“Baby, you and I don’t have enough time to see all the sights of the universe”, dismissed Delores Moon as I fumbled under the drive control panel of the Viceroy’s Elongi Special. Of course, she was right, but probably not for the romantic reasons I imagined she imagined. Our chances of getting away unvaporised were practically zero unless I learned to hot-wire this spaceship fast.

However, practically zero was considerably better odds than we had less than half an hour ago, chained together in the aptly named ‘death row’. (I appreciate that sentence requires some additional explanation).

Death Row is a grand name for the four shabby but overly secure cells hidden beneath the Viceroy’s palace in the sprawling market city of Beb Al’Shroud. A tiny rancid jewel of a planet in the local Muntap’s crumbling empire. (I say Empire; it’s three planets and a moon, but who’s counting?). The cells are “secure processing” for anyone unlucky enough to get caught. From here, they will transfer us to something (perhaps ironically) called The Grand Court of the Free, where a Justice Guard will prosecute us for our crimes (even if nobody attending knows what they might be). Anyhow, anyone who has had a run-in with the paranoid Viceroy’s Royal Guard will tell you (if they can still talk) that the Guard prefers accidental death by beating over a traditional court system any day. Hence, the nickname for our current residence.

In fairness to the three enthusiastic guards who had recently processed me to the point of unconsciousness, I doubt legal proceedings could ever be their modus operandi. On reflection, it was probably the use of the phrase “Modus Operandi” that got me so righteously beaten in the first place.

I digress - let’s start with me coming around on the floor of my little corner of death row chained to a seethingly hot (in both senses of the word), Delores Moon.

“About time, sweat stain, I need to piss, and I can’t get to the can without you coming along”. She yanked up our hands joined in holy custody, to evidence her statement.

I shook my head to try to clear the stars from my eyes and the bells from my ears. That was a lot of information for a man lying on an unknown cold, slimy floor, nursing a mild concussion and a not-so-mild hangover.

“Won’t that ruin all the mystery between us?” I quipped, hoping to come off the rakish side of cocky. However, all I got for my efforts was a sharp tug, more rough stone floor and a forced landing at her feet whilst she perched upon our cell’s well-used throne. I attempted to sit up but found the boot she had planted on the side of my head, still attached to her foot, somewhat restricted my movements.

“Face down, eyes shut, no peaking bitch!”

It was at that moment, with my head squashed against the vintage piss-infused flagstone that I fell in love with Delores Moon.

I didn’t tell her; it wasn’t the right moment. Instead, I enquired about some basic where, what, whys to help me better understand our current conjoined predicament. Apparently, there had been a meeting of some minor activist group (there are several hundred in Beb Al’Shroud), which had been gate-crashed by some heavily armed opponents of this aforementioned unknown movement. Their bullet-focused arguments against this particular theological position aroused the interest of the punch-hungry local Guards, who welcomed the distraction from traffic duty with their usual enthusiasm. In the end, Delores and I were the only two people the honour guard had found still moving in the destroyed Ben Nova Souk.

“But that doesn’t explain why I’m in a cell rather than a hospital bed eating Grapes.”

“What the fuck are grapes.”

I knew it wasn’t necessary, but a part of me loves explaining obscure Earth cultural references to anyone who will listen. Delores didn’t love to listen, preferring instead to kick a compact collection of my soft parts while repositioning her undergarments. The sudden oxygen impasse this created gave me a galaxy of sensations, including stars and a brief but total blackout.

When I came too for the second time in ten minutes, Delores and I were in a more customary side-by-side configuration on the bench/bed. The handcuffs clanking romantically on the metal frame between us.

“Sorry,” we said together. This cracked the first non-violent smile I had seen on her face since we met. It was a beautiful, if somewhat metallic, grin, her full-set titanium grill glinting in the harsh blue cell light.

“I don’t much like cocky mansplainers, but… I didn’t mean to black you out again.”

“I get that a lot!”

Her brow furrowed.

“I come from a high Oxy planet, which means down here it doesn’t take a lot to send me to sleep.”

She seemed satisfied with the explanation. It wasn’t 100 per cent true, but I hoped it would do.

“I’m Delores, Delores Moon.”

“Hi…I’m Bernard St Clare.”

I wanted her to say “The Bernard St Clare!” but she didn’t, so we sat silently, contemplating our parents’ naming choices. Until our internal ruminations were suddenly shattered by the external screams of a nearby prisoner as he became intimately acquainted with the sharp end of a minor law or two.

“We need to get out of here”, I stated obviously.

“No shit”, she agreed. We clearly had a lot in common, which was a real positive, considering how I felt about her.

Until now, I knew I hadn’t come across as the most capable short-to-medium-term prospective partner. However, I was sure my expertise in escaping near-death situations would impress me.

“Have you got a hairpin?” I asked in a wry yet knowing way, popular with criminal types the solar system over. She responded with a look so shaven and beautiful at the same time that I was forced to adjust my zero-G compression pants to make some room.

“Are you finished?” she rolled her eyes, with just a hint of intrigue… probably.

“Okay, no hairpin. Have you got anything sharp and metal?”

She spat her grill at me so fast it bounced off my jaunty moustache and landed moist in my hand.

“I assume you don’t want this back?”

“If it’s a choice between grill or life, I choose life”.

God, she is hot.

What I did next is not for the faint-hearted, so if you are squeamish, jump ahead a couple of paragraphs… look for the word lubricant…

Thankfully, Delores had invested well in her dental ornament, which was as sharp as it was strong. I like to think she was impressed more than grossed out when I used her incisors to sever my left thumb from my hand.

“What the actual…” she thanked me as my now defunct thumb slopped to the floor.  Her mouth remained open as I slid my reduced fist through the cuffs, thanks to a good squirt of red sauce for lubricant.

It didn’t stop bleeding. I offered up the blood-covered mouth knife.

“Are you fuckin’ ill or something?” she spat whilst pulling away from me so fast she nearly banged her head on the ceiling.

“Cloth?” I whimpered.

Thankfully, she was a doer rather than a thinker. She tore the lower half off her shrapnel blouse, revealing a custom Hericulian Anti-Stab bra underneath.

“Nice bra”, I quipped as I wrapped the fabric around my mutilated hand, making a bloody glove.

“Don’t get creepy…” she snapped.

“Or handzey?’ I joked, waving my remaining four fingers.

My brutal act of denturation finally broke the ice, and she cracked a metal-free smile that I will never forget. Now, finally connected we took a moment to check out the cell.

“No windows.”

“No air vents or grates.”

Delores stood up so fast that I’m not proud to say I flinched in fear, but her energies were focused on our front door, which took the brunt of an elegant rattle-and-kick manoeuvre. The door rang like a Beadles bell, warning mourners that a twin box of tortured space heroes was getting delivered very soon.

“Worth a try,” she shrugged.

“Worth a try,” I smiled, “No obvious route out, so what’s left that can be moved or used?’

A second scan culminated with us both staring at the still-warm throne in the corner.

I clapped my hands in that overly optimistic, “Let’s get a chivvy on” way, much loved by harassed mothers of toddlers the universe over, followed by a jovial “One way in, one way out!” for good measure.

Delores, wiped some inadvertant blood splats from her face and scowled at the nominated obstacle to our freedom. Perhaps hoping her furrowed face would have the same effect it would in any bar in the universe and make the toilet fuck off and leave her alone.

“Seriously?”

“It’s the only way,” I said.

“You’ve done this before?”

Big question. It made several assumptions that would be critical to address if our escaped-based romantic partnership was going to work. Firstly, the truthful answer is no, and as far as I’m aware, nobody has done this before. However, as a lover of all things vintage Earth, I had seen an ancient movie or two, and right now, a scene from a comedy called Trainspotting was forming the foundation of my plan.

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“I know a guy; he told me about a guy who was in a cell with a guy…”

(I know, I’m lying… it’s a habit when I’m with a beautiful woman).

“Cut the crap.”

Poor choice of words, considering how this plan begins and ends!

“It’s only held down with a couple of bolts at the back”.

“What the fuck are you? A space plumber?”

This hurt my feelings a little. Firstly, it sounded like being a space plumber would be bad; Secondly, being a “space plumber” made no sense.  You can’t plumb space; it’s a vacuum; why would you put a vacuum in pipes? Where is it going? Who’s it for? I’m a plumber who “works in space”, a very different beast. Again, I chose to hold my inner monologue in situ and went with wry smile number 5; it has a pleasing amount of teeth (and I knew she liked teeth) and, I like to think, it downplays the moustache which can come across as a little ostentatious in the wrong light. Toilets, from my professional experience, are always the wrong light for a moustache.

“Are you high or mad, or high and mad?”

AAAAAAAGH!

Another scream, followed by silence, then a worryingly enthusiastic round of applause from an appreciative audience at the torture two cells down, signified that our ticking clock was well and truly ticked. It was time for a fast-paced honesty bomb.

“Honestly, I’m bloody’ scared. I cut my thumb off in a moment of bravado. I have no idea how we are going to get out of here; I don’t want to go down the toilet, and I don’t want to die before we have made love. I am a plumber, but I specialise in cooling systems for Quantum Magnetic screw drives, which isn’t a lot of use anywhere that doesn’t have one! Still, I reckon if we rip the toilet out the ground, it will reveal a large shit pipe that pours directly into the ocean - about two kilometres that way.” I stuck my arm out in a very definite northerly direction to emphasise my point… my bloody point.

Delores nodded slowly. She finally understood that this Bernard St Claire was about as much use in our current predicament as a tutu and pointe shoes. But as I was all she had, she was fully prepared to pas de turd down this shiny shitter with me.

We stood on either side of the throne and grabbed the slippery rim. I was about to comment on how it seemed to have retained some warmth from her recent visit, but Delores wasn’t about to wait for witticisms now that the plan had been hatched.

I’ll tell her later.

The toilet came away surprisingly quickly. The bolts had eroded with tens of years of nervously sprayed acidic piss, corroding them to ferrous needles in the concrete. Delores snatched the toilet from me (I was man enough not to resist; it’s good to share the load) and placed it carefully on the bed to avoid alerting our nearby jailers. Underneath the promised maw was, in fact, a shimmering defecation mound of unfeasible proportions extending from our cell into whatever was below.

“In my professional opinion, it appears to be blocked?” I offered.

Delores looked at me accusingly, like I had somehow expelled the shit pile in secret last night. “Well, what part of my outfit will you be needing to get us through that pile of crap?”

I considered asking her how attached she was to her magnificent knee-high quad-buckled Dovian combat boots, but I thought better of it. This one was going to have to be all mine.

“Stand back!” I exclaimed in the way commanders have done in wars since the dawn of bullets, just before leaping over the wall and drawing the enemy’s fire to save their troops from certain death. Delores rolled her eyes and promptly smashed her combat boot’s fully armoured hydraulic heel into the metal plate surrounding our fetid obstacle. The plate obediently leapt into the air and hovered conveniently in front of her to catch. In the twenty minutes I had known her, she had never looked as hot as she did holding that dripping shit tray, awaiting my next move.

“Are you going to help with this escape, or is your plan to simply point at things and watch me work?”

“In fairness, that…” I waved my blood glove at her boot, “… was precisely what I was going to do, apart from the catch, for obvious reasons”.

Delores smiled. “Let’s go, plumber boy.” Before I had a chance to object, she grabbed my soggy severed paw and threw the metal plate into the air before leaping up, landing feet first on her improvised surfboard before sliding down excrement Everest. I swung my good arm around just in time to grab her wrist; unfortunately, the momentum wasn’t quite enough to keep me above the pile of poo.

“Dig your heels in like you’re sole surfing…” she screamed as the physics of our situation kicked in.

‘What the fuck is sole surfing..?’ Is what I wanted to say, but I chose to put a pin in it as the enormity of our predicament became apparent.

Surfing about fifty clicks a minute down a mountain of shite is one thing, but to do this under the Viceroy’s palace with only random shafts of light to mark the route through the dung mountains, along faecal valleys, to find an exit we don’t even know exists, was undoubtedly a rush! The first adventure of Delores Moon and Bernard St. Clare was, no matter how hard we tried, going to end in a massive dump.

We hit the towering stone foundations about a minute later. Delores was able to throw out an arm to cushion the blow, but I had no hands left that weren’t already holding on for dear life. The sudden change in direction slammed me into the wall… where a millennia of lubri-crap aided my smooth transit along its surface. The ancient stool spray peppered my face like so much moist shrapnel.

I wanted to scream but knew that would involve opening a front door in my face and inviting a lot of unwanted guests in who would likely delight in killing me slowly from a million forgotten germs and probably some new ones desperate to escape their shitty incubator.

Delores was taking our predicament in her usual (as far as I could tell from the twenty three minutes we had spent together), stoic, methodical, and beautifully violent way. She leaned forward on the metal plate, steering it carefully away from the wall, the front tip grazing some ancient stonework and briefly showering the excrement sea with bright sparks. This was either a massive mistake or an absolute stroke of genius. Either way, the results were… explosive. The thing with millions of tonnes of human waste is it just loves to rot, and even a Plumber who works in space and has only a rudimentary understanding of chemistry can do that equation;

Rot = methane, methane + spark = BOOM!

The fireball rolled away from us initially, illuminating our transit with an angry red light. We were hurtling through a vaulted cathedral of cack, careening down a cavernous valley containing hundreds of years of evacuated overeating and torture-induced diarrhoea. Delores turned to look at me, her eyes wide, grinning. Her face lit up red and orange from the enormous, angry methane ball now bearing down on us at an alarming rate.

She was fucking loving this!

As I have mentioned before, Delores is a woman of action, and once again, she didn’t let me down. Flexing the mighty arm, I was clinging to, muscles bulging to breaking point, she fought against the forces of the universe that were intent on separating us. As she pulled me close, we wrapped our arms around each other. She adjusted her feet position on the metal plate and tucked down to increase our speed. Clinging like a baby marsupial plumber to her designer warrior bra, I could see the all-consuming end-of-the-world moment about ten metres behind us. I was not fond of that perspective, so I dropped my head and viewed our future prospects upside down.

Ahead, the cavern’s end was a barrier of ancient stone animated with a projection of reds and oranges. This was not how I thought my life would end. In truth, if anyone in the whole universe seriously thought this was how their life would end, I would suggest there aren’t enough therapists in the solar system to fix that head.

“NO WAY OUT!” I screamed. Unhelpful, I know, but I felt I needed to offer my thoughts on the matter even though they were nothing more than the primal scream of a dead man sliding.

Delores, fully concentrating on steering our sliver of a vehicle across the valley of poop, chose not to respond. I took this to mean she had a plan more advanced than crashing into the slabs and saving us both from the pleasure of the impeding BBQ by smashing our skulls to oblivion. I was wrong.

As the blast wave reached us ahead of the heat, we accelerated to speeds no man should ever travel without a large amount of metal, straps, and a helmet!

“WAAAAALLL!”

As the rolling firewall’s Fahrenheit ferocity hit us, we hit the wall. Thankfully, the blast wave, which had passed us just a fraction of a second before, had done a fantastic job of removing the mortar and freeing the stones from their ancient prison. The wall bulged away from us, and we seamlessly transitioned from surfing a wave of fast-cooking faeces to traversing a tumbling jumble of exploding stones.

Delores lifted my head and looked hard into my eyes as we flew through the air. I could see clearly what she felt; I felt it, too. If we were going to die right now, thank god we had managed to spend this precious time together.

“I’m going to fuckin’ kill you if we survive this,” she whispered playfully just before, for the third time that day, I blacked out.

When I came to the ground around me was bouncing up and down in an alarming fashion. I closed my eyes, hoping it would think twice about the blatant disregard for normality, but upon opening them again, I was bitterly disappointed.

“Stop it!” I shouted at the ground, and weirdly, this seemed to do the job, although, for some inexplicable reason, I found the ground hurtling towards me to give me a swift slap.  As I lay there kissing the dirt, a recognisable shit-covered boot slid under my aching ribs and rolled me over. The stars were out tonight. I could see stars!! Actual stars, not the weird flashing head stars I had been seeing for the last half hour due to the dangerous concussion I was struggling to recover from.

“Can you walk?” said the sky.

“Are my legs still there?”

“Yes,” the sky was smiling a toothy smile.

“Delores?”

Delores grabbed my arm, avoiding the dusty, crusted improvised bandage hanging off my lesser hand like a vine on a branch. She pulled me upright and held my shoulders while I sent pleading messages to my legs to behave.

“You okay, space plumber?”

“Bernard is fine.”

“Don’t talk in the first person, it’s weird.”

I shook my head again, trying to figure out what that meant. “No, I meant…”

“I know dumb arse. We can do the name thing after the sex thing, which won’t happen until we find a spaceship and finish the escape thing… right?”

You can say what you like about the primal nature of men and their very bassist of instincts, but a promise of intercourse will snap you back to full consciousness faster than two adrenalin shots after an espresso enema.

“Around the front of the palace is the Viceroy’s private spaceport. He has an Elongi Special in there…”

Delores was noticeably impressed by my knowledge of the Viceroy’s personal fleet.

“Sounds like a sex toy!”

“Well, it’s sexy as fuck, and has a Quantum Magnetic Screw Drive… I rebuilt the cooling system yesterday; that’s why I was on this shit hole of a planet.”

“You see..”She said, squeezing my shoulders hard and lifting me a few inches off the ground. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t kill you when you were asleep.”

That’s real love; even when your partner annoys you, you resist smothering them as they sleep.

We stumble-ran across the open courtyard. Around us, the palace was in chaos. The CACKophonous explosion caused a large portion of the retaining wall to stop retaining and start releasing. The upshot of which was a massive hole in the side of the central keep and a slow-motion tsunami of vintage excreta sliding inexorably toward the Viceroy’s living quarters. Anyone who wasn’t running away from the wall of waste was dragging, throwing, dropping and pushing anything they could get their hands on to slow the tide. It wasn’t working. But it was the perfect cover for our escape.

A hop (over an elctroe-fence), skip (across a loading gantry beam) and a jump (into the starboard air intake vent) brings us right up to date, with me lying on my back with my pliers in my teeth and a wrench in my hand - like all good plumbers who work in space should be.

“Once I get her started, this beauty can take us anywhere in the universe,” I proclaimed excitedly as I pulled out yet another loom of wires from the launch control panel.

“Baby, you and I don’t have enough time to see all the sights of the universe,” Delores dismissed…

“Well, you’re going have to pick your top ten then because…” I paused dramatically as I flicked the blue wire across the red wire, just like every grand theft auto specialist has since cars began. Thankfully this time, the Screw Drive spun up. “…we are about to have a whole universe to choose from.”

“With a lot of angry royal guards on our tail?

I lifted myself up from the floor and flicked a switch, bringing the drive and navigator seats back to the control desk.

“It wouldn’t be a proper adventure if we didn’t piss someone off,” I quipped as Delores and I dropped into the empty seats in perfect synchronicity.

Delores looked at me long and hard. She told me later she was weighing up the relative merits of killing me or accepting the inevitable and allowing me to be her lover… until she decided to kill me. This was Delores’s way, unique in the universe, but that’s why I love her.

She smiled a full, grill-free grin.” okay, space plumber, why don’t you take Delores to the moon and back!”

I wonder how long she had waited to say that.

“Any particular moon?” I inquired as I disengaged the landing clamps, guided the pointy end towards the fast-closing launch bay doors and held my hand teasingly over the big red launch control button.

“All of them!” laughed Delores and slammed her hand onto mine, blasting us into the inky blackness of space to begin the next adventure of Delores Moon and Bernard St Clare.