Pew! Pew! - Bad versus Worse Read online

  “I do, I do. But… just occasionally… it gets noticed by something you don’t want to notice you… And there it is.”

  A single digit from Krantor’s gauntlet jabbed towards the twin suns. For just a moment, a black spot travelled across the slightly larger star.

  “Oh, shit,” said Lokhnakh.

  “What is it?” asked Bouffard.

  “Whalesteroid,” Krantor replied succinctly. “Ancient lifeform, somehow adapted to live in deep space. Drifts around feeding on stray hydrogen and solar radiation.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  Lokhnakh waved an arm around the corridor. “You think we’d have the sirens and the lights and all if it wasn’t?”

  “It looks enormous,” Bouffard agreed, “but still, it’s half a system away! Can you not…”

  “No, any move to power up the engines and it’ll be on us in a flash, like a moth to a flame. And it’s a big moth,” said Krantor, then flipped a switch at his throat to open a comms link. “Well spotted, gentlemen. Are we completely powered down? Kill the lights, and the sirens. We’ll try not to bump into anything.”

  “On it,” replied a disembodied voice. “All down now. But we can’t power down the cargo decks from here. Their heat signatures are huge, especially now that -”

  “Of course,” Krantor interrupted. “Can’t be helped. I’ll head down and do what I can. I’m sending you the Frag Prince. Keep him… safe.”

  Krantor cut the link, and replaced his battle mask. “I need to head down to cargo and power down… some secondary systems. Lokhnakh, you and Bouffard get to the bridge, before they do something stupid.”

  With no further explanation, Krantor turned and strode away down the corridor, back towards the lifts. As he set off, the lights cut out, but they heard him clanking away into the distance.

  Lokhnakh sighed. “I hope your arms are stronger than your feet appear to be, your majesty. We’re going to have to climb a few decks.”

  Barely visible in the starlight, he crossed to the nearest wall panel and gave it a sharp tap. It fell open with a creak to reveal an alcove in which Bouffard could just about make out the shape of a ladder.

  “You’re kidding,” the prince told him. “You want us to climb through the guts of a starship in total darkness, while a whalesteroid tries to decide whether to eat us?”

  “It’s not so far,” Lokhnakh assured him, grabbing a rung. “And it’ll keep your mind off things.”

  And he began to climb.

  Behind him, he heard Bouffard step onto the ladder, cursing under his breath.

  Space Bastard’s bridge was functional, betraying the ship’s origins as a transport rather than a craft designed for exploration or more military purposes. The room was big enough for a dozen control consoles, each with a notably unpadded seat. Huge screens ranged the walls, displaying navigation information as well as various data from the engines and life support systems. All the consoles faced towards the inevitable main viewscreen in the centre of the front wall. There was an enormous cushioned chair in the middle that was presumably intended for Krantor, but it looked as though it had been added later. This had been intended as a working vessel. Everything was running in low power mode as Lokhnakh and Bouffard finally entered.

  There was only one man on the bridge, chewing his thumb as he stared at the main screen. But there was a nasty smell hanging in the air.

  Lokhnakh wrinkled his nose. “Ah, yes. Better get back on with the mopping.”

  He unslung his mop from his shoulders, and busied himself with a viscous puddle that Bouffard was determined not to examine any more closely, once he saw the comms badge and blaster poking out of one edge.

  “Has it moved?” Bouffard asked the lone officer. Spydus, he thought his name was.

  “You… could say that, sir, yes,” replied Spydus, pointing a shaking finger towards the screen.

  At first Bouffard shrugged at the image. They were just staring at a nebula in the middle of a black horizon, weren’t they? Then the nebula vanished for a moment, swept under a curtain of utter darkness, before reappearing from the bottom of the screen upwards.

  A giant, blinking, eyeball.

  The whalesteroid was staring straight down the nose of the Space Bastard.

  “I’m positive these things don’t eat spaceships,” Bouffard said, though his voice shook and he certainly didn’t sound very positive. “I feel sure that sort of basic hazard would be included in frags’ basic priming. Or that Bouffard would at least have heard about it in nursery or something.”

  “There are no confirmed reports,” agreed Spydus, waxen-faced. “But then there’s several centuries’ worth of mysteriously vanished spacecraft that you might want to call unconfirmed reports. And we’re big. And we take a fair time to get moving, so we can’t run. And we’re running hot. We’ve got its attention. Our only hope is that the planetary debris is hotter.”

  “I thought we’d powered down,” called Lokhnakh from where he was mopping up a liquified cadet while whistling under his breath.

  “The cargo decks,” explained the officer. “All that tech’s running on separate systems.”

  “What tech?” demanded Bouffard. “What aren’t you all telling me?”

  “Evil stuff,” Lokhnakh supplied helpfully, before Spydus could answer. “And Master Krantor is switching it all to standby as we speak. Everyone, literally and figuratively, chill your tits. There’s nothing you can do for now… unless you fancy giving me a hand? I’m pretty sure there’s another mop under the captain’s chair.”

  Spydus let out a sigh of relief as the eye blinked again, and the Space Bastard was rocked gently in the whalesteroid’s wake as it coasted away a few hundred kilometres.

  It was an immense shape in the darkness. A giant, roughly spherical object with huge jaws that hung open, hoovering up radioactive chunks of Selmis Prime. A huge tail projected diametrically opposite its gaping maw, and it thrashed slowly, sending the impossible creature bobbing around to meet the largest chunks it could find.

  “It looks busy,” Bouffard suggested. Can we not… slope off? Spydus shook his head. “Not a prayer. This ship will run forever once it gets going, but it takes a sodding huge ignition to get it started. There’s no way that thing wouldn’t spot us making tracks. If we hadn’t blown up the planet, we could have waited for our orbit to carry us round to the far side and had a fighting chance, but…”

  “Can anyone see the bucket?” Lokhnakh called, a little pointedly.

  Bouffard forgot he was aiming to win the old man’s trust. “I’m not helping you mop up your dysfunctional crew! Make them mop themselves up when you reconstruct them, they might think twice about blasting each other next time.”

  Spydus took his eyes from the screen for the first time since they’d entered the bridge. He muttered quietly to the Frag Prince. “They wouldn’t take kindly to that at all. They just get a bit spirited and fire blasts into the ceiling. Lokhnakh’s the one that guns them all down, nine times out of ten.”

  “I was cursed with a fiery temper from childhood,” the old man chuckled, slinging the mop back across his shoulders, where it continued to drip foul-smelling dead crew ichor. “It’s the cross that I bear. Well, that they bear. But I does the mopping, so it all seems fair to me.”

  Bouffard took a little step further away from the old man, all thoughts of alliance forgotten. He was stuck on a dead spaceship, above the wreckage of an exploded world, trapped between a hungry space whale and a psychotic old man with a cleaning fetish. He missed his airless frozen asteroid and replicator wine, if he was being honest.

  Spydus checked a few readings on the nearest console. “What’s Krantor playing at?” he said. “These heat readings are still off the chart. If anything, they’re building…”

  A disembodied voice echoed over the bridge. “Krantor is playing at saving your worthless lives. Why Lokhnakh spared your miserable hide on this latest rampage is quite beyond me, Spydus.”

  “H
e’s all right,” protested the old engineer. “He brung me a cup of tea earlier.”

  Bouffard cut in, his eyes fixed on the main screen. “The, ah, whalesteroid seems to be turning.”

  Those dreadful cavernous jaws were now facing the screen directly, and the three men froze in place as they all stared down the creature’s throat, right down to the furnace in its belly.

  “Perhaps I was a little too assiduous with the mopping, under the circumstances,” Lokhnakh reflected. “Still, at least it won’t get the chance to get messy again.”

  The whale drifted closer, its furnace flaring in the darkness in anticipation of taking the Space Bastard whole.

  The ship rocked slightly.

  “Krantor launched another crustbuster?” Bouffard asked. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

  “Because it would be a waste of time,” Spydus explained curtly. “But that’s no missile…”

  An indistinct shape flashed into the field of the main screen, darting straight towards the whalesteroid’s gaping mouth.

  As the three men watched, it seemed to stretch and elongate, before darting at impossible velocity straight towards the creature’s furnace.

  Barely a second later, the creature vanished, leaving nothing but a few tumbling rocks behind it.

  “What? What just happened?” Bouffard demanded, as Lokhnakh clapped his hands once with glee, and Spydus sagged against his console.

  “I presume we’ll have a sensor log, or we can just ask Krantor, but I have to be honest, sir, I just don’t care so long as it’s gone.”

  The officer slammed a control on his console, and they all blinked as the lights came back to full power.

  A second later, there was a whine from the ship’s short-range teleporter, and Krantor stood before them. “I’ll be honest, Bouffard. I’ve been doing some pretty evil science experiments below decks, and they just paid off big time. I shot a probe into the whalesteroid, and blasted it into hyperspace.”

  Lokhnakh beamed. “Very clever, Master Krantor. And, ooh, I missed one. Moppity-mop, eh?”

  He scurried over to the remaining puddle, to Bouffard’s disgust, and Krantor glowered at Spydus.

  “Come on, man! Hyperspace! Now! I want to collect data on that probe launch!”

  Chapter 4: This is Yesterday

  On the planet Brothokk, a standing stone stood atop a cliff overlooking a ruby sea. This obelisk of strange rock had stood for aeons, covered in deep gouges that looked a little bit like writing in the ancient form of just about any language you cared to mention, but not exactly like any. It had been dubbed the Rosetteish Stone, and had stood through all five of the intelligent species that had flourished on Brothokk.

  It had stood when the seas it overlooked were still five miles away, before rising waters and cliff erosion had made its view immeasurably more dramatic. And it had even been under the sea more than once when ice caps had melted, or tsunamis had rolled over it, in the past few million years.

  It was rumoured that the Rosetteish Stone contained a secret left behind by the architects of all life in the Universe. No one knew exactly how this was rumoured or, if the rumours were even slightly plausible, why every cryptographer in the galaxy wasn’t constantly visiting, photographing, scanning and generally haunting the imposing monument.

  That day, however, all the rumours would end. That day, the Rosetteish Stone would embrace its destiny. That day, the Space Bastard was coming to Brothokk.

  Around eleven in the morning, just before lunch, Krantor’s shuttle touched down on the clifftops. Retro-rockets fired gouts of intense flame into the soft turf to slow the craft’s final descent.

  When it finally landed, it did so with a splintering crash that shook the shuttle on its axis.

  Moments later, Krantor bounded down the ramp, Lady Chatterley cradled in his gauntleted hands.

  He relaxed slightly on seeing the ruby seas, and the grassy downs that swelled up to form the cliffs on which he stood. At the bottom of the downs, maybe a mile away, he could see the fringes of a lush forest, and the gentle chirping of confused birds reached his suit-augmented ears.

  So what had caused the crash? If it hadn’t been direct hostile action?

  Behind him, Bouffard scuttled down the ramp with that odd limping gait of his, ceremonial sword drawn and ready.

  The two men exchanged a puzzled frown, then looked round and sighed.

  The fragmented remains of the Rosetteish Stone lay beneath the shuttle’s port nacelle, crushed into the soil under the weight of the craft.

  “Ah,” said Krantor, his frown clearing. He slung Lady Chatterley back across his shoulder. “Need to get those parking sensors fixed.”

  Bouffard still looked worried. “This is it, isn’t it? The Stone? The thing we came specifically to study?”

  As the frag troops began to march down the ramp behind their two commanders, Krantor laughed lightly. “No, I said we were visiting the site of the Rosetteish Stone. But there’s nothing on it we couldn’t learn from a holo.”

  His expression clouded, and he spoke in a lower tone. “No… but there are rumours of this dangerous world. Talk that it hides some deeper truth, below the pointless cryptic riddle we just crushed with a thousand tons of spacecraft. This world is a beacon in my quest, and this rock nothing more than a waymarker.”

  There was no reply to this speech, which Krantor found something of a surprise given how inquisitive Bouffard had been about every damn other thing since he’d come aboard the Space Bastard. He turned, to find the Frag Prince staring out over the ruby seas, transfixed. He was slightly nauseated to even see a single tear spilling down the man’s cheek.

  “It’s… beautiful,” he whispered.

  Krantor coughed. “Is it? Um. If you like.”

  More tears rolling down his face, Bouffard turned slowly, in a daze. “I must seem so sentimental. I’d lived so long on that asteroid, in the ruins of the palace, skulking in blowholes… and this is my first vista on an alien world. It’s spectacular.”

  “Surely the, forgive me, original Prince Bouffard travelled?”

  “Of course. I remember seeing three-headed alien cattle fighting amongst themselves over which neck first got to gulp brackish liquid mercury from a canal. Whole alien battle fleets exploding in sparkling flames as they hit Prillipium’s defence grid… but those weren’t my memories, however jealously I hoard them. This is…”

  Aware of some puzzled muttering from the dozen frags standing to attention behind them, Krantor laid a gentle hand on Bouffard’s shoulder. “Look. Space travel is pretty spectacular, apart from the endless stretches when it’s nothing but looking out of the window at distant stars that never move. But you can’t be uncool about it, man. There’s no use getting misty-eyed over this view, or that spatial anomaly, when it’s a stone cold statistical certainty that you’re less than fifty klicks from something that looks like a disused Dorset quarry.”

  The Frag Prince nodded, but couldn’t tear his eyes away from the bobbing crimson waves. Krantor left him to it for a moment, and addressed the troops.

  “Somewhere on this world, I believe somewhere near here, are the Elders of Klirrip. The last remnants of one of the earliest spacefaring races. Now, they have the reputation of pacifism, but they’ve lasted countless million years in a hostile galaxy - including surviving that sea down there that looks pretty but is composed primarily of lethal acids, just so you know. So, let’s assume nothing, and keep our eyes open, with one hand on our blasters, OK?”

  The frags nodded, and Krantor gave a slight smile as he noted their hands reaching in unison for the butts of their blasters in a shared unconscious twitch. His new army was as impressionable as a chunk of warm butter.

  They began the march downhill towards the forest. Before they’d taken a dozen steps, Krantor heard hurried footsteps behind him.

  He turned to see Bouffard’s anxious expression. “Acids, seriously?”

  The forest was eerie in its silence, with all
the chirping birdsong falling suddenly silent as soon as the party drew near.

  Krantor flicked a switch on his gauntlet, and his battle mask enveloped his head in an moment. The lead frag, Trooper Froll, he seemed to remember his name was, raised an uncertain hand.

  “Er, boss. We left our helmets on the shuttle. Should we have brought them?”

  “Evidently.” Krantor was aware his pithy sarcasm didn’t translate too well through his mask’s amplifier, so he didn’t waste too many words. The frags were enthusiastic soldiers, but their absolute lack of initiative was beginning to get on his nerves. He wished he’d been able to prime them to a higher skill level, but the lack of mental conditioning had been key to Bouffard’s support. Maybe the prince would feel differently after a few more of these blunders.

  “Wow! Actual trees!” Bouffard was standing just under the treeline with his arms outstretched, his head raised to stare into the sky in wonder and twirling slowly on his feet.

  Krantor winced. Or maybe not.

  He led them into the forest, and couldn’t help barging past the pirouetting Frag Prince on his way.

  In the still, shady woods, Krantor smiled to himself behind the mask. His army’s cluelessness would be an embarrassment if they ever got into a proper firefight, but right here and now it made his task easier. He just needed to get them through the woods without losing too many men.

  For a few minutes, there was no sound except the occasional crunch of leaves underfoot, and excited giggles from Bouffard. Eventually the prince sensed his ally’s mood, and skipped ahead of the rest of the frags to scamper alongside him.

  “I remembered to bring my helmet, look,” he said to break the ice, waving a piece of ornately plumed headgear that matched his uniform and seemed to be made from felt.

  “Impressive,” said Krantor sourly, without even glancing at it.

  “Don’t be cross,” the prince wheedled, “you’d be excited if it was your first time on a proper alien planet. If these were the first trees you’d ever seen with your own eyes.”