Bernice Summerfield: Filthy Lucre

Due

CHAPTER ONE

PAY DAY

‘Do that again and I’ll hit you!’

Trying, albeit not very hard, to stifle his laughter Jardin pretended to blow on burnt fingers after Sylana had firmly removed his hand from her thigh for what had to be the third or possibly even the fourth time.

Why, she thought, did these pilot and co-pilot chairs have to be quite so close together?

Sighing, she gestured towards the control cabin window.

‘Just keep your eyes on all that nothing out there,’ she said, shivering slightly as she always did when she allowed herself a moment to contemplate the mind-shredding emptiness of it all.

He grinned back.

‘And,’ she added, shifting her gaze back to him, ‘keep your hands to yourself.’

It wasn’t that Sylana didn’t love him – her stupid, genius, comedian – but there was a time and a place for everything, and this was neither.

She sat listening to the ship. Her father used to say that ships talked to you. That if you listened carefully you could hear them whispering and singing and if you understood what they were saying then you and the ship could work together.

Which was the point at which she had stopped listening. Her father had spent his life on haulage lines and cheap passenger runs and had had so little ambition it was a wonder to her that he had even attained that much. She had no intention of eking out a life like that, even if he had been happy. She was meant for something better than a creaking old freighter out in the depths of this goddess-forsaken expanse of desolation.

Nonetheless she was pretty sure she could understand what this antiquated hulk was saying, and it was not happy. Not at all.

It was something she might have ignored if the man beside her hadn’t just sneakily increased their speed. He cast a sidelong glance at her, clearly hoping that she hadn’t noticed, then nudged the power control forward again. She glared back.

‘Look,’ she said, deciding to try reasoned argument, ‘I know time’s tight for making the rendezvous, but it isn’t going to help if we blow ourselves to bits getting there is it?’

Silence.

She tried another tack: ‘Jardin, remember this ship is old and was never built for speed.’

He beamed at her. ‘Oh, come on. We should be celebrating. We’re home and dry, babes, home and dry. Just relax. I know what I’m doing.’ He smiled.

‘Well of course you do. You’re a man.’

‘Too right I am. It’s a male brain thing. We just have a natural affinity with mechanics and spatial awareness. It’s innate. You handle the paperwork and the people-stuff and I’ll take care of the practicalities. Play to our strengths.’

That grin again. She seethed. ‘Listen, babes, you’re pushing this thing too far. It probably fell off the maintenance schedules years ago. You push it any harder and sooner or later it’s going to fall apart. Sooner by the sounds of it.’

He waved dismissively and started picking at a broken fingernail.

Sylana leaned forward to ease the power back but he lightly slapped her hand away.

‘Ah, ah, ah. No touchy.’

She took a long, deep breath. Why did she always let him wind her up? There really wasn’t time for another argument. However great the sex would be afterwards.

From somewhere deep in the ship a load crack echoed through the gantries and girders. She jumped and glanced nervously over her shoulder. Jardin seemed not to have noticed, engrossed as he was in his makeshift manicure. A steady rumble began to impinge on her consciousness. She was sure it hadn’t been there a few minutes before but equally she couldn’t be sure quite when it had started.

She looked again at Jardin. Either he hadn’t noticed or he didn’t care. She opened her mouth to speak. He raised a finger to his lips and made a ‘shushing’ noise. Her hand inched towards the controls again.

‘We need to slow down,’ she said with exaggerated patience. ‘Seriously. Now.’

With a grin so smug she actually felt her jaw dropping open in response he casually reached out and upped the power a further measure.

This was ridiculous. His stupid games were going to blow them and, perhaps just as importantly, their cargo to kingdom come.

Before she could protest further another, louder, crack reverberated through the flight deck. The rumble had become a steady thrumming vibration and items of loose equipment were starting to judder their way towards the edges of control panels and shelves. An empty cup clattered to the floor and rolled away into a corner. Another crack, louder still, and this time she thought she could hear a series of small bangs like distant fireworks.

‘Jardin…’ she began, and got no further.

An alarm sounded, immediately followed by two others. Their insistent discordance almost but not quite drowning out the sound of what were very definitely explosions coming from behind them. The deck shook violently. More items fell to the floor. The lights flickered then flared.

Galvanised into action, his smug expression bizarrely frozen on his face, Jardin’s hands flew over the control desk, trying to pull up all the stat reports he could.

‘There’s system failures all over the place, but the engines are still good. They’re holding together.’

‘Slow down then,’ she yelled at him over the din, surprised by how calm she was.

Jardin was anything but calm, his confidence finally falling away. ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ he shouted, adjusting the power control over and over again with increasing urgency, but nothing was happening.

‘Why isn’t it working?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t know.’ He rubbed a hand over his sweating face. ‘Other systems are going down too.’ His puzzlement turned to horror. ‘No. No. No!’

Sylana grabbed his arm. ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’

There was genuine panic in his voice now. ‘It’s not just the engines, okay?’ He swallowed. ‘I think Vira’s fighting back.’

‘What are you talking…’ Then realisation kicked in. Sylana let go of his arm and sat back in her chair in complete disbelief. ‘Angry’ couldn’t even begin to describe how she felt right now. Her voice was barely audible above the din, ‘You’ve messed it up haven’t you? You’ve totally messed it up.’

Jardin reached for the power control again and as he touched it the panel sparked and crackled, the discharge throwing him backwards and half out of his chair.

‘The fracking controls are live,’ he yelled, blowing on and sucking his fingers for real this time.

‘Find something to insulate you then,’ she replied already casting around for suitable material.

Before he could move the ship was wracked by a series of loud blasts. The deck seemed to buck and rise beneath them. Cracks appeared in some of the pipes running around the walls and steam shot out in scalding gouts.

Sylana struggled out of her chair and made for a locker at the back of the room. Another violent lurch sent her sprawling and her head smacked against a bulkhead. She lay there dazed, watching Jardin who sat looking stunned as the ship appeared about to tear itself apart around him.

The lights dimmed and flared again. Then went out.

A final massive bang echoed up from the depths behind them. Smoke billowed around. Further crashes followed, the sound of metal rending against metal as the ship shuddered to a halt. Then all that was left was the dying call of the alarms, fading into silence as she briefly lost consciousness.

*

Inside the freighter’s hold, cargo units partly detached from their housings and crashed into those in front or behind, some buckling on impact. Outside, the lights along the ship dimmed and died. Then a few flickered back on again. A series of explosions tore holes in its side and automatic repair systems went to work to seal them, its primitive AI registering that several of them had failed, before it too failed. The ship sat silent and seemingly almost lifeless, thin trails of gas and vapour leaking out of the unrepaired wounds in the hull.

*

Very slowly, Sylana opened her eyes and registered the emergency lighting. Not for the first time that day was she seeing red.

Painfully, she got to her feet, coughing and choking on the dust and smoke that billowed around her.

Jardin looked over from the command chair, ‘Whoops,’ he said blandly.

‘Whoops!’ she shouted back at him. ‘Whoops?’

She marched over and raised her hand to slap him, her self-control finally abandoning her. He caught it and steadied her.

‘Well what else do you expect me to say?’ he asked. ‘Wasn’t my fault the old crate couldn’t handle it’

‘Oh no, not your fault,’ she seethed, ‘never your fault. Nothing ever is. Always someone or something else which just wasn’t up to it. Why the hell can’t you ever take responsibility for anything?’

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Okay. I’m sorry. All right. Happy now? Has that made anything any better? No? Well then.’

‘No it doesn’t make anything any better. You’ve stranded us parsecs out from where we are meant to be. I have no idea if what you have done is reparable and even if it is, it could take hours or days to do it, which means we’ll be late, by which time… what the hell are you doing?’

Jardin paused. He was holding a small, rectangular device, his finger hovering over the activator, ‘Recording a distress call.’

‘What? Are you crazy? With what we’ve got…?’

‘Well what else do you suggest?’

She stared at him. Her mouth moved but no words came out.

Taking advantage of the moment, he held up his hand for her to stay like that and started his message.

‘Mayday. Emergency. This is freighter… umm… F-one. We are in distress, I repeat, we are in serious distress. Our current position co-ordinates are 0908. 66140. 59317. Sector Delta 19 Gamma Gamma. Request immediate assistance. I repeat, please assist.’ The recording finished, he pressed transmit.

Sylana couldn’t stay silent any longer. ‘You are unbe-bloody-lievable! First you trash the main drives…’

‘You don’t know that they’re trashed,’ he said.

‘Oh right, sorry, my mistake, all those booms and bangs are probably just its normal running noises.’ Now she raised a hand to stop him interrupting. ‘You trash the drives, then you think it’s a great idea to draw attention to ourselves by sending out a distress call. Brilliant. Utterly brilliant. We’re supposed to be silent running not sending up flares to announce our presence.’

‘Well without some help we’re not going anywhere are we?’ he said and, absently, tapped the control desk. He yelped and snatched his burned fingers back again, but this time the desk was just hot and not live. He grinned then laughed.

Sylana made a strangled gasping sound.

‘Look it’s no big deal,’ he said. ‘Whoever comes doesn’t have to know what we’re carrying or who we are. We’re just a freighter in distress that’s all. Happens all the time. No guarantee anyway that anyone will hear it this far out of the…’

She slapped his face. Hard.

Jardin’s draw dropped open in comic astonishment. ‘You… you…’ he spluttered.

‘Yes, me, me,’ she said. ‘Me has finally had enough of dealing with your ‘oh don’t worry it’ll be fine’ attitude.’

She slammed her hand down on the emergency beacon’s cancel button and the distress call cut off.

He moved to reinstate it but she caught his arm and thrust her face right up to his.

‘Do you know what you’re gonna do?’ She pointed at the control desk. ‘You’re gonna fix whatever’s wrong with that, get the power back on and the drives going again. Because this time,’ she hissed, ‘it is not fine. Not by a very very long way. This time we have to sort your mess out for ourselves. You seem to be forgetting that this isn’t just another freighter in distress, not just another call for help. This ship doesn’t exist.’

A jet of steam hissed out from one of the grills and in the distance there came another ominous rumble.

CHAPTER TWO

PECUNIARY INTEREST

A jet of steam hissed out from one of the grills and in the distance there came another ominous rumble. Ruth stared up at the city’s protective shield arcing far above her as another fork of lightening crazed its way across the sky beyond it.

‘What a dump,’ she said to herself. She couldn’t help it. Even though she was a glass half-full kind of woman, this place could still get her down. Legion city was a sprawling metropolis, pretty much like every other one she’d ever seen; from glittering skyscrapers to tin hovels. Bright lights to begging bowels. Some glitz here, some glam there, even a central area of user-friendly, open green space that occasionally got tidied up. But the whole place lacked warmth, beauty, a sense of identity. If it had a marketing slogan it would be ‘Legion City – the city of buildings’. It didn’t even have a proper name. Eventually she had come to the conclusion that the problem was the people. Legion was a frontier world, home to the scum of the galaxy. The veneer of civilisation could be very thin indeed. Which was why grotty was the word which sprang to mind whenever she thought about the ‘god forsaken hell-hole’ (Irving’s description) of a world she now found herself on. Grotty food, grotty places, grotty atmosphere and grotty weather.

The street she was in now was a prime example: Either side were some once smart, well designed buildings, but their paintwork was now stained pollution-grey and there was a patina of decay that really needed sorting out. One building clearly housed a kitchen, with two large grilled vents alternately ejecting blasts of greasy steam which left blackened oily streaks smeared up the wall above them. The smell wasn’t pleasant and it caught at the back of her throat. Ruth let out a long sigh, coughed and hunkered deeper into her coat. Oh well, she supposed, it was as good a home as any.

The sky flickered again and she counted the seconds to the next rumble of thunder. The storm was definitely moving closer. Soon hot, heavy drops would sizzle and fizz on the surface of the energy dome. At a temperature close to boiling point rain didn’t just fall on Legion, it fried.

From down a side street she could hear an oddly plaintive wailing noise and momentarily wondered if some landcrows were fighting over a scrap of food. Or mating. Or perhaps both. She peered curiously down the alley, and managed to make out a poncho-clad busker standing in a doorway a few buildings down. The mournful wail was coming from the pipes he was huffing furiously into. He was also, she noted amused at the incongruity, wearing an Advent hat. Which was really nice, she thought. Considering that Legion’s winter festival was only a couple of weeks away, she’d hardly seen any celebratory clothing, or decorations, or indeed any sign of it at all for that matter, during her walk. That just summed Legion up perfectly. After a few moment’s more listening she recognised the tune: It was the one Benny had described as a traditional Earth folk song called ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’. Traditional it might be, but it wasn’t exactly seasonal or festive. Ruth didn’t really know any of Legion’s native tunes, or even if it had any.

The busker noticed her and stopped playing. She waved at him and he lowered back.

‘Do you do requests?’ she asked as she tossed a coin into the hat, which lay at his feet. He nodded, eyeing her suspiciously. ‘My friend Benny told me about this Earth Christmas tune, I wondered if you knew it. Thought it might be a bit more cheerful than…’ she broke off as his glower deepened and decided that she might need to pursue a more tactful line.

‘Well anyway. It’s called… Rats. I can’t remember. Oh, erm, something like, All I want for Christmas is a Da… Da… Da… Something. Sorry. I’ve forgotten… Oh what was it? Tip of my tongue. I’m rambling a bit aren’t I? Sorry. Oh hold on, yes, I know. Toothbrush.’

Totally bemused, the busker shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.

‘Never mind. Thank you. Oh, love the hat, by the way.’ She hurried on.

A few minutes later the rain started. A steady build from a miserable thin drizzle to a great deluge. As it hit the dome it vapourised and the sky disappeared behind billowing clouds of smoke and steam. It was a spectacle which never failed to fascinate and engross her and consequently she was slightly surprised to find herself standing outside the cheap café which was her destination, the inappropriately named ‘Welcome House, sooner than she had expected. That’s what comes of daydreaming, she thought, as she looked at the uninviting corrugated frontage.

She stood there for a moment, thinking hard about her next move. Her self-appointed mission was to help her best friend in the whole universe get through what she knew would be a particularly difficult day. But what to do? What to say? Should she be up front about it or stay off the subject completely? She pondered her options: Maybe best to avoid the sympathetic shoulder to cry on thing and concentrate on distraction. Maybe she could talk about her new project researching Legion’s ancient history although, on reflection, it wouldn’t make for a very long conversation as she hadn’t had much success so far. Legion being such a secretive society most of its records had either mysteriously disappeared or been destroyed. In fact, she’d discovered more about Benny’s past than Legion’s. Maybe she should consider writing a definitive history of Professor Bernice Summerfield, famed archaeologist and adventurer, instead.

Or… maybe… it would be a good idea to stop standing around thinking to no real effect and just go inside.

With a deep breath,