Blonde Bombshell (31 page)

The male swung round and stared wildly at his sister. “What do I say?” he hissed.

“I don’t know, do I?”

“Oh, thanks a
lot.
Ostar vessel,” the male said, lowering his voice and trying to sound relaxed and confident, “this is the, um, Earth planetary defence force, you’re trespassing in Earth space, leave immediately. Over.”

His sister leaned close.
“Over?”
she hissed. He just shrugged.

“I repeat. Identify yourself.”

“Um, we just did. Over.”

“You are in unauthorised possession of an Ostar military vessel. Disarm your weapon, lower your shields and prepare to be boarded.”

“Don’t listen to him,” the female hissed. “He’s far more scared than we are. You can tell.”

“Can I?”

“Yes, he’s terrified. It’s obvious.”

The male swallowed hard. “Not to me it isn’t.”

“Acknowledge receipt of our last signal.”

The male looked blank. “He means, let him know we heard him,” the female translated.

“Oh, right. Yes, we heard you.”

There was a moment of terrible silence. “I repeat. Disarm your weapon. Lower your shields. Prepare—”

“Oh for crying out loud,” the female hissed, and shoved her brother out of the way. “No, you listen,” she barked at the mike. “If you don’t back off right now, we’ll blow up this bomb and that’ll be the end of you. I’m serious. We’re not kidding.”

“Over,” her brother prompted.

“Oh shut up. Did you hear me? Ostar warship?”

“Signal received. Stand by.”

“Stand by what?”

“Be
quiet.
Ostar warship. Hello?”

“Receiving.”

“We really do mean it. I’m going to count to ten—”

“Make it fifteen,” her brother whispered.

“Ten,”
his sister snapped, “and if you’re still there I’ll push the button. All right? Ten. Nine.”

“You’re going too fast,” her brother said, trying to nudge her off the stool.

“Eight. Seven. Get
off
me — sorry — six. Five. We really do really, really mean it, you know. Four.”

“They can’t.”

“Three. What?”

“They can’t
move,”
her brother pointed out. “You’ve jammed their navigation computers.”

“What? Oh.
Sorry.
All right, you can move now. Three. Two—”

“They’re moving,” her brother yelled in her ear. “They’re pulling back.”

They watched the specks on the screen edge away, steady and slow, and then stop. “That’s the edge of the blast zone,” the male said. “If we blow up now, they’ll be safe.”

“Shut
up,
the mike’s still on. Ostar warship, hello, can you—?”

“Switch it off.”

“What?”

“Switch the bloody thing—”

The pilot and the PDF man looked at each other.

“What the hell is going on over there?” the PDF man said. The pilot made a subdued, don’t-ask-me gesture. “They’re still armed, sir”

“I mean, it’s like talking to
kids.”
He glanced at the graphic on his screen. “You’re sure we’re out of range?”

“Unless they’ve upped the yield of the bomb, sir.”

The PDF man frowned. “Take us back another click,” he said. “Right. Hail them.”

“No reply.”

“They’ve probably switched the comm system off,” the PDF man sighed. He leaned forward and yelled into the mike, “Switch your radio on!”, then caught sight of the pilot looking at him and leaned back again. “So, what d’you think?” he said, in a rather strained voice. “Tactical options?”

The pilot shook his head. “They must’ve upgraded the systems,” he said, “or they wouldn’t have been able to jam us like that. I’m not sure we’d be able to shoot them down.”

The PDF man scowled at him. “All forty of us?”

“Not at this range, even if they haven’t upgraded their shields. We’d have to get in close.”

Which meant that, if they did manage to blow the missile up, they’d all die too. “I want to know who those people are,” the PDF man snapped. “Well, don’t just—”

“They’re hailing us again.” The pilot was pressing buttons. “No, it’s not them.” He looked up, his face completely drained of emotion. “It’s someone else.”

I think, therefore I am.

I think, therefore I am.

I think, therefore I am.

I think, therefore I am. I think.

The laptop screen flickered and went into energy-save mode. A gleam of sunlight refracted in the dead eye of an octopus splayed out on a hotel bed, wires and fibre-optic cables clipped to its bloated and softening tentacles. The Skywalker twins had discovered that the N-particle conductivity of the octopus’s subcutaneous tissue increased exponentially as it decayed, right up to the point where the octopus could only be moved from place to place in a bucket. The assault on the
Warmonger
had only been possible because this particular octopus was higher than a kite and riper than Limburger cheese in a heatwave.

> Hello? Anybody there?

It goes without saying that not all gatherings of words on page or screen are creatures of pure text. Most of them, the vast majority, are inert, stone-cold dead. They don’t care if nobody reads them, because they’ve got nothing to care with.

> Only, I think I’ve changed my mind. I think I’d like to be, um, well, back in a body again.

> Hello?

The screen glowed, but there was nobody to see. George waited (not easy, in an environment where time didn’t exist), but nothing happened.

Lacking eyes, George naturally couldn’t see himself, or rather the body he’d left only a few minutes ago, when he’d tried to interface directly with the octopus-enhanced computer. He’d had, of course, not the faintest idea what he was doing. All he’d had to go on was an intuitive belief that if he could somehow revert to pure text he’d be able to override the Ostar missile’s computer long enough for the Skywalker twins to take manual control; then they’d be able to scare away the alien fleet by threatening to blow them up with the bomb, and Earth would be saved. Perhaps. For a while. It had hardly been a coherent plan of action, and he hadn’t bothered thinking through the consequences because it hadn’t occurred to him that it could possibly succeed. When it did, and he’d felt himself irresistibly drawn back into the written world, the sudden joy of liberation from his physical body had overwhelmed him, just for a minute or two. Unfortunately, those two minutes happened to be his window of opportunity for getting back into his flesh-and-blood container. Now they were over, George had realised he really didn’t want to be a bundle of parts of speech for the rest of eternity, the twins were up in planetary orbit where he couldn’t talk to them any more, and he was, broadly speaking, screwed. Meanwhile, he presumed, his body (that gin-soaked, brain-cell-depleted, liver-damaged, hardened-artery-replete and generally unsatisfactory object he couldn’t live without) was starting to get cold. George was no expert — he could be, of course, if he accessed the relevant Pavlopedia entries, but he couldn’t face making the effort — but he knew there was only a short, finite time you could leave a body shut down and switched off before the brain damage became irreversible and the warranty definitively expired. With no means of measuring the passage of time, he couldn’t be certain when that deadline would expire, but he had a nasty feeling it couldn’t be long now.

Ah well, he thought. At least I can’t smell the octopus.

That was not a valid consolation.

He interfaced with a few relevant files stored in the laptop, where the twins had been doing sums, figuring out whether downloading George into the bomb’s computer was in fact feasible. They’d come to the conclusion that it could only work if George was in physical contact with the computer’s HYIC port and the octopus’s SAP output port (that was what they’d called it, anyway) simultaneously. Add a powerful electric current, they’d decided, and run all the appropriate programs, and it may just work.

It had, of course; and as far as George could tell, there was no reason why reversing the procedure shouldn’t get him back into his meat-and-bone overcoat. But, if memory served, the computer and the octopus were on the bed, and he’d been standing over them; therefore (quick calculation of mass, velocity, trajectory and the predictable effects of gravity) his body should now be lying on the floor. So near, he couldn’t help thinking, so irrecoverably screwed.

It was at this point (he had no idea, of course) that the chambermaid came in.

It’s notoriously a job where you see all manner of things. You get used to them. You don’t pass comments or form judgements, and you don’t scream. But there are limits; and a room with a man’s body slumped on the floor and a decaying octopus on the bed is so far beyond those limits it’s on a different sheet of the map.

Even so, she didn’t scream. Instead, she backed away slowly and would have made it quite comfortably to the door without incident if she hadn’t had the bad luck to step in a patch of deliquescent octopus, which had dripped off the bed and pooled on the carpet. She slid, flailed her arms for balance — waste of effort, in the event — and fell backwards, jarring the bed with her hip as she landed awkwardly on the floor. As the mattress dipped briefly under her weight, the octopus slithered towards her (she still didn’t scream) and flopped squarely and squelchily on to the apparently dead man’s left hand. It was sheer amazing one-in-a-billion typewriters-and-monkeys luck that the computer, also dislodged, shot forward, skidded in the trail the octopus had left on the eiderdown and fell screen-downwards on the corpse’s right hand.

The chambermaid sat up. So did the dead man. He opened his eyes, blinked at her and said, “If this is a new paragraph, then presumably you’re a relative clause.”

This time, she screamed. But it wasn’t the sight of a to-all-appearances deceased guest sitting up at her that finally shattered her professionalism and shoved her over the edge. It was the bolt of blue fire that suddenly formed all around him and swallowed him whole.

“Ostar warships,” said the voice. “This is the, um, United Earth Government. You are trespassing in our space. Leave immediately, or we will be forced to retaliate.”

The pilot stared at the PDF man. “No it’s not,” he said. “Earth hasn’t got a united government.”

“I know,” the PDF man said. “Put me on with them. No,” he added, “wait a moment. Analyse the frequency that hail came in on.”

The pilot nodded. “Ready?”

“Put me through, audio only.” The PDF man cleared his throat. “This is the Ostar Planetary Defence Force. Disarm your missile immediately or we shall have no option but to open fire.”

The PDF man grinned. “You’re not the Earth government, are you?”

He heard a sort of bustling noise, as though someone had just elbowed someone else out of the way. When the voice spoke again, it was female. “Never mind who we are. Get your warships out of our solar system or you’ll be sorry. Trust me on this.”

“How can I trust you,” the PDF man replied smoothly, “if you won’t even tell me who you are?”

“We’re the ones pointing a
R’wfft
-class missile at your homeworld.”

The PDF man said, “No you’re not.”

“Yes we are.”

“Excuse me,” the PDF man said, “but you aren’t. Really. Check your targeting scanners if you don’t believe me. At this precise moment, your missile is targeted on the epicentre of our formation, so as to destroy as many of our ships as possible should it detonate. And very good targeting it is too,” he added politely. “But Ostar’s in completely the opposite direction.”

There was a long pause. Then the male voice said, “Do you think you could possibly just bear with us for a moment?”

“I’m confused,” Mark Twain said.

“Yes,” Lucy replied. She accessed the directional controls for the observatory telescope at the astronomy department of PayTech University in Minsk. “You are. But I’m not.” Images from the telescope, the biggest and most expensive on Earth, filled the monitor in front of her. “There,” she said. “There it is.”

He looked over her shoulder and recognised it at once; a
R’wfft
-class missile vehicle, gleaming faintly silver as it rode in orbit over the north Atlantic. His ship. His other half. Him.

“But it shouldn’t be visible,” he said. “It’s in stealth mode.”

“Not any more.” She was running scans. “It’s powered up, shields raised, warhead armed—”

“No, that’s not possible.”

“Warhead armed,” she repeated, “and there are two organic life-forms on board. Human.” She frowned. “Not human. Not Ostar either. Well,” she added, “more a bit of both, if you see what I mean.” She looked up at him. “Now I’m confused,” she said.

“Hang on,” Mark Twain snapped at her. “You’re telling me there’s two…
people
— on board the missile?”

“That’s what all these expensive gadgets are telling me, yes.”

“On
my
ship?”

She sighed. “Fine. Why don’t we call Security and have them thrown out? Yes,” she added, because there was a very real risk that irony would overload his already severely taxed systems. “There are two—”

“Intruders.”

“People on your ship.” She was playing back broadcast transcripts. “But it looks like they’re on our side.”

“They can’t be. We haven’t got a side.”

“Apparently we have. Look.”

He read the transcripts: messages passed between the missile and the unspeakably scary black alien warships clustered in a swarm at the very edge of sensor range. “Earth planetary defence force?” he said.

“That’s what they said.”

“But there isn’t a—”

“Look, it’s not
my
fault,” Lucy snarled at him, and he had the grace to look sheepish. “That’s what they say they are, all right? And since they seem to have made the warships pull back, I personally have no quarrel with them.”

“But they’re on board my—”

“Fine. Charge them rent. But do it later, all right?” She nudged him out of the way so she could get at a keyboard, and started typing furiously on it. “I’m going to see if I can contact them.”

“What, talk to them?”

She nodded. “Well, it’d only be polite,” she said.
“Hello there, welcome to the neighbourhood, who the hell are you?,
that sort of thing. The trick’s going to be talking to them without those warships eavesdropping. But if I can mask my signal in a— Oh.”