Billows of smoke and steam lick away, engulfing the other spaceships nearby.
“All personnel and visitors exit the launch zone immediately,” quacks an automated announcement from my iPad.”T minus ten to the scheduled launch of the … Skint Idjit. Exit the launch zone immediately.”
A sonic boom echoes down from the clouds.
I’m alone.
CHAPTER 4
IMOGEN KINCAID
FRIENDLY, RELIABLE, PUNCTUAL
Lying on my back on the wet rock, I hold Imogen’s business card up to the backlight of my iPad.
CALL 24/7
ORBITAL PICK-UPS BY REQUEST
She really is a taxi driver.
The rain’s running in around the edges of my gas mask, stinging my temples. I roll over onto my stomach and call her freedial number.
“Imogen?” Cough, cough. “Erm, this is Fletch …” cough … “we met earlier at the Pravda, if you recall …” I just manage to tell her where I am before I end the call and lie face down, wheezing.
There’s a bit of litter stuck to the rock. Green litter. No, it isn’t, either. It’s grass.
Would you believe that? Some little seed, exported from Earth to brighten up the subterranean bunkers of Arcadia, has found its way out here and managed to grow, despite the acid rain, the wind, and the regular spaceship launches.
I find this so inspiring that I show it to Imogen when she arrives to pick me up. “Look at that! It’s alive!”
“Wow,” she says politely, through her mask.
“It gives you hope, doesn’t it?”
“How do you mean?”
Her taxi is a Honda the size of a sixteen-wheeler. These little space shuttles are used for ground-to-orbit transfer. If a captain doesn’t want to land, which I understand perfectly, it’s nothing but trouble down here, he’ll just arrange for a taxi to rendezvous with his ship. They can do it for cheaper, anyway, The Isp of antigrav engines starts to make sense once you whittle your mass down under a few tons. We bundle Jonesy into the boot, strap him down, and strap ourselves into the cab for take-off.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Imogen says. “But you’re carting a corpse into orbit, chasing a spaceship that took off without you, for unexplained reasons …”
“I can explain—”
She holds up one of those cute pudgy little hands. “I don’t want you to explain. It’s more fun this way.” Unexpectedly, she’s choking with laughter. “Do you have to be nuts to work in the exploration industry, or is it just you?”
“I’m the soul of rationality next to most people I know,” I say, bitterly.
“Was that guy really a drug mule?”
“How did you know?”
“It’s all over Reddit.”
Gee-force presses us back against our seats. Rain streaks the windows, and then abruptly stops as we rise through Arcadia’s cloud blanket.
The light of Arcadia’s moon paints the clouds as white as cotton wool. It also illuminates the silver hoop of the Interstellar Railroad, encircling the planet.
Rationality is a crock; our Enlightenment philosophers suckered us. One look at the Railroad is enough to prove that we’ll never, ever understand how reality is put together. This monumental A-tech artifact, stretching from one end of the galaxy to the other, is apparently made of pure energy, with the ability to fold spacetime. On the Railroad you can travel up to ten lightyears in a single hour, and nary a sniff of relativistic time-dilation has ever been detected. Suck it up, Einstein.
The bits that loop around planets are less weird. You can go at regular orbital velocities.
Blips of light glide along the loop over our heads. Each one is a spaceship on its way to or from the local junction.
“That’s her,” I shout.
I can tell the Skint Idjit by the fact that she’s causing a traffic jam on the loop, everything else stacking up behind her like cars stuck behind a tractor.
The taxi rises towards the Railroad’s altitude of 9,000 miles, gradually converging with the Skint Idjit. Higher orbits are slower orbits, so we’ve got a chance of catching up. Imogen turns out to be great at this. Hunched over her controls, she chats to her AI assistant and occasionally sings snatches of Broadway musicals. I’m so excited I hardly notice we’re in freefall, which I hate.
The Railroad fills the sky, its twin shimmering arcs joined by ghostly ties.
The Idjit zooms towards us, and Imogen finesses the taxi onto a collision course.
“Bullseye!” she yells. “Am I good or what, baby?”
With a tooth-rattling jolt, the taxi’s grapples lock onto the Idjit’s hull. They are made of LiquidMetal. They stiffen into flexible legs. The Honda walks like a huge lobster to the crew airlock and squats on it.
“You’re amazing, love.” I give her a kiss. She’s shaking with exhilaration.
My phone doesn’t work up here, so I borrow the taxi’s radio. “Hello, hello Idjit. I hope you didn’t think you could get rid of me that easily!”
A chime signals that the airlocks have mated.
The taxi’s airlock is on the driver’s side, so when it opens, the first person they see is Imogen.
And the first person I see is the sharp-suited fella from the cemetery.
He’s still wearing his sunglasses and all.
Aiming a Glock at my face.
“Put your hands up,” he says, grinning.
I’m fecked if I will …
I’m fecked.
“No need for that.” I force a smile. “I’m just undoing my harness … hands in full view … I’m getting out …”
I slide across Imogen and stand up in the Idjit’s airlock, a short corridor that leads to the crew deck. The other end is closed. With the artificial gravity on, I weigh about half as much as I did on Arcadia, and so does Sharp Suit. A bandage around his left hand testifies to the bravery of the cemetery workers.
Behind him stands one of his confederates, with the Captain. The Captain is wearing his new exoskeleton. The goon is pointing a gun at his helmet, which might be bulletproof, but probably isn’t, given our luck.
“I didn’t mean to trip you in the cemetery,” I say apologetically to Sharp Suit. “These things just happen.”
He frowns. He’s got no idea what I’m talking about. “Your wookie hurt one of my friends.”
Bloody, bloody Woolly. I knew it.
“Sorry, Fletch,” the Captain says miserably. “I shouldn’t have launched. It was reflex.”
I nod. I’ve got the same reflex myself, after all. Trouble? Run away.
But I do not see how we’re going to run away from this one.
“Where is the body?” Sharp Suit suddenly shouts, so loudly that I flinch.
“It’s right here, Grigor,” sings out Imogen.
She’s crawling between the front seats of the taxi and snapping the pressure lock of the boot. Sharp Suit barks something in Russian at his confederate, who crawls into the boot after Imogen. The two of them haul Jonesy out between the seats. Jonesy is still in the exoskeleton so it’s like fitting a fridge up the stairs.
“A bit smelly, but undamaged,” Imogen chirps.
She doesn’t met my eyes, which is something.
Of course she wasn’t smitten by my forty-three-year-old body and my sexy accent. They set her on me, and if I hadn’t called her from the spaceport she’d have turned up anyway.
I should have taken my own advice and gone to church.
“Nice work, Imogen,” says Grigor. “The bill of lading,” he barks at me.
“Oh, right here. I’m just going to move my hand to the pocket of my jeans,” I narrate. “I’m getting out my iPad …”
There is something else in my pocket. I palm it. Then I carefully give Grigor my iPad.
He scowls at the screen. “Asparagus?!?”
“Click through to the documents folder.”
He swipes, clicks, and growls happily, “OK. This is the right body.”
The
Captain’s voice emerges from the grille beneath his new exoskeleton’s faceplate. “So who is he?”
“You don’t recognize him?” Grigor laughs.
“Should we?”
“His daddy is a very important man. You will be in a lot of trouble for transporting him improperly.” Grigor disdainfully flicks Jonesy’s exoskeleton with a fingernail. “This is not coffin.”
Jonesy sits up and punches him in the face.
I palmed the remote control when I took my iPad out of my pocket, and now I’m working the little joystick for all I’m worth. Grigor yowls and falls over backwards, blood spraying from his nose.
I drop to the floor of the airlock. Jonesy stands up and kicks Grigor while he’s down. That’s my idea of a fair fight.
A gunshot deafens me. The ricochet dents the floor in front of my nose.
“Feck—away—off—my—ship!” the Captain roars.
He hurls the second Bratva thug over my head, a superhuman feat. That new exoskeleton was worth the price, after all.
Grigor is on his knees, reaching for his Glock, but I grab it before he does.
“Your taxi is waiting, I believe,” I gloat.
“Do you know who I work for?!?”
“I’m guessing Samsung,” I say. His eyes pop.
“It’s all true,” Imogen says defiantly. Her eyes glisten with tears of pure frustation. I know how she feels. “They hired me as a developer. Then they fired me over some petty shit, and if I want my job back, I’ve got to prove myself.”
“So go on,” I say softly to her. “Do it.”
She gasps angrily, and does.
She scrambles back into her taxi and mashes the airlock-close button.
The mated A-tech valves squelch shut. I smile. The taxi detaches with a clank and falls away.
“Well now,” I say to Grigor and his accomplice. “What are we going to do with you?”
The Captain clanks back to the inner end of the airlock and opens it. Still facing the two Samsung contractors, I toss the remote over my shoulder.
“Got it,” Morgan calls.
I duck as Jonesy sails into the ship. Then I back away after him. Woolly catches me and drags me out of the airlock.
Grigor and his accomplice, finally understanding what lies in store for them, rush towards me—too late. I slam the airlock, cycle the chamber, and laugh maniacally as the pair of them are swept into space by the force of the escaping air.
They’ll be fine. They’ve got re-entry parachutes.
We watch them fall from the bridge. They plummet into the cloud cover just before the curvature of the planet hides them from us.
“Do you think they’ll inform on us?” the Captain says worriedly.
“How can they?” I say, and turn to the dead body in the exoskeleton. “Come on, Jonesy, let’s get you in the freezer.” I’m still calling him Jonesy although I’ve finally remembered where I know him from. Television. It was Grigor who tipped me off. “We’re only doing the job we were hired to do: taking the vice-president of Google’s son home to his grieving family.”
CHAPTER 5
Deep in the Perseus Arm of the galaxy lies a planet called Hell’s Armpit.
If you remember how Arcadia got its name, you can probably guess the next bit.
Hell’s Armpit teems with adorable alien wildlife, ranging from the size of a mouse to a woolly mammoth. All of them are herbivores. These gentle creatures frolic over several small continents fringed by warm seas, which are covered with woodlands abounding in delicious fruit and gorgeous flowers.
There’s suspicion that the whole planet was engineered by the aliens we call the Pinheads—it’s just too perfect—but that wouldn’t have kept the hoi polloi out.
Nor would the clever-clogs name of Hell’s Armpit. It’s a wee bit obvious, you’ll agree.
No, the reason Hell’s Armpit has not been overrun by refugees from Earth’s boring suburbs is because of its existing population, who number in the low hundreds. They include:
Six Fortune 500 trillionaires
Their families
And their servants.
One of said trillionaires is the vice-president of Google, and that is how the crew of the Skint Idjit ends up spending the weekend in the spaceport hotel in Brin Land. After five months on the Railroad, it feels like we’ve died and gone to heaven. ‘Spaceport hotel’ conjures up visions of cockroaches, leaks, and overpriced minibars, but this is a luxury beach resort with a spaceport attached. I woke up this morning to the crashing of surf, the smell of alien flowers, and the even better smell of hot coffee delivered to the door of my personal villa by unseen hands.
“One day,” I tell the Captain, “I’m going to live like this.”
He laughs mordantly. Then sees I am dead serious. I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror—it’s red and clenched.
“Want to live like this? It’s easy!” Morgan says. “Just inherit a software empire.”
I force myself to laugh. “I think I’ll make the A-tech discovery of the decade instead.” I spike my coffee with brandy from the overpriced minibar (nothing’s perfect) and stand on my verandah, watching the rest of the crew play with the furry sea slugs on the beach.
“The big man wants to meet with us at nine,” the Captain says nervously.
“I know, I know. Coming.”
We delivered our parcel of grief yesterday. The VP took it like a man, jaw set, very polite. After all, he’s had months to get used to the news—the Interstellar Postal Service may be limited to 20x the speed of light but it’s faster than any cargo ship can go. When we arrive at the VP’s treetop mansion, he welcomes us into an airy room with a tree growing through the floor. Clumps of flowers nod over little waterfalls. You can’t tell if you’re inside or outside, and I love it. There’s probably a retractable roof for when it rains.
My enthusiasm cools a bit when I see Kensington Page—as Jonesy is really called—laid out in a glass coffin like bleeding Cinderella.
There’s a hole in the middle of the coffin and from Jonesy’s tastefully white-draped midsection springs a green shoot.
I stare, the Captain stares, Morgan stares.
“Aha,” says the VP. “I thought you’d like to see how poor Kensington will live on as a part of Hell’s Armpit.”
He pulls out a Gpad—of course you wouldn’t catch him using the competitor’s products—and calls up a picture of a white flower with star-like petals. “The Kadupul orchid,” he says reverentially. “I’m an collector, as you can see …”
Oh, so that’s what all these flowers are. I thought they were local.
“The climate of Hell’s Armpit is perfect for breeding rare orchids. Kensington was my partner in our little enterprise, and he looked forward to completing our collection.” The VP passes the picture of the Kadupul orchid around. “Worth a hundred million dollars, give or take,” he says, and I nearly drop the Gpad.
Jesus Christ. We had a hundred million bucks in the freezer and I never knew?
The Captain coughs—as shocked as I am, for different reasons. He’s a decent man. Before he can make some unwise comment about how the VP seems to care more about his orchids than his son, I jump in with, “Isn’t that what they call gilding the lily?”
I’m a wee bit upset myself. This isn’t how the mega-rich should behave.
“What do you mean?” says the VP.
“Well, I mean Hell’s Armpit’s got its own plant life. The flowers are out of this world; I was smelling them this morning. It seems a bit pointless to bring orchids from Earth all the way out here.”
“Aha, I get you,” the VP says. “But after all, the galaxy is interconnected now. The Milky Way is a human lake!”
That’s not exactly what I meant, and he must notice my skeptical expression. Before we leave, he takes me aside. He’s holding an aerosol can. “You mentioned gilding the lily,” he says confidingly. “This is gilding the lily.”
He selects a lovely white flower and sprays
it gold.
“Twenty-four carats,” he says, and grins, with tears in his eyes.
The rich are different from you and me. When they suffer a terrible loss they can plunge into orchid-collecting or gadget-developing, instead of into a pint of Guinness.
And I will join their number one day—after our visit to Hell’s Armpit, I’m more motivated than ever. But still, as we return to the Skint Idjit, I remember that little shoot of grass pushing through the rock of Arcadia’s spaceport. For my money that was prettier than any $100 million flower.
THE RELUCTANT ADVENTURES OF FLETCHER CONNOLLY ON THE INTERSTELLAR RAILROAD
An Irishman in space. Untold hoards of alien technological relics waiting to be discovered. What could possibly go wrong?
Rubbish With Names (prequel)
Skint Idjit
Intergalactic Bogtrotter
Banjaxed Ceili
Supermassive Blackguard
Rubbish With Names: An Interstellar Railroad Story Page 3
