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

by Dave Schroeder

  “Try again,” said Chit, “and don’t try to snow me—it ain’t easy to do. You always have logical reasons for your actions except when you’re lovey-dovey with Poly.”

  I thought about her question for a few seconds, which helped distract me from how high up we were. Our height probably wasn’t a problem for Chit—she had her own wings. I had to depend on the kindness of Quirinx strangers.

  “It was Zelda Fitzgerald’s mobility cilia,” I said. “They weren’t moving right.”

  “Waddya mean?” asked Chit.

  “The cilia tend to move in unison when they’re doing the work of gliding a Pyr’s mass along,” I said. “Zelda’s cilia hung straight down and waved back and forth at random, as if all of them weren’t even touching the ground.”

  “Ya think it was The General in a Pyr suit, with wheels on the bottom?” asked Chit.

  “Uh huh,” I said. “You can buy suits like that for cosplay at Atlanta Costume. They’re really popular at Dragon Con.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind for Labor Day weekend,” said Chit. “But I don’t get it. The General hates aliens. He’s a rampant xenophobe.”

  “That’s another reason I went after the ornithopter,” I said. “Cornell said The General is devious, and I could see him using our prejudices about his prejudices against us.”

  “If you say so, buddy boy.”

  Chit clammed up, which gave me time to look around. All in all, I would have rather been distracted by conversation.

  We were gaining on the ornithopter. I could tell it was a Terran-made craft, but recognized its underlying Orishen design. The machine’s broad wings were flapping in slow, even strokes. The original Orishen version had wings that could morph into a fixed, swept-back configuration and included a high-powered congruent engine for longer flights. Since it hadn’t switched modes, I was confident its destination wasn’t too far away. My Quirinx assistants would never be able to catch it if it wasn’t moving at its current sedate pace.

  We were heading generally south. I looked down to find landmarks and saw Peachtree Road below us. I even spotted the corner where my favorite branch of Fellini’s Pizza was located. I wondered if The General was hoping to return to EUA headquarters, his own version of Barad-dûr, or had some other destination in mind?

  At this point, The General’s destination didn’t matter. We were gaining on him. The ornithopter was built like a First World War-era biplane, featuring open pilot and passenger compartments. The big difference was that it had giant, flapping batwings affixed to the sides of the fuselage, not a pair of fixed wings above and below. The original Orishen ornithopter design had dragonfly wings, since there aren’t any species resembling Terran bats on Orish.

  I could see the top of Zelda’s head in the back seat of the ’thopter. She was still wearing her absurd, broad-brimmed purple hat with a peacock feather and for some reason it hadn’t blown off. That gave me even more confidence we had the correct quarry, because Pyrs don’t have external ears. Short of using cyanoacrylate adhesive, there was no way to anchor her hat in place unless it had been sewn on as part of a costume.

  I couldn’t tell if the pilot was a man or a woman, or even human. Only an upper torso and head were visible. The head wore an aviator’s helmet and goggles. A long white scarf was wrapped around the pilot’s neck and fluttered back in the wind. I had to figure out a way to convince the pilot to land where I wanted, not where The General wanted. Peachtree-Dekalb Airport, a small general aviation field, was too far away, so it was out.

  Then I remembered that ornithopters didn’t need long runways. The roof of the huge new parking garage at Atlantic Station, a multi-use development north of Georgia Tech with lots of retail, would be a good spot to try to force them to land. I could see its flat, multi-acre expanse off in the distance along our line of flight.

  “Hey Chit,” I shouted against the noise of the wind. “Are you awake?”

  “I’m a thousand feet up riding on the shoulder of an idiot being carried like a dwarf snatched by an eagle and you’re asking me if I’m awake?”

  “When you put it that way…” I said, contritely.

  “Waddya need?” asked my little friend.

  “Do you have any weapons on you?”

  “Other than my rapier-sharp wit?”

  “Other than that, yeah.”

  “I got my stinger,” said Chit.

  “Where do you have room for a cruise missile?” I asked.

  “Not that kind of stinger—it’s a set of congruency-powered capacitors that can give a high-voltage zap ta anybody tryin’ ta get too friendly.”

  “Why haven’t I heard of this before, little buddy?”

  “Need ta know, chump. Need ta know.”

  “Right,” I said. “If we get close enough to the ornithopter, do you think you could fly over and threaten to zap the pilot unless the ’thopter lands at Atlantic Station?”

  “Yeah,” said Chit. “I’ll give it a shot. What’s the worst that can happen?”

  I didn’t want to think about that and stuck out the first three fingers on my left hand, making an “M” to appease Murphy.

  I shouted up to the Quirinx fliers. They increased their pace and brought us a dozen feet above and behind the ornithopter. Somehow they knew to stay a bit back so the people in the ’thopter couldn’t see us. I credit the sneakiness teenagers learn from trying to keep their parents clueless about what they’re really up to.

  “Time to go, little buddy,” I offered.

  “Sitting Bull!” shouted Chit as she jumped off my shoulder.

  What was wrong with “Geronimo?” I wondered. Then again, given our relationship, Chit’s choice of words was probably more appropriate.

  My little friend couldn’t just fall—she used her own wings to keep moving forward as she descended. Unfortunately, instead of landing on the pilot’s helmet, she got caught in the slipstream off the front windscreen and ended up fighting her way through the tangled length of the pilot’s long white scarf.

  Zelda Fitzgerald spotted Chit and reacted, rotating in place to face backwards. I could tell because the peacock feather on her hat turned one hundred and eighty degrees. Then a seam opened in the side of the Pyr’s “body” and a human arm stuck out. At the end of the arm was a hand holding a mini-sweetener.

  I felt two close near-misses, and suddenly my body was vertical, not horizontal. I looked down and saw a pair of fliers hanging limply from the small of my back—the shots weren’t misses after all. At my shoulder blades, the two Quirinx adolescents there were struggling to support a vastly increased weight. We were falling toward the ornithopter at high speed.

  As we neared the flapping flying machine, I twisted my body so my back was to The General and his mini-sweetener, then smacked into the leading edge of one of the horizontal tail fins, chest first. Thank goodness for my pupa silk shirt or I’d have broken a few ribs. I felt the two unsweetened Quirinx fliers release their hold and take the limp bodies of the other two off my lower back. They headed north toward the Ad Astra complex without sticking around to collect their one thousand galcreds. Chit and I were on our own. At least the angle made it difficult for the ersatz Pyr to suppress his line of fire enough to shoot me—not that he wasn’t trying.

  Luck is important in business and in chasing evil would-be galactic overlords. I realized luck was with me—I was in the right place at the right time. I pulled myself along until I got to the ’thopter’s vertical stabilizer, then stood up behind it, holding on for my life. I put my feet on the elevator flaps on the horizontal fins and pushed. The tail rose and the ’thopter’s nose descended. We were going down toward the roof of the parking lot at Atlantic Station.

  The General, stuck inside the Zelda Fitzgerald Pyr costume, tried to sweeten me, but the vertical stabilizer blocked most of the energy of his shots.

  “Chit!” I shouted, or a word a lot like that.

  “I got this,” said my little friend.

  She managed to cr
awl up the white scarf all the way to the pilot’s neck. I watched the body at the controls jerk and spasm as bolts of high voltage electricity shot out from Chit’s stinger. The pilot’s body fell forward, rendered insensible by the jolts of current. Unsurprisingly, the ornithopter went into a steep dive. I nearly fell off my perch on the tail.

  “Maybe you should have tried another approach,” I shouted to Chit over the roaring wind.

  “Ya think?” the Murm bellowed back.

  I moved out of the way of another barrage of sweetener shots from The General and used my legs and body to pull up on the elevators, changing the angle of our dive. It was working, but it wasn’t enough. We were descending so fast we were likely to go through the roof of the AMC IMAX-VR Theater at Atlantic Station rather than making a gentle landing on top of the mall’s newest parking structure.

  “Cavalry’s coming,” my phone exclaimed.

  Extending dozens of legs from its mutacase, my phone crawled forward along the fuselage until it reached the pilot’s compartment. Once there, it hooked itself into the guidance and navigation systems using a standard port designed for that purpose on the instrument panel. In seconds, we’d leveled off and were on track to make a smooth landing. We weren’t going to be an inadvertent IMAX-VR feature presentation after all. I was ready to cheer my phone’s efforts but had forgotten about Murphy and his blasted laws.

  After one last set of sweetener blasts my way, the arm with the sweetener withdrew into the Zelda Fitzgerald Pyr costume. I watched warily as the broad-brimmed purple hat with its distinctive feather rotated all the way back to its original position. I couldn’t see exactly what happened next, but The General’s arm must have grabbed the pilot’s scarf and pulled. Whatever he did, the pilot’s head was yanked back and slammed forward half a dozen times in quick succession, dislodging my phone from the instrument panel and Chit from the pilot’s neck.

  This wasn’t good. The wings on the ornithopter snapped tightly into the fuselage and the aircraft went into a diving spin. Chit and my phone fell out of the ’thopter and the only thing that kept me from falling to my death was my foot getting caught in one of the thin wires connecting the horizontal fins to the vertical stabilizer on the tail. It wasn’t fun hanging off the back of the ornithopter with my body blowing around in crazy whirls and arcs like the pilot’s scarf. I had a sense of deja vu, like I was hanging on to the banner on Cornell’s dirigible back in Vegas last Monday.

  The worst of it only lasted for a few seconds. The ornithopter pulled out of its gyrations and resumed its usual slow, methodical flapping. That gave me time enough to catch my breath and lever myself up to resume my previous position behind the vertical stabilizer, standing on the elevators. I saw that The General must have had a duplicate set of controls in his compartment and had resumed his original course going south. It was time to try forcing him down by pressing on the elevators again—but I never got the chance.

  My adrenaline surged as I watched the wings on the ornithopter reconfigure for fixed flight and a congruent engine screamed up to full power a few inches below my feet. Maybe the engine wasn’t the only thing screaming.

  The airship’s formerly sedate pace shifted to bat-out-of-hell mode and The General launched it upward in a steep climb. This time, my foot didn’t catch on a convenient guy wire. I lost my connection to the morphed ’thopter and began to fall.

  I flipped over as I fell, blown in random directions by the turbulence caused by the ornithopter’s rapid departure. My eyes watered from the rushing wind. I could sense the inevitability of death and tried to make my peace with the universe, but failed. I was too young to die—and Poly would never forgive me.

  My vision was going haywire as the ground rose to meet me. All I could see below me was red.

  I knew only one thing for sure—this would hurt.

  Then I hit.

  Chapter 38

  “So, what would you say… to get a free ride on a blimp?”

  — Lana Kane

  I was wrong. It didn’t hurt—much. And I hadn’t been seeing red. The color overwhelming my retinas was pink—a saturated, fuchsia-pink on steroids.

  I was resting on a resilient pink surface that felt like thick Mylar under tension. It yielded to my touch and I had bounced a few inches in the air when I struck it, like landing on a trampoline that’s been pulled too tight. Clearly, I hadn’t fallen very far.

  I sat up and found I was on top of something hundreds of feet long. It was rounded, almost as if I was riding a humpbacked whale. I oriented myself to the compass directions using the sun and my own shadow, then got to my feet and looked south. I could see a black speck quickly disappearing in the distance—The General’s ornithopter.

  I started to tell the universe what I thought of the situation, using alien-language analogues of Anglo-Saxon mono-and-polysyllables, but before I could get very far I was interrupted by a high-pitched buzzing sound. A dark shape looking like a thick business card between two soft-drink-cup lids was circling my head. The buzzing was from the drone-style fan blades spinning at either end. It was my phone, with Chit on its back.

  I waved at the pair and leaned forward. My phone and little friend landed on my head, then moved down to assume their standard perches on my shoulders. As usual, one played grumpy devil and one played informative angel.

  “You really screwed things up this time, bucko,” said Chit.

  “What do you mean, I screwed things up? Who zapped the pilot and put the ’thopter in a power dive?”

  “I had everythin’ under control,” my little friend asserted.

  “Were you going to lever his body away from the control stick with your superhuman strength?” I asked, not bothering to constrain my sarcasm for the sake of our friendship.

  “No way,” Chit replied. “I was gonna zap the pilot again at the base of the spine so involuntary muscle contractions would sit ’im up.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “That might have actually worked.”

  “Thanks for the vote o’ confidence, ya big doofus.”

  “I’m sorry for doubting you,” I said.

  Then I remembered Chit’s original comment.

  “Maybe you had a plan, but I don’t know where you got off saying I screwed things up?”

  “You approached from above,” said Chit. “If you’d come up from underneath, The General never woulda spotted ya until ya climbed into his compartment.”

  “Hmmm,” I repeated. That made sense. “Why didn’t you suggest it?”

  “I can’t do all your thinkin’ for ya, bucko.”

  She had a point.

  Unfortunately, in making that point, we’d lost a chance to capture The General.

  It was time to put my strategic errors behind me and figure out what to do next. I walked a dozen paces along the length of the pink surface I’d landed on, enjoying the way it put a bounce in my step.

  “At the risk of sounding like an amnesiac trope,” I began.

  “Spit it out, buddy boy,” Chit encouraged.

  “Where am I?”

  “You are on the dorsal surface of the royal Dauushan dirigible, Matriarch of the Skies,” said my phone.

  That made me do a double-take.

  “I thought the Sky Mama was still in Las Vegas,” I said. “What’s it doing here?”

  “Queen Sherrhi is here,” said my phone, “therefore the royal dirigible is here, too.”

  “That’s almost two thousand miles,” I said. “How did it get here so fast?”

  “The distance between Las Vegas and Atlanta is seventeen hundred and four air miles or nineteen hundred and sixty land miles,” said my phone. “Over forty-eight hours have elapsed since we left Las Vegas early Thursday afternoon, so the Matriarch of the Skies would only need to average forty land miles a hour to get to Atlanta by five o’clock Saturday. The maximum speed of the dirigible, with all congruent engines operating at full capacity, is one hundred and thirty-three land miles per hour, so it is not remarkable for the
airship to be here.”

  I was surprised and impressed. I hadn’t heard my phone go on at such length before.

  “Shut your yap and get with the program, bucko,” said Chit.

  Was she talking to me or my phone? Probably me. I hadn’t realized my jaw was hanging open and closed it with an audible click of my back molars.

  I was glad my phone had stuck to land miles for its answer. My brain hated the knotty problem of converting from nautical miles.

  “Not to pile on,” said my little friend. “ But we’ve got another problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I can fly off the top o’ this blimp,” said Chit, “and your phone can fly, too—but how do we get you off?”

  Poly might have some ideas on that, the prurient part of my brain insisted.

  Enough of this foolishness, I told my brain. I put my foot down and it bounced against the Sky Mama’s helium-filled envelope. I’d been given a problem I could solve and started riffing on possibilities.

  “Could I climb down the side?” I asked.

  “That might work for the upper half of the envelope,” said Chit, “but not the lower part.”

  “Right,” I realized. I’d be hanging out over a long drop once I got to the mid-line. “Are there any hand-holds in the surface I could use?”

  “The Matriarch of the Skies is a marvel of airship engineering with the latest in low-friction streamlined coatings on its envelope,” recited my phone, as if reading from a marketing brochure.

  I threw my arms up in frustration and proved what my phone had just been saying when my feet flipped out from under me and I bounced on my butt. I was lucky I didn’t start sliding down a sloping side.

  “Okay,” I said, carefully resuming my feet. “Climbing down is off the list. What about asking the crew of the Matriarch for assistance?”

  “Someone just tried to blow up the royal family,” said Chit. “Do you want to tell the crew there’s a strange human on top of the queen’s official dirigible?”

  I considered the question. What if none of the Dauushans I knew were on board? It wasn’t worth the risk.