Space Captain Smith (19 page)

‘I agree,’ Suruk said.

Carveth ran a hand through her hair. ‘Looks like we’re all in this together,’ she said. ‘Just don’t fry anyone.’

‘It was melt,’ Rhianna said.

‘Ah, so you admit it!’

‘I’m only repeating what Suruk said.’

‘Well, alright. Now,’ said Carveth, ‘has anyone got anything else they’d like to raise, or can we move on to Item Two on the list – Scrabble? Nobody? Right then, let’s Scrab. Where are all the letters?’

‘Mint, anyone?’ said Suruk, holding out the bag.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Carveth grimaced, mouthed some words and sighed. ‘Right then, Scrabble’s off. It’s chess or Mousetrap.’

‘Mousetrap,’ said Smith. ‘I wouldn’t play chess against a Morlock if I were you.’

‘Will he rip my arm out of its socket if he loses?’

‘I don’t know. He never loses. That’s why I wouldn’t play chess with him.’

‘Fair enough. Mousetrap it is. But don’t go crazy, now: we’ve got two days to kill.’

The next day, Carveth was on the bridge with the captain, reading. A light flashed under the main navigation dials and she turned around in her seat. ‘We’re coming into range of Deuteronomy’s main radar array,’ she announced. ‘I’ve plotted a course to take us into the landing zone with minimal engine activity. The computer’s logged to show us up as an unmanned automatic cargo lander.’

‘Righto.’

‘But we’ll have to go quietly. That means lights out and no whistling. We need to keep detectable noise to an absolute minimum.’

Smith frowned. ‘I don’t like it, Carveth, all this creeping around. It’s like we’re playing their game. We’re Imperial citizens, for heaven’s sake: we ought to be able to walk right up to them and say, “Listen here, Johnny Godpants, I happen to be civilised and I’m coming through”, not creeping around like a bunch of Wheezing Willies.’

‘Point taken. But until we get the supralux fixed we’re strictly in derring-don’t territory. We need this, Captain.’

‘I know. But it bothers me.’

‘Well, we need to do this quietly. Once we’re down on the planet we should be fine. But until we can make contact with Andy’s friends in the resistance, we have to go in with as little fuss as possible.’

‘What about the radio?’

‘I’m not sure. I thought we’d radio them once we’re in the atmosphere. It’ll give the police less chance to get the signal before we get the ship underground, and there should be plenty of background radio noise to confuse anyone.’

‘Good plan. But how do you mean, underground?’

‘Callistan is a wasteland. All indigenous life is extinct and there’s hardly any atmosphere at all. All there is above ground is bunkers. The wallies who run Callistan have wasted it.’

‘Wasted it?’

‘Environmental meltdown. Rhianna told me about it. It’s on the Friends of The Various Earths website, apparently.’

The radio crackled into life. A fanfare blasted out across the control room. Carveth fumbled for the switches. ‘It’s automated,’ she whispered. ‘We’re just picking it up.’

‘On the hour, every hour, hourly!’ the radio cried. ‘This is Eden Space News – True and Accurate! Today – British Foreign Secretary meets with bearded man. We ask: Is this evidence of Satanism? How could it not be?’

Smith stared at Carveth. ‘What’s this?’

‘Must be their version of the news,’ she replied.

‘Can’t be. Nobody shouts on the real news.’

The radio bellowed on. ‘The bearded “man” met with foreign secretary Lucy “Fur” Wilkins, ostensibly to discuss trade at a conference near the Baltic Sea. Baltic Sea – or Here-Sea? You decide. Damn right, it’s heresy! Good decision! For more stories on this story, stay tuned to me, Edward Cauldron, sending unbelievers straight to hell on the Edward Cauldron Truth Show! And now for a message from our new friends in the Ghast Empire.’

Smith reached up and flicked the radio off. ‘Foreign propaganda,’ he said. ‘A mere mouthpiece for the state.’

Carveth shrugged. ‘On the plus side, they are rerunning Space Confederates.’

The city of Deuteronomy was almost invisible from the air, as if it had escaped the Last Judgement by burrowing into the ground. On the surface, only squat bunkers broke the useless earth, linked by land-trains like fortresses on wheels. Beneath ground level, the citizens eked out their lives.

Satellites studded the sky: some relayed orders from the rulers of the Democratic Republic, on their more luxurious worlds, while others broadcast propaganda to any other chunk of space that would listen. Rival human empires switched off; aliens puzzled over the messages from the New Eden for a little while and switched off too. But most of the satellites were for gathering information, not for sending it out.

Carveth’s approach was clever, mainly because someone else had planned it. The
John Pym
drew closer in an arc, avoiding the long-range surveillance drones at the edge of Callistan’s orbit, slipping past the barrage of police stations that hovered over the main settlements. They were aiming not for any of Deuteronomy’s major spaceports, but for the shipworks on the edge of the city, the industrial area that the authorities treated with too much contempt to study closely. Here thousands of nobodies lived, welding and repairing ships in endless shifts, all of them too poor and badly-organised to be worth policing with anything more than the occasional riot squad. As a result, nobody bothered the
John Pym
. No-one cared that it was not an automated ship at all, or that its crew had spent the past day and a half failing to pay for the TV channels they had received. The only drone that checked them recorded nothing more than the fact that the vessel was unarmed. Their descent was quiet and untroubled, until at last a voice came across the radio and said, ‘Dude, this is Neil.’

All was dark and quiet in the
John Pym
. Carveth had fetched the covers from her bed, laid them across her lap and was now sleeping in the pilot’s chair, the door closed. 

Suruk, a stranger to innuendo, had retired to his room to polish his favourite bone. Smith decided it would be a good moment to make friends with Rhianna. 

Quite how was another matter. He could not ask Carveth for advice, as that would be embarrassing, and he could not ask Suruk, because he was asexual and would inevitably suggest ripping off Carveth’s head and presenting it to Rhianna, who was after all a vegetarian and would not be very impressed. It was difficult. 

Rhianna made him feel crass and ignorant, in the way that the Hillaries back home did not. ‘What ho!’ a random Hillary would shout, slapping dirt off her jodhpurs, and Smith would only have to reply ‘Quite!’ or ‘Bloody good, that!’ to draw her attention from the Labradors to himself. Rhianna came from a more sophisticated world, where trading with aliens was not supposed to involve exchanging shiny bottle tops for priceless cultural artefacts and, despite coming from Australia, AC/DC did not qualify as World Music. After lengthy deliberation, he decided to cook some food for her.

They ate by the light of an emergency hand-warmer, the closest thing to a candle on board the darkened ship. ‘I really appreciate this,’ Rhianna said, before Smith brought the food to the table. She smelt strongly of Patchouli oil, which meant that she might not be able to taste what he had made so easily. That could only be a good thing. ‘It’s very kind of you. What are these pink floating things?’

‘Ah,’ said Smith, ‘Special recipe. All completely without meat. You see, what you’ve got floating there is synthetic synthetic ham. We usually get given synthetic ham to eat, which contains ham extract and we spacefarers shortened to Sham. But this is synthetic Sham, which doesn’t even contain any synthetic ham and which the company used to call Sham Light but don’t any more because we shortened it to Shite. It’s not really shite, actually,’ he added, feeling that this explanation had ended on a weak note. ‘Well, it’s not got any meat in it, anyway.’

‘It looks very… cubic,’ Rhianna said. Smith put some of the stuff into bowls, reflecting on the rather runny sauce and the oddly furtive way that the pieces of Sham Light broke the surface before ducking out of sight again. He passed one of the bowls to Rhianna. She tried it. ‘Mmn!’

she said. ‘It tastes… cubic, too!’

Smith frowned. ‘I tell you what, let’s have some music, shall we?’

He crossed to the cassette player at the rear of the room, and selected one. ‘You might not have heard this before,’ he said, activating the machine. ‘It’s by Mozart, a historical British chap.’

‘Mozart, British? Wasn’t he from Vienna?’

Smith frowned. ‘I don’t think so. He was English, Mozart.’

Rhianna grinned. ‘You mean Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?’

‘That’s the one. English to the core. Take “Piano Concerto 21”, for instance. Or “The Requiem”. He wouldn’t have given them English names if he wasn’t from England.’

Rhianna put her hand across her mouth and gave a small snorting laugh. ‘How about “Eine Kleine Nacht Musik”?’

‘Well, he had to give it a German title. It was written for a German, you see. For Elise.’

‘You really are quite a man,’ Rhianna said. ‘So much for the brown questions.’

‘I’m better on Elgar, to be honest.’

Smith sat back down and looked at the meal he had made. With the sophisticated music playing around the room, he felt as if he were being piped to the table by an honour guard in preparation for eating a bag of chips. His meal lay sadly on his plate. He put a dollop on his spoon and raised it lipward. It sat there insolently, like a small animal that had made a dirty, sit-down protest on his spoon. ‘Mm,’ he said, opening wide. ‘Looks nice – flughk!

Oh Christ, that’s disgusting!’ He reached out and dragged her bowl towards him. ‘You are
not
eating any more of that.’

Rhianna nodded. ‘Well, now you mention it, it is kind of funny-tasting.’

Miserably, he said, ‘It’s foul, isn’t it?’

‘Not foul as such, no… foulesque, perhaps.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ Smith said. He shook his head. ‘All this is rather difficult, I’m afraid.’

She stood up, ready to take the bowls away. ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. I can’t cook to save my life. I appreciate the effort, though.’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean having a woman on board.’

He pinched the brow of his nose, suddenly surprised to find himself in this territory. So much for seduction, and tact: like a drunken man leaving a waterfront bar and strolling gaily off the pier, he suddenly found himself in difficult, uncharted territory. Time to thrash his way to the surface and escape. ‘I mean to say, there’s Carveth of course, but she’s not really a woman.’

‘She is a simulant.’

‘I was going to say “harridan”, but yes. Which leaves, well, you.’

She sat down. Rhianna put her elbows on the table and leaned on them. It made her look very earnest, and gave her face a serious beauty. She said, ‘Is it bad luck, having me on board?’

‘Only for you,’ said Smith.

She laughed. ‘Oh, it’s not too bad. Sure, the cuisine could be better, and the beds are kind of funny, and I get a bit nervous sometimes with Suruk and all those skulls he collects, but there’s loads of ways it could be worse, like…’ she thought about it, ‘loads.’

‘I suppose so,’ Smith said, unconvinced. She sighed. ‘Look. I think I know what this is.’

‘You do?’

‘Sure. I’m a woman, you’re pretty much a man, it’s—’

Carveth walked in. ‘Alright all. Good news is we’re on the final phase to touch down, bad news is where we’re touching down. I’ve got through to Andy’s contact on the surface, who’s called Neil, and he’s sorting stuff out. I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying, but we seem to be alright.’

‘That sounds like a pretty comprehensive “maybe”,’ said Smith. ‘Carveth, could you go out and come back in five minutes, please?’

‘Um, not really. You see, there’s a bit more. This Neil man thinks I’m the captain.’

‘What? Why?’

‘I don’t know. He just sort of got the wrong idea. I think it was me telling him that I was that did it.’ She sighed. ‘I thought it might take the heat off us a bit.’ Exasperated, she twirled her hands. ‘It just seemed like a good idea. Except it wasn’t, and now I regret it.’

Smith grimaced. ‘Just stick us down, Carveth.’

‘Right. I’ll see you in a minute,’ Smith said to Rhianna, and he got up and followed Carveth to the cockpit. She dropped into the pilot’s seat and he stood behind her, watching as the ship sank into Callistan’s ruined atmosphere.

‘You’re a bloody idiot, pretending to be the captain,’ said Smith. ‘I mean, whoever heard of a woman called Isambard?’

Carveth said, ‘You do realise I gave them a false name, don’t you? A girl’s name?’

‘Well, that’s slightly better, I suppose.’

The radio crackled. ‘Captain Daisy Chainsaw? Is that you?’

‘Or arguably worse,’ said Smith.

‘Ah, yes, yes indeed, that’s me,’ Carveth said. For some reason she had deepened her voice, as if the previous exchange had confused her into thinking that she was indeed a man. ‘We’re just on our way down now.’

A young man’s face was on the screen. He had a pointed chin and wore sunglasses with slanted lenses that made him look like a previous century’s idea of an alien. 

‘Okay, that’s cool. How come you’re flying it with controls? Isn’t there a neural port?’

‘Sometimes it’s easier to do things by yourself. Space is full of incompetents.’ She turned and whispered, ‘That was in character, Boss.’

‘Way true,’ said the face on the screen. ‘These days, half of the old reality’s just a bulletin board for burnt-out squat-jockeys, you know? So, when’re you cowboys due to jack in here, huh?’

Carveth glanced at Smith, who shrugged. She turned back to the screen. "Um, both?" In the cockpit of a small, fast craft, Dreckitt studied his instructions. His android brain memorised the face of the woman called Polly Carveth. He fed her picture into the onboard computers and they showed him how she would look with different hair, glasses and a false moustache, from behind. Dreckitt committed a thousand different disguises to memory and waxed his long brown coat.

Polly Carveth seemed like an ideal target. She should be a simple opponent: small and isolated, a civilian masquerading as crew on this British ship, the
John Pym
. From the look of her, she would have no fighting ability and not much resourcefulness. An easy kill. Those were the best sort. Among the non-cognoscenti, it was often thought that bounty killers took a certain pleasure in their work, that they appreciated the artistry and skill that went into a difficult job. Dreckitt, of course, took no real pleasure in anything (although he got a certain grim satisfaction out of eating cold Chinese food under a flickering neon sign), but had he been capable of
joi de vivre
, he would have found it elsewhere. He would far rather have had a weakling as a target than a dangerous foe. Some nights he dreamed of being paid to hunt down a particularly ferocious kitten, and awoke suspecting that he was in the wrong line of work.