It’s remarkable how well Finian gets along with the Draconians.
Remarkable to everyone who doesn’t know him, that is.
Me, I’m content to just lie in my hammock and let time do its healing work on my broken bones and bashed-up flesh. I rigged my hammock on the observation deck to be as far as possible from the nonstop party at the other end of the Ghost Train. When I’m not too drunk, I watch the Milky Way reappear. We are shooting out of the core of Sagittarius A* on a jet of highly energetic particles, which coheres ahead of us into the familiar Railroad. Caleb was right—it’s easier getting out than getting in—but it also takes longer. Almost a month passes before we reach the Norma arm, and then we’re on the other side of the galaxy from Earth.
By this time I’m on my feet, able to eschew a mobility chair for an honest crutch. I kill time exploring the regions of the Ghost Train previously marked PRIVATE. Finian has done away with those restrictions. Nowhere is to be off-limits to humanity. Admittedly, no one ever goes down here, as there’s not much to see—just a lot of computers, the same as in any spacecraft. The nukes are hidden away in their bomb bays and Finian is the only one who has access to them.
Still, Imogen finds it interesting down here. I meet her on the engineering deck, talking to one of the white-coated gandy dancers about the M-field and this and that.
“I won’t have to work for Big Tech anymore,” she says excitedly. “I’m going to start my own company.”
“You’re still taking the nootropic drugs, are you?”
She flushes. “Yes.”
“Grand. Be all you can be, Imogen.”
“Do you have a problem with that?” she shouts after me, as I swing away on my crutch. She’s developed the ability to detect sarcasm, although I don’t think the drugs helped with that. The opposite, if anything. It’s just exposure.
“Not at all,” I shrug.
It’s my problem, not hers. My desire for her died when I found out she was a stacker. She doesn’t understand that, and why should she?
She comes after me, pink with anger. “What are you going to do, Fletch?”
“Go back to the observation deck and have a drink. Only another four months until we get there.”
Normally, it would have been two years, but Finian nixed the Ghost Train’s traditional tour around the far side of the galaxy. It’ll still be there next year, he said. So we are zooming back towards the Orion arm by the straightest route possible.
“That’s what I mean,” Imogen says, still following me. “What are you going to do when we get home?”
I can’t answer that, because I don’t know.
CHAPTER 16
“Land your craft immediately!”
An NEPD patrol ship buzzes me as I deorbit from the Railroad. Several more of them swarm out of Treetop’s hazy atmosphere.
“Proceed to the coordinates I have provided! And no monkey business, or there won’t be enough of you left to bury, hotshot!”
Here we go again, eh? These little Hitlers, never satisfied unless everyone is doing exactly as they say.
“Land your craft IMMEDIATELY!” the NEPD officer froths over the radio, incensed by the fact that I am not a stacker with lightning-fast reflexes, so it’s going to take me a minute to alter my deorbit trajectory.
A patrol ship screams across my prow. It is needle-nosed, painted in spiffy white and blue, a new addition to the NEPD’s fleet. The department must be swimming in funds since our burglary of King Zuck’s tree. Hard to believe that was eight months ago.
“Hey! Asshole!” the officer barks. “Proceed to the coordinates I have provided! You have five seconds! Five! Four!”
“OK, OK,” I sigh into the radio, and follow them to a tree in the northern hemisphere.
It’s one of the heavily-settled multi-owner ones, its canopy pimpled with spaceport terminals that sprawl over whole leaves. I set my ship down and wait.
The NEPD ships land in a cloud of rocket exhaust, boxing me in. The officers leap out and surround my ship. They have new uniform spacesuits, skintight, with pale blue Kevlar vests and codpieces.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” the radio barks.
“Because I’m flying a refurbished Denebite star shuttle?”
“Shut up, smartass. You were wobbling all over the sky.”
“I’m a shite pilot. Never claimed otherwise.”
“Is that really a refurbished Denebite star shuttle?”
Out on the leaf’s surface, the keener officers are targeting me with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. I hope they’re not thinking of using those. The canopies of Treetop trees are quite flammable.
A new voice booms into my cockpit. From the way the officers outside jump, I know they’re hearing it, too. “Yes, it is a refurbished Denebite star shuttle! And if you saw it come off the Ghost Train, you’re starting to catch on! The pilot is Fletcher Connolly. He is the only son of my own brother, and if you fuck with him, I will be very unhappy.” The last words ooze out of the radio, hoarse with Irish menace. Even I shiver a bit. “You may ask why you should care if I’m unhappy. The answer is that I am the new chief of the NEPD! The name is Finian Connolly, and all of youse answer to me! I will be sorting out the details with your command structure on Earth shortly. For now, get rid of those awful uniforms you’ve got on. You look like faggots, the lot of you. And I’ll be speaking to the idjit who issued you with rocket-launchers.” Click.
I grin. “Thanks, Finian.”
My comms screen displays a live video stream from the lounge-cum-bridge of the Ghost Train. Finian’s crew of Draconians and liberated slaves are exclaiming over the views of Treetop. Finian’s got his eye to the optic sight of the new broadside-oriented railgun he had the gandy dancers put in.
“I didn’t say anything to them about the burglary,” he remarks. “Want me to mention that?”
I think about it. “Nah, on the whole. We picked up nothing on the news, so hopefully they’ve forgotten about it.”
“If they haven’t yet, they will soon,” Finian smirks. “I’ll be getting off the air now. There’s a heap of these bastards sniffing at my arse. I’m going to put a rod from God across their noses, so they know who they’re dealing with. Connolly out.”
“Connolly out,” I echo, and turn off the radio.
I slide into my new spacesuit—a deliberately drab product of the Wonder Wall—and deplane with a smile on my face.
My good mood curdles when I have to pay four figures for a taxi to Wilkinson Tree in the southern hemisphere.
According to the internet, this is where Donal lives.
Wilkinson Tree is another multi-owner tree, known as the San Francisco of Treetop, which is an insult to San Francisco. At least you can afford to live there on less than a million a year, now that Big Tech has mostly legged it to Arcadia, and I can’t wait until Finian gets around to dealing with that nest of vipers. They’ve all got friends and relatives here, anyway. There’s a university on one of the lower branches of Wilkinson Tree, and there are farmer’s markets where you can buy produce from the local pond farms, and frozen yogurt stands everywhere.
Donal and Harriet have got a house on the Glades level, 5.5 miles up. At first I think I must have the wrong house because it’s breathtakingly posh, three storeys with bamboo verandahs screened by curtains of moss. A colony of pretty little sunbirds twitters on the roof. Then I think I’ve definitely got the wrong house, because there are people trooping in and out as if it were a shop.
Attaching myself to the latest knot of visitors, I peek around a giant succulent moss and see Harriet holding court in a spacious living-room. She’s wearing a caftan, kneeling on the polished wooden floor with a furry bundle on her lap. Women crowd around her. They stroke the bundle with shy fingers and coo adoringly.
The treecats have had kittens.
Is that how Donal and Harriet afforded this pile?
I knew the treecats would be popular as pets, if we could get a few tastemake
rs to adopt them. But the supply is limited, after all. I can’t see treecats paying for this pile. Unless …
Dark suspicions float into my mind.
“Would you care for a mint julep?” says a feminine voice.
I reach for the offered drink, and jump out of my skin.
It’s Ruby!
Before the burglary, he was living with us on Arcadia. He had to stop taking his stack of drugs, just like Imogen, when we ran out of money. He also had to go off the drugs he was on for his transition to female.
But after Kenneth and Vanessa, the other two members of our crew, stole the Intergalactic Bogtrotter, Ruby found a job at a black market biomodification clinic on Treetop’s moon. It was a very dodgy place. Never mind transgender—most of the clients there were intending to become transspecies. Ruby was working for drugs, basically. His transition is now complete. He’s statuesque, with a glamorous wavy hairdo. The effect is somewhat spoiled by the maid’s uniform he’s got on.
His lipsticked mouth drops open. “Fletch? Everyone thought you were dead!”
“So did I, more than once. Jesus, Ruby, I thought you were dead.”
“Obviously not, dude.”
I shake my head. “How did you survive?”
When we last met, eight months ago, Ruby was piloting a security drone to cover our getaway from the Flower Lake Clinic. There was an extreme saleswoman with murderous intentions on our tail, and I’ve been worrying off and on that she and her associates may have taken it out on Ruby after we escaped their clutches.
“Where to start?” he says. “The NEPD shut down the clinic. And all the other clinics on the moon. There was a huge outcry, but maybe you know about that?”
“No.”
“Society just isn’t ready for extreme biomodification. It was a big defeat for the tech lobby, and a win for the NEPD. So, not an unmixed triumph for ordinary people. The NEPD are jackbooting around like they own the place.”
I smirk, thinking about what the NEPD have in store for them when Finian reaches Earth.
“Donal and Harriet have been wonderful,” Ruby says, smoothing his maid’s uniform. “Absolutely wonderful.”
“If you’re not liking this gig, there’s a place for you on Finian’s crew.”
“Finian?! Is he here?” Ruby looks around as if expecting him to jump out from behind a moss plant.
“He’s around,” I say vaguely. The whole galaxy will know Finian’s precise whereabouts soon enough. “What about Donal?”
“He’s on the third-floor verandah.”
I find my way to the third-floor verandah without meeting anyone else I know. These people come from a different universe. They’re stackers, or rich, or both. The only time they notice me is to frown at my jeans and Kyuss t-shirt (“The Wonder Wall shall now produce no clothing that isn’t made of denim or leather or has a rock band’s logo on it”—Finian’s edict number 100-and-I-lost-count). Tibetan flute music wafts through the rooms on currents of perfectly chilled air.
Out on the verandah, the air conditioning doesn’t work so well. The heat is overpowering and the sweet leaf scent coats my nostrils.
“A little of this place goes a long way, I’m finding,” I say.
Donal falls out of his chair. He was only balanced on the edge of it, his upper body doubled over in the tense posture I remember from when things were going badly on the Skint Idjit. He was also smoking a cigarette, which he hasn’t done in decades.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” he says, picking himself up. He looks at his cigarette and stubs it out. Then he stares at me. “Is it really you, Fletch?”
“It is.”
“Did no one offer you a drink?”
“Ruby did.”
“If it was one of those julep things, I don’t blame you. I think the caterers brought some Pepsi.”
“I’m all right, lad.”
“So … Jesus. Where have you been?”
I fill him in on the story of our adventures on the Ghost Train. I find myself skipping a lot of the important parts, such as Merrielande, and my attempt to vandalize the Tombs of Youth, and my headfirst dive down a Sagittarian toilet. Yes, there is a pattern here. I am skipping the parts where I come off as greedy, or desperate, or just plain stupid. Maybe sometime in the future I might feel comfortable enough to tell him the whole truth, and laugh at myself. But right now I don’t feel like being entirely open with him.
Because he’s obviously not been entirely open with me.
“So that’s me,” I finish. “What about yourself? You’ve come up in the world since we last met.”
Donal leans back in his chair. He scrapes his blond hair back with both hands and lets it fall—a new nervous habit to add to his collection. The hair’s grown out to his shoulders. He always had Adonis looks, but now he’s added a bit of pudge, which he’s trying to hide with loose linen trousers and a collarless blazer thing.
“I’m just trying to process it,” he says. “The Ghost Train. A pocket universe inside the black hole at the center of the galaxy. A billion-year-old Sagittarian dictator …”
“Whose hobby was blowing up intelligent species to make sure he’d never have any competition. But we blew him away, so now the galaxy really is ours. Up humanity!”
“Aye, yeah. It’s a bit much to take in.”
“Every word of it’s true.”
That gets me a shocked look. “Jesus, Fletch, I’m not saying you’re lying to me. We’ve known each other long enough.”
But you are lying to me, Donal, I think, about something. We’ve known each other since we were five. I can tell.
I stand up, part the green curtain, and flinch from a shaft of baking sunlight. Out on the leaf in front of the house, giant yellow lilies fringe a pond. People sit in the shade of the lilies, working on portable computers. Frog-analogs croak. “It’s a grand place you’ve got here,” I say. “Did you pay off our backers at home all right?”
With what? That is what I want to know.
“Yeah. I refunded every last fiver.” Suddenly he bursts out, “Ah God, I have to tell you. I’ll understand if you’re angry. You should be.”
Here it comes. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. Go on.”
“I kept the Gizmo. The treecats did their job perfectly, but the one I gave you was a fake. We swapped them on the catering plane. You went away with the fake one, and the real one stayed in Harriet’s pocket. After you vanished, we auctioned it off.”
I stare at him with my jaw on the floor.
I can’t believe he did that to me.
After a minute, I shake my head, smiling in confusion. “It wasn’t a fake, Donal. It worked fine, until the gandy dancers took it off us.”
Now it’s Donal’s turn for his jaw to hit the floor.
“Ours was real,” he insists. If it was a fake, the buyers would have come wanting their money back.”
The verandah door rattles. “Both of them were real,” Harriet says.
She steps out onto the verandah, barefoot, and goes to Donal. She sits on his knee. He winces.
“There were two Gizmos,” she says, holding my eyes. “We trained the treecats to steal anything that looked like a five-inch nail. There were two. So they stole them both. I kept one for us and gave one to you. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“But you said the one we gave Fletch was a fake.” Donal’s voice is hoarse with confusion.
“I wanted him out of our lives,” Harriet says.
That’s the hardest blow yet. I turn away from them, flapping my t-shirt away from my body. “Jesus it’s hot.”
The sunbirds twitter on the roof. The frogs croak in the lake. A treecat yowls within, and Harriet’s friends laugh. The ceaseless rustle of leaves and creaking of boughs adds a layer of white noise to the soundscape, like city traffic.
A treecat nudges the door open and pads out onto the verandah. Harriet scoops it up and buries her face in its fur. When she looks up, her nose is pink and her eyes are wet. “Welcome
home, Fletch, you asshole.”
I’m willing to leave it at that. I don’t want to sour things any further. Donal’s got what he always wanted, even if it’s the fruit of theft and deception. The best thing I can do for him now is to leave him be.
But he’s shaking his head, getting angry. “You had no right to lie to me, Harry.”
“She did the right thing,” I say. “What’ve I ever brought you but trouble? The results speak for themselves. As soon as I’m out of the way, everything starts going right for you. I mean, look at this place. It’s fecking amazing.”
“I hate it,” Donal says with quiet passion. “I thought I was going to love it here but I hate it.”
Harriet’s mouth falls open with surprise. She twists on his lap to face him. “You, too? Seriously?”
“You’re joking, Harry! This is what you always wanted. I felt so bad about everything I’ve put you through. I wanted to give you the lifestyle you deserved.”
“Maybe it is what I deserve,” she says grimly. “The ultimate gated community with the ultimate trendy, superficially caring, oh-so-environmentally-pure neighbors. And God, those frogs! They never fucking shut up!”
“Now you know why I sleep with the pillow over my head,” Donal says.
“And I thought it was because you didn’t want me to hear you talking in your sleep,” Harriet says. She turns to me. “He has nightmares about getting caught, Fletch. They don’t suspect us. They think the Gizmo was stolen by that biomodification gang that got rolled up last year. But he wakes up in the night kicking the sheets off, thinking they’ve come to put him in handcuffs.”
Donal inhales noisily and meets my gaze. “Are you going to turn me in, Fletch?”
We’re Irish. There is a lasting taboo against turning anyone in. The grass who squeals on his friends is the lowest form of life. This is the most insulting thing Donal’s ever said to me.
I’m about to blow up at him when I see the look of humble resignation in his eyes. It hasn’t even occurred to him that he’s just insulted me. He’s been away from Ireland so long that he’s forgetting how to talk and think.
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