Colony Read online

  41

  'Okayavissovanavich, dudes and dudettes: let's get this game kart loaded.' With Kirkian casualness, Gwent takes up his seat in the centre of operations. 'Pecky, babe, give me the count.'

  Peck grimaces and looks up at her screen. 'Detonation in two hundred and forty-seven and counting.'

  Oslo runs her hand over her control station. 'Sealing off decks fifty-four to three-sixty-five and surrounding.'

  Styx yells out: 'Laser cannons fully charged and ready to target.'

  Oslo looks over at Eddie. 'Laser cannons?'

  Eddie gives her an eyebrow shrug. 'I had to give him something to do.'

  'Do we actually have any laser cannons?'

  'I think probably not.'

  'Okayavanageela. This is it, peoploids. I'm renaming this the "Gwent Manoeuvre". Unless it fails, in which case it goes back to being the "Morton Manoeuvre".'

  'Detonation in two hundred.'

  Eddie looks around at the crew. All eyes glued to the monitors. In a little over three minutes, their fate will be decided. Live or die. That simple. He feels a twinge from his old spinal injury, and then another bolt from his more recently whiplashed neck. It's a big weight to carry.

  'One hundred and eighty.'

  Suddenly, the plan seems insane to Eddie. Before now, he's never even questioned its viability. But it suddenly strikes him as a lunatic scheme, born out of desperation and fear. Blow up the only escape craft? Steer the ship with a nuclear explosion? What was he thinking of?

  'One hundred and sixty.'

  But the panic attack passes. Of course the plan will work. It has to work. There are too many lives at stake. Too many...

  There is a distant blast, like a small explosion. Eddie looks up at the monitor, but the figurative display is alien to him. Something has clearly gone wrong, but what? Lights are flashing, sirens are whooping.

  Peck is yelling : 'The A-word! The A-word!' Her hands are waving manically over her controls.

  Eddie yells, too, above the sirens and the shouting behind him: 'What's that? The what word?'

  Oslo glances up from her console. 'Abort! She's saying "Abort"!'

  Peck's hands don't stop moving, but she yells at Oslo: 'Didn't I beg you never to use that blasphemic expression?'

  Gwent is standing, his eyes raking the workstations, trying to make some sense out of the mayhem on the monitors. 'I'm like, durrh, what's going down here?'

  Eddie's praying the blast wasn't triggered too soon.

  'It's the STiP,' Oslo says.

  'What about it, Oz?'

  'It's taken off.'

  Eddie wheels round and stares at the incomprehensible monitor. Like that will help. 'Taken off? In what way "taken off"?'

  'In the "Somebody launched it" way.'

  'But that's not...' Eddie looks down at his own monitor. Oslo's right. The STiP has launched. 'Styx? Can you get a signal from the STiP?'

  Styx shakes his head. 'The module won't respond. And it looks like we're locked out. No, wait... I was looking at the wrong monitor.' Styx taps away at his coms board for a while. 'Sorry, no, I was right first time.'

  Eddie's first thought is the killer took it. He feels ashamed at the wave of relief he derives from the idea. Then another thought strikes him. 'Lewis.' He hisses. 'That bastard.'

  'Lewis?' Oslo strides over to Styx's surveillance station and bundles him out of her way without ceremony. 'It can't be.'

  'He was still locked in his room when you last saw him? There were still guards on the door?'

  'Better than that. He's in the operating theatre. His pains got worse about an hour ago. He's undergoing stomach surgery.' She pokes up the medical bay cameras. The theatre is deserted. 'I don't understand it. I saw the operation start. I saw it myself less than half an hour ago. I saw the laser slicing into his stomach.'

  'Perfect. He knew that would be good enough to throw you off the scent. He probably limped down to the launch pad with his intestines hanging out.'

  Peck rounds on him, furious. 'You filthy, foul anti-life. How dare you suggest the Padre would be capable of such perfidy? That a soldier of Christ would deliberately sacrifice all our lives in a pathetic and cowardly attempt to save his own?'

  Oslo calls: 'Incoming message,' and Lewis's image appears on the monitor, sitting in the STiP cockpit.

  His forehead is speckled with sweat, and a blood-soaked bandage is crudely wound around his midriff. Apart from that, he looks fairly chipper. 'Sorry about scooting off without saying goodbye. The problem is, you all seem to have gone bloody mad, and I was afraid you might try and stop me.'

  'Congratulations, Padre,' Eddie says. 'You've killed every single member of the crew.'

  Lewis grins. 'Well, not every single member.' He leans to the side. A blonde woman Eddie doesn't recognize is seated behind the priest. She giggles and waves at the lens. There is more giggling off camera. Lewis leans back. 'I managed to rescue one or two lost souls from the Sexual Recreation Centre.'

  'You saved the ship's prostitutes?'

  'We're all equal in the sight of the Lord, Dr Morton. And, let's face it: there is much multiplying to be done. Much. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to navigate this little baby to the planet "Lewis".' He grins at the camera again and genuflects playfully. 'God bless.' And his image blinks off.

  Gwent sucks his brace in. 'Let me guessolize. This is very bad, right?'

  Eddie feels like sitting down. Even though it isn't possible, his limbs feel achingly heavy. 'This is worse than very bad. We'd need a miracle to get things back to "very bad".'

  Styx says: 'Shall I melt the son of a bitch?'

  Eddie sighs. 'What good would that do?'

  In a dull monotone, Oslo says: 'Well, it would brighten my day up considerably.'

  Peck says: 'Well, I'm not a told-you-so kind of person, but you see what happens when you place your faith in the pincers of the Living Dead?'

  'Right.' Eddie smiles without humour. 'This is God's judgement on you all. I hope He's very happy.'

  'That's it then?' Gwent looks around the room and sees only tired, blank faces. 'We're, like, durrh, out of options?'

  'You're never out of options with the Lord, Captain. We can always sing a hymn.'

  Eddie nods at the course monitor. 'I'm not sure we've got time. If the ship doesn't crack up into its component parts first, we'll be hitting the gas giant's gravitational pull before verse three.'

  'Well,' Oslo strikes a perky smile, 'since it's come to this, I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate you, Captain Gwent, on your stunning career. In less than three weeks at the helm of this mission, you've lost one hundred per cent of the engines, destroyed what's left of the ship and killed the entire crew. And you haven't even been trying. You make Captain Bligh look like a man-management genius.'

  'Why, thank you, Oslomander.' Gwent returns the smile. 'And may I say I could not have done it without your constant foul bitching and all-round pain-in-the-ass-ness.'

  'This is probably a totally dumb suggestion...' All eyes turn to Apton Styx. He looks around nervously. '... So I guess I won't bother making it.'

  'Go ahead, Apton,' Eddie says. 'Let's hear it. Even the dumbest suggestion couldn't make things any worse than they are already.'

  'I was thinking we could maybe try a space walk -- see if we can't repair one of the engines.'

  'That's not a dumb suggestion, Mr Styx,' Oslo says. 'In fact, it's quite brilliant. With the ship only travelling at full velocity and shredding itself to pieces as it goes, your average space walker would have a life expectancy of, ooh, thirteen milliseconds.'

  The deck judders. Cups and plates rattle to the edges of workstations and hurl themselves to the floor. All eyes are raised to the ceiling as a jagged rent snakes across it. Then, as quickly as it started, the tremor is over.

  Gwent looks down from the leering crack in the ceiling and over at the drone. 'Frankly, Styxovitch, the she-pig is right: it is a stupid plan. Unfortunately, we don't have any non-stupid
plans left.'

  'Have you lost your final marble, you pox-faced dork? It would be murder sending someone out there.'

  'And what's your plan, Queen Bitch of the Bitch tribe? We all stand around here bitching each other to death? Look, obviously, peoplovinas, I can't order anyone to take on a suicide mission... no, wait, I'm the Captain -- Of course I can! Morton, Styx, get out there and die for your vessel.'

  42

  Does Eddie want to live?

  Really?

  Does he really care whether or not he survives this lunatic attempt to save the ship?

  After all, there isn't very much left of him. And even if he is successful, the life the few remaining bits of him can look forward to is one of cruel privations and unpredictable dangers.

  But, yes, he wants to live.

  He wants to live now more than he ever did. There was a time, not so long ago in his memory, when he was facing a fatal drop from a very high window, and he hardly cared at all, one way or the other.

  It seems the less he has to lose, the more he wants to keep it.

  He's in the airlock now, watching Oslo check the seals on Apton Styx's space suit. He wishes he had to wear a suit, so she could check his seals as well.

  He's grown strangely, and asexually, fond of Bernadette Oslo, for no good reason he can fathom. She's rude to him most of the time, impatient with him all of the time, and he can't think of two consecutively pleasant words she's expended on him in their entire relationship. Still, it would break his heart if this were the last opportunity he ever got to hear her put him down.

  She straightens, looks Styx up and down and runs her fingertips one last, unnecessary time along his helmet join. 'All right, Mr Styx. You are definitely in that suit.'

  Styx grins broadly and gives her a thumbs-up sign. He's having a wonderful time.

  'OK. The important thing to remember is, you'll be travelling at a relative velocity to the ship. Try to cling to the hull at all times, and do not use your jet-packs unless you absolutely have to. Do not become detached from your umbilical cord -- you'll never be able to match speed with the ship again and you are effectively dead. If you slip, lose orientation or collide with ship debris, you are effectively dead. Some of the rips in the hull are razor sharp: if you snag your suit, your tether or your airline you are effectively dead. Clear?'

  Eddie feels an uncomfortable bubbling where his stomach should be. 'Nice pep talk, Coach.' He waddles round to face Styx. 'OK, let's get out there and have some fun.'

  The drone's broad grin broadens further still. 'You said it!'

  Oslo steps back inside the ship and clunks the airlock door closed.

  Styx watches the handle of the door spin round like it's the best ride in Disneyland. 'This is great! Is this great, or what?'

  'Yes,' Eddie says, more to block out the ominous hiss of the air pumping out of the chamber than for the purpose of conversation. 'This really is really great.'

  'I'm so excited. I've never been on a suicide mission before.'

  Eddie closes his eyes and fights off a small urge to throttle the man. 'Really? Me neither.'

  'Really?'

  'Really. You, uhm, don't get many veterans in that field.'

  'No? I wonder why?'

  Eddie decides he prefers the sound of the air escaping, and says no more.

  Finally, the hissing stops and there's a whirring sound overhead. Eddie looks up to see the wheel on the outer airlock door spinning. The circular door clunks open on to the astonishingly black blackness of space beyond. Though he's obviously the clumsier of the two, and by far the more afraid, Eddie elects to lead the way. He places his pincers gingerly on the sides of the metal ladder and starts to raise his foot.

  He finds it easier than usual to raise his foot.

  In fact, it won't stop raising.

  He's weightless.

  This whole operation is starting to seem even more lethally dangerous than he originally thought.

  He tries as best he can to stay in control of his upward motion, so he doesn't accelerate out of the airlock and shoot up into the stars like a giant firework. He's concentrating so hard on co-ordinating his body movements that he's actually halfway out of the ship before he registers the view.

  The view.

  Suddenly, he feels very, very small.

  The vast hull stretches out in front of him endlessly. It goes on and on, all the way to the horizon.

  And that's not even the most awesome aspect of the view.

  Beyond the hull, as it curves away into the impenetrable distance, there's a large, brilliant moon, bathing them in its stark glow. They are close to the moon. Very close. Eddie feels that, if his arm were just twice as long, he could reach over and cut a chunk of it out.

  And even that's not the most awesome aspect of the view.

  Because beyond the moon, there's this gas giant.

  It's one thing to see it in a computer-generated graphic. It's something else again to lay eyes on it for real.

  The word 'enormous' doesn't even begin to get you there. It takes up most of the visible sky. The Willflower appears to be so close to it, the idea they might somehow steer away seems faintly comical. It looks like they're already on the final approach-path for an easy landing.

  Across its surface, a ferocious tubular vortex of black is slashing across cloud oceans. A twister of some kind. A tornado that could happily accommodate Mars, Venus and Earth, and still swallow up Mercury like an after-dinner mint. And it's just a tiny feature on this behemoth of a planet.

  The planet Jockstrap.

  Eddie looks down, and realizes with a degree of alarm that he's several metres above the ship's hull and still rising steadily.

  He was so stricken with the view, he's about to become a feature of it.

  He feels a tug, and his motion reverses. Styx is standing on the hull, tugging at Eddie's cord.

  As he floats back down, if you can call it 'down', his gratitude to the drone begins to dissipate. He's coming in too fast, with no way of slowing down.

  Styx has realized Eddie's going to crash into the hull, and is desperately flicking the umbilical cord like a whip. But this only makes things worse.

  Eddie only manages to enunciate two-thirds of the first word of 'Stop, you jelly-brained tit' before he makes spine-jarring contact with the ship.

  The impact, and the resultant pain in the only part of him left to feel pain, cause him to lose sight, temporarily, of certain inevitabilities outlined by Isaac Newton, and when he opens his eyes he's bounced off the hull and floating back up again.

  If he doesn't do something about this, he's going to spend the rest of eternity playing the ball in a spacewalk version of the Captain's paddle game.

  'Don't tug!' He yells to Styx. 'I can tug myself.'

  Styx gives him a thumbs-up.

  Eddie reaches down with his claw, gingerly, and aims the apex at his tether line. Concentrating hard -- very, very hard -- he closes the pincers slowly and tenderly. Too much pressure, and he'll cut through the cord. And that's not worth thinking about.

  He tugs. Just a little.

  He tugs. Just a little more.

  And a little more...

  And he's stopped.

  He's floating above the ship. His body is naturally matching its velocity.

  One more tug and he starts to float gently down towards the hull.

  It's slow, achingly slow progress, and it's burning up time. But he can't risk another rebound.

  Finally, he makes gentle, clacking contact with the surface of the ship.

  Styx reaches out and grabs him. He's safe.

  Safe?

  He's hurtling along at a speed no human has previously experienced, standing on the side of a spaceship that's tearing itself apart, and charging pell-mell at a planet that could swallow up most of his solar system, assisted by a man who wants to make suicide missions his career.

  Safe is relative.

  He tries to ignore the view and scans the hull'
s surface for some identifying features.

  He sees lots of damage. Lots of rips and tears, folds and twists. He sees canyon-sized channels churned out of the metal, and mountainous mounds of distorted girders.

  He sees nothing recognizable.

  'Oslo? Are you getting these images?'

  'Yes. I don't... none of it seems to match up with our models.'

  'So, this engine we're supposed to repair? Where would that actually be?'

  'We're trying to find out.' A crackle and a pause. 'Try heading zero niner zero.'

  'Try?'

  'That's where the engine should he, relative to your airlock.'

  'OK.' Eddie tries not to look like an accountant trying to look like a space jock, and work out which way a ninety-degree turn would point him. That would be... to his right, yes?

  He lumbers round and starts moving towards an unpromising collection of metallic dunes.

  The damage looks much, much worse than Eddie had feared. There seems to be barely a centimetre of the ship left untouched by it. It's difficult to imagine what could possibly have wrought such widespread devastation, short of a long, sustained attack by a vicious fleet of alien bombers.

  In his head, he hears Oslo yelp: 'Wait a minute! What's that?'

  'What? What's what?'

  'On your... two seven zero. Turn two seven zero! Now!'

  Two seven zero? What the hell direction is that? Eddie has to do the sum. Three hundred and sixty minus two hundred and seventy, that would be ninety. Straight on, minus ninety degrees... that's his left. She wants him to turn left! She couldn't just say 'turn left'? How hard would that have been?

  Eddie swivels in his cumbersome way.

  The ship is rippling. The hull is actually undulating as he watches it. It looks as if the metal is soft, almost liquid.

  'What the hell is that?'

  'Maybe you should take a look.'

  That makes sense. A frightening kind of dangerous sense. Eddie says: 'Maybe. Yee-sss.' But he just stands there, watching the metal wobble and warp.

  'Sir? May I take a look?'

  'Fine, Styx. Just don't get too clo... No!'