Cargo Cult Read online

  Cargo Cult

  by

  Graham Storrs

  Copyright Graham Storrs 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-3106478-8-8

  Book and cover design by Graham Storrs.

  Published by Canta Libre at Smashwords

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorised, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Dedication

  I dedicate this book to my sister, Jacqueline.

  Acknowledgements

  I owe a great debt of thanks to Corporal Lauren Hull and Airman Louise McDonald of the Royal Australian Air Force who kindly gave me a personal tour of the RAAF's impressive airbase at Amberley and answered an endless stream of strange questions as they did so. (“So, if an alien spaceship lander just there, what would you do?”) It is from Corporal Hull and Airman McDonald that I learned all I know about how such a base operates. If there are any faults left in my understanding, it is not for lack of patient and detailed instruction.

  I'd also like to thank photographer, Marcus Gunnarsson, www.marcusgun.com and model, Tea Time, www.facebook.com/InsaniteaTime/ for permission to use Tea's image on the cover.

  Putting out a sci-fi comedy novel is a scary thing to do. What if nobody laughs? So, more than ever I have appreciated the support and encouragement of my wife, Christine, and my daughter, Kate, along with the encouragement of less partisan critics such as Ineke Prochazka of the Book Harvest Literary Agency and Stephanie Smith of Harper Voyager.

  Chapter 1: After the Crash

  Roxx walked unsteadily into the command centre, ducking to get through the portal. “Hey, I got it working!” he called, waving a long, jointed limb — an ‘arm’ as he should learn to call it. Fourteen eye-clusters swung around to gawp at him in astonishment — fifteen, if you included the bud growing on Joss’ flank.

  “It’s one of them!” someone chirruped and everyone grabbed for their blasters.

  “No, no! Wait!” Roxx shouted, aware of the strange croaking sound his voice made. “It’s me, your captain. I got the metamorphosis booth working. Now we can all disguise ourselves as hum—” But that was all Roxx had time for. Fourteen bolts of crackling energy sizzled into him, turning his lovely new body into a pile of smoking black goo. Not only Roxx but, as the Vinggans continued to blast away in panic at the spot their captain had once occupied, they destroyed most of the portal and part of the surrounding bulkhead too. The smell of burning flesh and plastics was awful.

  “Hang on! Hang on!” chirruped Drukk, rippling blue with agitation. “Stop shooting! Stop! Stop!” Gradually, the panicked Vinggans became aware of Drukk’s chirruping. One by one, they stopped firing and lowered their weapons. As the last, solitary shot melted a small hole in the deck, all eye-clusters turned to Drukk. “Er,” he said, hesitating to break the news. “I think we’ve just vaporised the captain.”

  The wreck of the Vinggan space cruiser Vessel of the Spirit sat on a blasted, barren plain. All around it, the charred remains of trees smouldered in the bright moonlight. On the horizon, to the west and north, a red glow was all that could be seen of the bush fire the crash had started nine hours ago. Of the crew of eight and the thirty-five passengers, just fourteen now remained alive.

  “The Great Spirit moves us in strange ways to do Her work,” said Braxx, sliding forward to address them all. Among the Vinggans, several muttered “We are pebbles on Her beach” and touched their dorsal brain pans in reverence.

  “Er, yes, quite,” said Drukk, eyeing them nervously. He always felt queasy around religious types and these Pebbles of the New Dawn guys were just a bit too creepy for his liking. As the last remaining member of the Vessel of the Spirit’s crew, it was up to him now to take charge and do what he could to ensure the survival of his passengers on this strange alien world.

  “Right,” he said. “OK.” They all turned to look at him and he felt sweat beginning to ooze from his ear sacs. The trouble was knowing exactly what they should do next. Captain Roxx had seemed to have some sort of plan — something about using the metamorphosis booth to emulate the local sapients. Maybe that’s what they should do? It was a shame they’d all killed him just then. Embarrassing too. Roxx had been one of the best. Still, everyone was bound to be a bit nervous in the circumstances, what with the crash and all. And it’s not as if you get stranded on an uncharted planet, swarming with dangerous sapients, tens of light-years from the nearest colony, with the infra-space communicator smashed to pieces, every day. It’s no wonder they’d shot him, bursting in here like that, looking so dry and ugly. In fact, it’s a wonder more people hadn’t been shot.

  “Well?” asked Braxx.

  “Pardon?”

  “You seemed about to say something.”

  “Oh. Did I? Hmm. Sorry.”

  Braxx stared at him for a few, long seconds. Drukk didn’t like that at all. It was a stare that seemed to carry far too little respect and perhaps just a little too much contempt. “No. Wait. That’s right. I was going to say, why don’t we all go and use the metamorphosis booth like the captain suggested? That way we’ll be able to move around without the local sapients being alarmed by us.”

  “The ‘humans’,” murmured Braxx.

  “That’s right, the humans.”

  Even as they’d hurtled out of infra-space towards this Spirit-forsaken backwater, the ship’s processors had begun listening to the planet’s emissions, interpreting the languages of the local sapients, piecing together whatever knowledge they could glean about the inhabitants, cross-referencing friendly-contact scenarios, survival scenarios and annihilation plans. Within an hour of the crash, the machines had spat out their summaries.

  The land-mass they had landed on was known in the local language as ‘Australia’. By searching something called the ‘Internet’, a painfully crude global information repository, the ship was even able to supply maps of the local area. The maps showed few towns and said nothing about the terrain but they indicated the presence of ‘hotels’, ‘beaches’ and ‘tourist trails’. None of this made much sense to the Vinggans and the strangeness of the maps only added to their growing unease.

  Top of the local food chain was an air-breathing carbon-based form with a single, small head and brain and two of just about everything else. The 'humans' were mostly hairless but were otherwise horribly ugly. They broke all the known laws of evolution by moving about on just two limbs, teetering around in a constant state of disequilibrium like a planet-wide circus-act. Yet, despite this incredible disadvantage, they were clearly successful and had overpopulated the planet to the point of infestation. Drukk and the captain had shuddered as they’d read the ship’s findings.

  The shuddering only grew worse when they reached the section headed, ‘Recommendations for Action’. Here the ship had written. “Activate emergency infra-space beacon and remain cloaked until help arrives. Warning: Contact with the locals is not advisable and in all scenarios will result in the destruction of the crew and passengers.” They had looked around at the smoking remains of the infra-space antenna and the wreckage of the cloaking control panel and had asked the ship for another option. It had pondered for several
more minutes — scary enough in itself — before suggesting they all have a good night’s sleep and try not to worry about it.

  “So. Let’s go do it, shall we?” said Drukk snapping out of his reverie. “We need to act quickly. The humans may find us here at any moment.”

  No-one showed any sign of rushing off to have their bodies remodelled. In fact, they were all looking at Braxx, waiting for him to speak. Eventually he did.

  “We are all pebbles on Her beach,” he intoned. “Rolled and buffeted by the tides of life. Worn smooth by the years. Insignificant. Worthless.” There was a general murmur of consent. “We have but one thing that makes us special, one thing that separates us from the dross of the Universe and that is the love of the Great Spirit and the wisdom of Her teachings.”

  Isn’t that two things? Drukk thought, but he kept his beak shut. Apart from himself, all the other survivors were religious fanatics, part of a mission to a newly colonised world in this bleak sector. The Pebbles of the New Dawn was perhaps the most fanatical of all the Great Spirit’s sects and was zealous in its ceaseless efforts to convert the rough and lawless colonies of the New Vinggan Diaspora.

  “What would She want us to do?” Braxx went on. “What can we do now that our mission has failed and our friends in the Space Corps” (here he swivelled his eye-cluster to give Drukk a disdainful glance) “can do nothing to save us?” He slid closer to the group, clearly enjoying being in the limelight. “For the past few hours I have been asking myself these questions and searching the Communion of Souls for guidance from the Great Spirit.” He looked about, theatrically, and the crowd hung on his words. Even Drukk was pretty curious to hear what the old fraud would come up with. “And the Great Spirit guided me and I have been inspired by Her, unworthy as I am even to speak Her name.”

  Oh get on with it, Drukk thought, finding it hard to keep his patience. The humans, the ship had said, possessed a simple but nevertheless adequately destructive technology and were horribly warlike.

  “Yes, inspired, I say! For this is the plan that She has revealed to me, the plan that was hidden until now and which is only possible through the divine intervention that brought us here. We have been brought to this planet so that we might convert the humans!”

  There was a gasp of shock from the faithful and a cry of “What!?” from Drukk but Braxx just smiled around the room. “It will be Her greatest triumph! The first sub-Vinggan species ever to be brought into the fold. And we will be Her humble instruments.”

  There was a stunned silence as they all absorbed this. Drukk felt that a word at this juncture might not go amiss. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “We’ve crash-landed on an uncharted planet. We have no means of escape or of contacting our people. We’ve lost most of the crew and our space-ship is a wreck. All our provisions are ruined. We’ve started a fire big enough to bring half the planet down on us to see what’s going on. Our computer — which, I should mention, was programmed by a bunch of war-crazed psychopaths, and therefore generally recommends annihilating the local sapients, regardless of the situation — is suggesting that we keep our heads down and hope it all goes away. Yet you want us to march out there and start preaching to seven billion godless monsters?”

  Braxx’s smile did not flicker for a moment. “Drukk, you are a simple man. A man of action. A doer, not a thinker. Whereas I,” the smile broadened, “I am a theologian. Each day I grapple with the great imponderables of the Universe, seeking revelation through communion with the Great Spirit. Ask yourself, Drukk, why would Her High Beneficence strand us here on this mudball? Why would She take so many of Her truest believers and cast them out of the society of their fellows? Why would She lead us to a world where seven billion sapients have never heard Her glorious word?” The eyes on his eye-cluster widened enquiringly. “I think you know the answer, don’t you Drukk? I think we all know the answer.”

  His acolytes seemed to see the reason in this and were murmuring their agreement when Drukk burst out, “But how? How in the name of the Spirit can you convert a whole planet of aliens? They won’t sit quietly and listen. They’ll blast us to atoms!”

  “Ah Drukk, if we knew all the answers, we wouldn’t need the Great Spirit to guide us, would we? Of course, we can’t use the usual methods to achieve mass conversions — carpet bombing from space, mind-altering drugs in the water supplies, advertising campaigns — we sent most of our equipment ahead by freighter. So we’ll just have to do it some other way.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll think of something. Meanwhile, I think you’re right. We should all take on human form. To the metamorphosis booth everybody!”

  -oOo-

  Now consider this. Even as the Vinggans are queuing up outside the metamorphosis booth, a slim, black starship is sliding out of real-space into infra-reality, far, far away along the Bellarno-Hengh Arm of the Galaxy, making a complete mess of Einstein’s tortuous legacy of messed-up simultaneity. For, although it was thousands of light-years closer to the Galactic Centre than Earth, it would be arriving here soon, very soon, thousands of years ahead of the light reflected from its sleek, black hull.

  From one perspective, the ship was slicing forward through time and the fabric of space-time responded with intense causality shock waves which pummelled onlookers all along its flight-path with causality so intense that almost anything could cause anything. Even on Earth, far from the main shipping lanes, the effect can be observed when an accused spouse looks up at the uncleaned gutters and wails, “It's all the dog's fault.” Or when a train pulls into the station half-an-hour behind schedule and the announcer blames its lateness on “leaves on the line”.

  From another perspective, the ship had merely slipped into a reality underlying our own in which distance hardly means anything, where entangled sub-atomic particles are still virtually right next to one another, and where a creature in a hurry, a creature with a mission, a creature with cold, steely eyes and a hide of black, armoured scales, could ignore General Relativity and really get its foot down.

  Chapter 2: Sam

  Albert Street in Brisbane is half coffee shops and half ‘outdoor lifestyle’ shops. As with other streets like this the world over, the coffee shops compete fiercely to look welcoming and relaxing, invading the pavement to such an extent that the casual passer-by is constantly falling over potted bay trees and colliding with fast-moving waitresses.

  Thanks to the climate, Brisbanites can sit out on the pavement night and day, all year round, chattering about the new coffee shop they tried last week, or the great outdoor lifestyle gear they bought that day. Sometimes, you’ll see a couple of business types among the chatterers, iPad and brochures cluttering the little round table between them, as one tries to sell something to the other. Far less often would you see a well-dressed young woman scowling at a dishevelled young man, saying things like, “Well? Can you get me in or not?” and “No, I’m not going to pay you, you greedy little shit!” Yet that was the scene that day.

  The young woman was Samantha Zammit, Sam to her friends, but well-known to readers of the local daily’s weekend magazine as ZamZam, the writer of a moderately popular outdoor lifestyle column. At 21, when she got the job, Sam had thought that she’d really made the big-time. Now, at 24, she was beginning to realise that there were further heights of journalistic accomplishment still to be scaled. In addition, after three years of writing about what you could do on foot, on two, three, four, or eight wheels (with or without engines), on things that flew or floated (with or without engines), or on one or two short, or long planks (on snow, water, or on wheels — with or without engines) she was beginning to feel a terrible desperation creeping over her.

  Salvation, she thought, would be to move into “real” journalism. She wanted to be a reporter, an investigative reporter. That’s what she should have been doing all these wasted years. That was where she could make a real contribution instead of mindlessly feeding the popular urge to move your body around on planks,
or wheels, with or without engines.

  That was why she was sitting among the potted bay trees and wrought-iron menu stands in a street of skate-board and bicycle shops, trying to get some sense out of her idiot brother, Wayne.

  Sam Zammit was a neat and pretty woman who affected severe business suits as befitted her perceived status as a rising young star in the media firmament. Her tiny shoulder bag held little besides a tape recorder, a notebook, and a smartphone. Like most rising young stars in today's competitive talent market, she worried about her 'personal brand equity', her social life had been replaced with 'networking', and her grasp of normal English — and on reality itself to some extent — had been seriously eroded by the increasingly bizarre business jargon that everyone around her spoke. As a front-line, customer-facing contributor, she shared her team's commitment to creating shareholder value and to personal growth targets and was ready to eat her babies if that's what the market demanded.

  Wayne, on the other hand, was another kind of animal. Slumped in his chair in baggy shorts, baseball cap and an old T-shirt bearing the faded slogan “Who needs educashun?”, Wayne was the black sheep of his industrious, social-climbing, second-generation, Hungarian-immigrant family. Inheritor of a prodigious musical talent that had gone unused in his family for generations, he’d decided that he was going to be the first of his line to yield to his sensitive nature and to live for his art. So, after many, bitter rows with his father — a solid, middle-manager in the Department of Transport — Wayne had gone to University to study music and then, after many dismal interviews with his Head of Department, had dropped out, to show them all.

  His father, in a desperate final attempt to save his son, had found Wayne a job with a jeweller friend of his. Wayne had shown a rare talent for the work and, at first, his father received glowing reports of his son’s skills as a jeweller but, in the end, the novelty wore off for Wayne. After that, even his father’s friend couldn’t put up with Wayne’s persistent lack of enthusiasm and had asked him to leave. Since then, Wayne had struggled on the edge of starvation, stubbornly refusing handouts from his distressed but slightly smug family.