The Worst Man on Mars
The King's Peach

20:21 The previous day – Mayflower III

The spaceship’s Assembly Room was unusually packed. Mission Commander Flint Dugdale was seated directly in front of the vast TV screen, his greasy hand wrapped around the remote control and his legs spread wide apart. Normally his predilection for darts, snooker and monster-truck racing drove the other personnel away, but right now they were strapped into the cinema-style seating and buzzing with anticipation. The forthcoming programme was a special broadcast, direct from Buckingham Palace. The King himself was to deliver a personal message to the prospective Mars colonists in a programme titled ‘A Very British Mission’.

As yet another lager advert commenced, Dugdale shook a fist at the screen and roared in his broad Yorkshire accent, “Gerron wi’ it!” He sat, his bloated belly pointing upwards, in the middle of the three front-row seats reserved for crew. On the back of his seat the gold embossed name of ‘Mission Commander Chad Lionheart’ had been crossed through with a thick marker pen and ‘Commandur Dugdale’ scrawled in its place. Rows two to four were for the Mars colonists.

Dugdale scratched between his legs with one hand and twirled a fat finger in his ear with the other as crewmember Lieutenant Zak Johnston floated in zero-G into the Assembly Room and made for the front row.

“Aye, aye, Cap’n. Permish to land?” asked Zak, indicating one of the empty seats.

Flint reached under his chair and pulled out a four-pack of Stallion extra-strong lager and a jumbo bag of Cheesy Watnots. He placed them in the middle of the empty seat Zak was pointing to and snapped the seatbelt into its clip to stop his booty drifting away. “Seat’s taken. Chuff off,” he growled.

Zak glided around the front, keeping out of range of his commanding officer, and made for the seat on the opposite side. Flint lifted his left leg over the armrest so that his steel toe-capped Doc Marten boot rested across the other empty place.

“No probleemo, Captain Nemo. I’ll just float here, shall I?” said Zak.

Dugdale didn’t react, so Zak belted himself into one of the empty seats in row 2. Po-faced, tight-lipped Harry Fortune in row 3 now found himself directly behind a bush of free-floating and widely spread dreadlocks. Harry, former stand-up comedian-turned-poet, and the mission’s token celebrity, leaned forward and tapped the Medusa-haired lieutenant on the shoulder. “You do realize I can’t see a thing because of your hair.”

Zak, having turned with a jolt, studied the comedian’s thin mouth as he spoke. Although not clinically deaf he had great difficulty hearing much of what went on around him. The ear wax in his auditory canals, together with his earphones, meant that he only registered the very loudest sounds above the steady beat of his personal music directory. He had come to rely on very poor lip-reading skills to understand what was being said. “You want me to sing Love is in the Air?” he enquired.

Sitting next to Harry was Miss Emily Leach, daughter of zillionaire nonagenarian mining tycoon Sir Geoffrey Leach. The heavily perfumed middle-aged lady butted in. “Oh, I love that song. Please sing it, Mr Zak!”

“Soz, Lady Em, that song is alien to this mammalian.”

“Surely not!” she exclaimed. And then, as if to mete out punishment for such ignorance of a classic, she let rip with a shrill, ear-jarring voice that, to her tin ear, perfectly matched the song in her head. All eyes stared at her. A single backward glare from the commander cut her off in mid-note and made her face redden. Meekly she resumed sipping Earl Grey from a dainty bone china cup. The cup had been ‘adapted’ for zero-G by the addition of a cheap plastic lid and a vivid-green curly straw. Just as attention was drifting away from her, and her face was returning to its former paleness, she made an embarrassing cup-draining slurp as she sucked up the last dregs, causing her face to flush once more.

Sitting behind Emily was the diminutive Tarquin Brush, only ten years old but already smarter than most of the others. On his knee was ‘Mr Snuggles’, the robot he had assembled during the journey using wiring and circuits pilfered from around the ship. Tarquin’s smiling mother, Delphinia Brush, gave his hand a warm squeeze, proud that her little soldier could have built such a clever robot. Around her shoulders lay the comforting arm of husband Brian Brush, a man rarely far from her side. Both had the nerdy look and spectacles of planetary scientists, which is what they were.

“About friggin’ time!” exclaimed Dugdale as the programme’s opening titles finally appeared on the screen.

Hardly anyone batted an eyelid at the commander’s bad language. Only Delphinia Brush reacted by placing her protective hands over Tarquin’s innocent little ears.

On screen, the credits cleared and a panning shot showed what appeared to be a dense rain forest. An elderly gentleman emerged from behind the leaves of a large banana tree wearing a three-piece tweed suit and matching flat cap. Looking somewhat incongruous in the jungle terrain, he sported a brass plant-sprayer in one hand and a fine walking cane in the other. As he stepped out of the tree’s shadow he was instantly recognizable by his drooping elephantine ears, anteater nose and deep-set pebble eyes. He removed his hat to reveal a scabrous scalp long since deserted by its mutinous hair.

Commander Dugdale fumbled to unclip his seat belt, all the time gazing reverently up at the screen. He stood to attention.

“Ayeup, you lot. Gerr’off yer fat bums ‘n show some respect for t’friggin’ King!” Having stood up too aggressively he found himself drifting, head-first, for the ceiling.

“That’s just great,” mumbled Harry Fortune, “Now I can’t see the screen at all.”

“Shhh!” beseeched Emily Leach.

Meanwhile, King Charles III was gesturing up at the huge glass roof above his head. “Simply splendid, isn’t it,” he was saying, letting the words escape through tightly clenched jaws. “A replica of Decimus Burton’s Temperate House. The original is in Kew Gardens, of course, but one had this exact copy built in the grounds of Buckingham Palace.” He paused to swat a tiny fly away. “During the past eight months, while Mayflower III and its valiant personnel, have been racing towards the Red Planet, I have found myself drawn here more and more. A place to meditate and consider the Universe above. Indeed, I often replace my mind drifting across interplanetary space to Mars, and the vast BioDome of Botany Base where, very soon, the first Martian colonists will be standing. I imagine it looking something like this.” The king swept his arm in a wide arc to indicate the lush vegetation surrounding him.

“Botany Base,” he mused. “Built not by humans, but by a small army of fiendishly clever British robots sent ahead by the National Astronomical Flight Agency. Five years they have toiled, and the result is a tribute to British engineering, British technology and British knowhow.”

Dugdale had managed to push himself back down from the ceiling and was stretching the seat strap across his oversized belly. “British know ’ow!” he scoffed.

“Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?” added teenager Gavin from the back row. His sister Tracey sniggered. Brian Brush removed his arm from around his wife’s shoulders and held up a shushing finger to the pursed lips of one of his sternest facial expressions. As usual, the teenagers ignored their father.

King Charles cast a solemn frown at the camera. “Our thoughts, of course, go to those three brave souls who have so far perished on this dangerous mission.”

Dugdale snorted. “Brave souls, my arse!”

“And yet, one can’t help but feel that the successful completion of this two-year mission, there and back, will form a lasting tribute to their memory and their courage.”

“Cobblers.”

Charles went on to make a feeble joke about Little Green Men, at which most of the colonists, apart from the teenagers, chuckled politely. “And finally, one would like to relay a special message to the colonists themselves. The boffins at NAFA Mission Control tell one that those valiant pioneers, currently in orbit around Mars, will, through some unfathomable wizardry, be watching this broadcast in about six minutes when the transmission reaches their ship.” The camera zoomed in on Charles’s craggy features. “Good luck, intrepid colonists. Remember, the whole world is watching you. The whole world will see Britain at her best. You are ambassadors for the first nation to land humans on Mars. We are proud of you all.”

Plucking a peach from an overhanging branch, the King took a bite out of it and smiled. The edges of the smile twitched at the bitterness of the unripe fruit in his mouth as he turned, parted several tree leaves with his walking cane, and slipped back into the jungle.

Emily wiped a tear from her eye. A few others could be heard making efforts to swallow the lumps in their throats. The teenagers at the back jeered, and the hand-built robot, Mr Snuggles, was trying out some new vocabulary it had just picked up. “Cobblers,” it said in a cute chipmunk-like voice. “Friggin’ cobblers.”

As the credits rolled, Dugdale gave a noisy sniff. “Load of ol’ bollocks,” he muttered, pointing the remote control at the TV and starting to flip channels, oblivious to the howls of protest that filled the room.

“One hundred and eighty!” boomed a voice from the TV, and Dugdale stopped flipping.

“Magic!” he said, making himself more comfortable in his seat. “Darts.”

Within seconds the Assembly Room began to empty. First out of their seats were the Faerydaes. Adorabella Faerydae – the mission doctor, holistic healer, spiritual reader and homeopath – floated towards the door. Chiffon, crystal beads and long auburn hair trailed behind her. Husband, Brokk, and their son, Oberon, drifted to her side and like a family of synchronised mer-people they glided over the heads of their colleagues and into the corridor.

Ex-comedian Harry Fortune unclipped his seat belt and launched himself towards the exit, staring miserably down at his Fliptab on which were jotted just a few random rhymes: ‘Dugdale – thug fail’, ‘disaster – plaster’, ‘doom – gloom’. In his capacity as Poet in Residence he hadn’t written a single poem during the entire journey, save for a few feeble love poems for the prettiest passenger, Penny Smith.

Penny Smith, alas, was not in the Assembly Room. Nor was she anywhere on board. For Penny was one of the three who had died on the mission so far.

In no time the room was left with just two occupants: Dugdale, eyes glued to the sweaty, beer-fuelled throwing action of the All-Yorkshire Darts Championship, and Lieutenant Zak Johnston whose attention had been caught by something outside the spaceship. Zak launched himself off a wall and drifted across to the huge panoramic observation window. He peered out, shading his eyes with his hands to cut the glare of the room’s fluorescent lights. There was a metal object drifting in space, about two hundred metres from the ship. It was about the size and shape of a large man.

“The Zak-detector’s detectin’ an inspector,” he declared, nose now pressed against the glass.

Dugdale reluctantly shifted his gaze away from the darts and peered past Zak’s dreadlocks out of the window. “What the ’ell’s that?”

“InspectaBot, that’s what.”

“Well, what’s that mechanical twerk doin’ there? ‘E should be on t’planet by now, doin’ his friggin’ job! I launched ’im two hour since.”

“Looks lost, dude,” said Zak. He raised an arm and waved to the distant robot, but the robot didn’t wave back. “Could be inspectin’ the view.”

“I’ll give ’im ‘inspectin’ t’view’! That clown better get down there an’ certify the base pronto. If I ‘ave to spend any more time cooped up on this crock of crap wi’ a bunch of lemons, I’ll end up batterin’ the lot of yer.”

“Shoo!” Zak was saying, flapping his arms at the robot to persuade him to go. “Go down to the planet. Start inspecting. Shoo.”

Dugdale huffed and puffed as he struggled with his seat belt, but then glimpsed a dart on the screen hitting double-top. His attention returned to the contest. The crowd oohed and aahed as another dart hit its target but the third missed. Flint settled back into his seat. “Get ’im on t’radio and order ‘im to get goin’,” he said, his eyes firmly back on the screen

Zak looked affronted. “No-can-do, skipperoo. Rest-break. Been promised a cupcake by Lady Emily.”

Dugdale grunted. “Well get Lieutenant Willie Walnut to sort out t’mechanical monkey. Tell ‘im to order it to gerron wi’ its friggin’ job! And another thing ...” His voice trailed off as Big Joe “Lard Belly” McGrath stepped up to the oche.

“Sure thing, boss,” said Zak. “I’ll break my break for the good of the mission. But I ain’t missin’ the uptake of a cupcake.”