I stop dead. A Klingon bumps into me. “Sorry, sorry,” I say, staring in disbelief at the second figure from my past to pop up today.
Penelope!
I never wanted to see her again, even less than I wanted to see Finian.
Penelope Adele Saltzman was our stacker on the Skint Idjit. Every spaceship needs a stacker to handle the tricky bits, such as AI subroutine programming, which are beyond the intellectual capacity of ordinary human beings like you and me. Penelope was a donor, meaning she invested in the Idjit and donated her brainpower to our expeditions for non-mercenary reasons. Chiefly because she was in love with Donal.
Now she’s standing on the gravsled, proclaiming, “This is a perfect example of how our politics have been corrupted by subservience to Big Tech!”
Ah, yes. There was that, too.
She waves the bag that was over her head like a black flag. The party guests stare. They’re all stackers like her, but they don’t know her. She rejected this glittering lifestyle long ago. Then I almost killed her—by accident!—but she got safely back to civilization aboard the Marauding Elephant, which was Finian’s ship before he went into law enforcement.
She points an accusing finger at Finian. “You! You used to fight the establishment. Now you are the establishment.”
“Amn’t,” Finian says, weakly. He’s as gobsmacked as myself. Thank God I’ve got my beak on, and I’m at a safe distance. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m with him, obviously,” says Penelope, nodding at Increpit. The notorious claimjumper sits at her feet, gazing up at her adoringly, holding the end of the chains that are still wrapped around her wrists and neck. I swallow a nervous laugh, remembering that she was into BDSM, as well as activism. She’s finally found someone who understands her needs. “We co-authored the one-man play about the Silicon People you heard earlier,” she explains.
Some guests start to shout out how brilliant the play was. Clearly it all makes sense to them now: a lowlife like Increpit could never have written that, but a stacker like Penelope could have.
“The very fact that we won first place,” Penelope announces, “proves that all of you are mentally enslaved to alien civilizations!”
Hang on, I thought it was the establishment we were all enslaved to?
Penelope rattles her chains. “Humanity has become a slave race! We don’t think for ourselves anymore! We don’t dream for ourselves anymore! All we do is pick up the trash left behind by dead aliens. And what’s worse, the exploration industry has fallen completely under the sway of Big Tech and Wall Street. It’s their money that funds exploration, their agendas that drive the search for A-tech, and their desires that shape our engagement with the galactic civilizations of the past! No one can make a living anymore without mortgaging their souls to the industrial-financial-technological complex!”
She’s got a point there, actually.
“It’s performance art,” says a Klingon to a Sagittarian near me.
The Sagittarian nods. “I’m just like, yes. THIS.”
Relaxing, I move on as Penelope continues to lecture the guests about what tools they are. It’s just performance art. Where the feck is Sam? This is our chance to make our getaway, while Finian’s stuck in the middle of the crowd. Penelope has incorporated him into her piece as a living example of an independent ‘explorer’ who was forced to knuckle under to the establishment.
There’s Sam, coming out of the elevator, his bowtie undone, his hair mussed. Over here, Sam!
But I daren’t wave to him. And now the idjit is slowing down to stare at the amazing sight of Penelope, in chains, calling King Zuckerberg’s guests filthy elitists, and them lapping it up and livestreaming the whole thing on their smartphones.
I’m about to go and drag Sam away from the spectacle when the Krells overtake me. They’ve all got their rubber heads back on, and they’re heading for the parking area. Looks like they plan to leave early, too.
“Taxi!” shouts one of them. “Taxi!”
Oh no, you don’t! I break into a run. Squeezing through a gap between two private cars, which the Krells cannot fit through on account of their tails, I fall into the front seat of our taxi. “Go, go, go!” I gasp.
“But Sam,” Imogen says, craning over the steering wheel.
“Leave him! He’ll be all right! Just go!”
“Is that really Finian?”
“It is,” I say in exasperation. “And he hasn’t spotted us, but he might at any moment, so just go, you stupid cow!”
I am not very nice to Imogen, am I?
But Christ, if you knew her history of bailing when the grass looks greener elsewhere. She can’t be trusted. I was all for leaving her out of this operation. It was Donal and Harriet who took pity on her, saying she’d shared our trials on the Lost Planet and deserved a second chance. Also, she is a good driver.
She reacts to my rudeness only by wrinkling her pretty nose. “Have you got the Gizmo?”
“Yes! I’ve got it!”
“Oh,” she says. “I thought Sam did,” and she puts the taxi in gear.
“Taxi! TAXI!” shout the Krells.
Imogen leans out the driver’s side window. “Sorry! I’ve already got a passenger.”
We are blocked in, but that’s not a problem for a vehicle equipped with anti-grav.
The taxi starts to rise into the air.
Not fast enough.
The Krells surround the taxi, wrench open the rear doors, and tumble in one after the other.
These taxis are not what you may be picturing. They aren’t your ordinary flying cars. They’re nuclear-powered mini-spaceships, capable of getting into orbit and back. The pressurizable, airlock-equipped cabin is on the front. It’s the two front seats and a large passenger compartment with seats along the sides. So there’s more than enough room in the back for six people dressed in Krell suits that make them look like skinny toads with the tails of diplodocuses.
Sam jumps on the roof of a Maserati, makes a flying leap, and grabs my door, which I’m holding open for him. Red-faced and panting, he scrambles over my lap. “Hey, who are these bozos?”
I slam my door. The taxi is now a good ten feet up. Faces are starting to turn our way. We can’t throw the Krells out. It would take too long and attract too much attention. “Feck it. We’ll have to just take them. We’ll drop them off at the spaceport on the moon. Go, go!”
“Fasten your seatbelts,” Imogen yells.
The taxi rises another twenty feet into the air and banks to the left.
“To get out of these domes,” Imogen says, “you have to get up to 160 kph. It’s really stupid, actually.”
“What’s that in miles?” I say tensely. She is Canadian. Ireland went back to the imperial system after leaving the EU.
“I dunno. About a hundred miles an hour?”
Faster than that, I would say, based on the way we’re accelerating. We scream around the inside of the bubble, over people’s heads.
“It’s gonna be like freaking Formula One in here when everyone tries to leave,” Imogen says with relish. “Hey, Krells! Have you got your seatbelts on?”
Of course they haven’t. No seatbelt would close around those costumes, so instead they’re wriggling out of the costumes. There’s the woman I tried to kiss at dinner. She’s Chinese or something like that. All of them are, actually.
“I’m sealing the cabin,” Imogen shrieks. She stamps on the accelerator, and we zoom out of the bubble-terminal, into the stratosphere. The canopy of King Zuck’s tree shrinks to a dark green blob.
I exhale in relief, and pull off my beak.
Sam makes a queer choking noise. I twist around.
One of the former Krells is twisting the ends of Sam’s bowtie around his throat like a garotte.
My little friend from the party crawls between my seat and Imogen’s. A gun appears in her hand. This is not the non-lethal type of gun they sell for self-defense. It’s the real deal, the type that shoots bulle
ts that put holes in you and make you bleed and maybe die.
“Take us to the moon,” she says, pointing the gun with rock-steady aim at Imogen’s head.
CHAPTER 3
“You’re in luck,” I say smoothly to the Chinese woman pointing a gun at Imogen’s head. “We were going to the moon, anyway.”
Imogen has frozen up. Her hands grip the wheel, white-knuckled. We’re no longer gaining altitude, but drifting.
My brain has frozen up, too, but my mouth is still going. This often happens at times of great stress. It gives people the impression that nothing terrifies me, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Put the gun away, darlin’,” I say, “unless you fancy a mid-air collision? No, I didn’t think so.”
The upper atmosphere twinkles with the headlights of cars and other taxis. Even on Treetop, where everyone flies everywhere, you don’t usually see this much traffic heading into orbit. Of course, it’s because of the Ghost Train. I’d completely forgotten about that. People are travelling into low orbit to see it up close. Idjits. It’ll be here for another 25 hours.
But the traffic gives us cover for our getaway. The Chinese woman moves the gun out of Imogen’s field of vision. Her compatriot stops strangling Sam. I promise with fervent sincerity, on Sam’s behalf and my own, that we’ll not try anything. We all sit in stiff silence as Imogen, handling the controls with robotic care, takes us into a polar orbit at 13,000 miles up, and peels out into deep space. Destination: Arnold.
Yes, Treetop’s moon has a name. It is Arnold. I think it was the name of the discoverer’s dog or something. Everyone just calls it ‘the moon’ except when they need to distinguish it from Earth’s moon.
I say into the silence, “It is Arnold you’re wanting to go to, right? Not our moon? Because these taxis don’t go that far.” Treetop is 700 lightyears from Earth. “Ha, ha.”
After a minute of excruciating silence, the woman says, “Yes. We’re going to Arnold.”
She’s kneeling on the floor, covering Imogen with her gun. The others are sitting on the seats, checking their phones and chatting in Chinese. I’m fairly sure the fella right behind me has a gun, too, hidden under the deflated Krell tail he’s draped over his lap. He’s still got the rest of his Krell costume on. The head watches me with glittering orange eyes, animatronic tongue flickering over froggy lips.
Apart from that, the scene is so ordinary, it’s surreal. I’m twisted sideways in my seat, elbow on the seatback, chatting.
“Your name was May, right?”
While I wait for the gunslinger to decide if she’ll answer me, my gaze wanders to Sam, slumped in a corner seat, rubbing his throat. I hope to God he’s not going to do anything stupid. He’s got violent crime in his DNA. His mother styled herself the empress of the Omega Centauri cluster until Finian caught up with her.
“Maude. Anyway, that isn’t my real name,” the gunslinger responds, after so long I’d forgotten my question.
“Right, right. I’m rubbish with names. So what’s on the moon, Maude? A sales convention?”
Sam speaks up. “They’re from the XS Group,” he says hoarsely. “I saw that dude’s tattoo when he grabbed me.” His lips tremble with emotion, as if he might spit at our hijackers.
“What’s the XS Group?” I say.
“Jeez. The Extreme Sales Group. I’ve heard of them, and I’m not even from Earth.”
Oh. I have heard of them, too.
I had a sort of a feeling, to be honest, when they took off their Krell suits and I saw all those Chinese faces. Even in our brave new interstellar age, when the opening of the galaxy has supposedly united all the nations in a mad headlong rush for loot, people tend to stick together with others like themselves. And that is doubly true when they’re up to no good. It was certainly true of us in the old days. A third of the late, lamented Skint Idjit’s crew hailed from County Clare, and we were on the fiddle if you like, cheating our backers out of every penny we could pocket.
But we didn’t harass, stalk, and threaten people with guns.
That is the least of what the Extreme Sales Group gets up to, according to the internet. They’re a Hong Kong-based outfit that hires out salespeople like mercenaries. If your product is dying on its feet, hire an XS salesperson and they’ll make it sell. Guaranteed.
I always wondered why they don’t leave a trail of lawsuits in their wake, and now I know. Dead men tell no tales … and bring no lawsuits.
I’m not surprised their MO includes hasty exits from high-end parties. But why us? We were in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s all. The luck of the Irish strikes again.
My moment of self-pity ends abruptly when Maude, not her real name, orders me to place my hands in full view. She elbows between the front seats and checks the radar and lidar readouts, changes the settings, checks again. Lastly she turns on the shortwave radio and listens to several minutes of traffic reports. The gun’s hovering in my peripheral vision, and Maude is so close I can smell her shampoo. She really had me fooled. Then again, I’m easily fooled. Just ask Imogen.
Finally satisfied, Maude retreats to her place on the floor in the back. She leaves the radio blathering about heavy traffic in Treetop orbit and don’t get too close to the Ghost Train. “OK. We aren’t being pursued. That’s good for us.” She frowns thoughtfully. “Maybe not so good for you.”
“Sure why would anyone be chasing us?” I say, all innocent, sweating like a pig.
“Oh, maybe because this mental defective,” she gestures at the fella with his Krell costumes still on, “smashed a display case in King Zuck’s private museum, and stole an A-tech artefact worth millions of dollars?”
The guy convulsively clutches his Krell tail. It’s not a gun hidden under there. It’s whatever he stole.
The light of acquisitiveness ignites in Sam’s eyes. He leans forward. “What’d you grab, buddy?”
The question excites all the Krells. They jabber in Chinese. Maude does not join in. She just sits there grinding her teeth. The one with dyed blond hair continues checking his phone. He’s the one who choked Sam. I can see the edge of the tattoo Sam referred to poking out of his sleeve. Watching them, I’m revising my assumptions. Only those two are armed. If I could deal with them ... But I’m not starting anything on board a small craft in deep space. Been there, done that, got the blood all over me.
The thief lifts the edge of his costume to reveal—
—a tangle of wires and cloudy crystals.
These A-tech artefacts always look so unimpressive when you see them for yourself. Just like the Gizmo. But if Maude says that’s worth millions, I believe her. The Gizmo, after all, is worth billions, and that reminds me, where is it? I feel inside my paunch, the back of the seat concealing my movements from the hijackers.
The thief struggles with English. The lips of his costume head move in sync with his words. “This,” he says, “makes us swim underwater. We are amphibian! This is our culture. Live on land, hunt in water! This crystal substance absorbs oxygen from water, gives us air! It was in Zuckerberg museum, but it is ours.” He’s cradling the ancient Krell artefact like a teddy-bear, smiling gleefully.
“So you just took it!” Sam says. “Way to go!” He winks at me. I shoot him an unguarded grin, understanding immediately. The alarm that summoned Finian and his merry men must have been set off by the Krells! The timing fits. That’s why they were in such a hurry to leave. We’ve got away scot-free!
Apart from them being in our taxi, of course.
And the Gizmo not coming to hand, no matter how much I feel around inside my pouch.
“Look,” the thief says. “We wear it like this!” He starts fitting the stolen artefact over his Krell head. A piece of wire falls off.
Imogen pipes up, her voice shaky. “Oh, I get it! You guys are biomodders.”
I halt my search for the Gizmo, startled. She’s right.
The thief is not wearing an animatronic Krell head. It’s his head. It’
s joined to his thin pale neck.
‘Biomod,’ of course, is short for biomodification. That’s tech-speak for cosmetic surgery that makes you look like an alien. I can’t be bothered with the jargon, personally; I just call them nutters. But there is no denying that that is one of the finest biomods I’ve ever seen.
“He’s the Chinese national champion of biomodification, Krell division,” Maude says. Each word sounds like she’s biting on something bitter. “The others are also Krells. Pre-surgery. You saw the costumes. So they got invited to this party. And what do the fucking morons do but smash the place up, set off the burglar alarms, and grab this thing they think is theirs?”
“Yowch,” Imogen says sympathetically. “Are you going to be in trouble with your boss?”
The biomodification world is notably shady. I didn’t know there was such a thing as the Chinese national championships, but I’m not surprised that the champions have minders like this. After all, the money for their surgeries has to come from somewhere.
“If they get arrested?” Maude says. “I’m going to be in trouble like you can’t even imagine.”
“Oh, I can imagine,” Imogen says. “I work for the Bratva.”
The Bratva—the Brotherhood—are the Russian mob who run Arcadia. See what I mean about arseholes sticking together? This is actually a Bratva taxi. If it were to vanish, and us with it, the Bratva would miss the taxi; they wouldn’t miss Imogen. But I see what she’s doing. She’s trying to impress Maude by letting on that we are connected.
Right now I’ve got other things on my mind. I feel around inside my paunch with increasing panic. Where is the bloody Gizmo? Could I have dropped it? I definitely had it when I got into the taxi. It must have fallen on the floor.
My size 13 duck-toed Denebite boots rest on a solid layer of fast food wrappers, coffee cups, dead electronics, batteries, sweaters and scarves, and various other items left behind by passengers, which are supposedly being stored with care until their owners collect them. I’d have to get down on the floor and do a proper search, and I can’t do that with Maude on guard, her gaze roving back and forth between Imogen and me, her gun resting on her knee.
The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure Page 21
