Then she remembers. The wall. The burrows at the receivers. The decision made long ago by some Director that moving data backups to the moon would not be a good use of resources.
Director Tyrell grabs her hand to help her from the couch and claps her on the back. His face is wreathed in smiles and without a care. Should she tell them what’s coming? It may not be today. It may not be a thousand years from now.
But it will come. Their virtual world will end. The battle just beginning in the physical world on Earth will someday end it for them.
Should she tell them time is no longer endless?
Dog. Flea. Shake.
Considering Tyrell’s face and the happy faces around her, she decides they have all carried enough burdens. Those who erred cannot go back and undo their actions. It is done. Telling them what she knows will only mar their time here. It would be cruel.
And really, is their future end a bad thing? Perhaps it’s time for Earth to be rid of humans … in every form. Maybe a new, more deserving species will arise in time. And maybe those humans who’ve seeded the stars will at last find the better angels of their nature.
Yes, she will keep her peace and share nothing of what’s happening out there in the world of flesh and bone. However long it lasts, this is the time for happiness, the time for ease.
She smiles back up at him and says, “Well, don’t stand there smiling all day. Show me around! Who’s up for a game of tennis? I haven’t played in centuries.”
About Ann Christy
This tale is the fourth side-story in the world of Lulu 394 … a book Ann hasn’t completed yet. She’s been working on it for four years and will likely be working on it for a while longer. It’s one of those that must be perfect, she feels, or it will entirely suck. These short stories help her flesh out parts of the tale that live in the background, never to be delved into within the pages of the book itself. If you’re interested, you can find The Mergens—a dark tale tied to the one you just read—in The Ways We End, a collection of apocalyptic tales by Ann. Also, within the pages of the follow-up collection, And Then Begin Again, you’ll find Lulu Ad Infinitum; and finally, in Robot Evolution is Posthumous. Fair warning, Ann says, that one makes pretty much everyone cry.
You can connect with Ann on Facebook or grab some freebie reading by signing up to her VIP Newsletter here.
Scrapyard Ship
by Felix R. Savage
1
WE BABIED THE SHIP FROM SILVERADO TO GORONGOL, but she gave out on us with eight thousand klicks left to go, and I had to duct the emergency LOX reserves into the retrorockets to put her down. No way was I taking her FTL with the antimatter containment loop losing integrity every time I breathed on the display. So we came down like a meteor, burning hydrolox that was 90 percent pure oxygen. If Dolph had chosen that moment to light a cigarette, we’d have been a scorch mark on the desert.
He waited until we were out of the ship and walking away. Grains of newly fused glass crunched under our feet. The smoke from Dolph’s cig masked the odor of burnt brush. The sun felt like a nail through the top of my head, even though I was wearing my old panama from San Damiano. The breeze rustling the bushes sounded loud in the silence. Heat rippled a stegosaurus ridge of hills on the horizon. I was walking in that direction for want of any better ideas. The ship shrank behind us into a forlorn crumple of metal origami.
I’d had that bird for eight years, ever since I got out of the army. Bought her cheap with my demob pay. Even at the time I knew I’d be lucky to get a thousand light years out of her. Now she was toast.
“Got any more bright ideas, Tiger?” said Dolph, shading his eyes with one hand. There was not a single living thing nor any sign of human habitation in sight. Well, you wouldn’t expect there to be any signs of human habitation. Gorongol is a Kroolth world. But there weren’t any signs of Kroolth, either.
“I’m thinking,” I said.
Dolph inhaled, exhaled. “Easy in, easy out, he said. It’s just a cargo run, he said. A bunch of graphene cables and some fancy tension dampeners—buy low, sell high, and there’ll be room in the hold for bananas.”
The Kroolth go ape for bananas. I think it’s something to do with micronutrients. They didn’t evolve in this system, of course—pretty much no one in the Cluster evolved where they’re from. Chronic potassium deficiency would help to explain their behavior.
Dolph went on, “You didn’t mention the part where the Silveradans intercept us because their Crown Prince is feuding with the Generalissimo of Gorongol—”
“How am I supposed to keep track of this stuff? Worlds like these change their government every second Tuesday.”
“So they confiscate the cargo, and put a hole in our freaking containment loop. Way to go, Mike. We could’ve kept Sally running for another ten years.”
It had always annoyed me that he called the ship Sally. I never gave ships pet names. Pets die on you. Behind us, Sally let out a series of sad pops as her fins cooled. Case in point.
“I think I have whiplash, too,” Dolph went on. He peevishly kicked the brush. His thin, sallow face was set in a frown, which turned into an expression of shock as a twenty-legged tarantula—that’s what it looked like—scuttled out from under the leaves and ran away.
“They didn’t confiscate the bananas,” I reminded him.
“Did you see that? It looked like a tarantula with twenty legs.”
“I wonder if we could fix the containment loop by cannibalizing a couple of electromagnets from the plasma chamber.”
“Great idea,” Dolph said. “We’ll also need some chewing gum and string.”
I scowled, in no mood for his wisecracking, even though I knew it was his way of dealing with the sad fate of “Sally.” For him, it was a personal tragedy. For me, it was a financial calamity. He wasn’t the one with his name on our business cards: Starrunner Imports, LLC. Freight carried, problems solved.
How was I going to solve this one? Dolph was right about one thing, anyway—I couldn’t solder my way out of it.
A crash reverberated across the desert. Dolph’s cigarette fell out of his mouth. Both of us spun around, reaching for our weapons.
Sally had lain down. That crash had been the noise of her nose slamming into the glassed surface of the desert. As we stared through the clouds of sparkling dust, a whole lot of black and fuzzy somethings swarmed up her crumpled jackstands and disappeared into the forward airlock, which we had left open.
At the same time, one of the bushes nearby grew legs and humped towards the ship, chasing the black fuzzies.
Dolph swallowed audibly, sighting down his .45.
“That bush has legs,” I said.
“Sometimes I wonder why they let you in the special forces,” Dolph said. “You must’ve gamed the IQ test.”
I slapped his pistol down. The walking bush was now trying to climb the airlock stairs. The last thing we wanted to do was piss it off and make it come this way. “At least I didn’t game the psych evaluation.”
“Hey,” Dolph said, “I was honest. Where it said, ‘How do your family and friends describe you?’ I put ‘Psychopathic.’” He lowered his pistol. Studying the bushes all around us, he handed me the .45 and stretched his arms over his head. “It’s damn hot,” he remarked, casually.
His sallow skin turned brown. His black hair turned into a bristly, spotted mane. Fur sprouted from his cheeks and the nape of his neck. He took off his clothes as he Shifted, to save the seams from splitting. Within ten seconds a jackal was loping to catch up with me. “Carry these for me, wouldja?” he said through the bundle of clothes he was carrying in his teeth.
Dolph isn’t really a psychopath. He’s a Shifter, like me. That’s why they let us in the special forces, not because we’re especially good at anything. Obviously.
I aimed a kick at him. “Shift back.”
“Hell with that,” said the jackal. “If these bushes try to eat us, I’ll see your ass at the mountains. Four legs are faster
than two.”
“OK. When the Kroolth make your skin into a rug, I’ll take a picture for your mom.” I got out my radio and crossed my fingers for a signal. The Kroolth are pretty low-tech, but they do have satellites.
“Who are you calling?” Dolph said.
I held up a finger. As I’d hoped, the stegosaurus ridges bounced the radio signals just enough that the handheld had finally found a lock. I entered my insurance code and broadcast it on the specified frequency. “I’ve resigned myself to the inevitable,” I said.
“You’re finally going to fire Irene? I told you she wasn’t working out.”
Dolph was referring to our weapons officer, whom we’d left behind on Ponce de Leon this time out. She was probably taking her kids to the beach, while we slogged across a desert infested with tarantulas and carnivorous sagebrush.
“If we can’t get the ship fixed,” I said, “I won’t need to fire her. None of us will have a job.” My radio crackled.
“Yeah ’lo how c’n I help ya?” droned a voice speaking English, which fortunately for us is the lingua franca in this part of the Cluster. My code would’ve told them I was an offworlder. I hoped they didn’t put two and two together and realize we were the same guys meant to be delivering an important cargo to their Generalissimo—a cargo we didn’t have anymore.
“Hi there!” I said as cheerfully as I could. “Is this Clusterwide Breakdown Services?”
* * *
Clusterwide will fix your ship on the spot if it’s something minor, like dead mice in the air ducts. That time, I had spent three days taking apart the CO2 removal assembly to find out why our air was becoming unbreathable, before I gave up and called Clusterwide. Irene had liked the look of the repair guy enough to let him into her cabin, where he soon traced the smell to escapees from the cage of mice Irene was keeping under her bunk. He had commiserated with me jovially as he pocketed our last quarter’s profit. Irene had said that she was sick of the vacuum-packed variety. That’s one reason I decided to leave her on the PdL this run. In retrospect: bad move. Had she been here, that pissant Silveradan patrol boat would never have got near us.
Clusterwide also provides haulage services, if your ship is actually still in space. There’s a small shipyard orbiting Gorongol, run by Ekschelatans.
However, my ship was decidedly not in space. It was sitting on a glassy smear of fused sand beneath a vast baby-blue sky, surrounded by carnivorous bushes.
When I gave our coordinates to the rep, he gasped, “You’re where? Do not leave your ship. Don’t even open the airlock.”
“Too late,” I said, staring across the desert at the camel-sized bush still trying to squeeze itself through the airlock in pursuit of the tarantulas.
“All right. All right. Go back to your ship and light a ring of fuel around it if you have any. Don’t follow the same path you followed out. There’ll be thornmaws waiting for you now. Basically, don’t brush up against the same plant twice.”
“OK,” I said.
“Separately,” the rep added, “I will have to ask for up-front payment before we come out there to pick you up.”
We did as advised, apart from lighting a ring of fuel. I thought that was overkill. While we waited with our backs pressed to the ship’s nose, Dolph said, “Do you get the impression the bushes are coming nearer?”
Actually, I did. They now formed a thick wall around the glassed area where the ship was standing, and now and then one of them would reach a claw-like root forwards and scratch at the rough glass, as if puzzled.
The Clusterwide reps arrived in a light prop plane. The first thing they did was fly in a low circle around the ship, hosing the bushes with a flamethrower. Then they landed on the smouldering ashes, hopped out in hazmat suits, and confirmed my payment details.
“Haulage plus repairs would cost you more than she’d bring on the parts market,” was their verdict on the ship, confirming my own gloomy assessment.
They were human, so I tended to think they were being straight with me. Plus, they were recommending a course of action that wouldn’t put any money in Clusterwide’s pockets.
“OK,” I said. The next words out of my mouth broke my heart a bit. “Is there a scrapyard near here?”
The male rep, a bandy-legged character with skin like cowhide from many years in Gorongol’s sun, pointed with a hazmat glove. “Right the other side of those hills, on the coast. Outside of the Karpluie spaceport.”
“Yeah, we saw that on our way down,” Dolph said. He had Shifted back to his normal scraggy, smiley, ponytailed self, of course. We needed them to think we were mainstream humans like them.
“Then you know when I say spaceport, I’m being generous.”
We had a laugh at the expense of the backwards Kroolth.
The female rep chipped in, “We know the guy who runs the scrapyard. He’s good people. I can call and tell him you’re coming.”
“I’d appreciate that,” I said. Then I glanced up at the lovely, now useless, silhouette of my ship, blocking out the sun like a metal swan with her wings raised. A swan 100 meters long. I didn’t even have a cargo dolly. (The Silveradans had taken that, too.)
“We’ve got a flatbed at the spaceport,” said the male rep. “I can send someone out to pick you up.”
“Is that covered by my insurance?”
“Unfortunately not. But I can give you ten percent off the usual rate.”
OK, then. Not so disinterested after all. But I didn’t begrudge it to them. We’ve all got to make a living. “You got a deal.”
The female rep had her radio out. “I’m going to give Gerry at the scrapyard a shout. Could I have your name again?”
It was on my insurance documents, but as I began to withdraw them from my pocket, I caught Dolph’s eye and thought better of it. I gave her a fake name.
2
The flatbed arrived the next afternoon. It was an enormous thing with 22 axles. Its crawler treads crushed the thornmaws to writhing, sticky mats, a sight that gladdened my heart. Dolph and I had spent an unpleasant night fighting the things off, ultimately resorting to the ring of fire idea. I had grabbed a couple of hours of sleep in the middle of a circle of mattresses from the berths, doused with rocket fuel and burning like a campfire. Now my throat felt raw from the smoke, and my mood was foul.
The crawler’s robot arms loaded my ship onto the back, mangling the wings in the process—not that that mattered now—and off we went. Dolph and I couldn’t ride inside the ship on account of the tarantulas, and there was no room for us in the flatbed’s cab. So we rode on the bed, underneath the landing gear of the ship that had been our house, wings, and workplace in one for years.
It was just like moving house. That’s how I decided to think of it. I’d moved house half a dozen times when I was a kid. Shifters don’t tend to have a wandering foot—the opposite, if anything—but my father’s job had taken us here and there, all over San Damiano. Then, of course, I’d left. Dolph and me both. So moving around was no big deal to us.
Now, however, I had a daughter. Six-year-old Lucy, the external repository of my heart. She was on Ponce de Leon, our current home base. Whenever I came back from a run, she loved to meet me at the spaceport and come aboard the ship. She even enjoyed rolling up her little sleeves and “helping” me with any needed repairs. She loved “Sally” as much as Dolph did. She was going to be devastated when I came home shipless.
As well as profitless and on the hook for that lost cargo.
The crawler bumped along, crushing thornmaws and scaring off unspeakable leggy vermin. A spectacular sunset engulfed the desert, turning it almost pretty. As we passed through a region of rocky dunes, we found an English-language radio broadcast—old news from across the Cluster, punctuated by an every-hour-on-the-hour “Predator Report.”
“Travellers in the Yephta Desert should be aware that a herd of dune worms are currently crossing the Karampox road.”
We stared at the dunes, whose spiky backs sudd
enly looked less like rocks.
“If it is absolutely necessary to take this route, drive as fast as possible…”
Instead of speeding up, as recommended, the flatbed stopped. I peered ahead and saw that a dune was blocking the road.
The instant we stopped all the dunes surged towards us, sand sliding from their armored sides.
An infernal boom shattered the evening, followed by a screech. A tail of flame shot out from the flatbed’s cab, searing the fuselage of my ship. A rocket-propelled grenade shot out in the other direction. It impacted the worm ahead of the flatbed. The explosion hurled gobbets of flesh and chitin into the air. The other worms flattened themselves to the sand, resuming their camouflage as dunes.
Dolph and I, lying flat, cautiously raised our heads.
“Ho, ho, ho,” shouted the flatbed’s driver, a seen-it-all human named Clint. He leaned out the window of the cab, brandishing his RPG launcher. “That’s the way you deal with them. Didja know the Kroolth evolved from a prey species? They say the wildlife is their planetary defences. Truth is, they’re just too scared to fight back.”
“If we’re staying here a while,” Dolph said, pointing to the RPG launcher, “I want one of those.”
“We won’t be.”
The flatbed creaked into motion once more. Dolph climbed up the ship’s landing gear and fussed over the black scorch marks left by the RPG launcher’s blowback. I heard him murmur, “Poor old Sally.”
“Quit it with the Sally stuff,” I yelled up at him.
The flatbed crawled up a switchback mountain road into violet shadows.
* * *
We stopped for the night at a roadhouse lavishly decorated with gold-framed photographs of His Specialness, the Generalissimo of Gorongol. A troop of secret police types came in while we were eating supper. I had heard their motorbikes outside, and I was prepared for swagger and noise. I was not prepared for them to command everyone in the dining room to stand up and sing the national anthem, which was (of course) a 12-verse paean to the Generalissimo’s specialness.
Bridge Across the Stars: A Sci-Fi Bridge Original Anthology Page 6
