Scum of the Universe Page 10

  Tuesday calmly sat back down, his face more pale than usual. Brian shook his head and chuckled.

  “Cold, man. Like ice.”

  “Had no choice.” Tuesday snapped.

  “Sure you had a choice. And you chose to kill the good guys.”

  Tuesday blinked. “What?”

  “Didn’t you see the little picture on the nose? He was from The Unison, man. He came to set us free.”

  Tuesday was sick again, but this time out of disgust for his actions. That pilot had come from the far reaches of the galaxy to bring peace and freedom, and what had Tuesday done? Blown him up. That guy could have wrecked the skimmer without a second thought, ripped them to pieces with micronukes and assault weapons, but he'd tried to stop them peacefully instead.

  Tuesday watched with relief when an ejection seat punched its way out of the burning ruin of the assault ship, sending the military pilot two hundred metres into the sky. A parachute opened, and the solider was clearly in good enough health to give Tuesday the finger. A few wildly inaccurate bullets whipped past their skimmer from an emergency field carbine, but Tuesday was just glad that everybody had survived the encounter.

  “Time to go, Brian.”

  They performed another one-eighty and sped off.

  *

  The main port of The Dream Factory was the largest open space on this world. Like most ports, it was a giant square of blackened concrete that had been precisely divided into a grid of yellow glow-in-the-dark lines with eight-digit identification numbers that flashed in assorted colour codes. Every parking spot offered the Holy Trinity of basic spaceport facilities - umbilical refuelling lines, magnetic parking clamps, and adjustable staircases - but when these functions weren't in use they could be cleanly retracted beneath the concrete.

  Smouldering, crackling and nearly out of gas, Tuesday and Brian touched down. To be more specific, they violently crashed their stolen vehicle into another, slightly more intact skimmer, and lightly bumped a fuel tanker as they came to a total stop. Cringing, waiting for a fatal explosion to kill everyone within a hundred metres, after a full twenty seconds it became obvious that the tanker wasn't about to blow up. The two escapees finally took another breath.

  Hopping out of the skimmer, Tuesday tried to walk nonchalantly, but this is hard to accomplish when several small fires have started smouldering on your back. Once he'd put them out, Tuesday casually swaggered along the glowing yellow lines for the better part of two hundred metres, Brian in tow, until finally finding the number he was looking for: Bay 345556AD.

  Stopping, Tuesday looked up and up and up and up at a monolithic ship that had more in common with a brick than a predatory animal. Her weathered skin was marked by re-entry burns and a thousand pockmarks. Some of the cavities may have been from weapons damage, but Tuesday wasn't enough of an expert to say for sure. And although he couldn't actually read it, Tuesday was pretty sure that the hundred-metre-long pink decal along her side declared this hulk to be called the USS Darling Bitch.

  There was a sailor of no relevant description pushing along a cube the size of a Mac Truck with minimal effort. A loud hum made it obvious that the huge crate had antigrav wafers built into its base, but the sailor looked solid enough to not need the help. Tuesday managed to get the stranger's attention just as the cube disappeared up a turbolift and into the belly of the Darling Bitch. The beefcake had MOMM tattooed almost illegibly across his windpipe.

  “Oi, you. We want safe passage to another world, preferably one that isn't allied with The Unison, and temporary tourist visas that'll last long enough for us to disappear.”

  “I'm the chef,” the burly man said, unimpressed. He scratched at the tattoo. “Unless you can cook it, it's not my job.”

  “Right, then.” Tuesday said easily. “How about you get me the Captain, and be sure to whip us up some dinner while you’re at it. No broccoli, extra chilli. Chop chop.”

  “Get your own dinner,” the hulking chef snapped, glaring at Tuesday's black uniform. “And don't you go bothering the Captain! He has better things to do than mix with you scumbag guards.”

  “Ah, words,” Tuesday mused. “Sometimes they're sharp, sometimes they're blunter than your mother's flat head.”

  The chef's eyes narrowed and he began to growl. He appeared more than ready to rip off Tuesday's scrotum and serve it as a deep-fried dim-sim. It was only total disbelief that had prevented any immediate violence, and that wouldn't last for long.

  “Did you...did you just insult my sainted mother?!”

  “You're right, sorry,” Tuesday smiled broadly. “Let's leave old mattress-back out of this. Hitting a target as big as that thumper is far too easy.”

  There was a natural progression to this conversation. Teeth were displaced. Noses gained some character.

  “You have a real way with people,” Brian commented, scraping Tuesday off the glowing lines of the dock.

  With all the commotion of this rather one-sided beating, a well-dressed man who was obviously the chef's superior made an appearance to see what was going on. The chef stomped over to the newcomer, then spent quite a while pointing at the two teenagers and shouting obscenities. The toff gave Tuesday a disbelieving look and began to walk over.

  “Oi, Tuesday, look.” Brian whispered. “No, with your good eye. The one that still opens. We've got someone posh.”

  Tuesday smiled despite the pain. He definitely recognised this guy from a very expensive conversation he’d had with a fellow crim. It was exactly who he was looking for. The Captain, oblivious to the fact this was just a small part in a large con, glared down at the two teenagers.

  “What's happening here? Why aren't you two in Cell Block Preschool?”

  “Escapees,” Tuesday said truthfully. His swollen lips twitched in a smile. “We want safe passage to another world, preferably one that isn't allied with The Unison, and temporary tourist visas that'll last long enough for us to disappear.”

  The Captain sniffed as though there was a bad smell. “Do you kids have any idea of the penalties I'd incur if I was caught smuggling people out of this hole? The local government, what there is of it, has a standard policy of removing people’s extremities with nail clippers as a first-time offence. Not to mention the amount of red tape even if we did manage to get you somewhere else...”

  “Lots of paperwork, is it?” Tuesday asked pleasantly, spitting blood. “I understand. After all, I reckon your time is worth a lot nowadays. Smuggling all those things that you’re not meant to be smuggling must take a big bite out of your schedule, yeah?”

  The Captain’s face didn’t change.

  “I don't know what you're talking about, kid.”

  Tuesday squinted, trying to remember the little speech he’d planned word for word.

  “Your name is Captain Ron Beattie, like the cigarette, and you were dishonourably discharged from an otherwise promising military career for The Unison, age twenty-three, due to....”

  “Yes, yes, nice to meet you, too,” Captain Beattie interrupted, looking around for witnesses.

  Tuesday churned on.

  “...you've been the Captain of the USS Darling Bitch since the age of twenty-eight, but before that you flew about with an assortment of illegal and unregistered commands in the Dark Zone. The Darling Bitch is well known for moving about large quantities of naughty things by hiding them in Mister Drizzle stuffed toys...”

  “Shh! Shut up!” Beattie started turning red.

  “… and your crew is also suspected of information-running for numerous organisations that oppose the current ruling regime of The Dream Factory...”

  “How much have you got?” Captain Beattie snapped, interrupting Tuesday's recitation of his many sins. A punch-blade had appeared between Beattie's fingers at some point. “If it's less than the bounty for your dead corpse than you better pray you have the reflexes of a spugging rabbit.”

  Tuesday opened his shirt to reveal the now-muddy jacket of pounds. Captain Beattie reached
out to inspect a bundle, but his hand stopped just short of a brick of what looked like neon blue Play Dough. Tuesday held up his hand to show he was holding a detonator, and smiled broadly.

  “Made these beauties out of toxic run-off from the plastic vats. Nice stuff, this. Used a few grams of it to blow out some concrete walls when I was redecorating my cell. Problem is, the fumes are seriously poisonous, so you have to hold your breath and keep your eyes shut for about two minutes when you make it...”

  “Who the hell are you?” the Captain asked breathlessly.

  “Bob Tuesday. And I just want a ride.”

  The Captain was still for a while. He was probably weighing up the chances of taking out Tuesday before he could detonate the plastic explosives, but found he didn’t like the odds. Gesturing roughly for the pneumatic gangplank, Beattie looked around for witnesses and bundled the two boys aboard the USS Darling Bitch.

  They’d made it.

  *

  Two days later, The Unison's elite “Silencer” operatives had finished successfully infiltrating the upper levels of The Dream Factory's regime without being discovered. As arranged, at exactly midnight the Silencers carried out a chain of surgical assassinations to lop the head off the snake, effectively decapitating the regime in the space of a minute. This was followed by hours of not-quite-surgical nuclear detonations against anybody who didn't understand that resistance was pointless...futile, even.

  Cell Block Preschool wasn't the first fortress to fall, but by dawn it had collapsed like all the others. Now without anything to stop them from leaving, its survivors escaped into the planet-wide garbage tips and did their best not to be incinerated.

  Once the six-hour firestorm had calmed and all armed opposition had ceased, The Unison forces landed to begin the long, long process of accounting for survivors, and then moved on to the impossible job of trying to figure out what to do with millions of displaced kids. It was quite likely that this part of the process may take more time and effort than dropping nukes.

  Nobody missed Tuesday and his servant Brian. To The Unison, they didn't even exist.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SLUG

  If you wanted to go interstellar, lightspeed was for chumps. Thankfully, there was no shortage of choice when it came to moving vast distances in short periods of time. Since the First Founding of The Unison a handful of centuries ago, humanity had developed thirteen different methods of skipping across the Universe by kicking space/time physics in the shin and stealing its lunch money. While these methods all had upsides, they each had inherent drawbacks, too. Of course, price was always a major factor. Like with anything else, you get what you pay for.

  The Wattson-Rice Drive was the original way mankind made space/time its bitch. It operated by folding space and tying it together like a needle and thread through a sheet of fabric. It wasn't instantaneous, but it was pretty bloody quick by any standards. Saying that the Wattson-Rice was far from the safest choice was a massive understatement, however. Early spacefarers quickly nicknamed it the “Deathwish Drive” after hundreds of ships disappeared mid-transit for no apparent reason. The further you pushed a Wattson-Rice Drive, the higher the chances you'd cease to exist, so anything beyond a million kilometres per hop was rolling the dice. Worse still, this inherent level of risk makes it impossible to get insurance from a reputable provider, which means using a Wattson-Rice for business purposes isn't commercially viable.

  On the plus side, the Wattson-Rice is so ancient that its schematics fell into the public domain decades ago, so anybody with a decent fourth-dimensional printer can mock up a working copy in an afternoon. Insert a few antimatter batteries, restrict its range to a few different spots in your backyard, and presto! The perfect way to amuse small children for hours at a time. The most popular application for Wattson-Rice Drives nowadays is to install them in lightweight cardboard laminate shells, reduce their maximum range to five hundred metres, and flog them off really cheap to teenagers who've just gotten their learner's licences and can't afford anything, well, safer.

  The Thornton Chronological Dilator was a definite step up from the Wattson-Rice Drive when it comes to safety, but a giant leap backwards concerning speed (not that the Wattson-Rice used conventional acceleration to move from one point to the other, but you get the basic idea). The Thornton remains the safest method of interstellar travel to this day, but it too has an unfortunate pet name: The Slowest Death. In realtime, a ship equipped with a Thornton can move a respectable thirty light-years a week, which is more than enough to cross three or four star systems in any direction across The Unison. However, the effects of extreme time dilation on the human mind is so unbearable that any passengers who travel on a ship powered by a Thornton need to be sedated into a coma if they want to avoid a total psychotic breakdown. You see, for every day of realtime that occurs outside the ship, anybody aboard an in-transit vessel using a Thornton will experience what feels like a solid year. Now, on the surface, most people would initially assume that hopping onto a ship with a Thornton could be a cheap way to attempt immortality. Accounting for the fact that the average life expectancy of a non-smoker is roughly a decade short of a double century, if you stretched each of those days into what felt like three-hundred and sixy-five - a whole standard year - then in theory a single human lifespan could be squeezed out to the better part of seventy thousand relative years.

  Like you've probably guessed, there are some major drawbacks to time dilation. The thing is, your perception of time gets stretched out, too. This means that something as simple as blinking your eyes can take several hours. A sneeze is a torturous ordeal that is requires two or three days. And as for eating? We're talking months of effort for every meal, and by the time you wipe the crumbs and suds from your mouth, yes, so sorry, you've gone completely insane and need to be permanently restrained for your own safety. This temporal realm is known as “slothspace” for good reason.

  There have been many other stardrives over the lifetime of The Unison, and just like the Wattson-Rice and the Thornton, they all have pluses and minuses. For instance, the Carter Device puts off enough gamma radiation to melt the toughest ceramics into porridge, a Farrugia Exciter only works if it's operated by an albino with a certain type of autism, a Lloydson Starbridge relies on seventh dimensional mathematics so complicated that they can only be calculated with a computer the size of a small moon, and the Heggarty Singularity only exists on Thursday afternoons.

  Like most modern ships, the USS Darling Bitch had been built around the industry standard: a Stiller Drive. Unlike other hyperdrives that messed about with twisting physics or accelerating light or otherwise kicking physics in the crotch, the way a Stiller Drive operates goes against every shred of common sense. First off, to understand a Stiller Drive, you have to know that everything moves. Planets, moons, stars, asteroids, old AOL telecommunication satellites, whatever. If it exists, then it moves. The Milky Way Galaxy – a seemingly endless field of light made up of billions and billions of stars across hundreds of thousands of light years – moves just like everything that is within it, as do all the far off, untouched galaxies beyond our reach. But it wasn't until eighty-seven years ago that mankind accidentally discovered that space itself is also in constant motion, and not only is it travelling so fast that light is a legless, upside-down turtle in comparison, but it turned out that space danced an incredibly precise waltz that it constantly repeated down to the millimetre every two weeks, three days, eight hours, sixteen minutes and four and a half seconds.

  So, knowing that space itself is in constant motion, a Stiller Drive does precisely one thing: it brings your ship to a complete stop. By reducing a solid mass of human-crafted ceramics and metal to total stasis, a Stiller Drive allows the entire Milky Way Galaxy and everything in it to spin past at speeds that have no calculable number. By knowing the exact direction that space will be dancing at any given microsecond, it's a relatively simple matter for any half-decent navigation computer to switch off a St
iller Drive at your desired moment and rejoin the realtime Universe with acceptable accuracy.

  Sure, the Stiller Drive was far from perfect and was well overdue to be superseded, but at least you didn't need to find an autistic albino to pilot one. Even in the 24th Century, they were mighty thin on the ground.

  *

  Sealed within a scanner-proof smuggling room until The Dream Factory was nothing but a microscopic dot on a long-range reader, Tuesday and Brian were given the royal tour.

  It was far from impressive.