“For a while, recently,” I continued, staring at the floor, “I thought I’d become one of the space villains, because if I wasn’t a star pilot that’s what I had to be, right? But that wasn’t it. Space villains and star pilots . . . they’re the same thing. They’re all kids who got let out on the playground. Some of them wanted to be goodies and some of them wanted to be baddies, but none of them cared who got trodden on as long as they were having fun. And looking good.”
Ic’s brow was furrowed, genuinely thrown for a loop this time. “You . . . denounce your own kind?”
“I’m sick of it,” I muttered. I’d let my entire body go limp, and now hung from my elbows like wet laundry on a line. “I was trying to get a real job.”
Ic leaned forward. “But do you denounce the Ancients?”
“Yes, fine, I denounce them!” I snapped. “If that’s what it takes.”
She and Terrorgorn both narrowed their eyes in confused suspicion. “Then why are you still dressed like them?”
I looked down. Rather, I was already looking down, so I just refocused from the floor to my flight jacket. I’d zipped it up to the neck, as I tended to do during flight to ward off the cold created by a combination of the dreadful void of infinity and the Neverdie’s dodgy air conditioning, so my view was the usual kaleidoscope of patches and stains. Each one carried its own story from the Golden Age of star piloting. I’d had to refresh some of the stains more than once, and incidentally, cyberserker hydraulic fluid is a real pain in the doints to import.
“It’s just . . . a jacket. It’s just a jacket for flying in.” I swallowed. “It’s a flight jacket.”
“You are adorned in symbols of the Ancients’ oppression,” clarified Ic loftily. “Take it off.”
The Biskottis holding my right arm suddenly released it, almost sending me flying into the Biskottis on my left like an elastic band. I brought my hand up to my jacket’s zip, and held it there as it began to tremble. I looked to the star pilots in the cage, all wearing similar jackets. They were crowding against the bars, packed closely enough to resemble a patchwork quilt.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Burn it,” said Ic, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.
I looked at my shaking hand. “But it’s my jacket. I mean, it’s just a jacket.”
“Then you should have no trouble giving it to us,” cooed Ic. “If you want us to believe that you truly denounce the Ancients and their ways.”
I held the tag of the zip between my thumb and forefinger and squeezed until my knuckles turned white, but I couldn’t bring myself to pull it down. I sensed the unhappy murmur of the Biskottis starting to build up again. “Hang on,” I suggested.
Ic ascended to tiptoe again. “The corruption of the Ancients runs too deep,” she announced. “The execution will begin.”
The Biskottis grabbed my free arm and pulled it away, stretching my chest taut. The ones with guns straightened their rifle barrels again, and I felt a hot sting of anticipation in my chest where their sights had lined up.
“What if I ripped the sleeves up a bit?!” I cried.
The Biskottis opened fire. With their trademark excellent coordination, all of them hit the center of my chest with such accuracy that I thought I saw sparks from bullets bouncing off each other. A cry of outrage went up among the star pilots, and they hurled themselves against the bars of their cage with renewed vigor, but all of that seemed to fade away as I stared at the smoking ruin that was the front of my torso.
The Biskottis relaxed their grip on my arms, and I fell to my knees, then onto my face. One of the spear carriers behind me stepped forward, and as he thrust his weapon into my back and I heard the sound of fabric ripping, all I could think of was Frobisher, and how much he’d probably charge me for the repair job.
Chapter 26
Four days previously, I passed back through the portable Quantunnel gate by which I’d entered the Ritsuko police force’s trap room, and found myself in the passenger cabin of the Neverdie. The dingy atmosphere was unmistakable, as was the increasingly potent stench of decomposing crime lord.
The first thing I detected after that was Malcolm Sturb, standing nearby with his hands over his eyes. This didn’t surprise me, as I’d been talking to him through our miniature speakers for the last ten minutes. “Are you through?” he asked in stereo.
“Yeah.”
“All right, just cover your eyes so I can close the link.”
I did so, and a moment later the voice of Jimi piped up. “Quantunnel closed.”
I looked back, and the only thing I could see through the Quantunnel frame was a section of bulkhead in dire need of polishing, just as any sensible person would expect. “Where’s Derby?”
“He’s in the cockpit, keeping watch.”
“On what? Are there any Biskottis left on the station?”
“Um.”
Something about that um gave me a sinking feeling. I cocked an ear, and noticed the telltale hum of the onboard air cyclers, which weren’t necessary inside a station atmosphere.
“Oh, you brackets,” I muttered. I reached for the shutter control, and discovered that there was nothing outside but space. Black, infinite, and as indifferent as ever to my feelings. “Did you steal my plying ship?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say steal,” Sturb said, standing beside me and examining the blackness as if trying to understand what I saw in it.
“Where are you taking her? What are you trying to do?”
“Ritsuko City.” Sturb glanced about in a slightly overdone effort to avoid eye contact. “To answer the first question. And . . . to rescue you. To answer the second.”
“Oh, sure,” I snarked. “I’ll bet you were gonna get right on top of that.”
Sturb let out an exasperated huff and he took a tone that seemed unfamiliar to him. “Look, I really think you’re being unreasonable, Captain. There was no other way off the station and the last we saw of you, you were being hauled off by police. What were we supposed to do?”
I glared at him and made some disgusted throat noises to put off having to actually answer his question. Finally, I said, “Did you sit in my chair?”
“Somebody may have sat in the chair, yes.”
I darted up the steps two at a time and almost ran straight into Derby, who was standing in the cockpit hatchway. I shoved past him and took my seat, and the angle of my limbs and back instantly felt wrong. “Urgh. It’s all plied up. I don’t like it anymore.”
“We know,” said Derby dryly. “That’s why we’re signing up with Oniris, isn’t it.” When I gave his remark the silence it deserved, he gave a little harrumph. “All right. How did you escape? In the trade, getting away from Ritsuko police is known as ‘easy mode,’ but I’m professionally curious.”
“I cut a deal,” I said, checking the navigation computer to determine exactly where we were.
“Ah.” He folded his arms and leaned on the rear wall. “Cheating on easy mode. Foolish of me to expect anything else, I suppose. Where are you taking us?”
I had keyed Salvation Station’s coordinates into the navigation computer, and it was flashing up a short flight time. Evidently Derby and Sturb hadn’t gotten too far from the Biskot system. “We’re going to Salvation Station to confront Terrorgorn. That was the deal.”
“What?” Derby asked. His tone was flat and abrupt, but there was a kernel of well-disguised terror hidden in the little dot of the question mark. “First you need to cheat to get through easy mode, now you want to go all the way up to hard mode?”
“As I said, it’s part of the deal.”
“Here’s an interesting little fact that many people don’t seem to realize,” said Derby condescendingly. “Criminals don’t have to do what the police tell them they have to do. Astounding as it sounds, it is actually the definition of
the word criminal.”
I finally looked at him, wishing as I did so that I could spit blood out of my eyes like a lizard. “Some of us want to go home at the end of all this. We’re not all trying to run away from something. This is the deal. We sort out Terrorgorn, we’re in the clear.”
“I think we should do it, actually,” said Sturb, who had quietly snuck into the background. “If Terrorgorn is at Salvation Station, I need to help bring him down. Salvation’s all I have left.”
Derby snorted. “Star pilots, space villains, you’re all the same. Kids let out on a playground. You think you can all just stop and go home because Mummy called you in for dinner.”
“Look, we probably couldn’t have joined Oniris anyway with the police hunting for us,” I said distractedly as I set the ship’s new course. “Don’t worry. It’ll be easy. It’s just one amoral, psychotic superbeing with an army of followers and powers none of us truly understand, how hard could it be.”
The pointed silence that followed my rhetorical question eventually made the hairs on the back of my neck stick up. I slowed and stopped my labors at the console, then turned my chair around, not moving a muscle in my upper body. Shortly, I found myself staring right down the barrel of Derby’s arm stump.
The lid was closed, but he was gripping his wrist with his other hand like a crazed gorilla, his thumb primed and ready to flip the lid open at any moment. “I do not recall signing a suicide pact.”
“Mr. Derby . . .” said Sturb. Derby briefly trained his wrist on him and he threw his hands up in surrender.
“Both of you, stay where you are!” he commanded, taking a step back to keep a bead on both of us, although in the cramped cockpit he could only manage about six inches. “Hands off the controls.”
“All right.” I showed him my hands. “I’ve already set the course, so I don’t actually need—”
“Hands on the controls! Stop this ship!”
I kept my hands where they were, with my thumbs almost going into my ears, but far enough away to create deniability. “What are you going to do, Derby? Saw our heads off? Fly this ship to the nearest planet, maroon yourself, dress up in leaves, and eat pineapples for the rest of your life?”
“I am instructing you to stop the ship.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
He flicked his thumb, and the lid of his wrist device flew open. Sturb and I both flinched and recoiled, but nothing came out. I peered into the hole, and saw Nelly, sitting with her hands clasped together in front of her like a mournful newsreader.
“Hi,” she offered.
Derby glared up his own wrist. “Nelly. I did left wink, right wink, blink. Don’t tell me that doesn’t mean—”
“It means the mini Taser, Uncle Dav, I know. I didn’t bring it out because I don’t think you should tase them.”
He gave us an apologetic look, then turned away, bringing his wrist right up to his mouth, although he couldn’t move nearly far enough away to prevent us hearing him. “Nelly, this operation hinges on your trusting my judgment on very short notice,” he said in his normal voice, minus his upper-class affectation.
“I know, Uncle Dav, but I really think Oniris is a good opportunity for you, and I don’t think you want to spoil that now.”
“Nelly . . .”
“Also I already told everyone you’re going to join Oniris. Uncle Ted’s finding someone else to take the job at the fish shop.”
Some of the color drained from his face. He looked at us—we both still had our hands up—as if wanting support from his audience, then turned back to his wrist. “You told Ted?”
“Yeah. He was really impressed.”
Derby frowned. “He was?”
“Yeah. And Auntie Pru says she’s really proud of you.”
The color had come back to his face, leaving him with a little more than his usual level. “Prudence said that?” His gaze drifted off into a little reverie, until he accidentally caught my eye and shook himself out of his happy place. “Damn it, Nelly, it’s Terrorgorn! We don’t even have a plan!”
“I have a plan,” I interjected casually.
He let his arms drop to his sides, and I heard his wrist tut in annoyance as Nelly was unexpectedly dropped from the conversation. “Do you indeed. Well. Why was I ever worried. The star pilot who planned to stop being a star pilot has a new plan for defeating the all-powerful avatar of galactic evil. By all means, tell. No, wait, let me guess: it ends with the phrase ‘and then figure out the rest on the fly.’ ”
“He’s not all-powerful. He’s just . . . willing and able to kill us from across the room with barely any effort. But!” I added hastily as he opened his mouth. “But, we have one advantage, and it’s a big one. All we have to do is press it as hard as we can before we lose the element of surprise.”
“What advantage?” asked Sturb.
I managed to give him a knowing smile and a raised eyebrow through my ever draining supply of confidence. “He’s invited Jacques McKeown, that is, me, to Salvation Station. Probably wants to put on a big satisfying show of defeating star pilots.”
“Sounds plausible,” conceded Derby, standing with arms folded again.
“He told me to get there within five days, and to come alone. Said that he’d shoot down any other ship that turns up. What does that tell you?”
My two colleagues exchanged glances. “That you’re completely screwed?” said Derby.
“It means,” I said patiently, emphasizing my words by making little gestures with my pinched fingers as if moving imaginary chess pieces into place, “that Terrorgorn believes that the only way to get to Salvation Station is by ship.”
I watched Sturb’s furrowed brow twitch as his eyes rolled back and he put the pieces together, then the penny dropped and his face unfurled like a window blind. “Oh. Oh! I see! It’s so obvious, isn’t it!”
“Of course it’s obvious,” said Derby quickly. “So obvious that it’s hardly worth mentioning. So how do you propose we press the advantage that this obviously gets us?”
I came to his rescue. “Terrorgorn doesn’t know about quantum tunnels.”
“You see, he was frozen during the Golden Age, before they were invented,” added Sturb. “And he’s only been hanging around with Biskottis since then. Of course he doesn’t know about Quantunneling.”
“And if the crew of Salvation have any sense, they probably haven’t clued him in, either,” I said.
“Yes, as I said, it’s obvious!” Derby pouted thoughtfully and his gaze tracked all across the ceiling as he considered it. “Hm. It certainly does present a significant surprise advantage, but how exactly do we use it?”
“We get close, we let him think he’s won, then we hit him with as much as we can, from every angle he doesn’t expect,” I said, clenching a fist.
Derby raised an eyebrow. “And then?”
“And then . . . figure out the rest on the fly,” I finished, throwing up my hands loosely in a weak little “ta-da” gesture.
Sturb loudly cleared his throat as Derby’s eyes threatened to roll a full one hundred and eighty degrees. “Erm. How about this? We prioritize blinding him, the first chance we get. I’m pretty sure he can only use his powers on specific things if he can see them. See, I’ve read some of the reports they put together from going through surveillance footage . . .”
“Perfect,” said Derby brightly. “So, we blindfold him, and then all he can do is snap the necks of every person in a two-mile radius.”
“No, you see, a neck’s not actually very big, and he’d need to be very precise to snap it,” said Sturb, scratching the top of his head. “I suppose he’d still be able to . . . throw everyone around a bit.”
Derby made a show of thinking, slowly letting his head rotate from one shoulder to the other, like the needle on a fuel indicator. “I feel I must say,
gentlemen, that even with our obvious advantage in mind, I still wouldn’t place our odds of surviving this plan on the optimistic side of suicidal.”
“Then it’s a good thing we have three or four days for you to figure out the fine details, isn’t it,” I said. “Sturb. Can you make a new portable Quantunnel gate?” I nodded my head vaguely in the direction of the stairs, down which lay the passenger cabin, inside which was one end of his hobbyist’s Quantunnel set.
“Not legally . . .”
“Yeah, trust me, the cops are letting this slide from now on. Can you do it?”
“Yes, I can do it. I just need two frames with the same dimensions, made from the same material.”
I bit my lip. “Can you make more? Different shapes and sizes? Assuming we might need to have more than one running at a time?”
He winced. Like the true tech specialist he was, he needed to take a moment to weigh the difficulty of the task against how much he could charge for it. “Prrrrobably.” He drew out the word like a bout of constipation. “I’d need some more parts.”
I switched on the local area scanner, and the debris field running through the Biskot system appeared as a symbolic sprinkling of pixie dust on the screen. “We salvage, we plan, we build what we need,” I summarized. “Four days. Four days, and then we bite the floor tiles.”
Chapter 27
Four days later, I was biting the floor tiles in front of Terrorgorn and his mob, as the spear carrier behind me thrust his spear into the back of my jacket again and again, yodeling with delirious religious glee as he did so. After seventeen or eighteen stabs, he began to slow down when a couple of odd details apparently dawned on him. Firstly, there wasn’t any blood leaking from the holes in my jacket. Secondly, the spear was passing through both my body and the floor with suspicious ease.
Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash Page 27
