Cargo Cult

Copyright Graham Storrs 2014

ISBN: 978-1-3106478-8-8

Book and cover design by Graham
Storrs.

Published by Canta Libre at
Smashwords

All rights reserved. Without
limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise)
without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either
the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners
of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have
been used without permission. The publication/use of these
trademarks is not authorised, associated with, or sponsored by the
trademark owners.

I dedicate this book to my
sister, Jacqueline.

I owe a great debt of thanks to
Corporal Lauren Hull and Airman Louise McDonald of the Royal
Australian Air Force who kindly gave me a personal tour of the
RAAF's impressive airbase at Amberley and answered an endless
stream of strange questions as they did so. (“So, if an alien
spaceship lander just there, what would you do?”) It is from
Corporal Hull and Airman McDonald that I learned all I know about
how such a base operates. If there are any faults left in my
understanding, it is not for lack of patient and detailed
instruction.

I'd also like to thank
photographer, Marcus Gunnarsson,
www.marcusgun.com
and model,
Tea Time,
www.facebook.com/InsaniteaTime/
for permission to use Tea's image on the cover.

Putting out a sci-fi comedy novel
is a scary thing to do. What if nobody laughs? So, more than ever I
have appreciated the support and encouragement of my wife,
Christine, and my daughter, Kate, along with the encouragement of
less partisan critics such as Ineke Prochazka of the Book Harvest
Literary Agency and Stephanie Smith of Harper Voyager.

Roxx walked unsteadily into the
command centre, ducking to get through the portal. “Hey, I got it
working!” he called, waving a long, jointed limb — an ‘arm’ as he
should learn to call it. Fourteen eye-clusters swung around to gawp
at him in astonishment — fifteen, if you included the bud growing
on Joss’ flank.

“It’s one of them!” someone
chirruped and everyone grabbed for their blasters.

“No, no! Wait!” Roxx shouted, aware
of the strange croaking sound his voice made. “It’s me, your
captain. I got the metamorphosis booth working. Now we can all
disguise ourselves as hum—” But that was all Roxx had time for.
Fourteen bolts of crackling energy sizzled into him, turning his
lovely new body into a pile of smoking black goo. Not only Roxx
but, as the Vinggans continued to blast away in panic at the spot
their captain had once occupied, they destroyed most of the portal
and part of the surrounding bulkhead too. The smell of burning
flesh and plastics was awful.

“Hang on! Hang on!” chirruped
Drukk, rippling blue with agitation. “Stop shooting! Stop! Stop!”
Gradually, the panicked Vinggans became aware of Drukk’s
chirruping. One by one, they stopped firing and lowered their
weapons. As the last, solitary shot melted a small hole in the
deck, all eye-clusters turned to Drukk. “Er,” he said, hesitating
to break the news. “I think we’ve just vaporised the captain.”

The wreck of the Vinggan space
cruiser
Vessel of the Spirit
sat on a blasted, barren plain.
All around it, the charred remains of trees smouldered in the
bright moonlight. On the horizon, to the west and north, a red glow
was all that could be seen of the bush fire the crash had started
nine hours ago. Of the crew of eight and the thirty-five
passengers, just fourteen now remained alive.

“The Great Spirit moves us in
strange ways to do Her work,” said Braxx, sliding forward to
address them all. Among the Vinggans, several muttered “We are
pebbles on Her beach” and touched their dorsal brain pans in
reverence.

“Er, yes, quite,” said Drukk,
eyeing them nervously. He always felt queasy around religious types
and these Pebbles of the New Dawn guys were just a bit too creepy
for his liking. As the last remaining member of the
Vessel of
the Spirit’s
crew, it was up to him now to take charge and do
what he could to ensure the survival of his passengers on this
strange alien world.

“Right,” he said. “OK.” They all
turned to look at him and he felt sweat beginning to ooze from his
ear sacs. The trouble was knowing exactly what they should do next.
Captain Roxx had seemed to have some sort of plan — something about
using the metamorphosis booth to emulate the local sapients. Maybe
that’s what they should do? It was a shame they’d all killed him
just then. Embarrassing too. Roxx had been one of the best. Still,
everyone was bound to be a bit nervous in the circumstances, what
with the crash and all. And it’s not as if you get stranded on an
uncharted planet, swarming with dangerous sapients, tens of
light-years from the nearest colony, with the infra-space
communicator smashed to pieces, every day. It’s no wonder they’d
shot him, bursting in here like that, looking so dry and ugly. In
fact, it’s a wonder more people hadn’t been shot.

“Well?” asked Braxx.

“Pardon?”

“You seemed about to say
something.”

“Oh. Did I? Hmm. Sorry.”

Braxx stared at him for a few, long
seconds. Drukk didn’t like that at all. It was a stare that seemed
to carry far too little respect and perhaps just a little too much
contempt. “No. Wait. That’s right. I was going to say, why don’t we
all go and use the metamorphosis booth like the captain suggested?
That way we’ll be able to move around without the local sapients
being alarmed by us.”

“The ‘humans’,” murmured Braxx.

“That’s right, the humans.”

Even as they’d hurtled out of
infra-space towards this Spirit-forsaken backwater, the ship’s
processors had begun listening to the planet’s emissions,
interpreting the languages of the local sapients, piecing together
whatever knowledge they could glean about the inhabitants,
cross-referencing friendly-contact scenarios, survival scenarios
and annihilation plans. Within an hour of the crash, the machines
had spat out their summaries.

The land-mass they had landed on
was known in the local language as ‘Australia’. By searching
something called the ‘Internet’, a painfully crude global
information repository, the ship was even able to supply maps of
the local area. The maps showed few towns and said nothing about
the terrain but they indicated the presence of ‘hotels’, ‘beaches’
and ‘tourist trails’. None of this made much sense to the Vinggans
and the strangeness of the maps only added to their growing
unease.

Top of the local food chain was an
air-breathing carbon-based form with a single, small head and brain
and two of just about everything else. The 'humans' were mostly
hairless but were otherwise horribly ugly. They broke all the known
laws of evolution by moving about on just two limbs, teetering
around in a constant state of disequilibrium like a planet-wide
circus-act. Yet, despite this incredible disadvantage, they were
clearly successful and had overpopulated the planet to the point of
infestation. Drukk and the captain had shuddered as they’d read the
ship’s findings.

The shuddering only grew worse when
they reached the section headed, ‘Recommendations for Action’. Here
the ship had written. “Activate emergency infra-space beacon and
remain cloaked until help arrives. Warning: Contact with the locals
is not advisable and in all scenarios will result in the
destruction of the crew and passengers.” They had looked around at
the smoking remains of the infra-space antenna and the wreckage of
the cloaking control panel and had asked the ship for another
option. It had pondered for several more minutes — scary enough in
itself — before suggesting they all have a good night’s sleep and
try not to worry about it.

“So. Let’s go do it, shall we?”
said Drukk snapping out of his reverie. “We need to act quickly.
The humans may find us here at any moment.”

No-one showed any sign of rushing
off to have their bodies remodelled. In fact, they were all looking
at Braxx, waiting for him to speak. Eventually he did.

“We are all pebbles on Her beach,”
he intoned. “Rolled and buffeted by the tides of life. Worn smooth
by the years. Insignificant. Worthless.” There was a general murmur
of consent. “We have but one thing that makes us special, one thing
that separates us from the dross of the Universe and that is the
love of the Great Spirit and the wisdom of Her teachings.”

Isn’t that two things?
Drukk
thought, but he kept his beak shut. Apart from himself, all the
other survivors were religious fanatics, part of a mission to a
newly colonised world in this bleak sector. The Pebbles of the New
Dawn was perhaps the most fanatical of all the Great Spirit’s sects
and was zealous in its ceaseless efforts to convert the rough and
lawless colonies of the New Vinggan Diaspora.

“What would She want us to do?”
Braxx went on. “What
can
we do now that our mission has
failed and our friends in the Space Corps” (here he swivelled his
eye-cluster to give Drukk a disdainful glance) “can do nothing to
save us?” He slid closer to the group, clearly enjoying being in
the limelight. “For the past few hours I have been asking myself
these questions and searching the Communion of Souls for guidance
from the Great Spirit.” He looked about, theatrically, and the
crowd hung on his words. Even Drukk was pretty curious to hear what
the old fraud would come up with. “And the Great Spirit guided me
and I have been inspired by Her, unworthy as I am even to speak Her
name.”

Oh get on with it
, Drukk
thought, finding it hard to keep his patience. The humans, the ship
had said, possessed a simple but nevertheless adequately
destructive technology and were horribly warlike.

“Yes, inspired, I say! For this is
the plan that She has revealed to me, the plan that was hidden
until now and which is only possible through the divine
intervention that brought us here. We have been brought to this
planet so that we might convert the humans!”

There was a gasp of shock from the
faithful and a cry of “What!?” from Drukk but Braxx just smiled
around the room. “It will be Her greatest triumph! The first
sub-Vinggan species ever to be brought into the fold. And we will
be Her humble instruments.”

There was a stunned silence as they
all absorbed this. Drukk felt that a word at this juncture might
not go amiss. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “We’ve
crash-landed on an uncharted planet. We have no means of escape or
of contacting our people. We’ve lost most of the crew and our
space-ship is a wreck. All our provisions are ruined. We’ve started
a fire big enough to bring half the planet down on us to see what’s
going on. Our computer — which, I should mention, was programmed by
a bunch of war-crazed psychopaths, and therefore generally
recommends annihilating the local sapients, regardless of the
situation — is suggesting that we keep our heads down and hope it
all goes away. Yet you want us to march out there and start
preaching to seven billion godless monsters?”

Braxx’s smile did not flicker for a
moment. “Drukk, you are a simple man. A man of action. A doer, not
a thinker. Whereas I,” the smile broadened, “I am a theologian.
Each day I grapple with the great imponderables of the Universe,
seeking revelation through communion with the Great Spirit. Ask
yourself, Drukk, why would Her High Beneficence strand us here on
this mudball? Why would She take so many of Her truest believers
and cast them out of the society of their fellows? Why would She
lead us to a world where seven billion sapients have never heard
Her glorious word?” The eyes on his eye-cluster widened
enquiringly. “I think you know the answer, don’t you Drukk? I think
we all know the answer.”

His acolytes seemed to see the
reason in this and were murmuring their agreement when Drukk burst
out, “But how? How in the name of the Spirit can you convert a
whole planet of aliens? They won’t sit quietly and listen. They’ll
blast us to atoms!”

“Ah Drukk, if we knew all the
answers, we wouldn’t need the Great Spirit to guide us, would we?
Of course, we can’t use the usual methods to achieve mass
conversions — carpet bombing from space, mind-altering drugs in the
water supplies, advertising campaigns — we sent most of our
equipment ahead by freighter. So we’ll just have to do it some
other way.”