A Game of Battleships (10 page)

They stood silently as the radio screeched around them.

‘Suruk,’ said Smith, ‘turn that off!’

Suruk leaned across and flicked the off switch.

‘Apologies, friends. I took the liberty of tuning the radio to my homeworld. That was
Thought For 
The Day
. Today’s thought, it seems, is
Attack!
’

A ball of fire throbbed in the centre of the windscreen. Perhaps aptly, the Edenites had built their 
base on a volcanic planetoid.

Smith pressed a button on the front of the radio, and it dispensed a copy of the
Ethervisual Times
.

He crouched down and worked the dials. The little needle moved from
Sane and Decent
into the red area reserved for aliens, dictators and car review presenters.

‘
Do you want answers to life’s big questions?
’ the radio suddenly inquired. The voice strained to be chummy.
‘Do you yearn for peace on earth, goodwill to al men and riches beyond mere wealth? Do you believe that the
meek will inherit the earth? Then get out of my face, you pansy communist, or I’l shoot you and set you on fire! If you want
to save your soul, you freak, and maybe have some chance of not being incinerated for witchcraft right damned now, surrender
al your worldly possessions to us. In return, you will receive a machine gun and a special hat –’

Smith flicked off the power switch. ‘Welcome to Eden,’ he said.

The Edenite fortress-port grew in the windscreen. It looked like a single bloodshot eye, a burning 
ball of liquid fire. The Edenites had sunk huge pylons into the lava, deep into the core of the world, and had built a city above the flames. They called it Deliverance.

*

Major Wainscott awoke to find a woman in a conical hat standing over him. ‘Arise, oh Arthur,” 
she cried, ‘for you are the true-born king of all Britain!’

‘I knew it!’ Wainscott sat up rapidly. ‘I always knew it was – oh, it’s you…’ He looked around the 
bay, with its rows of hypersleep chambers stretching out like cigarettes in a case. ‘Very funny, Susan. Take that stupid newspaper off your head before I remove it.’ Clad only in his underpants, he watched the rest of the Deepspace Operations Group getting up.

Wainscott climbed down from his slab and glared down the length of the room. ‘Bloody hell, 
woman, this floor is freezing.’

‘Huh. What do you want me to do, Boss, fetch your slippers?’

‘Of course not. That’s the robot’s job. Wallahbot!’

A wallahbot rolled slowly down the length of the room, its spindly arms dispensing dressing 
gowns and tea. ‘That’s better,’ Wainscott said, snatching a mug from the tray. ‘Now then, what are we 
doing here?’

‘Guard duty for the conference.’

‘Ah yes. Right, let’s have some breakfast, eh?’

Not bothering to close his dressing gown, he strode into the ship’s messroom, sipping his tea as 
he walked. Susan, neat in her own dressing gown and slippers, followed him like a worried mother 
supervising a small child.

‘Ten o’clock GMT, by God,’ Wainscott said, checking the clock. ‘Know what time that is, Susan?

Sausage time!’ He advanced to a dispenser set against the wall and began twiddling a pair of knobs, as if cracking a time-locked safe. The machine responded by ejecting a synthetic sausage, spear-like, into his face.

Susan brought Wainscott a paper plate and, after he had dusted the sausage off and added some 
scrambled powdered egg, they sat down to breakfast with the rest of the Deepspace Operations Group.

‘I suppose we’re near the target,’ Wainscott opined, jabbing at the sausage with a plastic fork. ‘It’ll be interesting getting to work on a space station – I mean, looking after one instead of destroying it.

Hullo, Nelson. Is that bacon you’ve got there?’

‘Allegedly,’ Nelson replied, holding up a droopy item. ‘Looks like the tongue of my boot.’

Susan fished a piece of paper out of her dressing gown pocket and spread it on the table. ‘Let’s 
see. Given that we’re awake, the journey must be over. So, first up, we’ll dock and unload the gear in the hold. Then I suppose we can start getting security set up for this conference.’

‘Party hats and such.’

‘Metaphorically speaking, yes. Of course, most aliens can’t wear hats.’

‘Quite,’ Wainscott replied. ‘Funny shaped heads.’ He scooped up a forkful of runny egg and 
tasted it warily. ‘This isn’t egg, it’s baby sick. And why aren’t there any biscuits here?’

‘Hey!’ Craig called down the table. Seeing that there were only five people in the Deepspace 
Operations Group, he didn’t have to call far. “Remember those digestives we got on Sirius Four?”

Nelson laughed. ‘Yes, and the one you had was soggy.’

‘It doesn’t matter if it’s a digestive!’

A sudden clang shook the room. Wainscott was up on his feet in a second, fists clenched and 
raised, dressing gown flapping. ‘Alien attack!’ he cried. ‘To arms, troops!’

Susan sipped her tea. ‘We’ve just docked,’ she replied.

‘False alarm, everyone!’ Wainscott announced. He was impressed by how quickly his men had got 
back to eating their breakfast. It was almost as if they had not moved at all. Very wily. ‘You not eating, Susan?’

‘I’ll give it thought once you’ve closed your dressing gown.’

Wainscott dressed whilst listening to the Galactic Service on the wireless. In the galactic West, 
the Senarian Lancers had stormed Aggrio XII, and together with the King’s Own Moonlanders had 
crushed Praetorian Armoured Legion ‘Grinding Death’. Scummy alien prisoners were being shipped into 
penal servitude by the thousand. Meanwhile, the prize bull had run off into Top Field, and was being 
hunted down by the Archers.

That’s where I should be,
Wainscott thought as he pulled on his largest combat shorts.
Not on Top
Field, but in the thick of it. Fighting for Britain. A stick of dynamite in one fist and a flimsy spineless Ghast neck snapping
in the other. Stark bol ock naked. Or a dirty lemming man – they think they know how to fight up close but I’l show
them… cutting, shooting… putting the right wires together and boom – boom. .

‘Are you alright in there?’ Susan called.

Wainscott suddenly found that he was getting dressed. ‘Fine, fine.’

‘I just thought I heard manic laughter, that’s all.’

‘A mere delusion, Susan,’ Wainscott said, strolling out to meet her. ‘You want to watch out for 
that. Don’t want to lose your edge, do you?’

‘Do your flies up,’ she replied.

W waited for them near the airlock, lounging against a scrollworked bulkhead. He looked as if he 
had been awake for some time. Beside him stood Rick Dreckitt, android bounty hunter and Service 
employee. Dreckitt wore a long coat and Panama hat. He seemed to stand in a pool of shadow, even in a 
spaceship, and despite being dry managed to look as if he had just been caught in the rain. 

As the Deepspace Operations Group arrived, other teams filed out of the side doors and into the 
hold: communications personnel, staff from the Imperial Office for Variety and Sanctioned Amusements 
and even a squad of cheerful soldiers from the First M’Lak Rifles, sent to maintain order among the 
visitors and decapitate anyone not queuing properly.

‘Ah, Wainscott!’ W said. ‘Sleep alright? Good. We’re going to be busy from now on, I suspect.’

Dreckitt nodded. ‘Word on the street is that this space station joint is a dive. We’ll need to tidy it up before the guest planets arrive.’

Wainscott said, ‘Eager to help out, are they?’

‘It’s a hell of a grift for them. They want protection, and we’re the biggest racket going.’

W flipped open a small black notebook, in which he kept useful information and a list of people 
he suspected of treason. ‘So far, we’ve got confirmations from the Morlock high lords, although one does suspect that they’d turn up to a drawer being opened if they thought they could batter someone with it afterwards –’

‘True,’ said Wainscott. ‘Splendid fellows.’

‘We’ve also had a response from the Khlangari. They’re going to grace us with a delegation of 
mystics.’

‘I see.’

The Khlangari were short, placid and fat, and spent most of their time pottering around their 
small planet, hooting and doing baffling things with soup. But they were protected. For reasons 
unknown, the Khlangari had a symbiotic relationship with the Voidani space-whales, who had a history of violently “researching” any space vessels they disliked. If anyone could make allies of the Voidani, it was them.

From deep within the ship, a metallic groan announced that the docking systems were 
synchronising. The ship rocked violently.

‘Looks like the joint’s open,” Dreckitt said. “Let’s go find the big cheese.’

*

As the
John Pym
swept into the landing bay, Smith realised that they were in good – and 
spectacularly bad – company. Deliverance’s lower spaceport, reserved for heretics and aliens, was packed with renegade ships of every sort: ex-light cruisers; freight ships bristling with grappling hooks and jury-rigged gun turrets; waste-disposal shuttles turned to dirtier work; Royal Mail ships gone postal; even a mobile hydroponics plant gone properly to pot – all united in the red stripes of the renegades, all flying under the Jolly Roger. A huge sign hung over the landing bay. It read:
Looking for meaning in life? Inquire
about murder and pillage within!

They touched down and gathered their kit.

‘It’s a bloody recruiting drive,’ Carveth whispered. She carried a shotgun, her automatic and two 
of Suruk’s smaller knives, which looked like swords on her. She had spent the last few minutes 
padlocking Gerald's cage shut, to keep him safe while they were gone.

The airlock opened and the smell of sulphur rushed in. Smith stepped out. The flames of 
Deliverance raged and bubbled below them, as red and angry as a drunk’s curry. A network of gantries 
and walkways stretched as far as Smith could see, strung together by great taut wires. Arches of blackened steel connected the habitation-blocks and guard towers, studded with images of reapers and skulls. It 
looked like a hellish, crazed version of the Empire itself, as though New London had mated with the 
sleeve art of one of Iron Sabbath’s less polished albums. Everything was grimy: the floor was perforated steel, crispy with soot; the propaganda screens had a sheen of black as though they had started to decay.

There were guards and guns everywhere, of course: robes, uniforms and brutish faces, mirrored 
sunglasses specked with dirt from the furnace below.

This, Smith thought, was going to be hard. The Empire allowed its citizens to worship practically 
anything so long as it didn’t involve criminality or making a fuss, but there were still plenty of sects too crazy to be granted a licence by the Collected Synod. However, none were as demented as the Edenites: 
not the Dawkinians who vehemently followed a god that refused to believe in itself, or the 
Objectionabilists who worshipped money and considered arrogance to be the greatest virtue. After the 
schism among the Ronaldian Dualists about the true meaning of the ritual of the Four Candles, the 
Republic of Eden now had a virtual monopoly in religious lunacy.

An Edenite acolyte stood at the bottom of the
John Pym
’s steps – beside the landing leg that 
sometimes folded up too early. One look at the man’s white robes and broad smile, at once insipid and 
sinister, and Smith hoped that the leg would malfunction again and deposit eighty tonnes of spaceship on his empty head.

‘Pirates, are we?’ the acolyte asked, opening his briefcase.

‘Yes – I mean
Arr
, that’s right, er… shipmate.’ Smith replied.

‘Right then.’ The acolyte fished out a wad of paper and shoved it towards Smith. ‘Are you 
stressed?’

Smith frowned. ‘Er, what?’ Carveth asked.

‘Not until now,’ Suruk replied.

‘It’s a questionnaire,’ the acolyte explained. ‘It’s well known that pirates suffer from extreme 
stress. We of the New Eden can cure you.’

‘Now look,’ said Smith, ‘Much as we pirates love paperwork, me old sea dog, I’m not sure I want 
–’ 

‘Stress is caused by the attachment of negative money energy. Money attaches itself to the 
uninitiated. Only by full initiation into the Church of the New Eden will you be relieved of all stress. 
Indeed, the highest levels of our faith are spiritually fixed –’

‘And materially broke?’ Carveth glared at the acolyte, her arms folded. ‘I know bollocks when I 
hear it. And believe me, I hear a lot of bollocks. . Jim lad.’

She had a point, Smith thought. The Edenites spouted out more crap than a whale with the runs, 
but they would have to be appeased. For now. He glanced around: Carveth looked unimpressed, while 
Suruk had taken off his pirate hat and seemed to be looking for something inside. Smith decided to act fast in case Suruk’s mislaid item turned out to be a grenade.

‘Shush, Carv – er, Black Tom. We will take your questionnaires, ye swab, and add them to our 
stack of plunder.’

‘Excellent,’ the acolyte replied. ‘You can fill them out while you watch our induction film.’

Carveth raised a hand. ‘Will there be ice cream?’

The acolyte shuddered violently, glared at her and shrieked ‘There is no ice cream in the cinemas 
of Eden because ice cream is a sin, you pie-chasing harlot!’