The God Complex: The Book Of Alan, Destroyer Of Worlds

Chapter Thirty-One

'Well, Dawkins is quite clearly insane,' declared Jaibles sitting next to Monkey in the bridge and observing the concerned look on Gabe's face.

'Keep your voice down,' hushed Gabe.

'He can't hear us, I left him making another pot of tea, have you heard how loud that kettle is?'

'Okay, so Dawkins is a little...strained, but that doesn't mean he's not telling the truth. Admittedly, the Alan thing was a little weird but other than that he confirmed everything Cain told me.'

'A little weird? Gabe, the man has clearly lost it, you could have told him you found out EDEN was set up to rid the world of excessive instagram hashtags and he probably would have confirmed it'

'you don't know that,' replied Gabe.

'I get your point, Geezer,' interjected Monkey, 'but he was supposed to be our credible witness. How are you going to convince anyone this happened based on that testimony?''

'And you don't get to choose which part of his confession best fits your theory,' continued Jaibles. 'If you believe EDEN deliberately trained children to test their new technological advances in suicide missions, then you have to believe we only escaped Earth because a God named Alan saved us, but is now going to kill us all for not saying thank you.'

'He never said he was going to kill us,' muttered Gabe a little embarrassed.

'It was implied. Listen Gabe, you wanted to do this and we backed you, we kidnapped a high ranking EDEN official, mostly because it was a cool space pirate thing to do, but also to satisfy you; we know how badly you want revenge against Cain, but are you seriously now saying you're now going after Abaddon off the back of what Dawkins just told you?'

Gabe sighed, he knew he didn't have enough to pin this on EDEN.

'Exactly, so let's just drop him back off on the same planet we found him, hope that satisfies the Military Police and rethink how we deal with Cain.'

Before Jaibles could finish, the Archangel stuttered and plunged into darkness. Gabe tapped helplessly at his controls in the solum silence of the broken Archangel.

Dawkins came rushing in, tea in hand and nudged Jaibles out of the way - moments later the shuttle was performing a full reboot and the lights gently flickered on.

'What the Hell was that?' said Monkey.

'That,' said Dawkins looking up, 'was your shuttle protecting itself. Your hull has been breached and you are clearly leaking fluid.'

'I had it performing a full diagnostic while we were talking to you,' remembered Jaibles.

'Well from the sound of how it shuddered and faltered,' continued Dawkins as he moved from control panel to control panel in a flurry of activity, 'I'd say it was your reserve aluminium tank that's the issue. Yes, exactly as I thought, you're at 15%.'

'But we fixed that?' protested Monkey.

'We took some heavy fire from the Military Police leaving that planet,' replied Gabe pulling up the report, 'that's really bad, if we don't find more we'll lose the ability to take off or land - we'll be stuck up here floating aimlessly. How do we find more?'

'We mine it of course,' replied Dawkins calmly.

'From where? With what?'

'From the nearest aluminium rich planet, with the standard mining equipment that every shuttle is issued with,' replied Dawkins adjusting his glasses, 'my oh my, I thought they taught all of this at the EDEN academy? Oh well, I suppose in the grand scheme of things it hardly matters.'