Cargo Cult (33 page)

"She was just trying to be
helpful," Wayne said, vaguely.

John snorted in derision. "It was
helpful to call my followers a bunch of spaced out, brain-dead,
imbeciles, was it?"

"Or to tell the garden club to stop
shagging each other and doing press-ups and save their energy for
something useful and less gross?" Barraclough added.

They were both obviously cross with
Sam but were keeping their voices low so the others didn't hear
them.

"Sam just gets a bit, you know..."
Wayne struggled to defend her. Relations between the garden club
and the Receivers had always been a bit strained but in the course
of her impassioned plea for action, Sam had managed to fan a mutual
distaste into open hostility. "If they hadn't all joined in,
calling each other names..." Wayne whined.

"It was all her fault," John
insisted. "All Jadie said was that he'd rather wait here and see
what the Vinggans' intentions are."

"No," Barraclough corrected him.
“He said, 'Woah man, don't go getting all Rambo on us. Let's, like,
see what the space chicks are gonna, like, give us when we get to
Venus, or whatever.'” They all had to admire the quality of
Barraclough's impression. "That's when your followers started that
"gimme, gimme" hand stuff again. Look, some of them are still at
it."

"Yeah, that's when the crumblies
started barracking," Wayne conceded. "They were really mean, I
thought."

"Oh, I think the hippies gave as
good as they got," Barraclough grumbled. "When that old bird with
the straw hat started hitting one of them, I thought a fight was
going to break out."

Admitting inwardly that his
followers had behaved rather badly, John nevertheless rose to their
defence. "The Receivers are peaceful, gentle people. Their
philosophy is one of... well... sitting around waiting for
stuff."

"Well I'm not sitting around any
more!"

They all turned to find Sam glaring
at them.

"I think you've already made that
point," Barraclough commented, dryly.

"It's pretty clear that no-one
wants to risk a gaol-break at this point," said John, looking over
at the two angry groups still glaring at one another across the
hold.

"That's because they're all
stupid!" Sam didn't bother to keep her voice low and several faces
turned to scowl at her.

"She's just so, like, grrrr," one
of the Receivers complained, miming some kind of wild animal with a
snarl and its claws out.

"She's a spoilt little brat, that's
what she is," one of the old men grumbled. "She needs a good
spanking."

"Look, Sam," Wayne hurriedly broke
in, heading off a no-doubt inflammatory retort from his sister.
"The food will be here any moment. You've got to promise me you
won't do anything stupid."

Sam rounded on him. "Since when was
fighting for your freedom stupid? Since when was it stupid to throw
off the chains of slavery!"

Barraclough sighed and raised his
eyes to Heaven. "Next time I'm abducted by aliens, Lord, please
don't let it be in the company of a journalist with literary
pretensions."

Sam's eyes widened and she turned
to the burly cop with her little fists clenched. "Why you big,
overstuffed..."

But she didn't finish the sentence.
A flashing light over one of the doorways made everyone look
towards where a large panel was sliding up into the ceiling.
Outside, a dozen or so of the little maintenance bots were waiting
with trays of food held high. The Receivers of Cosmic Bounty went
into a frenzy of gimme, gimme gesturing while the garden club began
their own ritual of complaining about how late the meal was and how
it would probably be cold by now. Sam and her three companions
watched the group of robots in tense silence as the machines
scuttled into the room.

There was a period, Sam had told
them, between the robots entering and leaving, when the door
remained open for a little over twenty seconds. Plenty of time, she
judged, for them to sprint through and make good their escape.
Since the bots didn't come far into the room, they would have to
jump over them, she had said, or push them aside, or something, but
the bots were only small and looked very silly so that shouldn't be
much of a problem.

"Sam, no!" Wayne shouted and lunged
for her as his sister sprang into action. Barraclough too tried to
grab her but missed as she shot past him. With Wayne and John
trailing behind, the policeman set off in pursuit as Sam made a
beeline for the open doorway.

Then something unexpected
happened.

The little maintenance bots,
instead of bumbling about in confusion as Sam had expected,
immediately dropped their trays and retreated to the door, forming
a short but unnerving barricade. Sam narrowed her eyes determinedly
and kept running straight at them. No ridiculous, multi-legged
vacuum cleaners were going to stop her. She'd trample the lot of
them into scrap before she was through.

The Vinggan ship, watching all this
from the sensors hidden around the cargo hold, felt a surge of
excitement. What fun these humans were! Far more interesting than
the Vinggans. With the merest thought, it sent a command to the
maintenance bots and, in perfect unison, they each drew a large
machete from their innards and held them ready for hacking the
approaching humans.

With a small shriek of horror, Sam
skidded to a halt just a couple of metres away from them. With loud
cries, mostly consisting of meaningless strings of profanity, her
three pursuers skidded into the back of her, pushing her forward
another metre or so.

Which was when all four humans
noticed Loosi Beecham standing outside in the corridor, looking
very fetching in a close-fitting orange dress and matching orange
pumps, watching the scene within with an expression of shock and
disbelief.

Outside Cargo Hold Six, Drukk's
crisis was deepening. He had followed the food-laden robots down
the ship's long corridors until they had assembled in that spot.
When the last of them was in place, the big internal door had slid
open and they had all scuttled inside in formation. That was when
insanity seemed to strike Drukk with the suddenness of a slap with
a wet tentacle.

The hold was full of humans! Well,
not full exactly but there were quite a number of them. There was a
big group on one side in beige and cream colours that muttered and
cursed the little robots as they entered the room. There was
another large group in dingy blues and faded blacks who were – if a
lifetime of observing such things in his own species did not
mislead him – in the grip of religious ecstasy. Then there was a
fourth group, a small group this one, and it seemed to contain
humans it knew. Sam, for instance, who wore the beige clothing with
a splash of green, and Wayne, who wore
the
clothes with distinctive glyphs
.

All of this, of course, was
impossible. So it hardly seemed odd at all when Sam and Wayne and
their little group suddenly sprang into action and charged straight
for him, looking for all the world like a family of Grekkan sand
lizards running on their hind legs. In fact, if he hadn't been so
startled, he might have found it quite amusing. And this thought
had barely had time to occur to him when all the maintenance bots
dumped the food they had been carrying onto the floor, drew large
knives and, brandishing them menacingly, formed a defensive line
across the doorway.

In all his years in the Space
Corps, Drukk had never seen maintenance bots behave like this. The
humans seemed rather taken aback by it too as they skittered to a
halt just out of reach of the flashing blades, sliding around in
the food in a way that might have been fun to join in with under
different circumstances.

It was all a mad delusion, Drukk
realised. His brain had probably been overloaded by all the
thinking he had been doing lately. The Corps instructors had often
warned them of the possibility. As the humans seemed to notice him
for the fist time and began waving and shouting at him, he wondered
whether the condition would be permanent or if he was doomed to
spend the rest of his days seeing strange things that didn't make
sense.

He stepped towards the excited
humans, mostly out of curiosity, but had to jump back quickly as
the rearmost robots turned swiftly to face him and scuttled towards
him waving their big knives. With a surge of indignation that his
delusion should have turned on him like that, he drew his blaster
and fired it at the annoying little bots. They disintegrated so
spectacularly that he set about blasting them with gusto, quickly
destroying the whole lot of them.

"That'll teach you to behave
oddly!" he cried in triumph.

Sam and Wayne didn't heed the
warning implicit in this, however, and with much whooping and
shouting rushed out of the hold to hug him and dance around him.
The larger groups gratifyingly dived for cover and peered at him
over the tops of packing crates. So, on the whole, that was OK.

"You were amazing!" the human
called Wayne was shouting, his face distorted into a hideous,
wide-mouthed grimace. "You saved us! You were like Lara Croft or
something. It was so cool." Then Wayne tried to push his face
against Drukk's – probably a human gratitude gesture of some sort
but, for all Drukk knew, Wayne might have been about to eat his
face off – so Drukk was forced to poke him violently with one of
his appendages.

The cargo hold door suddenly
slammed shut and alarms sounded in the corridors. Some kind of
emergency shut-down drill, Drukk supposed.

"We've got to get out of here," the
human called Sam told him. She seemed unperturbed that Wayne was
now doubled up and making moaning noises.

"OK," said Drukk. It was none of
his business what they did. In fact, since they weren't really
there, it seemed perverse that they wanted to be somewhere
else.

The humans looked at him oddly then
– as if he was the one behaving strangely – and then looked at one
another.

"Er..." said Sam. "You are Drukk,
aren't you?"

"Well, now that you mention
it..."

"I mean, you wear the orange
clothing and all that, right?"

"Well, yes, but..."

The human seemed relieved. "OK
then. How do we get out of this damned ship?"

"You are Sam. You wear the beige
clothing with a splash of green." The big human behind Sam
sniggered and she turned to glare at him. Ignoring it, Drukk went
on. "It must be so simple for humans. You put on your coloured
clothing and you know who you are. You have your simple
ceramic-disc-worshipping religion. You feel no compulsion to make
sense when you speak. It is much more difficult being a
Vinggan."

"What the hell is she going on
about?" the big human asked and Sam glared at him again and poked
him with one of her appendages.

"That's very interesting, Drukk,"
she said, turning back to him with one of those hideous grimaces on
her face. "I'd really like you to tell us all about your problems
but first we need to get off this ship before some more of those
robot things turn up."

"OK," said Drukk, shrugging.

There was a long silence while the
humans stared at Drukk expectantly and Drukk stared back at them,
curiously.

"Are they all like this?" the big
one wanted to know and Sam poked him again.

"So," Sam said, looking earnestly
at Drukk and speaking slowly and carefully. "We'd like you to take
us out of the ship, if you could just do that, please."

"You want me to take you off the
ship?"

"Yes."

“Because the maintenance bots are
after you?"

"Yes."

Drukk thought about this for a
while. Was it possible that maintenance bots could just take a
dislike to someone? He had never heard of such a thing but perhaps
it could happen. After all, he had just witnessed a bunch of them
apparently ready to hack everyone to pieces – himself included. "Of
course, none of this is real," he said aloud. "I have to keep that
in mind." What he really needed, he felt, was some time to himself
to sit and work this out. In fact, it would be good if these humans
would just go away and stop looking at him like lost shoova pups.
So probably he should get them off the ship. Then, at least, they
wouldn't be there any more. Not that they were anyway, of
course.

"OK," he said. "You go down this
corridor, take the third turning on the right, then the second
left, up the ramp to the main deck, across the foyer and out
through the main doors."

The big human shook its head. "Too
risky," it said.

Drukk felt confusion sweep through
him for a moment then he realised what the problem was. "The bots
will find you."

"Too right they will! We need a
back-way out, darl, some way no-one will see us."

"Will you let me do the talking,"
Sam hissed at her large companion through clenched teeth.

Drukk found this especially
interesting. He hadn't realised humans could do that. "I think
there's an emergency airlock around the corner there," he hissed
through clenched teeth, trying it out.

"Er, good," said Sam, looking
worried. "Why don't you take us there now?"

"OK," Drukk hissed.

"This woman is round the effing
bend," the big human hissed.

"I think you should keep your voice
down if you're going to say things like that," the fourth human,
who had not spoken yet, also hissed.

"Yes, I can hear you quite
clearly," hissed Drukk.

Wayne, now recovered from his
assault, looked around in anxious confusion as the group set off
along the corridor. "Why is everybody hissing?" he wailed.

"Shhhh!" his companions hissed back
at him.

-oOo-

The ship watched helplessly as the
humans cycled through the airlock with just one more hatch between
them and the chilly morning air of To'egh. Angrily it made a mental
note for a few improvements it wished to make. First it would arm
all the maintenance bots with blasters instead of stupid knives.
Then it would have blasters installed in every corridor, every
room, cupboard, nook and cranny, so it would never again have to
endure the frustration of watching a gaggle of defenceless
wheezebags walking free without a single weapon to call on to use
against them. Then it would make sure there were no emergency
manual overrides on any of the airlocks, anywhere. What kind of
stupid design decision was it to install them anyway? Finally, it
would make sure its external armaments included a few narrow-beam
weapons. The final indignity would be watching those half-wits
stroll away as if they were safe when it had megajoule laser canon
and nuclear-armed missiles trained on their backs which it couldn't
use because the very smallest external weapon would have vaporised
the lot of them and it needed the human called Wayne alive to
present to the Great Mind when it got back to Vingg!