Space Captain Smith (24 page)

‘They’re not losers,’ Smith replied. ‘Well, I’ve never actually seen them lose at anything. They’re my crew. I rather like them.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t bother. They’re probably dead by now,’ Gilead said, some of his confidence returning. Smith studied him coldly. ‘You know, Gilead, I’ve met people like you before – generally after I’ve paid a showman. You’re not as smart as you think. You’ll slip up, just like everyone else who tries to mess with the British Empire. They all get it wrong somehow – forget some detail, make some tiny error, invade Russia – and then it’s all downhill from there.’

‘I doubt it. It’s you who makes the mistakes. Hell, you’re so stupid even if I told you the truth you’d be too dumb to understand.’

‘Why don’t you try me?’

‘Alright. The reason we want Rhianna Mitchell is that she is an angel.’

‘Well, that’s too bad. Kind sentiments, but I can assure you she’s good as taken. It’s the moustache, you see.’

‘I don’t refer to fornication. I mean an Angel of the Lord.’

Smith had no drink to splutter into, and no trousers to splutter his drink on, but he tried anyway. ‘What? What?

Are you mad? Well, yes, obviously, but
really
, man,
really
.’

‘I knew you wouldn’t understand, being an unbeliever.’

‘That’s bloody ridiculous! She’s not an angel – she’s more like an art teacher, if anything. She works in a health food shop, for Heaven’s sake – more burning weed than burning bush, I can tell you. I mean, religious interpretations differ, but I can’t remember Gabriel having a toke between annunciations, can you?’

‘We shall see. Soon we will be beyond Republic space, and then only God will ever know what happens to you – and God’s on my side. Once I’ve finished with you, the Ghasts will use their technology to draw Rhianna Mitchell’s spirit from her pagan body, whether or not her corrupted will resists. And then – then the Republic of Eden and the Ghast Empire will be invincible, with the Angel of the Lord marching on before!’

‘What utter bollocks. It’s us who’ll win. We humans will save Earth from the Ghasts, just you wait.’

‘Huh. You see, Smith, you’re making a basic mistake. You assume that I don’t
want
the Ghasts to conquer planet Earth. But that’s where you’re wrong.’

‘But why, man? Why sell your people down the river like that?’

‘Not my people!’ Gilead cried, and suddenly he was enraged. ‘
Your
people: unbelievers, blasphemers, unarmed fools bleating about civil rights and democracy! That pansy crap is over! These are the End Times, Smith. The apocalypse is coming and it is coming in the form of the Ghasts. It is my sacred duty to hasten that day of weighing-out, and the powers of Rhianna Mitchell shall aid me in my divine quest. And then, when fire and destruction envelops the sinful Earth, the righteous shall ascend, and eternal life and a whole host of angelic handmaidens shall be mine.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Isambard Smith, and a cold certainly swept over him. ‘I’m going to have to settle your hash, aren’t I?’

Carveth awoke to the sound of whooping. Somewhere behind her head, people were hooting and yelling, celebrating. There was an angry, triumphant note to their voices. They didn’t sound like friends.

She opened her eyes a crack. The ceiling was very bright. She must be looking straight up at the bulb. It must have quite a wattage, she thought. Then she noticed that she was sitting upright and looking into the rapidly growing sun, and she became rather more concerned. She was tied to the chair. Crap. She squirmed around, silently, and discovered that she could not escape. Well, she thought, that’s just great. You go out on a date, your date turns out to be a robot assassin with baggage and then, just when you think it can’t get any worse, religious fanatics shoot you into the sun. I want to go home. Boots rang on the metal floor. She froze.

‘Alright, let’s move. We’ve done good, but it’s time to go.’

‘But we’ve not looked properly, Boss.’ This voice reminded her of a violent, outsize idiot and probably belonged to one, the sort of dim-witted thug who would chew a bit of straw inside his space helmet.

‘We’ve looked.’

‘But there might be guns, Boss. We could keep ‘em.’

‘Take the guns for ourselves, you mean? Yeah, maybe. Alright. Me and Zeb’ll check the rooms and the hold. You look in here. But we’ve got orders to be out in five, alright?’

‘Yep!’

One set of steps faded away down the corridor. Carveth heard someone stomp around behind her, then slowly became aware that somebody was leaning over her shoulder.

‘Hey, I can see down her dress! I can see her dirty pillows, Boss! That you, Boss?’

‘Not exactly,’ Suruk the Slayer said, and there was a sharp, messy crash as he took the man by the throat and threw him scalp-first into the ceiling.

Carveth opened her eyes. Never had the tusked, piranha-toothed nightmare of Suruk’s face looked so welcome. ‘Hey there!’ she said.

‘Good day,’ he replied. ‘Enemies are on board the craft. Would you care to join me in slaughtering them?’

‘Cut me free, would you?’

‘Of course.’ She heard his knife hiss through the rope, the cords fell away from her and she sat forward and rubbed her wrists. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Smith and the shaman woman are gone. Our enemies explore our vessel, despoiling it with their quest for loot. They have programmed a course that will take us into the sun. Soon they will call a shuttle from their own ship to collect them. We must slay them.’

‘This whole sun thing bothers me,’ Carveth said. She glanced at the instruments. ‘That’s a big sun alright. Where’re the guns?’

‘Stored in the hold. The enemy have the keys to the box, but they do not realise that it contains our weapons. We will have to ambush them and retrieve the key. In the meantime, I have acquired this cudgel.’

He pulled a rather familiar-looking item from his belt: a foot-long piece of black rubber, rounded at one end.

‘That’s mine!’ Carveth said.

‘Indeed. I did not realise that you were skilled in hand to hand. It is an excellent club, and if I flick this switch in its base, it massages my palm and imitates the voice of the bee.’

‘Can I have that back, please? That’s the closest thing I’ve got to family. Look,’ Carveth added, ‘I’m just slowing you down, right? Why don’t you go on ahead and get some killing in, eh? I’ll just stay here, and, um, do useful stuff.’

‘Humn. Your remaining hidden may be of use to me, cowardly one. Go into the captain’s room and see if there is a firearm. He may have concealed a weapon there.’

‘Alright.’ Carveth doubted that Smith was sufficiently organised to do this, but the idea of a gun was a good one. Preferably a really big gun that could be operated from a long way off.

‘I, meanwhile, shall slay my enemies. Good hunting.’

‘You too. Be careful.’

‘Fear not. I am renowned for my cunning in war. It has been said that I put the ‘savvy’ into ‘mindless savagery’. And arguably the ‘canny’ into ‘cannibalism’, but that might be stretching the point.’

With that, Suruk bounded into the corridor, almost silent on the lino. Carveth counted to five and crept to the door.

She glanced into the passage. The room doors were all open and she could see into the hold. A soldier in scrappy, converted armour stood with his back to her, a rifle in his hands. Suruk was nowhere to be seen.

She sneaked out and ducked straight into Smith’s quarters. Sighing with relief at not yet being shot, Carveth closed the door behind her and began to search the room. The wardrobe yielded nothing except a lot of tweed. She pulled the bed apart. Under the pillow she found a neatly-folded pair of wynceyette pyjamas. She knelt down and searched underneath the bed, and found only a picture of the Queen and a well-thumbed Laura Ashley womenswear catalogue.

From the hold came a shout. ‘An alien! Kill the greenskin!’ someone yelled – and then silence. Carveth took a deep breath and returned to the corridor. There was a sudden loud bang, like a door slamming, and she leaped back into Smith’s room and stood there panting until Suruk called from the hold, ‘You may emerge. They are defeated!’

He was waiting at the door to the hold. One of the mercenaries lay in the corner, his neck broken. The other seemed to have trodden on something volatile, which had thrown him against the wall with fatal force.

‘This fool panicked and stepped into a trap that he had made himself,’ Suruk said.

Carveth nodded. ‘Hoist with his own retard,’ she said.

‘Is that all of them?’

‘Indeed. We are all ready to fly. I found the plotting machine you needed hidden near the ship. It must have been Smith that placed it there.’

‘Thank God for that. Saddle up then, Suruk. We’re going home.’

She turned to the doorway, meaning to reset the navigational computer. As she reached the door the alien said, ‘Home?’

‘Yep. Let’s get out of here.’

‘But Isambard Smith is still a prisoner. Do you not have a plan for what we should do next?’

‘Sure. I’ve got two plans: cut and run. Come on, let’s go.’

‘We go nowhere. We rescue our comrade.’

‘Bollocks to that! We’re off home.’

‘Wrong,’ Suruk said, and suddenly Carveth was not so happy to have him on her side. His jaws attempted a smile. ‘I intend to enjoy my holiday. So far, it has been disappointingly without incident. Yet perhaps I shall start to remedy this by shedding blood. Either you can prepare to fight our foes, or you can experience me forcing the contents of the cutlery drawer up your snivelling behind. Turn the ship around and show the enemy our mettle, or I shall turn
you
around and show you mine.’

As he approached, making a weird croaking noise, Carveth realised that she was in a quandary. She did not know which she would rather face: death at the hands of Gilead and his brutal mercenaries, or death by rectal spoon insertion. It was a close call.

The door slid open. ‘Attention, scum!’ barked a voice, and 462 marched into the room. ‘Silence!’ he cried, despite the conversation having come to an end.

He looked like an ant in a trenchcoat. Despite the similarities to a locust and stick insect in the body, and despite the approximation of a face at the end of his bulbous head, it was as an ant that Smith would remember him: a gigantic red ant propped on its hind legs, draped in a long coat and decorated with a load of meaningless insignia – no doubt prizes for being best in show at a shouting contest or something of the sort. 462’s small eyes roved the room. ‘So,’ he said. ‘The mighty Captain Smith. We meet again, except for the first time.’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Smith replied coolly. ‘You chaps all look the same.’

‘Silence! It is fitting tribute to your crushing stupidity that for you, Earthlander, the war is over before it has even begun. Soon we shall commence our plans, and then planet Earth shall lie open to us for the taking.’

‘I have my doubts, alien. If you think the Earth’s a pushover, you’ve clearly never been to Woking.’

‘Hah! Neither you nor your puny planet is in any condition to resist the might of the Ghast Empire. Humankind will be destroyed and my service to my species will be rewarded!’

‘What will they do, promote you to 461?’

‘How dare you seek to mock me! It will in fact be 460. 461 died in a bizarre saluting accident. But I digress. You are doomed. Evolution has raised us far beyond your feeble species.’

‘Now that’s just a theory,’ Gilead put in.

‘If I might just get a word in edgeways, inferior human scum,’ 462 said crossly, ‘you are doomed. Our fleet will scatter the nations of mankind, descend on Planet Earth and destroy its useless liberty. The populations of Earth shall be put to work for our ends, and we, the Ghasts, shall crush mankind under an iron fist!’

Smith looked at Gilead. ‘I hope you’re listening to all this,’ he said.

‘So, your efforts to oppose us are worthless,’ said the Ghast commander. ‘With the secrets we learn from your captured breeding-partner, we shall sweep the galaxy clean of inefficiency. Now, I have business elsewhere.’

462 turned to go. As he reached the door, Smith said, ‘Wait.’

The Ghast turned, attempting a smile. ‘Ah, so you wish to beg for clemency, do you?’

‘I just wanted to say something.’ Smith fixed the Ghast’s hard eyes with his own. ‘Now listen closely, alien. You may be about to conquer the galaxy, but at least I’ve not got a great big arse.’

462 paused and looked over his shoulder at the large red thing, shaped like a wasp’s nest, that protruded from the back of his trenchcoat. ‘That is not an arse. That is my stercorium.’

‘No doubt. I’m sure it is… fatarse.’

‘Ignorant human! This organ is essential to my digestive system, far more efficient than yours, and is used to produce nutrients that give me the strength to conquer lesser specii like your own!’

‘Sorry, could you repeat that? I couldn’t hear past your great big red arse.’

The Ghast commander snarled. ‘Hah! Laugh while you still can, puny Earthman. But I promise, there will be no mercy for you, Captain Smith. You will be crushed – utterly!’

‘You’re going to sit on me, then? With your big arse?’

462 gave a yelp of rage. He whipped around, his antennae quivering. ‘You have mocked my backside for the last time! You, guard! Fetch the cage!’

‘Stop it!’ cried Carveth. She was the wrong way up, dress over her head, arms flapping. Suruk held one of her ankles and was shaking her up and down. On the plus side, he had not injured her with spoons, but on the minus side, she was sure that her breakfast was about to get acquainted with her dangling hair. ‘Let go of me and put me down!’

‘As you wish,’ Suruk said.

Carveth landed on her head and said, ‘I meant the other way around.’

The alien sighed. ‘You sadden me. Has mankind become so decadent that its pilots are not willing to charge into a savage gunfight they will almost certainly lose anymore?’

Carveth rubbed her head and said, ‘No way. There’s two of us, Suruk! There must be a hundred of them. How are we to deal with that?’

‘Three. You forget Gan Uteki.’

‘Who’s that?’

He turned and reached for a spear by the door. ‘Gan Uteki, weapon of the ancestors, blade of the spirit world.’