Destination Alpha Four - Chapter 5

5. Seen It Been There Done That

The chamber was vast; an English church could have been built inside it with room for St. George's flag flying over the steeple. It was filled with pieces of machinery in various states of disrepair. Some were cruiser gun turrets, their forward armour peppered with coil gun holes; others were entire space fighters. Repair crews were hard at work turning the mangled metal back into fully functioning hardware, moving welding torches over the thin metal like magicians' wands to seal the joins. Across the deck, a refurbished gun turret had been cabled into the deck to test it, and was turning in its housing like a giant eyeball.
On the deck, surrounded by a cat’s cradle of red tape saying DANGER! EXTREME HAZARD! RISK OF REJUVENATION! was a set of squat, circular devices, garage-sized and upwards, sitting on the deck. Some were covered by thick coats of dust, while others gleamed like new cars in a showroom. Each was rumbling gently as its innards revolved; where the field of dust around one device met the aura of spotlessness around another, shining curtains of dust motes hovered in the air, willing to float towards neither of the two devices. Blue palls of Cerenkov radiation swirled around them like aurorae.
Cleo stepped up behind the girl standing on the edge of the danger tape.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it”, she said.
The girl’s head jerked round sharply at Cleo.
“Oh, hello”, she said. “They call it Bad Times Square. Those are all the bad Spatchcock Flanges we’ve ever ripped out of battle-damaged warships. Right now we’ve just had a major engagement, so we have a lot of them. A lot of battle damage. The Spatchcock Flange is the part of the ship that lets it travel faster than light”, she explained. “It’s directly connected to the -“
“Forellen Turbine”, nodded Cleo. “I know what a Spatchcock Flange is. I also know why you’re standing here looking at a whole load of them. That tape’s there for a reason. That coating of dust over that big one closest to us means that if you took three steps forward right now you’d wither away into an old woman inside a couple of seconds. And be dust yourself in ten. Three crewmen died bringing that flange home. Their dust is part of what’s around it. They knew it was valuable. They made sure their deaths meant something. Do you want your death to mean something?”
The girl turned back to Bad Times Square and stared into the avenues, marked out by tape, that showed where it was safe to walk between the Flanges. “They were inside my head for eight years, Cleopatra. For the first year I woke up every morning hoping they would somehow be gone, but every morning they were still there, finding my hope amusing. Sometimes they used to pretend to be gone, just for fun. Once I got all the way to a starship at the launch facility before they turned me round again like a piece on a chessboard and walked me all the way back to Walhalla. The capital city of their homeworld, you know. It’s big on triumphal statuary.”
“The wind is cold, and dry, and dusty”, said Cleo, “and the night is totally black."
“But there is a moon”, agreed Charity. “It casts light you can read by. The crops grow by day, and get gathered in by moonlight at night. It isn’t safe to go out in daylight - the star the homeworld orbits makes it dangerous. Radiation, probably.”
“Did they punish you for trying to escape?”
Charity gave a hollow laugh. “Oh, yes. By letting me think I might escape again. Over and over and over.” She dug her hands into her incredibly long, incredibly fine hair. “Having them gone is like losing half my mind.”
"I had them in my mind too, remember”, said Cleo. “I don’t think Jochen has realized yet that I can still speak fluent German. I caught him talking to Tamora the other day, and halfway through a sentence he sighed, gazed longingly into her eyes, and said Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet dort oben wunderbar.”
“Euwww”, said the girl. “I’m not quite sure whether that’s charming or really rather creepy. You do know he’s quoting a Romantic poet, don’t you?”
“And Tamora’s my sister”, said Cleo. “I feel obliged to protect her from, you know, German invasion.”
“Steven Dawkins and Richard Gould are trying to hypnotize me”, said the girl.
Cleo nodded. “Regression therapy. To find out whether there’s anything else you know about the Sternekinder but don’t know you know. They regressed me too, back to the time the Sternekinder were still in control of me, knowing everything I knew, and making it very clear they could use all of it against me. It was horrible, Charity. I know what it’s like, believe me.”
The beautiful face soured suddenly into a frown. "No, you don't know what it's like. Because you don't know what it's like suddenly not to have them in your mind after eight years. Don't you see? I haven't been like you, like a normal human being, for a long time, Cleopatra. It's like having a crutch in your head, and when someone kicks that crutch away -"
She stared hard into the twinkling interfaces between fast and slow time. Incredibly slow dust motes stood still in the air, then were snatched away like streaming meteors.
"You have to think for yourself", said Cleo.
Sadly, the girl nodded.
"We should be getting back to the mission briefing", said Cleo.
"If I ran in between those fields", said Charity Drummond, "I should be torn in two."
"But you're not going to", said Cleo. "Because then, I would have to run in after you. And then I might be torn in two as well. And you'd have both our deaths on your conscience."
The girl turned and looked Cleo up and down, and smiled.
"And there's the thing", she said. "I actually know you'd do it. You know, they greatly underestimated you. The Sternekinder, that is. They're used to viewing all Africans as dull-witted, less than properly human. They know better now. You gave them quite a shock."
Cleo frowned. She looked at the floor, strewn with droplets of welding flux.
"You don't cope well with praise", said the girl. "At school, you learned that the girl who shoots her hand up and yells the answer is the teacher's pet. You learned never to smile at the teacher when you were given a good mark. You learned to look at the floor instead."
Cleo looked at Charity in astonishment.
"You've -"
"Been inside your mind, yes. And you've been inside mine."
Cleo considered the implications.
"The first thing you remember", she said experimentally, "is a moons-and-cows mobile your dad made you and hung over your bed. The cows jumped over the moons. Your dad fixed it for there to be more than one moon, because your family were from Lalande 2, and it has seven moons."
"But no cows", said the girl sadly. "I was always very upset there were no cows."
"We're like...weird compulsory twin sisters", said Cleo. "We know each other's minds. We have each other's memories."
"You didn't even know”, Charity said, “that your own little sister had got a boyfriend, lost her boyfriend, ended up with the most hideous chav in Year Seven on the rebound, broken up with him by text message, and got back together with him again after he threatened to cut his own throat with an electric razor, until you saw it spray-painted on the side of the Avon building in red letters ten feet high."
"With informative diagrams", agreed Cleo.
Charity laughed and clapped her hand to her forehead. "How do I know that? I don't even know what a chav is! Or a text message!"
"This could be useful", said Cleo. "I'm going to need a wingman. And that wingman could be, erm, a wing woman."
"A wingman who knows exactly what her partner's going to do next", mused Charity, "would be invaluable." She looked at Cleo for several seconds, deep in thought.
"Your first memory", she said suddenly, "is a Magic Eye picture your father brought home and hung on the wall. Neither your mother nor father nor sister could see anything in it. It had a spider in it. It scared you."
Cleo squirmed uncomfortably at the memory. "Dad had to get rid of it. Do you know what a Magic Eye picture is?"
"I think I have an idea. That's what the Enemy, the Sternekinder, are like in my mind. I can see a space where I know they ought to be and occasionally I think I catch sight of legs and fangs and eyes. And I'm terrified of suddenly seeing the whole thing back again."
"Charity, they aren't there any more. The parasite in your head was killed when Harjit shut it in a microwave oven.”
Charity sighed. "Yes. So everyone keeps telling me.“ She looked across the room at the gigantic airlock doors standing open to the cold Gondolin night and a glittering avalanche of falling stars. “My sisters are both still out there, you know."
Cleo nodded. "Faith and Hope. Faith is being groomed as a Zerstörer pilot. In flight training, she took up to fifteen G of unmodified acceleration without blacking out."
Charity nodded. "If I qualify as a pilot, I could end up facing her."
"And you're worried you might be forced to kill your own sister."
Charity smiled a fragile smile. "I'm worried my own sister will kill me. She's a real Walküre, she decides who lives and dies on the battlefield. If I face her, I will lose."
"And Hope is in training as a scientist.”
"In one of the special centres, yes. New subjects are brought in to test the effects of weapons. Sometimes they are obtained from Earth, from remote areas - a ship lands, a farmer or a traveller on a country road is taken. Sometimes they are obtained by invasion."
"The attack on New Dixie", said Cleo. Her heart suddenly seemed to be pumping ice.
Charity nodded. "I don't think it would be a good idea to tell Glenn Bob Linklater his parents might be strapped to a wall in a Nazi weapons testing facility just yet. Come on, Cleopatra. You mentioned we had a briefing to go to. I do so love briefings."
***
The room was dark, apart from the square of deep space projected on the opposite wall. It was quiet apart from the low hum of the projector.
The part of deep space that could be seen on the far wall was a dark, light-swallowing hole that might have been metres across, might have been light years.
"Never seen that before", said Cleo. "Nope."
"That's the Horse's Ass Nebula", said Captain Yancy's voice from the back of the room. "It's what the Horse's Head Nebula looks like from the other side."
"I've never seen it either", said Charity.
"Okay." A new slide slid into the projector - an intersection of jet-black lines in a cloud of glowing matter, like ink poured into a lava lamp.
"Trifid Nebula", said Cleo. "Seen it."
"Been there", said Charity. "Done that." She looked over at Cleo, puzzled. "Why did I just say that?"
The image changed; a blot on a starfield, like space look if seen though thick black velvet.
"The Coal Sack", said Cleo, and pointed at Charity. "She's been there. Ships can't drop below lightspeed in that area because of the dust hazard."
"So none of the fifty-four slides we've shown you so far are familiar to you from..." Captain Yancy waved a hand, searching for a polite way of putting it.
"...having been one of the enemy. No", said Cleo.
"Their homeworld has no stars", said Charity. "Its night sky is black."
"Which is why we've been showing you pictures of nebulae and dust clouds", said Steven Dawkins.
"It's not in a dust cloud", said Charity.
"When we say black, we mean black as in Hell's cellar with the light off", said Cleo. "No stars. No moon. Nothing. It’s also forty-one light years from Earth in orbit around the brown dwarf David One.”
"As I keep telling you, Cleopatra , that's not possible", said Richard Gould. "There simply aren’t any objects that could produce those sort of effects forty-one light years from Earth. Forty-one light years from Earth is our back yard. We know it well. We would know if a star and a bizarre planet with no other stars in its sky existed there.”
“I never saw the star from Asgard’s surface”, said Charity.
“Though there is a dull red star you see just after liftoff in a starship”, said Cleo.
“It’s dangerous to look at it directly”, said Charity. “Special varieties of crops have been developed that will grow under its light without withering and dying.”
“Asgard’s moon was put in place to reflect enough sunlight from over the horizon to allow people to live and work”, said Cleo.
“There is a peculiar light effect in the sky above Asgard,” said Charity.
“Bifröst”, said Cleo.
“The Rainbow Bridge”, said Charity. “It’s only visible for a few hours after moonset and just before sunrise. It’s a sort of circular rainbow in the sky. The Sternekinder say it’s the bridge the gods use to get to the world of men. When they say ‘gods’ of course, they mean themselves”, she added in disgust.
“Stars are visible inside it”, said Cleo.
“When ships leave Asgard, they travel through it”, said Charity. “It’s after you see Bifröst that you see the star that Cleo thinks must be David One.”
“Maybe some sort of planetary nebula”, said Gould, scratching his head. “Look, I've got some really good pictures here of a Bok Globule in Centaurus -"
Cleo took her head in her hands. "Richard, we've been through all of this. Neither of us were astronavigators when we were under Sternekinder control. Their ships are automatically guided. They know you want to know where their homeworld is. And they've always known that, one day, human beings will get smart enough to capture and interrogate one of them. So they make sure nobody will be able to tell them where their own world is. Because nobody knows. Apart from me, and now you. Because, and I really can’t stress this strongly enough, it’s forty-one light years away from Earth.”
Dawkins and Gould looked at each other. "But someone has to program the ships. That means somebody must know the precise location of their homeworld, as well as just its distance from Earth.”
"And if they know", said Captain Yancy, "that means you should know."
Charity looked at Cleo.
"There must be some..."
"...limitation to the effect. The..."
"...telepathy", finished Charity. "Maybe it just doesn't work across interplanetary distances."
"How convenient", said Captain Yancy, "for the Blue Goo."
He walked into the beam of the projector, arms folded. An almost complete lack of stars spangled his uniform.
"I'm not sure what you're implying, Major", said Charity.
Yancy's frown distorted the shape of the constellation Crux projected on his face. "That makes two of us, Miss. Because I'm not sure who or what I'm looking at."
Cleo fixed Yancy with a glare hard as champagne diamond. "If you're suggesting the Blue Goo isn't quite gone from our brains, Major, at least have the courage to come out and say so."
Yancy grimaced, walked out of the beam, and out of the projection theatre.
"I'm sure that's not what he meant, Cleo", said Richard Gould doubtfully.
"The Goo must have both an outer and an inner mind", said Charity. "It must have secrets it keeps even from some of its own hosts."
"But it doesn't have a brain, it can't think", said Cleo, "unless it has a human or alien brain to live in. Without a human host, it's blue slime."
"So there must be an inner group of human hosts controlling things", said Charity. "Separated somehow from the others, to stop secrets getting out to the enemy. A sort of ruler caste."
"Uh, don't take this the wrong way, Chaz", said Steven Dawkins, "but the way you two are finishing each other's sentences nowadays is nothing short of spooky."
Charity and Cleo looked at each other, and smiled. At exactly the same moment.
***
Glenn Bob bit his lip nervously. "Okay...okay. We should be dropping back into normspace around about - now."
He pressed the big blue button. There was the awful, stomach-inverting twist of the C Plus system disengaging. The hot, star-crowded universe of hyperspace became dark glitter scattered on velvet. Like a crashed computer, Truman J. Slughound displayed a variety of geometrical shapes, his eyestalks swaying giddily, before settling on a scheme of gigantic unhappy-looking yellow-and-black spots. He belched a thick cloud of glacial acetic acid. Ant knew how he felt.
"You don't need to worry about a few million miles here or there, lad", said Father Serafino mildly. "We're travelling light years."
"I need to be bang on the money", said Glenn Bob obstinately. "I ain't just doin this to pass no test. If I can’t hit the exact area of space I'm aimin at, in time of war, my shipmates could die."
Father Serafino scratched his head. "Erm. Yes. Quite. Quite." He adjusted the controls, and gently pirouetted the ship - a red-white ball rolled across the cockpit windshield like a prize marble, attended by three large moons.
"Oh my dear lord forgive me for taking you in vain", breathed Father Serafino. "That is the finest piece of astronavigation I have ever seen. Mr. Linklater, I do believe you could park a ship in its own hangar after a hyperspace jump from Alpha Centauri." He ticked a box on his examination sheet and wrote WITH DISTINCTION!!! in the margin.
Glenn Bob glowed redder than the planet underneath them. Cleo, Charity, Jochen, Tamora, Ant and Vladlena, who had been playing magnetic space Monopoly on a board stencilled on the ship's inner hull to pass the time, crowded round the windows. Everybody on board was dressed as a Native American - Tamora, Vladlena, Charity and Cleo as squaws, Ant, Jochen and Glenn Bob as braves, and Father Serafino as a chief. The costumes had been cobbled together using Gondolin's extensive store of old Western movies, and Ant suspected they were not entirely authentic. Most of Father Serafino's costume, for example, seemed to consist of bits of eagle, and as there were no eagles on Gondolin, the machine shop had had to turn the eagle bones out of billet aluminium. Most of Cleo's costume was feathers, and the feathers had had to be simulated with what were essentially plastic fibres stuck in to bigger plastic fibres. They looked less like feathers, more like toilet brushes.
"Are we yat dyestination now?" said Vladlena. "Yis too soon. I hyave three hyotels on Laputa. And yis my byirthday. I gyet to collyect one hundred cryedits from yeach player."
"I'm not bothered", said Ant. "I've just landed on Go To Alpha Four, Go Directly to Alpha Four."
"Yis tyerrible cyapitalist gyame in yany cyase", said Vladlena contemptuously.
"You seem to be very good at it", said Tamora.
Father Serafino reoriented the ship; heat shields began closing over the cockpit windows. A television screen the size of an Earth mobile phone display lit up in one corner of the console, showing the way ahead.
"This might be bumpy", he said. "We're coming down in the middle of the southern dioxide monsoon. The atmosphere's flying north for the winter."
The atmosphere was already picking at the outer hull; the metal under Ant's feet was vibrating slightly.
"Flying north", repeated Tamora, "for the winter."
"Yes. The southern polar cap is transforming straight from a solid into a gas, and rolling toward the equator like a big, cold, planet-wide hurricane."
A voice hissed insistently from the console speakers. “HELLO THIS IS TEER-NEWITH-A-DRAA-EEG-GOCK CONTROL TO UNIDENTIFIED CRAFT APPROACHING ON A TWO-SEVENTY DEGREE VECTOR. PLEASE IDENTIFY YOURSELVES OR WE WILL BE FORCED TO OPEN FIRE, OVER.”
Father Serafino blinked, startled.
“Oh gosh”, he said. “Oh golly gosh.”
He lurched across the console, one index finger in his mouth, his other one searching across the rows of dials and switches. “Now where is it on this model?”
“Are they going to open fire?” said Tamora in panic. “What should we do?”
“This”, said Ant, unlocking a button on the console top and pressing it. Immediately, a blue light lit up above their heads.
“Transponder”, said Glenn Bob. “Little radio beacon tells the control tower we’re friendly there.”
“WE CAN SEE YOU NOW, ASTROMOKE. PLEASE CONTINUE ON YOUR CURRENT COURSE, SLOWING TO THREE HUNDRED KILOMETRES PER HOUR, AND PUT DOWN AT PAD THREE. PADS ONE AND TWO ARE CLOSED FOR EMERGENCY REPAIRS, OVER.”
“Thanks”, said Father Serafino, leaned over to the pilot’s microphone and said: “Thanks, Teer-Neew - uh, Tau Boötis 3 control.” He wrestled with the controls as the whole craft bucked, sending down a shower of Monopoly houses.
"Heatshield sensors nominal..." he said, absent-mindedly pulling the airbrake release. "Brace yourselves..."
There was a CLUNK, the ship suddenly stood still in the air, and everyone in it lurched forwards into the deck, control console and each other.
"...airbrakes deployed..." muttered Father Serafino to himself. "Retract heatshield..." The ceramic slabs withdrew from the cockpit windows, allowing everyone on board to see a landscape as red and white as a strawberry sundae. Massive steaming glaciers crossed the land from horizon to horizon, slicing up an angry red desert covered in tiny red dunes looking like the sand ripples left on a very red beach after the tide went out. As the ship dropped closer, the tiny dunes proved to be massive hills of sand sending out shadows taller than skyscrapers. As the ship dropped closer still, they proved to be larger still. The Astromoke actually flew through the shadow of one.
"Let's get some air in here", said Father Serafino, checking the internal air pressure gauge before yanking the airlock release. The only door to the outside on an Astromoke, unfortunately, was the loading door, which made up part of the rear floor. Although the door wasn't yet open wide enough for a human being to fall out, it was now a gaping, hissing, steaming, brilliant white crack in the deck into which Monopoly money was vanishing at the rate Ant's dad had always claimed Ant's mum spent his wages. Truman J. Slughound panicked and slithered into one of the emergency space suits, his myriad eyestalks popping up behind the suit’s faceplate.
The landscape was covered with craters, each about the size of the ship.
"Are those glacial features?" said Tamora.
"Tamora likes to say are those glacial features to impress buff geography teachers", said Cleo acidly. "The last thing she said it about turned out to be a car park seen from an unusual angle."
"They might be caused by dry ice melting suddenly", said Tamora hotly.
The ship was now sweeping towards a set of buildings, tall towers streamlined to face off a stiff south wind. The towers were belching smoke. Sunlight could be seen through great holes ripped in their sides.
"Willickers", said Glenn Bob.
"Bozhe moi", said Vladlena.
"I think", said Father Serafino after long deliberation, "that those craters were made recently, and not by glaciers. I also think we now know why the base staff are so jumpy."
Big, solid fences had been built around buildings in the facility. Hundred metre lengths of those fences had been ripped from their foundations like sellotape.
"Uh, Control", said Father Serafino into the console microphone, "it looks as if you've been hit by some sort of hostile encounter."
"OH, YOU THINK? WING OF SHIPS WERE ON US BEFORE WE EVEN KNEW IT. NEVER SAW A THING ON RADAR. BLEW HOLES IN ALL THE HABITAT SECTIONS, CRATERED THE ROADWAYS, KILLED OVER THIRTY PEOPLE. ONLY REASON WE'VE STILL GOT ANY OFFENSIVE CAPABILITY IS THAT THE MISSILE LAUNCHERS DIDN'T HAVE TIME TO RISE OUT OF THEIR SILOS. BASE COMMANDER KEPT THEM DOWN TILL THE ENEMY WAS ALL FLOWN OVER, THEN ORDERED 'EM BACK UP TO SHOOT THE FILTHY SAA-EES UP THE EXHAUST ON THEIR WAY OUT."
"Smart man, your base commander", said Father Serafino.
"Smarter than a lemming with a hang glider. If he'd ordered those missiles deployed while the ships was still in the air above us, they'd have all been blowed up and left us defenceless. He's going to catch hell for it from the tribal elders, mind."
The ship swept over a landscape that yawned with great scarlet pits. Each pit had wide ramps spiralling down into it, carved into its inside face, dotted with mining machines as big as houses. The ramps had, however, also been damaged in the recent attack, and had collapsed inwards and downwards in many places, sending men and machines tumbling into the pits. One colossal ore transporter lay on its side, with its cargo, which looked oddly like coal, spilling out of it in a broad fan. The bottom of each pit looked black as oil; down there in the depths, men wearing respirators were fighting to right machines and dig other men out from under hills of rubble. One group in particular were struggling to prop up a massive bulldozer that was teetering on the edge of a crumbling ramp, directly above a group of wounded men laid out on the black gravel at pit bottom.
"If that falls -" said Cleo.
"I know", said Father Serafino.
"The Astromoke Mark Three", said Ant, "carries an onboard towing chain connected to the ventral chassis, twenty metres long. Terminating", he finished, "in a hook."
Father Serafino turned and looked at Ant in bewilderment.
"Ant memorized the Astromoke, Magus and Harridan manuals for reasons best known to himself", said Cleo. "If he says it's got a chain, it's got a chain."
"Well, I know it's got a chain", said Father Serafino. "Of course it's got a chain. So what are we waiting for. Frankly", he admitted, searching the console in frustration, "for me to remember where the chain control is."
"Over there, on the left", said Ant. "Next to the manual undercarriage winder."
"How you failed Basic Manoeuvring I'll never know, Stevens", said Father Serafino, finding the chain release. A solid CLUNK rang through the hull, and the ship seemed to bounce in the air, as if something heavy had dropped out of it.
"Everybody hold on to something solid, now", said Father Serafino. "Stevens, you poke your head out of the loading door and check I'm not swinging my hook at the heads of my fellow citizens. I'm going to go lower."
Ant scurried across the deck to the door, grabbing a pair of handrails and pushing his head out into the air of Tau Boötis 3. Almost instantly, he couldn't feel his face. His eyes stung with the cold. He felt breathing in would be a bad idea.
The hook was swinging directly below the Moke like a wrecking ball, dangerously close to the heads of the men who were trying to lever the dozer back up the slope with steel scaffolding poles. Ant put both hands to his lips and yelled incoherently at them; they looked up and nearly dropped their poles in shock. Frantically, Ant tried to yell and signal to them to catch the swinging hook and try to attach it to the front of the dozer. Quickly, one of them ran up to a set of handholds on the side of the machine's cab and grabbed the hook, trying to pull it down towards to the joint between the dozer blade and the chassis. Unable to pull the chain far enough, the man looked up at Ant and waved his arms excitedly.
"I THINK HE WANTS YOU TO GO DOWN", yelled Ant to Father Serafino, who nodded and adjusted the controls. The Astromoke settled slightly in the air - the chain went slack in the man's hands, and now hooked easily round the joint. The man looked up, grinned and made a thumbs-up.
"OKAY", yelled Ant. "NOW BRING HER IN TOWARDS THE PIT WALL, SLOWLY."
Tongue protruding from the side of his mouth with mental effort, Father Serafino crossed himself and gently eased his hands down on the controls. The chain went taut; the dozer began to move backwards onto the ledge. There were cheers from below; the dozer's treads, now on the flat with the machine's weight pressing down through them onto solid ground, began to move the machine further up the ramp to higher ground.
"EXCELLENT", yelled Father Serafino. "NOW, NO TIME TO LOSE! DOWN TO WHERE THAT DIGGER IS IN TROUBLE!" He span the ship around in the air; the hook swung free of the dozer and hurtled dangerously across the slopes of the pit, causing miners to duck and cover.
"PADRE!" yelled Ant urgently. "KEEP THE HOOK STILL!"
"SORRY", bellowed Father Serafino, and slowed the ship's rate of descent. Ant could see the oily black sheen of the rocks at pit bottom. He realized he was breathing heavily, no doubt due to all the excitement. The digger had fallen on its side on a spoilheap, and men in respirators were trying to right it to release its driver, who had been trapped when his cab door became wedged between the digger's hull and the ground.
"TRY AND GET THEM", gasped Father Serafino, "TO HOOK THE CHAIN ONTO THE GRABBY-EARTHY THING ON THE BUSINESS END OF THE DIGGER." Yelling this sentence seemed to be too much for him; he got his breath back in great wheezing gasps, staring at the console. The men beneath the ship on the ground, meanwhile, were yelling up at Ant in horror, as if terrified by his naked face alone. They were all wearing respirators, waving their arms and jumping up and down desperately, pointing upwards at the sky.
"Gosh", panted Cleo, sagging back against the hull, "I feel really tired all of a sudden."
Ant suddenly realized that he had been trying to breathe for several seconds without effect. His ribcage had been opening and closing, but what was coming in did not seem to be air. It was as if he were trying to breathe underwater; with his throat wide open, he was choking.
The world was beginning to go black round the edges. Ant threw himself upright and half-fell across the cockpit to where Father Serafino was now slumped insensible over the controls. He took the control column with both hands and jerked it sharply upwards. The nose of the Moke rose, and the lip of the pit sank down the edges of the windows. Ant punched himself in the stomach, trying to force himself to breathe. Air began to flood back into him. He sat back in the copilot's seat, gasping like a landed fish. All around him, other members of the crew were doing the same.
"What", said Cleo when she could breathe enough to talk, which was very quickly, "happened?"
"What the hell was that, Astromoke?" said the control console. "You trying to get yourself killed out there?"
"Carbon dioxide", gulped Ant. "The bottom - of the pit - was filled with - carbon dioxide. Invisible. Not really poisonous. Heavier than air. But you can't - breathe it. That's - why the men - were wearing respirators."
Father Serafino's eyes were bulging from their sockets as he tried to take in all the oxygen he'd missed. Ant grabbed the console mike.
"We're okay, Control", he said. "We had our outside hatch open. Forgot you've got two sorts of air out here. Can you repeat instructions for landing over."
"Pad three", said the console. "You can't miss it. It's got a big red '3' on it."
"Understood, Control", said Ant. "Can we breathe the air at ground level?"
"Breathable air at zero metres today", confirmed the console radio. "Big dry monsoon coming in from the south later, though; we'll be swimming in ten metres of CO2. Be indoors for that."
"Understood", said Ant, and switched control from the pilot's seat to the copilot's. He turned the Astromoke gingerly in the air. Somewhere in the smoking mess below had to be a landing area.
***
The airlock door hissed open. Inside the building, pressure was hissing out of cracks in the walls. Native American faces stared back at the Astromoke's crew, but these Native Americans were wearing bright orange coveralls and respirators. There were no feathers or eagle parts in evidence.
Father Serafino, who was dressed as a war chief of the Dakota Sioux, hid his medicine staff behind his back reflexively. The Kumm-Ree technician who had opened the airlock looked him up and down curiously.
"Well, look at you", he said finally.
"We were on our way to a fancy dress party", said Ant quickly.
"You guys look like you're on your way to some sort of Acid rave yourselves", said Cleo.
The Kumm-Ree brave looked Cleo up and down.
"Acid", he said, and then, having considered this first completely unintelligible word, went on to "rave."
"You know", said Tamora. "With the brightly coloured overalls and the construction helmets and the respirators. Larging it with the Tau Boötis 3 posse."
"We're from Earth", said Ant.
Comprehension dawned on the technician's face. Everything was now explained.
"We get Earth radio out here", he said. "We sure do like your Earth Howdy Doody. He's a hoot and a holler and a half. What do you think?"
Cleo looked at Ant; Ant shrugged.
"I think we're a long, long way from Earth", said Ant.
"We're not too keen on your Lone Ranger, though", said the brave.
Cleo nodded. "I think I can figure out why. Tonto keeps getting rescued by the Lone Ranger, never the other way round?"
The Kumm-Ree grinned. "You are going to fit in real well here, missy." He looked to Father Serafino. "We have a major decompression incident right now. All the wounded are being moved to higher levels before the dry monsoon hits. Trouble is, the CO2 scrubbers have broken down in all the areas we've been able to repressurize."
Father Serafino took off his headdress. "Are you still using the old Westinghouse units? The quicklime sets solid in the exchanger if moisture gets into it."
The brave nodded. "We had a guy, Big Rock Sixty Six, who was real good at fixing them, but he was buried in a rockslide. Would you like to take a look?"
Father Serafino nodded happily. "I'll, uh, I'll just change into my uniform."
"I'd do that if I were you."
"Big Rock Sixty Six?" said Cleo. "That's an actual person's name?"
"Sure", said the brave, casting a glance at Father Serafino's costume. "You may not know this, but most of the people on this planet are Native Americans, and it's an old established tradition in our tribe that when a child is born, the father goes out into the desert and the first thing he sees is the child's name." He looked out of the ship's viewports sadly. "Whole lot of big rocks in the desert."
"You number your rocks?" said Ant, horrified at the administrative implications.
"We number all the people who're called Big Rock", said the brave. "I'm lucky. My name's Spiders Big As Donkeys. My dad was very drunk when he went out into the desert."
"I thought Native Americans didn't actually do the name-your-kid-after-the-first-thing-you-see thing", said Cleo suspiciously.
"Other Native Americans think we're weird", admitted Spiders Big As Donkeys. He looked past the crew into the ship, suddenly mystified. "Hey - is that a buffalo you got in there?"