Secret Cargo Read online

  Damn it! I fired up the wrong rocket. I should have ignited the smaller motor to take us into a parking orbit and then awaited further instructions from the crew of the Chrysler-Zepp.

  I’m now verging on a state of panic myself and without thinking, I hit the ignite button for the retro-rockets. They splutter into life but I’ve left it too late. We are already swooping away from the starship at such a rate that instead of halting our progress, the retros only make matters worse by throwing the pod into a spin. I can feel the tears of desperation well up in my eyes as I gaze out of the observation port and watch the glow of the starship vanish from sight as we tumble away into the darkness.

  All too soon the rockets burn out but there is no slowing down in the rate of the pod’s manic tumbling motion. With difficulty I strap first Meredith and then myself into the pod’s seats and lie back to ride out the flight. I lose track of time. It could be minutes or it could be hours later but it feels like forever and at some point the G-forces overwhelm me and I blackout.

  4. The Sound of Silence

  I awake to the smell of coffee and fresh air. All is still in the pod although outside I can hear what sounds like sea washing up against a shingle shore. I try to sit up but fall back against my seat’s headrest, still feeling nauseous.

  “Hi, you’re awake,” I hear a voice say. “I was starting to worry about you.”

  I turn around to see Meredith standing next to me. “I’ll pour you some coffee,” she says with a smile, “it’ll make you feel better.”

  “Coffee! Where are we, what happened?” I ask.

  “Drink the coffee,” she says, passing me a mug of what smells like passable espresso. “OK, from the beginning. You were my Super Hero. You swept me up and rescued me when I was standing dazed and confused on the deck of a burning starship. If you hadn’t stopped to save me, I’d probably be floating around dead and shrivelled-up like a mummy in the empty vacuum of space right now.

  “I’m not sure what happened after that,” she continues, “but next thing I remember is being shaken awake by a large jolt and then everything was still. No sense of movement or motion. Nothing. After a couple of minutes I got up, looked through the porthole and saw we’d landed. The monitors were all showing green, indicating it was safe to go outside, so I popped the hatch. It’s amazing out there, we landed on what looks for all the world like a tropical island in the South Pacific. All we need now is for an elephant, an ostrich and a zebra to come trotting along the shore and we can have a remake of Swiss Family Robinson!”

  I laugh. “You’ve seen that movie too? I thought I must be the only person to have watched that film in the best part of three centuries!”

  “I studied Ancient Cinematics for two semesters at the University of Hollywood in Lost Angeles,” she replies, “Besides, Janet Munro as Bertie the cabin boy is a bit more uplifting than Tom Hanks talking to Wilson the volleyball for four years! And I’m uncomfortable with the Harrison Ford and Anne Heche Six Days, Seven Nights movie metaphor, I mean in real life he was in his dotage and she was a lesbian.”

  I’m not sure why but for a moment there is an awkward silence between us. “Well maybe,” I suggest, “Robinson Crusoe on Mars sums up our plight rather better.”

  “And what does that make me? Mona the Monkey or Man Friday the Slave?” As she asks this, Meredith gives me a distinctly arch smile I find difficult to interpret.

  “Anyway,” I say with a shrug of my shoulders, “with a bit of luck we’ll be rescued and off this planet in six days and seven nights.”

  “We’d better be,” Meredith replies. “While you were unconscious, I checked our emergency rations. We’ve got coffee, water, vitamin supplements, energy bars, chocolate and some packets of dehydrated stew that will last us about ten days max.”

  “What else do we have?” I ask.

  “Soap, a tent, a life-raft, a nuclear battery-powered water purifier and a laser-axe. Oh yes, and laxative tablets, anti-diarrhoea pills, toilet paper and a small shovel, which I’m guessing has something to do with the laxative tablets, anti-diarrhoea pills and toilet paper. Clearly whoever provisioned these escape pods was anally fixated. There’s also a small stash of medicines and first-aid stuff, though I see some of the midazolam had already been used. Did you shoot that into me?”

  I nod.

  “Thank you,” she replies. “And can I also rely on you to administer the sodium pentobarbital if that day ever comes?”

  Again I nod my head.

  Neither of us says anything for the next few minutes and we finish our coffee in silence.

  Eventually Meredith asks the obvious question “So what do we do now?”

  “Unless you’ve a better suggestion,” I reply, “I think we should explore our new but hopefully only temporary home.”

  We activate the pod’s subspace radio-beacon to transmit a distress signal then set off along the shore, taking the water and the axe with us. We walk for perhaps ninety minutes, trying to distract ourselves from our plight by discussing movies of the 20th century we’ve both seen. “Whatever you do,” she says, “don’t mention Ice Cold in Alex, I could murder a cool bottle of beer right now.”

  “I’d have never taken you for a beer drinker,” I reply, “you strike me as way too feminine for that.”

  “ Ha! There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,” I hear her say but I realise I’m no longer concentrating on her conversation. For the past fifteen minutes I’ve had this nagging feeling that something is not quite right but I’ve been unable to put my finger on it. Then I realise what it is.

  “Wait a moment,” I say. “Listen, tell me what do you hear?”

  Meredith pauses and listens. “Well, apart from the sound of the tide washing up against the shore, I can hear nothing.”

  “Exactly,” I reply, “that’s just it. Nothing. Nada. There aren’t even any bird sounds. When have you ever been to the coast and never heard the sound of gulls? And have you noticed the shingle we’ve been walking along? No remains of any fish or crabs. Nor even any shells. A seashore with no seashells! That’s unheard of. There seems to be absolutely, totally zero wild life out here.”

  “So what do you suggest we do?” asks Meredith. “From where I’m standing this shoreline looks like it goes on forever. I’m not sure about you but my shoes aren’t made for long distance walking.”

  I shake my head, Meredith is such a girly-girl. But, she’s right. “I agree,” I say, “there’s little point continuing in this direction, there are still places on Earth where you can walk for days and never meet another person and here, well...”

  I don’t end the sentence because both of us know the answer. If we are on a deserted planet we really could walk forever and never meet another living being.

  To one side of us lies an apparently empty ocean but on the land-side of the shingle beach is a small line of what appear to be trees. “Let’s head back to the pod,” I suggest, “but walk along by the edge of those trees. There must surely be some animal life living over there”

  But there isn’t.

  During the entire course of our return journey, we neither hear nor see another living creature. No birds. No animals. Not even any insects buzzing around in the shade of the trees. And, when I say trees, I’m not certain the vegetation really qualifies for membership of the Plant Kingdom. It’s outside my area of expertise but we both agree the plants, with their strangely curved, smooth stems, bright coloured caps and gill-like flaps, seem to have more in common with mushrooms and fungi than bushes and trees.

  “Maybe they are edible,” says Meredith with a little more optimism than our predicament deserves. “When I was living in Old London Town,” she adds, “there was a street cafe that sold grilled mushrooms for breakfast. And at lunchtime they chopped them up, fried them with rice and sold them as risotto.”

  “And in the evening?” I ask.

  “They didn’t open for dinner. Security and all that. They were located in one of the curfe
w zones when I was there.”

  “From what I’ve heard of London,” I reply, “the city is so ruinous that mushrooms grow just about everywhere!”

  “That’s not true,” says Meredith, a tad touchily but she has been complaining her shoes are hurting her feet for some minutes. “Well, not quite true although the city’s huge network of tunnels – where the Underground Tube trains used to run until about a hundred years ago – are now given over to mushroom farms. Anyway, I was joking about eating these mushroom things. If we are wrong and these are toadstools, we risk dying a painful death from food poisoning.”

  We retrace our steps back to the pod, once more talking about old movies we have seen. Meredith is explaining the plot of the film The Beguiled in which Clint Eastwood, an actor whose work I am passingly familiar with, dies from mushroom poisoning. As we walk, the thought crosses my mind that if we run out of supplies, we may have no option but to try eating these strange, gilled mushroom trees. And if they are poisonous, so be it. At least it will be quick, when the alternative is starving to death as the pod’s food runs out.

  Later, we prepare a less-than appetising early evening meal of rehydrated stew, followed by a couple of cubes of chocolate and a cup of coffee.

  “You know, when I booked my passage on the Chrysler-Zepp Airstream, I was expecting a rather better standard of catering than this!” says Meredith. We both laugh and she is about to say something else when we are distracted by a series of sonic booms high up in the sky above our heads.

  “Jet engines!”

  “No, rocket motors,” says Meredith.

  “Doesn’t matter either way,” I say. “Where there are engines, there are people. It’s either a flyer come to rescue us or a drone that’s looking for us. They must have picked up the radio-beacon signal and tracked us back to here.”

  “If this means we are getting off this rock, I think it also means we can celebrate by eating the remainder of the chocolate.”

  “Perhaps we should wait and see,” I caution.

  “Wait and see what?” she asks. “In case they are alien space pirates who will drag us off to their secret lair and keep us as sex slaves for the rest of our days. At least then we won’t have to worry where the next meal is coming from.”

  “Yes,” I reply, “and in that case you’d better hope you look good in a metal bikini.”

  Meredith pauses for a moment. “Gotcha, the Princess Leia slave girl outfit from Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi. I loved that movie, I had the hots for Carrie Fisher.”

  “Funnily enough so did I.” There is another awkward break in our conversation. “Seriously though,” I say, breaking the silence, “we really should take care just in case whatever is up there is dangerous. It could even be debris from the starship. There’s a hundred-and-fifty tons of nuclear reactor core floating around somewhere above our heads”

  “I can see it,” shouts Meredith, totally ignoring my concerns as she points up into the sky. “There’s a red glow and a trail of smoke coming from behind it. Whatever it is has flown into this planet’s atmosphere from outer space. Look, it’s deploying its drogue parachutes.

  5. Open Sesame

  Together we watch the craft as its descent slows and it floats down towards the surface. Whether by accident or design, Meredith leans up against me. And, whether by accident or design, I put my arm around her shoulder. I’m not sure how long we would have remained like this but suddenly there is the sound of retro-rockets firing up into life and, startled, we both jump apart at the noise.

  The craft is now clearly visible. It is using a combination of retro and directional rockets to slow its descent and steer towards us. It has to be a rescue ship yet it looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before. No, that’s not correct. It looks like no other spacecraft, manned or unmanned, I’ve ever seen before but it does remind me of something I’ve have seen stacked up in spaceport marshalling yards. It’s a deep-space cargo container. It must have been stowed in one of the Chrysler-Zepp Airstream’s cargo gondolas and fallen free after the starship broke up. “But what is it doing here,” I hear myself asking, “how and why did it find us?”

  “Semi-autonomous container,” says Meredith, almost as if she is reading my mind. “Some of them now come equipped with artificial intelligence, particularly if the cargo is valuable. Which out here could be anything from comms tech, to in vitro frozen embryos, to luxury goods.”

  “And the reason it has its own independent drive system?” I ask.

  “The AI’s primary directive is to protect and deliver its cargo. That gives it the ability and initiative to escape a wreck, or hijacking, and the motors mean it can navigate and fly its own way to a suitable landing site. Very useful if the starship hauling it can’t berth or the container’s ultimate destination is a long way from a spaceport. I’m guessing it homed in on our distress beacon because it would have recognised the signature as being linked to the Chrysler-Zepp Airsteam.”

  “So since when did you become an expert in galactic freight logistica?”

  “Hey,” says Meredith, “just because I’m cute, look good in a short skirt and like old movies doesn’t mean I can’t also have a brain – or a good job. When I was in London Town, I used to work as a claims assessor for the Lloydz insurance organisation. You know from your attitude I’d bet you are one of those old fashioned boys who like their women all submissive and wearing murdered cow skin!”

  I’m about to reply when the container once again becomes the focus of our attention. Over the last couple of minutes the craft has been manoeuvring closer and closer to our position before finally landing at the top of the shingle beach, midway between our pod and the mushroom trees. With a grinding of metal upon metal, the container’s dirty, pockmarked, smoke blackened outer heat shield slowly opens up, like segments of an orange folding back, to provide a stable platform for its precious cargo.

  And then there it is. The inner sanctum. Another container only this time one built to give the impression it had been hand-crafted, like a giant old fashioned wine barrel, from varnished wood staves and brass hoops.

  “That never is genuine wood,” I say. “Though if it is, at least we’ll have something to burn at night to keep us warm.”

  “It could be,” says Meredith. “Look at the name painted on the side of the container: Fortnumandmason. That is a seriously famous, seriously luxury goods store in London Town. Been there for centuries. The prices they charge for their stuff, they could easily afford to have containers like that built and then fitted out with AI.”

  “So OK Little Miss Know-it-All, here’s your next question: where is the AI located? And is it dangerous and going to start shooting laser beams at us if we get too close to it?”

  “Of course it won’t shoot at us, silly. All AIs are safe and obey the Asimovian Laws. Well, all except the military grade units which are meant to have sociopathic tendencies. As to where it is? On units like this they are usually housed somewhere within the casing of the inner container. Why, what are you thinking?”

  “It would be nice to get access to the cargo. It might be the key to our survival.” I don’t add what I’m really thinking: that it may be our only chance of survival. “And if we can communicate with the AI, it may have information on where we are and how we get out of this place.”

  “Oh, I do like a man with a plan,” says Meredith.

  For some inexplicable reason I blush.

  We approach the varnished wood container. At one end is an obvious touchscreen terminal. I tap the screen once, then twice more. Things are looking up, the AI doesn’t try to kill me. “Amazing, it’s brought up a menu and one of the options is Open Container!”

  “Why not?” asks Meredith, “What did you expect: Open Sesame? This is not Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves from The Arabian Nights. These containers are built for transporting luxury goods. The AI will know if the goods being carried are perishable and need to be delivered before they spoil. Why place unnecessary obstacles and
delays in the way by wrapping them up in layers of security?”

  “Yes, but what do I do now? I’ve tapped the screen but nothing else is happening. How do I communicate with it?”

  “Try talking to it,” says Meredith.

  “What?”

  “All AIs have Siri-audio interfaces, like our phones and search engines have had for centuries. They even had them in your precious twentieth century. Just speak to it.”

  Seeing the look of hesitation on my face (I haven’t yet confessed to Meredith that I’m only semi-computer literate or that, left to my own devices, I’d rather work with a pen and paper) she gently edges me out of the way.

  “Oh, never mind,” she says, “let me do it. I’ve worked with AIs before. I don’t know, if you want a man to do a job properly, get a woman to do it for him!” Meredith seems to find this last remark unduly amusing. “OK, let’s try this,” she says. “We are stranded human beings. We need access to the contents of this container. We seek food to eat. If we do not have access to food, we shall have nothing to eat. If we have nothing to eat, we will come to harm. We will starve and then we will die.”

  “That’s a bit melodramatic,” I say. “What are you doing, trying to appeal to its better nature?”

  “In a way,” Meredith replies. “These things take their commercial responsibilities for protecting and delivering their cargoes very seriously. They need to be given strong reasons for breaking their programming. And the best way to justify it is by quoting Asimov’s Laws at them, in this instance part of The First Law: An AI may not, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

  I nod and am about to reply (even a hopeless digital refusenik like me has heard of Asimov’s Laws) when the touchscreen flashes into life and displays the Fortnumandmason corporate logo, followed by a string of status report messages.

  STATUS REPORT 0001: EMERGENCY CONTAINER JETTISON

  STATUS REPORT 0002: BOOT-UP AI JULESVERNE