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

  But I can just about persuade myself that it’s not an unmitigated disaster, because half of a nine-figure payday is better than a quarter of a nine-figure payday. A lot better.

  I’ll spend some of it on houses and cars for their families. They’ll sing my praises all over County Clare.

  Sakashvili nods and nods, transfixed. “I arrange auction when we get back to Arcadia,” he mutters. “Defense sector, yeah. Maybe also energy sector. I reach out to right guys. All keep quiet.” He scowls up at me. “You can keep quiet until we reach Arcadia?”

  “Sure I can.” We are walking in a circle, back to where the others are waiting. “I’ve got it all planned.”

  “How you explain Morgan dead? With all crew?”

  I drop my arm from his shoulders. “I’ll think of something!”

  The other Georgians are holding the body bag by its corners. It is jumping as if trying to fly away.

  I stride past them to Morgan’s corpse. “It doesn’t need all of youse to carry that body bag! Someone help me with him.” I know it’s daft, but I’m not leaving him behind. I just can’t.

  CHAPTER 5

  Morgan’s body is stinking to high heaven by the time we get back to the LZ. Yeah, we had spare body bags, but we used all of them to capture more Butterfly-zillas. This has also brought us to the edge, power-wise. The flitters limp home on solar power. All our spare batteries and powerpacks are now dead lumps of A-tech inside the body bags that swing beneath our flitters.

  We are met in the LZ by Woolly and Saul, wearing faces of woe. I have been lying my arse off on the radio for the last 24 hours, laying the groundwork for the lies I’m about to tell.

  “Gosh, they look so small,” sighs Woolly, watching the Georgians manhandle the body bags.

  She thinks the body bags contain the corpses of Morgan and his crew. We caught enough Butterfly-zillas to make up the right number. They’re heavy enough. They are a bit flat-looking, though.

  “Have some respect!” I yell. The Georgians recollect themselves and carry the body bags towards the Idjit, one at a time, with the solemnity of undertakers.

  “This is a goddamn tragedy,” Saul says. “All of them!”

  “They were mucking around on a glacier,” I say sadly. “Roped together, for safety. When the first one went into a crevasse, they all went in.”

  There really are glaciers on Suckass. That’s how the water cycle works. It freezes on the nightside and the tidal bulge pulls it towards the dayside, where it liquefies into mighty rivers. I didn’t dispatch any scout groups to the glaciers or the rivers. It is my policy not to order people to do things I would rather do myself, and I quite fancied a dip at some point. Now this has worked out to my benefit, as no one will be able to disprove my story.

  When the rivers flow into the baking-hot regions of the dayside, they evaporate and the steam is blown around the planet by the wind. That’s where the downpours come from. What does not fall on us falls on the nightside, where it freezes, and around we go for umpty billions of years. I can’t wait to get off this planet.

  “Our insurance premiums are gonna go through the roof,” Saul says.

  That is what he considers a tragedy. I don’t feel guilty at all about leaving him out. Harriet? Her heart isn’t in this, anyway. Woolly? She’s a wookie—nuff said. I run down the crew list in my mind and confirm that not a single one of them deserves a share of our soon-to-be riches.

  But one name jumps out in my mind as deserving something quite different, that is, a punch in the gob, and I say casually, “Where’s Ruby?”

  “Oh, the schmuck from Goldman Sachs?” Saul says. “He’s up there talking to the Captain.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean what?”

  “I thought the Captain was dead!”

  “Oh no, he’s recovering.”

  “Harriet said he was still in the freezer!”

  “Yup. He feels comfortable in there, apparently.”

  “Jesus.” I’m grinning my face off. “Is he fit to travel?”

  “In my opinion, yeah, he is,” Saul says, and his expression says But he’s not fit for anything else.

  This changes everything. I have to get up there, but I also have to stay down here.

  The Georgians are loading the body bags into the cargo winch.

  “Sakashvili!” Jogging towards them, I gesture back at the flitters. “Stay here with a few of your lads,” I tell him. “Make sure no one goes near … you know. I’ll take the bags up.”

  “Hurry up,” he says. “I want to eat.” They have been surviving on ration bars and lemonade out in the field.

  The winch hoists me and Uznadze and six quiescent Butterfly-zillas into the air. We hump the body bags into the airlock.

  The interior of the Skint Idjit is as cramped as the caves near Lisdoonvarna, where I grew up. Miles of corridors scarcely wide enough for your shoulders, drips falling on your head from the leaks, litter in the corners. Me and Uznadze load the body bags onto one of the anti-grav cargo dollies and follow it forward to the crew deck.

  You have to go through the mess to reach the kitchen. Trigger, our cook, is kneading defrosted dough into loaves. At the sight of the body bags he bows his head and lays one hand on his heart. I feel a bit guilty.

  The door to the walk-in freezer is in the corner behind the microwaves. I heave the door open and Uznadze wedges it with the dolly. Cold fog billows out.

  “Captain, you’re back with us, are you? High time!”

  My jocular words mask dismay. The Captain is sitting in his exoskeleton on a cardboard box of frozen food. Ruby stands in front of him. We have obviously interrupted a tense conversation.

  “What’s your problem, Fletch?” Ruby says crossly.

  “I want to store the bodies of our shipmates in here where they won’t rot,” I say with dignity. Uznadze starts to unload the dolly. I gesture urgently at him to stop. Ruby is staring at the body bags. If he gets a look at them up close, he’ll see that the things inside are the wrong size and shape. They don’t look at all like corpses really. Bugger, bugger, bugger!

  But Ruby’s neat little hipster beard is white with frost, and his bare arms are all over gooseflesh. He decides it’s not worth hanging out in here any longer. “We can continue this conversation later,” he says to the Captain, and strides out without meeting my eyes.

  The minute he’s gone, I drag the dolly into the freezer, tell Uznadze to keep watch outside, and close the door. “Feck, it’s freezing in here,” I say heartily.

  We’re not at risk of getting stuck, anyway—this freezer opens from the inside as well. Health and safety.

  I take the Captain’s A-tech gloves in my hands and give them a double shake. “How’re you feeling, Donal?”

  His faceplate is frosted up on the outside and fogged up on the inside, so I can’t see his face. His voice emerges hollowly from the grille at the base of the faceplate. “Ah, not too bad.”

  “You’re recovered, anyway? Harriet’s given you the green light to resume your duties?”

  “Well, that’s the trouble,” he says.

  But I don’t let him finish. I’m in too much of a hurry to share my news. “Have they told you Morgan’s dead?”

  “Yeah. He always was a careless sod. And the others with him?”

  “Dead, too.”

  “Fecking idjits.”

  “I know.”

  And that’s all we say about it. If you were to think about it too much, let alone talk about it, you’d just go to pieces. So we don’t.

  I’ve no clue what the Captain is thinking about inside there, but I know what I’m thinking about: nine figures, split three ways between me and the Captain and the Georgians.

  “Now for the good news,” I say. I heave the first body bag off the dolly. “This isn’t Morgan and his crew in here. It’s our retirement plan.”

  When someone’s wearing an exoskeleton you can’t see how they’re taking things. I’d have expected the Capt
ain to be a bit more excited. He says all the right things in response to my story, like “That’ll be great,” and “We’ll have to give some of it to their families,” but it seems like his heart’s not in it.

  I finally take the bull by the horns. “Captain, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me, fact o’ God,” he grumps.

  The hard work of stacking the body bags, moving boxes and sacks to make room for them in a corner, has warmed me up a bit, but I still can’t take much longer in here. “Spit it out, Donal!”

  He sighs out a puff of white from his grille. “Ruby’s trying to kill me.”

  “Yeah, he’s a gobshite. Hang on. Do you mean he’s literally trying to kill you?”

  “Of course that’s what I mean. I’m not living in this bloody thing for my health. It’s itchy and I’ve got a horrible rash from the sweat building up inside. Boils on my arse and everything.”

  I frown. “Ruby had his chance when you were out with the heatstroke.” We cut Donal out of the exoskeleton. I can see where it’s been mended, a clumsy weld down the middle of the torso.

  “No, he never had a chance. Harriet was hovering over me like a mother hen. She slept on a cot beside me while I was out. I owe my life to that woman.”

  Well, well. Harriet does her job for once. I move her up on the shortlist for a nice little present once we’ve sold the A-tech.

  “Why is he trying to kill you?” I ask warily. “It can’t just be because he’s a gobshite.”

  Another sigh. “Fletch, I didn’t want to worry you, but …”

  These are leading candidates for the worst seven words in the English language.

  “Me and Penelope have been having problems.”

  CHAPTER 6

  This is bad. This is potentially very bad, but it’s not so bad I can’t joke about it. “Yet more proof that behind every successful man, there’s a woman trying to stab him in the back.”

  The Captain laughs gloomily at the idea of himself as a successful man, although he is. He’s the captain of a fecking exploration ship. When we’re home, the local media are all over him. He gets requests to speak at schools and shite.

  We never got that treatment when we were starting out. Everyone in County Clare expected us to be dead within the year. There was more awareness then that the Interstellar Railroad is dangerous. Now Wall Street’s propaganda has sold it to them as a safe and profitable business opportunity, and they’re all waiting—with increasing impatience—for us to bring home the bacon.

  But the trouble is it’s still dangerous, as we have seen to our cost this day. You can’t explain what it’s like to the people at home, they don’t understand, and I know I’ve been thinking that the easiest thing would be never to go home again at all.

  I will name my planet something like Fletchworld, and there won’t be any hypocritical, grasping Irish people on it--well, apart from me.

  I know the stress has been getting to the Captain, too. But what I didn’t know is how he has been coping with it.

  I make him tell me exactly what’s been going on, and it takes a fair old time in between all the errrs and ummmms and “I know it takes two to tango” and “I’m not saying Penny’s in the wrong” (although that is exactly what he’s saying). I pace up and down with impatience as much as to stay warm, but by the time I get the picture I’ve forgotten that I’m freezing my arse off. My rage could melt the dark side of Suckass.

  The Captain has been having it off with … drum-roll please … Harriet.

  This has been going on since Stig’s World, which was five planets before our last visit to Arcadia. So, the best part of a year.

  And I never noticed a thing!

  You would think there is no privacy on a Boeing X-80 inhabited by 28 people, would you not?

  I certainly thought so. Many’s the night I’ve hied me to the bogs for a quiet dump, only to find there’s a queue because someone is wanking in there and one of the Georgians is timing him. Har, har. Oh, it’s a non-stop party on the Skint Idjit, and there are no corners to sneak off to for a fag.

  But it’s different, obviously, when one of the guilty parties has the luxury of a cabin to himself, because he’s the Captain and is meant to be responsible for safeguarding all of our lives, so he needs his space to meditate upon vital questions of strategy and logistics … or to make sweet love to the life-support officer, as it turns out.

  Even Dimwit Donal can see I’m a bit upset. Worrying that I may have had designs on Harriet myself, he says nervously, “I know she’s not your type, Fletch!”

  “Put your mind at rest, I don’t fancy her at all.” This is completely true. If I have admired Harriet’s rear view it’s only because it’s such a contrast to her face. “I’m not jealous, you fecking dimwit. I’m wondering how we’re going to hang onto the ship, since you’ve pissed Penelope off to the point that she’s complaining about you to the backers!”

  He cringes, and for a moment I feel sorry for the man.

  “I taped over the camera in my cabin,” he says weakly.

  “And all the cameras in the corridors, so Penelope wouldn’t see you and Harriet vanishing in there together?”

  Another cringe.

  “Whatever she hasn’t seen, she’ll be imagining worse,” I say relentlessly.

  At about this point you are probably wondering who Penelope is. We don’t talk about her much, because the situation makes everyone uncomfortable.

  But the fact is Penelope is our donor.

  CHAPTER 7

  Some spacers call their donors chain dogs, because that’s what they do, they hook onto the Railroad. This use of jargon is a pathetic attempt to compensate for their own inferiority complexes. So we’ll just go with donor. I don’t have an inferiority complex. Do you?

  Penelope is a donor, ergo she is a stacker. This technology we human beings developed all by our little selves, before the Railroad came along. Actually it’s a collection of technologies and practices—nootropics, prep schools, chips implanted in your brain, assortative marriage, prebirth genetic screening—they stack all these things together, and the end result is they’re so much smarter than the rest of us, they’re basically a different species.

  Some scientists say they’ve already diverged from the rest of us. They’ve got better genes.

  So what do stackers do with their great brains?

  The usual:

  Manage hedge funds

  Work as consultants

  Get useless degrees in the humanities

  Run governments

  Reverse-engineer A-tech

  Raise the next generation of stackers

  And when they’re bored of all that …

  Operate spaceships

  There are always more would-be donors than there are ships. Apparently, for a certain type of stacker, it’s a huge thrill to be bedded down in the control room of a spaceship, communing on an intimate level with its computer systems, racing along the Interstellar Railroad, helplessly dependent on your Captain to deliver your daily whipping.

  And they talk about it like it’s this selfless volunteer activity.

  Many stackers have a dirty secret, you see. They feel bad about their natural and unnatural advantages. They want to be kicked. Quite a lot of them literally want to wear uniforms and be ordered around on the end of a leash.

  We had the bad luck to land one who likes to wear crotchless panties and be ordered around on the end of a leash, and if you think that sounds like fun, I can only assume you’ve not spent years holding the leash’s other end, trying to think up ways to please her.

  Because it’s the donors who’ve got all the power. Of course it is. Spaceship operation is way over the heads of average joes like you and me. You’ve got to interface in real time with the AI subroutines and the Railroad’s energy conversion algorithms and Jesus knows what. I had a go once; I felt like a monkey trying to type Shakespeare.

  No stackee, no flyee.

  So they g
et to travel the galaxy and use us to act out their psychosexual dramas at the same time. Sweet!

  On the whole though, the donor system functions well, with a Darwinian hierarchy built in. Lots of stackers want to be donors, but do we want a gap-year kid with an IQ of 200 and itchy feet? No. What we want—what every crew wants—is a rich donor … one who can kick in for construction and maintenance.

  Penelope Adele Saltzman fit the ticket perfectly. She’d had a high-flying career in public relations, made a lot of money one way and another, but her needs weren’t being met.

  She fell for Donal O’Leary’s good looks and was charmed by his decision to name his ship Skint Idjit, once she’d had it explained to her. I can still see them in that bar in New York, Donal waxing lyrical— “Skint, you see it means broke, no money in the bank. And idjit, no it doesn’t mean idiot, it’s more affectionate …” Myself ordering up another round of Guinness, thinking he was laying on the stage-Irish too thick and she’d laugh and walk away any minute now.

  But she didn’t.

  So much the worse for her.

  I glance down at the floor of the freezer; she’s somewhere below us, in the control room, and I feel an urge to lower my voice even though I know there are no cameras or mics in the freezer. That would be why the Captain is hiding in here in the first place. “I know you aren’t really into the BDSM shite,” I say, “but can’t you just go through the motions to keep her happy?”

  The Captain has confessed he’s been neglecting Penelope’s needs, on top of betraying her (as she sees it) with Harriet.

  He shakes his helmeted head. “I just can’t do it anymore,” he says, and I understand.

  I understand.

  I pat his armored shoulder. “Don’t worry. Ruby can’t have you fired for being a two-timing love rat.”

  “I know,” he says dolefully. “That’s why he’s trying to kill me.”

  I still think he may be imagining this. It would make sense for Goldman Sachs to protect their investment in the Skint Idjit. But how would killing Donal accomplish that? It would have the opposite effect, sure …