Rocket Fuel Read online

  ‘Mordy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  She crossed the final bridge, that spanning the ocean-filled divide between islands 2 and 3, and halted outside an irregular glass building, its low roof curved like a wave, the sea made concrete, spangled, a crystal pile.

  Music throbbed from deep. A seamless panel slid aside, giving her access to the lurking, miscellaneous entertainments.

  *

  The suit was too big, its oxygen tainted. The faceplate was spotted with oily dust. It had proved impossible to remove, stained her fingers. And all the while Byron Friendly stood and smiled, when he wasn't frowning.

  As for Luke...forget him, she thought, the conniving bastard, hyped up and moaning, clutching his toys.

  A jet of hot gas struck her arm, sent her spinning, tangling her line. Sally cursed, rebounded off an unseen obstruction into the floating debris that had assembled behind her, now encompassing, a multicoloured, sticky residue she'd disturbed on entering this freefall hell.

  ‘Droover S?’

  ‘Yeah...who is it?’

  'The engineer.'

  She checked, double-checked, but the channel wasn't open.

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Sal?’

  ‘Yes!’ She jerked violently.

  'Use the sealant-gun to locate the puncture, like I showed you,' came Byron's voice.

  Angry, she closed the channel again. Then, shakily, the suit's illumination embroiling her in ragged shadow, Sally manoeuvred toward the small hole in the tank's flexible casing. It pulsed at intervals, and she had to be careful to avoid being hit by a second blast of gas.

  It salved her ego to have found the leak without resorting to the bulky instrument attached to her shoulders. She tugged once on the line, waited, and bobbed at the reply.

  According to Byron the radio was unreliable in the presence
of so much retrograde - or the memory of it.

  The thought was eerie.

  The co-pilot mated the sealant-gun's nozzle with the roughly circular opening.

  Her suit's lights dimmed. The faceplate seemed murkier than ever. She switched the radio on. ‘Friendly.’

  ‘Here. What's the delay?’

  ‘Nothing, I...’

  The gun went off prematurely.

  Embedded in darkness, immobile - the glow before her eyes was illusory. She imagined it, didn't she? Sal was stuck, that was real. A coil of tubing floated through her field of vision: so the darkness, the tangible black, had its imperfections, like a clear, empty night of stars.

  There was a buzzing in her ear. It sounded bad. She had to move, but found it impossible, that and the situation, the two one...

  The tube was her air supply. What was left in the suit? What reserve?

  At least she didn't panic; panic was useless.

  The auxiliary fuel tank was two hundred metres in radius, she recalled. Sally Droover was glued to its inner wall like some insect on fly-paper.

  I wonder if I mended the leak? she mused, drifting, out of body, out of.. .

  Hey, a face.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. Her voice echoed, trapped in the deflating helmet.

  The face revolved, a construction of grime and spongy sediment the likeness of Ernie.

  *

  She hadn't cared for the planetarium; it made her homesick, filled her with the urge to run.

  Mothertug...

  But that was past, Kate reminded herself. That was gone, a different life, another world, planets and stars, moons and space - contorted space, flat, folded, corners all the same -which no longer occupied her sky.

  She ordered another drink and watched a series of shows, a noisy assemblage of horrendous acts and obscure passages. And what it lacked in content it lacked in every other department as well. Or so Kate imagined. There were people around her (too many, too close) who appeared to be enjoying themselves. Their expressions, however, lacked truthfulness.

  Am I like them? she asked herself. Is this what lies ahead, crouched in hiding ready to swallow me?

  She slammed her glass down on the garish bar. Nobody looked her way.

  The key dangling from her wrist shone red and blue, then red and green. Kate flicked it, tasted it, tasted the thimble that had fixed itself to her middle finger; tasted acid, a bitter flavour, sore on the tongue.

  Droover spat, a brief globe of luxuriant hues...

  She got up and walked, dodging, avoiding contact with those she newly despised. She'd been deluding herself, she realized, fleeing the wrong places, running nowhere. It had to stop; she was bound by friendship if nothing else, and that was something she could not so easily shake. Changed she may be, but the past, all of it, good and bad, left its mark, as had she on the once smooth skin of Mordy.

  It brought an old saw to mind...

  ‘When the elevator breaks down,’ Kate recited, jogging, ‘take the stairs.’

  Eleven - Uncle Stylo At Elbow Canyon

  Byron heard the wind, and, sheathed in his pressurized suit, made ready to fight it.

  The radio was useless. He tumbled headlong into the tank and looked around. There was a snowstorm, he fancied, whipping at his armour, flailing him with arrows. The sealant-gun hovered like a speared fish on a long thread of exoplastic, its dead eye the colour of iron. It was obvious what had happened. He set off for the tank's farther side.

  Sal lay immersed, motionless, a corpse weighted into some river bottom. He tapped her visor.

  She would hate him for this - but she was alive.

  Balding, frustrated, but alive.

  Abdul drank all the water he could find. When there was no more to be had he followed the damp footprints on the deck, their owner's toes sharply defined, a comic-book trail leading he didn't know where...but expected to discover...

  Sometime.

  ‘I told him not to move!’ raved the engineer. ‘The fool!’

  Sally flopped down on the bed among her clothes. ‘He can't have gone far,’ she reasoned. ‘He'll come back.’

  ‘Far enough,’ said Friendly.

  Casually, she dressed.

  ‘You don't care?’ he quizzed.

  She shrugged. ‘He's not helpless. He can look out for himself.’

  Byron rubbed his eyes. ‘How did I get into this?’

  ‘Fate,’ she replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, relax, Byron. There's much to do if we're to fly this thing. ..’

  He nodded, dragged his shoes out from under the table, its top laden with instruments, a terminal, gauges. ‘You think it'll work okay?’

  ‘Sure; have faith.’

  ‘In you or me?’ he said icily.

  She stood next to him, said, ‘The engine.’

  *

  They handed her a thick coat as she stepped ashore. The soft crunch of snow juddered under her boots. This was Bench 2. A mountain reached upward before her, the gradient approaching its misty summit gradually increasing, framed in an illusion of vermilion sky.

  There were sleds and reindeer. The animals' breath steamed like her own in the cold air. Nevertheless, Droover thought them constructs.

  She climbed into a sled and was driven ever faster toward a wall of fir trees, their fine branches heavy with white flakes and decorated in multihued coronae of broken light. The crude vehicle bounced, the team before it numbering four, hooves and runners cutting the unblemished snow. The trees, when she came among them, proved a blur...

  Kate sat alone.

  It wasn't so cold that she couldn't smile, but her teeth hurt if she kept it up for long. And then the sled arrived at a clearing, the forest quiet and dense all round. A lone figure appeared, wading, stooped with age or tiredness as it, a man, greeted the reindeer each by name.

  Kate watched him curiously. He avoided her gaze and clambered onto the empty platform at the front of the sled, where he found and gently whipped the loose reins.

  She was thrown back in her seat, laughing.

  The scenery c
onfused her again.

  Emerging from a high mountain pass, the sun at its zenith and the clouds dissolving, the buffeting of the runners abruptly ceased. The sled was airborne, gliding, its team vanished as if assimilated into the surrounding, ochre rock. Kate leaned over the side, caught a fleeting glimpse of the animals as they retreated through a hazy veil of fresh snow, having propelled the vehicle to the limits of their milieu.

  She shucked off the coat as the temperature climbed. A few metres below ranged the red-brown desert. It reminded her of old western movies; she might even be in a wheel-less stagecoach, en route to some jerry-built town.

  In the distance the sea was just visible, pushed back by the land's deceit, its cunning.

  ‘Is this still Bench 2?’ she asked her squat driver.

  His shoulders bunched tighter, but he said nothing.

  They descended with the contours, on rails of stone, walls of it rising above them as the air swept past. Kate slumped in the seat and tried not to think. She was hungry, she realized, and far from home.

  ‘Where is home? The ship?’ In that case it moved, like she did, was never in the same place twice.

  Deepening layers of shade overwhelmed her. The sled skidded to earth, to sand, plumes of orange dust.

  The stooped man jumped down and offered his hand. His face was swathed, despite the heat, in a scarf; like the rest of him, still dressed for the cold beyond the mountain.

  Droover ignored him. He sidled off, kicking stones. A second figure manifested itself on her blind side. He wore skin and cotton, khaki and white.

  ‘How was the trip?’ he inquired.

  Did she know him? ‘Fine...’

  ‘Ernie's told me all about you,’ he went on; ‘said you might need some help. Come on.’ He walked briskly from the grounded sled, a breeze in his stride, clutching his hat.

  Kate stayed where she was.

  He returned. ‘Something the matter?’

  ‘I...’ The breeze stole her voice. It curled from the rocky walls that flanked her, their vertical faces cracked, holed and leaning. She felt ill.

  He put a foot on the sled's top step and hauled himself up, sitting opposite her. In his palm rested a pebble, its surface curved, shaped by forgotten currents.

  ‘There's a lot to talk about,’ he said. ‘I haven't heard from Ern in a while, but I'm aware things are coming to a head. Your presence here's a part of it. The rest...’

  ‘Ernie's dead.’

  He tossed the pebble from hand to hand. ‘So - I thought that might be it. Anyway, he did all he could.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Kate was mystified. ‘How did you know him? Who are you?’

  He paused a moment. Then, ‘Stylo. Uncle Stylo they call me; and...’ he broke off. ‘It'd be easier if I showed you.’

  Kate agreed. What else could she do? Stylo led the way to a partly concealed entrance, a cave-mouth, lifted a lamp from a peg in the half-light and descended by its muted glow the rough stair that wound to a large room below. It was full of logs, cut and stacked, an axe resting upright against one pile. The smell of wood permeated her senses. He continued downward via a steel ramp. She echoed his footsteps, and entered a series of hewn passages, a variety of other rooms, some with plank or cloth doors, some open, to left and right as they moved deeper into the burrowed stone.

  ‘You're not alone here,’ she observed.

  ‘No,’ answered Stylo. ‘Not in terms of numbers. This is a place of many functions however, where many paths cross, as you'll see later.’

  Kate didn't question him further. She got the impression they were leaving the main complex and penetrating a more exclusive retreat, one linked to the surface by unrelated tunnels, its purpose equally removed from that of its neighbours, if not necessarily at odds. But whatever the truth, it couldn't have been very private.

  Finally there was a steel hatch, circular and fastened into the surrounding rock.

  Stylo pulled it wide and yellow light flooded out...

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked - a request, once they were on the inside, behind the steel.

  Blast-proof, Droover reckoned, quickly reappraising. ‘It's beautiful,’ she told him.

  He grinned, a sign of approval. ‘It serves,’ he said, false modesty in his tone.

  She was cheered by the inflection. ‘Where's the kitchen?’

  ‘There isn't one.’

  ‘No?’ Her stomach complained.

  ‘But if you're hungry,’ Stylo added, stemming her disappointment with what she imagined a practised flourish, ‘I'll pop out and shoot a cow.’

  That, she thought, would do nicely.

  *

  ‘What do you think they're doing?’

  ‘Who?’ Byron quizzed.

  Sally groaned, coughed as her throat filled. ‘The Research Section,’ she clarified hoarsely.

  The engineer, grimacing, handed her a lozenge. ‘Mot many left,’ he mumbled; then louder, ‘They're probably waiting to see what lunatic scheme we have in mind. I've taken out all the links, the visuals as well as the sonics. My guess is they'll sit on their hands until they think we're dead, or dying, and then come in and tidy up the pieces.’

  ‘How romantic,’ Sal commented, reclining.

  ‘Isn't it.’

  ‘Have we long, Byron, to live?’

  ‘I don't know about you and Abdul,’ he admitted, mimicking her facetiousness.

  ‘Hm...I never imagined it would be like this. I wonder what Kate's doing now?’

  ‘Sunning herself on some beach,’ he said.

  ‘Nah, that's not her thing at all. Sis is more the rucksack and thermos type.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He pushed a button and a light came on.

  ‘Does that mean it works?’ asked Sally.

  ‘I'm not sure. That was only a test.’

  She clacked the lozenge against her teeth. A few were loose, bleeding. ‘What about the ship? How are we going to disengage without tearing a hole in the engine?’

  They'd been over this before. ‘Explosive bolts, remember?’

  ‘Oh, right...’

  Byron concentrated on his wiring, doubting the reliability of hers. Luke Farouke hadn't come back, not yet...

  He'd slept.

  On waking, blinking through the garish cabin lights, he saw - or was convinced he'd seen - an ostrich. Anyway, it had feathers, was blue, the sighting brief as it sped past the open door; feet like huge, misshaped, forks.

  Fantastic.

  index i - EUROPA

  Ernie put pen to paper, the numbness in his wrist irritating, and wrote...

  Uncle Stylo showed her the presses, the bacteria-tanks that produced the newsprint, and the many stages through which the cellular-based scrip went before it finished up in a batch of original comics.

  He had a framed cover-page from issue 1.

  Kate was astonished.

  Morgan did his usual exercises. The bridge of his guppy was choked with pot-plants and cheeses. He had it from a reliable source that pot-plants and cheeses were all the rage on Europa and Sarpendon, that people - starved of vegetable company and deprived of something to put on their crackers - would pay well over the odds for such ordinary items.

  This was his chance to break into the big league.

  Interplanetary Spacelines, he thought gleefully, he comes Lumping Jack.

  He hoped to make enough from the venture to put down a deposit on one of the new retrograde engines just now becoming available to the smaller operator. As it was he and others like him were mostly restricted to in-system business, the routine ferrying of low-profit-margin goods and services, even resorting to the transport of passengers. But not any longer; this was it, the opportunity he'd been waiting for.

  Eighty-seven hours it took to make the crossing.

  Morgan had heard some weird tales concerning Jupiter's fourth moon and the pivotal station it carried piggyback, but was fully prepared, he believed, for every eventuality.

  The Happy Monkey nosed into
Sarpendon's topside dock. All that stood between him and his potential customers was six centimetres of amalgamated steel.

  And a confiscation order...

  ‘Illegal?’

  ‘Yes; I'm sorry.’

  Morgan was speechless.

  ‘All alien species are forbidden within the precincts of the station. Rules.’ The man said this last with a shrug. ‘Anything you bring from your ship will be seized.’

  Nonchalant, Lumping Jack interpreted his attitude; the fucking cunt; everything her owned, possessed or could lay his hands on had gone into getting here, loaded, and for what? Zilch...he was wiped out, washed up, fin.

  ‘Where can I get a job?’ he said.

  The man changed hats.

  Kate Droover punched the correct time-date sequence into the lock and stepped back. The hatch screeched open and the floor raised her out with the morning sun. From this airy vantage it was easy to see how the canyon got its name.

  To her left, subtly camouflaged, was a shady awning. She dumped her pile of comics on a stool and sat cross-legged on the cool stone.

  It was there to be read, Kate knew, the facts as expounded by Ernie and presented by Uncle Stylo, each separate panel hand-drawn, shades of black, blue, pink, crimson, green, white and purple.

  He'd been duped, that much was clear.

  Pot-plants and cheeses...

  Life for the foreseeable future was recycled and insulated, hermetically sealed and filtered. The job was glider pilot. He was, for the first time in his life, part of a team. They were twelve: himself, a mechanic and ten drillers, swept up in a bizarre half-light, tossed on undetectable winds and immersed in miragelike contours, reflections from the gas giant dominating the Europan sky. It was impossible to think in terms of day and night. The great red spot, God's thumbprint, ornamented the icy surface...almost as often as he did, waist-deep in the frozen illusions, stepping carefully to avoid the ephemeral pits and interstices. Morgan's head floated. This was research at its most basic and raw.

  And a synthetic version was still not perfected.

  Rocket fuel, the insubstantial element, the complex mutation of achromatic gases, lay in scattered pockets beneath the moon's inhospitable crust.

  And it was running out.

  Did very strange things, the real stuff.