‘I BELIEVE I MAY BE ABLE TO OFFER A SOLUTION TO OUR CURRENT PREDICAMENT.’
‘I’m open to anything at this point,’ I said, turning to him. ‘Go on.’
‘WHEN GERRY AND I ENCOUNTERED THE GENERAL THIS EVENING, MY SENSORS REGISTERED HOW SUSPICIOUSLY HE WAS BEHAVING. AS HE REPRIMANDED GERRY FOR BUMPING INTO HIM, I TOOK THE LIBERTY OF GENTLY AFFIXING A D-86 TRACKER DISC TO THE BACK OF HIS BERET. BASED ON THIS, I CAN APPROXIMATE HIS CURRENT LOCATION WITH EXTREME ACCURACY. FOR EXAMPLE, I CAN SEE THAT HE IS NOW INSIDE THE TUNNEL BEHIND THE INFIRMARY, THUS CONFIRMING KEVIN KEEGAN’S SUSPICIONS AS TO HIS INTENDED ROUTE.’
My eyes lit up – Barrington12 had saved the day! Each Barrington model had a built-in Tracker Mode, even a creaky old relic like the 12-series, I just rarely ever had cause to deploy it – I’d only used it for vitally important matters, like attaching them to the training cones to find out who kept stealing them (it had turned out to be Gerry, sleepwalking) or to find out who kept taking my Tunnock’s Teacakes from the mini-fridge in the changing room (Gerry, sleepwalking). Now, Barrington12 had deployed this technique for something equally important.
‘Oh, Barrington12, I could kiss you!’ I said in delight.
‘I MUST STRONGLY ADVISE AGAINST SUCH A COURSE OF ACTION,’ he replied tonelessly. ‘RELATIONS BETWEEN HUMANS AND BARRINGTON MODELS ARE EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN. IN ADDITION, ANY ATTEMPTS AT INTIMACY WOULD POSE INNUMERABLE PRACTICAL AND LOGISTICAL ISSUES.’
‘Duly noted,’ I muttered, but smiling in spite of myself. Despite those moments when Barrington12 had been almost uncomfortably close to sounding human, clearly he still had some way to go. ‘We’ve got him now, Gerry,’ I said triumphantly. ‘Right, you stay here – Barrington12 and I can handle this.’
‘Hang about, what?’ Gerry said, horrified. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you, Kev? We’re a team! We’re in this together.’
‘Gerry,’ I said, trying to pick my words delicately. ‘You’re… I can’t risk another incidence of the… what-have-you that we saw on Great Strombago. I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, come off it,’ he said sourly. ‘That was just some weird thing that happened – I’m hardly going to do it again, am I?’
‘That’s the problem in a nutshell – we have no idea, do we?’ I replied. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to take any chances with something I don’t understand – that’s why I’ve never paid any attention to the away goals rule. And, quite apart from anything else, I saw the state of you after it happened last time. It damn near broke you. You were a shell of a man for days.’
‘Look at me – I’m fit as a fiddle!’ he insisted. ‘You can’t go without me. Please, Kev.’
I sighed. I knew I was going to regret this.
‘All right, fine,’ I said begrudgingly. ‘But you’re on your best behaviour. Strictly no God stuff. I’m serious.’
I took a step forward then paused. I frowned.
‘Hang about,’ I said, scratching my chin. ‘You two were coming out of the bakery when you told me all this – surely you didn’t stop in for cream cakes before coming to find me?’
Gerry looked down at his feet awkwardly.
‘Well, I mean… when you’re hungry, you’re hungry.’
‘Bloody hell, Gerry,’ I sighed.
I found myself grateful for the first time for the lockdown being in place. Without it, there was
no way we would have gained access to the shuttle bays without being spotted. As it was, the crew didn’t clock us until we were right on the landing platforms next to one of the empty vessels – behind the pilot and co-pilot it was a roomy three-seater, which was ideal given how much space Barrington12 would take up, and Gerry for that matter, no disrespect to him. It was a beautiful thing, fresh off the production line, its blue-black metal glinting in the moonlight, not a scratch or blemish on it. It had two robust-looking engines under the hook-shaped wings, absolutely perfect for our needs. I decided there and then to christen it Sir Les in honour of Les Ferdinand, who had left me with the same sense of dumbstruck awe when I’d first clapped eyes on him.
With some assistance from Barrington12, who plugged his sub-5 connection port into the release button on the door to force it open, we clambered aboard the vessel and I hurried to the cockpit. Then I remembered that I couldn’t actually fly and made way for Barrington12.
At the back of the passenger seats was a small kitchen area with a coffee machine and two tubes of Pringles, which I thought was a nice touch. They were just the ready salted ones sadly, but listen: there was a war on.
‘Oh heck, Kev,’ Gerry said, strapping himself in next to me and glancing through the window. ‘We’ve been rumbled.’
I leaned across him and saw several of the shuttle bay staff legging it in our direction. It was now or never.
‘Get us out of here!’ I bellowed as Barrington12 ignited the engines.
‘KEVIN KEEGAN,’ Barrington12 said. ‘TRACKER MODE HAS IDENTIFIED THAT GENERAL LEIGH HAS ALREADY REACHED HIS OWN SHUTTLE AND IS NOW LEAVING PALANGONIAN AIR SPACE AT SPEED.’
‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘let’s get after him. It’s time to bring an end to this spy nonsense once and for all. Like Ashley Young in the penalty box, the guy is going down.’
With a roar, the shuttle took off at pace, hurtling up towards the sparkling blanket of stars above, and for one brief, blissful moment it felt as though nothing else really mattered any more, only the infinite beauty of that great expanse spreading as far as the eye could see.
But it passed. As Barrington12 hooked himself up to the console display, I watched a tiny speck of blue-white light flicker faintly on the screen.
Leigh’s shuttle. No turning back now.
ACBAELION OUTPOST XXI
We crept along the eerily silent corridors of Acbaelion Outpost XXI, every footstep seeming inordinately loud in our ears.
‘Which way?’ Gerry asked in an urgent whisper as we paused at a T-junction. The carpeted floor was thick with dust and the walls were completely bare. It was like the Mary Celeste. Or was it the Marie Antoinette? Look, the place was deserted, basically.
We had tailed Leigh’s shuttle diligently across the Antioc Nebula in which Palangonia was located, all the way into the Acbaelion Quad and into the shuttle dock of the outpost. This was a maligned and largely ignored area of space and, as we soon discovered, even the outposts positioned equidistantly around the fringes (for some purpose since lost to the annals of time) were crumbling souvenirs, space stations which had been all but forgotten by the Alliance. It wasn’t difficult to see why – there were no inhabited planets left anywhere within the Quad, the last having contained the snail folk of Drikk, who had died of a terrible plague centuries earlier. No one’s a fan of that.
On arrival at the outpost, we hovered in the distance to consider our next move, or to wait for Leigh to leave if it turned out to merely be a flying visit (for all I knew, there might have been a Tesco Express on board the space station from which he was picking up a coffee and some wine gums for the journey). After forty-five minutes with no sign of a departure, and with Barrington12’s tracker showing Leigh still aboard the abandoned station, we carefully, quietly landed Sir Les on the loading dock beside Leigh’s tiny shuttle.
‘Well?’ I asked Barrington12 as we stood there in the deserted corridor on the basement level of the station, unsure of our next move. ‘Where is he?’
‘UNFORTUNATELY, I NOTED AS WE DISEMBARKED SIR LES THAT THE GENERAL HAD REMOVED HIS BERET AND THE AFFIXED TRACKER AND HAS LEFT IT ON THE SEAT OF HIS CRAFT. I AM THEREFORE UNABLE TO NARROW DOWN HIS LOCATION OTHER THAN TO CONFIRM THAT HE IS SOMEWHERE ON ACBAELION OUTPOST XXI.’
‘Buggeration,’ I muttered. ‘We’ll just have to keep our eyes open. Come on – we need to stay together. If we split up, he’ll just pick us off one by one, like Tino Asprilla with his air rifle on the roof of Asda when they refused to sell him any more scratch cards.’
We skulked down the corridors of the outpost, a floating tube the size of a small shopping centre hovering there in the middle of the great galactic nowhere. It was running on a backup power system that, in its low energy mode, would last for perhaps a century or two before finally dying forever. Systematically, we moved from door to door on each corridor of the station, moving up a floor at a time (there was insufficient power to operate the lifts, so we had to take the stairs – I was well out of puff after a couple of minutes).
As each door opened, I leapt inside, finger outstretched in an accusing pose, shouting ‘Stop right there!’ but on every occasion, it was to an empty room. The offices, meeting rooms, personnel quarters and retail spaces that had once been a hive of Alliance activity were neglected and alone, untouched for God knows how many years until we and Leigh had arrived. If we elected to stay there, the strong likelihood was that we would never see another living being ever again. It was a chilling thought and only reinforced my desire to apprehend Leigh and get on our way.
Finally, we found him. And typically it was all the way up on the top floor; I was knackered by the time we stumbled into the main observation deck with its sweeping, panoramic views of the galaxy through the enormous windows on every side. Oddly, there were tables and chairs dotted around the large room that looked brand new, with colourful ribbons tied to each one and name cards on the table before each seat.
But I didn’t have time to worry about what that meant – I had eyes only for the General and, fortunately for us, his own were facing in the opposite direction to the door as we burst into the room. He was standing on a footstool and fiddling with what looked like a roll of Sellotape.
‘Well, well,’ I said in my grittiest Clint Eastwood voice. ‘Fancy seeing you here, General.’
His head jerked round quickly and his jaw dropped.
‘Keegan?’ he said in disgust. ‘What in the name of blazes are you doing here?’
‘I might ask you the same question,’ I said confidently, walking across the (recently hoovered for some reason) carpet. ‘It’s not a good look, you know – stowing a secret shuttle out beyond the Compound walls so that you can come and go as you please, away from prying eyes. Now why would that be, I wonder?’
He flushed bright red and tugged at the tight collar of his shirt uncomfortably.
‘This is none of your concern,’ he blustered – I’d clearly struck a nerve. I won’t lie, I was absolutely loving it. ‘You followed me then? I should have expected little else from a weasel like you, Keegan. Take my advice: turn around, get back on your shuttle and return to Palangonia. You’re in way over your heads here.’
‘Why’d you do it, General?’ I asked with theatrical dismay. I tried to perch casually on the edge of one of the tables, arms folded like a detective on TV, but it tipped over under my weight and sent the place cards and cutlery spilling onto the floor.
Leigh grabbed the footstool, threw the roll of tape down and walked towards me, his barrel chest puffed out ahead of him.
‘Er, Kev…’ Gerry said from behind me.
‘Not now, Gerry,’ I said, waving him away without looking. Leigh stopped right in front of me, throwing his footstool to the ground in a fit of pique, and stared down at me from his towering height of six-foot-whatnot, his stubbly jaw set and his blue-grey eyes burning into mine. Like an efficient referee, he was absolutely ready to kick off.
‘You’re making a terrible mistake here
,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You’re going to spoil everything.’
‘Oh,’ I said haughtily, practically standing on tiptoe to get into his face, ‘how awful that would be – to ruin your plans to hand the Compound over to the L’zuhl!’
Leigh looked slightly taken aback and withdrew a little.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked.
‘Kev, if I could just—’ began Gerry quietly.
‘Shush a minute,’ I told him absently as I stared at Leigh. He was trying to obfuscate and worm his way out of things but I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily. ‘The gig’s up, General!’ I announced. ‘You had us all running in circles trying to find out who the spy was and all along it was you. You’re a disgrace, kid.’
‘What in God’s name are you blathering on about?’ Leigh snarled. ‘I’m not the spy; I’ve spent the past several weeks trying to find the bastard!’
‘Spare me the feeble excuses,’ I said, relishing the sight of the pompous oaf on the back foot at last. ‘We’ve got you bang to rights. Just come quietly – I’ll ask Laika to be lenient. Fifty years in the slammer should be about right for selling out your entire species to a reptilian alien race, what do you reckon, Gerry?’
‘Kev, I really think you should—’
‘This is preposterous, it really is,’ the General said, sounding more irritated than angry. ‘It’s completely false. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick in a big way and you’re only going to embarrass yourself.’
‘Oh, so I suppose you’re going to claim that there’s nothing suspicious about you sneaking off through the underground tunnel system to a secret shuttle so you can swan off to this abandoned tin can to feed your intel reports to the L’zuhl then?’ I countered.
‘It’s not what you— Hang on, how do you know about my shuttle anyway? You’re not saying that you used the hidden tunnel network yourself, are you? In direct contravention of my lockdown order and all?’
