Gennetta had felt
seriously nervous stepping onto the flimsy steel ladder beneath the rocket
ship. The whole thing seemed totally un-aerodynamic and frankly unflyable. The
crudeness of construction made her shudder. Great big ungainly sheets of sharp,
hard, shiny stuff bolted together and ill-shaped mechanical spinning blades for
propulsion that god help them all should they break loose. She shivered in
anticipation of a terrible and painful end. Once inside the cockpit the smell
of cigar smoke and oil nearly made her wretch. It was a tight squeeze in there.
Angelo and Belle were jammed into the back seat, while Gennetta, squeezed into
the teeny, tiny passenger seat was practically jammed up against Sam and his
less than pleasant body odour. He also had a nasty way of looking rather
pointedly at her genitals that made her have to restrain a natural urge to rip
his bowels out with her talons. He leered and leaned closely over her to set
the trim on his flaps. She was working up a healthy dislike for this human.
“Welcome aboard ladies
and gintlemen,” said Sam, cheerfully hitting switches left and right. “Gets
ready for take-off. This is your captain speak. Hope you enjoy flight. Ha ha.”
Gennetta held tightly
onto her seat as the servo motors cranked and whined and struggled to start the
engines. At first, when they wouldn’t start, her hopes started to rise.
“Come on you donkey
cow,” urged Sam, coaxing them on until finally they caught. The noise was
stupendous. The vibration and rumble was like nothing she’d ever experienced
before. Sam shoved the throttles forward and the howl of sound increased to fever
pitch and stretched Gennetta’s nerves to their limit. Then he hit the deflector
switch and the craft lurched into the air like a drunken sailor.
Gennetta closed her eyes
and tried to think of something nice. She thought of Eric and wondered if he
was alright. She needed him right now. Things just weren’t going very well. If
she had been human she would have been in tears. Sure she was a warrior, but
there was a limit to the things even an Ahram could endure. Oh how she needed
Eric’s reassurance now. She opened her eyes and stared out of the window.
“Where now, lizard lady?”
asked Sam, sucking cheerfully on his cigar.
Gennetta coughed on the engine
fumes that were seeping into the cockpit. She had absolutely no idea.
“That way,” she said,
pointing straight ahead.
After two hours of
searching Sam was becoming more than a little pissed off. Angelo and Belle were
keeping a low profile in the back seat and Gennetta was brazening it out in
front.
“I see nothing. I see
sand. What you think I should see?” There was an impatient edge to Sam’s voice
as he addressed them.
“I don’t understand,”
said Angelo curiously. “Why sand? Why can we see the desert? What happened to
the illusion? It’s daytime. Normally we’d see grass and trees and rivers……”
“We’re too far from the
equator,” said Gennetta. “The Shimera only happens where the sun is strongest,
and it is getting weaker and weaker all the time.”
“Stop talking crapola. I
got sand. I got nothing. You got nothing. If we see nothing in five minutes I
kill Mr Big Belly over there. Then I kill Bitch. Then I shoot you and go nuke whole
goddammed valley to shit. I have enough of this shit. You pipples……..”
And then there was
silence. Complete and utter silence. Sam was silent, the passengers were
silent…and more importantly…the engines were silent.
“Holy shit,” said Sam,
slapping at his control panel and jiggling his switches and levers in an
attempt to restart the engines, but there was only a deflating hiss to be heard
as they lost power and pressure. The plane was going down like a flying brick.
Gennetta, Angelo and
Noot closed their eyes in silent prayer. Then the Tartarus hit a sand dune and
skipped a thousand feet into the air.
*
The Ahram poured in
through the gate like water funnelling through a crack in a dam wall, slowing
everything down and causing a major jam. For a moment Dutch wondered whether
they were going to make it at all. The crowd in front had come to a relative standstill
and the ones behind were pushing and piling in on top of each other, crushing
closer and closer together. Dutch had to fight to keep the flying saucer
upright and Shim and the girls did their best to keep the crowd from swamping
them. Then the bottleneck seemed to clear and they were flying towards the gate
again. But too fast. Too many bodies converging all at once and there was no
way of stopping or slowing down. Dutch could feel her friends clinging to her
legs for dear life. Indeed, she felt a bit like Ben Hur in the chariot race,
flailing this way and that with the reins, hooves flying, dust everywhere and
riding purely on a prayer. When they got to the gate the press of Ahram hit
them like a freight train and the flying saucer flipped over and went spinning
along the ground, spilling its passengers willy nilly under the feet of the
trampling hordes.
Dutch felt a foot thud
into her neck and clutched tightly to the crozier. Whatever happens, she
mustn’t lose that. Then everything went black.
*
She opened her eyes and
all was white again. ‘In heaven’ was her first thought, until she remembered
that she didn’t believe in it. Or God. Well, she believed in him enough to
dispute his existence. She was probably in the Cantave somewhere. But where
were the rest of them? Did they make it? And what to do now? She was pleased to
see the crozier was still in her hand, but it looked dead and lifeless.
At that thought an Ahram
maiden, fashionably undressed, entered the white space and came to stand in
front of her.
“The Seesh will see thee
now if thou wilt follow me.”
Dutch followed her,
holding the crozier up like some shepherd’s staff in front of her and feeling a
bit foolish. She looked at it more closely. It was absolutely dead and about as
much use as a walking stick.
And then there he was.
The little old man again. Correction - Ahram
man. But Dutch had been here so long now she was starting to think of them as people.
He was leaning on his walking stick.
They made the perfect couple.
“We meet again Dulcinea,”
he smiled at her. “I see you have bested my Rider. Oh well. He always was a bit
of a wimp. Never mind.”
At the sound of her name
she began to prickle…and so did the crozier. The first signs of life began to
show as small blue sparks of light flickered in the swirling mist of the bone
circle.
“Anyway, you look so
much better with a magic wand. Every girl should have one. So, have any of your
wishes come true? I know you are dying to liberate some of my masses…and so are
they…dying…by the thousands apparently, thanks to you. Isn’t it funny how the
road to freedom and peace is always paved with the bodies of innocents? Do you
think the sacrifice was worth it?” The old man’s joints creaked and groaned as
he sat down on an invisible pedestal.
“But I forgot. Your
first intention is to save the human race from annihilation, to save your
precious Earth from destruction. But actually you don’t really give a shit
about them either, do you?”
Dutch felt more shocked
at his language than the truth of his proclamation. In a way he was right…if
she took the time to think about it. What did she care for those who were going
to throw her in prison to rot out the rest of her life? And what did she care
for the Earth. She’d never been there. She’d heard it was all pretty much
fucked up anyway. Why should she care? And yet she cared for Sweet Mary. She
felt a painful twinge at the thought of her. Oh god she just hoped she had
survived. She wouldn’t really care much for anything if Sweet Mary was dead.
“Yeeees. I didn’t forget
about her,” he said, reading her thoughts. “She’s alive. But only just.”
Dutch’s crozier began to
flare red and orange with her anger.
“Where is she?”
“Oh, she’s hanging
around somewhere. Ha, ha. Her and that black boyfriend of hers. You know of
course that the two of them have been….you know….”
Dutch fired off a blast
but the old man hopped nimbly aside.
“What did you expect. She’s
only human and you’re such a bitch. I mean, look at your last relationship,” he
said, and taking on the shape and form of her dead husband, face battered and
bloody, he spoke to her through mangled lips. “Help me Dutch. Don’t let me die
here…”
Dutch hurled another
blast of white lightning at the spectre in front of her but the old man dodged it
quite easily.
“You can fire at me as
much as you like but I don’t have a range.” It was a rather strange statement
but Dutch kinda knew what he meant.
“There is nothing physical of me to hit.”
“Does that mean you’re
just an illusion?”
“In a way. But a very
real one. I am a construction of forces and electromagnetic properties rather
than actual matter. I have bent time and space into a configuration that you
can see. But you can’t kill me because I don’t actually live here, I just
appear here. To kill me you have to find where I really am. And even if you do
and succeed in unravelling me I shall just change into some other form.” There
was nothing Dutch could say to that. She didn’t even really understand what he
was saying, except that he was virtually a ghost. Still, there must be a way.
“I will leave you to
your puzzle,” said the Seesh. “I would love to stay and chat, but unfortunately
I have other things to attend to. Sayonara”
Then he was gone. Dutch
looked around for a moment wondering where Righteous was. She knew she was no
match for the Seesh on her own. She couldn’t even see her way out of this room.
She was on the verge of becoming severely depressed when out of the whiteness
came….Rags. It was the second best blessed sight that Dutch could ever hope to
see. The creature didn’t so much fly to her as flip and flop in a haphazard
course in her general direction, dropping bits of fur and the equivalent of
Ahram fleas as he went. It crash landed in Dutch’s arms and squirched and
skweerched at her enthusiastically as if it was trying to say something. Dutch
scratched the bat-thing with her finger.
“I have no idea what you’re
saying; I just hope Sweet Mary is alright.”
“Greep,” it said
flapping itself loose and heading back the way it came. Dutch set off after it
at a trot, but Rag’s floppy flying technique was deceptively fast and soon she
lost sight of it. The bat/cat creature did leave a trail of fluff and fur on
the clean white floor that was pretty easy to follow though. As she hurried
forward Dutch tried to remember what had happened at the gate.
What had happened at the
gate was that the Ahram who entered the North gate in the Cantave wall found
themselves simultaneously exiting through the South gate, mystified and
disoriented, back in their own slum city. These workers knew the Cantave like
the back of their hands: the administration offices that lined the inside of
the wall, the roster sheds where they received their tools and work assignments
for the day. They usually entered at the North gate at the beginning of the
shift and exited through the South at the end….but not this time. The
transition was instantaneous. The Cantave had closed them out and merely spewed
them out the other gate as fast as they went in the first one. All except for Dutch
and her little band.
