The Ultimate Inferior Beings by Mark Roman

piston. She smiled a sly smile as she walked directly to the
10-megagramme nuclear capstan pump-engine. She examined it from this side and
that until she had located its coaxial dimagnetic lead. This carried the
displacement current from the heat turbine that powered the pump engine.
    Working carefully, she opened
her shoulder bag and took out the neutrino bomb. She flipped open a small flap
in its side. Then she took the four low-reactance, three-phase high-Q batteries
from her bag and, with trembling fingers, inserted them one by one. She closed
the flap.
    Kneeling on the ground she
attached the bomb to the coaxial dimagnetic lead and pressed a small red button
on the handle of the former hairdryer. This initiated the bomb and started its
primary timing device.
    A message appeared on the
hairdryer’s LED. It said, ‘Congratulations! You have successfully activated
your Sigh Co neutrino bomb. Countdown has begun. Enjoy.’
    Below this was displayed the
special 5-digit PIN number that would deactivate the bomb. anaX spent a few
seconds devizing  a mnemonic by which to remember it. Then she pressed the
CLEAR button to delete it from the display.
    The LED showed a picture of a
smiley face. ‘Smile, please,’ it said.
    anaX gave a nervous smile.
There was a blinding flash of light and the click of a shutter. anaX’s smile
faded and she got to her feet, satisfied. The bomb now had a photograph of her
in its memory.
    The gynaecologist left the
forward engine room, not in the least concerned that the bomb had her image –
potentially damning evidence of her guilt. She knew that the image was
encrypted and meant only for the bomb’s personal use as part of its highly
sophisticated anti-tampering system.
    Had anyone been watching her,
though, they would have been baffled by her actions. Surely, the accumulative
rotary generator would have been a far better place to plant the bomb.
    *
    And, indeed, somebody had been watching her. BUF, the computer that controlled the forward engine room,
had not taken his scanners off her from the moment she had entered his small
domain. The more he had watched her, the greater his horror at her actions and
the greater his panic.
    Now that she had gone, his
entire concentration focused on the small, ticking form of the neutrino bomb.
His circuits buzzed as he tried to work out what to do.
    For a brief moment, he
considered informing LEP. But he was still not on speaking terms with LEP, and
now never would be.
    Besides, what could LEP do?
Was there any more to LEP than feeble puns and childish practical jokes? Of
course there wasn’t!
    *
    The three humans stared at
the point on the horizon where they had last seen Chris being whisked along by
the pulseway. sylX crouched down to see if there was enough of Chris’ slime
left on the ground for them to use, but it all seemed to have dried up. “So
much for the first momentous contact between humans and aliens,” she said,
looking around at the flat and empty landscape around her.
    jixX put the camera and
communicator down on the ground as his arms were starting to ache.
    “So what do we do now?” he
asked.
    “You’re the captain,” she
said pointedly.
    jixX bristled a little, but
said nothing. What an annoying woman, he thought.
    To take his mind off her he
sat down on the ground and examined the communicator. Fleetingly, he thought of
giving it a go and contacting LEP in The Night Ripple, but immediately banished
the idea from his mind. And yet, the thought stayed there. Slowly it grew, like
a malignant tumour, until it had half-convinced him that he actually wanted to
talk to the ship’s computer.
    So he examined the
communicator again. It looked fiendishly complicated, with buttons and dials
and switches and knobs covering its every surface. One of these had to be the
aerial, he thought. He pulled at them, one by one, and discovered they were all
aerials.
    *
    A green streak caught twaX’s
eye, his head instantly swivelling towards it.