34

Demi stood, awestruck, at the magnificence of creation. Or, rather, destruction. The closer they came to the enormous black hole at the centre of the galaxy, the more she came to understand the nature of life itself. An endless cycle of birth and death. An inevitability of mortality. The colours. The accretion disk had far more detail to it than she had previously expected. Whole planets and moons fell into the gravity well and broke apart as she watched. The black hole sat like a representation of death for the entire universe. Or DEATH, depending on which books you read as a child.

"I've seen better?" Briyun had returned, holding a cold can of Water Plus in her pudgy fingers and grimaced at the portrait of celestial majesty upon the skin-flap view screen. "I once saw an otter the size of a house build a dam that flooded a planet right up to its mountains? Good eating?"

"Shush! They'll hear us!" With a hissed whisper, Demi looked at the Water Plus can and suddenly needed a drink. "We're in silent running mode."

"Silent what?" Friss laughed and fell back upon his captain's chair, newly regrown from the floor. He raised his head. "DWAIt CORPS ARE A BUNCH OF THIEVES! See? They can't hear a thing. We are in space. In space, nobody can hear you scoff at cosmological beauty."

Demi felt a little stupid at that, but only a little. She'd seen holo-movies, transcribed from old data streams from the Earth-That-Was. They had 'silent running' all the time in their space battles, where defiant captains found a way to win in no-win situations with little more than badly coded messages between them and their first officer. Firing torpedoes after catching their enemies unawares.

She felt a little disappointed about that and settled down into a chair Lodka grew for her. So far, along this journey, nothing remotely cinematic had happened. Well, apart from the fleet of drone ships surrounding a planet. And the appearance of Brenda, the AI moon with a grudge. And possibly the time she had accidentally destroyed a moon while trying to turn off the news. Apart from that, nothing exciting had happened. If you also didn't include all the death, the maiming, the arena fights, and the enormous cake that Bognrd had thrown out of an air-lock in a huff.

"Don't they have, you know, sensors?" In the very centre of the black hole, Demi could see a large structure, now. The station where they were headed, hidden in a place no-one could try to reach and survive, unless they had an organic ship and the MacGuffin-Hawking Temporal Gravitation and Event Horizon Compensator. "Does Lodka's cloak really work that well."

"Ah, see, that's the thing." Friss reluctantly dragged his eyes from the view and leaned upon the arm of his chair. Something beeped excitedly and Friss poked a finger at a button to stop it. "It's very clever. What she does is, and it's genius really, she turns a shade of black with the occasional light on her surface. Brilliant and works a whole lot better than using lasers and containment fields and meta-materials to hide a ship."

"Is it 'genius'? Really?" For a short time, Demi had felt the nervousness she had experienced, since first meeting Friss and Lap, had started to dissipate. Or, at least, become used to it. That nervousness returned. "Because it just sounds like someone holding a leaf in front of their nose and calling it camouflage."

Friss scowled at her as though she had said the most ridiculous thing anyone had said since the beginning of time. He started to say something, only for Lap to interrupt. A series of crackles and crinkles and rustlings from the Planeian made Friss look even more confused and then his face brightened.

"You're absolutely right! A demonstration is needed for our disbelieving crew member." He spun his captain's chair back to face the view screen, held up a finger and looked as though he had something serious to say. Or take a long visit in the loo. It wasn't altogether clear. "Lodka, I want you to drop the cloak for exactly one second, then raise it and adjust course in case they take a long look at where we were. Engage!"

Demi didn't know whether Friss had just proposed to Lodka or not. Either way, the lights on the bridge suddenly brightened. Briyun looked around as though she had been caught performing an act she shouldn't perform under any circumstances and Bognrd sighed. He had abandoned the previous cake for one that took advantage of the low lights, that would send decorous shadows upon marzipan objects that looked different depending on the angle they looked at it. Then the lights dimmed once again and the view on the screen began to adjust.

"RESTRICTED AREA - DWAIt CORPS PERSONNEL ONLY." A familiar message flashed up on the skin-flap view screen. "TRESPASSERS WILL BE ... AH, I SEE. IT'S THAT BLOODY GLITCH AGAIN! I SWEAR, ONE DAY THEY'LL CUT THE BUDGETS BACK SO FAR WE'LL HAVE TO RESORT TO BINOCULARS AND A NOTEPAD. TURN THE DAMNED SENSOR GRID OFF AND BACK ON AGAIN. SEE IF THAT HELPS."

Friss looked at Demi with an insufferable 'I told you so' expression. The kind of expression banned in dozens of star systems because nobody likes a smug bastard and more people had died due to someone proving their point in entirely the wrong way that governments had had to step in and legislate against self-righteous gits being smarmy. Friss came very close to Demi breaking those Anti-Self-Satisfaction-Retaliation laws.

She turned her attention back to the view screen, trying desperately to ignore the continuing gaze of Friss trying to attract her attention so that he could prove how superior he was to her. She couldn't hit him. That would be petty, but, as soon as he undressed for any reason, she was putting the most irritating substance she could find in his pants. Irritating and, preferably, wildly toxic.

The BlastArmour she had found in the depths of Lodka's superstructure continued to annoy her almost as much as those wiggling eyebrows and altogether too large a grin from Friss. It rode up in the most uncomfortable of places, sat all wrong on her shoulders and, she felt certain, the designers had never seen a being with breasts before. Despite it auto-fitting to her body, the BlastArmour had the annoying ability to push her boobs almost under her chin and exposed the formed cleavage to any manner of attacks through a wholly inappropriate peek-a-boo porthole on the chest. She hated it and no-one else had even started to wear theirs.

"I'm the only one in BlastArmour, aren't I? None of you are going to wear it." She began jabbing at the auto-release button but it looked as though it had jammed. "It's a joke. I get it. 'Ha ha, why not have the new girl wear the stupid, viciously misogynistic armour? That will be so much fun!'. It's not fun! It's offensive! I bet you wouldn't wear armour showing your bits and pieces to the world!"

"I don't need armour? I move like a leaf on the wind? Nothing can harm me?" Briyun gave a shrug, her arms crossed over her chest. "But I couldn't wear it anyway? Eight breasts? There'd be more holes than armour?"

"I DO NOT REQUIRE ARMOUR! MY SKIN CAN WITHSTAND FAR GREATER DAMAGE THAN YOUR PUNY, WEAK FLESH! YOU DISGUST ME WITH YOUR FAILINGS!" Bognrd poked the skin upon one of his mighty, red arms and it didn't make the slightest impression. "EXCEPT FOR DRVCRDICK HYPER-MOSQUITOS! THOSE CREATURES CAN GIVE A NASTY, IRRITATING BITE!"

Lap stood up, crinkled toward Demi as though explaining just why they didn't require armour. They pointed toward their arms, their legs, made circling motions in front of their chest with both hands, had a little dance and then turned to the side, almost disappearing but for the ripple of their two-dimensional surface. Demi had no idea what they said and hoped someone would translate.

"Well, I think that was pretty obvious, too, Lap. No need to translate that!" Clicking his fingers and pointing at Lap, Friss winked and almost leapt from his captain's chair, pointing at his chest. "And I never wear armour. If I'm going down, I'm going down with a gleam in my eye and a smile on my face and no-one will ever say that I didn't die in style."

After the hundredth, or so, stab at the auto-release button, the BlastArmour opened, hissed, closed again, opened with another hiss and then collapsed in a broken pile around Demi's feet. She doubted it would have protected her anyway. Glad to be out of the armour, she pulled her knickers from out of her cheeks, adjusted every single item of clothing and glanced at the screen. They had made good progress and now their destination loomed before them.

"It's a bank." With only a little turbulence from the chaos that raged around them within the black hole, Lodka edged ever closer to their target and Demi recognised the structure. Or, at least, its type of structure. "It literally looks like they ripped a bank from its foundations on a planet and dropped it here."

"Of course it's a bank! Where else would you find a vault?" Friss glanced at Lap as the Planeian crackled at him, correcting him. "True. They do have them. But, this is a bank vault, in a bank, where a bank vault is supposed to be, and it has what we've all come here for. Through everything we've suffered. Everything we've experienced. This is it. This is our time. This is ... hello. Are those opening hours?"

They were, but Demi wondered how that could even work. Time didn't happen within a black hole the way it happened on the outside, unless that MacGuffin-Hawking Temporal Gravitation and Event Horizon Compensator compensated for that, too. She doubted it. How could anyone compensate for the movement of time? You can't mess with the fundamental nature of the universe. Demi firmly believed that.

"Good job the MacGuffin-Hawking Temporal Gravitation and Event Horizon Compensator compensates for this kind of thing." Friss looked at a watch that he didn't have and puffed out his cheeks, eyes widening at what he didn't see. "I'd say we've got another two hours before it opens. Does anyone, and I can't stress this question enough, want to sing karaoke?"

Everybody's hands flew in the air, except Demi's. She hated karaoke, but she fully expected that she would have no say in this. Outside, the bank building drew closer and closer. The letterbox was taped up with a little sign stating packages were to be left at the counter. This was not the most bizarre thing she had seen recently.