Sister Ships and Alastair - Chapter 8

8. A Bomb That Shouldn't Have Been There

"What's happening?" said Cleo.
Drague looked up from his memo pad. Whatever his reply was, it could not be heard over the alarm. Almost immediately, a group of black-uniformed men burst into the interrogation cell and hauled Drague out of his chair by his elbows. This would have been amusing if it had not also happened to Cleo at the same time. Drague and Cleo were dragged out of the cell and rushed down a gangway beneath flashing red lights; finally, they arrived in a chamber containing nothing but rows of seats bolted to the floor back-to-back. Each seat held a man in uniform, except for two, into which Cleo and Mr. Drague were stuffed, despite Mr. Drague's complaints. Hands then buckled complex four-pointed safety belts that held Cleo and Drague tight in their seats - Cleo heard Mr. Drague breathe out with a yelp as the belt cut into his abdomen. Then the men who had fastened them in rushed to seats of their own as the walls, floor and ceiling began to rumble as if from an earthquake.
Cleo gasped in surprise. "We're in a ship", she said. "The whole time, we were in one of the ships parked in Weaponisation."
"INSIDE BLACK PRINCE, TO BE PRECISE", shouted Drague in her ear. The floor snapped upwards, as if they had been cricket balls and it had been the bat. Cleo remembered the spare blanket hanging upside down in her cell. It had not been a spare blanket. It had been another bunk. The cell had been designed for use in zero gravity. The hooks and eyes had been there to stop the blanket from drifting off a sleeper.
Mr. Drague yelled at a nearby officer, with some difficulty; his face muscles were having to fight acceleration. He looked like a man having a stroke. "LIEUTENANT, WHAT IS GOING ON?"
"SORRY, SIR. CAPTAIN'S ORDERS. EMERGENCY LIFT-OFF. DANGEROUS CONDITIONS IN THE BASE."
"WHAT SORT OF - DANGEROUS CONDITIONS?"
"UH...WE BELIEVE WE FOUND A BOMB, SIR."
"LIEUTENANT - THIS BASE IS A THERMONUCLEAR WEAPONS ASSEMBLY CENTRE - IT IS FULL OF BOMBS."
"I MEAN, A BOMB THAT SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN THERE, SIR. AN IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE ON THE SIDE OF ONE OF THE DOOMSDAY UNITS."
This shut Drague up for entire seconds. When he finally spoke, he shouted:
"FINISHED - OR INCOMPLETE?"
"ALL UNITS IN THE BASE ARE INCOMPLETE, SIR. THEY GET LOADED THE MINUTE THEY'RE FINISHED, AND THEN THE SHIP HAS TO TAKE OFF AND GET A MILLION MILES OUTSYSTEM OF EARTH IN AN HOUR -"
"I KNOW THAT, LIEUTENANT - I HELPED DRAFT THAT REGULATION - THERE WAS A UNIT ON THE LOADING LIFT UNDER DRESDEN DOLL WHEN WE WERE ON THE GROUND - BY DEFINITION, THAT ONE IS FINISHED - IS IT THAT ONE?"
The Lieutenant went pale. "UH, NO, SIR. CAPTAIN MULGREW'S GETTING DRESDEN DOLL UNDERWAY. THE BASE STAFF ARE MOVING SANDBAGS INTO PLACE AROUND THE UNIT. EVERYTHING'S SHORTLY GOING TO BE UNDER CONTROL -"
"SANDBAGS? AGAINST A NUCLEAR DEVICE WEIGHING A THOUSAND TONNES? IT'LL BLOW A HOLE - BIG ENOUGH FOR BEDFORD TO FALL INTO. IN THE EVENT HE SURVIVES - INFORM YOUR BASE COMMANDER I INTEND TO HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH HIM - REGARDING SITE SAFETY."
The Lieutenant gulped, saluted, nodded, and moved away across the compartment. The ship now had to be in orbit. He was floating rather than walking, and Cleo could feel the familiar and uncomfortable sensation of her stomach contents going wherever they wanted.
The alarm died, leaving Cleo's ears still ringing. The crewmen released themselves from their seats and pushed themselves off in all directions to their tasks on board ship.
"Idiots", said Drague to himself, recovering his breath now the G force had released him. "I am...hemmed in by incompetents on all sides...as usual." He gulped in a draught of air voraciously.
Cleo said nothing. Drague looked up at her.
"You think I'm being hard on the poor dear men, of course...Maybe some background is in order. I was sent here to Bedford to investigate why the base was able to assemble bombs so quickly...Bedford were able to build devices twice as quickly as the equivalent American facility in Nevada. Our senior ministers were obscenely proud of it...I, however, was suspicious - and, it seems, rightly so...Even the cursory inspection I've made reveals that they've been assembling up to three weapons while they're still loading another..."
He looked at Cleo as if expecting a response of shocked outrage. He was breathing more slowly now.
"Is that bad?" said Cleo.
"My dear girl, a cobalt bomb is essentially a colossal amount of plastic explosive wrapped round enough plutonium and cobalt to ballast a battleship...When you're assembling a doomsday bomb, for reasons of safety, the plastic explosive and the plutonium should only be allowed to come together right at the end of the process, just before the weapon is loaded into the starship that will carry it...That way an armed bomb capable of destroying planet Earth is only ever on planet Earth for the hour or so it takes to load it and lift off...Do you follow me so far?"
Cleo nodded tentatively. "I think so."
"Now, an unarmed bomb is still a colossal amount of plastic explosive...That explosive is intended to compress the plutonium in the bomb and produce an earth-shattering KABOOM...So what do you imagine would happen if an unarmed bomb went off accidentally, right next to an armed one?"
Cleo frowned. "An earth-shattering KABOOM?"
"There are safeguards against it, but yes, there is a danger of that. It's called sympathetic detonation...The weaponisation bay at Bedford is modelled on the American ones in Nevada...It has unthinkably thick walls capable of containing any accidental detonation of the plastic explosive, stopping it from setting off any other weapon on the base...The idiot that runs that base has been allowing up to four bombs to sit in weaponisation at once. He obviously realized it would allow him to assemble them faster."
"What'll happen to him?" said Cleo.
"Court martial. If I have anything to do with it, he will spend the next ten years on Alpha Four. And if you think that's harsh, what you would do to someone who risked blowing up the world just in order to boost his performance statistics?"
Cleo nodded. "When you put it like that, it seems fair."
"I agree. So how do you feel about your Lieutenant Farthing now?"
Cleo, put off balance, blinked in alarm. "I beg your pardon?"
"She just planted a bomb on the side of one of the cobalt devices. One of the bombs that would destroy all life on Earth if it detonated. Who else could have done that? I need hardly remind you that it would be very convenient for a group of people who see Earth as their only obstacle to independence if Earth ceased to exist."
Cleo's mouth dropped open. She was aware that she was staring at Drague like an idiot.
"Lieutenant Farthing wouldn't lie to me", she stammered. "Lieutenant Farthing wouldn't do a thing like that -"
"Of course", nodded Drague in frank disgust. His breath had now returned completely to normal. "Then in the absence of any other suspects, I imagine one of our highly aggressive robo-sheep must have done it with its little hooves. My, those little devils learn quickly." He rubbed his bony shoulders where the seat restraints had cut into them during take-off. "I believe these gentlemen are waiting to escort you back to your quarters." He cricked his neck up at two armed crewmen who had been literally hovering nervously, waiting to catch his attention. One of the crewmen saluted, propelling himself several inches sideways in the process.
"Beg pardon sir, but Captain Pulsipher says standard procedure is for all enemy prisoners to be secured during flight, sir."
Drague nodded. "Quite so, quite so. Carry on, Able Spaceman."
Cleo, batted about like a volleyball by the crewmen, who were far more experienced in zero gravity movement than she was, was bundled back towards the cell she had been in to begin with.
***
The cell still smelt of burnt insulation. Now the ship was in orbit, it also smelt of dirt that had shaken free from the walls during lift-off and failed to fall back under gravity.
It also smelt strongly of Hammond Karg.
Karg was lying on the second bunk, securely fastened in with the hooks and eyes on the bunk blanket. Despite this, his knuckles were white with holding on to the bunk sides.
"For heaven's sake", said Cleo irritably.
"I'm falling", explained Karg, his teeth gritted against imaginary oncoming impact.
"It's not the falling, it's the bit where the falling stops that kills you. This is free fall. You never stop falling. Therefore, you are safe."
"I thought it was zero gravity, not free fall."
Cleo had researched this subject. "Strictly speaking, zero gravity doesn't exist anywhere in the universe. We're floating around like this in the same way a peppercorn floats around inside a shaker if you throw it in the air. The only difference is that our shaker was thrown so fast, it'll never come down."
"I don't understand any of this", said Karg. "I really am a private investigator. I really was following your friend. I've never been to space. They said they'd let me go if I cooperated."
"They won't ever let you go", said Cleo, shaking her head. "You have a secret to keep. The secret that they're building their own little empire in space. That means you're going to Alpha Four."
"Alpha Four?" Mr. Karg's eyes swivelled desperately in their cage of flab. "Is that a nice place?"
Cleo laughed hollowly. "Oh yes. There are beach hotels and ice-cream mines."
"Thank God. I thought it was going to be somewhere bad. No. Wait. That was sarcasm, wasn't it. I know sarcasm. That means Alpha Four is bad. Oh lord."
"Really, really, really bad, yes." Cleo had never been to Alpha Four, but tormenting Karg gave her a fertile imagination. "Imagine Luton with death camps."
"Luton?"
"I would have worried more about the death camps part myself", said Cleo, "but each to his own. Yes; it is true. Alpha Four has no clearly defined civic centre and acres and acres of terrible Sixties concrete housing. And a very poor traffic system -"
She stopped in mid-sentence. Something had changed.
"Did you feel that?" said Cleo.
Karg hesitated - then, eventually, he nodded. "Yes", he said. "I don't know how to describe it...but I felt it."
It had been definite but indefinable, as if everything in existence had just stretched out flat and taut as a drumskin and then snapped back together.
"We're in hyperspace", said Cleo.
"Gosh", said Karg. "Erm - how do you know?"
"I just do. I've been in hyperspace before. Why have they gone hyperspatial? They only took off to get the ship clear of the base in case a bomb went off. And the ship's halfway through a refit, so it should be in no fit state to go to another star. And there'd be no point in being in hyperspace unless we were under -"
Mr. Karg shrieked as at least a full gravity of acceleration took hold of him and hurled him at Cleo's end of the cabin. Luckily, he didn't fall straight downwards, but collided flabbily with the floor to one side of Cleo's bunk.
"- thrust", said Cleo.
Karg groaned from the floor. Alarms sounded again. There was no alarm speaker inside the cell; this time, the sound was relatively bearable.
"Something's wrong", said Cleo. "They know they shouldn't be in hyperspace either." Hope started to build inside her. "It's Lieutenant Farthing. She's on board. She's come to get me." She looked up at the light fitting. "Am I right, Alastair?"
The light fitting coughed in embarrassment. "Erm - I'm afraid you are. Could you possibly accompany the two gentlemen who are about to enter your cell?"
"Which two gentlemen?" said Cleo. The cell door ground open on millstones of hinges. Two gigantic guards now stood, rather than floated, outside.
"These gentlemen", said the light fitting.
***
In the valley of the River Ouse, thunder rain lashed down, making weird sinuous shapes in itself, so thick that it seemed to have physical form. Rain serpents writhed across cornfields and cow pastures and cast sunlight into bars of solid gold. The bridge across the dual carriageway was one dripping sheet of water. The feet the bridge had been designed for were not human, and a whole herd of such feet were shuffling over it as their owners mooed moronically.
Lieutenant Turpin, who every now and again kept physically slapping himself in the smile to knock the after-effects of the Personal Orgonizer away, was watching the cows with deep suspicion. "Do you think they're genuine?" he said.
Ant sniffed the air delicately. "Unless what I just stepped in is really, really authentic, I'm almost sure of it."
Below them on the dual carriageway, another car had pulled up, and a group of men in camouflage trousers and T shirts had piled out of it to inspect the Lagonda.
"Do you think they've seen us?" said Turpin.
"No", said Ant. "They were in too much a hurry to put their headsets on. They can't see our body heat. That one there next to the car is checking the paintwork to make sure a VIP's lovely car hasn't been damaged. That one behind him is checking the undergrowth to make sure we're not hiding in it. The one who worries me is the one who's looking up at the bridge. They'll be over here just as soon as the cows are."
"He looks nervous", said Turpin. "Every time he looks our way."
"Erm, I think that might be because he's figured out I took this out of the car", said Ant, holding up the immense rocket pistol he had found in the glove compartment. It felt heavy in his hand, and powerful. With it in his hand, he felt invincible.
"Don't try firing that thing", warned Turpin. "The rockets it fires home in on body heat. An untrained trooper firing one often finds out they home in on his own body heat."
Ant dropped the gun as if scalded. In his left hand, he held up other device they'd stolen from the car. It was circular and hemispherical, like a snowstorm shaker, with an array of buttons round its circumference. One of the buttons was large and red. Ant pressed it. Instantly, the shaker lit up from within. A glowing spoke swept round the snowstorm shaker, leaving a three-dimensional residue of glowing snow behind it.
"That's a search beam", said Turpin. "It's some sort of tracking device."
Halfway across the shaker was a hard bright dot, more permanent than the snow static. The dot was labelled CLEOPATRA SHAKESPEARE. Ant turned the device experimentally. The dot was redrawn every time the spoke swept round the screen - and it was always redrawn in the direction of the airship sheds.
"They've been tracking us", said Ant. "Tracking Cleo, at any rate. That's how they were following us so easily. That must have been how they caught us. How could we have been so stupid? And Cleo's still in there."
"Correction", said Turpin. "Whatever they were tracking her with is still in there. There's no guarantee Cleo is. Or that she's alive or dead."
"But we can't just assume the worst!" complained Ant, raising his voice without meaning to. Down below on the road, he saw one of the Special Ops men look up sharply. He froze behind his bush, not daring to move.
"I didn't say that", hissed Lieutenant Turpin, frozen behind his own bush in turn. "If she's alive in there, we'll get her out."
"How?" whispered Ant.
"Erm. That was more of a morale-building reassuring statement than any sort of coherent plan of action", admitted Turpin. "In the short term, we really should be getting out of here. I think the ugly one down there's made us."
A mile away on the other side of the valley, the zeppelin sheds were momentarily visible in low, heavy cloud; then the clouds closed over them again. Somewhere in the middle of an angry sky, thunder boomed and lightning spat.
"I forgot to ask", said Lieutenant Turpin as Ant led them carefully round the edges of a ploughed field, "is all this water safe?"
It took Ant several seconds of bemused blinking at Turpin to realize what he meant. "The rain", he said. "You mean the rain."
"On Lalande 21185 Two, it rains acid," said Turpin. "On Beta Hydri Three, it rains upwards. On 54 Piscium Nine, liquid iron; on Gamma Trianguli Four, fish."
"Our rain is safe", said Ant. "It's just water. I thought you'd spent a lot of time on Earth."
Turpin squinted nervously up into the clouds. "I've spent a lot of time on Earth without dying. And I do that by never taking anything for granted. And this rain feels so cold." His teeth chattered as he spoke, and he hugged his shoulders with his hands.
"It's all right. Cold is about as much as our rain can do to you."
Lieutenant Turpin peered through the rain in the direction of the zeppelin sheds.
"Could the message have been a fake?" he said. "They might have captured Cleopatra's mobile phone, but not captured Cleopatra."
"No", said Ant. "The message was too well punctuated. It was Cleo all right."
As he spoke, the clouds in the direction of the sheds suddenly lit up from within, as if illuminated by highly selective sheet lightning capable of forming itself into a set of concentric rings and rising into the sky at a steady rate. Each ring looked as big around as a motorway roundabout.
"That's a Revere", said Turpin. "And she's lifting off in broad daylight. Why would they take a risk like that?"
"Lucky for them there was this storm", said Ant, "or everyone in the valley would have seen her."
"Luck had nothing to do with it", scoffed Turpin. "Remember that weird-looking set of tubes at one corner of the airship sheds? That's a Lynmouth Gun. It's used to project dry ice and silver iodide into clouds and make rain out of nowhere. The government first tested it on Exmoor in 1952. Apparently they were intending to use it in farming - you know, your version of hydroponics that uses plants planted in earth rather than water. It was so effective that a whole small seaside town was destroyed by a flash flood. Completely washed away. Nowadays they only use it on military installations for camouflage protection. They created this storm to mask the take-off. Didn't you hear the first peal of thunder?"
Ant nodded.
"Didn't you think it was odd that it happened before the storm? It was the sound of the Lynmouth Gun going off."
"Why didn't you tell me this before?" said Ant.
Turpin looked at him oddly. "You never asked."
Ant balled up his fists in frustration. "It would have proved this was a flying saucer base!"
"Well, I didn't know that! For all I knew, you might have used Lynmouth Guns on all your military bases, even the funny little ones with the winged air machines -"
"Aeroplanes", said Ant. "We call them aeroplanes."
"Wait a minute!" Ant held the snowstorm up to his eyes again. "Cleo's dot! It's moving! It's going vertically up! She's on that ship!"
"Why would she be there?" said Turpin, and then added: "They're climbing out of there in an awful hurry."
"Can we climb faster in the Fantasm?"
"Are you kidding? We could make the Fantasm to the Moon and back while they were still clearing the ionosphere...of course, as soon as they go hyperspatial, we won't be able to follow. The Fantasm's too small for a faster-than-light drive."
"So we'll lose them?" said Ant, aghast.
"Not necessarily", said Turpin. "We got here from Gondolin, didn't we? And how did you think we did that? But like I said - there's no proof that dot is Cleo. And Pen might still be in the base in any case. If we go after the Revere, we might abandon Pen."
"Lieutenant Farthing will be where Cleo is. She won't abandon her."
Turpin stood hunched against the rain. "She might have had no choice."
Ant vaulted a nearby stile. "RACE YOU TO THE SHIP!"
"Hey! That won't do you any good! I'm the one with the keys!" Turpin patted his sodden pockets frantically. "Hey! You've got my keys! How did you get my keys? Give me back my keys! Hey!"