The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure Read online

  Except where it is always night.

  I trudge between the geraniums, periodically stopping to knock leaf muck off my boots, until there are no more geraniums. In their place grows a weird kind of purple grass. Adapted to the deep twilight zone, it’s a whole separate ecosystem.

  The grass has broad blades with sharp edges. I’m glad I’m wearing thick jeans. The warm wind blowing from behind me ruffles the grass in waves, so I seem to be up to my waist in purple water. I glance back. I don’t see anyone. But that means nothing, and I’m a sitting duck, here in the open.

  I slide my lightsaber out of its holster. I’ve not wielded it in anger in twenty years, but streaks are made to be broken. If it turns out that our backers have screwed us, and Morgan’s in trouble as a result, angry won’t begin to cover it.

  The grass fades from purple to gray as I walk towards the darkness. Puffball butterflies flutter around. One of them lands on my arm and tries to take a piece out of me. It has a proboscis the size of a robin’s beak.

  “Shoo!”

  “Fletch?”

  The shout comes out of the darkness.

  “Morgan?” I start to run, the grass slicing at my jeans.

  “Ah, thank Christ you’re here.” His voice is weak. “It’s a nightmare, Fletch, it’s a fecking disaster.”

  Morgan’s a real piss artist. But I’ve known him for a long time and I’ve never heard him sound like this.

  “Morgan, where are you?”

  “Over here.”

  I run towards his voice. It’s getting darker. I pull my torch off my utility belt and switch it on.

  “Turn that shite off!”

  I nearly step on Morgan. He is lying in the grass. It’s only low, patchy tufts here, almost beyond the reach of the light. He grabs weakly at my torch.

  “Turn it off!”

  “Jesus God, Morgan, what happened to you?”

  He is gray. His face looks drained and haggard. He seems to have shrunk inside his clothes. I can’t see a scratch on him, but it’s clearly not mere exhaustion that has felled him, it’s something worse. I start thinking about bacteria, alien viruses, fatal infections. You’ll have every chance of finding something new, they said. Something that’s never been found before.

  “Would you turn that fecking torch off?”

  I do as he asks. In the deep twilight I take a knee beside him. “First of all tell me, is it contagious?”

  “I had my immune booster last month.”

  These immunization shots we get are A-tech. Humanity’s first journeys to alien planets were complete carnage, valiant explorers snuffing it left and right, whole crews suiciding to keep the alien bugs from getting back to Earth. Then you had a period when explorers were shuffling around in EVA suits à la Neil Armstrong. Surface rats, they called them, or white rats. Very humorous. Then someone found this all-purpose immune booster, and here we are today, sat on Suckass in our shirtsleeves.

  Aren’t we the lucky ones.

  “It’s not a fecking bug, Fletch. It’s wildlife. Or more likely A-tech.”

  “Did you get any—”

  “No, I didn’t stop to take any pictures while it was eating Aisling’s FACE!”

  This roar of self-justifying rage is Morgan’s last. His face goes slack. He falls backwards. His head bounces off the ground, and comes to rest at a sideways angle. His mouth hangs open.

  My mouth hangs open, too. I stare at him, completely gobsmacked.

  Pulling myself together, I check his vital signs, but there’s no point really. I can see he’s dead.

  I’ve known him for fifteen years.

  I stand up and point my lightsaber into the darkness. If anything pounces out at me, I’ll scream and run.

  Nothing happens for several minutes. My arm starts to ache.

  I walk away a bit to use my portable radio. I’m using the flitter’s more powerful transmitter to re-broadcast my signal. “Lukas? …Yeah, you might want to hurry it up. Yes … Maybe … No, he’s dead. I don’t know. Just fecking get here.”

  When I end the conversation, I realize how stupid I’ve been, walking away from Morgan to talk, as if he were asleep and I didn’t want to wake him up.

  I go back to his body. It is covered with puffball butterflies.

  “Get off him, you wee buggers!”

  Where they’ve been feeding from the corpse—basically, on every bit of exposed skin—it looks shrivelled. Vampire butterflies. What a lovely planet this is, to be sure.

  CHAPTER 4

  Eight hours later, Scout Group A finds me still sitting beside Morgan’s body, shooing the butterflies away.

  “Hell! You OK, boss?” Sakashvili says.

  “I’m OK. He’s not.”

  “The rest of them?”

  “Somewhere over there.” I stand up. Ow, my back is stiff. Sakashvili gives me a look that holds me responsible for whatever has happened to Morgan’s crew, and for whatever will happen to Sakashvili’s own crew when they follow, under fervent protest, my undoubtedly feckless and half-arsed orders.

  They have disembarked from their flitters in biohazard suits, hung about with weapons and specimen packs and all the bells and whistles. “Good job you brought that stuff,” I say approvingly.

  I’m trying, see? Praise people when they do something right. Management 101.

  Then Sakashvili opens his mouth and I just know the next thing out of it will be something about health and safety.

  I snap, “Give me that,” and I jerk at the seals of his biohazard suit. He howls as I pull it off him. I think his terror is genuine, although he doesn’t try to stop me from taking his bunny suit. He is more terrified of me right now than of imaginary alien bugs. Can you believe this man hails from the same city that gave us Stalin? I believe it. They’re religious about ‘elf ‘n’ safety, these Slavs. I suppose it’s because the concept is new to them, historically speaking.

  That said, Sakashvili has other points in his favor.

  I put on his bunny suit and tell him, “Wait here.”

  He will wait. He will wait until night comes and the atmosphere freezes. Because Sakashvili would sell his soul for a sniff of A-tech, and so would his cousins and his friends’ aunties’ neighbors (the lads grouped behind him in a fluorescent yellow huddle). The Irish are not the only ones who consider nepotism a virtue.

  Donal and Morgan, both gone in a single day.

  Walking into the darkness, I shake a bit.

  I’m the only one of our group left now.

  Mother of God, but the universe is an unfriendly place.

  The air’s getting colder. I start to shiver, even inside the biohazard suit, which usually makes you sweat like a pig. Worse, it’s slippery underfoot and I have to watch my footing.

  I can hardly see a fecking thing now. In a harebrained spasm of defiance, I switch my torch onto the highest power setting. The 1,000,000 candle-power beam stabs into the dark ahead of me.

  Yes, I know Morgan said to switch it off, but he was clearly wandering in his wits.

  The beam illuminates black rock glistening with moisture. A bright red object flies past me. I nearly shoot it before I realize it’s just a bandanna, carried on the tepid wind from the dayside. In fact, it’s the same one Aisling used to wear.

  I run after it and trap it under my boot. For some reason this little find convinces me that Aisling, Eamon, and the other three members of Morgan’s crew are dead.

  I am tying the bandanna around my wrist when the night rushes towards me.

  It’s a storm of flailing darkness, a blast of colder air, a stink of dusty fur, and I act on sheer instinct.

  I throw my torch at it.

  In the follow-through of the same movement I am aiming my lightsaber, and I have time to sight on the monster because it’s actually stopped. It is stroking my torch with its wingtips, doting on it, and no I’m not imagining this, it does have wings. About six hundred of them. It is in fact one of those bleeding puffball butterflies. A Godzilla-size
d version.

  Well, maybe not quite that big.

  But it is definitely as big as an eagle.

  Wisps of steam tear from between its wings. The steam looks ghostly in the light of the torch that’s lying on the ground, shining up into the furry crevices of the thing.

  And then the torch starts to dim.

  I stab Butterfly-zilla with my lightsaber.

  This lightsaber is not exactly like the ones they used to wave around in the Star Wars movies. It has much better range, for one thing. But it’s similar enough that I feel justified calling it that.

  It’s A-tech, of course. It shoots laser pulses at the rate of one per femtosecond, so that they appear to converge into a solid blue beam as thick as your arm.

  Luke Skywalker, eat your heart out.

  “Die motherfecker die die die!” I scream at the top of my lungs.

  Butterfly-zilla does not die. It perks up. It clusters its fore-wings together and stretches them into the beam, like a person might stretch out their cold hands to a fire. Abandoning my torch, it flutters heavily towards me, and the more I shoot it the faster it comes, the wet-dog stink of its wings filling my nostrils, and all I can think of to do is mash the pushbutton even harder, and its wings curve around to embrace me and the lightsaber together, and at the last possible minute a new idea comes to me.

  Actually it’s the same idea I had to begin with, before I got carried away with the thought of avenging my friends.

  Scream and run.

  I don’t bother with the screaming part. I just release the pushbutton of the lightsaber and take to my heels.

  Running, I wrench things off my utility belt and toss them behind me, in hopes that it will slow Butterfly-zilla down. After all, that seemed to work with the torch.

  The camera. The iPad. The radio. All my various A-tech analysis gadgets. Away they go, one after the other, bouncing into the dark.

  But it’s not working, or not working well enough.

  I can smell Butterfly-zilla catching up. I can hear its wings beating, a noise like a thousand paper bags being crumpled. Something bats lightly at the back of my bunny-suited head, and I put on a new burst of speed.

  Stumbling, my lungs on fire, I see mustard-yellow daylight.

  Sakashvili’s crew crowd towards me, clustering at the edge of the grassy zone like a bunch of children afraid to go into the water.

  Why aren’t they running?

  Because they can’t see Butterfly-zilla. The bloody thing is as black as the devil’s underpants. You’d never know it was there until it got you. That’s how Morgan’s crew must have died.

  I throw one last item behind me, and Butterfly-zilla’s wingbeats fade.

  Completely out of breath, I stagger into the grass and collapse. Knife-like pains stab my lungs. My heart feels like it will burst. I’m only forty-two, and I’d have said I was fit, but I think I’ve just broken the galactic record for sprinting in Timberlands.

  Sakashvili & Co. pelt me with panicky questions. Still fighting for breath, I haul myself upright and stare into the darkness.

  “Lukas,” I say to Sakashvili. “Do you recall on Day One, you reported an attack from a butterfly the size of an eagle?”

  “Yeah. Is that what kill Morgan?”

  “Yeah.” Poor fecking Morgan. He didn’t run faster than Butterfly-zilla. He ran faster than everyone else. But it wasn’t enough to save him.

  Shuddering, I rub my gloved hands down the sides of my biohazard suit. I didn’t outrun Butterfly-zilla, either. But I had this.

  “What was the Butterfly-zilla that attacked you doing at the time?”

  “The what?”

  “The fecking butterfly! That attacked you!”

  “You want coordinates?”

  “Yes!”

  “Oh, it was on nightside. But no big deal,” Sakashvili says. “We were maybe 300 meters up. It fly into engine of Uznadze’s flitter. Nearly break the shit thing. Insect fall down to ground, dead as fuck, and he have to do emergency landing in grass like this.”

  “Was that on account of battery problems?”

  “Yeah, that battery still don’t hold charge. He use spare now. I told you about this. Why?”

  “Give me your torch!”

  I make sure the torch is on the lowest power setting. Then I walk warily, one step at a time, back the way I came. At the edge of the grassy strip, I realize the Georgians are not following me.

  I go back and roar at them a bit. The end result is Sakashvili still refuses to come, because he hasn’t got a bunny suit. I’m wearing it. That’s OK. He can stay with Morgan. This charmer Uznadze goes first, with the torch, while I hold someone’s camera at the ready.

  Not thirty yards into the dark, Uznadze lets out a shocked yell in Russian.

  Then he sprints back the way we came, easily breaking my speed record.

  I stay where I am, snapping pictures.

  In the instant the torch was shining on Butterfly-zilla, I confirmed that it is not moving. It is resting on the rock with its wings all pointing straight up, like, well, like a butterfly.

  I’m pretty sure it is busy with the last thing I threw down: the spare powerpack for my lightsaber.

  I jog back to Morgan’s corpse. The Georgians, ever attentive to regulations, have put him in a body bag. This is exactly what I was hoping for, and I tip him out of it. “Come back, you COWARDLY GOBSHITES!” I yell at their receding figures.

  Pride gets the better of them. They trickle back and I snatch Sakashvili’s spare powerpack off his belt. “Give me your weapon, too. Your torch. Anything that’s got a battery …” I drop the items into the body bag. “Uznadze and you,” I can never remember their names, “come with me.”

  The two men scowl behind their perspex masks, mentally filing their worker’s compensation claims, I can see. When I explain what we’re going to do, they mentally file their life insurance claims. But they do not mutiny. There’s spirit in the old East yet.

  Carrying the body bag with the gadgets in it, we trot back into the darkness.

  Butterfly-zilla is still enjoying its meal.

  “Here, big boy.” I lay the body bag down, open at one end. “Here you go, fresh and hot. Come and get it … FECK!”

  I forgot how fast Butterfly-zilla can move. In an instant it is on top of us, burrowing into the body bag, pointing all its wings into the closed end where the gadgets are. Jesus but it smells horrible, even through the HEPA filter. I think about my planet and I throw myself on top of it, flattening its wings. It feels like a sackful of ferrets wriggling under me. “Close the zipper, CLOSE IT!”

  We get Butterfly-zilla bagged up and lug it back into the daylight. A hysterical cackle bursts out of me.

  “If this A-tech material,” I say, pointing at the body bag, “can keep a fizzy drink ice-cold in ninety-degree heat, it should be able to contain our fuzzy friend!”

  “I don’t get it,” grumps Sakashvili.

  I remove the hood of my bunny suit and drink a gallon of tarragon-flavored lemonade, which is what the Georgians carry around with them. Disgusting stuff. Right now it tastes gorgeous. “These are vampire butterflies.” I wave at the wee ones fluttering around us, landing on our bunny suits. “I don’t think they’re butterflies at all, actually. They look like it to us, because our minds search for Earth analogues. But they’re not even organic. They’re A-tech.”

  The Georgians shout hooray. This is a wee bit inappropriate, in my opinion, considering that Morgan’s body lies near us, and the bodies of five more of our colleagues lie somewhere beyond the terminator, entombed forever in the icy dark.

  “My theory is they feed on electricity,” I say. “I stabbed that big fecker with my lightsaber and it drank up the beam. It was like spraying booze down the throat of an alcoholic! I’ve never seen anything like it! That’s the same reason it went for the powerpacks, the torches … especially the powerpacks.”

  These, needless to say, are A-tech. A fist-sized package contains th
e KW equivalent of a legacy-tech battery the size of a bungalow back on Earth. The discovery that broke the battery bottleneck may have banked more licensing revenue than any other. And I believe we have just discovered its opposite.

  The faces of the Georgians fall.

  To cheer them up, I add, “They’ll drain anything that produces electricity. And you know what else does? That’s right … the human brain. We have tiny electrical impulses running through our nerves all the time. We’re walking feasts for these fellas!”

  Sakashvili whacks the butterfly that has just landed on his arm. His face is a sight to behold. The other Georgians, safe in their bunny suits, piss themselves laughing.

  “I think it’ll take more than that to do any serious damage,” I say.

  “This useless discovery!” Sakashvili says. “Is shit! Who want A-tech that drain electricity? Useless!”

  I shake my head. “Have I got to do all the thinking around here? Shields, guys. Defenses against energy weapons.”

  The security situation on the Railroad is awfully unbalanced at the moment. Every claim-jumper and his sidekick commands vast reserves of power, thanks to A-tech batteries, see above. And law-abiding ships like the Skint Idjit have no defenses other than shields three yards thick.

  Butterfly shields, as I am already thinking of them, will change that forever.

  Sakashvili’s eyes light up with avarice. He’s getting it now. He casts a lustful glance at the body bag.

  I sling my arm around his shoulders and walk him away from the others. Suckass’s bloated sun peeks over the horizon, spearing red light into our eyes.

  In a low voice, I say, “This doesn’t have to go any further, Lukas. It can stay between the two of us.”

  Well, the seven of us. But I know Sakashvili can control his crew. There is a good reason they are such scaredy-cats, apart from taking their cues from him. If they breathe the wrong way, he’ll get his contacts in Tbilisi to kneecap their grannies. This is the point about Sakashvili. He’s connected.

  Myself and Morgan and Donal were going to involve him, anyway, if and when we found anything worth selling.

  It’s a shame that Morgan is dead, and Donal is languishing at death’s door. It’s a disaster.