I felt the switch in my head turn back the other way. My hands dropped. “I nearly got plying lynched because of you! And trapped in a cave! All you had to do was make a sexy video, which you put way more effort into than was necessary, by the way! I wasn’t even being sarcastic! Why would you think I was . . .” My monologue switched tracks midjourney as I read the minuscule changes in her expression. “Is this promotion not a thing we like? Why wouldn’t a promotion be good? It’s got pro right there in the word.”
Somewhat softened—in the sense that quartz is somewhat softer than diamond—Warden looked away. “Henderson has made me a divisional head.”
“Yeah. Well done you.”
“He made Brian Pritchard a divisional head, too.”
I was still trying to read her face, but she had reined her emotions back in, and it was like trying to make a picture out of a particularly nondescript cloud. “And we don’t like Brian Pritchard?”
“Brian Pritchard was my predecessor as Mr. Henderson’s assistant. Just under a year ago, he began serving nineteen consecutive life sentences.”
“So, no, then?”
Warden sat gently back down onto the mattress and stared at the papers splayed across the carpet. “The UR’s current government have been making a concerted effort to combat corruption. Since they came into power, there have been several high-profile investigations into the Henderson organization’s activities,” she said. “Each time, all incriminating evidence has mysteriously led to only one of the company divisions. Each time, the head of that division has taken full responsibility. Each time, Mr. Henderson’s lawyers have convinced the jury that Henderson himself knew nothing about it. It has been a continuous pattern. He now refers to the process as the ‘naughty-ectomy.’”
“Ah,” I said, understanding at last. “And I take it that Henderson is actually more closely involved than the official record states?”
She passed over one of the loose pieces of paper. “Look at this.”
It was a rather poor-quality satellite picture of a bubble city. I didn’t immediately recognize it on sight, but the tacky pseudo-Arabian Nights architecture gave it away: it was New Dubai, the colony on the desert moon Sigma 14-D. At the bottom was some writing in a red spidery hand. “P: Investigate potential market for all the incredibly illegal things we sell. Mr. H.” Then he had drawn a little smiley face.
“This is why Mr. Henderson has given me these instructions in a nonelectronic format. All of these papers are going to be burned.”
“Not necessarily. You could—”
“No, McKeown, they are. They are going to be burned because I am going to burn them. Mr. Henderson will instruct me to, and Mr. Henderson’s instructions must be carried out.”
I leaned on the door frame, arms folded. “Mr. Henderson also instructed you to employ the real Jacques McKeown for his son’s birthday. But you actually haven’t. You got one over him there.”
She glared at me. “And along with the video shoot, that knowledge is why I did not sleep last night.”
I raised a finger. “Hang on. So you’ve only been Henderson’s assistant for less than a year?”
She looked a little ill. “Henderson has never had an assistant for more than a year. I only found that out after I was promoted. Before then, I mainly looked after Daniel’s affairs. Henderson hand-picked me from the administrative team of his corporation, and—”
“Whoa,” I interrupted, swapping my raised finger for a raised hand. “What do you mean, you looked after Daniel’s affairs?”
She reddened and looked at the floor, shifting her weight. “Daniel had been falling behind at school, and Henderson . . . I was looking for a way to rise closer to the inner circle; I didn’t know the full extent . . .”
“Oh, go forth and multiply,” I breathed, wide eyed and grinning. “That is beautiful. You were the plying nanny.”
She stiffened, rage flashing in her eyes. “I was not a nanny! I was a tutor and a personal assista—”
From the hidden speakers in the ceiling, there came the sound of a string quartet experiencing a momentary burst of loud enthusiasm, followed by Daniel’s voice. “This is your captain speaking,” he said, his mock-professional tone wavering with barely contained excitement and impatience. “Would star pilot Jacques McKeown please report to the bridge for space adventure time.”
I sighed contentedly. “Well. Little Lord Dointleroy is calling. Let’s talk about this later.” As I unfolded my arms and turned to leave, the zip fastener on my open flight jacket brushed my holstered blaster pistol, rattling audibly.
Warden glanced up just in time to see me holding my jacket closed in about the most obvious way possible. Her eyebrows went up, first one, then the other. “Mr. McKeown, is that a gun?”
I thought quickly. It probably wasn’t worth trying to deny it. So I went the opposite direction.
“Uh, yeah,” I said beratingly, as if she’d merely asked me if I was wearing trousers. I held my jacket open, then snapped my fingers to signal realization. “Oh, I know what you’re worried about. Don’t fret, it’s only a blaster pistol, see? Energy based. Won’t leave stray projectiles knocking holes in the hull. Anyway, like I said, I’m needed on the bridge so I’ll see you later bye.”
Then I turned smartly around and walked away, crossing my fingers and hoping to God that she’d drop the matter. It had always been the best technique for getting out of awkward conversations with Mum.
Chapter 10
The bridge was grandiose, of course. It was a circular chamber within the largest front-facing observation bubble, with a magnificent captain’s chair in the center, artistically realized entirely in curved lines and silvery mock leather. In front of it was a complicated-looking horseshoe-shaped console about fifty times larger than it needed to be. A cursory glance on my way across the room revealed that the console had little to do with controlling the actual ship and seemed mainly concerned with disco lighting effects and adjusting the backrest.
“Is this, like, the best ship you’ve ever piloted?” asked Daniel proudly, gazing at me from over his illuminated control panel.
I rotated in my chair and looked down at my own controls before answering. There was a two-joystick steering system, and every other function was controlled by a touchscreen in between. No pedals, no gauges, no separate controller for externals. I had to flip through three menu screens on the touchscreen to find the controls for the weapon countermeasures. There might as well have been a button that unrolled red carpets for boarding parties.
“Well, it suits my purposes,” I said, guardedly. Daniel beamed. “Are we ready for takeoff?”
“Ooh! Not yet.” He pressed one of the illuminated buttons in front of him and leaned a little too close to a nearby mike. “Prepare for takeoff!”, he shouted, before sitting back and grinning at me expectantly.
I drummed my fingers on my station. “That was it, was it?”
“Did I do it all right?”
“Uh. Yeah. Textbook.” I turned back to my touchscreen, checked the external cameras to make sure the bay was clear, and activated the engine.
The ship lurched forward as an apparently slightly poorly-angled takeoff jet belched into life, and I narrowly escaped gouging my eyes out on the two joysticks. Then the landing legs rapidly withdrew into their housing like startled trapdoor spiders and the ship lurched the other way. I wrestled with the sticks until the angle was somewhat corrected, and the ship bobbed clumsily on a cushion of thrust like a fat person trying to get comfortable on a beanbag chair.
“Wow,” breathed Daniel appreciatively. “Listen to that engine purr. Like a cat.”
If there was anything about this ship that was like a cat, it was its willingness to do as it was told. Not the engine, which was greedily consuming about three times as much fuel as a ship this weight would realistically need, projecting the energy from the thrusters the way an overfed pig projectile vomits swill back into the trough. It climbed up into the sky in the man
ner of an overweight cherub with undersized wings, correcting its course with the occasional well-timed fart. Daniel was enjoying the view of the city, sitting proudly upright like a benevolent overseer.
I set a wobbling course for the airlock at the very apex of Ritsuko’s plexiglass dome, which reminded me that we needed to call in for clearance. I eventually found the communications tab, after several touchscreen swipes and pop-up advertisements, and hailed the upside-down control tower.
“Golf Whiskey Sushi Zero Zero Niner One calling Apex Tower,” I said in my professional voice. “Requesting exit to Big Black, over.”
“Apex Tower to Golf Whiskey Sushi, exit request acknowledged,” came the tower controller’s voice. “Stand by, your vessel will be scanned.”
I was chummy with a lot of ground control and tower boys, since we’d all been thrown on neighboring trac-heaps after Quantunneling came about, so I had a pretty good idea what was coming next. I took a deep breath and waited.
“Apex Tower to Golf Whiskey Sushi. Seriously? Over.”
I let the deep breath out again. “Golf Whiskey Sushi to Apex Tower. Don’t worry, it’s not mine. Over.”
“Exit granted. Opening internal airlock access. Have fun with the pirates. And with explaining the blaster damage to whatever plying fatheaded rich bracket you’re flying that thing for. Over and out.”
I risked a look back at Daniel while the ship was in the airlock and we were waiting to be cycled out through the inner and outer doors. He was still watching me with a huge excited smile on his face, like a dog on their first car trip before they’ve come to associate such things with the vet.
“That was so cool how you were talking just then,” he said, jiggling up and down. “All that star pilot banter, it was like actually being in one of your books. Hey, do you think, after the trip, we could go to one of your star pilot bars and meet all your drinking buddies?”
I tried to picture how that would turn out. An underage client walking into somewhere like the Brandied Bracket and announcing that it’s okay, he’s being accompanied by his friend Jacques McKeown. My mind’s eye was suddenly flooded with shoe leather. “No offense, Daniel, but I’m only being paid to fly.”
“Oh. Sure. That’s cool. You can just drop me off at Dad’s new place when we’re done. And then I can tell him all about the time I had.”
That was the first time I began to wonder exactly how many layers of intellect I was up against. What game were Daniel and I playing here? Poker or Guess Who?
When the outer airlock was open I took the God of Whale Sharks upward, and I was almost lurched out of my chair again when we escaped the effects of Ritsuko’s artificial gravity field. Once I’d killed the thrusters and jiggled the joysticks into line, the ride became comparatively responsive. The ship certainly benefited from being in zero gravity; now all it needed was six or seven weeks’ work by a team of men with angle grinders.
Below us, Luna seemed a lot smaller, especially with the Earth hanging directly overhead like a yellow disco ball. The black infinity on all sides gave the usual dizzying vertigo for a second. I took my customary moment to meditate on it, then began plotting a course. That ran into an immediate roadblock.
“So, you haven’t told me where you actually want to go,” I said.
“Ooh! We should go to Earth first.”
I turned and looked at him again. “I was under the impression you were after a more exotic adventure than the place where you live.”
“Oh, we just need to make a quick stop. It’s cool.”
“I can’t land on Earth. I haven’t got the paperwork,” I revealed. “I can’t get the paperwork without six months of background checks, and they’ve got a lot of tricky legislation for people trying to land unauthorized. ‘Tricky legislation’ is the name they have for surface-to-air missiles.”
“Nah, it’s cool,” said Daniel, cool being the default position of the entire universe, apparently. “We don’t have to land. We just need to pick up one of my, er . . . friends. In Cloud Castle. You can just fly us close to Earth and I can use the Quantunnel booth.”
Cloud Castle. I’d heard rumors about it. An exclusive gated community for the ultrarich residents of the United Republic, attached to a point halfway up one of the space elevators they used to get workers up to the satellite surveillance network. It made sense that the Hendersons and their friends lived there. The only reason someone with the money to leave Earth wouldn’t do so would be if they never had to set foot on the ground.
“You can’t Quantunnel to Earth from orbit,” I pointed out. “Earth’s Quantunnel network doesn’t allow offworld transport. It’s their law. We’d need to land first.”
“Oh. Well, it’d probably be cool if we just landed quickly.”
My fingers were drumming on the joystick. “I doubt the authorities would see it that way, Daniel.”
“No no no, we have to. It’s really important. Come on, it’s really easy to just quickly land and pick something up and go. Dad’s friends do it all the time.”
“These friends of your dad,” I said. “Do they tend to be . . . burly sorts? In suits? With guns? ’Cos I have a pretty good idea of why they don’t get hassled.”
“Do you want to meet them?”
I paused for a moment, digesting this, then rotated one hundred and eighty degrees in my chair and placed my hands tentatively on the joysticks. Then I made a snap decision and rotated one hundred and eighty degrees right back. “Was that a threat?”
“What?”
“I’m not asking in a doint-waving counterthreat kind of way, you understand, I genuinely couldn’t tell if it was a threat or not.”
“No, it wasn’t a threat, seriously,” said Daniel, but he kept smiling earnestly.
I wasn’t prepared to call it. “It’s fine if it was a threat. I respond well to threats. It clears the air. I just like to have a grip on the situation.”
“Okay, it was a threat.”
“Are you only saying that because I said it was fine?”
“Um. Maybe.”
I stared into his wide, trusting, admiring eyes, his big, beaming smile. There was always the possibility that he was on the level and had been only saying innocent things that I, in my paranoid way, had taken for veiled threats. And even if he wasn’t, would Mr. Henderson care that much for Daniel’s complaints? How much did he dote on his son? Enough to buy him whatever he asked for, but spending money was something he seemed to do pretty casually. And he didn’t care enough to do thirty seconds of research and realize the ship he was buying was total pirate bait. There was a distinct possibility that Daniel did not actually have any power here.
Power to have me violently murdered, that is.
I placed my hands on the joysticks and sighed. “Shall we just stop off on Earth, then?”
“Yay!”
Chapter 11
Thankfully, as paranoid as the United Republic could be about non-Terrans, they were still slightly more paranoid about their own citizens. Almost the entirety of the satellite surveillance network around Earth pointed inward, and it didn’t take long to find a gap in the coverage big enough to squeeze even the Platinum God of Whale Sharks through. After that I was able to mask our presence by hiding in the upper pollution layer.
One of the broader societal effects of Quantunneling, I’d noticed, is that people became much worse at giving directions. The best Daniel could offer was that Cloud Castle was “in the sky somewhere.” Although Quantunneling probably wasn’t entirely to blame.
Fortunately, a space elevator is a difficult thing to miss, and even with smog reducing visibility to roughly the distance between my face and the tip of my nose it didn’t take long to find the thick silvery-blue cable snaking off into the clouds in both directions. Then it was just a matter of hugging close and following it downward.
The first sign that we were drawing close to our destination was when the yellow clouds began turning green, then to a rich, healthy blue, apparently du
e to artificial coloration. The next sign was when the clouds began to thin and we almost ran straight into an artificial sun, attached to the space elevator with a gigantic steel brace.
Past that, we found ourselves in a massive sphere of clear air, apparently maintained by a complicated array of powerful fans that were making a determined effort to use up what energy the planet had left as quickly as possible. In the center of this space was Cloud Castle, and it was clear that, for all the things Mr. Henderson had had to say about bubble colonies, he can’t have been completely averse to the concept.
Cloud Castle was a network of tightly bunched spherical habitats clinging to the space elevator like a colossal glass raspberry on a branch. I peered into the domes as we flew past and saw a succession of neatly spaced white houses and perfectly-kept green lawns, interspersed with gleaming white surveillance poles, each with row upon row of cameras along its length. As we passed by human figures, lightly dressed in fashionable pastels, their tiny faces turned to look, suspicious. Shortly, the cameras began doing likewise.
“We’re drawing too much attention,” I said, uncomfortably. “Where’s the plying docking bay?”
“Oh yeah, it’s in the middle somewhere,” said Daniel. He made a very strange gesture that involved bending his wrist right back and pointing to something below and to the left of him. “That way.”
“Thanks,” I said, smiling with both rows of teeth.
The ship circled the dome cluster like a mosquito who’d shown up at an orgy and was trying to decide which buttock to sample first. We must have been spotted by every resident in the place by the time I noticed a set of bay doors in the roof of a small, white dome marking the nexus of six large habitats.
The ship hovered close to the doors and my hand hovered over the communicator as I concocted a lie to tell the ground control people. If I could come up with something that would get us inside, I could figure it out from there. The never-fail method was to put on the falsetto voice and claim to be going into labor, but that tended to be overkill . . .
Will Save the Galaxy for Food Page 8
