The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure

by Felix R. Savage

  My uncle is one of the most superstitious people I know.

  “How did it end up, then?” I already know, actually. I just haven’t heard it from him.

  “Oh, those bastards from Samsung called in the army on us. Woke up one morning and the sky was full of fecking Sukhois.”

  That was the first time the military ever left our solar system. “You know you’ve made it when they alter government policy for you,” I offer.

  “Oh, it wasn’t me they were after, it was the force fields.”

  “I thought it was Special Delivery Sam.”

  “No, she was collateral damage as well. They were there to enforce Samsung’s claim to the force fields discovery.”

  “So you and her got caught in the same net.” As I thought, they must have given Finian a choice between going straight and going to prison. “That was right before they set up the NEPD …”

  “Yeah. They decided they needed an option in between doing nothing and sending in the military.”

  “And is that why you joined?”

  He gives me a death’s-head grin. “No, lad. It was for the health benefits.”

  I’m halfway into a laugh when I realize he means it.

  “I’ve got lung cancer.”

  “Ah, shite.”

  He nods. “They’ve given me six months.”

  “Can they not do anything for it? What about those drugs that attack cancer cells?”

  “They don’t work if you’ve let it metastasize on account of not seeing a proper doctor in years.”

  “You don’t even smoke.”

  “I used to.”

  It’s true, he was a fearsome chimney when I was working for him on the Draco spur.

  “Are you taking the drugs, though?”

  “I am, sure. I was, anyway.”

  Before we got abducted by the Ghost Train.

  “Have you asked the Wonder Wall to whip you up some generics? It did the drugs we wanted to take to Merrielande. I’ve got … erm … cigarettes out of it and all.”

  Something flashes across Finian’s face. Probably the reference to cigarettes. But all he says is, “Fletch, the drugs aren’t going to cure me. I’m too far gone. The only thing that works is the painkillers.”

  He shows me a couple of pills, and downs them with a mouthful of whisky.

  “Just what the doctor ordered,” he says with a haggard smile.

  I put down my glass. “Finian, you’ve got to go in one of those things.”

  “Those tombs?”

  “Yeah, whatever they are. The technology obviously works. Caleb’s a hundred and thirty-five years old, he looks sixty. He ought to be dead from cancer by now, the amount of fried food he eats.”

  Finian shakes his head, and I know what I’m up against: the solid granite wall of his superstition.

  I argue with him, half-heartedly, and after a few minutes I get up on the excuse that I’ve got to go for a slash. I leave him hunched over his whisky glass, staring into the core of the galaxy.

  Back in the parking lot, the others are cooped up inside the Sagittarian monowheel, watching a film on the telly we got from the Wonder Wall. Quietly, I retrieve Finian’s metalforma knife from the place where I hid it days ago under the wrecked Denebite space shuttle. He never even asked me what happened to it. That shows how demoralized he is.

  But he will not refuse a go with the Gizmo of Rejuvenation.

  It’s not like I’ll be asking him to lie down inside a sarcophagus lined with nails. That would put anyone off. It certainly did me.

  It’s just a little injection.

  That’s how Sam did it.

  He stuck the Gizmo into his side, and boom, it healed him of gunshot wounds that should have killed him.

  If it could do that, it can certainly knock out a few measly cancer cells.

  With the metalforma knife in my waistband, I hurry back up the stairs to the lounge.

  Dizzy took our Gizmo, but I can get another one just the same. There are thousands of them.

  The lights are still dim, the Hippo-Arses still encased in their Tombs of Youth, and the Tomb that Caleb summoned is still hanging above a table with no one on it.

  I’m six foot one in my sock feet. I can just about reach the inner edge of the Tomb if I balance one knee on the edge of the table.

  Bracing my left hand on the outside of the Tomb, I apply the metalforma knife’s blade to one of the spikes. I could use my lightsaber, of course, but I’m not sure what these spikes are made of. Energy sometimes interacts with energy in unpredictable ways. The knife’s a safer bet.

  Metalforma is an A-tech material, originally found on a planet called Basilisk, which must have been inhabited by serial killers with warped minds. It changes shape when pressure is applied, sending out thousands of wee spikes and tendrils. These fracture the target material at the atomic level, as well as slicing through it on the macro level. I’ve seen a metalforma knife used to cut through solid artificial diamond.

  Whatever these spikes are made of, they aren’t that tough.

  Flakes fall on the table, followed by a whole five-inch spike, which now has a jagged thick end.

  I snatch it up with my sleeve over my hand. Into my pocket it goes. Finian never examined our Gizmo very closely. He won’t know the difference.

  So I’ll tell him this is the Gizmo we stole from King Zuckerberg, and what’s good enough for Zuck’s filthy-rich friends should be good enough for him. Anyway, it’s only a wee injection …

  This is as far as I get in my thinking before I’m lifted off my feet.

  The lights go on.

  The white-coated gandy dancers troop into the lounge. Dizzy, in the lead, is holding her arm up in that Heil Hitler gesture.

  I’m borne over their heads, bellowing and kicking helplessly. Then a mighty shock jolts my body and everything goes black.

  CHAPTER 8

  I’ve woken up in some awful places in my time. On a planet covered with giant geraniums (Suckass, of evil memory); face-down and hungover in a desert where every bloody thing evolved from spiders (that was when I was working for Finian); and in a field behind the house of the girl I was seeing in fifth year, with her auld fella standing over me, on his way to let out the cows. I was so drunk that after she sent me on my way, I slipped on a cowpat and passed out where I fell.

  But all those awakenings compare favorably to this one.

  My back is breaking. I’m hanging spreadeagled with four squashy cuffs around my ankles and wrists. Each cuff is attached to a rod perpendicular to my body, so I can’t move.

  I’m looking down into a psychedelic soup bowl of swirling colors where shapes appear and vanish. It’s like one of those pin art toys everyone had when we were little. You and your friends would press your faces into it and laugh at the impressions you made. Except these impressions are the colors of curry vomit and they are the shape of pyramids, poking up and collapsing.

  When I blink, the concave bowl turns into a convex sphere.

  Blurred stars twinkle above its limb.

  It’s a fecking planet.

  I’m hanging above an unknown planet, at less than Railroad height. Much less. This is satellite height, barely out of the atmosphere.

  And actually, I’ve not got a spacesuit on, so I should be dead.

  Oh, right. Advanced force fields.

  Jesus, my back!

  I flex my limbs, trying to take the weight off my tortured spine, and above me I hear a bitter laugh.

  “How does it feel to be too stupid to live?”

  Imogen!

  With a huge effort, I twist my head to see over my shoulder.

  Above me floats the pearly belly of a flying saucer, maybe the same one we rode down to Merrielande. I’m suspended at an angle to the hatch. Imogen sits on the lip of the hatch with her arms wrapped around her knees.

  “Help me,” I gasp.

  She shakes her head slowly. There’s anger on her face, but also resolve. It’s the latter which
makes my teeth chatter with fear.

  “We barely made it into the sapient category, you know,” she says. “Dizzy and Pew Pew showed me our test scores. We don’t stack up to the Klingons, or the Sagittarians, or even the Denebites.”

  “Help me. Please, Imogen. My back’s breaking.”

  “As for the Silicon People? Forget it. They were the smartest aliens who ever lived. Their brains were supercomputers. Actually, this was their home planet.” Her voice shakes. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  I might call it pretty if I were much, much further away. Up close, it is a nightmare vision. I can’t even put names to the colors of those clouds.

  And now the clouds are bulging. A blue-gray thunderhead climbs towards us like a punching fist. It rears hundreds of miles high, and then crashes back into piss-yellow froth.

  “Oh fuck,” Imogen says, shivering. “It almost got us that time.”

  Dizzy appears beside Imogen. “THOSE NOT CLOUDS,” she says. “THIS NOT PLANET. ONE POINT FOUR BILLION EARTH YEARS AGO, PLANET FORMERLY OCCUPYING THIS VOLUME WAS CONSUMED BY QUASI-SENTIENT SWARM OF NANOMACHINES. GGXKT’VA, CALLED SILICON PEOPLE IN ENGLISH, WERE CONSUMED, TOO.”

  “They weren’t that smart, so,” I grit.

  “HAVE YOU HEARD OF SINGULARITY? GGXKT’VA ENGINEERED OWN SINGULARITY. PLAN WAS UPLOADING SELF-BRAINS INTO NANOSWARM.” I hear an unfamiliar crackling noise. It is Dizzy laughing. “SMARTEST BEINGS MAKE BIGGEST MISTAKES. THIS IS PARADOX OF INTELLIGENCE.”

  Imogen leans down towards me, her dark shoulder-length hair hanging on either side of her face. “They’re still in there!” she hisses. “They uploaded themselves … into hell.”

  She draws back.

  “Do you want to get off here, Fletch?” Her voice shakes. “Really, I mean, it’s your choice. Would you like to get off?”

  She’s angry with me. She’s fuming. It’s about Merrielande. It’s about our dashed hopes. It’s about the mess I’ve dragged her into, when all she wanted was a normal life. “Jesus, Imogen!” I twist helplessly in my bonds. “I’m sorry Merrielande went to shite! I apologize, it’s all my fault, but you can’t blame me for the Hippo-Arses! If the bleeding gandy dancers had told us they were there—”

  “If the gandy dancers had given you weapons like you wanted, you’d have murdered them all!”

  Yes actually, I would, and I’d not have lost any sleep over it. Well. Not much.

  “You think just because they’re barely-intelligent aliens, they don’t deserve to live! But maybe we’re the barely-intelligent aliens who don’t deserve to live. ” Suddenly, tears spill from her eyes. She leans across the hatch. That’s my metalforma knife in her hand. I can’t see what she’s doing, but I find out when the rods attached to my wrists give way, one after the other. Metalforma can cut through anything.

  I plunge head-down. Now I’m hanging by my ankles. My arms flail.

  “How does it feel to be helpless, Fletch?”

  Everything falls out of my pockets. The Gizmo of Rejuvenation—that is, the one I hacked off the sarcophagus, bringing down this terrible punishment on myself. My lightsaber! I’ve had that for more than twenty years. There it goes, tumbling end over end, down towards the planet-sized nanoswarm.

  Finian said that when he lost his lightsaber he lost his luck. I get the feeling I lost my luck a long time ago. On the day I met Imogen, perhaps.

  “The way you feel right now,” she shouts, “is the way I’ve felt all my life.”

  I crane my neck and see her leaning out of the hatch.

  “It fucking sucks, doesn’t it, Fletch?”

  “Yes, Imogen. It fucking sucks.” I try to mirror her diction exactly, without a hint of sarcasm. “Please don’t kill me.”

  Unless they’ve ordered her to. Unless this is her punishment. For what? For associating with me.

  Tears glitter on her face. She leans out further. Now it’s her iPhone in her hand. “I’m just going to take a few pictures.” Her voice shakes. “If I ever get a signal again, I’ll submit them to the Darwin Awards.”

  Click, click, and the stupid clumsy bitch drops her phone.

  She rears back, crying, “Dizzy! Dizzy, my phone!”

  The iPhone hits me on the hip and falls past me.

  Down below, the planet-sized nanoswarm extrudes a green-and-black cyclone. It lashes upwards like a whip, reaching for the phone.

  Dizzy pushes Imogen aside. She raises her arm and hums. The iPhone reverses course and rises up towards the flying saucer, past me. It floats back to Imogen, who clasps it gratefully. “I’m so sorry, Dizzy.”

  “BE MORE CAREFUL.”

  “I will.”

  “WHAT DO YOU WISH TO DO ABOUT FLETCHER? IT IS YOUR CHOICE. THE DECISION YOU MAKE NOW WILL HELP US DETERMINE WHETHER YOUR SPECIES IS WORTHY TO INHERIT THE GALAXY.”

  And even with the blood rushing to my head, even hanging upside-down above a planet-sized swarm of silicon ghosts that’d eat the flesh off my bones before I ever reached the ground, if there is any ground down there at all, I find a moment to be outraged. Who the hell appointed these soulless little robots to sit in judgement over us?

  Imogen neatly dodges the question. She says, “No, it’s his choice.” She leans down again—holding onto her phone very tightly this time. “What did you say, Fletch? Do you want to get off? I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”

  “I don’t want to get off,” I say, looking up into her eyes. “Imogen, I don’t want to get off here.”

  She smiles, wetly. “Good.”

  Dizzy stretches down a strong three-fingered hand and pulls me up through the hatch, to safety.

  On the way back to the train, Imogen and I sit close together, not quite cuddling, but something like that. Both of us are limp with exhaustion. I don’t know exactly what just happened, but I know I’m alive. That’s what counts. I also know I should be angry with Imogen, but I can’t muster any rage at the small, soft, tearstained bundle resting against my side. I am also aware of how much I don’t understand at the moment. Any rant that I went off on, I might be barking up the wrong tree, further confusing the situation, when we’ve only just made it up.

  Yes, I know. Too stupid to live sums it up nicely.

  Her head rests against the top of my arm. She clings to her iPhone, as usual. I suppose it represents the whole of human civilization to her now.

  Are we worthy to inherit the galaxy? Obviously not. But that’s not the point. Why do the gandy dancers get to decide?

  “Can I see those pictures?” I say. “Must be gas.”

  Imogen instinctively clutches the iPhone away from me.

  “I won’t delete them. Promise.”

  This time, she gets my sarcasm. She gives me a tiny, secretive grin. Flick flick go her eyes, making sure Dizzy and Pew Pew are busy in the cockpit.

  Shielding the screen with her hand, she opens the iPhone’s pictures folder and shows me …

  Nothing. The folder’s empty.

  “I wasn’t taking pictures of you,” she breathes into my ear. “I was taking pictures of that planet. Ex-planet. Whatever.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, not exactly taking pictures. When I ordered this phone, I asked for wide-bandwidth wireless data transfer functionality.”

  “Huh?”

  She shrugs. Her expression says I’m being stupid again. I suppose I am. My shoulder joints ache like hell, and I’ve got a fearsome headache.

  Back on board the Ghost Train, the sorting of the Hippo-Arses has been completed. Some of them are on their way back to their home planet, I assume. Others must have seen the Wonder Wall, and decided to stick around. Look at all this lovely A-tech, Ugg. Yeah, let’s take advantage, Grok. The galaxy clearly has a lot to offer Hippo-Arses of superior smarts and daring.

  The paradox of intelligence. I think that was the phrase Dizzy used.

  The parking bay echoes with gunshots, whoops, and cries of terror from Hippo-Arses who thought they were smart.

  One of them lies
in the aisle near the police cruiser. He, or she, is bleeding out from a gunshot wound. Imogen’s fingers dig into my wrist. We circle as widely around the dying Hippo-Arse as the narrow aisle allows.

  “Why do the gandy dancers allow Caleb to shoot them?” I say.

  “Survival of the smartest,” Imogen says. “That’s why they made me punish you, instead of doing it themselves. It’s their hands-off approach.” Her pretty lips draw back in what looks uncommonly like a snarl.

  We sit in the back of the police cruiser. In the intervals between bursts of gunfire, Waylon Jennings sings Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys. Finian and Sam must have joined Caleb’s hunt. This strikes me as another example of the kind of stupidity that might doom our species. I might actually have gone out there and tried to stop them, but I’m too tired and sore. Anyway, I can’t go anywhere with Imogen snuggled up beside me, one hand on my thigh, making sure I don’t desert her.

  “It was an intelligence test,” she says.

  “What? Us versus the Hippo-Arses?”

  “No, idiot. Me versus you.” Suddenly she’s shaking my thigh. “So I had to act stupid, don’t you see? I had to pretend I was mad enough to kill you. What do you think? Was I convincing?”

  She starts to cry, real tears now, not the crocodile tears she shed on the flying saucer when I was dangling 250 miles above hell.

  I hold her, stroking her hair. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: I don’t understand her at all.

  BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Caleb must have ordered up a year’s supply of ammo in advance.

  Eventually the gunfire dies down. Sam dances back to the cruiser, bearing a grisly trophy: an antenna snapped off some alien spacecraft, with the head of a Hippo-Arse impaled on it. “I think this is the motherfucker who dinged me,” he crows. “I just wanted to show you before I throw it out.”