Planet Zog, The Third Age, year 36 (roughly equivalent to the year 2162 in Earth years)

  In just a week and a half, the Zogtown automobile industry was already taking shape. It was a rather wonky shape, but a shape nonetheless.

  There was a steep learning curve. Local personal mobility devices of any sort hadn’t been made on British soil since the mid 2100s. So it wasn’t easy to find Zoggites who were good with their hands, which is what they really needed.

  What they did have was a lot of the sorts of people who asked people in other countries to do the hands-on work for them, so that they could save money. Lots of engineers, CEOs, marketers and that sort of thing. But the job needed doing, and they were what was available. And of course, they were slaves and as such they didn’t have a say in it really.

  What this meant, however, was that the Baroness had a lot of people who had rather basic jobs with a lot of opinions about how she should be doing her job. Which she found rather irritating.

  But this was where she found, to her surprise, Gloam, saving the day. Because he always thought that if someone got too big for their boots, the best thing to do was to take off their boots and beat them with them until they had a change of heart.

  The Baroness found it immensely refreshing. Could she be starting to have a crush on him? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was something even more unexpected - that she actually respected him.

  This wasn’t something she was particularly used to, being always the smartest person in the room. But perhaps it was something of her imperial genetics revealing itself. She was, being a Baroness, related to two previous kings of Britain.

  The first one was rather violent. He got his crown by murdering the previous king. She wondered if it was in her genes to be attracted to a brute like Gloam. Or perhaps she just liked the cut of his jib.

  In any case, Gloam whipped the workers into shape (by actually whipping them, in many cases). The whipping helped the workers to look past their egos, and work for the common good. The common good, in this case, being Gloam’s pocket book.

  After a week of solid scrimmage, the Baroness’ first domestic rocket ship came off the line. It looked astonishingly sparkly and impressive. And it continued to look impressive for approximately 15 seconds, before it blew a fuse and conked out, whizzing and spitting plumes of crud smoke all over the crowd. Its passenger got off lightly, with a severely messed up hairdo and some mild brain damage.

  Meanwhile, Bickly Urgh had been waiting outside Gloam’s penthouse for a week and a half, clutching a ramekin of Helium3 and fending off leering looks from Gloam’s brutal and mentally unstable guards.

  Bickly, once the darling of the Zog social scene, had fallen out of favour of late. His mining efforts had been productive, in that he had found loads of Helium3, which was initially thought of as something very exciting because it was seen as something everyone could make boatloads of cash from. But it had become rather unexciting rather quickly when efforts at finding someone to pay actual money for the product kept coming up at a dead end.

  Unfortunately, Helium3 wasn’t effective for powering electricity - which was Bickly’s initial idea. The material simply turned out to be too unstable and generally a bit too explosive. The first efforts at using it for this purpose had resulted in an entire block of Zogtown being scorched to a crisp, and twenty Zoggites with third degree burns.

  But Bickly had an idea. A good one, in fact. That is why he simply had to get in front of Gloam right that second, or if not that second, whenever Gloam had the spare time. Which was all the time, realistically, but Gloam was far more interested in partying and eating cheeses and being entertained by his many girlfriends, so Bickly wasn’t high on his list of priorities.

  So he waited, and waited. And he waited some more.

  Eventually, Gloam emerged from his penthouse with a cracking headache, and Bickly got his chance.

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  ‘Sir…sir!’ he bleated.

  Gloam leered at him imperiously.

  ‘Oh God. You again.’

  ‘Yes…sir.’

  ‘You blasted disappointment of a man. I’ve got half a mind to have you sent to the death pits.’

  ‘Yes sir, I most certainly deserve the death pits, if you will it sir. I respect your divine wishes as the high protector and exalted ruler of…’

  ‘Out with it man. You’re embarrassing yourself.’

  ‘Well sir, I…I think I’ve got an idea of how to use all this Helium3, sir.’

  ‘You what?’ Gloam snorted.

  ‘The stuff that we’ve been digging up - the product.’

  Gloam laughed.

  ‘You mean that useless garbage you convinced me was going to make us all a truckload of cash, but instead just blows up my buildings and injures my slaves? You idiot.’

  Gloam indicated to his guards that he’d had enough. They grabbed Bickly’s shoulders and started dragging him away. Bickly started pleading at a quicker, more desperate speed.

  ‘But sir…sir. SIR. It’s the Baroness’ invention, sir! This could be the fuel source that could take it to the moons!’

  Gloam fluttered his eyeballs to indicate a mild amount of intrigue. He waved his sausage fingers at the guards, who dropped Bickly abruptly onto the floor. Gloam ummed and ahh-ed for a moment.

  ‘Oulright Bickers. You’ve got my attention. But I must warn you, if I don’t like what I hear, I’ll be calling old Ellis down at the death pits to sharpen a spike with your name on it.’

  ‘Yes, yes sir, of course sir.’

  Across town in her fancy new factory, the Baroness examined her conked-out cruiser as if it were a Rubik’s Cube. She pulled a wire out here, and plugged something in somewhere else, stopping at regular intervals to turn the ignition key to see if the blasted thing would turn on. So far, not so good.

  The workers had all gone home for the night, but the Baroness was never one for a work/life balance. She generally thought that the more she worked, the better she enjoyed her life, and the rest balanced itself out.

  Though she wasn’t alone in the factory. The Baroness’ biggest fan, her test pilot Azoga was still around. She tended to follow the Baroness around like a lovelorn puppy dog. While the Baroness worked, Azoga looked over at her from across the room with adoring eyes, as she drooled on a socket wrench. She wasn’t the brightest of characters, but she had a good heart.

  ‘I think it’s…oh hang on…’ said the Baroness, as she had a lightbulb moment. ‘It’s this lightbulb! It’s in the wrong spot. There. That should do it!’

  The Baroness, with a look of smug contentedness, twisted the lightbulb into the socket, then went back to the cockpit, and twisted the key.

  BarUMMMM!

  The engine sputtered happily to life.

  VrEEEM! Was the sound the stabilising rockets under the chassis made, as the superheated air was forced out, lifting the cruiser gently off the ground.

  ThrUMMM! Was the sound, and feeling that gripped everything in the ships’ immediate vicinity, causing the entire building to buzz every-so-slightly.

  Azoga quite enjoyed the ThrUMMM. If she knew what is was like to sit on a washing machine, she would probably have thought that the feeling was rather like that. But since her mind had not been swapped with an English person like the Baroness, she didn’t know the slightest thing about washing machines.

  Instead, Azoga thought something that might be roughly translated into: ‘this. Feeling. NiiiIIiice.’

  The Baroness surveyed her creation. The fancy new factory, along with all the marvellous new materials that Gloam supplied it with allowed her to advance her design in delightful ways.

  For example - instead of the flame-proof waxen palm fronds that she had previously used to build the chassis of her vehicle, she now had access to a type of metal alloy quite similar in molecular structure to steel (but not quite the same, seeing as the entire elemental table of Zog was like a cross-eyed cousin of Earths’).

  But the material was light, and strong, and most importantly - shiny.

  The Baroness hadn’t ever considered before now how much her original design lacked shininess - but now that she’d seen it herself, she was convinced that shininess was next to godliness.

  Ooh…so shiny, she thought, almost erotically, as her hands caressed the smooth, chrome lines of the ship.

  It had an almost retro-futuristic look about it. Almost like a Thunderbird, except with a smooth reinforced plastic-like bobble over the driver’s seat. The Baroness had a fondness for the 21st century cartoon ‘The Jetsons,’ and had secretly held the notion that the aesthetics of 22nd century ship design could have done a lot better if it used ‘The Jetsons’ as inspiration, and less of the iPhone look that seemed to dominate everything after Apple became the biggest company in the world for almost two centuries.

  Who’s a pretty girl.

  Then there was a knock at the door. On the other side of it, was Gloam, a couple of his bumble-headed guards and a very nervous-looking Bickly, clutching his receptacle of Helium3.

  Azoga looked at the Baroness for approval before lumbering over to open the door.

  As soon as the door was ajar, Gloam levitated into the room, gleaming at the sight of the new cruiser.

  ‘Who’s a pretty boy!’ he said, eyes as wide as saucers. ‘I rather think you’ve outdone yourself on this Baroness! Auwfully good job I say!’

  The Baroness knew that she did a good job, and didn’t need the approval of men. But she enjoyed it all the same.

  “Baroness,” Gloam cooed melodically. “I’ve got something that might give your rocket a little bit more ‘oomph’”

  OOh?” Replied the Baroness. “That does sound rather lovely. Let’s sit down for a spot of tea and you can tell me all about it.”