The Ultimate Inferior Beings (29 page)

“What do you Dogs think
you’re up to??” screamed Jeremy. “Let me out!!”

“How?” asked jixX, covering
his ears against the noise from the bag.

“Use one of the emergency
deep-space survival modules in the boat hangar,” said LEP.

“You can’t do that!!” yelled
Jeremy.

sylX was shaking her head.
“He’s right,” she said. “You can’t do that. Those things take forever to
prepare.”

“Usually,” agreed LEP. “But I
happen to know that No 3 is all ready for launch.”

“How’s that possible?” asked
the stowaway.

“Sorry, can’t tell you,” said
LEP. “Top Secret Space Mission, remember?”

Jeremy, who had been
impatiently listening to the conversation, suddenly realized that the humans
had no intention of letting him out of the bag. They had tricked him! “Let me
out, you Dogs!” he started yelling anew. “Let me out!”

jixX rolled his eyes and took
the bag from the stowaway. Together they went into the ship’s boat hangar and
mounted the ramp leading into emergency deep-space survival module No 3.

“Listen to what I have to
say, Dogs!! I am the Chosen One. Let me out!!”

jixX placed the bag on the
floor of the control room and surveyed the complicated instrument panels and
consoles. “Do you know how to work this thing?” he asked sylX.

“No,” she answered. “I only
know how to stow away in it.”

“LEP?”

“No idea,” said LEP.

“Great.”

“You could ask anaX,”
suggested LEP. “She’ll know.”

“Very funny,” said jixX.

“Ask her,” insisted LEP.

“This is not a gynaecological
problem,” said the stowaway impatiently.

“Ah, wait! LEP’s right.
Electronics is her hobby,” said jixX, remembering. “I’ll go get her.” He turned
to sylX. “Will you be alright here... with him?” He pointed to the writhing
plastic bag on the floor.

“Let me out!!!” screamed
Jeremy.

“I think so,” said sylX with
a confident nod. “So long as he doesn’t deafen me.”

*

sylX silently watched Jeremy
writhing about in the bag for a while. The silence seemed to have a calming
effect on the blob – possibly because he thought he was about to be released.

sylX kneeled down on the
floor beside him. “Dear, oh, dear,” she said gently. “What are we going to do
with you? Eh, Jeremy?”

“Release me?” suggested
Jeremy hopefully.

sylX smiled. “And what would
you do then?”

“Destroy you and all the
other Dogs.”

“For all your faults, Jeremy,
at least you’re honest.”

“Well?”

“No.”

Jeremy sloshed about inside
the bag for a bit. “Okay, you’ve had your little joke. Now let me out.” Then,
with rising impatience, “Let me out! I am the Chosen One. Let me out!!”

“No,” said sylX calmly.

“Please.”

“You’re going back to
Ground.”

“I can’t. They’ll laugh at
me.”

“Good.”

Jeremy fell silent. He
decided that, rather than waste time arguing with The Dog, it was far better to
conserve his energies for his escape. He fully intended to escape. Any minute
now he would be making his escape; just as soon as he had figured out how.

Just then jixX returned with
a sleepy-eyed anaX.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Fine,” said sylX getting
back to her feet. “A lot of squelching, but he hasn’t tried to make a run for
it.”

“Very funny,” said Jeremy
from inside the plastic bag. “Very, very funny.”

Chapter 3

It
took anaX
five
minutes to program the emergency deep-space survival module for its journey
down to Ground. All other preparations had, of course, already been made. As
she completed her task, she hit a large red button and started a countdown
timer.

“Right,” she said. “We have
30 seconds to get off this thing before the doors shut and the engines fire
up.”

jixX and sylX crouched down
by the black plastic bag on the floor and said their final farewells to Jeremy;
they were not well received.

As the three were leaving,
anaX came to an abrupt stop and put a hand to her mouth. “Oh no!” she
exclaimed, panic on her face. “I need to get something from the food store!”

“There’s plenty of food in
the kitchen,” said jixX

“You don’t understand.” She
glanced at the timer. There were fifteen seconds left. Fourteen. Thirteen. She
made for the corridor leading to the food store.

“Come on,” urged jixX. “We
need to get off!”

“Quickly!” added sylX.

They were already heading
down the ramp.

anaX stood frozen in
indecision. Another glance at the timer told her there were only ten seconds to
go. She gave a grunt of annoyance at herself and followed the other two down
the ramp.

*

Back in the main control room
the three of them watched the departure of the module on one of the display
screens. The craft made its slow, ponderous way down the oxido-aerobic,
pre-sheared, friction-limiting slipway and out, out into deep space. They
crowded around the tertiary observation window to watch it go. anaX kept biting
her nails as she watched. The module drifted into the distance until it became
a tiny point in the ebony darkness of the Pseudogravitic Continuum. Its only
passenger – a slimy, yellow-green blob inside a black, plastic bin bag.

“I hope they don’t laugh at
him too much,” said sylX.

*

But Jeremy had no intention
of being laughed at. No, he was the Chosen One, and no one laughed at the
Chosen One. As soon as he was free of the bag, he would fulfil his mission of
destroying The Dogs and then no one would ever laugh at him again. However, the
bag was proving a bit of a hindrance. He needed to get out of it, and fast.

He sloshed about for a while,
considering various escape strategies. As far as he could see – which wasn’t
very far in the darkness of the bin liner – there was only one way out, and
that was to extrude himself through the knot at the top. But that would be a
hard squeeze and Jeremy was getting tired of extruding himself through things.
First, the long tube, with its eight porous membranes, then the air vent by
which he had gained entry onto the ship and, most recently, the ventilator
grille. How much more squeezing would his poor body take?

It seemed that there was no
other choice. For the Good of the Species. In the Light of the Dark.

So, summoning all his
remaining reserves of strength, he reached out to the knot and started trying
to force his way into it and through it. It was hard going. sylX had tied it
really tightly. He strained and he pushed and he squeezed. But it was no good.
It was too tight.

Then, just as he was about to
give up, he noticed something. Here and there in the bag were tiny pinpricks.
One of The Dogs must have pierced the bag to prevent him suffocating. Jeremy
chuckled to himself. What a foolish mistake! Blobs could go without breathing
for weeks. What a fatal error!

With renewed energy and
determination he applied himself to the pinpricks. And, little by little, he
found he could get his slime to pass through. Very slowly and painfully, he
managed to extrude his slime through the tiny holes, emerging in several long,
thin spaghetti-like strands. The strands dripped down the side of the bin liner
until they reached the floor where they gradually coalesced.

Ten minutes of intensive
squeezing later and Jeremy was out, perfectly formed outside the bag. He sat
there, panting for a long time, in need of a rest. He felt he had strained
every muscle in his body – which, of course, he had.

After a few minutes rest he
pulled himself together. This was it. Time for action. He slithered across the
floor to the main control panel. He managed to pull himself up onto the command
chair in front of it and surveyed the massed array of buttons, knobs and
switches.

“Only beings as truly
inferior as The Dogs could have designed anything as pointlessly complicated as
this,” he muttered to himself angrily.

He tried pushing a button.
There was a brilliant flash of light in the observation window in front of him.
A blast of focused laser light had fired off into space. Jeremy allowed himself
an evil smile. He had found the button that fired the laser cannon. That would
definitely come in useful!

He pulled a lever to the
right, and the module veered to the right. He pulled the lever to the left, and
the module veered back. Forwards made it go faster. Backwards activated the
brakes.

He grinned once again. He’d
cracked how to steer the thing. Which meant one thing: he was in business...

*

“Well, that’s it, then,” said
jixX, clapping his hands together at a job well done. “Full speed ahead for the
singularity and then on to Tenalp.”

“Aye, aye, cap’n,” said LEP.

jixX turned to the others.
“Thanks for all your help,” he said appreciatively.

They all smiled and shook
hands and high-fived for a little while.

“Er, I don’t want to worry you
all,” started LEP.

They stopped their
celebrations.

“What is it, LEP?” asked
jixX.

“According to my scanners,”
started LEP, “the emergency deep-space survival module has just changed course.
It is now on our tail and gaining fast.”

“You’ve worried us,” said
jixX, speaking for himself and the others. “Whether you wanted to or not, you
have worried us.”

Chapter 4

Jeremy
was getting
more
and more excited now. He had finally mastered most of the controls. One dimmed
the cabin lights, one made the module spin nauseatingly, one made it spin less
nauseatingly, one worked the windscreen wipers, one seemed to do nothing at
all, and one had broken off the moment he had touched it.

And now he was pushing hard
on the accelerator and racing towards The Night Ripple. He could see the ship
on the radar screen. He pushed harder and harder, gaining ground all the time
until, at last, the glistening hull of the Night Ripple came into view as a
tiny silver dot ahead of him.

“Dogs!” he yelled without
even thinking.

Now he switched his attention
to the laser cannon’s telescopic viewfinder. He grinned evilly as he fixed the
Class XI phonon-drive spaceship in his sights. He fine-tuned the viewfinder
until the cross hairs were slap bang in the middle of The Night Ripple. He locked
onto her.

Jeremy exhaled in
satisfaction. He made himself more comfortable on the command chair as he
prepared to trigger the laser cannon. He was in no rush now. Now that The Dogs
were at his mercy he wanted to savour the moment of their destruction.

*

jixX was in the anti-inertial
command couch steering for the singularity that would take them out of the
Pseudogravitic Continuum and return them to Normal Space Time.