And I crash head-first into the wall.
I come to on the floor, feeling like I’ve been run over by a lorry.
There is a terrible racket of alien argument, but to my surprise and disappointment, there is no pitched battle. The Draconians are just waving their lightsabers and yelling at the Manager, who towers over the mob, maaaing deafeningly. I was expecting he’d be in pieces by this time. That reptilian scrote who pushed me down the toilet certainly seemed to be promising a uprising by the Nursing Home’s staff.
Maybe the Draconians are not so hard as they let on. I suppose you would lose your edge after 1,536,000.000 years as a janitor.
Which means it’ll have to be the real hard men who handle this.
I try to stand up. Something in my left leg goes crunch and I sit down again. My breath comes in short, shallow pants.
Imogen shoves through the crowd to me. “Fuck you,” she says, half laughing and half crying. “I was really grooving on that Ovid question.”
I reach into my cargo pocket with my good hand and extract the last lightsaber, the only one that didn’t fall out during my maiden flight. “Give this to Finian.”
What? When I said ‘hard men,’ did you think I was including myself? Away with you. Finian’s the one who’s got the right stuff. Me, all I’ve got is three broken fingers and probably a broken leg.
Imogen slaps the lightsaber away. “He’s already got one,” she says. “Quick!” She tries to pull me to my feet, and drops me again when I howl in pain.
“I’ve busted my fecking leg!”
Imogen darts into the crowd and comes back towing a mobility chair.
Meanwhile, the alien baying has gotten louder. The Draconians are threatening the Manager and the Manager’s threatening them back, I’d say. Everyone else is streaming towards the exits.
“Where’d you get this?” I gasp, heaving myself into the mobility chair.
“I tipped a bunch of Yellows out of it.”
“Good girl.”
With Imogen standing behind the seat—which is greasy, and all over yellow dandruff—I take the chair up as high as it will go. There’s Finian’s white head in the middle of the reptilian mob.
I grip my lightsaber between my knees, trying to aim it at the Manager’s head. While I am not one for battle, I’ve no objection to sniping from a safe distance. But these weapons are not meant to be used one-handed. The bright blue beam springs out—and slices through the Manager’s throne, missing the gent himself altogether.
The Manager lets out an earsplitting bleat of fury.
And a horde of gandy dancers bursts through the hangings behind the throne, tearing them down and trampling them in their berserk charge at the Draconians.
Not all of the gandy dancers are full-sized. Some aren’t even fully formed. They’re the carvings from the walls in the Manager’s bedroom.
Carvings? Self-assembling robots, or something like that. The whole city is probably made of nano-wotsits. Bloody hell.
These larval gandy dancers may be tripping over their own feet, but they’re as vicious as wolverines. With sweeping gestures, they bowl the Draconians head over heels. It’s the tractor-beam effect. Lightsaber beams swing wildly, inflicting more friendly damage than otherwise. I smell reptilian flesh cooking.
Finian, left in the middle of the room, drops to one knee and meets the gandy dancers alone, like a musketeer standing his ground against a cavalry charge. He slashes his lightsaber across the first wave, cutting about twenty of them in half. It’s beautiful, and then they overrun him.
The Manager leans against the wall in the corner, laughing his head off, at least that’s what I think he’s doing. It’s hard to hear over the screams.
I shove the lightsaber into Imogen’s hands and dive the mobility chair down to Finian. Imogen stabs at gandy dancer heads. I lean over and grab Finian’s arm. He’s dazed, but he’s still got hold of his lightsaber. He clambers onto the chair, standing astride me, which means the chair now can’t rise more than six inches off the floor. But this also makes it too heavy for these immature gandy dancers to toss around.
We careen around the bar like a team of warriors in a battle chariot, buffeted by tractor beams, me steering, Imogen and Finian mutilating all the gandy dancers they can reach.
The Draconians, heartened, throw themselves back into the fray.
The Manager’s not laughing anymore.
“Get him!” I shriek. “Get the Manager, for feck’s sake!”
“I am stabbing the shite out of him!” Finian bellows. “He’s got body armor!”
Indeed, the air around the Manager glows faintly blue. He’s got some kind of a shield that absorbs and dispels the energy of the lightsabers. With a sinking feeling, I remember the Butterfly-zillas of Suckass. They absorbed energy. We were going to sell them to the military for energy shields. The Sagittarians probably made them.
The optics behind the bar disintegrate in a cloud of glass shrapnel. More gandy dancers surge over the bar.
“Retreat!” Finian bellows, using the voice that carried over the mayhem on the Bagged & Tagged, ten kiloparsecs from here.
The Draconians do not need telling. But as I slew the mobility chair around, they stumble back from the door that leads out to the foyer.
Something else is coming in.
It’s a platoon of ragged, sinewy, barefoot … humans,
“Sam!” I yell. “Over here!”
Sam’s eyes roll. He’s supporting an older fella who’s got to be the unfortunate Owen Jones—he’s the spitting image of Sam himself, except for the white hair. Sam’s liberated the rest of the farm workers, too, and they’ve arrived just in the nick. I always said that boy had a superlative sense of timing.
The whole heap of them dive for cover, scattering like dead leaves in the tractor beams crisscrossing the bar.
Ah. They were not coming to our aid, after all.
They were fleeing ahead of …
An enormous hand closes on the jamb of the door, and rips the entire frame out of the wall.
The hand is identical to the Manager’s, except it’s pale gray.
So is the head that now pokes in through the crumbling opening.
It’s one of the statues that used to support the buildings on the main street.
I thought I felt an earthquake a little while ago.
So the gandy dancers aren’t the alpha and omega of the Manager’s repertoire.
He can make anything he likes, can’t he?
And what he likes is reflections of himself—
EMPEROR OF THE MILKY WAY, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING—
—forever and ever.
The nano-stone Sagittarian head retreats. The hand shoots back into the room up to the elbow, and seizes two farm workers. It drags them back out. Their screams cut off abruptly.
I lower the mobility chair to the floor. Imogen’s clutching my shoulders. I squeeze one of her hands with my good one. “I’m sorry it didn’t work in the end,” I say.
Finian growls: “You give up too easily, Fletch.”
He swings his leg across the handlebars and steps off the mobility chair. In a bowlegged stance like a boxer, he dances towards the door. His lightsaber beam leaps out and singes the knuckles of the giant hand that’s now tearing out chunks of the wall, widening the opening.
I groan. He’s decided to sell his life right now, right here … for nothing. I mean, it’s not as if he can buy us time to get away. All he’s doing is getting in a few kicks at THE EMPEROR OF THE MILKY WAY, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING, for sheer spite. Because it’s better than dying of cancer.
The Manager rights his bar stool and sits down amidst the carnage, savoring our destruction. When he sees Finian tickling his golem, he bleats in outrage. He gestures to his gandy dancers—
BLAM!
The Manager freezes, looking puzzled.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
The Manager topples off his bar stool and plants his goatish face
in the flood of spirits from the bar.
The gandy dancers sag in place. The golem stops tearing at the wall.
Black Sagittarian blood dribbles from the Manager’s nose and mingles with the puddles on the floor.
A cackle fractures the silence. In the most distant corner of the bar, Caleb, whom I completely forgot about, slides off his stool. He saunters over to the corpse of the Manager and fires another round into his hairy ear.
“Just makin’ sure.” He blows on the muzzle of his 1911. “Guess all that target practice paid off, huh?”
CHAPTER 15
All the gandy dancers have irretrievably frozen up except for the ones on the Ghost Train. Dizzy, Pew Pew, and the white-coats say it is only a matter of time until they themselves crash, too. The Manager’s nanites—the invisibly tiny machines that lived in his body, keeping him in youthful fettle—were quantumly entangled, or unified in the M-field, or something equally incomprehensible, with the nanostuff that’s everywhere on Pron, which can become carvings, or gandy dancers, or weaponized caryatids.
When we ventured out of the bar, we found a whole queue of sixty-foot golems in the foyer, their great grey heads stooped beneath the high ceiling, their car-sized fists bunched.
He’d summoned every robot in the city to come and tear us to pieces.
Now they’re just statues again, petrified where they stand, as useless as that duplicator from Seventh Heaven that stopped working after copying a few wristwatches.
No Manager, no nano-wizardry.
The city’s in a fair old mess. Fallen masonry (at least it looks like masonry) litters the streets.
And 129 (!) ancient alien residents of the Nursing Home at the Core of the Galaxy haven’t had their breakfast, or had their beds changed, and the lavatory is blocked up, and the television is broken, which you’d think they would not be complaining about, but they are, they are. And there’s no food coming from the farm anymore because all the surviving slaves are now ensconced on the Ghost Train. Like rabbits down a fecking hole. They’re eating hamburgers and chips and taking long hot showers and they won’t budge at gunpoint. Not that I can blame them.
“Why don’t you come with us?” I ask the residents. I’ve got them together in the wide street in front of the Nursing Home, which is only partially blocked by golems. It’s a bright sunny morning on Pron. Occasional tremors shake the ground as another building, deprived of its support pillars, collapses in the distance.
The ancient aliens chirrup, squeal, whirr, and grunt. Eventually the Silicon Person floats out of the crowd to speak for them all. “We are used to it here.”
Translation: They are used to being waited on hand and foot.
And as luck would have it, the only aliens dead set on accompanying us back to the Milky Way are the Draconians.
I rub my hands over my face. I don’t know what to do. I feel fate closing in on me like a shadow out of the cloudless sky. Fletch, you wanted to be the king of your own planet one day. Here’s your chance. Stay here and be the Emperor of the Milky Way, the Universe, and Everything.
I could probably master the Wonder Wall machine upstairs, given time.
And if I stayed here, I’d have all the time in the universe.
Someone needs to look after these poor old souls, anyway.
And who else is going to do it?
Rusty guitar chords drift down the street.
I whip around, and nearly fall out of my mobility chair.
Caleb strolls through the gate, cowboy hat pulled down low, strumming his guitar:
Yippy yi yay, oh yippy yi oh
Ghost riders in the sky
He breaks off and says with a twisted smile, “I lost my soul long ago, Fletch. Cain’t get it back, no matter how many aliens I kill. So maybe it’s time for me to help these old aliens stay alive.” He shrugs. “I had enough of endless riding through the skies, anyway. I’ll stay here.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Cain’t I? You jest watch me. Hey, Dggkchak?” He addresses the Silicon Person by a name I never knew it had. “We’ll have us some games of canasta. Get a domino tournament going. No more goldurn Pub Quizzes. No more Sagittarian war videos, either. I got five thousand hours of downloads here—” he touches his wristwatch— “Seinfeld, the History Channel, the Simpsons. Y’all are gonna love this stuff.”
“No,” I says. “Caleb, the point is you can’t make it work. Potatoes don’t grow themselves. Who’s going to hoe the fields while you’re playing dominoes? Who’s going to do the washing and cooking?”
“We are,” Caleb says. “No more sittin’ around on our behinds, ain’t that right, guys?” He gets a few dubious chirrups. “Ya don’t work, ya don’t eat, that’s the law of the universe. This’s been a lawless place, but that is gonna change.” The ancient aliens nod dubiously. “However, I appreciate that y’all are old and infirm. So Fletch, next time you swing by Earth, I would be greatly obliged if you get the word out to the Knights of Columbus and the Rotarians. I ‘spect there’ll be no shortage of volunteers.”
“I can see it already,” I say, giving in. “The Kibbutz at the Core of the Galaxy.”
“Naw, uh uh, none of that Commie shit. Point is, I want charitable organizations involved from the get-go, so we ain’t overrun by guys like you, trying to steal our shit.” He slaps me on the shoulder. “Now you better git on back to the train. Finian’s as sick as a three-legged dog.”
I thought he looked a bit poorly last night.
But it’s a death’s-door scene that I find in the lounge. He’s lying on the floor, surrounded by people who don’t know what to do for him. What do you do when a legend collapses? His face is the color of recycled paper. The flesh of his cheeks has fallen in, leaving his cheekbones prominent. He’s got so thin.
Imogen sits by his head, wringing her hands. “I think he’s had a stroke. He won’t tell me anything.”
“I thought it was lung cancer,” I say.
“It’s everything,” Finian croaks, “catching up with me at once. I’m seventy-six bloody years old. What do you expect?”
I tip myself off my mobility chair. My leg, in a makeshift splint, hits the ground badly. Finian hears my yelp and manages a thin smile.
“Get yourself some pain pills out of the Wonder Wall. That’s all it’s good for.”
“You’re going in one of those.” I drag on his shoulder with my good hand, pointing at the nearest couch.
“Feck off! You wouldn’t go in, why do you want me to?”
“Because if you don’t, you’re going to die.”
“So fecking what,” he says, and closes his eyes.
“I won’t let you die like this.”
“Are you afraid I’ll come back to haunt you? Heh, heh.” His laugh turns into a racking cough. Imogen holds his shoulders.
“You’re just scared.”
“So are you.”
“I’m scared of dying. You’re scared of living.”
There’s nothing for it, then. I bend down and whisper into his ear, so quietly that no one else can hear.
Finian’s eyes pop open. “Jesus,” he says. “You make a good point, lad.” He tries to push himself upright. “Get me on that bloody couch!”
So he vanishes inside a Tomb of Youth, and comes out hale and roaring, full of vim, just the way he was on the Draco spur when I first crewed for him, and I almost wish I hadn’t persuaded him to have the rejuvenation treatment.
Almost.
Because, as I whispered into his ear while he lay dying, if he were dead, who’d drive the Ghost Train?
“WE REQUIRE A SAPIENT DECISION-MAKING AUTHORITY,” Dizzy and Pew Pew told me after the battle. “WE WOULD RATHER HAVE IMOGEN. BUT SHE REFUSES. WE WILL SETTLE FOR YOU.”
“Let me get this straight,” I told them. I was in terrible pain at the time, the adrenaline all gone, my fingers and my leg throbbing fit to fall off. “You’d let me drive the Ghost Train? Me?”
“SAFEST PLACE FOR YOU.”
I see now that they were trying to talk me out of staying on Pron. But at the time I just thought they were rubbing it in that everything I touch goes to shite. Oh, it’s a dark place you go after there’s been fighting and killing. Even victory feels like a personal failure, and all you want to do is take a handful of pills and dive into a bottle, and there aren’t any bloody bottles left because they’re all smashed on the floor, and the corpse of the Manager is sprawled in the shards. I had to organize some of the farm workers in the end to drag him down to the sea and tip him in. It was getting on for twenty-one o’clock by then and Pron’s moon was up, very big and bright. We saw the nanites starting to flee from his body, like drops of mercury oozing out of his pelt, vanishing into the ground of Pron.
“You want to put that shite in me?” I said to Dizzy and Pew Pew. “Not in a billion years, am I making myself clear?”
“THEN THE GHOST TRAIN WILL NEVER MOVE AGAIN,” they said, standing on the shore of the sea in their little baggy overalls. “ALSO, INTERSTELLAR RAILROAD WILL NO LONGER BE MAINTAINED. TRACKS WILL BREAK. JUNCTIONS WILL BECOME ERRATIC …”
“You’re threatening me with a strike.”
“FOR BEING OF MEDIOCRE INTELLIGENCE, YOU ARE NOT STUPID.”
I tore my hair a bit thinking about it. I was still down by the water, after sending the farm workers back to the Ghost Train. I sat on the shore of that alien ocean and lost my mind for a little while.
Eventually I said: “Would you take someone else, at all?”
I know, I know. It was a mean trick I played on them. They wanted better working conditions. They are now finding out what it’s like to crew for Finian.
Video games and football on all the newly installed screens in the lounge, constant roars of “This is not satisfactory,” Queens of the Stone Age and Eagles of Death Metal blaring from the newly installed speakers, and he’s got the gandy dancers putting gold elephants on every bloody thing. He’s going to round up all his old mates from the Marauding Elephant and recruit a cast of attractive young cabin attendants. Oh, and he’s going to turn the parking bay into a mini Formula One race track. They will refurbish some of the more interesting alien vehicles to race with. He’s got the Draconians working on that.
The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure Page 39
