Starship Home (3 page)

The bus came to an abrupt halt as all its electrical systems failed. The space ship was moving toward them, a humming, booming noise filling their minds as they watched its shadow roll up the road toward them.

Meg got her voice back. ‘Drive!’ she barked in a tone of command which could have galvanized a troop of Hussars into action.

‘Can’t!’

‘You’re a driver, you’re paid to drive, drive!’

‘You think I want to stay here? You think I like this? I hate this, I really hate this!’ Zachary said, believing that he was reasoning with her. ‘The electrics have gone. Nothing works!’ He was pushing at the lever which was supposed to open the door, but that wasn’t working either.

‘It’s a space ship,’ Harold said with cool interest. ‘The aliens have come.’

‘Rubbish. Some kind of new airplane,’ Meg said, staring up at the great form which was now passing over them.

‘It’s hovering,’ Harold said with infuriating calm, ‘airplanes don’t hover.’

‘Helicopter then. Some kind of balloon perhaps,’ Meg said in total defiance of what her eyes were seeing.

‘Harold’s right, Miss,’ said Zoe.

‘Harold is…’

Which is when the bus disappeared from the roadway and reappeared inside the hold of the starship.

The four people on the bus felt the matter transmission as a jolt in their stomachs, a flash in their vision, a momentary pounding in their temples. Then everything was normal again.

That is, everything was as normal as it could be for four people sitting inside a school bus which had just been transported into the hold of a Slarn starship.

Physically, everyone was okay, mentally everyone was about to come apart at the seams.

They just sat there, looking out the windows of the bus. Where they were was like the hold of a ship, but bigger, a place the size of a warehouse with smooth metallic walls. There were people moving in streams toward doorways. The people were like the war refugees they had seen on television newsreels. They were blank-faced, in shock, some were crying, some hugged possessions.

The possessions were being taken from them by creatures in armor. One man who would not give up his briefcase was first threatened, and then, when he still would not give up his briefcase, one of the creatures pointed a short flanged staff at him, there was a flash of light, and the man fell. The creature kicked the briefcase away and gestured to two other people to carry the man.

It was only then that Harold realized the man with the briefcase was his father.

‘That’s my Dad!’

‘It’s okay kid…’ Zachary’s voice was pitched low, controlled, intended to calm.

‘That’s my Dad they just shot!’

‘If he’s dead they would’ve left him.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I know that,’ Zachary said firmly, not knowing it at all, but sounding as if this kind of thing happened to him every day.

Two of the creatures were at the door of the bus. Seen closer, the armor reminded Zoe of green crayfish. The creatures were the same size as human beings, and like humans they walked upright on two legs, using two arms to carry and manipulate objects, but the armor was like the outer skeleton of creatures from under the sea. Lobsters, crayfish, crabs.

The armor was topped with a helmet with dark bulbous areas where the eyes would be in a human being. It was impossible to see into the “eyes” of the helmets, but it seemed that whatever was in the armor was watching them.

The two creatures outside the door of the bus each held a flanged staff like the one which had been used on Harold’s father.

‘They’re aliens,’ Harold repeated.

‘Come on, kid, there are no aliens,’ Zachary said.

‘Don’t call me “kid”.’ Harold hated to be called “kid”. ‘They’re aliens. Look at the weapons. You ever see weapons like that? They moved the bus from the road into here … without moving it, right? I mean they just … it was a matter transporter.’

One of the creatures now pointed its flanged staff at the bus door. A flash of light and the door opened.

‘All right,’ Zachary said, ‘so they’re aliens. So what?’

‘Is my father all right?’ Harold asked the creature. ‘Do those things kill or just stun?’

The creature did not answer, but beckoned them out of the bus. Harold came out, still asking questions. ‘Do you have a translation program? Can we communicate? I’d be very interested to know what star system you’re from, I mean is it a G-type star like ours, are you a carbon-hydrogen life-form…?’

The creatures moved him on and beckoned the others. Meg pushed herself back in her seat.

‘I’m not getting off this bus,’ she said, then looked at Zachary. ‘You’re a servant of the bus company, you and the company have contracted to take us all to the High School and I’m not getting off the bus here!’

‘I think … I think things have sort of changed since we got on the bus, Miss Henderson,’ Zoe said, but Meg was already turning to the creature at the door.

‘Do you speak English,’ she said very slowly and very loudly. ‘My father is Brigadier Henderson. He’s a very important man. Do you understand “important”? Very important man. The local member of parliament…’

‘Just get off the bus will you?’ Zachary said. It seemed to him that the creature was getting a little agitated.

‘I’m not…’ Meg began, but then the creature pointed its staff at her, and she changed her mind. ‘You people just better have a very good explanation for all this,’ she said and got off the bus.

Zachary followed her, and then Zoe got out.

Meanwhile Harold was talking to the second creature. ‘I want to know about my father, okay? I want to know if he’s alive or not, I want to know what these things do…’

The creature pushed him in the direction of the nearest stream of people and Harold reached snapping point. ‘Well I’ll find out!’ he said and started to run toward the far stream of people where he had seen his father and mother. The creature did not hesitate. It lifted its staff, there was a flash of light and Harold dropped like a shot rabbit, and skidded across the floor before lying still.

Zoe ran forward to him, putting her hand to his throat to feel for a pulse. She looked up with relief. ‘He’s alive!’ Meg and Zachary were now moving to them with the creatures up behind. Zachary flicked a look over his shoulder at the creatures, decided that they were not in a mood to discuss things and picked up Harold, slung him across his shoulder, and the four of them joined the stream of people that the creatures were directing them to.

Thus they moved out of the hold and into a corridor, the walls, roof and floor of which were formed of the same smooth metallic substance as the hold.

Zachary look at the sheen on the walls as they moved along. ‘Easy clean surfaces. I used to install designer kitchens.’

‘How could I possibly not have guessed that?’ Meg said.

Then a voice came from behind Zachary’s back. ‘If I was only stunned, that means Dad was only stunned,’ Harold was saying, ‘and why am I being carried like this and where are we going?’

Where they were going was a room where the walls were like those of a beehive. They were structured in transparent hexagons, and behind each transparent hexagon could be seen a space about the size of a bed. They were designed to fit people.

As Harold, Zoe, Meg and Zachary came into the room, they saw the compartments sliding out, people being urged into them, and then the compartments sliding back into the wall.

‘Just terrific,’ said Zachary. ‘We have battery hens, they have battery humans. I think it’s an idea whose time has come.’ He looked at one of the creatures. ‘Could we have four together please?’ he said, sounding a lot brighter than he felt. Telling lies about how he felt was one of Zachary’s best things, probably his best thing of all.

They were urged into their compartments, and the compartments slid back into the wall, and for a single moment they were bathed in green light and their foreheads itched briefly. To Zachary it felt like a light touch of a tattooing needle, and then it was gone. Zachary wondered if anyone would hear him if he screamed. Somebody else was screaming, and he could hear them, so he guessed Zoe and Harold would hear him. He therefore decided to forego his urgent desire to scream on the grounds that it would not be good for morale.

In her compartment, Meg had just reached the same conclusion.

Zoe lay in her compartment worrying about her three-year-old sister Helena.

Harold was having a fantasy about becoming God-Emperor of the Galaxy in probably only 20 years if he just worked at it.

‘Holy hell,’ said Spider Costello, armorer to the Trolls Motor Cycle Club as he sat astride his stationary Harley Davidson, staring up at the belly of the starship floating above him and his companions. It had not been there a moment ago. Now it was there, huge, looming, humming, booming, casting its shadow over them. ‘Holy hell,’ Spider repeated, regretting the beer he had drunk and the bongs he had smoked the night before.

‘And I looked and behold,’ said Padre John, toastmaster and archivist of the Trolls Motor Cycle Club, as he sat astride his equally stationary Harley Davidson, looking up at the belly of the starship, ‘a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire,’ said Padre John quoting the Old Testament, because before he had discovered Harley Davidsons, Padre John had had a good Catholic upbringing.

‘You should lay off reading science fiction, Padre John,’ said the Trollmaster, as he brought a cold can from his saddlebag, cracked the seal, and skolled it.

‘The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, chapter one and verse three,’ said Padre John, who was particular about such things.

‘That mother’s on my piece of road,’ said the Trollmaster, and pulled a 12 gauge riot gun from its holster and fired at the belly of the starship.

Sometimes, Spider thought, the Trollmaster worried him. The psychotic episodes were getting closer together and this did not make for good and stable government within the Club. He might, Spider thought, have to challenge the Trollmaster for the leadership, if he should ever find him drunk enough.

The Trollmaster fired at the starship again.

Within the starship, First Officer Moorlow of the Slarn Anthropological survey classified the Trolls Motor Cycle Club as a low level barbarian warrior caste, and marked them to stay on Earth, on the assumption that they would either wipe themselves out, or breed high-survival humans.

As it happened, most lived to breed. One exception was the Trollmaster himself who died of a knife wound as a result of Spider Costello exercising his democratic right to challenge for the leadership.

First Officer Moorlow would come back to Earth years later and would meet some of the Trolls’ descendants. On that occasion he would become very impressed with Spider Costello’s instinctive grasp for political theory, in particular, the theory of feudalism.

Meanwhile, Omar Harrison of Guardbridge Nebraska, the only human being to have known what was going to happen, was in another starship soon to be headed for the far side of the Galaxy. On the whole, taking all things into consideration, Omar would have preferred to have been proven wrong about all this, or nuts, or in the grip of illicit substances. He felt that analysis or a short spell on the State prison farm would have been preferable to what was actually happening to him. (At the time the Slarn picked him up, Omar had been under the influence of illicitly distilled hard liquor. This had made him a terrible subject for interrogation.)

The Slarn starship leapt from Earth. The pilot felt regret that she had not been assigned to England and so had not been able to see her beloved Kent once more. Tempering the regret was the knowledge that the Kent she had once known no longer existed, that motorways would cross it, and sprawling towns engulf the green fields she had known. Better, she told herself, to have been assigned to the other end of Earth, far away from memories.

She wondered whether there had been policy involved. Her friend Charles de Josselin, a native of Bretagne in France, and pilot of another starship, had also been assigned to the southern continent. Perhaps the Slarn did not want to awaken feelings of homesickness in their pilots.

The Starship Guinevere leapt from Earth to take her place in the vast armada which was now about to leave an all-but-depopulated planet. Within the ships, and the cruisers, and the lighters, and the traders, and the revitalized hulks now lay 98% of the Earth’s human population. They would go out to the Slarn seed planets, and from there either they or their children would go to the talent markets of the Galaxy.

The 2% who were left would fight to survive, would breed, would become hardy barbarians, would cease to meddle in things they could not begin to understand, things like space travel and interstellar communication.

The Slarn had a plan for their economy, and it did not involve the source of their main item of trade attracting the attention of the Elder Races.

The home planet of the human race would stay what it had been for 10,000 years, the most closely guarded secret of the Galaxy.

The armada was ready to Leap. They would Leap as one, the minds of the pilots fusing for the moment of the Shift.

The ships hung against the black of space, bathed in the glare of a star unfiltered by any atmosphere, unshielded by any cloud.

Then the armada vanished.

In the room with the beehive walls, within the pods, Zoe and Harold and Zachary and Meg felt, as all the other captives felt, the sudden drop in the stomach, the flash of light in the eyes, the pounding in the temples, the symptoms they had now felt twice before, once when captured, once when the ship Leapt from Earth into space.

This time it lasted longer. Just as a dentist’s drill stretches seconds into minutes, the discomfort of the Leap stretched the moments into hours.

Light years away, in a place where the stars were arrayed in unfamiliar patterns, the armada reappeared.

But there were other ships already there. Waiting in ambush.

The Slarn never discovered the identity of the traitor who had told the Ursoid pirates where the armada would emerge after its first Leap. But someone had told. The pirates knew, and were waiting.

Waiting to ambush the richest slave fleet the Galaxy had ever known.