Rocket Fuel Read online

Rocket Fuel

  by Andrew McEwan

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  Copyright 2012 Andrew McEwan

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  Cover design by Andrew McEwan

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  ***

  I come from a land in the sun-bright deep,

  Where golden gardens grow,

  Where the wind from the north, becalmed in sleep,

  Their conch shells never blow.

  Moore

  1st Part: MOTHERTUG

  Their faces were not all alike,

  nor yet unalike, but such as those

  of sisters ought to be.

  Ovid

  One - The Happy Monkey

  Okay, wind up the elastic band, we are GO...

  Morgan pressed the button and the light winked off. He spun in his chair before the glitzy console, whistling, tuneless, the tight air squeezing his sound, killing it.

  Frozen Hound peered over his shoulder and yawned. Morgan stroked the dog's wet nose.

  The minutes sidled past.

  Fourteen. Fifteen, and the light came back on. Morgan, known as Lumping Jack, frowned.

  ‘Something not right,’ he said.

  The dog paced in circles, tail between legs.

  The console died, echoing the engines, the ship's drive not only cut but paralysed.

  The Happy Monkey, Morgan's guppy, wound down its vacuous spiral to rest...

  ‘Permission to come aboard.’

  ‘Permission denied.’

  ‘I have a warrant for the arrest of Dr Henry Grey.’

  ‘On what charge?’

  Pause. Then, ‘Murder.’

  Lumping Jack and Frozen Hound shared a bowl of cheese-flavour crackers...

  The brand was one with which she was familiar.

  ‘They're really pushing this stuff,’ she commented to nobody in particular. ‘Cheese-flavour Yum-Yums, bacon-flavour Yum-Yums, banana-flavour Yum-Yums - really, Morgan and his dog have a terrible diet.’

  ‘Really...’ said Sally.

  ‘Yeah,’ Kate replied, nudging her sister. ‘I thought you were asleep. Did I wake you? I'm sorry; I was reading.’

  ‘I can see.’

  ‘I don't know why I bother. It's all Byron's fault, he got me hooked.’

  ‘Kate.’

  ‘What?’

  Sally turned, over. ‘Shut up.’

  They faced each other across the dark expanse of a fibrous carpet, its tangled pile like charred grass. Morgan smiled his jolly smile and folded his arms, rested his weight on one hip, said, ‘Please, no autographs.’

  Kate Droover fell asleep. When she woke, groggy, the comic's lurid colours over her face, Sally was gone, vanished. The dim cabin closed about the emptiness, disguising it, but Kate knew in her heart that Sal was in trouble.

  She swung her legs from under the covers and dropped lightly to the metal deck, its warmth - faintly pulsating - comforting beneath her as yet drowsy toes.

  ‘Sally?’ She keyed the door. Nothing happened. ‘What the...’

  Everything was quiet; too quiet.

  Pause. Then, ‘Murder.’

  Lumping Jack cursed. Frozen Hound switched herself off. One of the dog's ears stood erect and Morgan blew in it, folding the extraordinary animal in on itself, hiding it in a space that was no space, a universe inside out...

  There was an explosion. Screaming in her brain was a host of squabbling bats, feral creatures with one eye. The cabin door slid open, the air-pressure keeping it shut expended in a single languid kiss.

  Kate shook her head in an effort to clear it and ran into the black corridor, its walls undetectable, its floor slick with condensation.

  Someone caught her arm and yanked her through a jagged rent, the cooling teeth of which tore the skin of her upper arm and shoulder.

  ‘Slow down!’ came the order.

  ‘What's going on?’

  ‘Quiet...listen.’

  Kate freed her arm and stood. After a moment she thought to hear dripping - water or blood. ‘What is it? Sal? Monica?’ She fumbled in the uncompromising dark but was alone.

  The dripping stopped. As if a tap had been more firmly closed, she told herself, and shivered.

  Two - The Friendly Mould

  War raged about the star Horus, its six worlds and thirteen moons. The forces of Topica and Upfront fought over the planet Bid-2., its mineral resources for past centuries the focus of countless disputes, with each side accusing the other of abusing agreed quotas and violating land rights.

  The contest was bitter, more so as the opposing planets drew ever closer in their mutual orbits through the firmament. A peace delegation from Earth had been annihilated. Daily the worlds grew in one another's skies, bleeding across green and yellow horizons. And daily the cost in lives and hardware was beamed into Byron's living-room.

  He waited for the knock on the door that never came...

  ‘I can still fly,’ he protested bitterly. ‘They had no right to discharge me.’

  ‘They had no choice you mean,’ answered Sally.

  Byron cracked his knuckles and switched the screen off. ‘Whose side are you on?’

  ‘The Topican's,’ Sally told him. ‘I'm a spy...’

  ‘No,’ said Byron; ‘you're too ugly. Spies are beautiful and dangerous.’

  ‘You don't think I'm dangerous?’ She rose from the couch and walked into the kitchen, acting the ruffled tigress.

  He rolled a cigarette. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘But your sister, she has all the qualifications.’

  Sal returned with a glass of milk and a doughnut. ‘You wish she was here instead of me.’

  He couldn't refute the statement. Brooding, he sighed. The cigarette smoke soothed him, quietened his nerves; but the restlessness was still there, the urge to be flying.

  ‘Don't look so worried,’ Sally said. ‘Sis and the captain want to be underway as much as anyone.’

  ‘To Earth and Sol system,’ whispered Byron, who had never been farther down the arm than Fortuna. ‘Is it really as paradoxical as they say?’

  ‘Earth? Nah, not like it was years ago, more...What's the word? Cultivated.’

  ‘Cultivated?’ It was a new one on Byron. He'd met Sally Droover the previous day on a hilltop on the outskirts of town; she was taking in the sunset, pale and smooth in the waning light. They got to talking about places, his homeworld of Upfront so close to destruction, hers of Luna, Earth's grey satellite, and he'd felt it then, what she called mothertug, a strange, almost overpowering desire to set foot on the world of origin, the blue-green planet from which the threads of life extended, its gravity of the heart and mind an unquenchable attraction, a thirst exacerbated by the fact all non-military traffic would soon stop around the vicinity of Horus, the golden sun that was for many years his guiding star.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sal, munching. ‘Not nearly so raw as Upfront or Grandee or Deathspoint - but kind of boring; the parts I've seen anyway...’

  Which amounted to nothing.

  And they were stuck without a trained engineer, albeit one with a record.

  Byron Friendly would never fly again in this sector, that was definite. So what did he have to lose? Zero, and they were sure to take him as every available engineer of even middling ability had been drafted.

  But not Byron. Byron had survived the unsurvivable, lived to tell the tale, too often; those who flew with him were luckless and, rumour had it, regarded as expendable.

  Sal was right, they had no choice but to discharge him. Still, he should never have floored that controller.

  *

  ‘What do you think of him?’

  ‘I don't know, he puzzles me.’

  ‘In what way?’ Captain Jones leant on the bar, face alert to every movement in the room, its tables and chairs, pillars and shad
ows fixed in their pattern, each subtle change noted, each citizen and soldier marked.

  ‘It's difficult to say,’ admitted Kate. ‘I like him; he's good, we know that much. But...’

  ‘You can't forget Ernie,’ Amy finished.

  Kate nodded.

  ‘Me neither. But Ernie's dead, gone, and we need an engineer, unless you're planning to spend the rest of your life on this precarious edge, eh? Halfway between somewhere and nowhere!’

  Kate sipped her drink. ‘You've made your decision,’ she said.

  ‘Right,’ confirmed the captain, adding, ‘I may be the majority shareholder in our little outfit - and a drunken whore to boot - but I still like to discuss these changes in...’ She paused, tensed.

  ‘Amy?’

  ‘Sorry, Droover, touch of nerves.’

  ‘You drink too much.’

  ‘Right again...’ A man with brown skin and yellow hair watched them from the far side of the scantly peopled, grotesquely furnished restaurant. ‘No manners.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Guy in the corner there.’

  ‘Security?’

  ‘Yeah, they have those eyes.’ She waved obliquely.

  Kate laughed, smothering it. ‘We leave in six hours,’ she reminded; ‘don't go getting us arrested.’

  ‘No chance,’ Amy rejoined. ‘What for, flirting?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Captain Jones shrugged. ‘Okay, okay...I'll curb my less demure instincts; you just buy the drinks.’

  And so it went.

  Kate stood alone in the dark street, shades like gravel shards, icy charcoal about her. In the distance she could make out the faint umbral glow of Upfront's main spaceport, its screened image mellow and illusive, her sight subtly nudged aside. The stars, close-nit, glimmered overhead, providing the colourless illumination.

  She heard sweetened breath in her ear, the captain.

  ‘I hate to squat in strange alleys...’ confessed Amy Jones, tugging Droover's padded sleeve. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Sure you can walk?’

  ‘I was born walking; besides, it's late, we don't want to miss our slot.’

  ‘And Friendly?’ said Kate, guiding her companion like on so many occasions: a little guilty, a little sick...

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The engineer!’

  ‘Oh, I took care of that hours ago.’

  ‘You called Sal from the bar?’ questioned Droover, navigator to pilot.

  Captain Jones kicked a stone, chased it. Grinning, she glanced over her shoulder at Kate. ‘Race you!’

  And was gone.

  Kate broke into a run, following the hollow footfalls that echoed in the street, the buildings either side leaning as if poised; preparing, given sufficient encouragement, to fall like oddly pigmented waves onto the road, washing her away.

  The spaceport loomed ahead beyond a fence of brittle trees and harsh, netted wire. Eerily quiet, the wells and bunkers filled the ground for several kilometres square. Kate reached an IN ramp and jogged the descending pathway, eager to board the ship, its familiar sanctuary and contented faces. The sky lit up briefly, a ball of lightning closely attended by a weight of exhausted thunder as booster rockets lifted a guppy clear of the planetary surface, thence toward some orbiting engine.

  She smiled a half smile, felt the thrill of near departure, wondered at the course her life, the lives of the crew might take from here, Rigmarole. It was months since she'd seen Earth, breathed its neutral (reconstituted) air and returned its harmless (stagnant) gaze, and like a favourite lover she longed once more to array her limbs across its naked contours.

  ‘Slow as ever, Droover...’ drawled the captain from a hidden doorway.

  ‘I never could keep up with you,’ she came back; ‘not in anything.’

  Together they rode an elevator. Kate stuffed her hands in her pockets and Amy drummed her fingers on her brow - on, off, on, off, on...

  ‘We got lucky,’ Sally told her sister some time later, prior to launch.

  ‘How's that?’ Kate concentrated on her maps, the traceries in her skull like a firework display. ‘I wish Frank and Monica would slow it down once in a while,’ she commented.

  ‘Our new engineer,’ said Sal. ‘You know. He's a funny colour, but I like him.’

  ‘What?’ She blinked.

  ‘I said he's a funny colour. Don't you agree?’

  ‘He's native Upfront,’ Kate returned.

  ‘Yes! And if he's at all like Ern...’ Sal shrugged and wandered from the narrow space.

  If he's at all like Ern, mouthed Kate, aligning neat rows of neat figures, shuffling their order, filing the rote, feeling the old man's loss, the possible gain. If he's at all like Ern, we'd better watch out.

  Ernie was crazy. Ernie sang. Ernie, on four of the last five loops, had nearly wiped their slate.

  She belled the captain.

  ‘Jones.’

  ‘Droover K. Listen, what does Byron Friendly know of Ernie's bubbles?’

  'Nothing; they died with him, that's finished.'

  ‘You're sure?’ Kate had other ideas, thought there was more to his fantasies than a lifelong addiction to squeaky, ten-a-penny pheromones.

  'Ain't I always?' replied the captain, feigning disinterest, a sure a sign as any that she was concerned. But they had to leave Upfront, and in a hurry.

  ‘Fine,’ the navigator concurred, satisfied Amy had taken stock of the situation. Didn't she always? Okay. Still, it intrigued her, what the engineer would find...

  'Straight, Droover K?'

  Kate pursed her lips. ‘Fine,’ she said again.

  'Okay...'

  Fine, she repeated, a third time, to herself...really.

  And to Sally, ‘Yeah,’ dissolving sugar in coffee, ‘he does sort of grow on you.

  Three - Carbon Crazies

  Spritzer Rich was the diarist among the crew. He wrote nothing down, but stored visual and audio material in his head. He'd collect data from the central computer into which every member of their little family was at some time plugged: Captain Jones through her pilot's station, Luke Farouke during his regular trysts with comp's menu-memory...

  He kept a separate channel for movies. His favourite at present was The Great Escape, with Steve McQueen, and he'd fashioned himself a baseball glove out of copper sheeting, the ball steel and lethal.

  He alone knew the truth about Ernie; and he was silent, keeping a resentful distance, a repairman's aloofness between Rich and Jones, Spritzer and the Droover sisters, Abdul, Frank Marsh and Monica Hat, this new engineer, who he secretly envied.

  ‘Pitcher,’ he said. ‘The engine should belong to you. Ernie knew his business, but you could make her interiors dance, her bubbles into more than spectres, insubstantial girls whose hearts are as bloodless as their eyes; you could assemble a cornucopia of things...’

  Things like - he laughed.

  Things were secret...

  ‘Kinema.’

  Frank and Monica liked to swop bio-chips. On Upfront they'd escaped the confines of the ship and walked beyond the fences, giving themselves over to an unfamiliar nature.

  Cut off from everything but each other they strolled for hours beneath the green-tinged sky and yellow-flecked leaves of tall bushes and stunted trees, the latter heavy with exotic fruit, shrouded in colourful, noisome insects.

  For now the pressure of co-ordinating the dimensionless void was lifted. There was neither input nor Droover, output nor Droover's backhanded remarks.

  They enjoyed teasing her, but enough...

  ‘Is enough,’ closed Rich. ‘One day, I know, you two are going to surprise me; but until then,’ he shook his empty hands, ‘I'll put my money on Abdul.’

  The little thief.

  Luke Farouke spent his vacant moments polishing his crime skills, liberating items of dubious value, replacing them with miniature treasures: an ivory brooch for a cheap watch, a pot of Roman ancestry for one massed out of donkey faeces - but the man was
a true artist, a genius.

  *

  Lumping Jack prowled the night streets like a wraith, his veneer of darkness compelling the eye to look askance as he burgled the record's office of Interplanetary Spacelines. The supernational had a contract he was interested in; a lot of money - he conjectured - was involved.

  Naturally, he got what he wanted.

  Twenty minutes later Morgan was back on board his guppy, mind and fingers prying into the procreative wellspring of graphic information. What he had gleaned from a hapless nightwatchman; the stuff that made worlds pause; a mad scientist's ciphered elucidations, no less than Dr Grey's confidential papers, his instructions as to the handling and transportation of certain valuable cargoes...

  But what?

  It was worth his while, he decided, to find out.

  *

  ‘Corpses.’

  Spritzer, snatching the revolving steel ball, congratulated himself. He had to admire Ernie, his use of fact, turning it inside out, hawking it as fiction, and in such a format, a comic-strip that by now had so many lookalikes and facsimiles, imitations and blatant rip-offs, the truth, the compact warning of the originals was forever swamped. Buried like Ern: in life an engineer of opposing forces, in death a force without substance or identity; a bubble popped...

  If only they knew, he thought. There was Ern, dropping his pills, and why? He was slave to the engine much as the engine was slave to retrograde, its bizarre fuel, the splicer of time and space.

  The twisted runt had a Messiah complex, a megalomaniacal desire to wrest mankind from its entropic fate - all through the medium of an irregular, pictorial rag.

  Why indeed...it was more than syphilis contorting his brain, the insanity of Ernie stretched to points achievable solely within the thraldom to which he had given his every breath, his final act.

  ‘Rich.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing, I...’

  ‘Captain?’ He let the ball drop. It struck the gantry and rolled, nudged the toe of his boot.