Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash

by Yahtzee Croshaw

Derby finally looked behind him, and saw, as I had, that the biker had run away. They must have weighed up the potential results of attempting a sneak attack, and had decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

  Gratifyingly, Derby was momentarily lost for words as he examined the spot where the biker had been lying. When he turned, I could see that he was sweating profusely even with the camera’s incredibly low resolution. “I don’t . . . that probably couldn’t have been avoided,” he eventually said.

  “Keep cutting,” I suggested through my teeth, clutching the joysticks as if they were a pair of skinny throats.

  “Um, the thought occurs, sorry to interrupt, they’ve probably run off to fetch more guards,” said Sturb, clutching the back of my headrest urgently.

  “If Henderson wasn’t already getting on that,” I said. “I guess this might speed things up since they know exactly where we are now.”

  “On balance, I think we’re all still doing a very good job under the circumstances,” said Sturb, eyes bulging wildly.

  I checked the monitor. Derby was still cutting, the steel glowing red hot under his arm-mounted saw. Sparks were flowing from the cut in spectacular floods, but the ship wasn’t getting less tethered to the anchor block any faster.

  There was a brief lull in the sparks as Derby repositioned himself, and I caught another glimpse of the scene behind him. The door that led into the building was being held open, and two indistinct blobs peering around the door frame could conceivably have been the faces of concerned guards.

  “Are those guards?” I asked.

  Derby stopped sawing and sighed extremely audibly. “Would you please let me get on with this? I’d be done by now if you didn’t keep . . .” He finally looked behind him, and his voice trailed off. “Erm. Yes, I was talking to you two. Let me get on with this. It’s important.”

  The guards barked something at him that we couldn’t quite hear, but it was safe to assume it wasn’t friendly.

  “How intimidating.” Derby rose to his full height and placed his hand on his hip. “Perhaps you gentlemen don’t understand that you’re dealing with Davisham Der—”

  A shot rang out. Derby hopped down from his perch, clinging to the edge of the anchor block to keep it between him and the shooter. He slowly raised his head to see what they were doing, and swiftly dropped back down when a second shot hit the top of the block, sprinkling him in concrete dust.

  “Doints to it!” I gunned the takeoff thrusters.

  The Neverdie ascended gracefully for all of two yards before all the slack went out of the tether and she stopped with a lurch, rocking sickeningly back and forth. I felt Sturb grab my backrest before he could be thrown off his feet.

  “What are you doing, man?!” hissed Derby.

  “I’m the getaway driver,” I replied, pushing the takeoff thrust up to maximum. “So I’m getting us away.”

  The tether cable was creaking so loudly that I could hear it through Derby’s microphone. I could see on the monitor that the cut he had made had expanded into a triangular notch about three inches wide, and getting wider.

  Then the creaking was drowned out by the growing roar of the thrusters. If either of those guards had tried to run toward the ship at this point, the engine exhaust would probably have reduced their entire bodies to the consistency of barbecue sauce.

  “You’re going to kill us all!” cried Derby, just about sheltered enough by the block to avoid getting much worse than a sunburn.

  “It’s going to snap,” I said, with strained confidence. “Sooner or later it’ll have to either snap, or—”

  Sturb lurched forward again when the ship suddenly shifted, then just as suddenly stopped. I could see on the monitor that the tether cable was still in one piece, but the anchor block was definitely sitting at a slightly different angle to where it had been before.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, the Neverdie inched upwards, as the anchor block tilted onto one edge. Then it crashed down onto its side with an almighty thump, halting the ship’s progress with another stomach-turning lurch. Derby narrowly avoided being pancaked by scrambling up onto what had until ­recently been the side of the block, like a tarantula navigating a person’s hands.

  “Or, this might happen,” I conceded.

  I kept the thrusters running at maximum heat until the tether was back at full strain, then hit the auxiliary thrust. This was a system that activated a short burst of additional power, which was supposed to be used for slight course corrections, but in this situation, it succeeded in getting us and the anchor block a good eight or nine inches off the tarmac. We bobbed gracefully up and then back down again like a magpie trying to carry a brick.

  But now we had momentum working for us, and a moment later we were off the ground again, dragging the block along with surprising grace, our horizontal speed increasing rapidly. I tried to block out the constant sound of Derby’s terrified gibbering and focus on the notch in the tether. It had definitely grown by another couple of inches. If I could keep this up . . .

  “Careful, we’re about to—” began Sturb, before we ran out of landing pad and his warning became moot. The anchor block dropped off Henderson Tower like a stone, appropriately enough. One nanosecond later, so did the Neverdie.

  Sturb clung even more tightly to my backrest as the windows on the side of Henderson Tower streaked vertically past the view screen, occasionally featuring the astonished faces of onlookers. Any chance of ending this heist by vanishing undetected into the night was officially in the bin, but surviving the next thirty seconds was the bigger concern.

  Smashing the anchor block into the sturdy foundations of Ritsuko City was conceivably a way out of this problem—it’d shatter like a watermelon with a hard-enough impact. The snag in that plan was preventing the ship from pancaking on top of it a fraction of a second later, on flat, unyielding ground newly strewn with painful lumps of jagged rock.

  Not worth the risk. I put everything the Neverdie had into slowing our descent. The thrusters screamed. I was hitting the auxiliary thrust like it was a malfunctioning drum machine. I activated the emergency parachute without even knowing if it was even still there, as I seemed to recall using it to carry a load of laundry to Frobisher’s a few months ago. I emptied my lungs on the off chance that the extra air was making us heavier.

  Somehow, between all of my efforts, I was able to slow the fall just enough that the anchor block landed in the middle of the street with only a mildly ear-shattering boom. The Neverdie’s descent slowed and stopped with two feet between her underbelly and solid concrete, narrowly saving Derby from becoming the filling of a jam sandwich.

  I saw from the monitor that an encouragingly large chunk had broken off the block. “All right!” I said, suddenly buoyed. “Derby, you can finish cutting. That cable’s got to be weak as trac by now.”

  Derby didn’t respond. I noticed that he was hugging the section of cable directly above the anchor block with all four limbs, his face buried in his own armpit for comfort.

  “He’s frozen up.”

  “Well, he did just fall off a building,” suggested Sturb, who was still slowly picking himself up from the floor.

  “We all just fell off a building, you don’t see me complaining. Derby! Come on!” I was feeling the warm, prickly sensation of adrenaline comedown. I was still energized, but I could already tell that before the end of the evening, I was going to crash like an inexperienced asteroid racer with an outdated autopilot.

  Derby’s one fully intact arm detached from around the cable and began dangling loosely toward the cracked asphalt. He must have passed out. Part of me relished having something like this to hold over him later, but a less manic and rational part knew that this wasn’t going to get us off the ground any quicker.

  I quickly set the ship into hover mode. “I’m going out there,” I ­announced, getting up.

 
“What?!” Sturb rapidly glanced between me and my newly vacated chair. “But you’re the pilot!”

  I nodded toward the gantry steps that led down to the main airlock. “You want to go out there?”

  “No,” admitted Sturb instantly.

  “Didn’t think so. I’m just going to pop out, cut the cable, grab Derby, and pop back in. We might have bought enough time, taking the express route to the ground floor.”

  I headed to the airlock, my shoes rattling down the gantry steps like an impromptu glockenspiel performance. Technically, standard safety regulations prohibited opening the external airlock door while the ship was in flight or in motion, but I’d always considered “safety” to be a highly interpretive concept.

  The pleasant coolness of Ritsuko’s night air hit me as the exit door slid aside. There wasn’t much traffic at this time of night—thankfully we hadn’t landed on a late-night cyclist—but a commotion was developing in the street. A ring of onlookers, composed mainly of cyclists and a few convention attendees who had been trying to keep the party going, was forming around the edges of the shallow crater we had made in the tarmac.

  I tried to focus on the situation. The anchor block was directly below me, and Derby’s unconscious body was still slumped around the cable; it looked like he’d hastily attached himself to it with the straps of a concealed harness he had on under his suit.

  I stepped out of the airlock and dropped the six or seven feet onto the anchor block, which rocked a little as I landed, because about a quarter of it had broken off in a big, pyramid-shaped clump lying nearby. I turned my attention to the cable, and saw that the cut was only holding together with an inch-thick strand surrounded by frayed steel threads.

  It didn’t seem ready to snap from the two cautious prods I made with my finger, so I took a searching look around, pretending not to notice the boggling eyes of the crowd. Eventually, my thoughts turned to the inactive saw that was still on the end of Derby’s false arm.

  I picked up his limp wrist. It was a vicious-looking tool, the slightly cracked edge sparkling with diamond dust, but I couldn’t see any visible way of turning it on. I was about to try rubbing it against the remaining strand like a hacksaw when I heard the muffled voice.

  “Hello?” It was young, female, and coming from where the tool met the Quantunnel ring on Derby’s stubby arm. “Uncle Dav?”

  “Hello?” I put my mouth close to the crack. “You’re Derby’s assistant?”

  “Yeah, hi,” she said, concern overpowering the process of formal introductions. “Is Uncle Dav all right?”

  I saw no reason to lie. “He’s passed out and strapped to a concrete block dangling off a ship in flight.”

  She clicked her tongue. “Any idea how I’m going to explain this to Auntie Pru?”

  “You won’t have to,” I said, “if you can turn this saw on from where you are.”

  “Erm, why are you talking to that man’s wrist?”

  I looked down and saw that the gathering crowd had nominated a spokesperson, in the form of a slightly tubby, dark-haired woman wearing the fluorescent vest of the Ritsuko Traffic Police. Her hand was poised near the stun gun on her hip, but for now she was only indecisively tapping the hilt with her thumb.

  “This your ship, sir?” she asked, eyes wide and with one corner of her mouth curling up in a grimace of confusion.

  I performed a double take as if I’d only just noticed the battered red ship hanging over the street like a giant proactive vulture. “Yes. Sorry. Emergency landing. I was having some engine trouble.”

  “What kind of engine trouble?”

  I glanced around again, then gestured toward the giant cracked anchor block I was still standing on. “Erm. This.” I cautiously flicked the switch in my head, blinked hugely, then offered her a pained smile. “I know what you’re going to say. If I didn’t keep skimping on maintenance, the little problems wouldn’t build into big ones. But I’ll be out of everyone’s way just as soon as I’ve gotten this sorted out. Would that be all right?”

  Her eyes flicked all around. I could sense her trying to mentally catalog what crimes I could potentially be charged with at this point. “I . . . suppose.”

  On cue, the electric saw on Derby’s arm came to life and began to whine like a dog anxious to get back to chewing on its favorite toy. I grabbed Derby’s elbow and held the whirring blade to the frayed section of cable, recommencing the flow of flying sparks. I offered the policewoman a reassuring smile and a nod, in what I hoped would be enough body language to communicate the phrase “please plying go away.”

  “Right,” she said. Her foot stirred a couple of shards of concrete as she backed uncertainly away. “Wait a minute. What are you planning to do with this block?”

  “Erm, I hadn’t quite decided,” I said casually over the cutting noise.

  “Well, you can’t just leave it here,” said the policewoman, squaring her shoulders. “This is a no-littering zone.”

  I drew the blade back and was about to answer when a small explosion on the edge of the anchor block spat up shards of concrete, and I was interrupted by my own flinch.

  Several bikers were emerging from the ramp that led to the Henderson Tower’s underground car park, waving handguns and ringing their bells menacingly. They streamed from the building in a disorderly queue that didn’t seem to be showing any signs of stopping when another gunshot rang overhead and I was forced to take cover behind the block, yanking the cable down with me to bring Derby into at least relative safety.

  More shots hit the anchor block, then stopped, although the incoming sound of bells and rattling chains continued. Presumably they were waiting for a clearer shot before using up any more ammo, and it wouldn’t be long before they would have me fully flanked. I clung to the covered side of the block with three limbs like a climbing monkey, soon to become like a sitting duck.

  I wasn’t entirely surprised to see that I had unconsciously drawn my ­blaster again with my one free hand, but it wasn’t immediately helpful. Even if my aim was on point, I didn’t have nearly enough ammunition to do more than dent—and subsequently infuriate—the biker horde.

  Instead, I brought the gun up to my face, turned the dial as far as it could go with my teeth, then aimed for the weakened part of the tether cable and fired.

  A jolt of recoil added another few years of crippling arthritis to the end of my life, and a massive fireball went up, splashing plasma about the cable like a roaring sea around a lighthouse. When it cleared, the cable was glowing red hot, but still defiantly intact.

  In retrospect, a more concentrated shot might have been smarter, but now my repeated pulls of the trigger were producing nothing but the dismal clicks and occasional sparks of dry fire. The cable was specifically designed to hold together like grim death, and somewhere behind all my screaming terror I was gaining a grudging respect for the manufacturing quality.

  “Without wishing to interrupt, don’t we need to get moving now?” asked Sturb in my ear.

  “It would be nice, wouldn’t it!” I yelled.

  “So just so I’ve got this clear, you agree that we need to move?”

  “TRAC, YES!” The sound of encroaching bicycles was like the clashing of an army of supermarket trolleys in my mind.

  “And if we get moving you’ll forgive whatever needed to be done for it to happen, even if it was something that’d normally put you out?”

  I frowned, but the hostile ringing of bells was making it hard to divine what he was getting at. “Yes! Anything!”

  “Right. That was all I needed to know. Hold on.”

  I was about to make some snap sarcasm along the lines of having few other plans at present when the block moved. I looked up and saw the Neverdie’s maneuvering thrusters glowing, then roaring into life.

  “Oh, trac. Sturb! Not that!”

  My words were swiftly dr
owned out by the grinding of the anchor block against the road as it began to move. Enough of it had broken off after the fall that we could build up a decent horizontal speed, but there still wasn’t much chance of gaining altitude.

  It took all of my strength to keep clinging to the concrete as it vibrated violently, occasionally making little skips and hitting the ground again with jarring impact.

  “Sorry,” said Sturb after a particularly violent one. “I’m sorry about that. Jimi’s managed to key into the road database that the driverless cars use, so we can keep moving without hitting any buildings. Is that okay? Say the word and I can put a stop to it.”

  The ship curved widely around the intersection of Ritsuko’s Knee and Ritsuko’s Tailbone, making the anchor block swing around nauseatingly and smash the top half of a light pole. Impressive as it was that Jimi had jury-rigged an autodrive system for my temporarily grounded ship within seconds, it was abundantly clear that the driverless-car road database operated on the assumption that the vehicle fit inside one lane, and didn’t have a large piece of jagged rock dangling from it like an inconveniently huge dointsack.

  Sadly, I wasn’t articulate enough to express all of this in my present frame of mind, so I compromised by just inventing new swear words at full volume, like “GYARGHTRACMURDER.”

  Another gunshot hit the top of the block, inches from my white knuckles. I summoned some energy to my arms and pulled myself up, feet scrabbling at the concrete for purchase, until I could see over.

  We were still trailing a war party of bikers, although the ship was keeping up a decent-enough pace that we had weeded out the less athletic ones. The remainder, a universally burly lot, were cycling their pedals like a platoon of furious organ grinders on steroids. I could see blue and red lights behind them and just about hear the hum of electric police scooters, but if the bikers had any doubt about the legality of their actions, they weren’t letting it slow them down. Working for Henderson must have been a plying lucrative gig.

  As I watched, another stray gunshot hit the anchor block and detached a fist-sized chunk that had been umming and aahing about breaking off for several minutes. It bounced in front of one of the lead bikers and almost made them go into a fatal skid before they wrestled their handlebars back under control.