Saucerers and Gondoliers - Chapter 15

Chapter 15
Man Can’t Live At This Speed

An alarm was sounding. Voices were yelling at Ant through the intercom in Russian. Star trails were spinning round him. He was suffocating in a tiny space because of someone who was sitting on his chest, stopping him from freeing himself by pushing open the glass above his hands. Somewhere around the edges of the glass, he knew, was a catch which would open it and let him out. He searched for it frantically with his fingers.

"ANT! ANT! STOP TRYING TO PUSH THE CANOPY OPEN! THIS IS CLEO!"

He realized suddenly why there were stars spinning round him. Cleo's breath was hot on his face.

"GLENN BOB!" he yelled. "STOP THE SHIP SPINNING! TURN ON THE MAIN DRIVE! GET US OUT OF HERE!"

"I'M TRYING!" came a deafening shout from the intercom. Turning his head with difficulty, Ant could see a crowd of eyestalks perched on Glenn Bob's head as he searched frantically through the banks of dials and switches in the instructor's cockpit.

"Oh dear", said Ant. "It's all going Horribly Wrong."

"GOT IT", yelled Glenn Bob unnecessarily. The ship seemd to straighten, and the stars to stand still. Cleo was no longer pressed against Ant's chest like a sack of potatoes. The fighter was drifting in mid-space.

Before Ant had actually been in space, he had somehow expected it to look like a starry night on Earth. When Mr. Turpin’s ship had taken off, however, there had been no stars, just a glaring sun blotting out all other light. But here, there were bright glowing clouds of gas and dust laid across the universe like lengths of velvet. Ant, who had never properly seen the Milky Way, had been eagerly awaiting his first view of it from space - but here, there seemed to be no Milky Way either. Instead, the whole of space here seemed to be one big Milky Way, surrounding him with huge, painfully bright stars and lumps of tumbling iron that he thought might be asteroids, but some of which glowed as if they'd just been torn off a volcano.

"We're back in hyperspace", said Ant. "Oh no. We must have left the carrier while it was still in hyperspace."

"Looks like hyperspace all right", said Glenn Bob. "This universe is real small and hot, and expanding fast."

"Is hyperspace smaller than our universe?" said Ant.

"Certainly is. Otherwise, there'd be no point in going through it, would there? We zip through hyperspace to save us all that trouble of flying from here to Alpha Centauri there. Hyperspace is like a ping pong ball in the middle of a baseball, the baseball being our universe. We can go round the baseball to get from point A to point B, or we can burrow down to the ping pong ball and make the journey shorter. That's your simple four dimensional geometry."

"Oh", said Ant. "So smaller universes expand faster, do they?"

"Yup. Our own universe was real small just after the Big Bang when God did all of his Creation. It's just got bigger since then."

"Glenn Bob", said Cleo, as if she had thought of something extremely unpleasant, "does this ship have a faster-than-light drive?"

Ant could see Glenn Bob looking round the cockpit. "Don't look like it", he concluded. "Most fighters are too small to have hyperdrives."

"So we're stuck here", said Cleo. "We can't leave hyperspace. We are stranded here forever."

Almost on cue, two identical Russian military saucers dropped out of nowhere to flank their own fighter. The Russian voices became louder and more insistent in the console. A lump of cratered rock the size and shape of the Isle of Wight tumbled past overhead.

Then the console changed both voice and language and said: "THIS IS CYAPTAIN GREGOR GREGOROVICH POPOV OF THE SOVIET ASSYAULT CYARRIER ALEXEI STAKHANOV. YOU WILL CYEASE YOUR YINTERSTELLAR PYIRACY AND RETURN BYEAUTIFUL SOVIET SPYACE FYIGHTER TO DOCK OR WE WYILL BE FORCED TO RYESORT TO TYOTAL YANNIHILATION OF YOURSYELVES OVER."

The two saucers flanking them were keeping pace with effortless ease.

"CAN'T WE OUTRUN THEM?" yelled Ant desperately into the console microphone.

"Uh, that's a negatory", came the reply. "Them guys looks like they know a deal more about piloting these here machines than yours truly."

"Such as knowing how to turn the main drive on?" said Ant sarcastically.

"You could say that", said the console forlornly. Then, it added, in Captain Popov's voice, "YIS NO YESCAPE. YOU WILL SUBMYIT TO ADDYITION OF TOW CLYAMP PLYEASE."

A long metal cable had snaked out of one of the flanking fighters, and was motoring slowly towards them, apparently under its own power. The tip of it was venting a blue flame like a rocket motor.

"Yis no Yescape", parroted Cleo hopelessly.

Ant's attention, however, was elsewhere. Rather than staring at the tow cable as it jetted closer, his eyes were fixed on Mr. Turpin.

Mr. Turpin, in the pilot's cockpit in front of Ant, was still examining the flight console in front of him, and Ant doubted he'd taken his eyes off it since he was first dumped into the pilot's seat. He'd stopped running his hands over the controls like a child in a new nursery, and was now sitting studying them carefully, as if imagining which did what.

"Look at him, doing nothing", said Cleo contemptuously.

Then, rapidly and without a single pause for thought, Mr. Turpin reached up above him and flicked several switches to the 'ON' position. Immediately, banks of lights that had been lit up in scarlet on the pilot's console streamed into green. Mr. Turpin reached forward, turned a second switch, and ignored the three-dimensional display that bounced into the glass screen in front of him, because by then he was busy flicking other switches, making the navigator's console in front of Ant and Cleo light up as bright a dense thicket of Christmas trees. In the three-dimensional display, a big green dot that Ant assumed was their own fighter was surrounded by one big green dot and two small ones, which Ant assumed were the Russian carrier and the two other fighters.

Then Mr. Turpin took hold of the joystick.

The universe turned inside out and upside down. Ant felt Cleo attempting to crush the life out of first one side of his chest, then the other. Stars that had stayed put a moment ago now moved so fast they became long and thin like string. An asteroid big as Bedfordshire whirled past Ant's ear so close, he could see craters inside its craters. In the console, a Russian voice was yelling, and there were red letters flashing on the display saying Враждебная Ракета! Then Mr. Turpin's hand moved again, and Ant was treated to an extra special close-up view of the universe as his face was jammed hard against the canopy glass. Star trails seared past his face. A bright white line slashed the dark like a lightsabre, and Ant knew it was the trail of an incoming missile. Then the cockpit turned upside down - or right side up, there was no up or down in space - and Ant was looking up straight into the eyes of a clearly terrified Russian fighter saucer pilot. The other ship was right above them, flying the wrong way up. The Russian pilot jinked desperately on his joystick left and right, but Mr. Turpin matched him jink for jink. The two men's eyes stayed locked. The Russian stared into Mr. Turpin's eyes, almost as if pleading. Then he began yelling into a microphone clipped to his flight helmet, and Ant saw a red dot blinking in the three-dimensional display inside his cockpit.

Then Mr. Turpin pulled hard on the stick and pirouetted away from the other ship, and Ant just had time to see the Russian's face fill with relief as he punched down hard on something in his cockpit and the entire front of his fighter blew away into space, carrying him away from his vessel just as something bright white and fiery tore into it from underneath and the saucer exploded into a galaxy of tiny fragments.

"Clever", breathed Glenn Bob. "Real clever. He done hid his ship beneath the Russkie's, and the missile the other Commie fired homed in on his comrade."

"Clever?" said Cleo. "He just nearly killed someone."

"That someone was fixing to kill him", reminded Glenn Bob. "And us. And Turpin done rolled us out of the way to let him get to his eject in time."

Then the ship was moving again, and Ant and Cleo were crushing the life out of each other. The saucer raced through a sliver of light between two rolling boulders the size of Snowdonia.

Ant peered past Mr. Turpin at a blue glowing dot in the 3-D display on the pilot's panel. "He's still behind us", he said.

The stars turned like a glowing whirlpool as the ship veered and spun to escape invisible attacks from behind. Although the attacks were invisible, they were very real, as Ant could see when their ship scooted across the front of a planetoid which lit up in a line of sparkling flashes as they passed.

"What's the other ship trying to do to us, Glenn Bob?" said Ant.

"Shoot little bitty slivers of ferrous metal up our butts", said Glenn Bob informatively. "They zip along right fast, about point zero one of lightspeed."

"Not lasers, then", said Ant.

"What's a laser?" said Glenn Bob.

"Nothing", said Ant. "That's a relief", he said to Cleo. "No lasers."

"Ant, those little bitty slivers of metal look like they made a hole the size of Godzilla's bum in that asteroid."

"Oh."

The ship raced under another asteroid, did a back flip over it that Ant was sure had left his eyeballs plastered to the canopy, and raced back in the opposite direction. Looking back, Ant saw a fizzing green star that had to be the pursuing fighter rounding the planetoid on a course that implied the enemy pilot had temporarily lost track of their ship. Then another tumbling hulk of space pumice blocked off the line of sight between them and the enemy fighter, and Ant was sure that this was no coincidence. Their ship was slowing, racing towards a third asteroid, which glowed in two colours as it tumbled toward them in the dark. One side of the rock fragment was reflecting the bright white light from the nearest star, almost as colourless as moonlight. But the dark half of the asteroid also glowed, with a dimmer, greenish-purple light that didn't look entirely healthy. It was here that their saucer murmured and burbled to a halt, with a squillion tons of emerald and violet turning slowly above their heads.

"Why does it glow?" said Cleo.

"Natural fluorescence", said Glenn Bob. "Real clever. This asteroid's made of some sort of stuff that's luminous, maybe even radioactive. It'll hide our exhaust from that other fighter's sensors."

Mr. Turpin was looking up at the giant grinding mass of interstellar granite rotating above their heads. Occasionally, he would make an adjustment to the ship's controls without looking down, like a footballer trying to keep a billion-tonne ball in the air above him. Whenever he touched the controls the ship would drift forwards, backwards or sideways slightly with a whoosh of jets.

"He's keeping the planetoid between us and that other fighter", said Glenn Bob.

Russian voices began crackling out of the console once again. To begin with, the voices were quite loud, and then they began to fade, until eventually they could hardly be heard at all. When they had died away almost to nothing, Mr. Turpin sat back in his seat with one hand on the dog tag round his neck, raised the dog tag to his teeth, and bit down on it hard so that it snapped in half. In the gloom of the pilot's cockpit, a tiny red light could be seen winking inside the broken metal. Mr. Turpin settled back in his seat with a beatific smile, and went to sleep.

"I think", breathed Ant, "that we have just found out what Mr. Turpin is good at."

"Oh, yes, he's brilliant", said Cleo. "We die when the air supply runs out."

"No we don't", said Ant. "Don't you see? It's a, its a homing signal. He had a homing beacon hidden in his dog tag. It's probably sending out a signal to a USZ ship right now."

"Sorry to fart in your airlock", said Glenn Bob, "but that ain't possible. We're in hyperspace. Ships in normal space can't pick up radio signals out of hyperspace."

"So why did he even bother to activate the signal?" said Ant.

"Probly thinks he's still back in realspace. He's delirious."

"So we're going to die anyway. After all this."

"Sure does look that way."

"What are the symptoms of oxygen starvation?" said Cleo.

"Uh, shortness of breath", panted Glenn Bob. "And listlessness", he added, yawning.

"Couldn't we rig up some sort of enormous greenhouse to recycle our breath into oxygen?" said Cleo. "Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, you know."

"You got yourself a seed nursery in your pants pocket there, do you?" said Glenn Bob.

"There's no need to be offensive", sighed Cleo.

Ant, meanwhile, was still staring over Mr. Turpin's shoulder. "Glenn Bob - what does it mean when something blinks red on the pilot's 3-D display, do you think?"

Glenn Bob thought for a moment. "Means an enemy ship within target range, I shouldn't wonder", he yawned.

"But the Russian ships that fired on us were green on the display."

"That's cause we was Russian, and they was Russian too. Ant, iffen you don't mind me saying, on occasion, you is a low watt bulb."

"So...if there was a red light on the display, that would mean a non-Russian ship, very close by", said Ant.

Glenn Bob thought again. He heaved out an enormous sigh. "Guess so...d'you got such a light?"

Cleo pushed Ant aside and gawped into the pilot's cockpit. "Yes! Yes! Yes, we do! I mean, we have! There's a ship coming to fetch us! Oh, happy day, callooh, callay, we're saved!"

"All we know bout that vessel", cautioned Glenn Bob, "is that it ain't Russian."

"That's good enough for me!" yelled Cleo. "Woohoo! Woohoo! Yahoo!" she added.

"Going 'woohoo woohoo yahoo' wastes oxygen", said Glenn Bob.

Through the canopy glass, meanwhile, Ant could see one more star than he'd been able to before - and that star was growing larger.

The radio squawked into life. "Attention Soviet Mikoyan-Korolev. This is the United States of the Zodiac cruiser Jervis Bay. Do you require assistance, over?"

"English", said Ant in disbelief.

"All the U.S. Zee speak English", said Glenn Bob breathily.

"No", said Ant. "He is English. Just like us and Mr. Turpin."

The star had by now grown large enough to be, visibly, a saucer under power. It was not a red-star-spangled monster like the Russian carrier, but was far smaller, not much larger than the U.S. Corvette Virginia. There were, though, as it came closer, a few stars on its hull - old ones that someone had tried to paint out and failed. An attempt had also been made to paint out the ‘A’ of ‘USA’ on its hull and replace it with a ‘Z’.

Glenn Bob scoffed. “Why, that ain’t but one of our old Revere class light cruisers with a different paintjob. I doubt she’ll make one thousand times lightspeed.”

The ship was, it was true, in a shabby state. As well as painting over the emblems of the ship’s previous owners, the USZ refitters also seemed to have tried to paint over micrometeoroid scars and long streaks of corrosion; seen from close up, the ship was a mess of welds and repairs.

Cleo leaned over to the console. “This is, erm, Mick Korolev. Our pilot is injured, and we are incapable of movement, over.”

There was a pause, after which the console said, not without suspicion:

“You speak very good English for a Russian, Mikoyan-Korolev, over.”

Cleo frowned. “I lyearn Yinglish vyery well in Byeautiful Soviet KGB”, she replied. “Syize of an Yelephant”, she added.

“Можем мы помочьвам, over?”

“Ah, repyeat plyease, byeautiful Soviet radio is nyot fyunctionying”, improvised Cleo. “Is dyamyaged in myeteor stryike that yis also damagying pilot.”

There was another pause.

“Don’t you mean meteoroid, Mikoyan-Korolev, over?” said the radio.

“Meteors is meteoroids outside planetary atmospheres”, whispered Glenn Bob helpfully through the console speaker. “Don’t go askin me why now.”

“It’s a bit of a crowded house over there by the sound of things”, said the voice from the cruiser. “Do Americans often travel on Russian military vessels, over?”

“Shucks and fudge”, said Glenn Bob. “I plumb forgot there they could hear me iffen I talked into the radio. Aw dang, I forgot I done talked into the radio again.”

“You certainly did”, said the radio. “Prepare for docking, over.”

“Uh, I don’t think we got us no airlock nor docking clamps”, said Glenn Bob, and added, “Over.”

“We syeek asylum in Dyemocratic Yunited Styates of Zodiac”, added Cleo.

“That’s the spirit. Can you make a space walk across to this vessel at all, over?”

“Aw, we don’t got us no space suits neither over.”

The next pause was very, very long. Then, the radio said:

“You’re flying a high performance fighter without a space suit?”

“That’s a positive”, replied Glenn Bob.

“There aren’t many suits in our size”, said Ant.

“How old are you exactly, Mikoyan-Korolev?”

“Twelve”, said Cleo.

“Twelve”, said Ant. “And a half”, he added.

“Twelve point six”, said Glenn Bob.

“Don’t move. And don’t touch anything. We’re going to try and take you into our lifeboat bay.” There was a sound of muffled conversation from the radio, one side of which went like this:

“What’d’you mean, it’s blocked with essential supplies?”

“I don’t call that essential.”

“I don’t care how many households on Gondolin have to do without soft toilet paper, Mr. Ruskin. Lives are at stake here. If it’s not needed, kick it out of the airlock.”