Transgalactic Antics
Chapter One – Carrie the MaverickCarrie Hatchett silently wished she had put on her thermal underwear. She had been crouching for hours in a cold, damp, trench dug by Unity troops, while the siege of the squashpump city dragged on.
‘City’ was a loose word to describe the squashpump municipality. It was in fact a massive mound of moist, brown organic matter on a bare, boggy plain. Try as she might, Carrie couldn’t help but see it as a huge manure pile and the squashpumps as large, intelligent, civilised slugs.
“Ma bairns, ma bairns.” Nearby—close enough for Carrie’s translator to pick up its squeaks and transform them into Scottish-accented English in her mind—a squashpump official sat, or lay. At the beginning of the negotiations several days earlier, this squashpum
