Cargo Cult (35 page)

Shorty knew she should not have
shot that group of hunters the other day but she'd been mad. For
the first time in three hundred years she'd had the chance to
strike back and, like a fool, she'd taken it. It was probably only
a matter of time now before the humans started a serious hunt for
them.

"They're still coming Boss."

Shorty looked around and there were
the vehicles, changing course to follow them. “Keep moving,” Shorty
snapped. “That way.”

They bounded off in a new
direction. "Why don't we just stop and shoot 'em, Boss?" Fats
wanted to know.

"Give me strength!" Shorty growled.
"Why don't you just save your brains for thinking about not falling
over your own feet, dingo face, and let me decide who we shoot?
OK?"

"Er, OK Boss."

Another voice piped up. "There's
some more of 'em over there."

Shorty looked to find several more
vehicles emerging from the trees she had been guiding them towards.
"They're after us!" She turned again and quickened the pace. If it
came to a fight she had no doubt at all that her guys would win
hands down but she didn't want another fight. If she kept
escalating this thing she'd end up with the whole planet hunting
them. She just wanted to get herself and her gang out of there so
they could go back to being unnoticed and unremarked. Right then
she would happily have settled for serving out her remaining two
hundred years in total anonymity.

"If we can make it to those trees
over there we'll be safe," she called over her shoulder. How had
she let herself be caught like this out in the open? Even the real
roos knew better than that!

'Uh oh," said Fats, quite
redundantly, as another group of vehicles moved to block their
escape.

There was still one route open to
them and Shorty took it, putting on a burst of speed that would
leave most utes, driving off-road, well behind them. She thanked
the
Frofrifrathalionionians
that they'd
transformed them into kangaroos – creatures beautifully equipped to
race tirelessly along at high speed across the roughest possible
terrain – rather than something less serviceable, like an echidna,
or a goanna. Behind them, the vehicles had formed a line and were
bouncing and lurching across the ground towards them. She thanked
the Froops that the humans were too primitive to have cheap flying
machines at their disposal. If they had, her guys wouldn't have
stood a chance. As it was, they were easily out-pacing the
rattling, clanking ground vehicles.

The hills were rising on her right.
She could lead the gang up into them and they'd be safe there for a
while but ahead of her was a small gorge, a natural water-course
full of tumbled rocks, falling away to open ground beyond. If she
went through there, there was no way the human vehicles could
follow. She would be free. Once through to the other side, she
would just keep going. They'd just keep running all day and all
night. By the next day they'd be knackered, but they'd be well
clear of this district. They could then head back towards the
coast, get among the mountains – and stay there for the next fifty
years!

As the walls of the gorge rose up
around them, she had a sudden panic that maybe this was some kind
of an ambush. But what if it was? Their Vinggan shields would
protect them from anything these country hicks could throw at them
and, once they were through, they were home and dry. But there was
no ambush. No shots rang out, no humans appeared among the rocks.
They emerged from the gorge unscathed and unmolested.

And fell straight into the gigantic
camouflaged pit that Collins and his team had dug the previous
day.

In the great carousel that is the
Milky Way, the stars twirled about the centre, the planets whirled
about their stars and the moons spun about their planets. Into this
vast, churning whirligig, appearing as if by magic from the complex
nothingness of infra-space, the Agent's sleek, black spaceship
came. Automated systems checked the ship's location, speed and
direction, then fired the engines that would match its trajectory
to that of the fifth moon of the second planet of the star system
it found itself in.

"Course set for Arabis Five," the
ship told the Agent. “Planetfall in seventeen minutes."

The Agent cleared the ship's hull
and looked out at the solar system around it. Not far away, a huge
gas giant swung at breakneck speed around a bright, orange star,
both star and planet looking bloated and degenerate. Closer still,
a second gas giant raced ahead of the pursuing spaceship. As the
Agent's ship matched vectors, the gas giant grew to monstrous
proportions. One by one, the bright dots of its many moons slipped
out of view until only one was left, Arabis Five. As big as the
Earth, the moon was a dull, brown colour with splashes of bright
silver where small oceans dotted its surface. There was ice at the
poles and thick, jaundiced cloud in whorls and streams, adding to
the moon's dismal appearance.

“Unidentified craft in sector
thirty-two twelve, this is FiveSpace traffic control, please
identify yourself."

The voice from the planet sounded
anxious. Few ships, the Agent knew, would approach an inhabited
world at this speed, broadcasting no identification, unless they
were up to no good, or, as in this case, they were an Agent of the
Lalantran Government on official business. The Agent gave the ship
permission to send the identification codes and to begin
negotiating an orbital insertion. Then it groped around for its
invisible couch and settled there to watch the approach.

-oOo-

It wasn't until they reached the
relative safety of the spaceport buildings that Sam began to take
in her surroundings. The Vinggan ship dominated everything. As big
as Lang Park Stadium, it seemed to crowd out the dozens of smaller
spaceships parked around it. The buildings too seemed to cower away
from the massive ship, even though several of them were quite
large. The fact that they were all rounded and mud-coloured made
them seem oddly primitive – especially against the majestic Vinggan
ship – as if an Airbus 380 had set down in the middle of an African
village.

John and Barraclough were still
with her, panting heavily, as she was, from the sudden exertion in
the high gravity, but Wayne was missing. She looked back the way
they had come and felt more irritated than relieved to see him
staggering along behind Drukk. Just like Wayne to go and injure
himself when they were trying to run for their lives!

Above them, the sky was a sickly
yellow colour with a few beige clouds hanging about in it. A light
breeze stirred the yellowish dust on the hard-packed earth. Apart
from that, there was no movement. The pale brown, mud-rendered
buildings completed the planet's shades-of-cappuccino decorating
scheme. Sam looked in vain for any sign of life – animal, vegetable
or otherwise – but there was none.

"Now what?" Barraclough demanded,
gruffly.

"We need to find a ship that'll
take us back to Earth," said Sam, absently, scanning the area for
likely candidates.

"I don't think we're on any of the
main bus routes."

His surly tone penetrated Sam's
concentration. She rounded on him angrily. "Then we'll get a cab.
What's your problem, Barraclough? We're out of there aren't we?
We're free, aren't we?"

The big policeman drew in a long
breath, obviously intending to spend it on an equally long tirade
but John jumped in ahead of him. "I think what Mike means, Sam, is
that we don't really know where we are and we don't know if the
natives will be friendly or not. We could actually be a lot worse
off than we were on the Vinggan ship."

"Oh rubbish!" She grabbed Drukk,
who had just arrived, and pushed him in front of the scowling
Barraclough. "Drukk, tell this overstuffed warthog where we are and
how easy it will be to get back to Earth."

Drukk looked uneasy. "Well..."

"Go on."

"Well, the planet is called To'egh
I think, but I'm not really sure where it is. As for your planet, I
have absolutely no idea where that is."

Now it was Sam's turn to scowl.
'But we can hire a ship or something to take us back home, can't
we? I mean, this is like a kind of airport for spaceships, right?
We just need to, you know, charter a flight, don't we?"

Drukk shrugged. "I have no idea
what you're talking about. In my experience, spaceports are usually
run by the local military and they shoot people on sight who
trespass on them."

Sam's face turned white and
Barraclough adopted a 'told you so' attitude.

"W-we should contact the
authorities," Sam stammered. "We should explain that we're escaped
prisoners. Someone will help us, surely?"

"I think the authority here is a
Durak warlord who enslaved this planet a little while ago," Drukk
offered.

Wayne, stumbling into the group at
last, looked around at the worried faces and groaned. "That really
hurt," he whined.

"Shut up, Wayne!" the three humans
said in unison.

He glowered at them, astonished at
their insensitivity. "So what's the plan?" he asked,
grudgingly.

"I think it amounts to this,"
Barraclough said. "We've got nowhere to run to. No-one will help
us. Sooner or later someone will find us and drag us up in front of
the local warlord and we'll all be executed as runaway slaves. Is
that about right, Drukk?"

The Vinggan nodded sagely.

Wayne looked at Sam, half expecting
that the big cop was making some kind of joke. From the angry scowl
on his sister's face, he could see he was wrong. "Hang on a
minute..." he began but was literally brushed aside as Sam marched
past him on her way to grab Barraclough by the lapels.

"No-one asked you to come along,"
she snarled, almost dragging herself off her feet as she tried to
pull the big man down to her. “But since you're here, you'd better
start playing for the team, Mister." Drukk and Wayne exchanged
puzzled glances. "I'm going to get us off this
café-au-lait
hell-hole and if you want to see home again, you'd better get with
the programme. There's no I in team, Barraclough, so I don't want
to hear any more of your prima donna bullshit. Do you hear me?"

Barraclough gazed down into her
angry face and for a long moment seemed to consider whether he was
going to hit her or laugh out loud. At last, he said, "You know,
you're quite pretty when you talk crap."

With an animal cry of fury, Sam let
go of him and, stepping back and squaring off, swung her arm back
to deliver what they could all see would be a completely
ineffectual blow. Calmly, Barraclough stepped up to her, making the
planned swing impossible, and said, "Now don't make me put you
across my knee, Sam."

Wayne goggled. If the man had
levitated two metres into the air, Wayne could not have been more
astonished.

"Why don't you just calm down and
start thinking this through," Barraclough continued. Sam was frozen
in a rather silly combative pose. Barraclough smiled down at her.
"We're not getting out of this by running around like – oh, I dunno
– like Rambo in a corporate motivational video."

Sam put down her arm and stood up
straight. Clearly the danger of fisticuffs had passed. She glared
at Barraclough through narrowed eyes. "I hate you," she told
him.

"That's fine by me. We're all out
here because of you, because we all tried to stop you getting
yourself killed. Our only safe course of action was to wait on the
ship until the Lalantran authorities caught up with it."

"That's another thing," Drukk
interjected, speaking to no-one in particular. "Why did that big
black thing turn up saying it was a Lalantran Agent? And what
business have they got bothering a Vinggan space ship?"

Barraclough ignored him and went on
talking to Sam. "Now, obviously, we can't get back into the ship.
Equally obviously, whatever you think, we can't get another ship to
take us back home. I think our only option is to find somewhere
safe to hide out and then stay there until the Lalantrans
arrive."

"Are these Lalantrans really
coming?" John asked, hoping Barraclough would have a convincing
answer and Sam would stop glaring at him as if she meant to chew
through his neck.

"No they're not," Sam said. "It's
all rubbish. Whatever that big black thing was, it couldn't stop
the Vinggans last time and, even if it can find us here, there's no
reason to think it could do anything for us except stand around
looking ugly." She didn't look at John as she spoke. They'd all
learnt not to do that.

"All right then." For the first
time, Barraclough was starting to sound angry. "You tell us what
you think we should do, Rambo."

Sam narrowed her eyes even further.
"All right I will! See those spaceships over there?" She pointed to
a clutch of small, boxy machines standing on the apron in the
shadow of the mighty Vinggan craft.

"If they are spaceships," said
Barraclough, “and not just the local equivalent of
helicopters."

"Of course they're space ships!
It's a spaceport, isn't it? What else would they be?"

"They do look a bit small,"
ventured Wayne.

"Shut up, Wayne," his sister
snapped. "We go over to those. We get aboard one."

"If it's not locked."

"We get aboard one," Sam insisted.
"We take off and we fly back to Earth. What's so hard about
that?"

"Oh, I dunno," Barraclough's tone
was mocking. "I suppose it would be easy to check if they have
enough fuel in them, or to read the alien instruction manual to
switch on the life-support, so where could the problem lie? Oh yes,
even if those things were actual human-style helicopters, what do
you think the chances are of any of us learning how to fly one in
ten seconds flat? And don't you think that maybe a spaceship might
be just a tiny bit more complicated? And what about navigating our
way home with alien star charts when we haven't got a clue where
home is and we'll probably be dodging half this planet's police and
military once they notice we've just stolen a billion-dollar
spaceship?"