[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult (2 page)

‘Always you are coming up with these schemes,’ said Misha Senior. ‘It is same as when you said you would be comics artist. Or when you were going to be zoo keeper. Or when you were going to be in band.’

‘The band was really good. It’s hard to get decent representation these days.’

‘You had four omnichord players. No drummer even.’ His father shook his head sadly. ‘Awful, awful sound.’

‘I just think the President is right,’ said Misha. ‘We need to move with the times. In his book on
Innovating The Workplace Via Space-War,
Cliff Ganymede says a business, like a shark, must constantly swim forward, or it will be eaten by a moon whale or a squid.’

‘Oooff. Again with Cliff Ganymede. Always his stories filling your head with tales of exciting adventure beyond the stars. I know what it is. You feel destined for some life greater than pig farming. A life much more exotic, yes? Well. There is reason for this.’

Misha Senior pulled the hover-truck over to the side of the road and rested his chin on the wheel. He exhaled a heavy, whistling sigh.

‘There is something I must tell you.’ The old man sounded tired and resigned. ‘I think maybe you have long suspected it. The truth is …’ He paused for a moment. ‘I am not your actual father, Misha. Your real father was great hero. An Elite space ace. He fought brave secret battle in the Alioth Rebellion of
3228
. When he was dying, I swore to him I would raise you as my own, out of harm’s way, but now I see: is pointless to try to fight the destiny that courses through your blood.’

‘What?’ Misha’s mouth opened and closed like the door of a broken elevator, except up and down, not sideways. ‘What?’ he said again.

‘Oh, sweet mother of Belka and Strelka. Look at your stupid plate face.’ Misha Senior cuffed his son round the ear. ‘You want to know why
really
you feel destined for great things? Because you are idiot dreamer just like President. All so many dreams, but no follow-through. Wasting money on expensive notebooks to write big ideas down.’

Misha scowled. He knew that using
paper
notebooks in the thirty-fourth century was a pretty daft affectation, but he’d seen a show where at the start of each episode Cliff Ganymede, sat behind his sturdy non-synthetic desk, introduced the upcoming space adventure with a real leather-bound journal in his hands. And Misha really liked Cliff Ganymede.

‘Nice stationery is important for the creative process,’ he mumbled.

‘You never even fill up notebook! I know this because I found one. You write “sit-ups x
100
”. You write “learn coding language”. Then five pages of drawings of girls in tight tops. You want to know something?’

‘Not really.’

‘You are much better at drawing boobs than faces. Also, you have no perseverance. You say you will do a thing, then you waste time playing Cliff Ganymede computer game. How are you going be daring intergalactic space-trader when you are never even getting around to doing ship’s health and safety check?’

Misha Senior started the truck up again and it bobbed on down the road.

‘By the way, who is “Phoebe”?’

‘Phoebe …?’ Misha pretended to try to recall a Phoebe. ‘I think
maybe
there’s a Phoebe works up on the space station. I don’t remember exactly. Why do you ask?’

‘Along with the sketches of girls and ideas for terrible films, you have written down the name Phoebe many times. Sometimes you have drawn flowers next to it.’ Misha Senior shook his head pityingly. ‘Is good your mother is dead in violent threshing machine accident to not see this type of thing.’

Back at the farm, Misha lay on his bunk and called up his copy of
Are You A Man Or A Thargoid? – Taking Control Of Your Life The Cliff Ganymede Way
. He zoomed through to a random chapter and started to read.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to give up. I could have given up in episode ten of ‘Galloping Ganymede!’ when I found myself trapped in that asteroid field, a battalion of Thargoids breathing their foul insect breath down my neck. But I did not. I lasered their stupid Thargoid faces in. And by following my Eight Steps To Willpower, you will too! Obviously, because of the current uneasy peace, the Thargoids in your case will be metaphorical Thargoids, but whether it’s preparing for those accountancy exams or impressing a date, the principle still stands. There is an Old Earth expression I like – Carpe diem! It translates as ‘Don’t delay, seize that fish before it rots!’

Misha switched the book off again and with a resolute firmness of purpose that he was sure would make Cliff Ganymede proud flicked on his personal subspace interface and called up Officer Phoebe Clag’s dating profile.

He started to type.

He read it back, shook his head in horror, and tried once more.

He clenched his teeth and hit delete.

‘Oh god,’ whispered Misha under his breath. ‘Oh
good god
.’ He started again.

Two hours later – after deleting a draft which began
‘Whoop! Is that the sound of the police?’
and then went on to feature an elaborate ASCII picture of a plant-pig doing a thumbs up – Misha logged out. He sighed, reached under his pillow, pulled out his notebook, the one with ‘LET’S HAVE AN INNOVATION JAM’ printed on the cover, flipped to the page marked
Misha’s Achievement List
, and found where he’d written the word ‘Phoebe’. He carefully wrote the words ‘STILL PENDING’ next to it. The item after ‘Phoebe’ was ‘Malkovich – Important Health & Safety Check.’ He would do that right now because regardless of what his dad said he was a dynamic and proactive individual. He looked at the clock in the corner of his retina-overlay: Three minutes past nine. It might be an idea, Misha reasoned proactively, to start work
on the hour
, with a nice round number. That would be a cleaner mental space. He flipped on the entertainment channel. It was enough time for one quick game of Cliff Ganymede’s
Mission: Thargoid Kill-Punch
.

When Misha next noticed the clock he saw it had somehow crept to ten past ten, so, still keen to start work exactly on the hour, he decided to go on playing for a little while longer. Thirty minutes later he dutifully logged off, and went to make a thermos of coffee. Then he got sidetracked into staring out of the kitchen window for a while. Once he’d stopped doing that he realised it was now six minutes past eleven, which kind of messed up his plans. If he was going to start work on the hour he’d have to wait until midnight. Better, perhaps, to write it off as a bad job for this evening and punch some more Thargoids. Get it out of his system. That way he could wake up early tomorrow, do the health and safety check, and then, with the wind in his sails, he would be bound to have a really productive day. He resolved to put the new deadline in his notebook. He would use extra heavy lettering, and underline it twice. And this time he would definitely, finally, send his message to Phoebe Clag.

Construction had started on the space station
Jim Bergerac
a few months before Gippsworld’s rich natural resources turned out to be worth bupkis, so half of it was what
Architectural Exercises In Narcissism
’s
presenter would term ‘radical froufrou’, with mock Greek columns in the corridors and coolant pipes that didn’t drip everywhere and nice scatter cushions, and half of it was built out of paste and packing crates and chunks of old satellites mashed together with whatever other space flotsam had come to hand. In the shabbier section of the huge creaking doughnut, under a dirty plexiglass dome, a young police officer ate some synthetic noodles out of a pot.

The best thing about the
Jim Bergerac
’s observation deck, in Phoebe’s opinion, was that the view was poor. Nobody ever stopped by to marvel at the unimposing grey lump that was Gippsworld spinning away in the void, or at the ugly, floating black rectangle that was the planet’s unused advertising hoarding. This meant she could spend her entire lunch break stretched out on a row of seats undisturbed, and watch the rolling news blather away across the display beamed out from the pea-sized projector implanted in her eyebrow. The headline had been the same all afternoon.

It was exactly the kind of exciting and mysterious case that Phoebe had gone through six years of police academy to work on. Dogged detective work required. A high pressure, high-profile assignment carried out under the glare of the media spotlight. But Phoebe didn’t work in homicide. Phoebe worked in the customs and excise unit of a police force who had jurisdiction over a solar system that contained a level of illicit trading activity so close to
nil
as to be Statistically Irrelevant, according to the latest crime census.

She scratched her stomach, and thought about poor life decisions.

She wondered if she should wash the synthi-noodle stain out of her top.

She wondered how much synthi-noodle she must have eaten to stain a Teflon-weave, StayClean police shirt in the first place.

She wondered what the chances had been of this new stain combining with the old stain to create what now looked like an angry face.

She wondered if she had maybe let her personal hygiene standards slip a little.

She wondered if there was a record for the amount of synthi-noodle consumed in a single afternoon.

‘What a bowl of cocks,’ she said out loud, to nobody.

Lunch had officially ended five minutes ago. She should be back on her beat, carrying out the random cargo spot-checks that made up the bulk of her dreary, pointless days. But she knew in advance how that would go: she’d either patrol the docking bays on foot or pootle about near-space in the Police Viper for a few hours, and if she was lucky some dreary, pointless methane shipment might head out in her general direction. She’d stop it, go aboard, there’d be a bit of forcibly sunny small talk. They’d probably make a dreary, pointless remark about her cybernetic leg. She’d do a semi-comprehensive check depending on how lazy she was feeling and find exactly zero contraband. Maybe a few smuggled episodes of
Laser, Baby & C.H.O.M.P.S.
or
Neil’s Nine
if they happened to be heading past Placet B. None of it would be worth the energy or effort, and she’d have another stack of admin to hide somewhere. ‘Most Likely To Do A Thorough And Conscientious Job’ it had said under her yearbook picture. Perhaps
,
thought Phoebe,
she should spend the afternoon looking at videos of sloths falling asleep in zero gravity.

The
blip
of a call coming in over the network interrupted her wallow, and she guiltily hit answer before she had a chance to register that it wasn’t anything to do with work – it was her mother.

‘How are you doing, flower?’ Her mother’s big floating head popped into a space a few inches from her face, automatically and nightmarishly keeping pace with any eyeball movement, because Phoebe had forgotten to turn that setting off. ‘Is everything all right? I’m not interrupting?’

‘Hi, kind of, things are pretty busy here.’

‘I can imagine! I saw the news. Are you working the Cliff Ganymede case?’

‘No mother, I’ve explained this before, that’s not the sort of policing I do.’

‘You used to love mysteries and murders and things. I remember how you drew that darling picture of a bleeding skull when you were only a toddler. With the maggots! We all thought you’d become an artist.’

‘Mother, I’ve—’

But Mrs Clag was already up and running into an account of the goings-on back on Gurney Slade Six. Phoebe drifted off during a detailed anecdote about the new model of food printer her father had installed and the type of warranty that came with it. In the distance a couple of Phoebe’s colleagues patrolled the nothingness. Gippsworld went on not looking anything like a blue jewel. Phoebe only zoned back in when she realised she was being asked a question.

‘Don’t you think, petal?’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘That you should try to get out and socialise more. You know you have a tendency to bury yourself away.’

There was a meaningful pause.

‘Have you met anybody?’

At this inevitable point in the call, Phoebe squirmed and rolled her eyes, causing her mother’s head to do a juddering loop-the-loop.

‘No, mother. Like I said, I’ve been busy. Work things.’

‘Do you ever hear from Glen? We really liked Glen.’

‘Glen,’ said Phoebe, as firmly as she could manage, ‘was a twat.’

‘But such lovely cheekbones. And those teeth! Anyhow, that’s not relevant, because your father and I wanted you to know that you absolutely shouldn’t feel any pressure on the relationship front. Neither of us are the
slightest
bit worried about that. The Kewleys next door, did you know their Janey didn’t have a kid until she was
seventy
? It’s amazing what they can do these days. Besides, you can grow babies in jars. Sometimes the face comes out a bit wonky, like Megan at number fifteen, but mostly you can’t even tell. Not that there’s any reason you should feel you ought to procreate anyhow. We just want you to be
happy
.’

There were only so many relentlessly upbeat assurances that her life wasn’t a crushing disappointment that Phoebe could take in a day, so after another couple of minutes she pretended a klaxon was going off.

‘Sorry mum,’ she said, waving. ‘The thin blue line never sleeps!’

‘Okay dear, we miss you—’ The words died on Mrs Clag’s holographic lips as she vanished into the sub-ether. Phoebe breathed deeply, thought about sitting up, but decided she wasn’t in a rush. She checked her inbox.

She scrolled on.

Phoebe quickly flicked it over to the trash. She tried to think calming thoughts about dogs with sad eyes.

She wondered why anyone would batter the system’s biggest, most popular star to death with a hardback copy of his best-selling sex-and-spreadsheets manual
Be A Gas Giant In The Boardroom & The Bedroom, Not A Nebula
.

She wondered why, as his final act, Ganymede had scrawled the words ‘knuckle down’ across the title page in his own blood.

She wondered whether that bonehead Alicia still had a mouth that looked like a paper-cut.

She should stop dwelling on it. She should stop thinking about unsolved murders and think about tax evasion and export licences instead. Be constructive with her time. Concentrate on her job. Maybe, if she concentrated hard enough, something interesting might turn up. She rubbed the label on her empty pot of noodles.

‘What’s the largest amount of synthi-noodle consumed by a human being in a single afternoon?’ she asked the interactive packaging.

‘Fifty pots!’ replied Chet Noodles, the relentlessly chirpy, anthropomorphic embodiment of the SynNoodle brand, dancing across the label. ‘Set by Nils-Olof Franzen, deceased, on Lansbury Five. Synthetic noodle RDA is zero pots.’

She flopped out an arm and waved for a baristabot.

‘Hit me,’ said Phoebe. She was going for the record.