Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  “All right,” I said over my shoulder. “I’ll get the clothes; you go back in there and explain to Terrorgorn that you’re in charge. See where it gets you.”

  I headed to the luggage compartment behind the cockpit and clawed a few handfuls of lost property out into the light. There were a couple of child-sized coats that looked like they might fit Terrorgorn, but I didn’t run the kind of ship where children and small people tended to lose their trousers, so that was about it. I decided to bring a pile of medium-sized garments and let him choose for himself. After a moment’s thought, I also picked up the large muumuu I used as bedding, on the basis that it might fold up into a toga, or something.

  I found Sturb sitting up on the gantry steps by the time I was ready to head back down. “What happened?” he slurred.

  “Terrorgorn’s awake,” I said quietly, deciding it probably wasn’t worth sugarcoating. “He’s awake and he’s in the passenger cabin with Henderson.”

  “Terrorgorn’s awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked down the steps at the cabin door, rubbing his head, then peered up at me, confused. “So . . . why are we alive?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not questioning it. He wants clothes.”

  “Where’s Mr. Derby?”

  “I don’t think he’s onboard. If he’s alive, I think he went outside to figure out where we are.” I paused to mull over my own words. “We should probably figure out where we are.”

  Sturb pushed his tongue into his lower lip, and the crackle of the speaker in my inner ear made my hair stand on end. “Mr. Derby? Can you still hear us?”

  I’d completely forgotten about the communicators. I jammed my little finger in my ear and twisted it around until the crackling turned into something that sounded like Derby’s voice, but I couldn’t make out any words. He was moaning, but not in pain or sorrow; it sounded more like anger. Like he was trying to insult us but something was holding his tongue in place.

  “I think . . .” began Sturb, before having to pause as Derby let fly a parting salvo of incoherent abuse. “I think he might have gotten into some trouble.”

  I stared at the airlock door at the base of the stairs as if I could somehow see through it. “Out there.”

  “Erm. Possibly.” Sturb blinked. “Do you know what is out there? Are we on a planet?”

  “Looks like a rest stop station,” I said, taking a little pause before I dropped the really interesting part. “Still powered and functioning.”

  “At Biskot?” His head tossed as he weighed this up. “Could pirates have taken it over?”

  “That’s one possibility,” I conceded. But my thoughts instantly returned to those lit-up electric signs I’d seen in the concourse just below our landing pad. They must be pretty significant power hogs, and it felt unlikely that pirates would be running unnecessary systems, not with the frugal life the Black demanded these days. Then again, the Black was a scary place; maybe they needed a night-light.

  “Do you think they’ve got Mr. Derby?” asked Sturb.

  I made up my mind. “I’m going out there.” I pushed my armload of clothing into Sturb’s arms. “You go down and give these to Terrorgorn.”

  His slightly groggy expression disappeared in an instant as his eyes boggled and fresh beads of sweat visibly popped into existence on his brow. His jaw waggled like the hind leg of an excited dog for a few moments before he found words. “You—Terror—me—gorn—tell you what, how about I go looking for Mr. Derby instead? It’s no trouble.”

  “I need to check around the ship, too.” I was already most of the way down the steps. “Make sure we can actually take off once we’re ready.”

  “I could do that if you want!” said Sturb in a very high-pitched voice. “I know quite a lot about technology, remember? I used to make cyborgs!”

  I already had the airlock open. I stood in the doorway and looked back at him. Even with him silhouetted against the meager light coming through the cockpit, I could see the moisture glimmering in his terrified eyes. “Look, it’ll be fine,” I said. “You’ve got stuff in common. Just talk about, I dunno, your favorite murders.” I turned and left before he could add anything and closed the airlock door behind me.

  Chapter 18

  I felt a lurch as I stepped down, which a moment later I attributed to the airlock step being considerably closer to the landing pad than it was supposed to be. The Neverdie wasn’t beyond repair, but the landing had been heavy enough to flatten the underbelly, like the ship was a soft clay model that had been dropped on the floor. The landing legs were bent and the takeoff thruster was askew. If I got the reactor back online and tried to take off, the ship would corkscrew horizontally off the landing pad and smash into one of those perplexing signs on the concourse below.

  The repairs were well within my ability. A few hours with a sledgehammer and a welding gun would probably suffice. The problem was that I needed the ship to be raised off the ground to do it, and foolishly I had neglected to bring a giant twenty-foot novelty jack.

  The more realistic option would be another ship, hovering overhead and suspending the Neverdie from tow cables. The Neverdie being a light, maneuverable star pilot model meant that virtually any passing vessel could do the job. That just left the issue of the Biskot system being in the middle of nowhere and how there wouldn’t be any passing vessels for decades.

  There had to be at least one pilot who owed me enough favors to cover this. I dug my phone out, only to find it refusing to respond to my thumb jabs. The battery had run out, or it had been damaged in the crash. Either way, there wasn’t going to be any wireless recharging with the reactor shut down.

  I looked around the spaceport. It was very basically laid out, as was typical of these modular Speedstar stations. A couple of elevated landing platforms on pillars, sticking out of the perfectly square shopping concourse like forest mushrooms on stalks. If it followed the usual Speedstar template, then underneath that would be a small labyrinth of private sleeping areas and miscellaneous infrastructure.

  There were the lit-up signs I had noticed earlier, advertising the services of the shops below. Strangely, all the electric lights that were actually there to help people see—the light strips on the walls and the four-sided light posts on the concourse floor—were turned off. Only the signs were powered, as well as . . .

  This was odd. The landing pad we were “parked” on was lacking the usual guiding lights, but a string of what looked like multicolored Christmas lights had been wound around the perimeter safety rail. They were unnaturally bright, probably with more power running through them than specifications demanded. Probably enough to make them burn out in a matter of days, but every single bulb that I could see was intact and functional. Someone was maintaining them lovingly.

  Inadvertently my gaze slipped from the string of lights to the landing pad floor, and I tottered back a few steps in surprise. The words LANDING PAD had been stenciled across it in the usual urgent six-foot letters, but the original paint was little more than scattered wisps of light gray. In its place, someone had filled in the shapes of the letters with dense, swirling patterns and spirals, drawn in paint, chalk, and correctional fluid by finger painting from multiple small hands.

  The patterns continued outside the letters in a variety of different colors, circling and swirling all the way to the edges of the landing pad, breaking off into all kinds of different imagery: flowers, bubbles, and strange triangular blue things that reminded me of star pilot ships, albeit drawn by someone who’d only ever had them verbally described to them by an inarticulate person.

  I headed for the metal spiral staircase that wound down around the pillar to the concourse floor. The moment my head descended below the landing pad, a powerful stench of rot hit me like a shovel across the bridge of the nose. I came close to toppling right off the steps but managed to cling to the handrail as I stag
gered, and my foot squished messily into a cake.

  As far as I could tell from what hadn’t been destroyed by my foot, the cake had at one point been white, with blue icing on the top in a shape that reminded me of that ill-informed spaceship cartoon I’d seen earlier. Age had changed the blue-on-white icing to an ugly rotten brown on snot green, and the sponge that was now clinging to the tread of my shoe was practically in a liquid state. I covered my nose and mouth with my sleeve.

  On further examination, virtually every step of the spiral staircase was adorned with some kind of food item. Not cast thoughtlessly aside like rubbish or leftovers, but full plated meals lovingly crafted and arranged. Many of them were on trays, some were accompanied with glasses of drink or small floral arrangements, but all were completely uneaten and had been left here rotting for a very long time. It was easily one of the worst smells I’d ever encountered, and I’d once been paid to clear out bodies after a sulfur-mine disaster.

  I descended the stairs, carefully planting my feet around the plates, trying to grind my shoe on the rough metal with each step to dislodge the rotting cake. I noticed that the food was getting fresher the further down I went. At more or less the halfway point, I was seeing plates of chicken wings and fried potato that I might conceivably have considered eating, were I in a particularly hung-over state, and at the very bottom, the food was virtually fresh cooked. The smell of it immediately made my stomach complain about how long it had been since my last meal.

  It wasn’t just the steps. Food and flowers had been reverently laid on the floor in a wide radius around the landing pad’s pillar, and more multicolored Christmas lights were scattered around to draw attention to it all.

  Now that I was on the concourse level, I could see that most of the shops and stalls were closed, abandoned, and dark. Only the signs advertising their services were lit, along with the menu screens at the fast-food outlets. Curious, I walked over to the nearest one, my slightly cake-softened footfalls filling the huge empty space with echoes.

  It was a fried-chicken restaurant, and the mouthwatering smell indicated that it had seen very recent use, in stark contrast to its neighbors. I hopped over the counter and peered through the serving window into the kitchen, squinting to see by the mediocre light offered by the signs outside.

  I could just make out a few fryers and worktops that were glistening with grease and wet sauce stains, so someone must have been using the kitchen as recently as today, probably to create more dishes to add to that minefield of assorted dinners in the concourse. But the serving counter behind me was covered in a thick layer of undisturbed dust, including the cash register.

  This was getting weirder by the second. Clearly someone was living on the station, but I was losing more and more faith in the theory of it being pirate squatters. Maybe a group like that might waste some food and power frivolously in the first few elated days after finding this place, but even pirates would quickly settle down, find a broom, and start thinking about long-term survival. Someone had been placing meals on and around the landing pad stairway for years.

  I headed back out into the deserted concourse, and quickly found what I was looking for: a sheltered area with an illuminated sign above it showing an icon of a staircase. The floor around it was as dusty as everywhere else, but the dust had been kicked around and streaked by countless feet, far too many to identify individual prints. I headed down the steps.

  The stairs were lit with bare functionality by white fluorescent strips, and on the first landing I saw a shiny, gold-colored object that had been kicked into a corner. It immediately struck me as familiar, and it took me a few moments to remember that I’d usually seen it on the end of a doint in a sharp suit. It was Derby’s arm device.

  I picked it up, brushing off the dust. The side that his arm stump normally fit into was a stiff cloth tube, and there was a leather strap made from a cheap belt that was presumably what held it on.

  “Hello?” came a muffled voice from under the metal lid. “Uncle Dav? Is that you?”

  The lid was held shut with a brass clasp that looked like it had come from an antique jewelry box. I flipped it aside and opened the lid, to be greeted by an unflattering view of the underside of a young woman’s chin. Derby’s assistant appeared to be holding her end of the Quantunnel tube between her knees.

  “Uncle Dav?” she said, looking down. The appearance of my face immediately snuffed out the gleam of hope in her eyes. She was of around college age, as near as I could tell with her face silhouetted against a ceiling light. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she was wearing huge spectacles and an ash-gray hoodie. “Oh. Captain. Is Unc—is Davisham Derby there?”

  I checked around, just in case there was an unconscious well-dressed tosser lying in a nearby corner that I’d missed at first glance. “No. Just his arm thing. Do you know what happened?”

  “They took off his wristlet?!” She looked up, staring urgently into the middle distance for a moment, and I was subjected to the sight of her chin wobbling with concern. “Can you save him?”

  I shifted my weight and let out a sigh. This was by no means the first time I’d been entreated to rescue someone at the behest of their distraught female relative, but it wasn’t exactly consistent with my recent career change. I mulled it over, and decided that rescuing Derby would mean that I could turn my ear speaker back on without having to listen to him complain. Yes, that was exactly the sort of calculating approach us supervillains would take. “Did you see anything?”

  “No, I couldn’t see past the Taser.”

  “What Taser?”

  “I heard voices,” she remembered aloud. “Lots of voices. Uncle Dav was doing his, you know, his . . .” She puffed out her chest and spoke with Derby’s dramatic voice. “ ‘I’m Davisham Derby, unhand me, knave,’ thing. Then the voices got louder, that’s when he gave the signal for a Taser, so I stuck one in. Then I didn’t hear anything else because the Taser was in the way. It activated, like, three times.” She was starting to babble. “It went quiet for a while, so I pulled it out and all I saw was floor. So I waited another while, but then there was just more floor. Then there was a spider, then floor again. You’ve got to go after him, Captain. I don’t know what’s happened, but he might be in trouble.”

  I peered down the stairs ahead of me that led into the darkened residential area below. It was quiet enough for the silence to be audible, a sort of deep, sepulchral yawn that bristled the hairs on the inside of my ears. I drew my blaster—it was still out of ammunition, I was pretty sure, but it made me feel slightly better and it might make potential attackers feel slightly worse—and continued descending, one step at a time.

  “Oh! And,” said Derby’s assistant, whose name, I seemed to recall, was Nelly, “when you rescue Uncle Dav, could you not make a big thing out of it?”

  I turned Derby’s wristlet around again to show her my confused expression. It was like having a conversation with a shaving mirror. “What?”

  “Just, you know, don’t lord it over him that he needed to be rescued, or anything like that.” She bit her lip worriedly. “He doesn’t like it when he thinks people are trying to make him feel inferior. He does silly things.” Her voice lowered. “Silly things like running off to become a master criminal.”

  I took another step down, peered fruitlessly into the darkness, then ­decided I wasn’t quite ready to end the conversation. I brought her up to my face again. “How long have you two been doing this master criminal thing?”

  “Er . . . eight or nine months.” Her gaze darted around as she avoided eye contact. “I was the only person he knew who knew anything about computers. I told him that working as a TA for the Introduction to IT professor didn’t count for much, but he said it couldn’t be that difficult.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “B-but things have been going pretty well since he came up with the micro-Quantunnel idea,”
she added quickly. “He hasn’t been caught or had any more hands cut off . . . have you found him yet?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a flashlight or something, would you?”

  “Oh, sure.” Her face disappeared and I heard a clattering of items on metal shelving units. “Flashlight, that’s . . . one blink and a complete eye rotation, that’s . . . over here. How bright did you want it?”

  “Bright enough to see by, but not bright enough to alert every doint on this level.”

  “Roger. Try this.”

  I held the wristlet outwards, toward the darkness, and it began to judder in my hand as something was slotted into place, instantly doubling its weight. A moment later, there was a click, and the room ahead was bathed in a gentle green glow.

  It was the reception area for the motel portion of the spaceport, which was still in line with my experience of modular Speedstar rest stops: the good-looking commercial stuff at the very top, then the residential level under that, then administration, then finally engineering at the bottom, the least photogenic layer of the increasingly disappointing trifle. I was in a circular room decorated with wall panels advertising the wonderful sights of the Biskot system, and three connecting passages presumably led to the bedrooms. A ring-shaped desk was in the middle of the lobby, which would allow staff to instantly serve incoming customers as well as the ones coming out of the rooms to complain about the toilets.

  I stepped onto the carpet, and immediately had to look at it, because it felt like I had stepped onto a sheet of greaseproof paper. Just as on the stairs, the carpet had been heavily worn down by innumerable footprints. It might have happened during the Golden Age, when hundreds of star pilots would have been passing through Biskot every day, but Speedstar would usually have been replacing the carpets every few months or so.

  The desk was polished and impeccably clean, and some flower petals had been scattered around it, but none of the electronics were functioning. The hover module for the check-in computer was clearly broken, as the fastidiously polished screen was neatly lying on top of it.