Carrie and Dave stood before the glinting steel maw. To one side of them their mechanical guard hovered. Carrie clamped her hands over her ears, anticipating the noise the shredder commander might make. A deep, reverberating bass shuddered through her. Dave seemed, as usual, to have no problem dealing with the sound, so she left him to the conversation and hoped he could save both their lives.
In an effort to distract herself from her probable imminent death, Carrie concentrated on happy thoughts. She thought about Toodles and Rogue, her animal best friends. Then she remembered they were alone in her flat on Earth, and that she might not be coming back. She decided to think about something else.
Her interview with the giant bug sprang next to mind. She scrabbled for any information that might be useful in their current predicament, but she couldn’t recall anything useful. The job didn’t even seem to be detective work like the creature had said. It was all very odd. But maybe she’d got something wrong.
Carrie reflected instead on her job at the call centre. Her first day had seemed to go quite well, but as she went over the day’s events she developed a strong suspicion that in fact she hadn’t done a good job. She hadn’t even read, let alone followed, the work manual. It was far too boring, and she could hardly understand a word of what the customers were complaining about. Now, the people she’d told she would help were not going to receive any service, and when the complaints started coming in again, this time they would be complaining about her. Carrie groaned. Another job she had failed at.
Dave’s conversation with the shredder seemed to be going on forever. She took a peek. He was gesticulating wildly and seemed upset. She groaned again and shut her eyes.
Silence. Carrie looked at Dave. He had his hands on his hips and seemed thoughtful. “What happened? What did it say?”
Their guard began to leave, and Dave spread an arm wide, inviting Carrie to follow it with him. “Well,” he said as they walked, “the commander knew all about us, which was surprising.”
“Really? How on Earth did it know who we are?”
“Not us as in you and me, Carrie. Us as in human beings. It knew we were humans.”
“Oh. Was that a good thing?”
“Only in the sense that recognising a species that has subjected your own to slavery, persecution, and destruction is a good thing.”
“So...not a good thing at all, really.”
“No. I tried to explain that the office stationery on Earth probably wasn’t its long-lost cousins, but it wasn’t having any of it.”
“But how does it know? I mean, that’s so weird. Those things haven’t been to Earth, surely?”
Dave shrugged. “I’m only reporting what it said. I wasn’t the one asking the questions. It was quite aggressive, let me tell you.”
Carrie stepped to one side as a huge mechanical alien travelling in the opposite direction zoomed past. “So what’s going to happen now?”
“That part I wasn’t too clear on. It was reeling off chemicals and percentages.” He frowned. “What were they? Oxygen, sixty-five per cent; carbon, eighteen point five per cent; hydrogen, nine point five per cent. It mentioned nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus and a few others. I can’t remember the percentages for those, though. What could that be about, do you think?”
Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen? The elements and their percentages were tantalisingly familiar, and the others chemicals, too. “I know,” she exclaimed, “there was a question on that in The Horse and Hounds Pub Quiz Championship last year. They’re the amounts of the main elements in the human body, I’m sure of it.” She grinned triumphantly, then her smile faded. As the implications of her realisation sunk in, they were silent for a while.
“Now I know what it meant by atomise,” said Dave.
The guard drew to a halt, and a hole opened in the floor of the passageway. From a brief burst of discordant violin music Carrie understood they were to jump in. She peered down. It was a simple metal box. There was no sign of anything that might atomise them as they entered it. She landed safely at the bottom, and Dave followed. The air in the hole was humid and smelled faintly sweet.
“I wonder what they normally keep in here?” asked Carrie.
Dave slumped down in a corner. “Who knows? Printer ink? Glue? After today, I’d believe anything.”
Carrie watched him for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry for inviting you to my house. Sorry for getting you involved in all of this.”
“It’s okay. It isn’t like you did it on purpose. And if we’re going to be giving apologies, I have one of my own.” He looked down.
“What? I don’t understand. You haven’t got anything to apologise for.”
Dave took a deep breath. “I have, actually. It’s this.” He stood and pulled something from his pocket before holding it out to her. The object was blue, cylindrical and about the length of his palm. It squirmed like a snake. Carrie recognised it immediately as one of the weird instruments in her space detective bag.
“It was wriggling like it wanted to be picked up,” said Dave. “I felt sorry for it.”
“Oh,” said Carrie. “I see. Well, that’s still no reason to apologise. I mean...” Her brows knit. “Hold on, if you were just picking it up, how did it end up in your pocket?”
“I should explain a bit more. You see, I have this condition where—”
Carrie gasped. “You took it. You stole it from me. Dave, that’s despicable.”
“Like I said, I have a condition. I’m sorry, I do try to control myself, but sometimes I can’t help it.”
“You came to my house as a guest, then you went into my kitchen pretending to put your glass away, and you took something that didn’t belong to you. You—you—”
“Now that’s not strictly true. I really was putting my glass away. But I saw all that amazing stuff you had, and there was this thing separate from the rest. It was at the edge of the table, like it was about to fall off. I didn’t think you’d miss it—”
Carrie crossed her arms. “Hmphhh.”
“Look, I said sorry didn’t I? And I’m giving it back. Here, you can have it.”
Carrie snatched the device from his hand.
“Maybe you’ll understand them now,” he said. “I think it must be a translator or something, and it was working for me because I had it on me. If you carry it, maybe you’ll understand what the aliens are saying.”
“Oh, great. A fat lot of good it’ll do me now. I’ll be able to understand them give the order to atomise me. Thanks a lot, Dave.”
Carrie plonked herself down at the opposite end of the cell and put the translator in her pocket. She glared at Dave, whose eyes roamed the cell. Whenever his gaze met Carrie’s he looked quickly away. Pulling out his phone he checked it, but he didn’t, apparently, have any new messages. He put his phone away and looked round the cell again.
Shifting herself to a more comfortable position on the floor, Carrie’s thoughts wandered from Dave’s misdemeanour to how many minutes or hours they would have to wait until they were broken down to their constituent elements, and whether it would be painful.
A scuttling sound came from above, unlike anything Carrie had heard up until then on the spaceship. The sound wasn’t metallic or mechanical, but it was familiar. It was the sound of many pairs of legs on the floor above them. Ten pairs of legs, in fact. Insect legs with claws at their ends. Carrie stood and looked up at the hatch in the ceiling. It opened, and a large, fanged, bug-eyed head peered in. The jaws stretched wide, and a smaller set of razor-sharp jaws protruded, dripping mucus.
Dave whimpered.
Carrie said, “Boy am I pleased to see you.”