The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 2: Intergalactic Bogtrotter Read online

  I should pause here for a moment to tell you about these treecats. They aren’t cats, although they do look a bit feline with their triangular faces, big eyes, and lithe furred bodies. They’re about that size too. But their legs are more like a koala’s, built for climbing trees—or anything. We found them on a planet halfway up the Beta Aurigae spur.

  It was the turn of our chief engineer at the time, Saul, to name the planet, and he chose Leaves-A-Million. Then when we were heading back into orbit, emptyhanded, or so we thought, half a dozen furry alien beasties tumbled out of the pantry, and Saul retrospectively changed the name of the planet to Sphinx, and named them treecats. He was a huge science fiction fan, always shoving books and films at you.

  Saul used to say that sci-fi died in 2024, which was when the Interstellar Railroad zoomed out of the sky. Now the galaxy is ours, and the riches of bygone civilizations are there for the picking up. People still talk about the Star Trek dream, but the “boldly go” jokes wear thin after you’ve lost enough friends. And there’s no peace to be made with aliens when they’re all dead.

  However, their loss is our gain. As we whirl out towards Omega Centauri, following the taillights of Finian’s fleet, I feel the old excitement sparking up again. Who knows what we might find out here? We’re heading for the frontier. Finian’s hinted at a mighty trove of A-tech lying in wait. Maybe he’s stumbled on the ruins of an alien empire no one’s discovered yet. Maybe he’s found live aliens—ones that have discovered the secret of eternal life!

  Well, that’s not likely. But is it unrealistic that I might find something small enough to fit in my pocket?

  Just one little find, that’s all I need.

  One find that isn’t shite.

  It has famously happened that more than one explorer walked straight past something a sharper-eyed soul later sold for millions. You’re looking for the secret of eternal life, say, and so you ignore the queer little cocktail umbrellas stuck in the ground everywhere, which turn out to optimize biological nitrogen fixation. That patent went for $480,000,000 to Archer Daniels Midland. You’ve got to keep an open mind.

  The treecats are a classic example of what happens when you don’t keep an open mind. Saul and Harriet both insisted at first that they were sentient. Bollocks to that, says I. Calling an animal a treecat does not make it a sophont capable of telepathically bonding with a human. (I read part of that book at Saul’s urging.) It just makes it an animal with a catchy name. Harriet eventually concluded they are about as smart as colobus monkeys. But by that time, we were six hundred lightyears away, and it was too late to drop the treecats off on their home planet, even though there turned out to be seventeen of them.

  “They have got one promising characteristic,” I say to Imogen, a month or so into our voyage.

  “What’s that?”

  The two of us are alone on the bridge. Now that she’s taken over piloting duties, I’m back to being the chief A-tech scout, which means there’s not much for me to do at the moment. There’s not much for her to do, either. The Railroad stretches away forever through the blackness of mysteriously folded space. The taillights of the Big Swinging Dick, one of Finian’s new ships, glow ahead like red eyes. Imogen touches the yoke from time to time to maintain our trim, as the Bogtrotter’s antique inertial dampeners shift 500 tons of cargo around. She’s got ‘her’ treecat, named Fluffington, on her lap.

  “Nice moggy,” I croon, reaching out to tickle Fluffington behind the ears. “I think you like me really. Don’t you?” I think no such thing. This is just a pretext to move closer to Imogen, and Fluffington seems to see through it, because he nips my arm with his eight million pointy teeth. “OW!”

  Imogen frowns at me. “So what exactly have they got going for them?”

  “They’re kleptomaniacs.”

  Her expression brightens. “Oh my God, they totally are! Fluffie’s got the craziest shit in his nest. Spoons, wires, I don’t even know what.”

  “Yeah, the Captain lost his iPhone on the Beta Aurigae spur. It finally turned up last week in Chairman Meow’s nest.”

  “I’m not surprised. Fluffie’s like a magpie—if it’s sparkly, he wants it. He even got into my safe the other day, which is like, OK, how the hell did you manage that?” She strokes him lovingly. I am jealous.

  “Imogen, would it be out of line to ask what you’ve got in that safe?” I am fairly sure it’s the same one she used to cart about when she was selling jewelry on commission for the Arcadian mob.

  She slants a wary glance at me. The bridge is quiet, for once, apart from the humming of the computers. Gordon’s dragged Donal off to teach him about finance, so we haven’t got to listen to his music. It’s just Imogen and me and the Interstellar Railroad. I wish this could go on forever. I feel a sense of peace when I’m with her. It’s like being alone, without the alone part.

  “You know, I used to sell jewelry,” she says. “So … I kind of took a few of my favorite pieces. Most of it was just bling. But we had some A-tech pendants with wireless comms functionality, and … stuff. I liked those.” She shrugs. “So I took them.”

  I laugh out loud. “You’ll never eat lunch on Arcadia again.”

  “I know. This trip better work out.”

  I want to grab her and kiss her. I heroically restrain myself. Fluffington growls.

  Donal strolls onto the bridge and leers, believing that he has interrupted a romantic moment. I wish. He casts an eye over the screens that Imogen and I have been ignoring. “Hey, we’ve got a capsule from the Big Swinging Dick!”

  “That sounds so wrong,” Imogen mutters.

  These capsules are the only way to communicate ship-to-ship when you’re on the Railroad. Radios don’t work up here—well, I suppose technically they do, but you’d be old and gray by the time you got through how-are-things, I’m-surviving. The Big Swinging Dick is dozens of lightyears away, even if we can see her taillights. So they’ve sent us a message capsule. Similar to mail packets, these little efforts are cylinders with chain dogs on the bottom. Drop them on the rails and shoot them back to the other party. So much for peace and quiet.

  I clatter downstairs with Donal to retrieve the BSD’s message. The Intergalactic Bogtrotter being military surplus and about as old as I am, it doesn’t have one of those handy robotic arms that can grab a capsule and bring it inside. Someone has to suit up and go out and fetch it. Donal starts to get into the old EVA suit we keep down here, but I stop him. I have this recurring fear that if he once gets into a suit of any kind, we’ll never get him out of it again. It’s irrational, I know. Ruby, who tried to kill him on Planet Suckass, is five ships down the line, and in the middle of transitioning to female. Donal’s got no reason to fear for his life …

  … and yet, and yet.

  I put the spacesuit on.

  Outside the ship, I keep my tether short and slide the magnetic soles of my boots over the hull. The Railroad whips past ‘below’ my head. I fight zero-gee nausea. I detest spacewalking.

  A gandy dancer pokes its head around the curve of the hull and holds out the capsule, blank-faced.

  “Thanks,” I mutter, knowing it can’t hear me. I take the capsule from the stubby three-fingered hand.

  The gandy dancers came with the Railroad. They’re humanoid, with bulgy heads, you’d recognize them from all those supermarket tabloid pictures in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The belief is they were testing us for sentience at that time, and somehow we passed. They try to be helpful. For this reason among others, it’s thought that they’re not actually alive. They’re energy-based automatons built by the same long-gone entities that built the Railroad. Probably.

  The gandy dancer vanishes, and I scuttle gladly back into the ship.

  Donal opens the capsule. “It’s from Finian …”

  This is SOP. Since the Marauding Elephant is in point position, Finian has to pass his messages back from one ship to the next. Each captain adds comments along the way, e.g.:

 
Pit stop, next exit –Finian

  About time –David (captain of the Avenging Angel, a stupidly up-armored Boeing X-90)

  Did anyone remember to bring the barbie? –Jennifer (captain of the Bond Girl)

  It might be in the supply ship –Armando (captain of the Terremoto. I hate his Spanish guts. The supply ship, indeed.)

  Have a look for it, Donal, if you don’t mind –Willem (Dutch, 5’2”, named his ship the Big Swinging Dick; some people are beyond mockery)

  So Donal goes to search for the barbecue grill, and I warn everyone to secure any loose objects and treecats, and fasten their seatbelts in preparation for landing. I’m such a comedian.

  CHAPTER 5

  We come off the Railroad behind the Big Swinging Dick and join the rest of the fleet in orbit around a turquoise and green planet. The radio’s alive with cross-talk, crews exchanging long-hoarded insults. Finian directs us to land on the edge of the largest continent on the planet’s dayside.

  “This planet’s mine,” he boasts over the radio. “I call it the Burren.”

  The Burren, if you’re not aware, is a scenic region in the west of County Clare. The name turns out to be quite apt. Just like its namesake, Planet Burren, or this region of it anyway, is windy, treeless, and a dead loss in economic terms. We land our ships on the cracked, grassy pavement of glacial rocks that clearly inspired the planet’s name, and hurry towards the sea. Surf curls onto a wide shingle beach. The real Burren hasn’t got that. I soon discover another difference: the sea here is deliciously warm.

  If you’ve never seen 93 pirates, many of them past retirement age, in their swimming togs, you’re not missing much. But the sea is large, the sky is huge, and their voices fade as I swim out deep. I float on my back. Ah, solitude.

  Then I get stung by something that looks like floating Brillo, and when I flounder back to shore everyone cracks up at the weals on my back. It’s a good thing I got my booster shot before we left Arcadia. These immune boosters we get are A-tech, fecking amazing—we can laugh off alien toxins and infections that would’ve felled a whole crew in Finian’s day.

  “I was first out in this way in ‘33,” Finian says, reminding us all how old he is. “We were prancing round in EVA suits back then, of course. It was the days before booster shots. No swimming, no sunbathing. But even through a triple-strength faceplate and a layer of Kevlar, I knew I wanted to come back someday.”

  We are sweating in the sun, shifting cargo from the Bogtrotter to the five other ships, which are parked as close together as is safe, given that their engines char a wide area when landing and taking off. We’re redistributing food and water across the fleet, giving each ship sufficient provisions for another month on the Railroad. I still can’t work out why Finian’s so keen to fly nonstop from here on out. For that matter we could have filled the water tanks from the Burren’s sea. We’ve got desalination equipment. But Finian made vague noises about wanting to get on as fast as possible.

  So we’re jogging 500 yards between one ship and the next, following anti-grav gliders loaded with stuff—and Finian, who’s taking his ease on top of the rice and potatoes and mountains of spare batteries.

  “I came back in ’56, when I had my own ship,” he reminisces.

  You’ll notice he’s glossed over the years I spent on that ship, on the Draco Spur. That did not end very well for Finian. I’ve only heard the story at second hand, as he’d booted me off his crew by then, but the way my dad heard it from Padraig, who’s one of Finian’s trusted men, Finian got into a full-scale battle with another cough cough ‘explorer,’ and the other fella kicked his arse for him. No wonder he fled to the other side of the galaxy after that, and no wonder he doesn’t mention it now.

  “I claimed this place as fast as I could drop a beacon,” he says. This is how you claim planets: you drop beacons on them with your ID and the date, and hope some fecker doesn’t come along and move the beacon before you can get back to Earth and file an official claim with the Planetary Registration. You’ve got to pay through the nose for that, of course.

  “After that, I carried on up the Omega Centauri spur, claiming everything with water on it. By God, lads, there are some jewels up there! Views you’ve got to see to believe. And …” Finian sits up and surveys the rest of us flocking behind the gliders. “The reason we’re here. On a certain planet, I made an absolutely fecking stunning discovery.”

  “Go on Finian, don’t keep us in suspense,” cries Jennifer of the Bond Girl.

  “Heh heh,” he cackles. “I want to see your face when we get there, darlin’.”

  The thought crosses my mind that there’s got to be some reason Finian did not claim this ‘stunning’ discovery nine years ago. But I’m hot and tired and I could eat the hind leg off the Lamb of God.

  “We’ve got time to fire up the barbie, anyway,” Finian says.

  The Bond Girl’s cook takes charge of grilling duties. When you want a barbecue done right, leave it to the Australians. The steaks and burgers may have started off frozen, but they come off the grill sizzling and flavorsome. There’s coleslaw, and fresh bread, and a platter of shrimp which Ruby carries around like a cocktail waitress, offering it with a simper. He’s even got a little apron and a doily on his head. Donal and I have a laugh about that.

  “I can’t believe I was ever scared of him,” Donal says.

  “Her, Donal, her. Mind your pronouns.”

  We sit around the campfire stuffing our faces as the sun slides towards the sea. Donal’s got his arm around Harriet. Kenneth (the lazy dosser, he didn’t even offer to help with the grill; I don’t believe he was a cook any more than he was a pilot) has got his hand up Vanessa’s t-shirt. I am sitting next to Imogen and I have not got my hand up her t-shirt. It’s the only flaw in an otherwise perfect cookout, 3.1 kiloparsecs from Earth.

  Finian drones on between gulps of lager. When he’s speaking there can be no other conversation, except on the fringes (remember there are 106 of us) where the lesser pirates are squabbling in their various languages. Everyone in the English-speaking circle leans towards Finian, and oohs and aahs in the right places because he’s Finian, the $700 Million Man. I am deliberately ignoring him, for the principle of the thing, when a sudden shift in the pitch of his voice captures my attention.

  “—and then they attacked us! Out of a blue sky, they swooped down upon us with five upgraded DC-100s and thousands of homemade flitter-bombers. They strafed our camp, killed half of my men on their first pass …”

  What, what?

  “… we ran for the ships …”

  I frantically nudge Donal. “What’s he on about?”

  “Just listen!” Donal leans forward as if a string is pulling him towards the demonic form sat gesticulating on the other side of the campfire.

  “I personally notched up eleven kills,” Finian brags. “Those rotten little flitter-bombers are lethal, to the man flying them. A shit sandwich with A-tech bells and whistles is still a shit sandwich. But in the end we had to retreat. We were outnumbered five to one, in terms of actual ships…”

  Listening with intense interest now, I piece together the story wrapped in Finian’s exaggerations and digressions.

  The short version is we’re fecked.

  The long version is we’re completely fecked, and here’s why:

  When he first travelled up the Omega Centauri spur, nine years ago, Finian somehow neglected to consider the possibility that he was being followed. He was, and the other fellas were cleverer than him. They hung back, waiting for him to find something good. When he did—they deduced this when he settled in for a month’s stay on this ‘certain planet’ of his—they swooped in to grab the loot.

  This is a time-honored exploration tactic. You don’t have to have sharp eyes or an open mind. You just have to have bigger guns. Needless to say it is illegal to kill people, burn their ships, and claim their discoveries as your own. However, there are no police out here. So the further you get from Earth, the be
tter your odds of feeling alien worm-analogs, while some other bastard laughs all the way to the bank.

  Having powerful backers, like we did with the Skint Idjit, improves your chances. Even pirates will be deterred by the prospect of Goldman Sachs dragging them into court.

  But Finian has never deigned to take a penny from ‘The Establishment.’ So he was very lucky to get away from the Omega Centauri spur with his life.

  And now he’s taking five heavily armed ships, plus one Intergalactic Bogtrotter, back, to teach the feckers a lesson?!?

  “I give up,” I say to Imogen. I have gone for a walk to relieve my feelings, and she’s come after me. That would be encouraging, if I were in any state of mind to appreciate it. “Jesus and Mary! I just give up.”

  She squints out to sea. The twilight is luminous here. The sky seems to glow with an inner light. “Well, the guys who attacked him must be dead by now,” she says. “I mean, if they ever made it back, it would’ve been all over the news, if this discovery is as big as he says it is.”

  She’s parroting Finian’s own logic. Oh, I suppose they might be dead. Alien wildlife, bad weather, radiation, fuel shortages, drunken brawls—on the Interstellar Railroad, there’s no shortage of health hazards. Six million ways to die? Try thirty billion.

  “So we’ll just stroll in and pick up the A-tech,” Finian said before I left the campfire, and everyone cheered.

  But I know my uncle better than they do. He did not come all this way for A-tech. He already had three-quarters of a billion dollars, before he spent it on this lot! No, there is only one thing that could bring Finian Connolly back to the Omega Centauri spur at his time of life, and that is a grudge.

  “If he really thinks they’re dead,” I say, “why did he wait so long to come back?”

  “To be on the safe side?” Imogen says.

  “With this huge discovery lying around, waiting to be found by someone else? No, he waited until he was rich enough to hire a fleet of like-minded arseholes—and not one minute longer. The instant he got that cheque for $700 million, he was off like a hare.”