Bridge Across the Stars: A Sci-Fi Bridge Original Anthology

by Rhett C. Bruno

  Clint indicated that we should stand up, too. For all his contemptuous talk about the Kroolth’s timidity, he showed no inclination to piss off a roomful of them.

  I had to sidestep so I could fit my head between two rafters. Dolph is a couple of inches shorter than me, and Clint was only about five ten, but all three of us loomed over the impromptu choir like totem poles. The Kroolth are small. The tallest of the secret police types was about the right height to headbutt me in the groin if he stood on tiptoe. And he looked like something of the sort was on his mind as he glared across the crowd at us. I moved my mouth as if I was singing.

  Dolph, under cover of the fourth refrain, said, “So I’m doing the math.”

  “Me too.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither.”

  I was still annoyed at Dolph for grieving over the ship, but we were on the same wavelength now. We’ve known each other a long time, and a higher than average proportion of our ventures together have involved a) fighting and b) running away, not necessarily in that order. So I knew that he was referring to the math of us versus them. There were eleven secret police types, and thirty more Kroolth in the dining room who would definitely join in if encouraged.

  Clint’s theory about the Kroolth having evolved from a prey species was probably correct. They looked like startled primates with long faces, sort of like you were lifting them by their furry cheeks and screaming at them about their gambling debts. They had long arms like colobus monkeys. On the other hand, monkeys can hurt you bad, even if they don’t have guns. And each of the secret police types carried a toy-sized pistol. Dolph had his .45 and I had my Midday Special, but we were too badly outnumbered to even think about using them.

  “Shift?” Dolph whispered.

  “No! Jesus, no!”

  “They’d never know what hit them.”

  I shot him an appalled glance. The pupils of his eyes had gone slitty. His shoulders were starting to bulge, straining his shirt. He grinned.

  “Quit it! If they find out we’re Shifters, we’re dead!”

  I held Dolph’s stare until the pupils of his eyes returned to normal. Goddamn jackal never could think more than five minutes ahead.

  “First one draws down on us, I break his neck,” he whispered, while the Kroolth ended the anthem with a round of applause in honor of His Specialness.

  Shaken, I had difficulty smiling as the troop leader scuttled up to us.

  “You are the owner of that pile of junk outside?”

  Dolph let out a low growl. I fought to keep my smile in place. After all, the Kroolth was technically correct. “That’s me.”

  “Remove it immediately. It is blocking the road!”

  Relief pulsed through me. Only a parking violation. “Absolutely, Officer. We’ll be on our way shortly.”

  He turned away with a sniff, then turned back. “You are human?”

  “We are,” I confirmed. Dolph sniggered. These back-of-beyonders couldn’t even tell humans by looking at them.

  “Have you ever been to … oah, Ponce de Leon?” He pronounced the name of PdL, one of the Big 5 worlds of Humanity United, with the same care that I would use if trying to speak Kroolth.

  “A few times,” I said cautiously.

  “Are you aware of any cargo ships bound from Ponce de Leon to Gorongol?”

  I put on a puzzled face, while my relief curdled. They were looking for us.

  “This one would be, oah, a very large ship, much bigger than that pile of junk of yours. Laden with very valuable technology, oah yes. It would have an armed escort.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Come to think of it, I may have seen exactly such a ship on the pad at PdL. The captain boasted that he had a personal commission from the Generalissimo.” I had done just that, but only to make the regulars at Snakey’s Bar & Grill laugh. As for an armed escort? We were our own armed escort. I admit to dropping the ball on the Silveradan patrol ship. I just couldn’t blow those little guys away. They said it was only a customs inspection, and I was dumb enough to believe them. “It was a 60-ton tri-engine Phantom with an extended cargo bay. Does that sound like the one?”

  Lord strike me down now.

  “Oah yes! That must be it! Do you know when it departed Ponce de Leon? It is delayed.”

  “At about the same time we did,” I said. “I should think it’ll arrive any day now.” We would have got here on time, but I took it extremely slow at the end. You do, with a leaky antimatter containment loop.

  The little Kroolth went on his way beaming. He could expect a warm pat on the head from his commander for bringing news, even if it was just hearsay, of the missing cargo ship.

  We finished our supper with no appetite. Kroolth food is vegetarian. Dolph can usually eat anything, but even he left half of his stringy hash browns. We paid up, stooped to get out of the dining-room, and crawled down the hall to the front door.

  Outside, the air was soft and sweet with the smell of (probably carnivorous) flowers. Clint the driver said, “Were they looking for you?”

  “Gosh, I can’t believe you worked that out,” I said. My mask of politeness was slipping, as I knew we were up to our necks in excrement. It couldn’t take even the Kroolth much longer to work out that the ship which had just crash-landed in their desert was the one they were yearningly awaiting. I left Dolph to transfer some extra GCs to Clint to convince him to drive through the night, instead of parking up here as we had planned.

  “I gave him some extra to keep his trap shut,” Dolph said as he returned to our perch under the landing gear.

  “He’d better. We’ll be spending the rest of our lives in a jail with five-foot ceilings if the Generalissimo’s enforcers catch up with us.”

  “Humans ought to stick together in places like this,” sighed Dolph. “Maybe I should go back and scare him.”

  “No, don’t. Paying him off was the right move.”

  “I just hate to think of him spending our money…”

  It was my money, actually, as both of us knew. I appreciated that Dolph was trying to smooth things over between us by being fiscally responsible, in his own way. I said, “Just imagine him spending it on his personal harem of Kroolth bimbettes.”

  Dolph shuddered. I chuckled.

  Of course, there was a glitch in this pretty picture of human solidarity. If Clint, or anyone else on Gorongol, figured out that we weren’t human—not like they were human—we wouldn’t even have that.

  Neither of us Shifted that night, even though it would have been more comfortable to curl up in the form of an animal on the hard, cold bed of the crawler. I knew I wouldn’t get any sleep, anyway.

  3

  The flatbed crawled over the mountain pass as dawn was breaking. The corded flanks of the mountains dropped away to forest. Further down, a strip of green and blue cropland bordered the sea. The prevailing winds clearly dumped all the rain on this side of the mountains. The trees lining the road looked like actual trees, not predators.

  The only thing that spoiled the view was the carbuncular rash of concrete on the coast: the city of Karpluie, and its spaceport. We rappelled into the ship’s forward airlock to get breakfast. When we came back out, the view was unchanged. Good old Clint was not risking his rig on these steep roads by travelling any faster than 20 kilometers per hour.

  It took us a whole day—well, a whole human-standard day; the Gorongolian day is 38 hours long—to reach Karpluie. In the forest, we kept getting hung up on low branches, and on the ring road around the city, we kept getting hung up in traffic jams. Or rather, causing them. A 100-meter flatbed carrying a spaceship does tend to do that. Dolph hunted tarantulas inside the ship to blow off steam. I messed around with my computer, trying to find out where we would get the best price for our bananas. I already foresaw that we would need to spend big to get off this planet before the Generalissimo twigged our breach of contract. By now, every motherloving Kroolth on the continent knew that a crashed spaceship had been trans
ported to Karpluie today.

  We picked up speed on the modern ten-lane highway to the spaceport, and rumbled past it. The height of the flatbed allowed us to see over the sound-baffle fence. Tarmac stretched away to the diamond thread of the sea.

  “One,” Dolph said.

  “Two,” I disagreed.

  “One. And it was just an Ek tanker.”

  “I was counting the airplane.”

  That was the sum total of the craft that had landed and/or taken off from Karpluie today. I counted the airplane because I thought it might come to that. Even a trip to somewhere else on this planet might turn out to be better than sticking around. While we were stuck in traffic jam number nine hundred and three, I had seen a gang of those secret police types apprehending a Kroolth driver. With hollow-points. It took me right back to Tech Duinn, where Dolph and I spent the most, shall we say, active years of our military careers. I had zero wish to revisit the era of my life when I killed people. And less-than-zero wish to be killed myself.

  The flatbed turned off the highway, following the curve of the spaceport fence. Another fence appeared on the other side of the road. Beyond it, curvilinear metal shapes gnawed the afternoon clouds.

  “Here we are,” Clint yelled back from the cab.

  I jumped down. It felt good to stretch my legs on the gravelly red dirt. With Dolph a few paces behind, I marched up to the gate of the scrapyard, which was locked. I stretched out my finger to the buzzer … and froze.

  On a bulletin board beside the gate, covered with perspex against the rain, above a lost dog notice and a circular for the Biannual Human Community Barbecue, my own face stared at me from a full-color poster.

  MICHAEL “MIKE” STARRUNNER

  WANTED FOR GRAND THEFT & LÈSE-MAJESTÉ

  100 GC REWARD

  The bold black text was written in English, Kroolthi, and Ekschetalan.

  Dolph nudged me. “They got your name wrong.”

  “I’m deeply insulted.”

  “You should be.” He was cracking up so hard he could hardly get the words out. “One hundred GCs? One … hundred?”

  For reference, I spent two hundred GCs the last time I took Lucy for pizza on PdL.

  The Generalissimo valued my life at less than the worth of a deep dish Hawaiian pie.

  But as funny as it was, to the Kroolth, one hundred GCs was obviously a lot of money. The relative paltriness of the reward would not deter them from going for it, if they connected me with the man on the poster.

  Dolph said, “The Kroolthi is longer than the English.” He twisted his head sideways—Kroolthi is written from top to bottom. “That last line?” He was no longer smiling. “Think it means ‘dead or alive.’”

  “Now that really makes my day.” If I couldn’t get off this planet pronto, I would never get to take Lucy for pizza again. Never see her smile, never hug and tickle her again. She’d be alone in the world. That thought lit a fire under me. I touched the pocket of my donkey jacket and made sure my Midday Special was still in there.

  “The Clusterwide reps must’ve dropped us in it,” Dolph said bitterly.

  “Naw,” I said. “The Generalissimo’s just freaking out because his cargo’s late.” And was now on Silverado. “They paid retail for that stuff, remember? Three hundred thou. That’s probably the equivalent of their entire planetary GDP.”

  “Nice place to settle if you’ve got a GC-denominated income,” Dolph said, looking around at the sticky-leaved blue bushes that grew up against the fence. The flatbed’s treads had crushed some of them, and they smelled like marzipan. Large insects buzzed around us. “Not.”

  “It wasn’t the Clusterwide guys, anyway,” I said. “I gave them a fake name.”

  I was even gladder of that in a moment, as the gate concertinaed open a few feet. In the gap stood a human with a scowl on her face. “Are you Will Slaughtermore?”

  My own lame-ass humor struck me as both puerile and risky now. But I straightened my back and shook her hand with a smile. “That’s me.”

  “Crash Hardlander,” Dolph grinned, elbowing past me for a chance to squeeze her grease-stained hand. “You must be Gerry?”

  “Yup. Like it says on the sign. Gerry Scavarchi’s Ships & Parts.”

  Scavarchi doesn’t sound like a human name, so I had been worried that Gerry would turn out to be a Kroolth. As a human, she would be less likely to turn me in for the princely sum of one hundred GCs. That was something.

  The other thread of hope I clung to was that the clean-cut, handsome young man on the WANTED poster did not look much like the scruffy, stubbled, not-so-young chancer facing Gerry Scavarchi now. They’d used the picture from my pilot’s license. Years had passed since that was taken, and last night was far from the first time I’d slept—or rather, not slept—rough.

  Independent freighter captains are known to be hard-living, penny-pinching losers, so I hoped that was all she’d see in me.

  In one sense, it was a shame. Ms. Gerry Scavarchi had the body of an angel, imperfectly disguised by a mechanic’s coverall, and the face and hair of a shampoo model.

  I fixed my eyes north of her neck and said, “Theo and Annette from Clusterwide may have told you I’m looking to sell a damaged ship. I’m not gonna lie to you: the containment’s gone. She’ll never fly again.”

  “Yeah.”

  “However, I hear you’d be interested in buying her for scrap.”

  Long pause. Gerry’s gaze scanned the 100-meter metal swan hulking over the trees behind me and Dolph.

  “Sure,” she said at last. “Happy to take her off your hands.” She raised her voice without moving. “Clint! Put ’er over there.”

  “Roger,” Clint yelled back. The flatbed ground forward a few meters and the robotic handler arms unfolded. My ship swung over our heads and over the fence of the scrapyard. We heard it hit the ground with a crunch. Dolph flinched.

  It was a no-brainer from Gerry’s point of view, of course. Totaled or not, my ship was a long-haul Skymule. Those don’t come along on a world like Gorongol every day.

  “Come in,” she said with about as much warmth in her voice as a LOX tank, “and show me what I just bought.”

  We waved goodbye to Clint and followed her into the scrapyard. I took her on a tour of the ship, inside and out, pointing out all the high-spec features such as the 360-degree radar/LiDAR, the gimbaled retrorockets that enabled VTOL, and the threeway microwave/oven/sous vide cooker. I did not point out the coilgun, even though that was the most expensive bit of kit on the ship and I could have used it to justify a higher asking price. She would find it later, when we were safely off-world. Most indie freighters do not have military-grade cannon, and I wanted her to think we were in no way special.

  She was impressed enough, anyway. I could see her ripping the cockpit apart with her eyes, and I figured we were home free.

  “All right, come on over to the office and we’ll talk,” she said when we were back on the ground.

  Meanwhile Dolph was ripping her clothes apart with his eyes. I whispered, “Down, boy,” as we followed her through the scrapyard.

  It was a jungle of dismembered spacecraft and airplanes. A grinding, screeching noise impinged on my ears as we walked. I glanced to my left and saw a handler robot three storeys high, with tractor tyres and four hydraulic arms, piling the junkers on top of each other.

  “We remove the resalable components and then sell the airframes for scrap,” Gerry explained over the racket. “There’s an Ek outfit comes and takes ’em over to the compactor.”

  She waved at the distant cab of the handler bot. The motion caused her breasts to rise enticingly under her coverall. I wasn’t staring or anything. Of course not.

  Dolph was, unashamedly. “There’s got to be a catch,” he muttered. “Babes like that don’t work in places like this.”

  “Sexist,” I said, but he had half a point.

  The handler bot stopped work. A Kroolth emerged from the cab and spidered down the access
ladder. It joined us as we reached a shack attached to a hangar-sized workshop in the middle of the scrapyard. Gerry pushed the door open and removed spaceship parts from chairs, including one very small one.

  The Kroolth came in and sat in it.

  “This is my husband,” Gerry said. “Opizzt, these are the guys that Annette rang about.”

  Husband?

  Dolph’s jaw was on the floor. I realized mine was, too, and picked it up. “Great to meet you, um, Opizzt.” I kept talking to cover up my astonishment—and consternation. With a Kroolth in the picture, our odds of being turned in for the one hundred GC reward had just rebounded. “I’m the owner of the Skymule out there. I’ve just shown Gerry her features, and I’m sure you’ll agree four hundred KGCs is a more than fair price, considering the resale value of her parts.”

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I paid five hundred thousand GCs for her new. Well, second-hand. Actually, third-hand. But who’s counting?

  Dolph put on a sad face, suggesting that I was practically giving the ship away.

  But what we had both forgotten was that with a Kroolth in the picture, our odds of being ripped off had also increased astronomically.

  “Noaaah,” said this little shyster. “You have added too many zeros, oah yes. By a factor of three. We will give you five hundred GCs.”

  “Five hundred?” I spluttered.

  Gerry smirked.

  “No one wants to buy a Skymule on Gorongol. We cannot even sell the parts. We are doing you a favor, oah yes.”

  “But she’s got a sous vide cooker,” I said, desperately trying to keep the tone light.

  Dolph did not help me haggle. When I glanced around to see why he was being so quiet—apart from the shock of finding out that Gerry was married to a Kroolth—I caught him looking out the window behind Gerry’s desk. It faced the back of the scrapyard, opposite to the way we’d come in. The sea sparkled far off. In between the sea and us stood a number of spacecraft. Some of them looked fairly new, at least from this distance.