Vivian on 9/10/2010 at 08:08

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As on every morning, the foreign cook wakes them with his boot, thrashing his weird whip-like legs against the hill to ring it like a giant bell. And, as on every morning, the lieutenant snaps awake from dreams of war to leap down from his bunk in excitement, his bleary brain mistaking the sound for ordinance glancing off the armored side of his beloved and much-missed battleship, and as on every morning he sighs, disappointed, and mournfully puts his underwear on. He is almost fully dressed by the time the cook applies his boot to the hull once more, sounding a great sonorous boom throughout the ship. The lieutenant recalled a direct hit on the first ship he had served on, a dreadnought. An enemy warhead detonated right on the bow armour – even with the baffles, the noise had been like a thousand cymbals being dropped in a bare rock cave. Music to his ears. He smiled and left his cabin.

The mess of the aging cargo clipper Don't Call Me Again was easily spacious enough for the six members of the crew – originally a deployment vessel for the transport ministry's wormhole division, she was designed to comfortably accommodate an entire team of dedicated physicists and technicians in addition to the standard crew. It meant that those who did not enjoy each others company could seat themselves several places away from each other around the large central table, and successfully avoid eye-contact with each other while they ate the pastries, fruits and eggs the cook prepared each morning. As the lieutenant arrived the captain was already spread out comfortably between the two chairs, body on one and feet on the other, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a small handheld screen in the other.

The lieutenant stowed himself bolt upright on an adjacent seat and took an apple from the bowl welded to the centre of the table, feeling the slight sticky resistance of the restraining field. He spread butter and jam onto a slab of seed toast from the rack, and added a custard-and-almond pastry to the hazy field-plate at his place on the table.

“What’s the news?” he asked the captain, gesturing at the screen with his knife.

“The tarantula has spread to another system. It's definitely heading inwards, that’s plain to see. Down the spiral.” The captain nonchalantly drummed her fingers on the tip of a custard-filled pastry.

“Oh.” The lieutenant took a thoughtful mouthful of toast, struck by a brief day-dream image of proud navy gunships in incandescent combat with the whispy, insubstantial ships of the tarantula. “Anyone get out?”

“Two transports got out OK. There was a third, but it was compromised. The navy torpedoed it.”

“Two transports out of a whole system.” The lieutenant made a flat statement, eyes downcast and fixated on the fruit bowl. Having a typically nostalgic memory of war in which everything exploded and no-one died, the complexities and carnage of the ongoing tarantula encroachment made him confused and uncomfortable. He decided to change the subject. “Still, only another week of winging it for us until we get to Perth, then real gravity and a real horizon for a whole two months. Sky and trees and seas. What do you think you're going to do with your holiday?”

“Got a stint in the mountains booked. Going to learn to wing it, properly – you know, using wings.”

“A wing-suit?”

“No, actual wings. Large-scale body modification is legal on Perth; they can graft a whole secondary set of limbs onto you, a bird design - new sternum, stiffened ribcage, whole new set of muscles and nerves, physiological tune-up, the works. You can soar like a mountain bird with a few weeks practice, apparently. You have to eat and drink like a pig to catch up to the demand of running the weirdo muscle-type they install, but after four months of this rubbish” - she jabbed a finger at the pastry – “I’ll be quite alright with that.”

“Oh. Sounds like um... fun.” The lieutenant took a bite of his pastry. Sticking wings to you indeed. Captains were supposed to be level-headed, steely-jawed types, not the sort that spend their time off pretending to be birds. You would never find this in the navy.

At that moment the engineers mate – a stocky, unusually short man with an inconsistent thatch of short, bristly hair that made his head resemble the surface of a pig – entered the mess, closely followed by a pungent organic odor. He was holding a small pistol in one of his large hands, and threw it down on the table with enough violence to make the lieutenant jump and the captain raise her eyebrow.

“Safety's on. Damn thing's empty anyhow.” He grunted, sinking into his seat. He took a handful of almonds from the bowl and gave the lieutenant an expectant glance.

“Trouble?” The lieutenant asked, on cue.

“I don't want to talk about it”. The engineers mate put three almonds in his mouth at once, and chewed them with an audible crunching. “But seeing as you would pester me about it for the rest of the day anyway, I might as well tell you”, he went on, looking unhappy. The lieutenant was always too interested when either the engineer or his mate had cause to use their weapons. Given his obvious love of all things military and marshal, the circumstances surrounding the lieutenant’s leaving of the navy were a regular topic of conversations between the engineers mate and the engineer.

“An ecosystem escaped. There was a coolant leak in the containment hold, and the temperature change must have popped its hermetic seal. The damn thing got into one of the supplies holds and was already forming decent sized beasties by the time we found it. Me and the boss had to destroy the ones that could move” - he gestured at the pistol on the table - “and hose the rest down with renderer and shut the door”. He sighed.

“So, I've been running round a nice dark, wet maze, firing at shadows since 5 o'clock this morning, and in a few hours I'll have to go and mop up a hold full of primordial soup and stuff it back into jars. I haven't even had breakfast yet!” He clumped his boots emphatically against the leg of his chair. “Not my ideal way to start the day.” He took a pastry from the tray and stuffed it straight into his mouth.

The captain put down her screen and frowned. “The containment on those things really needs to be sorted out. We're the second vessel to experience a leak in the last month. If one of them goes unnoticed for long enough to start developing large apex predators, who knows what could happen?”

The engineers mate mumbled agreement through a mouthful of pastry.

“I don't want to wake up one morning” she went on, “to find my crew have been eaten by a pack of cargo wolves. Or a hull squid. Or whatever crazy animals those things can cook up. All we have are a few pistols to deal with anything that moves too fast to be sprayed down with enzyme renderer.”

The lieutenant perked up at this, sensing opportunity. “I agree, captain. Our defensive capabilities on this ship are highly limited. We should carry a few multiprojection carbines, you know. Or at least a decent assault emitter. Those pistols are old service, totally outclassed these days. They're too weak to even burn through the most basic armor.”

“Of course our defensive capability is limited, this is a bloody cargo ship!” the captain snapped, eyes pointed. “If you want to go burning a hole through the hull waving military-grade weapons around, you can wait until you've got your own ship, thank you very much.”

“...but what about hull-squid?” the lieutenant protested, feebly.

The engineers mate snorted a laugh at him. “They should just spring for stasis pods to transport the damn things safely in the first place. Waiting until they leak and start to grow heads and then shooting them off doesn't do anyone any good.”

“Quite.” The captain agreed, taking an egg from the bowl and starting to peel it, arranging the shell fragments neatly on her field-plate. “Ecosystems belong on planets, or in habitats. Not in the bottom of our ship.”

“Unless they're bottled up properly.”

“Unless they're bottled up properly, yes.” The captain popped the now-spotless egg into her mouth, whole, and widened her eyes into a 'and that's that' expression.

A sharp smack-clunk of plastic shell-boots and a mutter of inscrutable cyrillic swearing echoed in through the open door of the mess hall, signaling the arrival of the engineer on the habitat deck. The clanging boots and steadily mumbled curses grew closer as the occupants of the breakfast table exchanged expectant glances and prepared for the inevitable outburst. The noise reached the mess door and paused for a few seconds, as if adjusting itself. Eventually: “......shit.”

The engineer lurched into the room, kicking the already open door against the metal wall with a loud boom. A surly powerhouse of a man, generic slavic features set into a grimace, great booted leg still pistoned out in front of him like the head of a camel. “Whore! Fuck! Bastards.” He declared, slightly out of breath, with a thunderous scowl. The strange, funky odor in the room became noticeably stronger.

He detached a chair from the table and sat down with a grunt. There were steaming, moth-eaten patches on his greasy blue shipsuit where the potent mix of solvents and enzymes they used to destroy out of control ecosystems had got to work on the fabric. Thankfully, the renderer had been sensibly designed to be minimally dangerous to human flesh, but the smell was hardly pleasant.

“That fucking porridge got all the booze.” The engineer chewed the words as they came out. “I just double-checked. The hold that got infested was the one we were using as a cellar. What they didn't gobble up the renderer will have wrecked. All of it!”

“We make landfall in a week, you can stock up then. Wouldn't kill you to sober up a bit, anyway.” The captain sipped a cup of coffee and gave him a pointed glance.

The engineer returned it with a slack-jawed yawn. “I'm sorry, miss captain – you want me to wind new coils for this rust-balloon all day, pausing only to rebuild the power switching gear every other day and to pour this stinking shit -” he gestured at the smoking patches on his suit “-over those shit-eating abominations when they escape from their jars, and you want me to do it sober?” He grabbed a cinnamon pastry from the dish and mashed it against his plate. “You have the wrong man if that is what you expect! What you really want is a robot! Work all day, never want to relax or to have fun, perfect for you. But you're too fucking cheap, so you get me.”

The captain sat back, eyebrows raised.

“That is what I thought, nothing to say, eh? Maybe you should try a drink every now and then, loosen your tongue. No balls, that is your problem.”

“Shut up, engineer Borysko. Before you earn yourself a pay cut.” The captain raised her eyes to meet the engineers. “I take it the situation below has been taken care of?”

The engineer was silent. He held the captains gaze for a few moments, eyes smoldering. The skin of her cheeks tightened almost imperceptibly and she put her coffee down with a distinct 'clink'.

“Yes, yes, it's taken care of.” The engineer baulked, deflated. “At what a cost, though.” He huffed air out of his cheeks and shoved the crushed remains of his pastry into his mouth with a resignation. The other crew members visibly relaxed.

The table ate in silence for a minute or so, chewing, swallowing or just staring into space; personal or, through the portholes, literal.

“Right.” Said the lieutenant after a minute or so. “Right.” He repeated, standing up this time, brushing crumbs from the knees of his suit. “I'll go and check our course. There's some kind of leak somewhere, pushing us off-line, rotating us slightly. Somewhere upstairs, I think.”

The engineer and the engineers mate sucked air in through their teeth and exchanged glances. “A leak? On this tub?” The engineer chuckled quietly down his nose. “You don't say” he continued, in a parody of the lieutenants english accent.

“Just look for it, will you? We've wasted enough propellant on this trip already”. The lieutenant spun smartly on his heel and exited the mess hall.

“We'll get right on it”, the engineers mate said, setting his mug down and giving the engineer a tired look.

“I guess I'd better go balance the books, see how much losing the contents of that hold is going to hurt.” The captain looked serious. She stood up and left, taking her portable screen with her. “You guys, do your jobs.”

The engineer and his mate remained where they were, finishing of their plates in resentment and contemplative silence, respectively.

“Reckon we can find the leak?” The mate said, eventually.

“Yeah. Easy” The engineer said, shifting his bulk around on the stool. “It'll be in the starboard atmosphere exchange port on deck 3. Thing has needed replacement for years.”

“Hard to fix?”

“Nah.... but I'm thinking – if we fix it too quick, these idiots will just find us something else to waste our time on. We can make it home with a little leak like that, no problem, so don't worry about it. It's probably making us go faster!” He snorted. “Let's drink instead, what do you say?”

“Drink? Drink what? You said all the booze was destroyed.”

“Well, nearly all.” Agreed the engineer with a somber look. “I still have a few bottles of the real stuff in my locker.”

“The illegal stuff? From tarantula worlds? I won’t ask where the hell you got that. Is that why you didn't mention it before?”

“Yup. Captain dear would throw it out the airlock if she found it, rather than risk a fine and a slap on the wrist. The woman has no spine at all.”

“She's not so bad. She got us out of that stuff with the highwaymen last year, didn't she?”

“Och, that was just luck. Besides, the lieutenant pulled off most of the maneuvers. I suppose that having an ex-military boor on the ship is useful sometimes. Anyway my friend – a drink and a game of chess? In the upper-forward bulkhead? A far more pleasant way to spend the day than patching up ancient hardware, I'm sure you agree.”

“Agreed.” The engineers mate said, slapping the other mans back. They both rose from the table and made their exit unhurriedly.

With the crew gone about their daily business, the mess hall was still. Crumbs of uneaten food hovered on the unsubstantial plate-fields, the remains of pastries stayed where they were, the captains coffee mug sat next to the fruit bowl, unmoving and unmoved, silent as the bright void beyond the portholes. All this was observed by the foreign chef - a hairless and functional mute figure of completely unknowable sex (foreigners were nonetheless generally referred to as ‘he’), who had been secluded in the adjoining galley throughout breakfast. He unfolded himself from his chair next to the stove, revealing shockingly long, joint legs socketed into a plump, heavy body, like an aubergine on arthropod stilts.

Moving into the empty mess, he takes a cleaning hose out of the socket in the wall and begins to methodically clean the room, sucking the crumbs off the field-plates before disengaging them, one by one, and reattaching the stools to the table. He saves the better half of a pastry, left by the captain, placing it to his rotund purplish midsection, where a hundred tiny tentacles secure it solidly. With the cleaning finished, he returns to his perch next to the stove and furtively retrieves a medium-sized pickle jar a quarter full of what looks to be green mold, the lid securely fastened. He unclasps the jar a fraction and slips the half pastry inside, quickly resealing the lid and raising it the lowest of his globular cluster of eyeballs.


The so-called instant ecosystems were a mainstay of human colonial expansion, allowing a harvestable food-web to be developed in weeks on almost any planet type. If he had not been effectively lobotomized, along with the rest of his kind when humanity used a psychic bacterium to destroy their node-creatures at the end of the war the lieutenant remembered so proudly, then the foreign chef would remember that they were originally developed by his species. Prior to human contact the great space-borne arenas of the foreigners would hold regular tournaments, where continent-sized terraniums containing ecosystems that had been preened and tended by rival teams for months previous would be connected and allowed to intermingle and compete in front of a baying and heavily gambling audience of millions.

Even with the death of the collective culture-mind, some vestigial traces of this sport remained in the depauperate existence of the remaining foreigners, confined to the backstreets and abandoned warehouses of foreign districts. The chef cooed at his pickle jar as its contents, stolen earlier from the leaking container in the hold, rapidly consumed and converted the remains of the pastry. The chefs sharp eyes already detected the slight glints of mineralized claws and jaws within the tiny forests of mold-like primary growth in the jar, and he quivered slightly in satisfaction. Tertiary consumers after less than half a day, and armed and armored already. That bastard Slarrrrrr of Perth was going to get his comeuppance in this rematch, pitmaster or no!

SubJeff on 9/10/2010 at 08:57

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Read half, liked it but gtg will finish later.

Kolya on 9/10/2010 at 14:14

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The characters are credible and funny, the language witty and descriptive without letting lose. I figure you must have spent some time tuning to get this tight flow. Excellent work.

Vernon on 10/10/2010 at 07:02

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The wings reminded me of Perdido Street Station, but that story was a retard and so am I tbh

Sulphur on 10/10/2010 at 08:01

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Nice! I love fiction that pays attention to the details. The crew personalities and the tension between some of them comes across quite well. Pretty interesting bunch of concepts as well. Overall, it's a nice set-up/prologue for the complete story I hope you're going to write.

Just a couple of niggles, there are a few typos (you probably want 'martial' and not 'marshal', of vs. off as Tocky noted, a couple missing apostrophes, one or two other words I can't remember now), and the third paragraph from the end awkwardly switches to the present tense, then switches back to the past tense by the end.

Also, and I'm just curious, I see the spelling's pretty much completely American. You are from the UK, though, aren't you?