Will Save the Galaxy for Food

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  “You know, you’ll laugh when you hear this,” I said hopefully. “But I was actually planning to do something along the same lines.”

  “Yes, McKeown, I am fully aware of that. So all you have to do now is continue according to that plan with the slight modification that we are now partners in the crime.”

  I stopped and turned on my heel, and she promptly froze, hand tightening on the gun. “So you don’t have to keep pointing the gun at me!” I said, exasperated. “We’re on the same page, right?”

  “That will remain to be seen,” replied Warden, gun unmoved. “Proceed to the bridge.”

  I got halfway through turning around again, then stopped. “We don’t need the kids. We can just drop them off when they’re finished sightseeing and make for the Black. Then it’s barely even a crime.”

  “Don’t be dense, McKeown. Henderson would have us blasted out of the sky for disloyalty alone. While we have his son, we have leverage. We can release them as soon as we are out of Henderson’s reach.”

  “All right, so maybe we’re not on the same page. What do you mean, release them? So we’ll cut them loose as soon as we’re in the middle of the Black and give them twenty euroyen for the rickshaw home, will we?”

  “You’re good at improvising. I’ll let you come up with something.”

  By this point we were outside the door to the bridge, and from the other side I could hear scrips and scraps of the most stilted and awkward conversation in the history of courtship. I turned around, keeping my back to the door, and was pinned into place by the gun, still aimed squarely at my chest.

  “Once we go through this door, there’s no turning back,” I advised. “There’ll be no more chances to change your mind. You know perfectly well we could do this without bringing the kids into it. But when we go in there and tell Daniel that he’s being kidnapped, Henderson will be after us both for the rest of our lives.”

  Hints of emotion rippled across her face. A twitch of an eyebrow here, a wobble of the corner of the mouth there. She took a deep breath, and all was stone again. “Henderson is not all powerful. Until recently, I thought that he was. I’d never seen any scheme of his not go entirely according to his desires.”

  She paused lengthily. She was either meditating on the thought or waiting for my prompt. “And then what?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And then, I saw him swallow that a two-bit out-of-work star pilot could actually be Jacques McKeown.”

  “All right,” I sighed. “Fine. You didn’t have to make personal comments. And you can be the one to tell them, then, since you’re insisting.”

  “Fine.” She jiggled the gun barrel. “Open the door.”

  I turned around and did so. Daniel was sitting in his captain’s chair, and Jemima was standing nearby, leaning on his console with arms folded. As we entered, they both boggled at us like deer in headlights.

  “Whoa, is that a gun?” asked Daniel, pertinently.

  “What’s going on?” asked Jemima. Her hands gestured uncertainly behind her. “I’ve got . . . I’m supposed to be back home . . .”

  I looked back at Warden, gathering my hands behind me, looking at her with polite expectation. Bits of her face were quivering again, as if every individual muscle was taking part in a heated debate over whether this was still a good idea. “Well?” I said. “Isn’t there something you’d like to tell our passengers?”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have needled her. Her scowl hardened with determination. “Daniel, Jemima,” she said. “I am kidnapping you. Remain calm and make no attempt to resist, and you will be returned unharmed to your families in due time.”

  The kids maintained their boggle-eyed looks as if she hadn’t said anything at all. Then Daniel smacked both his hands over his eyes with what sounded like quite injurious force, and he emitted the same “URRGHH” sound he’d made at the dinner. Which, with all the ways he could have responded, was frankly not the one I would have put money on.

  “What?” Jemima asked him.

  “My dad is SO embarrassing,” he wailed. “He’s making Ms. Warden pretend to kidnap us because he wants to make it exciting. URRGH. He’s ALWAYS INTERFERING.”

  “Your dad is really weird,” said Jemima.

  I leaned toward an unmoving Warden and whispered as close to her ear as the gun would allow, “Seems like I was wrong back there when I said that that was your last chance to back out.”

  Her face flashed thunder at me. Teasing her probably wasn’t doing me any favors, but I was tired and letting Pragmatism have a rest while Spite had a go on the steering wheel. “I assure you,” she declared to the kids, “this is not an act. Take your phones out, turn them off, and give them to me.” To me, she said, “Get into the pilot’s seat. Set a course.”

  I shrugged, and made my way around the perimeter of the bridge to the pilot console as Jemima in the center watched, worried, rotating like a lighthouse.

  “Do you have any specific guidelines for what direction to take?” I said, swiping onto the navigation map.

  “Just get us out of system surveillance,” ordered Warden, placing a hand on my chair’s backrest while trying to keep the gun trained on both of the kids at once. “Then make for the pirate base you think best suited for our needs.”

  I rubbed my chin as I inspected the poorly detailed representation of what was colloquially referred to as “the Black”: the portion of known space that fell outside the policed zones surrounding the Solar System and every other major human settlement. A significantly large majority of the galaxy that only I and my peers were willing to attempt to cross without Quantunneling. “And our needs are to find a pirate clan that won’t immediately strip us for parts the moment we show up in a glittering bonanza yacht,” I said, partly to myself.

  “Yes, Mr. McKeown, that adequately describes our needs.”

  Den and Mark would probably be the best bet, I thought. Our relationship was based on mutual dislike, but they technically owed me one. “Right then,” I muttered, plotting a course for the asteroid belt near Cantrabargid. Warden leaned over my shoulder, watching my inputs carefully.

  “Um, hi,” said Jemima, directly behind us.

  Warden spun and pointed my gun at her. Jemima cringed apologetically, holding out a smartphone in a pink case that matched her hair.

  “Sorry,” said Jemima. “Here’s my phone. But, er, hey, if this is something Mr. Henderson arranged, could we do it, you know, some other time, only I didn’t tell my mum . . .”

  Warden sighed like a housewife whose nervous dog was terrified of the vacuum cleaner and took the phone. “I’m afraid I do not care about how your mother feels about it, Jemima. Mr. Henderson did not organize this and I am actually kidnapping you.”

  “She says she’s actually kidnapping us,” called Jemima back to Daniel.

  “Well, she isn’t,” said Daniel stubbornly. “It’s my stupid dad.”

  Warden stood politely still as Jemima held her chin, frowned, and scrutinized Warden and the gun. “Are you sure? I mean, this is exactly the sort of thing that tends to happen with, you know, people who work for your dad.”

  “No, it’s totally my dad.”

  “But can you be sure?”

  “Yeah, ’cos he’s telling me so.”

  There was an audible snap sound as Warden and I both whipped our necks around to look at Daniel. He was holding a slim, expensive phone to his ear and listening with eyes rolled heavenward.

  Warden’s face, already pale from a lifetime of staying in doing administration, turned the color of an unpainted papier mâché project. Then she moved with the suddenness of a jumping spider, launching herself at Daniel’s phone. She misjudged the height of the metallic railing around the captain’s chair and face planted into the deep-pile carpet.

  Her head rose, after an embarrassed second of stillness, to meet the gaze of a startled Daniel, who was almost leaning far enough back in his chair to turn himself two-dimensional. He held out his phone toward Warden. “He wants
to talk to you.”

  And then, she was on her feet again. It was that fast. There was no messy struggling to get the limbs into place; she simply zipped upright. There was maybe the briefest glimpse of a transitionary phase, during which she appeared to be in the fetal position about one foot off the floor, and then she was standing, smoothing down the creases in her business attire.

  All eyes were on her as she took the phone and, her hand shaking almost imperceptibly, held it to her ear. “Yes,” she said, after listening for a few tense moments. “Yes,” she added, gaining confidence. “Ye-es,” she clarified.

  Her conversation with Henderson continued in this rather monotonous fashion until she suddenly glanced at me. “Yes,” she reiterated, thoughtfully. She offered the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Her complexion was far beyond merely pale. She looked like all her blood had been replaced with correctional fluid. I took the phone from a hand resembling a bunch of cold chicken bones in a surgical glove.

  I took the phone and felt a little spark of hope. Warden was weakened, dividing her attention between too many factors. Perhaps this was the opportunity to throw her back into the clutches of the bear while I made a run for it. I brought the phone to my ear.

  “I already told him we’re working together on this,” said Warden, apparently reading the look on my face.

  “Hello, Jacques,” came Mr. Henderson’s voice, dangerously level. “How is Daniel’s trip going?”

  I’d been preparing some statement along the lines of “oh god she’s gone insane send help,” but Warden’s comment closely followed by Henderson’s greeting had derailed my words on their way to my mouth. “Whurt?” was all I could manage.

  “Jacques, could you do me a favor?” said the familiar voice on the phone, entirely devoid of Henderson’s usual good cheer.

  “Mr. Henderson,” I said, trying to get things back on track.

  “Could you look behind you? Could you do that for me?”

  I was peering over my shoulder before it could even occur to me to disobey, and I found myself staring at a blank section of bulkhead by the door, allegedly gold colored but more like the color of urine. “Why?”

  “Now look down.”

  I did so, straining uncomfortably. I saw only the backs of my shoes, or at least the small percentage of them that extruded from the ridiculously thick carpet. “Yes?”

  “What you’re doing there, Jacques, is watching your back. And I just wanted to give you a head start, because you’re going to be doing a lot of that from now on. By which I mean watching your back. Jacques.”

  “Oh,” I said, grimly. “Mr. Henderson, whatever Warden said . . .”

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong. It’s heartwarming, it really is. You and her running off together, love triumphant across the class divide.” There was a wobble in his spiteful tone of voice that was probably more to do with murderous rage than being touched by the romance. “I’ve got a lump in my throat. Have you got a lump in your throat, Jacques?”

  I couldn’t decide what aspect of this conversation was the most horrifying. “What?”

  “’Cos if you do, I’ve got a whole room full of knives expressly designed for removing that sort of thing. Now, I know you’re a man who’s had a lot of empty threats, so I won’t waste your time. First thing I’m going to do now is call your publisher and see exactly how much trouble I can make for you, yeah?”

  I hastened to get a word in edgeways. “But! But . . . what about . . . Daniel?”

  “Oh, I thought that went without saying. I’m going to have all my best talent hound you to the edge of the universe, and then, as long as not a hair on Danny’s head has been harmed, I will make your deaths as quick as I can be bothered to make them. Oh, but I hate planning too far ahead. Maybe I’ll just wing it, yeah? See you soo-oon.” He hung up, with furious speed.

  I grimaced, despondent, at the dead screen of the phone. I shared a stony-faced, tight-lipped glance with Warden.

  “So embarrassing,” said Daniel.

  Chapter 14

  “Well, thanks a plying bunch,” I muttered, hands on the joysticks, bitterly jerking them like a cuckolded farmhand at the cow’s udders.

  “For what?” asked Warden, perching on the console beside me, for want of another chair. She’d only just returned from throwing Jemima and Daniel’s smartphones out of the airlock, and the airlock still wasn’t properly sealed, so her hair had become a lot more tangled.

  “Getting me caught up in your psycho-div kidnap plan.”

  “We already agreed that we both had an interest in fleeing to the Black.”

  “I didn’t agree to saying as much to Henderson’s plying face,” I ­pointed out. “And I want it on record that I was completely against bringing the kids into this.” I half turned in my chair and meaningfully caught Jemima’s gaze.

  “Is this some kind of good-kidnapper, bad-kidnapper thing?” she asked, twiddling her fingers.

  “If it makes you feel any better, McKeown,” said Warden, pushing every word out of her mouth like a bitter cherry stone, “I am the one who has flung themselves into the unknown. You are the one who has experience with the Black. I am not the one who has friends among pirates.”

  “Friends?” I repeated. “I give them things they want and they don’t blow me up. They’re not on my plying Christmas-card list.”

  “Maybe you should, you know, park somewhere and think your plan through properly?” called Jemima. Two factions had naturally formed within the bridge around the only two available chairs. Daniel was still in the captain’s seat, with Jemima perched on one of his armrests. He had crammed himself aside in case he accidentally were so ungallant as to touch her posterior with his elbow.

  “Ugh,” said Daniel, bored. “Please don’t go along with my dad’s stupid plan to take over my holiday like he always does.”

  “I don’t know, dude, I think it might be for real,” said Jemima conspiratorially. “You saw how she went for your phone. She went, you know, mental.”

  “Dad just didn’t want the surprise being spoiled. She’s probably taking us to some lame pizza restaurant so he can sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and be really embarrassing.”

  Warden watched them, testily. She was holding my blaster loosely by her side. My chair was on casters. At any moment I could have made a swift kick, followed by a swift grab, and then she’d have to stop pretending to be the one in charge.

  And then I could wave my doints around like a big, strong man before going back to doing exactly what we were already doing. Because any victory I could have over Warden at this point would be a hollow one with Henderson on our tail. Like it or not—and that was a pretty huge and emphatic “or not” as “or nots” go—I was going to have to see this kidnapping thing through. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t grumble as I flew the ship and tried not to think about being savaged by reindeer sweaters.

  After a couple of hours of awkward nonconversation, we reached the trebuchet gate that served the Solar System. This was the first step in getting some serious distance between us and our many problems on Earth and Luna.

  Trebuchet gates were the answer to long-distance space travel before quantum tunneling came along. They were massive corkscrew-like devices that harnessed the kinetic energy from the movements of nearby star systems to slingshot individual ships massive distances within a sort of static warp bubble missile. Most of the galaxy was littered with the things. In fact, the standard definition of “known space” was “everything within a certain distance of a trebuchet gate.” They had the advantage over quantum tunneling in that you didn’t need to have another device at the destination point for them to work—you just had to be prepared for whatever unknown horrors you might end up stranded in the middle of.

  Quantunneling could claim every other advantage, of course. Like lower energy usage. A lot of space environmentalists had complained that the trebuchet gate system had accelerated the life cycles of several stars by many millions
of years and had robbed their systems of the chance of ever supporting life. And then there was the issue that trebuchet jumping was an inexact science at best, and that there were still one or two cases per year of ships being hurled directly into solid objects and being reduced to two-­dimensional stains on the surface.

  Still, I’d always felt that the danger and gross overuse of energy was part of the romance and adventure that gave star piloting its allure. A small chance of death was the spice of life. Nevertheless, I opted not to mention any of this to my passengers.

  The trebuchet gate was visible through the viewing dome. I started moving us along the illuminated spaceway leading up to it, which had originally been intended to manage the queue, and which was now, of course, deserted. I was about to key in to the gate’s automated systems when I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket.

  It must have been able to refresh its battery now we were near a modern electrical system with wireless charge support. I glanced at Warden. She was keeping her eye on the kids as they took in the sight of the trebuchet gate’s coiling form. I subtly nudged my phone halfway out of the pocket to see the screen. “Unknown Number,” it said.

  I made a snap decision. “Bathroom break,” I said, getting up.

  Warden glanced at the view screen. “Can it not wait until we’re out of the system?”

  I glanced over my shoulder when I was already halfway to the door. “Nah, it’s smartest to be as biologically evacuated as possible before starting a trebuchet jump,” I said. Again, it was easiest to con people with the truth.

  Once I was in the corridor with my back to the closed door, I took the call, holding the phone like it could turn red hot and burn my ear at any moment. “Hello?”

  “Is this Mr. Jacques McKeown, the author?” The voice was female, businesslike, and sounded slightly worried with just the mildest injection of spite.

  I looked back at the door for an instant, as if I could somehow see Warden through it. “Yes, that’s me,” I said unhappily. “Who is this?”