Scum of the Universe Read online

  The common areas of the USS Darling Bitch mostly consisted of a dingy little pit where the common rabble drank away their pay, and the communal bunk-rooms where they passed out afterwards. Both rooms stunk worse than a Kings Cross pub toilet on Free Burrito Night, and could have used a good dousing in bleach. Besides shelves of the cheapest, filthiest gut-rot liquor the galaxy had to offer, the bar had an alleged coffee machine that dispensed boiling-hot ultra-caffeinated mud to the hungover crew. Beyond a few nudie posters of tentacled alien pin-up girls here and there, there wasn’t much else to see on this level.

  Go down just one floor, though, and you’d find yourself in the yawning cargo hold, which took up ninety-nine percent of the USS Darling Bitch, and currently held in excess of two million Mister Drizzles, Missus Stretchees, Action Jacks and other high-quality slave-produced toys from Cell Block Preschool and other production centres, all destined for spoilt little brats who demanded the best. Of course, the lowest layer of plushies were all stuffed to bursting with shrink-wrapped bricks of Blink tablets.

  Both teens spent most of their time finding ways to be irritating. They'd sneak about the no-go areas of the ship, filch any morsels of food the hairy chef hadn’t guarded well enough, steal packets of smokes from unconscious crew members, and generally be annoying seventeen-year-old gits. Other notable activities that kept the two teenagers happily occupied in deep space included mooning passing shuttles, skewering scum-roaches with throwing knives and hour-long staring competitions.

  The teens were seen as vermin from the moment they arrived, and this only worsened over the next three days. Had it not been for the explosive brick mounted over his heart, Tuesday would have been shot within half an hour. Every now and then, when food was scarce, Tuesday would nibble on the brick of nutrient gruel that everyone thought was a bomb, and chuckle about his genius.

  Those days aboard the USS Darling Bitch were long, varied and fun, even though most of them ended with Tuesday gaining a new enemy. Unfortunately, on one of those days, it turned out to be Brian.

  “Stop talking at me like that!” Brian roared, spraying saliva.

  The entire drinking pit went quiet. If anybody could get past Tuesday's defences, it was Brian, and everyone knew it. All six of the crew members who were present prepared themselves for a fist fight that Tuesday was definitely going to lose. It wasn’t even worth betting on.

  At this moment, a punch-up was far from Tuesday’s biggest fear, as it was the aftermath that worried him. Brian knew all about the “bomb” strapped to Tuesday’s chest, and Tuesday had gathered far too many enemies in this room for such a titbit of information to get loose. He hoped Brian wasn’t idiotic enough to play such a lethal card, or they were both dead.

  “Calm it,” Tuesday ordered.

  “You’re always mean!” Brian blubbered.

  The difference between tears and violence was a thin one for Brian. Tuesday had witnessed this sudden transition a few times over the years. The sailors laughed amongst themselves at this brute of a kid crying like a little girl.

  “It's nuthin' personal,” Tuesday mumbled. “I just don’t have time to waste on…on bloody pleasantries. And things just go smoother when you do as you’re told, right? It’s a matter of efficiency.”

  Brian assumed an expression of rage.

  “Efficiency! I'm not your spugging butler, Tuesday! You gots to stop talking down to me!”

  Tuesday rolled his eyes as the crew all sniggered at this childishness.

  “Okay. Fine.” Tuesday shrugged. “I won't talk to you then, if that’s what you want. See you later, chum.”

  Brian’s eyes popped wide in fury. His face reddened.

  “That's not what I said!”

  Tuesday pointed at Brian, baring his teeth.

  “How about you take a minute to think about what I've done for us?” Tuesday started counting on his fingers. “Who got us out of Cell Block Preschool? Me. Who bought and threatened the two of us halfway across civilisation? Me. So stow it and be grateful.”

  Brian was silent for a long second.

  “Why do you always…”

  “Because I’m the boss, and because I’m the brains, and you’re just some inbred hick who accidentally fell out of his Mummy's…”

  Tuesday and Brian both jumped up at the same time and started swinging. As expected, Tuesday managed to get a noseful of knuckles and an eyeful of toes and fell to the deck, puffing and panting and bleeding. His usual defence of pure rat-cunning didn’t work all that well when it came to being repeatedly kicked in the kidneys, especially against boys as big as Brian, and Tuesday knew it.

  Getting woozily to his feet, his head spinning and little explosions still playing out before his eyes, Tuesday gave a pathetic little bow of defeat.

  “You win.”

  “Knocked his teeth out, kid,” a sailor growled.

  “I was already missing those,” Tuesday contradicted. He decided to make some friends for once. “Who wants a drink?”

  Stripping a few notes from his coat of currency, Tuesday bought a round of moonshine and happily lit up a cigarette made out of a greenback, which he’d been doing a lot of lately. Tuesday rolled his shirt back down and accepted a sweaty glass of lemonade and coconut rum.

  “Here's to the best friend a slave could ever have,” Tuesday toasted, raising his drink at Brian.

  The other boy looked uncomfortable. He didn’t know how to react to this new and improved version of the bastard he knew far too well.

  “Man, honestly, you carried me out of that place, and if it wasn't for your driving skills I'd still be at the tip. You were right, okay? Mates?”

  Brian nodded slowly and accepted a beer with lemon cordial in it.

  “Sure, why not? Hell or high water.”

  Tuesday smirked. Brian was off-guard, just as he liked it. Sure, Tuesday may be battered and cut up, but it was a small price to pay in the greater scheme of things.

  *

  Fun as it was, the day finally came for the boys to leave. Even a slow old wench like the Darling Bitch eventually got to where she was heading: an almost-legal trading waypoint with a serial number for a name and very little to see beyond an eternity of automated cargo lines. Tuesday was pretty sure that the only way the Darling Bitch could have gone any slower is if she'd flown backwards.

  Over the next couple of hours Tuesday greased palms, made donations to assorted worker's unions, accidentally dropped money in dark places...and he also outright bribed a few people, too. Later on, Tuesday and Brian sat at a rickety plastic table beneath a tarnished alcohol dispenser and proceeded to feed Amerikan pounds into a slot until they were both skint and borderline incapable of standing up under their own power. Under-age drinking was probably the most legal thing Tuesday had done all day.

  Brain had remained within sight of Tuesday the whole time he'd been engaged in “clarifying a few minor paperwork issues.” Even a man with half of Brian's IQ wouldn't give Tuesday the chance to run off with all their cash.

  Tuesday slugged back his fifth drink (the tepid slime had mercifully stopped tasting like fermented cough syrup after the third one), and finally slapped two plastic cards and a couple of tear-proof paper sheets down on the table. The small rectangles were “counterfeit-proof” citizen cards for the sector they were currently sitting in – one for Mr Robert Tuesday and another for Mr Brian Bebbington – as well as two pre-signed employment contracts. Brian had to move his lips to read the fine print, but he could quite clearly make out that one contract was for a mining job at a place called The Mistress for a company called PusCo, while the other was for a grease-pit cleaner at the closest MacDeath's franchise. Brian instantly snatched the MacDeath contract without discussing it, and Tuesday took one look at the thug's facial expression before giving a wave of permission.

  “They're only for a few years, anyway,” Tuesday consoled. “But that should be long enough to start a proper paper trail, put us on the taxman's radar and all that. Before you kn
ow it, thirteen months have gone by four times, and suddenly we look totally legit to The Unison. Then we can move about as we please.”

  Tuesday licked the bottom of his glass. Beyond the small pile of faked paperwork, his Dad's Zippo and the unfashionable clothes he'd purchased from a second-hand shop, Tuesday's only possession was the complimentary laser-tip pen he'd used to sign away a full two-thirds of his cash to a crooked lawyer. The pen had immediately ceased to work the moment it had signed both contracts.

  “I think it's time we parted ways.” Brian rumbled.

  Tuesday slowly turned to regard Brian’s caveman form. The bigger kid had been nothing more than a tool to Tuesday, a battering ram for the moments when he needed muscle and unthinking loyalty. Now, Brian was no longer required, and thus had no further value.

  “I'll miss you,” Tuesday lied.

  Brian gave a genuine smile.

  “No, you won't.”

  Tuesday somehow managed to get to his feet. It felt like the space station was tipping slightly to one side.

  “Okay, let's not get all emotional about it, all right? We're both seventeen. We're practically men.”

  “This too emotional for you?”

  Brian flipped the bird and walked away.

  Tuesday smirked, turned in the opposite direction, and left.

  He never saw Brian again.

  *

  Tuesday's mining job wasn’t exactly what he'd expected. For one, it turned out that “The Mistress” was actually a World Slug, a living, football-shaped grey behemoth of invertebrate filth the size of New York City. World Slugs were the largest living objects that mankind had ever encountered, but thankfully they spent most of their time snoozing in loose orbits around murky little stars, thriving off the radiation and not bothering anybody. Of course, there had been a few recorded instances where a World Slug had awakened for a time and hungered for something more substantial than gamma and UV...

  An automated drop-ship had dumped Tuesday on the World Slug's back with nothing but a leaky spacesuit, directions to the only permanent structure on the whole football, and about a hundred life-or-death warnings. One of the more notable concerns was that while the World Slug was surrounded by a very, very thin breathable atmosphere, it simply wasn't sufficient to keep Tuesday alive beyond a few minutes, hence the dodgy spacesuit. After all, if The Mistress didn’t have an atmosphere, then life would be impossible for the stellar invertebrate, and all her little live-in parasites wouldn't last a second.

  Thankfully, although there were hazards, the job itself was simple: Tuesday's orders were to attack the World Slug’s assorted slime glands with a pickaxe, collect the thick ooze in glass jars, and prepare his harvest for pick-up once a month. It turned out that the nineteen different colours of gunk were used in all the finest cosmetics, especially the most expensive facial creams and age-defying lotions, and could sell for thousands of pounds a gram.

  So far, he’d survived. That was a start.

  Trudging across the World Slug in his defective spacesuit, dragging a trailer of empty glass jars mounted on a trolley covered in antigrav wafers, Tuesday was on the lookout. His sharp vision finally picked out a shaking pustule the size of a large termite mound about thirty metres away, and he increased his pace with enthusiasm.

  Swinging his pickaxe again and again into the warty hide with grunts of effort, after eight strikes a geyser of green erupted from the pimple as though he’d struck oil. Catching as much slime as he could before the wound sealed itself, Tuesday loaded his latest haul of mucus on the trolley and headed back home. As usual, the World Slug itself didn't react to his violence, but punching a new mining pit always entailed the risk of disturbing something below the surface, so it paid to be alert and ready to run at all times.

  Tuesday reached his airtight home within ten minutes. The dome-shaped tent had been nailed into the World Slug's skin with steel pegs ages ago, and had housed precisely one occupant at a time for the last two centuries. Although Tuesday wasn't its first resident, this tent was more of a home than Cell Block Preschool had ever been.

  It took a few minutes to stack the full, warm jars of pure green next to his tent in the correct way with all the others, but as every jar had an antigrav wafer built into its base this job didn't require much muscle. As some of the grades and shades of green gunk were literally worth more than gold and uranium put together, Tuesday was so careful and delicate it might as well have been foreplay.

  After going through the whole tedious “pressurising-depressurising” airlock routine, Tuesday popped off his helmet and finally took a deep breath that didn't taste like sunburnt fish. The tent Tuesday called home was basic, but it contained all the essentials. On the left was a small fusion stove for basic cooking duties and warmth, and a soft self-cleaning bedroll was situated right next to it for obvious comfort reasons. An eye-level electronic calendar above Tuesday's pillow kept track of upcoming slime pick-ups, but all the remaining wall space was taken up with shelf after shelf full of standard no-expiration foodstuffs like Mac&Cheese. On the right side of the tent was a shower and a sink fuelled by water from the World Slug's lake-like armpit (which had to undergo a lengthy decontamination process before being used), and both spigots dripped constantly in the background. Directly ahead, a big storage cupboard held Tuesday’s other leaky spacesuit, his single set of horribly unfashionable civilian clothes and, of course, there was a hook for his pickaxe. Being without his beloved broom had been hard for Tuesday to handle, so the pickaxe had quickly become his best friend in its place.

  Tuesday flopped on his bedroll and got out his Nintendo Beyond console, an obsolete piece of junk which resembled a pair of paper-thin white sunglasses with the Nintendo logo stamped into them. A quick tap on both temples plunged thousands and thousands of microscopic electrodes into his skin, but before the game could start Tuesday had to spend ten straight minutes mentally accepting the two-hundred-and-seventeen assorted disclaimer notices that had to be verified at the start of every booting session. This had become second nature by now, and there was no way in Hades he actually read any of it.

  A symbol appeared just before the game started: the word TRANCE in a simple white circle. As long as he could remember, Tuesday had now seen the TRANCE logo in day-to-day life more times than he could count, but he still had no idea what it meant. It wasn't the name of the game company, and he'd never heard anything about Nintendo being connected to anyone called TRANCE. But every time without fail, whenever Tuesday saw the word TRANCE it caused something to bubble up in the depths of his mind, as though he desperately needed to remember something to prevent a terrible atrocity from occurring... something horrible beyond words...

  As usual, Tuesday soon lost interest in this mystery once the game started: a pirated version of Grand Theft Astro that had been translated from Korean to Russian by somebody who only spoke Norwegian. Tuesday killed enough nameless civilians to sate his immediate need for carnage, and eventually resigned himself to the fact that he couldn’t lie down all day. Sure, it took about seven hours of gaming to reach this decision, but that was beside the point.

  Getting out a Bowie knife that was more akin to a broadsword, Tuesday screwed his almost-airtight helmet back on and sighed.

  Dinnertime.

  Tuesday casually hit the red button by the door without thinking. Both airlocks opened simultaneously and an explosive burst of oxygen blasted him out of the portal crotch-first and scattered his possessions in all directions. Hitting a relatively soft patch of slugskin and rolling to a stop, Tuesday was unharmed by tumble, but he cursed viciously as all his stuff continued to flutter about the slugscape. As usual, he’d forgotten to go through the proper procedure for opening and closing the protective airlocks in the right order, even though a child would have gotten it right more often by now. All that junk would take ages to collect again…

  Tuesday tapped the ground with his fingers until he found an especially tender patch, and proceeded to savagely hack away
at it with the giant knife. Carving out a decent porterhouse from the World Slug's back, Tuesday whistled and clicked his tongue as he had wonderful thoughts about how good it would taste done medium-rare with a bit of Diane gravy...

  A bear-sized parasite burst out of the surface of the World Slug without any warning, nearly knocking Tuesday on his butt. Rearing up, screeching and grinding its six interlocked mouths together like a pile of chainsaws, the thing looked like one of H.R. Giger’s nightmares during an LSD overdose.

  Tuesday ran.

  Making it back to his tent in seconds, as Tuesday rushed into the still-unsealed airlock he was instantly bowled over by the bug. Rolling into the depressurised area, the thick fabric of Tuesday's spacesuit was quickly flayed apart by so, so many teeth. Fighting automatically on a pure adrenaline high, Tuesday’s knife flashed out at the hellish creature again and again. The beast was set on a warm human meal, though, and savagely tore strips from Tuesday’s gloves and neck armour despite its wounds. Panicking just as badly as you’d expect, Tuesday desperately jammed his hunk of slugmeat into the parasite's maw. Chewing rapidly at the fleshy lump, the distracted bug suddenly screamed and gurgled as Tuesday’s Bowie knife sank into its stomach and slid from bellybutton to ribcage. Just to cap off a stellar evening, the creature vomited corrosive yellow bile all over Tuesday's visor as it died.