Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  “What?”

  “I’ve got this stubble thing going on but I’m thinking I might let it grow out, that’d be more villain-y, wouldn’t it. I could shave it into a triangle, but something tells me that would be overdoing it. I don’t want to seem like I’m trying too hard.”

  “Captain . . .”

  “Whoops, they’re on the move.” I grabbed the joysticks.

  The enemy ship, which had stayed still up until now as its pilot processed my statement, suddenly darted sideways. They strafed the section of debris field we were, for want of a better word, “hiding” in. The residence module we were clinging to shielded us, thudding like an umbrella in a violent storm.

  Something broke away from the module. It looked like part of a bulkhead and some ceiling, followed closely by an extremely modern toilet that must have known the bottoms of hundreds of sleepy travelers back in the heyday of Biskot Central. But more importantly it had created enough new moving objects that I could execute the next stage of my plan. The Neverdie flew alongside the broken chunks, spinning as it went, as I did my best impression of a piece of floating debris.

  It worked, for the moment. They maintained plasma fire upon the module, hoping to keep burrowing through it to the prey hiding behind, ignoring the bits that came off it. All they needed to do was look at their scanner and the deception would be revealed, but I’d bought myself some seconds to act.

  In the meantime, my tactical systems had had time to compensate for their movement speed, and a new reticle appeared on the view screen, helpfully indicating where I should be aiming my Gatling cannon.

  “Aha,” I crowed. “You have made your fatal mistake now, star pilot fools.”

  I thumbed the red buttons on the joysticks without hesitation, and the floor shook as bullets rattled from the rotating cannons with blinding speed. Good old-fashioned lead was practically invisible against the blackness of space, and the enemy ship remained oblivious until it strafed right into the bullet stream like a cyclist speeding into a cloud of stinging hornets.

  The bullets weren’t much use against armored hull—they were more useful for deflecting missiles—but there was a decent hope of getting some lucky hits in on the joints, engines, or windows. The ship halted when the bullets hit, turning up its nose to let the underbelly take the brunt. Clearly we were dealing with keen instincts.

  Their nose leveled out, then turned directly toward me. They’d spotted us. And now there was nothing between us but vacuum.

  “Captain, I would like to state for the record that I really do seriously think that maybe you should calm down,” said Sturb, back stiff and fists clenching and unclenching as he said his piece.

  “Fair enough.” I lined up the other ship in as close to the center of my view as I could. With loving slowness, I folded my hand tightly around the forward thrust lever. “I won’t do a laugh. I’ll work on a really good villain laugh in my spare time. Just imagine it for now.”

  I slammed the lever down. The Neverdie screamed toward the other ship. With the artificial gravity, Sturb shouldn’t, technically, have felt any physical pull, but he dropped into a crouch anyway. My thumbs found the cannon controls again and I sent a hailstorm of hot lead ahead of us like a violent calling card.

  The other ship’s engines fired and the game of chicken began. It spun in a barrel roll as it lined its crosshairs up with me, and I felt my lips part and my mouth spread into a wide grin not entirely on the right side of sanity.

  “All right, I didn’t want to do this,” said Sturb. He was fiddling with his phone again. “But you will thank me later.”

  Suddenly, there was a loud clonk and the joysticks shuddered in my hands. I tried to yank them, but they refused to move. “What did you do?!”

  “I’m making Jimi lock your controls out.” He raised his chin with proud self-righteousness.

  “How dare you, you sniveling worm!” I cried, really getting into the swing of things now. “Give me that phone!”

  “No!” He held his arm up fully, keeping it out of my reach. “You don’t want to kill them! I’m stopping you from making a mistake!”

  I reached fruitlessly for his hand. “The mistake was your mum going off birth control!”

  “Now that was unnecessary . . .”

  I jumped off my chair at him. The cockpit hadn’t gotten any bigger, so my legs became entangled with the chair, but I dragged him to the floor with me and pinned him into the corner. He was still holding the phone out of reach, but I was able to grasp his elbow and smash his forearm against the nearest panel again and again.

  Derby appeared at the door. “What on earth are you doing?!”

  “This plier won’t let me blow up that ship!” I yelled over my shoulder.

  “What ship?”

  I thrust a hand toward the view screen, but my pointed finger faltered when I saw that my opponent was no longer there. In his place was something smaller, faster, and torpedo shaped.

  As the missile smashed into the Neverdie just below the engine decks and exploded, sending the ship spinning into a death dive and sparking a hundred warning lights to life that bathed the cockpit in blood red, I realized that I’d forgotten one fairly major aspect of doing things the villainous way: traditionally, you’re expected to lose.

  Chapter 17

  Consciousness returned gingerly, like a cautious hippo breaching the surface of a muddy pond, but I kept my eyes closed. It was a habit I’d gotten into; one tends to get knocked out a lot in the life of a space adventurer, and it pays to be able to check if you’re waking up with the appropriate dramatic timing.

  I used subtle twitches of my whole body to feel my surroundings. I was in the cockpit, lying on the floor beside the pilot’s chair. The texture of sandwich crumbs and flicked bogeys was a dead giveaway. I didn’t fully remember how I’d gotten there, but the pains all down my side indicated that I hadn’t gently laid myself down for a snooze. I let my eyelids slowly crack apart, and discovered that the cockpit was in almost complete darkness. The lights were off, even the emergency strips, and all the screens and readouts were dead.

  I remembered the duel. I remembered the torpedo impact. If it had knocked out the reactor, then the ship would have lost power. That would also have killed life support, and sure enough, I couldn’t hear the constant reassuring hum of the air cyclers.

  And yet, I had no trouble breathing. Perhaps I had already died, and was now a ghost, doomed to haunt the ruins of my ship forevermore. I swiftly dismissed this notion, because if I was a ghost, then the old footlocker on the cockpit floor would be passing through me, rather than uncomfortably shoving my head to one side.

  So life support was off but I could still breathe. Either I hadn’t been lying here unconscious long enough for the air to run out—which the level of stiffness in my joints gave me reason to doubt—or I’d crash-landed on a planet with a breathable atmosphere, and a hull breach was letting it in.

  That made me finally sit up. The last I knew, Biskot 2 lacked an atmosphere, and so did the moon we had been orbiting. Biskot 4 was the nearest planet with breathable air, and that wasn’t anywhere near close enough for an emergency landing. I happened to know it was on the complete opposite side of the star, enjoying its decadelong summer.

  I peered through the central viewing window, and saw that the Neverdie was lying in a crumpled heap on a standard Speedstar landing platform. One with a design consistent with the prefab spaceport module that Speedstar used to ship out wherever they needed to construct new facilities in a hurry. There must have been about fifty or sixty such modules scattered throughout Biskot Central.

  I hauled myself upright with the help of whatever components and levers came into grabbing range, and saw what was beyond the landing pad. The first thing that caught my attention was a large illuminated sign advertising authentic Ritsuko-style sushi sandwiches, complete with an animated image
of a fish happily leaping between two pieces of bread and submitting to a hand wielding an enormous cleaver. It was old enough that most of its colors had faded into a shade of institutional blue, but it was lit up nonetheless.

  There were other adverts around, all extremely old and out of date, but still powered and apparently well maintained. Beneath them, I saw the familiar boxy enclosures, shops, and walkways of a hastily constructed Speedstar rest stop station. Above, there was only the void of space, the shadowy arc of Biskot 2’s third moon, and the occasional blue-white shimmer indicating an active force field. Probably of the type designed to let solid objects through but keep air inside, as evidenced by my nonasphyxiated status.

  Force field bubbles were a cheap and quick way to maintain a station’s atmosphere, much more so than a plexiglass dome, although you did have to come to terms with the fact that everyone on the station would instantly die if there was ever a major power outage. They were normally only used when the station was still under construction and a more permanent solution was in the works, or (in the case of Biskot Central) when the executives were planning to cash out and retire before it became an issue.

  Presumably the force fields around Biskot’s various trade hubs and entertainment centers had winked out one by one after the Golden Age ended and neglect settled in, which made it all the more difficult to explain why this one was still online, along with all the signs and electric lighting below. Could there really have been enough travelers still coming through Biskot to sustain one of the stations, after the Quantunnels were built? Hard to see how one budgets around a customer base of zero.

  This probably wasn’t as important as the fact that there was a grand total of four unaccounted-for galactic criminals onboard (five, including me), so I put our current whereabouts aside and turned to checking over the ship.

  Sturb was accounted for first. He was lying unconscious across the gantry steps that led down from the bridge, one leg in the air with his foot propped up against the door frame. I pushed it down, rubbed at a little mark his sneaker had made on the wall, then checked him for a pulse.

  Satisfied that he wasn’t in immediate danger of much beyond waking up with very sore joints, I continued past him down to the cabin level. The mystery of the hull breach was solved in that both the airlock doors were wide open—either jarred open by the impact, or one of us was already out looking for someone to sell out the rest of us to. I closed the external door, for want of keeping the ship’s current population consistent, then went to the passenger cabin.

  The furniture was still bolted down and precisely where I had left it, but I was infinitely more concerned about Terrorgorn’s cryonic cylinder, which was now angled upside down over the backrest of the far bench. That brought a lot of memories urgently back to the forefront of my mind. The cylinder didn’t seem to be open or damaged from where I was standing, but the new number one priority was getting it attached to a power source of some kind. I took a step forward.

  I heard a footfall directly behind me, and a hand seized one of my wrists, yanking me back. A sharp point pressed coldly against the side of my throat. It was a sensation I’d felt before.

  “Henderson?” I hazarded, trying to speak without moving the flesh of my throat too much.

  “The same,” he said cheerfully, his voice right next to my ear. “You’re getting sloppy, McKeown. Before you enter a room, check the corners. Same principle as cleaning out a litterbox. You remember the ring I was wearing at our first little get-together?”

  “The one with the cassowary talon.”

  “You remember what I told you about cassowaries?”

  My brain had clouded over, and speaking was only getting more difficult. “Slit, glurgle glurgle glurgle.” I mimed various stringy objects falling out of my midsection.

  “Glurgle glurgle glurgle, exactly. Now, I think there’s going to be some changes to the dynamics of this situation. Here’s the good news: you can fly this thing, so you get to live. I might cut some of your fingers off, I haven’t decided. Let’s round up your chums and see how I feel.”

  Both of us flinched when the cryocylinder made a sharp cracking noise, and a cloud of condensation puffed out of a vent in the cylinder’s upper half. I felt Henderson’s hand tense up, squeezing my arm painfully, but the talon came away from my neck.

  “What was that?” he hissed.

  I swallowed. “If we’re lucky, it was the cryopod making some kind of compensation for the loss of power,” I said carefully.

  The pod was face down, with the part that folded out like a lid blocked by the bench and the floor. It made another crack, followed by another blast of vapor, and then wobbled left and right.

  “What was that?” repeated Henderson.

  “That . . . was us not being lucky.”

  The cryopod wobbled again, then slid right off the bench onto the floor with a sharp clang. It rolled back and forth until it had built up enough momentum to turn itself right side up.

  “Stop it,” suggested Henderson. I could feel the sweat gathering in his palm.

  “How?!”

  With a final, apocalyptic crack, like the detaching of a glacier above an orphanage, the cryopod opened. Its entire front half split apart and folded aside like the engine hood of a flashy space yacht. A massive belch of condensation mushroomed out, instantly reducing the temperature of the cabin by several degrees.

  Terrorgorn sat up, shaking off his lengthy frozen sleep the way anyone else would shake themselves out of a daydream. He was a deceptively small humanoid, skinny with sharp joints and pointed fingers, with a skin tone on the slightly unnatural side of Pepto-Bismol pink. His hairless head tapered down and transitioned into a neck without the merest hint of a chin, and his tiny jet-black eyes were buried in crinkled folds of flesh.

  He looked at the pair of us, and his fanged mouth opened briefly in curiosity, before he dropped his gaze and reproachfully examined the cylinder, as if he were sitting in a bathtub that had lost its bubbles. Eventually, reluctantly, he stood, his knife-like legs unfolding like a pair of bloodstained scissors, and stepped out of the cryopod.

  Henderson took a step back, jerking me along with him. “Terrorgorn!” he said. He gave another little jolt when Terrorgorn’s black eyes turned on him. “I bring you an offering of a star pilot. One of your hated enemies. You can do what you like to him. Just remember that the Henderson organization wants to be your friend and ally!”

  Terrorgorn blinked, scrutinizing me. I could feel rivulets of sweat running into my collar. There were barely two meters of space between me and Terror-plying-gorn. If only it were three meters, I might live an additional fraction of a nanosecond.

  After a tense moment that seemed to extend into infinity, he lowered his gaze. “Nah, I’m fine,” muttered Terrorgorn, in a voice like granite blocks being rubbed together.

  Several seconds of silence passed, and Terrorgorn glanced around with mild interest, apparently considering the conversation suspended. I could sense Henderson’s puzzlement, but his grip on my arm didn’t weaken in the slightest. I noticed that Terrorgorn was standing with his bony hands gathered just under his belly, covering his crotch, so I made a rather high-pitched throat-clearing noise. “Ahm, Terrorgorn,” I said. “Perhaps you’d like me to find you some clothing?”

  Terrorgorn regarded his own nakedness for a painful few seconds. “Yeah, okay.”

  “Trousers, shirt?” I prompted. “Shoes as well?”

  “Okay.” He stepped over the backrest of the nearest bench and sat down demurely, keeping his knees together.

  I pushed back against Henderson to signal to him that we needed to leave. “Terrorgorn wants clothes,” I said through my teeth. “I need to check around and see what I have.” I carefully pulled my wrist out of his grip and ducked out of the way of his cassowary talon, and he didn’t fight me.

  He followed me out into the
passage. “What the hell was that?” he demanded before I could take more than two steps toward the luggage compartment.

  “Terrorgorn wants clothes,” I said again, more emphatically. “That means I need to go and get him some.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, it seems I didn’t make it clear enough who’s in charge.” Henderson stepped into my personal space and brandished his talon ring again. He was red in the face and flustered, and his attempt at a confident tone faltered. He could probably tell from the look in my eye that there was no plying way he was going to intimidate me more than Terrorgorn could.

  “Do you even know what it is that we’re dealing with in there?” I hissed, thumbing toward the cabin door.

  “I know it’s one of your . . . space villains. I know he’s supposed to be the worst. I’m not seeing why. He’s just sitting there.”

  “Exactly! He’s already plying sitting there! Trac knows what he’ll do next!” I gave a little gasp of exasperation in response to Henderson’s confused look, letting a few flecks of spit fly from my mouth like popcorn. “Look, I don’t have time to fill in all the background for you. I’ve got clothes to find.”

  “Are you serious?”

  From the passenger cabin, I heard a prolonged, deliberate sigh of mild irritation. To me, then, it was like standing under a rocket engine one believes to be depowered and hearing the sound of a pilot light clicking. “Terrorgorn!” I called, heart pounding. “Did you want us to leave you alone?”

  “No, it’s fine,” droned Terrorgorn, barely audible.

  “You’ll have to stay with him,” I muttered to Henderson.

  “What?!”

  “He doesn’t want to be left alone.”

  Henderson staggered back and clutched at his head in a “had quite enough of this trac” kind of way. He puffed himself up and tried to get in my space again, but he was still the least frightening part of the whole equation, and his colorful jumper didn’t help his case. “Did you forget already that I’m in charge now?”