Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  “Yes, we . . . overheard,” said Derby, tapping his ear. “My question stands. Why is the heist off?”

  “Because! She suckered me into it!”

  “Ah, stop me if I’ve read the situation completely wrong here,” said Sturb. “But aren’t we all here to get an antidote for Robert Blaze?”

  “Yes!” I was still using my loud, ranty voice but beginning to lose confidence. I nodded sarcastically in an effort to stall. “But! I’ve been, you know, manipulated!”

  Warden piped up. “So, if you’d known this from the start, you wouldn’t have wanted to save Robert Blaze?”

  I waggled a dynamic finger at nothing in particular. “You might well ask that.”

  “I am not going to let you jeopardize the payout I have in store,” promised Davisham Derby, brandishing his wrist device. “A deal was made, and I’ll see you sit in that pilot’s chair even if I must saw off your legs for it to be so.”

  I had been halfway to slumping, defeated, on the nearest bench before I remembered the other thing, and rose triumphantly back to my full height. “Actually! It’s all academic. The spaceport guards have put an anchor block on the ship.”

  “Oh. Really?” said Sturb, looking to the closed shutters. “We did wonder what all that noise and screaming was about. Sounded like three people getting hernias at once.”

  “Pft, have you forgotten?” Derby held up his shortened arm and let the cover fall from his miniature Quantunnel.

  Sturb and I exchanged a glance. “Forgotten what?” I asked.

  Davisham peered down his arm, affronted. “Eighteen F!” Moments later, his shortened forearm was significantly extended by a diamond-tipped cutting drill on the end of an angled metal limb. He only just moved his head out of the way in time.

  “Sorry, Uncle Dav,” came the muffled voice of Derby’s assistant. “I had my dinner in my lap, so I couldn’t get up right away.”

  “Yes, well. My point is, whatever is holding the ship in place, I have something that can cut through it. Davisham Derby has the tool for every task. I would have said that more emphatically, but I fear the moment was lost.”

  “I said I was sorry,” added the assistant, slightly ruefully.

  “Great, so everything’s sorted out.” Sturb rubbed his hands together ­keenly, then gestured to the other side of the cabin. A rectangular metal frame, about three feet wide by five high, was leaning against the wall. It was attached to a nearby tablet computer by a single cable. “I’ve already got the exit Quantunnel set up on this end, and I’ve got all the pieces for the entrance gate ready to go.” He hefted a small jangling kit bag. “Are we all set to get cracking?”

  I was offended by the way everyone had entirely brushed off my compelling reasons to abandon the heist. I jerked a thumb in the vague direction of outside. “What about that guard on the landing pad? We can’t just wander out and let them see you two coming off the ship.”

  “Leave them to me,” said Davisham Derby, the cutting tool withdrawing back into his arm as he closed the cover with a snap. “You shall have the enormous privilege of witnessing the elite skills of Davisham Derby in action.”

  Chapter 11

  A few minutes later, the three of us were on the landing pad, standing around the unconscious body of the biker guard.

  “You tased them,” I said flatly.

  Derby was still winding the Taser’s thin wires back into the miniature launcher sticking out of his arm hole. “Your point?”

  “That’s elite skill?” I opened my flight jacket to reveal my blaster in its holster. “I’ve got a stun gun, too. I could’ve done that.”

  Derby leveled a severe look at me. “The skill lies not in owning the tool, but in knowing when to use it.”

  I folded my arms. “So far, I know that you’re a complete tool. And you aren’t any use at all. So that must mean I’ve got elite skills, too.”

  “Gentlemen, they will not be out cold forever,” said Warden through our earpieces. “You must proceed with the plan. Even more hastily, now.”

  I sighed. I was very much aware that whatever small chance I had of getting everyone to call off the heist had disappeared. Wanting to bring my ship, refusing to answer any questions, all of that could be easily excused as conventional Jacques McKeown dointery, but tasing the staff went a bit beyond the territory of celebrity mood swings. One way or another, we were all in this to the end. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t be grumpy about it.

  “Yeah, obviously. Follow me. At a distance,” I added hastily, as they began to shift their weight. “I’ll scout ahead. Maybe I can talk us past the other guards without anyone else needing to be tased.”

  “Right you are, Captain,” said Sturb brightly. “Can I just say, I was very impressed by your performance as Jacques McKeown at the con. I think you fooled everyone.”

  Derby scoffed. “A star pilot can imitate another star pilot. Shocking. Put on a cap and a jacket and refuse to grow up, and you could pass for any one of them.”

  It was probably too late to run ahead and scream for the guards to help save me from these Taser-wielding madmen, so I just consoled myself with a little thought experiment on the nature of Quantunnel physics, and if it would be theoretically possible to take Derby’s arm thing and get him to ply himself.

  I advanced from the stairwell to the main corridor of the penthouse level, trying to keep my gait somewhere between sneaky and not so sneaky that a surprise guard would be made instantly suspicious. But luck was on my side—or at least, keen to see how we would ply this up next—and we ran into no more guards on the way to the apartment. All the ones currently awake on this level must have been in the Hendersons’ apartment, fiercely staring at priceless star piloting artifacts.

  I reached the door to the other apartment and casually held it open, staring upwards as if momentarily fascinated by the pattern of the ceiling tiles, and pretended not to notice Derby and Sturb slip in. I felt like the good boy finally succumbing to the pressure to let his two naughty friends into the tuck shop after closing.

  Even in the darkness, the luxury of the apartment was obvious. I could feel the siren call of the soft bed above me, and the fully stocked bar under the kitchen counter ahead. But in the context of being midheist, the high ceiling and tall windows were more judgmental than alluring.

  Derby, of course, was loving the new surroundings. “And why, pray, were we not waiting out the day in here?” He stood in the center of the living space with his one remaining hand on hip. “Instead of huddling in that miserable man-child cave. It’ll take days to wash the smell of failure from my clothes.”

  “If we could silence the unnecessary chatter,” requested Warden, her disembodied voice cut with the stern diplomacy of a playground monitor.

  “So is this the balcony through here?” asked Sturb.

  “Through the balcony doors, yeah,” I snarked. “The doors to the balcony.”

  The balcony doors were integrated so well into the large windows that they were difficult to spot until you noticed the tiny rectangular latch, but once I was out in the still night air, I could see why that had to be the case. The view of the city was so breathtaking that putting anything in the way of it should have been a capital crime. At least, rich people probably thought so. As a pilot and former space adventurer, I’d put it near the bottom of my top twenty views, probably just below the view of the basalt plains of Yuctha from the top of Karfung the Tall’s burial mound.

  It also meant that the other apartment had an equally good view and equally big windows, and as such, it would be virtually impossible to get onto its balcony without being instantly spotted. Going by the moving shadows in the shafts of bright light that spilled from the windows, the Hendersons’ lounge must have been fully manned by the night-shift security team.

  I whispered all of this to my companions. Derby listened to my concerns, nodding
politely, then patted my upper arm with the back of his hand until I stepped to one side. Then he leapt across the gap.

  I was less impressed by the leap—the balconies were only about a foot and a half apart, so a single stride could’ve done the job—as I was by the follow-up. His sensible shoes landed precisely on the opposite balcony’s railing with the merest whisper of a sound, and then he remained balanced there, standing fully upright with only his hand keeping him steady on the nearby wall. There, he was still out of view. “Sturb,” he muttered, audible only to those of us with earpieces. “If you wish to make yourself useful in the manner we discussed, now is the time.”

  “I’m on that right now. Jimi, can you access the household computer network?”

  I checked over my shoulder and saw that he had his phone out.

  “Searching,” said the little computer voice. Sturb waved his phone around his head, looking for the signal. “Accessing most likely wireless network. Assessing Henderson organization. Entering network password most likely to be correct. Network accessed.”

  Again, I was grudgingly impressed by my coworker’s tech; my own phone could just barely run Joogie Bounce, and even that seemed to crash every time I was about to beat my high score.

  “All right, now—” began Sturb.

  “I have assessed the situation and have concluded that you are conducting a heist,” said Jimi the phone voice. “Displaying security camera feeds and household convenience functions.”

  “That’s very perceptive of you, Jimi, well done.” Sturb made some stalling noises along the lines of “bumble bumble bumble hum” as he swiped through a number of displays. “Mr. Derby? I can confidently state there’s one guard patrolling the ground level, he’s just passing by the windows now. Three more in the lounge area, playing . . .” He peered closer to the screen. “Scrabble, I’m prepared to say. Two are looking at the game, the other one’s staring out the window. Looks very bored.”

  “Yes, we knew it would be guarded,” said Derby impatiently. “Can you do anything about the lights?”

  “Just let me get the home console up. There we go. I can turn out the lights, open the balcony doors, play something over the speakers . . . there’s a thought. I’ve got some really disorienting Finnish black metal on here somewhere, maybe . . .”

  “Let’s try to keep quiet,” I suggested, thinking of Henderson sitting in the adjoining room, harboring a fury that could have burned through the floor.

  “On my mark, turn off all the lights and open the balcony door a crack,” said Derby. He popped the cover off his wrist device, and plucked a small metal cylinder out of his mini Quantunnel. I caught a glimpse of skinny fingers passing it to him from within his secret hideout. “Around six inches will do. Three. Two. One. Mark.”

  Sturb made a decisive finger movement, and the lights that bathed the opposite balcony winked out, prompting a cry of irritation from someone inside. There was a moment’s tense silence that lasted just long enough for us to collectively wonder if some kind of massive doints-up was on the cards, then the glass that separated the balcony from the apartment slid a few inches aside with a thud.

  Derby had already plucked the cap from his handheld device, the way one pulls the ring on a tin of microwave dinner. He smartly tossed it through the gap with impressive accuracy, and a few white tufts floated into the night air to indicate that the apartment was flooding with blinding smoke. Derby crouched to spring, and then I blinked, and by the time I had finished blinking, he was gone.

  “What’s going on in there?” I asked Sturb, turning on my heel. I stared at the screen over his shoulder, and saw only a bright rectangle of grainy night-vision green, with the occasional glimpse of thrashing limb.

  We both looked up when we heard a thump of flesh against glass, and then one of the black-suited bodyguards staggered out of the swirling white fog, coughing and half collapsing onto the balcony railing. He took a moment to recover, then looked up. Directly at me.

  His brow furrowed. “W—”

  Suddenly his body spasmed, his back arched, and his clenching teeth cut off whatever he’d been about to say. Then he collapsed, unconscious, and I could see two narrow black wires leading from his back to the open balcony door.

  “Report,” said Warden testily. “Ground team, report.” Derby peered through the gap while winding the wires of his Taser back into his arm ­device. He had been wearing a pair of thermal goggles that were now pushed up onto his forehead. “All hostiles neutralized. The way is clear.”

  Sturb nodded, took a deep breath, and jumped over the tiny gap to the other balcony, landing in a crouch and clutching his chest as the unfamiliar sensation of physical exercise took the wind right out of him. I followed, stepping nonchalantly across the eighty-story drop. A lifetime of space travel is excellent for overcoming vertigo.

  “Your task in the freezer awaits,” said Derby, brushing imaginary dust from his lapel. He slid aside to let Sturb into the Hendersons’ apartment, then promptly slid back to block the way as I made to follow. “You’re no longer needed, pilot. Why don’t you go keep your engine warm while we take care of the important business. You’ll be informed when we’re ready to leave.”

  I jerked a thumb behind me. “And what am I supposed to do about that anchor block?”

  “You’ll have some time. I’m sure you’re equal to the task.”

  “The cable is as thick as my plying leg. What am I supposed to do? We don’t all keep superdrills up our magic holes.”

  Sturb stopped and turned halfway to the kitchen. “Actually, didn’t you say you would cut it, Mr. Derby? You said you have a tool for every occasion. It was a whole bit you were doing. Why don’t you go back to the ship, and the captain can come with me?”

  Derby’s smug look vanished like an inconvenient corpse in a junkyard. “What?”

  “You can get to work on cutting the cable now and we won’t have to worry about it later. You’ve already done a wonderful job neutralizing the guards, and I’m sure Mr. Pierce and his blaster are quite up to the task of assisting me. Plus, he’ll be able to return directly to the ship through our Quantunnel and get on with the business of piloting.”

  “Yes, fine, whatever,” said Warden. “Just get the job done.”

  I gave Derby a completely reasonable look, and his nostrils flared as he analyzed Sturb’s logic. “And if I am discovered by guards on the way back?”

  Sturb shrugged. “Tase them?”

  Derby scowled at him, then me, before gathering his dignity and stepping back across the gap with considerably less aplomb than before.

  “He can be a bit much, can’t he,” said Sturb in a hushed tone, when it was just me and him, creeping through the darkened apartment toward the meat freezer.

  I noted the coffee table in the lounge. Two of the guards were slumped unconscious over the Scrabble board. Judging by the large number of four-letter words, it hadn’t exactly been a clash of the mental titans. “A bit much,” I repeated, before giving him a stern look. “I dunno. I haven’t seen him enslave people’s minds and turn them into cyberserkers against their will, but maybe we’ve all got different definitions of ‘a bit much.’ ”

  Sturb stopped dead right outside the door to the freezer. His egg-shaped torso heaved with a deep sigh, and he turned fully around to address me. “I understand why you’re wary of me.”

  “Do you.”

  “But I want to give you my complete assurance that I really have moved on from mind slaving people. My priorities are completely different now.”

  “Oh. You’ve moved on.” I irritably kicked the snoozing form of a muscular biker out of the way. “As long as you’ve ‘moved on.’ Wish I’d thought of saying that at my last court summons. ‘I know I sold that tourist’s luggage to a pirate, but hey, maybe we should all just move on.’ ”

  He pouted sadly as he turned his attention to the
handle on the freezer door, but paused in the act of turning it to eyeball me again. “Forgive me, but . . . I thought you were a star pilot?”

  “I am! Was!”

  “But you were selling luggage to pirates?”

  I waggled a finger at him aggressively, trying to think of the no doubt extremely good and obvious counterargument that, for some reason, was escaping me for the moment. “Things changed,” I said eventually, letting my hand drop. “And it was nothing like your supervillain trac.”

  He gave a conciliatory sort of half shrug, then finally pulled open the meat freezer’s door, releasing a hiss and a waft of cold air.

  The space inside was roomy for a refrigerator, but still a little uncomfortably poky with two adult males inside it, along with a shelving unit covered in prepackaged frozen cheeseburgers and the cryonic cylinder that we had come here to steal.

  It was larger than I had expected, as tall as a man and about two feet wide, constructed from highly reflective stainless steel that was caked with frost. Some of the urgent stenciled lettering on the side had rubbed off in places, but it didn’t take a genius to infer what WARNING: HA ARDOUS BIO ATTER was supposed to mean. In keeping with the way Daniel had treated his other priceless artifacts, there was no further protection or housing; the cylinder had simply been leant against the wall, with nothing but a packet of fish fingers to keep it from falling over.

  Sturb went straight to the far corner—to use the word far generously, as it was still only about three feet away—and knelt to start work on the Quantunnel. I pulled the freezer door shut behind us. If any of those guards outside woke up, with any luck they wouldn’t think we’d be stupid enough to still be around, trapped in the fridge.

  Sturb slid one piece of the Quantunnel frame into another and clapped his hands together with glee when it stood up on the floor without falling over. “The funny thing is, I never actually intended to become a supervillain.” Sturb was standing with self-satisfied hands on hips. “I just started messing around with some human-machine interface systems, then one thing led to another; I wanted to see how far I could take it before someone tried to stop me, and no one did. Well, they did, but by that point there were cyberserkers to fight them off.” His tone was more remorseful than nostalgic.