A Game of Battleships (20 page)

‘Thanks,’ Carveth said, sliding down in her seat.

Captain Fitzroy beckoned down the table. ‘Ensign Driscoll, more wine, please!’ A slight, freckled 
girl brought a bottle over. ‘Not too much plonk, eh, Tallulah,’ the captain said. ‘We’ll need you on the astroturf for lax practice tomorrow.’

‘Aye aye, ma’am,’ said the girl, and she hurried away.

‘You see, Smitty,’ Captain Fitzroy resumed, admiring the retreating form of Ensign Driscoll, ‘the 
Space Navy’s a curious thing, no doubt about it. But it’s a fair one. A lad can do well in the navy, but so can a girl. Of course, a girlish lad can really go places, but let’s not drop anchor in that port just yet, eh?

So, where’re you headed?’

‘Any imperial spaceport. We need to offload our cargo securely.’

She rubbed her chin, as if to check for stubble. ‘All sounds a bit cloak and dagger. Well, so’s our 
destination. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you chaps have got special operations written all over you. But don’t worry.’ She leaned back and tapped the side of her nose. ‘Old Felicity’s been riding the spacewaves for long enough to know how to handle a bit of funny business – know what I mean?’

‘I’m not sure I do.’

‘Well then,” she said, and Smith realised that he had just placed his most important piece in 
check, ‘why don’t I show you, eh?’

Carveth finished her wine. ‘Mr Chumble?’

‘
Theophilius
, please, if you would be so kind.’

‘Before the war, did you work in a theme park, by any chance?’

Chumble chortled. ‘Indeed I did, young miss, indeed I did! It was my pleasure to greet visitors to 
Dickensland – for the day out that lives up to great expectations. I ran The Old Curiosity Souvenir Shop for six years, excepting a short stint in the Bleak Haunted House. Then I was called up to replace the previous simulant. His name was Ezekiel Weaselsludge, and I am sorry to say that no good came of him.

Who would have thought it?’

As Smith covered his shamon liberally with salt, pepper and anything else that would disguise its 
taste, something started to rub itself against the inside of his leg. Starting, he looked around the room as if just informed that one of the fellow guests was a murderer. As the sensation moved higher, he checked 
the people within range: Dave, who being a computer had no limbs, Mr Chumble, who was packing his 
cheeks with food as if planning to hibernate; Captain Fitzroy, apparently preoccupied with stacking peas under her fork. He left out Carveth, whose legs were too short to reach him, and Suruk, who would have 
got Smith's attention by cutting the nonsense and booting him in the shin. Perhaps it was the cat. He had never felt so relieved at the thought of being dry-humped by a mutant feline.

The sensation rose. Felicity Fitzroy gave him a broad, conspiratorial smirk.

‘Captain Fitzroy?’ Carveth asked from down the table, ‘could you pass the Smash, please?’

Felicity Fitzroy whipped around in her seat, and the thing that had been brushing Smith's leg 
impacted violently with his kneecap. Smith yelped and leaped back. Suddenly, he was standing upright, 
the room ringing with his shout. In the silent chamber, the butlerbot clattered over to dispense mashed potato.

Smith looked down the table. Faces turned to him like flowers towards the light, in expectation 
of some sort of trick.

‘Something wrong, sir?’ Chumble inquired. ‘Is it ague?’

‘Er,’ Smith said. He stood there as if shoved onto a stage, suddenly the centre of attention. He 
realised that quick thinking was called for. ‘A toast! I propose a toast!’

Captain Fitzroy raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh yes?’

‘Yes. To, ah, friends and family. Such as my girlfriend,’ he added, quickly filling his glass. Smith 
raised the glass but realised suddenly that nobody else had moved. He caught Carveth's eye: surely she would be glad to assist in any drinking ritual. ‘Such as my girlfriend,’ he repeated helplessly. ‘Carveth?’

Felicity Fitzroy stood up. ‘Well then,’ she declared. ‘To Captain Smith's girlfriend… Miss 
Carveth.’

The officers and crew rose to their feet. In the rumble of voices and the scrape of chairs, Smith 
was unable to hear what Carveth was saying to him. Something to do with plucking and idiots, it seemed.

Smith sat down again. Shuttles and Captain Fitzroy began to discuss the peas. Suruk was dividing 
his attention between his cutlery and the cat. Chumble was talking to Dave about Christmas future.

Carveth finished her wine in two swigs and, muttering something about the lavatory, made a set of 
deliberately incomprehensible gestures and scurried towards the door.

*

Carveth opened the airlock and wandered back into the
John Pym
. She pulled the door closed 
behind her and spun the wheel for good measure.

God almighty! How did Smith manage to be so stupid? How the hell had he managed to turn a 
simple act of standing up into claiming to be romantically linked to her? Business as usual: as long as she didn’t actually have to simulate any sort of affection towards him it would probably be tolerable. Smith was a decent bloke, but… God… no… ugh! That moustache, that collection of model spaceships. .

Still, soon they’d be out of here, delivered safely to the Empire in the armoured belly of the 
Chimera.
Carveth pulled a face and wondered whether it was time for bed. She had several back issues of
Pony And Very Smal Horse Monthly
to peruse, along with
The Young Lady's Inspiring Chapbook
and
More
Inspiring Chaps for the Young Lady
. It seemed too early to sleep, but she was too fuzzy-drunk to want much more booze.

Carveth put the kettle on and ransacked her secret biscuit stash, only to find that she had already 
cleaned it out some time she couldn't remember. Her second secret biscuit stash yielded better results.

‘Gotcha!’ she muttered, digestive in mouth, as she stuffed the front pockets of her dress with food. ‘You can't outwit me!’

She made a cup of tea big enough to drown a cat and thought about the dinner party she'd left 
behind. Why wasn't there anyone
normal
around? No, not even normal.
Not crazy
would do. Someone who didn't collect skulls, or hadn’t escaped from the Charles Dickens theme park. If a person was known by the company they kept, Carveth would be judged on the standards of several lunatics and the Patent 
Oscillating Lady's Companion currently charging up on the wall socket under her bed.

The door to the hold was open. A small person moved at the far end of the hold, a girl in blue – 
her reflection. Carveth walked in, steam rising from the mug in her hand.

The dim light caught in the ornate frame. Carveth stood in front of the mirror, puzzled for a 
reason she couldn’t quite decide, and realised that the frame had been put together wrong.

She set her tea on a packing case and crouched down. In the bottom-left corner there was a sort 
of broken square design, as if a tile had been smashed into three. As she reached out to touch it, she saw that there were tiny grooves in the carving. Perhaps the pieces could be moved.

They slid under her fingers. It was the easiest thing in the world to turn them and push them into 
place until they had locked together to form a diamond.

She stepped back. It looked slightly better, but the other corners were still wrong. In the top right 
there was a curved thing: a broken heart symbol. Again, the elements turned and locked into place. There, much better.

Suddenly, she noticed that she was cold. ‘Brr,’ she said, as if to confirm it, and she took a deep 
swig of tea, thinking that she needed to find a jumper and maybe put on something thicker than stripy 
tights. After she'd finished this, though.

Above the diamond, a symbol like a heart with a spike growing out of it. No,
not
a spike at all. It clicked as her fingers turned it. It was a spade.

‘That's clever,’ she said, ‘it's cards.’ They'd go crazy for something like this on the Antiques 
Roadshow. Last week they'd had a bottle of something called Diet Coke, which had ended up being sold 
to the British Museum. Who knew what an artefact like this mirror would fetch?

The last of the corners was trickiest, but Carveth knew what she was doing now. The three circles 
clicked into the tail, and the final suit, the club, was complete. Carveth picked up her mug and stepped back to admire her work – and with a bang like thunder the hold door slammed shut.

She leaped around, and as she did a faint glow spread from under her boots. Some sort of 
emergency lighting had come on beneath the floor. It crept around the edges of the floor tiles, drawing a chequerboard across the hold. But surely emergency lights were red, not this cold shade of blue?

Like an automaton, she lifted her tea to her mouth again.
Moral fibre
, she told herself,
it's full of
moral fibre
, and she forced herself to look around, knowing as she did that she had made a terrible mistake.

The mirror was the same as before. But the reflection had changed. What were those things 
hanging from the roof, criss-crossing in front of the hold door like ropes? She glanced back at the real hold door – and all sense seemed to have evaporated. There were paper chains across the doors, each link made from a playing card.

The air was alive with sound, as if a bird fluttered around her head. As though paper was being 
shuffled. But that wasn't the worst of it, not by a million miles.

There were people in the mirror. They stood behind her reflection as if they had formed from 
the shadows of the mirror-image.

The one on the right wore a hood, pulled up to a sharp peak over a grinning skull’s mouth.

Beside it, a fat crowned thing patted a bulbous sceptre against its palm like a billyclub. The third wore a sort of metal brace on its neck, which pulled its cheeks and chin into sharp points. Now that the world had gone completely insane, their awful faces made perfect sense to her: diamonds, clubs, ace of spades.

But the last suit –

‘My,’ said a voice behind her, ‘how you’ve grown!’

Carveth whirled around. A figure stepped from the shadows of the hold, her skin grey in the bad 
light. A heart had been cut out of the chest of her red robe. Axes hung from her belt. But none of that compared to the vast construction on her bald head. Attached by a ring of masonry nails, it rose out of her scalp like a little tower: half crown; half oversized chess piece.

‘Who
are
you?’ Carveth gasped.

The woman’s voice was a deep, stern growl. ‘Players of games, explorers of wonder. As if you 
didn’t know.’

‘Card games?’

‘Oh, far more than that. We also do chess and backgammon. And the pleasures of the flesh,’ she 
added, with extreme relish.

‘Really?’ Carveth’s stomach rumbled. Terror had left her rather hungry.

‘Oh yes. We can show you experiences beyond your imagining. Logic and proportion are nothing 
to us. Taste
our
pleasures.’

‘You’ve got food, then? I don’t suppose you’ve got a pie, maybe?’

The queen shook her bald, crowned head. ‘Where we’re going, we won’t need pies. Besides, that 
was a metaphor.’

‘Oh.’ Well, Carveth thought, so much for wondrous pleasures. She decided not to explore that 
avenue any further. After all, anyone who thought that nailing a big hat to their skull might be a good idea was not qualified to suggest fun ways to spend an afternoon. ‘Look, I think you’ve got the wrong person.’

‘Oh, I think not,’ snarled the queen. ‘Let’s see: blonde hair? Check. English accent? Check. Blue 
dress? Check. Prissy little pain in the arse? Check and
mate
.’

‘But I’m just a nobody!’

‘A pawn to some, a queen to others.’ She stepped forward and licked her blue lips. ‘So, what’s it 
to be? Red queen takes white pawn, to mate in one move?’

‘No, wait! No mating, please!’

‘Ah, so chess is no longer an option.’ She flexed her fingers. ‘Perhaps our game will be a little 
more. . mature in nature, now that you are all grown up. Poker!’

‘Don’t poke me!’ Carveth squealed. ‘Please, I don’t want to join your club. Alright, I’ve done 
some bad things, but. . never with props. Well, except for one but, come on, let’s be reasonable here.’ She shuffled back. ‘I know – why don’t we play Scrabble with rude words? My boss says it's great. I could get you a drink, some migraine tablets perhaps –’

‘You have migraine tablets?’ the queen stopped. She paused, then took another step forward.

‘No. Why cheat the senses? Welcome back, child.’

The figures advanced from the edge of the room. One slipped a card from its leather sleeve – the 
Jack of Diamonds – and drew it across its palm. A needle-thin stripe of blood appeared: a paper cut.

‘Six hundred years I’ve waited to get my hands on you,’ said the queen. ‘We have such wonders 
to show you.’

Carveth took another step away from them but her back met the wall. ‘The others’ll be here 
soon. They won’t like it, you know, you just – I’ll tell Lord Prong. I’ll tell him you were trying to do it with me!’

Six inches from her, the Queen of Hearts said, ‘What?’

‘I’ll tell him. I swear I will, unless you let me go. You’ll be in such trouble –’