Chapter I

I had a suspicion my career as a journalist was stalling the day I had an article rejected by Doorstop Bulletin.

Oh sure, the words ebbed and flowed most beautifully, the editor said, but they couldn’t possibly accept an article penned by someone who lacked demonstrable knowledge of weighty inert objects. Whatever would their readers think? I remember being shocked that they had any.

Let’s face it, I hadn’t been quite the success as a journalist that I had always supposed I would be. I had imagined that by the time I was 30 I would be a top international news writer with a couple of major awards slung casually on the mantelpiece, and a following on Twitter that numbered more than a stranger with the detestable moniker ‘Media Mel’ and that cross-eyed girl from the local chip shop who I feared had a crush on me.

In reality though, much like my attempts to start up a business selling chewing gum to the homeless and my botched plot to grow paw-paws in Brighton, things were not panning out as I had hoped.

But none of that mattered now. For I had a plan, one last attempt to stamp my mark on the world of publishing and make all those dreams come true, and it involved a groundbreaking piece of investigative journalism in the frozen wastelands of Antarctica.

I had been travelling the world sniffing for a decent story when, just as I had been at the point of going home and submitting to a life of office drudgery, I had come across an inebriated researcher at a bar in Christchurch, New Zealand. Now this particular researcher, as well as regaling me with all the details of how he had bedded his assistant inside a snow fort, also happened to let slip that Antarctica’s finest scientists had made a rather singular breakthrough. The boffins, my acquaintance slurred earnestly, had cloned a breed of warrior penguin that would mate with Antarctica’s native birds to produce a new strain of super-penguin that not only could fly but would also viciously attack any nearby targets. The penguins would be just the first phase of a new form of covert animal warfare that would change the face of 21st century battle, my wide-eyed colleague insisted as he collapsed slowly to the floor.

While this story was almost certainly nothing more than the vivid creation of a drunken imagination, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I would never forgive myself if I didn’t follow it up. And so, clinging by my fingernails to the coat tails of my career, I made straight off in search of this greatest-ever scoop and handed over a wad of cash to the captain of an ice-breaker heading to the frozen continent. Using skills of persuasion I never knew I possessed, I managed to convince the head of Antarctica’s Rasturk research station that I had been commissioned on a series of writing assignments ranging from everything from a complex meteorological report for National Geographic to a tub-thumping piece on international collaboration for Newsweek. I was allowed to stay, and I had my way in.

Antarctica, I quickly discovered, is a weird a wonderful place for many reasons. Did you know, for instance, that the entire continent has only one ATM machine, which would probably lead to lengthy queues in places that actually contained outlets where you could spend cash. The Dry Valleys region is so dry, in fact, that it hasn’t rained in over two million years, while many of the continent’s sea life have anti-freeze in their blood to stop them literally freezing to death.

The Rasturk research station also had a personality all of its own. It had surprisingly delicious coffee, for instance. Everyone laughed at strange scientific jokes that were entirely lost on me. We would get hourly playings of Frozen by Madonna and Don’t let the sun go down on me by Elton John. And Jack Frost was so frequently spoken of that you could be forgiven for thinking he was a resident scientist.

Antarctica, the experts all agree, is also rather cold. In fact, it’s quite simply the coldest place on Earth, a place where, if you were to wonder inadvertently outdoors at the wrong time of year, you would swiftly be transformed into an angular ice lolly, almost certainly to be uncovered and defrosted many aeons into the future and hailed as an archaeological marvel.

I had spent the first few weeks of my stay getting to know the scientists, interviewing them for my fictitious articles and generally doing all I could to glean any information about the whereabouts of weaponised penguins. Though nobody actually went as far as to confirm their existence, I did receive enough encouragement to believe there was something to the story, and one particular research site just a few miles from the Rasturk facility was constantly named as the scientists’ R&D playground.

And so one evening, when the researchers had all turned in for the night, I decided to make my move and examine this site for myself. My heart beating excitedly, I sneaked out with my notebook and video camera in hand, and made off across the ice. I wasn’t unused to the Antarctic conditions, but the temperature felt colder and the wind a little more biting than usual. As I trudged out across the ice, I cut a strange figure making his way into miles of white nothingness. It wasn’t that people didn’t normally make this walk; it was that they didn’t normally do it wearing a designer suit.

I had been thinking about this for some time - what to wear for the day of my big discovery. I didn’t want to do the usual fifteen jumpers and six scarves routine, as my video was likely to be the most played piece of footage the world over once I secured that shot of the deadly penguins. No, this was essentially my audition for one of the big jobs in broadcasting, and I needed to look the part. As luck would have it, I had not three months earlier purchased a particularly trendy suit in Australia, together with an equally chic shirt, tie and shoes that I had never had occasion to wear. So I had carefully dressed myself in the crisp white shirt, did up the dark blue tie with the top button left open in a very stylish Italian kind-of-a-way, and slipped on the black jacket, trousers and shoes. Now this was the way to break a story.

My attire was perhaps chiefly to blame for me feeling the cold more than usual on this strange December night. My face felt numb within seconds of stepping out, and I couldn’t have gone a couple of hundred metres before it became difficult to move my fingers. Still I struggled on though, and within perhaps twenty minutes I had reached the experimental site the scientists had spoken of.

I couldn’t hide my disappointment when I arrived. I panned the camera across the scene, almost hoping to be assaulted by a series of battle birds, but instead there was nothing. Not so much as a nano-enhanced gnat. All there was, in fact, was a series of pylons, a couple of sheds which contained nothing but what looked like gardening tools, and a picnic bench. I sat down on this and put my head in my hands. I threw the camera down and cursed my back luck, scarcely believing that I had put all this time and effort into chasing up a story that I should have clearly seen had no credibility whatsoever. My journalistic career, to all intents and purposes, was over.

But now bigger concerns were presenting themselves. The wind had picked up quite suddenly, and the temperature had noticeably fallen. And unless I was mistaken, a snowstorm appeared to be moving in. I quickly awoke from my melancholy and pulled myself to my feet. I had to get back to the research station fast or else the scientists would be making a new discovery tomorrow in the shape of my frozen cadaver.

I began the trek back, but the conditions were deteriorating rapidly and I quickly became disorientated. I tried to run, but my body was starting to seize up with the cold and I began to panic as I looked around in desperate search of a clue of where to turn. As I stumbled randomly on my thoughts started to morph into a microcosmic rerun of my life. My mind was beginning to glaze over, and the swirling katabatic winds and floating diamond dust created an otherworldly irreality in front of me. It felt as if I was watching myself through someone else’s eyes as I staggered towards my doom.

I don’t know how long I had been walking, but I was starting to feel my end was near. It’s difficult to explain the sensation that was running through my body, but brightly coloured lights were now dancing before my eyes. Though somehow I kept moving, I was shaking considerably, and my whole body was in a great deal of pain. I was beginning to stumble now, and I almost fell down several times before I finally did. A moment later, there I lay, face down in the snow, waiting for the darkness to engulf me. And just a few seconds after that, it did.


Chapter II

Everything hurt. A lot. It was a struggle to open my eyes, and a very bright light was doing nothing to improve my malaise. Wasn’t death supposed to be all floaty and tranquil? Shouldn’t a white robed figure with a wise old beard and a trident be welcoming me through the gates of heaven? Not in my version. Perhaps this was a punishment for my foolhardy and cavalier approach to life.

And yet, if I wasn’t mistaken, I appeared to be tied up to some kind of machine. As my eyes began to focus on indistinct objects around me, I started to make out the fact that I had thick metal straps on my wrists that were keeping my arms stretched out to my sides. And unless I was hallucinating, my legs were being held apart by two clamps that prevented me from moving. Now I came to think about it, there was also a considerable amount of warm air being blown straight at me from a series of large jets in front of me.

I found myself coming to my senses quite quickly, and I was able to find my voice to cry out to anyone who might be listening. At first quietly, and then as loudly as I could, I bellowed for assistance. In spite of the continued pain, my strength felt quite recovered, and I wrestled from side to side to free myself from the shackles.

Surprisingly, someone turned up. He was a fairly short man, with greying hair and thick-rimmed glasses, through which he peered at me with a slightly curious expression. He wasn’t exactly fat – portly, perhaps, but not fat – and his ageing hairline suggested that he was probably somewhere in the latter end of his forties.

I stayed silent for a few moments, expecting the man to strike up a conversation. He didn’t.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m Loo Croker,” he replied quickly. No further explanation was offered.

“Why am I strapped to this machine?” I ventured again.

“To protect you.”

“Protect me from what?”

“Death” replied the man.

“Oh.”

I grappled with the restraints on my wrists, flailing about uselessly like a fish caught in an angler’s net, but with equally little chance of freeing myself. “Do you think you might help me out of this?” I asked hopefully.

Loo Croker walked over to a grey control panel on the wall and tapped a few buttons. Immediately, the jets whirred off and my arms and legs were released, allowing me to slide down onto the floor. I lay slumped there, blinking stupidly at the man.

“Thanks,” I muttered as I dragged myself to my feet, rubbing my aching limbs in an exaggerated show of melodrama.

This really was something of a surprising development. While my body certainly ached, I felt very well considering that I should to all intents and purposes be dead by now. And whatever this place was, it was unlike anything I had seen before. The room was very small, not much bigger than a garage, but was filled with a staggering amount of strange looking machines and instruments whose function I couldn’t even guess at. Frankly, it was a bit of a mess, and it was difficult to imagine that all this stuff could possibly serve any useful purpose.

“So,” I began, straightening myself out and trying to look nonchalant, “where are we? Is this another of the scientific bases? You obviously know how to thaw a guy out!” My attempt at lightening the mood seemed entirely lost on my new companion.

“Scientific base? No.” said Loo Croker, who was frustratingly reticent to be drawn into a conversation of more than a few words. “You’re here because I need your help.”

“My help? Really?”

“Yes, I’m stuck, you see. Why else would I be here in this monotonous frozen wasteland?”

“Indeed,” I replied. “And what exactly can I do for you? I suppose I do owe you a favour after you saved my life.”

“I can’t get my ship’s engines started. They stalled when I hit the ice. That’s where you come in. There’s a manual override handle to kick start the automated system. I need to fire up the controls at exactly the same moment that the override handle is turned. And my talents don’t extend to being in two places at one time.”

It all started to become obvious. I must have walked further than I had realised, because here I was having stumbled my way to a ship - probably a fishing vessel of some kind – that had evidently run aground on an ice shelf. Loo admittedly wasn’t exactly your stereotypical fisherman, but then these days it was very difficult to identify a stereotypical anyone. But I wasn’t given much time to ponder the matter, as he was already deep into explaining the conditions of the task.

“Now, there’s something I have to point out. Once we get the engines started I’ll have to get us moving immediately in order to propel us away from the ice. So that means you’re coming with me, I’m afraid.” This last comment was made more in despondency that he was going to be travelling with me rather than any empathy for my predicament.

While I might have protested against the presumptuousness of my companion, given the option of trudging back to the research base and continuing my wild goose chase after genetically modified penguins, it made sense to help out this stranded individual and see where it took me. Besides, perhaps he would have some insight into the situation or be able to offer me some new leads for my article.

It seems strange looking back on it, but for some reason it never struck me as particularly singular that Loo Croker was travelling on his ship alone. Surely thoughts like ‘What happened to all your crew?’, ‘What exactly caused you to crash into an ice shelf again?’ and ‘Hold on, it’s solid ice for hundreds of miles in every direction, so you must be lying’ should have been filling my mind, but instead my head was awash with the feeling that I’d made a complete pig’s ear of my life and the least I could do was help out this stranded fisherman before figuring out how to rekindle the dying embers of my career.

Loo led me into an adjoining room, where equally impressive piles of metallic junk lay strewn about. In one corner was a small machine that was quite unfamiliar to me – a kind of black steel lump the size of a suitcase, with two outsized wheels on the side that resembled ears – and into this Loo inserted an angular piece of metal that he found lying on the floor nearby.

I stood by slightly unimpressed as he first shook and then kicked the machine into life, though by life I mean the slight flicker of a light and a rather unhealthy spluttering sound. My companion seemed pleased with this outcome to his handiwork though, and he stood up rubbing his hands together and nodding his head with approval. He then turned and handed me a two-way radio, with the instruction that I should wait for his word before putting all the energy I had into turning the makeshift handle as fast as I could.

I nodded dumbly throughout all of Loo’s directions, the sensation not quite escaping me that something exceptionally peculiar was going on. When Loo rushed out of the room, I made a point of having a poke around some of the piles of objects that filled this place. He had certainly been around, for not even the most touristy gift shop in Manhattan could compete with some of the stuff here in terms of pure kitsch. In one box that I simply couldn’t resist opening was a selection of cheap pottery with extravagant looking beachscapes etched on the sides. In another were a couple of t-shirts with ‘I love Styllergont’ written on – wherever or whoever Styllergont was. A third revealed a couple of mugs that changed colour when I picked them up them up, in a very Blackpool circa 1986 kind-of-a-way. And a fourth, to my utter disappointment, contained nothing but dozens of sticks of rock.

More remarkable were the objects that I couldn’t identify, and these made up the majority of stuff in this room. Strange metallic devices, balls and cubes with no apparent purpose, plastic blobs that morphed into something else when you picked them up – it reminded me of my visit to the Museum of the Unknown in London, only with stuff that didn’t look as if it had been congealed especially for the purposes of looking weird.

Before I had time to dwell too much on what it all meant, my radio crackled into life and Loo Croker’s excited voice came through to demand that I begin turning the leaver. I put down the objects that I had been examining, and went back to the corner of the room where the machine was still clinging to life. Not one to be put off a task by the fact that I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing it, I energetically began turning the handle as fast as I could.

The effects of my exertions were instant. The machine – so feeble just a moment ago – suddenly began resembling an object that had just remembered what its purpose in life was, and a rich low hum and a row of flashing lights told me that my efforts were paying off. After a couple of minutes of this, Loo’s voice came through to tell me that all was well and I could stop and make my way up to the bridge. This was quite an exciting moment, as the likes of me seldom got themselves invited forward on boats unless I was in trouble. As I walked out of the room, I felt the ship shudder as it made the exertion to remove itself from where it was stuck, and then a certain calmness as it began to pull away from the ice shelf.

It didn’t take me long to find my way to the bridge, a fact that had more to do with the size of the ship than any great skill on my part, but when I did I could have collapsed in a way far more dramatic than when I had keeled over in the ice. It wasn’t the fact that the walls of the bridge were lined with all manner of futuristic computer equipment. It wasn’t the fact that I felt as if I had just walked onto the set of a slightly low-budget sci-fi movie. And it wasn’t even the fact that Loo Croker was sitting at the front of all this, stabbing at buttons and shouting out sequences of numbers at a computer that beeped complicitly after each one. No, what took me by surprise more than anything was the fact that, outside the large viewing window at the front of the bridge, I could see nothing but blue sky and clouds, and, on closer inspection, the sea several hundred metres below us.

It’s always a pain when people don’t clarify exactly which type of ship you’re going to be travelling in, though I think it’s fair to say that on Earth it generally goes without saying that it is the seafaring sort rather than the space variety. However my presumptuousness was looking a little foolish now, for here I was on the bridge of a spaceship, looking out at what was an admittedly wonderful sight of miles and miles of Antarctic coastline below us.

I couldn’t help feel slightly annoyed at my companion for having withheld this small but critical piece of information from me. There was no doubt that he was not one of the great conversationalists, but by saying that I would have to come with him I had expected this to mean that I would be dropped of in New Zealand or Argentina, not Neptune as was now looking more likely. On the other hand though, this could be my chance to, instead of dying alone in an undignified heap in the snow, explore other worlds and have untold adventures across the galaxy.

But I was letting my mind get carried away. Shouldn’t I ask Loo Croker for an explanation before presuming that I was the next Luke Skywalker? Perhaps this was nothing more than some American military exercise that had gone wrong, or one of those hermetic scientists who spend their entire lives trying to build machinery to see if there really is life out there. There was certainly going to be a logical explanation, and it was sure to be a great deal more feasible than anything that my overactive imagination came up with. Who knew, maybe it would even involve the odd psychotic penguin?

I approached Loo, who was now concentrating on an exercise that involved moving lines around a touch-screen and making new shapes that made no more sense to me than the first ones had. I slumped down into the chair next to him, and tried to look nonchalant.

“So Loo. Don’t mean to interrupt. Nice ship, by the way. I was just wondering though – what the hell is this and where are we going? And while we’re at it, who are you? I mean, really. Because most ships that crash into Antarctica and need a jump start tend to be local vessels, you know, as in from this planet.” I never was good at being cool and aloof.

Loo Croker didn’t look up from his task. “You offered to help, I took you up on that offer, and now we’re off.” Not only was this a highly inaccurate interpretation of events, it also told me precisely nothing about what I wanted to know. I tried a new approach.

“Okay. Where are you from?”

“Slahartee 7.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s out by the Palaadie Martus, just past Fogh Sharpols.”

“Of course, where else would it be? Answer me this then – how come you speak English.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“What do you call it?”

“Standard. It’s the most widely spoken language in the universe.” Loo finally looked at me, though with a condescending smirk. “You didn’t think you’d invented it, did you? You fringe planets – you’re so primitive.”

“So you’re telling me that English, er Standard, is spoken right across the galaxy then? And I suppose there are humans on thousands of worlds too? Well if that’s true, how come we’ve never flown further than the moon?”

“Look,” sighed Loo. “Do you think people just magically appeared on this planet out of thin air? What was your theory about where you came from?”

“Er, God and stuff,” I muttered, somewhat inadequately.

“I don’t pretend to know the history of this backwater, but a lot of worlds developed when travellers visited – or got lost – thousands of years ago and ended up colonising the planet. Standard has been spoken for grillions of years. Humans have been around even longer than that. Most planets grow that way. I’ve seen it a million times.”

I wasn’t convinced by this explanation, but I didn’t want to expose my naivety any further with my dubious grasp of evolution, so I let the matter be for now. What was of more present concern was what was going to happen to us now. Loo had apparently finished his task, for he was now strapping himself into his chair and wearing the face of satisfaction of a man that knew that he was about to escape from a personal hell.

“Better get yourself strapped in,” Loo instructed. “Wouldn’t want to get hurt on take off would you?”

“You mean we haven’t taken off yet? I’m not sure I’m ready for this.”

Loo Croker pressed a couple of buttons, and the angle of the ship tipped to a sickening 45 degrees, accompanied by a disturbing shaking sensation that made the ship feel like it was about to fall apart. I grappled for the harnesses, and locked myself into my chair. A moment later, speakers in my chair began to blare out a familiar tune. It was Gloria Gaynor’s Never can say goodbye.

And, as the ship propelled itself at an incomprehensible speed upwards and out of the Earth’s atmosphere, a new thought entered my mind: Loo Croker had a sense of humour after all.


Chapter III

I’ve never been very fond of flying. I mean, think about it. You sit there – knees somewhere in the vicinity of your ears – with a kid on one side finding it hilarious to pinch you and a loner on the other who keeps telling you that planes have fundamental design flaws. When the air host (who, if it’s a woman, wishes she’d got a job on a more prestigious airline, or if it’s a man, wishes he’d got that dancing part in West Side Story) brings you your food, you don’t even get a real knife and fork to cut the dinner. Which, by the way, looks like it was an exhibit at the World in Miniature. If you are lucky enough to get a window seat, you get a few moments of a good view, but no possible access to the toilet. If you get an aisle seat you’ve got access to the toilet, but you’d better be quick before the trolley gets moving and prevents your return for at least half an hour. And if you’ve got a middle seat – well, you really should think about checking in earlier.

My flight with Loo Croker was nothing like that. In fact, crucial differences from conventional flying abound. Where normally you have the comfortingly familiar, softly spoken English accent of the pilot, I had the more animated Loo Croker, who would periodically scream at one of the devices on his control panel, all of which looked like they might terminally malfunction at any moment. In place of air hostesses there was, well, no-one. On the plus side, my seat was unusually comfortable and roomy, and I had the added advantage of a wonderfully large viewing window that was far more impressive than your standard pea-sized aeroplane porthole.

It had taken just seconds to get clear of the Earth’s orbit, and though there was a little too much rattling for my liking, this was undoubtedly a highly advanced craft. Having done a nifty manoeuvre around a couple of satellites – Sky TV were within metres of having their technical helpdesk flooded by a million simultaneous calls, let me tell you – Loo Croker started to relax and nodded his head in quiet satisfaction.

For my own part, I was engaged in a new emotion somewhere in the vicinity of agog, a little to the left of bewildered. At what felt like a gentle strolling pace, but in reality certainly faster than man had ever travelled before, we meandered past the stunning line up of planets that made up our solar system. For there was Jupiter, majestic ball of gas that it is, dominating our section of space. And you could almost reach out and grab the rings of Saturn, if you had the inclination and large enough hands.

There were many important questions that I needed to ask Loo, and though it would have been nice to simply sit back and admire the view, I felt that I needed to put them to him now before things got too far out of control. My companion hadn’t proved himself to be overly fond of thorough explanations up until now, so I thought I’d ease him into conversation gently by bowling him a couple of easy ones for starters.

“So what’s this ship called anyway, Loo?”

“The Pineapple.”

“You’re kidding?”

“No why?” He fired me an annoyed expression.

“Just doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing you’d call an intrepid space faring vessel, that’s all. I’d have thought it would be the Challenger, the Majestic or the Galaxis, something grandiose like that.”

“Well it isn’t, it’s called the Pineapple.”

There followed a period of silence before I tried again.
“Look, Loo, I don’t want to come across all needy, but there was still a couple of things I needed to ask.”

My companion sighed, clearly annoyed that just when things seemed to be going well, here was I demanding answers to a whole host of common knowledge questions.

“What?”

“Where are we going?”

“The Hub. It’s the central space station in the universe. I recently bought a new ship and it’s waiting there for me to pick it up. Fabulous craft it is too – one of the most sophisticated explorers money can buy. I’ve been saving for years. It’s got a Tubor 5000 satellite navicomputer on board – there’s nowhere you can’t go with that.”

Finally I seemed to have hit on a subject that Loo was enthusiastic about, and I was keen not to let the conversation die.

“And how do we get there?”

“It’s not as easy as you might think. Most galaxies are simple enough places to navigate around. You typically head out past the furthest planet and then the Farqll Streams that are created in the voids at the end of the solar systems carry you out onto the Panuniversal Hyperlink. And from there you can head out anywhere you like.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ coming here…”

“But in the case of this solar system, things are a little different, which explains why you don’t get many visitors here. You see, where the Farqlls normally converge to form your path out of the system – which would be a few thousand miles beyond the object you call Pluto – there is instead a highly combustible gas field that makes it extremely dangerous to navigate. And even if you do manage to get through that you still come out in the back end of nowhere, a place no-one has even bothered to chart on conventional star maps because of the fact that nobody ever bothers to go there. Really, you would only go to all the trouble of coming here if you either have a very good reason to or an insatiable thirst for adventure. Or unless you happen to be an Experimentalist of course - there’s nowhere those trouble stirrers won’t go.”

“And who might the Experimentalists be?” I asked.

“They are the professional irritants of the universe. They travel to every world in existence, kidnapping individuals and generally freaking out yokels who they know won’t be believed when they say they’ve been abducted. They’re harmless enough, of course, I think it’s just their idea of sport. They’ve probably got a kidnapping league going or something, with extra points for the weirdest places to abduct from. But give them their due – they’re certainly persistent in finding ways of going to planets like yours that everyone else would rather die than visit.”

I fell silent for a moment. This was all very well, but it had still not provided the comprehensive explanation that I had been hoping for of how exactly this tired looking and inappropriately named vessel was going to find its way out of the Milky Way. When Loo finally did take it upon himself to explain, it wasn’t quite the confidence filling master plan I had hoped for.
Loo’s idea was to do a nifty shimmy around what should be the least combustible side of the gas field (I loved the ‘should’), then dive off down a little-known black hole that my companion had stumbled across, which, provided it didn’t warp us back into the stone age, will bring us out just a few million miles west of the Hub. From there it would be a simple matter of finding our way onto the nearest inter-stellar transitional to reach our destination.

Try as I might, I could not find flaws in Loo’s proposal, though this had more to do with the fact that it made no sense whatsoever to me than any tactical brilliance inherent within the plan. It would have made little difference anyway, because out of the viewing window a deep blue Pluto-shaped mass was looming up, and it was more apparent than ever that I was way beyond the point of no return. Besides, Loo was an experienced space traveller, and there could be little doubting the fact that he knew exactly what he was doing, even if he frequently did his best to demonstrate to the contrary.

As if to emphasise the point, Loo took the opportunity to accidentally lean on a lever that set off a series of alarms and flashing lights, accompanied by a panicked expression and the frantic twisting of dials on the dash. For my part I sat with my arms folded rigidly across my chest, doing my best to give the impression that I was thoroughly unperturbed by all of this.

A few moments later, Loo brought the machine under control for long enough to explain what was about to happen next.

“Okay, this is how it’s going to work,” he said. “In a few minutes we are going to approach the gas fields. I’m not going to lie to you – it’s going to get bumpy. But it’s important that you don’t distract me with all your daft questions and asking whether we are going to survive. Everything’s going to happen very quickly, but if you can’t handle it you’re going to have to sit in the hold. Understand?”

I nodded dumbly, and set my face to a smile that I had used many times to cover the fact that I had absolutely no confidence whatsoever in what somebody else was doing. Clearly I was going to have to rely on Loo’s somewhat slapdash approach to piloting to get me though this, but in the absence of anyone more suitable, or indeed anyone at all, he was going to have to do. So I sat back uncomfortably in my seat and tightened the straps a little more.

Nervous though I was, the overriding emotion to hit me during what happened next was awe. For despite the fact that the Pineapple was now juddering about in a way that would make most roller-coaster fanatics sick, I was simply transfixed by the stunning sight that was unfolding in front of me.

For far from the invisible death trap that I had imagined a highly combustible gas field to be, before me instead was a kaleidoscopic masterpiece of shapes, colours and imagery that not even the most creative of artists could have conjured up. There were deep blue swirls, jagged blood red lines and mesmeric glistening lights. It was quite the most extraordinary vista that I could remember seeing, and I only wished I had a camera to hand.

As we skirted alongside one particularly bright patch, the ship lurched violently to one side before Loo hauled it back under control. And then, just as the Pineapple looked set to be ripped apart by the forces being exerted on it, everything suddenly fell silent and all went black.


The lights came on. I couldn’t say exactly how long we had been sitting there in the dark, but it must have been several minutes. I probably could have broken the silence earlier, but it seemed more appropriate to wait dramatically for something to happen.

When it didn’t I glanced across at Loo, who was doing a remarkable job of looking utterly aghast at the situation we now found ourselves in. I shook my head and wondered, not for the first time today, how exactly it was that such a character as this could come to have explored the universe alone.

“This is not good, it’s not good,” Loo was growling through gritted teeth. It was an assessment that I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to hear.

“What’s not good, Loo?” I sighed.

Loo turned to look me in the eye. “We’re way off course,” he said. “We survived the gas field and made the dive into the black hole alright, but from there it didn’t work out quite as I’d hoped.”

“Go on.”

“We are hundreds of millions of miles away from where we ought to be. But could we have ended up somewhere benign with maybe a space station to take care of us and fix our wrecked spaceship? No, of course not. We had to wind up in the Slambarr Nebulus.”

There were two obvious questions here that simply demanded to be answered, but supposing that my companion wouldn’t want to conduct an interview right now, I plumped instead for the most pressing.

“What do you mean the ship is wrecked?”

Loo looked at me with red, bloodshot eyes. “You obviously don’t have much understanding of the geology of the universe. All that pressure on the ship as we passed the gas fields – that wasn’t just the air caressing us on our way, you know. Far from it, every moment that we were in its vicinity the Pineapple was being severely damaged. And then, when we passed though the black hole, the navigation system became completely crippled and sent us on a random course towards the strongest signal it could pick up. And now, nothing’s working. Nothing at all. We’ve got no choice but to sit here and wait for someone to come and pick us up.”

I said nothing, unstrapped myself, got up and paced around the bridge. I wasn’t annoyed, per se. After all, I was supposed to be dead by now and Loo Croker had at least afforded me a greater view of space than anyone from my planet had ever had before, but it was difficult not to be irritated by our pilot’s lack of nous when it came to, well, just about everything. I hadn’t even had the chance to ask what was so terrible about this particular area of the universe, and why it was that he seemed to be so pessimistic about our chances of survival here.

I turned around and looked at Loo. He was sitting bolt upright on the edge of his seat, staring rigidly down at one of the instruments in front of him. Indeed so intently was he staring, that I wondered whether there wasn’t some new crisis that had afflicted us. An unstoppable gas leak perhaps, or an end to our supply of oxygen.

I strolled back up to my seat and coughed to grab Loo’s attention. He didn’t look up, but instead extended his arm theatrically and pointed ahead out of the viewing window. And there, looming large and on an apparently irrevocable collision course, was an enormous, grey and intensely mean-looking starship...