The Ultimate Inferior Beings (30 page)

“Faster! Faster!” LEP was
saying. “He’s gaining on us.”

“How long to the singularity?”
demanded jixX, pushing his foot down hard on the accelerator.

“Ten seconds,” said LEP.

sylX and anaX were staring in
panic out of the tertiary observation window.

“Faster!” said one.

“Faster!” echoed the other.

*

“Ah, revenge is sweet,”
muttered Jeremy, as he poised a green slimy finger over the ‘FIRE!’ button.

He cleared his throat and
cried, “I am the Chosen One! Death to The Dogs. For the Good of the Species! In
the Light of the Dark!”

Then, with a relish he had
rarely ever experienced, he pushed down on the ‘FIRE!’ button and leaned back
to watch The Night Ripple blow.

*

The skew-focused pulse of
hyper-coherent light from the laser cannon shot towards The Night Ripple. It
hurtled across the space between the two ships at, not surprisingly, the speed
of light. Nothing could stop it. The pulse was bang on target and hit the
glistening hull of The Night Ripple square on...

...and then...

...reflected straight back
off the ship’s shiny surface and headed right back from whence it had come.

Instantly, The Night Ripple’s
emergency cooling mechanisms sprang to life to minimize heat-damage from the
blast. And, a fraction of a second later, the ship shot through the
singularity, out of the Pseudogravitic Continuum, and was safely clear. She had
incurred practically no damage whatsoever; The Night Ripple was designed to
take a lot more than a single blast from a puny laser cannon.

The same, however, could not
be said of the emergency deep-space survival module. The reflected pulse of
laser light tore into the module and blasted her apart, detonating the neutrino
bomb in the food store and unleashing the most powerful explosive device ever
built.

The combined explosion tore
through the Pseudogravitic Continuum blowing apart anything in its way. Stars,
planets, everything. All ripped apart. All completely destroyed.

Including the planet Ground,
home of the Mamm aliens.

A fraction of a millisecond
before this happened, in the module’s control room, a tiny voice uttered a
single word: “Oops.”

*

The Night Ripple, now back in
Normal Space Time, accelerated away from Singularity SCN8-4, heading for
Tenalp. The three humans in the main control room had seen a brilliant flash of
light and the two women had been thrown off their feet by its impact but, other
than that, had not been hurt.

“What was that??” jixX was
saying, blinking his eyes and seeing multicoloured spots in front of them.

“An awfully lucky escape,”
said LEP.

The two women picked
themselves up from the ground and dusted themselves off.

“What just happened?” asked sylX.

LEP explained. “Jeremy’s
attempt to destroy us backfired. The explosion has destroyed the singularity.
And, from the size of it, probably took a large part of the Pseudogravitic
Continuum with it.”

“What about the Mamms?” asked
the stowaway.

“My calculations suggest
their planet was one of the first things to go.”

They all suddenly fell
silent.

jixX looked puzzled. “How can
the explosion have been so large?” he asked.

“There must have been a
secondary explosion on board the survival module,” said LEP. “Something
massive.”

“Oh my God!” cried anaX,
suddenly. She put her head in her hands and rushed from the room.

jixX and sylX looked at one
another in stunned bewilderment.

*

A few minutes later jixX was
staring out of the tertiary observation window, looking back in the direction
from where they had come. sylX came to join him. Both were quiet and subdued.

“So,” mused the captain with
a bitter smile. “Just as Benjamin predicted.”

“What do you mean?”

“It looks like
they
were The Dogs after all. The Ultimate Inferior Beings. They destroyed their
Universe.”

sylX was nodding her head.
“Jeremy. The Chosen One,” she said. “Yet the Chosen One was an imposter. Maybe
that’s what the Hour of the Lie was all about!”

jixX looked excitedly at her.
“That would explain why Randolph was so worried when he discovered there were
eleven Benjaminites and not ten.”

sylX’s eyes widened as
another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Today’s Monday,” she said with a
gasp. “Today’s Monday – the day they said their Universe would be destroyed!”

*

Back in her cabin anaX was in
tears.

“It’s my fault,” she wailed.
“All my fault.”

She tossed and turned in her
bunk, wracked by guilt. She thought it would drive her crazy.

“Is something the matter?”
asked LEP, although quite clearly there was.

anaX rolled and tossed on her
bunk, pulling at her hair and gnashing her teeth.

But, after a few minutes she
calmed enough to confess everything to LEP. He was, after all, a computer. When
she had explained about the neutrino bomb, LEP told her something that she
hadn’t been aware of, and this made her cheer up a little.

It was then that LEP asked
her to marry him.

PART THE SIXTH: TOT

Chapter 1

jixX
sat in
a large,
comfortable armchair in a cheerful, spacious office waiting to be seen. In
front of him sat TOT’s secretary, busily typing on her psychomagnetic
touch-screen as though unaware of jixX’s presence. He glanced at his watch,
wondering when the Transcendental Overlord of Tenalp would be ready to see him.

jixX was hungry, unshaven and
very, very tired; he hadn’t slept for two nights. He had been back on Tenalp no
more than half an hour. The moment The Night Ripple had ‘touched down’ at
Tropecaps Spaceport he had been whisked away. No hero’s welcome. No tarmac
reception committee plus brass band. Not so much as a red carpet. Instead,
under cover of darkness, he had been bundled out of The Night Ripple by a bunch
of uncouth soldiers with lampblacked faces, thrown into a camouflaged military
vehicle with very poor suspension, and raced over some of Tenalp’s bumpiest
roads all the way to TOT’s headquarters.

As he waited, he wondered
what the others were doing. sylX the stowaway, he knew, had gone to some secret
location to collect her pay packet. fluX the behavioural chemist had gone home
to work on his Proof. anaX the gynaecologist had accepted LEP’s proposal of
marriage and the two of them wanted to be left alone together to plan their
future. And, as for twaX, the carpenter’s whereabouts were still a mystery. Had
he been in the Pseudogravitic Continuum when the neutrino bomb had exploded?

jixX thought, too, about his
dwarf Alberta spruce which, in the hurry of his forced departure, he’d left
back in The Night Ripple. He would need to go back to retrieve it – and endure
more of LEP’s wit. But he was kind of missing the computer. Kind of.

His thoughts turned to the
imminent audience with TOT, which made his hands start to shake and his heart
beat faster. To meet the supreme ruler of the planet was a great honour, but he
couldn’t help wondering whether there might be more to it than that. Like a
medal, perhaps, or some other kind of reward...?

There was a buzz on the
secretary’s desk. She stopped typing and turned to jixX. “The Transcendental
Overlord of Tenalp will see you now,” she said in a very formal manner.

“Thank you,” said jixX,
getting up and suddenly feeling his knees turn to jelly.

“Go straight in.”

jixX went through the door
and into TOT’s spacious office – a large, magnificently decorated, impressive
room. No pink Velvex wallpaper here. He briefly surveyed it in awe before
becoming aware of TOT, seated behind a vast desk, reading a file. jixX gulped,
but said nothing, trying to soften his steps so not to disturb TOT’s
concentration.

After a few seconds, TOT
looked up, saw jixX, and beckoned him nearer. “It’s jixX, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” said jixX humbly,
his voice shaking a little as he approached.

“Excuse me for a second.” TOT
turned to the intercom on his desk and spoke into it. “No interruptions for the
time being, please, darling.” He took his homogeno-digital finger off the
intercom button and indicated a small, rickety, wooden chair standing
uncertainly in front of his vast desk. “Do take a seat,” he said.

jixX approached the chair,
noticing that it was probably the least magnificent thing in the entire room,
and didn’t even look particularly safe to sit on. jixX carefully and awkwardly
lowered himself onto it. It creaked as it took his weight and managed to make
him even more uncomfortable here in the presence of the supreme ruler of Tenalp.

“Right,” said TOT in a
business-like manner, intertwining his homogeno-digital fingers on the desk in
front of him and leaning forward. “Top Secret Space Mission. The Night Ripple.
Correct?”

“Yes, sir,” said jixX,
nodding and trying not to glow too much with pride.

“Successful?”

“Er, I think it went quite
well,” said jixX modestly, the pride continuing to swell up in his chest.

“Good man!” said TOT, a thin
smile on his leptodermal pachyresin face. He opened a cigar-box and offered one
to jixX.

“No thank you,” said jixX. “I
don’t.”

“Very wise”, said TOT,
closing the box and leaning back in his leather swivel armchair. He regarded
jixX for a while before leaning forward again. “Well, then,” he started in a
paternal manner. “Let’s get to the nub of the matter. The question everyone is
asking.”

jixX waited expectantly.

“What did you learn about the
fate that befell The Living Chrysalis?”

jixX froze. At first it was
because he didn’t understand the question. It bore so little resemblance to the
sort of question he had been expecting, that it was as though it had been
uttered in some strange foreign language. Then, as the words became clearer, he
became aware that the name sounded familiar and, in some way, critically
important. But where had he heard it before? “The Living Chrysalis?” he
repeated to himself, his eyes transfixed on TOT’s.

And then, when he finally
managed to place it, the blood drained from his face. He recalled his encounter
with VOZ, the Ministry of Intelligence and Spying computer.

jixX swallowed. His muscles
started to twitch and his bowels liquefied. ‘The Living Chrysalis,’ he thought.
‘Oh my God, The Living Chrysalis.’ He had completely forgotten about her. What
was he going to do now?

jixX tried to loosen his
collar as his breathing had become shallow and difficult. He felt beads of
sweat breaking out on his forehead.

“Well?” prompted TOT.

“Ah, The Living Chrysalis,”
mumbled jixX as a golf-ball sized lump formed in his throat.

“Go on,” said TOT, still
smiling benignly but looking as though his good humour could be on the turn.
“What did you find out about her fateful last voyage?”

jixX gave a nervous cough as
his hands trembled uncontrollably. He looked down at the ground to avoid TOT’s
piercing eyes. “Um,” he started, his mouth dry, wishing he were somewhere else.

“Well?”

“Well,” said jixX, his voice
wavering. “We didn’t really find out all that much.”

TOT’s facial muscles tensed
visibly. “How much did you find out?” he asked, his voice becoming colder.

“Nothing.”

TOT’s eyes widened and his nostrils
flared. For several seconds he didn’t utter a sound, but just glowered at jixX.
Then, quietly, he asked, “What?” as though he had decided his anechoically
processed audioreceptive ears must have misheard jixX’s answer.

“We didn’t learn anything at
all,” admitted jixX, his eyes lowered. “We forgot all about her,” he said,
using ‘we’ in an attempt to spread the blame.