Blonde Bombshell (29 page)

48

Novosibirsk

“The Global Society,” the female repeated, “for the Ethical I Treatment of Dumb Brutes.”

George frowned. “I know that name,” he said. “They bought me a cup of coffee.”

“You’re welcome,” the male said. “Anyway, that’s us. At least, we work for them.”

“Right,” George nodded. “And the globe as in global would be…?”

“Ostar,” the female said. “You won’t have heard of it. Long way away from here.”

“How far?”

“Seven hundred light-years, give or take,” the male replied.

George nodded dumbly. Aliens, he thought. Way back when, before I addled my brains with booze, people called me a genius for proving they didn’t exist. But I always knew they did, ever since they stole— “That’s where you’re from.”

“Yes.” The male gave him an Earl Grey smile: weak and insipid.

“Yes, we’re both Ostar. Or we used to be.”

“Used to—”

“We can’t go home,” the female said briskly. “Ever. So we’re stuck here, for the rest of our lives, on this—”

The male tried to do a significant warning cough, swallowed air the wrong way and nearly choked.

The female waited till he’d finished and went on, “There’s an Ostar ship in orbit,” she said. “We had to go there, so we teleported up to it. But — well, there’s side-effects. It means we’re stuck in these bodies for ever.”

Using his coffee cup as cover, George pursed his lips. He could sympathise, up to a point. Except for his brief interlude as a creature of pure text, he’d been stuck in his body since the day he was born, and it wasn’t exactly the body he’d have chosen, even before he started marinading it in alcohol. Even so— Then the penny dropped like an asteroid. “Those aren’t your—”

“Real bodies, no,” the male said. “When we came here, we were surgically altered. You know, gene-resequencing, DNA involution therapy, morphic stasis diasporation, the whole bit. So we’d blend in and be inconspicuous.”

George looked at them: the Skywalker twins. Maybe “inconspicuous” had a different penumbra of meanings where they came from. Then something that had been nagging away at his subconscious for a while clicked into place. “You don’t look like you did when I first saw you,” he said. “For one thing, she wasn’t a—”

The female growled, just like a dog. “Bit of a sore point,” the male said quickly. “Let’s just say we had an accident. Anyway, Bro — I mean Sis — is quite right. We’re stuck like this. She’s wrong saying we can’t go home, but—”

“No I’m not. Nobody’s going to see me looking like this,
nobody.”

George thought for a moment. “So the Ostar are — well, they look different from us, yes?”

The male shivered. “You could say that. In fact,” he went on, “it’s not too bad, it could be worse. I mean, the Ostar have one head and four limbs, just like your lot, and we see with eyes and hear with ears and so on. I suppose, looking at it from a xenobiological point of view, we’re not so different. Like, you should see some of the creatures there are out there. Some of them don’t even have physical bodies, which is just so weird.”

George, who’d quite recently been a sentence, with a verb instead of a heart and relative clauses where his arms and legs should have been, let that one go. “So,” he said with a slight degree of effort, “what exactly are you doing here? And what’s the Global Society—?”

“We are, like I said a moment ago,” the female replied. “The GSETDB is the biggest animal-rights organisation on Ostar. We found out that our government was planning to destroy your planet.”

George’s mouth fell open, and he made a single gurgling noise. “Why?”

“Ah.” The male smiled grimly. “That’s rather a good question. The government says it’s because sound waves from Earth, relayed through a wormhole that used to link your planet to ours—”

“Used
to?”

The male nodded. “Sound travels very slowly,” he said. “The wormhole closed up a long time ago, but the sounds that passed through it are only just reaching us now. Anyway, these sounds, including your Earth music, have reached our planet and they’re driving us nuts. We don’t have anything like music, you see, we’re totally unused to it, so when we get a tune in our heads …” He shrugged. “Parallel from your own history,” he said. “Settlers from one of your continents landed in a distant country, isolated from the rest of your species for thousands of years. The settlers brought a virus with them; their lot were so used to it that it hardly bothered them at all, but the natives in the place they’d moved to hadn’t ever had it, so they’d got no immunity and died like flies. That’s us, when your music reached us. At least,” he added, with a scowl, “that’s what the government told us.”

“We think they’re lying,” the female said. “We think—”

“Hold on a moment,” George interrupted. He was starting to get hangover symptoms, even though his blood-alcohol level was lower than it had been for some time. “You said the wormhole the music reached you through has closed up now.”

“That’s right,” the male said. “But it could open up again at any moment, the scientists say, so you lot have got to go. A question of the survival of our species. According to the government.”

“Who are lying,” the female added. “We believe the sounds that reach us are too quiet to be heard—”

“Even though the Ostar have much better hearing than your lot,” the male put in.

“We believe,” the female went on, giving the male a sour look, “that the government has been deliberately boosting the noise to dangerous levels, just so they’d have a pretext for blowing up your planet.”

George gaped at her. “Why the hell would they want to do that?”

“Another good question,” the male said with a shrug. “But anyway, one thing’s for sure, our lot launched a missile at you. A
R’wfft
-class, a planet buster. This place should just be a thin cloud of rubble by now.”

George waited, but that was it, apparently. “But we’re not,” he prompted.

“Correct,” the male said. “Something went wrong with the bomb. Either it broke down—”

“Which is really, really unlikely,” the female said.

“Entirely right,” the male said. “Or else your lot managed to shoot it down or defuse it—”

George shook his head, then really wished he hadn’t. “I doubt it,” he said. “I can’t guarantee that, because our governments tend to believe that interesting news is for hoarding not sharing, but from what I’ve seen, your technology—”

“Quite. You wouldn’t stand a chance.” The male frowned. “But here you all still are. Which is a good thing,” he added, quickly and earnestly. “The Global Society is passionately opposed to the wanton slaughter of living things. We believe that all life-forms, no matter how primitive, have a basic right to exist. Including you.”

“Thank you so much,” George said, with a slight scowl.

“That’s all right,” the male said. “It’s our mission, and we’re prepared to make sacrifices for it. We volunteered to come here, you know.”

“Well,” the female muttered, “our dad volunteered us.”

“Yes, but we—”

“Did as we were told,” the female said crisply. “But we’re here now, for ever and ever and ever, so we might as well make ourselves useful. Save this miserable planet from being annihilated. That sort of thing.”

George took a deep breath. Between wanting to thank them and the urgent need he felt to kick their spines out through their ears, he felt mildly confused. He tried to focus — a bit like trying to build a sandcastle out of semolina pudding. “This bomb,” he said. “I think I know where it could be.”

The male nodded. “So do we. Of course, there’s another one now.”

If George hadn’t changed back, he’d have been a row of dots at this point.

“It’s OK,” the male went on, “it’s just sitting there, not doing anything. We disarmed it.”

“
You—”

“Us,” the female said. “At great personal cost,” she added. “But all that means is, they’ll send another one. Or more than one, or maybe even warships.”

Warships. Just a word, and these days he had a special insight into what a word was. But some words are different.
Warships.
They were going to blow up the Earth. Furthermore, only he knew about it, and there was nothing he could do about it, not by conventional means — telling someone, notifying the authorities, writing to his Congressman, the stuff you’re supposed to do in a modern civilised society. Warships, for crying out loud, as in war. War was a concept he could understand — planet-buster missiles were too remote, too sci-fi; might as well be dragons — and if he could understand he could believe, and if he could believe he could be scared out of his feeble, booze-ravaged mind.
There’s going to be a war,
and we’ll lose and that’ll be the end of all of us; unless George Oh-you-mean-the-dipso-in-Security Stetchkin managed to stop it…

“Are you OK?” the male asked. “You’ve gone a very strange colour.”

Coming from a little green man, that was quite something. “Yes,” George said. “I mean no, of course I’m not OK.
Warships?”

The female scratched the tip of her nose. “What we need to know is,” she said, “what happened to that first missile. Should’ve gone off, didn’t.
That
wasn’t anything to do with us.”

“Which suggests,” the male went on, “that maybe you people’ve got something that can beat our technology. Hardly likely,” he added, as George made a sort of hysterical-pig noise, “but how else can you explain it? This Lucy Pavlov—”

“Ah.” George nodded.

“Well, she’s your planet’s most high-powered tech expert.” The male looked at George but sideways. “And you think she may not be from these parts exactly.” He glanced at the female, who shrugged. “I take it we’re on the same side, then.”

George thought, Are we? I guess we are, at that. So; not just George Stetchkin against the might of the Ostar Empire. George Stetchkin and these two idiots.

Oh boy.

“Really,” the male said, his voice a little lower and softer as he edged a little closer. “Really, what we need to do is get to this Lucy Pavlov and find out what she’s got, who she is, all that kind of stuff. And you said you work for her.”

George nodded slowly. “That’s right,” he said, trying to concentrate; but inside his mind, the beak of an idea was tapping doggedly against its shell. It was a wild, probably impractical idea, the sort that either fails outright or half works and makes everything incalculably worse. I’m not listening, he told it, go away. “I could probably get the three of us in to see her,” he said. “Look, if she’s — well, one of your lot, would you be able to tell?”

Tap tap. “Probably,” the male said. “It depends on how deep the morphic resequencing goes. If all she’s done is replace the primary and sub-primary interfacing pairs, we’d be able to pick it up with a phasganon scan, but if she’s gone deeper into the tertiary— Sorry, am I boring you?”

Taptaptaptap. “What? Oh, right. You were saying. Tertiary something.”

The male scowled at him. “We’d need to run a sub-mutagenic beacon scan, and that’s definitely an invasive procedure, it’s not just something I can do behind her back while she’s looking the other way.” He paused, shrugged and said, “I suppose we could just ask her.”

George blinked. “Ask her what?”

“Ask her if she’s an Ostar.”

“Yes, fine—
No!
I mean, you can’t do that. I mean, what if she isn’t?”

(But it was a valid question. It was the question, he remembered, that she’d hired him to answer. Asking her, therefore—)

“It’s either ask her or stun her and tie her to a table. It’s your call, but I invite you to consider which option might prove more embarrassing in the long run.” The male pulled a sad face and sighed loudly. “Look,” he said, “I can tell you’re not paying attention. What is it?”

George looked at him solemnly for a moment; then — tap tap crack — his face split into a wide, frantic grin. “I just had an idea,” he said.

49

?????

“He’s completely lost it, you realise,” the young male whispered.

The elderly female glanced at the monitor built into the back of the seat in front of her; it didn’t look like it was operational, but she couldn’t be sure. Even so. “Barking,” she whispered back. “But what can we do?”

“There must be something.”

The elderly female fiddled with the air-conditioning, just for something to do. “Not now he’s got the military on his side,” she said. “Well, it’s the other way round, of course. It’s them who’ve scooped him up and made him their own; he’s just an excuse so they can test their new fleet and blow something up. I wouldn’t give much for his chances after all this is over.”

“Agreed,” the young male replied. “Or ours.”

She winced. “You’re probably right,” she said. “But at least we’ll have the unique privilege of being there on the spot when history is made. And astronomy too, of course. How many people can say they’ve seen an entire planet being needlessly destroyed?”

“Something to tell the grandchildren?”

“As it happens,” the elderly female said, “I have seventeen grandchildren, so there’s a remote chance I could tell them, before they come and take me away. In your case, I don’t think you’ll have time.”

They both looked at the older male, who was fast asleep, his head cushioned on his front paws, his ears over his eyes. “We’ve got to do something,” the younger male said. “There must be…”

“Such as?”

The younger male thought. “We could override this ship’s autopilot, get manual control and use it to shoot down the—” He sighed. “All right, don’t say it. You suggest something.”

“I propose telling anybody who’ll listen that we were abducted and brought along against our will,” the female said. “I shall insist that I asked for my opposition to the project to be noted in the minutes as soon as I became aware of the misuse of government facilities. Nobody’s going to believe me, of course.”

They sat very still for a while. The older male started to snore.

“How much further, do you think?” the younger male asked.

“Don’t ask me.” The elderly female tried tapping the keyboard in front of her, but nothing happened. “Switched off,” she said; “there’s a surprise.” She looked up. There was, of course, nothing to see. On the other side of the ship’s clear-steel canopy, there was only the dull bronze glow of a Somewhere Else field. “I’m not even sure we re still inside linear time,” she said. “Of course, I’m not the right person to ask. When I was at school, you could do astrometaphysics or you could learn ballroom dancing. I’m quite a good dancer, as it happens.”

“If we could get the communications beacon working,” the younger male persisted, “we could send a message to Central Command—”

“I should stop fretting about it if I were you,” the elderly female said. “I always find that when everything’s crashing down in ruin around my ears, the best thing is not to dwell on it too much.”

The younger male didn’t reply to that. After a lot of effort and bad language, he managed to prise the cover off the console next to his left-hand armrest with the back of the plastic spoon he’d been given for his in-flight breakfast. There was nothing to see except grey insulating foam.

“They may just let us off with life imprisonment,” the elderly female said. “Apparently it’s quite civilised nowadays, you can take adult-education classes, and there are hobby workshops and drama groups and everything. A bit like life in a retirement village, but with decent food.”

“We could try reasoning with him,” the younger man said. “Oh come on, it’s got to be worth a try.”

But she sighed. “I don’t really think it’s up to him any more, dear,” she said. “I suppose you could try talking to the PDF man, if you really want to. But I get the impression he’s not exactly the listening type. Do you know if these seats are adjustable? I’m starting to get a touch of cramp in my neck.”

The younger male stared up through the canopy. From time to time he almost believed he could make out the shadows of nebulae, the faint patterns of asteroid clouds. “Maybe the Earth-people really do have a secret weapon,” he said quietly. “If they could shoot down two
R’wfft-class
missiles …”

“They could blow us to smithereens too,” the elderly female said. “Wouldn’t that be nice? So much better than being executed by our own people. Thank you, you’ve quite set my mind at rest. I think I’ll just close my eyes for a minute or so, if it’s all the same to you.”

There was a faint click as she switched off her light, and her silhouette was lost in the all-encompassing bronze glow. The younger male took his spoon and set to work on another panel; he was making quite good progress when the spoon broke, whizzing a small shard of sharp plastic very close to the tip of his nose. And then all the lights came on and the bronze abruptly faded into the deep matt black of a real sky, dandruff-sprinkled with stars. As the young male looked round, he saw a small blue-and-green blob directly overhead, with a tiny glowing pebble directly behind it. All the monitors flickered into life, and the intercom voice said, “We have now arrived at our destination.”

Slowly, the young male placed the broken spoon on the armrest next to him, and considered the blue-and-green blob. It didn’t look like much: a tiny speck of colour against a vast monochrome background, like a very small jewel on a very big tray in a shop window. Up there, apparently, sentient creatures lived; not nearly as advanced as the Ostar, to be sure, but smart enough — smart enough to have built a rocket, an overgrown bullet, on to which they’d packed two to-them-expendable life-forms, whose descendants were now zeroing phasganon phase disruptors on the planet’s core. It doesn’t matter, said a voice in his head, it’s no worse than pouring boiling water on an ants’ nest. Valid point: an ants’ nest is a complex social structure, a culture, a civilisation, albeit rather more totalitarian and brutally focused than anything the Ostar had ever allowed themselves to be governed by. Well, there were some people who were squeamish about pouring boiling water on ants, or smoking out wasps. There was even a pressure group somewhere campaigning for bacterial rights, demanding that they be extracted from sick Ostar and sympathetically resettled in controlled environments. Life, they argued, is life, even when it’s not furry and cuddly, even when it’s malevolent. Any counter-argument, they claimed, could only ever boil down to
We’re bigger than they are, so there.

It bothered him. What bothered him even more was the certain knowledge that he was far more worried about what was going to happen to him when he got back to Homeworld than the fate of ten billion super-evolved humans. He ought to care more about them than his own mangy pelt, but he didn’t. Another part of his mind was running a ticker-tape loop of excuses —
It wasn’t me, it wasn’t my idea, They made me do it, They made me go along against my will, There was nothing I could do, I was only obeying orders.
If he could do a deal right now, be let off, allowed to escape in return for abandoning Earth to the disruptor cannon of the fleet, he’d do it so fast he’d cause a bubble in the space/time continuum. Coward. Worthless person. Bad dog.

That’s the thing about being helpless, though: you can’t do anything. Right now, at the crux of it all, his options had dwindled down to two: he could watch it happen, or he could look away.

He fixed his eyes on the back of the seat in front, and started to count to a million.