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Space …
The final frontier …
These are the orbits of Space Station Whisky Tango Foxtrot, known to its inmates, support staff and religiously crazed Captain as SS Whisky. Like a rough diamond cast carelessly into a pool of glittery ink, it wheels drunkenly about a dying star on the outer reaches of the Andromeda galaxy. The sun it orbits, a sullen red giant, as wasted and dissipated as the Station's Captain, glowers angrily through long Days that last five times Earth normal, and rather briefer Nights that always start on what, back on the home planet, would be called Friday midnight UK time.
A sullen red giant.
The population of this far-flung outpost is a motley collection of individuals numbering fifteen at the time our story begins. Some are drifters, wasting their lives away in the fetid darkness of one of the few places in the Universe they know no-one, especially not an over-enthusiastic chambermaid, would ever come looking for them. Some are broken-down space cowboys, freefalling from crew job to crew job, doing whatever keeps them in smokes and bacon. Some are creatures the like of which no-one back on Earth has ever seen – nor would want to. Easier to dismiss staring-eyed space wanderers' tales of multi-limbed time-reversing lizards who eat light as alcoholic fantasy than to admit that somewhere in the darkness of infinity, such creatures exist. In the eyes of the Captain, they are all equal. Equally bathed in God's limitless love, and equally damned to hell for their scandalous abuse of that sacred trust.
God's Limitless Love t-shirt, available in the on-board gift shop
The Captain Priestess is a woman with a mission. In fact, she's a woman with a missionary. No, hang on – she is a missionary. One of the last keepers of the holy mysteries of the Church of the Seventh Day Alcoholics, she is blood and thunder on weekdays and Bloody Marys on holy Saturdays, the one day of the week she gives herself over entirely to sin.
A Bloody Mary, SS Whisky style ...
Some say her binges are in order to understand how sinners think and feel, some say that they are to give her enough material to flagellate herself over for the rest of the week – some maintain that they are simply a means of staving of the dreaded space sickness they call in Earth's ancient tongue "boredom". It hardly matters why this holy woman turns into a kill-crazy Jameson-swilling nutjob one day a week – just don't get in her way …
It is Monday night, and the Captain is fasting and praying her way through the usual twenty-four hour hangover's hangover, when a terrible sound screeches like a soul in perdition. The squeal, like Satan's sphincter after a bad curry, pierces the Captain's penitent eardrums and scares the living crap out of the Station's other residents.
"Purple Alert! Purple Alert! Incoming emergency message! Station integrity has been compromised! Priority Alpha!"
The Captain rises, swaying, from her knees, pulls on her cassock and sprints down the corridor to the nearest infopad, where red digits spew across the screen in a series of alarm codes the Captain has never seen before. Gathered around her, the crowd falls silent, wondering what disaster can have visited their dusty corner of Buttfuck, Andromeda. The Captain slowly deciphers an incoming message from the nearest relay station, a scant 2.5 million light years away. She turns with a heavy heart and a pale face to look at her flock.
Buttfuck, Andromeda
"I'm afraid that from now on no-one can be allowed to enter or leave this station. I have just been informed that we have three Malignant Anonymous Fatal Interloper Aliens – MAFIA for short – on board this station. They are utterly hostile to human and friendly alien life, although their shape-changing abilities make them able to pass unnoticed for any life-form or inanimate object they choose. They appear to have transformed themselves into .wav files of eighties novelty hit Shaddapa Your Face, which was then downloaded by one of the people on board. If I find out who it was, needless to say I will not wait until Friday night to strip the nerves from their quivering flesh."
"Ahem. Anyway, the point is that we are trapped here, in quarantine (or Purgatory as I prefer to call it) until we have erased this blight from the fair face of our station. We cannot risk allowing these creatures to get off board and spread their hideous progeny over populated worlds. They are killers – and the SS Whisky law in cases of emergency such as this is – Kill or be killed!"
She turns to stare into the drawn faces of every man, woman, hermaphrodite, sentient vegetable and post-human gaseous entity on board.
A sentient vegetable, at home.
"It is up to you, my flock, to pluck the black sheep from your midst and offer this scapegoat up as a sacrificial lamb to my weekly wrath! You must vote for the one you think is an interloper, a brain-sucking fearsome monster. Remember, show no mercy – these things are the Michaelangelos of murder, the Leonardos of lawlessness, riding in the Popemobile of bloody purification which is driving us headlong to our doom! By Friday midnight I must have a victim – and those who attempt to abstain from voting by hiding in suit lockers and so forth will be summarily executed in a variety of nasty ways, probably drawn from the Bible."
Brain-sucking fearsome monster
"That's all. Tea and coffee is available in the Low Gravity Snooker Lounge." |
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