Part One
Robyn was pacing.
‘Oh, gawd,’ Steve whispered, parking his hovercarrier on Mickey’s shoulder. ‘She’s pacing.’
‘Yeah,’ Mickey whispered back, completely still.
Beth shuffled over to them and talked through gritted teeth. ‘There’s only one thing that riles her up this much–’
‘My co-workers chatting about me as if I can’t hear them,’ Robyn said, pausing mid-pace and glaring deathly at them. It was a channeled, powerful beam. It blasted them. They all went stony, ready to shatter.
‘And, also,’ she continued, resuming pacing: ‘The ACS Vibe City.’
‘Rec Squad,’ Beth hissed.
‘Rec Squad!’ Steve exclaimed.
‘Jones,’ Mickey growled under his breath.
Sophie, who was now eight minutes late, wandered over, looked around, and said: ‘Rec Squad! What’s up with them?’
‘Where have you been?’ Robyn asked.
‘Just late,’ Sophie explained. ‘What’d they do?’
‘What haven’t they done? What won’t they do?’ Robyn turned and dramatically looked off into the distance. The people walking by tried to awkwardly dodge around her gaze, like it was made of steel wiring. ‘Who else has proven to be such a thorn in my–our–sides? The only greater threat to my–our–careers might be labour regulations. Or death itself.’
‘But what’d they do?’ Sophie asked, leaning on Mickey.
Mickey cleared his throat. ‘The Annual Plesdephont Refugee Charity Drive is coming in three months, isn’t it?’
The Plesdephont was one of the galaxy’s biggest charity drives, having been founded, years and years and years ago, as a drive to support the refugees of the Plesdephont Refugee Crisis. The Plesdephont system, by this point, hadn’t had any refugee crises in years, yet the charity drive continued on, fundraising instead for similar causes galaxywide.
‘Two months,’ Robyn corrected. ‘They intend to hold it sooner rather than later, on account of the projected solar storms in the Plesdephont system.’ She spun around and looked each and every one of them in the eye. ‘And, yes. They will be there.’
‘Oh gawd,’ Steve murmured again.
‘The Ples…’ Beth groaned quietly.
‘Jones…’ Mickey hissed.
‘Oooh!’ said Sophie. ‘The Plesdephont is great! Mickey, do you remember that chocolate making class thing they had?’
Mickey scratched his head. The Plesdephont always passed by in a flash of effort and stress. After each one he only ever remembered Robyn being crazy and Max Jones. Max Jones. His smug face appeared in Mickey’s mind and his tendrils curled up in anger.
Mickey had never hated anyone before he met Max Jones. It was a new and fascinating experience for him and he was never sure if he was doing it as well as he could have been. He was always looking to improve.
‘C’mon, Mickey. The one where I invented smoked chocolate?’
‘Oh!’ Mickey exclaimed, suddenly remembering, Max Jones’ face dissipating like fog. ‘I kept falling asleep during that. I was so tired.’
‘It’s good though, we wouldn’t have invented smoked chocolate if you didn’t,’ Sophie said, proudly. ‘I hope we have another one of those. Who helped set it up? Wasn’t it the crew on the Magrok-Grock or something?’
Robyn clapped. ‘This! Is! Important! Possibly the most important part of our careers–our lives. Our very legacies. This is a fork in the road. The very moment we underestimate this opportunity, we fail. We die as penniless nobodies, cremated and dropped into a sewer system in the Glow-Oceans.’
‘What’s wrong with the sewers in the Glow-Oceans?’ Steve asked, wiggling argumentatively.
Robyn bore down on Steve like a meteorite. ‘If you are truly interested in this topic I could link you to one of my many essays on it. Would you like that?’
Steve was on the verge of weeping: ‘No–please–not your essays–gawd–no!’
Robyn glared at him for a few more moments to emphasise her brute power and then suddenly stepped away and continued pacing. ‘Most importantly, we cannot let the crew of the Vibe City continue to outshine us. I refuse to even let them exist as equals to us. They would not, and do not, grant us that mercy.’ Her lenses narrowed. She gazed over the crew of the Impressing like soldiers about to be sent to their deaths. ‘Now. Do we have any ideas, at the moment?’
Sophie put up her hand.
‘We will not run a stall to sell smoked chocolate. Smoked chocolate will have no place whatsoever in any of our plans.’
Sophie put her hand down.
‘Anyone else?’
Beth shrugged. ‘The Thypeofillion ethical hardlight handsoaps went well last time. We could just do that again.’
Robyn shook her head. ‘Those handsoaps are manufactured primarily on Thypeofillion itself, and its entire population have already entered the first stage of their planet-wide hibernation. We will not have access to a good supply of Thypeofillion handsoaps for nearly fifty years.’
Mickey put a tendril up, and another tendril, and then a third. He hopped excitedly. ‘Aptic pearls! They’re quite a medical commodity for silicon lifeforms, and if we generate them ourselves, we can help to entirely sidestep the illegal trade–’
‘Generate them ourselves?’ Robyn asked.
‘Yes!’ Mickey said. ‘I’ve been practicing. They form in my third throat when I’m in a state of extreme stress, which I have been learning to deliberately induce in myself. Once they get big enough, I instinctively spit them out by the grasperful!’
Robyn silently took in this imagery. ‘Can anyone else here generate aptic pearls?’
‘I cough up furballs if I eat too much hairy stuff,’ Beth said.
‘Thank you, Beth,’ said Robyn, face dull. ‘Anyone else?’
They were all silent.
‘Oh. Sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed we could all do that.’
Robyn sighed. ‘We don’t need anything too detailed now. Just some ideas. Just some basic concepts. Even one. Rec Squad, by now, probably only has thirty. Maybe even forty. We are still going strong.’
‘The races!’ Sophie exclaimed. ‘Does anyone remember the races?!’
They all looked at one another, trying to see if anybody else remembered the races. Robyn tapped her chassis distractedly. ‘The races?’
Mickey looked up suddenly. ‘Oh! The races! I hadn’t even grown all my limbs, last time the Ples had a race.’
Sophie nodded frenetically. ‘In the old Pleses–me and Mickey’ve been following them for ages, and we’ve watched footage of the old old ones–they used to have these ship races. To build up donations and all. They were so cool.’
Robyn adjusted her lenses impatiently. ‘You are suggesting we organise a race?’
‘Duh!’ Sophie cheerfully replied, making Robyn so angry so suddenly she had to completely pause and vent a gust of hot air before she could continue.
‘It’s not an idea without promise,’ Robyn admitted. She tapped out notes on her comms. ‘A race…’
‘That’s nothing,’ Steve said, suddenly.
‘Thank you for your commentary, Steppanus,’ Robyn said, not looking up from her comms.
‘All I’m sayin is in the Glow-Oceans, racing’s a big joke. Kid stuff. Me and my pals were racing when we were stuck together in our egg-pods.’
‘Really?’ said Beth, breathlessly. They gazed at Steve, instinctively fluttered their eyelids. ‘Is that true?’
‘And what do you propose instead?’
Steve grinned in a way he thought looked cool and irreverent. ‘Spleenching.’
‘Spleenching,’ Robyn repeated.
Sophie spoke up: ‘That sounds like a–’
‘That’s so cool,’ Beth said.
‘I think I’ve treated that before,’ Mickey said distractedly.
‘It is the primo sport in the whole Extedges. C’mon–none’ve you’ve ever heard of it? Mick? Not even you?’
Mickey shrugged. ‘I’ve never been to the Exterior Arm Edge. I looked into it as a case study once, though. The most strange diseases occur there.’
‘Yeah, yeah. That sounds like the Extedges.’ Steve replied. ‘All we’ve got out there (other than our diseases) is our extreme sports, and spleenching was the most extreme of the most extreme! The hottest of the bunch. And, lemme tell ya, when it came down to business–’
‘What’s spleenching?!’ Sophie shouted, suddenly.
Robyn cleared her throat. ‘Yes. I agree with Sophia. Please explain what spleenching is, before bragging extensively about it.’
‘It’s very simple,’ Steve said, now taking his turn to pace, from one side of Mickey’s shoulder to the next. ‘Spleenching is a kinda race in itself, but its big difference was in setting. See, out in the Extedges, we’ve got so much old mining crap and spacejunk, by the time you’d find a good place to race you’d be half outta gas. So–instead–we found the most crowded parts of space and we’d spleench right through them!’
Robyn nodded, tapping her finger on her comms. ‘And you would crash and die, presumably?’
‘No! Well. Uh. We weren’t meant to. But we all knew what we were getting into. And–the big part, too, is we’d install junk-clearing guns on our speeders! Don’t you see the beauty of it, now?’
‘No,’ Robyn said instantly.
Steve stopped pacing and nearly tripped over, despite having no legs. ‘It–It, I. Hem. The beauty is, is you have a gunner, see? Or gunners. They’d shoot up the big bits of space junk, and you’d have to dodge around them, get it? And you’d get points for that, too. Y’see, now? Now, see, now there’s an element of risk in it. Great, right?’
‘That sounds preposterously dangerous,’ Robyn said.
‘Not if you’re good at it,’ Steve replied, a smug smile lining his face.
Robyn looked up from her comms. ‘And I suppose you’re good at it?’
‘Well, I don’t like to brag…’ Steve said, letting it trail off.
‘So it’s like a stunt-thing?’ Sophie asked, leaning on her desk and chewing a pencil. She leant forwards. ‘You do stunts? You can stunt?’
‘Wellll, I don’t like to brag,’ Steve continued.
‘We should do it!’ Sophie decided, snapping her pencil in half.
‘Do what?’
‘I can be the gunner. We’ve wanted a gun on the Impressing for ages, right, guys?!’ She looked around at her colleagues.
‘I think you were the only one who ever wanted a gun, Sophie,’ Mickey said.
Robyn tapped at her comms and adjusted her lenses, again. ‘I suppose it has the most… basis of any of our ideas so far. We do have our gunner and, Steve, I assume, will be piloting.’
‘Weren’t we just organising it? Surely it’s a conflict, to, to organise it and also race in it.’ Steve glanced carefully around. He wasn’t a bad pilot by any means, and he wasn’t even the worst spleencher back home, but he had sold himself up maybe more than he should have.
‘I will be organising it,’ Robyn said, tapping away at her comms. ‘We don’t need the whole team organising it, of course. If I need assistance I can simply, say, ask Mickey or Beth, or collaborate with another supervisor or two. Best to stick to our specialties. You never were one for administrative work, hm, Steve?’ She looked at him and the lights slid over her lenses. Steve’s insides went icy.
‘The second question of course being, who will we be racing?’
Steve spoke up: ‘I have at least three, maybe four, more questions I just wanna run by–’
‘Well, us, of course!’
They all went silent.
‘Ah. Max Jones. How wonderful and unsuspicious to encounter you here,’ Robyn said, unmoving.
Max Jones emerged from behind one of the couches that was scattered across the relief team shared office space, and the rest of the Vibe City crew disentangled themselves and emerged with him.
‘As wonderful and unsuspicious as ever!’ Max exclaimed.
Max Jones was a Slikkid from Mulch-Plus and he looked, in essence, like a more smug human. Convergent evolution was common among wormiformous species–it wasn’t unusual for a particular planet to deem four limbs, vertebra, and one central neural processing centre to be a necessity for survival. It, however, was unusual for a planet to deem smugness as an important evolutionary attribute. The galaxy was beautiful in its endless diversity and creativity.
He had smooth green skin and sweeping orange hair and a sculpted, clifflike face like a theatre mask. His lips were thin and pale from insincere grinning and he had a tendency to sniff the air and wiggle his eyebrows, as if he were constantly smelling something embarrassing. He had a pair of silicon eye coverings that resembled, by one of those amazing coincidences that just happened sometimes in the galaxy, a pair of human sunglasses. Slikkids were actually capable of retracting these eye coverings at will and it was, where Max came from, considered highly pretentious to keep them on while indoors.
Max Jones never ever retracted his eye coverings.
He adjusted them arbitrarily and sniffed. He posed, slightly. He shifted his arms so his biceps were more visible in the light. He liked women and, even more than that, knew that women liked him. He was a public service, and so were his biceps, and so he put them on display. He served the people humbly.
Xequenocoftamaxigus hovered over his shoulder behind him. She wiggled languidly and waved her tail at Sophie: ‘Hiiii everyone. Hiiii Sophie I love your new jacket. You look so nice in it.’
‘Hey, Xeq!’ Sophie said, waving back. She didn’t bother to mention to Xeq that she was still wearing the same jacket she had been wearing for the last few years, that she had been wearing almost every other time she had encountered Xeq.
Xeq was kind and complimentary and incredibly forgetful. It took a special kind of person to withstand working in the same team as Max Jones, and Xeq was, more than anything, a special person.
She was a Thriftite, like Steve, from the Glow-Shoals to the north of the Glow-Oceans. She was sluglike, like him, though noticeably bigger, almost the size of Max’s lower arm, with a small set of vestigial fins along her back. Her skin was a dark marbly blue with long faint white lines running along to her back. Her eyes were beady, focussed little black dots. She stared a lot–right into people’s eyes, at random bits of dust on the floor, at a crack in a wall.
Her comms were thin and smooth, almost indistinguishable from the skin of her back where they were installed. Small grey metal nodes glinted across her body, mere suggestions of the heavy system of cybernetic modifications that spiderwebbed inside her. She had replaced almost 60% of her original body.
She had a taser installed along her stomach that could, in one short burst, produce enough voltage to shut down a moderately sized freighter, let alone an organic nervous system. There was a computer the size of a fingernail implanted in her brain. It ran constant trajectory calculations and was permanently determining the most efficient way in which to murder everyone around her. Even smaller machines lived and multiplied in her blood, monitoring her physical state constantly and rapidly knitting closed any wounds that ever formed as quick as they could ever be inflicted. In the case she somehow ended up completely, thoroughly dead, they could also turn toxic, quickly turning her body into a melting, highly volatile acid.
She was the Vibe City’s weapon’s specialist. Her favourite weapon in the galaxy was a Therasian Bonecracker which she had decorated up and down with wobbly pictures of flowers and an awkward looking creature that might have been an alligator.
She knew very well how to hurt people.
‘Do you like my new hovercarrier?’ she asked. ‘Look–it has pictures of cats on it.’
Sophie scientifically observed the varying cat images across Xeq’s hovercarrier. ‘I love them!’ she exclaimed, clasping her hands together.
Three-Two-Eff-En-Five slipped out from behind the couch, grinning, and Odeon Grit-Chewer lumbered after him, nearly knocking him over.
‘well lookit what the cat dragged in lookit what the dog dragged in look what the fuskbung dragged in heh-heh if it in’t the impressing or as they oughta called the SCHMUCKpressing heh-heh,’ Enfive said, rapping his front actuators against eachother. He was a Hust-Ustipodian glass-mining robot, composed mainly of sharp, triangular crystals organised into a vaguely spiderlike form. He was skittering and deadly-looking. His chassis was faintly see-through, like frosted glass–deep at his centre his engine was faintly visible, a lump, eerily organic green thing.
He, and his entire species, were some of the newest additions to the Galactic Census’ Sapient Citizens list, having only been deemed their own sovereign species five years ago in a lengthy court case involving various Alliance-hired lawyers against the Hust-Ustipodian International Glass-Miner’s League. Many Hust-Ustipodian glass-mining robots would, in those following years, join the Alliance, out of gratitude, and a sense of hopeful justice–that they could help do for others what the Alliance had done for them.
Not Enfive. Enfive joined the Alliance purely for its cheap access to relatively efficient spaceships. He was addicted to speed and to ship crashes. His existence as a glass-miner had been a slow and patient one and the second he had been freed from it he needed, more than anything, to catch up with all that speed he had missed out on.
He didn’t like most people, and he slobbered when he was worked up, which was a lot of the time. He was the worst possible candidate for a pilot possibly in the entire Alliance, but he knew his stuff, and, frankly, everybody was too afraid of him to try firing him.
‘That’s A Good One, Enfive,’ said Odeon, a Half-Crunkist. He was an elephantine sort of person, lumberingly huge, nearly as tall as Mickey, with great wrinkly fists and rotund, bulging musculature. His head was round and simple, with dull, uninterested eyes and a fat trunk that lingered around his chest.
Odeon was fascinatingly boring. He was the Vibe City quartermaster and his job involved an interminable number of spreadsheets. He had a collection of rare staplers. His favourite colour was raw khaki and his favourite smell was the smell of paper–not freshly printed paper, not the paper of old books, but just paper itself. He had a mild phobia of clowns and was very slightly allergic to Telluran voltweed pollen. He read The Cycle Telemetrograph every morning and never developed any opinions on anything he read in it, but always made sure to attempt the daily crossword puzzle, which he did with moderate skill and haste. He could almost do a backstand. He woke up every morning at exactly 6:30 am and fell asleep every night at exactly 9 pm after a short, uninteresting routine of mildly physically exerting stretches. Of all these aspects of himself, he could talk about for hours on end.
He was deeply in love with Steve, for reasons even more inexplicable than Beth.
He glanced at Steve. Steve glanced at him. Steve nodded a neutral ‘hello’. He stepped back, buckling, breathing heavy, nearly crushing Enfive again.
‘Yes!’ exclaimed Max Jones. He beamed at Robyn. He could never help himself from smiling at beautiful women who he knew were in love with him and, though he had never seen Robyn outside of her solidsuit, assumed that she was sexy as all hell inside of it. It made sense to him–he only ever smiled at pretty women, hence, if he smiled at her, surely she was pretty. Somewhere in there.
‘A race. That’s a decent idea–ain’t it?’
‘It’s A Decent Idea Max,’ Said Odeon, nodding blandly. ‘It Makes Me Reminisce Of The Filing Methods So Devised By–’
‘Darn right! But–a simple race? A race is kid stuff. I hear, out in the Glow-Oceans, they race while they’re in their egg pods. Heck–I was racing in the womb, myself.’
Robyn adjusted her lenses, sighed quietly, and prayed for this moment of time to pass as fast as possible. ‘And what, I wonder, do you intend to do about this?’
Max nodded and pointed an entrepreneurial finger. ‘Spleenching. Biggest sport where I come from–its main difference from a normal race is in its setting.’
‘Yes, Max, we are all familiar with spleenching, considering our colleague, Stepannus, here, just had that very idea. And explained it. In detail.’
‘That doesn’t sound right. I didn’t hear anything like that.’
Robyn sighed again. She looked at Steve, saw the look on his face, and sighed again.
‘Why didn’t I have that idea? Gawd–it’s practically my system’s official sport!’ She hadn’t taken into account that Steve thought that Max Jones was the coolest person in the entire universe. Steve thought Max Jones was rad as all hell because he was confident, irreverent, and relaxed. Max Jones didn’t care what anyone thought, and simply did as he wanted, stylishly, with sunglasses on. Max Jones got chicks. Max Jones could walk through a tornado, right into its centre, and smirk so hard at it, so coldly, that it would simply dissipate. He was the unattainable–all the things Steve wanted to be, and knew, deep down, that he never could be. He was the living realisation of just how much a failure Steve was, the walking icon of all the things he should have been.
Robyn stood among them all. She was at the calm centre of a whirlwind of animalistic tension. The air felt tight, lined with thin fragile strings that would cut you to shreds if you made the wrong move. The crews of the Assistance Impressing and the Vibe City meeting were a bit like when a bird (or any sufficiently birdlike species) sees itself in the mirror and starts puffing up its feathers to be more threatening. Robyn felt like she was the owner of the mirror.
‘Yes. Of course. Why didn’t you, or any of us, have that idea? You had better go fill out the necessary forms now, Max. Before anyone else comes up with an idea like that, and takes credit for it.’
Max smiled insincerely. ‘Why yes. We should, shouldn’t we?’
‘Yes. You should. You should do that.’
‘Ah-huh. We should.’
‘Mhm.’
‘We really ought to–’
‘Max Jones will you and your crew please leave our working space already and proceed with your Plesdephont event forms?’
Max Jones was caught off-guard by the sudden iron in Robyn’s voice and felt almost embarrassed for himself until he realised, of course, that this was simply another of her methods of flirting with him. ‘Yes–yeah, of course. Well. We’ll see you when we see you.’ He added a final wink, before casually turning around and walking away with deliberate, fashionable slowness.
‘we’re gonna beat your asses so hard your asses will be will be ass. beated. assbeated. heh! heh-heh!’ Enfive exclaimed.
‘That’s A Good One, Enfive, And I Agree Completely,’ Odeon said, nodding solemnly.
‘Byeeeee Sophie,’ Xeq said. ‘Seeee you with whatever we’re doing.’
And they all shuffled conspicuously away, bumping into and merging with the passing crowds.
‘Well, it was nice to see them again,’ Sophie said cheerfully.
‘I hate him so much, I hate him so much, I might explode,’ Mickey hissed through gritted teeth.
The gardeners were driving Steve crazy. He was pacing back and forth so much his foot was beginning to dry out, harden, grow thin wrinkles. They wandered languidly across the Assistance Impressing in their RAS-suits, pulling back their stained caps to wipe sweat from their foreheads or tugging their bandana from their mouths every now and then to spit, for some reason, on the floor. They unpeeled the Assistance Impressing (his sweet Knife Edge, as he, and nobody else, called it), looked up and down its guts in a brutish, graceless way that made Steve’s own insides churn.
What was even worse was that he knew them. He knew them to the worst, most agonising extent, that point of familiarity where he was obliged to recall their names and perhaps a shared interest or two, yet was still lightyears away from anything resembling ‘comfort’ around them. He knew the Alaesian sand-dog from back when he had himself been a gardener, on contract with the Alliance. Their name was Barharf Fifteenth and their five eyes were always screwed up in a piercing glare. Their snout was short and hefty and well suited to displaying various forms of disapproval and frustration.
‘FINE work as always Steve. You’ve taken GREAT care of this patchwork HUNK.’
Flecks of spittle and gushing dog-breath flew when Barharf spoke. Steve shied away, creeping towards cover. He wasn’t sure if Barharf was complimenting him, or being sarcastic. Barharf always sounded angry.
Greg sauntered over from his side of the ship wearing Beth’s body. He had joined up with the gardeners long after Steve had become an official Alliance pilot–Steve only knew him because he was one of Beth’s weird friends, of which they seemed to have a nearly endless supply of. They seemed to spring, already hungover, from cracks in the walls.
‘He’s complimenting you, B-T-W.’ He winked unnecessarily. The effort of this sent his entire tired form wobbling, and he steadied himself.
Greg’s real name was not perceivable for Steve’s carbon brain. It sounded a bit like an elongated gurgling cough. His species was selectively amorph-formous, meaning, they shapeshifted. Sophie had done some work with them a while back, so he had heard.
‘Why do you always gotta wear Beth around me, Greg?’ Steve asked. It wasn’t actually that hard to tell Greg apart from Beth. Selectively amorph-formous citizens were obliged, by various anti defamation and such laws, to remain visually distinct from any other person’s specific body. Greg looked like Beth, but purple.
Even if he hadn’t been purple, it wouldn’t have been hard to distinguish him. Steve had never met Greg after a good night’s rest. There had always been some kind of event, or party, or occurrence. There was always something in his bloodstream.
He blinked bleary eyes and ruffled hair so messy and scratchy, the actual Beth might have given up entirely and torn it right off their scalp.
‘They’re my co-worker. It’s weird.’
Greg shrugged widely and waddled around on limbs that were still, clearly, somewhat of a novelty to him. ‘I mean–they let me,’ he said. He smiled fondly down at Steve. ‘Just tryna make you more comfy is all. I thought you’d like it. Because–uh. Heh.’
‘Because–’ Steve shook his head and refused to share eye-contact with Greg, who was fluttering Beth’s eyelids. ‘I mean, really, I don’t see why you can’t just use my body. I’d let you use it.’
Greg shook his head. ‘Naw. It’s the limbs more’n anything. I love these things.’ He waved them around.
Steve, who was insecure about his own limbs (and lack thereof), fumed silently.
The gardeners were on contract from the Vorden-off Gardener’s Collective, one of the bigger worker’s unions in their galactic spiral arm. They weren’t even the biggest Gardener Guild–it was the Usuyusuan Gardener’s Guild that was the famous one, from Usuyusuan in the Core Edges. They specialised in the growth and management of RAS flowers, which were grinded up into a deep blue dye and applied to spaceships and other huge mechanisms for their uncanny antigravitational properties.
The gardeners were, by necessity, more mechanics than strict “gardeners” (the majority of them couldn’t tend your average potted cactus, with how different RAS flowers were to much plantlife.)
People weren’t completely sure what RAS stood for. The most common interpretation was ‘Referencing Ancestral Sentiences.’
They grew in gentle blue patches, buds and petals spread outwards and their stems jutting gently towards the sky. Pollen came off them, twisted into the air, melded with clouds. They had religious significance on Usuyusuan. Their dead lived in their sun, so it went. The RAS flowers, so it was said, wherever they were in the galaxy, were always trying to fly back to Usuyusuan’s sun.
This was not, of course, scientific, as was remarked endlessly by people who weren’t from Usuyusuan. But anybody who knew anything about gardening knew that the Usuyusuans knew more about RAS flowers than anyone.
‘SO,’ Barharf yelled, stomping towards Steve. ‘It’s MOSTLY good. Other than your STINKIN vapour thrusters and their RUST buildup.’
Steve quivered and shrunk under Barharf’s form until Greg leant in and said: ‘Very minor, near the actuators. Nothing serious, yet.’
‘Not to mention all the COMPLAINTS from the A-SERVS in your storeroom air-conditioner.’
‘Those morons complain about everything. They take any chance they can get to emasculate me.’ Steve grumbled and tried not to think about the Atmospheric Services fungi who had been installed in the Assistance Impressing and who had from day one made it their job to belittle him at every opportunity. At any threat of vengeance they would cry out to him: ‘Nuh-uh cousin! We’re an endangered species! Extinct at any minute! You wouldn’t wanna do that!’
Barharf rolled this idea around their head. ‘PERHAPS. They DID keep calling you the LITTLE SLUG BABY MAN.’ They said it so unnecessarily loud it echoed through the hangar.
Those bastards, Steve thought, embarrassing me in front of the gardeners. ‘Gawd. Awful. Lemme tell you, even if I was a little slug baby man, I’d be the best, manliest one around. Don’t get me wrong–I ain’t one–but if I was–you’d barely notice it.’
Barharf looked at Steve in silence for a few moments, before continuing: ‘O.K. Well–the MAIN issue is your TRAVESTY of a–’
‘Let me show him,’ Greg said cheerfully. He wandered over to the Impressing, and then wandered back with a pair of heavy-looking cylinders over his shoulders. He hoisted them effortlessly up on Beth’s slender, crushable body. The cylinders had see-through screens of them. Within them each was a thick yellowish fog and, within that fog, a thin blue pole.
‘The RAS conductors?’ Steve said, looking desperately over the cylinders for any sign of damage. ‘I just had those replaced.’
‘Well it LOOKS like you got em CHEAP. Cheap from a GARBAGE HEAP.’
Steve made a kind of harsh squeaking noise which was the sound of him realising, weeks later, that the deal had been too good to be true.
‘These conductors are wayyyy oversaturated,’ Greg said, setting down the cylinders. He began the process of opening one, twisting a knob by the side of the glass until there was a faint click and a gentle hiss. The yellow fog vented from the cylinder in a sharp stream. Greg carefully pulled up the top half of the cylinder, held it steady, then dropped it to the floor with a dramatic clatter. The fog swirled, twisted in the air. It smelled bitter and fruity.
‘Your gravitational congestant gas is GARBO, too,’ Barhar added, watching the yellow fog dissipate into the air of the hangar.
‘You know how expensive good ICG is, bud,’ Steve shot back.
Barhar opened their mouth to say something back, spraying Steve with more dogbreath and dogspit. They paused in silence, glanced at Greg, and only nodded at that.
‘Sooo. The ICG’s going to wear off soon, so we should probably–’
There was a sudden noise like a whip cracking, a blue flash from the cylinder, and then–CRASH. Tiny crumpled lumps of metal rained from above.
An alarm went on, and the entire hangar was bathed in red light:
‘LEVEL ONE HULL BREACH IN HANGAR SEGMENT TWO, LEVEL ONE HULL BREACH IN HANGAR SEGMENT TWO. STANDBY FOR INERTIAL BREACHSHIELD TO ENGAGE. SOLAR RADIOALLERGENIC ORGANISMS PLEASE TAKE AN EXTRA COURSE OF SOLTZOL TABLETS.’
Within all the noise Steve heard, far away, the solar radioallergenic organisms all yelling in despair at once.
‘Oh my gawd,’ Steve said, staring up at the hole it had made in the ceiling.
‘Saturated the WHOLE. WAY. THROUGH.’ It was hard to tell if the rumbling was from Barhar’s voice, or the hole in the ceiling of the hangar.
Greg smiled dimly, covered his eyes and gazed at the damage above. It was a tiny black line, a hairline crack from this distance. The inertial breachshield shimmered through it.
‘Too porous,’ Steve mouthed.
Greg sat down on the other, untouched cylinder. He held his hands between his legs, still smiling, and said: ‘Was it just these two you got?’
‘Only the two,’ Steve said quietly.
Greg nodded airily. ‘That’s not so bad. Still… two whole cylinders. We could hook you up with a couple good ones, if you wanted.’
‘C’mon, Greg, I was with the Gardeners. You ratchet up the prices like, like–’
‘Like an OVERSATURATED RAS CONDUCTOR,’ Barhar helpfully suggested.
Greg leant back and shrugged and looked at the ceiling again. ‘Whatever. I get that. But, uh–we’re always on call if you ever want.’
‘I won’t want you. I’d sooner eat my own hovercarrier,’ Steve said. Starships were the only thing Steve had ever been confident about, and he paraded that confidence around like a toddler with a new hamster. It always, invariably, made him feel like a huge asshole afterwards. ‘Uh. At the moment. I can probably source it, er, y’know. Thanks. Bud.’
Greg grinned, glanced at Steve, then looked back up at the ceiling. ‘Course. Well–that’s everything.’
‘Before you go–’ Steve said quickly. ‘How’s the, er. The other one? The project? What’d you think?’
Greg thought for a few moments, and then nodded thoughtfully.
Barhar laughed so hard they nearly puked. They rocked wildly back and forth.
Greg tilted his head apologetically at Steve and shouted: ‘Well–it’s clearly a prototype. Sweet as hell though–the hydroaccelerant drive in the vapour thrusters? The optimised RAS storage? I’ve never seen it that compact. Mmm-mm!’ He shook his head and pretended to smell something delicious.
‘On a VAPOUR THRUSTER though!’ Barhar roared. ‘I’ll tell you THIS, Stevey–if you can drive it more than five string-lengths without it BLOWING THE HELL UP, it’ll be the FASTEST ASS vapour drive in the galaxy!’ Barhar turned onto their back, waved their legs up in the air, keeling over and struggling for breath. ‘It’ll be nearly as fast as a MEDIOCRE anti-inertia drive! Like a slightly worse BRUFTINS-OLLINS! GOOD JOB STEVEY!’
Steve was pretty certain as to whether or not Barhar was being sarcastic, in this case.
Greg couldn’t shrug apologetically enough.
‘Y-yeah. It’s good and all but–y’know. You know?’ He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand in a distinctly unBethlike movement. ‘You don’t use a vapour drive for speed. Even with the vapour overproduction tabs…’
Steve’s whole body undulated with quiet fury. His pride had been wounded, and he felt that pain deeply, because he was almost never proud of the things he did. ‘I’ll use it for speed, pal. I’m gonna make inertia drives a punchline. Don’t you underestimate Glow-Oceans RAS gardening for a second.’
‘I’m not underestimating you or the Glow-Oceans or anything, brother, I’m just–I’m just saying.’
Barhar shut their eyes and was oddly silent for a few moments. Their necklace (not a collar, of course, because collars were for pets or aristocrats and Barhar was neither of those) thrummed gently, puffed invisible, unsmellable pheromones but for Alaesean Sand-Dogs.
‘Well, I’d LOVE to stay around and UNDERESTIMATE you ALL DAY, or ALL WEEK, or, XHISTI, ALL YOUR LIFE, but we’ve just had an EMERGENCY CALL.’
Greg scratched his nose. ‘D’you think it’s got to do with the ceiling hole.’
Barhar shrugged before unceremoniously walking away. Greg smiled awkwardly at Steve and waved even more awkwardly, before leaving.
Steve fumed silently as he watched them amble into the distance.
Barhar paused suddenly, then turned around. ‘And–listen–Stevey. I know you ain’t a Gardener anymore. But you better WIN that RACE, right? For US. The GARDENERS. We’re ALL cheering on you. And your STUPID vapour drive.’
‘I mean I’m still betting on Max. But that’s just money. Morally, I’m into him,’ Greg said to Barhar.
If Steve had overheard that, he wouldn’t have grinned so loudly.
The high wore off quickly, and the second Steve whirred into Robyn’s office on his hovercarrier, it had totally disintegrated. Robyn’s office did that to good feelings. There was something about the shape of the doorframe, maybe, or how polished the doorknob was, or how symmetrical everything was. The airflow in there sucked you dry of any feeling except for hyper-professional numbness.
‘I can’t get a conductor from them,’ Steve hissed. ‘It’s impossible. I won’t, and can’t.’
‘Why not?’ Robyn said. She was reading a book on interior design, her latest hobby. She had taken it up with the same terrifying, machinelike fervor with which she approached all her hobbies. Already, her trophy shelf had a new addition–a second place interior design trophy, which Robyn, at that exact moment, loathed more than anything in the world.
The second thing she loathed most in the world, at that exact moment, was Steve.
‘Well–you know they always rip us off. I mean, gawd–’
‘Yes, I am well aware. I recall our first meeting, in fact, when you attempted to pull that very trick on me.’
Steve’s entire body blanched. ‘Well–yes. We’re sort of–expected to–listen, that’s not the point, the point is I can’t take a RAS conductor off them.’
‘Steve. I understand wanting to save money. But, frankly, with the RAS flowers in our zone out of bloom, the Gardeners are going to be the fastest way to get ahold of the replacements. Don’t forget, we only have two months until the event. While the prices are–not ideal–we can afford this.’
Steve sputtered, spat out a few dozen half-sentences, and finally said: ‘I just kinda told them I’d rather eat my own hovercarrier than buy a RAS conductor from them, is all.’
Robyn placed her book down.
She always read a book while she was talking to people she found dull. She put her book down when she was talking to be people she found infuriating.
‘Well, you had better build up an appetite quickly.’
‘Rob, I can’t eat a hovercarrier. My diet doesn’t allow silicon except as an occasional small snack, not to mention, I’m allergic to the copper wiri–’
‘And what, what did I tell you about your nicknames?’
Thriftites, being at the bottom of nearly every foodchain they ever entered, had numerous fear responses, the most notable of which involved them rapidly shedding moisture in the form of a thick, vaporous gas and shrivelling quickly up into a kind of barely edible beef-jerky type form.
This was what Steve was doing, as Robyn talked to him. He deflated like a balloon in slow motion. He shrivelled, quietly, subtly.
‘Robyn, Robyn, of course, Robyn–’
Robyn slid her book away and stood up. She slid her book away when she was talking to people she was darkly furious with.
‘You seem to forget, Stepannus, that you do not own the Assistance Impressing (the “Knife Edge”, as you call it, in a pathetic attempt to claim something of it for your own.) Rather, you are a co-owner at most, and it is through, entirely, my own goodwill that you are that at all. Were I a more pragmatic supervisor than I am, you would be little more than an obsessive gardener.’
Steve shrivelled smaller and smaller.
‘When we first met you were an obnoxious, spineless, penniless nobody duct-taping methane pipes in the supply ships and ripping people off for spare parts, and, to this day, despite my best efforts, you have not changed one bit. I have kept you around thus far, Stepannus, not for your awkward, grating, insecure presence, but for your performance. I do not care if you have made, or will make, an idiot of yourself in front of your moronic friends in the Contract Gardeners, I care that you are the most talented gardener I have ever worked with. Put. This. To. Use.’
Steve squirmed and shrivelled and looked up and said: ‘Er–thanks?’
Robyn stood in silence, gazing blankly down at Steve. She was the hugest thing he had ever seen in his life. Her metal skin glinted. She had six huge limbs and any one of them could smite him instantly into a tiny blackish paste.
Her vents puffed a spray of hot air and she collapsed back in her seat.
They were both silent.
‘Vibe City’s really getting to you this Ples, huh? You gotta go back to those stress management courses I told you about, Rob. And–where’d that set of stress balls go?’
‘I crushed all of them,’ she admitted, blankly looking up at the ceiling.
‘All? Even the hyper-tensile ones?’
‘I nearly shattered my wrist actuators, but, yes. Crushed as well.’
‘You’re not meant to crush them, yakknow.’
She shut her lenses and vented more hot air. ‘I’m well aware, Steve. Now, please get back to work. I’ll see if I can source the conductors from anywhere. But don’t expect results.’
‘Uh. Yeah. Well, uh. Keep it easy, bud,’ Steve said, pacing to his hovercarrier, glancing at Robyn, hovering out of the room.
‘You too, Steve,’ she said, her lenses still closed.
Steve’s head was swirling. He had no single, distinct emotion but, rather, four or five completely unrelated ones, and they were swishing about and pushing eachother around like horrible liquids.
Who the hell was she? Who did she think she was? Just because he was pitiable and loathsome didn’t mean he wanted to be pitied and loathed. He had put that whole ship together practically with his own two hands (technically he was only borrowing them, but he used them so much that the Accessibility Department of Alliance Base 17 just let him keep them anyway), every mismatched hull plate, every chitin bolt, not to mention its entire undercarriage, its entire original anti-inertial thrust system that he had torn out and replaced wholesale with a RAS system. The only part of that ship that had her mark on it at all was its stupid name, ‘Assistance Impressing’, whatever that was.
What really grinded his guts down was that he had needed her. Not because she had any real interest in that ship except for where it got her in her career, that any ambitious team supervisor in the Alliance needed a ship if they didn’t want to end up working as lackeys on someone else’s ship.
Not because she even really knew anything about ships, or gardening (she had read about it, of course, she had read about everything, but reading about something and knowing something isn’t the same).
It was money, was all it was. And connections.
She got the ship officially sanctioned, she supplied the parts cheaply, she hooked him up with the R&D workers. The works.
He had always wanted a ship of his very own. A ship of his own construction, with a full RAS-vapour thrust system, one that wouldn’t stink up local atmospheres with radioactive gasses and pump up the orbits with flickering space-junk. And he had done it, finally, he had done it.
And its name was the ‘Assistance Impressing’ (whatever that was). And it wasn’t his own.
‘Steeeeeve. Heyyyy.’
Steve shook himself out of his own thoughts and looked up to see Beth grinning lazily down at him.
‘Uh. Hey, Beth.’
‘Need a ride, dude?’
‘Um–well–my carrier is here and, and I’d hate, yakknow, to impose–’
‘Nahhh babe–’ Beth paused for a second, as if they regretted using that phrasing. ‘There was something I wanted to show you anyways.’
‘Um?’
‘It’s not like… weird. Not like that. Hahah. Unless, you know, like, you’re… into that.’
Steve’s eyes narrowed. He sighed and slumped into his hovercarrier. He figured he could afford a distraction, right now.
‘Sure, sure.’
Beth’s face lit up. ‘Yess, dude,’ they said, scooping him gently off his hovercarrier and slinging it under their shoulder.
‘Hey, so, you were getting told off by Robyn, yeah?’
‘Does she ever do anything else?’
‘Heh. You can say that again.’
‘Does she ever do anything else?’
‘What? Hey, by the way, are you OK?’
Steve wondered for a moment if he was OK.
His brain felt like a bunch of marbles being bounced around in a glass jar.
He wondered if he should complain. If it was worth opening this up with someone like Beth. It wasn’t as if he disliked Beth, or didn’t trust them. It was the opposite, really–he liked Beth. They kind of reminded him a little of Max Jones. People liked people like Beth and Max Jones. They were cool, was the only way to put it. They always seemed like they knew what they were doing–you could put them in any situation, and they’d fit themselves right into it. They passed through Alliance Base 17 in a cloud of anonymous friends and admirers. They were the exact kind of people who looked down on the exact kind of people that Steve was.
He figured, the less Beth knew about him, the better their relationship would be.
He was so stressed, his mouth began talking anyways.
‘Oh gawd I’m freaking out I think I’m gonna have a panic attack. I haven’t been this stressed in months. I wanna sleep for four hundred years and even then I’ll still be a little stressed when I wake up after it, not that stressed, like a normal stressed, but it’ll still be there after that long, that’s my point. I feel like I’ve aged forty years.’
‘Yeah?’
‘We need new conductors and I need to eat my hovercarrier and Robyn thinks she owns my ship and Greg thinks I don’t have limbs and then I still need to go and win a race for charity against the Vibe City and Max Jones.’
‘You need to eat your hovercarrier?’
‘This is just like the last time I spleenched. Oh, gawd, oh, gawd.’
Beth walked in silence through the corridors and waited for Steve’s hyperventilating to calm down somewhat. They had gone out of the office cubicles, past the big shared office space, and were heading towards the base quarters, past the huge round centre of Alliance Base 17. The air smelled faintly of wood and leaves and mud. Every now and then the walls opened up onto a huge red and purple vista of curling, chitinous leaves and dark wood, knobbly and jutting like old bones. At the floor they were on, all they could do was stare at a tiny segment of canopy.
It was the edges of the Staphan Atmospheric Services, A-Serv, as it proudly called itself–an entire forest from Staphas that had been hired by the Alliance to provide an atmosphere for their base. It was, famously, the fourth largest member on the Alliance payroll, and the second one to technically count as an entire ecosystem. It had been interviewed on the news and everything.
‘What happened the last time you spleenched?’ Beth asked.
Steve groaned for a while. The groan went quieter and quieter and quieter until it became a rumbling croak.
‘You don’t gotta tell me, dude. It’s OK.’
‘I choked,’ Steve said. ‘I choked to hell and back, oh gawd. I spent the whole week preparing for it freakin out and then, in the thing itself, I choked so hard I came second last. In front of the whole Extedges.’
Beth slowed for a moment. They screwed their face up. ‘The whole Extedges?’
‘Yeah, yeah. The Exterior Edges Grand Spleench. The biggest sporting event in the whole Extedges after the Edgewide Synchronised Garbage Shuffling Contest and the Extedges Beer Sculling Nopuke Grand Prix. They had a local outreach program and I was on the team representing the Glow-Oceans.’
Beth’s eyes were wide. ‘Yeah?’
‘All that gawd-damned training and crap. I was gonna be something, pal! I was this close. I have four sisters and six brothers and two dads and one mum and I was gonna buy them all a house. One each. We’d have a whole street, just for us. They still barely own two apartments. Cripes, Beth, why’s it always come down to money?’
Beth had a variety of very political answers to that question, but they decided to pipe down and let Steve continue.
‘And–what else is there?!’ Steve howled, suddenly squirming around in Beth’s hand. ‘I choked alright?! I choked so hard my spleenching career died on the spot. And I came here as a gardener just like my mum and my dad and now I’m here, piloting again, finally, getting ready to choke, again. I can’t do this kinda stuff, I’m not like Max Jones, who’s–chill. Why did I suggest spleenching?! Am I nuts?!’
Beth blinked. He was warm and lumpy in their hand and felt a bit like a beating heart that was about to erupt.
‘You’re hyperventilating so much, dude. You gotta breathe deep, and–’ Beth realised they weren’t even sure if Thriftites even had lungs. ‘Er, you gotta just, hold it in, then release it. Real slow.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know, I gotcha,’ Steve babbled. He went silent for a few moments, just breathing gently. His squirming slowed. He pulsed peacefully in Beth’s hand.
‘Gawd, that’s all. I’m done. I can’t believe I did that. I’m gonna zone out now.’
‘Wait just a sec, dude,’ Beth said, a small smile growing on their face. ‘I just gotta show you that not weird thing. Then you should totally zone out.’
Steve recognised this segment of crew quarters. A-Serv plants crept around the corners of the corridors and chatted with people he recognised by vague appearance.
They turned a corner, and stopped at Mickey’s quarters. Beth knocked on the door.
‘What’s the password?’ Sophie’s voice slipped from under the door.
‘What? What password?’ Beth replied.
Sophie opened the door, her eyes wide. ‘That was literally it. Did Mickey tell you? How did you know?’
Mickey stood at the back of his bedroom, by his huge collection of bottles and junk that he never let Beth recycle, holding his kids in their jar, rocking them peacefully. There was a blanket on the floor which was unusual for Mickey’s room, as he didn’t use beds and had, in fact, never slept in one in his entire life. It was obscuring some long, smooth form. Mickey looked up and said: ‘I told you it was a bad one. That’s the first thing anybody would say.’
‘I have acquired Steve,’ Beth said, holding him up for display.
He tiredly wiggled hello, smiled faintly at Sophie and Mickey.
‘Steve? Are you OK?’ Mickey said instantly, placing his kids back on their desk and sliding across the room.
‘Could be better,’ Steve said, casually waving his head around.
‘He’s, uh. Sort of stressed.’
Mickey held his graspers together and leaned in gently. His three eyes were big and doelike and took on that “searching for injuries” look. ‘I can see that.’
‘You look like you’ve aged forty years,’ Sophie said quietly.
‘That’s what I said,’ Steve agreed.
Beth set their mouth in a hard line and glared at Sophie and Mickey. ‘Guys–the thing, show him the thing. The thing we got.’
Mickey’s whole body straightened and he practically hopped back. A huge smile spread over his face. ‘Yes! Right! That thing.’
‘I swear, if it’s weird…’ Steve murmured drearily.
‘It’s not weird,’ Mickey assured him. ‘Not unless you’re into it being weird, in which case, it’s only weird in the ways that you want it to be weird.’
He stood behind the blanketed form dramatically, with his graspers outstretched. Sophie stood by him, her arms wide.
They both pulled the blanket off, threw it to the side, and revealed a pair of brand new RAS conductors, gleaming, on Mickey’s bedroom’s floor.
Steve woke up almost immediately. ‘What?! Huh?! What?! Huh?!’
‘We heard that the ship needed new thingy conductors, so we got some,’ Sophie said proudly.
‘The A-Servs in the aircon told me, actually,’ Beth said, beaming. ‘They overheard the gardeners.’
‘I thought those guys hated me,’ Steve said, in awe.
‘Oh, well, they still called you–what was it?’
‘A “toddler baby goop boy”,’ Mickey said. ‘But they put down bets on us!’
‘How’d you guys even get this? And so soon?’
‘It was surprisingly simple, actually,’ Mickey said, smiling fondly.
‘We stole it!’ Sophie exclaimed.
Steve did a double-take. ‘You–’
‘We acquired it,’ Mickey said. ‘We obtained it. We got it, from a source, that perhaps wasn’t entirely, not fully prepared to offer it to us.’ His wide, honest smile turned up at its edges and went mischievous in a way that Mickey’s face rarely went. He exchanged devilish glances with Sophie and Beth.
‘You stole it from Rec Squad!’ Steve yelled.
‘Don’t just shout that!’ Sophie hissed.
‘We procured it,’ Mickey emphasised. ‘Which–I would normally be against, but, well, considering the circumstances, and the parties involved…’
Once again, Steve’s head was filled with emotions, barraging, liquid, filling him up ready to explode.
He looked at Mickey’s dumb grin, and at Sophie’s dumb grin, and he turned around and looked at Beth’s dumb grin.
He grinned dumbly, too.
‘Ain’t this sabotage?’ Steve asked, before bursting into laughter.
‘Probably a little!’ Sophie said. ‘But they had so many spares anyway!’
‘That Max Jones can afford enough conductors for five Impressings,’ Mickey said bitterly. ‘I still think we could have gotten a few more, just in case.’
‘Mickey, what would we do with all of the City’s spare conductors?’ Beth asked. ‘You wanted all of them–they have, like, twenty!’
‘We should have taken their spare thrusters, too,’ Mickey huffed. ‘And those glowy green things.’
‘The inertial compromisers?’ Sophie said, eyebrow raised. ‘Those things are so radioactive.’
‘You’re insane, you’re all insane,’ Steve howled, rolling around between Beth’s cupped hands, laughing so hard he expelled water in thin clouds. ‘You’re the best but you’re nuts, you’re insane,’ he yelled between choking laughter.
‘We try, babe,’ Beth said.
So the weeks went, terrifyingly fast. It had felt like sweat and barely held back panic. Steve’s intake of junk food nearly doubled.
The Impressing came together. It was smoothed out where it could be, its ugly little maintenance problems that Steve could never justify taking the time on fixing otherwise were fixed.
A TCF04 Zet Corkscrew had been installed on the roof of the cockpit and rigged up to a set of controls on its left side. It was a clean, black, swivelling thing with a barrel that went in a strange spiral shape and which made a meaty THHHH-TUNK noise whenever it fired. It shot zet-field corkscrews that twisted in violent, iridescent patterns and which shattered silicon to shards. Its controls were a large and simple pair of silver joysticks and thick, dark goggles that connected directly to a camera mounted on the gun itself.
Sophie couldn’t stop bouncing when she saw it. Her eyes practically gleamed. When she got to testing it, she threw her head back and performed an entire evil laugh that left them all looking at her in wonder and horror.
‘I’ve never seen her like this,’ Mickey whispered with bated breath.
The track had been chosen. It was in an asteroid field a few stringlengths away from the Plesdephont system that had, years ago, been home to both a huge system of shopping centres and shipyards and, also, an industrial scrap dumping space. It took people a surprisingly long time just why this mixture was a bad idea, and it was only when the industrial scrap began flooding into the shopping centres, and vice versa, when everyone decided to drop the whole project. Much of the trash conglomerated into a sort of trash planet at its very centre, a great raggedy grey ball that loomed over the entire place. It had grown big. It had the beginnings of an atmosphere. Sometimes it had weather.
The Alliance, in tandem with the Plesdephont officials, were setting it up as a proper spleenching track. The nature and ideology of spleenching suggested that preparations be as minimal as possible, but this same nature and ideology rewarded extra points for every injury accrued by every surviving crewmember, and made medical insurance companies some of the biggest spleenching sponsors around.
They weren’t, so said Robyn, ‘in the Extedges,’ and they were obliged to, at the very least, clear out the particularly radioactive space waste.
Everything came together, steadily, slowly. Odeon Grit-Chewer checked over the Vibe City storeroom and wondered, briefly, if it looked like they were missing a spare RAS conductor or two, but ultimately decided that finishing up polishing their stapler collection was more important.
All that was left was to wait. And even that didn’t take long.
Meat Girls Dot Org 