The Ultimate Inferior Beings by Mark Roman Page A

But it was no plant matter. It
looked like a large blob of green slime surfing the crest of a black wave.
    twaX rubbed his eyes and
looked again as the green blob sped off into the distance.
    “What on Earth was that?” he
asked aloud, still staring at the receding smudge of green.
    He turned his head left and
right to look at the emptiness all around him. Deep within his mind a small,
brass-coloured coin fell with a clink.
    “Ah,” he said.
    *
    anaX turned left and headed
up a ramp. She knew she would have to work fast as she had only eight hours
before the neutrino bomb exploded. Eight hours was the default timer setting;
deemed long enough by its manufacturer for the user to either reconsider the
wisdom of their action or to get the hell out of there. anaX’s thoughts were
now focused on the latter.
    A large steel door swished
open in front of her and she entered the ship’s vast, brightly lit boat-hangar.
This was where the emergency, deep space, survival modules were parked. She
stopped and surveyed the hangar. In front of her were the four emergency
modules, their matte-grey, steel-plated hulls resting on iron-braced, protoactinium
exoskeletal support struts. They faced her like sleeping giants, their lights
dead and their drive tubes silent.
    She raised an eyebrow
momentarily as she read their identification numbers from left to right: No 4,
No 1, No 3 and No 2. Then her eyebrow settled back into place. Very amusing,
she thought. The modules had been parked in alphabetical order.
    *
    jixX was busy trying to get
the communicator to work. He had located a pair of army surplus headphones and
an army surplus microphone and was now sitting over the communicator, wearing
the former and speaking into the latter. “jixX calling The Night Ripple. Do you
read me, Night Ripple?” He kept pressing the various buttons and twiddling the
various knobs until finally the army surplus headphones burst into life with a
deafening surge of static.
    jixX gave a yelp of pain as
he tore the headphones off. But then, as he listened to the static, he detected
a voice buried deep within. He gingerly placed the headphones back on his head.
Masked by the white noise, and only barely audible, he could just make out
LEP’s voice saying, “Hello? Anybody there? Come in. Over.”
    The static stopped and the
headphones became silent again.
    “Hello, LEP?” said jixX.
“Over.”
    The static exploded out of
the headphones again.
    “Hello, captain,” said LEP’s
cheerful, acoustically masked voice. “Long time no hear. You want something?
Over.” The headphones became silent again.
    “Yes,” said jixX into the
army surplus microphone. “How do I get rid of this interference? Over.”
    The first half of LEP’s
answer was lost in a surge of static, and the second half was not really worth
hearing. “...the audiovocal long-range crystal-diode transceiver is one of the
finest, most efficient communicators known to Humankind. So be very careful
with it. Over.”
    jixX looked at the glistening
hull of The Night Ripple in the distance, hardly more than a mile away, then
down at the communicator and then back at The Night Ripple. “Why me?” he
wondered.
    “Look, LEP,” he said as
loudly and clearly as he could. “Our alien friend, Chris, has left us like
lemons in the middle of nowhere. We’ve no idea how far he’s gone or if he’ll
come back for us. I was thinking that perhaps there might be some sort of land
vehicles on board The Night Ripple we could use to go after him. Have you any
idea what there is? Over.”
    “Sure,” said LEP’s distant
voice. “Let me see. There are three polyprome swivel-slung steel-sprung
lifeboats complete with eight oars, a diesel-powered aluminium outboard motor,
one life jacket, four flares, and a first aid box. Over.”
    “I said land vehicles.
Over.”
    “So you did. Sorry.” LEP
paused for thought as jixX strained his ears all the harder to catch what LEP
was about to say. “Well, there