Free Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett Page B

you were supposed to play. You spotted some aliens and you shot at them. That was what the game was supposed to be about.
    Lurking in the distance and just watching made him uneasy. It looked like the kind of thing people would do if they were…well…
    …taking it seriously.
     
     
    The Captain sat in front of her desk, watching the big screen. She was chewing. Anything was better than waterweed, even—she looked at the box—even Sugar-Frosted Corn Crackles in cold bovine lactation. Sweet and crunchy, but with odd hard bits in…
    She inserted a claw into her mouth and poked around among her teeth until she found the offending object.
    She pulled it out and looked at it.
    It was green, and had four arms. Most of them were holding some sort of weapon.
    She wondered again what these things were. The Chief Medical Officer had suggested that they were, in fact, some sort of vermin that invaded food sources. There was a theory among the crew that they were things to do with religion. Offerings to food gods, perhaps?
    She put it carefully on one side of her desk. In the right light, she thought, it looked a bit like the Gunnery Officer.
    Then she opened the little cage beside the bowl and let her birds out.
    There had been things very like alligators among the ScreeWee’s distant ancestors, and some habits had been handed down. The Captain opened her mouth fully, which made her lower and upper jaws move apart in a way that would make a human’s eyes water.
    The birds hopped in and began to clean her teeth. One of them found a small piece of plastic ray gun.
     
     
    The watching ship was moving, still keeping at a great distance, traveling around the fleet in a wide circle. It had watched one more attacker come in; Johnny had got rid of this one with a missile and some shots, although a flashing red light on the panel was suggesting that something, somewhere, wasn’t working anymore. Probably those secondary pumps again.
    He found he was turning the ship all the time to keep the distant dot in front of him.
    “Johnny?”
    It was the Captain.
    “Yes? Are you watching it?”
    “Yes. It is moving between us and the Border. It is in our direct line of flight now.”
    “You can’t sort of steer around it?”
    “There are more than three hundred ships in the fleet. That may be difficult.”
    “It seems to be waiting for something. I’ll…I’ll risk going to have a look.”
    He let his ship overtake the fleet and run ahead of it, toward the distant dot.
    It made no attempt to get out of his way.
    It was a starship just like his own. In fact, in a way…it was his starship. After all, there was only one starship in the entire game, the one You flew to Save Mankind. Everyone was flying the same one…in a way.
    It hung against the stars, as lifeless as a Space Invader. Johnny moved a bit closer, until he could see the cockpit and even the shape of a head inside. It had a helmet on. Everyone did—it was on the cover of the box. You wore a helmet in a starship. He didn’t know why. Maybe the designers thought you were likely to fall off when you went around corners.
    He tried the communicator again.
    “Hello? Can you hear me?”
    There was nothing but the background hiss of the universe.
    “I’m pretty sure you can. I’ve got a feeling about it.”
    The tiny blob of the helmet turned toward him. You could no more see through the smoked glass of the helmet than you could through a pair of sunglasses from the outside, but he knew he was being stared at.
    “What are you waiting for?” said Johnny. “Look, I know you can hear me, I don’t want to have to—”
    The other ship roared into life. It accelerated toward the oncoming fleet on two lances of blue light.
    Johnny swore under his breath and kicked his own engines into life. There was no hope of overtaking the attacker. It had a head start, and a starfighter’s top speed was a starfighter’s top speed.
    It was just out of gun range. He raced along behind