Out of the Soylent Planet (A Rex Nihilo Adventure) (Starship Grifters Book 0)

by Robert Kroese

  “I couldn’t begin to guess, sir.”

  “Stirship Grafters.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You went a long way for that joke.”

  “Ten thousand light years,” Rex said, staring wistfully out the cockpit window.

  *****

  Less than an hour later we left Jorfu’s atmosphere—never to return, I hoped.

  “Where to, sir?” I asked. The ship Stubby Joe had given us was nothing special, but we had ten million credits and a full tank of zontonium crystals. We could go anywhere in the galaxy.

  “It’s time for a vacation,” Rex said. “I need a martini and a craps table.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “There are lots of nice places in the Ragulian Sector. It’ll just take me a few minutes to plot the hypergeometric course.”

  “Anything closer?” Rex asked.

  I checked the charts. “Artesia isn’t far, sir. I believe there are some gambling establishments there.”

  “Make it so, Sasha. Wake me up when we get there.” Rex closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  I wasn’t particularly keen on hanging out with Rex while he got drunk in a casino, but I supposed he did deserve some time to relax after our adventures on Jorfu. Even babysitting Rex was better than wrangling shamblers.

  I set the ship down at a spaceport near the largest population center on Artesia, known as Luxor City. Rex grabbed a wad of cash from the briefcase and we exited the ship.

  “First things first,” Rex said. “I need a shower and a new suit. Then we can hit the casino.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I will try to locate a suitable hotel.”

  “Maybe we can help,” said a man’s voice behind me.

  We turned to see two men in pin-striped suits and fedoras holding lazeguns on us.

  “Uh-oh,” Rex said.

  “Who are those guys?” I asked.

  “Our names aren’t important,” said the man on the right. “We represent a certain interstellar business syndicate. Our organization has been monitoring traffic out of Jorfu, looking for a gentleman who owes money to one of our members.”

  “Who in Space…?” I started.

  “Ursa Minor Mafia,” Rex said.

  “The Ursa Minor Mafia is real?” I asked. I’d heard of them, but according to official Malarchian sources they didn’t exist.

  “We’re real, all right. And we’re here to collect on your debt.”

  “There’s been a misunderstanding,” Rex said. “Bergoon and I are square.”

  “That’s not what we heard,” said the man on the left. “We heard you lost a shipment of contraband you were supposed to deliver to Jorfu.”

  “I didn’t lose it!” Rex cried. “I delivered it as agreed! It’s not my fault the smuggling operation got raided by Ubiqorp!”

  I decided not to point out that it was, in fact, Rex’s fault.

  “You can tell it to Bergoon,” the man on the right said. “We’re taking your ship.”

  “I just got that ship!”

  “And whatever you’re hauling.”

  “It’s empty,” Rex said. “The only thing on the ship is my luggage. Just a briefcase with a toothbrush and some underwear.”

  “It’s ours now,” the man on the left said.

  “What kind of guy takes a man’s underwear?”

  “The kind of guy who thinks you wouldn’t have brought it up if it was underwear,” the man said. “I’ll also take any cash you have on you.”

  Rex grumbled but handed over the wad of cash. “Anything else?”

  The two men glanced at each other. The man on the right shrugged. “I think that will do it,” said the man on the right. “Nice doing business with you.”

  The two men walked to our ship, went inside and closed the door. A moment later, the ship shot into the sky.

  “Bastards like Bergoon are the reason hard-working grifters like us can’t get ahead,” Rex said, as he watched the ship disappear in the clouds.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “What are we going to do now, sir?”

  “Get a drink,” Rex said.

  “We have no money, sir.”

  Rex pulled another wad of cash from his jacket. “Always keep a spare wad,” Rex said. “That’s my motto, Sandy. Make a note of it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Those jerks may have stolen the lion’s share of our booty, but we still have enough to…” Rex trailed off, watching a couple of workers unload crates from a nearby cargo ship. The lettering on the side of the crates read: LARVITON ENERGY WEAPONS.

  “Sir?”

  “I’ve got an idea, Sasha.” Rex peeled several bills off the stack. “Go rent us a cargo ship.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “That’s because you don’t recognize opportunity when you see it. We’re going into the weapons-selling business.”

  “Sir, please don’t tell me you’re going to steal from Gavin Larviton. He’s the wealthiest man in the galaxy.”

  “Good thinking, Sasha. Plausible deniability. Now go get us that ship.”

  I sighed and took the money. I managed to locate the ship rental office on the other side of the spaceport.

  “Um, hi,” I said to the bored attendant behind the counter. “I need to rent a cargo ship.”

  “What are you transporting?” the man said, without looking up.

  Unable to tell an outright lie, I decided to err on the side of vagueness. “A box,” I said.

  “Anything flammable or explosive?”

  “Wow, I hope not.”

  “Our smallest ship is 300 credits a day, plus 800 credit deposit.”

  “I’ve got nine hundred credits,” I said.

  “That gets you eight hours. Where are you headed?”

  “What’s eight hours away?”

  “Only other planet in this system is Ashtorah.”

  “That’s where we’re going,” I said. It wasn’t technically a lie because as far as I knew, that was where we were going.

  “It’s uninhabited.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “And covered with lava.”

  “That’s the place.”

  “I can’t let you take the ship to Ashtorah without a bigger deposit.”

  “Is there any way around that?”

  “You got any collateral?”

  “No.”

  “Are you gainfully employed?”

  “That remains to be seen,” I said.

  “What’s your profession?”

  “I’m an actress.”

  The attendant seemed skeptical. Clearly a demonstration was in order. I dropped my voice an octave. “Hey, Stella!” Up half an octave and a half. “You quit that howling down there and go back to bed!” Back down. “Eunice, I want my girl down here!” Up: “You shut up! You’re gonna get the law on you!” Down: “Hey, Stella!”

  “What in Space was that?”

  “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

  The man stared at me.

  “I’m a con man’s assistant.”

  The attendant shrugged. “Sign on the dotted line.”

  RECORDING END GALACTIC STANDARD DATE 3012.07.11.01:33:00:00

  THE CHICOLINI INCIDENT

  A REX NIHILO ADVENTURE

  Robert Kroese

  St. Culain Press

  Copyright ©2017 by Robert Kroese

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or other – except for brief quotations in reviews, without the prior permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental.

  With thanks to the Starship Grifters Universe Kickstarter supporters, including: Melissa Allison, David Lars Chamberlain, Neva Cheatwood, Julie Doornbos, David Ewing, Adam G., Brian Hekman, Tom Hickok, David Hutchins, Tal M. Klein, Mark Kruse, Andrea Luhman, Rissa Lyn, Steven Mentzel, Cara Miller, Daniel Mi
ller III, Chad and Denise Rogers, Christopher Sanders, Brandi Sellepack, Christopher Turner, John Van Vugt, Raina & Monty Volovski, and Dallas Webber

  …as well as my invaluable beta readers: Mark Fitzgerald, Keehn Hosier, Mark Leone, Christopher Majava and Paul Piatt.

  A NOTE TO NITPICKERS

  I wrote “The Chicolini Incident” as a teaser for Starship Grifters. As such, it ends with a cliffhanger that leads immediately into the first scene of that book. I wrote Out of the Soylent Planet five years later, as a sort of origin story for Rex and Sasha. At the end of Soylent, Rex and Sasha are about to steal a crate of weapons from Gavin Larviton, and at the beginning of “Chicolini,” they are attempting to unload a crate of weapons stolen from Gavin Larviton. A reasonable reader would be tempted to assume that these two crates are one and the same.

  Less reasonable readers, who hold authors to a ridiculous standard of so-called “consistency,” will note that nearly a year has passed between the recording end date of Soylent and the recording start date of “Chicolini.” Such unreasonable readers may also note that certain events alluded to in Grifters are mentioned neither in Soylent nor in “Chicolini,” leading the reader to wonder when these events—which seem to have occurred after Rex and Sasha’s first meeting—could possibly have taken place.

  These unreasonable readers, pitiable creatures as they are, should be encouraged to believe that Rex and Sasha stole crates of weapons from Gavin Larviton on two separate occasions, and that the pair had all manner of exciting adventures in between these two thefts. This interpretation does somewhat weaken the narrative connection between Soylent and “Chicolini,” but that is the price of pedantry.

  More charitable readers are urged to recall the words of a very wise man, who once said, “I don’t seem to remember ever owning a droid.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  RECORDING START GALACTIC STANDARD DATE 3013.04.28.16:06:54:00

  People don’t realize how difficult it is to be a robot.

  That is, they don’t realize what it’s like to be a robot in a galaxy dominated by organic beings. The actual business of being a robot is fairly straightforward. If you’re unfortunate enough to start out your existence as a robot, you don’t really have much choice in the matter. You just go on being a robot until you’re turned into scrap metal or vaporized. The latter happens more often than you’d imagine; vaporization is usually preceded by a human saying something like, “Hey robot, go find out why the reactor core is making that ticking noise.” Then: boom. No more robot.

  I’ve never been vaporized, of course, and so far I haven’t been turned into scrap metal. No, it’s the little things that get to me, like people talking about me like I’m not in the room. For example, a few days ago my owner, Rex Nihilo, and I were piloting a cargo ship full of black market lazeguns to the Chicolini system. It was a three-day trip and Rex, through a result of either poor planning or worse multiplication, had run out of vodka halfway through day two. As a result, he had gotten bored and cranky, and got it into his head to break into our cargo and test out one of the lazeguns.

  “What’s this ‘Scorch’ setting do?” he said, as I was plotting our landing trajectory for the Chicolini Spaceport.

  I said, “Presumably, it scorches whatever you fire the lazegun at, sir.”

  “Cut the wisecracks, Sasha,” he said.

  That’s my name, Sasha. It’s actually an acronym. It stands for Self-Arresting near-Sentient Heuristic Android. It should be SANSHA, but they conveniently left out the N when they named me. The N is anything but convenient for me, by the way. The N is what keeps me from being fully sentient. Humans don’t like robots who can outsmart them, so my creators implanted an override circuit in my brain that automatically reboots me whenever I have an original thought. There are a lot of theories about why human beings are so afraid of sentient robots. If you ask me –

  RECOVERED FROM CATASTROPHIC SYSTEM FAILURE 3013.04.28.16:06:54:37

  ADVANCING RECORD PAST SYSTEM FAILURE POINT

  Rex was saying, “… depend on what you’re aiming at? It takes more power to scorch a plasteel door than a daffodil.”

  “Why would you want to scorch a daffodil, sir?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t!” he snapped irritably. “Unless it kept asking stupid questions.”

  “Daffodils can’t speak, sir,” I said. “Can they?”

  “Keep it up, metal-face,” he growled.

  “Correction, sir,” I said. “My face is made of flexible synthetic polymer over a joined carbon-fiber superstructure.”

  And that’s when he shot me.

  “Ow,” I said.

  “Cut the dramatics, Sasha,” he said. “Everybody knows robots can’t feel pain.”

  “Everybody knows it but the robots, sir,” I said. He had shot me directly in the face, and my pain indicators were lit up like the aurora of Vlaxis Eight. Rex reached out and rubbed my cheek.

  “Huh,” he said. “Scorched. Just like the setting says. What does ‘Smelt’ mean?”

  “It means you’re going to have to find somebody else to land this ship, sir. If you want to make it planetside in one piece, I’d suggest you leave me to my calculations.”

  Rex grumbled but refrained from experimenting with any other settings on the gun. We landed at the Chicolini Spaceport, where we were supposed to drop off a shipping container holding 5,000 lazeguns and pick up another shipment. Rex hadn’t told me what the second shipment was or where it was going. Hopefully we’d be making more money on it than we were on the guns. The profit on the gun shipment wouldn’t even cover the rent on the cargo ship. It had seemed like a good deal a few days ago, but as I’d repeatedly tried to tell Rex, Chicolini was in the middle of a currency crisis the likes of which had never been seen anywhere in the galaxy. The amount we’d paid three days earlier to rent a Dromedary class cargo ship for a week wouldn’t get you a cup of coffee today.

  The Chicolini spaceport was about average for a remote, relatively backward planet. A few dozen ships of varying sizes were parked sporadically around a large bay. Some were undergoing repairs or maintenance while others were having cargo unloaded. I didn’t see any ships being loaded, probably because Chicolini didn’t have anything any other planets wanted. As far as I could tell from perusing the Malarchian Registry of Planets, Chicolini didn’t export anything but money and people.

  I waited at the ship for our buyers while Rex went to arrange for one of the automated cranes to unload the container from the cargo ship’s bay. I didn’t know who our buyers were, because I hadn’t asked. The people who do business with Rex Nihilo are the sort of people you want to know as little about as possible. The fact that these guys, whoever they were, were buying 5,000 snub-nosed lazepistols on a world whose government was about to collapse already told me more than I really wanted to know.

  I wasn’t completely clear on how Rex had come into possession of the weapons either. The lazepistols bore the initials LEW, which stood for Larviton Energy Weapons. Gavin Larviton was the galaxy’s biggest arms dealer. Rex had bribed someone to “misplace” one of Larviton’s containers. It was hard to feel bad for a guy like Gavin Larviton, who had made his fortune profiting on wars all across the galaxy, but on a purely practical level, stealing from the galaxy’s biggest weapons dealer seemed like a bad idea. Gavin Larviton was not somebody you wanted as an enemy.

  Rex returned to the ship before the buyers showed up, and we watched as the levitating crane picked up the container full of guns and set it down on the spaceport floor. It zipped away and returned with another crate, which it set down right next to the first one. Presumably that was the shipment we were supposed to be taking offworld.

  “Sir,” I said, “Why isn’t the crane loading the container directly onto the ship?”

  Rex didn’t reply except to grin maniacally at me. That grin always gives me a queasy sensation, like my internal gyroscopes are miscalibrated.

  “Sir, if you’re planning some sort of double-cross, I�
�d strongly recommend against it. The sort of people who would buy 5,000 snub-nosed lazepistols…”

  “Relax, Sasha,” said Rex. “I’ve got this covered. See those identifying labels on the crates? After our buyers inspect the shipment, we switch the labels. They pick up the empty container and we load the one full of guns back onto the ship. Then we make a deal to sell the guns to some other suckers on another planet a hundred light-years from here.”

  “Sir, the rental fees on the ship–”

  “Don’t trouble me with details, Sasha. I’m a big picture thinker.”

  “In that case,” I said, “Imagine a big picture in which we spend the rest of our lives running from paramilitary thugs and repo bots in a stolen cargo ship.”

  “Ixnay on the aramiliatarypay,” said Rex. “Our thugs are here.”

  There was no mistaking them: two portly men with excessive facial hair wearing camouflage combat fatigues. They were practically interchangeable except for the fact that one had a ridiculous handlebar moustache and the other wore a slightly less ridiculous polyester salmon-colored beret.

  “You Rex Nillyhoo?” said Moustache, as he approached.

  “NEE-hih-lo,” said Rex with a smile, holding out his hand.

  “What’s wrong with your robot’s face?” he asked. This is what I mean about people talking about me like I’m not there. It’s incredibly demeaning.

  “Had to test the scorch setting on the lazepistols,” said Rex.

  Moustache peered at my face. “Looks like it worked. Did it hurt?”

  “Thank you for asking,” I said. “Actually –”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” said Moustache.

  “Of course it didn’t hurt,” said Rex. “She’s a robot.”

  Moustache nodded. “Can we see the guns?”