The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 3: Banjaxed Ceili Page 4

  The taxi bumps to a halt, and we unbuckle. From the relaxed demeanor of the Krells, I gather this is where they expected to be.

  “Out!” Maude puts on a pair of mirrored sunglasses and opens the driver’s door. There’s a gentle whoomp of escaping atmosphere.

  It’s like opening an oven … and climbing in.

  Arnold’s air is thin, the sky dark indigo. Even the Krells—the real ones—could not persuade a moon with less than 30% of Earth’s gravity to hold onto a proper atmosphere. We’ve been acclimatizing all the way from Treetop, but all the same, I’m gasping. The air feels too thin and hot to breathe.

  The Krells put on oxygen masks.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Maude says through her mask. “It was a big help.” She points her gun at Imogen. “Step away from the taxi.”

  Imogen’s picking flakes of carbon off the taxi’s nose cone, which is a charred mess. That descent burnt off several inches of insulation. “You’ve wrecked my taxi,” she says in a trembling voice.

  “I said step away from the fucking vehicle!”

  Imogen cringes and scuttles back. Poor girl. She thought she’d built up a rapport with Maude, and now she’s confused.

  Not me. I’ve met people like Maude before. The way she screamed at Imogen gave her away. She’s annoyed, frustrated, and frightened by the way everything’s gone so wrong, so she’s going to take it out on us, because that’s what sociopaths do.

  Besides, it wouldn’t do for anyone to find out they hijacked our taxi.

  I bend over, as if trying to breathe better. I’ve still got the bottom half of my Denebite costume on. It’s falling down around my hips. On the pretext of holding it up, I slide my right hand into my waistband.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Fucking move already!” Maude yells. “It’s too hot to stand around out here!”

  I straighten up, heart thudding. She’s not about to shoot us, after all. She’s trying to herd us away somewhere. I don’t like that much, either.

  Nor do I want to move away from the taxi, because it’s got the Gizmo in it.

  But Maude points her gun at me, and I decide obedience is the better part of valor. I give Imogen what I hope is an encouraging smile. “Cheer up, it’s going to be fine,” I whisper, and we follow the Krells.

  Blondie walks ahead, talking on his phone. We all bounce awkwardly in the low gravity, except for Maude, who brings up the rear. She’s got the loping micro-gravity gait dialed in, and her gun stays in her hand.

  Heat ripples off the ground. It’s as dry as a bone. The dust makes me cough. I lace my fingers over my eyes and squint through them. The rectangular outline of a building shimmers in the distance.

  A flatbed lorry purrs past us, going in the other direction. Walking sideways, I watch it shrink into a tarry blob and converge on the other blob which is Imogen’s taxi. The whine of hydraulics cuts through the silence. They’re loading the taxi onto the flatbed, taking it away.

  “My taxi!” Imogen says.

  My Gizmo! I think, stricken.

  There it goes, gliding away into the haze. We have no option but to stumble on, into the shadow of the building. It’s an industrial facility about a mile long. This side is lined with loading docks. Here and there, semi-trailers nuzzle their rear ends against the wall. They all have Chinese writing on their sides.

  Maude herds us up a flight of concrete stairs and in through the side door of an unused loading dock.

  Air-conditioning comes as a huge relief. It does not compensate for the smell, which is horrendous. So is the noise—clanking, whining, thudding, crunching.

  We climb onto a tongue of rusty steel that sticks out over a conveyor belt as wide as a highway. The conveyor belt runs the entire length of the building, carrying rubbish towards a crusher apparatus at the far end.

  It’s a recycling center.

  The rubbish inching past below includes kitchen waste, broken furniture, debris from Krell buildings (they’re still demolishing shite to make room for more human facilities), and huge chunks of cactus, oozing goo from their fibrous ends.

  “Hey, isn’t this a recycling center?” Sam says, his voice too high.

  “Yes,” snaps Maude.

  “But what about separating the trash? They’re fanatical about that on Treetop! Kitchen waste, cardboard, plastics, metal, it’s all supposed to be recycled separately!”

  Blondie looks up from his phone and speaks for the first time. His English is as fluent as Maude’s. “Oh, that’s just PR bullshit. It makes them feel good. But it all goes into the same incinerator. Now we’ve got a whole galaxy to pollute, who cares?”

  “And the incinerator runs hot,” Maude says with a dark chuckle. “No one can tell from the ashes what went in there, whether it’s plastics … or cactuses … or human remains.”

  She raises her gun, sights on the thief, and shoots him in the heart. Then she shoots the other former Krells. Pop, pop, pop.

  It all happens in a few seconds flat. While we’re still staring, too stunned to react, she goes back and puts another bullet into the head of each writhing body.

  Blondie says consolingly to us, “It’s just business.”

  I find my voice. “How is it just business?”

  “They screwed up.”

  Maude rolls the bodies off the side. They fall ten feet to the conveyor belt, and are carried slowly away.

  “Damn,” she says. “Out of ammo. Can you handle the rest?”

  “Sure thing,” Blondie says. He raises his gun and sights on Imogen, who backs away towards the end of the platform. Her hair’s coming out of its bun, falling down over the collar of her taxi driver’s uniform. Terror bleaches her face.

  Maude’s patting her pockets in annoyance, searching for her spare clip, I suppose. That gives me the moment I need to reach into the waistband of my Denebite costume and pull out my lightsaber.

  Here are the mistakes Maude and Blondie made:

  They didn’t make me take off the bottom half of my costume.

  They assumed I was a harmless party guest. (I assumed the same thing about them, of course, until disillusioned.)

  They picked Imogen to murder first.

  Imogen has made it fairly clear to me in the past that going through a garbage compactor would be too good for me. To be honest, I feel the same way about her sometimes. But letting this happen to her is not an option.

  I switch my lightsaber on and stab Blondie in the back. Piercing guilt paralyzes me for a second as he goes down as if struck by an axe. Maude’s mouth falls into an O of astonishment. Her hand drops to her gun—which is empty, thank God.

  Sam leaps at her with a despairing yell. They topple to the floor in a clinch, punching and kicking, and I can’t use my lightsaber for fear of hitting Sam.

  My lightsaber, if you’re just joining us, is a fearsome weapon. I found it on the Draco spur twenty years ago when I was working for Finian. It looks like a slim baton with alien writing on it, with a powerpack that swings down like a stock, and it emits laser pulses so fast that they appear to blend into a solid beam. It’s like the ones in Star Wars except better, because it’s got an adjustable range of about thirty yards.

  Blondie heaves himself onto one elbow. Pain twists his face into a grimace. There’s smoke and steam coming out of the hole in his back! I must not have hit anything vital. Or else he’s on some fearsome drugs. Actually, that would explain a lot. He reaches with a trembling hand for his gun, which he dropped when he went down.

  Imogen reaches it first. Screaming wordlessly, she snatches up the gun and shoots Blondie in the face.

  I’m busy trying to kick Maude away from Sam, so I only see it out of the corner of my eye. Blood splatters the platform.

  Maude and Sam have rolled dangerously near the edge of the platform. Maude lands a karate chop on Sam’s neck. Stunned, Sam loosens his stranglehold on her—

  —and both of them go over the side, and fall to the conveyor belt.

  Without even thinkin
g about it, I leap down after them.

  Sam howls, half-buried in a chunk of cactus. He landed in a sitting position as if the cactus were a deep sofa.

  Maude’s on her feet, running back along the conveyor belt, zigzagging around the piles of rubbish.

  I chase her, holding the bottom half of my Denebite costume up with one hand, slashing my lightsaber wildly at her back. I don’t want to hurt her, but I can’t let her fetch reinforcements. I slice a pile of household garbage in half, and it cascades across the conveyor belt, blocking my way. I jump on top of it, and sink knee-deep into fruit rinds, coffee grounds, leftovers, and—judging by the smell—dog poop.

  Feck! I haul my feet out of the reeking mess. Maude’s so far ahead I can no longer see her. Anyway, what’s the point of chasing her? She had her phone. She’ll have called for back-up already.

  I peel the bottom half of my Denebite costume off over my boots, wipe my hands on it, and throw it down. We’ve got to find transport and get out of here.

  “Fletch! Fletch!”

  Sam’s voice is barely audible over the grinding noise of the compactor, but I can hear his panic.

  I charge back the way I came. The conveyor belt has been moving all the time, so I’m only a few yards past where I started out. I glance up at the loading platform. I can’t see Imogen anymore.

  But I haven’t got time to stop. Sam’s cries are getting louder and more frantic. I dash along the conveyor belt towards the compactor.

  There he is, still stuck in that fecking chunk of cactus!

  He’s struggling desperately to get out, but he obviously can’t. A few yards beyond him, the packer blade of the compactor slams down on a pile of construction debris. It slowly pulverizes fiberboard and polysteel and Krell regocrete. Dust billows over us.

  I grab Sam’s hands and pull. All that happens is I lose my footing and end up in his lap. The problem is the micro-gravity.

  Another problem is he’s covered in cactus juice. On my next effort, our hands slide apart as if covered with grease.

  “Why are you stuck?” I scream.

  “Because this shit is very fucking sticky!” he screams back.

  The compactor swallows the construction debris. As the packer blade rises again, heat blasts my face. A sullen orange glow radiates from beyond.

  The blade descends on the other end of the piece of cactus Sam’s stuck in, and sucks it under, inch by inch. Juice squirts all over us, stinging when it gets in my eyes.

  I whip my lightsaber out of my pocket. “Tuck your legs and arms in!” I chop off the bit of cactus he’s sitting in. It tumbles loose, pitching him onto his side.

  The packer blade grinds down to the belt, inches from my feet. I skitter back. The blade rises again.

  Sam crawls back along the conveyor belt on hands and knees, with a lump of cactus still stuck to his bottom.

  The packer blade starts to fall.

  I pick Sam up, cactus and all, and stagger with him across the conveyor belt. I throw him over the guard rail to the floor. Then I jump after him.

  “Thank feck for micro-gravity!” I say breathlessly, picking myself up.

  He’s thanking me profusely for saving his life. Well may he. I suspect he wouldn’t have done the same for me.

  “Can you get that shite off you?”

  We’re in a concrete ditch under the loading platforms. If Maude and / or her reinforcements show up now, we’ll be sitting ducks.

  I flinch as a torrent of fabric cascades off the end of the nearest unloading platform, onto the conveyor belt. It looks like carpets.

  Right. I climb up on the guard rail, grab the edge of the nearest descending carpet, and flip myself onto the platform above. I feel like a Olympic gymnast. Micro-gravity definitely has its points.

  I land upright on the loading platform, staring into the face of a Chinese party in dungarees and a baseball cap, whose arms are full of carpets.

  “Drop the carpet,” I say, showing him my lightsaber. It looks a bit like a gun when I’m holding it by the powerpack.

  His hands fly into the air.

  “Good, now lie down on the floor! Hands behind your head!”

  I’m getting good at this, amn’t I?

  And the better I get at it, the less I like myself.

  “Sam, can you climb up the carpet?”

  It’s a red carpet, the kind of runner they use at celebrity events. Quite ironic. I flip and shake it until the end falls into the ditch where Sam is tearing bits of cactus off his bum. He clings to it and I haul him up.

  “Brilliant. Now—” I address the fella on the floor. “Give us your car keys. D’you speak English? Car keys!”

  “Don’t you want my phone as well,” he says into the floor, “so that I can’t call management?”

  “Good thinking, sir. Yes, I’ll have the phone as well.”

  He hands both items over. “I’ll testify against them if you like?” he offers.

  “Aye well, that’s your lookout. Testifying against the XS Group is not a wise move, as far as I know, but that’s only based on films.”

  “Oh. I thought you were the police.”

  Sam laughs out loud at that.

  “No,” I say, “but thanks for the keys. We’ll be seeing you.”

  “What’s this fancy new NEPD for?” the lorry driver complains. “If they can’t even crack down on fraudulent recycling practices …”

  We leave him contemplating the uselessness of the NEPD. He’s right—they are useless. But the more I think about it, the more I suspect they were designed that way. The politicians deliberately hamstrung them so they couldn’t interfere too much with organized crime in the colonies.

  The shutter door at the back of the platform has been rolled up and a semi-trailer half full of carpets is docked with it. We could walk straight in. “You go in the back,” I tell Sam.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll not be able to sit down with a cactus stuck to your arse, will you?”

  I hurry through the side door, out into the daylight, and down the stairs. The shadow of the building has shrunk. It now slices across the parked lorries. “Imogen!” The silence rings in my ears. “Imogen!”

  Oh, feck. I knew she was not to be trusted.

  I run along the side of the building. I can’t remember which of all these many doors we went in at.

  My legs start to tremble as the adrenaline wears off. Muscle cramps shoot through my limbs. I’m not an Olympic gymnast, after all. Just an Irishman on the wrong side of the law and the wrong side of history.

  “Imogen! IMOGEN!”

  “Fletch!”

  To my extreme relief, Imogen’s voice carries over the desert. She comes running through the sunlight, a blurry streak.

  “This way!” I windmill my arms.

  She must have given up on us and set out by herself, hoping to make it across the desert on foot. She’s come back because she thinks her chances are better with me. I hope she’s right.

  I bang on the side and hear an answering bang. “Is that Sam?” Imogen says.

  “Yeah. He’s in the back.”

  She squints at me for a long second, then nods. “I don’t trust him, either.”

  “It’s not that,” I say, although it is. Partly, it is. He wasn’t part of the old crew and he’s not from Ireland. We may have worked together to plan this heist, but when you come right down to it, ours is a partnership of convenience, which began with us trying to kill one another.

  And that actually goes for Imogen, too. So I don’t open up that can of worms. I just tell her about the sticky cactus, which makes her laugh.

  We climb into the cab and I stick the key in the ignition.

  “I’ve never driven a lorry before,” I say. “Hope I don’t crash it into anything.”

  Ha, ha. There is nothing to crash into. The desert stretches as empty as a snooker table with no balls on it. All quiet for now, but how long will it stay that way? I keep expecting Maude to burst out of the recycl
ing center with guns blazing.

  “Where did you get the keys?” Imogen feels her cheeks. “Ow. I’m sunburned.”

  “I took them off a fella delivering carpets.”

  Thankfully the lorry’s an automatic. I put it in gear. For a minute nothing happens. Then a squealing, clashing noise comes from behind us, and the lorry leaps forward. I think I just pulled the loading door out of the wall.

  “I can drive,” Imogen says.

  “No, I need you to navigate.” I hand her the lorry driver’s phone.

  Imogen regards the phone with distaste. Fair enough. It’s got pornographic decals around the screen. Then she looks across at me and utters the words I’ve been dreading. “You’ve still got the Gizmo, haven’t you?”

  “No. I left it in the taxi.” I forestall her cry of despair. “But we’re going to get it back.”

  I accelerate. The lorry gathers speed, bouncing across the desert, and takes off ungracefully into the air.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Do you actually know,” Imogen says, biting off her words, which makes her sound like Maude, “where the taxi is?”

  “It got towed,” I remind her. “I assume Maude wanted to get rid of it fast. So it’ll be in the local impound lot. Could you check on the phone and find out where that is?”

  Like any modern vehicle, the lorry has stubby wings. These are only for balance, not for lift. The antigrav does the hard work. I fly low over the desert. Glancing down at our shadow, I can see that a number of carpets are flapping out the back. Good thing no one’s around to see.

  Imogen looks up from the lorry driver’s phone. “Guess how many tow lots there are on Arnold?”

  “A lot?”

  “Fifteen. There must be a lot of bad drivers on this moon.” She sighs. I know the carnage in the recycling center affected her. She’s trying not to break down, and succeeding, mostly. “Anyway, I’ve got the GPS working, so now we know where we are. It’s like a hundred klicks to the spaceport. I guess we should try the nearest tow lot first.” She sticks the phone in my face. It’s all in Chinese.