“Emily,” said the alleged Emily, as if I should have known that. “Emily from Blasé Books. Your publisher. I’ve sent you emails?”
“Ohhh,” I said, nodding slowly as my eyes darted around. “Yeeeeah. Emily.”
“Is this a bad time?” asked Emily. I’m fairly certain there was sarcasm in there.
“No, no, not at all,” I said. “What’s this about?”
“Is that all you have to say, Mr. McKeown? We’ve been trying to open a dialogue with you for years. You never reply to emails, you refuse to give us your phone number . . . but you’re happy to give it out to some very strange man you’re doing some kind of contract work for?”
I assembled a few puzzle pieces in my head. “Henderson called you?”
“I think that was what he called himself, yes. He was really very angry about something. I didn’t catch the full details. The moment I got a word in edgeways I asked for the number he had for you.”
I rubbed my eye with my free hand. “Did he tell you to . . . do something to me? Something I wouldn’t like?”
She didn’t seem to be listening. “It really is very maddening that we have only now been able to talk one to one. It’s really very unprofessional. And might I suggest, Mr. McKeown, that perhaps you wouldn’t need to take contract work if you would finally allow us to pay you for—”
“Emily, please, listen. This man, Henderson, what did he tell you to . . .” I finally parsed the sentence I’d interrupted. “Uh. Pay me for what?”
“No, Jacques, Henderson doesn’t want to pay you anything. Please pay attention; it’s really very rude. We are the ones who are trying to pay you.”
“Pay me for what?” I repeated patiently.
“For books! Remember? Those books we publish? That you write? Honestly, what else would we want to pay you for? Look, I have your number and your chip ID now. Can I just transfer the money to the associated account?”
“Yes,” I said. The word escaped before it had even had a chance to cross my mind. I was, after all, still a star pilot. “But hold on. Are you saying that Mc. . . that I haven’t been paid for a book?”
There were some slightly adorable shocked noises before the reply came. “For goodness’ sake, Mr. McKeown, what on earth kind of income do you have that you haven’t noticed? We haven’t paid you for any books. Not until now. Every time we email we ask for your bank details, but all you ever send to us is manuscripts. We even tried searching the bank databases for your name and address, but that came up empty. Really very unprofessional. Have you considered hiring an agent if you’re so busy?”
“Sorry,” I said, dreamily. My head was starting to spin. I leaned on a bulkhead for comfort.
“It’s all right, Mr. McKeown. It’s just that the tax people were starting to ask questions about all this money we allegedly paid you still sitting in our account. Oh, and since you’re answering the phone now, I wonder if you’d like to hear a couple of appearance offers. Some of them could be really very effective . . .”
My arm suddenly lacked the strength to hold my phone up. It fell to my side, causing the call to automatically end. I’d just stolen from the real Jacques McKeown. I’d plied him up on behalf of all pilotkind.
My arm strength suddenly returned and the phone came back up again so I could check the balance on my account. Then I had to bring my other hand up to swipe across because the number wouldn’t fit on the screen. It was the kind of amount that makes you immediately terrified of the inevitable karmic backlash.
Right on cue, the door beside me flew open, and Warden was there. Her eyes flicked from the phone in my hand to my face, and she bared her teeth. “Who were you talking to?” she demanded. Then something approaching concern crossed her face. “McKeown, you’ve gone white. Who was that on the phone? Henderson? You should’ve gotten rid of it.”
I couldn’t help myself. Right then and right there, I had to share it with someone. It was too big for one mind to toss around alone. And Warden might have been right up there on my least favorite people in the universe list, but she was the only one who knew who I really was. “Not Henderson. Publisher. Jacques McKeown has never gotten around to collecting his money. Henderson told them I was him, so they’ve just sent me everything they owed him.”
Warden’s brow immediately made like a car crash. She was born of the corporate environment, of course, so this clearly made even less sense to her than it did to me. “You have stolen McKeown’s royalties?”
“Yeah,” I said. A slightly insane grin pulled my lips apart now that I had sounded it all out, and I laughed. “Yeah! That plying story-stealing bracket, profiting off us all while we’re eating out of the bins. Looks like we got the last laugh!”
She rolled her eyes around, thinking. “Except, if what you’re saying is true, he has not profited at all. He has not accepted any money for exploiting you people.”
A few unpleasant thoughts dropped into my mind with echoey, ominous plops. My elation was still there, somewhere, but now it felt like someone listening to very loud music at the back of a funeral service. “Yeah . . .”
“But now you have.”
Her statement hung in the air for a moment, then some kind of missile struck the ship, and we were both flung into the bulkhead. I laboriously disentangled myself from Warden and made it most of the way back to my console, just in time for another missile to fling me off my feet and cause my face to smash into the back of my chair.
“We’re under attack!” relayed Jemima. She was almost fully crouched and clinging to the center railing with both hands.
Daniel was still sitting in the captain’s chair, propping his chin on his hand indifferently. “Now he’s just trying way too hard.”
I threw myself into the pilot seat and checked the damage report. The ship informed me with large flashing red letters that it had “sustained damage.” This plying ship had the computer interface of a poorly researched movie. But none of the major functions seemed to be damaged and there were no hull breaches. I suspected it was a warning shot, even though such things are traditionally supposed to miss.
I brought the ship around to face the blips on the radar and saw a cluster of buff-colored ships arranged in a threatening attack pattern. I saw two of them break from the group and move across into a flanking position, covering both sides of the route to the trebuchet gate.
“It’s not pirates, is it?” thought Jemima aloud. “We’re still in the policed areas, aren’t we?”
“No, it’s not pirates—it’s my dad,” insisted Daniel.
“He may have a point,” muttered Warden, suddenly beside me again. “Henderson will be sending mercenaries. But . . .”
“But they shouldn’t have found us this quickly,” I finished, distracted by my display. I had brought up a zoomed view of what seemed to be the leading ship. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. It had the faintly organic design I associated with the just barely spacefaring extrasolar races, who were still more comfortable with designing plows and combine harvesters than spaceships. But there were also custom augmentations more consistent with human aesthetics—a sleeker nose cone, an out-of-place set of silver fins.
The pilot hailed us with a video call, and an image immediately came up of a hulking figure completely silhouetted against firelight. Nevertheless, I recognized him immediately. An open fire in an enclosed atmosphere will lead to death or the need for a supremely expensive air filtration system. Either of which requires a psychotic level of devotion to your image.
“Angelo,” I said, by way of greeting.
“Address me not by that name, steward of falsehood,” boomed the man I had last seen getting his armor polished at Frobisher’s laundry. “Bad enough that for years thou would sully the same air as I, professing hatred for deeds thou thyself had committed. Bad enough that, without thee addressing me with such familiarity.”
“Friend of yours,” said Warden quietly, very slightly a question, but mostly identifying aloud wi
th no small amount of relief.
I was almost relieved, too. My list of potential threats had been fluctuating so wildly lately I’d almost forgotten that all my former colleagues still wanted me dead. There was something comforting about knowing that at least one state of affairs remained stable. “Listen, A—er. What would you rather I call you, then?”
He shifted in his seat, and for a moment, a flicker of firelight revealed that he was leaning on the hilt of his sword. “Address me as Nemesis, as I name thee Traitor,” he growled. “Address me as the avenging hammer of justice, brought down upon thee as though all pilotkind doth hold the hilt.”
Behind me, I heard Jemima audibly untense. “Oh, thank God. This whole thing actually had me going for a while. I really literally thought we were being kidnapped for real.”
“I told you. It’s so fake, isn’t it,” said Daniel.
The emotionless blackness of Angelo’s silhouetted face glared at me. “Um,” I said. “Listen. Mr. Nemesis . . .”
“Your companions would mock me?” he hissed. All those years of hunting jungle monsters to lay their carcasses before his uninterested alien queen had made his hearing pretty sharp. “Inform them that I would not spare thy household to reduce thee to stardust, Traitor.”
I shushed the children, then made a gesture with my hands as if holding up an invisible volleyball. “Okay. Hear me out,” I said to the unmoving black outline on the screen. “I actually have a really large amount of money . . .”
Angelo’s ship, still visible in the zoomed-in view, launched a missile. A white triangle expanded rapidly, filling the view as the torpedo sped toward us.
I slammed on the joysticks, and the Platinum God of Whale Sharks—or the Jemima, depending—immediately began to speculate upon the possibility of taking evasive action. The ship’s components finally reached enough of a consensus and she began lumbering into a barrel roll, at which point an explosion in her underbelly accelerated it a bit.
“Face thy death with dignity, Jacques McKeown,” said Angelo. “Do not waste thy final moments with bargains. Use them to decide which of thy many names shall adorn thy tombstone.”
I checked the readout. According to the one warning window that wasn’t a pop-up advertisement, we had a hull breach. It was in food storage, which was easy enough to section off from the rest of the internal environment, but most of the ship’s inventory of potato chips and ice cream was now lost to the pitiless void of space.
Warden took the opportunity to address the communicator. “Enemy vessel. There are innocents onboard this ship.”
“She’s right, there are,” I said, nodding rapidly.
“Thou would hide behind children,” sneered Angelo. “Your dishonor knows new depths with every passing second.”
“Trying way too ha-ard,” commented Daniel in a singsong voice.
“It’s not very realistic with the whole medieval-talk thing, is it?” added Jemima, not quietly enough. “It’s really, you know, twentieth century.”
“Listen,” I hissed, leaning close to Warden. “Push the innocents thing. These guys are big on honor.”
She nodded and turned back to the communicator. “Enemy ship,” she said. “Would you be willing to spare the rest of us if McKeown surrendered to you alone?”
I immediately shoved her away and started making static sounds with my mouth. “Pssssh! You’re breaking up! Stay on the line! Krsssssssh pksssssssssh.” Then I ended the call and opened and closed my fists at Warden a few times before finding the words. “What is wrong with your brain?”
“I was merely assessing all available options,” she said coldly.
I gestured to the ships. “Those brackets are all-or-nothing lads,” I said. “It’s like seeking forgiveness and asking permission. They might have let you go if you hadn’t been so unclassy as to ask them.”
“Nevertheless, we seem to have given them pause for thought.”
Together, we looked at the ships, hanging silently and unmoving in space. And then, after a couple of seconds’ contemplation time, every single one of them started emitting volleys of blaster fire.
This time, I was somewhat more prepared, and the engines had warmed up a little, so I was able to use the sheer distance between me and them to anticipate where the shots were going and carefully arrange for the ship to be elsewhere. But the distance was closing fast.
The Platinum God of Whale Sharks actually had a fairly competitive top speed. It was just getting there that was the problem; the thing accelerated like manure making its way out of a cow’s arse. I pulled both joysticks back with one arm and used the other to set everything I could find on the touchscreen interface to maximum. I could only hope that Angelo and his friends wouldn’t be able to get into close range before our speed topped out.
I scanned the nearby area. Nothing but space. With a few asteroids to weave around, a bit of texture, I’d be in my element, evasionwise. Even without my usual suite of pre-programmed movement sequences, give me a few tons of rock and I could wipe any pursuer off like trac on a tea tray. On a level playing field—and open space is about as level as it gets—then it comes down to who showed up in the best ship. In this case, that debate would end with one word. The word was kaboom.
The trebuchet gate was the way out. All I had to do was make a beeline for it, setting its firing angle as I approached, then get ourselves launched the moment we were in range. The beauty of the system was that it was impossible to tell precisely where we’d be flung to. But before I could do that I had to get into a position where there wasn’t a throng of hairy murderers between us and the gate.
We reached top speed, which was helpfully indicated by the entire ship vibrating violently and ringing with the musical squeaks and pings of screws coming undone. Angelo’s little lynch mob of a fleet kept in hot pursuit, just far enough away to be the size of murderous crows on the viewing screen. I was dodging their missiles with well-timed rolls, but it was only a matter of time before that wouldn’t cut it anymore. Turning at this speed, in this ship, was like pushing a boulder up a hill.
But that gave me an idea. I scrutinized Angelo’s ships through the rear view. They were stocky attack ships, well armored, built for making head-on attacks and soaking up damage. Well suited to Angelo and other overcompensating warrior types of the opinion that dodging is for girls.
All of which meant that they, too, were at a disadvantage at speed. They could deliver a nasty frontal charge to get them in the thick of it as fast as possible, but they lost confidence if the charge went on too long. They couldn’t maneuver well.
“Hold on to something,” I warned, flexing my hands like a concert pianist in preparation. I felt Warden grip the back of my chair urgently.
“You know, this is actually getting exciting,” said Jemima, obediently clutching a length of railing. Daniel grunted and swung his chair back and forth, bored.
I waited for the brief pause between volleys of missiles as the pursuers let their tubes cool down, then made my move. I put both joysticks up, and the ship began to pitch forward, describing a downward arc.
Just as I knew they would, I saw our pursuers begin to plot a similar path, curving downward to get us back into their sights. But at that moment, I dropped our speed to zero. The ship was no better at decelerating, but its turning jets became more and more effective as we slowed, rolling us into a tight little spiral as Angelo’s ships sailed away above us, no doubt wondering where the hell we’d gone.
Then, when our ship was pointing upward, squat nose cone aimed at the dissipating vapor trail Angelo’s fleet had left behind, I put the speed back up to maximum.
That was where it all went wrong. Instead of the expected burst of acceleration, there was a smoky cough from somewhere behind us, something important-sounding made a rather distressing noise, then the engines fell silent.
The touchscreen flashed red and bleeped to itself for a few seconds as I drummed my fingers on the joysticks, frozen in a dynamic piloting pose w
orthy of a dramatic escape.
Warden broke the silence with a polite cough. “What was the plan, McKeown?”
“No one ever looks up,” I muttered.
“Excuse me?”
“If we could have gotten out of their sight and ended up above them, they wouldn’t have figured out where we’d gone until it was too late. ’Cos no one ever thinks to look up. We would’ve been halfway to the gate by the time they realized.”
“I see. So what went wrong?”
“The engine failed.”
“And why did it fail?”
I read the words flashing red before me. “Engine Overheat Error,” it read. “Probable cause: coolant rod deactivated by user.”
“It just did,” I said through my teeth.
Angelo and his hunting party rose back into view like an elevator full of grizzly bears arriving at my floor. I palmed the touchscreen rapidly, but it seemed to have frozen on a red screen stating that, for our comfort and convenience, all engine functions had been disabled for cooling. I took issue with the “comfort” part.
“Make thy peace, Jacques McKeown,” said Angelo, appearing momentarily onscreen again.
“I’m not Jacques McKeown!” I revealed loudly, when their missile tubes began to glow. “They’re making me pretend to be Jacques McKeown for that doint back there!”
“Yeah, I knew that,” said Jemima. Daniel looked over his shoulder, wondering what doint I was talking about.
“Pathetic,” intoned Angelo.
“Well, he’s obviously not the real Jacques McKeown,” said Jemima. “Jacques McKeown’s, like, really rich from all the books and doesn’t need to come out into the open like this.” I nodded rapidly as the phone on which I’d seen my new bank balance started feeling very warm in my pocket.
Angelo’s guns still hadn’t fired, so perhaps we’d at least given him a moment of consideration. The big, sweaty fish was biting at the hook; it was time to start reeling. “You have to admit, there’s room for doubt, isn’t there?” I said, keeping my face placid and tone civil, being the better man. “Whatever you think is most likely, there’s at least a chance that you’re about to kill four innocent people. Half of them children. And then who’ll be the one with no honor, Angelo?”
Will Save the Galaxy for Food Page 12
