Dolph leaned back into the conversation and coughed, in a jackally kind of way. “How about a trade-in?” he said.
4
Our negotiations stalled with three zeros between what I was willing to take and what the Scavarchis were willing to pay. Coming around to Dolph’s idea of a trade-in, I agreed to a stroll outside to look at the second-hand ships. Dolph lit a cigarette as soon as we got outdoors.
“Sometimes you do have good-ish ideas,” I told him. “Unfortunately this is not one of those times. What are the chances any of these junkheaps even fly?”
“You never know,” he said.
The Scavarchis walked ahead of us. Opizzt had to take two steps for every one of his wife’s. His head came up precisely to her shapely waist.
“How do they do it?” Dolph whispered.
“Do what?” I whispered back. “Run a business while criminally stiffing their suppliers? Very profitably, I expect.”
“No, it.”
I had been trying to stop my imagination from grappling with the particulars. Now my efforts failed. But so did my imagination. “Same way we do?”
“It’s got to be this size, Mike.” Dolph held up his pinky finger.
“Beats loneliness, I guess.”
“Or maybe—” Dolph perked up— “they aren’t really married. It’s a front so guys won’t hit on her.”
“Try hitting on her and see what happens,” I suggested.
Dolph sighed.
We passed a Grav-X and a Voidbreaker. Up close, airlock hatches sagged, the sky stabbed through rust-eaten fins, and toxic fluid dripped from neglected piping. A family of bustard-like birds flew out of an engine bell, wings whirring.
It was my turn to sigh. None of these lemons could come close to replacing my ship. My customers would take their business elsewhere, with good reason. My competitors would laugh their asses off. Lucy’s little face would crumple, and then she’d try to cheer me up. That was the worst thought of all.
“Hey, Mike,” Dolph murmured. “What about that one?”
“Don’t call me Mike,” I hissed. “It’s Will Slaughtermore, remember?”
“He must be spinning in his grave.”
I actually borrowed this alias from a guy we knew in the special forces. He lived up to it. I hoped I wouldn’t have to.
Opizzt and Gerry were heading away from the ship that had caught Dolph’s interest, intent on showing us another Grav-X that was sitting precariously on the edge of a marshy creek.
I caught up with them. “What about that one?” I pointed.
“Oah, you do not want that one,” Opizzt said, speeding up.
My antennae tingled. If Opizzt didn’t want us to want that one, I wanted it. “Can’t hurt to take a look,” I persisted.
Gerry said something in Kroolthi. Opizzt replied. The conversation sounded to me like this: zzziphrrchkk, ksst. Akhzzp. Yeah, but dikuccchizztra.
“Oaaahkay, if you want,” Opizzt said grudgingly.
The ship stood a stone’s throw from the boggy bit where the creek ran into the sea. A smell of rot came from the tall pampas grass-like plumes growing in the bog. The ship was definitely in better shape than any of the others we had seen. However, it was a design disaster.
About the same size as my late lamented ship, it lay belly-down with two large wings angled back from its flanks, ending in what appeared to be floats, and two small wings dangling like flippers from the fuselage. It had no fewer than five engines—a cluster of three at the tail, and two more at the bottom of what the army would call the rigid core assembly, a.k.a. the fuselage. Strikingly, its nose cone—raised off the ground—was not actually a cone, but a rounded oval that split open along blunt serrations, gaping at the sky like the jaws of a plesiosaur. If I did not mistake my guess, that was an energy cannon protruding from the jaws like a cheeky tongue.
Long before I was the owner of a shipping company, with bills to pay and a daughter to provide for, I was just a guy who loved spaceships. That guy had been in hibernation for quite some time. But for some reason, this weird and wonderful ship woke him up. I stepped up to it and ran one hand along a sun-warmed jackstand, feeling like myself again for the first time in ages.
Dolph, also staring raptly at the ship, murmured, “Fugly as heck.”
“Yup.”
“It looks like one of those extinct things they used to have on Earth, those what do you call ’ems—”
“Dinosaurs.”
“The one that swam.”
“A plesiosaur.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“Mike, we gotta have it.”
I had made fun of Dolph’s emotional attachment to our old ship, but now I was feeling the same way about this one. I would never again mock him for caring too much about a hunk of metal. The truth was he’d stayed young at heart, and now I felt young at heart again. I nodded enthusiastically. “I can already see it landing at the PdL. The guys will think someone put LSD in their coffee.”
“And look at all that cargo space.”
“Look at those engines, Dolph.” I could tell from the ovoid mouths of the two lower engines that they were air-fed. “I bet she can go hypersonic in-atmosphere, breathing atmospheric oxygen, and then transition to rocket mode, burning onboard fuel supplies. The main drive cluster is probably a set of standard thermal hydrolox plasma engines, but look at the size of them. Depending on where her wet mass tops out at, I bet she does point five acceleration over short distances. Maybe even point six.”
“Need a cold shower, Tiger?” Dolph pretended to fan me.
“We gotta get the specs without appearing too eager,” I said, more to myself than to him.
“Oh.”
“What?”
He pointed to the top of the ship.
I had thought the plesiosaur’s long neck was just a truss. Now I saw Gerry kneeling on its top edge, waving down at us from 5 meters above our heads. She was leaning down, so her cleavage threatened to spill out of the V of her coverall, which had somehow come unzipped a short way. Dolph groaned under his breath.
“Hey guys,” she called. “Come up and see the airstrip.”
She wasn’t joking. The top of the truss was an honest-to-God airstrip. Dashed line down the middle and everything.
“It even has arresting gear. Fighter jets sold separately.” Gerry said, as we walked aft along the shockproof flexible tarmac. I hated to think how much mass this added to the ship. I decided I’d remove it. In my head, the ship was already mine.
Dolph said, “Who the heck would put an airstrip on a spaceship?”
It was a good question, and would have been a better one if he had asked it to her face rather than her cleavage.
Gerry didn’t seem to notice. Her mood had taken a turn for the friendlier. “The Kroolth would. As you see.”
“This is a Kroolth ship?” Dolph said.
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
“I didn’t know…” Dolph trailed off, but I knew what he’d been going to say. I didn’t know the Kroolth built spaceships.
Suddenly, however, the airstrip made sense—kind of. It was only 60 meters long, and no wider than a king-size bed. You couldn’t land a fighter on that, arresting gear or no arresting gear. You could, though, if the fighter were Kroolth size.
That left the original question of why the heck anyone would put an airstrip on a spaceship in the first place. Gerry answered it.
“This is actually the one and only Kroolth spaceship. The flagship of the Imperial Kroolthi Space Fleet. Built by the Eks on Port Aronym, in orbit.” I breathed an inward sigh of relief. The Ekschelatans, or Eks, made the best spaceships in the Cluster. If they had built this one, I could count on solid manufacturing quality. “There’s no native shipbuilding capacity on Gorongol. There’s an assembly plant on Silverado, but well, you know about that situation.”
I nodded. Did I ever.
“Since it was his first spaceship, the Emperor wanted it to have everything. Thus
, we have the runway.” Gerry gestured to the rear wings, with their oddly fat tips. “We have the floats.” She pointed down. “We have the caterpillar treads.”
“Caterpillar treads,” I echoed, getting more googly-eyed by the minute.
“Yeah,” Gerry said. “It’s a spaceship! It’s an aircraft carrier! It’s a tank!” She almost smiled. “Kinda like your microwave / oven / sous vide cooker thing.”
“That never really worked,” I admitted.
“Maybe not, but this does. The Eks wouldn’t have let it out of their yard unless it passed all their tests. Hell, they charged enough for it.”
“So what happened to the rest of the Imperial Space Fleet?” Dolph said, struggling to keep a straight face.
“The Generalissimo happened to it.” Gerry waited a beat. “Do you guys know anything about Kroolthi history?”
Our faces must have told her, truthfully, that we didn’t.
“Akondil begat Urzip, who begat… Sorry. The bit you care about is last year. The Emperor of Gorongol and Legate of Silverado, Princeps of the Many Moons, etcetera, had ideas about making the Kroolth a spacefaring people. He started out by building the ship we are standing on. But it came in at three hundred percent of budget, you know how the Eks are, and people were pissed. The Generalissimo, who used to be the Emperor’s army chief, put himself in the middle of the anti-space movement, and used the public anger to stage a coup. Off with the Emperor’s head! In with twice-daily choruses of the new national anthem, and a bonanza for the suppliers of ugly gilt picture frames and tiny motorbikes.”
Dolph laughed. Gerry frowned. Despite her ironic tone, I could tell that these recent developments disgusted her.
“The Crown Prince made it to safety on Silverado. They’re still loyal to the Imperial Family out there.”
I was thinking that if I had bothered to find this stuff out before we came, I would still have my ship. I would have delivered my cargo to the unsavory Generalissimo and have been on my way with a spring in my step and money in my pocket.
“So that’s how things stand right now,” Gerry finished. “We would be in the middle of an interplanetary war, were it not for the fact that the Kroolth have no spaceships.”
“Except this one,” Dolph said.
Gerry nodded. “Except this one. But the Generalissimo thinks spaceflight is a waste of money, remember, so he sent it away to be scrapped.”
“But you never scrapped it,” I said, finally understanding.
“Opizzt couldn’t bear to do it.” A softer note entered her voice. “He keeps thinking the Crown Prince will come back and want it. But those biker assholes come around here every so often, asking what’s taking so long, accusing Pizzy of being an imperialist … they pistol-whipped him a couple of months back. Next time, they might do something worse. The only thing that’s protecting him is that I’m human, and that’s not surefire, you know? So I want this—” she ground her boot heel into the airstrip— “damn thing gone.”
“Lady,” I said, “you won’t even have to pay me to take it off your hands.”
“Sod off,” she said with half a smile. “I’m still keeping your Skymule.”
“A fair trade.”
“All contents included.”
“Not a problem,” I said. An instant later, Dolph kicked me in the ankle and mouthed: Bananas. His head may have been turned by Gerry’s strategic display of loveliness, but it was less turned than mine was by the thought of possessing this overpowered beast.
Crap; the bananas. Oh, well. It wasn’t as if we’d have a chance to sell them, anyway.
“All contents included,” I assured Gerry.
“Great,” she said, finally giving us a genuine smile. “Let’s go back to the office and we can file the paperwork.”
At which point I’d have to tell them my real name, if I wanted the ship legally registered to me. I decided to risk it. My real name isn’t Starrunner, anyway. Of course it isn’t. Come on. When was the last time you met someone named Starrunner, or Hardlander (Dolph’s actual nom de guerre), who’d been born that way?
“There’s another ground access ladder back here,” Gerry said, clambering down past the arresting gear. “That door is the hangar. It’s sealed, so you can either keep it in vacuum, or pressurize it to extend your livable onboard space. This right here is the airlock to the engineering deck. There are three airlocks total. Each of them is flush with the hull, and retracts into it—like so—” she slapped the pressure plate. The ship had power. The hatch opened, releasing an unpleasant smell of decay. “So you don’t have to mess with outwards-opening hatches that could be vulnerabilities in a combat scenario. Did I mention the weapons systems? A CP cannon, a keel-mounted railgun, and a tail-gunner’s turret with a large-caliber coilgun.” She enumerated the specs of the weapons. She was really selling the ship now, as if to impress on me what a great deal I was getting. She didn’t need to. I was past sold.
“Hey,” Dolph said. “What’s bit Pizzy?”
Opizzt was running towards us, weaving between the second-hand spaceships, shouting in Kroolth.
Gerry stiffened for a second and then started down the ladder at dangerous speed.
I was about to follow her when I saw several more Kroolth pursuing Opizzt. They wore black, like the secret police types from yesterday, like every wannabe badass in the entire freaking Cluster. My hand dropped to my Midday Special.
An amplified voice blared, in English, “Mike Starrunner. Mike Starrunner, we know you are there. Come out with your hands up, or we will toast you, oah yes.”
My instincts took over. I dived into the open airlock of the ship like a rabbit down a burrow.
5
Dolph dived into the airlock half a centimeter behind me. “They didn’t mention me,” he grumbled. “I feel unwanted.”
“Are you really jealous?” I panted. “Really?”
We were in a Kroolth-sized chamber. Dolph’s elbow whanged into my eye. My knees were crushing into his stomach. Somehow I managed to close the airlock. Hopefully they hadn’t seen us dart in here.
The chamber was too small to stay in. We crawled out of it into a corridor whose ceiling was all of five feet high. I had forgotten the interior of the ship would also be Kroolth-sized.
“Shift?” Dolph said.
“Shift,” I agreed.
We stripped off our clothes, folded them in the airlock chamber, and Shifted. Dolph became a jackal. It isn’t his favorite form, but he only has two, and the other one is not appropriate for spaceship decks. I … well, I’ve got a bunch of forms. Most of them have bad memories attached. I went with my current favorite, a white tiger.
Mainstream humans always want to know how Shifting feels. My answer, if I ever wanted to gratify their prurient curiosity, would be something like: Have you ever had a root canal? Now multiply that by an order of magnitude, and imagine your whole body is a nerve. The bones, muscles, blood vessels, everything has to drastically realign. No way that’s not gonna hurt. However, you get used to it. And when you’re old hands like we are, it only lasts for a few seconds.
We shook it off and padded along the corridor, which was now just the right height for us, or rather, we were the right height for it.
In animal form, you have a better sense of smell. This allowed us to experience the full rancidness of the odor of decay that pervaded the ship. My enthusiasm went off the boil a bit, but I had more important things on my mind right now. Such as putting Gorongol in the rearview mirror, for good.
The engineering deck turned out to be high enough for a human, or even an Ek, to stand up straight, owing to the amount of space required for a five GeV antimatter containment loop. We might as well not have bothered to Shift, after all. But neither of us felt like Shifting back just now. The secret police assholes were still out there.
Emergency lighting in the form of pink LED strips edging the hatches and control panels saved us from having to blunder around in the dark. I headed straight for the an
timatter drive.
It was a standard gray, heavily rad-shielded torus with two smaller C-shaped units clamped onto it, what the army calls electromagnetic force generation assemblies. You and I call them big honking magnets. A Kroolth-induced failure in one of these magnets was what had doomed my late ship. The bastard Silveradans had tried to steal it. While cutting it off its anchor points, they had, predictably given the level of Kroolth technical expertise, broken it. Without a strong enough magnetic field to contain it, the antimatter inside the loop had inexorably started to annihilate itself. This is what we call a leak in the loop. The process of annihilation progressively wrecks the inside of the torus until it’s unusable. Four hundred KGCs down the pan. The drive accounts for 90 percent of the cost of your average spaceship.
This was a brand new drive, manufactured to Ek quality standards. It even still had a sticker on it saying it passed rad safety testing. To my delight, the console in front of the loop (at face height to my tiger form) indicated that the magnets were currently generating a field, and 13.5 trillion positrons were whizzing around in there right now.
I said the drive accounts for 90 percent of the cost of a ship, but the fuel costs as much as the drive.
“Dolph,” I said in a choked voice, “I estimate that we have five hundred KGCs worth of antimatter on board. No, make that five fifty, the market’s been going up.”
Tiger and jackal each lifted a front paw and performed a clumsy animal high-five. Screw the Generalissimo.
“Plus three tonnes of LH2 and one point five of LOX,” Dolph said, gloating over the tank gauges.
“Oh yeah baby. We are out of here.” In my mind, I was already landing the new ship on Ponce de Leon, swooping Lucy into my arms, and giving her the grand tour of our funny-looking new cash cow. She was going to absolutely love it. The corridors were even child-sized. I had not had a proper look around the ship myself yet, but I already felt as if I knew her inside and out. Which just goes to show what I know.
“Nice of Gerry to keep the power on,” Dolph mused.
“They expected the Crown Prince to come back and claim it any minute, remember?” I felt a twinge of guilt about waltzing off with 500 KGCs of antimatter that belonged to the Kroolthi imperial family. But Gerry’d said it: contents included. She’d almost insisted on it. Funny, that.
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