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

by Dave Schroeder

  “Diet Starbuzz sounds great,” said Emma Ann, popping the can and taking a long swig.

  Bavarian brought over a tray of drinks for the rest of us. I grabbed a Diet Starbuzz of my own, while Poly and Shepherd opted for water. Rosalind and Cornell were sipping tumblers of an amber liquid that smelled alcoholic, which was perfectly understandable after our latest close call.

  “Are you two okay?” I asked Terrhi’s parents.

  “How’s the baby?” asked Poly.

  “We’re fine,” said Queen Sherrhi, “and no worries--it takes a lot more than a few shock waves to cause problems for a Dauushan fetus at this stage of gestation.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  “Without your fast thinking,” said Tomáso, “Dauush would have had a new Matriarch.”

  “We’re rather fond of the current one,” said Poly with a smile.

  Queen Sherrhi, however, wasn’t smiling.

  “Now,” she said, in a threatening basso, “I shall deal with my treacherous sister!”

  “Don’t forget,” said Tomáso, “you’ve also got the G70 meetings Monday morning and the delegates’ Atlanta tour tomorrow.”

  “I won’t forget my duties, like Lüzhiulterianne has forgotten hers,” said the queen. “You can be sure I will devise and execute the appropriate actions.”

  If I were Lüzhi, I didn’t think I’d like hearing Queen Sherrhi’s emphasis on the word execute.

  “I guess The General knows we’re not on his side anymore, Sis,” said Cornell.

  “Not necessarily,” said Rosalind. “We could have been brought here against our will.”

  “Close the door!” said Cornell, imitating Rosalind’s shout.

  “You’re right,” said Rosalind. “I sort of forgot about that.”

  “Now we’re really the pig, not the chicken,” said her brother.

  Poly looked at me for a second, then got it—bacon and eggs for breakfast. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed.

  “I wish we’d actually had a chance to capture The General when he showed up,” said Poly.

  “Yeah,” said Rosalind. “But he outsmarted us.”

  “He tends to do that,” said Cornell, finishing the rest of the amber liquid in his tumbler in one gulp.

  “Not necessarily,” said my phone.

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  “Continuing to search the Ad Astra security recordings,” it said.

  “Even while you were cutting the straps on Emma Ann’s backpack?”

  “Multitasking is a specialty,” it said.

  “Thank you for helping to save me,” said Emma Ann.

  “You’re quite welcome,” said my phone.

  “Well?” I asked. “What did you find?”

  “The General,” said my phone. “He’s upstairs.”

  Chapter 36

  “I have learned to hate all traitors…”

  — Aeschylus

  “Upstairs?” I asked.

  “On the fourteenth floor,” said my phone. “Room 1417.”

  The trivia engine in my brain informed me that was the number of archvillain Sinestro’s space sector in the Green Lantern comic books. It was probably just a coincidence, though The General was a comparable representative of evil. My mind tried to spin off on a tangent casting my friends as members of the Green Lantern Corps, but I shut it down hard.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “That’s where Ad Astra’s surveillance systems recorded someone saying the words The General said.”

  “Good enough for me,” said Cornell.

  “Is he still there?” asked Poly.

  “There is still at least one human in the room,” said my phone.

  “That makes sense,” said Rosalind. “The General would need someone else to attach the nova bomb to Emma Ann while he was directing her movements.”

  “If we move fast, we can catch The General—and his accomplice,” said Poly. “Where’s the elevator?”

  “There isn’t one in these apartments,” said Tomáso. “Dauushans like living on the ground floor.”

  “Where’s the nearest elevator to the fourteenth floor of this part of the complex?” I asked Shepherd.

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought he lived in the building.

  “Outside, to the left, first doors on the left,” said Shepherd in economical Pâkk fashion.

  “Don’t just stand there, open the blast door, ya big hairy galoot!” Chit ordered.

  Shepherd’s fingers touched something on the panel beside him and the blast door slowly lifted into the ceiling.

  “Tomáso?” asked Poly gently, getting his attention with a wave.

  The Dauushan consul looked away from his spouse for a moment. Queen Sherrhi appeared to be ticking off ways to punish Lüzhi and Tomáso stood ready to talk her down if she sounded like she would do something rash. He noticed Poly and pulled out his phone. The roll-up door on the other side of the blast door also rose.

  “Where’s the queen’s security detail?” I asked.

  “Deployed around the perimeter, I expect,” said Tomáso.

  “Anybody in the parking garage?”

  “Lohrri and Naddéo.”

  “Great,” I said. “Have everybody on high alert looking for The General in case he tries to leave the building.”

  Tomáso nodded and pushed more keys.

  By this time, both doors were a few feet up. With my phone on my belt and Chit hanging on to my collar, Poly, Rosalind, Cornell and I rolled underneath them, followed by Emma Ann and Spike, once he’d confirmed Terrhi was safe.

  I didn’t try to stop the trisabertooth from coming with us—cats aren’t good at following orders. I did try to dissuade Emma Ann, however.

  “Stay inside the consulate,” I said to the Remote Hands Operative. “You’ve been through enough.”

  “No way,” said Emma Ann. “I want to give that creep a piece of my mind.”

  “But you’re not armed,” said Poly as we ran through the consulate’s private courtyard, dodging holes in the concrete and smoldering ornamental shrubbery. We headed left once we reached the main public courtyard.

  “Says who?” asked Emma Ann.

  She was holding a nine-inch switchblade in one hand and a mini-sweetener in the other.

  “Not me,” said Poly, looking over her shoulder at Emma Ann with a smile.

  Not counting my phone, Emma Ann was better-armed than I was.

  “Why the small arsenal?” I asked as we ran.

  “My big brother told me I should always be prepared to defend myself,” said Emma Ann.

  I think I liked her big brother.

  A dozen yards to the left were a set of glass double doors. I tossed my phone ahead and it had them open before we reached them. They led to a lobby with banks of elevators on either side. We wasted ten seconds figuring out that we wanted the elevators on the right. The ones on the left started at the twenty-first floor and above.

  Cornell, Rosalind, Poly and I each pushed the up button in frustration to try to speed up a car’s arrival. Emma Ann seemed patient, but her expression was hard. I guess Operatives had to learn patience to be good at their jobs.

  “If ya keep pushin’ it ain’t gonna come any faster,” observed Chit.

  “It makes us feel better to be doing something, bug,” said Rosalind.

  My phone chimed.

  “Elevator operating system access obtained,” it noted.

  The door to the car in front of us opened and we all piled in, looking more like a rugby scrum than a well-ordered team. I was surprised to see an ATM at the back, but figured if there could be banks of elevators, there was no reason not to have banks in elevators.

  My phone’s control of the car’s systems meant we were spared the cliche of stopping at every floor, encountering an old lady with an umbrella going out to walk her corgis, or a troop of roaming bravos out to rob us. Our vertical trip was uneventful, except for Chit wanting to use the ATM.

&nb
sp; “Are you kidding?” I asked.

  “Hey, bucko,” she said. “I just need some small bills.”

  “For you, aren’t they all small bills?” asked Poly.

  “Badum-bump,” said Rosalind.

  I think Chit was just trying to get us to loosen up a bit. We were almost to the fourteenth floor.

  “Ready to rock and roll, everybody?” asked Cornell.

  He pulled out a mini-sweetener and held it at the ready. Rosalind, Poly, Emma Ann and I all readied our mini-sweeteners. My phone climbed from my belt to my shoulder, opposite Chit. Spike yawned to loosen up his jaw. The elevator doors opened.

  A sign pointed to Rooms 1401-1421 on the right. We tiptoed down the carpeted hallway like Elmer Fudd stalking wabbits. When we were outside 1417, Chit flew over to the bottom of the door and listened. She returned and whispered in my ear.

  “I hear two humans. They’re arguing—and their voices sound familiar.”

  “Crap,” I thought.

  My phone hopped from my shoulder to the locking mechanism above the door nob and worked its magic. I nodded at Cornell and Rosalind. They opened the door and stormed into the room, scanning for places to aim their mini-sweeteners. Poly and I were right behind them, with Emma Ann and Spike guarding our rear.

  Scott Winfield and Josephine Johnson were standing in an elegant suite, drinking scotch and arguing about which one of them would replace Cornell as The General’s chief lieutenant. When we made our entrance, they stopped their debate and froze in place without any need for us to use our sweeteners. The pair didn’t look happy to see us and seemed even less so when Spike approached and gave them his predator’s you-could-be-lunch stare.

  We were standing in an apartment designed for human needs and tastes. The living room was luxuriously furnished, with a high-end Terran leather sofa and overstuffed chairs arrayed around a fieldstone fireplace. It had the feel of a sitting room in a British gentleman’s club with green wallpaper, red accents, and lots of dark mahogany. A hand-woven Persian rug resembling the one I’d seen in the courthouse covered the hardwood floor. Doors led off to what I assumed would be a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom.

  “Check the other rooms,” I said to Rosalind and Cornell.

  The siblings did a circuit and were back quickly.

  “They’re clear,” said Rosalind.

  “We checked all the closets and under the beds,” added Cornell.

  I looked at the carpet again and confronted Winfield and Johnson.

  “Did The General teleport out?”

  “No way,” said Johnson.

  “He wouldn’t risk his brain cells by teleporting,” said Winfield, “but he made us teleport in.”

  “At least that wouldn’t do you any harm,” said Cornell. “You don’t have any brain cells to risk.”

  I don’t think he liked hearing the two of them talk about replacing him.

  “How did you get out of the research facility?” asked Poly.

  “Martin had to leave early, and Pomy stayed in her room,” she said, “so only Sally was around to watch us.”

  “Let me guess,” said Rosalind. “Max distracted her…”

  “And bingo, we walked right out,” smirked Johnson. “We took an autocab to a convenience store and bought a cell phone.”

  “When we explained things to The General, he said all would be forgiven if we’d help him with a special project,” said Winfield.

  “He said he’d give us our old jobs back,” said Johnson.

  “If we would weld a bomb on her backpack,” added Winfield, pointing at Emma Ann.

  “While The General stayed out of sight in the bedroom,” said Johnson.

  “We just had to get to EUA’s headquarters,” said Winfield.

  “So our autocab took us to downtown to HQ and we teleported here,” said Johnson.

  “Why did you teleport instead of taking an autocab directly to Ad Astra?” I asked.

  “Great question,” said Winfield. “I think The General was punishing us.”

  “He was, I’m sure of it,” said Johnson, rubbing her temples. “I’ve never teleported before. I think it’s giving me a migraine.”

  “Poor baby,” snarled Rosalind, holding her mini-sweetener to the side of Johnson’s head. “I’d be glad to cure your headache. And remember, there’s only a one in ten thousand chance of permanent brain damage from teleporting.”

  “Temper temper,” said Poly.

  My partner was lucky Rosalind’s eyes weren’t lasers or she would have been vaporized. Rosalind lowered her weapon and stepped away from Johnson. I could hear her counting down from one hundred in Orishen, using mutable emphatic scatological suffixes after each one.

  “You were in here with The General?” I asked. “Does that mean you know what he looks like?”

  “We know about how tall he is,” said Winfield.

  “And?” said Poly, stroking her thumb close to the trigger of her mini-sweetener. Winfield got her meaning.

  “He’s short. About five-foot five.”

  “Why don’t you know what he looks like?” I asked.

  “Because he was wearing a full coverage Remote Hands Prime suit,” said Emma Ann.

  “Maybe,” said Johnson. “But we aren’t even sure he’s a he. We had to wait in the other bedroom when The General left.”

  “Oh, he’s male alright,” said Emma Ann. “I can tell by the way he made me walk. And he’s not young, either.”

  “If he didn’t teleport, how did he leave without any of Tomáso’s security-types spotting him?” asked Poly.

  “I figured that out,” I said. “It’s my fault. I was only thinking in two dimensions.”

  I looked up. Poly got it.

  “The roof?” she said. “There are cameras on the roof.”

  She snatched my phone off my shoulder and held it out in both hands.

  “Show us the roof cams,” she ordered. “We have to find him.”

  My phone started to display camera views on its own screen, then switched to the smart wall on the far side of the living room where the pictures were nearly life-sized. In the middle of the roof, fifty-nine floors up, two dozen adolescent pterodactyl-like Quirinx fliers were practicing their takeoffs by diving off the side of the building. At the far end, a pair of workers were rolling a wooden box the size of refrigerator onto a cargo dirigible. The view at the near end showed an aged female Pyr wearing a raccoon coat and a broad-brimmed purple hat with a peacock feather gliding on her mobility cilia into the passenger seat of a two-being ornithopter.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s Zelda Fitzgerald,” said Emma Ann. “She’s famous! I’ve seen her picture all over the gossip pages for her affairs and the news sites for her charity work.”

  “Thanks,” I said, marveling at Emma Ann’s capacity for trivia even though it ran in a different direction from own.

  “Can you access the cameras’ history?” asked Poly. “Maybe The General already left?”

  “Yes,” said my phone, “and no. The cameras’ history is available, but these views show the only activity in the past hour.”

  “This is real time?” I asked.

  “Correct,” said my phone.

  “How do I get to the roof?” I mused rhetorically, then raced for the door with Poly and Emma Ann at my heels. I looked to my right and saw Spike loping beside me. For The General’s sake, I hoped I caught him, not the big trisabertooth.

  * * * * *

  We raced up the stairs from the top floor elevator lobby to the center of the roof and saw the flock of adolescent Quirinx gathered around a flat box. When we got closer, I saw they were eating a pizza topped with large bugs that were still crawling from slice to slice. Chit buried her head in my hair.

  “I can’t look,” said her muffled voice.

  “Give me a break,” I said, “Murms and Terran insects have no evolutionary ancestors in common. Just be glad I speak Quirinx.”

  I started to walk toward th
e fliers, careful not to frighten them and warning Poly, Emma Ann and Spike to stay back with an upraised hand.

  “Can you help me with the higher pitches?” I asked my phone.

  “Over six million forms of communication are readily available…”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Affirmative.”

  I tweeted a greeting to the Quirinx pizza-eaters, using my unassisted vocal chords.

  None of them paid me any attention. I needed to up the stakes and motioned Spike forward. The trisabertooth understood what I needed, opened his mouth wide enough to swallow a flier in one bite, and roared like the legendary Divine Wind.

  That got the fliers attention. We were lucky they froze in fear instead of flying off.

  “Who wants to make a thousand galcreds?” I asked in Quirinx.

  A flurry of beaks bobbed their interest. In short order, four fliers had their talons embedded in the rigid fabric of my Orishen pupa silk shirt. At least they were only ruining one of my casual polo shirts and not one of my good suits. Poly would have joined me on this stage of the chase, but she didn’t speak Quirinx.

  “Follow that ornithopter!” I tweeted.

  I took a running start—slowed a bit by the wings of the four fliers on my back—and jumped off the side of the building.

  Chapter 37

  “This flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master…”

  — Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

  Flying is a lot like falling—with style, according to Pixar. After my initial leap and subsequent descent, the quartet of Quirinx on my back started flapping in unison to regain and maintain our initial altitude. The sky was nearly cloudless, so I had no trouble spotting the ornithopter far ahead, flapping its own wings on its way south from Ad Astra. It was cold enough at this height that I wished I’d brought a jacket. The wind had enough bite that I would have been smart to bring goggles as well, but I persevered. It would be worth it if I intercepted The General.

  “Hey, bucko,” said Chit from her secure perch on my shoulder. “How come you went after the ornithopter, not the cargo dirigible?”

  “Instinct,” I said. “I just knew.”