Destination Alpha Four - Chapter 3

3 - The Beards Are Coming

"Oh", said the Commodore, glancing up briefly from his desk. "It's you."
The Commodore's desk was tidier than usual. Normally it was difficult to see the desktop under a stratum of reports, memoranda, dossiers, and technical manuals. Today, the desk was clear, apart from one single sheaf of papers neatly stacked so that the title page was tantalizingly on top. Ant crooked his neck to read it, but jumped back when the Commodore looked up sharply.
"Erm", said Cleo, embarrassed. "Drinky poos?"
The Commodore's mouth formed a silent o.
"Oh my", he said. "Where are my manners. I am getting so forgetful in my old age. Here I am, head buried in dry old top secret intelligence documents that only I should see, and I'm forgetting that I agreed to toast the success of the Fleet's highest rated group of newly flight-qualified cadets -"
"Erm", said Ant. "Actually -"
"Newly flight-qualified cadets", repeated the Commodore. "I'm afraid I have so much on my mind, what with the old Bay being scheduled for scrapping -"
"SCRAPPING?" Ant, Cleo, Jochen and Glenn Bob were all indignant simultaneously. Even Truman J. Slughound’s eyestalks shot up like exclamation marks.
"Oh, mercy me, I really shouldn't have said that. What was I thinking, that is top secret military information, what a bad old Commodore I am. Why, if the public knew that Jervis Bay, along with nine other warships, had been scheduled for decommissioning by President Ortega...and that, by curious coincidence, the nine vessels just happen to be ones stationed in and defending systems that failed to vote for President Ortega in the last election..."
"The Uriel", said Ant.
"Quite so, quite so. Capital gel, our President Ortega." The Commodore drummed on the table with his fingertips. "Which leaves me in a bit of a fix, of course. I was planning to do so much with the old tugboat."
"With President Ortega?" said Ant.
"Good heavens, no. With Jervis Bay. There is so much to do. For example, those alien brain-controlling chaps who kidnapped Mr. Linklater here's mother and father, who were involved in the death of Mr. von Spitzenburg here's grandfather, and who destroyed Miss Ilyushina here's home colony...we have no idea where these creatures come from. Hence, they can attack us, but we cannot attack them back.”
“Please, sir”, said Glenn Bob, raising a hand. “We know where they come from, sir. They come from Earth.”
“In a sense, yes”, said the Commodore. “But only that applies only to the host bodies they have infected. A small group of Waffen SS soldiers who, in the closing years of the Second World War, appear to have come upon a flying saucer, slaughtered its alien operators, and taken off in the ship for an unknown world where they became the slaves of a parasitic organism which controlled their minds. This does not explain, however, where that world is or where the parasite comes from. On the plus side, of course", he continued, "our blue friends don't know where we live here on Gondolin either, though they almost certainly will do shortly. Britain knows where Gondolin is now, and British and American security leaks like a Menger sponge."
Ant was about to open his mouth, and Glenn Bob said:
"It's a three-dimensional solid of infinite surface area enclosin zero volume there, on account of infinitely iterated, successively smaller inclusions in each of its faces. Y'all", he added.
"Thanks for that", said Ant.
"It leaks", said Glenn Bob. "You wouldn't want to make yourself no house out of Menger sponges, no sirreebob."
"So I was planning", said the Commodore, "to go out in Jervis Bay and look for their homeworld. But now here I am, my ship mothballed, awaiting the results of an investigation -"
Cleo's eyes narrowed. "Investigation."
Drummond nodded. "President Ortega is doubtful of the reality of blue space nazis as a military threat, but finds it very convenient that they might have infiltrated our navy and government. There is now, so I'm told, an organisation called the Un-Zodiacal Activities Commission, whose job it is to ferret out Blue Nazi influence, and I am currently under investigation by that Commission. I am accused, of course, of deliberately letting the British fleet get away at the Battle of Gondolin."
"Gosh", said Ant. "What will you say to that?"
"That it is the absolute categorical truth. They had been hurt enough; I let them withdraw. We are gentlemen, not murderers."
"But the British and Americans aren't blue space nazis", said Cleo, and then added, less certainly, "I think."
"I am afraid that, in the eyes of our Administration, they might be. It is now being assumed that both the British and American space navies are completely under the control of our turquoise foe, and that anyone who would therefore refuse to open fire on a British or American vessel must be, himself, a Blue in league with the enemy."
"But the President does not think the British and American fleets, joined together, are a military threat", said Jochen.
"Absolutely not", said Commodore Drummond. "We defeated them at the Battle of Gondolin, didn't we?"
"We have defeated only the British navy, in a very clever surprise manoeuvre", said Jochen. "The next time, they may not be surprised. And the American navy is very much larger than the British, and very much more technologically sophisticated. They will - wie sagt man? - wipe the floor with us."
"I am afraid you may be right", said the Commodore. "That is why it is essential that we locate and neutralize the Blue Menace ourselves. Of course, with no ships at Gondolin's disposal apart from a wing of cadet training vessels, it is going to be very difficult to do this."
The Commodore looked meaningfully into the eyes of everyone standing round his desk. It was very clear that a great deal was being left unsaid.
"Why can Navy nyot send out flyeet to find Blue Fascist homeworld?" said Vladlena, who had no concept of things left unsaid.
"Because the Blue Fascists don't present a military threat", said the Commodore. "You see the Presidential logic."
"I see the lack of Presidential logic", scoffed Cleo in disgust.
"I just wish I had a squadron of trained pilots", said the Commodore, "even newly-trained pilots, at my disposal." He drummed on the desk with his fingers. "Ah well. Can't be helped, I suppose. In any case - drinky poos. I'm sure I have a bottle of New Salem Sparkling Beef Liqueuroid somewhere in my married quarters. You wait here, and don't read any top secret military documents while my back is turned, you young scamps." He straightened up in his seat, screwed on a pair of casual house legs, and rose to his feet, which were rubber-tipped for maximum traction in an indoor environment. His footsteps thudded out and away down the corridor.
"He wants us to read that report", said Ant.
"Gee, d'you think?" said Glenn Bob.
"It was the way he kept looking meaningfully at it, winking, and pointing that gave the game away", said Cleo. She pulled the report towards herself, and turned it round to read it.
"Threat Assessment", she read. "By Benjamin Davis Yancy, Zodiac Intelligence, February 28 2001. Subject: Cerulean Amorphoids...."
She looked across the office at the Commodore's ancient Xerox copier. Lieutenant Turpin had bought it second hand from a second hand photocopier salesman who had seen him coming on his last visit to Earth. It ate toner by the bucketload, and put out so much heat that the Commodore no longer needed radiators in his office.
"What the hell", she said. "Turn it on. We might as well be hung for a robosheep as a cyberlamb."
***
Armand ducked out from behind the group of girl scouts he had been using as protective cover, took three quick steps to one of the pillars of the palace gate, and flattened his back against the masonry. Behind him in the courtyard, none of the Special Operations goons, who had helpfully all dressed in sharp suits so Armand could identify them, could see him.
He turned to the Grenadier Guardsman next to him and winked. The guardsman, standing rigid while an American kid jumped up and down in front of him doing baboon imitations and yelling "THAT'S YOUR MOMMA", flicked his eyes briefly sideways at Armand, but did not otherwise respond.
Armand set off along the Mall at a leisurely walk, trying to keep large groups of Latin American tourists between him and the Special Operations men at all times - the Latin Americans seemed to have no readily identifiable sense of fashion, and dressed like pizza delivery men quite voluntarily. Feeling he was now out of danger, Armand flipped a cigarette into his mouth. Behind him, he heard the American kid still yelling "WE KICKED YOUR LIMEY BUTTS AT SARATOGA!" at the guard.
He turned left into Trafalgar Square, feeling more comfortable among heavy traffic. A cooing carpet of pigeons covered the flagstones, feeding greedily on cigarette ends thrown maliciously to them by teenage tourists. Armand sat down on one of the fountains in the shadow of a bronze lion. The sound of rushing water was relaxing.
"Relaxin, ain't it", said a voice in his right ear, "the sound of rushin water."
He turned sharply. One of the tramps was sitting at his right elbow, so close in that he would be unable to move his arm to push the man away.
"You don't wanna be stealin stuff", said a voice to his left, "that don't belong to ya."
He turned in the other direction; another tramp was sitting close in on his other side. The left hand tramp's eyes were directed accusingly at the ABOVE TOP SECRET folder still in Armand's hand. The tramp held up his own hand; he had a small electronic device, the size of a key fob, in his palm. A red LED flashed in the middle of it. Taking hold of Armand's ABOVE TOP SECRET folder, he ripped the cardboard cover off it with one flick of his wrist. Inside the cardboard, glued to one of the bottom corners, was a microchip and a hair-thin wire aerial.
The tramp moved his electronic device closer to the microchip; the LED began flashing as fast as a disco light.
"There ent no Project Proteron, is there?" said Armand desolately.
The left hand tramp shook his head and smiled; he had very good teeth for a tramp.
"This folder ad a tracer in it, led you straight to me, didn't it?" said Armand.
The left hand tramp nodded.
"Looks like you've smelt a rat a bit too late", said the right hand tramp.
Armand sniffed the air, and wrinkled his nostrils.
"I think om smellin Lynx, the Irresistible Arftershave for Men", said Armand, "which is worse than rats in my umble opinion."
"You'd best be lettin us have that gun of yours", said the left hand tramp.
"Our science bods are itchin for a look at one of em", said the right hand tramp.
"Issa top secret prototype", said Armand. "Iss not got to fall into the wrong ands."
"We'll make sure it won't", said the right hand tramp. He made a grab for the Personal Orgonizer.
"Naughty", said Armand, snatching it away and flicking a switch on top of it. It began to vibrate loudly in his hand.
"We really must insist", said the left hand tramp, grabbing the Orgonizer and wrenching it out of Armand's fingers.
"So must I", said Armand, and threw himself backward into the fountain.
The water closed over his head; he had been told water would dull the effects. A couple of well-meaning men had explained this to him on board the USZ Jervis Bay, and had used long hard words like fast neutrons, hippocampus, and brain.
The world above the water seemed to glare green and purple, and Armand felt an odd and very specific fear of dwarfs with beards. Since he had never had anything against dwarfs or beards before, he put this down to the fact that he had just activated the Orgonizer's self destruct. When he poked his head back up spluttering above water, the Orgonizer was lying in a fused heap on the pavement, and both of the tramps, along with everyone else within thirty metres, was running around gibbering in a panic.
"DWARFS!" said the left hand tramp to Armand, attempting to tear his own hair out at the roots, wild-eyed. "STOP THE DWARFS!"
"BEARDS!" yelled the right hand tramp, pointing at a man ten metres away who actually had a beard. "THE BEARDS ARE COMING!" The man with the beard, once it had been pointed out that he had it, started batting at it with his hands while screaming "GET IT OFF ME! GET IT OFF ME!"
"Smart", said Armand. A bus had stopped on the other side of the street, and two passengers were walking into it; Armand strode across the street; the doors opened just before he got to them.
He stepped onto the bus. The driver did not acknowledge his presence in any way.
"D'you goo to Euston station?" said Armand.
The driver did not appear to operate any control Armand could see, but the doors slammed shut behind Armand, and, unusually for bus doors, locked. Armand could hear the bolts shooting home.
Armand looked at the driver in more detail. He was a round-faced, middle-aged man, with sparse greying hair under a London Transport cap, and a permanent idiotic grin. His face also appeared to be made of plastic.
Armand dived across the driver to kick out the emergency door in the side of the cab. The steering wheel shifted as he vaulted over it, without the driver appearing to turn it, and the clutch and accelerator pedals moved up and down in the footwell of their own accord as the bus pulled away from the kerb. Armand tried hard not to breathe. The air was cloudy now, stinking like a GCSE chemistry lab; he didn’t even have to inhale to smell it. People, nonsensically, were trying to flag down the bus, some of them even running out into the road from crowded stops, but the bus didn’t slow, continuing to eat up the road into Piccadilly. As the bus turned in the road, the passengers lolled in their seats, and Armand could see, on each and every one of them, the fixed expressions of shop window dummies. Some of them might be real people, but how would he know?
Easy. Real people would be wearing oxygen masks. And two of them were - the same two who had boarded the bus before him. A lady shopper and a hard-faced man in a suit and tie, sitting in their seats at the back, waiting for him to give in and breathe in. Their oxygen masks were transparent, covering their mouths and noses, and underneath these, they were wearing little oxygen bottles like neckties. He locked eyes with them, and they glared defiantly back. Eventually, he knew, he was going to have to either breathe or die - black walls were beginning to close around the world.
He lurched forward towards the lady shopper, ripped her mask off her, and pulled it over his own head. She stared at him in shock, as if, by doing this, he was somehow breaking the rules; then she took a breath in, and began coughing violently. The man was coming for Armand down the bus now; Armand took several steps back to the cab, lifted the driver’s cap off his head and flung it like a frisbee underneath the brake pedal. A corner was coming up at Oxford Circus; the brake tried to slide down into the footwell as if stamped by an invisible foot. It failed. The steering wheel turned the wheels, too hard for the speed the bus was travelling at; the bus rose onto two wheels, teetered on them, and then slammed down hard into the ground, hitting the yellow crosshatches of a box junction like a hammer. Armand was ready for the impact, hanging on to the disability rails along the walls. Ahead of him, he saw the rear wheel of a car skid into the windscreen, which jolted out of its frame, still in one piece, leaving a hole just large enough for Armand to squeeze through.
When he emerged into Oxford Circus, skidded cars and shocked shoppers surrounded him. A middle-aged lady in a lilac coat ran forward and took him by the arm. She had brown hair stuffed into a lilac hat in the shape of a lilac pouffe, stylish wire glasses, and a twin set and pearls.
“Good lord”, she said, “Are you all right?”
“Om all right”, said Armand.
“I think you have a nose bleed”, said the lady, and brought a paper handkerchief out of her handbag. “Here. Blow.”
She slapped the handkerchief over his face, and at the same time, punched him viciously in the stomach. Her hand appeared to have knuckledusters on it. The breath whooshed out of him, and almost immediately, had to whoosh back in, and what he was breathing in from the handkerchief was not entirely air. The world collapsed like the screen on a very old television to a very tiny dot, in the centre of which a woman in a lilac hat was saying:
“I think he’s fainted. Oh, look, there’s an ambulance. Flag it down, quickly. How lucky we are that one just happened to be driving by.”
***
It was cold out above ground on Gondolin Field. Space junk from the Battle of Gondolin was still raining back into the atmosphere, making the sky a brilliant waterfall of shooting stars. The Field was the unnatural neon green of astroturf, a carpet of what the eye said had to be grass stretching out a half mile towards a blue, flat expanse of what the eye swore blind on it's mother's grave was water. The green fuzz on the rocks was herboidea lichen, deadly poison for even the most determined goat. The wind in everyone's hair was blowing in from the False Sea, a desert larger than the Sahara coloured midnight blue by another species of lichen, instaraquae. Instaraquae spores, so older cadets said, could take root in human bone if swallowed and cause a person's whole skeleton to rot from within. Cleo didn't know how much truth there was in this, and suspected Gondolin adults just didn't want Gondolin children wandering far away out of doors, but it certainly wasn't wise to spend too much time out in the desert wind.
The British fighter had taken a direct hit from a USZ Gladiator during the Battle of Gondolin. Its pilot had been attacking Gondolin Field with radar-homing bombs to disable the Field's long-range eyes. He had managed to put his ship down, but had been horribly, fatally aged by time leakage from his own ship's damaged Forellen Turbine. The parched and wrinkled face of an Egyptian mummy grinned out of a flight helmet in the Harridan's cockpit. The Gondolin cadets’ duties often included patching up the planet’s ageing fleet of Harridan A1 fighters using bits of the many wrecked British A3s now floating around Gondolin. The downed Harridan was slowly being picked clean by scavenger teams sent out from the Field. In the meantime, it was doubling as a shelter from desert winds and airborne lichen spores for Gondolier teenagers looking to break the rules. Miniscule bottles of Gondolin moonshine were littered round the inside of the ship, along with occasional attempts at cigarettes rolled up in lichee leaves.
"Someone's actually smoked this one all the way through", marvelled Ant, holding up a green dog end.
"They're braver than I am", said Cleo. "Last thing I heard, they were making them out of dried nettle leaves." Tobacco was in short supply on Gondolin and throughout the USZ. It had never been possible to get it to take root in any of the thirteen alien soils available. The USZ's few smokers had to smuggle it in, like so many other luxuries, from Earth.
"Doesn't that sort of", said Ant, trying to think of a polite way to say, "not work? And, uh, sting a bit?"
"No and yes, but there's nothing stronger than the power of a thirteen-year-old's imagination", said Cleo. She sat down on one of a ring of ammunition crates someone had left in a circle on the lee side of the fighter's empty hull. "And the beauty of it all is, if anyone sees us all here, they'll just think we sneaked out to the Field to damage our lungs.”
"We are here to read Report", said Vladlena, rolling herself a genuine Earth cigarette. Vladlena seemed to be able to locate smoking tobacco in any environment she occupied, up to and including vacuum. "We are not hyere to discuss byasic dyecadent weakness of Gondolin cyitizen." She managed to get her black market lighter to spark, and puffed out a cloud of vanilla-smelling smoke. Cleo looked up at her with a scowl, turned the report to page one, and cleared her throat.
THREAT ASSESSMENT
BY
BENJAMIN DAVIS YANCY
USZ INTELLIGENCE
"SUBJECT: CERULEAN AMORPHOIDS
(q.v. 'BLUE SPACE NAZIS',’THE BLUE AXIS’, 'THE BLUE MEANIES', 'THE BLUE GOO', ‘THE BLUE GOOP’, 'THE TURQUOISE PERIL', et al)
1. CAPABILITIES
The enemy is a single-celled organism - nonetheless, it has internal structures which are radically different to what we would commonly expect from earthbound monocellular life. Samples of the enemy’s cellular structure have now been examined in USZ laboratories.
The enemy is capable of infecting and controlling individual human minds using only a very small component of itself, entering the body via orifices such as the mouth, nose, or excretory apertures.
["Hurr", said Ant. "He said 'excretory apertures'." Cleo scowled at Ant and continued reading]
The enemy requires a willing human subject to be able to take control in this manner, however. As a secondary strategy if the subject does not prove willing, once inside the brain, it can induce rapid cerebral haemorrhaging and kill the subject (c.f. Pulsipher, Captain William, Black Prince incident, 2000). The enemy will then exit the subject's body via a suitable bodily orifice, typically the nostrils.
If enough of the enemy's bodily collateral is available, it can mechanically take control of an unwilling target body, manipulating it into walking, grasping, and so on, although it seems not be be able to control the target body’s thoughts in this instance.
The enemy exhibits an ability to speak whatever languages it has assimilated from previous subjects, and an ability to communicate, via an unknown but highly sophisticated means, with other components of itself. In this sense, it can be considered as one single thinking organism. If individual host bodies which it has infected are killed, the organism as a whole survives, apparently retaining the memories of the bodies which 'died' (c.f. von Spitzenburg, Kurt, Spitzenburg incident, 2001). These properties may make allegiance to the Blue Goo dangerously attractive to weak minds, as this does seem to provide a sort of poor man's immortality. It may be speculated that human legends of immortal or unkillable creatures of great power (c.f. vampires, the Green Knight, the Lernaean hydra) might be mythological relations of actual events, of historical invasions of Earth by similar creatures.
Cleo took a pause for breath, then continued to the next section.
2. WEAKNESSES
Components of the enemy’s body can be killed with any of the following:
(1) Sodium hypochlorite
(2) Exposure to vacuum
(3) Exposure to microwave radiation
(4) Electrocution
The enemy is, however, immune to gunfire, explosives and hand Orgonizers, which unfortunately make up most of our current infantry arsenal. It should also be noted that the enemy will take pains to avoid certain chemicals secreted by the phytozoic wildlife of Krasnaya Zvezda Three.
[“Leshiy”, muttered Vladlena, nestling further into her greatcoat as if it could protect her against bad memories.]
None of these attacks, however, reliably destroy the entire enemy organism, and it might even be expected that each new method of attack will be remembered by the enemy as a whole, and possibly eventually counteracted. Human hosts whose brains are exposed to microwave radiation do appear, however, to be ‘cured’ of enemy infestation (c.f., Drummond, Charity and Shakespeare, Cleopatra, Spitzenburg incident, 2001). This has not been conclusively proven, however - it is difficult to see how it could be conclusively proven - and these individuals must continue to be treated as low-level security risks, possibly indefinitely.
[“The cheek of it!” humphed Cleo. “After all I’ve done for them! And after I was de-infested!”]
3. HOSTILITY
The enemy has shown itself to be intelligent - though possibly only truly intelligent once it has a human mind to occupy. It appears to either have a similar psychological makeup to those of a Nazi German, or to have acquired those same characteristics through symbiotically occupying the minds of Nazi Germans. Whichever of the two is true, human beings whose minds are infected by the Blue Goo believe themselves to be supermen, a new master race destined to be the next step in human evolution. Uninfected human beings must either submit to infection themselves or be exterminated.
4. TECHNOLOGICAL CAPABILITIES
The enemy’s capabilities for interstellar travel are far in advance of our own. Their starships’ C Plus drives are more efficient, they are capable of higher superlight speeds, and their onboard weapons systems are superior to ours in almost all respects. They possess a ‘Bavarian Cloaking Device’ similar to the systems installed on the American Aurora fighter, making their vessels all but invisible to radar. Furthermore, even their smallest vessels seem to be protected by a ‘Wolfram’s Shield’ which harmlessly deflects the majority of incoming cannon or missile fire, and they are also very solidly built. The vessel captured in the Spitzenburg incident of 2000, which I will hereafter refer to by its nickname of ‘The Blue Shark’, is known to its designers as a Zerstörer - literally a ‘Destroyer’. It is assumed to be a standard Blue Axis model. If this assumption is correct, we have cause for alarm. This analyst assumes that the enemy only currently possess a few of these ships as, if they had more, their psychology dictates that they would certainly attack us immediately. In such a scenario, it pains this analyst to admit that the enemy would almost certainly win. If we are to survive, we need to develop similar systems and technologies rapidly, before the Blue Goo can expand the size of its navy.
5. ORIGINS
It is believed the Blue Goo first infected German SS astronauts who landed on an as-yet-unidentified world some time during or after 1945 in the Venusberg starship. It is not known whether the Goo was native to that world -
[“It wasn’t”, said Cleo bluntly, and read on -]
- or whether this is only one of many worlds the Goo has spread to by symbiotically infecting the minds and bodies of various spacefaring alien species. From this unknown starting location, the Goo has used its human hosts to build advanced spacecraft and spread into Russian, American and USZ space.
It is assumed that exploratory Goo attacks on human shipping lanes have been happening for some time (c.f. the USZ Xenophon incident, the loss of the USS Spotsylvania, and the possible loss of the Russian cruiser Kapustin Yar in 1999). Analysis of unexplained shipping losses in recent weeks reveals a clustering in the constellation of Boötes. This is at odds with the attacks on the American and Russian settlements at Krasnaya Zvezda and Barnard’s Star, which were in the constellations of Andromeda and Ophiuchus respectively. It should be remembered, though, that the attacks on these colonies were, in the opinion of USZ intelligence, carried out in order to provoke the Russians and Americans into interstellar war. Given that the attacks were designed to be discovered, therefore, it is this analyst’s opinion that the Goo deliberately chose star systems well away from its own homeworld in these cases, in order to prevent us from tracing the assaults back there. It is also this analyst’s conclusion, therefore, that the search for the Goo should begin in the direction of Boötes...
Cleo looked up from the report. “The Commodore’s actually drawn a helpful picture of the constellation of Boötes in the margin, and written Good luck - On No Account Engage the Enemy next door to it.
“Fat chance of that”, said Glenn Bob. “The Magus’s only got one forward coil gun there, an it’s sloweren a photon in a swimming pool.”
“Taking on a Blueshark in a Magus would be like entering a head-biting contest with a Tyrannosaurus”, agreed Ant. “And giving the Tyrannosaurus the first move.”
“But we would need an interstellar drive to reach Boötes”, said Jochen. “And the Magus flight trainer has no interstellar capability. We are on cadet training on the Levi for the next twelve months. We are forced to go to whatever star system our carrier goes to. If the carrier goes to Altair, we go to Altair.”
“We don’t just need to go to Boötes”, said Cleo. “We need to go to one very particular part of Boötes. We need to go to David One, a deep space navigation hazard with declination plus thirty degrees, right ascension fifteen hours. It’s a brown dwarf. A star that never quite passed its Basic Thermonuclear Fusion.”
“Watch it”, said Ant.
“Not every word I ever say is directed at you, Ant. Earth astronomers have never discovered David One, because it’s what’s called a field dwarf - one which exists in open space, far away from any sun. Astronomers usually use a brown dwarf’s gravitational effect on a nearby sun to work out where it is, because the dwarfs themselves hardly give out any light - but if the dwarf is light years away from the nearest sun, the only way of finding it is to run into it accidentally in a spacecraft. And this brown dwarf is where Asgard is.”
Everyone looked at Cleo. “Why?”
“Simple”, said Cleo, gloating. “I have worked out an infallible method of finding the Sternekinder homeworld.”
Glenn Bob looked long-sufferingly at Ant. “Uh, Cleo, the combined military intelligence services of every world in the US Zee have been tryin to locate the Blue Goo homeworld for over a year an come up with a result asymptotically approachin diddly squat.”
“I found Gondolin, didn’t I?” said Cleo.
Glenn Bob obviously tried hard to think of a way in which Gondolin’s location might not have been discovered by Cleo, but was eventually forced to nod grudgingly.
“First of all”, said Cleo, “how far away is the Blue Goo homeworld from Earth?”
Glenn Bob considered this. “Uh - that would fall into the category of ‘stuff we do not know’ there, Cleopatra.”
“Yes we do know. Think. How long did it take Kurt and his SS crew to travel from Earth to the homeworld?”
Ant’s eyes popped like light bulbs going on. “No more than fifty-six years”, he breathed.
Tamora shook her head. “Not following this. Explanation for the hard of thinking please.”
“Because they were travelling at a hair’s breadth under lightspeed”, said Ant. “We know they were, they had to be. Relativistic effects caused Kurt to hardly age at all, and that sort of thing only happens at point nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine lightspeed.”
“Uh, you missed out a nine there”, said Glenn Bob.
“We know their speed, you see”, said Cleo, “and we know when they lifted off from Earth - January 1945. Given that it’s now 2001, they physically could not have gone further than fifty-six light years from Earth in the time they had. And they’ve been on the Blue Goo homeworld for quite a few years now -”
“Fifteen years”, said Charity. Cleo had not even known she was there. “They’ve been there fifteen years. They had been there seven years when they first kidnapped me, and I was with them for eight.”
Cleo nodded. “That means their homeworld has to be less than forty-one light years from Earth. And David One is exactly forty-one light years away in the right constellation. And it is a brown dwarf. You see, when you leave Asgard in a starship, just before the starship shifts to hyperdrive, there is always a dull red star visible through the viewports.”
“It’s kinda creepy that you know that, Cleopatra”, said Glenn Bob.
“I think it’s just as creepy as you do - it’s because I used to have the enemy in my head. The Sternekinder parasite that infected me may have died, but it left a lot of information behind it when it did. The Sternekinder are a group mind - every single one of them has access to the memories of every single other. So let’s use that data since we have it. I think the red star must be the star that Asgard orbits. It’s big enough or close enough to be disc-shaped when you see it, like Earth’s Sun, but so cold that it’s really only a dull red patch of space.”
“Looking out at it through a Zerstörer’s window”, agreed Charity, “you feel no heat on your cheek.”
“It’s more visible as a dark disc where there are no stars than from any actual light it gives out”, said Cleo. Maybe the light it gives out isn’t visible at all, but some form of radiation. I think it might not be a star at all. Which is why it has to be a brown dwarf. There are no neutron stars that close to Earth, and a black hole wouldn’t give out any light at all. The only other type of star-sized body that gives out virtually no light is a brown dwarf. Which means we need to go look at David One.”
“We’d need to pretend to be going somewhere else”, said Ant. “Somewhere nearby and inhabited. No-one’s likely to let a bunch of cadets go off to look at a deep space navigation hazard.”
“Nearest Zodiac colony to it is up at Tau Boötis, ‘bout ten light year away”, said Glenn Bob. He picked up a pock-marked, eroded polypropylene frisbee and hurled it out into the lichen steppe. Eagerly, but very, very slowly, Truman J. Slughound, Glenn Bob’s personal New Dixie sluggie, began undulating in the direction of where the frisbee fell, every one of his forest of eyestalks fixed on that position. Glenn Bob had trained Truman J. to fetch the frisbee, and each time he would bring it back and deposit it at Glenn Bob’s feet. Each time, the Frisbee would be slightly smaller, as Truman J. Slughound enjoyed polypropylene as part of a balanced diet.
“Got me my first interstellar navigation flight at fourteen hundred hours tomorrow”, said Glenn Bob. “Takin an Astromoke to Coma Berenices. Astromokes has got interstellar capability.”
“Gosh”, said Cleo, patting Glenn Bob’s knee. “You must be so proud.”
Glenn Bob went redder than a star fusing hydrogen in its outer shell.
“Glenn Bob”, wheedled Tamora, sidling up to him on the left hand side, “could we go with you on your flight?”
“And could we change the destination to Tau Boötis?” said Cleo, sidling up close to Glenn Bob, resting her chin on his shoulder, and fluttering her eyelashes at him.
“Gee”, said Glenn Bob. “Iffen you’re gonna torture me with your womanly wiles, I guess so. It’s Father Serafino doin the instructin, an he’s pretty free an easy. Some eleventh graders managed to convince him to let em land in the Vatican gardens once an write JESUS WAS A SPACE ALIEN on the lawn using the ship’s Saucer Drive.”
“Which eleventh graders?”
“I think one of em might have been Lootenant Turpin”, admitted Glenn Bob. He accepted the battered, half-dissolved frisbee, smoking with sluggie saliva and smelling strongly of acetone, from Truman J. Slughound.
“Good boy! Good ole sluggie there!”
Truman J. pulsed magenta with ecstasy. Glenn Bob cocked his wrist and flung the frisbee away, further this time. Truman J. rippled excitedly away over the lichen-encrusted boulders to retrieve it.
“I’m gonna have to get me another new frisbee”, said Glenn Bob mournfully.
“Why don’t you just get him a metal one?” said Ant.
“God bless you an keep you, he don’t like em. Eatin em’s half the fun for im. We’re gonna have to watch out - iffen he gets any fatter he’ll pupate an go into his egglayin stage, an we really don’t want that.”
“Why is that?” said Ant.
“On account of his egglayin stage is thirty foot long an carnivorous”, said Glenn Bob. “Never overfeed your sluggie.”
“What is Tau Boötis like?” said Tamora.
Cleo clucked in annoyance. “Tamora Athena, if you had paid any attention whatsoever in Planetology class, you would know. Tau Boötis is a triple star system. Tau Boötis A3 is a type AE planet, small and cold. Its poles tilt heavily towards Tau Boötis, meaning that they can get quite warm in summer, but get cold enough in winter for the carbon dioxide in the air to freeze solid. And then in summertime, the dioxide melts -“
“- sublimes -“ corrected Ant.
“- sublimes, and becomes carbon dioxide gas which rushes from pole to pole in a sort of poisonous monsoon, bringing freezing cold rain with it and carving great canyons in the landscape.”
"So it has a hot season, and a cold season", said Ant.
"No, Ant. It has a wet season, and a cold season. In all other respects, it is quite unlike Weston Super Mare. The population is low. Ninety per cent of them are Native Americans. They have a rich and interesting culture which is a vivid synthesis of many indigenous American peoples’ traditions and beliefs.”
“And not much to do on a Saturday evening, by the sound of it”, said Ant.
“Most of em was members of an Injun tribe who talked a language no-one else could understand”, said Glenn Bob, “not even other Injuns. The Navy used to use em to send secret messages by radio there.”
Ant thought this over. “How did anyone know the Indian at the receiving end wasn’t just making up the message from the Indian at the sending end?”
Glenn Bob shrugged. “Guess at the end of the day, you just gotta trust your Injun. Hindtalkers, they was called, on account of how they was the only ones who could speak to the commanders behind the lines. Their language was such an unbreakable code that the government kept 'em in military service after the war, transferred their whole tribe up to Tau Boötis 3 there. They call themselves Kumm-Ree. They call the planet Teer-Newith-a-Draa-Eeg-Gock, New Land of the Red-Winged Fire-Breathing Serpent."
"Gosh. Are there red-winged fire-breathing serpents there?"
"There ain’t bin no native life there big enough to see without a microscope for millions of years, but one of the first survey teams found a massive skeleton in the side of a cliff, a fossil from way back in the planet’s history, an it looked like one of the Kumm-Ree’s special tribal animals there, so they named the planet after it. Millions of years ago there was plenty of life - there’s coral cliffs miles high - but it got wiped out by the cold an all the water leakin out into space. The local deserts are the remains of sea bottoms, covered with the bones an teeth of million-year-old sea monsters. The Kumm-Ree are tryin to introduce North American wildlife - plant life, mostly - an turn the world into a big happy huntin ground."
Tamora's imagination was running riot. "Do the people live in teepees and hunt space buffalo?"
"Pressurised habitats, mostly. An the biggest local industry's buckminsterfullerene minin. There's lotsa buckminsterfullerene in the planetary crust there."
"What's buckminsterfullerene?" said Ant.
"Well - " Glenn Bob opened his mouth to explain, then considered who he was talking to. "Uh - it's kinda like coal, only more complicated. It's used for, you know, stuff." Glenn Bob rose to his feet and dusted the lichen spores off his uniform. "So we got to talk Father Serafino into visitin a buncha Injuns. Anyone got any ideas?"
Cleo frowned as she fingered her communion ring.
"As a committed Christian, I hate to say this, but I believe I have a plan that will allow me to wrap Father Serafino round my little finger and play yo-yo with him, possibly doing Sleep, Loop and Walk The Dog."