Xenotech General Mayhem: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 4)

by Dave Schroeder

  The best way to handle land mines is not to step on them in the first place. My phone used only six legs for movement and devoted most of the mass of its mutacase to extrude a three-foot rod with a sensor on the end. It panned the sensor back and forth in front of its path, mapping out a safe course through the minefield.

  We had to backtrack several times when we ended up in cul-de-sacs where the mines were packed in too tightly to navigate around. The top of the butte had been extensively mined and I was very glad my phone knew where I should go to avoid being blown up. After a few minutes, it became mechanical to shuffle my feet forward along ground that my phone noted, like food additives, was generally recognized as safe. I thought back over the last few hours and marveled how I ended up in this position.

  * * * * *

  My mind and my psyche had still been recovering from several major shocks. I’d been in the house in western Las Vegas where we’d tracked Cornell and doing what one does in the first-floor powder room when I’d heard the sound of the front door opening. Shortly thereafter came the loud, distinctive Soooo-eeeeet! of sweetener blasts, then five heavy thumps. By the time I’d pulled myself together, stepped out, and moved from the hall to the living room, everyone had vanished. I’d raced to the open front door and saw an airship disappearing toward the north.

  The vessel had an uncommon design. It was some sort of blimp that looked like an overinflated upside-down clothes iron inside an aluminum frame, with wings and silent congruent engines on top. It was moving fast. The side of the gasbag closest to me was painted in the black and purple crenelated and crowned hill logo of Chapultepec & Castle. I needed to follow it.

  I must not have been thinking straight, or I would have contacted Tomáso or Shepherd or even Martin to get Queen Sherri’s huge dirigible, the Matriarch of the Skies, to follow the C&C ship. But Tomáso was still recovering from being drugged and I was lost in non-cognitive action mode. I ran to the garage, got in Cornell’s large, silver Mercedes-Kia, overrode the autopilot, and burned rubber trying to keep the odd C&C airship in sight.

  I followed it—with plenty of help from my phone’s telephoto lens function—until I saw it moor to the dock at the oligarch’s fortress villa in the butte whose upper surface I was now trying to cross without turning into hamburger. My phone briefed me on the villa’s security profile, so I drove Cornell’s car around to the rear of the butte on a collection of conjoined potholes pretending to be a road. I was prepared to free-climb the back of the butte in my best navy blue pinstripe suit and was surprised to see a vehicle already parked up ahead, waiting for me.

  I looked at my phone.

  “Initiative,” it said. I could have kissed it.

  Martin got out of a rented Jeep Land Rover and shook my hand.

  “I’ve got your backpack tool bag and suitcases,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  I changed into a comfortable pair of black pants and a long-sleeved black shirt—the outfit I liked to use when playing ninja—and traded dress shoes for sneakers, frightening a prairie dog or two in the process.

  “You might want this,” said Martin, pressing a bundle into my hands when I’d finished tying my shoes. It was a bag with with rope, a small hammer, and mountaineering supplies.

  Machismo be damned. I hugged him.

  “Thank you!”

  Martin hugged me back and gently pushed me toward the base of the cliff.

  “Get moving. I’ll mobilize the appropriate resources,” he said.

  “We don’t want to spook the people holding Poly and…”

  “Duly noted. Dauushan Drop Marines won’t be storming the villa. We’ll be ready—but only when you give the word.”

  This time I didn’t hug him. I just nodded, walked to the cliff, and prepared to start climbing.

  * * * * *

  I pulled myself back into the present. My phone had stopped. We were at the edge of the butte, directly above the windows of the oligarch’s fortress villa.

  The oligarch who owned the place—Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Komanev, according to my phone—had made billions selling natural resources when Siberia declared its independence from Russia back in 2018. He’d moved to the United States, renamed himself Nicky Stone, and hobnobbed with American corporate royalty, playing bridge with Bill Gates and poker with Mark Zuckerberg. Stone had been smart enough to sell his companies before Earth’s business community realized just how cheap access to asteroid mining and teleportation would make raw materials. With billions in cash, Stone bought the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders, the NBA’s Pittsburgh Inclines, and the NHL’s Mexico City Aztecs, turning all three franchises into champions in less than a decade.

  Stone was a fanatic about privacy and security. His fortress villa, carved into the side of a butte, was his ultimate sanctuary. He also rented the place out through Airbnb. Go figure. I didn’t know if that meant Stone might be The General, the secret master behind EUA Corporation, or just an astute businessman trying to monetize an underutilized asset. Either way, the mines would kill me just as dead. I wondered about the rental agreement’s fine print for injuries if any renters stumbled into the mine field.

  “Where’s Nicky Stone right now?” I asked my phone.

  “He just finished giving the Commencement address at Harvard Business School in Cambridge.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That takes him off the suspect list for being The General.”

  “Don’t count on it,” my phone retorted. “Maybe he just wanted an alibi?”

  “What does Chapultepec & Castle want with a Russian—pardon me—Siberian oligarch?”

  “Low off-season rental rates for fortress villas?” responded my phone.

  I stepped forward to stand next to my helpful communications device. Unfortunately, I must have strayed from its carefully selected path. I heard a click underneath my foot.

  “You didn’t,” said my phone.

  “I think I did,” I said ruefully. I was sure triggering a land mine was not on my bucket list. In this case, it would be more like my kick-the-bucket list.

  “Oops,” said my phone.

  “It will go off when I lift my foot, correct?”

  “Uh huh,” said my phone. The fact that it was behaving unlike its usual loquacious self convinced me I was in deep trouble. There was no way I could outrun the blast wave from the mine’s explosives—and I was quite fond of my lower extremities.

  “Is something the matter?” asked Gus from his perch near my right ear.

  “You might say that, bub, if you was payin’ attention,” growled Chit.

  “If that click was a mine being triggered, don’t worry. I can shrink down and put myself between your foot and the mine, then grow fifty feet tall so the blast would only tickle,” said Gus.

  “Don’t bother, bozo,” said Chit. “You’d only set off every security alarm for a quarter mile doin’ somethin’ like that and screw up the rescue.”

  Gus let out a practiced actors’ sigh and my little friend pushed her way out through the space where the hood met my neck on the B.I.T.S. coverall. She tickled. I couldn’t look down far enough to see what she was doing but felt Chit land on my tennis shoe through the canvas. I didn’t need to worry about following her actions—she kept up a running commentary.

  “I’m inside the housing,” said Chit. “These babies are old. Third Gulf War-era conventional explosives. If they’d been modern congruent black hole mines we wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “Good to know,” I said, trying to encourage my little friend’s troubleshooting.

  “There’s a little stirrup I can put over the trigger mechanism to hold it in the down position,” she said. Her deep voice echoed inside the mine’s casing.

  “Be careful,” I said, regretting my words as they left my mouth.

  “Don’t teach your grandma how to suck…”

  “Jack,” said my phone, distracting me. “Poly is in the room directly below us. I can pick up her voice through the rocks. If th
e plans for the fortress villa on Airbnb are correct, she’s in the room with the picture windows on the front of the butte.”

  “Roger that,” I said, “but first things first. How’s it coming little buddy?”

  “One stirrup on,” said Chit. “Now I’m fastenin’ the other one…”

  I held my breath for three beats.

  “Done,” said my little friend.

  “You’re sure it’s safe now?”

  “I ain’t exactly out of the blast radius myself, bucko. Of course it’s safe.”

  I stepped off the trigger plate and nothing happened. Nothing went boom. Chit flew back to my left shoulder, on the outside of my B.I.T.S. suit, this time. Thank goodness she was too small to register as more than a tiny blip on the fortress villa’s security cameras. I started breathing again. Then I heard a mechanical voice below my feet. It was counting down.

  “Ten. Nine. Eight…”

  My fingers scrabbled in the soft dirt below me. They found the edge of the mine and I pulled it out of the ground.

  “Six. Five…”

  Using both hands and a discus-tossing spin, I launched the mine over the near edge of the butte. I could hear it continue to recite as it fell past the top.

  “Three. Two…”

  I threw myself on the ground as a blast loud enough to wake a sleeping teenager assaulted my ears. It was accompanied by the sound of tinkling glass. Fine reddish dust settled over my body. I brushed it off when I stood up.

  “You guys okay?” I asked.

  “I’ve had better days, buddy boy,” said Chit.

  Gus sobbed theatrically and began a soliloquy, “’tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough...”

  Thespians. He must be okay, too. I pulled off my backpack, removed and repacked my B.I.T.S. suit, and got out my climbing rope. After the blast, the idea of trying to sneak up on the fortress villa went out the window with the shattered glass.

  “Hold this,” I said to Gus, now returned to human size. He understood what I was doing and increased his mass to be a better anchor.

  I tossed the rope over the side of the butte and scrambled down it until I was even with where the windows had been. Poly grabbed me and pulled me inside, past a sprinkling of safety glass on the floor. As I’d expected, the windows had been armored and substantially resisted the blast, turning into powder, rather than shrapnel.

  Rosalind was holding a mini-sweetener on a dozen frozen thugs and henchmen piled up against the left hand wall. Cornell was standing at a well-stocked bar, fixing himself a drink, and Max was sitting on the floor in the back of the luxuriously appointed room playing with Verne Wells & Company models of the Nautilus and Martian tripods on the plush carpeting.

  “Where’s Sally?” I asked.

  “Guarding the prisoners,” said Cornell.

  Prisoners? I thought. Weren’t all the prisoners out here?

  “What took you so long?” asked Rosalind.

  “Who cares about that?” added Poly with a smile. She gave me a hug and a more-where-that-comes-from kiss. “What a way to make an entrance!”

  * * * * *

  It all started when…

  Chapter 3

  “Fatherhood is the most amazing thing that

  could ever have happened in my life.”

  — Corey Feldman

  Small arms wrapped around my knees and my universe changed forever.

  My mini-sweetener fell from my fingers and clattered to the porch.

  I reached down and hugged the boy back. I had a son.

  My brain was a jumble of emotions. I felt joy like fireworks exploding, since I’d always wanted children—just maybe not so soon. I felt pain like knives stabbing, since Rosalind had hidden Max from me and I hadn’t been part of his life. I’d never known my own biological father and that lack made it hurt even more not to have known Max from the day he’d first come into the world. I felt anger at Rosalind for manipulating me and spared a moment of lucidity to wonder whether or not she was telling the truth about Max, though one look had been enough to know that he was my child. I felt concern for Poly. She was my business partner, my lover, and—I hoped—would someday be my life partner. She hadn’t signed up for a relationship with a man who’d had a child with another woman.

  None of that mattered now. I went to my knees, so I could be at Max’s level, and looked him in the eyes.

  “Hello, Max,” I said. “It’s wonderful to meet you.”

  “Are you really my daddy?” said the boy. His eyes were shiny.

  I looked up at Rosalind. She nodded, and shrugged a halfhearted apology, as if trying to make up for years of subterfuge. We’d have that conversation later.

  “Uh huh,” I said, giving him another hug.

  We didn’t say anything for a minute—we just held on to each other, neither one of us wanting to let go.

  “Jack,” said my phone, making a throat-clearing noise to get my attention, though it didn’t have anything remotely resembling a throat. It had jumped off my belt and was on the porch beside me, waving half a dozen pseudopods.

  “Later,” I said. I had more important things to do.

  Max and I broke our hug.

  “What do you like to do for fun?” I asked.

  “Take things apart,” said the boy, “and put them back together again.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  Max was looking at my phone. I could almost read his thoughts. He wanted to figure out how its mutacase worked. My phone noticed Max’s gaze and scuttled closer to Poly.

  “It’s really important, Jack,” said my phone.

  “Tell me,” said Poly.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw Poly staring at Max, then at me, then at Rosalind. Poly and I would have our conversation later, too. I could hear Poly and my phone talking, but wasn’t paying attention to what was being said. It was much more fun to talk about taking clocks apart with my son. Then Poly leaned down and tapped my shoulder.

  “You need to hear this,” she said, holding my phone near my ear.

  I squeezed Max’s hand, rolled my eyes to ensure he knew I’d rather be talking to him, and listened to what my phone thought was so blasted important.

  “There was a plane crash at Hartsfield Port,” it said.

  “So?”

  “Just with felt and yarn,” said Max, “but Aunt Sally says she’ll teach me how to use a needle and thread when I’m five.”

  I returned my focus to Max for a second and smiled. I had a cool kid. I also couldn’t give him all the time he deserved right now.

  “I’ll show you some tricks with leather and waxed thread soon, Max.”

  “Thanks, Daddy.”

  “It was a private jet,” said Poly, interrupting.

  “Owned by Chapultepec & Castle,” continued my phone.

  “Scott Winfield and Josephine Johnson were on board,” said Poly.

  “There were no survivors,” said my phone.

  I heard a noise in front of me and looked up to see Rosalind holding her hand near her throat. Her face was white.

  “You’d better come in,” she said, turning around and heading inside.

  Max took my hand and led me into the house. Poly tapped my shoulder, returned my sweetener, and followed. Chit distracted me by flitting over from the door’s view port to my ear.

  “I knew I should-a had that birds ’n’ bees talk with you when you were younger, bucko,” she whispered.

  I didn’t reply. I just shook my head slowly from side to side and rolled my eyes again, this time for my own benefit. I reached back with the hand Max wasn’t holding and squeezed Poly’s. She squeezed back.

  We stepped into a square three-story foyer with a marble-tiled floor. Rosalind shouted to the balconies above.

  “Sally, Cornell, please come down. We have company.”

  Without waiting for an answer, she led us into a large living room furnished in Galactic Modern. It was filled with eclectic pieces from a do
zen worlds and species. Poly and I sat on a black, white, brown and tan Tigramm faux-hide love seat and Max sat on a matching ottoman facing us. The bottoms of his sneakers were a few inches off the floor. Rosalind sat across from us in a wingback chair covered in light blue Nicósn vine-style upholstery. She looked worried and distracted, like someone at the wrong end of a Hellfire missile lock.

  Max kept up a non-stop chatter. He told me all about the books he was reading and web series he was following. He was a particularly ardent fan of the Muppet Avengers and loved it when Kermit Hulked out. I told him I liked it when Ms. Piggy did Black Widow’s martial arts moves, which always tended to break important pieces of the set. We both giggled as I tried to imitate one of her punches.

  Poly nudged my elbow. I looked her way and realized I’d forgotten to introduce her to Max. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

  “Sorry, Sweetheart,” I said. “Poly Jones, please meet my son, Max.”

  Max held out his hand with a child’s exaggerated politeness and earnestly shook the hand Poly extended.

  “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Jones,” said the boy. I was glad to see that Rosalind had raised him with good manners.

  “I’m very glad to meet you too, Max,” said Poly. “I think we’re going to be great friends.”

  She smiled at Max using the same high-energy expression that made me glad to be her lover and partner. Max was clearly taken by Poly as much as I was.

  “Do you work with my Daddy?” he asked.

  “Uh huh,” said Poly. “We’re partners.”

  The boy looked thoughtful.

  “We’re also boyfriend and girlfriend,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Max. He turned to me, seeming even more thoughtful.

  “What’s your last name?” he asked.

  “Buckston,” I said. “What’s yours?”

  “That’s my last name, too!”

  I hugged Max and we both smiled, pleased to have more in common. I made a note to add that to my list of topics to discuss with Rosalind.

  Our discussion was interrupted by the arrival of Sally and Cornell. When they entered the living room they froze, staring at us, staring at Max, and staring at Rosalind’s pale and fearful expression.