Boarding the Starflake Ch. 04

He couldn't get his breath. Did that just happen?

"Pamela! Pamela!" he heard Steph say. "Are you all right?"

"The monster! It was here!"

Safely backstage, he rubbed his sated crotch and tried to catch his breath. He'd creamed himself. He'd only had to touch Natalie for ten seconds, tops, and his eyes had rolled up in his head and he'd creamed himself. Christ, but he got worked up on human femmes when he was in season. But more amazingly, the girls seemed not to have noticed. All four were on stage now, running through their lines like nothing had even happened. In fact, when he'd walked off, he thought he might have heard a ripple of applause in the audience.

"That's impossible," said Brooke. "There's no monster."

"Yeah," said Heather. "That's just a story the boys made up to scare us."

He doubled over to collect himself and then staggered to the table where the Dubs were. A few straggling after-dribbles were still leaking out of him, and a jangling thrill clogged his brain like cotton.

"I'm telling you," Natalie gasped, out of breath, at the groped and terrified Pamela. "He was here. He put his hands on me. It was horrible!"

"Well, there's no one here now," assured Heather. "It was dark. Maybe you just bumped into something. Maybe there's a cat." She looked off stage as a gesture to punctuate her line, and in so doing made eye contact with Morgo, who caught Heather's look in a way that made him feel like he had a canary in his mouth.

He needed to hurry. He'd only skimmed this scene in the script but he knew he just had a handful of lines before it ended and the girls bounced back off the stage. Bracing himself on the table by one stiff arm, he shook out the vapors in his head and made himself study the Dubs.

They were boxy, cream colored, bulkier than communicators but still small enough to fit in the palm. A knobby antenna about two inches long poked out the top of each one.

"Cats don't have hands, Corinne, or fingers! It grabbed me! It . . . it felt me all over!"

"Okay," Brooke reasoned, "okay. We're not getting anywhere. I'm pretty sure something was in here with Pamela, whether it was the monster or not. Whatever it is, we need to stick together, and we need to look for it."

Just as the Gob had said, each Dub-LM had an LED display that about spanned its upward face. On the screen was an array of sliders with a word on each end: "Sad" to "Happy," "Lazy" to "Energetic," "Subservient" to "Resistant." Each slider had a heading bug, and they were all zeroed out on both units, except one: the "Assured" to "Frightened" slider, which was edged up to +4.

Method acting, Morgo realized at once. Okay. Sure. That was one way to do it.

He picked up a Dub-LM and turned it in his hand. No labels or markings, no way to tell who it belonged to. Or rather, which girl belonged to it.

"Do we have to?" Natalie wheedled, as Pamela. "Couldn't we call the police? Or wait for the boys. They can take care of it."

"No good," said Brooke. "The storm took out the phones and the nearest house is miles away. And the boys won't be here until midnight, if they're even going to prank us at all."

"I agree," Steph agreed. "If we want to find out what's going on here, we'll have to do it ourselves."

He slid his finger along the long dimension of the screen and the sliders scrolled with it. There seemed to be hundreds. "Polite" to "Rude," "Obsequious" to "Resistant," "Pain" to "Pleasure." The next line, he knew, was the scene's last. Whatever he was going to do, it had to be now.

"It's agreed then," said Heather. "We'll go to the kitchen, get some knives, and search the house."

He scrolled the unit back to the top and flicked the bug on the "Assured, Frightened" slider three quarters of the way up—it went to plus twenty, turned out—and fumbled it back onto the table with the other Dub-LM and raced back to the scrim and feigned acting casual, just as the curtain closed and the girls skipped offstage, all giggles.

"Fantastic!" he heard the director say from the front row. "Take five."

"I think we've found a natural," Natalie added, patting Morgo on the shoulder. "You were great."

"Believe me," replied Morgo, uttering the first sincere words he'd said to these Earth girls since he'd come aboard this ship. "So were you."

***

This sure was an odd play these chicks were putting on, Argon mused, and admittedly it had started off slow, but he couldn't say he wasn't starting to enjoy it.

A lot had happened since Morgo, lucky bastard that he was, had taken on the role of the monster in the first act. After the monster's aborted attack on Pamela, she and the other girls—Adriana, Corinne, and Selena—had decided to arm themselves with kitchen knives and search the house en masse for safety's sake. This had been conveyed through dialogue to save the need for changing sets, and at the end of the first act they'd reconvened in the living room, convinced the house was, in fact, empty.

In the second act, the girls were all in separate bedrooms, this being signified on stage by a quartet of twin cots divided by three flimsy posterboard walls. They whispered like prisoners over the waferish boards about their boyfriends and their plans for college. They confided in each other. Finally, one by one, they fell asleep.

First to go was Adriana. Morgo as the monster, reading stage direction off his script, snuck noiselessly into her room stage left and made his way to her bed as she was snoozing on her back. In a deft, seemingly rehearsed motion, he clutched her face to dam her mouth and nose and at the same time arced a retractable stage knife into her belly. He held her down and silent as she squealed into his greasy palm and her life drained away in a spreading, sick-sweet scented pool of stomach blood. He knew it was fake, but the fragrance of blood met him nonetheless.

Next to go was Pamela, the girl he'd already used to get his quicky jollies. The monster did her in with a clinched pillow to her face as she slowly suffocated.

All along, a clock ticked on the wall high up the rear of the stage, struck twelve and ticked on. No boys. These helpless lasses were dying, murdered by the monster, one by one. Where were the boys to save them?

By the time Act III rolled around, the monster had snatched Corinne and Selena, the only two missies left. Now there was a new set: the monster's lair, a mad scientist's lab with an array of mainframe-sized instruments on the edges and two stretchers in the middle. One girl had been cinched on each. Between them gleamed a clinical table with a boxy prop bearing a huge, wishbone-shaped switch like the ones used for triggering electric chairs.

Argon watched.

The monster had already firmly buckled Corinne to a stretcher and wrangled a wired, aluminum skull dome on the top of her head, and was in the process of doing the same to her lovely compatriot. As Morgo tried to follow his stage direction while fixing the dome on her, poor Selena fought and writhed impossibly, her boy-bob black hair frizzing as she shook and gasped.

Her struggling availed her nothing and soon enough, Morgo had cinched her down and strapped the prop skull dome on her lovely crown. His task done and his hands free, he reached for a folded open, three-ring script.

"And now," declared Morgo off the script, "I will activate the brain transplant machine, and Corinne, you will inhabit Selena's body, and Selena, you will find yourself in Pamela's."

"You're mad!" Natalie cried. "Why are you doing this to us?"

A stagecraft crack of lightning.

"Ten years ago, an experiment went terribly wrong and I, a brilliant scientist, found myself in the body of a monster. But now, with my brain transplant technology, I'll be able to rid myself of this hideous shell," Morgo gestured at himself, clad in the monster costume, "and become like you, the sexy young woman I've always longed to be." To illustrate, he stroked Selena's pliant, prostrate figure from thigh to breast. For her part, the helpless girl quivered nearly uncontrollably. Her chest bellowed with frantic, fearful breath.

"But first," Morgo went on, "I must use it on you to make sure it really works."

Everyone stood (or, in the two girls' cases, lay) around and waited.

"Psst. Brooke," said Heather, the prop metal skull-dome going akimbo on its short cord as she turned her head. "It's your line."

"M-Ms. Evers?" Brooke cried, querulous. "I feel kinda sick; I think I-I-I need to go back to my room."

From the front row, the director sighed and took off her glasses. "You're giving up on us, Brooke? You're my anchor."

"I know, but I feel super-weird. Nervous, like I ate bad fish or something."

"Well," she flipped through the script, "Selena's only got a couple more lines. I'll go ahead and read them out for you. Morgo, can you unfasten Brooke?"

Morgo did as told, and before he was even quite finished, Brooke bolted upright in a rattle of buckles and booked backstage. A second later she reappeared and scurried out of the auditorium as though racing for a flight at a gate that was closing. As she did, she frantically slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder and slipped her Dub unit in it without even looking at the device. Morgo couldn't help but feel that he was at least partially responsible for Brooke's outburst. But he kept his mouth shut.

***

Space was unremarkably barren as Steph stepped back on helm. In fact, Julie, who had been staffing the bridge by her lonesome, had been using the interface in the right arm of the captain's chair to idly play Minesweeper.

"Done so soon?" she asked. "Isn't the rehearsal still going on?"

"Yeah," said Steph, "but the monster kills off my character early. So Ms. Evers let me leave since—well, let's face it, I'm a third of the crew at the moment."

"Hmm. Good point."

"And here's a twist: I guess we'd all forgotten Pete went with the Uni's along with just about everyone else, so we didn't have anyone to take the part of the monster. But it turns out one of the Trogs was about the right size for the outfit so we had him stand in, and he did a pretty good job. He might wind up doing it on Obiron; if he doesn't, I'm not sure how we'll fill the role."

"That's a break, sure. But don't get too cozy with those two. Anyway, routine bridge duties. Let's get started." she nodded, took her workstations, and got to buttonpushing. She was done in less than a minute.

"Nothing to report on ship. All systems functioning normally."

"And nothing in our sector, Cap, except the Trog ship, of course."

"Yeah," said Julie. "I saw that while I was playing Minesweeper."

Heather bounded through the tube, brooding. "Wait, the Trog ship? I thought they said the convoy would be picking it up. Where's the next ship in the convoy?"

"Heather?" Julie murmured. "You're here too? I thought you were helping with the play."

"I got my brains swapped out." She threw her pointing finger at the screen. "Seriously, though, what's with the Trog ship?"

"I dunno," Julie murmured. "It's derelict. Could be they wrote it off as a loss."

Heather bristled. "Even if it hasn't been picked up, shouldn't it be drifting? Why's it mirroring our course?"

"Maybe they have a last-chance homing beam," suggested Julie. "You know, for disabled ships; automatically uses whatever power's left to move it toward the nearest large object."

"Not likely. I doubt the Trogs would even equip those. They like to die heroes. Anyway, I was talking with those two before the rehearsal started and I'm telling you, something just isn't sitting. Steph, I assume the Lechworth's still jamming us?" She nodded. "Well, the minute we land at Obiron, I'm going straight to the Trog consulate, find out what they know about our new leading man. In the meantime, let's keep Jim close to hand."

"I think we still have some phasors," Steph offered. "The Uniteds took our crew, but they didn't take our weapons."

"Good. Get Jim on, tell him to go by the armory, pick up phasors for all three of us and bring them up to the bridge."

"I'm on it."

"I think you're forgetting who's in charge here," contributed Julie.

"Steph, parabolize our course for Obiron. We're going to change heading and approach the planet on its shutdown trajectory."

"But we're going as the crow flies!" groaned Julie. "There's no shutdown on Obiron. That'll just slow us down."

"I know, but I'm not sure that ship's derelict. I think it might be tracking us. If we change course and it follows us, we'll know for sure."

"And if so? What happens then?"

"If that happens, we'll have to assume they're hostile and we'll have to try and take those two Trogs into custody, toss them in the brig. They'll be the only bargaining chips we'll have."

"Well, I can see why the consulate rejected your diplomatic application," fretted Julie. She gave Steph a consoling look. "Belay those orders. We need to show our guests more hospitality than Heather seems to be willing to give."

"Look," intoned Heather, "you didn't see those two during the play. They both acted like they'd robbed a bank. I practically expected them to have ink all over their hands."

"Okay, so you're telling me we're going to run the risk of sparking an interplanetary scandal because you have a bad feeling about the Trogs? I get that they're not the prettiest bastards in the world, and they don't smell that great, but we can't let that guide our thinking."

"It's not that." Heather rolled her eyes, conceding. "Okay, it's not just that. Those two are up to something. I can't prove it, but I know it same as I know the Pleiades has seven suns."

"Stephanie," said Julie, shifting gears, "you worked with these Trogs. You know what Heather's talking about, here?"

"I dunno, I didn't really get much from them one way or the other." Steph gave a noncommittal shrug, which Heather met with a bitter glare.

"All I'm asking you is to make a minor course adjustment," Heather doubled down. "Just to see if they follow. If they don't, I will totally shut up."

Julie pondered, looking captainesque. "Okay," she nodded, after much musing. "Steph, go ahead and plot Heather's numbers. We'll do it her way." She wagged a finger at her ship steward. "When this all turns out to be a great big nothing, though, I'm gonna expect an apology from you."