'Well. Yes. A bit.'
'In that case ... I would like to say ... I am grateful.'
'I don't understand.'
'That you are on our side.' 'Yes, but I'm not bloodthirsty.'
'Then I think perhaps a little while ago someone else must have been flying your ship?'
'No. It's hard to explain it to you,' said Johnny. First of all, he'd have to be able to explain it to himself. 'Shall I embark upon a less troubling topic of conversation?
'You don't have to,' said Johnny. 'I mean, you're in charge. You must have things to do.'
'Oh, spaceships fly themselves,' said the Captain. 'They keep going until they hit things. There is little to do. Tend the wounded and so on. I seldom have a chance to talk to humans. So ... What is sexist?' 'What?'
'It was a word you used.'
'Oh, that. It just means you should treat people as
people and, you know ... not just assume girls can't
do stuff. We got a talk about it at school. There's lots
of stuff most girls can't do, but you've got to pretend
they can, so that more of them will. That's all of it,
really.' 'Presumably there's, uh, stuff boys can't do?'
'Oh. yeah. But that's just girls' stuff,' said Johnny. 'Anyway, some girls go and become engineers and things, so they can do proper stuff if they want.'
'Transcend the limitations of their sex. Outdo the other sex, even. Yes. It is much the same with us. Some individuals show
an awe inspiring desire to succeed, to make a career in a field not traditionally considered to be appropriate to their gender.'
'You, you mean,' said Johnny. 'I was referring to the Gunnery Officer.'
'But he's a man - I mean, a male.' 'Yes. Traditionally, ScreeWee warriors are female. They are more inclined to fight. Our ancestors used to have to fight to protect their breeding pond. The males do not do battle. But in his case- A speck appeared on the radar.
Johnny put down his cup and watched it carefully.
Normally, players headed straight for the fleet. This one didn't. It hovered right on the edge of the screen and stayed there, keeping pace with the ScreeWee ships.
After a while, another dot appeared from the same direction, and kept on coming.
This one at least looked like just another player. There was a nasty equation at the back of Johnny's mind. It concerned missiles. There were the six missiles per level in Only You Can Save Mankind. Once you'd fired them, that was it. So the longer he stayed alive, the less he had to fight with. But all the attacking players would have six missiles each. He'd only got four now. When they were gone, it'd just be guns. One missile in the right place would blow him up. Losing was kind of built-in, in the circumstances.
The attacker came on. But Johnny kept finding his gaze creeping to the dot at the edge of the screen. Somehow it had a watchful look, like a shark trailing a leaky airbed.
He switched on the communicator.
'Attacking ship! Attacking ship! Stop now!' They can't speak, Johnny thought. They're only a player, they're not in the game. They can't speak and they can't listen.
He found he'd automatically targeted a missile on the approaching dot. But that couldn't be the only way. Sooner or later you had to talk, even if it was only because you'd run out of things to throw.
The attacker fired a missile. It streaked past Johnny
and away, heading on into empty space.
Not real, Johnny thought. You have to think they're
not real. Otherwise you can't do it.
'Attacking ship! This is your last chance! Look, I
mean it!'
He pressed the button. The ship juddered slightly as
a missile took off. The attacker was moving fast. So was
the missile. They met and became an expanding red
cloud. It drifted around Johnny's ship like a smoke ring.
Someone, somewhere, was blinking at their screen
and probably swearing. He hoped.
The dot was still on the edge of the screen. It was
irritating him, like an itch in a place he couldn't scratch.
Because that wasn't how you were supposed to play.
You spotted some aliens and you shot at them. That
was what the game was supposed to be about.
Lurking in the distance and just watching made him
uneasy. It looked like the kind of thing people would
do if they were ... well
taking it seriously.
The Captain sat in front of her desk, watching the big screen. She was chewing. Anything was better than waterweed, even - she looked at the packet - even Sugar-Frosted Corn Crackles in cold bovine lactation. Sweet and crunchy, but with odd hard bits in.
She inserted a claw into her mouth and poked around among her teeth until she found the offending object.
She pulled it out and looked at it.
It was green, and had four arms. Most of them were holding some sort of weapon.
She wondered again what these things were. The Chief Medical Officer had suggested that they were, in fact, some sort of vermin which invaded food sources. There was a theory among the crew that they were things to do with religion. Offerings to food gods, perhaps?
She put it carefully on one side of her desk. In the right light, she thought, it looked a bit like the Gun- nery Officer.
Then she opened the little cage beside the bowl and let her birds out.
There had been things very like alligators among the ScreeWee's distant ancestors, and some habits had been handed down. The Captain opened her mouth fully, which made her lower and upper jaws move apart in a way that would make a human's eyes water.
The birds hopped in, and began to clean her teeth. One of them found a small piece of plastic ray-gun.
The watching ship was moving, still keeping at a great distance, travelling around the fleet in a wide cir- cle. It had watched one more attacker come in; Johnny had got rid of this one with a missile and some shots. although a flashing red light on the panel was sug- gesting that something, somewhere, wasn't working any more. Probably those secondary pumps again.
He found he was turning the ship all the time to keep the distant dot in front of him.
Johnny?'
It was the Captain.
'Yes? Are you watching it?'
'Yes. It is moving between us and the Border. It is in our direct line of flight now.
'You can't sort of steer around it?'
'There are more than three hundred ships in the fleet That may be difflcult.'
'It seems to be waiting for something. I'll... I'll risk going to have a look.'
He let his ship overtake the fleet and run ahead of it, towards the distant dot.
It made no attempt to get out of his way.
It was a starship just like his own. In fact, in a way ... it was his starship. After all, there was only one starship in the entire game, the one You flew to Save Mankind. Everyone was flying the same one in a way.
It hung against the stars, as lifeless as a Space Invader. Johnny moved a bit closer, until he could see the cockpit and even the shape of a head inside. It had a helmet on. Everyone did - it was on the cover of the box. You wore a helmet in a starship. He didn't know why. Maybe the designers thought you were likely to fall off when you went round corners.
He tried the communicator again.
'Hello? Can you hear me?'
There was nothing but the background hiss of the universe.
'I'm pretty sure you can. I've got a feeling about it.'
The tiny blob of the helmet turned towards him. You could no more see through the smoked glass of the helmet than you could through a pair of sunglasses from the outside, but he knew he was being stared at.
'What are you waiting for?' said Johnny. 'Look, I know you can hear me, I don't want to have to-'
The other ship roared into life. It accelerated towards the oncoming fleet on two lances of blue light.
Johnny swore under his breath and kicked his own engines into life. There was no hope of over- taking the attacker. It had a head start, and a starfighter's top speed was a starfighter's top speed.