A Game of Battleships (3 page)

Seven letters.’

Suruk lowered the trophy-skull, opened his mandibles and made a thoughtful purring noise.

‘Carnivore,’ he said. ‘Abbreviated.’

One of the instruments began to clatter rapidly. Smith glanced up, wondering what the device 
was for. The needles in two dials rolled upwards and a white tongue of tape began to rattle out of a slot under them as if the machine was jeering at his ignorance. ‘Important thing happening, Carveth!’ he called out, feeling that this sort of detail was best delegated.

She peered at the tape. ‘It’s a message from the tankers, boss. They say everything’s fine.’

‘Are you sure?’ Smith asked.

Carveth shrugged. ‘Well, depends on what you call fine. When you said we were taking a cruise 
across the galaxy I didn’t realise we’d be escorting half a billion tons of explosive fuel.’

‘Nonsense, Carveth. The convoy is fully automated. What could go wrong?’

‘Well, what happens if one of the cooling computers packs up? Or what if your girlfriend gets off 
her face and throws one of her joints out of the porthole while it’s still lit? I don’t like it. I might as well have stayed at home and sat on a hand grenade.’

‘Or the washing machine,’ Suruk added helpfully. ‘Do you remember that time when I walked in 
–’

‘Shut up, Suruk,’ Carveth said. ‘Look out of the window.’

Smith leaned forward. ‘Let him finish, Carveth. If there’s a problem with the washing machine, I 
want to know. A good captain always –’

‘No, look!’ Carveth pointed to the window. ‘What’s that?’

Smith squinted at the windscreen. A small ball of light had appeared in the middle of it, growing 
steadily. ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s just the sun or something.’

‘Suns tend to stay the same size,’ Carveth said. She unfastened her seat belt and slipped under the 
dashboard. ‘Tell me when it’s gone, would you?’

Smith reached to the navigation console and took down the slide rule. ‘Stop worrying, Carveth.

It’s way off. It won’t reach us for at least a parsec.’

‘Actually,’ said the voice from below the dashboard, ‘parsecs measure distance, not ti –’

The world exploded.

Smith opened his eyes. He was looking at the stellar chart attached to the ceiling. His chest felt heavy and breathing was difficult. Faces loomed in at him: Carveth, slightly grimy from her time under the 
dashboard, and Suruk, his mandibles parted in an enormous grin.

‘What happened?’ Smith asked.

‘We got hit in a blastwave,’ Carveth said. ‘Systems are down to twenty-five percent. The main 
engine’s on half power and we’ve lost part of the landing gear.’

‘On the plus side,’ Suruk added, ‘we rode the sun.’

Smith hauled himself upright. Breathing became less difficult as Carveth lifted the hamster cage 
off his chest. ‘What about Rhianna?’ he asked.

‘I’m here.’ She stood in the doorway. A single droplet of blood ran down her forehead. She 
wiped it off and peered at her forefinger as if she’d never seen the stuff before. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked, stepping into the room.

Smith blinked. ‘Nothing broken. But your head…’

Rhianna reached up to her scalp. There was a circular object wedged in her dreadlocks. She 
breathed in and yanked it free: it was a panmelodium music-disc, fallen from the shelf in her room. She looked at the title. ‘
Relaxing Moods
,’ she said. Rhianna closed her eyes and the blood on her head dried.

Suddenly, there was no cut at all. ‘There.’

‘Well then,’ said Smith, ‘everybody’s fine. We can get back to escorting this con –’

Carveth raised a hand. ‘Er, slight problem. There isn’t a convoy any more.’

Smith rushed to the window. In the far distance, the remains of half a dozen robot tankers rolled 
slowly in the void. They looked like scraps of metal eggshell, spinning lazily from the force of the blast, their edges glowing as the remnants of the fuel cooked off.

‘Good God!’ Smith whispered. ‘They’ve exploded.. Carveth, this is a disaster.’

‘You’re telling me.’

‘And it raises a single question.. ’

‘Will they dock it from our wages?’

‘Is this the work of the enemy? Can it be that even here, deep in the back end of space, we can 
still feel the insidious touch of the Ghast Empire? Is there no region so dark or obscure as to be safe from the vile probings of alien tyranny? Is this the main thrust of the attack or must we –’

‘Basically, yes.’ Carveth sat down and shook her head. ‘I knew this was a bad idea. God, I’ve not 
seen such a horrible cock-up since Suruk tried to milk that bull on Ambridge Prime – hang on, there’s 
something on the scanner –’

‘Look!’ Rhianna cried.

Space rippled in front of them. The stars flexed and bent as if painted onto stretching rubber: 
space seemed to pull back, then spit something out of itself before the
John Pym
. Cold blue lightning crackled over soot-encrusted steel. For a moment Smith saw the front of a spacecraft: bigger than the
Pym
and angled as if to ram it head-on; striped with red as though smeared in blood; spikes welded to the hull; chains thrashing between them in an electrical storm. The storm swelled, wrapping the hull of the craft in crackling white lightning – and suddenly it was gone. Only space remained.

‘Well, crikey!’ said Smith. ‘Did everyone see that, or am I just concussed again?’

‘It was totally real,’ Rhianna replied. ‘Believe me, I know a hallucination when I see one. I mean,

when I see something that isn’t really there, I really know it’s not real. If you see what I mean.’

Smith tried not to work it out. ‘Well, at least nobody’s hurt. Carveth, check the instruments!’

At the back of the room, Suruk rubbed his stomach. ‘I feel uneasy,’ he said. ‘I am afraid that the 
impact may have triggered my reproductive cycle.’

Carveth moved towards the door, then looked back. ‘What did you say?’

The alien grimaced. ‘Most irksome. It seems that I am about to breed. I feel nauseous.’

‘You’re not the only one,’ Carveth replied. ‘The thought of you having babies. .’

‘Bucket, quick!’ Suruk snarled.

Smith dropped down and grabbed the emergency flight recorder box. He tipped the emergency 
flight recorder out of the box, shoved it into Suruk’s hands and darted back just in time for Suruk to be noisily and voluminously sick. They stood around him like murderers around the body of their victim, 
realising the enormity of the horror they faced.

‘That,’ Suruk announced, ‘was most unpleasant.’

Rhianna was first to recover her composure. ‘Well, that is wonderful news, Suruk. New life is 
always a cause for celebration. When are you due to, er, procreate?’

‘About five seconds ago,’ Suruk replied.

Carveth crept forward, one hand over her mouth. ‘God, Suruk, you’ve been eating a hell of a lot 
of tapioca,’ she said.

‘That is not tapioca. Tapioca is unnatural.’ Suruk straightened up. ‘It is spawn.’

Smith stepped forward. It was all rather horrible: any proper spaceship, he reflected, would have 
had a trained medic or a mechanical nanny to deal with things like this. ‘Right. Thanks for that, Suruk.

Perhaps if you could remove your, er, substance, we can get back on with things. No doubt you’re very 
pleased at having bred –’

‘Not especially,’ Suruk said.

‘– but we do have to get back on with our mission. Even though all the ships we were escorting 
have exploded.’

‘Wait,’ Rhianna declared. She drew up to her full height in a soft hiss of tie-dyed fabric. ‘I feel we should formally congratulate Suruk on his experience. After all, Isambard, children are our future–’

‘What –
now?
’ Face contorted with alarm, Smith stumbled back towards the door.

Carveth tugged his sleeve. ‘She means mankind’s future.’

‘Oh, right!’ Smith smoothed his uniform down. ‘Right, yes, of course. Children – good idea for 
mankind. In general. Very true.’

Suruk flexed his mandibles. ‘Excuse me, humans. Once you have finished gabbling about the 
sanctity of reproduction, do you have somewhere where I can dump this frogspawn, please?’

*

Like an explorer wading through jungle, Carveth shoved a roll of dangling tubes out of the way and 
pressed on into the heart of the engine room. Behind her, Suruk looked around with suspicion. The ship rumbled around them. The air smelt of burning.

‘All this dust and questionable repair work,’ he muttered. ‘On my planet, an engine room would 
be very different. Less gaffer tape and more skulls.’

‘It looked better before we were caught in a colossal explosion,’ Carveth replied. Above her, one 
of the boilers vented itself with an angry hiss. She set her torch up on the secondary piston array and angled it at the far wall. ‘God, what a mess! The main spinner’s burnt up its oil, the red thing up there’s now down here – and barely red – and just look at the bit that goes round the other bit. It’s going round a different bit entirely!’

‘I have full confidence in your expertise,’ Suruk replied. ‘Is this room not radioactive?’

‘Well, it’s colour-coded,’ Carveth replied. ‘If it’s green and glowing, it’s time to be going.

Especially that corner over there.’

‘Then that is where the bucket shall go.’ Suruk thrust the bucket of frogspawn into the corner, 
under a cracked pipe.

‘What’re you doing?’

‘It is an old custom to leave one’s spawn in the engine room. Since we M’Lak reproduce 
asexually, we have no genetic variance. Therefore, we must induce variation through other means.’

‘So you’re all irradiated at birth? That explains a lot.’

‘I assume our planet of origin was rather more volatile than much of space. Of course, only the 
greatest elders know where it is. . and they forget quite a lot, too.’

Carveth looked around the room, surprised just how much duct tape had been used in the 
construction of the
John Pym
’s engines. ‘So what do we feed them on?’

‘Feed? My spawn, you mean? Well, I was not really planning on feeding them on anything.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘They have each other.’

‘They eat each other? That’s horrible!’

‘It is the only way. Would you want your galaxy swamped by a wave of my spawning?’

‘That’s even more horrible. God, Suruk, you really are gross.’

The alien shrugged. ‘It is the honourable way. As the ancients said in the days before time, when 
the spirits of the forefathers roamed across space, “Better tusks than rusks”. The surviving spawn will become warriors, eventually – unless one remains in the water and grows to be a seer.’

‘A what?’

‘Never mind. It is bad to speak lightly of the Gilled.’ Suruk cracked his knuckles. ‘Now then, 
what needs repairing?’

Smith carried the tray to the dining table, ducking under the lampshade. Rhianna finished shoving most of the clutter to the far end and they sat down to receive the status report.

Carveth stood up and cleared her throat. She opened her in-flight logbook, which would have 
looked more impressive had it not been decorated with stickers of ponies and rainbows.

‘Status report, revised,’ she announced. ‘We’re stuffed.’ She closed the logbook and sat down.

‘Any details?’ Smith asked.

‘Alright then. Basically, I’d say we’ve passed the stage of being merely inconvenienced and are 
now moving into the realm of being totally buggered. Should the buggeration continue, I’m anticipating 
us losing not just paddle but canoe very shortly, leaving us floundering helplessly in the filthy rapids of a certain malodorous creek.’

Smith thought it over. ‘Thanks. Now, call me pedantic, but can this spaceship still fly through 
space?’

‘Barely. We can move, but very slowly. Faster than light’s only just working, and pushing it harder 
will risk the gears blowing up. Any slower and pensioners will start overtaking us.’

Smith sipped his tea. The badness of the news was allayed by the moral fibre flowing from the 
teapot. This sort of thing, that lesser men might interpret as a disaster, might have potential for great things. Quite what the things might be other than horror and dismay, he was not sure, but all in good 
time.

Rhianna said, ‘Well, everyone, let’s try to be positive. Did you know that in China opportunity 
and crisis are represented by the same character?’

‘Sounds like a rum character to me,’ Smith replied. ‘If I was Chinese, I wouldn’t let him on 
board.’

‘Character as in a single word,’ Rhianna said.

‘Oppicrisis?’ Suruk suggested.

‘So we need repairs,’ Smith said. ‘That much is clear.’

Carveth nodded. ‘Big repairs. We need a space dock.’

‘Right.’ Smith reached behind his chair and took out the AA map book of space. ‘The second 
matter I want to discuss is the vehicle that attacked our ships. Clearly, this was an enemy vessel… happy to blast our automated convoy into scrap but too cowardly to fight a British craft face-to-face.’

Carveth sighed. ‘Actually, boss, I think the reason they didn’t fight us was because they thought 
we
were
scrap. Also, I’m glad they didn’t because we have no guns. But, whatever they were, they came out of nowhere. Nothing on visual or scanners before all that light and.. well, there they were.’

‘Do you think they’re nearby?’

‘I don’t know. But active stealth uses up power like nobody’s business. If that ship’s anything 
normal, it can’t be far away.’