“Ucccch. I am not the thrills and spills type.” She gives me a wry glance. “I may have mentioned that before?”
I can see she’s trying to coax a smile out of me, but she’ll have to do more than be charming before I can forgive her. If not for her treachery, we’d be on our way back to Arcadia right now with a cargo hold full of Care Bears, and an obscenely huge payday awaiting.
Well, at least Finian didn’t get the A-tech, either. So that’s him paid back for cheating me out of my $280 million. It’s cold comfort.
“There’ll be no thrills where they were going,” I say.
“Right? I am so not up for a buccaneering raid on Omega Centauri 49.”
“He’ll probably lose.” I slide the basket of tubers towards Imogen. “Do you want to do some of these?”
As I suspected, she does not. She wanders off to seek sympathy elsewhere. I continue to clean the tubers. My hands are chapped, my nails torn, soot ingrained into the skin. My ancestors in the nineteenth century cleaned tatties with their hands, just like this, and they also suffered hunger pangs night and day.
But they did not have Hollywood deals, and video game development deals, and their own line of perfumes.
What’s that? you say. Ah, yes. Before the Samsung VP left, he got around to asking our names. When he heard Donal’s name, he said that reminded him, the Goldman Sachs people on Arcadia had given him a letter for Donal if he should happen to meet us out this way.
The letter went: “Dear Mr. O’Leary, per section 144.6(b) of your contract, in lieu of your debt we have seized all rights to your poem Feck Off With You: Butterfly-Zilla, An Epic Poem. Your account is now closed. You should, however, expect no revenues relating to Feck Off With You or its related properties, including Feck Off With You (film), Feck Off With You (video game), the upcoming Feck Off With You clothing and fragrance line, or the Feck Off With You cooking school franchise and reality television show.”
We were blindsided, as you would be. But the Samsung VP swore the letter was genuine, and then we remembered that before we left Arcadia, Donal put my poem on the internet. I’d said he could, not expecting anything to come of it. Now it turns out the bloody thing went viral. People want to hear about the trials we face in the exploration industry. So my poem’s going to make millions … for Goldman Sachs.
Congratulations, said the Samsung VP, and then he buggered off and left us.
We were quite elated, for about five minutes. Goldman Sachs won’t be slapping liens on the houses of our families on Earth. That’s something. It is not a small thing.
But we’re still stuck on the Lost Planet, digging tatties up with sticks, and we’re still broke.
The blasted tubers are not going to get any cleaner than this, given the state of my hands. I carry them over to the cookfire and dump them into the pot.
Now it’s time to go out and relieve Donal.
We’re mending the Intergalactic Bogtrotter.
All the other players dismissed it as a wreck, and it is, it is. But you can do a lot with force fields.
We’ve got experience and motivation, and we’ve got a stacker: Ruby, who declined to go on the Special Delivery Sam-bashing expedition. He feels very betrayed by Finian. He wants to get back to Arcadia and start taking his meds again.
He will be disappointed, but he won’t be the only one.
Shouldering my spacesuit, I set out on the long tramp to the airlock. I’ve got an hour before the truck, so I take my time. New green shoots haze the burnt forest floor. There’s a tangy smell of fresh growth.
I’m surprised you didn’t go with Finian, Donal said to me after my uncle left.
Why? I said.
Well, you nutted those two kids like it was nothing. I couldn’t have done that. I never knew you had it in you.
I didn’t know I had it in me either, I said with a laugh, and Donal looked at me as if I was a stranger.
I wanted to tell him then that I regret it every day. I slid one toe over the edge of the precipice, and I didn’t like what I saw, so I pulled back. But I can’t add to his trauma. He already feels guilty that I killed poor Annika and Jesse because he wouldn’t or couldn’t.
So I just said I didn’t fancy Finian’s chances, and that’s why I didn’t go with him. And this is perfectly true. I expect Finian will lose the battle and spend the rest of his days slaving for Special Delivery Sam in a rainy potato field. Or else the whole heap of them will be killed by Samsung’s security contractors.
“What’ll we do when they come back?” Donal said at the end of that conversation, his thoughts running along the same track as mine.
After congratulating us on clearing our debt to Goldman Sachs, the Samsung VP told us we’d better be gone when they come back for the rest of the Care Bears. This is their version of sparing our lives. We won’t kill you now. We’ll give you a couple of months to get clear.
We’ll have the Bogtrotter spaceworthy in half that time.
But where’ll we go in her? That is what Donal was asking, and when I said bleakly that I suppose we’d better go home, he got a fiery look in his eyes.
No, he said. No! We can’t go home emptyhanded.
I never planned on it myself, Donal …
And we won’t, he said. We’ll turn this thing around. All we need is one little find.
One little find that isn’t shite.
Trudging through the burnt forest towards the airlock, I preview his plan in my mind. It’s so easy to visualize, it’s as if it has already happened and I’m remembering it. We’ll return along the Omega Centauri spur to the Burren. That’s where we were attacked by Special Delivery Sam. They blew up three of Finian’s ships but that leaves two, including the Marauding Elephant. They might have taken those two away (they certainly have, in my own opinion) but the wreckage of the others will be there. We’ll forage for useful bits and parts, top up our water tanks, and then ho! for the Scutum-Centauri arm.
Donal’s eyes were glowing and he picked up my hand and squeezed it for emphasis as he spoke, like an evangelist saving me from the fires of hell.
I wanted to get out of this life. When I think about all those unexplored planets on the Scutum-Centauri arm, it just makes me tired. But I couldn’t say no to him.
Reaching the airlock, I sit down on my spacesuit and smoke a cigarette. I found a packet poor Jesse must have dropped. I’ve been eking them out, one a day.
“That’s how the fire started,” says a voice from the sky.
I nearly swallow my fag.
Sam Junior slides down the same big tree that me and Donal hid in during their raid. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in a few days. Him and his friends, the ones that didn’t join Finian, have been hanging out in a different part of the forest. When we have crossed paths there’s been blaming and posturing.
No need for that when it’s just him and me. I satisfy myself with a cold stare.
“Just make sure you put it out properly,” he says.
His hair’s growing back. He’s covered with soot and scratches. They’ve not been eating any better than we have, by the looks of him.
“You’re going out to work on your ship, aren’t you?” he says.
“Yeah, we’ll be leaving soon,” I say. “We’ll give you a lift to the Burren if you want.”
“Screw the Burren. It’s a nothing-burger.” He sits down beside me. “We found your treecats.”
“Did you?” Harriet and Vanessa will be overjoyed. “We were wondering where they went.”
“They’re in our camp. They’re hella clever, huh?” He laughs.
“Are you thinking of taking them home to your mom?” I’m just twisting the knife. He hasn’t got a ship to go home in.
“Screw my mom,” he says, and the parts of his face that aren’t soot-colored whiten with intensity. “I hope Finian kicks her ass into the Andromeda Galaxy.”
“You should have gone with them.”
“Fuck that. I’m sick of risking my life, fo
r what? For bragging rights? Oh, I am the empress of a shitty fucking galactic cluster no one’s ever heard of. Woo-hoo. No, no, man, I’m through with that.”
“Congratulations.”
He sighs. “If you and me had taken a bunch of force fields and gotten the hell out, no one would have ever been the wiser about this planet. It would have been our own private ATM, forever.”
“I won’t say that has not occurred to me.” I drag on my cigarette and stub it out. The truck’ll be here any minute. “But I don’t believe in regrets. The best discovery is always the next one.”
“Exactly. Exactly!”
“We’re going to explore along the Scutum-Centauri arm,” I tell him. “Out on the frontier. Lots of unexplored planets out there.”
“The Scutum-Centauri arm?” he scoffs. “I’ve got a way better idea.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. You’ve got a ship. I’ve got my mom’s list of contacts. And we’ve still got the treecats.”
“And?”
“Dude, didn’t you ever notice? There is nothing they can’t get into. They’re the best thieves in the freaking universe ...”
Fletch’s (mostly unwanted) adventures continue in the next volume of the Interstellar Railroad series, Banjaxed Ceili.
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THE RELUCTANT ADVENTURES OF FLETCHER CONNOLLY ON THE INTERSTELLAR RAILROAD
Near-Future Non-Hard Science Fiction
An Irishman in space. Untold hoards of alien technological relics waiting to be discovered. What could possibly go wrong?
Skint Idjit
Intergalactic Bogtrotter
Banjaxed Ceili
Supermassive Blackguard
THE SOL SYSTEM RENEGADES SERIES
Near-Future Hard Science Fiction
A genocidal AI is devouring our solar system. Can a few brave men and women save humanity?
In the year 2288, humanity stands at a crossroads between space colonization and extinction. Packed with excitement, heartbreak, and unforgettable characters, the Sol System Renegades series tells a sweeping tale of struggle and deliverance.
Crapkiller
The Galapagos Incident
The Vesta Conspiracy
The Mercury Rebellion
The Luna Deception
The Phobos Maneuver
The Mars Shock
The Callisto Gambit
Keep Off The Grass (short story)
A Very Merry Zero-Gravity Christmas (short story)
FIRST CONTACT, INC.
Not A User’s Manual
The alien rulers of the galaxy are pyramid marketers, and humanity’s role in the grand scam is to play the sucker at the bottom.
Unless we can find suckers of our own to prey on …
Against The Rules
Payback
The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 2: Intergalactic Bogtrotter Page 10
