The First Mann on Mars - Chapter Four
Chapter Four of the hilarious new science fiction novel, The First Mann on Mars by best selling, multi-award-winning author Mark Watson...
The First Mann on Mars
©Copyright 2024 by Mark Watson
THE STORY SO FAR…
Moronic Billionaut Derek Mann, along with his snarky, silver AI sidekick Barry Wilkinson, are hurtling toward Mars in a somewhat questionable spaceship. Back on Earth, things have gone predictably wrong—most of Northern Europe has been obliterated after Derek’s genius friend Noel decided to crank the Large Hadron Collider up to eleven. The rest of the planet is now enjoying the charming chaos of a post-apocalyptic era. Meanwhile, Derek’s biggest concern isn’t the destruction of humanity—it’s that the spaceship’s replicator can’t seem to make a decent pudding. Priorities, right?
Chapter Four: Hot Dog, Jumping Frog, Albuquerque
"I'm going back to bed," said Derek as he floated past Barry, radiating an aura of cosmic defeat.
While he was somewhat relieved that his family had survived the unfortunate "Large Hadron Collider Incident"—an incident that had, as far as he could tell, turned Earth into a giant ball of microwaved chaos—he was fairly certain his old friend Noel had been responsible for it. Noel, who had recently bought the Large Hadron Collider and, as Noel was prone to doing, decided to turn it up to eleven.
"Hang on," said Barry, his voice taking on that irritating tone of urgency that people tend to use when they’ve just discovered something unspeakably ominous. "There’s an anomaly."
Derek, who had been fully prepared to disengage from all conversations until further notice, muttered, "I don’t eat fish," in a cryptic manner, as if that would somehow end the discussion. "I’m off to bed."
"No, not that kind of anomaly. This is in space. And I don’t think it’s connected to what happened on Earth either—it’s happening here with us."
Derek groaned, which, in zero gravity, involved far more flailing than he’d intended. He rolled his eyes, but since this wasn't visible to Barry (who was annoyingly focused on the console), he made a half-hearted attempt to sound interested. "Okay, what’s happening now?"
"There’s a dark patch in space," Barry said, pointing at the screen with an air of someone who’d just found a mysterious stain on an otherwise pristine sofa. "And it’s moving parallel to us. Roughly in the shape of a massive spaceship. It’s coming closer. Look, you can see it on the viewscreen."
The viewscreen flickered to life. Barry gestured toward what appeared to be a smudge among the stars. It was small, motionless, but oddly menacing as the stars zoomed past it. He traced his finger around the shape on the screen, creating a rough outline of an elliptical blob, with smaller blobs attached to the back.
"It looks like," Barry continued, with the calm detachment of someone delivering bad news to a half-wit student, "a very large spaceship. Some kind of propulsion system at the back. And it seems to be cloaked."
Derek blinked twice, which was about all he could manage as a display of understanding. The word “cloaked” clearly didn’t register in his brain.
Barry sighed. "Camouflaged. It’s made to look like the background of space, so it’s less detectable. I only spotted it by accident—it doesn’t show up on any of our sensors."
Derek’s eyes flicked between Barry and the viewscreen. “Right. So what you're saying is, we’ve got an invisible spaceship that wasn’t supposed to be visible at all, and now it’s decided to sneak up on us. Is that about right?”
"Essentially, yes." Barry replied.
Derek sighed, letting the enormity of the situation hang in the air. "Great," he muttered. "First Noel breaks the Earth, now we've got an interstellar stalker."
“Can we outrun it?” Derek asked, more out of a sense of cosmic obligation than any real hope. He wasn’t exactly sure how spaceships worked, but he assumed it involved a lot of speed, floating, drifting, and occasionally exploding.
Barry’s fingers danced over the console, making him look very busy and, to Derek’s annoyance, very competent. “Depends what you mean by ‘outrun,’” he said, in that maddeningly vague way people do when they’re about to deliver terrible news wrapped in technobabble.
“I mean, can we not be where it’s going to be?” Derek clarified, rubbing his temples.
“Well,” Barry began, adopting the tone of someone explaining quantum mechanics to an inebriated hamster, “if it’s a spaceship, and we’re also a spaceship, in theory, yes, we could outrun it. But space doesn’t exactly have traffic lanes, and this thing is very large, very cloaked, and seems to be in a hurry to catch up with us.”
Derek stared at him. “So that’s a no, then?”
“It’s not exactly a yes either,” Barry said brightly. “Think of it as a strong probably not with a side order of let’s hope they’re just here for a chat.”
Derek’s mind wandered back to his friend Noel, the man who turned the planet into a slightly overcooked marshmallow purely because he thought science needed more ‘pizzazz.’ What kind of intergalactic lunatic would they be dealing with this time? Galactic traffic wardens?
“Right,” Derek said, clinging to the last shred of optimism floating in his brain. “What if we do... the opposite of running?”
Barry raised an eyebrow. “You want to not run?”
“Exactly,” Derek said, warming to the idea. “Just stay perfectly still. Let them come to us. Act casual. You know, like we do this all the time.”
Barry blinked. “You want to play dead. In space.”
“More like... playing indifferent. Like, ‘Oh, didn’t see you there. Come in, have a seat, don’t vaporize us.’”
Barry stared at Derek for a long, uncomfortable moment. “So... you want to invite a potentially hostile, massive, invisible spaceship for tea?”
Derek nodded. “Worked for my mum when she had to deal with the neighbors.”
Barry looked back at the viewscreen, the dark smudge drawing ever closer. “Right. Let’s hope they’re as fond of tea as the neighbors.”
The ship hummed quietly, as if it too was unsure whether this plan made any sense at all.
The large, ominously cloaked spaceship loomed closer, its vastness eclipsing the stars like an intergalactic bully blocking the sun. The capsule, which had previously been merrily coasting through the void in the direction of Mars, now began to shudder violently, accompanied by a noise that could only be described as a cosmic washing machine trying to chew a bag of gravel.
“What the hell was that?” Derek asked, gripping the nearest handhold.
Barry, ever the voice of unsettling calm, glanced at his console. “We’re in a tractor beam. They’re pulling us in.”
Derek’s mind went into overdrive, which in his case meant a rapid flurry of unhelpful thoughts. “Well, that sounds bad.”
“Hang on to something,” Barry advised.
Before Derek could reply with anything stpid or panicked (likely a blend of both), the ship’s speakers crackled to life, and a cacophony of whooping and shouting poured through, sounding for all the world like a Western bar brawl breaking out in space.
"Yeehaw! Earth ship, this is the Mars Defense Force, coming to your rescue!” a voice bellowed, full of reckless bravado. “Callsign: Hotdog!"
“Jumping Frog!” chimed in a second voice, clearly excited.
“Albuquerque!” added a third, enthusiastically.
As if in response to this unexpected display of space cowboy heroism, the massive, shadowy spaceship that had been dragging Derek and Barry in for what was almost certainly going to be a deeply unpleasant encounter suddenly de-cloaked. The once invisible leviathan was now fully visible—an enormous, ugly green monstrosity of a ship, the kind that looked as though it had been designed by someone who had once seen a spaceship in a nightmare and decided to recreate it with scrap metal and bad intentions.
Lasers flared to life as the three Mars Defense Force ships—small, sleek, and silver—began to pepper the green behemoth with precise laser fire. The huge ship groaned under the assault, explosions rippling across its surface in a dazzling display. The tractor beam flickered and released its grip on the capsule, leaving Derek and Barry free, though still perilously close to the sort of spaceship that no one in their right mind would want to be close to.
"Are these guys some sort of space cowboys?” Derek asked, trying to wrap his head around the absurdity of the situation.
"Looks like it,” Barry said, with the tone of an AI who had long since given up trying to understand the universe’s sense of humor.
"Brilliant," Derek muttered, as the capsule shook again, this time from the recoil of an explosion that lit up the viewscreen. “We’re being saved by people who name themselves after Prefab Sprout lyrics.”
Outside, the battle raged on. The green monstrosity of a spaceship, now fully visible and utterly unappealing, continued to take a pounding from the nimble Mars Defense Force ships. It wasn’t quite a David vs. Goliath situation—it was more like three slightly unhinged Davids vs. a Goliath with very bad taste in ship design.
The large, hideous green spaceship was now groaning under the relentless assault of the Mars Defense Force’s laser fire.
Derek clung to the side of the capsule as it lurched left, then right, seemingly caught between explosions and the ridiculousness of the situation. His mind was still grappling with the fact that their rescuers were, as far as he could tell, a group of space cowboys with a naming convention that suggested they'd spent too much time watching classic MTV.
"Are they winning?" Derek asked, peering at the viewscreen, which was flashing red far more often than he felt was healthy.
Barry, who had now managed to fold himself into a position that suggested he had absolutely no faith in the structural integrity of the capsule, glanced at a readout. "It would appear so."
Outside, the massive, ugly spaceship continued to get pulverized, looking increasingly like a badly designed cake that had been left out in the rain and was now taking artillery fire from all directions.
“Hotdog here! Yee-haw! One last push, lads, let’s take this ugly sucker down!” came the excited voice over the comms.
Derek winced. “Did he just ‘yee-haw’?”
"He sho did," Barry confirmed.
There was a final, deafening explosion, and the viewscreen flashed bright white. When it cleared, the massive green spaceship was gone. In its place was nothing but a cloud of rapidly expanding debris, twinkling faintly like space dandruff.
“Hotdog to Earth ship!” the voice crackled triumphantly. “We just saved your collective behinds. You’re welcome! Now, let’s get you to safety. We’re heading to Mars. Follow us!"
Derek raised an eyebrow. "Finally, Mars. So, this is what being ‘rescued’ feels like,” Derek muttered, gripping his seat as another tremor rattled through the capsule. “It’s less dignified than I imagined.”
Barry, who was furiously pressing buttons that seemed to have no effect whatsoever, gave him a glance. “Rescued? More like 'kidnapped with enthusiasm.' We're now officially in the hands of the galaxy’s most trigger-happy maniacs. I half expect them to blow us up just for the fun of it.”
Derek grimaced, keeping a wary eye on the trident-shaped ships darting about outside. They moved with all the finesse of children pretending to be fighter jets. "Let’s just hope they don’t decide to ‘escort’ us into the side of a mountain."
END OF CHAPTER FOUR
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