Free Blonde Bombshell by Tom Holt Page B

music (inaudible to Dirter ears but painfully obtrusive to his weapons-grade sensory array) was getting harder and harder to ignore. There was one particular melodic line, tum tumpty tumpty tum tum, that went straight through his interference barrage like a disrupter bolt through custard. He tried to fight it, but that only seemed to make things worse. The pattern of numbers and intervals sent cascades of pure mathematics, meaningless but irresistibly tantalising, racing through his circuits, flooding the buffers with pseudo-equations and arithmetical white noise. Infuriating, but it reminded him of why he was here, the vital importance of his mission. He was, after all, a machine; a machine, furthermore, skilfully designed to resist music attacks. What must it be like for the poor defenceless organic Ostar, who had no way of blocking the stuff out? When he’d left Homeworld, things were so bad that parents were having their children’s auditory centres surgically removed at birth. Obviously, something had to be done if the Ostar were to stand any chance at all of surviving as a species. It was, Twain reminded himself, up to him and him alone. Getting the job done was all that mattered, by all and any means necessary, and if that meant smiling, he’d smile.
    So, he told himself. Be strong. Concentrate. Tumpty tum tum. “Excuse me,” he said. The Dirter with the earphones didn’t react; hadn’t heard him. He raised his voice. “Excuse me.”
    The Dirter looked up.
    “Would you mind turning the music down, please?”
    The Dirter looked at him. “You can hear it?”
    Twain nodded. “Turn tumpty tumpty tum tum,” he said. “It’s driving me nuts. Would you mind terribly?”
    The Dirter shrugged, pressed a tiny button on his plastic box. The music stopped. It was wonderful. “Thanks,” Twain croaked.
    “You could really hear it?”
    “Oh yes.”
    “You must have ears like a bat.”
    Cross-reference. Bats. Bats’ ears. Correlate and compare; relevant cultural reference found. Evaluate cultural reference. On balance, he decided, it was probably meant as a compliment. He raised one eyebrow, lifted his right hand and spread the fingers.
    “Live long and prosper,” he said.
    That just seemed to disconcert the Dirter, who looked away. No matter. The music had stopped, and he could think.
    Think— Yes! So blindingly obvious, and yet the finest minds on Ostar hadn’t even considered it. Of course, it was almost inevitable that the finest minds on Ostar, when they’d been contemplating the question, had been fighting back waves of tum tum tum-tum tumpty; perfectly understandable, therefore, that they might have missed the screamingly obvious.
    The defence grid was music-based. Possessed of a weapon capable of reducing even the Ostar to mumbling idiots, naturally they’d used it as their last, best hope for survival. The Mark One, on reaching planetary orbit, must’ve been assaulted with a deafening burst of Dirt’s catchiest tunes, sufficient to blank out all its primary systems and strand it paralysed in space, mindlessly humming and flashing its warning lights in time to the music. Presumably some last-ditch failsafe had triggered the self-destruct — hence the big bang, the melted ice-caps, the heat and the hydrocarbons; but there was no way to spin that into anything remotely resembling a victory. If that was what he was up against, Twain decided, this wasn’t going to be easy.
    The door opened. The religious type wandered out, looking as if he’d just been turned loose minus his brain. The music fan got up and went in.
    Right, then, Twain thought, tumpty-tum. Plan A still looked like his best bet, but a Plan B would be a good idea, tumpty. Now all he had to do was think of one. Tumpty-tum.
    He thought for a long time, but nothing came. All he could think of was the spiralling, scintillating paths of numerical progressions sparked off by the repeated sequence, tum tumpty tumpty tum tum. He tried to resist,