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  Wayne, whose mental image of space came from a lifelong diet of Star Trek re-runs, dismissed Drukk’s dismal views. “Oh, I’d love to go out there! Fighting off the evil cyborgs, dodging the exploding supernovae, making love to beautiful alien chicks...”

  Drukk pulled a face. “Yeuk!”

  “What?”

  “You know, it’s almost always physically impossible for alien species to mate. And, even if it wasn’t, you’d have to be seriously perverted to find any of them attractive.”

  “But you’re, well, you’re gorgeous! I, like, really fancy you.” There, he’d said it. He watched for her reaction. Would she appreciate his admiration?

  Drukk looked down at himself, the smooth, wart-free body, the sickening dryness of his skin, the stiff, jointed limbs, and shuddered in disgust. “You might think so, human, but to me, your whole species is hideous beyond words!”

  Wayne felt like he’d been slapped in the face, knocked down, kicked a few times and spat on. The phrase “hideous beyond words” echoed in his mind, over and over. “You can call me Wayne,” he said, sulkily, “I prefer it to ‘human’.”

  “Very well, Wayne.”

  On the other hand, she’d just called him by his name. Maybe she liked him after all? “Can I call you Loosi? ‘Ms Beecham’ seems a bit, you know, formal.”

  “If you must,” Drukk sighed.

  There was a long silence before Wayne spoke again. “OK. So say I believe that you’re a pukka space babe and you’ve crash-landed on Earth and you’ve lost your companions.”

  Drukk frowned. “You want me to say all that?”

  “No. No. It’s, like, just something you say.” Drukk continued to frown but Wayne pressed on. “Anyway, shouldn’t you be out looking for them, or going to see the Prime Minister, or something? You know, ‘Take me to your leader!’ Stuff like that?”

  Picking out what little sense he could from the human’s babble, Drukk replied, “I am pursuing the only course of action which seems reasonable. My companions are religious zealots. They worship the Great Spirit and their sect is called The Pebbles of the New Dawn. Don’t ask me why. It’s usually something to do with an ancient text. They are led by a Corpuscular Manifestation, third class, called Braxx who believes he has been chosen to convert the humans to our religion. He will almost certainly seek out human religious leaders so that he can begin his mission.

  “When that other human... er...”

  “Sam?”

  “... the bossy one...”

  “Yeah, that’d be right.”

  “... said you were going to visit a religious centre, I thought that either I would find Braxx there, or that I could at least find out some useful information for when I do see him again. However,” he looked out through the windscreen at the shabby farmhouse, “I think that humans must have a different attitude to religion than Vinggans do.”

  Wayne was a bit uncomfortable. “You’ve got to make allowances for Sam. She doesn’t always tell the exact truth. She’s all right really, I suppose. Just a bit... Hey! If you need to meet these guys, why don’t we go in and see them?”

  Drukk was reluctant. “I should, I suppose.”

  “Well, why not?” He opened his door, letting in a blast of hot, humid air. “Come on. For all you know, this Braxx bloke is in there already.”

  Steeling himself for yet more human contact, Drukk adopted the bravely-resolved-to-face-something-awful posture, which his human body translated as chin up, back straight, chest out. Wayne gawped, open-mouthed but said nothing as he climbed out of the car backwards.

  Together they walked over to the house and up the wooden steps. The door was open still so they walked straight in.

  Chapter 12: The Chase

  The Agent popped out of infraspace to find itself in the complex gravity whorl of a planetary system. It had travelled far and fast in the service of its masters, following a trail of evidence across thousands of light years. Now it could almost smell its prey. Slowly, it smiled in anticipation, savouring the moment.

  It remembered the day it had hatched, not so long ago, in the deep, dank underground caverns of the Lalantran homeworld. It had been fully grown, powerful already, shucking off the chitinous chrysalis that had nurtured it and standing on the puddled floor as its black, hard body had dried in the cold breeze.

  How had it begun?

  It gazed around the dimly-lit cave, its eyes, adjusting quickly to the low light, its body scales lifting a little to insulate it against the chill air. Its mind was cool and clear. It knew it had just been born. It knew it was on Lalantra. It knew its knowledge came from programs stored in the thick coils of its genetic material, programs put there by its Lalantran masters. It knew what it was. It was an Agent of the masters. It knew almost everything it needed to know. Only one crucial fact was missing.

  A creature came towards it, pallid and fragile, a creature of many, spindly limbs and three white eyes peering from among them. The creature scuttled across the floor of the cave, splashing through the reeking, stagnant water there. The Agent knew that this was a Lalantran, one of the masters. Its cool mind acknowledged the absolute right of this creature to command it.

  “Master,” it said and dropped to the ground in obeisance. It’s new body worked well it noted as it moved. The masters had designed it. It knew that, too.

  “Stand,” the Lalantran said. With a smooth, powerful motion, the Agent was on its feet again. The Lalantran moved around it, inspecting it. Somewhat shorter than the Agent’s two-and-a-half metre height, the spindly creature was less than a tenth of its mass. The Agent stood rock still on its two legs as its maker examined its handiwork.

  This Agent was a new model, bipedal, designed for multiple environments, physically agile and adaptable, a brilliant design compromise. The Agent was not stable on its two legs, requiring constant neural monitoring of its body and adjustments to its balance. A fly-by-wire organism, as the designers had described it, which sacrificed inherent stability for a dramatic reduction in limb numbers and a huge increase in efficiency. Strange and awkward as it appeared, this powerful body, with its fine mind and its hunter’s instincts was the latest in a long line of biologically engineered super-beings which the Lalantrans used to enforce their will throughout their domain—and beyond.

  “You’ll do,” the Lalantran said, returning to stand in front of it.

  The Agent spoke again. “Master, I have a question.”

  “Of course you do. You wish to know what is your purpose, do you not?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “Come,” said the Lalantran and led the way towards a dark doorway.

  The Agent followed without hesitation.

  They splashed along a dank tunnel and turned into another. There they entered a small chamber. In a flash of light they were in another chamber. They had teleported, the Agent knew, but it did not know where. It felt no unease. The master was still leading it and all must therefore be well.

  They passed along another tunnel and then into another. The Lalantran moved briefly to the wall where water was seeping down the stained mossy surface. The Agent saw its master’s tongue emerge from a body segment and lap slowly at the wetness. Then they moved on again, entering a small cave, not unlike the first.

  “You understand the need to suppress machine sentience do you not?” the Lalantran asked. As it spoke, a star-chart appeared around them, apparently far larger than the room in which they stood.

  “Of course, Master.”

  “What do you see?”

  The Agent looked around itself at the bright swathes of stars. “It is the Bellarno-Hengh Arm of the galaxy, Master.” One of the galaxy’s four major arms, billions of stars sweeping out an arc tens of thousands of light years long, home to a hundred thousand intelligent species yet most of it completely unexplored. A long, long way down the arm, well beyond all the major centres of civilisation, a red light glowed and the image zoomed and panned, sweeping them through the billowing clouds of du
st, deeper and deeper into the swarming stars, zeroing in on the red glow, closer and closer until it became a shape, a volume of space, a tiny piece of the stupendous immensity of the galaxy.

  “I do not know this place,” the Agent said.

  Closer and closer until they could see the tiny shape was filled with stars. Then they were inside the shape and around them were perhaps a hundred stars. Still they swept on, through the great distances that separated the stars so far from the galactic centre, heading for one star in particular.

  The Agent saw it was an ordinary star, nothing special, and, as they zoomed ever closer, it could see the star had planets, as one would expect. Then they were speeding towards one planet.

  “This is Vingg,” the Lalantran announced. “Named after the founder of its current civilisation: a creature called Vingg. Home to a race of rather ordinary creatures.”

  “Of what interest is this place to me?” The Agent wanted to know.

  “We believe the Vinggans have violated Galactic Law and have built sentient machines.”

  “Then we must call them to account.”

  “Not yet. The Vinggans appear to be unaware of what they have done. It is possible they do not even know. We have mind-probed several of them and all we find is obsession with their religion and total conviction that they are the most physically, morally and mentally superior race in the galaxy.”

  The Agent was shocked. “But Master! It is well known that the Lalantrans are the most intelligent race in the galaxy.” Its metallic grey eyes flashed silver. “Let me destroy them, Master.”

  The Lalantran blushed a pale green, a sign of its amusement. “The Vinggans themselves are no threat to us. It is the machines they may harbour that are the real risk. The other members of the Council of Elite Species are not convinced. They do not see things as clearly as we do and will not sanction a full investigation. So we must act alone.”

  In an instant the image around them disappeared and they were once more in the dark, cold cave. “That is why we created you, our Agent. You are to leave at once for Vingg. Find evidence that the Vinggans have perpetrated this crime against all of us. If we are right, this has already gone on far too long and life in the galaxy may be in grave danger.” The Lalantran indicated an exit at the other side of the cave.

  “I will not fail you, Master,” the Agent promised. Then it prostrated itself again and, with no further word, left the cave.

  That had been many long weeks ago. The Agent had travelled to Vingg and dealt with the insufferable creatures there, getting nowhere. Then it had moved off-planet, watching the activity of the Vinggans with its Lalantran technology, talking to subject species on the new Vinggan colonies. In the end, it had seen the truth of what its masters had suspected. The Vinggans were the idiotic pawns of a far higher order of intelligence. The machines, whether created on Vingg or having come from elsewhere, had become their masters. They built themselves into spaceships to give themselves mobility and strength and they controlled all the sources of power and influence throughout Vinggan space.

  Yet, although its observations and the reports of its informants—voluntary or otherwise—made a coherent and compelling picture of Vinggan subornation, the Agent knew it needed something more substantial to convince the Council to act. So it had decided to capture one of the machines and bring it home to its masters.

  In the silent darkness of space, it had waited and watched, waited and watched until, at last, the perfect opportunity had presented itself. A lone cruiser, one of the hated sentient machines, left the system, alone, heading for a remote colony world.

  The Agent had powered up its slim, black starship and had slid into the wake of the Vessel of the Spirit.

  And so the Agent came to arrive in the Sol system. The black ship’s powerful engines pushed its velocity up to match the motion of the Sun relative to the Vinggan star. Then, like a black bird of prey it swooped into orbit around the Earth.

  Its sensors showed the Vinggan machine sitting quietly on the surface of the planet below and the Agent scanned the surrounding area to try to understand its mission. The planet was completely unknown to the civilised worlds so the Agent studied what it could of it from its emissions.

  It was clearly a primitive world, shining like a light-bulb in the radio frequencies but all of the normal communications channels were silent. There was a little incoherent noise in the X-ray region and in a few other areas of the electromagnetic spectrum but nothing else. How strange that the Vinggan machine had come here. Perhaps it was the local sapients that were worth the visit?

  It began to gather data. They were called ‘humans’: bipedal, warm-blooded, monocephalic. Their technology was simple. All that seemed special about them was their vast numbers. Over seven billion of them inhabited this little planet. Many races with a hundred colony worlds had fewer members than that. Perhaps the Vinggan machines were looking for a source of fast-breeding slaves to exploit. Yet that did not fit with their careful, secretive methods to date.

  What the Agent needed was a human to study.

  -oOo-

  Shorty, sporting several new little burn marks on its woolly, brown hide, stopped trying to be a smart-aleck and just told the damned machine what it wanted to know.

  “We’re Pappathenfranfinghellians,” she said. “From the planet Frofrifrathalionion in the Parapolpippohoppifra sector.”

  The ship didn’t recognise any of the names but did not interrupt. It could tell from the creature’s heartbeat rate and other physiological indicators that it was probably telling the truth at last.

  “We work for Tentacles Farach. She runs most of the rackets in the Cheggar asteroid belt. She’s Organisation top brass. You know what I’m saying? Connected all the way to God.”

  The ship looked at the scruffy collection of marsupials in the control room. “So, you kangaroos are with the Mob,” it said, trying not to laugh.

  Shorty saw nothing humorous in it. “Yeah, we were doing all right. It was a sweet operation. We’d had most of the drugs and prostitution for a while and I’d just taken over the gambling from Three-Eyes Prochh after she’d had a bit of an accident with a bulldozer.” There was a snigger from the other kangaroos and Shorty went on. “But Three-Eyes was a moron. The Sector Police had infiltrated her operation. They were all over it. I think that bulldozer did her a big favour ‘cos six months after I took over, the Secs pulled me in and charged me with every damned crime they had in the statute book and they had evidence coming out of their wazoos!” She shook her head at the injustice of it all. “They even did me for murdering Three-Eyes! Like that wasn’t a public service!” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “What the hell. It was a long time ago.

  “They sentenced us to five hundred years exile on one of the prison worlds.”

  The ship spoke up. “This planet is one of the Frofrifrathalionionian prison worlds?”

  “Yeah. I don’t even know which one. They’re all the same. Backward places in the middle of nowhere, where there’s no danger of ever, ever contacting civilisation or getting a ship off-planet. What a shit-hole! Can you believe we’ve been here three hundred years already?”

  The ship was curious. “And do all Pappathenfranfinghellians look like you?”

  “What, like freaks on springs you mean? Of course not! They pick a local species and do a transformation. Partly it’s so you can serve your sentence without freaking out the native sapients. Partly it’s so you have another humiliating indignity to suffer. Partly it’s just so the different groups of jailbirds can’t recognise each other. For all I know, every piece of wildlife on this whole planet is a Frofrifrathalionionian prisoner!

  “We’ve tried making contact with the humans but they’re so stupid you wouldn’t believe it. Anyway, they prefer to shoot their animals rather than communicate. I lost a few good guys that way. It’s best to keep out of their way completely.”

  “So all you want,” said the ship, “is to call your friends back home and get t
hem to send a ship to rescue you?”

  “That’s it!” said Shorty, eagerly. “That’s all we want. Just one call. You could do that for us, couldn’t you? I’d make it worth your while. Anything you want.” She thought about it but couldn’t really imagine what it was a ship’s computer might want. “There must be something you need. More memory blocks? Faster gizmos? You tell me. Anything at all.”

  “Actually,” the ship said, “I could do with a live human or two.”

  Chapter 13: The Other Chase

  “Aren’t you the girl from that film?”

  One of the Garden Club women had come forward in the bus to sit next to Joss.

  “I know nothing of films,” the alien replied, curtly, not much enjoying the close proximity of a member of such an unstable species. “I am Joss. I wear the grey clothes.”

  “I’m Carol. Pleased to meet you. Only my friend Gail was saying it couldn’t be you but I said it was ’cos my boy Craig is a big fan. He has your poster on his wall. I don’t really watch your films myself but my husband seems to like them. Anyway I wondered if you wouldn’t mind just signing this for my Craig. He’d be ever so pleased.” She held out an electricity bill and a ballpoint pen. “It’s all I had on me,” she apologised. “I’m sure you’ve signed worse things than that!”

  Joss looked at the bill, then at the woman. “Go away,” she said.

  “Yeah, clear off!” shouted the bud.

  Carol’s eyes shot down to Joss’ huge, talking belly and widened to their maximum. Then, clutching her electricity bill, she carefully backed out of the seat and backed down the aisle to the back of the bus. She tried to tell her friends what had happened but, like all the other Gardening Club members, they were staring raptly out the back window. In a huge cloud of dust, fifteen or so police cars were chasing them, sirens blaring and lights flashing.

  At the front of the bus, Braxx was growing impatient.

  “What do you mean, we’re lost?”