Cargo Cult (45 page)

The sergeant looked past her and
shouted, “Next!”

So she stepped aside, checked her
weapon, inserted a clip, chambered a round, and headed back towards
the
HQ Building
. The queue at
the armoury was already growing long and she was glad she had been
one of the first to get there. The morning was far too hot to be
standing in line.

According to the messages popping
up on her computer screen, the base had jumped straight from the
lowest to the highest alert status – and it was not a drill. Then
came orders to lock down the base and evacuate all civilians, then
to cancel the lockdown but still evacuate the civilians, then to
report to the armoury. It had all the signs of a cock-up somewhere
in the senior ranks, but who was Brownlowe to question the wisdom
of her officers? Someone in the armoury queue had said there was an
alien spaceship coming. Aliens! Ever since that nonsense on the
news a few weeks ago, all anybody ever talked about was aliens.

Apart from the large number of
people running around looking confused, things seemed pretty much
normal. The sun was high, the low-rise buildings sat peacefully in
the morning sunshine, and the sky was clear and blue and cloudless.
A group of four men went hurrying past her, heading for a nearby
car park. Civilian defence contractors, she assumed, from their
lack of uniforms, their flabby, overfed faces, and the nervous
glances they gave the weapon she was strapping on.

As Brownlowe walked, she looked up
at the sky. The F/A-18F Super Hornets of 1 Squadron, were out at
the moment on a routine flight. She envied them being away from
whatever was going on. In all directions, the sky was absolutely
empty. All directions, that is, except straight up, and even then,
all she could see was a small black dot. A small black dot that was
growing even as she watched it. In fact, it had become quite a
large black dot now, and was still getting bigger, and bigger,
and...

With a cry of alarm, she threw
herself to the ground. This wasn't a spaceship, it was a bloody
asteroid. A big one. A wipe-out-all-life-on-Earth one. And coming
in so fast it would tunnel half-way to Europe before it finally
stopped, leaving a big crater behind where Australia used to
be.

She peeked up at it again as its
shadow enveloped her. She had only a moment to register its
gigantic bulk hurtling down at her and to think,
This is it. I'm
going to die.

Then it stopped dead, just a metre
above the ground.

The non-impact was so sudden, so
strongly at odds with her every intuition of what was proper for
massive, hurtling, megaliths, that Brownlowe felt as if she had
bounced off the ground. It took her many thumping heartbeats to
realise she hadn't. That, in fact, nothing had happened. Except the
impossible.

The gigantic spaceship – not an
asteroid after all – hovered above the main runway, right next to
the hangars, bigger by far than any of the puny buildings around
it, making the gigantic C-17 heavy lifter standing beside it look
like a toy plane. There hadn't even been a rush of air, she
realised. She rose unsteadily to her feet, finding her legs were
shaking and would hardly hold her.

"All right," she told herself,
unaware that she was speaking out loud. "A gigantic, alien
spaceship has just landed on the runway at Amberley. It's probably
an invasion and we're all going to die.

“Fine.

"No problem.

“Right."

She picked up her hat, dusted
herself off and straightened her uniform. "I'd better get along to
my office then. We can't let the base face total destruction
without Corporal Brownlowe at her post now, can we?" She put on her
hat, tipped her chin up, and moved off, not noticing she was
stumbling along in the wrong direction.

-oOo-

On the bridge of the Vinggan
spaceship, the screaming slowly died away as everyone realised they
were not, after all, going to die in a horrible fireball. One by
one they pulled their gaze free of the viewscreen that had shown
them plummeting at terrible speed towards the ground below and
looked sheepishly about them.

“I thought...” said John.

Someone tittered, a little
hysterically.

“You might have warned us, Drukk,”
Braxx said.

Drukk, of course, had never
actually seen a landing either. He simply stared back at Braxx with
his mouth open, waiting for his brain to re-engage.

“Very well,” said Braxx, a little
shakily. “The Great Spirit has delivered Her servants safely, if a
little abruptly. Now we must find what we came here for.” He turned
to John. “Where in this land of Amberley will we find the Mechazoid
Hoard?”

Drukk watched the human with
interest. John turned several shades paler than usual and swallowed
as if he had something stuck in his throat. It occurred to Drukk
for the first time to wonder whether John actually knew where the
treasure was, or if it had all been a cunning human ruse to get the
ship back to Earth.

The thought amazed him. First he
had begun suspecting the ship of subterfuge. Now he was suspecting
the humans. Neither of which should have had the wit to take a
slime mould from a dead Trogian, as the saying went. Certainly,
Braxx was a pompous old fraud. As far as Drukk could see, the
religious leader got through life by spouting pious nonsense and
pretending he knew what any of it meant. But, if Drukk was right
about the machines, maybe they had fooled much better men than
Braxx. His own captain, for example, one of the finest Vinggans
Drukk had ever known. And if the machines could fool Captain Roxx,
maybe even the humans were smarter than they looked, however hard
that was to believe.

“I think we should call them and
ask them to turn over the treasure to us,” John said, looking
immensely relieved.

He's stalling
, Drukk
realised.

“Excellent idea!” said Braxx.
“Ship. Open a connection to the humans. I wish to address
them.”

“Who shall I say is calling?” Was
it only Drukk who noticed the dry sarcasm in the ship's tome?

“Tell them it's their new Vinggan
overlords.”

There were approving nods from the
other Vinggans present. They clearly thought Braxx was taking the
right tone. No one but Drukk seemed to be cringing with
embarrassment.

While they waited for the call to
be put through, Drukk sidled over to John as casually as he could.
John looked alarmed to find the Loosi Beecham in the orange dress
pressing up against him. Alarmed but not exactly unhappy, until
Drukk whispered, “There is no hoard here, is there?”

John was wide-eyed with rising
panic. “What do you mean? Of course there is. It's here in the
vault.”

Drukk made the
tell-it-to-my-grandma-she's-got-Drebonian-brain-rot gesture, which
his body translated as a disbelieving shake of the head. “Don't
worry. I won't tell Braxx. But we have to get you and the other
humans off the ship before he finds out, or he'll have you all
vaporised.” Even then, he might have the whole planet vaporised,
but Drukk couldn't help that.

“Why would you help us?”

It was a good question. One Drukk
was not prepared for. Irritably, he whispered, “I've got bigger
issues to worry about than you and your species. The sooner you are
gone and we can get back to Vingg, the better.”

“What are you two whispering
about?” Braxx demanded.

Drukk and John jumped apart with a
guilty start. Drukk searched desperately for a reason to get out of
there. “This human has become sexually active,” he said, saying the
most unpleasant thing he could think of.

John turned from white to red. “You
were standing very close...” he said. “I'm only human.”

Drukk shuddered at the implications
but pressed on. “I should remove it from your august presence
before it erupts with its disgusting ejaculate.” Drukk had no idea
how humans mated and didn't want to know, but most species had some
kind of disgusting ejaculate. Fortunately, everyone else felt the
same.

“Eeew! Get it out of here,” someone
said.

“Just shoot it,” said another.

“Take them both,” said Braxx, and
shoot them somewhere else.

“As you wish,” said Drukk and
grabbed John and Marcus before the mood of the room grew ugly,
dragging them off the bridge and away from the weapons that were
already being drawn.

“W-wait a minute,” Marcus said as
Drukk dragged him along the corridor. “You can't just kill us
because this guy had a hard on!”

“I didn't,” John protested. “I
mean, well, sort of, but that's not the point. He's right. That's
no reason to shoot someone.”

Drukk looked at John in disgust and
held him at arms length. “What do you mean, 'well, sort of'? I
thought I was just making that up.”

For a moment, John stammered in
confusion, then pulled himself together. “Yeah, I knew that. Of
course I knew that. I was just going along with it. That's
all.”

“What the hell is going on here?”
Marcus demanded. “You two know something I don't. I hate that. It's
always happening to me. Everybody's always got some little secret
they're sharing and I'm always left out of it.”

John looked Marcus in the eye and
said, “Put a sock in it will you, mate?”

Dazed and befuddled under the twin
beams of Sunders' mesmeric influence, Marcus closed his mouth and
nodded.

“So where are you taking us, Drukk?
It is Drukk, isn't it? You wear the skin-tight, figure-hugging
orange clothing, and all that?”

Drukk renewed his internal shudders
at the idea that his disguise aroused these human males. It was the
computer's fault, he now realised. It had selected the body form
and it had then told them the metamorphosis booth was broken. “It
was toying with us,” he said aloud. “It was amusing itself at our
expense.” It was a shocking revelation.

“What?”

Drukk snapped out of it. He mustn't
say such things out loud. The ship was probably listening to
everything that he said. “Nothing. Just a drama I watched recently.
Horrible thing about a brave spaceman being tormented by a hideous
sub-Vinggan alien.”

“Are you all right?”

“Of course I am.” He suddenly
realised he couldn't just take these two back to their friends and
then let everybody go. The ship would stop him if he tried. He
needed a plan. “Ha!” he said, loudly, for the ship's benefit. “Now
I will take you to the other humans and execute you in front of
them.”

“What?”

Drukk gave John the gesture of
clandestine-complicity-among-colluding-confederates, which his body
rendered as a broad wink. John blinked back at him uncertainly, but
said no more.

“There's a call for you, sir.”

Air Commodore Barnabas Braby
lowered his field glasses and turned to Flight Sergeant Cooper, who
stood there holding out a mobile phone. Braby had been studying the
alien space ship that was sitting on the main runway. Not that you
needed binoculars to see the thing. It was as big as a damned
shopping mall. And when it came to potential enemy warships, Braby
was of the view that size most definitely did matter. He frowned at
his nervous-looking sergeant. “A call, Sergeant? On your personal
phone?”

“It just started downloading apps,
sir. And then it rang. It's a woman, sir, says she is our new
Vinggan overlord.” Braby was about to request that the sergeant
insert her phone and its crank caller where the sun didn't shine
when the woman added, “Says her name is Braxx, sir.”

He recognised the name instantly
from his recent briefings. Several eye-witnesses interviewed by the
Queensland Police had mentioned a woman called Braxx who was
clearly the leader. “Give me that,” he said, taking it.

He wanted to start yelling. He
wanted to tell the bloody aliens to get their bloody ship off his
runway. Instead, put the phone on speaker and said, “This is
Air Commodore Braby, I'm in charge
here. To whom am I speaking?”

A well-modulated and sultry female
voice said, “I am Braxx, Corpuscular Manifestation third class of
the Great Spirit, and, in lieu of the proper Colonial authorities,
I speak for Drukk, Acting Governor of this miserable mudball. In
short, I am your your new master and spiritual leader.”

The silent officers in the room
collectively goggled at the implications. Braby pursed his lips.
The urge to shout was growing, but he knew that shouting at the
aliens was the general's prerogative, not his. He just had to keep
the ETs from blowing anything up until the man's plane arrived – he
glanced at his watch – which would be in about five minutes, thank
God.

“That's very interesting Ms
Braxx...” he said.

“Please, just Braxx.”

“Right. Braxx, then. You can call
me Air Commodore. Perhaps you'd care to join us out here so that
talks can begin between our two peoples?”

“Talks?” Braxx sounded genuinely
confused. “What talks?”

Braby looked around the room at his
second-in-command and the base security officer who both shrugged
back at him, trying to look sympathetic. “Well, you know, just to
get to know each other better then. I'd like to think we could
offer you a taste of Aussie hospitality while we're waiting for the
big brass to get here.”

“It's started talking nonsense,” he
heard Braxx say, obviously addressing someone at the other end.
“Why do they always do that? They start off sounding quite sane,
and then suddenly they start to gibber.”

“Maybe you should just tell it to
shut up and hand over the treasure,” said a voice from near Braxx.
It was another woman's voice. It could even be the same woman
talking to herself, it sounded so similar. Braby remembered the
briefing. Thirteen, or maybe fourteen, identical, oddly-dressed
women, who all looked like Loosi Beecham, except one of them was
pregnant.