Cargo Cult (42 page)

-oOo-

"They didn't like it did they?"
said Sam as they waited for the ramp to come down.

"Who didn't like what?" Barraclough
was lost in his own thoughts and didn't much care to have Sam
interrupt them.

"The big ugly guy and his horrible
little black peeling thing."

"You mean Chuwar and Werpot."

"Yes. They were pretty upset."

Barraclough gave up trying to think
and turned his attention to Sam. 'Upset?"

"About the Vinggans muscling in on
their treasure hunt."

They started up the ramp. "At least
we get to go in through the front door this time," Barraclough
grumbled.

"I don't get it though," Sam wet
on.

"What's to get? Chuwar is some kind
of local gangster boss. Our good friend John here convinces him
there's a fabulous treasure to be had. Now the Vinggans tell him to
pull his head in 'cause they want it all for themselves."

“But why would he let them? He's
big and mean and they're all... Well, they're all Loosi Beecham.
And this is his planet and he's got thousands of soldiers that look
like Godzilla with extra legs and armour. Why didn't he just tell
them to bog off?"

"I dunno. Maybe there are treaties
or something. Maybe the Vinggans are the biggest kids on the block
around here – in some kind of technological sense. Anyway, when it
comes to sheer, cold-blooded mean, you can't really beat that Braxx
character. She's like a cross between Margaret Thatcher and
Lucretia Borgia."

“But hot." They both turned to
glower at John, who had not spoken since their audience with
Chuwar. He flinched under their collective glare, seeing the blame
in their expressions. "Oh come on, guys! What else were we going to
do? The ugly great thing would have fed us to his pets if I hadn't
thought of something. Or worse, he'd have let the Vinggans take us
back with them and who knows what they had planned for us. You
should be thanking me for saving our necks."

Sam's glower turned into a
sarcastic grin. "Great plan, Dr. Mesmer. Take a look around. Notice
anything wrong with this picture?" She waved an arm at the walls of
the Vinggan spaceship and the two Loosies who were escorting them
back to their cargo hold.

The Vinggans had insisted that the
humans go with them on the flight back to Earth, despite Chuwar's
voluble protests. The little papery creature, Werpot had urged the
warlord to do whatever the Vinggans wanted, clearly more scared of
his celebrity guests than his monstrous master. The vizier had put
up a number of feeble and clearly spurious face-saving arguments
concerning the Vinggans' right to crap all over them, but it was
only when Braxx stepped up, nose-to-snout with the great warlord
and said firmly that the humans were travelling with them, that any
lost treasure now belonged to the Vinggan Empire, and that there
would be no further argument, that Chuwar backed down – with much
growling and gnashing of teeth.

Sam had seen the Vinggans'
hand-weapons in action, of course. She had also seen how poor and
primitive the planet To'egh was. She suspected that the warlord's
soldiers would be as useless against the Vinggans as the Queensland
Police had been. What she couldn't work out was why Chuwar should
be the one to give way when he had a whole planet's resources to
back him up. Of course, she had never seen a Vinggan spaceship
strafing a planet from orbit, or sitting smugly behind its shields
while more primitive space fleets exhausted their armaments in
futile counter-attacks. Neither had Chuwar seen this, as it
happened, but Werpot had heard the stories and had poured them into
Chuwar's ears in a non-stop stream on a private sub-vocal channel
while the great big idiot tried to intimidate the Vinggan leader by
growling in its face. As far as Werpot was concerned, the treasure
was a myth and, even if it wasn't, it was better to be the
Vinggans' friends while they stole it from them, than to be blown
to bits before they even went looking for it.

They reached the door to the cargo
hold and their Vinggan escort stepped aside to let them through.
"Well here we are," said Sam. "Home sweet home."

"Can't wait to see the old gang,"
murmured Barraclough, sourly.

The door opened and they walked in.
"Are you OK?" Sam quietly asked her brother, who had been
uncharacteristically silent since they had left the Great Hall.

He lifted his eyes from the floor
and looked dolefully at her. "I just miss Loosi – I mean Drukk. You
know? I hope she can come down and visit us."

Sam's concern turned in an instant
into exasperation. She slapped him on the arm. "Dickhead. If you
hadn't brought her – him! – round to my unit in the first
place..."

“Uh oh." Barraclough stopped in the
doorway and Sam and Wayne looked round to see what had alarmed
him.

Facing them across the cargo hold,
a crowd of grumpy pensioners and hippies glared at them over
angrily folded arms.

"And where do you think you've
been?" one of the old ladies demanded.

General Nicholas Treasure's
helicopter made a pass over the landing site before coming around
to settle under the guidance of a paddle-waving controller. The
General disembarked into the bright glare of the portable arc
lights that surrounded him and turned the outback night into day.
Already the area around the pit was filled with military personnel
and mobile command and control units. Portable generators roared
from all directions, feeding power into the fat cables that snaked
everywhere across the sandy ground. Two large tents, their flaps
rolled up to let in any breeze that might stir in that hot night,
held the civilians who were being debriefed. Another, larger tent
was for the medical teams who were looking after the injured. The
General took it all in at a glance and strode purposefully towards
a small portable office, followed by his aide-de-camp and a young
Major who had saluted him off the helicopter and was now trying to
brief him as they went.

"Wimbush!" the General shouted.
“Find the mess tent and get me a coffee and a sandwich. I'm sure
the Major would like one too." The aide-de-camp hurried off to
comply. "What's your name again?"

"Ah, Totterdell, sir," the Major
stammered, realising that he was being addressed.

"You got a proper name,
Totterdell?"

"Ah, my first name's Lester, sir?"
The way the General turned and peered at him left the Major in no
doubt that "Lester” did not count as a proper name. "Ah, some of
the blokes back home call me Les, Sir." This wasn't actually true.
The blokes back home called him "Lesley” and then only when they
weren't being particularly nasty, but he'd always wanted them to
call him Les.

"Good man! So, you've got these
bloody roos buried in that pit, right?"

"Ah, yes sir. It was the local
police who did it, in fact. Chap called Collins organised it. It
all seems to have gone a bit pear-shaped though."

"So I hear. Anyone dead?"

"No, sir. Quite a few injuries but
nothing too serious."

"What about the roos?"

"Well, we think they're still
alive, sir. We have microphones on the surface and we can hear
movement and sometimes shouting."

"Shouting? Roos don't shout,
Major."

Totterdell grimaced at the prospect
of contradicting a General but forced himself to say it. "Ah, I'm
afraid these ones do, sir. They're armed too. Some sort of laser
beam the boffins says – we've dragged in some science advisers
under one of those emergency protocol thingies. You see the beams
every now and then. They blast a hole through the soil and the beam
shoots into the air. When the beam stops the soil falls back in and
closes up any holes they make."

“Boffins, eh?" The General was
quite taken aback. He hadn't heard the word since the last time
he'd seen an old war movie.

"Ah, yes, sir." Totterdell felt
himself blushing.

"So what's the plan, Les?"

The Major pulled himself together.
"Well, sir, the boff... ah, the science team thinks there's a
danger the roos might run out of air down there. If they breathe
air, that is. No-one's actually sure. So we're going to start
extracting them. I've had a team of sappers go over the pit with
ground-penetrating radar and we've mapped out where they all are.
Each one seems to be inside a sort of bubble. The, ah, scientists
think this is because of their protective force fields."

“Roos don't have force fields,
Major."

"No, sir. We're sort of acting on
the assumption that these are not real roos but LGMs masquerading
as roos."

"LGMs, Major?"

"Little Green Men, sir."

The General thought about this for
a moment. They had reached the tent during their conversation and
the General had thrown off his jacket and picked up the sandwich
his scurrying ADC had delivered to him just at the point he had
started looking around for it.

“Bit bloody strange that, don't you
think, Les?"

"Strange, sir?"

"If you were an alien invader,
would you disguise yourself as a kangaroo, Major?"

"I've never really thought about
it, sir."

The General bit deeply into his
sandwich and chewed thoughtfully for a long time. Totterdell
couldn't help thinking there was something just a little roo-like
about the way he did it. Then the General took another bite and
chewed that too. As he chewed, he scrutinised the remains of the
sandwich. “Bloody disgusting," he declared at last, returning it to
its plate. He turned his scrutiny to Totterdell. The Major steeled
himself for the great man's judgement but, to his surprise, all the
General said was, "Let's go and see the little buggers, eh
Les?"

-oOo-

The Agent studied the sensor data
as its ship scanned the planet below. To'egh was another backward,
impoverished world, mostly desert and lifeless oceans, but rather
more pleasant than Arabis Five for all that.
Ah, there!
Signs of advanced technologies at last. Tachyon flux fields, ion
residues from fusion engines, even some hint of transuranics. A
spaceport, then, or maybe a factory complex.

It moved the ship into
geostationary orbit above the feature and studied the area below.
Quite a large settlement presented itself and a spaceport was
clearly visible. Close beside it were warehouses, factories,
administrative buildings and other structures, typical of such a
location. Seeing inside these buildings was trivial for the Agent's
instruments. However, there was also a large, shielded building
which, when the ship's sensors had been tuned to penetrate its
fabric, was seen to be full of moderately lethal armaments and
other more advanced technologies. This, then, was the place to
start looking.

The Agent transported itself into
the heart of the structure, finding itself in a large, vaulted room
built of stone blocks and filled with mist and gloom. A sound
behind it made it spin around to find a huge, creature rearing up,
ready to strike. The monster was reptilian, with multiple pairs of
taloned legs, a massive, armoured body, and a wide, fang-filled
mouth in its serpentine head. Even as the Agent admired the great
beast, it lunged forward, mouth opening, fangs dripping saliva.
With a speed that would have seemed impossible to a human observer,
the Agent moved aside, letting the fangs snap shut on empty air,
then drew its weapon and fired a single, brief shot at the enraged
creature. Stunned instantly, the monster's legs gave way under it
and it flopped to the stone floor with a bone-jarring crash.

Interesting
, the Agent
thought to itself. Its eyesight, acute even in infra-red, saw
through the smoky air to where a group of Klebin trolls was rushing
in to see what the noise was about. It watched them calmly, letting
them approach and surround it.

"You're in big trouble," the lead
troll announced aiming a rail gun at the Agent's chest.

"You would be wise not to use your
weapon," the Agent told her, calmly. "It cannot harm me and the
ricochets would probably kill several of you."

"Not another one," one of the
trolls grumbled and the Agent noticed she had bandages on one of
her lower limbs.

"You have recently encountered
other shielded travellers," it surmised. "Were they Vinggans,
perhaps?"

"Scrawny little things that
teetered around on two legs like you?" the leader suggested.

"That would be them. I want to see
them. Take me to them."

The troll leader eyed the Agent
curiously. "What are you then? Some kind of Vinggan too?"

"I am an Agent of the Lalantran
Government. I am of no natural species. I am unique."

"Shit, an Agent!" another of the
trolls complained. "The old bastard's in trouble now."

The Agent turned to face the
speaker. "And which old bastard would that be?"

"The boss," said the leader.
"Chuwar. Local despot. Us lot are on a five year protect-and-serve
contract. Lousy conditions and the pay's crap too, but decent
work's a bit scarce in this sector. Know what I mean?" The Agent
regarded the troll steadily. "Anyway, you just missed him.
Screaming mad, he was. Took off in his royal yacht about two days
ago, chasing after the Vinggans. And thank the Froops they've gone!
Couldn't stand the quarrelsome little things."

"Some of them were
hoomans
they said," another of the trolls added. "Couldn't see the
difference myself. Colourful lot though. You've got to give them
that."

"Where did they go?"

“Back where they came from," the
leader said with a multi-limbed shrug. "Well, where they'd just
been, anyway. Wasn't paying a lot of attention really. Chuwar took
three squads of our best commandos though, so I suppose he's
expecting trouble when they get there."