Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  “Oh, now that you’ve explained, it all sounds perfectly understandable.” I was barely paying attention to him as I listened at the door for the slightest noise. “Could you get on with what you’re supposed to be doing, please?”

  “Right, good idea,” said Sturb, with his ever infuriating reasonableness. He added another piece to the developing tunnel frame, sliding it into place with a solid click, then stepped back to survey it. “Need to concentrate. Has to be perfect. You know how close it has to be to the size of the other tunnel?”

  “Yeah, it’s, like, point three of a millimeter, or something.” A few nagging thoughts coalesced. “Hang on. You said the cops might be able to redirect an illegal Quantunnel if they detect it?”

  “Just a rumor I’ve heard, but it wouldn’t surprise me, the amount of ­money that’s gone into Quantunnel-security research since they were invented,” said Sturb, pausing in his work again with infuriating nonchalance after he had inserted one more piece. “It’d certainly be a deterrent, if the police could just drop you into a prison cell when they detect you coming in.”

  “Wouldn’t they need a Quantunnel in the prison cell exactly the same size as this one?”

  Sturb had been reaching for his tool bag, but aborted this to make some illustrative gestures as he spoke. “Ah. Very good question. This is the interesting thing. It’s not that the tunnels have to be the same size or it won’t turn on. They’ll still turn on. But it becomes a lot more dangerous to pass through them.”

  “Why?”

  With another piece of frame attached, it was getting close to around person height. “You might come out the wrong shape,” he explained. “If you’re lucky, the universe figures out its mistake and you pop back to normal, which can be pretty traumatic in itself. If you’re unlucky . . .” He huffed in mock concern. “I know someone who ended up looking like one of those forced-perspective drawings being looked at from the wrong angle. The point-three-millimeter thing is just the threshold where that’s never happened.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “So far.”

  “Okay!” I barked, suddenly conscious that I was getting dangerously close to having a casual conversation with Malcolm Sturb. “Just get it done. Quickly. Stop pausing to talk to me.” I thought I heard a faint bump from somewhere in the apartment, so I listened against the freezer door. Nothing but silence, and now my earlobe was getting frostbite.

  The top bar clipped on, connecting the sides and completing the six-foot Quantunnel entrance. Sturb spooled a cable out of his phone as if it were dental floss and plugged it into a port at the base of the frame. “Jimi, how are we looking? How close are the proportions to the exit gate?”

  “Deviation of two point four millimeters,” said Jimi the phone voice. “Highlighting maximum deviance points.” A number of lasers burst forth from the projector on the back of the phone, illuminating some of the joints in the frame. Sturb took up a handheld electric wrench and tightened one of the highlighted screws with a brief whir.

  I heard another bump. This time, I was pretty certain it was coming from the second floor of the apartment, but before I could continue my analysis, Derby’s voice flooded my earpiece. “I have returned to the ship,” he reported in a sulk. “Davisham Derby is ready to begin cutting a cable like a glorified handyman—”

  “Shh!” I hissed, with such urgency that even he shut up. “Sturb! You saw the cameras. Was there anyone upstairs?”

  Sturb was still correcting the screws, unconcerned. “No, I can’t say there was. Besides that catatonic fellow.”

  Another sound. Definitely from upstairs, and definitely the sound of a door opening.

  “What about Daniel?” I asked.

  Sturb put his wrench down and talked over his shoulder. “No, I don’t remember seeing him anywhere. It’s the big first night of the con, I assumed he’d be at some kind of after party.”

  That made sense, but it was difficult to imagine Daniel having enough actual friends to populate a party. Still, the con had been crowded enough that he had probably gathered a few opportunistic people who were prepared to pretend in return for some free cake and fizzy pop.

  “Jimi, how about now?” asked Sturb of his phone.

  “Deviation of one point eight millimeters.”

  Sturb clicked his tongue, and started incrementally turning the screws with brief attacks of the wrench, seeking the perfect spot for each one.

  Upstairs, I heard the sound of a foot on the top step. It was swiftly joined by a solid clunk, the kind of thing that might be made by a walking stick held by someone who had trouble walking because one of their legs had a nasty case of absence. Surely something as everyday and harmless as a daring midnight heist of his expensive possessions couldn’t have been the thing to finally rouse Mr. Henderson from his stupor.

  “You need to hurry this up,” I informed Sturb.

  “Don’t worry, Captain. I already said I’ve been getting these done in under ten minutes.”

  “Zero point nine millimeters,” reported his phone.

  The stomp-clunk sounds of foot and walking stick were descending the stairs. Ten minutes was a long time in the world of daring heists. More than enough time to, say, catch two idiots in your freezer and bring down the entire wrath of your criminal empire upon them.

  “Zero point six millimeters.”

  “Is that close enough?!” I asked, trying to focus on Sturb and listen at the door at the same time.

  “Mm, hard to say.” Sturb rested his wrench on his shoulder and talked with maddening slowness as he thought. “Most of the time you can probably get away with point four. Point three’s just the maximum allowed by safety regulations. Actually, the really interesting thing is—”

  “I don’t care! Get it done!”

  The footsteps were now moving around the apartment, presumably inspecting the new decor themed around unconscious bodyguards. I heard a faint fleshy thump that a moment’s thought identified as the sound of a walking stick prodding a human torso.

  “Zero point four millimeters,” said Jimi.

  “That’ll do! Start it up!” I yelled slightly louder than I’d intended. My hand instinctively slapped across my mouth when I heard the footsteps outside suddenly halt.

  Sturb poised his hand over a button on his touchscreen dramatically. “Mr. Pierce, don’t look this way. Quantunnels don’t open while anyone’s watching.”

  I knew that, and it was a pointless request anyway: all my attention was devoted to the freezer door. The footfalls, now softer and more cautious, were getting closer.

  “One. Two. Three,” said Sturb.

  As always, the effect of opening a Quantunnel was rather underwhelming. I heard the sound of rattling metal, a slightly uncomfortably loud snap, and then a persistent hum that sounded like the thrumming of an atmospheric cycler in dire need of a clean.

  I turned. With the completed Quantunnel frame propped against the wall, the meat freezer appeared to have acquired a brand-new door, which led directly into the passenger compartment of the Neverdie. Sturb gingerly prodded the edges of the doorway. “I think we did it.”

  I hurried over to the cryonic cylinder. Sturb was already standing on tiptoe, struggling to tip it toward the new door. I put a hand under the other end and lifted until my back took the weight.

  “It’s rather heavy,” said Sturb, in response to my surprised grunt. “Why do you think that is? Does this antidote stuff need a lot of padding around it?”

  I was about to reply—probably with some kind of clever putdown ­relating to Sturb’s weight—when I heard someone rattling the freezer’s door handle outside, and all my words were replaced by a frightened high-pitched squawk. The two of us hurriedly took the strain and carried the cylinder across the threshold before we could spare a thought for the icy sensation scything painfully through our hands.

  I
n unspoken agreement, we dumped the cylinder horizontally on the nearest bench, then simultaneously snatched our hands up and shook them vigorously to restore sensation to our fingers. “Cylinder’s on the ship,” reported Sturb. “Derby, get ready to close the building’s Quantunnel on three.” He threw his arm over his eyes, and I did the same. “One. Two. Three.”

  A few seconds of silence passed, and cold air continued to waft from the meat locker into the passenger cabin, along with the faint hum of the refrigeration system.

  “Did it close?” I asked.

  “I . . . don’t think it did,” said Sturb in the quiet voice of someone experiencing an ongoing sequence of sinking feelings.

  “I don’t think it did either.” I heard the fleshy sound of Sturb’s thumb patting the touchscreen on his phone over and over again, but I didn’t dare open my eyes. “Is it because we can still feel the cold? We have to stop sensing it, not just stop looking at it?”

  “Maybe, but . . .”

  He trailed off in such a way that I felt moved to uncover my eyes. He was boggling at his homemade Quantunnel with his mouth hanging open wide enough to admit a Silusian belchwasp.

  I followed his gaze. The Quantunnel was, as expected, still open into the Hendersons’ meat freezer, facing the heavy steel door. That door was now open, and Mr. Henderson was standing on the threshold, leaning comfortably on a pair of crutches.

  “Jacques McKeown, as I live and breathe,” said Mr. Henderson calmly.

  Chapter 12

  “This isn’t what it looks like,” I said, on instinct. It probably wasn’t my worst ever attempt at improvisation, but no other candidates sprung to mind at that very moment.

  Henderson remained in the doorway of his apartment’s freezer, staring at us through the Quantunnel as he blinked rapidly and swayed dreamily, drunk on either the effects of prolonged catatonia or the heady prospect of revenge. He waved a limp hand at the carnage in the apartment behind him. “Did you knock all these guys out?”

  “I can’t close the tunnel while he’s looking at it,” muttered Sturb out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Yes, I knocked them out,” I said loudly. “Especially that one.” I pointed behind Henderson. He frowned, then smiled, but didn’t turn.

  “I think I’m going to keep an eye on you,” said Henderson sluggishly, digging his phone out of a pocket of his cardigan. “I think I’m going to call some guys and then I was thinking I might tell them to kill you.” He held the phone to his ear.

  I shot him. I’d already drawn my blaster out of nervous habit and had clicked the dial to the Stun setting, so all I had to do then was go with my instinct to pull the trigger. A sprawling cluster of plasma bolts riddled his chest and he swiftly went down, his back arching uncomfortably over the freezer door threshold and an expression of pain and overpowering rage fixed on his face.

  Sturb had reflexively put his hands up, and now gawped at me in unconvincing pretense that the man who’d enslaved half the Black at one time or another was thrown by a little violence. “O-okay.”

  I turned to him. I’d only meant to point, but forgot that I was holding a gun in my pointing hand, so he flinched and put his hands up even higher. “Get this plying tunnel shut,” I spat. Then I bolted for the door. The real one.

  I climbed the steps three at a time until I was in the cockpit, and flung myself into my chair with such force that one of the bolts that kept it attached to the floor popped out and pinged away. Muscle memory took over, and my hands flew about the controls, activating the ship’s systems in the order that usually succeeded in making the engine start. I was only half-aware of the sweat dripping down my face; firing the gun had triggered something in me, and my brain was producing adrenaline like a lawn sprinkler.

  “Derby, you onboard yet?” I barked.

  “No,” said Derby contemptuously, as if I were supposed to know that. “At present, I am still on the landing platform, addressing the anchor-block situation.”

  I made a frustrated noise and slapped the steering column. “You ­haven’t cut that thing off yet?! We need to get in the air, like, ten seconds ago. We’ve been made! And we’ve got however long it takes to recover from a stun-blaster shot before Henderson’s goons are on us.”

  “Oh,” he said loftily. “If only, say, some kind of stealth expert and master thief had been assigned to the task of recovering the cylinder.”

  “DERBY, YOU TRAC-HEAD—”

  “Calm yourself, Captain, the grownups are on the case.” An earsplitting high-pitched whine started up, making me snatch at my ear in surprise. “I’m switching to my most powerful saw. Rest assured that this infernal cable will not trouble it for long.”

  I wasn’t reassured. I activated the external view monitor that would theoretically show me the view from the belly camera on the underside of the hull, but of course, it didn’t work. I hadn’t used it in years; it was more of a training tool for when you’re still learning how to land or parallel park, and my instincts had taken over for it long ago.

  Sturb crashed clumsily into the cockpit behind me, patting his ear to dispel the noise of Derby’s sawing. “Do you know how long Mr. Derby’s going to be doing that?”

  “You’re the plying tech guy.” I thumped the buttons under the monitor, and caused it to flash to life for precisely one quarter of a second. “Make this plying camera work and then maybe we’ll know.”

  “Right. I can do that, actually.” Sturb brought his phone out with suspicious speed. “Where should I plug in?”

  An alarm bell rang through the haze of my energized mood as I stared at the vicious little teeth on the end of his dongle. “What’re you planning to do with that?”

  “Oh, sorry. I need to install a link for Jimi. They can diagnose and find the most efficient way to bypass the malfunctioning systems. You see, Jimi uses a sort of modular coding system that can theoretically emulate any—”

  “Yeah,” I interrupted. “But then what? You turn my own ship against me? Fly out to the Black to start enslaving planets again?”

  “Well, I really wasn’t thinking of doing that, but . . . Jimi, could you assess this system’s processor potential for mind slaving?” He held his phone toward the main computer housing by my leg.

  “Assessing,” said the phone, projecting holographic lines across the nearest panel. “Local computer system has sufficient processing power to maintain a slave colony consisting of . . . one . . . severely mentally disabled . . . ­domesticated animal.”

  “So you see, there’s nothing to worry about,” said Sturb, waving his phone. His face was going red and sweaty with tech excitement again. “I can only run Jimi on my phone because I’ve customized the ansible system to give it the equivalent processing power of three naval-fleet strategic mainframes.”

  I pursed my lips. In other circumstances I might have stuck to a hard-line stance on keeping Sturb’s weird supertech trac out of my ship’s computer, but we were pressed for time and the whining noise in my ear was grating across my nerves like a carpenter’s file across a recently drilled tooth. I gave him the nod.

  Sturb reeled the cable out of his phone and shoved it rudely into the universal input slot. A moment later, he started swiping through windows on his touchscreen. I felt slightly insulted by the way his expression turned aghast at the sight of my archaic systems, which I think had been updated around the time of Halley’s comet’s last visit. Eventually he found what he was looking for and turned the screen for me to see: the feed from the Neverdie’s keel camera.

  There was the anchor block, still connected to the front landing leg; the cable extruding from its top led windingly to the underside of the image and out of sight. Derby was standing on top of the block with one foot upon the large iron ring in a suitably dramatic pose, attacking the cable with a thin chainsaw-like device extruding from his wrist. Blinding sparks were flying off the spot where it c
onnected, making it impossible to see how much of the cable he had gotten through.

  “Derby, how much longer?!” I demanded.

  He stopped sawing for a moment to put one finger to his ear. “No faster for having to incessantly reassure you. You just keep your engine running and be ready to take off.”

  My eye flicked to the readouts on the main console. “It is running. It’s warmed up. We’re waiting on you.”

  Now that he had stopped sawing for a moment, I could see that he was barely a third of the way through the tether’s six-inch thickness of wound steel. I could also see a few background details, including the biker Derby had left lying unconscious on the tarmac. I noticed them straightaway, ­because they were acting a lot less unconscious than would have been preferred.

  They were sitting up, apparently making a groggy attempt to pat their head and rub their tummy as they made up their mind which part of them they wanted to clutch first. They glanced around, confused, then noticed Derby.

  “Derby, the guard!” I yelled, informatively.

  He paused to click his tongue and roll his eyes just as he was about to resume cutting. “The guard will be out for more than enough time, fret not. Trust in the expert, star pilot. Your micromanaging is getting tiresome.”

  “The guard is—” My sentence was drowned out when his saw reactivated and he touched it to the cut, filling the view with sparks and our ears with the sound of pigs being slaughtered in fast motion. I had to scream Derby’s name three times before he turned it off again.

  “What now?”

  “The—oh. Well, I was going to let you know that the guard behind you was awake, but that’s become plying moot, hasn’t it.”