Some Days You Have To Dance (Rose, Mickey, Jake, Pete)
Title: Some Days You Have To Dance
Author: doyle_sb4
Recipient: livii
Rating: PG
Character(s): Rose, Mickey, Jake, Pete
Summary: Five times Rose, Mickey and Jake had an adventure; featuring zeppelins, killer robots, sea monsters, mad scientists and at least one space pirate.
Notes: for livii whose request was ‘Rose, during her first go-round in the alt!verse, having fun and mostly angst-free zeppelin adventures with Mickey and Jake. Laughter and close scrapes and an exotic location or two would be icing on the cake.’
i. nothing in ze world can stop me now
“So.” Mickey cleared his throat and, when that didn’t seem loud enough to get a reaction, rattled his handcuffs. “I suppose since you’re going to kill us anyway, you might as well tell us the plan.”
They were chained back to back, but he knew, he could just tell that Jake had one of those looks on his face.
“I bet it’s a really clever plan,” Mickey said, and Professor Darkman’s hands actually paused over his bank of switches.
“I don’t believe this,” Jake muttered.
Neither did Mickey, although he’d always known that there had to be some good side to a universe that didn’t have James Bond.
“I suppose there’s no harm in you knowing why you’re to die,” the Professor said, the words coming through his voice changer like Stephen Hawking doing a bad impression of a Clanger. “You,” he snapped - buzzed - at his assistant, a woman in glasses and a lab coat who’d been scribbling something on a clipboard, “monitor the power emissions. Tell me at once - at once! - if it drops below five point three.”
The problem with wearing a metal mask that fitted all the way over your eyes, Mickey thought - this was useful information to file away just in case he ever looked seriously into supervillainy as a career option - apart from the stupid voice and the way it made you look like you were ripping off Doctor Doom, it also cut off most of your vision. And that made it hard to tell when your assistant had had her coat nicked and been locked in one of the storage rooms.
Rose gave him a smile, palming the Professor’s microgun from where he’d abandoned it on the top of the cabinet.
“I began to know my destiny,” Darkman said, settling into a comfy monologue stance as Rose started powering down the death ray, “when I was a small boy and first looked up at the stars…”
An expression of suitably awed interest glued to his face, Mickey drifted off into wondering if Rose was going to keep the specs.
ii. robots of death
“They’re not Cybermen,” Rose said. After a second - probably too long a gap to be really polite - she added an awkward, “Your Majesty. We think - Torchwood are pretty sure they’re just robots, nothing human inside. They’re alien, and we can stop them.”
Queen Marguerite nodded, still looking shocked and pale but starting to rally now that there was somebody telling her what was going on. She’s only about fifteen, Rose thought. This time yesterday she was only a kid.
“You sound French,” the girl said after a moment.
“I’m not, I just… speak it.” As far as she was concerned they’d been talking in English, but that was the sort of thing you wanted a lot of time to explain; time, and maybe a PowerPoint presentation on TARDISes and the human brain. “I’ve got to talk to my team,” Rose told her. “You’ll be safest here. We’ve got people on all the doors. Don’t leave this room, don’t go near the windows, just… stay here, please. And you lot,” she said to the dozen unblinking guards arranged around the throne, “these things have got shields, so bullets’ll just bounce straight off. EM guns only, all right?” Not one of them so much as looked at her. “Great,” she muttered. “Robots out there, robots in here.”
The new queen roused herself. “Gentlemen,” she said quietly, “Miss Tyler and her people have my full authority. You will acknowledge her orders.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Rose said, even as she secretly enjoyed the disgruntled look from the beefiest one. “So long as they keep you safe, that’s the main thing.”
“I’m sure they’ll afford me the same stellar protection they gave to my uncle,” she said coolly, to twelve identical winces; not quite fair, Rose had to admit, because by Torchwood’s reckoning nearly twenty guards had died before the robots got to the King. Still, anyone who’d shot overnight from ninth in line to the throne to Queen of France and All Her Dominions probably had a right to throw a strop about the whole thing.
“Seventeen of them somewhere in the grounds,” Jake reported, shoving a pulse-cannon at her before she was properly through the war room door. She cradled the gun in both arms while he clipped the straps into place over her flak jacket. “We’ve disabled thirty-six of the robots, but try not to trip over them or give them a good kicking or anything, they could still be holding a charge. Still no contact from whoever’s in control of them; yeah, I know,” he said, as she opened her mouth, “if they’ll listen at all we’ll try and get them to go peacefully, Pete’s already said.”
“Good,” she said, surprised.
Jake grinned at her. “He takes a while, but he does learn. You secure? Good. Five minutes.”
Rose stood back to wait for the surviving palace guards to suit up, only half conscious that she was fingering the settings on her weapon. Jake couldn’t keep still, going from person to person checking equipment and armour. Normally Mickey would have been doing the same, but today he was standing at the gallery side of the room, looking up at the portraits. Kings and queens, she supposed, wandering to join him; they were all oil paintings, all historical and posh. The last in the line, the dead King, was covered by a black cloth, and it suddenly annoyed her that someone had taken the time to bother about a painting when there was a living girl next door mourning for her uncle and aunt and cousins and not knowing if she was going to live or die.
“How’s the Queen?” Mickey asked.
“Okay,” she said, hefting the cannon to a more secure position. “Young. Scared. Her life’s completely changed and she’s just got to sort of… go along with it. I’d be climbing the walls.”
“Nah, you’d be kicking the walls down.” He nodded up at a portrait of one of the Louis’s, a familiar man with a sharp face and brown eyes. “I said to one of that lot, ‘Me and Rose nearly met him’,” he said. “Dunno what it is about this place and robots.”
He tried not to look, she saw him trying not to look anywhere near, but his eyes flickered sideways to the end of the room and the massive mirror over the fireplace.
“It’s not the same,” Rose said.
“Ready to go,” Jake called out.
Mickey said, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She grinned at him, fiercely promising herself that she’d come back here; she’d come back and see Marguerite’s portrait hung in place when she was officially crowned the Queen of France, when they’d made her safe. “We won’t even need a horse.”
iii. six impossible things
Three in the morning was either the best or worst possible time to go through the status reports. He was up anyway - Tony’d been grizzling all through the night and Pete had grown up during the worst years of the war in London East, where you could either be a light sleeper or dead - and it got an important job off the ever-growing To Do list.
On the other hand, this particular team’s reports rarely looked more coherent when you read them sleep-deprived.
From his stepdaughter: Team Tyler’s current position, we think, is about fifty miles north-west of the United States of Italy, although we got winged by something big an hour ago and it knocked out our navigation so we’re flying on Mickey and Jake and a big pile of maps we found in the emergency drawer. If we’re never heard from again, this is why.
The software blinked a link at him, a redirect to a related part of Mickey’s report. He opened a new tab.
An emergency Team Smith command meeting was held where we discussed (1) the UFO that had hit us (term ‘UFO’ had to be explained to Jake; then five minute diversion while Rose explained the plot of The X-Files) and (2) what to do about the navigation. Suggested that maybe somebody who actually did GCSE Geography instead of dropping it for Art in Year 10 should be reading the maps. Rose plus autopilot to keep flying while me and Jake handle the map reading.
Another redirect, which he followed with a feeling that when a man had worked hard at making money all his life he should be able to pay someone else to sort this stuff out.
I had a stab at finding our position while the other two argued about somebody called Miss Petersen and how Mickey only took her subject because she wore really short skirts. No clue if we’re actually near Italy. The boot looks the wrong way round on the map compared to the country we can see out the window. Fuel running low. Almost certain it was one of those sea monsters the Italians have been spotting that clipped us, whatever Mickey says about flying plates. Otherwise Team Simmonds doing well.
The videos had been all over the news; probably all of the news, everywhere in the world. It wasn’t every day you got to see footage of an airship leading an enormous sea-serpent into the bay at Naples, a blonde woman clinging to the emergency rope ladder, laughing, as she coaxed the creature to follow the sinking balloon.
“There’s lots of things I’d love you to learn from your big sister,” Pete told his gurgling son, flipping with a sigh through three one-line follow-up reports that told him far less than the news and the internet, “but when you’re grown up and working for Torchwood I hope to God you’re better at the paperwork.”
iv. downtime
“At least a week.”
“A whole week?”
“At least,” Mickey repeated. “It’s the supply to one of the gasbags. I went and found a mechanic in town, ‘cause I thought one of us should get off our backsides today and it obviously wasn’t going to be one of you lot.”
Rose and Jake, lounging on the grass in the zeppelin’s shadow, swapped lazy glances as he ducked beneath the tether chains to join them.
“I resent that remark. We’re working ourselves into the ground, me and Rose. We were just checking the bottom of the dirigible.”
“Yeah. Checking. To make sure we didn’t… scratch it… on the tops of the trees…”
“Looks lovely, though. Not a mark on her.”
“So that’s good news anyway.” Rose rolled onto her stomach to look at Mickey, even that feeling like too much effort in the heat. “Is that definite, then, a week?”
“The bag’s easy to fix, but they’ve got to fly the engine parts in from the mainland.” He looked lovingly up at the balloon swaying above them. “This model’s not even been made for years. You can’t just stick any old bits in her and expect her to go. She’s a classic.”
Which was why it didn’t have air conditioning and drifted off course every couple of hundred miles, Rose thought, but saying that would be like telling her mum that Tony looked like a tiny Phil Mitchell. People, even people who loved you, didn’t like hearing bad things about their babies.
“You can break the news to Pete,” Jake told her. “’Sorry, boss, we just happened to have to make an emergency landing on a gorgeous tropical island and now we’re stuck here for a week’ - that’s the sort of thing you can only get away with if he’s married to your mum.”
Mickey was quiet, and she wondered if he was thinking about how he didn’t need to let anybody know that he wouldn’t be back for a while; his Gran had been dead nearly six months. Jake, watching him too, nudged him with his foot.
“Anything else in town?”
“Yeah,” Mickey said, normal again after a second when he’d seemed to be somewhere else, “couple of cafes. Loads of touristy bar places. You’ve got to see the beach, it’s like something off a travel programme. All white sands and palm trees.” He frowned. “One of the barmen said something about sharks, though, so I’m not getting in the sea.”
“Sounds good, apart from the sharks,” Jake said - slowly, as if he was already considering materials available for making a realistic pretend shark fin. “What d’you reckon, Rose? Think you can stay here a week?”
“I think I could stay here forever,” she said, stretching luxuriantly out on the warm grass, the words popping into her head before she could really think about it.
v. sky pirates!
“This is the last picture anyone got of the ship.” Pete circled it on the screen with the light from his laser pen. It wasn’t necessary - the three of them could hardly miss the spaceship zooming through the clouds - but the pen had been a present from Jackie, and he was hoping Rose would mention it at home. “The flight technician who made contact with them was never seen again. She’s presumed dead.”
“Maybe she went with them,” Rose suggested.
Pete frowned. “Don’t think it’s likely, do you? A nice, normal nineteen-year-old girl just up and running off with a bunch of space travelling…” Mickey was making tiny but very definite shut up now gestures. “Anyway,” he said, “they haven’t been heard from since the eighties. Not only did they initiate contact this time, they’ve invited us aboard.”
Jake’s hand went up. “Aboard their space ship? In space?”
“We’ll rendezvous in the atmosphere and they’ll pull back into orbit.”
“Wow,” said Jake quietly; the other two, for once, said nothing.
“I can’t order any of you to go,” Pete said, looking at the photograph and wondering what it would be like up there. “It’s an amazing opportunity for trade but you’ve got to remember these are pirates, they’re dangerous, you three need to think hard about whether -“
“And I turned round,” he told Jackie later, bemused, “and they were all wearing eye-patches…”
**
“So you’re all women, then?”
“Mostly. We’ve got a few men. There’s no actual rule.” The First Mate, a human-looking woman with tight red curls, joined her at the railing and they looked down together into the cargo bay. “Lukin, there, he’s a male.” A thing Rose had thought was a storage container detached a spindly, metallic arm and waved.
“It’s beautiful,” Rose said; the bay was transparent, so that Lukin and the other crewmembers seemed to be walking in space, the Earth and the moon hanging above them in the sky.
“When I saw it I never wanted to leave.”
After a minute, when she could make herself concentrate on something other than the vast blackness and the stars, Rose said, “You’re her, aren’t you? You were the flight technician on the airship they connected with thirty years ago.” Pete had said the name, she’d even made a note of it: “Melanie. Your name’s Melanie.”
“Call me Mel,” the First Mate said cheerfully. “Oh, look, your friends must have finished their tours.”
Jake, who’d had his mouth hanging open from the moment he stepped on board, almost stumbled into them, their guide keeping a hold of his arm with a tolerant smile. Mickey was steadier on his feet but he kept taking quick looks over his shoulder.
“Showed them the ship, sir,” the guide told Mel. “There was one slight deviation when Mister Smith ended up in the crew quarters by mistake.”
“Oh, dear. Anyone mind?”
The halo of fronds around her head were twitching and twining together; Rose wasn’t sure, but she knew that in some species that was the same as a human trying not to laugh. “Quite the contrary. I believe there’s a petition for Mister Smith to join the crew.”
“Lot of use you two were when I was getting Castle Anthraxed down there,” Mickey muttered, putting himself in the middle of Rose and Jake.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Jake said dreamily. Rose was pretty sure he meant the space view.
“The other one’s still with the captain,” the guide reported.
Mel nodded as if she’d expected that: “I can take you to the galley,” she told Rose. “It could be a long wait, I’m afraid. They’ve got a lot of negotiations to get through, especially if your leader’s interested in buying the dimensional cannon.”
“Dimensional…” Mickey started and Rose pulled her scrambled thoughts together enough to shake her head at him; don’t let them know we’re interested. And it’ll be nothing anyway. It’s always nothing. The walls are closed.
And a tiny part of her, one that had been quiet for so long she’d thought it had gone away, said: But you’ve seen impossible things happen before…
“Mel,” she said, “how’d you end up with this crew, anyway?”
It got them onto a safe subject as Mel led them to the corridor. “Well, there wasn’t a lot for me on Earth, really,” she said. “My Dad died in the War and I never knew my mother, and I didn’t fancy the five years I’d have to do in the military if I ever wanted anything higher than technician; and then the Electric Universe came along and the chief engineer said did I fancy an adventure and I said ‘yes please’.” She beamed, a human being perfectly at ease with the strangeness of the life she’d chosen.
“I think that’s brilliant,” Rose said softly. “Good for you.”
Author: doyle_sb4
Recipient: livii
Rating: PG
Character(s): Rose, Mickey, Jake, Pete
Summary: Five times Rose, Mickey and Jake had an adventure; featuring zeppelins, killer robots, sea monsters, mad scientists and at least one space pirate.
Notes: for livii whose request was ‘Rose, during her first go-round in the alt!verse, having fun and mostly angst-free zeppelin adventures with Mickey and Jake. Laughter and close scrapes and an exotic location or two would be icing on the cake.’
i. nothing in ze world can stop me now
“So.” Mickey cleared his throat and, when that didn’t seem loud enough to get a reaction, rattled his handcuffs. “I suppose since you’re going to kill us anyway, you might as well tell us the plan.”
They were chained back to back, but he knew, he could just tell that Jake had one of those looks on his face.
“I bet it’s a really clever plan,” Mickey said, and Professor Darkman’s hands actually paused over his bank of switches.
“I don’t believe this,” Jake muttered.
Neither did Mickey, although he’d always known that there had to be some good side to a universe that didn’t have James Bond.
“I suppose there’s no harm in you knowing why you’re to die,” the Professor said, the words coming through his voice changer like Stephen Hawking doing a bad impression of a Clanger. “You,” he snapped - buzzed - at his assistant, a woman in glasses and a lab coat who’d been scribbling something on a clipboard, “monitor the power emissions. Tell me at once - at once! - if it drops below five point three.”
The problem with wearing a metal mask that fitted all the way over your eyes, Mickey thought - this was useful information to file away just in case he ever looked seriously into supervillainy as a career option - apart from the stupid voice and the way it made you look like you were ripping off Doctor Doom, it also cut off most of your vision. And that made it hard to tell when your assistant had had her coat nicked and been locked in one of the storage rooms.
Rose gave him a smile, palming the Professor’s microgun from where he’d abandoned it on the top of the cabinet.
“I began to know my destiny,” Darkman said, settling into a comfy monologue stance as Rose started powering down the death ray, “when I was a small boy and first looked up at the stars…”
An expression of suitably awed interest glued to his face, Mickey drifted off into wondering if Rose was going to keep the specs.
ii. robots of death
“They’re not Cybermen,” Rose said. After a second - probably too long a gap to be really polite - she added an awkward, “Your Majesty. We think - Torchwood are pretty sure they’re just robots, nothing human inside. They’re alien, and we can stop them.”
Queen Marguerite nodded, still looking shocked and pale but starting to rally now that there was somebody telling her what was going on. She’s only about fifteen, Rose thought. This time yesterday she was only a kid.
“You sound French,” the girl said after a moment.
“I’m not, I just… speak it.” As far as she was concerned they’d been talking in English, but that was the sort of thing you wanted a lot of time to explain; time, and maybe a PowerPoint presentation on TARDISes and the human brain. “I’ve got to talk to my team,” Rose told her. “You’ll be safest here. We’ve got people on all the doors. Don’t leave this room, don’t go near the windows, just… stay here, please. And you lot,” she said to the dozen unblinking guards arranged around the throne, “these things have got shields, so bullets’ll just bounce straight off. EM guns only, all right?” Not one of them so much as looked at her. “Great,” she muttered. “Robots out there, robots in here.”
The new queen roused herself. “Gentlemen,” she said quietly, “Miss Tyler and her people have my full authority. You will acknowledge her orders.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Rose said, even as she secretly enjoyed the disgruntled look from the beefiest one. “So long as they keep you safe, that’s the main thing.”
“I’m sure they’ll afford me the same stellar protection they gave to my uncle,” she said coolly, to twelve identical winces; not quite fair, Rose had to admit, because by Torchwood’s reckoning nearly twenty guards had died before the robots got to the King. Still, anyone who’d shot overnight from ninth in line to the throne to Queen of France and All Her Dominions probably had a right to throw a strop about the whole thing.
“Seventeen of them somewhere in the grounds,” Jake reported, shoving a pulse-cannon at her before she was properly through the war room door. She cradled the gun in both arms while he clipped the straps into place over her flak jacket. “We’ve disabled thirty-six of the robots, but try not to trip over them or give them a good kicking or anything, they could still be holding a charge. Still no contact from whoever’s in control of them; yeah, I know,” he said, as she opened her mouth, “if they’ll listen at all we’ll try and get them to go peacefully, Pete’s already said.”
“Good,” she said, surprised.
Jake grinned at her. “He takes a while, but he does learn. You secure? Good. Five minutes.”
Rose stood back to wait for the surviving palace guards to suit up, only half conscious that she was fingering the settings on her weapon. Jake couldn’t keep still, going from person to person checking equipment and armour. Normally Mickey would have been doing the same, but today he was standing at the gallery side of the room, looking up at the portraits. Kings and queens, she supposed, wandering to join him; they were all oil paintings, all historical and posh. The last in the line, the dead King, was covered by a black cloth, and it suddenly annoyed her that someone had taken the time to bother about a painting when there was a living girl next door mourning for her uncle and aunt and cousins and not knowing if she was going to live or die.
“How’s the Queen?” Mickey asked.
“Okay,” she said, hefting the cannon to a more secure position. “Young. Scared. Her life’s completely changed and she’s just got to sort of… go along with it. I’d be climbing the walls.”
“Nah, you’d be kicking the walls down.” He nodded up at a portrait of one of the Louis’s, a familiar man with a sharp face and brown eyes. “I said to one of that lot, ‘Me and Rose nearly met him’,” he said. “Dunno what it is about this place and robots.”
He tried not to look, she saw him trying not to look anywhere near, but his eyes flickered sideways to the end of the room and the massive mirror over the fireplace.
“It’s not the same,” Rose said.
“Ready to go,” Jake called out.
Mickey said, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She grinned at him, fiercely promising herself that she’d come back here; she’d come back and see Marguerite’s portrait hung in place when she was officially crowned the Queen of France, when they’d made her safe. “We won’t even need a horse.”
iii. six impossible things
Three in the morning was either the best or worst possible time to go through the status reports. He was up anyway - Tony’d been grizzling all through the night and Pete had grown up during the worst years of the war in London East, where you could either be a light sleeper or dead - and it got an important job off the ever-growing To Do list.
On the other hand, this particular team’s reports rarely looked more coherent when you read them sleep-deprived.
From his stepdaughter: Team Tyler’s current position, we think, is about fifty miles north-west of the United States of Italy, although we got winged by something big an hour ago and it knocked out our navigation so we’re flying on Mickey and Jake and a big pile of maps we found in the emergency drawer. If we’re never heard from again, this is why.
The software blinked a link at him, a redirect to a related part of Mickey’s report. He opened a new tab.
An emergency Team Smith command meeting was held where we discussed (1) the UFO that had hit us (term ‘UFO’ had to be explained to Jake; then five minute diversion while Rose explained the plot of The X-Files) and (2) what to do about the navigation. Suggested that maybe somebody who actually did GCSE Geography instead of dropping it for Art in Year 10 should be reading the maps. Rose plus autopilot to keep flying while me and Jake handle the map reading.
Another redirect, which he followed with a feeling that when a man had worked hard at making money all his life he should be able to pay someone else to sort this stuff out.
I had a stab at finding our position while the other two argued about somebody called Miss Petersen and how Mickey only took her subject because she wore really short skirts. No clue if we’re actually near Italy. The boot looks the wrong way round on the map compared to the country we can see out the window. Fuel running low. Almost certain it was one of those sea monsters the Italians have been spotting that clipped us, whatever Mickey says about flying plates. Otherwise Team Simmonds doing well.
The videos had been all over the news; probably all of the news, everywhere in the world. It wasn’t every day you got to see footage of an airship leading an enormous sea-serpent into the bay at Naples, a blonde woman clinging to the emergency rope ladder, laughing, as she coaxed the creature to follow the sinking balloon.
“There’s lots of things I’d love you to learn from your big sister,” Pete told his gurgling son, flipping with a sigh through three one-line follow-up reports that told him far less than the news and the internet, “but when you’re grown up and working for Torchwood I hope to God you’re better at the paperwork.”
iv. downtime
“At least a week.”
“A whole week?”
“At least,” Mickey repeated. “It’s the supply to one of the gasbags. I went and found a mechanic in town, ‘cause I thought one of us should get off our backsides today and it obviously wasn’t going to be one of you lot.”
Rose and Jake, lounging on the grass in the zeppelin’s shadow, swapped lazy glances as he ducked beneath the tether chains to join them.
“I resent that remark. We’re working ourselves into the ground, me and Rose. We were just checking the bottom of the dirigible.”
“Yeah. Checking. To make sure we didn’t… scratch it… on the tops of the trees…”
“Looks lovely, though. Not a mark on her.”
“So that’s good news anyway.” Rose rolled onto her stomach to look at Mickey, even that feeling like too much effort in the heat. “Is that definite, then, a week?”
“The bag’s easy to fix, but they’ve got to fly the engine parts in from the mainland.” He looked lovingly up at the balloon swaying above them. “This model’s not even been made for years. You can’t just stick any old bits in her and expect her to go. She’s a classic.”
Which was why it didn’t have air conditioning and drifted off course every couple of hundred miles, Rose thought, but saying that would be like telling her mum that Tony looked like a tiny Phil Mitchell. People, even people who loved you, didn’t like hearing bad things about their babies.
“You can break the news to Pete,” Jake told her. “’Sorry, boss, we just happened to have to make an emergency landing on a gorgeous tropical island and now we’re stuck here for a week’ - that’s the sort of thing you can only get away with if he’s married to your mum.”
Mickey was quiet, and she wondered if he was thinking about how he didn’t need to let anybody know that he wouldn’t be back for a while; his Gran had been dead nearly six months. Jake, watching him too, nudged him with his foot.
“Anything else in town?”
“Yeah,” Mickey said, normal again after a second when he’d seemed to be somewhere else, “couple of cafes. Loads of touristy bar places. You’ve got to see the beach, it’s like something off a travel programme. All white sands and palm trees.” He frowned. “One of the barmen said something about sharks, though, so I’m not getting in the sea.”
“Sounds good, apart from the sharks,” Jake said - slowly, as if he was already considering materials available for making a realistic pretend shark fin. “What d’you reckon, Rose? Think you can stay here a week?”
“I think I could stay here forever,” she said, stretching luxuriantly out on the warm grass, the words popping into her head before she could really think about it.
v. sky pirates!
“This is the last picture anyone got of the ship.” Pete circled it on the screen with the light from his laser pen. It wasn’t necessary - the three of them could hardly miss the spaceship zooming through the clouds - but the pen had been a present from Jackie, and he was hoping Rose would mention it at home. “The flight technician who made contact with them was never seen again. She’s presumed dead.”
“Maybe she went with them,” Rose suggested.
Pete frowned. “Don’t think it’s likely, do you? A nice, normal nineteen-year-old girl just up and running off with a bunch of space travelling…” Mickey was making tiny but very definite shut up now gestures. “Anyway,” he said, “they haven’t been heard from since the eighties. Not only did they initiate contact this time, they’ve invited us aboard.”
Jake’s hand went up. “Aboard their space ship? In space?”
“We’ll rendezvous in the atmosphere and they’ll pull back into orbit.”
“Wow,” said Jake quietly; the other two, for once, said nothing.
“I can’t order any of you to go,” Pete said, looking at the photograph and wondering what it would be like up there. “It’s an amazing opportunity for trade but you’ve got to remember these are pirates, they’re dangerous, you three need to think hard about whether -“
“And I turned round,” he told Jackie later, bemused, “and they were all wearing eye-patches…”
**
“So you’re all women, then?”
“Mostly. We’ve got a few men. There’s no actual rule.” The First Mate, a human-looking woman with tight red curls, joined her at the railing and they looked down together into the cargo bay. “Lukin, there, he’s a male.” A thing Rose had thought was a storage container detached a spindly, metallic arm and waved.
“It’s beautiful,” Rose said; the bay was transparent, so that Lukin and the other crewmembers seemed to be walking in space, the Earth and the moon hanging above them in the sky.
“When I saw it I never wanted to leave.”
After a minute, when she could make herself concentrate on something other than the vast blackness and the stars, Rose said, “You’re her, aren’t you? You were the flight technician on the airship they connected with thirty years ago.” Pete had said the name, she’d even made a note of it: “Melanie. Your name’s Melanie.”
“Call me Mel,” the First Mate said cheerfully. “Oh, look, your friends must have finished their tours.”
Jake, who’d had his mouth hanging open from the moment he stepped on board, almost stumbled into them, their guide keeping a hold of his arm with a tolerant smile. Mickey was steadier on his feet but he kept taking quick looks over his shoulder.
“Showed them the ship, sir,” the guide told Mel. “There was one slight deviation when Mister Smith ended up in the crew quarters by mistake.”
“Oh, dear. Anyone mind?”
The halo of fronds around her head were twitching and twining together; Rose wasn’t sure, but she knew that in some species that was the same as a human trying not to laugh. “Quite the contrary. I believe there’s a petition for Mister Smith to join the crew.”
“Lot of use you two were when I was getting Castle Anthraxed down there,” Mickey muttered, putting himself in the middle of Rose and Jake.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Jake said dreamily. Rose was pretty sure he meant the space view.
“The other one’s still with the captain,” the guide reported.
Mel nodded as if she’d expected that: “I can take you to the galley,” she told Rose. “It could be a long wait, I’m afraid. They’ve got a lot of negotiations to get through, especially if your leader’s interested in buying the dimensional cannon.”
“Dimensional…” Mickey started and Rose pulled her scrambled thoughts together enough to shake her head at him; don’t let them know we’re interested. And it’ll be nothing anyway. It’s always nothing. The walls are closed.
And a tiny part of her, one that had been quiet for so long she’d thought it had gone away, said: But you’ve seen impossible things happen before…
“Mel,” she said, “how’d you end up with this crew, anyway?”
It got them onto a safe subject as Mel led them to the corridor. “Well, there wasn’t a lot for me on Earth, really,” she said. “My Dad died in the War and I never knew my mother, and I didn’t fancy the five years I’d have to do in the military if I ever wanted anything higher than technician; and then the Electric Universe came along and the chief engineer said did I fancy an adventure and I said ‘yes please’.” She beamed, a human being perfectly at ease with the strangeness of the life she’d chosen.
“I think that’s brilliant,” Rose said softly. “Good for you.”