Empire Dreams (2 page)

(The drinks trolley arrives at seats 28C and D at the same instant as the Boeing 757 makes the subtle change of altitude that marks the commencement of its descent to snowbound Northern Ireland.)

* * * *

SHE HAD WISHED
upon a star, the star around which her son orbits, a shooting star, fast and low and bright, diving down behind Divis Mountain. When you wish upon a star, doesn’t matter who you are, everything your heart desires will come to you: a cricket had sung that to her once upon a rainy Saturday afternoon in the sixties somewhen, but what if that star is a satellite or an Army helicopter, does that invalidate the wish, does that fold the heart’s desire back on itself and leave it staring at its reflection in the night-mirrored window? The night outside fills the reflection’s cheeks with shadows, and, in the desperate warmth of the hospital room heavy with the scent of sickness, she hugs herself and knows that she is the reflection and it the object. Every night the hollows fill up again with shadows from the shadowland outside where Army Saracens roar through the night and joyriders hot-wire Fords to cruise the wee small hours away round the neat gravel paths of the City Cemetery or stake their lives running the checkpoints manned by weary police reservists watching from the backs of steel-gray Landrovers with loaded rifles.

Stick them in neutral; he’d told her that once. We do that sometimes, stick the Landrovers in neutral and cruise for a couple of hundred yards, then shove them into second, and when they backfire it sounds like gunshots. Gets them ringing up the station: shots heard, Tennant Street, 1:15 A.M. Some of them make it sound like Custer’s Last Stand, he’d said. It had made her laugh, once. Last Stand in Shadowland.

Somewhere in the room is the soul of a twelve-year-old boy, somewhere among the piles of junk Dr. Montgomery had suggested might trigger some response from him. Sometimes she thinks she sees it, like an imp, or like one of the brownies her mother had convinced her had lived behind the dresser in the farmhouse’s kitchen: an imp, darting from under his American football helmet to hide behind his U2 poster, concealed like a lost chord in the strings of his guitar or looping endlessly through his computer like the ghost of an abandoned program. There are his favorite U2 albums, and the cassettes specially recorded for him by John Cleese to try and raise a smile on his face; there is the photograph of Horace, half-collie, half-greyhound, wall-eyed and wild-willed; there is the photograph of Tom senior.

Tom senior, who knew all about backfiring police Landrovers, and the room at the station with the ghettoblaster turned up loud outside it where they took the skinheads, and the twelve different routes to work each day: Tom, who had always been just Dad to him. No, the soul of a twelve-year-old boy, whatever its color, whatever its shape, is not something that can be captured by computer-assisted machinery or lured back to ground and trapped like a limed songbird by a junk-shop of emotional relics, not when it is out there in the night flying loops around Andromeda.

* * * *

As many as the stars in the sky or snowflakes in a blizzard or grains of sand upon a beach, that is how many the Zygon fleet is; wave upon wave of fighters and destroyers and scouts and cruisers and battleships and dreadnoughts and mobile battlestations and there at the heart of it, like the black aniseed at the center of a gobstopper, the Zygon flagship. The enemy is so huge that it takes your breath away and there is a beat of fear in your heart, for the Imperial throneship
Excalibur
is but one ship and Major Tom is but one man. Major Tom points his fighter’s nose dead into the densest part of the pack and leads Force Orange into the attack.

Is he totally without fear? you ask yourself, sweating under your helmet as the sudden acceleration pushes you deep into your padded seat, stamps all over your ribs, and stands forward on its head to become up.

“Where do they all come from?” you whisper to give your fear a name you can hold it by.

Major Tom hears you, for privacy is not a thing a fighting team with a Galaxy-wide reputation can be bothered with, and answers, “Survivors of the Empire’s destruction of their capital world, Carcinoma. Must have got the Zygon Prime Intelligence off before we blasted Carcinoma, and now they’re here, grouping for another murderous attack on the peaceful planets of the Empire. And we’ve got to stop them before they destroy the entire universe. A battlefleet could fight for a hundred years and still be no nearer the flagship of the Prime Intelligence, but a small force of two-man fighters might, just might, be able to slip past their defenses and attack the flagship with pulsar torpedoes.” And now he says into the relay channels you have opened for him,

“Orange Leader to Orange One through Five, accelerate to combat speed. Let’s go get ‘em, boys. The destiny of the Empire is ours today.”

How you wish you could make up lines like that, words to inspire men and send them into battle, words that wave the star-spangled banner of the Galactic Empire, words that make the hair prickle under your helmet and proud tears leak from the corners of rough-tough space-marine eyes. You think it might not be such a terrible thing to die with words like that ringing in your ears.

Your targeting computer has located the cluster of Zygon dreadnoughts and fighters protecting the flagship of the Prime Intelligence. The first photon blasts from the battleships’ long-range zappers rock your X15 as the enemy fighters peel out of formation to intercept. Opaque spots appear on your visor to screen out the searing light of the photon blasts.

“Orange Leader to Force Orange,” says Major Tom, “I’m going in.”

“Tactical computer available,” you say.

“Forget it, son, Major Tom does his own shooting.” Your thumbs twitch on imaginary triggers as Major Tom locks a Zygon fighter in his sights and blasts it with his laser-zappers. The black alien spacecraft unfolds into a beautiful blossom of white flame. Already Major Tom has another in his sights. Swooping up, up, and away from the nuclear fireball, he rolls the X15 and downs another. And another, and another, and another …

On your tactical display a green grid-square flashes red.

“Big Tom, one on your tail.”

“I mark him. Orange Leader to Orange Two, Big Ian, I’ve a bogie on my tail. I’m going in for the big one, the flagship.” He throws the astrofighter into a rapid series of bounce-about evasive maneuvers. A sudden flare of fusion-light throws your shadow before you onto the astrogational equipment as the Zygon pursuit ship explodes in a billion billion sparkling fragments. Orange Two thunders in to parallel your course. The daring star-pilots exchange greeting signals, and Orange Two rolls effortlessly away into a billion billion cubic light-years of space. Ahead, the Zygon flagship is sowing fighters like demon seed and now its heavy-duty laser turrets are swinging to bear on you. Photon blasts fill the air like thistledown on a summer’s day.

“Hold on to your seat, kid, this calls for some tight flying,” shouts the voice of Major Tom in your helmet-radio earphones, and he twists, turns, spins, loops, somersaults, and handstands the X15 past the crisscrossing Zygon fighters and the laserfire of the Flagship. The immense metal bulk of the enemy ship swells up before you, so close that you can see the space-armored crews at their batteries.

“Arm pulsar torpedoes’ smart systems.”

Click switch, press button; green lights reflect in your visor.

“Pulsar torpedoes armed.” The infinitesimal white X15 Astrofighter hurtles over a crazy metal landscape bursting with laserfire. Before you loom the engine ports, ponderous as mountain ranges, vulnerable as free-range eggs. Your mouth is dry, your hands are wet, your eyeballs as desiccated as two round pebbles. Red lights …

“Squadron coming in behind us, fast.” The metal landscape blurs beneath you; this alien vessel is so huge …

“Damn. Orange Leader to Force Orange, what happened to the cover? Mark three bogies on my tail, take care of ‘em, I’m going for the engine ducts … five”—the iron mountains open like jaws—“four”—on your rear screen, three evil black Zygon pursuit ships slip into tight cover—“three”—you veer down a sudden valley in the huge geography of the flagship’s drive section—“two”—ahead is the white doomsday glow of the stardrives—“one … Fire.” Orange Leader climbs away from the engine pods. The pursuit ships come after you, never seeing the tiny blob of light detach itself from your fighter at count zero and steer itself down the engine tubes into the miles-distant bowels of the enemy flagship. Major Tom loops twelve thousand miles high above the doomed starship and declares, “Detonation!”

At first there is nothing, as if it has taken time for Major Tom’s voice to travel across space and the torpedo to hear him, but then, as if by his express command, the Zygon flagship silently expands into a rainbow of glowing particles. The afterblast paints the cockpit pink, a beautiful bathroom pink. The glow takes a long time to fade, a man-made nova.

“Yahoo!” you shout. “Yahoo! We got him!”

“We sure did,” says Major Tom. “Son, we sure did.”

“What now?” you ask. “Take care of those pursuit ships and then back to
Excalibur
?”

“Not yet,” says Major Tom and there is a strange note in his voice that reminds you of something you have purposefully forgotten. “We’re pressing on, continuing the attack on our own, because there’s a planet out there beyond the lines of Zygon ships, a planet hidden for a million years away from Galactic knowledge, and we, and we alone, must go there to destroy Zygon power forever.”

PRESS RELEASE: DECEMBER 22, 1968 (EXTRACTS).

* * * *

(The front seat of a Vauxhall Cavalier, somewhere on the motorway between Belfast Airport and the Royal Victoria Hospital.)