Ditched (part 8)

    “So, where now?” There is no obvious exit this end of the cargo bay.

  “Well, this monstrosity managed to get into the room somehow...” Jimmy starts.

  “It stands to reason there must be cargo doors at the rear of the bay.” I concur. “You want me to climb over Crabzilla, don't you?”

  “You got any better ideas?”

  “I suppose its too late to apply for a transfer.”

  If we were able to crowd around the monitors were would have done, but we are under acceleration and moving about in the ship is dangerous. The pictures beamed back from the probe as it passes close to the incoming object are unimpressive in real-time, just a vague dot, maybe a blur, then a dot again. But the cameras are running as fast as technology allows and enhanced by the processing power back at base the stills are fantastic.

  There is a continual stream of amazed exclamations and wild theories from the crew, the object is definitely not a natural formation, almost certainly not of human manufacture and although it does not show in the visible spectrum, slowing itself down with some sort of engine. A ribbed vaguely spherical body follows the more angular, flattened bulb of the engines. No markings, the surface shows up as black and slightly shiny, although in places it has been pitted by high speed collisions.

  Ikaro, looking at images from spectra, gives us a rough estimate of the force, Fernandez uses this and the object's deceleration to give us a rough figure for the mass; this thing is heavy. We wait for better calculations from base.

  I double check the fuel usage and course projection figures on my screen, no change from earlier. A relatively speedy trick to Saturn, loop around the gas giant and then leave the ecliptic plane to rendezvous with the object somewhere just within the orbit of Mars. Other points marked on my screen indicate other missions with the same idea, our rivals. Our ship is mostly fuel tank and engine, bigger and more powerful than we have ever needed before. Not for the first time I wonder what the company originally designed these engines for.

  I slide myself up to what I suspect is Crabzilla's nose, trying not to look at it. I fail and realise that next to my nose is the horror's mouth parts, a ghastly maw I could easily fit my arm into. I steel myself and remember the sight of severing my own arm, suddenly it doesn't seem so bad.

  “I said climb over it, not kiss it.” Jimmy says, saved from the stench by not being real.

  “Its still more desirable than many of your romantic hook-ups.” I counter.

  I place my hand on what would have been the underside of the crab's carapace if it had been the right way up and slide it forwards as far as I can. There are no handholds. I slide myself to the side and stretch to hook my elbow around the place where the first leg joins the main body, briefly wondering if this is a shoulder in a crustacean.

  “I'm trying to think of some words of encouragement, but unless you want me chanting 'Mount that crab!' I think I'm going to remain quiet.” Encourages Jimmy.

  “You know,” I say between pants and grasps at the legs of over-sized seafood. “If I knew it would come down to this I would have paid more attention at school.”

  “I've just had a call from your school,” my legal guardian, a wild-haired, fifty-something, perpetual bachelor he was never prepared to take in two kids, but had been too in love with our mother to say no. “They've giving me a list of things you've done, you're suspected of having done or you've just plainly refused to do, they are threatening expulsion, unless I can get you under control.”

  “Is this where you tell me how ashamed my parents would have been, Brian?” I respond with all of a fourteen year old's defiance and disdain. Behind Brian the next generation of lower consumption jet engine rotates as it shows the simulated effects of high velocity airflow, if he was not so irate he would be trying to explain the intricacies to me.

  “No, Will, we both know how effective that approach is. I'm too busy to have a shouting match and there are things in the house that I would like to remain unbroken.” I pause, uneasy at this new tact, vaguely aware of some psychology being used, but unsure of how to counteract it. “I want you to take a look at this.” He holds out a tablet, displayed on the screen is a prospectus for a vocational course.

  “You probably don't know the names of the people on the interview panel, but at least three of them know yours, they worked closely with your mother. I'm not guaranteeing anything, but you get the right academic scores and you're as good as there.” Absently I copy the document to my own devices as I scroll down open-mouthed.

  “Orbital and interplanetary operations and zero gravity fucking engineering!” I forgot myself and who I am talking to. “How...?”

  “The house server records more than your searches for porn, you know.” I wince. Brian continues. “This is bribery, if I see an immediate improvement I will send the application, you have my support and backing as you maintain a clean record. Drink, girls, drugs, parties, well, I know what I was like when I was your age, but if anything gets back to me, the school or the police its game over. Do we have a deal?”

  “Imogen?” I suddenly remember my sister, the course, the job, its what I want more than anything, but it would mean leaving her behind.

  “Imogen is doing well, unlike you she's settled here. By the time you're through with all the training and earning she will probably be starting out on a career of her own. Don't worry, I'm not going to kick her out in the cold, compared with you she's the perfect house guest.”

  We shake hands, my teen-aged brain still trying to work out how it was possible to be both conned and to get exactly what you want at the same time.

  I push another over-sized leg out of my way, it slides back and I have to catch myself before it undoes all my hard work and dumps me back on the floor. I let it know exactly what I think of it loudly and wait for Jimmy's wisecrack.

  “You should take a rest.” He quips.

  “Because a giant dead crab would make a comfortable mattress?” I ask, confused on his sudden switch. He gives me a funny look, as though I was attempting to scramble over a giant dead crab in the middle of a respectable restaurant.

  “No, because you heart rate has become elevated and your blood chemistry is showing signs of extreme stress.” Doctor Jimmy is back.

  “I really can't think what could be causing that, although I did miss going for a jog this morning and I've had a nagging feeling something is wrong and out of place all day.”

  “Remember the old calming techniques they tried to teach us back in the day?”

  “Oh, yes, they never did realise that I don't control my breathing very well when thinking about calm blue oceans.”

  “Well, try to imagine something that is not a calm blue ocean, and just take it a little easier.”

  “Yes, oh guru, should I become one with the crab?”

  “I don't think she's really your type.” I shake my head, take a deep breath and continue my efforts in a more measured manner.

  I cast my eye around the crew as we all pretend to be busy, but really we are all bored. Fed up of the constant vibration of the engines, the force of the acceleration, of each other's habits and company. The excitement will begin soon enough, but the day-to-day is living in close, crowded proximity, with little to do that we have not already been doing for the last few months. More than once Jimmy's casual word has kept me from harsh and rash utterances.

  The last few notes play over my headphones, it is a rearrangement of some tune I should be able to name, but cannot place, my latest message from home. The accompanying text reads -Latest effort, watcha think? I grin to myself and reply -Too much plink, not enough plonk. I forward the track to Fernandez, who enjoys jazz and Jimmy, who hates it.

  I glance over at Liefman, I look of intent concentration on her face as she pretends to be running a diagnosis on the main communications array. Pretty, in a compact sort of way, astute and smarter than me, she is the sort of girl I should have probably fallen for thirty years ago. Thirty years ago I might have fallen for her if she was a guy, I remind myself. But, concussed and confused, I had pinned everything on a strange and funny pianist, who just happened to turn out to be the most marvellous creature in the world. I start to wonder when was the last time I missed her this much.

  Liefman's real efforts are to find a way to intercept messages between base and certain members of the crew without anyone noticing. I already had my suspicions when she contacted me using a repurposed debugging tool with her own, the company is not telling us something. Once again I tell myself that I am too old for this and should have resisted the invitation.

  Finally I half slide, half fall off Crabzilla, panting and lying in a uncomfortable heap between yet more giant legs. I am halfway through an attempt to right myself when I realise that this particular motion relies on the leverage gained through having lower limbs.

  “Okay, that's it. This is your last warning, you either rest now or I am going to do something to make you.” Doctor Jimmy waves a finger at me.

  “Like what? Jazzhands? Naked interpretive dance? Jimmy, you're not real.”

  “Don't tempt me. Look, are you getting good advice from any of your other friends? No, because just right now I am the only one caring for you.”

  “Don't get your knickers in a twist. I'm too knackered to go anywhere for a little while.” I shuffle myself around a little, close my eyes and try to forget that my pillow is a giant monster from beyond the stars. “Tell me a bedtime story.”

  “Once upon a time there were two boys, they were the best of friends and maybe a little bit more, they went everywhere together. But then one day one of the friends grew bored of his chum...”

  “Jimmy, if this is about my wife, you knew we would never last, you told me to go for it.”

  “No, Bill, this is much later than that. He locked him in a tall, tall tower.”

  “I'm sorry, Jimmy, I'm not going to start feeling guilty about something I don't remember, I have too much going on in my life right now.”

  “But one day he hurt himself and really needed his friend. The friend didn't know how long he had been locked in the tower but he knew his chum really needed his help, so he did everything he could and hoped he wouldn't get put back in the tower.”

  “You suck at stories, Jimmy, but I appreciate the company.”

  There is another crash from the inside of the room Liefman is using in our latest hide-away. I knock loudly, but get no response. The handle doesn't turn and using my watch to over-ride the lock yields no more success than asking her to let me in did. I change tactics, hoping the door is of similar quality to the soundproofing, and apply my left foot liberally.

  The door is sufficiently parted from its hinges by the fifth or sixth attempt to render the lock mostly useless. I wrestle the now dented door out of the way and enter the room like the conquering hero to find Liefman alone and crying, sat on the bed. The room is mostly wrecked, but in typical Liefman style the electronics equipment is stacked neatly, wires furled.

  “Er...” I start, unsure. “I...er...thought...” I stop and park myself next to her on the bed, feel awkward for a second and then place my arm around her and pull her closer. A couple of people, weapons drawn, peer through the wreckage of my ingress. I wave them away with my free arm, it briefly occurs to me that I should probably know their names, but things have been too hectic lately to make friends.

  We sit like that for a while. I think about the things we have lost, friends, favourite places, freedom, there is no surety, no constant left in the world. Everything is a maelstrom and we are at its centre. Jimmy shows himself, but can offer no help.

  “Hseng's message.” She says at last. We had picked up the message, distributed widely through the nets as though she wanted everyone to see it, eight months ago, before the Indian outbreak. A short video of Hseng herself shutting off all of the safeguards and throwing herself into the molten heart of an orbital smelting furnace, over the upsetting visuals played a message sung in the language of the Angels – More and more, but less and less, broken, failing, mistake.

  “Ikaro said he was fragmenting, Saunders told me there were more and more of him inside his head. Jimmy thinks that there's a flaw in the Angels' work.”

  “She was talking about the Angels themselves, they were sick, what happened to Ikaro and Hseng and Saunders and probably some of the others as well, that was what was happening to the Angels. They were looking for others of their kind, to try and find a cure.” There is a sense behind it, Jimmy thought them lonely or lost, desperate fits better.

  “And how about you, how are you coping with that?” In many ways Liefman has become the crux of our shambolic resistance, I realise how much I rely on her.

  “Its odd, we're the same person so I don't always know where I end and she begins, but we have now come to an agreement, no conflict, I always was my own best friend. I hope that's enough for now. And you?”

  “Its different, I think.” I hope.

  “So what can we do?”

  “Finish it. Hunt Davis down, the real Davis, destroy him and then go hide somewhere until this can be fixed and we can't cause any more harm. You think Davis is suffering?”

  “Yes, but every time he fragments he just shunts it into a new clone.”

Ditched (part 7)

   “Shit.” I stop and slump to the floor.

  “Its dead. Some sort of semi-organic robot?” Jimmy peers at the thing with a complete lack of fear.

  “Not that, that's just disturbing, I can handle disturbing.” I hope I am handling the whole thing quite well. “The map, I figured out where we are.”

  “Ah, do you know of any good restaurants in the area? I have a sudden hankering for seafood.”

  “Ah, indeed, Jimmy. Another thing that I had to work out on my own?” I refuse to be sidetracked.

  “And what, exactly, have you worked out?”

  “We're not on Earth.”

  “So when do you leave?” She asks me over her coffee cup.

  “Hold on, I've not agreed to anything yet, the whole thing is crazy, I stopped being a spaceman twenty years ago.” I look down at the drink in my own cup, it contains no caffeine, no calories and if I did not know that then I am sure it would taste just fine.

  She laughs, a full on hearty outburst of amusement. Stops, looks me in the face and then starts again. She puts the cup down and the house remotes appear to clean up the spilled liquid. Eventually she has herself under enough control to speak.

  “You'll go, there's no question. There's this big alien spacecraft thingy hurtling towards Earth and they want someone with experience to go out there and talk the aliens or whatever into signing up with them before anyone else gets a chance. They asked you. You'll do it because you hate what you do now. You'll do it because you would do anything to get back up there. You'll do it because its one last chance to be the hero. You'll do it because Jimmy asked. You'll do it because if you don't then someone else will. I knew exactly what you were like when I married you, and you are still the same man. I still love that man. If you ever stopped being that man then I would leave you like a shot.”

  I stare at her, wondering if I should be hurt that she managed to distill me into such a small container or be proud that she knows me so well.

  “Call them and get going. I am supposed to be working at the piano and you keep distracting me, I'll see you when you get back. Call ahead if you are bringing aliens over for dinner.”

  “You're right. But before you ask, I honestly have no clue where we are. That's something we'll have to find out together.” Jimmy gestures at me to move onwards, but I still have questions.

  “Is there anything you are going to tell me, or do I have to play detective with my own past?”

  “You've had quite a bump on the head, its best if you sort out those memories and file them away on your own. Trust doctor Jimmy.”

  “Like I trusted you when we were making the comm-link repairs back on Brayard Station?” I lift myself back up and start to make an attempt at the lip of the door.

  “That was a drunken bet, besides, they never managed to pinpoint the blame.”

  The spin of Brayard Station imparts a feeling of weight, but it is not enough that pacing back and forth is advisable. Still, I imagine Jason Vickers, would be doing that if there was space in the room. The entire team is here, sixteen cadets, the graduates of Beyond Inc.'s training program and the next generation of space miner. Vickers is only a few years older than us, but he has the benefit of practical experience and the authority the company have invested him with. He is not happy.

  “I just can't see why any one of you would think this was in any way safe, advisable or funny.” He has been holding forth like this for quite a while and his face is red. “And seeing as no one of you is willing to come forth and admit responsibility, I have no alternative but to punish the lot of you!”

  Behind him a display screen shifts its focus from a woman's ecstatic face to a close-up of male genitalia. There is a cough as one us suppresses his giggles.

  I cast my mind back to the exercise, all of us working together to upgrade the station's array of communications equipment, a mix of drone piloting, actual space-walking, internal alterations and the job of co-ordinating it all together. Working outside of the station, I had followed Jimmy's instruction to the letter, but at the time had not had a clue what the strange box I was wiring up was supposed to do, I should have known better.

  “With all due respect, and I know you don't want to here this,” A voice from the back, the class's acknowledged expert on signal processing, someone who could not be far from the centre of this little plot. He chokes off as Vicker's withering gaze turns upon him, swallows and then regains his courage. “I don't know exactly how it was done, but if it is anything like I suspect, I think I can turn it into a kind of unintended upgrade.”

  “Really? Do you think you can do it within the hour I have before I need to make my report to the central office and make arrangements to deport the lot of you back down to solid ground?”

  There are a number of gulps in the crowd.

  I lose my balance and tip unceremoniously into the room, coming to rest uncomfortably close to one of Crabzilla's outstretched, but unmoving limbs. There is a smell in the air, something that would turn my stomach if I was convinced it was plumbed up correctly. It is horrid, but it convinces me that the monster is quite and irrevocable dead. I detach the lingering horror and replace it with curiosity.

  “Some sort of robot, you said. A weapon, or do you think its into construction?” I ask Jimmy.

  “If it is a weapon then we got shot down for a reason, I certainly wouldn't want that thing getting close to me if it was angry.” He crouches close to it. “Would you trust that thing to build your extension?”

  “Fair point. Do you think they grow them or build them?” I swallow my revulsion, reach out and stroke my hand along the smooth shell.”

  “Something between the two, that exoskeleton is probably an metallo-ceramic composite, and most of the muscles are probably artificial, but it certainly smells like a dead crab. Maybe his friend has some answers.” He straightens himself and gestures at the human corpse.

  “Maybe she has a spare pair of legs I can borrow, this is getting tiresome.” I drag my carcase over to the dead woman. The overalls carry the name of Jun, her mirror shades are shattered, much like her spine, I stare at her legs before I work out the visual puzzle. “She has arms for legs.”

  “Enhancement for zero gee work?” Jimmy suggests. “Meet the new humans.”

  Bayard station has changed, other larger facilities have taken over its former duties as a base for the rock catchers and there is little left from its use as a wartime command centre. Nowadays it is home to Beyond Inc.'s experimental test labs, although their security division still maintains a presence. I estimate it is twice its original size, although as the transport approaches I catch sight of the memorial to Irena Ivanov we welded to the outer ring, metal stars and her old helmet, to remind us of her supreme bravery.

  A new docking system catches the shuttle, cargo and personnel taking different routes into the station. Jason Vickers, now carrying the rank of colonel in the security arm of Beyond Inc.'s parent company, intercepts me in the disembarkation area with a hearty handshake, a little too hearty in this unspun area.

  “Steady there, I've not acquired my space legs yet.” I grin, part of my soul ecstatic to be back in free-fall at last.

  “Apologies, its not often I meet one of the old boys up here, most of our generation are now ground-bound. Talking of space legs, Medical want you to pop in for the final fitting on your new prosthesis. But before you get into all that I thought you'd like to meet the boys on your new crew.”

  He leads me through the rotation lock into the spinning part of the station and then into a elevator that takes us slickly down, gaining weight. I recall the old elevators, slower and less reliable than the ladders. A short hike along the main outer corridor brings us to a small meeting room containing a small crowd of people I mostly recognise from their files and, mercifully, a small buffet.

  “Richard Saunders, one of the finest drone operators on our books,” Vickers starts the introductions with an earnest young black American, they are all young. “Ikaro Itaki, propulsion engineer; Ilse Liefman, electronics and communications engineer; Roger Davis, materials science; Henrik Peterson, linguistics and diplomacy; Tseng Hueng, medical and biological science; Felicity Patrick, policy officer; Maria Fernandez, physics and navigation; and of course, Muhammed Mahdi you already know.”

  “Intimately.” Says Jimmy, giving me a sandwich and a wink.

  Davis looks me up and down with disdain, a scowl on his pasty white face.

  “I don't wish to put a downer on this reunion for some of you, but shouldn't we be putting our piloting in the hands of someone with a little more current knowledge and experience.” He drawls, the accent too hard to place in today's mostly mobile population. Jimmy, my second in one too many brawls back in the day, puts his hand on my arm. Vickers jumps in with the iron edge that he used to discipline my squadron all those years ago.

  “Captain Larkin has been recalled because we wanted someone not prone to making rash decisions and he beat the next pilot on the intercept simulation by a good six hours.”

  “Besides,” I add. “I was probably consulting on ninety percent of the components in that tub we'll be flying as well as most of our likely competitors' birds, your own score in the centrifuge doesn't come close to mine from last week and any time you want to book a court for a game of zero-gee baskets we'll show you what a bunch of old space-farts can do.”

  Jun yields no new clues. Nothing in her pockets, no terminal, if she has one then it must be internal.

  “Looks like whatever we wanted to accomplish, we were doing it while leaving as few clues as possible. Helpful.” I resign myself to living perpetually in the dark, no-one wants to tell me anything.

  “Probably doing something naughty, Bill.” Observes Jimmy.

  “That's Commander Larkin to you, Group Co-ordinator Mahdi, wasn't it?”

  “Ah, the glory days of directing orbital rock interception. Besides, if this was secret you were probably acting under some sort of codename, Commander Legless.”

  “I've still got half a body more than you, Group Co-ordinator Realised Psychosis.”

  “You'll remember eventually, just try...”

  “Not to panic, got it. You realise we have no idea where the fuck we are in the galaxy, what the fuck we were doing here or how the fuck we are going to get out of this mess and we are arguing like an old married couple?” The ship moves slightly under me to emphasise my point.

  “Just like old times, eh?”

  “I'm not going back.” Saunders tells me.

  “Don't be soft,” I reply. “Set the bomb and we'll be gone.”

  “Bill, I can't do this any more, I feel like I've eroded away to nothing. There was two of me in here, now there are many, all of me talking at once. Each one take a little more of me away and I can't hold myself together.” He is wasting time, our drones are slowly being knocked offline by the counter-attack and before long we'll be vulnerable.

  “Come on, we'll get through this together, Liefman and I can both help you.” My guilt mounts, he has followed me this far and I missed the signs that he was losing it, Hseng's coded message starts to make sense.

  “What's the hold-up?” Liefman over the comm. “You're running out of time.”

  “No, I'll defend the bomb, give you some time to get clear.” He is trembling, fighting his own nervous responses.

  “He's too far gone,” Opines Jimmy “There must be a flaw in the Angel' work, Ikaro was complaining of something similar before he was captured.” Captured and dismantled, Jimmy is right, I just thought it was the stress of our whole situation, the implications start to creep across my brain.

  “Saunders...Rich...” I am out of words to say.

  “Go!” Saunders and Liefman in my ear simultaneously, our time has run out.

  I sprint back into the connecting tunnel, a trio of drones cutting the air ahead of me. One of the drones succumbs to some sort of electronic attack, turns on its fellows and takes one out before it is disabled by the remaining quadcopter. Damaged, the final machine lags behind me and is lost in the gloom.

  A countdown appears in the corner of my vision-enhancing goggles and I increase my efforts to avoid incineration. Something flashes in my vision to the right and I flinch away, but not fast enough to avoid an aerosol spray. My right hand catches a good amount of the spray and then I am past whatever machine just ambushed me. I see my glove starting to dissolve.

  “Jimmy!” In the heat of the moment I forget just to form the words in my mind and it comes out as a shout.

  “On it, invasive nano-compound, aggressive, might be a problem.” He replies.

  “Shit! Options?”

  “Safest and quickest is to lose the hand, separating at the elbow now, grab your knife.” Jimmy is calm, it is not his hand.

  Left-handed I saw at my sleeve with my knife and then with a wince plunge it into the flesh at my elbow. Jimmy's work means the tissue parts easily, but butchering yourself is never pleasant, then pain is mostly but not completely dampened. Blood spurts sluggishly from the wound, then stops, cut off. I slice away the last of the fabric and the grisly totem falls to the floor, dissolving and becoming something else.

  I increase my speed back up to that of a run, trying to protect my wet stump. The timer ticks down to zero.

Ditched (part 6)

  “This is hardly the speediest escape in history.” I tell Jimmy, dismayed at my own progress.

  “Well, from some angles you do look like a snail.” I scowl at his comment. “Just around the corner there might be a nice big lettuce leaf for you.”

  “Tell you what, why don't you scoot ahead and find out for me?” Make believe friends must have their uses somewhere. “And take that dazzling wit with you.”

  “Sorry, buddy, gotta stay here and look after you.”

  “You still making sure I don't panic?”

  “Just making sure nothing new comes out of that murky memory of yours and spooks you.”

  “Have you seen this on the newsfeed?” I ask her over breakfast. Cereal, juice, no coffee, definitely sticking to the dietary regime this time.

  “Hanson working with the philharmonic? He mentioned something about it when we were recording last month, I expect a call some day soon asking if I'll arrange the piano section.” We've lived together for so long, but some mornings we are just in completely different worlds.

  “Sorry, I meant my newsfeed.” I flick the article across to her screen. She browses it, flicking a wayward strand of hair out of the way of her spoon.

  “Its a bit technical, isn't it just a rogue rock? Surely they'll just catch it or blow it up or something.” She reads scientific and space industry terms much the same way I read music.

  “Its not from our solar system, its moving really fast, its a very funny shape and they think it might be slowing down.” I explain.

  “You don't mean people are calling it an alien spacecraft? That's just silly.”

  “They probably are on the populist channels, here people are speculating that its something someone launched in secret during the war.” Twenty years of the accord holding peace between the various larger powers, but still no-one trusts anyone else.

  “Well ask Jimmy if it is, he's still plugged into all that.”

  I pull myself another half dozen centimetres forwards and then stop to rest, as I drop back to the ceiling I realise I can just about see down the corridor. It runs for about three metres before some sort of structural brace bisects it. There are two doors off it, the one on the far side is buckled and looks like it is probably stuck closed, the near one looks open, but the angle is wrong for me to see properly.

  “Not a dead end, then. Looks like Billy the snail can crawl a little further.” Jimmy encourages me.

  “Billy the snail thinks that leaving Jimmy the dead weight behind might speed things up a little. Get off my back, this would be easy in zero gee.”

  I catch the ball, take a fraction of a second to note my new trajectory and then hurl it towards the goal. It looks destined to miss, but the slight drift imparted by the spin of the station carries it to glance of the inside of the bar and into the net.

  “Eight-three, I believe. Not bad for a team of dilapidated old space-farts.” I crow. Davis scowls at me, Liefman shakes her head and Peterson covers his face in shame. Jimmy floats over and gives me a high five that sends us both slightly out of control.

  “I give in,” admits Peterson. “Apparently there is a reason why we are letting the veterans fly this mission.”

  The third member of our team, Colonel Vickers, suggests we leave it there, so we agree the point has been made and head back to the parts of the station spun fast enough to simulate gravity to collect on the bet at the bar.

  “Fucking hell,” I say to Jimmy when we are out of earshot, trying to regain my breath without making it obvious. “We're definitely not as young as we used to be.”

  “One more push?” Jimmy raises an eyebrow and once again gives me his 'punch me here' smile.

  “If you're so eager to see what's through that door then why don't you take a peek and let me know?”

  “And spoil the surprise?”

  “Is this the surprise I should not be panicking over? Because if you don't start filling in the blanks before long I think I might just panic to see exactly why I shouldn't.” The ship moves around us again, I brace myself for a catastrophic slide, but again it settles.

  “You must be getting tired, you're making even less sense than usual.” I am already pulling myself forwards again before I realise I have risen to his gibe.

  I ease myself around the corner into the corridor. The doorway has a lip on the ceiling that could hamper my progress, but also provide some thing to pull myself along with. The door itself is either open or missing. I grab the edge and pull my head into the room.

  The room appears to be some sort of cargo bay, with boxes mostly still attached to the walls, that much is easy to figure. The body of a broken woman lies like discarded laundry not far inside the room. Most of the rest of the room is filled with something that my mind struggles to make sense of.

  There are what I take to be legs, legs with far too many joints encased in a grey armour or shell. A lot of legs, one seems to be equipped with an industrial cutting tool, another with something that could be a gun or blowtorch. The legs spill upwards from a carapaced body, probably two metres across, something like a massive crab lying on its back, it takes me a moment to realise it is probably upside down like the rest of this place.

  The structural spar the blocked the corridor has crushed this alien monstrosity, it lies in a pool of its own greenish fluids. It would be sensible to consider it dead, but I freeze in terror, waiting for it to twitch, to come alive and reach for me. My heartbeat echoes in my ears, so I force myself to relax, not very easy with Crabzilla watching me.

  “What the...”

  “...fuck is that?” The tunnel between the spaceport and the main body of the settlement gives me my first proper view of this new planet. New to me, I remind myself.

  Something moves in the refuse pile so thoughtlessly dumped outside the enclosed human habitats. Small quick movements, a pause, a scuttle, too many legs. I widen my view to try to gain a sense of scale and see that it is not alone. Swarming over the detritus is an army of giant, dark grey crabs, digging, shuffling, chewing.

  “Sorting the settlement's rubbish you may see the recycling crustaceans.” The drone guiding me accepts my outburst as a query. “These were genetically modified from crabs brought by the original settlers, to survive in the local atmosphere and to exist consuming waste and convert it via their tailored intestinal bacteria back into usable materials. Their meat is considered a delicacy which can be purchased at many stalls and restaurants.”

  “Sounds delicious,” Jimmy comments, “Ask the tourbot if you get fries with that.”

  I grimace and continue along the tunnel, wondering how much longer I have to endure the awful music piped in to make the foot slog more bearable. The strings finish their journey into crescendo, orgasm, spasm and then are silent, replaced by an even more annoying choral group. I begin to doubt if intelligent life ever left Earth and journeyed to the stars.

  I surprise myself by humming along, it seems familiar and then realisation dawns. Someone has left a message in the language of the Angels, disguised as music. There were only nine people who could have done that, four are certainly dead, three probably, one hopefully and I did not do it myself.

  “Decipher that for me, Jimmy.” I subvocalise.

  “I have left here, looking for those who started this, follow me if you must, travel lightly for we trail destruction in our wake.”

  “Liefman.” Jimmy concurs. “I thought she was captured, I never dreamed she escaped the entire thing.”

Ditched (part 5)

   The terminal's screen fails to wake up to my touch. Not having any pockets on my ruined clothing, I lie back and secure it to my own wrist at which point it wakes with a soft beep. The screen announces that it is detecting a new user and I should apply thumb and voice prints to affirm identity, so I do.

  “Commander, eh?” The screen welcomes me but disappoints me by only addressing me with a title, still its more than I had. It goes on announce that the system is on full lockdown, limiting communications options to 'none', information access is denied and there is one stored message.

  “Helpful, we still have no idea where we are.” Jimmy says, despite not being at the correct angle to see the screen.

  “I still outrank you, Jimmy.” I fumble with the interface and bring up the message, two unhelpful words.

  Good luck – Y.

  An attachment looks more promising, a map of somewhere I don't recognise and two intersecting lines. An icon suggests this is a video so I play it. Two dots travel and meet each other while a timer runs. In trying to stop it I accidentally rotate the image. One dot flies from one location to another whilst the second dives on it from great height. An interception from orbit.

  “Someone was in a hurry to make a meeting,” Jimmy comments.

  The bird is stable, screaming through the atmosphere in level flight after its plunge from orbit. There is an acknowledgement from Jimmy as our drone escort take up positions ahead of us. Launched from an allied algae factory ship mid-Atlantic they have been repainted in bright colours to mark the nature of our mission.

  There is a knock at the cabin door, I press the release and the most important of our passengers enters the cramped flight deck.

  “Well boys, how does it feel to be flying the last mission of the war?” Nicole Ayrault, the woman who has come to represent the corporate side of these negotiations is to meet with representative of the remaining governments and the United Nations for the ceremonial signing of an agreement designed to end conflicts and realign the world's power.

  “Its a relief,” I reply. “I look forwards to being able to retire and let the computers fly these things without someone trying to fry them.”

  “Well, no matter what you choose to do next, you can rest assured that you made the world a better place.” Being an supersonic bus driver, I have met her before, a hard bargainer, with a reputation for listening before speaking.

  “We made the world a different place, that's true.” Last time we met she told me she valued truth, it seems with a hold full of the corporate elite she is towing the company line.

  “Well, we have completely repainted the political map, but feel proud you fought in the first global war when the civilian population was not directly targeted. This agreement gives us the power to move forwards and build the world of the future.” She sounds like she is quoting straight from her speech. Jimmy gives me a warning look, but it is too late, I have already launched.

  “I used to have a sister until she was 'not directly targeted'. There are millions out there going hungry because of the global recession, but they can be thankful the war hasn't touched their lives. I just drive your taxi, but I hope you build your world of the future quickly, because someone has made a big mess of the world of today.”

  “Well...” She starts, but Jimmy jumps in quickly.

  “You are going to have to excuse my colleague, Ma'am, he hasn't seen his wife in a while, so is a little on edge and I am going to need his concentration to help me land this plane. I am sure he is as thrilled as I am that all this has finally come to an end. Now, if you wouldn't mind taking your seat, we are approaching crowded airspace at several times the speed of civilian traffic and we may need to apply the brakes sharply.” He gives her his big, everything-is-fine grin and she exits the cabin. Turning to me, he gives a sterner expression. “You are going to tell me what was in that message before you single handedly restart global hostilities.”

  “Any idea where this is a map of?” I ask Jimmy as he shows no sign of going away. I look closer, estimating distances from the re-entry glide path this is a map of continents I have never seen before.

  “Not a clue, somewhere I've never been before.” There is a sudden lurch and I slip on the deck. The craft has gained a slight tilt it was missing before.

  “I don't think I'm safe here.” I tell Jimmy.

  “No, looks like its time to get moving.” I feel a faint tug at the point where my body abruptly ends and see the nightmare rope attaching me to Peterson's corpse detach. No longer the conjoined twin of a cadaver I take a look around to try and determine which way to go, I pick a direction which seems to have fewer obstacles and start to drag my carcass along what was once a ceiling.

  “You, know, Jimmy, this would be a lot easier with legs.”

  “Feel free to crash your next flight a little gentler.”

  “Are you okay, I saw it on the news and it looked awful!” Her face shows real concern.

  “The video makes it looks much worse than it was.” Towing a tail of flame I had put the shuttle down on a commercial runway, there certainly had been a lot of fire.

  “The commentary made it sound like you were going to crash, if I had known it was you I would probably have passed out.” She has been my wife for five months, we have spent very little of that time together, she looks more ravishing every time I phone her.

  “We just caught a bad bit of luck, computer error put us off course and we were mistaken for a military bird, by the time they realised their error they had put a hole in our backside.” We had attempted a covert drop using a converted civilian shuttle, they had seen right through it, but didn't have anything fast enough to finish us off after the initial missile hit.

  “So does that mean you're going to be in town for my concert tomorrow night?”

  “I'd fall burning from orbit any day just to be with you.”

  Going is slow, picking my way around anything too sharp to drag my carcass across. There appears to be some sort of access corridor to the aft of the cockpit, or at least in the direction I have taken as aft.

  “So what happened after the war, Jimmy?” I haven't left him behind with Peterson, so I figure I might as well, use him as an information source. “I remember working with someone called Liefman, but she wasn't part of our squadron, so that must be later.”

  “Its all in there, probably, remember it for yourself.” I have had enough of this.

  “Screw you, Jimmy, what happens when you get into that corridor and I need something you don't want to tell me really quickly?”

  “Your winning attitude and willingness to crash any vehicle placed under your control made certain that you were drummed out of active flight duty as soon as possible. You lost your leg proving them right and went into contracting, which you hated.”

  “We had fifteen kids and lived happily until the giant crab monsters invaded.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Will, I know this isn't what you want to hear, not right now when it looks like the war might finally be over and we can settle down.” Her voice cracks and my heart stops.

  The message is audio only, with everything going on we are supposed to be in a media lockdown, but being a pilot I can smuggle all sorts of things back into orbit and that brings favours.

  “Believe me, that's what I want so much.” My heart restarts timidly.

  “I slipped and injured my wrist a week back, so no piano playing. I went to get it checked out and when at the doctors they ask me when I last had a full check-up, which was probably never. So I let them go the whole hog on me.” I picture her playing with the strand of hair that always escapes her attempts to tame it.

  “They even checked out my...” Embarrassed pause, she is the only person I know who still blushes when genitalia is mentioned. “...Lady bits. They're doing further test, but it looks like I can't have children.” I want to gather her in my arms and tell her its okay, tell her that she is all I need, tell her only a fool would bring children into a crazy world like this. But she is on Earth and I am in orbit, and any attempt to get a message out will have me thrown in the brig.

  “Will, I'm sorry.” The sound of a sob, hers or mine I can't tell.

  “William. That's my name.” I tell Jimmy, redundantly.

  

  “Fireball Billy, you build it, I burn it.” My companion agrees with glee. “Come see my fabulous display of wrecks. Take a flight with me, if you dare!”

  “Fuck off! I seem to remember you weren't exactly scared to fly with me.” I put my hand on something sharp, wince and hold my it up to my face to see the damage.

  “When something did go wrong you always had a habit of making it home.” There is a small drop of blood, but as I watch it shrinks and disappears back inside the wound. Its hardly the weirdest hacen'sthing that has happened to me recently.

  “And I thought you were just still chasing my arse.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but your gorgeous rear is currently on the missing persons list.”

  “Bill, we need to disappear completely.” Liefman's voice through the suit communicator is almost conversational in tone, as though we were not drifting untethered, it is a long time since we have managed to have an unmonitored chat. Four suits only connected by a flimsy rope slowly orbiting the Earth.

  “I know a bunch of people on the west coast of the USA who will help us out there.” Below us dawn marches across the face of Africa, I almost feel it is a shame that we both have spent too long in orbit to find it novel or breathtaking.

  “That's if Alhacen's contacts at Palmic Inc. are on the level and don't just want their own piece of us.” Behind us a transport pod is fired from the space station in a brief flash of light on its way to Palmic Inc.'s orbital manufacture platform.

  “Everyone wants a piece of us, if we hadn't become minor celebrities they would have dissected us already. With Davis and Hseng running the shop it is only a matter of time until they do.” Slow drifting is excruciating for a species evolved for propelling itself, but if we move any faster we risk someone taking a closer look.

  “Yeah, but your enmity with Davis and the affair with Peterson certainly hasn't helped us in the slightest.” Automated systems have queried our suits and are satisfied we are human, the iris scanner in the HUD giving our identities, but a sneaky hack in the system by a friend of Liefman prevents them being flagged up as suspicious.

  “Peterson was gone, there was nothing of him left, we did him the only favour we could. Davis is a fucking prick and no mistake.” As expected, it is only matter of time before our disappearing act is discovered, a quartet of drones power out from the station to intercept the suits. We use the manoeuvring jets to gain what speed we can, but it is a forgone conclusion.

  When they drag the suits in the airlock they discover the gristly truth. They are empty, controlled remotely by servos, the iris scanners foiled by a removed eyeball, the conversation relayed by radio. Foiled, they go through their records and find irregularities in the weight of the transport pod dispatched shortly after our faked escape. The recovery of the pod and exposure of the conspiracy causes friction with Palmic Inc., but the four bodies expected to be found within are missing.

  A string of malfunctions, oversights and hacks mean that when the shuttle launched from the station an hour earlier is hijacked by a gang of war veterans and landed on a camouflaged runway in the Ural mountains, the miscreants and four stowaways escape without capture. Newscasts notice the increased tension, but fail to realise it as the first step in a new war.

Ditched (part 4)

  “You're dead, Jimmy,” I look up at my impossible friend, his face distorted by a tear that trickles down towards my ear. “I killed you. I should have followed orders, I should have let them crash.”


  “Old news, buddy, I forgave you long ago. Don't break down on me now.”


  “Whatever became of us, Jimmy? Why did you ever stick with me? I only ever hurt you, but you were always there, always ready to forgive me.”


  “Ever since we were two lonely, scared kids, trying to be brave, trying to do a job a long way from anyone else. Craving comfort, understanding and intimacy. We moved on to other things, other people, but I knew we'd always have that connection, always be linked together.” He grins. “We still are. Don't let it bother you.”


  “Don't let it bother you,” The patch on the suit says 'Mohammed J. Mahdi', but I called him Jimmy when we were first paired up and the name stuck.


  I try to ignore the water, imagine it as the cold hard vacuum we are training for. The EVA suit is bulky and snug, it fails to hold out the crushing pressure I feel in my mind. I concentrate on the task in hand, replace the damaged system and let Jimmy close the hatch. I put my mind on the ultimate goal, escaping the atmosphere and working out in the booming space industry. Still the water is there, enveloping me, enfolding me, trying to smother me with its embrace.


  “Focus, they are monitoring your heart rate.”


  I decide that the rescue divers are not helping and close my eyes to block them out, there are no bubbles in space. I click the new aerial in place and tighten the securing bolts by feel alone, I have practised this and will not let some leftover childhood fear spoil my career.


  “Quit talking, I've got this.” But after they hoist us out of the tank and we are left alone to strip our suits and get dressed, he holds me until I stop shaking.


  I lie there a weep for a while, mourning something lost in the past. The rational part of my mind wonders what else I have left behind, feels the need to prod it to see if still hurts.


  “C'mon, don't flake out on me.” Jimmy is still there, his discovered non-existence hasn't dissuaded him.


  “You're not real.” I tell the ghost.


  “Sulking is not going to get us anywhere. You were doing well with the memories.” Jimmy is young, lacking the salt and pepper hair that gave him a distinguished look, the skin graft marks on his hands from a cabin fire and the lines on his face properly earned. He looks like he did when we joined the war ourselves.


  I arrive at her door in a state, wrung out and quivering, not knowing where else to go She takes one look at me before pulling me inside and making me coffee.


  “Imogen...” The cup sits in my hands gently scalding them, not hurting enough. “The fire in Bonne...”


  “Your sister? I saw it on the news, I didn't know...” I had introduced the two women in my life briefly at a party a couple of months ago, now my last family member was gone.


  “Her company signed the Freedom from Interference agreement last month, but their I.T. Supplier is in government pockets. Someone used a backdoor exploit to get into their servers.” I recalled the newscasts, smartly dressed people standing in from of a blackened building using phrases like 'multiple systems failures', 'tragedy', 'essential services deactivated', 'trapped' and 'cooling malfunction', talking and talking until I could stand it no more.


  “What will you do?” Her arm around my shoulders.


  “My company are starting a private security force, we reckon there's going to be fighting, the talking is failing, the electronic war is now killing people, we need to bring this to an end. I'm joining up.”


  “It won't bring Imogen back.”


  “It might save someone else.”


  “Imogen...” More tears blur my vision.


  “For fuck's sake, man, get your hand on the stick!” An angry ghost, he shakes his fist at me. He would probably punch me if he was real. “Becoming maudlin isn't going to help. What's next, the goldfish you found floating belly-up in the tank when you were six? The sandwich that seagull stole in Gothenburg? The boating accident that took your parents?”


  “Fuck off, Jimmy, you're still dead.” He's right, of course, I've spent too long lying on my back hurting and feeling sorry for myself. Time to do something. “And it was a fantastic sandwich, don't demean it.”


  I use my hands to manoeuvre my torso so I can search Peterson's body. My body feels light without the weight of my legs, but not being able to kneel makes movement awkward and clumsy. I hold my body up on one arm and use the other to check the corpses pockets, hovering on the edge of balance. My hand brushes his skin, paper-thin but not yet cold, something has sucked all vestiges of life from him. I guess that was me.


  The search reveals nothing until I disturb his coverall sleeve and see a small terminal strapped to his wrist, like a streamlined version of the old pilot's watch I used to wear. It takes an effort of mental and manual dexterity to figure out how to remove it without falling onto the cadaver, but finally I have my prize.


  “Good thinking,” say Jimmy. “We've done all we can here and should probably get moving.”


  “You talk a lot for a dead guy, Jimmy.”


  “There's different kinds of dead, you know.”


  The air fills with bullets and as I dive behind a vat I feel a tell-tale tug at my leg. I bark the command to engage and the armed drones commence to make a mess of their human adversaries.


  “Little more than a graze,” Jimmy tells me. “Won't slow you down.”


  I let my little mechanical army fight the battle without my clumsy interference. I scan the factory for any other sign of threat, but it is a fairly low-tech set-up considering the nanoculture in the vats. By the small scale of the place, it looks to be some sort of experimental manufactuary, a lab trying to cook up the next batch of nasty.


  “Verrek! You have to see this!” Liefman seldom breaks into profanity, or indeed her native language, so I risk sticking my head back round the side of the tank.


  The man has been pierced several times by the projectiles of the small, flying, insectile drones, but he still keeps backing away from them, dragging his shattered leg behind him. I stand and walk over to the figure, my leg inconveniencing me less than the rip in my trousers.


  “Davis, I killed you properly. You're dead.” I tell him despite evidence to the contrary.


  “You never did grasp the implications, did you? Try thinking big for a change. Why just be one person. Hseng figured it all out.” Davis hisses through pain.


  “Hseng was mad, she threw herself into a furnace. Why didn't you do the same?” I draw my gun.


  “And miss being the architect of the new world?” He gives me the smirk that had made me hate him the moment we first met, so I empty my clip into his face and chest.


  “Liefman,” I say into my microphone. “Bastard's cloned himself, this isn't good.”


  “Bring him back,” She replies into my earpiece. “We need to know if he managed to replicate the controller. And get out of there quickly, I've leaked the location and the scouring squad will be there very soon. Take the rear exit, I've arranged transport, should be okay for two if you don't mind being intimate.”


  “Is this all revenge for something I've done?” I say as it dawns on me how much of this could be my doing.



  “Yes. If he wakes up on the way, put a bullet between his eyes for me.”

Ditched (part 3)

  “We killed Peterson.” I slump back down, overwhelmed and unable to comprehend anything.


  “Peterson panicked. He couldn't handle it. Calm yourself, you're not like that.” I let my breathing slow, my heartbeat ceases its drumroll. Jimmy is right, panic doesn't serve any use. “That's better. Now tell me what's happening, I know its in there somewhere.”


  In here somewhere, part of a rich soup of anecdotes, memories, fantasies and lies. A sea of me that I am floating on the surface of, unable to make any sense of the murky depths. I am a creature of the air, the water scares me.


  My father's attention is held by the sailing boats, jostling for position out on the water. My mother's attention is held by the squirming and wailing bundle that is my baby sister. My attention is held by the sleek, shining form of a fish hanging beneath the jetty. My arm is only long enough to dangle my fingers in the water, my stomach against the worn wooden boards, I need to grasp the fish with my chubby, four year old hand. I inch myself forwards.


  The transition to the aquatic world is instant. I watch with sadness as the fish darts away from my reach, a stream of bubbles escaping from my mouth. I look up to the surface, getting further away and for the first time wonder how deep the water is. Things grow darker and I start to worry, but down here I cannot scream for my parents. As everything goes black I spy the light of the angels as they embrace me and bear me back up to the world of air.


  “The angels...”


  “The angels, yes, do you remember?” I have disappointed Jimmy, he needs me to be rational. The horror connected to me is what? Something important, something necessary. Jimmy knows the answer, he won't tell me, it must be better that I remember.


  “I remember the war, there were no angels.”


  “Tell me about the war, then.”


  “So,” I address the class,”Who can tell me what the Company Sovereignty War was really about?”


  “Freedom, the companies didn't like the laws.” I really need a drink, but it was drinking that got me into doing community service.


  “Good answer, but not quite right.”


  “Power, 'cus they are stronger than the nations.” I shuffle my weight onto the prosthetic leg, it tires slower.


  “Well, if they hadn't thought that then there wouldn't have been a war, but it wasn't a contest of strength.” I wonder if I was like these kids when I was their age, but this is a company school, all these children will work for Qorsa Inc. for at least a few years to repay their education, I had a choice.


  “Taxes, they didn't want to pay them.”


  “Bingo. It was all about the money.” The teacher gives me a disapproving look and looks ready to leap in with the company line, so I continue. “Or rather, it was all about what was happening to the money. Even back then some companies generated more money, employed more people and accomplished more than many nations. They had to pay tax to the nations they operated in and the nations used this money to pay for infrastructure (that's stuff like roads and cables), schools, armies and lots of other stuff. But the companies saw how much of this tax was being wasted on stuff no-one needed and thought they could do a better job for the people.”


  “We were overseeing the automatic drones for one of the asteroid mining companies,” I search for the name and to my surprise it pops up immediately. “Blaze Horizons. Basically flying them when the computers broke down again. Remember the input lag you used to get working drones that far out?”


  “Yes, its just like talking to you.” Jimmy's smile shows me I am putting the shards together properly.


  “The whole non-taxable space earnings thing kicked it off, then while the international courts were arguing about that along came the re-entry taxes, then the retaliation with the government incompetency suite. It was a muddy bureaucratic mess long before anyone fired a shot, no-one could follow the issues, it was all debates, meetings, summits and protests.”


  The rain has not dampened the fires of passion and hate, so we try to escape the erupting violence between the two protests as they meet in the plaza. I lose track of the others in the swirling mass of people and decide on hiding my “Manage Not Rule” T-shirt, but find I am not quick enough to escape being caught in a three-way scrum between both factions and the police. Something airborne and heavy catches me on the head me and half blinded I fall into an alleyway.


  Using the wall to guide myself and keep myself upright I follow the alley, but I hear people following me. I pick up speed, but stumble on something unseen, the world swims around me and I lose track of up and down. Strong fingers grasp my arm and propel me through a doorway and I collapse in a heap.


  “Eat mace, fuckers!” The door slams and standing over me is a vision, light streams through her fair disarranged hair, murky green eyes and sharp nose fit perfectly above a small mouth and pointed chin.


  “Are you an angel?”


  “No, I'm a jazz pianist.”


  “That's nearly lucid. You're doing well, except the parts where you drift off, still having trouble with names?” Everything shudders slightly as the world settles another couple of millimetres.


  “I can think of a few I would like to call you, if that's what you mean. The trip down memory lane is so much fun, but what are you not telling me, Jimmy? What's up with my eye for a start?” I have resisted touching my face, fearful of my hand coming away wet and sticky, fearful of what I might or might not touch with my fingers.


  “Its damaged, temporary, but there are more important things at the moment. We need you to remember more.”


  “The dead guy, Peterson, tell me what the fuck that's about before I lose my mind, what happened to me?” Something is caught in the tangle of wreckage above me, its not part of the craft we're in, could be organic, but its in too much of a mess, no flesh, to have been a person.


  “You've got to trust me, don't dwell on it. Exercise your arms a little, you might need them.”


  “And try not to panic, I get it. Can you answer me one question straight? What the hell is that hanging over there?” Jimmy may be infuriating at times, it is always a question of catching him off-guard.


  “The remains of your legs and left arm, we salvaged what we could and then let go. Happy? Now don't lose it.”


  “Don't lose it!” Jimmy cries over the cacophony of alarms. I vector the drive thrust to combat the manoeuvring jets.


  “Liefman, lock them out of the control systems,” I shout into my helmet microphone. Base has hijacked our systems through the main communications array and we are fighting our own ship.


  “Got it, main comms going offline!” My own screens flash her handiwork up among the frame stress reports and a list of errors from things that we have sabotaged and jury-rigged.


  There is a grinding noise that shudders through the ship as I correct the thrusters and our contact with the artefact slips. The window showing our trajectory updates its estimates, its more optimistic but not quite enough, the alien device will still plough into the Earth. I tell myself its just another misfired rock from my mining days, but we never had to catch anything this massive. I up the power an increment and glance at the stress indicators, not good.


  Over the internal voice comms I can hear the choral symphony that the artefact broadcasts onto our net, control has been trying to decode it since we picked it up. Liefman has been trying to find a way to block it. I have been trying to ignore it.


  There is a crash and the ship lurches, something in the nose section not designed to be used as a bulldozer gives way. A new alarm sounds in my helmet, the air pressure monitor has detected a leak.


  “Is there anything on this ship that doesn't have an alarm?” I ask as fight to keep the contact and the thrust under control. The stress indicators go red and start to drop offline.


  “If there is you haven't managed to break it yet.” Jimmy sends a revised engine profile to my screen and I okay it. The cabin shakes and settles again. Peterson starts screaming and I add him to the list of people excluded from the comm net. The trajectory indicator looks good, but only if I can hold the power in place without destroying the ship.


  There is a ripping sound and then external sounds lessen as the air flows out of the hull, wearing the vacuum suits was my one concession to Peterson's objections, looks like he saved our lives. Something inside the ship snaps, sending a shockwave through my seat, the floor erupts and a broken structural spar spears into the cabin. I recoil against my seatbelts but it is not aimed at me.


  Jimmy spasms once as the jagged point pierces through his suit, through his body and through his seat. I open my mouth to shout a denial, but without Jimmy's assistance the craft skews across the face of the artefact. I cut the engines, and try the manoeuvring thrusters, but we slam side on into the object, tumble out of the groove the nose was lock into and impact heavily into a rounded pod we thought might be some sort of sensor array. The impact sends my screens black, I catch a glimpse of stars through where the hull used to be.



  Over the sound of my own cries I can hear the angels singing.

Ditched (part 2)

  “C'mon, Chief, you can't keep on drifting out on me like that, I know there's a lot of shit going on in your head, but right now I want you to pay attention to what's happening out here. Can you do that for me? Can you nod your head to let me know you're in there and not panicking?”


  The idea to rebel crosses my mind, but I have no other ally, crazy hallucination or not. My neck seems seized solid, but I put on a display of will, I move my head a few millimetres and then relax it. I am rewarded by a coughing fit that shakes my body, refilling it with the sea of pain and threatening to send me back into unconsciousness.


  I choke on the smoke, now filling the cabin and starting to obscure the canopy and instruments. Systems are failing but the craft clears the border fencing and hits the hardtop, the landing gear holding up despite the warning messages and weapons damage. The logos of an allied company stream past as the 'chute deploys and I decelerate to a rapid and uncomfortable stop. I hit the manual release on seatbelts and canopy, hurl myself out of the seat, slide down the craft's side and fall to the tarmac, flopping on the hard surface, coughing and retching. Sirens and fire-retardant foam start to fill the air.


  “Easy there, relax, using two lungs takes a little getting used to. Was that nod for me?” I nod again, carefully. “That's good, it means I'm probably not going to have to start from day one and get you toilet trained. Try to keep still, we're getting there, but we're still not quite ready for moving about. Try your right arm, slowly now.”


  I ponder for a moment on which is my right arm, make a decision and find that it seems to be pinned under a heavy weight. Suddenly it spasms and jerks, I realise it was not trapped after all. With careful concentration I lift the aching limb until the hand comes into my eye-line. The flesh is red and a little puffy. I wiggle my fingers experimentally and am pleased to watch them respond.


  “Fantastic.” Says my spirit guide. “You'll be playing the piano before you know it.”


  We sit side by side on the stool, one arm around the other and one hand on the keys. She laughs as my inexpert touch messes up another chord and improvises around it. The tune becomes a parody of itself, a music joke at my expense. My attempts to get the song back on track make it worse, her laughter is infectious.


  I rub some life into my left arm and soon have the use of two limbs. My physical world appears to be pulling itself together, I feel stiff and raw, but there is no longer any great pain. My mental world is still a forest of clashing images, snatches of memory that I cannot put into order, familiar times that seem to have happened to other people.


  With a grinding noise the floor moves again, something shifts and crashes down to my left. I turn my head and try to bring my working eye to bear on the source of the sound, but all I can see is a damaged and dark visual display, some sort of liquid has adhered to its cracked surface and congealed.


  “Yes, we'll have to make a move before too long, but we'll cross that bridge in a while, stay patient and try not to panic. I need to know how well you're doing in there, can you remember your name? Or my name? Or even her name? C'mon, think deep, it must be in there somewhere, get your hand on the stick, push that throttle forwards.”


  “Are you really going to go through with this?” He brushes imagined dust from my dress uniform's collar, and looks straight at me with those eyes that could have won any girl he fancied, if he wanted to. His hand lingers on my shoulder. “Is this what you really want?”


  Through the small window I can see that the bridal party has decanted from the beribboned vehicles. There are murmurs from the chapel, I should already be stood at the altar. Our families are small, but the place is packed with her orchestra and my squadron. A break in hostilities coinciding with a gap in their schedule and we jumped at the chance without really thinking it through.


  “Yes.” I finally reply. I lift his arm away from my shoulder.


  “Then get your hand on the stick, push that throttle forwards.” He says. We clasp hands, reseat our caps and then Jimmy leads me out in front of the congregation.


  “Jimmy,” I force out of a throat only now coming under my control, little more than a croak, but Jimmy's face opens up with a warm smile of relief.


  “Hey, you're actually in there, how much do you remember?”


  “Bits...don't connect...wedding...her...flying...war...saving plane...” I realise that somewhere all these fragments must connect into a coherent narrative, but they flow too fast for me to put them in place. I am a crippled man trying to run.


  I fall again onto the gravel, a victim of the uneven and shifting surface. She starts forwards to help me but stops dead at my angry bark. Unwarranted, I pour my frustration into her and watch her recoil in horror. Tears are in her eyes and suddenly they are in mine. We cry for a while, then I let her help me up and readjust the prosthetic. She supports my weight all the way to the memorial and I tell her how little I am without her.


  “My leg!” I struggle to sit upright, but my lower body doesn't work properly. Jimmy stretches out his hand to hold me down, so I sink back onto the floor.


  “Easy, now, remember what I said about not panicking?” I recall Jimmy's penchant for relaying bad news in the calmest manner. “The leg is old news. You were in an old military surplus orbital-to-ground lander when the computers failed. You were drunk and you'd just had your licence revoked, but the inquest covered that up. Computer simulations say you should have hit the ground hard enough to leave a crater, but we all learned a few things about those birds during the war and you managed to bring it in horizontally. You still smeared it over a couple of kilometres, but the survivors forgot how you basically hijacked the craft and declared you a hero.”


  “Any landing you can walk away from...”


  “That's just the point, you didn't, remember?” Jimmy's attempt to distract me fails, I have myself up on my elbows, head raised, before he can react. I am having trouble recalling my own name, but no-one can prevent me exerting my will. It is a mistake.


  My clothing is gashed and striped in gore, with no real clue as to what style or colour it was originally, I can see a large patch of my raw looking chest through a tear. Worse lies further down, my vision moves steadily to greater devastation. My clothing and my body both end abruptly where my pelvis should be, only tatters of flesh and cloth lie any further. My vision swims, but I force focus and look beyond.


  Running from my truncated torso is a length of what I take to be intestine, it spans the arm's length to the corpse of a man, where it plunges into his abdomen. It pulses slowly, some obscene, adult umbilicus ferrying sustenance from the dead to the impossibly alive. The cadaver's skin is sunken, pillaged by whatever unholy process is keeping me alive. The name on the breast pocket of his coverall is Peterson.


  Peterson struggles against my grip. I outweigh him and while my years of judo practice in low gravity should give me the edge, he has the strength and determination of a madman. His arm breaks free and flails out, striking Liefman and then dislodging his gag. He starts screaming again, his wails drowning out Liefman's complaint and threatening to expose our furtive endeavour.


  “Sanders, for fucks sake, help me!” The look on Sander's face tells me that his courage is wavering and if we don't finish this soon then the game will be up, but he repositions the gag while I catch the wayward arm.


  “Hurry it up,” I bark at Liefman, unnecessarily. The airlock door beeps and then slides slowly back, she looks up from her pad to give me an accusatory glance.


  We manhandle Peterson through the opening, throwing him against the far door so he has no chance to come back at us before he is sealed inside. Liefman works to keep the alarms from going off while I run through the manual sequence, Sanders stands there looking sick. The vocal alarm refuses to be silent and a calm synthesised woman's voice announces our crime.


  “Unauthorised airlock discharge, unauthorised airlock discharge,” She accuses as the expulsion of air takes Peterson's struggling form outside the limits of the space station. The automated drone senses the garbage tag we planted on him, grabs his body and flings it towards the Earth's atmosphere for cremation.



  She is still chiding us when security apprehends us, stood staring at the airlock.

Ditched (part 1)

  Everything is a mess. I am a mess. This isn't anything new.


  Everything hurts. Something is burning somewhere, I can smell that, its probably why I can't breathe so well. I can't see so well, either, a blur, half a blur, one eye doesn't seem to be working. I try to move my hand to touch my face but a stab of pain almost sends me back into unconsciousness. I lie still while it subsides.


  Nearly everything hurts, nothing below my waist hurts, but neither does it respond to my efforts to move it, I guess I won't be dancing any time soon.


  Dancing, the lights sweeping across the floor, the band filling the room with the beat and melody, and her, eyes beaming, hair streaming out as we flew together between others. Two people as a comet.


  I try to place the memory, but draw a blank. She doesn't even have a name. It occurs to me that I don't even know where I am now, why am I here and what I did to deserve this pain.


  I am lying on my back in the wreckage of something. There is a groaning noise and the world moves slightly and then settles again. I concentrate on my eye again and manage to get some kind of focus. Just above me is some kind of chair and control apparatus, part of a vehicle of some kind.

  We are crammed close on the seat made for one person. I steady her hand on the stick. Giggling we fumble together for the throttle, laughing at the voice of the computer warnings.


  Something coalesces by my head, a man crouched next to me. Bizarrely he is wearing a white suit, is somehow sharper than his surroundings and glows slightly. Is he an......?


  “Before we start, no. I am not an Angel, get that out of your head.” His voice is clear, clearer than I feel it should be. “Really, why is that the first thing you always think of? The Angels are gone, they left long ago, forget about them.”


  Something about the dark skin, the long nose, the deep liquid eyes, the disapproving lips and the floppy black hair is familiar. I file it under things I really should know but are failing to make much sense. I feel the whole world could fit in there and I can go back to lying on my back in agony.


  She is there by my bedside, her face is framed by her hair, made hazy by the drugs. Somewhere there is the noise of a busy hospital, but she is all I can focus on. I try to raise my hand to stroke hers, but it seems to be tied down.


  “Hey, stay with me.” He waves a hand in front of my eye, I think I might be able to see through it. “You might need to move quickly. Well, relatively quickly. We're going to turn the pain down a bit, keep still and try not to panic.”


  I open my mouth and try to ask him what I was supposed to not panic about, but I can't even make a croak. The pain ebbs as though it was the tide, there is no increase in fuzziness, so it must be direct neural intervention, not pharmaceutical. My thinking seems clearer, or at least more able to grasp abstract concepts.

Somewhere some liquid is dripping. A broken fuel line? Or something less dangerous, hydraulic fluid or a coolant. Whatever happened, this vehicle is not going anywhere in a hurry, not under its own power, anyway. I lie there for minutes or maybe hours, listening to the dripping.


  The rain has finished, but the water still drips from the pine trees. We are arm in arm on the veranda of a little log cabin, miles from anyone. We huddle together watching the insects and the birds come out of hiding and begin their evening flights.


  “Okay, things are really starting to happen now. First the other lung and then we can start restoring motor control.” His white suit has acquired colour, a deep blue, brass buttons, some sort of military uniform. “How are you doing there? Comfortable? Concussed? Constipated? Confused? You lost it completely and now I'm hanging around an empty shell? No, I certainly don't have the luck for that. You've jarred you brain and fucked up your memory. Again. Let me guess, you haven't got a fucking clue where you are, why you are here, who the fuck I am, or why I would even bother to help such a fucked up individual as yourself.”


  The vehemence is sudden, I feel like I should be wiping spittle off my face. He stops, takes a breath and adjusts his jacket cuffs before continuing.


  “Well, I can't answer the last one. Look, I know everything is confusing, you're in some pain and everything reminds you of some girl whose name you can't recall. I need you to know that, despite everything you've done and are probably about to do, I'm your friend.” I believe him there, the touch of tenderness on his features, a friend that I have betrayed. My mind fishes for a name. “As for the girl, I'm not doing that again, you can tell me her name if and when it returns to you. Above all, I need you not to panic, can you do that for me?”

I'm still am unsure what I should not be panicking over. I flick my eye around in its socket to see if there is anything threatening within sight. I notice my companion doesn't quite move in time with his surroundings, I am beginning to suspect he might be not quite real, I consider panicking over this, but madness seems the least of my concerns. Beyond the upside-down chair there is only twisted metal, broken composites and trailing fibre-optics, this thing is not in a fit state to fly.


  I ignore the screams and sobs of the other passengers, ignore the buffeting and pull my way to the front of the compartment. The door to the cockpit is locked, of course, but in these old, re-purposed TRA-119's there's still an electronic override. I put my pilot's watch against the pad and push myself through as the door opens. The co-pilot looks up in alarm as I re-lock the door behind me, he is yammering on to his controller on the radio.


  The pilot is in a bad way, something has gone wrong with the computer systems and fed back into her implanted visual interface, a deliberate attack, most likely. She hangs against her seatbelts and drools. The co-pilot reaches for some kind of stun device, but he is strapped in and cannot bring it to bear before I have anchored myself to a grab handle and twisted it out of his grip; I apply it to his neck before he has time to protest.


  I secure the co-pilot in the chair originally designed to carry a tactical and counter-measure specialist, but spare in this hasty civilian conversion. I seat myself in front of the controls, there are a few added civilian niceties, but its the same old unstable bird. I clip on my earpiece and let my watch connect it to the radio.


  “Respond, inbound 38, please respond.”


  “Shut up, control, this is the situation, the pilot is fried, the co-pilot has been relieved of duty under suspicion of sabotage, you have three hundred people about to die a fiery death unless you do what I say. I need you to patch me through to the Atmospheric Control Centre at Heathrow, I need you to calculate exactly where this bird is going to hit and I need you to tell me how to bypass all the shit you've added to this pile of junk so that I can activate manual thrusters.”


  “Who are you? You can't land a 119 manually, they're too twitchy.”



  “I'm used to coming in hot, I flew orbital insertion during the war, I cut my teeth on these old wrecks. Now do as I say or I will aim this right for your building.”