Starcustard { chapters 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 }
Chapter 6
Optional music track: 'Death Cab For Cutie – Bend To Squares.'
'This is the way to the storage room,' said the boy, pointing at a trap door on the floor behind the counter, where the two of them now stood.
His name was Jormes, and Mel had told him to give Gen a guided tour of the café. They had walked around while Jormes pointed at things and explained them in his minimal sort of way, glaring fixedly at his feet. He hadn't looked Gen in the eye once the whole time, leastways not when Gen was looking back. He stood awkwardly, and he had equally awkward sort of hair, black and longish, which did well to help him hide from the people with whom he was forced to talk.
They were both wearing black attire reminiscent of a helmetless spacesuit, with lines of blue and green running across the torso and down the arms. All the kids in the café wore the same, she'd been told. She had put it on over her white clothes and put her spacesuit and pendant away in a safe place.
He took a torch from a bracket on the wall, mumbling 'Light's broke' by means of explanation. Then he pulled the trapdoor open and plodded awkwardly down some metallic steps. Gen followed him. The steps formed a brief spiral staircase that clung to the wall.
'This is the storage room,' said Jormes, sweeping the torch lazily around the place when they reached the bottom.
The torchlight revealed rows and rows of large, bulging brown sacks occupying the length of the floor, some of them illuminated already by a warm, red glow from within. The sacks were suspended from the ceiling by thick hemp rope, which wrapped constrictively around their entire length, squeezing the sack and its contents into grotesque protrusions. Some of them had wires that travelled along the rope and into the sack itself. There was a small tap at the base of each.
''Scustard,' said Jormes.
'A lot,' observed Gen.
Jormes shrugged. 'Everyone likes custard.'
* * *
Stat continued to look up at Andromed in anticipation, and the rest of the slavekids followed her example. For lack of anything else to do, so did the Captain.
Andromed cleared his throat.
'We got to get rid of the tag signals.'
Stat said, 'How?'
The Captain narrowed his gaze, deep in thought, and stared intently at his nose while everyone else started shouting.
'Set the ship on fire!'
'We don't wanna die, idiot.'
'Hijack a big chronospeeder!'
'How?'
The kid with this grand ambition brandished his long meat skewer.
'We'd never catch up to a chronospeeder, stupid. They go faster than time!'
'And I don't know how to fly one,' the Captain admitted.
'I know--contact the Authorities, but throw them off course. Tell them a different sector!'
'But we're tagged! They'd know. Maybe they already know!'
'They don't know or we'd be fried.'
'But they're gonna find out. Mistress O is out there and she's gonna tell them everything.'
'We need to erase the tag signals!' Andromed shouted this time. 'Can't they be disabled? Unprogrammed?'
'Not without permissions. Authorization.' The Captain's head was beginning to hurt.
'Fake it. Do something!'
'Impossible. The only ones with the proper codes are the Nousu's.'
'His body's in the corridor F11 closet.'
'No use.'
'And it's not anywhere in a file or on a disk?'
'Nowhere.'
'Someone go sack the bedroom. Make sure.' Four slavekids ran out of the room obediently. 'Can we sabotage the equipment?'
'Not without damaging half of my flight deck and stripping the ship its major functions.'
Andromed raised his eyebrows as if to suggest this sacrifice might, perhaps, be necessary.
'Impossible.' The Captain was starting to shake.
'Can we hack the system?'
The Captain laughed a weak, disparaging laugh.
'Answer me!' the slaveboy shouted.
'Not from onboard.'
'Get somebody off board to do it then.'
'Who?'
'ANYBODY!'
'Now there, no need to scream like that--'
'Shut up, you cross-eyed weasel!'
The Captain cowered against the main switchboard. Andromed was holding a greasy kitchen knife right up against the tip of the Captain's long nose. 'You do what we say you do! No stupid excuses!'
When, after a long moment of heavy breathing and enmity, Andromed pulled away, the Captains nose was bleeding pathetic little beads of blood.
'You don't understand,' the man said, cracking his knuckles nervously. 'Every dynamic system on this ship includes some kind of reference tag. The fuel lines, the waste management, the communications. Even you slavekids--you're tagged individually like boxes of wheat flakes. Your teeth, your kneecaps. To hack all of that would take months.'
Andromed kicked the Captain's chair.
'Then what can we do? The spacepods are gone--we're all tagged except for you--and Mistress O will be after us any second! We can't block it with anything? An asteroid field or a comet or a... a...'
For a full minute everyone stared at the map on the screen, at the blinking green dot that signified their position in the middle of space.
'We can't give up,' Stat pouted. 'We can all pull out our teeth if we have to.'
'And our kneecaps?' someone said, with a voice half full of sarcasm, half full of fear.
The Captain cringed; he could feel their helplessness, boiling beneath every word, every wide-eyed glance. Of course he had seen slavekids killed; Gilt Nousu was an unforgiving and extravagant slug. Ignorant as the Captain was, he knew as well as any human that the Slavekid Authorities were untouchable. No matter where they were, no matter the distance, once Mistress O betrayed their situation, they were done for. Dead in the worst possible sense. Tortuously, excruciatingly, scorched and dead. A vision of his flight deck strewn with blackened adolescent corpses flashed into his mind, seeming to forecast the inevitable.
'We could turn you in. Hope for mercy. They couldn't kill you all, there are so many...'
'NO!' Every kid in the room bellowed together.
And then the Captain was struck by the oppressively black despair of the whole situation, his whole body as weak and trembling as a three-legged newborn giraffe.
'Look--' he began.
'No, you look,' Andromed stepped back into the Captain's personal space. 'Nousu is dead. Mistress O should be dead. Maybe you should be dead too if you ain't gonna help us.'
Somebody shouted 'Kill him!' but Andromed's knife remained loose in his right hand, pointed at the floor. The Captain's eyes were closed.
'What do you want me to do?' he yelled. 'I'd tear the whole ship apart if I thought it would get us anywhere! I'd crash the whole thing into the nearest planet if you really wanted me to. That would certainly fry your little tags! We're all gonna die anyway, so what the hell!'
* * *
Optional music track: 'Our Lady Peace – Not Enough.'
Noleph, a very young slavekid of the cute and pudgy variety, whom Organza had purchased specifically to display in a large fishbowl on special occasions, was trying to climb through the large dishwashing machine in the spaceship's kitchen. He got along well until his pudgy leg got caught in a hose of some kind.
After a few frustrated whimpers, he started screaming. Nobody heard him.
* * *
Organza and her slugchildren made their way hurriedly across the docking space, almost bulldozing an usher who had made the mistake of approaching them. They had more or less crash-landed the pods in which they had arrived, discarding them like the insult to status they were.
'Make haste, my most innocent and victimised children,' growled Organza. 'We have much vindication to inflict!'
She slithered massively up the steps, her flab moulding to them and providing a smooth ride. Her restless offspring followed in her immediate wake. She hummed a horrific tune, a collision of several pianos filled with trumpets, barely concealing her excitement.
She squealed with grotesque delight when they reached the central passage and saw the hundreds of different creatures making their way through Hepthazard to the glorious commerce that was to be found in the station's six outer appendages.
'The brightness of our salvation,' she said, distractedly in awe. Without another word, she and her children slid slimily towards destiny.
And, for the moment, the horrid, mutinous little slaves were forgotten.
* * *
'Would we survive?'
All the other slavekids began murmuring. Stat watched Andromed, gradually surer and surer of what he wanted to happen. She didn't know if she was ready for that. How could you ever be ready for that?
'Would we survive?' Andromed asked again, louder. 'Could we survive?'
'Crashing into a planet?' the Captain gaped at the boy in front of him. 'Are you asking me, could we survive crashing this ship into a planet?'
Calmly, Andromed responded, 'Yes. As we ain't gonna survive anything else.'
'We?'
'Us. You. Anyone.' Andromed was nearly growling.
'Survive a crash landing on the nearest planet?'
'You heard me, squidface!'
'Um. No. We'd never survive that. The nearest planet is a ball of frozen aluminium.'
Andromed glared. 'And on a planet that isn't frozen aluminium? Could we survive then?'
'Er... given a habitable planet, relatively calm weather systems, and a suitable angular velocity...and if it isn't too big, and if I can... fudge all the alarm settings...hmm.' The Captain looked up at Andromed. 'Maybe.'
'And be un-tagged?'
'Oh definitely. This ship is not built for re-entry, kid. The temperatures will destroy her--every system, every signal.'
'Even us?'
'Well, your signals are routed through the accounts within the ship's transactional database. So when you go walkabouts, the Authorities know and can alert the proper owners--the slugs. Get rid of the ship and you've got rid of that. You'd still be technically tagged microbioelectronically, but...' The captain made a sound of incredulity at what he was saying. 'The way the ship will blow in that atmosphere, if you don't fry, your tags certainly will. The electromagnetic interference would just--'
'Good. Let's go.'
'Are you sure about this? Really sure?'
'I said go. You fly the ship. We ask the questions. Clarx and Styrene, stand watch.' With that, Andromed wove his way out of the room through the crowd. Stat watched him go, an intoxicated sort of admiring smile on her young face.
* * *
Optional music track: 'Dispatch – Drive.'
'Now, Gen,' said Mel, in a voice that filled the café sevenfold and reverberated in the furniture. The colossal man took the forefront position behind the counter, surrounded by Jormes and half a dozen other human children, all dressed in the same Mel's outfit. 'You'll be wanting to do something with yourself while you're here. No point in moping around, is there? And there's nothing better at keeping you occupied than customers! Therefore, welcome to the team! We'll make a fine crewmember of you yet! Won't we, Jormes?' he boomed, slapping his huge hand into the boy's back with a noise like smacked dough and propelling him forwards.
'So, I see no reason to delay! Let's get you started!' He tied the back of his apron and rubbed his hands together as if he were about to embark on a cooking extravaganza.
He grabbed Gen by the shoulders and steered her to a centre position behind the counter. Then he made his way around to the front and placed his hands upon the countertop with all the grace of two freefalling spaceslugs. 'An oatmeal eel-glazed roll, please!' he rumbled.
Gen blinked. 'Er,' she said.
'What's this?' demanded Mel. 'Corpsing? How very unprofessional! I think that next time I shall acquire my oatmeal eel-glazed roll elsewhere! To which you reply?'
'I...'
'Not I! We! We here at Mel's are terribly sorry for the delay, but would like to rather merrily point out that Mel's is in fact the only place from which your favourite oatmeal eel-glazed rolls can be acquired! Feel free to peruse our astonishingly decorative menu, but nothing beats talking to our top-notch, first-rate staff, the latest addition to which is the rather spectacular Gen, who has the amazing ability to juggle custard shakes with her feet! HOORAH!'
Gen found herself laughing. She wasn't sure why. Perhaps because he was mad, with his hands up in the air and his strange, almost comical face of large, rounded features and his huge, open mouth. Or perhaps because there was nothing else she could do in the face of such mountainous joviality. Mel was scary, definitely, and his presence was at the same time fierce and everywhere, but Gen found herself taking comfort in this fact. She found herself drawn to his charismatic personality in the same inexorable way that planets are sucked into black holes. She felt reassured that if any horrible slugs were to get close, he'd wallop them with a rolling pin.
He readjusted his hat, and leaned on the counter with one hand on his hip. He looked at Gen with his big, pale eyes. 'Escaped from the slugs, eh?' he said, his normally theatrical voice taking on a more thoughtful tone. Gen's grin faded under his curious gaze. 'How about that. Delighted to have you on the team, Gen.'
He turned and clapped his hands together, as if bringing himself back to the more pressing matters at hand. 'Jormes! Flit! Take Gen and the trolley and go and spread our good name! Show Gen around the place.'
'S'this way,' said Jormes, peering at Gen through his dark hair. Another girl had already run ahead to fetch things. Jormes trudged along in the same general direction, and Gen followed him.
The girl, Flit, wheeled a three-tiered trolley out from a corner of the café and threw boxes of custard confections rather carelessly onto it. Flit was a short girl with large, brown eyes and wispy, chestnut hair. She had a permanent windswept look about her, and strands of forelock that travelled in adventurous otherdirections.
'This is one of my favourite jobs,' she told Gen, pushing the trolley through the doors as Jormes held them open. 'Generally we're supposed to get people to buy stuff and tell them about the café, but generally I just like jumping on the trolley and going really fast.'
Jormes walked along behind them, clutching a small, pocket-sized device that he glared at with a look of intense concentration, and pressed buttons.
Flit glanced back in the direction of the café, and then, apparently satisfied that they were sufficiently out of sight, shouted, 'Push!' The trolley doubled in speed as the girls raced down the spacestation's arm and then jumped up, their feet on the trolley's lower tier. Jormes looked up from his device, noticed them rapidly disappearing from view, and ran awkwardly after them.
Optional music track: 'Our Lady Peace – Bring Back The Sun.'
Flit giggled maniacally as they almost ran over a creature with tentacles on its face, and Gen giggled too. Then Flit jumped off momentarily so that she could keep the trolley on course. Gen let the air brush against her face, enjoying the ride. She closed her eyes and imagined herself drifting through nothingness, finally free. Freer than a spacesheep.
'This way, kiddies, and quick! Your beautiful mother has just witnessed some shoes to die for!'
Gen's eyes snapped open. She saw a flash of leathery slugskin as it disappeared into one of the shops. She felt her breath knocked out of her and cold dread start to strangle her insides. She tried to step off the trolley and stumbled backwards, hitting her head on the shiny floor.
'Gen?'
Gen struggled to her feet, clutching her head and looking fearfully at where she had just glimpsed her stepstepmother. She felt lightheaded, and her breathing felt shallow. 'No...'
'Gen?' asked Flit. 'Are you alright? What's wrong?'
'No,' Gen repeated. 'She's here. She can't be here! No, no, no...'
'What are you talking about, Gen? Who's here?'
'My...my stepstepmother. I escaped from her. I got away. She's come to get me! She knows where I am...how? She's...she's killed all the others!'
'What?'
Gen turned to Flit with a look of mounting panic. 'The Authorities,' she said. 'She's killed all the other kids, and now she's after me! She must be! We have to go back!'
'Go back where?' asked Flit, bewildered. Jormes' eyes were fixed on Gen, a look of worry on his face. 'The café?'
'Yes. No! No, she'll find me! Wherever I go, she'll find me! No, please, she can't find me...'
'Gen, calm down!' said Flit. 'We'll think of something! Don't worry, you're safe with us. Are you sure it's even her?'
'Yes!' said Gen. Then, thinking about everything that had happened to her, everything that she had gone through and the improbability of it all, she said, 'No. I don't know.'
'Well, let's go and make sure!' said Flit, pulling at her sleeve.
'No!' cried Gen, pulling back. 'She'll see me!'
'No she won't,' insisted Flit. 'Don't worry. Where did you see her?'
'That shop, there,' said Gen, pointing.
'The shoe shop?'
'Yes.'
'Come on, then,' said Flit, dragging Gen helplessly along. Jormes, not one for unexpected adventure, followed reluctantly.
* * *
Slavekids had never been allowed into Mistress O's bed chamber. The four who Andromed had sent to ransack the room broke open the door easily, but almost could not bring themselves to step across its threshold. The world within that room was endlessly large and pink, strewn with frilly slug-underclothing and saturated with the smell of greasepaint and perfume.
'Ew,' one of them said.
'What we looking for again?'
'Passwords. Copydisks. Stuff.'
'Right.'
So they walked into the room, covering their noses, and kicked aside every pile of lingerie, every pile of mismatched slippers, and every collection of empty perfume bottles. They emptied every drawer, inspected every closet. They pulled pictures from the walls, dug through every plastic crate under the bed, and checked every tile in the floor for secret hiding places. They even knocked down the ugly decorative lamps. They found nothing but a few spacemites, a slipper that looked like someone had tried to eat it, three curly wigs, and a countless number of cosmetics in tubes and bottles and jars.
Having nothing to report back to Andromed, the four slavekids donned the wigs and took the cosmetics with them to the spacelounge, where they proceeded to graffiti its walls, its furniture, and themselves. Some of the other slaves joined them after a while, and the whole room became a sticky, happy mess of colour and shouting.
* * *
Optional music track: 'Muse – Map of the Problematique.'
The damp and slimy innards of the ship's dishwasher creaked. Noleph was still screaming.
* * *
'I like these pink ones. How many do you have?'
'I'm not sure, ma'am. I'll just go and check for you.'
'Actually, don't bother. They're not that nice.'
The three of them peered through a shoe rack from the next aisle.
'It's her,' said Gen, watching with distaste as Organza attached a fluffy and green specimen of footwear to the flab or her tail and examined it.
The minislugs slithered restlessly around the shop. Gen watched them warily, pressing herself against the shoe racks and trying to keep hidden behind other customers.
Flit watched thoughtfully as Organza removed, replaced and rearranged the shoes, viewing the cataclysmic garishness from every angle before trying another combination.
'Gen,' whispered Flit, 'we can put stuff in her tail!'
'What?'
'We can put stuff in her tail and get security on her. I bet she won't even notice!'
'What about the little slugs?' asked Jormes.
'Hm,' said Flit, looking around the shop for inspiration. Then she saw the trolley abandoned just outside. 'Jormes, we need you to distract them. Get the trolley. Everyone likes custard, kids especially. Slugs like custard, right, Gen?'
'What?' said Gen, still trying to stay out of sight of the patrolling minislugs. 'Yeah. Slugs like custard.'
'Good. Go, Jormes, go!'
Jormes went, very nearly falling over on his way. He got hold of the trolley, paused for a moment while he thought about exactly what it was he was supposed to be doing, and then steered the trolley clumsily towards the shop. Then he turned it around and pushed it slowly and deliberately across the shop entrance.
'Er...custard!' he announced. 'Free, like, custard snacks! Er. Delicious custard for all your...you know, custard needs. And stuff.'
The slugchildren, already quite bored of shoes, turned and gravitated towards the trolley, as did one or two others. Gen was relieved to see them go. Jormes, on the other hand, was slightly horrified as they approached and started welling around his feet. He fumbled with the boxes in a desperate attempt to keep their attention.
Gen grabbed a pair of bright red shoes and handed them to Flit. 'These ones,' she said.
Flit nodded and crept to the end of the aisle where Organza was viewing a selection of thick-soled boots with bizarre, spirally attachments. She had removed all previous considerations, leaving lots of space to hide things in. Flit reached out and carefully tucked the shoes into her rubbery flab, one after the other. She made to retreat, but accidentally knocked her elbow into a rack, causing several shoes to tumble to the floor.
Organza turned irritably, expecting it to be one of her nuisance children, and Gen grimaced. Organza glared at Flit. 'What are you doing?' she demanded.
'Sorry,' Flit said, and walked away as if it had been a casual mistake.
Organza made to turn her attention back to the boots, but not before she noticed the red shoes implanted in her tail. She looked at them curiously. She didn't remember ever trying those ones on. But then, there were so many shoes it was easy to forget. She shook them off and looked around to see what had happened to all her children. This shop had a rather dire selection, she had decided, and she was ready to move on.
She saw them gathered around the trolley and sighed.
'Come on, kiddies, time to go!' she shouted down the aisle, making her way towards the exit. 'What are you doing around that boy? Come here!'
Jormes watched her nervously as she approached, her large orange eyes and painted lips approaching him with an expression of severe disapproval. Jormes saw Flit pick up the red shoes and run up to her, seemingly for a second attempt. Then he looked away so that his gaze did not betray their plan, and busied himself once again with the boxes, throwing a few onto the floor to keep the minislugs at bay. They poked at the boxes with their little, twig-like hands.
'Don't touch them!' shouted Organza, quickening her pace. Flit just about managed to insert the shoes once again, but was almost pulled flat onto her face. 'We can get nicer, better food elsewhere,' said Organza, making to herd her offspring away from the horrid, greasy little human boy.
And then a loud siren went off and lights flashed at the entrance as the tags in the red shoes triggered the alarm. Organza shrieked in fright. 'Oh my goodness!' she said, clutching her fat chest with her tiny hand. 'You want to get that fixed!' she called back, heading back into the surging crowd of people outside.
An almost spherical creature, apparently encased in dark blue metal, made its way to Organza on a strange, elastic, black limb protruding from its base and blocked her path. 'Step back inside, please,' it said, its tiny head mostly occupied by thick, bushy eyebrows that crinkled into an authoritative glare.
'What? No! Get out of my way!' She made to push it backwards, and in a lightning second two slick, black appendages shot out of holes in the armour's sides and whipped Organza with a crackling hiss and a nasty electric shock.
She shrieked hideously. 'How dare you, you disgusting, vile...'
'Step back inside please,' it repeated, evenly.
Organza was outraged, and demonstrated this by spinning around and slapping the thing extremely hard with her tail. There was a metallic clonk and the security guard reeled momentarily. Then several new holes opened up all over its armour and two dozen tentacles shot out, whipping Organza from head to tail. She writhed and screamed, beaten into incredibly painful submission.
Gen watched, half in horror, half in awe.
'You are under arrest,' said the security guard in its deadpan voice. 'Any further retaliation will result in the continued functioning of your vital organs being of little concern. You are defeated. Stand down.'
Optional music track: 'Blur - Far Out.'
