Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  “Daniel Henderson. The young man we fooled once before, and who still believes you to be Jacques McKeown. Son of Henderson the business magnate and crime lord.”

  I nodded. “Henderson, who was your old boss.”

  “Yes.”

  “Until you blew his leg off.”

  She did a very poor job of sounding unperturbed. “Indeed.”

  “Mm.” I glanced around the room, popping my lips theatrically. “Well, consider me convinced. I mean, if I’m going to commit suicide, might as well do it in the most painful, drawn-out way possible, right? Shows commitment—”

  “Robert Blaze is dying,” interjected Warden, brutally casual.

  Robert Blaze, the original star pilot, the hero to a generation, founder of Salvation Station and erstwhile leader of same, the only thing keeping the scheming general administrator before me from having total control of the station and all the star pilots therein. “Doints he is.”

  “Ever heard of the Ecru Death?”

  “Of course.” The Ecru Death was a manufactured virus that none other than Terrorgorn himself had unleashed upon the Fainkov system, on the fringes of the Black. It had almost wiped out the entire sentient population and would have spread even further if Robert Blaze himself hadn’t synthesized a cure from the blood of one of Terrorgorn’s immunized lackeys. I said, “The Ecru Death was wiped out. The antidote killed all the loose strains.”

  Warden touched her pad, and the projection on the wall changed. A molecular diagram of the Ecru virus on the left, and a photo on the right of what looked like the kind of sample bottle I’d used often when donating to the Ritsuko City sperm bank. “Blaze decided it would be wise to keep a very small quantity of it on hand for future study. He was keeping it in Salvation’s medical lab, until one of the nurses knocked it off a shelf. The lab was quarantined, obviously, but Blaze volunteered to go in and seal it away again, exposing himself to infection.”

  I emitted a sigh that was about seven-tenths along the way toward being a growl. “Yeah. That’s what a star pilot would do.”

  “Indeed. He had to fight off six other volunteers to get the job.”

  I shook my head. “So why hasn’t he just taken the antidote?”

  Warden smartly tapped her screen, and a new image appeared. It showed a large metal cylinder caked in bits of ice and frost, sealed in a glass cabinet on some kind of ornate plinth. “When the Ecru virus was assumed wiped out, the last remaining samples of the antidote were placed in a cryonic storage cylinder and frozen.”

  “I can’t believe you actually made a slideshow,” I muttered.

  “After Jacques McKeown’s typically self-aggrandizing novelization of the incident, the cylinder gained the status of a collector’s item among fans of McKeown and McKeown memorabilia.” She pronounced the last word with aloof distaste, like a nanny discussing a child’s favorite mud puddle. “It is currently in the possession of the galaxy’s most dedicated Jacques McKeown fan.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Rhymes with Benderson.”

  She answered by switching to the next slide, which displayed a photo of a smiling Daniel Henderson, taken from a very long distance. He was standing outside the front entrance of what had once been the Ubatsu building in Ritsuko City, but was now named Henderson Tower. He was two years older than when I’d seen him last, seventeen now. He was largely unchanged, if somewhat more elongated, and his complexion had apparently surrendered in its battle with puberty.

  “The younger Henderson is as desperately in need of a father figure as ever,” droned Warden. “He mentioned Jacques McCon in his forum post. That’s the fan convention he organizes and hosts at Henderson Tower, now in its second year. He intends to display his collection of memorabilia on the show floor. The antidote will be part of that.”

  “And you expect me to go in there by myself, sling it over my shoulder, and scarper?”

  “Not by yourself. I have a plan in mind for its recovery, but it calls for an appropriate team of specialists, including an inside man. You are uniquely qualified for that position.”

  I made a token attempt to wriggle free from my bonds, just to make it clear that I wasn’t coming around in the slightest. “Well. I’m sure it’s a very well-thought-out plan and you’re very proud of it. But I’m afraid I’m not buying this.”

  She switched off the projector and stood in front of me, hands on hips. “Buying what?”

  “You expect me to believe that you’re so invested in saving Robert Blaze that you’d risk getting back on the Hendersons’ radar? If Blaze dies, you get to take over Salvation unchecked.”

  “If I were trying to kill Robert, I could just as easily not be arranging an effort to save him,” she pointed out. “I could have used a method that wouldn’t have potentially exposed the entire station to an incurable plague.”

  She made some valid points, but it was the unintentional one that made my eyebrows raise. “Robert?”

  Her face colored noticeably as she shied back, breaking eye contact. “Blaze. Captain Blaze.”

  This was a surprising development. Surely she wasn’t harboring anything as human as affection. Then again, she had been working under Blaze for a couple of years, and his charisma versus her attitude would have been an “unstoppable force, immovable object” scenario that would have had to resolve itself sooner or later.

  And besides, I didn’t actually believe she could run Salvation Station without Blaze as a figurehead. She was the lighthouse keeper, but he was the gigantic flashing bulb that drew the sailors in.

  “Will you help me save him or not?” she demanded, returning to the subject like a drowning person to a flotation device.

  “No,” I summarized, staring fixedly at the corner of the room as the word tasted sour and vinegary in my mouth.

  “That’s all? You’ll abandon your childhood hero to a highly unpleasant death?”

  “I’m sure he understood the risks. You can’t expect me to feel responsible every time Robert Blaze puts his life on the line. And besides. He’s a hero to star pilots. And I’m not a star pilot anymore.” The words felt like such a wrench to get out that I fancied my nose would start bleeding. Robert Blaze was more than a childhood hero; he was the inspiration for every star pilot in the sky. Most of us would do anything to save his life. If he needed a lung donated, virtually everyone I knew would get together to fight over the scalpel. But I couldn’t give in to her. Not when she knew she was pushing my buttons.

  “No, you really aren’t,” said Warden quietly, with an acid in her voice that could have stripped me to the bone. Her hands had ceased to fiddle with her tablet, and her foot was tapping with an anxious rhythm. “What would be your price?”

  This I hadn’t expected. “Seriously?”

  “Tell me how much it would cost for you to overlook our history and take this as a contract job.”

  I stared at her for some time before answering. “Money isn’t highly ­motivating right now,” I confided. “I had money for a while. Nothing good came of it.”

  “Anything, then. What do you need?”

  This was more like the Warden I remembered. Desperately trying to keep her expression fixed and her jitters hidden, clutching that plying tablet to her chest like she was hoping it would stop a bullet. “Maybe there is something,” I said eventually, in spite of the part of me warning that I had reached the bargaining stage of the terminal illness that was Warden.

  “Go on.”

  “I’m doing some recruitment work on the side for a company called Oniris,” I said, choosing my words carefully so that it wouldn’t sound stupid out loud. “They’re having trouble finding scientists for their next project.”

  Her expression didn’t change. “You’re joining Oniris Venture.”

  “Yeah!” I snapped, angered by the blatant lack of a question mark on her statement. “Yeah, I plying
am. So that’s my price. You help me find some scientists who are willing to join a deep space recon mission, and I’ll help you out. And after we’re done, I’m going to retire to the edge of space, where I can be far away from plying you and plying Jacques McKeown and plying star piloting. Any questions?”

  “What kind of scientists?”

  “I don’t know! The deep space recon kind!” I searched my memory for everything I actually knew about the kind of science they did on recon ships. Most of it came from a TV soap opera I used to watch about a medical team on an isolated scout ship who ended up plying each other in supply cupboards a lot. I said, “Doctors! Nurses! Biologists! Geneticists! Someone to tidy up the supply cupboard!”

  “Very well.” A suddenly much more relaxed Warden made a little note on her tablet. “I can help you with this. And in return, you work for me until the item has been recovered. Do we have a deal?”

  I stared at her for a while, my mouth frozen in a skeptical sneer. “Don’t trac me about. Where are you going to get them from?”

  “You know that I still have contacts in the United Republic?”

  I had a sinking feeling. The United Republic—or Earth, to give it its increasingly less popular name—was the nightmarish totalitarian society from which Warden and the Hendersons had been spawned. Any human being with any sense (or any money) had been glad to see the back of it the moment Ritsuko City had been founded on the moon.

  “There are still people on Earth who manage to graduate in science, in spite of the education system,” she said. “I suspect every single one of them dreams of defecting and taking a position on the scientific frontier. In fact, after they’re smuggled off-world, they’ll need to lie low for a while anyway. The UR increased the off-world spying budget last year after they cut food stamps again.”

  Of course it made maddeningly perfect sense. I’d hoped it would have been such an obscure request that she’d have had no choice but to say her sarcastic farewells. Only now that she had laid out the details did I realize I’d priced my life and future safety at a cost she could have met with one afternoon and a phone. I hadn’t even asked for expenses.

  “Do I get expenses?” I asked in a monotone.

  “Naturally. Do we have a deal?”

  As the realization sank in that I had accidentally talked my way into agreeing to all this, my mind swiftly began to rationalize. I didn’t have any other plan for getting hold of scientists, and these refugees she was talking about sounded like a match made in heaven. Maybe she was right. Maybe if I was so keen to move on from my star piloting life, it made sense to wipe the slate clean on my past relationships.

  Besides, Daniel Henderson wasn’t exactly an intellectual powerhouse. I’d fooled him once before, and more importantly, he was a spoiled little rich doint, and any piece of star piloting history that was in his possession should be taken off him on principle, whether or not Robert Blaze’s life was on the line.

  That was the moment. The moment I decided to join Warden’s little crew, against all my instincts. That was the moment that would haunt me for the rest of my life. The one that would make me long for the invention of time travel so I could visit my younger self in that moment and stick one of the chair legs right through his plying skull.

  Chapter 5

  Twelve hours later, I was back in Ritsuko City, looking up at the Henderson Tower’s façade the way an overly complacent aristocrat might once have looked up the steps to the guillotine.

  Warden had said, “The next step is for you to go to Daniel Henderson in person and tell him you’ll be delighted to be guest of honor at Jacques McCon.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s worth suggesting that you could always just ask him to return the cylinder for Robert Blaze’s sake,” I had replied. “They seemed to be getting along all right the last time they met.”

  “Come on. You know how Daniel Henderson’s father feels about Salvation Station.”

  “After you blew his leg off there.”

  “After I blew his leg off, quite. He may arrange to have the place nuked just because someone mentioned the name.”

  And so, after a brief stay on Salvation Station—very brief, as a large chunk of it was still sectioned off and under quarantine—I had made use of their one functioning Quantunnel to return to the spaceport in Ritsuko. My activities since then had consisted largely of using up every last excuse I could think of to put off doing what I was now doing.

  With my hair freshly cut, my flight jacket dry-cleaned, and my teeth aching slightly from a thorough examination at the dentist, I stared up at Henderson Tower. The Hendersons hadn’t done much redecorating; they’d only added the word HENDERSON above the door in sharp white lettering. But it was enough to turn the once blandly welcoming front entrance of the Ubatsu building into a huge snarling mouth with a row of spiky fangs.

  “You got business here, fumper?”

  I stopped gawping upwards to take in the person who had moved between me and the door. They—for I wasn’t ready to take a guess at their gender—were probably on the more physically threatening side of their teens, and were sporting a shaved head, multiple piercings, and an awful lot of ripped leather and denim. They were also sitting astride a ten-speed racing bicycle with a metal skull on the gears and spikes on the pedals.

  It said something about Ritsuko City that even its biker gangs respected the unspoken rule that motor vehicles should be driven as little as possible. After all, to quote the slogan on the omnipresent Tend Your Rooftop Gardens posters, maintaining an atmosphere is everybody’s problem. I was surprised to see a biker out in the open, and looking so well nourished; their numbers had been dwindling ever since Quantunneling had removed most of what reason there was to make use of the roads. They had also been getting somewhat resentful of the star pilot community, because they’d been trying different dialects of swear words for years and none of them had ever caught on.

  “You gonna stand there staring all clotting day?” demanded the biker, gloved fingers drumming their handlebars.

  “Sadly not, thanks. You with the Bell and Chain gang?”

  “No,” they sneered. “I’m the clotting doorman, aren’t I, you fumping scranker.”

  “Just going in to see the boss,” I tried, making obvious motions toward the door to signal my intention to end this conversation and move on with my life, forever enriched.

  The biker rolled a couple of feet to block my path, and fixed me with a threatening glare as they rang their bell with ominous deliberation. “Boss doesn’t see any scranker if he’s not expecting ’em.”

  This was interesting. So Henderson was hiring bikers as security. I supposed that made sense. He had been some kind of terrible global crime lord back on Earth, but he was still a relative newcomer to Luna, and would probably have needed to employ local talent. The yakuza wouldn’t touch Terran money with a hundred-foot dome-washing pole and the mobsters of the European quarter were too easygoing and almost always drunk, so that left the bikers.

  A second biker rolled into the conversation, breaking off from the small cluster of them that was hanging around the main entrance. This one had paired his frightening beard and spiked leathers with a pink unicorn T-shirt as some kind of hilarious ironic counterpoint. “Who’s the scong?”

  “Some fumper off the street thinks he can just roll up and meet the boss,” said the first biker, keeping me pinned in place through the combined use of a glare and their front wheel.

  The second biker’s eyes flashed with realization as they looked me up and down. “You McKeown?”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling like it was the simplest answer to this extremely complex question.

  “Leave it, Les. He can come in.”

  Les gave him a look like he’d scraped his earwax cleaning device off on their sleeve. “Clotting why? He’s just some scranker.”

  “He comes in because he�
�s Jacques Mc-yatching-Keown, you yatching scong, and the boss wants to see him as soon as he gets here, doesn’t he. So get out of the wobblesplinking way.”

  Les did so, rolling backwards with a defeated ticking of spokes, not breaking their suspicious eye contact. I passed sheepishly between the two thugs and through the entrance, the automatic doors humming obligingly aside.

  When I was satisfied that I was out of view of the hired toughs, I took out my phone and set the camera to take a picture every few seconds, just as Warden had instructed with characteristic condescension, and placed it in the breast pocket of my flight jacket with the flap propped up to expose the lens. Hopefully it would go unnoticed.

  I put my hands behind my back and did a few slow, complete rotations, pretending to be drinking in the scenery. And then, having nothing better to do, I drank in the scenery for real.

  The Ubatsu Building’s intended function had been somewhat vague; I think the Ritsuko City Council had been sold more on its imposing size and presence than what it could actually be used for. It had ended up filled with generic, if fairly prestigious, rented apartments and offices, with a private spaceport on the roof and some convention space on the ground floor.

  Not much had changed in the transition to Henderson Tower, except that the small convention space had been replaced with an extremely large and decadent one. The cathedral-sized reception hall gave way to two staircases wide enough to admit combine harvesters, and the whole place was decked out with black marble floors ingrained with thousands of glittering white specks, evoking what idiots think a deep space star field looks like.

  Which was probably the intended effect, going by the centerpiece. On a raised platform between me and the reception desk, surrounded by lofty pillars that are interior design shorthand for “Please look at this,” was a huge red fiberglass model of a spaceship. It didn’t correspond to any ship design I was familiar with, but it slightly reminded me of the fat and clumsy Platinum God of Whale Sharks I had piloted for Henderson during our past acquaintance, just with some of its curves trimmed down and some more flashy fins added.