[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult (7 page)

‘I think they’ve gone,’ whispered Phoebe after a while. ‘It should be safe to switch on the emergency distress systems.’

Misha grunted and managed to press a button with his chin. An electronic poster automatically shimmered across the visor around their heads.

‘Oofff,’ said Phoebe. ‘Why do they fit these things with advertising?’

‘Apparently, it’s supposed to be relaxing,’ said Misha. ‘Also, I read that in a high stress situation, such as one where you’re having to activate an emergency distress system, the human brain is more susceptible to buying stuff.’

‘Free bucket-of-beaks chicken feast on level two of the
Jim Bergerac
,’
chirped an advert. Misha blushed.

‘Singles night at Club Moroder,’
said another pop-up. This time, they both blushed.

‘Why are the backpack jets not automatically firing to send us towards the nearest population centre?’ said Phoebe with a frown, after another few minutes had passed. ‘And why isn’t the emergency beacon doing anything?’

‘There is a chance,’ said Misha, ‘that I didn’t get round to upgrading the software.’

‘We’re in the middle of nowhere, Misha. It could be
days
before anyone finds us. Can we at least fire a manual guidance booster?’

Misha looked at the fuel gauge, and pulled a face. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was honestly intending to sort that one out this week.’

‘Damn,’ said Phoebe.

‘What is it?’

She stared glumly at something in the distance. Misha couldn’t really turn his face, but he tried to follow her gaze. About twenty metres away, the Lenslok box was spinning in the blackness. It seemed to be keeping pace with them but staying tantalisingly out of reach.

‘That was the evidence,’ said Phoebe. ‘And now we’re going to lose it.’

Misha thought for a moment. A sleepy-looking pig drifted in their direction. ‘Hang on a second, I’ve got an idea,’ he said. ‘Look – see that pig coming towards us? Try to grab it as it goes past.’

Phoebe, with some sliding and cursing, managed to get her arm free from where it was trapped next to Misha’s belly, and poked it into the other sleeve, which concertinaed out into space.

‘Now I can’t really see because your head is in the way,’ she pointed out.

‘Don’t worry, I can. Hang on a moment. It’s coming … hold your hand open … now!’

Phoebe felt something brush against a glove. She just caught hold of the pig’s leg before it drifted past.

‘So I’m holding a pig. Now what?’

‘Okay, now we need to get the pig up to this side of the visor, the side opposite to where the box is.’

There was some more slightly awkward twisting. Phoebe managed to stretch and curse and press the pig up against the domed helmet. ‘Now we just need a strong, focused light source,’ said Misha. ‘How about your eyebrow implant – does that have a torch function?’

Phoebe activated her brow projector’s torch beam and maxed it out to its highest setting. She pressed her face right up against the inside of the visor, so that she was looking straight at the pig’s backside squashed against the plastiglass.

‘Why have I got my face pressed against the backside of this pig?’ asked Phoebe, because it seemed like a reasonable question.

‘Wait a moment.’

A minute ticked by. Phoebe recoiled with a gasp as the pig exploded in a messy, gaseous shower, and they slowly rolled away in the exact opposite direction, towards the box.

‘Hooray for Newtonian physics,’ said Misha, feeling momentarily triumphant, as he scooped up the Lenslok on their way past.

‘It’s quite pretty really, isn’t it?’ he added, watching the trail of pig innards silently drift past them.

‘In a way,’ said Phoebe, dubiously.

They floated for a while. The tiny shimmering dot that was the space station possibly got a little closer, or possibly got further away; Misha couldn’t really tell. Phoebe’s breath was hot on his face in an alarming sort of way. His nose was pressed up into her ear. A bit of her hair had gotten into his mouth. He tried to blow it out.

‘I’m not blowing on your neck – I’ve got some of your hair in my mouth,’ he explained.

Phoebe didn’t say anything. It seemed to Misha as if she was maybe in a bit of a mood. A warning alert began to flash, accompanied by a gentle dinging noise.

‘Warning,’ said the warning alert. ‘Cartridge requires replacing! Oxygen will run out in ten minutes.’

Phoebe groaned. ‘Of c
ourse
it will.’

Misha stared guiltily out at the distant stars.

‘I’m sorry my hand is sort of touching your boob, by the way,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry about it.’

There was another difficult silence. Misha desperately tried to come up with some interesting conversation.

‘So,’ he said eventually, ‘I’ve been thinking of writing a novel.’

‘Fucking hell,’ said Phoebe.

‘Misha, you are a great galactic hero to the human race,’ said the Thargoid Queen, waggling her mandibles. ‘In you, and you alone, we truly met our match. But now that my hive-mind legion of Thargoid drones has finally bested you in battle, we cannot let you return to your people, so we are keeping you here in this luxurious zoo enclosure, which has all the mod-cons.’

‘Damn you to hell, you insect monsters,’ Misha shouted, rattling the bars of his cage. ‘Damn you to
hell
.’

The Thargoid Queen laughed a terrible Thargoid laugh, which was the same as a human laugh but with more mucus. Omninutrients gurgled through an organo-processor pipe. Her carapace glistened. She blinked her dozen eyes, which were black and dead, like the eyes of a games journalist or a shark.

‘Whilst here in the zoo, you and the female police human will mate vigorously, so that we may better understand your strange, disgusting mammalian biology,’ said the Queen.

Phoebe stepped into the cage wearing a wispy off-the-shoulder thing, and put a hand on Misha’s cheek.

‘Hey, let’s face it, it’s no use trying to resist the Thargoids,’ she said, with a wink. ‘We might as well go along with this.’

‘There are also as many chicken buckets as you can eat,’ added the Thargoid Queen. She waved a proboscis at a big pile of chicken buckets.

‘Fine,’ seethed Misha. ‘Just this once I’ll succumb to your obscene alien wishes, but don’t start thinking it sets a precedent.’

Something sharp jabbed him in the neck. Misha opened his eyes. It wasn’t an insectoid Thargoid appendage attempting to wrap him in some grim symbiotic mind-fuse cocoon, it was a tiny medibot with an adrenaline syringe, which promptly buzzed away when he flapped his arm at it. He looked around and saw Phoebe floating next to him. Inexplicably, it seemed, they weren’t in the spacesuit anymore.

‘What happened?’ said Misha, groggily trying to work out where he was.

‘I don’t know,’ said Phoebe. ‘I think we must have passed out from the lack of oxygen.’

‘But we’re not dead.’

‘No.’

‘How would that work, then?’

‘It looks,’ said Phoebe, indicating the airlock in which they were bobbing about, ‘like somebody picked us up.’

‘Do you think it’s Thargoids?’ Misha whispered.

‘What? No. Why would it be
Thargoids
?’

‘Zoo exhibit. They might want us for a sexy zoo exhibit.’

‘Are you okay, Misha?’ She waved her hand across his face. ‘You’re not really making sense. I think you might have hypoxia.’

The inner door of the airlock hissed open. A sinister
tapping
sound echoed down the corridor outside. Someone or something was coming towards them. Phoebe and Misha braced themselves, as much as you could in zero gravity. The tapping grew louder.

A hen, wearing tiny magno boots, stepped into the airlock. It looked up at them, or down at them – stupid bloody space, thought Misha – and opened its beak.

‘FIT GIRL,’ said the hen.

Misha and Phoebe stared at each other. They stared at the hen again.

‘BITCHES GONNA BITCH,’ said the hen.

Then it turned and went back the way it had come. Two pairs of human-sized magno-boots flipped out of the wall on a spindly robotic arm and waved themselves in an obvious way.

‘What should we do?’ said Misha, terrified.

Phoebe shrugged. ‘I suppose we follow the rude hen.’

They pulled on the boots and climbed through the airlock door, as a decontamination spray did its thing. A little way ahead of them, at the far end of the corridor, the hen rounded a corner and disappeared from view again. They went on following it. Another door opened into a gloomy sort of waiting room. It smelt of oil. They both tried their best to avoid looking at the gigantic, digital wall mural, which showed a dizzying series of dancing skull-and-crossbones, clacking their jaws and winking menacingly. The words ‘ABANDON ALL HOPE’ were written beneath the mural in a really unwelcoming font.

‘I don’t much like that font,’ said Misha.

‘No,’ agreed Phoebe. ‘I think it’s the fact it’s made out of actual shrunken heads.’

‘Space pirates! We’re done for. We’re going to get eaten by space pirates.’

‘Pirates don’t
eat
people, Misha.’

‘Well, that depends, doesn’t it? I heard they eat people in the Orion system.’

‘They’re not cannibals in the Orion system. That’s actually kind of racist. I’ve been to Orion Beta. They have a nail salon and a branch of
Zappp’s
. I think people on Gippsworld should probably try to get out more.’

A scream wafted through the ventilation grill.

‘But I admit,’ said Phoebe, ‘that I’m not an expert or anything.’

At the far end of the room another door began to slide open. Phoebe pulled out her sonic truncheon, and crouched down. Misha dropped to the floor behind her. A passage from one of Cliff Ganymede’s dating books,
Getting To Third Base During A Transhuman Apocalypse
– about how relationships forged in a moment of shared stress were more likely to get physical sooner than other relationships – popped into his head.

‘Officer Clag. Phoebe.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I feel that there’s something I need to get off my chest.’

‘Not right now, Misha.’ whispered Phoebe. ‘Someone’s coming.’

There were more footsteps, but heavier than a hen’s this time. A figure appeared, silhouetted in the doorway.

‘Lights,’ said the figure.

All the lights blazed on at once. Misha gasped. The figure in the doorway looked exactly like he imagined a space pirate would look: shiny, black, knee-length boots with silver lightning bolts on the tips, a half-unbuttoned shirt, a Byronic kind of haircut, a livid scar across his cheek and a dangerous-looking ray-gun hanging from his belt. Misha had a pretty generic imagination, as it turned out. He closed his eyes. Phoebe closed hers. Then she opened them again. Then she blinked a few times. Then she frowned.

‘Hey, dollface,’ said the figure.

Phoebe pocketed her truncheon and got to her feet. She shook her head. She heaved another big sigh. Finally, she groaned for good measure.

‘Hello, Glen,’ said Phoebe.

‘What are the odds of that?’ said Glen, for the fifth time. ‘I mean,
what are the odds of that
?’

‘Yes, low,’ said Phoebe. ‘I think we already agreed on this point.’

Glen laughed, stroked his floating ponytail thoughtfully, scratched a well-defined pec, and shook his head in continued disbelief. ‘Sometimes, cupcake, it’s like the universe is trying to tell us something.’

Misha sucked miserably on his coffee, and marvelled at how his life found exciting new ways to get worse. The real leather magno-chaises longues on which the three of them were sat hummed expensively. Not particularly tasteful wallpaper swirled, coalesced and melted away again on the walls of what he had now established as being Phoebe’s ex-boyfriend’s top of the range starship. The cabin’s luxury chrome fittings glittered around him in a really annoying way.

‘What are you even
doing
here, Glen? And why are you wearing that shirt?’ Phoebe pointed to Glen’s blousy shirt, which had a lot of ruffles on it. ‘You look ridiculous.’

‘I’m a pirate now! How great is that?’

‘Oh,
Glen
, for crying out loud,’ Phoebe threw her hands up in despair.

‘Yeah, I guess you shouldn’t be fraternising with me. But, in a way, doesn’t that give this whole thing an extra frisson?’ Glen flashed her an atomic white smile. ‘I’m like the forbidden fruit that can never be.’

He spun his antique ray gun in the air in front of him and laughed again.

‘Sorry about the waiting room, by the way. With the screams and the shrunken heads and all that stuff. It’s mostly just to set the mood for visitors. The guy who designed the mural did my scar implant, too. Do you like it?’ He pointed at the scar on his cheek. ‘I’m wondering if I should get it moved a bit higher, have it go across the eyeball, maybe?’

‘It’s a very nice scar, Glen,’ Phoebe said, politely. ‘But I don’t understand. I thought you were producing game shows on Alioth?’

Glen nodded. ‘Yeah, I gave that a go for a while. Didn’t work out. Had some disputes with the producers. I wanted goats behind the doors, they were saying it had to be spoons – because of some animal welfare nonsense – I wasn’t prepared to compromise my artistic vision like that. So I went back to Lansbury Five, dabbled with millinery.’

‘Hats?’

‘Hats. I’ve always liked hats. But there’s way too much politics with those people. Anyway, after
that
I moved into corporate promotional items. You know, stress balls, those pom-pom things with googly eyes; there’s a real market for that stuff. But we had this warehouse fire – asteroids, jeez, asteroids are the
worst
– and so I took a sideways career move into Features Development on Phreetum Prime. I actually did pretty well at that – either of you guys see
Spacestation: Dogs
? About a space station run by dachshunds?’

Phoebe and Misha shook their heads.

‘Well, you should check it out, the third act is mostly my direct input – point is, I was doing really great, the box office returns flowing in, but I wasn’t
happy
, you know? I wasn’t
fulfilled
. So I took a holiday to try to really … introspect. And one day, I’m sitting on the quartz beach near Barnard’s Star, and I look down, and I see this bug. He’s looking right back at me, waving his little feelers. And we sort of shared this moment, this all-the-creatures-in-the-universe-connected-by-a-single-thread type of thing. And then a pigeon came and ate him. Just pecked his head right off. Powerful stuff. I had an epiphany right there. I realised that life is precious, you can be minding your own business alongside some guy with great cheekbones and a nice shirt, and then— Bam! You get eaten by a pigeon. It could happen to any one of us at any time. That was it for me, I went back to Features Development and I said, ‘Dave,’ – this was Dave Bendrix, head of the studio – ‘Dave, I quit. You’ll have to do
Target: Space Donkey
without me.’

Glen leaned back, the chaise longue gently adjusting its magnetic field to the contours of his body, and beamed. ‘Best thing I ever did. Stepped out of the rat race. I don’t get why everyone doesn’t do it. Just quit their boring jobs today. What are those people thinking? It’s weird.’

‘Mmmm,’ said Phoebe. ‘How
is
your dad’s real estate empire?’

‘What? It’s fine.’ Glen frowned. ‘I can’t really see how that’s relevant to the story at hand. Anyhow, I decided to live life on the edge. Occupy the moment. And now here I am, dashing space pirate.’ He did an elaborate bow, got some of his sleeves’ billowy ruffles caught in an air vent and took a moment to untangle himself. ‘What do you think of the old girl?’ he added, gesturing to the gleaming ship. ‘I’ve christened her the
Lili Damita
, after the wife of famous historical buccaneer Errol Flynn, from back in the
17
^th
century. She’s a Zorgan Peterson Fer-de-lance RX
1
limited edition.
Starships You People Can’t Afford
magazine asked to do a spread on it.’

‘It seems very clean. Like it hasn’t had much action.’

‘Well, I’ve only been in the game a couple of months. I’ve not done any actual pirating yet, per se. God, Pheebs, I forgot that you can be needlessly confrontational. It’s a very unattractive trait. I think that might be why we split up.’

‘We split up because you had sex with a ski instructor on Gordonworld.’

‘Tomayto, tomarto. Do you like my hen?’ said Glen, deftly changing the subject. He whistled, and the hen hopped up onto his lap.

‘GAY,’ said the hen.

‘I don’t think I do,’ said Phoebe. ‘What IS it?’

‘It’s a hen. A guy sold it me on the basis that apparently in the old times pirates used to walk about with hens attached to their shoulders.’

‘I’m not sure that’s right.’

‘Well, no, I know that
now
.’

‘NICE PINS,’ said the hen. ‘CALL THIS NEWS?’

‘Sorry,’ said Glen, flipping a switch on the hen’s neck and pouring some birdseed into a pipette. ‘It’s been bio-engineered to talk. And there’s some AI implanted in there too.’

‘Artificial intelligence is very, very illegal, Glen.’

‘Don’t worry, I don’t think it counts when it’s this poorly implemented. Some college guys did an experiment by hooking a self-teaching AI program up to all the galaxy’s newsfeeds, and implanted it into a hen. Except these boffins didn’t stop to think about how ninety-nine percent of the intergalactic chatter is just
comment sections
, right? So the thing has precisely learnt to emulate the type of people that comment on news stories. The upside is I got her pretty cheap.’

‘GIRLS DON’T GET GAMING,’ said the hen.

‘The downside is she’s an idiot.’

Phoebe rubbed her temples. Conversations with Glen had always given her a bit of a headache. ‘Your career history and your pirate hen are very interesting, obviously, but really I meant: what were you doing HERE. At this exact spot in space. Rescuing us.’

‘Oh, right, yeah, got you. Well, see, there’s a hidden message board you won’t know about, because it’s a criminal underworld thing.’

Phoebe rolled her eyes. ‘We know about the message boards, Glen.’

‘Really?’ momentarily, Glen looked disappointed. ‘Okay, anyway, the other day there’s this bounty pops up. It’s for a ship leaving the
Jim Bergerac
. And I thought to myself, hey, why do I know that name? Then it hit me – that’s where Phoebe works now! So I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone. Kill in a literal sense, by turning up and collecting the ransom on your man here, and in a less literal sense, by getting the chance to see you again, babe. I like what you’ve done with your hair.’

‘Glen, you can’t just murder people. That isn’t a socially acceptable occupation. And I thought you said you were a pirate, not an assassin.’

‘It’s all in that same general outlaw milieu, isn’t it? I guess you get to wear a lot of black in the hit-man business, that’s the appeal of that side of things. I look good in black. But I don’t really fancy going on one of those voyages of self-discovery hit-men are always having. Meaningful life lessons don’t sit well with me. Bit academic now. I stopped off at a services for that second cheese scone and this mysterious dude who attacked you must have beaten me to the punch by a couple of minutes. Kind of lucky for you how it worked out though.’

‘Okay,’ said Phoebe, the police bit of her brain taking over for a moment. ‘So, you’re telling me someone put a bounty on Misha’s ship?’

‘Now, see, that struck me as odd too,’ said Glen. ‘Who’s going to go to the effort of offing some harmless schlub – no offence, guy –’ he grinned at Misha, who went on staring miserably at his coffee, ‘– in a transport barn? I figured he had to be shifting something better than pigs.’

Phoebe and Misha both looked at the vibrating Lenslok box.

‘I suppose somebody really doesn’t want somebody else to get whatever is inside this box,’ said Misha.

‘What’s in it?’ asked Glen, taking a bite out of an apple and flexing a bit.

‘No way of knowing,’ said Phoebe. ‘It’s Lensloked, so we can’t open it without the decoder. Impossible to break a Lenslok, everyone knows that.’

‘Can’t we just hack it open? With a brick or something?’

‘We could, but it’s going to detect that, and automatically fry whatever is in there, which doesn’t do us much good.’

‘So what then?’

‘Well, first I can check to see what’s on my crime scene recorder.’ She tapped her head. ‘Can I use this?’ she said, pointing at a computer terminal.

‘Be my guest.’

Phoebe uploaded the contents of her automatic black box implant with a waggle of her eyebrow. ‘Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.’

A stereoscopic Phoebe’s eye view of Misha in the nightclub filled the screen.

‘Yes,’
he was saying,
‘so another great thing about being a successful galactic trader is the views.’

Misha reddened, and Phoebe quickly hit fast-forward. It got to the bit where the mysterious silvery ship turned up.

‘No markings, no ID trace. Someone a bit more professional than you, Glen. But let’s see what we’ve got on spectroscopy.’

The computer whizzed through the list of elements and compounds recorded at the moment of the attack, looking for a chemical fingerprint, like a telltale type of mud on the sole of a burglar’s shoe, but drew a blank.

Phoebe sighed. ‘Okay, that just leaves us with the original message putting the bounty on Misha. Let’s have a look at it.’

Glen shook his head. ‘It’s a pirate trade secret. There’s an outlaw code of honour. I don’t think I should be sharing it with you.’

‘Glen.’

Glen pouted, but logged on to the network. A screen popped up. The words ‘WELCOME TO PONY MAGIC: FRIENDSHIP IS SUPER discussion forum’ flashed in bright pink letters.

‘Pony magic?’ said Misha, feeling out of his depth.

‘It’s an old terrorist trick,’ explained Phoebe. ‘To avoid drawing attention to yourself you leave messages on an innocuous-looking forum.’

‘It’s not
just
that,’ said Glen. ‘A lot of us pirates are quite into Pony Magic. I think we like it
ironically
, but to be honest I’ve kind of lost track. Anyway, there you go,’ he pointed to the message. ‘It was from Sparklechops
17
. A set of coordinates, this guy’s flight ID, and an account number. The usual stuff.’

‘The trouble is,’ said Phoebe, slumping back in her chaise longue, ‘There’s no way of tracing Sparklechops
17
with these things. Everything gets routed through out-of-system tax haven bank accounts. Sparklechops
17
wires the money to a holding account, verified by a third party; the successful assassin receives the cash upon providing evidence of the hit. They never have to deal directly with each other at all. Except …’ Phoebe paused, trying to remember something. ‘Except I think I’ve heard of Sparklechops
17
before somewhere.’

‘Sparklechops is one of the main ponies, probably you’re just thinking of that,’ said Glen. Phoebe looked at him. He shrugged. ‘Seriously, it’s a good show; it has well-thought-out themes.’

Phoebe shook her head again, logged into the police database, and started to scroll through some news files. Glen yawned, and spun his couch round to face Misha.

‘So, you’re from Gippsworld, right?’

Misha nodded.

‘Pretty happening indigenous art scene going on down there. You involved in that?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Shame. I think art is what makes us human, don’t you? I mean, that and thumbs.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Misha.

‘There, look – Sparklechops
17
!’ Phoebe jumped up so fast she detached from the chaise longue’s magnetic field and had to clamber back down again. ‘I knew it! I knew I’d seen it before. It was Sparklechops
17
who put a bounty on Cliff Ganymede. The idiot didn’t bother setting up a different account.’

‘So what does that mean?’ said Glen.

‘It means that whatever is inside that case has something to do with the
murder of Cliff Ganymede.
’ She grinned, because this time she wouldn’t be turning up to Peterson’s office with some tenuous missing-cargo non-event, she’d be turning up with a genuine Exciting New Lead. ‘Come on, we’ve got to get this back to the station.’

‘Whoa, hold up there,’ said Glen.

‘What?’

‘Sorry, Pheebs, but nothing doing.’ Glen shook his head firmly. ‘As a paid-up member of the pirating fraternity, I can’t be seen delivering criminals, even harmless schlubs – again, no offence – to
police stations
. I’ve got a reputation to maintain. It would not fit with my personal brand.’

Phoebe opened her mouth to say something, but then stopped. She thought about things for a moment and chewed her lip. She didn’t care very much about Glen’s personal brand. But she also didn’t want to just desert Misha to his second-rate-criminal fate. And, more than anything, she couldn’t bear the thought of having to hand over her big new discovery to Alicia. She could already see her doing that patronising, low-wattage smile of hers.
‘We’ll take this from here. You’ve done a very good job. Best leave it to the professionals now.’
Besides which, Phoebe reasoned, if you wanted to get
technical
about it then really neither Misha nor Glen had done anything particularly illegal so far. Until they found out what was inside the Lenslok box, Misha wasn’t guilty of smuggling. And if Glen’s concentration span was like she remembered he would probably have got over his piracy fad by the start of next week.