Starstormers 3: Catfang by Nicholas Fisk

Author:Nicholas Fisk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette
Published: 2014-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Smash-up

The Starstormers held a party to celebrate nothing in particular. The party was over; the mess was still there to be cleaned up. Makenzi and Vawn were doing this chore while Tsu and Ispex made the three-hourly check of the ship – its Navplan, Aircon, fuel levels, drives, TVs, course, Ecoputer, Recycler . . . the list seemed endless and endlessly boring. Things kept going wrong. It was rare to make a check that didn’t reveal faults that could lead to disasters.

Tsu sighed and said, ‘Shambles, stick a probe in the Ecoputer.’ Shambles slid a silvery tentacle into a tiny socket in the Ecoputer, the machine that – with the Aircon – controlled the climate and atmosphere of Starstormer. Lights flashed along Shambles’ side. Ispex crouched to read them.

‘It’s lagging,’ he said at last. ‘Lagging again. There! Did you hear that double bleep? It’s trying to catch up with itself.’

Ispex glowered at Shambles’ read-outs, bit his lip and did mental sums. ‘It’s the monitors,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if we got Shambles to monitor the monitors?’

Then the ship seemed to jump and he was lying on his side with Tsu sprawled over him and a deafening noise in his ears.

They scrambled and butted and blundered along the curved, snailshell corridor to the pow controls. The ship was tumbling. The shock of the blow from the attackers had thrown Starstormer out of its proper spin into a new one. It made everyone dizzy. They got to their feet and fell over again, cursing.

Makenzi shouted, ‘The TVs! There’s no proper picture, everything’s sliding! Vawn, get to the RV window!’ But Vawn was hopping and yelping with pain, clutching her ankle, falling over, getting up again, her face twisted with pain—

A bellowing yell from an attacking craft, then the dying scream as it shot past—

Makenzi lurched drunkenly, unable to keep his balance, towards the RV window. Before he could reach it, there was another howl from an attacker and Starstormer lurched into an even worse spinning motion. Makenzi fell, heavily. On the floor, he said, peevishly, like a sulky infant, ‘I’m sick of this!’ – then pulled himself together, clambered to the window and stared out.

There was nothing new for him to see. Only luminous curves in the sky, the trails of the attackers: curves that swung away even as he watched because Starstormer was all wrong, dizzyingly wrong, gravity came and went, you kept falling—

Tsu shouted, ‘OK, ready!’ She had anchored herself to her pow-firing console with her legs. ‘No, take the wobble plate!’ Ispex shouted. She did not hear. Her face was no longer golden yellow, but putty-coloured. ‘I’m going to be sick!’ she shouted to Ispex. ‘Hurry! Get the pows aimed before I’m sick—’

Ispex uselessly repeated, ‘Take the wobble plate!’ but it was useless. So he puffed and strained, trying to steady himself over the spinwheel aimers. His head felt heavy. It wanted to loll and surge like a balloon. He felt idiotic and furious at his idiocy. ‘Help me!’ he shouted at Vawn.

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