Pursuit and Proposition Thatcham Writers

“Its all just a biss, I mean pish..  mean…” he trailed off. Despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, Frank’s best ideas usually occurred to him when he wasn’t drunk enough to be called drunk, and sober enough to accept he wasn’t sober.
“Its a teleportation beam,” he mused, “that teleports things. Like matter. And energy. I just wish I could teleport the beam to somewhere else.” He zipped up and washed his hands and face. In the mirror, all he could see of himself were his gaunt eyes and heavy stubble.
“I wish I could teleport myself somewhere else” he muttered. “If only we had enough power. We just don’t make enough power in the entire world!” Frank watched his eyes widen.
“Unless,” he said to the black-clad tattooed man who just came into the men’s room as he walked out to find a pay-phone, “we use a power source that isn’t on the planet.” He whistled as he weaved his way inexorably into a chair that he swore had been a little further to the right. Frank turned himself around and continued with uneven steps toward Magnus.

“What is your real name?” He asked without any preamble as he reached his seat. “Never mind. Do you get me a mobile phone? I need to talk to an old friend of mine. Wonder what Gentle Dickie Dirk is up to these days?”

He lifted his pint. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a way to magically get phone numbers do you? I need to get hold of someone who’s traditionally near-impossible to get hold of.”

He watched Magnus scratch at his own stubbled face, before reaching into his pocket in a burst of motion.

“How can you fit your whole forearm into those tiny pockets?” Frank asked abstractedly. “And isn’t it your round? I need to get some pen and a paper.” He considered the previous sentence. “Or some paper and a pen.”

“We would never abuse our language to have a word as both a noun and a verb,” Magnus grumbled, “although we don’t actually have any verbs as such.” He pulled his arm out with a flourish, causing Frank to jump backward and tip over his chair. Magnus shot forward and used his other arm to steady the now precariously balanced Frank as he shook a black slab of something thin in Franks face.

“We used a more holistic way of using language.” Magnus shouted, pushing the plastic gadget so close to Franks eye, it took up his whole vision. The screen lit up, blinding him in contrast to the murky gloom of the pub. He could just make out the first three letters of “Goo.”.

“Right. What am I trying to detect? Dickie who?”

plans of pints and men Thatcham Writers

Magnus had not stopped his buzzing machine until they were clear of the capital. The journey reminded Frank his first pillion ride on a motorcycle when one of the sixth formers at school had stopped at the bus stop near his home and offered him a lift. Frank, a spotty third former* found it difficult to stand when he got off ten minutes later at school. This time it was no different.  Stote had driven like a maniac, down side streets and the narrow lanes between rows of terraced houses. He was like a professional escaping from a bank robbery, wailing police cars wailing all around.  But he might just as well have driven straight along the A4 for no-one followed. He had, planned or unplanned, done the perfect springing.

Frank strode over to the window and looked out. It could have been anywhere. There was a lorry park outside, way down below, half full of trucks of all sizes, with a small stack of containers along one side. The faint buzz of traffic could be heard if he listened hard, and he could see large, low flying jets.  He could read the logos of some of them on their tails. He watched a green one descend from left to right, shortly followed by a white one. They must be landing not very far away.  Stote had gone to get a car, well that’s what he had said. Frank was unsure. He tried the door but it was locked. He had to wait until the sneaky Stote returned, but he could hit him on the head when he came through the door. He looked for a suitable weapon but the only possibility was a small metal waste bin. Frank lifted it beside the door but it was never going to do the job. The other part of him thought home was dangerous. Those crooks would be watching for him to come back.  Frank fell asleep, to be woken by the door swinging open shortly followed by Magnus Stote.  Frank realised he was on the run, but with less than ideal company.

The next morning the pair set off, Magnus driving. He wouldn’t say where they were going, though it was clearly northwards. Shortly the pair joined the A1, and stayed on it for quite some distance. They shared little. That was until they reached Stamford, which the only thing Frank knew about was the town’s odd habit of letting bulls run loose through the streets. He didn’t know whether they still did it or whether it had died out in the 20^th century. Stote seemed to know nothing.

By plying the fellow with best bitter in the Stamford Arms, Frank discovered that his companion was not immune to the effects of alcohol.  It had taken over eight pints to get him merry, and Frank had had to appear to be drinking at the same rate while not actually doing so. The things Frank heard made him think hard. It was clear that Magnus was not from the earth. He was not even from one of the nearby, well understood planets. Stote’s home planet, which he referred to as Kagekitu, was also going to be wiped out by the gamma ray burst.

On the run Thatcham Writers

“Coffee, Sir, at a Starbucks. That’s when the subject was abducted.”

“They should drink tea, like any good British agents.” Sir Reginald’s icy voice down the phone line held no sign of humour. Whitehall lore was that the last joke Sir Reginald had told was when he was six years old. “How was Mr Hope abducted?”

“On a pizza delivery scooter, Sir. The field agents saw it leaving the scene carrying two people. They tried to follow but their vehicle was caught in traffic.”

Being the senior agent in the ultra-top-secret MI7 used to be a dream job for Kevin McDonald. He reported to pretty much no-one, had an almost unlimited budget, played with the coolest tech gear on the planet and got to protect the world from the dangers of outer space. He WAS a Man In Black, although he still thought the American team had made a mistake allowing Hollywood to see one of their operations and make a film about it. Yes, it was not a bad life for a comic-book and Sci-Fi geek really. But now he had to deal with Herman and Stavinski’s bungling, again. He understood the need for big, imposing men who could turn up and make people tell them things but why, oh, why did it have to be those two on shift today? Stavisnki’s Terminator impression was pretty cool but he insisted on using it every time he called at a door and Herman was always requesting “emergency extractions” for civilian witnesses. Now he had to get three teenage boys picked up, drugged, mind-wiped and dropped off at some remote location, probably just for giving Herman some lip. Oh well, he knew a nice spot under the M4 flyover at Uxbridge that would do.

Kevin sighed. It was basically a simple job at MI7; he just had to keep the public from finding out about the many, lovely ways space might kill all life on the planet so they didn’t panic and end civilisation for themselves. A few years ago he had persuaded the world that a dangerous virus which had invaded Earth on the back of the returning space shuttle had only been bird flu and last year he had covered up that the Russians and Americans fired their Star Wars orbital defence platforms at a meteor which could have wiped out all life on the planet (again). But now there was this gamma ray pulse and there was no way he could cover that up for much longer, despite what Sir Reginald wanted, Olympics or no.

So, when Kevin had heard about Frank Hope and his mice, he realised they needed to talk.

But he couldn’t as some other clandestine group had snatched the poor bastard. Kudos for using a pizza delivery scooter but didn’t they know that they had just doomed the Earth, for real this time. Kevin reached for his mug of tea, Earl Gray, hot and thought Sir Reginald might have a point about caffeinated beverages after all.

They Should Drink Tea Thatcham Writers

Observing Frank being hauled off by a pair of dubious individuals, his mind’s eye locked onto one of the earlier scenes in Apocalypse Earth! – his computer game that had never got off the ground – when a leading British scientist is kidnapped by extremists, requiring a timely rescue by the hero, Duane Clandestine, amidst a bodycount soaring to numbers beyond the ridiculous. Bearing in mind that he was certainly no superhero and the most lethal weapon he possessed was a Sabatier paring knife, Magnus made the instant decision if not to free Frank, then at least to discover where he was being taken. Christ, it couldn’t be, could it? Extraordinary rendition and a fast jet to Azerbaijan or some equally godforsaken hole?

By now, the black Landcruiser with Frank bundled into the rear was getting under way, narrowly avoiding a pizza delivery bike. The lad on board gave them the finger, then removed his helmet, standing on the pavement, arms waving, employing language that Magnus found disturbing in one so young.

Magnus didn’t hesitate. With a resoluteness that frankly surprised him, he snatched the helmet, vaulted onto the bike, gunned the engine and shot off down the street. Putt-putting a precarious path onto the main road, he kept the Landcruiser in sight, gripping the handlebars with a ferocity that turned his knuckles white. Thankfully, the weight of traffic held the Landcruiser in sufficient check to enable Magnus to close in.

Weaving dangerously between stationary vehicles, the enormity of his decision to give chase was starting to prey on his mind. What the hell was he thinking of? He could hardly ram the Landcruiser, force it off the road straddling nothing more deadly than a pizza delivery bike. And if he did, then what?

As the questions tumbled over each other, the Landcruiser inexplicably pulled over alongside a parade of shops. Sucking in carbon monoxide from the rear end of a bus whose emission levels were surely way beyond Ministry of Transport guidelines, Magnus watched the two heavies emerge from the vehicle and head into a Starbucks, crucially leaving Frank all on his own. In an instant, he knew what Clandestine would have done. Well, obviously minus the gunning down of both suits and the associated collateral damage.

Jerking to a halt beside the Landcruiser, Magnus yanked open the rear door, noted the look of shock on Frank’s face with a certain amount of perverse pleasure, and in his best Duane Clandestine voice drawled: “Hop on, sunshine, and let’s get the hell outta here!”

LET’S GET THE HELL OUTTA HERE! Thatcham Writers

The Other Side of the Galaxy Thatcham Writers

If humanity was to be saved from the impending disaster by a ‘teleporter thing’, Dr Matthew ‘Dirk’ Harlow felt that he ought to have known about it. Angela was probably off on one of her flights of fancy – something she seemed increasingly prone to since their divorce. Then again, he’d had an uncomfortable feeling of late that something wasn’t quite right. Meetings he wasn’t invited to, emails where he failed to make the copy list. Despite being chief scientific adviser to the government, he was beginning to think that he was being deliberately kept out of the loop.

Had someone found him out? Despite being a scientist who used to pride himself on his integrity and objectivity, he had been unable to resist the temptation of exploiting his unique knowledge. If the world really was going to end (and he wasn’t even entirely convinced of it himself), people would have other things to worry about than insider dealing or breaches of the official secrets act.

He had already revealed the facts to a number of people, most of them women. He had discovered that it was possible, if he could convince them it was true, to have the most mind-blowingly amazing end-of-the-world sex. What they did with the information afterwards wasn’t his concern. Since Angela left him, he had lost touch with the parts of his psyche that dealt with caring, sharing and moral responsibility.

But he definitely hadn’t told Angela – in fact he’d taken deliberate pleasure in imagining her distress when he let her in on the secret at the last minute, when it was too late to make any plans. How long had she known? And more to the point, who had told her? In his drunken state, he grabbed her hand and pulled her towards him.

‘Fancy a quick one for old times?’

Angela slapped his face.

It had been worth a try, he thought confusedly. It would have been easier to question her in an atmosphere of post-coital intimacy. But now he would have to get the information some other way.

Dr Matthew ‘Dirk’ Harlow wanted to survive. Sensing that his tenure in the circles of power might not always be secure, he had created his own insurance plan through a series of strategic dealings on the stock market. Once the news of the planet’s doom was either leaked or announced, he was likely to reap immense profits. How long they would hold their value in the ensuing financial chaos was anybody’s guess, but he was planning to use them as swiftly as possible to buy his way into some kind of personal survival scheme. A place in a bunker, transport to another planet, cryogenic burial if need be – he wasn’t too fussy as long as it got him out of the way of that bloody gamma-ray burst.

Or a’ teleporter thing’, if his ex-wife was to be believed. Now, he needed to pull out all the stops to get her on his side.

A teleporter thing Thatcham Writers

Granted that running is often pointless, occasionally it has benefits. For Angela, these were usually an improved digestion and increased heart-lung function. This time, however, she cannoned into Dirk (Dr, for short) Hadlow, coming out of an off-licence with several fancy bottles in a bag, and looking shifty. If she hadn’t already known that face and look, she would have apologized and moved on. This time, she stared at her ex-husband and exclaimed: “Oh for Christ’s sake, who is she this time?”

Dirk picked himself up, took one look at Angela and reached into his bag for a bottle of vodka. He took a ten second swig, before saying to Angela: “She’s the whole world to me, ” hiccupping, and laughing uproariously.

“Who is?”

“Mother Earth. Dear old mother, with trees and stuff. Thing you’re standing on. Ever seen a film called Melancholia?” He reached out and, drawing Angela to him, proceeded to hug her as if she were not only still his wife, but also his ideal squeeze.

Angela broke away, a little reluctantly.

“Is this about that gamma-ray burst?” she asked. “The one that’s going to kill everything more evolved than a stone in six months time?”

Dirk didn’t so much gasp as fail to breathe for twenty seconds, then hyperventilate. Angela patted him on the back, and sat down on a nearby bench with him. It was deliberately designed to be hell to sit on, and impossible to lie on, so as to ensure that tramps would have to sleep on the ground and die as soon as possible.

“I know a man,” she said, “who knows all about the end of the world. And he has a teleporter thing that he thinks will save lots of people, and some mice. Only two other men stole him tonight. Now, what do you think of that?”

Hasta la Vista, Baby Thatcham Writers

“Do I look like Frank to you mate?” she snapped, “I think those shades aren’t helping, I’ll tell you that.”
The man touched a hand to the side of this head. Angela put a hand on her purse and stepped forward to squeezed past him. “That’s a negatory on contact.” He murmured.
She stopped mid-step and looked up at him. “What did you just call me?” Angela demanded looking up. “Listen to me you big gorilla, I don’t know who you are, but I’m not the type of Sheila to take that – “
“Your name is Sheila?” the man rumbled, taking off his glasses.
“What? No? Why would you -”
Angela stopped pinched the bridge of her nose. “I can’t deal with this.” she complained. “Frank!” Angela yelled over her shoulder, “One of your sight-impaired mates are here to see you.” She’d barely walked three steps when the sight of another man in a dark suit who could have been the first gorillas twin appeared out of the blue to step in front of her. He held out a hand. It was so close to her face that she could see the pattern of lines on his palm.

“Sarah Connor?” He asked in a voice so low that she thought he might set off some sort of seismic alarm.
“Who?”
Angela watched open-mouthed as this second man also proceeded to talk into his hand.
“Negatory to Clintock.” After a second, he looked up. “Alice Bannad? Talia Lu Deville? Katherine Janeway?”
The surprise on her face disappeared as she recognised the second to last name and she crossed her arms.

“You’re talking about Frank’s fancy girlfriends with all their airs and graces, are you?” I am not one of those – women!” She sniffed. “Besides, what’s it to you?”
Gorilla one looked up in the air.
“Identity Confirmed. Miss Weiss? Have you had any contact with Mr Hope recently?”
“What?” She asked, instinctively looking back towards the front door.
“Have. You. Had. Any. Contact. With. Mr. Hope. Recently?” Gorilla one repeated patiently.
“I’m not a bloody fool you know,” Angela snapped. “Why do you want Mr Hope? Who are you?” She cringed inside as her journalists training took over, and the five “W’s” of who, how, where, when and what came to the forefront of her mind. There really was a story here, she thought to herself. What had Frank gotten himself into?
“They’re F.B.I.” piped up a voice to the side of them. Both agents whipped up handguns and pointed them to where the voice came from where three teenagers, two sporting thick woollen hats, and the other one in a t-shirt so green it reminded her of radioactive snot even in the sodium streetlights.
The first one used a be ringed hand to nudge his friend. The hand soon dropped under the weight of so much gold. “Nah, that’s a glock. Pretty sure its still not on the approved list for the feebs anymore.”
The first suited man waved his hand, and they put their guns away as quickly as they’d drawn them.
“Please step away from Ms Weiss.” He said as he stepped in front of the lads. The youth squinted.
“True dat.” He said. “Listen to him, innit. Issan English voice, so gotta be MI6. MI5 wouldn’t keep drawing down on da innocent unsuspecting public like us. My dad says issa tax fing. They don’t wanna shoot da few people who actually paying tax!” He cackled and the kids pounded fists with each other. The two men stepped towards the youths and they scattered.
“Wait until Magnus hears about this, he’s gonna love it!” one shouted happily.
Angela looked at the backs of the two suited men and walked backwards slowly to the front door. She pressed against it and cursed the lineage of all poms who have doors that keep shutting themselves as it refused to open. She turned and knocked surreptitiously. At her back, either gorilla one or two were talking quietly and she could catch the occasional phrase.
“Request emergency extraction, three, repeat three extra tango’s.” There was a pause in which she finally heard halting footsteps come towards the door. As the door finally opened, a shadow loomed over her to push the door hard as soon as it opened.
“Mr Hope. Please come with us. We’ve been sent to retrieve you.”
Frank stared. “What?” The suited agent put his own hand to the bridge of his nose.
Angela patted him on his arm. “I have that feeling too. Do you work out a lot?”

Come with me if you want us to live Thatcham Writers

“I’m sorry, Prime Minister, but there isn’t any.” The British government’s chief scientific advisor, Dr Matthew Harlow said to his ultimate boss wearily. “The gamma ray wavefront from the supernova is going to arrive in just over six months.”

“And there’s no way to survive the blast, or whatever it is?” The question had the hope of the scientific layman. Dr Harlow shook his head sadly.

“It’s not like a solar flare that might just knock out electronics and make birds fall out of the sky, Prime Minister; this is a high-intensity burst of gamma rays, the sort that will strip the atmosphere of all the ozone, leaving the earth unprotected. Anyone on the planet will be exposed to horrendous amounts of UV unless they live underground. It will also cause a new Ice Age that will severely disrupt the planet’s ecosystem and our food chain. You know all those post-apocalyptic movies; well it will be like that but without Hollywood’s saccharine veneer.”

“Can we build underground bunkers or cities, or something?” This question came from Sir Reginald Dower, the Cabinet Secretary.

“We don’t have time, Sir Reginald. Oh, a few people would be able to survive in old Cold War bunkers and I expect the American survivalists will be fine for a while, but the majority of the earth’s population is going to die in one way or another. We have six months, and we only know its that long because we got lucky with the new detector array under Ben Nevis and picked up some rogue particles travelling faster than light that CERN didn’t create. Normally, the first you know about a star exploding is when you see it. As a gamma ray travels at the speed of light, along with all that visible light and radio waves you are looking at with your telescope is the nasty stuff too!” Dr Harlow’s voice rose a bit.

“Calm down, Doctor.” said the Prime Minister, “Tell us what can be done.”

“Nothing, there is no good news! It is the end of the world!”

The Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary shared a glance. Sir Reginald cleared his throat.

“Thank you Doctor, you may go. And we don’t need to impress on you the need for secrecy?” His dark eyes bored into Dr Harlow’s. “We can’t have the public finding out and panicking, can we? You will need to make sure everyone on the research team and anyone else who might know about this signs the Official Secrets Act. Keep them quiet.”

Dr Harlow nodded reluctantly and left the room. Sir Reginald looked at the Prime Minister.

“When I first heard about this, I took the liberty of getting the bunkers online. I told them it was a drill, of course. There will be continuity of government, Prime Minister. Where there’s life there’s hope.”

“Keep a lid on the crisis please, Reggie; do whatever you need to stop people from finding out they are all about to die and can do nothing about it.”

“Yes, Prime Minister, I will keep them distracted with the Olympics.”

Secrets and Lies Thatcham Writers