Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  Plus, it couldn’t hurt to ruin his reputation in the eyes of his public. Maybe they’d stop buying his plying books if they knew what a divbiscuit he was in real life. With any luck, the universe at large would know after this weekend that Jacques McKeown was a massive doint who had contempt for his fans. And who stole extremely valuable cryonic cylinders from his host.

  I settled into character and waved a hand to keep the line moving. Numerous visitors went by, most of them uncannily similar to the first one, appearancewise, with mild variations in beard growth and acne patterns, and I ensured that every single one went away feeling like trac.

  “So what advice would you give to someone wanting to start out in writing?” asked one.

  “Forget it,” I replied. “Don’t need the competition.”

  “I love your books, I’ve read them all, like, fifty times,” said another.

  “Good on you,” I said as I signed the book. “Keep at it. With any luck, you won’t have time to breed.”

  “So where do you get your ideas?” asked several people.

  “I get inspired every time someone asks me a question that makes me want to stick their head in an exhaust pipe,” I said, each time.

  Halfway through the day, I took a moment’s downtime to examine the remaining queue. The end still wasn’t in sight, but I’d worked my way through the ones who had camped overnight, and the remaining attendees looked more bored than psychotic. Most were dressed in cringeworthy interpretations of star pilot attire, but a few were in costume as other, non–star pilot figures from Jacques McKeown’s canon. There was a rather convincing Malcolm Sturb costume about twenty people down the line. The wearer must have decided to play to their strengths, since they had the perfect build for Sturb, and now that I was looking closely, an uncannily similar face . . .

  The penny dropped with a thunk. I put my hand over my mouth and spoke quietly enough so that only my tooth microphone could hear. “Sturb. Is that you?”

  I saw the Sturb standing in the queue put his hand over his mouth just as I was doing. “Oh. Yeah. How’s it going?”

  “You’re supposed to be staying on the ship,” I whispered.

  “Yes, sorry, I know I said I would. I just want to get one book signed.” He stirred the dirt on the floor around with one toe. “And then I need to pick up something to eat for Derby and me. I can definitely say I’ll be back before midnight.”

  “Indeed,” confirmed Derby. “And remember, if Derby must taint his palate with mediocre Lunarian wine, I will only tolerate a Watanabe red. The ’54 for preference.”

  I still didn’t know what Sturb’s angle was in all this, but there was nothing I could do about him while I was stuck at the table, and I’m sure he knew that damn well. “Someone might see you,” I tried.

  “Yeah, like six people have asked for selfies already! It’s great, this. I can tell people I’m the real Malcolm Sturb all day and they just love it more and more.”

  “Anyway, why do you want a signing?” I asked, as another of the many issues jostling for attention in my mind rose to the surface. “You know I’m not the real McKeown.”

  “Yes, but my thinking was, if this heist becomes famous, your signatures are going to be collector’s items anyway. Besides . . .” With the tooth ­microphone, even his shamefaced mumbling was clear as a bell. “I did want to attend the con. I’ve been looking forward to it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I heard last year was pretty good. Even without McKeown, it was a lot more fun than Galaxpo. Shame about the riots.”

  I shook my head, and inadvertently glanced at Geranium Pleasant’s table. She was receiving one of her extremely small number of visitors with a genuine warmth and grace that had been entirely absent from her dealings with me, leaning forward and clasping their hand to shake. She caught me watching after the attendee left, and gave me a look that could have punched holes in the wrapping on a microwave dinner.

  “It must be such a burden to you,” she said, sarcasm gushing from every syllable. “To be so popular, having so many people wanting to make your work part of their lives. Perhaps that’s why you can’t help treating them with such contempt.”

  It was hard to hold anything against her for her attitude, since she thought she was dealing with the real Jacques McKeown, and in her position I’d have already leapt across the table wielding a broken bottle. But I was committed to the character now. “No need to be jealous, lady.”

  “Jealous?!” She flushed. “Some of us aren’t in this for money or fame, you know.”

  “Right,” I said, nodding. “And I can tell you’re not in it for the sex, either.”

  Her face, already the color of a red dwarf, looked like it was threatening to go supernova. Her jaw flapped up and down for a while before her throat came up with some words to go with it. “H-how dare you? You can’t just treat people like . . .” She looked ahead at the queue, and her expression softened rapidly.

  I followed her gaze. There were two people approaching, one on foot, one in a wheelchair. The latter was the size of a child, but with the hollow look and sunken features of the prematurely aged. Her head was shaved, and the cheap flower-patterned dress she was wearing was the only indication that she was female.

  The adult with her was pushing the wheelchair with the apologetic sensitivity of a devoted parent. She was a tall woman with a face that looked like I had caught it in a brief window between streams of crestfallen tears.

  “Hello, Mr. McKeown,” said the adult, in a heartbreakingly meek tone of voice. “This is Kelly. She’s a big fan of your stories. We both are, aren’t we, Kelly?”

  Kelly nodded weakly, jostling the various tubes that connected her to a suite of life-support equipment on the backrest of her wheelchair.

  “I used to read them to her because her eyes don’t work terribly well,” continued Kelly’s mother. “That was until the house burnt down, of course. That’s why we haven’t got any books for you to sign.” Kelly’s life-support equipment gave a little pneumatic hiss to punctuate the statement.

  “I’m . . . sorry?” I said, instinctively, which scarcely felt like enough. I kept my eyes on the mother, because I could sense Geranium Pleasant watching my reaction with keen interest.

  “Kelly just wanted to thank you for making her life a little bit happier,” said the mother, dropping her gaze as emotion began to build a quaver in her voice. “And we were in the middle of Jacques McKeown and the Doomtrac Tournament when the fire happened, so we were wondering if you could tell us how it ended?”

  “Yes, how did that one end, Jacques?” asked Geranium with unconvincing interest.

  The thought occurred that blowing off this particular attendee would be a spectacular black mark against Jacques McKeown in his future endeavors. This was the stuff of social media boycott campaigns.

  This thought was swiftly drowned out by the occurrence of another, significantly louder, thought, one that had been nagging at the back of my mind all day: What the plying hell am I doing? I’m genuinely thinking about tearing down a burn-victim cancer kid out of spite for someone I’ve never even met. In the middle of a heist. A heist to crush the dreams of a not-that-much-older kid whose only crime was being slightly annoying.

  Ten years ago I’d been a space hero, damn it. Back then, if a villain had offered me a chance to rule the galaxy alongside them, I’d have beaten them up on pure principle and left them for the authorities. Now, I was apparently more likely to haggle my price and request an expense account. This was Warden’s doing. She’d successfully brought me down to her level.

  “Mr. McKeown?” prompted Kelly’s mother, after I had been blinking stupidly at her for a good thirty seconds. “Doomtrac Tournament?”

  “How it ended,” I said, mostly to myself.

  “Don’t worry,” said Geranium Pleasant, in her most grandmotherly voice. “It somet
imes takes a while for something to sink in when you have an imagination as vivid and creative as Mr. McKeown’s, but he’ll be able to tell you soon. After all, what kind of writer can’t remember the endings to his own books?”

  There was only one course of action I could take that would save my self-respect. Stand up, admit everything, abandon the heist, and walk out of the building with my head held high. And my arms held even higher for when the crowd started throwing things.

  I blinked a few more times. They blinked right back. “I . . .”

  “If I may?” said a hushed voice in my ear.

  “Er . . .”

  “He wins the final battle against Mungnash by inciting the mole people to dig underneath his feet and knock him over,” said Malcolm Sturb. I glanced at him, and saw that he had a hand in front of his face as if pretending to pick his nose. “Then the special request he makes as his prize is to end mole-people oppression.”

  I let my mouth hang open for a few moments, then pushed the words out. “The mole people help him defeat Mungnash,” I conveyed.

  “Oh, we knew Jacques McKeown would win out in the end,” said Kelly’s mother, clapping her hands in relief. “Kelly’s been so worried about what might have happened, I’m sure when I get her home, she’ll just be bouncing off the walls.”

  My brain immediately conjured an absolutely inexcusable witticism along the lines that Kelly looked like someone who’d been bounced off more than enough walls for one lifetime, but this time I didn’t even entertain the notion of voicing it aloud. I merely watched the mother and daughter roll back off into the convention proper, and bathed in the unimpressed scowl of Geranium Pleasant.

  Sturb offered me a cheery thumbs-up, and I put on a scowl of my own that made all my cheek muscles burn. Warden had successfully made me sink to another low: accepting help from Malcolm plying Sturb.

  After that, I went sulkily back into maximum trac-head mode for the remainder of the queue, until by the end of the day, I was signing each book with little more than a squiggle and answering each question by blowing a dismissive raspberry. The line finally dissipated two hours after the convention was supposed to have ended for the day, presumably because the convention staff had gone from polite requests to threatening to break out hoses and tear gas.

  Even having used as little energy as possible, my signing hand was curled into a stiff claw of constant ache. I was blowing on my wrist when I saw Daniel Henderson emerge from the usual cloud of bruised bodyguards. Mercifully, Geranium Pleasant had already left, her fans having dried up at around dinnertime.

  “Cool, okay,” he said, shifting his weight back and forth, either from nervous excitement or a pressing need to use the bathroom. “Uh. Shame we didn’t get around to any of the panels, slightly bigger queue for the meet and greet than we thought, but it’s all cool. We’ll do some tomorrow.”

  “Yes, tomorrow,” I said, relishing the word. “There’ll be plenty of time for everything tomorrow.”

  For a moment I had thought happily of repairing to my extremely luxurious penthouse suite and collapsing onto a bed the size of an apartment in a low-income neighborhood, until I remembered that I had a daring heist on this evening, and that the Henderson organization and the police were going to be hunting me across space pretty soon, so I wasn’t looking at turning in until about three a.m. at the very earliest.

  “I’m going to bed,” I said bitterly, getting up.

  “Okay, cool,” said Daniel, hovering around the edges of my personal space. “You can just, you know, get on up and walk around the table and go up to the apartment, like that, cool. We’re all really, really grateful to you.”

  “I know.” I buried my hands in the pockets of my flight jacket. “You keep saying that.”

  “I know, I know, cool,” repeated Daniel. “Just can’t say thank you enough for all this. And to Ms. Warden.”

  “Great.” Two steps later, I stiffened, my forward heel down and my toe hanging in the air. Then I carefully rotated myself 180 degrees by shuffling with my back foot. “Why would you thank Ms. Warden?”

  “ ’Cos she gave me your email address,” said Daniel, still beaming.

  I felt a multitude of emotions, mostly hatred, mostly directed at myself, but the one thing I did not feel was surprise. “Did she, now.”

  “Yeah! She said she knew you’d be onboard for this but you need her to give you a little push sometimes. So are you going out with her now?”

  Chapter 10

  I walked all the way to the Quantunnel, through it to the penthouse level, along the magnificent hallways, and up the access stairway to the spaceport without untensing a single muscle in my upper body. I walked with my teeth bared, my shoulders squared, my fists clenched, and my elbows out like I was carrying two invisible carpets under my armpits.

  I was running on automatic at that point, as most of my conscious mind was occupied with words like kill and death swimming around in multiple sizes and colors like tropical fish in an overcrowded aquarium. I could just about spare enough reasoning ability to recall the way to the rooftop landing pad where the Neverdie was parked.

  A small amount of relief washed over me at the familiar sight of her, although in these strange surroundings, she looked like I’d left her waiting at the bar in a shady establishment. Not entirely to my surprise, she was guarded. A bored biker was leaning on a six-foot cube of concrete.

  “Just grabbing my overnight bag,” I said as I approached, gesturing toward the Neverdie’s airlock steps.

  “I ain’t fumping stopping ya,” growled the biker, not looking away from their phone. They looked and sounded similar to the first biker I had encountered, Les, and might even have been them, but frankly all bikers look the same to me once they go past a certain number of facial piercings.

  I took a single step toward the ship, then froze, because it was at this point that a couple of relevant details sank fully into my conscious mind. The first was that the six-foot cube of concrete that the biker was leaning on was an anchor block, the kind of thing spaceports keep around when a ship needs to be kept where it is. The second was the enormous steel cable as thick as a gorilla’s bicep that led from the top of the block to one of the Neverdie’s landing legs, where it was attached by a locking mechanism the size of a small fridge.

  “My ship’s on an anchor,” I said aloud, instinctively.

  “Yeah,” said the biker, not looking up. “And you’d better clotting appreciate it ’cos three guys got hernias dragging that thing up here.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno. Lack of clotting exercise or something, you’d have to ask them.”

  “No, I mean . . . why anchor my ship?”

  “Boss man ordered it. Thousands of scrankers at this convention, any one of ’em might get drunk and want a joy ride.”

  “But what if I need to fly somewhere?”

  Finally they looked up, their lips pulled back in a harassed grimace. “What for?”

  “Um.” A number of possible answers surfaced and were swiftly rejected. Medical emergency? A call to adventure from distant stars? If I foresaw an urgent need to get somewhere quickly, then there was no reason to use a ship, not with Quantunnels all over the building. “I might need to air the engine out.”

  “Air the engine out.”

  I detected a note of incredulity in their voice. “Y-yeah,” I said, trying to feign confidence in my own words. “These old models get a lot of particle buildup. Especially in a bubble atmosphere. It’s best to at least turn the parts over once a day or so.”

  They looked up at the extremely heavy cable with exasperation. “It’ll take, like, four guys to get the clotting clamp thing open again. Pretty sure it’ll survive till Sunday.”

  I had officially run out of energy for this conversation. It wasn’t like there was a pressing need to take off right now, and if there was a way t
o talk this doint into releasing the anchor, then it would work just as well in an hour or so. I simply let my shoulders sag, then stomped off and let myself into my ship without a word.

  “All right, Warden,” I growled the instant the airlock door had closed behind me and formed a nice tight, soundproof seal. “I know you’re still plying listening to me. Is it true?”

  A brief tense silence, then an annoyed click of the tongue. “Is what true?”

  “Your giving my email to the Doint Emperor.”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  “So you lied.”

  “Not at all. You asked if I was the reason you had started receiving emails from Jacques McKeown fans, and I was not. I gave Daniel Henderson your email last year, when he was trying to contact you for the first convention. He only posted it publicly in the last few weeks as he began seeking you out for this one.”

  I was pacing around the airlock like a tiger in a photo booth, one finger stuck in my ear. I didn’t remember getting an email from Daniel last year, but at the time, I’d avoided checking my emails much, as they were usually just more bad news from the lawyers. “Why did you let him have it in the first place?!”

  “He asked for it. I saw no reason not to give it.”

  “Oh, didn’t you, now.” I stomped into the passenger cabin.

  Sturb and Derby were waiting on the benches, and Sturb hadn’t mind slaved any helpless convention attendees as far as I could see, so that at least was a mercy. A forest of Sushi Station takeout boxes was arranged on the coffee table, some on a delicate silk tablecloth that Derby must have provided.

  “Hello, Captain! Do you want some takeout?” said Sturb. “We saved you some takeout.”

  “Stick it. Heist’s off.”

  “Why?” asked Derby, recrossing his legs comfortably.

  “Warden’s played me like a spoon,” I ranted, only partly certain I knew what the hell I meant by that. “She’s the one who told Daniel Henderson how to contact me in the first place!”