Wormbender's Circus
Chapter 23

Zoe was juggling whilst on her knees, her back arched, her legs spread wide apart and her hips thrusting rhythmically upward. Before her, Lichinsky was sitting forward in his chair, gripping the arms and staring, transfixed by a paroxysm of lust.

Gradually, not losing sight of the fruit she was juggling for a moment, she drew one foot forward, then the other, and slowly rose, her body gleaming with sweat and heaving with exertion. She was wondering how long she could keep up the performance, how long Lichinsky could keep himself from springing at her in a frenzy, and what she would do when he did.

“Lichinsky.”

Casey’s voice came from the intercom. The spell was broken instantly, and it was only Lichinsky’s weight that kept him in his chair. In an instant Cliff was on his feet and had put on the lights. Both he and Lichinsky looked round angrily and saw Casey and Sebastian gone.

Through the intercom came the sound of something being smashed.

“Lichinsky, some of your monkeys seem to have got in amongst the china.”

Lichinsky let out a roar like a wounded animal. Cliff already had a gun in his hand, and it was trained on Zoe.

“Bitch!” he yelled and fired. Lichinsky tugged at his free arm, and the shot hit the wall. Zoe was already prostrate on the floor.

“Not her!” howled Lichinsky. “The monkeys! Get the monkeys!” Tears were already flooding down over his jowls as the sound of more centuries old porcelain crashing to the floor came through the intercom. Cliff raced out of the room.

Lichinsky was still struggling to get out of his chair.

Sebastian’s voice was heard on the intercom. “Zoe? Casey? The hangar door will be opening in five minutes. Do you hear that? Five minutes. Let’s get going.”

Lichinsky was half way out of his chair. “You stupid little tart, I’ll make you suffer a miserable death for this.”

He leered down at her as she picked herself up off the floor. An apple she found beside her became a missile as she launched it at him. It hit him squarely in the forehead and sent him crashing backwards into his chair, which collapsed under him and sent him sprawling on his back.

Zoe raced past him and out of the room.

Cliff opened the door to the china room. Casey’s saucer flew at him, knocking him sideways and to the floor. He spun around and fired at Casey’s receding shape. The shot rebounded off the saucer and hit a Klee canvas, setting it alight.

Sebastian was already in the Semiramis, firing up the engines, when Casey arrived and got into the elevator tube. There was still no sign of Zoe. Then with a rumble the hangar door began to rise, sucking the air out into space.

The elevator door at the end of the hangar opened, and Zoe appeared, running madly. As she approached, the elevator tube of the Semiramis began to rise off the ground. As it reached chest height, she hurled herself at it. Casey’s hands closed around her arms in a vice-like grip and dragged her onto his saucer as the elevator tube rose into the hull of the ship. Even before it had entered the hull, the ship’s thrusters were firing, lifting her off the deck and turning her towards where the hangar door was now nearly three quarters open.

Zoe stared accusingly at Casey. “You were going to leave without me!” she yelled above the din.

“Nah,” Casey yelled back. “I knew you’d make it. We’re a team, aren’t we? We’ve just got to be together. It’s fate!”

He grinned. Zoe knew he didn’t believe a word of what he’d just said, and she was still ready to punch his lights out, but there was no time for that.

In moments the ship was free from the confines of the Primum Mobile and powering away into space.

“Stand by to make a jump,” Casey ordered.

“Jump?” echoed Sebastian. “Without co-ordinates? We could end up anywhere!”

“It’s that or have Lichinsky blast us to atoms.”

“Okay,” said Sebastian, “let’s jump.”

The Semiramis emerged from the jump, and two things became immediately apparent. One was that their field of vision was filled by a dull orange ball, and the other was that the Primum Mobile was in hot pursuit, having by some technology that was unknown to them locked onto them during their traverse of hyperspace. A bolt of light swept past the Semiramis.

“He’s firing at us!” Sebastian yelled.

“A brown dwarf!” Casey bellowed. ”Reverse thrust, reverse thrust or we fry!"

A brown dwarf, a mere 500,000 kilometres across, a star that never got hot enough to emit much light, would nevertheless consume the ship in short order.

“Reverse thrust?” said Sebastian. “But what about Lichinsky?”

“If you look at your retrovisual monitor,” said Casey, throwing the engines from full forward power straight into full reverse thrust, “you will see that Mr. Lichinsky has problems of his own right now, without bothering about us.”

Cliff and Lichinsky had also observed that they were plummeting towards the brown dwarf, and were seeking to execute the same manoeuver as the Semiramis. The far greater size and power of the Primum Mobile was now its handicap. It would take far longer to stop the ship, let alone reverse its thrust, and the gravitational pull of the star was already making itself felt.

Conflicting forces sent tremors through the Semiramis as the reverse thrust of the engines fought to counter the inertia of the speeding ship and the increasing gravitational pull. The bodies of her crew were crushed into their seats, they felt as if they were being sandwiched between steel plates as they stared into the dull glowing maelstrom of the star.

They were on the verge of blacking out, and scarcely registered the fate of the Primum Mobile as it was sucked past them in a silent scream, drawn inexorably into the inferno, its engines incapable of countering its delirious forward motion.

All aboard the Semiramis knew that it was a matter of mere moments before they shared its fate. The ship was moving forward at a slower rate as the engines sought to pull it in the opposite direction, but still the fiery maw of the dwarf star edged closer.

With muscles straining, distorting his features grotesquely, Sebastian turned his head to face Casey. He stretched out his hand.

Casey, glimpsing the motion out of the corner of his eye, extended his own hand and clasped Sebastian’s tightly. “Well, old buddy,” he said, “looks like the end of the line.”

Sebastian nodded. “It was going to be good, too!”

“So long, pal”

Sebastian gulped. His own mortality was pressing down hard on him. “So long, Casey.”

He turned his head painfully in the opposite direction to see Zoe and say goodbye. She was already looking at him.

“Love you...Zo.”

Her jaw, her throat, her lips moved, but the sound seemed to take forever to emerge. “Love you, Seb.”

He stretched out his hand, she hers, and for a long, long moment, their fingertips touched. Then they parted.

The ship seemed to give its death rattle, and the only hope that remained was that death would be quick.

All three had tears in their eyes, all three had eyes screwed up with pain as the g-force bore down relentlessly on their chests, and the temperature in the cabin began to rise uncomfortably as the ship’s cooling system began to fail.

And yet all three gradually became aware of a change. There was a subtle yet unmistakeable change in the colour of the star, its dull burnt orange being overlaid with a bluish tint.

And, even more inexplicably, their forward motion slowed perceptibly, until finally the ship halted, and the weight was lifted from their chests.

“Wh-what’s going on?” Sebastian stammered.

There was no reply.

And then, little by little, the Semiramis began to pull slowly away from the star, sucked back from the very brink of oblivion.

Zoe was the first to realise what was going on. The blue tint on the monitors was the vital clue. “It’s the erg!” she cried. “Somehow it senses the danger to us, and it’s using all the energy it absorbed from the star cloud to pull us away from the dwarf.”

The combined power of the engines in reverse thrust and the pull of the erg dragged the Semiramis out of the brown dwarf’s gravitational field. When the danger was past, the blue tint vanished from the monitors as the erg swept in from its position around the ship’s hull and returned once more to its spot in the hold.

“Wow!” said Casey at last. “That’s twice that critter’s saved our bacon. I think he must really like us!”

The closest of brushes with death left Sebastian, Zoe and Casey in a contemplative mood as they established their co-ordinates and planned their course once more.

“What you thinking?” said Sebastian, as Zoe sat staring blankly.

She started. “Mmm? You’ll think I’m crazy, but I’m sorry Lichinsky and Cliff died, even though they would have certainly killed us.”

“I know what you mean. We don’t like to see anyone die, no matter what kind of scum they were. Just soft, I guess.” He paused for a moment, then smiled. “Tell you what, though. Old Harry would have been pleased.”

The remainder of the Semiramis’ quest for circus acts was mercifully uneventful, and in a matter of months her crew were ready to begin a concert tour. There was some debate as to where the inaugural show would be held, and it was eventually decided that in the light of Zoe’s interrupted supply run to Theta Triplex, that would be their first venue. Advance probes were duly sent speeding through space to announce the impending arrival in the colony of `Wormbender’s Galactic Circus’.

The advent of the Semiramis was the most exciting event quiet Theta Triplex had ever experienced. Igor was sent out before the show to collect credits and came back laden.

“This bodes well,” said Casey.

While the erg gave a display of sapphire blue pyrotechnics overhead, the `Entry of the Gladiators’ resounded from the bowels of the ship. Casey emerged, dressed as a clown, and passed among the colonists in his saucer, pulling all kinds of stunts to entertain the children.

Zoe rode out of the ship on the unicycle, juggling. She had rendered the serpent costume a good deal more respectable, but it still showed enough of her slender figure to draw admiring glances from the men in the crowd.

The spotlight settled on Sebastian, resplendent in his glowing red tailcoat and top hat, the garb of ringmasters since time immemorial.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he boomed. “Welcome to Wormbender’s Circus, the greatest show in the galaxy! Are we all ready? Then let the show begin!”

End of ‘Wormbender’s Circus’.