16

When the galaxy turned away from war, it made countless trillions of people rather happy. Gone were the days when huge fleets of ships would descend upon a planet demanding surrender and their precious resources. Gone were the days when arbitrary lines drawn upon maps of the galaxy decided whether you were part of the Federation of Infidelities, or a member of the Cranial Inversion Imperium. Gone were the days of brothers and sisters trudging to war, or, more often, being transported to war in tiny transport ships where personal space became something of the past and hygiene decided it could have no part in such squalid conditions.

Of course, not everyone was happy about it. There were those that missed the days of phallic disruptors pointing at enemies and sending fiery death via torpedos that looked like the kind of liquorice sweets that every child knew was the most disgusting confectionary ever created, but ate them anyway because it made their teeth and tongue black. Which was fun.

Those people; the generals, the warlords, the tyrants, tried their very best to continue their war efforts only for the general public to sigh and wish they'd get over the whole 'subjugating and murdering people' thing and find something more productive to do with their time. Like crochet. So, they did. With practically every person within the galaxy unwilling to play their violent games anymore, the aforementioned generals, warlords, tyrants, et al, decided to retire. Partly because they could no longer recruit armies to their dubiously 'righteous' causes, but, mostly, because the galactic peace had taken the fun out of everything.

Entire planets were put aside for these people, outfitted with the very latest in virtual realities, haptic arrays and holo-matrices, and tabletop games, where they could satisfy their desires for conquest in the privacy of their own homes, in specially programmed battlefield simulators, or furiously trying to prove why Napoleon should never have lost Waterloo if he had had an intricately detailed, three-dimensional table with tiny, little painted soldiers upon it.

One such planet, the 'Shady Pines Retreat For Former Generals, Warlords, Tyrants and other Violently Pre-Disposed Persons', was where The Great Spituan had told Demi she could find War Garbler Tonbush and, inevitably, Bognrd BloodRage, the final member of Friss' crew and a vital part of whatever it was that Friss had planned. What Demi had not expected, however, was to find herself talking to War Garbler Tonbush's father, Reagatcher, listening to his many, and varied, complaints.

"And the soup? Let me tell ya, the soup! I've had better, but I can't complain." Reagatcher stood up from his motorised wheelchair, scratched his backside, adjusted the cushion and sat back down again. "Now, Grimthorn DeathClutcher, over there, he likes the soup, but, I gotta tell ya, how can you like soup that's dry. Dry! Let me tell ya, it takes a certain kind of nasty to make soup dry, but try telling that to Grimthorn. You can't. He won't listen. Watch. Hey, Grimthorn! The soup sucks!"

An elderly man, sat at a table alone, slammed his hands down onto the surface and attempted to leap to his feet. Unfortunately, his knees didn't have the fortitude of his intentions and he wobbled before sitting back down, his knees creaking and his false teeth needing to be pushed back into his mouth. Grimthorn scowled at Reagatcher and returned to studying the schematics of a particularly deadly looking warship. He sighed, tears forming in the corners of his eyes.

"That's all good and well, but what I need to know is ..." She paused as a virtual battle started in the corner of the lounge between a Uargatan cyber-monkey and a Wallakian Blow-Fish. No-one could get harmed, but it did make a noise. "All I need to know is whether you've seen your son lately? Tonbush?"

"Oy! Let me tell ya, that boy is the only one that can make a warlord father proud and exasperated at the same time. You know I bought him a hyper-dog one time. Yes, I did. All the bells and whistles. Internal mines, plasma regulators, blast repulsers. The works." Reagatcher waved a hand in dismissal. "Forget about it! He used it to attempt to annex the class next door. Great idea, terrible execution. I gotta tell ya, a hyper-dog used for infiltration and assassination? No subtlety, that boy."

Demi had started to feel more than a little exasperated herself. She had tried four times to get the old warlord to focus upon the question at hand and for four times, he had receded into reminiscences about his son that largely involved the boy being a complete idiot. She had started to wonder whether War Garbler Tonbush was as bad as his reputation would have people think.

What she needed was help. Someone to back her up, but Lap had disappeared almost as soon as they had landed and Friss had descended upon the retirement facility's canteen. How he managed to keep himself as healthy looking as he did, Demi could not begin to imagine. Lodka overfed him and, while on Zapasnoy, Friss had eaten nothing but Repli-Junk Food. Yet he still had muscles and low body fat and seemed to want to eat all the more. She wondered whether he had a tape worm.

"But have you seen him? Your son?" With Lodka's super-fast, super-luminal drive, they had probably arrived far faster than any other ship, but that didn't mean Demi could waste time on a clearly senile warmonger. She needed answers. "Answer the question, soldier!"

"Ugh. You remind me of my third wife. Or was it the fourth? She could yell, I gotta tell ya." For some reason, Reagatcher clasped Demi's hand and she felt a sudden need to bathe in disinfectant. "You know I'm single, right? Divorced. Or widowed. I can't remember. I like a fiery woman to keep me on my toes. Hey! You wanna know what bothers me? No pines. They call this place 'Shady Pines', but there aren't any. Not a one. No. Pines!"

Certain she wasn't going to get any worthwhile information from the man, Demi tried to pull her hand from his without offending him. Then she realised she didn't care if she offended him or not and snatched her hand away. She wiped her hand on a sleeping resident as she strode away from War Garbler Tonbush's father toward Friss, who had sat down with a plethora of plates and bowls before him, tapping his teeth as he decided what to eat first.

All the dishes appeared to be a variation on one type of food. Some appeared like soup, though it didn't look dry at all. Others looked thicker. Some had meat in them, others various vegetables, but, somehow, Demi knew they were all basically the same thing. Friss scowled at each one before poking a finger into each meal, sucking the finger tip dry and then moving on to the next. Once he had performed the same operation on each dish, he sat back, disappointed and sighing.

"Just goes to prove, there's only one perfect Borscht." He pushed the nearest plate away, then brightened and winked at Demi. "You'll see, soon enough. Anyway! News?"

"He's as mad as a bag of badgers. I don't think he even remembers the last time he saw Tonbush." With an absent-minded finger, Demi tested the bowl of soup-type Borscht nearest to her. It was, surprisingly, delicious and Friss had turned his nose up at it! "We could have missed him, could have arrived before him. Who knows? What do we do now?"

"I've always found waiting and seeing what the galaxy throws at us usually works out in the end." He leaned back, his head resting against his hands and pushed against the table with his boot, tilting his chair precariously. "In the meantime, while we wait, I heard Doris over there has challenged Mad Mick McMurder, over there, to a holo-war later. Bless. It's the only true way to satisfy their homicidal urges."

Demi certainly did not want to witness that. Doris looked as though she couldn't walk faster than a hamstrung turtle, and the blaster rifle with over-and-under grenade launchers looked bigger than her. Against her opponent, a relatively spry seventy-year old if Demi was any judge, looked about ready to murder everyone as he licked the blade of notched axe. Mad Mick cursed as he cut a slice of his tongue away, blood dribbling from his mouth.

It all looked like they had made a wasted journey and Demi had decided to have another attempt at trawling Gal-Net in order to find the latest rumours of War Garbler Tonbush's whereabouts, or of Bognrd's, when someone dropped a donkey, made out of string and wearing a sombrero, upon the table next to her. She couldn't see Lap as they pulled out a chair, scraping it along the floor, and then sat down beside Demi. They crinkled and rustled and even gave a little rattle amongst the other tones before they finally turned so that Demi could actually see them.

"What did they say? And where did they get the donkey?" The donkey looked as though it had gone through several wars itself. Threadbare, punctured by bullet holes, at some time in its past, a little sad looking. At one time, someone must have loved that donkey. "And what is it with all these stuffed toys? Is it ... is it a sexual thing?"

"Sexual? Lap?" Friss laughed for several minutes. Literally. In the meantime, Lap took to tasting every Borscht variant on the table, their two-dimensional features grimacing as they tasted each one. "No. They just like them. They'll get bored with them eventually. The donkey? Let's just say they found it and leave it at that."

Friss set his chair back on four legs, reaching for the donkey and turning it, slightly. Except he turned it the wrong way, exposing the fresh bloodstain on the opposite side. As though Demi had not seen the blood, Friss realised his mistake and turned the donkey back the other way. It fell over, coming to a rest on its side, showing the bloodstain to anyone that could see. Lap reached over, grabbed it and cuddled it tight to their two-dimensional body.

A sudden crackling sound reached everyone's ears. At first, Demi thought that Lap had become angry, prompting her to jump to her feet, race around the table and hide behind Friss. It was not Lap that made that sound and Demi could see several of Shady Pine's residents had noticed the noise, too. Others had switched off their hearing aids. The crackling came from the ancient looking speakers that hung from the walls at regular intervals. Demi had already tuned out the sad music those speakers had played, but she couldn't ignore the crackling.

"People of Shady Pines Retreat For Former Generals, Warlords, Tyrants and other Violently Pre-Disposed Persons. Please be aware that I have surrounded this planet with deadly, well-armed and sleek-looking drones and I will not hesitate to use them if you do not comply with my demands!" A perfectly modulated voice replaced the crackling noise and everyone except Demi and Friss paid absolutely no attention to the voice in the slightest. "Demand number one: You will hand over my father. There are no more demands. Do as I say and you will all live. Fail to comply and you will all die in the most terrible and brutal fashions. Oh, and this is War Garbler Tonbush. My father is Reagatcher. Just for clarification. You have one hour to comply!"