Starcustard { chapters 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 }
Chapter 9
Optional music track: 'The Cranberries - Empty'
She woke up from a dream, and the faces of it faded immediately into the black canvas of space, leaving behind only colourful smudges: glossy pink, frazzled grey, and a rusted sort of green.
The delivery cart had slowed, drifted. Hepthazard was a spidery silver speck in the distance. Most of the spacetraffic had thinned, but a few small vessels still made their way along similar paths, clumping together based on relative destination.
All around were brilliant stars, etching the outlines of people Gen had come to know and care about. She remembered longing to be in this place--longing for this wandering freedom and wide-open possibility. Now that it was here, swallowing her up completely, leaving her with only a promise from Mel Marsh that she would be able to go back, she found herself staring into the eyes of a goat with a thousand doubts murmuring across her mind. In Brinzolio's watery pupils Gen thought she could see Flit and Jormes and the others, and she almost wished she had not done what she had done. Memories, infused with the trivial as well as the monumental, surfaced randomly. The colours and contents of all Organza's cosmetic cases, the sound of Gregarium's voice, the shops Flit taken her waltzingly through, the eyes of her stepfather...the smell of the pirate's greasy fur...
Her own face too was reflected, so distant and small, in the goat's eyes. But Gen hardly recognized herself.
What am I doing?
Running away.
Again.
But Marsh expected her back. He needed this goat. They needed it. Something confusing was going on behind the innocent neon awnings of Mel's Custard Café. Keeping slave kids, but not as slaves? It didn't make sense. The pirates didn't make sense. And what did they want with an animal like this? What was it for?
Brinzolio stumbled against the wall and plopped down contentedly to munch on an empty pasty box. Gen shuffled her feet and glanced at the controls. Her body slouched in the chair, but her mind was too full for any more sleep. She watched the little radio anxiously as Hepthazard shrank by degrees into the darkness behind them.
When she noticed the first glint of movement from a ship far out below, they were nearly out of range of any communication signals from the station. Gen pulled back a little, shifting the cart's nose to the right as if to trace a line around Hepthazard at what she hoped was a safe distance. Looking down, she could just distinguish the bronze vessel there from the stars beyond it, but it was moving slowly closer, headed to the station. All the other traffic, for hours, had been headed in the opposite direction.
Gen watched it, and soon she noticed another. There was a whole trail of them, each large vessel the wrong shape for a star and moving so smoothly, so together, stretching in a wide curve as far as she could see. With breathless curiosity Gen put her face against the window and peered as far as she could in the other direction. Bronze and red, their spines glowing like the eyes of a hundred spacesheep, each ship stood as one link in a chain, tightening flawlessly around the distant space station.
Gen didn't dare count them. Her hand went to the brake, paused...
Her gaze sank to Brinzolio where he lay on the floor. This is what they're after. This goat. Who knows why? And Mel says it's too important. She stared at the control screen, trying to breathe normally.
'They don't know I have you,' she muttered to Brinzolio. 'They don't know this is me...' Brinzolio stood up and with a calm disregard for Gen's rising worry, stepped around her knees and started rubbing his horns against the back of her chair.
***
The rusted metal door was kicked open and wedged, caught against the blizzard and the rising mounds of snow that had formed around the hut because of it. A glow of warm, orange light emitted briefly from a circle-shaped hole before a stout creature all wrapped in leather and spacefurs, a smaller version of himself stood attentively by his side, got around the other side of the door and pushed it closed again. His feet slid, grooving long marks into the deep snow, his whole upper half wrapped around the metal lever as he heaved it shut.
The smaller one was gazing up at the sky, where it was raining fire--where red streaks, earthbound, lit up the surrounding darkness, and where a deafening crack had happened, awakening Bloy and Jack from their sleep, just minutes before.
'What do you reckon it is, Bloy?' the smaller one asked, in a piping, awe-filled voice.
Bloy rubbed his mittens together in a troubled sort of way, peering up through contracted eyebrows. 'Trouble,' he said. 'That's what. Spacejunk.'
'Oooh,' said his companion, rubbing his eyes in an unconscious reminder that he should still have been in bed.
Bloy set off, trudging along in his thick, wide boots. Jack shuffled after him.
'Spacejunk is dangerous, right?' Jack said. 'Could be anything.'
'Yes,' replied Bloy. 'And nothing that was ever right and normal caused spacejunk. You pay attention and keep your eyes on the dark.'
Jack walked happily along, his face still turned up at the sky. Behind them, their round little hut, which looked at a distance perhaps not so different from spacejunk itself, watched them depart through two round windows. A thin trail of smoke still puffed from its chimney.
Every now and then Jack and Bloy heard a distant zip and zoom above their heads and the sky lit up again, the red balls of flame burning with an unusual green. As they advanced across the snowy plain, bonfires, small and not so small, crackled into view.
Bloy gripped Jack's shoulder to halt him when burning rubble buried itself in the ice little enough away to be felt in a jolt of the earth beneath their feet.
'Maybe we ought to go back, Bloy--'
Bloy squeezed the shoulder tighter as his eyes alighted on an awesome sight ahead of them--of something, a great, hulking shape, almost too immense to comprehend. It was wreckage, like the rest of it, scorched, black and half-melted like a burnt carcass; and it was still on fire, fierce illumination that threw its skeleton into sharp relief. But the scale of it--and it was only one bit--
'This spacejunk is huge,' Jack said, clearly impressed.
Bloy was inclined to agree. It was the biggest he had ever seen.
Jack's eyes once again lifted his head in awe. 'You keep watch,' said Bloy, scanning the other islands of fire in the darkness, 'and let me know if anything comes our way.'
***
Looking out again at the line of pirate ships, Gen tried to think. She knew they wouldn't notice the Mel's logo painted across the sides of the delivery cart. She knew they had no reason to notice her at all... but if she stayed too close while all the other traffic moved on...
She stood up, wobbled as the goat pushed the chair into her, and switched the radio off before its range ran out and went to static. Her mind went back to the attack on the café. The next attack would be worse. There were more of them this time, and what they were after was no longer there for them to find. Gen looked back, through the small round windows in the back doors, and wished she could do something. Her insides ached, knowing she would not be there when they needed help. If only there were weapons on a delivery cart. If only she knew a way...
Gen switched the radio on again, just before throttling the little cart over the line where communication would become impossible. She twiddled the knob to the right station and hoped someone would be standing somewhere close on the other end. 'This is Gen. I can't stay here... The pirates. I'll try and come back.' Then she switched it off again, took her place in the chair, and sped away.
Traffic became so sparse this far out that Gen could hardly discern the dirty-white curves of a small ship off to her left. Its speed and the cart's were nearly matched already, so Gen hoped whoever it was would not suspect anything as she lined up her cart and followed them. Wherever they were going, she hoped it would be safe.
Wherever they were going, she hoped Mel's Custard Café would catch up with her.
***
Jack found a mess. It left a dark red stain in the snow. What it had once been--something living, trying to escape whatever chaos had befallen it in the skies above--was now deformed and nearly unrecognisable. Jack felt himself go a little paler, step back and turn away.
'Another one?' Bloy asked, stepping across the fuzzy white towards him.
Jack nodded.
Bloy regarded the corpse grimly. It lay next to some material, full of holes, that still fluttered in the plain's gentle currents of wind.
Bloy sighed. 'They didn't stand a chance,' he said.
'What do you think happened?' Jack asked.
'They must have crashed,' Bloy suggested. 'As for why, I couldn't guess. A ship as big as this one had no place as close to the gravity well as it must have been for this to happen. Whatever they were doing, they were fools.'
Jack found his previous excitement unsettled by a mingled horror and repulsion. He found his eyes drawn back to the gruesome sight as the more curious part of him tried to imagine what creature it had been before.
'Come on,' Bloy said. 'Let's keep looking. A wreckage this big, we might yet find something we can salvage.'
The idea did not appeal to Jack, but he obeyed his elder anyway and followed him away.
'We're lucky it didn't land on our hut,' Bloy mumbled.
The ruined bits of twisted metal, showing through yellow beneath the ash and grime where the surface had not boiled away, still smoked and smouldered, but most of the smaller fires had begun to die down. The remnants of the ship changed the landscape; they made it bleak, made it nightmarish--made it somehow eerier and more silent than ever.
***
Optional music track: 'Peace Orchestra - Who Am I?'
There was one long window across one side of the dirty white spaceship. Edible Frepsn, a thin, aproned woman, paused in the middle of pouring tea, one eye on her poised kettle, two peering between the curtains. 'What does that look like to you, dear?' she said, prodding her husband.
'What's what look like?' he responded, his eyes still on his crossword.
'They look lost...' his wife continued.
'They who?'
'Oh come look, dear--just there--can't you see that tiny ship out there? With the green and blue? Do you think...'
The man glanced up at his wife and then out the window at the trailing vessel. 'Hm. Doesn't look like any ship from our sector.' After a moment he stood, looked into her trio of eyes, and waited for her to tell him what to do next.
'Should we find out if we can do anything?' she proposed.
The man turned his patient gaze back to the distant ship. 'Could be anyone, Edible.'
A spark of wariness lit her face. 'Thieves?'
He nodded the smallest hint of a nod and sat down again. 'Must've been following us for a while. Hepthazard's quite a ways behind us.'
'Should I... should I call for a space patrol?' Edible lifted the kettle and held it with both hands, watching her husband think.
'It might come to that. Get Lar down here, we'll hook up the skelescope.'
Edible finished pouring tea and took a long sip before walking to the end of the kitchenette and shouting for her sons. 'Boys! Get down here!'
Before long, two gangly boys were leaning over the kitchen table, elbows and shoulders angled against each other. A trailing younger sister had followed them down from the upper level and situated herself snuggly in her mother's arms. The skelescope and its few disconnected cords lay across the table. Abort fiddled with the ends.
'Dad, Dad! Don't... Wait wait wait...' Lar, with breathless commentary from his younger brother Skert, aligned each plug with its jack in a matter of minutes. 'Now turn it on.'
The flat screen faded into a montage of camera angles. Abort took a deep breath and grinned at his sons, sliding the machine out of their hands and tilting it out of the lamp's glare. He tweaked and re-tweaked the coordinates, and with impatient suggestions from his sons zoomed in until neon colours of Mel's Custard Café splashed into view.
'Custard?' Lar grunted. 'What? Initiate the multi-scan, Dad. See what's really in it.'
'How do you know it's really following us?' Skert said. 'You know, if they wanted to suck our oxygen or leech our power they'd probably already--'
'Ooh,' Edible worried, 'they couldn't...'
'Tiny ship like that couldn't leech much, but they'd probably need it. Maybe they're desperate, Dad. Obviously there's no com systems--'
'Unless it's on an invisible frequency!'
'Shh, shh,' Abort insisted. The scan of the little ship revealed only the simplest of radio systems, very small-scale navigation controls, and energy patterns so low Lar and Skert couldn't imagine it being dangerous.
'Can't be any weapons on,' the older boy concluded.
His father laughed. 'There's kinds that don't register on scans like this, my boy. Old weapons. We must not be telling the right bedtime stories.'
'Dear--don't tease them like that,' Edible whispered, patting her daughter's messy hair.
'Two passengers, it says. Not much movement. Don't weigh much. Since they aren't accepting any of our signals, and since they insist on following us, we had better find out what they want. Come on boys, get your suits. And the disapproachifrier.'
'But dear--are you sure?' Lar and Skert were already racing for the closet.
'With me, Lar, and Skert we'll outnumber the villains, whoever they think they are and whatever they think they'll get out of us.' Abort took her arm and spoke softly. 'Better we sort this now than back at home, eh? We'll call patrol if there's any trouble at all.' With a quick peck of a kiss, he sauntered across the kitchen, pulled his spacesuit off a hook in the laundry room, and disappeared down a ladder.
***
As Bloy had been expecting, and despite his hopes, they found nothing. The trek back to the hut was made in silence, both of them struck by more than a few shivers even beneath all of their extra layers. The snow, abated for most of the night, had begun to fall again in rather dense, chunky flakes.
'What a night,' Bloy muttered eventually. 'I'll get some broth on when we get back. I think we'll need it.'
The thought of hot broth, strangely, made Jack's extremities feel even colder, and he huddled into himself ever more tightly. He morosely watched his own steaming breath. Then, through the damp cloud, he watched the round metal hut return to view as they crested a snowy dune. He squinted, closing an eye as a mini avalanche collapsed and tumbled from one eyebrow.
'Hey Bloy--look at that!'
There was something near the hut: a thin, pale shape that limped and appeared to be hitting its fists against their door.
Bloy squinted in kind and, noting the creature, quickened his pace to a bustling run. Jack jogged after him. He saw Bloy's hand reaching for the firestick in one of his hind pockets.
The two of them descended the slope of the dune like small, hairy, barely controlled boulders, kicking white powder back behind them. Jack found himself blinking rapidly just to keep the snow out of his eyes and the strange, gangly-looking thing in his vision.
The creature had its jaw stretched wide, as if it were in pain or shouting or both, yet even when they got closer and it turned around to face them, a tortured shade of blue under its wholly inadequate, off-white clothing, it managed little noise and only fell to its knees.
'Please,' begged Andromed, his black, snow-flaked hair falling over his eyes. 'Please...help me!'
***
Optional music track: 'Royksopp - In Space'
'This corridor is so long,' said Tenua. 'I wish they would put pictures on the walls. Pictures of stars. That would be nice.'
Her frilly, glistening white shape hovered in floaty orbit around the spines of Doctor Gregarium's improbably tall hair, occasionally detaching to stare at something more closely--as if her constant, all-encompassing gaze were not enough to take everything in.
Gregarium's mind was, as usual, half elsewhere. His attention was given more towards the end of the spacewood-panelled tube, from which a familiar but not entirely welcome face--that of Grillar Quench--looked back at him mildly, watching as he and Tenua approached.
Gregarium walked with the hands in his white labcoat pockets thrust forward a little apprehensively, the spiky collar and top buttons of his colourful shirt poking out from beneath his labcoat with unpreventable eccentricity.
Grillar Quench was smiling triumphantly. Gregarium felt his return smile freeze in falseness as he removed his right hand from its pocket already balled into a cold fist and let Quench grab it and shake away obliviously.
'Gregarium,' Quench said, curtly and smugly, as if there were something in Gregarium's very name that he had to be smug about. 'I see you brought your fish.'
Tenua's large, luminous eyes peeled away from their latest distraction and applied themselves to him, her foremost fins quivering lazily. 'You are quite short,' she said.
Quench scowled. Then he pretended that Tenua had never happened and turned again to Gregarium with an even wider grin. 'How's your mysterious project going?' he asked, with tones more than gently mocking.
Gregarium remained blank at the nudge, though he had not managed to hold the smile for long. 'Fine, thank you,' he replied.
'Enjoy the speech,' Quench said, courteously stepping aside.
'Sure thing, Quench,' said Gregarium, no longer bothering with face-to-face interaction. 'Malicious waste of spacetime,' he muttered under his breath.
Tenua was ahead of him and already filling the room beyond with her curiosity.
The room was large, a kind of auditorium with a pitched floor and tiered seats, curving around in a broad arc. The carpet beneath Gregarium's feet was yellow and worn.
Perhaps a hundred people, human people, had gathered here--chatting away, finding their seats or already seated, waiting patiently.
Tenua's flitting and billowing increased in waves of excitement. Gregarium sidled along an empty row and sat himself down, letting the spacefish gravitate to the seat next to him in her own time.
A few more people arrived in dribbles before Quench walked in, still grinning, and closed the door behind him. Gregarium's eyes swept the room and spotted a dark-haired young woman he recognised--Izz Marsh--conversing with some associates.
Then the audience quietened as a figure in a white spacesuit hopped into the circle of space below them and arrived at the metal lectern with a flourish. His hair was a swept quiff that carried itself over in swerves and curls to one side, and might have carried itself off into space had it not been attached to his head. Spont Ontanei was his name, Gregarium remembered. He lifted his arms up on either side of him, his hands splayed like pictures of stars, and looked at his audience with burning seriousness.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' he said, his voice amplified and echoing around the room. 'Obviously I cannot keep you for long. So I will be brief.'
Gregarium folded his arms and leaned back.
'You all know why you have come here. Why we are all here. We are here, of course, to start a rebellion. We are here'--he swivelled, absorbing their attention--'to free the human slaves. And I am here to present to you what we've all been waiting for! I am here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, exactly how this may be done!'
Optional Music Track: 'The Flaming Lips - The Gash'
