The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 2: Intergalactic Bogtrotter

by Felix R. Savage

  Finian lunges after it.

  I stowed my lightsaber in my spacesuit’s thigh pocket this time. I jerk my right glove off with my teeth and press the pushbutton. The bright blue beam leaps past Finian’s shoulder, stopping him cold.

  “Stand and face me if you’re a real man!”

  “Aw Jesus, you’re not serious,” Finian says.

  “I am as serious as a fecking heart attack.” I dial the beam down to the shortest setting. Now it’s about the same length as a fencing foil. The scientists of Earth would give their collective left bollock to know how a beam of focused energy can be short, instead of carrying on to infinity the way energy’s supposed to do.

  “What is this, the classic movie channel?” Finian says.

  “If you like.” I nod at the little faces peeping over the rim of the hollow. “They lost their homes in a forest fire.”

  “You’ve got a smart mouth on you.” Finian wrenches out his own lightsaber. “You’re still crap in a fight.”

  His beam lances out, the same length as mine, the same bright blue—and that’s when my own beam dies.

  Out. Of. Charge.

  Finian’s rolling. He can hardly speak for laughing. “That never happened to Luke bloody Skywalker.”

  “Fletch!”

  I jerk my head up. A small object comes flying end over end out of the charred undergrowth. I duck, and then see what it is, just in time to catch it in my left hand.

  A spare powerpack.

  “Thanks, Gordon.” I slot it home.

  “I believe in fighting fair,” Gordon says, sat on a tree root, safely out of range.

  “We’ll discuss this later, Gordon,” my uncle growls, and then he slashes at me, his beam sizzling through the debris drifting down from the burnt trees.

  You can’t parry with these things. Can’t block, can’t deflect the other man’s beam with your own—they just go straight through each other. They’re not really much like the ones in the films at all.

  So Finian slashes at me, and I jump aside, which brings him lunging into the bottom of the hollow, and I swing my beam in a wide arc, not aiming at him, but at the thousands of force field bubbles stirred up around us.

  They pop in their hundreds, shrivelling into silvery rags.

  I keep on slashing.

  A nasty rotten-egg smell wafts to my nostrils.

  It is the smell of hydrogen sulfide gas.

  Colorless, invisible, heavier than air, and highly toxic.

  Finian is lower down in the hollow than me.

  He looks puzzled.

  Then he looks apoplectic.

  Then he crashes onto his back, unconscious.

  I slam down the visor of my helmet and drag him up out of the hollow by his heels, with help from Gordon. Without help from Gordon, I tie his wrists behind his back. It’s a good thing I am an explorer who always carries string.

  “He’ll be spitting when he comes around,” I say to Gordon. “Will you stay with him?”

  “How did you know that would happen?”

  “The first time we popped one, it smelled like a fart. I’d say the CBs’ intestinal gases are far more toxic than ours, and that’s why they evolved the forcefield bubbles, to keep the air in here from getting contaminated. It wasn’t genetic engineering the Denebites did on them, so much as guided evolution.”

  “We’ll make a stacker of you yet, Fletch.”

  “Feck off with your condescension.”

  I pick up Finian’s AR-15. My ribs are really killing me now.

  “Donal!” I shout, not very hopefully. “Donal, where are you?”

  The fire’s been beaten back from our immediate area. The trees are still whipping around, shedding burnt bits of leaf on us, like black rain. A dozen Care Bears of the Lost Planet, their fur caked with soot, huddle mournfully nearby.

  “Donal!” I shout once more.

  Someone answers me.

  It is not Donal.

  They aren’t even speaking English.

  Two fellas charge up to us, crashing through the burnt undergrowth, yelling in Russian.

  I do not speak Russian, but it’s pretty clear they’re telling me to drop the AR-15. So I do.

  They wear spacesuits that may have been white before they came in here. The faces in the open visors are narrow-lipped, fleshy and hard withal. They’re mafiosi from Arcadia.

  This might sound impossible to you—what the feck would mafiosi from Arcadia be doing here?—but there’s no doubt about it, because the logos on their spacesuits say SAMSUNG.

  CHAPTER 16

  I’ve faced death before, and more often than not it has been Big Tech security contractors on the other end of whatever weapon was involved.

  That I am facing death now, and not a nice trip back to Arcadia, seems certain.

  Invaluable A-tech + Samsung security contractors + independent explorers on the scene first = dead independent explorers.

  I know this is how they operate, you know it, the whole galaxy knows it, it’s just that no one will call them on it because they’re all holding tech stocks.

  The equation looks even bleaker when we reach the airlock, and there’s Donal, and Harriet, and Kenneth, and Vanessa, and Jasmine, all sat on the blackened grass, with two more mafiosi holding AK-47s on them.

  We nod to each other—AKs pointing at your head tend to quell outpourings of joy and relief.

  A few minutes later, more mafiosi plunge up with some new victims. The new lads are covered with soot, so it takes me a minute to recognize Sam. Half of his curly hair is gone. His eyes glitter blue in his grimy face.

  “How’d you escape the fire?” he says to Donal, who sneers and turns away from him.

  “We took refuge in the lake,” Harriet says. “The Care Bears were all doing it.”

  “And the treecats?”

  Harriet manages a smile. “They’re good swimmers, too.”

  “They ran off when we were captured,” Vanessa says, shoulders slumped, jaw jutting, holding back tears. “Maybe they’ll learn to get along with the Care Bears someday. When we’re all dead and gone.”

  “Shut up,” yell the Bratva—this is what they call themselves, the Brotherhood, believe it or not.

  An hour or so passes. Finian—who’s been out cold on the grass—groans. He opens his eyes, says, “Feck,” and closes them again.

  I sneak a glance at my wrist screen. One more hour until the truck goes out. It’s like waiting for the bus, except we’re waiting to die, and I can think of no way out of this, none at all.

  Twenty minutes left to go. The Bratva order us to take off our spacesuits. This is it, then. Spacesuits are valuable. You don’t want punters dying in them. It’s these little efficiencies that make the stakeholders happy. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, I don’t want to die.

  Finian, awakened with a kick, sees the same thing in his crystal ball as I do. He starts to argue for our lives. He speaks a bit of Russian, which makes the Bratva listen to him, but he has to lapse into English to make his points. These are:

  We haven’t broken any laws (apart from wantonly murdering dozens of people, Finian, I think to myself)

  You can have the bloody A-tech

  You can have the ships, too

  Just give us a lift to Arcadia

  I’m famous, you know

  To my surprise, this last point gains some traction. The boss of the security contractors, a fat lad who wears his watch outside his spacesuit for maximum bling value, says, “Ye-esss. You are Finian ‘The Elephant’ Connolly?”

  “That’s right, I am. Whatever you’ve heard about me, the truth is twice as bad.” Finian grins in his filthy beard.

  “He’s a freaking legend,” Sam pipes up. “He was gonna invade us, can you believe? My mom wanted the whole fleet obliterated, but when she heard it was Finian Connolly, she was like, well, actually, no. We can’t kill him. Everyone in the business looks up to him. He’s got a fan club.”
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  Does Sam actually think this will help?

  The boss of the subcontractors grins like a shark. “OK. We don’t disappoint fan club. You, Mr. Connolly, we take back to nice comfortable jail cell. Rest of you, hurry up! Off those suits!”

  “Vot ty gde!” sings out a new voice.

  A Toyota Hummingbird comes zipping along the road that runs around the inside of the dome. The Hummingbird is a flitter, but it’s not in the same class as the ones we used to carry on the Skint Idjit. This is more like a Prius with anti-grav. The tips of its stubby wings clip the burnt trees.

  Hope surges when I see who’s riding in the front passenger seat, next to the Bratva chauffeur.

  Imogen!

  I start up off my knees, shouting her name. One of our Bratva whacks me in the head with the stock of his AK. I sink down again.

  The Hummingbird settles in front of the airlock. Imogen gets out, avoiding my eyes.

  Oh no.

  She used to work for the Bratva on Arcadia.

  Correction: she never stopped working for the Bratva, obviously.

  Why, why, why am I so gullible?

  All she’s ever wanted was to get her old tech job back. Now, apparently, she has. She’s wearing a skin-tight spacesuit that must have cost a fortune, and across her lovely breasts it says SAMSUNG. She opens the rear door of the Hummingbird for an older fella wearing a slate-gray spacesuit, helmet off.

  It’s funny how you can always spot stackers, even when they’re thousands of lightyears away from their green, ergonomic, organic offices. It’s the glow of confidence. Gordon’s got it, Milton’s got it, even Ruby’s got it, and this fella’s got the world’s supply of it. He smooths back his wind-ruffled silvery hair and flashes a laser-whitened smile at the security contractors. He must be at least a vice-president.

  Finian starts to blether again, desperately. A boot in the kidneys shuts him up.

  The vice-president affects not to notice. Maybe he really doesn’t notice. Maybe he doesn’t see us at all. He’s chatting with the boss of the Bratva, and none of their talk is about the eleven people lined up on their knees, some out of their spacesuits, some half-disrobed. We’ve already ceased to exist.

  “Imogen,” I whisper. “Imogen.”

  Her eyes flick towards me, defiant, admitting no guilt.

  “How’d you get in?”

  “There are other airlocks, dummy. This dome is hundreds of kilometers in circumference. All the trucks go out at different times.”

  Oh.

  She goes back to ignoring me, standing straight and respectful, waiting for the VP to need her. How could she do this to us? I remember our conversation beside the lake. She said that she felt relaxed here. That it was different and good. I’m sure she was speaking from the heart.

  “They’re going to kill us, Imogen.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she hisses.

  “As soon as your man’s out of the way, it’ll be curtains for us. You have to say something.”

  Nothing.

  “It was them behind us on the Railroad, wasn’t it? That ship blocking the Burren junction? That was a Samsung ship.”

  “TchVK Arcadia Security,” she corrects me.

  “How did they find us? I suppose they just followed Sam’s lot?”

  Imogen smiles faintly, and holds up a necklace she is wearing outside her spacesuit. It’s one of those chunky ugly pendants she was selling on Arcadia. “Behold the Tangle.”

  “The what?”

  “They come in pairs.” She nods at the TchVK Arcadia Outsourcing boss’s wristwatch.

  “What are they?”

  “Quantum-based FTL comms. A-tech, of course.”

  Jesus Christ, that’s been on the top ten wish list forever. “Why haven’t I heard about this?”

  “No one else has, either,” she whispers. “It’s totally hush-hush. They haven’t been reverse-engineered yet. There are only about twenty pairs in the universe.”

  And now we know about them, too, which gives TchVK Arcadia Security another reason to bump us off, if they needed one.

  The VP is saying to the Bratva: “ … they’d be pretty cute if you cleaned them up. They look like Ewoks! Or is that just me? Anyway, I can totally see them as high-end pets.”

  Immersed in our own plight, I did not notice that the Bratva have caught some Care Bears of the Lost Planet. They now drag them closer for the VP’s inspection. The poor things have leashes around their neck. They cringe, snivelling.

  “Awww,” says the VP, patting one on the head. Isn’t it queer how he’s warmed to them, whereas we, members of his own species, might as well not be here at all? He tells the Bratva, “Yeah, top priority is finding out where the force fields are manufactured. We might have to take the whole dome apart. But we’ll definitely take some of these little guys home with us. Nice job, Sergei.”

  And it dawns on me.

  They don’t know where the force fields come from.

  At the moment, myself, Donal, Gordon, and Finian are the only ones in the universe with that knowledge.

  And very soon, Finian will be on his way back to Arcadia, possessing a secret worth billions—while our bones moulder on the Lost Planet …

  No!

  Sheer rage jolts me to my feet. I’m talking loudly, before the Bratva can knock me down. “Sir! I know you’ve not had much time to observe them yet, but these little guys are actually intelligent.”

  The VP sees me for the first time. He raises his eyebrows.

  “We’ve been here for weeks, living with them and communicating with them. They’re talking to you right now! They’re begging you to save them! They’ve been imprisoned here forever! It was the Denebites who victimized them and set up this horrible jail.”

  Kenneth figures out what I’m up to, and jumps in. “I’m a trained xenobiologist, and my observations support the conclusion that they are sophonts,” he lies, desperately.

  Gordon—who has been in the ‘they’re intelligent!’ camp all along—concurs, in his educated stacker’s tones. Finian scowls.

  But the Samsung VP is not looking at either of them. He’s looking from me to the Care Bears. The wheels of that well-polished mind are turning.

  “They were trapped here, so they survived the fall of the Denebite Empire,” I lay it out for him. “And here they are, and here you are, sir! In your position you can save them from further victimization!”

  I stop there, wary of laying it on too thick.

  But he’s going for it. He is going for it! He’s crouching, looking into the nearest Care Bear’s eyes, and the little creature chooses this moment to growl in a way that sounds very much like talking. It stretches out its paw to touch the VP’s face.

  Maybe they are intelligent, at that.

  Maybe they can tell that if there’s one thing that gets a stacker even more excited than new A-tech, it is the prospect of being the first person to discover living, sapient aliens.

  The VP stands up, trembling. “It’s a distinct possibility,” he says in a voice choked with emotion.

  Finian blurts in rage, “They’re never intelligent! They’re just teddy bears that shit force fields!”

  “They what?” shouts everyone who did not know this before.

  “They produce force fields via their digestive processes,” I say. I was going to play this card soon, anyway. “That is why the Denebites imprisoned them! Sir, it’s as if aliens locked us up to harvest our skins or something! We must rescue them from their cruel captivity.”

  The VP nods decisively. “Regarding, um, shitting force fields, I’d have to see that to believe it. But are they intelligent? I’m gonna stick my neck out here and say … Jesus, they obviously are!”

  And with this I am content. He’s heard what I have to say, and agreed with me. I exist for him now. Our lives are safe.

  “What do you say, little guys?” the VP croons to the Care Bears. “We’ll fix you up with a nice new planet, your sapient rights guaranteed, and in return
you can, um—” he’s giggling helplessly— “shit for us?”

  He throws his head back, laughing, and I laugh with him, we all do (except Finian), chortling along as sycophantically as any Bratva.

  We may not get any of the credit, and we won’t get any of the money, but what does that matter? We’ll get a lift back to Arcadia.

  Which shows how little I understand the minds of Big Tech executives.

  CHAPTER 17

  “This,” says Imogen, “fucking sucks.” She flops down beside me. “I can’t believe they left us here!”

  We are sitting on the ground in the refugee camp the maintenance robots set up for the surviving Care Bears of the Lost Planet. Silver shacks, provided by the robots, gleam against the bleak burned forest. Baby Care Bears frolic around. Nearly all the forest is burned, and we’re not allowed into the un-burned part. The robots are busy, taking cuttings and whatever else they’re programmed to do, rejuvenating the forest. In the meantime we’re living on tubers that taste like mashed potatoes without salt. We dig them up in the burned areas. They give everyone tummy-aches.

  I continue flaking the charred shells off another basket of the horrible things, while Imogen vents her feelings.

  “Three ships, three, and there wasn’t room for us on any of them?”

  The Samsung security contractors bumped us to make room for more Care Bears.

  And adding insult to injury, Finian abandoned us, too. The minute the glow of TchVK Arcadia Outsourcing’s thrusters faded in the sky, he took all three DC-100s and buggered off. Gordon went with him. They took the Old Elephants who’d been imprisoned on the Bagged & Tagged, our own South Africans, and a few of Sam Junior’s surviving lads who were up for it. They’ve gone to bash Special Delivery Sam. That’s why Finian came out this way in the first place, after all.

  “You could have gone with them,” I say to Imogen. “Nothing was stopping you. Finian said anyone could come if they were up for it.”